The Immortality Factor

by Ben Bova

  Arthur looked up at me. “Half an hour ago.”

  I sank down onto the sagging old sofa beside my brother. “She’s dead?” It was like that feeling you get after Christmas, after all the presents have been unwrapped and opened up. It’s over.

  “There’s nothing you could have done, Jess. She was so far gone.”

  “Was she in much pain at the end?” I asked him.

  Arby shrugged inside the overcoat. “I only arrived here a few minutes before the end. She was unconscious, completely out of it.”

  “That’s something, at least.”

  “It’s good that it’s finally over. She suffered enough.”

  My eyes were misting over. “I want to see her.”

  Arthur looked bleak, too. “Yeah. I think they’ve moved her back to her own room by now.”

  We got to our feet.

  “Julia’s called three or four times,” Arthur said. “She sounded pretty worried about you.”

  “It wasn’t easy sledding out there,” I said.

  “You came by ambulance?”

  “Naw. I drove my own car. Slid into a snowbank at one point.”

  “That was brilliant.”

  Ignoring Arby’s sarcasm, I realized I had left my cell phone in the car, so I looked around the lobby for a telephone.

  “There’s a phone in Momma’s room,” Arthur said. “You can call Julia from there.”

  Ma was back in her bed when we entered the little corner room. In the dim light from the bedside lamp, she looked as if she were asleep, but I realized that I had never seen Ma sleeping with her arms lying straight at her sides like that. She’ll never open her eyes again, I knew.

  “Phone your wife,” Arthur whispered.

  It took a real effort to tear my eyes away from Ma’s body. I went to the telephone on the bedside table and tapped out my number. Julia picked up before the first ring was finished.

  “Jess?” Her voice sounded frightened, almost frantic.

  “Yes, hon. I’m here with Arby.”

  “Oh, god, I was so worried about you! I was afraid to phone and distract you from your driving. The TV news is showing nothing but smashups on the roads. I was afraid I’d see you.”

  I smiled into the phone. “I’m okay, nothing to it. Nothing to worry about.”

  “You’ll stay there overnight, won’t you?”

  “Hadn’t even thought about it. Yeah, I suppose that’s the best thing to do.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  The question brought me back to the reality of the moment. I had to swallow hard before I could speak again. “She died, Julia,” I said, struggling not to cry. “Half an hour before I got here, from what Arby says.”

  “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s a blessing, really. She’d been in a lot of pain for a long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. The usual twinges, that’s all.”

  “Stay warm and don’t go outside. If you need anything, phone for delivery.”

  “Of course,” she said. “The streets are positively swarming with delivery boys.”

  “I mean—”

  “I’ll be fine, Jess. Don’t worry about me.”

  I glanced at Arthur, who was staring out the window at the snow, his back to the bed, making a big show of not listening to our conversation. “I love you, Julia,” I whispered.

  “I’m mad about you,” Julia answered.

  “Is she all right?” Arthur asked as soon as I hung up the phone.

  “I guess so. It hasn’t been an easy pregnancy.”

  Arthur turned to face me. “Oh?” The room was dimly lit, shadowy, but I could see the concern on his face.

  I waved a hand at my brother. “It’s nothing, really. Everything’s under control.”

  “Well, is it nothing, or is it something that’s under control?”

  “A bit of both,” I said, starting to feel a little pissed off at his big-brother act. “Julia just has to be a little careful, that’s all. There’s been some bleeding. She’s going in for tests—that is, she was going for tests tomorrow. I don’t think she’ll get there, with this storm and all.”

  “You shouldn’t have left her,” Arthur said.

  I stared at him, not certain I had really heard Arby correctly. “I shouldn’t have left her?”

  “There’s nothing either one of us could do here,” Arthur said. “You should have stayed with your wife on a night like this.”

  “Arby, this isn’t the Victorian Age. Julia’s fine.”

  “You shouldn’t have left her.”

