Callahan's Legacy

by Spider Robinson

  The next five minutes were busy but uneventful. I remember thinking that for the first time, passing booze over the bar felt less like distributing refreshment and more like issuing ammo. Zoey’s quiet support buoyed me as I worked. We can talk a lot without words.

  “All right,” I said finally. “Who wants to go first? No, wait, I know who I want to go first. Better than half the stories I know about how people first came to Callahan’s Place trace back to one man: Doc Webster. You steered me here yourself, Doc…and somehow I never got around to asking you how you found the Place.”

  A rumble of agreement indicated that others had long wondered, too. “Hell,” Long-Drink said, “I always figured Mike just ran into Doc one day, and built a bar around him. It’s what I’d have done.”

  “Drink,” the Doc boomed, “one of these days an aroused citizenry will build an entire network of bars around you.” He sipped at his glass of Peter Dawson scotch, placed it where he could reach it conveniently, and sighed. “All right, children, brush your teeth and hop under the covers, and Grandpa Sam will tell you all how he met the big man with the smelly cigars. Eddie, a little bullshitting music, please.”

  Fast Eddie took his stool, and began something that managed to convey the essence of “As Time Goes By” without ever quoting or even paraphrasing it, a music most conducive to nostalgic reminiscence.

  People gathered round, pulled up seats, lit up smokes, and generally settled in to listen. Buck Rogers tossed a couple of logs on the fire, and the room filled with the unmistakable tang of birch. Ralph Von Wau Wau curled up by the fire and began to emit that soft sound for which we have not yet found it necessary to invent a word, which is the dog’s equivalent of a cat’s purr. The CounterClock ticked. The Doc folded his hands over his vast belly, thought in silence for perhaps twenty long seconds, and then began to speak.

  Doc Webster’s Story

  I’d been a doctor for seven years (he said). ER resident down at St. Eligius in Brooklyn. Married four years. I was just starting to feel settled enough to think about kids, and Janet told me she wanted a divorce. Couldn’t have shocked me more if she’d burst into flame. I’d thought things were fine. Asked the usual questions. No, no other lover. No, she didn’t think I was having an affair either. For a long time she couldn’t explain it and couldn’t explain it, and then all of a sudden she started to talk, and she talked for about half an hour nonstop, and the gist of it was, I wasn’t a very nice person anymore. I had become distant, and she didn’t know how to reach me.

  That shocked me even more than her asking for a divorce. It was as if she’d suddenly started talking in Martian. Not a nice person? Hell, everyone who knew me said I was a barrel of laughs. Best punster in the hospital. Didn’t she realize what a damn saint I was, breaking my ass in Emergency seventy hours a week? How hard it was, how much I needed to veg’ out and relax when I got home? Sure, I got a little impenetrable, sometimes. Brusque. Distracted. Was that any reason to break up a good partnership? And so on.

  Then Janet said her piece again, and I said mine again, and fifty reps later we each hired a lawyer. She got the good one.

  I was convinced she’d lost her grip on reality. So, for my own reality check, I began quietly taking people aside at work and asking them to tell me honestly what they thought of me, starting with the ones who seemed to like me. They were all very polite, talked a lot about my medical skills and my reaction time in a crisis and my administrative efficiency, everybody without exception mentioned my wonderful sense of humor…and when you added it all up and filtered the bullshit, they all said I wasn’t a particularly nice person. Words commonly used included “distant,” “facade,” and “arm’s length.” To me they came through as noise. I was the jolliest soul I knew.

  Okay, so my colleagues didn’t like me much better than Janet had. Surely my patients knew what a nice guy I was. They had to. All I’d ever really wanted to be, when I came right down to it, was a nice person: that was why I was in medicine in the first place, and in trauma work in the second place. Who could be nicer than a guy who saves your life? Especially when he could just as easily be doing face-lifts, or autopsies, or playing golf.

  Of course, I knew it would be awkward getting one of my patients to tell me honestly what he thought of me as a human being. What trauma case wants to risk annoying his doctor? So I decided to start with a patient not under my direct care, a patient I knew about because everyone at that hospital knew about him, a guy I knew I had gone out of my way to be nice to. I went up to Six East, and knocked on John Smiley’s door.

