by Dick Cluster
When Jay Harrison entered, everybody quieted down. Jay took off gown, cap, and gloves and dropped them onto an empty chair. Alex watched him work his way through the crowd to Barbara, standing alone in a comer. He took her hand and said something, a few words, his expression unreadable from where Alex stood. The crowd figured out there was going to be more waiting. A hesitant babble re-emerged.
Then the door opened, and Yvonne Price stood there with Linda Dumars at her side. Linda was wearing faded green hospital scrubs and a hospital cap. She looked like the hostess at a pajama party, smiling broadly, choosing from some eccentricity to appear in her shower cap. In a few days she could go home to her kids, though for a while she wouldn’t go out, and she’d be held to a limited diet and visitor list. It was unusual to permit this many visitors even here in the hospital, but she’d been kept in isolation for an extra week after her counts had returned to acceptable levels. Her recovery was no ordinary recovery. Some collective sigh of relief and absolution had to be arranged.
Jay started to clap, and Alex found himself joining in. “Happy Breakout Day,” Kevin called. Linda smiled even more broadly, showing a lot of straight white teeth. She looked pale but otherwise strong and excited. She looked ready to face the world outside her sterile room.
“I just want to thank everybody awfully much,” Linda said. “You know I can’t kiss you or shake your hands yet. In spite of everything, I consider myself very lucky. Without this treatment, I probably would have been in and out of the hospital for the rest of my life. Now I hope I’ll be able to relax and get on with it. Each one of you has been a big part of making that possible. I really just want to say thank you. I’d also like to thank someone I’ve heard about who isn’t here, whom I suppose I’ll never get to meet.”
Sounds like a canned testimonial, Alex thought as the crowd applauded again. Carefully worded not to refer out loud to anything real. In truth, the hospital was lucky she wasn’t suing. But her smile came back, and it lingered especially on him. He felt a quiet glow of satisfaction in spite of the things he’d done wrong. He’d done a lot of things wrong, but he’d done some things right. He remembered the very nervous hour in Jay’s office— him and Jay and Deborah— waiting for a telephone that didn’t ring. And then a messenger had shown up with a package for Dr. Harrison, COD.
There was too much Lone Ranger, Alex felt, about the person Linda would never get to meet. Foster took a lot of chances, even if he did turn out to wear a white hat, or a black hat, or whatever the hell color hat the good guys ought to be distinguished by. Though maybe it was just that Alex would never forget being tied on Kramer’s dirty rug, watching Foster’s broad back go out the door. Meredith thought the Foster who left Alex tied was, paradoxically, very much the same character who’d once tossed a pair of wire cutters over a chain-link fence. He might have good and practical reasons for his actions, but he was also somebody who liked to put people in a situation and see how they’d react. If that was true, Alex thought, it could be a dangerous trait. In the moment Foster was scooting out with the marrow, Alex would have been happy to see Special Agent Fridley fly through the window, turned-up nose leading, cape streaming behind, machine pistol gripped in both hands.
But Linda didn’t have to worry about any of that. For her, today was simply a great day. Alex knew that in her place he’d be smiling too. He was smiling himself, because about a week ago his double vision had disappeared. He hadn’t even been able to say exactly when. He’d just been grateful. That was how Linda would be feeling. Grateful. Even when she woke with nightmares about empty bones, still she’d be grateful that trying to live without marrow was over except as a dream.
The ceremony was short, just the applause, and Linda’s thanks, and some cake served by the dietary aides. Kevin, now bushy-haired and bearded, circled around Linda like a mother bear around a cub, anxious to come between her and any threat. Linda seemed flattered yet uncertain how to respond. There were advantages on both sides to a mandatory no-touch period, Alex thought. In the meantime Alex made small talk with Jay and Barbara, though he couldn’t say he felt comfortable with either one of them.
It didn’t really help that he’d apologized to Jay for his suspicions, and Jay had apologized for firing him. They’d pretended to find it amusing that Alex had spied on him, and that Alex had read guilt into Jay’s box of old papers and poetry books, when all Jay had been doing with those was trying to play detective himself. The truth was, however, that spying on Jay and Barbara had left Alex embarrassed. Not from what he’d seen, but from what he’d sensed.
Alex liked the idea of old lovers’ reunions, he even cherished a few such fantasies himself. These two, though, had seemed in too much of a hurry, needing each other too much. They’d needed each other not out of love or chemistry, but to answer some question or questions that had troubled them for a long time. At least that’s what Alex read into it. He didn’t know whether they were still seeing each other, and he didn’t want to ask. He left them to having and eating their cake, if that’s what they were doing, and drifted over to Deborah McCarthy. He would have preferred her to Barbara Binder, hands down, if he’d had such a choice. Deborah was very reserved and businesslike with him now.
When Linda Dumars went back to her isolation room, the gathering rapidly broke up. Alex rode down in the elevator with Mary Forziati, the sperm bank tech. She also deserved credit, he thought, and by stretching a point he might be able to share some of his satisfied glow with her. She could use it, because her nightmares would feature a masked man who wasn’t the Lone Ranger at all. She’d relive those hours pounding on the door of the dark closet with life-or-death news whose value seemed to plummet with every minute that ticked by.
“I hear you would have found the marrow by process of logical deduction,” Alex told her, “if Kramer hadn’t barged in right then.”
