Pretty Leslie (2 page)

Ben made a face. “I think you and the moppet had better cancel your trip, June. We can't repeat this vaccine. We've had our warning.”

Yet he too expected that the baby would recover swiftly. He had been conservative in ordering her into the hospital. He probably would not have done so if her parents had not had insurance. He was faintly dissatisfied with himself for such conservatism in somewhat the same way a tightrope walker is dissatisfied when he feels his left ear pulling and the right one pushing. Better straighten up. Carefully. The worst thing about misjudgment can be the subsequent overcompensation.

The swaying unbalance of his hunches began, then, with the conviction that he hadn't really needed to put the kid in the hospital, but by that afternoon he was swinging to the perilous, unsupported opposite extreme. Something was wrong. Something was very much wrong. But perhaps the worst thing wrong was that the hunches had almost literally the force of a voice in his ear. At that point they scared him. They were a clear sign that he was too involved with the patient—the situation degenerating toward one in which fear called for a contraindicated relief. He would have been ashamed to call the hospital and ask about Mandy. Probably no one except the nurse's aides had seen her after admission. There was no reason why anyone should. If he was needed he would be called.

But the almost objective voices began yammering at him to call. They began to speak to him very clearly that afternoon while he was examining a Negro boy of three and a half. This boy, with a skin the color of an unused wallet, lay, hardly to be waked, in his mother's arms while Ben took the history of his illness and examined him. “He sleep all the time any more. He don't eat,” his mother said. “He never was a lively boy.” He had not complained of any pain. “He an angel,” his mother said defiantly, as if she knew a debilitating pain must be hidden in the little walnut of a head, somewhere. He was not abnormally sensitive to light. Just drowsy, always drowsy or sleeping. Ben had ruled out encephalitis and doubted a tumor. He was toying with more exotic diagnoses when an annoying fear slipped past the guard of his speculations—and set off a whole system of alarms. He had been worried about this child. Instantly he was afraid for another. A voice spoke to him clearly, telling him with disgusting emphasis to break off this examination and get on the phone.

He called the hospital. “The Tabor baby …” he said.

“I was just trying to call you,” the interne told him. “She's in coma. I can hardly get a pulse. She's blue. Hot as a cinder. I've been in her room for forty minutes trying to thread a vein and I can't, so—”

“All right. Get her in the o.r. and do a cutdown. I'll be right there. Oh … Jaeger?”

“Yah?”

“She's not going out.” In rebellion against his will, an image of the child as she had been that morning forced itself into his mind. The stroboscopic effect of morning light between the tree trunks of the residential district. The corner of a little eye blinking its pain, unable to find a comfortable rhythm against the onslaught of sunlight. “She's not going out. You know.”

“Yah. See you.”

In sixteen and a half minutes—just seven on the freeway, accelerating constantly, swinging off ahead of a tank truck at eighty miles an hour—he was standing with Jaeger in a gown and mask. They stood on opposite sides of the table where the baby girl was dying. Each man had a leg in his hands no bigger than a turkey drumstick, each was working into an incision. They were trying to find a vein large enough to accept the needle of the intravenous equipment.

Dehydration had collapsed the veins, had flattened and hidden them, so that a vicious circle was established; need blocked the remedy. If there had been enough fluid left to distend the veins normally, no needle would have to feed it in.

“I got something,” Jaeger breathed. He motioned for the nurse to begin the flow. “Cut it off. Cut it off. Goddamn it, it was nothing.”

Then Ben felt it. The fierce, fine point of the needle was touching no resistance. Something not quite physical—too shy, too unreliable for belief—seemed to tug at his hand like the ghost of a fishing line that tells the fisherman something is nibbling beneath the opaque and reflecting surface of the water. He felt his fear of not finding the opening transform instantly into a fear that he might lose it, might go too fast and puncture the wall of the blood vessel, might go too slow and from his own tremors lose the contact. No sleight of hand would do here. Magic or nothing, he thought. He thought, Don't let her shrivel. Then he was in.

“Let's have it,” he said to the nurse.

“Good boy,” Jaeger said.

