The Doctor Stories

by William Carlos Williams

  He went back to their doctor in the company car.

  It was funny. We were at supper that evening when he came to the house door. I didn’t have any office hours that night. Floss asked him to come in and join us but he had eaten. He had a strange look on his face, half-amused and half-bewildered.

  I don’t know, he said. I couldn’t believe it. You ought to see the way I was treated. I was all ready to be bawled out but, oh no! The nurse was all smiles. Come right in, George. Do you feel all right, George? You don’t look very well. Don’t you want to lie down here on the couch? I thought she was kidding me. But she meant it. What a difference! That isn’t the way they treated me the first time. Then she says, It’s so hot in here I’ll turn on the fan so as to cool you a little. And here, here’s a nice glass of orange juice. No kiddin’. What a difference!

  Floss and I burst out laughing in spite of ourselves. Oh, everything’s lovely now, he said. But you’re not working? No, I don’t have to work. They sent me back home in the company car and they’re calling for me tomorrow morning. The only thing is they brought in the man who got me the job. That made me feel like two cents. You shouldn’t have acted like that, George, he told me. We’ll take care of you. We always take care of our men.

  I can take it, sir, I told him. But I simply couldn’t go back to work after the burning I got. You didn’t have to go back to work, he said. Yes, I did, I said. They had me dragging forty-pound cases around the floor ….

  Really? he said.

  He didn’t know that, did he? I interposed. I’m glad you spoke up. And they want you to go back tomorrow?

  All right, but don’t work till I tell you. But he did. After all, jobs aren’t so easy to get nowadays even with a hard-boiled firm like that. I won’t get any compensation either, they told me, not even for a scar.

  Is that so?

  And they said they’re not going to pay you, either.

  We’ll see what the Senator says about that.

  He came back two days later to tell me the rest of it. I get it now, he said. It seems after you’ve been there a year they insure you, but before that you don’t get any protection. After a year one of the fellows was telling me—why, they had a man there that just sprained his ankle a little. It wasn’t much. But they kept him out on full pay for five months, what do you know about that? They wouldn’t let him work when he wanted to.

  Good night!

  Geez, it was funny today, he went on. They were dressing my arm and a big piece of skin had all worked loose and they were peeling it off. It hurt me a little, oh, you know, not much but I showed I could feel it, I guess. My God! the nurse had me lie down on the couch before I knew what she was doing. And do you know, that was around one-thirty. I didn’t know what happened to me. When I woke up it was four o’clock. I’d been sleeping all that time! They had a blanket over me and everything.

  Good!

  How much do I owe you? Because I want to pay you. No use trying to get it from them. If I make any trouble they’ll blackball me all over the country they tell me.

  Ancient Gentility

  IN THOSE DAYS I was about the only doctor they would have on Guinea Hill. Nowadays some of the kids I delivered then may be practising medicine in the neighborhood. But in those days I had them all. I got to love those people, they were all right. Italian peasants from the region just south of Naples, most of them, living in small jerry-built houses—doing whatever they could find to do for a living and getting by, somehow.

  Among the others, there was a little frame building, or box, you might almost say, which had always interested me but into which I had never gone. It stood in the center of the usual small garden patch and sometimes there would be an old man at the gate, just standing there, with a big curved and silver-capped pipe in his mouth, puffing away at his leisure.

  Sure enough, one day I landed in that house also.

  I had been seeing a child at the Petrello’s or Albino’s or whoever it was when, as often happened, the woman of the house stopped me with a smile at the door just as I was leaving.

  Doc, I want you to visit the old people next door. The old lady’s sick. She don’t want to call nobody, but you go just the same. I’ll fix it up with you sometime. Will you do it—for me?

  Would I! It was a June morning. I had only to go twenty feet or so up the street—with a view of all New York City spread out before me over the meadows just beginning to turn green—and push back the low gate to the little vegetable garden.

  The old man opened the house door for me before I could knock. He smiled and bowed his head several times out of respect for a physician and pointed upstairs. He couldn’t speak a word of English and I knew practically no Italian, so he let it go at that.

  He was wonderful. A gentle, kindly creature, big as the house itself, almost, with long pure white hair and big white moustache. Every movement he made showed a sort of ancient gentility. Finally he said a few words as if to let me know he was sorry he couldn’t talk English and pointed upstairs again.

  Where I stood at that moment it was just one room, everything combined: you cooked in one corner, ate close by, and sat yourself down to talk with your friends and relatives over beyond. Everything was immaculately clean and smelt just tinged with that faint odor of garlic, peppers and olive oil which one gets to expect in all these peasant houses.

  There was one other room, immediately above. To it there ascended a removable ladder. At this moment the trap was open and the ladder in place. I went up. The old man remained below.

  What a thrill I got! There was an enormous bed that almost filled the place, it seemed, perhaps a chair or two besides, but no other furniture, and in the bed sinking into the feather mattress and covered with a great feather quilt was the woman I had been summoned to attend.

  Her face was dry and seamed with wrinkles, as old peasant faces will finally become, but it had the same patient smile upon it as shone from that of her old husband. White hair framing her face with silvery abundance, she didn’t look at all sick to me.

