Murder in Little Egypt (5 page)

Dr. Pearce confided to Dale that he had plans to replace the Eldorado Hospital with a new building after the war, a modern and efficient place with all the latest equipment. There would be opportunities. After medical school, Dale might even decide to come back to Eldorado.

Graduation approached; Dale prepared to join the navy. As the final event before commencement exercises, Dale’s English teacher happened to choose a melodrama about a doctor as the senior-class play. The teacher came across the piece in a volume called
One Act Plays for Stage and Study
and thought it suitable in spite of its morbid theme. Dale did not try out for a part. He was too busy with basketball and getting himself into shape for running the mile, but he and Helen Jean were in the audience for its Friday night performance. The play, written by a Hungarian, Eugene Heltai, was called
Death Sends for the Doctor
.

The action takes place in a low-arched room of the Castle of Death in “an undiscovered country” resembling Transylvania. The time is the present; and the dark, dusty room, filled floor to ceiling with filing cabinets and shelves holding file folders, suggests a bureaucratic government office.

Principal characters include the Doctor and his young male Assistant, Death himself and Death’s Secretary, another young man. Death, also called His Grace, has not been feeling well and has summoned the Doctor. The Doctor and his Assistant at first do not recognize His Grace as Death. They look around the room and notice at one end a clock which has neither hands nor numerals. Its pendulum bears a crest composed of two scythes crossed. Their own watches have stopped at midnight; they begin to catch on.

“There’s something about this place,” the Assistant says. “It smells of death.”

“You mustn’t be afraid of death, my son,” says the Doctor. “A physician must never fear death. It’s always at his side, watching and waiting. We fight death. Sometimes we drive it away . . . for a while. But we always fight it. A physician need not fear so old an enemy as death.”

The Doctor examines his patient and realizes that the sick man is actually Death himself and that he is suffering from a malignant tumor. The Doctor decides to operate.

“You mean to save Death?” the Assistant asks.

“No—to destroy Death,” the Doctor replies. “I am going to kill him.”

“You can’t.”

“Yes, I can. . . . Now he has science against him. For the first time men are learning how to outwit him. I myself have held him at bay a good many times. And he is afraid. We have not yet overcome him. We have not yet won a clear, decisive victory. But he is afraid. We have made progress, and he fears that some day we may destroy his power. . . . This is my opportunity.”

“You must be insane,” the Assistant objects, but on reflection suggests that there might be a lot of money in killing Death.

“Money?” the Doctor says. “No, I may become a murderer, but I shall not be a usurer. These murderer’s hands will bestow health and peace—life. They won’t reach for gold.”

“But to kill! Aren’t you afraid? You, who believe in God—”

“God will help me.”

Offstage the Doctor places Death under the knife and kills him. Thunderclap. The Doctor returns rubbing his hands, feeling proud of himself. Boasting of the power of modern science, the Doctor suggests to Death’s Secretary that immortality would be an appropriate fee.

But Death’s Secretary has a surprise in store for the Doctor.

“I am no longer the Secretary,” he announces.

“Who are you?”

“I am now—His Grace.”

“His Grace?”

“He was my father.”

The Doctor and his Assistant step back, dismayed. The ticking of the clock grows louder.

“This pendulum swings on forever,” Death’s son says. “Life and Death exist together, but Death is the stronger. . . . His power lies in my hands, Doctor. Take care that I do not use it.”

The Doctor offers a handshake. Death’s son refuses it “with an ironic smile.”

“I no longer fear you,” the Doctor insists, alluding to his scientific knowledge. His hands tremble.

“I don’t fear you, either,” the Assistant chimes in.

“Time enough, Doctor,” Death’s son snickers. “We shall meet again, all of us.”

The curtain falls.

No one in the audience that night was required to take the play seriously.
Death Sends for the Doctor
, with its theme of murder and death and scientific arrogance, was familiar stuff to a crowd raised on Frankenstein movies. Only in retrospect did it seem a peculiarly appropriate choice for the senior play at Eldorado High that year.

4

AT FIRST EVERYTHING WENT ACCORDING TO PLAN. DALE SPENT two years in the navy, entering Officers’ Candidate School at the University of North Carolina, where he was able to take several courses for college credit, and then serving as an ensign aboard the battleship
North Carolina
in the Pacific, seeing some action during the kamikaze phase of the war. As soon as he was discharged, he went home to marry Helen Jean.

