Different Seasons (73 page)

“Oh! I’m sorry.” She got to her feet quickly, tucking the thick folder into her purse.

“No need.”

She shrugged into her light coat, looking at me with those direct hazel eyes as she did so. “No,” she said. “Not a radical at all. I suspect you’re actually quite ... comfortable? Is that the word I want?”

“I hope it will serve,” I said. “It’s a word I like. If you speak to Mrs. Davidson, she’ll give you an appointment schedule. I’ll want to see you again early next month.”

“Your Mrs. Davidson doesn’t approve of me.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true at all.” But I’ve never been a particularly good liar, and the warmth between us suddenly slipped away. I did not accompany her to the door of my consulting room. “Miss Stansfield?”

She turned toward me, coolly enquiring.

“Do you intend to keep the baby?”

She considered me briefly and then smiled—a secret smile which I am convinced only pregnant women know. “Oh yes,” she said, and let herself out.

By the end of that day I had treated identical twins for identical cases of poison ivy, lanced a boil, removed a hook of metal from a sheet-welder’s eye, and referred one of my oldest patients to White Memorial for what was surely cancer. I had forgotten all about Sandra Stansfield by then. Ella Davidson recalled her to my mind by saying:

“Perhaps she’s not a chippie after all.”

I looked up from my last patient’s folder. I had been looking at it, feeling that useless disgust most doctors feel when they know they have been rendered completely helpless, and thinking I ought to have a rubber stamp made up for such files—only instead of saying ACCOUNT RECEIVABLE OR PAID IN FULL OR PATIENT MOVED, it would simply say DEATH-WARRANT. Perhaps with a skull and crossbones above, like those on bottles of poison.

“Pardon me?”

“Your Miss Jane Smith. She did a most peculiar thing after her appointment this morning.” The set of Mrs. Davidson’s head and mouth made it clear that this was the sort of peculiar thing of which she approved.

“And what was that?”

“When I gave her her appointment card, she asked me to tot up her expenses. All of her expenses. Delivery and hospital stay included.”

That was a peculiar thing, all right. This was 1935, remember, and Miss Stansfield gave every impression of being a woman on her own. Was she well off, even comfortably off? I didn’t think so. Her dress, shoes, and gloves had all been smart, but she had worn no jewelry—not even costume jewelry. And then there was her hat, that decidedly out-of-date cloche.

“Did you do it?” I asked.

Mrs. Davidson looked at me as though I might have lost my senses. “Did I? Of course I did! And she paid the entire amount. In cash.”

The last, which apparently had surprised Mrs. Davidson the most (in an extremely pleasant way, of course), surprised me not at all. One thing which the Jane Smiths of the world can’t do is write checks.

“Took a bank-book out of her purse, opened it, and counted the money right out onto my desk,” Mrs. Davidson was continuing. “Then she put her receipt in where the cash had been, put the bank-book into her purse again, and said good day. Not half bad, when you think of the way we’ve had to chase some of these so-called ‘respectable’ people to make them pay their bills!”

I felt chagrined for some reason. I was not happy with the Stansfield woman for having done such a thing, with Mrs. Davidson for being so pleased and complacent with the arrangement, and with myself, for some reason I couldn’t define then and can’t now. Something about it made me feel small.

“But she couldn’t very well pay for a hospital stay now, could she?” I asked—it was a ridiculously small thing to seize on, but it was all I could find at that moment on which to express my pique and half-amused frustration. “After all, none of us knows how long she’ll have to remain there. Or are you reading the crystal now, Ella?”

“I told her that very thing, and she asked what the average stay was following an uncomplicated birth. I told her six days. Wasn’t that right, Dr. McCarron?”

I had to admit it was.

“She said that she would pay for six days, then, and if it was longer, she would pay the difference, and if—”

“—if it was shorter, we could issue her a refund,” I finished wearily. I thought:
Damn the woman, anyway!
—and then I laughed. She had guts. One couldn’t deny that. All kinds of guts.

