“Chewing gum,” Benny said. “I always think of tired girls on buses and subways.” A light ache, the merest throb.
“Don’t know what got into me,” Bartholomew apologized. He started a cigarette, and blew smoke darker than his hair. “Getting old. Pay no attention. Keep the faith.”
“Never thought of myself as a man of faith,” Benny said.
“You’ll lose it,” the old doctor said.
But he lost Bartholomew. The old man died, not quickly as he had wished but over several days, a general but unhurried vascular collapse. Benny tried but could not see it as the death of a man; Bartholomew had lived almost ninety years and had earned his rest. Instead Benny saw it as his own loss: another era, country, limb detached from him and restored to eternity. “They” had taken the old man away from him. The surviving doctors insisted on every technical refinement, and long after Bartholomew had lapsed into coma they were feeding him, cleaning him, plugging him in, monitoring awesome machinery; the dying man was like a spaceship, with fuel and arithmetic and little red lights and telemetry. Benny kept remembering a line from some protocol—religious, medical, perhaps the Pope, he could not recall—but the line, yes, pure poetry: “There is no obligation to use extraordinary means to keep the person alive.” He wanted to shout it; he said it quietly instead, and earned scowls.
He went to the old man’s house and found suits, shirts, shoes, a large stamp collection, many books, most of them history; on the walls reproductions of Constable and the rural Dutchmen. He sat in a plump armchair and married himself to the silence, tried to be Bartholomew, and for a moment succeeded. He sensed in himself much of the old man’s grudging and sullen rectitude, and was pleased; also a cheerful pessimism. He remembered the silvery hair and the sea-blue eyes as if he had lost a lovely woman. Then the housekeeper arrived weeping and evicted him, so he returned to the hospital.
Bartholomew had not come to, and Benny knew he never would. Later they found that he had left everything to a niece in Vermont, and had explicitly ordered that his body be defended from quacks and haruspices and bound over to the nearest Episcopal church, the higher the better, for decent burial. Benny emitted one bawl of absolute mirth, earning more scowls. Even at the funeral he suppressed loony laughter, as if only he knew that Bartholomew was not really dead, just Sisyphus taking a little time out for that restful walk back down the hill. A week later he wept, like the heroine of some Scotch romance, wept as if his heart would break, yes, because he had lost a friend and he was lonely.
19
His automobile, he decided, was contemptible and malevolent: he must be a whoreson buggy doctor. He almost smiled. He was tired of the shuttle, the one road, toing and froing past the innumerable milestones of his own rut. He remembered earlier days, he and his buggy spanking new and the morning itself of breeze and brass, Benny avid, diamond-eyed, gleeful and catchy, making his rounds, saving lives and the surf roaring … Yes, we were all young once and sang aloud. Now he drove through whiffs of petroleum, cigarette smoke and stale sweat, riding sullen between ribbons of roadhouse and restroom, no Irish princesses to do him homage. Just once. Once before he died he would like to see that. Principally brunettes. Only for remembrance, nothing personal, you understand, an anecdote for my grandsons.
He entered the hospital and found himself smiling at strangers, who made way with the utmost deference; he tried to look grave, sagacious and respectable.
No change. None of his pint-sized charges had swallowed a thermometer or savaged a nurse. None had died, not even Baby Roland, who lay comatose and untroubled. A rare moment of peace: at the nurses’ station no bustle, no clatter, painters, plumbers or janitors; only the occasional pad of a ripple-sole, or a lost visitor doing his righteous best.
“Management summons me,” Benny boasted.
“Ah so,” Grentzer rejoiced. “Remember: up against the wall. We shall overcome.”
“My God, I forgot about Rosalie. How is she?”
“Checked out.”
“I don’t believe it,” Benny said.
Grentzer shrugged.
“Citizen Grentzer,” Benny said, “it becomes more and more difficult to love the common people.”
“The baby has brown eyes,” Grentzer went on, “or a brown eye. Notice that?”
Benny said, “Bobby, today’s my birthday. Do me a favor and stick to fruit flies.”
Grentzer laughed. “Many happy returns. How old?”
“Forty-six and fading fast.”
