House of God (49 page)

The Leggo and the Fish canned the second verse of Hooper's song, and we settled down to the serious business of the day: ‘All of you, when you came here almost a year ago,' said the Leggo, ‘agreed to do two years, and yet some of you are thinking of not going on in medicine. Boys, I'll be frank: I'm banking on your being here with me for the rewarding House residency year. One year isn't enough. One year is nothing, almost a waste. It's the second year, built on the foundation of the first, that makes it all worthwhile.' He paused. Angry silence filled the room. A waste? ‘Now, how many of you are considering psychiatry? Raise your hands.'

Silently, five hands went up: the Runt, Chuck, Eddie, the Crow, the
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. And then the Leggo's eyes and the Fish's eyes bugged out, staring at the back of the room. We turned. Both Gilheeny and Quick had raised their hands.

‘What?' asked the Leggo. ‘You too? You're policemen, not physicians. You can't become psychiatrists on July the first.'

‘Policemen we are,' said Gilheeny, ‘and strictly speaking, psychiatrists we cannot become. At first this seemed a singular limitation for us, so taken as we are with the warped and criminally perverted—'

‘Get on with it, man. What's the point?'

‘The point is that we shall become lay analysts.'

‘Lay analysts? You cops are thinking of becoming lay analysts?'

There was a pause, and then, out of it rolled a familiar question: ‘Would we be policemen if we were not?'

‘Yes,' said Quick, ‘for lay analysis was introduced to our minds by our old friend Grenade Room Dubler. Dr. Jeffrey Cohen also—'

‘WHAT?!' yelled the Leggo. ‘DUBLER A PSYCHIATRIST?'

‘Not just a psychiatrist, no,' said Gilheeny, ‘a Freudian analyst.'

‘THAT MADMAN? A FREUDIAN PSYCHO-ANALYST?'

‘And not just a psychoanalyst,' said Quick, ‘but the bearded President of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a preeminent humanist and scholar.'

‘Yes,' said Gilheeny, ‘having left the House of God directly after his internship year, Dubler never looked back, and has risen to the very top. At this moment, he is pulling strings for us, giving us “a leg up.”'

‘And with Finton's banjaxed leg anyway,' said Quick, ‘it is time for us to change careers to a less ambulatory one. Lay analysis is perfect.'

‘For did not the great Sigmund Freud in 1912 conclude a symposium on masturbation with the statement: “the subject of onanism is inexhaustible”?'

‘And will it not take time to work out our Church dogma that masturbation will render the Catholic lad blind, hairy-palmed, insane, doomed, and with the leg bones bent like an orphan with the rickets?'

‘And so excuse us, Chief,' said Gilheeny, folding his big arms across his chest and leaning back against the door, ‘we will now resume the free associations,' and he closed his eyes and lapsed into silence again.

The Leggo was shaken. Turning back to us, anxiously tugging the stethoscope deep-sixed in his trousers, he asked, ‘Psychiatry? All of you five? I don't understand. Hooper?'

‘Well,' said Hooper sheepishly, ‘I got to admit I was thinking Path most of the year, but for some reason, right now Psych seems a better deal. Lot to work through, Chief—the divorce, splitting up the furniture, saying good-bye to the wife's old man, the works—anyway, the fiancée's a pathologist, she'll keep me up on the stiffs.'

‘Chuck? Even you?' asked the Leggo.

‘You know how it is, man. I mean, just look at me. When I firs' came here, I looked great, didn't I, guys? I was thin, atha-letic, dressed like a Bluenote, remember? Now I'm fat, and I'm dressin' like a janitor, a damn bum. Why? You dudes and them gomers, that's why. And mostly you—you made me what I am today. Thanks, man, thanks a lot. I be good goddamned if I stay here for round two.'

We were startled by Chuck's outburst. The Leggo looked hurt and puzzled. He began to question Eddie, but the Runt, more and more angry, exploded: ‘Damnit, Leggo, you don't realize what we've been going through this year. You don't have a clue!'

There was an ominous hush. The Runt, wild-eyed, looked like he was about to strangle the Leggo, and the Fish shielded his Chief with his body and gestured toward the policemen. Snarling, the Runt continued: ‘There's some good news, there's some bad news: the bad news is there's shit around here; the good news is that there's plenty of it. You've broken us this year, with your pious version of medical care. We hate this. We want out.'