Mrs. Davidson allowed herself a smile ... and if I am ever tempted, now that I am in my dotage, to believe I know all there is to know about one of my fellow creatures, I try to remember that smile. Before that day I would have staked my life that I would never see Mrs. Davidson, one of the most “proper” women I have ever known, smile fondly as she thought about a girl who was pregnant out of wedlock.

“Guts? I don’t know, doctor. But she knows her own mind, that one. She certainly does.”

 

A month passed, and Miss Stansfield showed up promptly for her appointment, simply appearing out of that wide, amazing flow of humanity that was New York then and is New York now. She wore a fresh-looking blue dress to which she managed to communicate a feeling of originality, of one-of-a-kind-ness, despite the fact that it had been quite obviously picked from a rack of dozens just like it. Her pumps did not match it; they were the same brown ones in which I had seen her last time.

I checked her over carefully and found her normal in every way. I told her so and she was pleased. “I found the pre-natal vitamins, Dr. McCarron.”

“Did you? That’s good.”

Her eyes sparkled impishly. “The druggist advised me against them.”

“God save me from pestle-pounders,” I said, and she giggled against the heel of her palm—it was a childlike gesture, winning in its unselfconsciousness. “I never met a druggist that wasn’t a frustrated doctor. And a Republican. Pre-natal vitamins are new, so they’re regarded with suspicion. Did you take his advice?”

“No, I took yours. You’re my doctor.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all.” She looked at me straightforwardly, not giggling now. “Dr. McCarron, when will I begin to show?”

“Not until August, I should guess. September, if you choose garments which are ... uh, voluminous.”

“Thank you.” She picked up her purse but did not rise immediately to go. I thought that she wanted to talk ... and didn’t know where or how to begin.

“You’re a working woman, I take it?”

She nodded. “Yes. I work.”

“Might I ask where? If you’d rather I didn’t—”

She laughed—a brittle, humorless laugh, as different from a giggle as day is from dark. “In a department store. Where else does an unmarried woman work in the city? I sell perfume to fat ladies who rinse their hair and then have it done up in tiny finger-waves.”

“How long will you continue?”

“Until my delicate condition is noticed. I suppose then I’ll be asked to leave, lest I upset any of the fat ladies. The shock of being waited on by a pregnant woman with no wedding band might cause their hair to straighten.”

Quite suddenly her eyes were bright with tears. Her lips began to tremble, and I groped for a handkerchief. But the tears didn’t fall—not so much as a single one. Her eyes brimmed for a moment and then she blinked them back. Her lips tightened ... and then smoothed out. She simply decided she was not going to lose control of her emotions ... and she did not. It was a remarkable thing to watch.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve been very kind to me. I won’t repay your kindness with what would be a very common story.”

She rose to go, and I rose with her.

“I’m not a bad listener,” I said, “and I have some time. My next patient cancelled.”

“No,” she said. “Thank you, but no.”

“All right,” I said. “But there’s something else.”

“Yes?”

“It’s not my policy to make my patients—
any
of my patients—pay for services in advance of those services’ being rendered. I hope if you ... that is, if you feel you’d like to ... or have to ...” I fumbled my way into silence.

“I’ve been in New York four years, Dr. McCarron, and I’m thrifty by nature. After August—or September—I’ll have to live on what’s in my savings account until I can go back to work again. It’s not a great amount and sometimes, during the nights, mostly, I become frightened.”

She looked at me steadily with those wonderful hazel eyes.

“It seemed better to me—safer—to pay for the baby first. Ahead of everything. Because that is where the baby is in my thoughts, and because, later on, the temptation to spend that money might become very great.”

“All right,” I said. “But please remember that I see it as having been paid before accounts. If you need it, say so.”

“And bring out the dragon in Mrs. Davidson again?” The impish light was back in her eyes. “I don’t think so. And now, doctor—”

“You intend to work as long as possible? Absolutely as long as possible?”

“Yes. I have to. Why?”