  He was standing on the other side of the bed, our dead mother between us, and giving me his usual I know better than you do routine. “I suppose that’s what you would have done: let Ma die and stay with your wife.”

  “On a night like this that’s exactly what I would have done,” Arthur said. “I wouldn’t have left my pregnant wife all alone.”

  “What’s the matter, you pissed off that you didn’t have Ma all to yourself at the end?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. There was no reason for you to risk your neck driving out through this storm. There was nothing you could’ve done for Momma.”

  “Oh, but it’s okay for you to drive out here, isn’t it?”

  “I came in a police cruiser.”

  “Big deal. So you’re an important man.”

  Arthur looked like he was going to say something, but then he bit it back. Looking down at Ma’s body, “We shouldn’t be arguing like this, Jess,” he said, dropping his voice low.

  That was another one of his tricks. Stick you with the point he wants to make and then say we shouldn’t argue.

  “It won’t bother her now,” I said.

  “It’s just—if I were Julia’s husband I would’ve stayed with her on a night like this. I wouldn’t have left her side.”

  “Well, you’re not her husband. And you don’t know much about Julia, really, if you think she’d want me to be holding her hand when my mother was dying.”

  Arthur seemed to retreat into the shadows. He backed away from the bed, then turned to the window again. I heard him mumble, “You’re right. I don’t know much about Julia.”

  Look, the last thing in the world that I had wanted was to break up Arby’s romance.

  It had struck me funny, at first, to see Arby so crazy about this Englishwoman. He was usually so damned serious about everything he did. Like the last thing in the world he wanted was to look even the slightest bit foolish. He’d think about something for a year before moving an inch. What did that guy on television say about doing carpenter work? Measure twice, cut once. All his life Arby would measure until the damned sun went down and then start in all over again the next day.

  But there he was, all of a sudden gone totally bonkers. In love, yet. Like he had watched a video on how to have a torrid romance and now he was acting out his part. Flowers and moonlight and the whole nine yards.

  I was almost always too busy at the hospital or the medical center to even think about romance. Almost. Sure, there were plenty of women available. Trouble was, sooner or later they wanted to get married. Usually sooner. I used to think that hell was a cruise ship filled with Jewish women and their mothers, and they all know that I’m a doctor.

  The idea was to have fun. Don’t get emotionally tangled up. There’d be plenty of time for marriage and kids and all that. Later. After I was more settled.

  Arby insisted on our going out on double dates.

  “You can’t work all the time, Jess,” Arthur would repeat over and again. “You’ve got to have some relaxation or you’ll drive yourself into an early grave.”

  Truth was, Arby just wanted to show off his girlfriend. Oops, make that his fiancée. He had asked Julia to marry him and she had said yes. Imagine Arby married!

  But Arby could do strange things sometimes. I never thought he’d leave Columbia, but all of a sudden he up and quit a
nd started this research laboratory of his. Moved out to Connecticut, for chrissakes. Maybe he really was getting old enough to want to settle down.

  So there we were, the four of us: Arby and his fiancée and me and my date—a buxom Latino X-ray technician from the hospital named Gloria who claimed she was into channeling and reincarnation. And oral sex, if the rumors were right.

  Julia was the quiet type, but those dark eyes of hers could look right through you. I felt almost uncomfortable when she studied me from across the dinner table.

  Arby was bragging about how many Nobel Prize winners he had hired as consultants for his lab. Gloria was fascinated with him, maybe because he looked so well off and sure of himself. The silver hair gets them, I think; gives Arby a fatherly look. But although Julia was smiling in all the right places of Arthur’s stories, every now and then she looked at me as if she were X-raying my mind.

  My beeper went off, and it turned out to be an emergency back at the hospital. I had to leave Gloria with Arby and Julia and grab a taxi outside the restaurant. It was past dawn by the time I got back to my apartment. I pulled my clothes off and flopped on the unmade bed. I dreamed of Julia; nothing erotic, I was just talking to her in some kind of an office. Arby’s office, I recognized it, at his lab up in Connecticut.