  She said a few words, smiling the while, by which I understood that after all it wasn’t much and that she knew she didn’t need a doctor and would have been up long since—or words to that effect—if the others hadn’t insisted. After listening to her heart and palpating her abdomen I told her she could get up if she wanted to, and as I backed down the ladder after saying good-bye, she had already begun to do so.

  The old man was waiting for me as I arrived below.

  We walked to the door together, I trying to explain to him what I had found and he bowing and saying a word or two of Italian in reply. I could make out that he was thanking me for my trouble and that he was sorry he had no money, and so forth and so on.

  At the gate we paused in one of those embarrassed moments which sometimes arrive during any conversation between relative strangers who wish to make a good impression on each other. Then as we stood there, slightly ill at ease, I saw him reach into his vest pocket and take something into his hand which he held out toward me.

  It was a small silver box, about an inch and a quarter along the sides and half an inch thick. On the cover of it was the embossed figure of a woman reclining among flowers. I took it in my hand but couldn’t imagine what he wanted me to do with it. He couldn’t be giving it to me?

  Seeing that I was puzzled, he reached for it, ever so gently, and I returned it to him. As he took it in his hand he opened it. It seemed to contain a sort of brown powder. Then I saw him pick some of it up between the thumb and finger of his right hand, place it at the base of his left thumb and …

  Why snuff! Of course. I was delighted.

  As he whiffed the powder into one generous nostril and then the other, he handed the box back to me—in all, one of the most gracious, kindly proceedings I had ever taken part in.

  Imitating him as best I could, I shared his snuff with him, and that was about the end of me for a moment or two. I couldn’t stop sneezing. I suppose I had gone at it
a little too vigorously. Finally, with tears in my eyes, I felt the old man standing there, smiling, an experience the like of which I shall never, in all probability, have again in my life on this mundane sphere.

  Verbal Transcription—6 A.M.

  THE WIFE:

  ABOUT AN HOUR AGO. He woke up and it was as if a knife was sticking in his side. I tried the old reliable, I gave him a good drink of whisky but this time it did no good. I thought it might be his heart so I … Yes. In between his pains he was trying to get dressed. He could hardly stand up but through it all he was trying to get himself ready to go to work. Can you imagine that?

  Rags! Leave the man alone. The minute you’re good to him he … Look at him sitting up and begging! Rags! Come here! Do you want to look out of the window? Oh, yes. That’s his favorite amusement—like the rest of the family. And we’re not willing just to look out. We have to lean out as if we were living on Third Avenue.

  Two dogs killed our old cat last week. He was thirteen years old. That’s unusual for a cat, I think. We never let him come upstairs. You know he was stiff and funny looking. But we fed him and let him sleep in the cellar. He was deaf and I suppose he couldn’t fight for himself and so they killed him.

  Yes. We have quite a menagerie. Have you seen our blue-jay? He had a broken wing. We’ve had him two years now. He whistles and answers us when we call him. He doesn’t look so good but he likes it here. We let him out of the cage sometimes with the window open. He goes to the sill and looks out. Then he turns and runs for his cage as if he was scared. Sometimes he sits on the little dog’s head and they are great friends. If he went out I’m afraid he wouldn’t understand and they would kill him too.

  And a canary. Yes. You know I was afraid it was his heart. Shall I dress him now? This is the time he usually takes the train to be there at seven o’clock. Pajamas are so cold. Here put on this old shirt—this old horse blanket, I always call it. I’m sorry to be such a fool but those needles give me a funny feeling all over. I can’t watch you give them. Thank you so much for coming so quickly. I have a cup of coffee for you all ready in the kitchen.

  The Insane

  WHAT ARE they teaching you now, son? said the old Doc brushing the crumbs from his vest.

  Have one, Dad? Yeah. Throw it to me. I got matches.

  I wish you wouldn’t do that, said his wife trying hard to scowl. It was the usual Saturday evening dinner, the young man, a senior in medical school, out for his regular weekend siesta in the suburbs.

  I’m curious, said the old Doc glancing at his wife. Then to his son, Anything new? She placed an ash tray at his elbow.

  I go on Medicine Monday, said the boy. We finished Pediatrics and Psychiatry today.

  Psychiatry, eh? That’s one you won’t regret, said his father. Or do you like it, maybe?

  Not particularly. But what can we learn in a few weeks? The cases we get are so advanced, just poor dumb clucks, there’s nothing to do for them anyway. I can see though that there must be a lot to it.

  What are you two talking about? said his mother.

  Insanity, Ma.

  Oh.

  Any new theories as to causes? said the older man. I mean, not the degenerative cases, with a somatic background, but the schizophrenics especially. Have they learned anything new about that in recent years?

  Oh, Dad, there are all sorts of theories. It starts with birth in most cases, they tell us. Even before birth sometimes. That’s what we’re taught. Unwanted children, conflicts of one sort or another. You know.

  No. I’m curious. What do they tell you about Freud?

  Sex as the basis for everything? The boy’s mother looked up at him a moment and then down again.

  It’s largely a reflection of his own personality, most likely. I mean it’s all right to look to sex as a cause, but that’s just the surface aspect of the thing. Not the thing itself. Don’t you think?