“I think I’m going to frighten you a little before you go,” I said.

Her eyes widened slightly. “Don’t do that,” she said. “I’m frightened enough already.”

“Which is exactly why I’m going to do it. Sit down again, Miss Stansfield.” And when she only stood there, I added: “Please.”

She sat. Reluctantly.

“You’re in a unique and unenviable position,” I told her, sitting on the comer of my desk. “You are dealing with the situation with remarkable grace.”

She began to speak, and I held up my hand to silence her.

“That’s good. I salute you for it. But I would hate to see you hurt your baby in any way out of concern for your own financial security. I had a patient who, in spite of my strenuous advice to the contrary, continued packing herself into a girdle month after month, strapping it tighter and tighter as her pregnancy progressed. She was a vain, stupid, tiresome woman, and I don’t believe she really wanted the baby anyway. I don’t subscribe to many of these theories of the subconscious which everyone seems to discuss over their Mah-Jongg boards these days, but if I did, I would say that she—or some part of her—was trying to kill the baby.”

“And did she?” Her face was very still.

“No, not at all. But the baby was born retarded. It’s very possible that the baby would have been retarded anyway, and I’m not saying otherwise—we know next to nothing about what causes such things. But she
may
have caused it.”

“I take your point,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t want me to ... to pack myself in so I can work another month or six weeks. I’ll admit the thought had crossed my mind. So ... thank you for the fright.”

This time I walked her to the door. I would have liked to ask her just how much—or how little—she had left in that savings book, and just how close to the edge she was. It was a question she would not answer; I knew that well enough. So I merely bade her goodbye and made a joke about her vitamins. She left. I found myself thinking about her at odd moments over the next month, and—

 

Johanssen interrupted McCarron’s story at this point. They were old friends, and I suppose that gave him the right to ask the question that had surely crossed all our minds.

“Did you love her, Emlyn? Is that what all this is about, this stuff about her eyes and smile and how you ‘thought of her at odd moments’?”

I thought that McCarron might be annoyed at this interruption, but he was not. “You have a right to ask the question,” he said, and paused, looking into the fire. It seemed that he might almost have fallen into a doze. Then a dry knot of wood exploded, sending sparks up the chimney in a swirl, and McCarron looked around, first at Johanssen and then at the rest of us.

“No. I didn’t love her. The things I’ve said about her sound like the things a man who is falling in love would notice—her eyes, her dresses, her laugh.” He lit his pipe with a special boltlike pipe-lighter that he carried, drawing the flame until there was a bed of coals there. Then he snapped the bolt shut, dropped it into the pocket of his jacket, and blew out a plume of smoke that shifted slowly around his head in an aromatic membrane.

“I admired her. That was the long and short of it. And my admiration grew with each of her visits. I suppose some of you sense this as a story of love crossed by circumstance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her story came out a bit at a time over the next half-year or so, and when you gentlemen hear it, I think you’ll agree that it was every bit as common as she herself said it was. She had been drawn to the city like a thousand other girls; she had come from a small town ...

 

... in Iowa or Nebraska. Or possibly it was Minnesota—I don’t really remember anymore. She had done a lot of high school dramatics and community theater in her small town—good reviews in the local weekly written by a drama critic with an English degree from Cow and Sileage Junior College—and she came to New York to try a career in acting.

She was practical even about that—as practical as an impractical ambition will allow one to be, anyway. She came to New York, she told me, because she didn’t believe the un-stated thesis of the movie magazines—that any girl who came to Hollywood could become a star, that she might be sipping a soda in Schwab’s Drugstore one day and playing opposite Gable or MacMurray the next. She came to New York, she said, because she thought it might be easier to get her foot in the door there ... and, I think, because the legitimate theater interested her more than the talkies.

She got a job selling perfume in one of the big department stores and enrolled in acting classes. She was smart and terribly determined, this girl—her will was pure steel, through and through—but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly ... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness—the ache of the uprooted plant.