‘What?' asked the Leggo incredulously, ‘you mean you don't enjoy doing medicine here at the House of God?'

‘Get it through your fucking skull!' shouted the Runt at the Leggo, and, according to Freud, at his mom and pop in the Leggo, and sat down.

‘It's just a small radical nucleus.'

‘Nope,' I said in a somber tone. ‘It's all of us. This morning I saw Howard Greenspoon bashing and screaming at the elevator door like a maniac.'

‘Howard? No!' said the Leggo. ‘My Howie?'

The attention turned to his Howie. Silence. The tension billowed out. Howie squirmed. The tension hung, taut. Howie cracked: ‘Y-y-yes, Chief, sir, I'm sorry, but it's true. It was the gomers: one named Harry and a flatulent woman named Jane. See, it's my admitting days that kill me. Each admitting day—knowing that the total age of my admissions will be in the four hundreds—I get depressed and I want to kill myself. The tension had been incredible: those M and M Conferences where I get roasted every two weeks for my mistakes—I can't help making mistakes, can I, Chief?—and then Potts splattering and his mess being spread around so we had to park right on him, and all these gomers. And then the young patients dying no matter what we do. The truth is, Chief, well . . . well, since September I've been on antidepressants, Elavil. And I'm staying on here; imagine how the other guys feel. Like the Runt: he used to be a fun guy, and now . . . why, just look at him.'

We all looked at him. The Runt was staring at the Leggo with a gaze as ferocious as Crazy Abe's. The Runt looked extraordinarily mean.

The Leggo, shocked, asked, ‘You mean you don't look forward to your admitting days?'

‘Look forward?' said Howie. ‘Chief, two days before my admitting day—just after my last admitting day—I'm nervous, and I up my dose of Elavil twenty-five milligrams. One day before my admitting day, I add fifty of Thorazine. On my admitting day, as I start to see the gomers, I start to shake, and . . .' Shaking, Howie took out a silver pillbox faced with mother-of-pearl and popped a Valium into his mouth. ‘. . . and it's Valium all the way. On real bad days . . . well, it's hits of Dex.'

So that was Howie's smile: the guy was a walking pharmacopoeia.

The Leggo had gotten stuck on something Howie had said, and asked the Fish: ‘Did they say they don't enjoy their admitting days?'

‘Yes, sir,' said the Fish, ‘I do believe they said that, sir.'

‘Strange. Boys, when I was an intern, I loved my admitting days. All of us did. We looked forward to them, we fought for those “toughies” so we could show our Chief what we could do. And we did damn well. What's happened? What's going on?'

‘Gomers,' said Howie, ‘gomers are what's going on.'

‘You mean old people? We took care of old people too.'

‘Gomers are different,' said Eddie. ‘They didn't exist when you were a tern, 'cause then they used to die. Now they don't.'

‘Ridiculous,' said the Leggo emphatically.

‘It is,' I said, ‘and it's true. How many guys have seen a gomer die under his own steam this year, without medical interference? Raise your hands.'

No hands went up.

‘But surely we help them. Why, we even cure.'

‘Most of us wouldn't know a cure if we found one in a Cracker Jack Box,' said Eddie. ‘I haven't cured anybody yet and I don't know an intern who has. We're all still waiting for number one.'

‘Oh, come, now. Surely. What about the young?'

‘They're the ones who die,' said the Crow. ‘Most of my posts were on guys my age. It was no picnic, Chief, winning your Award.'

‘Yes, well, you are all my boys,' said the Leggo, as if he had forgotten to turn on his hearing aid that day, ‘and before I close this meeting I'd like to say a few words about the year. First, thanks for the terrific job. In many ways it's been a great year, one of the best. You'll never forget it. I'm proud of each and every one of you, and before I end, I'd just like to say a few words about one of you who isn't here today, a physician with a tremendous potential, Dr. Wayne Potts.'

We stiffened. Leggo was asking for trouble if he messed with Potts.

‘Yes, I'm proud of Potts. Except for some defect that led to his . . . accident, he was a fine young physician. Let me tell you about him . . .'

I tuned out. Instead of anger, I felt sorry for the Leggo, so stiff and so clumsy, so out of touch with the human, with us, his boys. He was another generation, that of our fathers, who in restaurants before paying, added up the arithmetic of the check.