  John Smiley was an insult to medical science. He had arrived at that hospital so chopped up he had no business being alive, and his condition had been deteriorating steadily since. Every day, for three years. From the nipples down he was meat, and the meat was going bad. He needed a new operation of one kind or another every month or two. Usually the kind a surgeon would call “interesting.” He held the world’s record for number of appearances as the subject in JAMA articles: just about every organ and system in his body came up for discussion at some point. He was one of the—thank God—rare spinal cases who loses everything but pain sensation. He couldn’t feel a caress, below the chest, but he could count his stitches and track every gas bubble and tell you if the catheter kinked up. He had long since become immune to every analgesic the hospital could legally supply.

  (Doc paused, sipped his scotch, and frowned at his memories.)

  I can see him now. Lying in bed, sheet always pulled up to his collarbone so he wouldn’t make people feel faint. Wasted, of course, but you could see he’d been a big tough guy once. Redhead, face like a pirate. Effect enhanced by the eye patch, and the cheek scar. Still had arms and shoulders like a sailor, too, from hauling himself back and forth on the bed by that silly trapeze thing. When he grinned, you pictured a parrot on his shoulder. He grinned a lot.

  He’d been a fireman. He and his partner were taking a truck back to the barn, and as they pulled in, the counterweight cable on the garage door snapped. The emergency braking system failed, and the door came down on the cab like God’s Ax. His partner got lucky, died before he knew he was in trouble. John got the booby prize: he lived.

  There was some kind of Catch-22 in the insurance. I never did get it straight. The other guy’s wife got her death settlement. But John was four minutes past the end of his shift, or wasn’t supposed to be driving, or some bullshit, so there was no disability for his wife. Not a red cent. Not until he died; then she’d get rich. Meanwhile, his total financial asset was Medicare. It didn’t cover half the treatment he needed, let alone the private room. He got them anyway.

  How? you ask? So did I, when I figured out what it must be costing. The answers tended to veer. Basically, surgeons kept forgetting to bill for his operations. Charge nurses kept losing track of his expenses. The accounting department did a lot of creative arithmetic. “Lost” equipment could be found in his room most of the time—but never was. People—staff and other patients—sometimes made donations to a Smiley fund…at least once in five figures.

  I strongly doubt that anyone ever mentioned any of this to him. There were always two packs of Camels on his rolling table when he woke up, that’s all, and shortbread cookies on the table beside the bed, and two or three very good books he’d never read before in the drawer. If he ever wondered about any of this, I never heard him mention it. It would have been too much like worrying, and that was something John Smiley was no more capable of than he was of trampolining.

  Why did he rate this kind of treatment? you’re wondering. I can put it in nine words. He was the happiest human being I ever met.

  Don’t ask me how. All he had in the world was that room and those smokes and books and cookies and whoever happened to wander in his door…and somehow the son of a bitch managed to have more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I never spoke to anyone who ever found him other than cheerful, and his door was always open. Somehow he’d found the handle. Joy had become a h
abit for him. And he had a way of making it contagious.

  They sent the hard ones to him. Terminal cases. Women who’d lost babies. Unsuccessful suicides. Patients in clinical depression. Amputees. Burn cases. Parents or loved ones of patients in bad shape. He helped, they said. Patients who could walk, hop or wheel themselves up to Six East tended to heal faster, they said.

  I’d heard about him; everybody had. I’d even worked on him one night when he coded and nobody else was available—and gotten a signed thank-you card the following week. But I’d never met him. Tell you the truth, I hadn’t much wanted to. What I’d heard of him had made him sound a little too Leo Buscaglia, a little too Michael Landon. You know, the smiling suffering Saint of Six East. Pat O’Brien would play him in the movie, and there’d be too much music.

  But then one day I got to figuring that if he could help the Head Nurse handle the death of her mother, and help the Chief of Staff cope with the death of his son, and help the boss porter deal with the loss of his hand, maybe he could help me manage the dread news that I was not a very nice guy. So I walked into his room and bummed a smoke.

