Authors: Elizabeth Brundage
The Doctor's Wife (25 page)
PART THREE
Need
21
SOME PEOPLE called him a workaholic, some called him an arrogant son of a bitch. He didn’t care. Get the job done right was his philosophy. It wasn’t always pretty. Go in and clean up the mess. As the weeks passed, Michael found himself growing more and more involved in the world of the clinic. Working with Celina had sharpened his view. He realized that he’d grown complacent over the years, passive to the system. She had challenged him to do more, to be proactive, and he’d responded.
At home, they’d begun to get prank phone calls. The calls would come late at night and emit the sound of a crying baby. They were upsetting to Annie. She called the phone company and had their number changed to an unlisted one, but within a week the calls returned. When he made his rounds at the hospital, he’d begun to get nasty looks from some of the other doctors. A few of the nurses refused to help him. One nurse anesthetist, a devout Catholic, had herself removed from all of Michael’s cases. On his rounds one morning Michael saw a young woman who had shown up in the emergency room with an obstructed bowel, a result of a mangled abortion at another clinic. She now suffered with a host of other complications. That morning he found her in terrible pain.
“Didn’t you get your pain medication?” he asked.
“The nurse wouldn’t give it to me,” she told him. “She said I deserved to be in pain. She said God was punishing me for what I’d done.”
Michael had the nurse removed from the service and asked the head nurse to consider having her fired, but he knew the hospital wouldn’t let her go. There was a nursing shortage for one thing, and the nurse had been employed at St. Vincent’s for nearly thirty years. “I know I don’t have to remind you that we
are
a Catholic hospital, Dr. Knowles,” the head nurse stated, peering up at him over her bifocals.
are
a Catholic hospital, Dr. Knowles,” the head nurse stated, peering up at him over her bifocals.
His patient’s case prompted him to research the other abortion providers around Albany, of which there were few, including the office that had so severely damaged his patient. He was shocked to discover that these clinics offered patients only a local anesthesia during the procedure, instead of the preferred intravenous drugs, like Versed and fentanyl, which not only obliterated pain but also quelled the emotional stress of the event. It seemed to him a decisively punitive omission, and he likened it to having root canal without novocaine. When he raised the issue at a gynecology conference on medical ethics, a doctor from one of the big hospitals upstate snorted and said, “I have no sympathy for women who get themselves into this situation.”
On any given Wednesday afternoon, Michael performed sixteen abortions in four hours. The way he saw it, he had thirty seconds to make a connection with the patient, to make her feel like she wasn’t just a hunk of flesh. Most of the cases were routine, but there were also stories that made his hair stand on end. Once, after examining a thirteen-year-old girl who’d been raped by both her brother and her father, on separate occasions,
and
was twenty-five weeks pregnant at the time, he’d excused himself and gone into the men’s room to vomit.
and
was twenty-five weeks pregnant at the time, he’d excused himself and gone into the men’s room to vomit.
How to process these acts he could not say. He stored them up like mementos of a nightmare. The most pathetic aspect of his work was the reality that the majority of his patients who came in to terminate a pregnancy were hardly able to take care of themselves, let alone an infant. A doctor’s role was to decipher the cause of an illness. But there was no easy remedy for sexual misconduct or apathy. It was an enormous ugly mess and it oozed into every corner of society. It was easy to practice war from the high tower, he realized. But when you were down on the ground, getting blood on your hands, you saw things differently.
One night, before leaving the Medical Arts Building, Michael found a strange pamphlet in his mailbox. Cheaply produced, it looked like a comic book, its characters rendered in blue and black ink. The main character, the Abortionist, was a short, disorderly man with a five o’clock shadow and a nose that resembled a dill pickle. They’d dressed him in undershorts and a T-shirt with his beer belly sticking out. His dirty white coat had pockets crammed with whiskey bottles and cigarettes. A fat cigar protruded from his huge, salivating lips.