They were both still under age, so they eloped to Arkansas. Noma, who had wanted Dale to finish college first, capitulated once the marriage was accomplished. Peck professed approval, and Dr. and Mrs. Pearce were enthusiastic.

Dale entered Southern Illinois Normal University at Carbondale, switched to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in June 1946, and with credits transferred from North Carolina and Southern Illinois received his bachelor of science degree
cum laude
in May 1947, benefiting from the G.I. Bill and from the university’s Division of Special Services for War Veterans. He entered the Washington University, St. Louis, Medical School in September of that year, still a month shy of his twenty-second birthday. His quick mind and hard work had enabled him to keep on schedule toward becoming a doctor.

A private university founded by T. S. Eliot’s grandfather, Washington was the most distinguished educational institution in the region, its medical school among the best in the nation. Medical students from Washington trained at Barnes Hospital, which was also highly regarded. Dr. Pearce had advised the move to St. Louis. If Dale did decide to return to Eldorado to practice, it would be useful for him to have had experience and contacts there. Dr. Pearce routinely referred difficult cases to St. Louis specialists. Dale and Helen Jean settled into a tiny apartment over a pizza parlor on Pine Street, near Barnes. She took a part-time job with the telephone company, and with the G. I. Bill and help from her parents, they were able to sustain a pleasant if frugal life, postponing having children until Dale could secure his degree.

Dale began that gradual conditioning to disease and death that every medical student experiences. He had seen some injury and death in the Pacific, but he had not stuck needles into arms and legs, into livers and bone marrow. He had not threaded tubes down noses and mouths into lungs, nor plunged his arms into a body up to his elbows. He had not confronted death in the form of old people preserved in formaldehyde and displayed on stainless steel tables perforated to permit fluids and fat to drain away as from meat in a roasting pan. Systematically cutting dead people into pieces over a semester, the medical student may gain the sense of being different from the common run of humanity, coming to regard life as a proving ground and other people as members of an opposing team. When the classwork finishes and the student goes into the hospital to deal with live patients—to whom he may speak, whom he may even get to know, whose relatives may gather—the success of a procedure or the loss of a patient may become more a matter of performance than of suffering, more a question of winning or losing than of pity.

Dale prided himself on his cleverness and efficiency. He could grasp the principles of a subject, while many others became distracted by details. He had no trouble mastering the vocabulary of body parts and processes: He had developed mnemonic tricks, he said, and his high school Latin helped.

Some of Dale’s fellow students found him a blowhard and a know-it-all; others admired him. As in high school, slower students came to him for assistance. Everyone agreed that with Dale Cavaness, there was no middle ground. His country accent and folksy manner were among the points of division. He still called everybody Rudies. His brothers in his medical fraternity, Phi Beta Pi, elected him president, a sign of social rather than of academic approval. When he visited Eldorado, people there were glad to see how little he had changed, outwardly at least. They saw the same old Dale, older and smarter but, apparently, uncitified, down-to-earth.

In Eldorado Dr. Pearce built his new hospital on Organ Street. He was so pleased with his son-in-law, who from all reports was sailing through his studies in St. Louis, that he decided to make a special gesture. When he chose the cornerstone for his new building, Dr. Pearce ordered it to read: Pearce-Cavaness Hospital.

Dale’s return to Eldorado now seemed a certainty. St. Louis in those days had a reputation for beer, baseball, and Buster Brown shoes. It also had the energy of its railroads and all the attractions of a long-established metropolis, a symphony and an opera company, a jazz scene, scores of Italian and other good restaurants, celebrated botanical gardens, neighborhoods of beauty and wealth. The flow of American life in this postwar period was away from small towns and into cities of promise. Yet Dale’s inclinations remained homeward, toward the outdoors and scenes of his early triumphs. On holiday visits he enjoyed reminiscing about high school athletics and hearing about who was leading the Purple and Gold that year. He could draw on the past, and now people also revered him as a doctor, or as almost one, confiding in him about their ailments and regarding him with spaniel eyes. Even Noma, while she remained cool toward Helen Jean, deferred to him.