  I didn’t see Julia again for more than two weeks. Then Arthur insisted that I come up to his house for the weekend.

  “Bring a date with you, if you like,” Arthur said. “Julia’s going to be here. We can make it a foursome.”

  I didn’t bother with a date. I couldn’t get away for the entire weekend, anyway, only Saturday night.

  It was midafternoon when I got there. Autumn, at last. Football weather, crisp and clear after months of heat and humidity. We always had more violent crime injuries in the emergency room during the hottest part of the summer. But now leaves were falling on Arthur’s vast lawn and tempers were cooling in the ghettos. We could play football out on Arby’s lawn, I thought as I looked out the window at the green expanse and the drifting leaves. Hell, the National Football League would have room enough to play a game on that lawn.

  Arby looked happy and perfectly relaxed in a green velour pullover and chocolate brown slacks. The country squire at his leisure, I thought, smiling to myself. Julia wore a pale yellow turtleneck sweater and light blue skirt. Very pretty. I had come in my Saturday jeans and the shirt that had been at the top of my bureau drawer.

  Arby was showing off again. He had bought new furniture, redecorated the house, and he was like a real estate agent showing the damned house off, room by tedious room. I thought maybe Julia had picked out the furniture. Maybe Arby’s just trying to make her happy. Who the hell knew?

  A phone call from the lab took Arthur to the den he had built next to the living room. He closed the door, leaving Julia and me standing next to the picture window, drinks in our hands, looking like a couple from the pages of the New Yorker: rich, sophisticated, slightly hostile.

  “You see,” Julia said, “you’re not the only one who gets called away for emergencies.”

  I made a smile for her. “On a Saturday afternoon, yet. I guess Arby doesn’t have everything under control, after all.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  I shrugged. “He’s always in charge of everything. Always calculates all the angles before he moves ahead. Arby’s always been the organized one.”

  “And you?”

  What is this, I wondered, an interrogation? So I answered, “I’m the baby brother. I don’t have to be organized.”

  “Arthur thinks the world of you, you know,” said Julia.

  “I know.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell between us. She was waiting for me to tell her how much I adore my big brother.

  Before I could make up my mind to speak, Julia took a step closer to me. “You have this peculiar little smile on your lips, you know.”

  “I do?”

  “It’s almost a smirk.”

  “I wasn’t aware of it,” I said.

  “I’ve noticed it before. Perhaps it’s your natural expression.”

  “A smirk?”

  “As if you know something that no one else knows. It gives you this slightly superior, slightly bored look.”

  She was smiling. Not a big smile, just enough to show that she wasn’t trying to pick a fight.

  “Well, I certainly don’t feel superior,” I said.

  “No, of course not. You’re rather in awe of Arthur, aren’t you? You don’t have to live up to him, you know. You’re quite a marvelous human being yourself, actually.”

  That’s how it started. With that conversation. We double-dated a few more times and the more I saw Julia the more I felt like I was being drawn into some kind of a whirlpool. I mean, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I never wanted to hurt Arby or get between him and Julia, but I couldn’t help it. It was overwhelming. Like there was some force pulling at me, dragging me in a direction that I knew I shouldn’t go.

  Not that I did anything about it. I never said a word to her, never even saw her without Arby being present. Oh, okay, so we were alone for a few minutes at a time once in a while, when Arby had to answer the phone or whatever. I tried very hard not to let anything show, but the smile that Julia always gave me—that smile. It seemed to know what was going on inside me, the turmoil, the wanting, the pain that was better than any pleasure I had known before.

  So help me, I never took a step toward her. But I made time to go out with her and Arby as often as I dared. Sometimes I brought a date along, but usually the poor kid just sat there, ignored, while I talked with Julia. Arby never seemed to notice anything. Not a thing. You could have whacked him on the head with a frying pan and he wouldn’t have noticed it. Not when he was with Julia.

  And then, at dinner one night Julia said, “Your work at the hospital must be fascinating.”

