Lie Still (6 page)

Sometimes she was curt and sometimes generous, offering impromptu explanations of the pertinent physiology, pathology, or pharmacology involved in the particular case. Her didactic base was as advertised—extensive. She asked for daily lectures from me—schoolboy-style—on various neurosurgical topics, to be certain I was reading my texts at 38

DAVID FARRIS

night. Things like, “Tomorrow give me five minutes on the choice of diuretics for cerebral edema.”

In the second week, though, our rigid professionalism cracked.

In afternoon clinic I got an urgent page from the operator. She had on hold a patient I had known almost a year, Karen Booker. The operator told me she sounded “bad.” I took the call alone in Mimi’s office.

Karen was a good-looking blonde, nineteen and round as a beach ball when she showed up on Labor and Delivery with contractions every three minutes. As the intern on Obstetrics, I delivered the baby. Her boyfriend, Enrico, the child’s father, was a thick and surly Hispanic who, I came to find out, regularly beat Karen. He also kept her away from any money—even her own—and from talking to her family.

This came out during a postpartum encounter when I asked her about some bruises and refused to accept the usual lies.

Before letting her take the baby home I made sure the hospital social worker had Karen in touch with the police in her neighborhood and a shelter. The social worker and I had a long talk with her. Very pragmatic stuff like accumulating a few dollars in change, memorizing phone numbers and the bus route to the shelter.

Eight weeks after going home with Enrico, in the face of a fresh assault, she put the plan into effect, slipping away as he slept off a drunk. She phoned me two days later to share her moment of pride.

True to the course of the disease, she eventually went back to Enrico. And got beaten. She called me in tears one night, speech impaired by her thick lips. I called the police.

Enrico, no virgin to the county jail, went away for a while on a parole violation.

Karen’s call that afternoon was a kindly warning: Enrico was out. He had roared over to her mother’s house, where she was staying, to tell her he would be coming for her when he got an apartment and not to bother to call me, he was going to “dust” me soon. He said he knew my car and where I lived. She was going to take a bus to her sister’s in Reno.

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She thought I would do well to leave town, too. She assured me he meant it.

Mimi came into her office as I was telling Hospital Security that there was a faint possibility of a row on campus and would they mind keeping an eye on my Datsun. Naturally she asked what that was all about. After hearing my tale she gave me an odd smile and said, “Does she call you often?”

“Oh, maybe once every three months. It’s no big deal. I give her pep talks. She sent me a picture of the kid she had done at Sears. He’s really cute.”

“Are you afraid of this Enrico?”

“I don’t think so. He just wants her to believe he’s her only resource. Keep his place as sole source of everything. If he can make her think I’m as good as dead, that’s all he needs.”

“He could be genuinely angry with you.”

“Maybe. But I imagine I’m not worth a lot of jail time to him.”

“You hope so.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it.”

She stared at me, smiled and nodded. “How did you know what to do? Most doctors are in the dark about domestic abuse.”

“We studied it in a criminal psych course in college. I guess it carried over.”

“Well, you should be proud of yourself. Seriously. I know a bit about it.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked at me. “I mean I’ve been there. My husband—

I was very young—seventeen—I wanted away from my father. I’d dated Tony off and on for three years. He was a sailor, home on leave. The whole thing struck me as awfully romantic. I could live away from my father’s obsessive control and have a love ‘lost at sea.’ Then every few months a week of passion.”

“But it didn’t work out,” I said.

“Well, partly. I got away from Daddy. But the first week home on leave the passion went wrong. On the fourth night together we quarreled. He started hitting me.”

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“Oh God.”

“I was frightened enough to just take it. I knew if I fought back it would only be worse. So I got him more whiskey.

When he passed out I took all the money from his wallet and drove to my brother’s. I was half hoping he would come after me. My brother would have made him regret ever having met me.”

“But he didn’t come?”

“No.”

“Well, Karen doesn’t have a brother. She needed a little help. It was the right thing to do.” She was looking at me. I shrugged. “Maybe the guy just pissed me off. The worm.”

“Still, you watch yourself.”

“Yeah.” I got a wry grin. “I’ll know if he’s behind me. She said he’s driving his cousin’s big silver pickup. It rides low but it’s real loud.”