‘. . . maybe this year has been a little difficult, but all in all it was a pretty typical year, and we lost one in the middle, but sometimes that happens, and the rest of us will never forget him. Yet we can't let our dedication to medicine suffer because . . .'

The Leggo was right: it had been your standard internship year. All across the country, at emergency lunches, terns were being allowed to be angry, to accuse and cathart and have no effect at all. Year after year, in eternam: cathart, then take your choice: withdraw into cynicism and find another specialty or profession; or keep on in internal medicine, becoming a Jo, then a Fish, then a Pinkus, then a Putzel, then a Leggo, each more repressed, shallow, and sadistic than the one below. Berry was wrong: repression wasn't evil, it was terrific. To stay in internal medicine, it was a lifesaver. Could any of us have endured the year in the House of God and somehow, intact, have become that rarity: a human-being doctor? Potts? Fats had done it, yes. Potts?

‘. . . and so let's have a moment of silence for Dr. Wayne Potts.'

After about twenty seconds the Runt blasted off again, shouting, ‘DAMNNIT, YOU KILLED HIM!'

‘What?'

‘YOU KILLED POTTS! You drove him nuts about the Yellow Man, and you didn't help him when he was crying for help. If an intern sees a shrink, you stigmatize him, you think he's nuts. Potts was scared that if he saw Dr. Frank it would damage his career. You bastards, you eat up good guys like Potts who happen to be too gentle to “tough it out.” It makes me want to puke! PUKE!'

‘You can't say that about me,' said the Leggo sincerely, looking crushed. ‘I would have done anything to save Potts, to save my boy.'

‘You can't save us,' I said, ‘you can't stop the process. That's why we're going into psychiatry: we're trying to save ourselves.'

‘From what?'

‘FROM BEING JERKS WHO'D LOOK UP TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU!' screamed the Runt.

‘What?' asked the Leggo shakily, ‘what are you saying?'

I felt that he was trying to understand, and I knew he couldn't but that he was crying inside because we'd pushed the button that had him hearing the tapes of all his failings, as father and son, and I said as kindly as possible, ‘What we're saying is that the real problem this year hasn't been the gomers, it's been that we didn't have anyone to look up to.'

‘No one? No one in the whole House of God?'

‘For me,' I said, ‘only the Fat Man.'

‘Him? He's as kooky as Dubler! You can't mean that, no.'

‘What we mean, man,' said Chuck forcefully, ‘is this: how can we care for patients if'n nobody cares for us?'

At that, for the first time, the Leggo seemed to hear. He stopped, still. He scratched his head. He made a gesture with his hands, as if to say something, but nothing came out. He bent at the knee, and sat down. He looked hurt, a kid about to cry, and as we watched, his nose twitched and he dug into his baggy trousers for his handkerchief. Saddened, sobered, yet still mad, we filed out. We'd played for keeps. The door closed behind the last of us, leaving our Chief alone. Boozy, babbling, Nixon was coming apart in public places. People were filing out. What he was feeling, no one wanted to know.

Berry, Chuck and I were at the mansion of Nate Zock. We sat in the fake Elizabethan garden basking in the late-afternoon summer sun, looking back up toward the multimillion-dollar palace, a mixture of millennia of architectural vogue. Nate finished retelling the ‘Basch's a tough guy, don't cross him' story. Berry and I excused ourselves to play tennis, leaving Chuck to booze it up with Nate and Trixie and the overweight bovines grazing on the hors d'oeuvres and low-calorie celery tonic. The tennis court was wind-sheltered by beech and poplar, and roses coated the fence enclosing it. The splash of color and waves of scent made it like playing tennis inside a rose. We sweated. We stopped, and Nate urged us to cool off in the indoor pool. We hadn't brought swimsuits.

‘That's OK,' said Nate, ‘no one's going to watch.'

‘And no one's keeping track of the time,' said Trixie, ‘we know all about the sex lives of our young Dr. Kildares.'

We wandered up the lawn to the house, and I realized that unlike the rich, I was unused to privacy, to being unwatched, to things—pools and tennis courts—coming in ones. We passed the garage, where the butler was waxing Berry's Volvo, trying to match the shine on Nate's white El Dorado. In the indoor pool, tile-echoing, secluded, we stripped, embraced, dived down into the perfectly right water. We played. Delight delight. Splash splash not the best splash splash but the most splash splash not the splash best but the splash fuckin' most.