“Old Doc Beer. I hear you’re going to run for mayor.”
“Gruff, kindly old Doc Beer, chuckling merrily at gleets and buboes. Who’s on tonight?”
“Dembo and Hines.”
“Good. Good. There isn’t a damn thing I can do, is there?”
“Nothing.”
“Then I can go home and enjoy my birthday.”
“Absolutely.”
“And the baby won’t ever know that nobody cared.”
“Never.”
“Terrific,” Benny said.
He strode the wide corridors like a ghoul, Flying Dutchman, Wandering Jew. Behind every door a malfunction mocked him, a clot or lost limb, tumors, bloats. Sobs. Radios. Orderlies, interns, nurses, housekeepers, like floorwalkers and salesladies. The team, as Taubeneck said while underpaying all. Benny had intended a quiet private practice, occasional visits to the local pesthouse, pomander ball well in hand; he had been tricked, edged, elbowed and betrayed, euchred by history and politics: medicine was hospitals now. A bright expensive machine for every cheap dull ailment. Here at the end of the corridor, a solarium, standard irony on a day like this, and a couple of tables, cards and checkers, forlorn plants. The panes were streaked; beyond, gloom and cloud. A woman wept. He hesitated. Rosalie? He peered cautiously within. Mrs. Diehl. The melancholy Mrs. Diehl. She glanced up; he smiled. “Is anything wrong?”
“Oh no.” In her forties, frumpish and silent, short curly brown hair and insufficient chin, she endured in sempiternal depression. Her commitment papers, complete, lay on McCook’s desk. “My medicine,” she said.
“Oh? Are they late with it?”
“I mean will they let me have my medicine in the other place?”
“Of course,” Benny said.
“I’m running out,” she whimpered.
“I’ll tell the doctor.”
“No. I mean my own.” Tears welled.
Benny sighed, sat beside her and patted her hand. “Spring’s coming. You’ll cheer up.” They shared a flaking trailer on the shore of a large lake. It was one of many hundreds of flaking trailers, occupied by retired couples, mainly Baptist and overweight. Mrs. Diehl gathered wild onions while Benny, in dirty khakis and a tank-top, smoked a nickel cigar and fished from the bank. The fish he caught were diseased, coated with sludge, trapped in plastic loops or used contraceptives; they seemed stone-eyed and prehistoric and could not be eaten. But Mrs. Diehl smiled, and gathered wild onions, and cooked stews, and adored Benny. No one else in all her life had let her be.
“Oh yes.” She strained at a smile. “It’s just my hands. Without the medicine I hurt all day. I can hardly pick things up, or play solitaire.”
She was not his patient, and he recalled nothing of this. “What kind of medicine is it?”
“Pills. White pills.”
“What’s it called?”
“It’s cortisone. You know cortisone.”
“Yes, I know. How long have you been taking it?”
“About a year. I don’t know what I’d do without it.”
Benny patted her hand again. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “I’ll see about it.”
“You’re a gentleman,” she said.
“I’ll stop in later,” he said. How many times had he said that? Five times a day, or ten, for fifteen years. As needed for chronic fear and acute disillusion. “You take it easy and don’t worry.”
She smiled, a tear-stained mask. Benny rose. There but for the grace of God went a human
being.
At his knock and entrance they said “Ah.” Smiles bloomed, papers seemed to skitter, they stared like the Syndics. Benny nodded; Taubeneck, chipper, indicated a chair and said, “Tea, Marcia, if you will.” Marcia Hargum, president of the garden club, whose husband raised Brown Swiss, offered a silvery smile and darted up. Benny sat between Finlay the pharmacist and Runge the oil dealer, Finlay thin, gray and dapper, Runge balding and rumpled. Mrs. Lacey winked; her late husband had been mayor and real estate. Drs. Bolden, Thilmany and Lindahl sat glum. Cassini the bank manager, young and groomed, strove for dignity.