  The first words out of his mouth were, “Jesus, Doc, who pissed in your canteen?” The Saint of Six East. I guess I stared at him for a while, trying to figure out how to reply. I thought, my wife, and then, God, and then, pretty much everybody, I guess and then, I wish to hell I knew, and while I was trying to decide which to pick, what I heard come out of my mouth was, “I’m given to understand that I did.”

  To which he nodded and said, “Now that’s a bitch, alright. Pull up a chair and tell me about it.”

  “Well,” I said, “I kind of came here hoping you could maybe tell me about it.”

  He nodded. “Sure,” he said. “As soon as you tell me what to tell you. When did the first symptoms present?”

  And we were off.

  First I told him about Janet, and of course by now I had that polished into a nice comedy routine. He was a great audience—laughed like a lumberjack on nitrous, fed you little straight-lines, volleyed but always let you have the topper. Then I did a slapstick sketch of me wandering the halls like a fat Diogenes, looking for a dishonest friend, getting pie after pie in the face. He laughed so hard I was afraid it might be hurting him, so I throttled it back and tapered off and finally just asked, “So tell me, John: what do you think I’m doing wrong?”

  He kept smiling and said, “I can’t answer that until I get to know you, Doc—and I don’t know if I’m gonna live that long. It’s up to you.”

  I asked him what the hell he was talking about.

  “Look,” he said, still smiling, “I thank you for the show. It was great, and I really appreciate it. But Doc, there’s only two reasons to make people laugh. One is because you like ’em, and you want to make ’em feel good. And the other is because you’re scared, and you want to keep ’em at arm’s length. You’re good: I don’t know if you’ll ever let me get inside.”

  I stared at him and started to cloud up, but how can you get mad at a guy who’s nothing but bad meat from the collarbone down? Finally I just said, “I’m not scared of you, John.” But even I could hear my voice shaking. And he did two astonishing things.

  He pulled the sheet down to his lap. And he closed his eyes.

  Do you get it? First he made it possible to look, then he made it okay to stare. So I stared.

  Well, I told you, I worked ER. I guess I’d seen things as bad or worse. Hard to quantify, really. How many mangled limbs equals one decapitated infant? I’d seen things so bad I won’t describe ’em to you…but I’ll tell you this: I had never once cried. Not once since I entered med school. If the patient was unconscious and there were no civilians around, I made a joke. If it was real bad and the patient was listening, I thought of a joke and someone to tell it to later.

  I looked at John Smiley’s body and I thought of a sidesplitter…and then I burst into tears and cried harder than I had since I was three years old.

  I cried so hard so long the Charge Nurse came in to see what the hell was going on and John had to pull the sheet back up. I’d never liked her, and hated crying in front of her, but I couldn’t stop. I was afraid she was going to hug me, and she did an amazing thing herself. She said, “Call me if you need me, Sam,” and walked out again. Thirty-five years she and I have been friends now.

  When I was cried out, John took hold of my shoulder. Grip like the jaws of a tax collector. “Sam,” he said, “you got the same problem all doctors got if they’re worth a shit. You got too much empathy. That’s why you got in the racket, and why your life’s going south. You feel other people’s pain. Your line of work, that’s good and it’s bad. It helps you fix what you can fix—but it chops you up. It kills you when you can’t fix one. You overdosed.

  “So you put an off-switch on your empathy. You turn it off with a joke. You look at the symptoms instead of the patient, because you can’t stand to feel what he feels anymore. Trouble with them off-switches, when they break it’s usually in the off position. You can’t turn your heart off all day and then go home and pop it back on for the wife. After a while you can’t even warm it up for your friends. You can’t even feel your own goddam pain.”

  “So what am I supposed to do,” I asked him. “Change jobs?”

  “I hope not,” he said. “Word in the halls is you’re damn good. Overinsulated, maybe, but good. Maybe you just need to cry a little more. And do a little more of the right kind of laughing. The kind that brings you closer instead of further apart.”

  “Where do you find laughter like that?” I asked him.

  And he gave me directions to Callahan’s Place.