The Abortionist is unclean. The Abortionist is a whore chaser, a bumbling alcoholic, a filthy embarrassment to
the medical profession.
He put on his coat and stuck the pamphlet in his pocket.
The Abortionist is unclean. The Abortionist is a whore chaser, a bumbling alcoholic, a filthy embarrassment to
the medical profession.
He put on his coat and stuck the pamphlet in his pocket.
He noted the time; it was six o’clock. Anxious to get home, to spend some time with the kids, he grabbed his coat, but Finney stopped him on his way out the door. “Michael! Got a minute?”
Here we go,
he thought. “Of course.”
he thought. “Of course.”
They went into Bianco’s office, the walls of which were covered with pictures of the infants he’d delivered over his thirty-year career. Bianco was sitting behind his desk with his bifocals on, dictating charts into a microphone. He turned off the tape when they walked in and stood up, extending his hand to Michael for a shake. Bianco had a stout build and long sideburns framing his bald head. The nurses joked that he had no fashion sense. Everyone gave him ties for his birthday, one more outrageous than the next. Today’s tie had Bugs Bunny on it. “From my kid,” he explained. His “kid” was thirty-two. Finney, on the other hand, projected a good-old-boy image in his khaki pants and striped shirts and little bow ties. His freckled skin and red hair gave him a wholesome innocence, but the man was no pushover. The younger married women gravitated toward him, Michael had noticed. Bianco’s patients were on the older side, women he knew from the club.
When Michael had joined the group, his partners had made it clear to him that they were both Republicans. “Vote for Nash or your job is hash,” Finney had said to him once, jokingly, but Michael knew he wasn’t really kidding. Earlier in the year, they’d asked Michael to contribute $10,000 to the Republican Party. “They’re looking out for the docs, Mike,” Bianco had pressed. “Do us a favor and throw some money their way.”
Michael had done no such thing.
“Take a seat, Mike,” Finney said, and Michael sat down.
“What’s up?”
“Just wanted to catch up.” Bianco shrugged, hypercasual. “How are things going?”
“Things are going great.” Already Michael felt defensive.
Bianco squinted at him. “You seem just a wee bit unfocused of late.”
“What gives you that impression?”
Bianco patted the stack of charts. “I believe these are your charts I’m dictating. I have to admit, it’s a bit tricky reading your handwriting.”
Michael began to apologize, but Bianco cut him off. “No need to apologize. We’ve all been under stress from time to time. And I don’t mind helping you out if that’s what’s necessary.”
“I guess I am under stress,” Michael admitted. “My wife and I . . .”
“No need to go there,” Finney said. “Been there, done that.”
“You know, Michael, we were hoping to get you over to the club this weekend, join us for a round of golf before winter kicks in?”
This weekend he would be helping Celina at the clinic, but he didn’t dare tell them that. “I’m not much of a golfer.”
“We’ve got a terrific pro over there. This guy is just incredible. Let him give you a couple of lessons. You know, it’s good for a young doc like you to get out on the course once in a while.”
“All right. I’m sure I can find the time,” he offered, knowing it was a lie.
“You just tell us what you need, Mike. We’re here to help you out. I know it’s a bitch and a half doing so much call. We’ve been talking about hiring another man, putting an ad in the
Journal.
But, hey, until then don’t let it beat you down. You need something, you just ask,
capisce
?”
Journal.
But, hey, until then don’t let it beat you down. You need something, you just ask,
capisce
?”
Michael nodded and waited for a signal that the meeting was over, but nobody stood up. Then Finney said, “About that friend of yours.”
“Sorry?”
“Celina James?” Finney tossed him a newspaper. “She’s hit the big time, front-page news.”
Michael glanced at the paper. The photograph showed Celina standing in front of the clinic among a throng of protestors. Bianco and Finney were waiting for his reaction; they may as well have been holding a spotlight at an interrogation. “I hear she’s doing well,” Michael said plainly.
“Has she approached you?” Bianco asked.