  That’s what I’m asking you.

  But everybody has a different theory. One thing I can understand though, even from my little experience, and that is why insanity is increasing so rapidly here today.

  Really? said his mother.

  I mean from my Pediatric work. He paused. Of the twenty-five children I saw in the clinic this week only two can be said to be really free from psychoneurotic symptoms. Two! Out of twenty-five. And maybe a more careful history would have found something even in those two.

  Do you mean that those children all showed signs of beginning insanity? said his mother.

  Potentially, yes.

  Not a very reassuring comment on modern life, is it?

  Go ahead, son, said his father.

  Take a funny-faced little nine-year-old guy with big glasses I saw in the clinic this afternoon. His mother brought him in for stealing money.

  How old a child, did you say?

  Nine years. The history was he’d take money from her purse. Or if she sent him to the store to buy something, he’d come back without it and use the money for something he wanted himself.

  Do you have to treat those cases too? asked his mother.

  Anything that comes in. We have to get the history, do a physical, a complete physical—you know what that means, Dad—make a diagnosis and prescribe treatment.

  What did you find?

  The story is this. The lad’s father was a drunk who died two years ago when the boy was just seven. A typical drunk. The usual bust up. They took him to the hospital and he died.

  But before that—to go back, this boy had been a caesarian birth. He has a brother, three years younger, an accident. After that the woman was sterilized. But I’ll tell you about him later.

  Anyhow, when she came home, on the ninth day after her caesarian, she found her husband under the influence, dead drunk as usual and he started to take her over—that’s the story.

  What’s that?

  Oh, you know, Mother. Naturally she put up a fight and as a result he knocked her downstairs.

  What! Nine days after her confinement?

  Yes, nine days after the section. She had to return to the hospital for a check up. And naturally when she came out again she hated her husband and the baby too because it was his child.

  Terrible.

  And the little chap had to grow up in that atmosphere. They were always battling. The old man beat up his wife regularly and the child had to witness it for his entire existence up to two years ago.

  As I say, she had a second child—three years old now, which, though she hated it, came between the older boy and his mother forcing them apart still further. That one has tuberculosis which doesn’t make things any easier.

  Imagine such people!

  They’re all around you, Mother, if you only knew it. Oh, I forgot to tell you the older kid was the dead spit of his dad who had always showered all kinds of attentions on him. His favorite. All the love the kid ever knew came from his old man.

  So when the father died the only person the boy could look to for continued affection was his mother—who hated him.

  Oh, no!

  As a result the child doesn’t eat, has lost weight, doesn’t sleep, constipation and all the rest of it. And in school, whereas his marks had always been good—because he’s fairly bright—after his father died they went steadily down, down and down to complete failure.

  Poor baby.

  And then he began to steal—from his mother—because he couldn’t get the love he demanded of her. He began to steal from her to compensate for what he could not get otherwise, and which his father had given him formerly.

  Interesting. Isn’t it, dear?

  So young!

  The child substitutes his own solution for the reality which he needs and cannot obtain. Unreality and reality become confused in him. Finally he loses track. He doesn’t know one from the other and we call him insane.

  What will become of him in this case? asked the mother.

  In this case, said her son, the outcome is supposed to be quite favorable. We’ll
explain the mechanism to the woman—who by the way isn’t in such good condition herself—and if she follows up what she’s told to do the boy is likely to be cured.

  Strange, isn’t it? said the old Doc.

  But what gets me, said his son. Of course we’re checked up on all these cases; they’re all gone over by a member of the staff. And when we give a history like that, they say, Oh those are just the psychiatric findings. That gripes me. Why, it’s the child’s life.

  Good boy, said his father. You’re all right. Stick to it.

  Comedy Entombed: 1930

  YEAH, I know, I said. But I can’t go three places first.

  When can you come then? he answered.

  I told you I’ve already promised two people to see them as soon as I’ve had breakfast. Why don’t you get somebody nearer if you’re in such a hurry?

  Because I want you. You know where it is, don’t you?

  I’ll find it.

  There’s a little wooden house behind the shoe shop between Fourth and Fifth. I’ll be looking for you. You sure you’ll come.

  Oh, Lord! I said, hanging up the receiver. What next?

  Did you get the name? said Floss.

  No. Porphyrio, Principio—something like that.

  Well, she answered me, shrugging her shoulders.

  There he was, at ten sharp, waiting on the street, coatless, with a narrow face and his hair standing up long and straight at the top to make it seem still narrower.

  I felt a little self-conscious as I got out of the car in my light-gray broadcloth suit and gray topcoat and went to follow him. The old car seemed large and costly in those poor surroundings, especially so before that diminutive wooden house. The place as if it had been abandoned long since and later reclaimed it was so tumble-down and yet attractive.

  That old familiar smell—of greasy dirt—greeted me as we stepped inside the door. It was a pleasant October day and the stove wasn’t on full so there was no emphasis, but there wasn’t a clean place to lay my coat. I chose a green painted kitchen chair, folding the coat up into a little pudding so it wouldn’t spread over too much of the surface.