  I sort of shrugged. “It’s drudgery, most of it. Poor people don’t have exotic diseases. They’ve got parasites or infections or complications from do-it-yourself abortions. AIDS. Women beaten up by their boyfriends. Kids, too; more and more child abuse. Oh, yeah, there’s a fair amount of stabbings and shootings, especially on the weekends.”

  “And that’s your practice?” she asked.

  Arby said, “Jesse’s a doctor of internal medicine. He’s director of research at the La Guardia Medical Center. But he spends most of his time in the hospital in the ghetto.”

  I didn’t like the way he said that. “Hey, Arby, you know at one time it was our people in the ghetto.”

  He looked a little surprised. Then he said, “Our people got themselves out.”

  “Some of them did.”

  “And those who did helped the others to break out. We didn’t get welfare.”

  Julia ended the incipient argument. “Would it be possible for me to visit your hospital?”

  I felt stunned.

  “I’d like to see what it’s like.”

  “It’s not pretty,” I said.

  “It doesn’t even smell good.”

  “I think it’s time I saw where you work,” she insisted. My heart was thudding in my chest so loud I was sure that Arby could hear it. But he seemed not to notice a thing.

  Julia went on, “We see enough of good restaurants and people who are well off. The poor are rather hidden from us, don’t you think?”

  I couldn’t answer because I had the wonderful fantasy that what Julia was really saying was that she wanted to see where I work, what I do. She wanted to be with me!

  Arthur shrugged. “If you want to. I’m sure one look will last you a long time.”

  “Perhaps,” Julia murmured.

  “Frankly,” Arby said, “I don’t see how you put up with it, Jess. Doesn’t it ever get you down, all those needy people, day after day, year after year?”

  I made the best speech of my life. I said, “They need help.”

  So two days later Julia showed up at the hospital. Without Arb
y, who was busy running his lab. She stuck right beside me all through my rounds. We grabbed a couple of soggy sandwiches in the cafeteria and then I took her through a typical afternoon of seeing patients and conferences with hospital staff and administrators. The guys on the resident staff all gave me leering grins, that’s how great-looking Julia is. The administrators looked flustered that an outsider was listening to them whine about shortfalls of funding and new insurance regulations.

  We skipped dinner. There was too much to do, too many sick and bleeding people to deal with. She stayed with me every step of the way until it was past ten o’clock. Finally I signed out and we went out onto the street, surprised that it was dark. I was pretty tired.

  And damned depressed. It had been a wonderful day with Julia beside me. But now she was going home. And in a few weeks she’d be married to Arby.

  JULIA

  If there’s any blame to it, it’s mine. I could sense that Jesse cared about me, perhaps he even loved me, but he wasn’t going to do anything about it. I was Arthur’s and he wouldn’t interfere, no matter how much he wanted me.

  It was tremendously flattering, of course. Very romantic. Even dangerous. Here I was, making arrangements with Arthur for a big wedding bash and fantasizing about his brother. I told myself a thousand times that I was being a foolish little girl. Arthur offered the kind of world that a woman could only dream about: a posh lifestyle and social position and considerable wealth. It was all right to fantasize about the romantic, forbidden brother, but I had no intention of allowing those fantasies to rule me.

  And yet . . .

  No matter how I tried to avoid it, I was drawn to Jesse. I found myself asking to see his hospital. I wanted to see where he worked, I told myself. Truth to tell, I wanted to be with him. Alone. Without Arthur.

  Most of Mendelssohn Hospital was grubby. The buildings were old and dingy, the staff harried, the patients poor and dark-skinned and desperate. It was huge, of course, taking in several city blocks. Inside, it was quite confusing, a haphazard conglomeration of wards and offices and waiting rooms, the painted walls faded and worn-looking. Pitiful families wandering through the labyrinthine corridors, trudging along the scuffed floor tiles, looking confused or worried or frightened. Patients moaning in their beds or calling for a nurse or just lying there resigned and helpless. In some wards they had filled all the beds and had patients on gurneys out in the corridors.