Taubeneck was a lawyer, a large man and bluff, with hairy ears; toward Benny he affected the plain blunt camaraderie of aging warriors—intended also, Benny knew, to convey righteous fraternity, all races, religions and blood types. Benny visualized him at the country club: “That Beer is a Jew and a fighting man.” These directors were of all shapes, and they all had money. When Benny stepped into this ducal room—oak and leather, deep armchairs, an ostentatiously simple conference table, oil paintings by local landscapists, the colonial tea service—he thought of cash. Sometimes he even saw it: fat piles of green bills, chamois bags bulging, louis d’or, a litter of finely engraved securities.
“Well,” Taubeneck began, “we’ve got our hands full this time.” Benny did not answer; he accepted tea. “A bad business,” Cassini said. “A disgrace,” Bolden said. They waited.
“You own a share of Finlay’s store,” Benny said, or wanted to say, to Thilmany, “which is highly unethical and maybe illegal.” Outside he saw hills, houses, moving vehicles, the drab setting of a rainy afternoon.
“The disgrace is here,” he said, “and not out there. Any one of us spends more in a day than they make in a week.”
“Good old Ben,” Taubeneck murmured.
“You know how I feel,” Benny said.
“That’s not the point, comparing like that,” Finlay said.
“I’m just a witness,” Benny said. “I have no vote.”
“Well now,” Taubeneck said, “that’s not the point. The point is, we’ve got to keep this hospital running, and make them see reason.”
“The working conditions are admirable,” Mrs. Hargum reported. “They have a cafeteria.”
“This is a private hospital,” Lindahl said sourly. “We don’t have all the money in the world.”
“We have the glaucoma clinic for children,” Cassini said.
“And therapeutic abortions for rich ladies,” Benny said, or wanted to say. And tea and cookies at board meetings.
“Back to the point,” Taubeneck insisted. “We all know the hospital’s history, and the good work we’ve done. Question is, what do we do right now about this particular problem. Benny?”
“Give them what they ask. It’s not unreasonable.”
“We can’t,” Lindahl said. “Can’t give in just like that. They’ll come back for more.”
Marian Lacey said that there was a question of principle. She was pleasingly plump, prematurely white-haired, surely corseted. Benny’s tea was hot, tasty and invigorating. Taubeneck reminded them that the hospital was run at a profit. Droplets of mist condensed on the shiny panes. Thilmany spoke of a costly computer. Benny drew forth a leather cigar-case and extracted a breva. “Your permission,” he asked the ladies. They nodded. He clipped the cigar while Finlay spoke of health insurance and communism. The cigar was as rich as chocolate; Benny saw a finca on the Cabo de Viñales, all green and gleaming brown in the Cuban sun, his ketch lying offshore. Nan sipped red wine. He thought it was Nan; her face swam and shimmered, out of focus.
“That cigar smells good,” someone said.
“Honduras,” Benny said. It was a fine Havana, Colorado. “All I can tell you is what I think,” he said, “and some of it you’ve heard before. But people don’t listen to me. I’m not very forceful.”
“Just a moment,” Taubeneck said. “We’re particularly interested this time because you know some of these people better than we do. I think you know that we all have the greatest respect for you, and if we don’t agree with you—well, it’s an honest difference of opinion.”
“Right,” Benny said. “That’s what it is, all right. I know some of these people pretty well, right you are. Marcia,” he said, sunny, “a bit more tea? A spot, I believe.”
Alarmed, she sprang to serve him, frisky little Brown Swiss, udders bobbing, dark eyes moist. Marian Lacey smiled primly and winked again. A conquest. The widdy-woman, so chic, blue suit, Liberty scarf, chiming silver earrings. If they two were younger. That lovely tension: he with his fingers crossed, she with her legs. Finlay blew his nose. Finlay’s left hand was cramped and arthritic.
How to begin? When I was in Korea. Yessir. They would be attentive and respectful. The way the Chinese army handled this. I think we should ask Frank Cole to shoot them down, and start fresh. Unemployment is high. Perhaps the board too. He thanked Marcia Hargum. He sipped; he blew blue smoke. “First,” he said, “this hospital is not run at a profit and never was. It was built mainly with federal money, and if you had to pay that off you’d never see a profit. Second, the place does half what it could. Twenty years ago they pumped all that money into the countryside because that’s where we had no hospitals. Then everybody moved to the big city, and big city hospitals are a mess now, and all over the country little rural hospitals, much like ours, are turning into nursing homes and such. We run at about sixty percent of capacity, so you jack up the prices, and people who can’t afford it don’t come, and pretty soon it will be fifty percent, health insurance or no. Now, by the terms of that federal grant we’re supposed to give at least ten percent of ourselves to charity, more if we can—free clinics, beds for indigents, emergency care for poor people. We don’t. The glaucoma clinic, for God’s sake. Two hours a week?”