“Well,” she said, “I wish I’d logically deduced a lot sooner. All of a sudden a man had his hand around my windpipe. As far as I knew I was fighting for my own life, not anybody else’s.” She folded her white-coated arms as if to ward off a shiver. “And I didn’t know he’d already murdered a woman early that day.”
“I think he barely knew what he was doing any more,” said Alex. “He couldn’t handle that things hadn’t gone according to his original plan. The other thing that’s scary is how close he came to making that one work.”
That original plan had been simple, and it had seemed safe. The exchange on the beach would have gone very much the way it actually happened, except the note in the cooler would have said something short and cute like Look for the marrow in the sperm bank tank. The transplant would have gone forward, everyone would have breathed a sigh of relief, and in due course an investigation would have revealed that a phony technician had hidden the one specimen in Mary’s tank shortly after a phony delivery man had stolen the two specimens from Edie’s. Both men would have been remembered only as uniforms, caps, glasses. At most, somebody might remember the false hair color or the equally false mustache.
It was only because of an ex-patient— a lawyer whom Kramer had informed of the sad results of a biopsy seven months back— that Kramer was forced to deviate from his plan. The lawyer, getting his counts checked post-treatment, had happened to be sitting in the sperm bank waiting room on Kramer’s all-important day. And as Alex knew from experience, you didn’t forget the voice that laid a cancer diagnosis on you. The patient had looked up and dismissed this as an oddity, but when investigators got around to interviewing everybody who’d been in there that day, the lawyer would have mentioned (in fact, had mentioned, now) how the repairman sounded just like Dr. Kramer to him. Knowing this, Kramer hadn’t been able to earn his $300,000 with a short cute note. He’d stalled, substituting the Emily Dickinson poem plus his own hungry cat verse, until he could mail the second batch from out West. He’d figured he could find a way to retrieve the first specimen some other day, some other month, after all the excitement had died down.
“He did things that were dumber and dumber, as he put it,” Alex summed up. “But to start with, the idea wasn’t so dumb. It could have worked. It almost did.”
“Almost, yes,” Mary said. A tired grin flickered across her freckled face. “That’s how it is here, I can say that for sure. If you worked in a hospital, you’d know how many things that almost went right go wrong. And how many things happen the other way around. But it’s better than working for Mega-Toxic Chemical, you know what I mean? I mean, some lab where they invent new ways to give people cancer. At least the idea here is to help people get well.”
“Uh-huh,” Alex agreed, but none of that was what he wanted to talk about. This conversation wasn’t sharing any glow. Instead it was taking a distinctly depressing turn. Suddenly he just wanted to get out of there. It wasn’t Mary Forziati’s fault. Maybe it was Gordon Kramer’s ghost, still wishing to be Bobby Lynch, now trapped forever in this institution where so many people’s dreams didn’t come true. Anyway Alex felt tired of the whole industry: cancer, and cancer patients, and all the people who took care of them too.
When the elevator reached the lobby level, Alex said a quick good-bye and headed for the street. Outdoors it was a gorgeous June day, one of the rare, really spring ones. Alex looked forward to two small things and wished for one big one. He looked forward to a Chinese dinner out with Maria and Meredith, and to filling the two seats he’d bought for himself and Maria at Fenway Park. He fervently wished never to see the inside of the Dennison Center for Cancer Treatment and Research, ever again.
THE END
For Bruce Millies
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For answering my questions about medicine and the medical world, I am grateful to Janet Belanger, Liz Dreesen, Joanne Geake, Joan Goldberg, Holcomb Grier, Eugenia Holbrooke, Peggy Lynch, and Sandy Shea. These helpful informants are in no way responsible for any of my interpretations or inventions, nor should the medical institutions in this book be seen as portrayals of the places in which any of them may have received or provided care. I would also like to thank my companions in a wonderful writers’ group (Lucy Marx, Barbara Neely, Kate White) and fellow writers Jane Langton and Judith Van Gieson for their comments and support.
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Also by Dick Cluster:
Alex Glauberman Mysteries
RETURN TO SENDER
REPULSE MONKEY
OBLIGATIONS OF THE BONE
Non-fiction:
THEY SHOULD HAVE SERVED THAT CUP OF COFFEE: Seven Radicals Remember the 60s
THE HISTORY OF HAVANA with Rafael Hernandez
Translations from the Spanish:
A CORNER OF THE WORLD by Mylene Fernández Pintado
VITAL SIGNS by Pedro de Jesús
FRIGID TALES by Pedro de Jesús
OPHELIAS by Aida Bahr
HAVANA REVISITED: An Architectural Heritage; Cathryn Griffith, Ed.
THE CUBAN MILE by Alejandro Hernández Díaz
CUBANA: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women, with Cindy Schuster; Mirta Yáñez, Ed.
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About the Author
DICK CLUSTER is the author of the novels Return to Sender, Repulse Monkey, and Obligations of the Bone. He has written both crime novels and history books, as well as popular economics (another mystery, for sure). Some of these have been translated into Japanese, Danish, Hungarian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Bulgarian.
He landed in Havana’s José Martí airport for the first time in 1969 and has been fascinated by that city ever since, exploring it by foot, bicycle, bus, car and other means. He is co-author of The History of Havana and a translator of Cuban literature. Previous nonfiction books include They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee, about U.S. radical movements of the ’60s and ’70s, and Shrinking Dollars, Vanishing Jobs, about the U.S. economy. He taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he was Associate Director of the University Honors Program.