  Well of course, none of us needed to be told any more about the specifics of the Doc’s cure. We all knew what happened when you came to Callahan’s. And for as long as any of us had known him, Sam Webster’s laughter had been, beyond question, the right kind. His laughter had brought a great many of us together, over the years.

  “What happened to John?” Zoey asked.

  “Oh, he hung on for another two years,” the Doc said. “Plain impossible, of course—but then, the shape he was in, I don’t suppose two years was all that much more remarkable than two minutes.”

  “Jesus,” Marty Matthias said. “What the hell kept him going?”

  “I asked him once,” the Doc told him. “He said to me, ‘Sam, people keep comin’ in that door with problems I can fix. How many guys you know are that lucky? Even healthy guys.’ Then he laughed and told me the one about the man with the silver screw in his navel. That’s how long ago all this was: that joke was new, then.”

  “How did things work out with his wife?” Zoey asked.

  “To tell you the truth,” the Doc said, “that surprised me more than just about anything else about John. They got along great.”

  “That is surprising,” Zoey said, nodding. “It sounds like she was in a strange position.”

  “One of the strangest,” the Doc agreed. “Look at it from her point of view. ‘Mrs. Smiley, your husband has taken his last step, and earned his last nickel. You’ll get rich from it—but not until he dies…and it looks like he’s going to keep circling the drain for years to come. And if you divorce him before he dies, you won’t see a dime. Have a nice day.”

  “How did they deal with it?” Zoey asked.

  “Well,” the Doc said, “Helen came to visit every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday night. Generally got in by eight o’clock, and sometime along toward ten, she’d shut the door…or whoever else had been visiting with them left and shut it behind them. You can’t lock those doors, of course—but it would’ve taken a very busy guy to get past all the nurses and patients running interference, and get within twenty feet of that door. By eleven she was usually on her way home, smiling like Mona Lisa.”

  “Jesus,” said Dink Fogerty. “What the hell could they do?”

  “I actually got up the balls to ask him one time,” the Doc said. “Relying on doctor’s arrogance. He d
idn’t mind a bit. By that point he’d been utterly without privacy of any kind for so long, he was willing to tell anybody anything. ‘Hell, Sam,’ he said, ‘I got the use of both hands and my tongue—what more do you need to please a woman?’ ‘Well, okay,’ I said, ‘but is there anything she can do for you? Women aren’t wired up like men: damn few of ’em can just take.’ And he gave me that big pirate’s grin and said, ‘I can’t feel a damn thing from my chest down…nothing good, anyway…but Sam, you wouldn’t believe how sensitive my nipples are.’”

  Les Glueham murmured, “That’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard of,” at the same instant his wife Merry breathed, “That’s the most terrible thing I ever heard of,” and then they looked at each other and both nodded. Zoey and I shared a glance, too.

  “Wait for it,” the Doc said. “About a year and a half before he finally died, John asked me to find some nice guy for his wife. He said she had to stay legally married to him, so she’d collect big-time when he finally caught the bus, but that was no reason for a woman as nice as her to live alone.”

  “Wow…what did you do?” Tommy Janssen asked.

  “What could I do? Went home and cried my eyes out, and then I found a nice guy for his wife. Three guys, actually. Nicest three bachelors I could find. She dated all three for a while, then settled on one and moved in with him. Never missed a visit, mind you—except now she brought her boyfriend along. He and John got to be good friends. He’d stay for an hour or so, then leave her alone with her husband, and swing by to pick her up an hour later. The two of them got married the week John died.”

  “Holy smoke, what a story!” Tommy said. “Are they still together?”

  “No,” Long-Drink McGonnigle said. “She died on me.”

  8

  RETTEBS, I FLAHD NOCES,

  EH? TTU, BUT THE SECOND HALF

  IS BETTER…

  There was a silence, and a stillness so sudden and complete the flames seemed to freeze in the fireplace, and then everybody started talking at once. Sure, I’d been told that Long-Drink had had a wife that died before I met him, though I’d forgotten what of, and now that I thought about it I did seem to recall that her name had been Helen. But he’d never mentioned anything about a previous marriage of hers to me—and from the hubbub it was apparent nobody else had heard the story either. The McGonnigle sat serenely at the center of attention, sipping his beer.