Ben frowned and put his left hand on the tabletop to steady his weight. He was still on the tightrope, but he had a long wobbly crutch now, touching solid ground. His right hand still held the needle. Now it seemed more living than his hand, as if vitality had discharged from his hand into the inorganic thing like the accidental discharge of a battery. His hand was still needed, but it was the machine that was giving life.

“I think so. We'll see,” he said to Jaeger. He began to count time.

Doubt had been there, not like a moment but an aperture in time and in time's protective sheath. In the aperture where he doubted her life, he had been like a man swimming naked up a waterfall of dung. Everything came through the breach—a lot of things he didn't want to remember at
any
time had been clear and distinct as if they were present, yapping in dead-dog voices.
She's going out, she's going out, she's out
. In his blind, momentary defenselessness of concentration, he had believed them utterly, had known no less than that the child was dead. His hands were occupied with carrion. He
knew
that, and in that aperture of vision the child's death had been like his own. He had had to supply will enough for both to come back. And there is never enough for two.

Now as he watched the big second hand in its sweep around the o.r. clock, he hated this living child exactly as he would have hated a vampire who had sucked his blood for sustenance.

Jesus God, what kind of a doctor? He got a good deep breath into his lungs and answered: A very good one. Good enough to wade through the most vicious tricks his own psyche had to play on him. Good enough to save this child. If more than that was asked of him.… It seemed that no more was asked.

He felt a tremor in the baby's leg against his rubber-sheathed thumb, but he forbade himself to believe it was anything more than the involuntary tremor of muscles responding to the mechanical thrust of the fluid. It could even have been a spasm of release from the control of the higher nerve centers. And yet he knew that she was alive.

She cried presently, a terrible, fretful, tiny wail of petulance, suffering—even dismay or hatred. She had robbed him (of something, what was it? Already the impression was fading like a harshly forbidden dream) and hated him for permitting the theft.

“Ah,” Jaeger said. You could see his eyes change. You could believe there was some commonplace thanksgiving in heart and mind, though it would never come from his lips except in the disciplined slang of the profession. He knew the uncomplicated joy of beating death against the odds. You saw that whatever image death might take on in the private anterooms of his mind—whether it was a ghoul or some cadaver hauled out of the formaldehyde or just empty blackness—that image had been mocked and imprisoned again. In spite of his reticence, you knew his happiness was pure as a boy's when he has won a game. “She'll make it now,” Jaeger said.

Jaeger knew that and it was enough for him. Useless as the knowledge might be, Ben knew something else. He knew the needle would not have found the vein unless there had been something like a miracle, and he felt himself disastrously indebted to a power he could not quite name—something in himself, no doubt, but something that would not be charitable in demanding repayment. The last several minutes had been as unnerving as a brush with spooks. He had felt, quite literally, a mystic union of flesh with the child. Now which of them was running off with the spoil like a bitch with a bone?

For another dumb few minutes he stood there telling himself that he should have let her go. Once a respected teacher had told him, “You can't save them all, Daniels. If you bear down too hard you'll only ruin your nerve and judgment.” And he—had he answered like the all-American interne, “But, sir, my duty …”? He had not. He had taken the advice deeply to heart, not as if it were a general maxim, but a very shrewd appraisal of his personal limitations. He had made it a principle, just now violated it—and spookily felt that somewhere, somehow, someone would have to pay for the violation.

When the baby whimpered again he turned away from her. “I think we've got her,” he said to Jaeger. “I'll stick around awhile just in case. Her mother's here, I think. Has she been told?”

Jaeger said, “Not really. She knew something was serious when we took the kid out of the room. You'd better give her the news.”

“Are we sure the kid will make it?”

“I'm sure. You ought to be.”

Perhaps he was. But the sense of hovering menace that had brought him to the hospital was exactly as intense as before. Before he went to speak with June Tabor he stopped in the toilet. When he meant to urinate, he found that his penis was so shriveled it had almost disappeared in his pubic hair. This revolted him excessively. He could not produce urine in spite of his furious resolve to master his nerves. He spat dry cotton into the urinal.