Pressed as he was by his studies and by being president of his fraternity, Dale found time to take Helen Jean to movies and sporting events. They saw a lot of another couple: Chet Williams, a medical classmate, and Marian Newberry, a nurse at Barnes who was a lot of fun. The four of them took weekend excursions together, picnics in the countryside, drives over to Champaign-Urbana to watch the Fighting Illini play football. Chet and Marian were not serious about one another; she had dates with other fellows, too. Sometimes Chet would come over to share pizza and a couple of beers with the Cavanesses by himself. Dale considered Chet one of his best friends.

* * *

One afternoon in June of 1950, Marian Newberry was working at her station in Chest Service at Barnes when Dale dropped by to chat. Dale asked her whether she would be interested in a blind date for next Saturday night.

“Oh, gee,” Marian said, “no, thanks, Dale. Blind dates just aren’t my cup of tea.”

“You’d like this guy,” Dale said.

“What’s his name?”

“Elad Senavac.”

“What?”

“Name’s Elad Senavac.”

“My God, what kind of a name is that?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll really like this guy.”

“I’ll let you know,” Marian said. “Let me think about it.”

That evening Marian telephoned Helen Jean to find out about this mysterious stranger. If he was a medical student, Marian could not imagine why she had never heard of him. With a name like that he would stand out.

“Who is this Elad Senavac?” Marian asked. “Dale dropped by today and asked whether I’d like a blind date with this guy. Is he a friend of yours or something?”

“Marian, I think Dale means himself,” Helen Jean said.

Marian felt like an idiot, not having caught on to Dale Cavaness spelled backward. What was all this about? One of Dale’s jokes, she supposed. He was always kidding around.

“We’re separated,” Helen Jean said. “Dale and I are no longer living together.”

Marian could only mumble that she was sorry. She hadn’t heard the news. She hoped the Cavanesses would reconcile soon.

“I doubt it,” Helen Jean said.

Marian had not seen the Cavanesses for about a month, and she had had no inkling of troubles between them. She had thought them well-matched and had never noticed signs of friction. Helen Jean was not as jovial as Dale, but her relative quietness and seriousness had seemed to complement his constant joking. Marian thought that it was typical of Dale to have asked her out in the form of a joke—one that had misfired under the circumstances. She had no intention of accepting a date with him. She had never thought of him as anything but Helen Jean’s husband: The two might be separated now, but they could get back together, and in that case, Marian knew, she would be caught in the middle and lose both of them as friends. She thought it was foolish of Dale to have asked her out.

But when Dale telephoned Marian, he apologized:

“I know I didn’t handle that very well,” he said. “I’m pretty upset. I’m not myself. Let’s get together and I’ll tell you what happened.”

Marian Rose Newberry had grown up in the Webster Groves and Kirkwood sections of St. Louis, pleasant middle-class districts first settled in the 1850s and resembling small midwestern towns, with broad, tree-shaded lawns, big brick houses, white churches, and tidy little stores with colorful awnings. Her father had been a paperhanger, an amiable man but a heavy drinker whom her mother divorced in 1929, when Marian was only a year and a half old and her brother, Bill, five. Her mother received neither alimony nor child support from Harry Newberry—it would have been futile to ask; he was always broke—and she supported herself and her children by working as a housekeeper for a high school Latin teacher.

Marian’s mother had started out in life under more comfortable circumstances. Her parents, the Schotts, had been successful grocers and had left money to their daughter and her brother, who managed the inheritance. But the stock-market crash wiped out the investments, and for a time during the Depression Marian had to go to live with her uncle and aunt who, she believed, did not really want her. Her mother and brother shared a one-bedroom apartment that Mrs. Newberry considered too dingy for a young girl. Once reunited, however, in a small house for which Mrs. Newberry somehow managed the down payment, the three formed a happy band; and Marian began to absorb her mother’s steady emphasis on culture and education. Mrs. Newberry read aloud to her children every evening, drumming into them the importance of doing well in school, and saw that Marian got piano lessons. Every Sunday Marian and Bill traipsed off to services and to Sunday School at the Presbyterian church. Over her bed Marian hung the eight gold stars she received for being able to recite her beatitudes.