She nodded a smile.

The next morning, our rounds had us crossing paths with Doug Goodbout, one of the general surgery professors. He was a perverse legend among us underlings for always using the longest possible phrase for anything medical and an amusing breathiness in his voice. He was often imitated, though we were definitely laughing at him, not with him.

As we passed in a hallway he suddenly stopped to ask Dr. Lyle to see a patient of his who might have a nerve en-trapment. As he waxed aerobic about this “septuagenarian female with abdominal distension and pain,” the possibility of “an incompletely obstructing colonic carcinoma,”

and his plans for “radionuclide scintillography, and a chest roentgenogram,” Mimi caught me rolling my eyes behind Dr. Goodbout.

When he had gone she asked, “You find Dr. Goodbout amusing?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Lyle.”

“No. That’s normal, I’m sure. Many of us find him amusing.”

“Well, you
could
call a roentgenogram an X-ray.” I was suddenly feeling less cowed. “Once, after Dr. Goodbout LIE STILL

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gave a Grand Rounds last year, one of the students on my team started imitating him on rounds: ‘Um, Dr. Ishmail, did you happen to notice on that last gentleman the particularly noteworthy examples of the dermatologic manifestations of the stigmata of hepatic degeneration resulting from excessive ethanol intake?’ I broke up. The resident thought we were laughing at the poor alcoholic and just about busted our heads.”

She laughed. I smiled at her. She said, “I saw on the surgery schedule once a case booked as ‘
difficult
repair of
large
, recurrent,
incisional, ventral
hernia with Marlex mesh.’ ”

“Isn’t that kind of redundant?”

“It positively defines redundancy! I didn’t have to look to know who the surgeon was.”

Now I was laughing. “Were you at the Grand Rounds last year? When he spoke?” She shook her head. “He was lecturing in his normal style, about something esoteric like va-soactive peptide of the gut, using a lot of ”—I again imitated his breathiness—“
excess verbiage
, when, right in the middle some guy near me in one of the back rows, maybe about seventy-five himself, well dressed, I’d guess a retired surgeon, stands up to leave, clattering chairs, and says to no one in particular but loud enough for half the audience to hear,”—I deepened my voice and slowed it way down—

“ ‘I’ve always said he was a pompous son of a bitch! Can’t say what’s on his mind. Has to use a bunch of half-dollar words!’ and climbs out of the lecture hall. Everyone in the back was busting up, giggling but trying to be quiet.”

She was laughing. “Burt Lorenzen,” she said. “Gravelly voice. Thick silver hair?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“He’s a great man, one of my favorites. Never shy about what’s on his mind. He’s nearly deaf, though, so he tends to be loud. Not retired either. Keeps busy with general surgery out in Sun City. He’s sent me a couple of patients. He’s a dear man.”

“Well, we figured he had nailed Dr. Goodbout.”

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She was still laughing. “Don’t the students call him Grand-Uncle Doug?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where did that come from?”

“I’ve never heard.”

“Probably Dickens. Or just one of those names that gets passed down from class to class until its roots are lost,” she said.

“It just fits because you can’t take him a hundred percent seriously.”

“And what do you call me these days?” Her eyes were dancing.

“You?” I was caught off guard.

“Dreamy Mimi?”

I grinned. “Well, I have heard that one.”

“Any new ones? That one’s from junior high.”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“No ‘Grand-Aunt Meems’? No ‘Wicked Witch of the East’? ‘Mimi Lyle the Crocodile’?”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“When I was in medical school,” she said, “our Chief of Medicine, Hanna Johnston, was a very large woman, maybe five foot ten, two-twenty, but not so much fat as just big—

big shoulders, big bones—who lived with a very strange little person. Not her husband, it was said. In fact there was some speculation about the person’s gender. Everyone said Dr. Johnston smoked cigars, though no one could ever claim to have seen her in the act.