He was lethargic and irritable when he returned to the clinic after an hour, but his mind was working as if stimulated by benzedrine. It seemed positively odd to him that he had not previously been able to diagnose the Negro boy.

That diagnosis, as he would recall later to Leslie, was exotic, brilliant, and of no practical use whatever. The slight delay in arriving at the diagnosis proved to be of no importance, either, for the sleepy little dark boy had lead poisoning. He had been eating old paint and plaster from the walls of the apartment in which he lived.

“Caught him at it a lot of times and never thought nothing of it except it was funny,” his mother said when Ben made the admission possible for her. “What make a child want eat that
stuff?
”

The child's brain was full of microscopic particles of lead. There was not the slightest chance that the toxic process could be reversed. It was conceivable, even likely, that the lead had some anesthetic effect. The good-hearted nurses who would attend him at the last could assure his mother that the boy had seemed to feel little pain.

And that, too, Ben had to suppose, was exactly as much and no more of a miracle than his saving the Tabors' child. He could not help thinking of the two cases, as if they were paired in significance. But still, comparing them gave him neither comfort nor wisdom.

chapter 2

T
HE WAITING ROOM
at Beiman's Studio was a fraud of indirect lighting, plywood paneling varnished to the dark sheen of walnut, and paintings on the wall which merely lacked the lettering they bore when they had showed up as the advertisements for beer, a nationally famous shampoo bottled locally, and the specialties of the South Side packing plant. Only one of the paintings had been done for any but commercial purposes. That was a large, long landscape with harvesters in a grainfield dotting the foreground, and it had been painted in dead noncommercial earnest by Jarvis (“Daddy”) Bieman, owner of the studio, but painted so very many years ago that the style superficially resembled that of the other pictures.

In the center of the room, under a haloing light, a blonde sat behind a structure like a nightclub organ which was, in reality, a switchboard designed by the layout man Ozzie Carter, graduate of Pratt Institute. The blonde, who was flanked by two rubber plants when she sat at the combination switchboard and reception desk, was something of a fraud, too. Her hair was peroxided like a showgirl's. Her hands sparkled with the kind of rings bestowed by oil barons on the doxies of the twenties, and she smiled on every visitor as if she recognized him to be a lascivious big spender. But peroxided Dolores Calfert was past sixty. She was the chaste widow of a big-league ballplayer and, insofar as her intentions went, was Mama to the world.

She had not even worked at Bieman's as long as Leslie. But she knew more than Leslie would ever know about the management and employees (why shouldn't she, since she could eavesdrop on all conversations coming and going?) and cheerfully meant to make all their screwed-up lives turn out O.K.

She was counseling a girl named Dolly Sellers (who had, among others, a parent problem) one morning when Leslie sailed through the waiting room on her way home.

Dolly shut up the minute Leslie appeared. Dolly also took her problems (boyfriends, deodorant, and whether to put her money in Postal Savings or the bank) to Leslie, and it might seem like ingratitude to be caught taking another's advice.

“If I were rich …” Dolores called after Leslie.

Leslie stuck out her tongue. “You rabble don't bother me with your envy. I get more done in my three hours than the shop can keep up with. No joke. I'm going to start wearing a hat to my desk and be treated like an executive.”

Dolly loved such talk. It was what made her job worth while, being around people who had been somewhere.

“Now, if I could go with you on such a nice day, we'd go get a massage,” Dolores said. She closed her eyes and rippled her fat shoulders in anticipation of delight.

“But I've got a lunch date,” Leslie said. She wavered a moment, felt the flattery of Dolly's silent adulation and the old woman's envy—admitted her duty to be their proxy to the world. She did not expect Martha Lloyd to be delighted with an hour's detour, more or less, before they got their lunch. But the bare suggestion from two women who counted on her had suddenly sketched the role of a woman who
would
, cost what it might, interrupt all schedules. Would pay June its homage by having her vegetative nervous system and her muscles toned. The role seemed more like Leslie than the person who had just been pounding out church promotion copy for Our Lady of the Novena building committee.