“What?”
Finney cleared his throat and changed the tact. “She may approach you, Michael. I hear they need doctors. She usually gets the rejects.” Finney looked at him meaningfully. “Nobody with any class would do that.”
Michael understood that they suspected him, but Finney didn’t need to know for sure. The point of the meeting was to let Michael know they didn’t approve and that, if he was involved with Celina James, they expected him to end the arrangement immediately.
Michael shrugged in denial. “We never got along,” he said. “She hates my guts.”
“Really?” Bianco said, noticeably relieved.
“We used to give her a hard time when she was an intern. I remember this four-hundred-and-fifty-pound woman came into the ER. I made her do the rectal. Her first time. She never forgave me.”
Bianco chuckled. “We don’t support what she’s doing, Michael. I hope you understand that. We have our reputation to think of. I know I don’t have to remind you that this is a very small town.”
“Of course.”
“Good.” Finney flashed a smile. “It’s like my grandfather used to say: you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.”
The meeting broke up and Michael said good night and walked outside. He felt queasy suddenly, and couldn’t imagine getting into his car. A walk would do him good, he thought, and he started up the sidewalk in the direction of Washington Park. The meeting with his partners had troubled him. He knew, eventually, that they’d find out. It wouldn’t be long now.
He reached the park, where huge forsythia bushes scrawled their branches along the sidewalk. The sun had begun to set and the light glimmered like fire off the windows of the brownstones. They were lovely old buildings, all lined up next to one another. Regardless of gentrification, Washington Park was still a marginal area, but there was history here, and grace. It was easy to imagine women in long dresses, and horses with carriages, and lamplighters lighting the old gaslights.
Exhausted suddenly, he found his way to a bench. Obviously he was stressed, he thought. Christ, he could hardly breathe. He waited, taking deep breaths, squinting at the sun’s gold reflection in the windows of the buildings. A young woman appeared suddenly, unfolding out of the city landscape, and joined him on the bench. He recognized her immediately, the girl he’d seen outside the clinic that first night. He remembered her long black hair, which again was twisted into braids. She had on her track team jacket. “Hey, there,” he said, but she did not return the greeting, and it left him cold. She began to adjust the laces on her sneakers, tying and retying them, and mumbled quietly, without looking at him, “You should know you’re being watched. They know everything about you.” She glanced at him for a split second. “Be careful.”
With that, she got up and resumed her run, her braids swinging to and fro against her back. Again, he read her name on the back of the jacket: SAWYER. He looked around stealthily, but it was impossible to judge if he was being watched in such a large place. Skateboarders circled the monument in the center of the park. There were young couples with children near the playground. Another young couple was kissing on an adjacent bench. If the girl had gone to the trouble of warning him, he had to assume that there
was
someone out there watching him, someone he couldn’t see. He stood up and started walking down Willet Street. A bar on the corner caught his eye and he retreated into it and ordered a glass of beer, glad for the noisy distraction of the place. He felt weak, suddenly.
They know everything about you:
the girl’s words echoed in his head like a foreboding refrain. He thought of calling Annie but made no effort to do so. He drank the glass of beer and left the money on the bar and went back outside. He made his way along the street, walking quickly, brushing the shoulders of strangers. The clinic on South Pearl Street was five blocks away and he found himself walking toward it. He desperately wanted to see Celina.
was
someone out there watching him, someone he couldn’t see. He stood up and started walking down Willet Street. A bar on the corner caught his eye and he retreated into it and ordered a glass of beer, glad for the noisy distraction of the place. He felt weak, suddenly.
They know everything about you:
the girl’s words echoed in his head like a foreboding refrain. He thought of calling Annie but made no effort to do so. He drank the glass of beer and left the money on the bar and went back outside. He made his way along the street, walking quickly, brushing the shoulders of strangers. The clinic on South Pearl Street was five blocks away and he found himself walking toward it. He desperately wanted to see Celina.
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