“If they don’t pay,” Bolden said, “they don’t appreciate the care and they don’t follow instructions.”
Certain elegant crudities, the relics of a distinguished military career, leaped to Benny’s tongue and expired there. He tugged grandly at his lapels instead. “That’s absolutely not true in my experience,” he said. “And how would you know? You make them pay.”
“Medical care is a privilege, Benny, not a right,” Lindahl said.
“Ah yes, I’ve heard that,” Benny said. “And the doctors who favor free care are always the doctors who wouldn’t make it in a competitive situation, we’ve all heard that too; and if we treat the poor we only assure the survival of the unfit, we’ve heard that too; and anyway we have no health problems around here, and if we give out a free aspirin it’s the end of the American way—”
“It’s no sin to turn a profit,” Finlay said.
“Maybe it is. We sell life, not gaskets.”
“What’s your point?” Taubeneck asked.
“Hell, I’ve got a dozen,” Benny said, with a patrician wave of his cigar. “A strange day. My birthday, ladies and gentlemen. Upon this day in nineteen twenty-four—” They murmured felicitations. “I have premonitions and tremors. Fire-drakes and aerolites tonight. Mars in the house of Venus. An Aries trembling on a sharp cusp.”
“There he goes,” Thilmany said.
“Nay,” Benny said, “I do but begin. I mean, take this tea set. Eight hundred bucks, I believe. And half your hospital was contributed to start with, the Westerdonck Pavilion and the Schirmer therapy room and the Lazenby staff room, television and pool, and for all I know the Agatha Mergendahler Featherstonehaugh duckbill speculum. And on Elm Street there are no elms, and there’s TB, rickets, anemia, honest-to-God malnutrition. What kind of health boutique are you running? You took the federal money and then broke the contract—that’s what it amounts to. You’re liars and cheats and possibly murderers. Other than that I refrain from moral judgment.”
Taubeneck said sternly, “That’s enough, Benny.”
“No. It isn’t enough.” He hitched himself higher in his leather armchair. “What’s my point, you said.
One: give in on this strike. Just give in. What they want is pitiful. Don’t make it a matter of principle. Two: put some blacks on this board and some poor whites too. You people have no idea what this county needs. A computer, for God’s sake! Do you know how many outpatient visits a computer would cost? Why not a hyperbaric chamber to use twice a year, or an open-heart unit to use once? Three: preventive medicine. A free checkup once a year for everybody in the county who makes less than a certain amount. Four: take Bolden and Thilmany and Lindahl and Finlay off the board—nothing personal—or at least make sure that a majority of the board, a working majority, is at all times non-medical. Why should us docs make policy and lay down priorities and set fees; who checks on us? We’re prosecutor, judge and jury. We’re the only industry in the whole damn country with no quality control, no cost control and no inspectors. Five: when people like Lipscomb try to set up a prepaid group practice, or any damn new thing whatever, don’t keep denying them hospital privileges. We’re going to need a whole lot of new ways. All you free enterprisers—any kind of competition comes along and you call out the cavalry. This isn’t a hospital, it’s a club.”
“All very generous,” Taubeneck said. “Do you suggest that we abolish fees altogether?”
“Why not?” Benny was delighted. “We’re all rich. Right, Cassini? Cassini knows. I’ve been here fifteen years and I’m fat as a hog. Wheat and soybeans keep closing higher, though pork bellies are lower. Tell you what: you’re making socialized medicine the only alternative. Won’t be the hairy radicals bring it in; it’ll be you.”
“Not immediately, I trust,” Taubeneck murmured. “This is all very idealistic, Benny, but we have a practical problem too.”
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