“Anyway, she terrorized the students. She would have sit-down rounds in a conference room once a week with all the third years on Medicine and grill them endlessly on obscure diseases. So, the story goes, one day she was puffing down the corridor in her long white coat, with a white blouse underneath. She passed a bunch of students and housestaff and one of the third years said, ‘Who was that?’ The resident said grandly,
‘That
was Hanna Johnston,’ and the student said, ‘That was Hanna Johnston? I thought it was a refrigerator.’ ”

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I was laughing again. She went on.

“Supposedly Dr. Johnston heard the comment, because she stopped suddenly, but never turned around. She just started up again and never said anything. Naturally the story spread and Hanna Johnston has forever been ‘The Refrigerator’ to the otherwise terrified junior students.”

“It’s their only defense,” I said.

“Well I’ve always been afraid of acquiring a name like

‘The Refrigerator.’ One might as well be ‘The She-Bitch from Hell.’ The medical sense of humor can be cruel.” We smiled at each other. She looked at her watch. “Let’s get some lunch, “ she said.

Against a back wall in the Doctors’ Dining Room, over some soupy lasagna, she went on reminiscing with a story from her class skit at the end of medical school. “Will you be involved in your resident-class graduation skit?”

“Is there one?” I answered. “Over three years away.”

“Well, I’ll give you a song you might find useful. But you have to promise to keep my name out of the skit. Can you do that?”

“I guess I could try, but I don’t even know if we’ll have one, much less who’ll be writing it.”

“Oh, of course you’ll have one. Every surgical residency class does. And you’ll have to be involved. You’re quicker than most and, it seems, much funnier, too. Anyway, I’ll take that as a promise. The song is to the tune of ‘Love Is Blue.’

Do you know it?”

“Sure.”

“We started to write it for our skit but never found a place to use it, so it just hangs out there, waiting.” She sang, “Blue, blue, the baby’s blue. One ventricle, there should have been two . . .”

I broke up laughing. She smiled at me, all of her scariness gone, vanished with a smile. I smiled back.

During afternoon clinic I asked her what the rest of the song was. She said that was all they’d written.

An hour later I passed her in the hallway, each of us nose down in a patient’s chart, and I softly whistled the melody to 44

DAVID FARRIS

“Love Is Blue.” She grinned over her shoulder and disappeared into an examining room.

Around four-thirty I had just finished helping our last patient—a paraplegic in an electric wheelchair souped up with motorcycle accessories—down the hall to the waiting room.

When I turned back Mimi was staring at me from her office door. She turned slowly inside. I went in and was about to say “Goodbye, see you at morning rounds,” when she again made me bumble. Very quickly and without looking up, she asked, “Would you consider having dinner with me?”

I’m sure I stopped breathing. She may not have been scary anymore as an Attending but she was still very much in charge, still the boss, still Teacher, now dangerous at a whole new level.

I might have said no, if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t.

“What time? I mean, yes. Um, what time?”

“Any time, really. Nothing formal. Do you have evening plans?”

“Well, a basketball game. A bunch of us have a team in a city league. For any game, about half of us can get there. It’s a five-thirty game, though, if that wouldn’t be too late.”

“In my younger days I would have come to the game to watch a bunch of hulking, hormonally overloaded young men sweat all over themselves and each other. And enjoyed it quite a bit. In my situation these days I’ll just have to enjoy it in my mind. But, I will wait for your game. Give me your address and I’ll pick you up at, say, seven o’clock?” I nodded. “You live alone, don’t you? I have to be fastidiously discreet. You understand.”

“My housemate is on call tonight. Neonatal ICU service.

I won’t actually see her during daylight for six weeks.”

“Her?”

“Lab partner and best friend from medical school. Purely platonic.”

She eyed me.

“We keep secrets from each other,” I lied.

“Seven o’clock then.”

At the end of the game I declined the usual “Let’s go get LIE STILL

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a beer” invitations with no explanation to my friends. The game ran long, but my house was near the gym so I was home right at seven. A Mercedes convertible was in my driveway, and Mimi was waiting on the porch.

“Uh, Dr. Lyle,” I said, “I’m sorry. Still have to shower.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I came early on purpose. I told you I like sweating young men.” Judging from the way she smiled I guess my face flushed. She had on a sleeveless satin blouse, a long skirt of something light and filmy, and sandals. The evening was warm, even for Phoenix in spring.