Ghost Country (17 page)

“That’s okay, Charmaine.” He turned to the young woman, touched by the misery in her face. “I’m Dr. Tammuz and I’m about to start seeing people. Do you have an appointment?”

The young woman muttered she had no appointment, and no, no referral, that she’d walked in from the street.

“I’ll be glad to talk to you this afternoon, but it will have to be after I’ve seen all the people with appointments, okay? So why don’t you give Gretchen here your details,” Hector said.

“My details?” the woman whispered.

“Name, insurance, that’s all. It’s a hospital; we have to know how to charge for the service.”

“I’ll pay cash,” she said. “I—there are reasons for me not to say my name out here.”

“Dr. Tammuz,” Gretchen butted in, eager to take part. “People are waiting for you. I’ll take care of the administrative details.”

Gretchen got up from behind her counter and followed Hector to the tiny consulting room assigned to him on Wednesday afternoons, She shut the door and lectured him on how he couldn’t just add people to the clinic list on his own whim, because it totally disrupted the accounting in the unit.

“She said she’d pay cash. I’d think Midwest would be thrilled to take her on.”

“It’s not the money for one person per se, Doctor, but we get
assigned rooms for so many hours, me and Charmaine work so many hours on Wednesday based on the patient load. It all gets out of kilter if we just let people walk in off the street assuming they can see a doctor for the asking.”

“I see,” Hector said. “So we should turn away people in trouble?”

“Oh, people who come in here think they’re in trouble. They should try raising four children alone on a clerk’s salary while their old man is on permanent disability, if they want to know what trouble is all about.”

“Well, Dr. Tammuz? Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

Abraham Stonds greeted Hector from behind his leather-covered desk. Brocade drapes drawn across the window blocked out the summer sun. The curtains, the desk leather and the walls were all in green; in the shadows created by the only lamp that was switched on, Hector felt as though he had walked into the bottom of an aquarium.

“About what, sir?” Hector, irritated at having to leave his patients on a whim of the old man’s, was thrown off balance by his opening question.

“Don’t play the fool with me, Dr. Tammuz. What were you proposing to do with my granddaughter? After the events of last night you have one hell of a nerve attempting to see her.”

Hector could feel his lower jaw droop slackly. He wondered if the old man was exhibiting dementia symptoms that his staff was concealing from the rest of the hospital.

“Last night, sir?” he said, trying to move cautiously, “I’m afraid I—”

“Are you a damned parrot, Tammuz, echoing everything I say? Yes, last night. When my granddaughter was arrested, thanks in large part to your officious meddling in matters totally beyond your expertise. And now you try to see her in your clinic on the sly? You think you can make a fool out of me? I’ll teach you vvho’s the fool here, young man!” And Dr. Stonds smacked the leather desktop with his open palm.

Hector became convinced the surgeon had suffered some kind of infarct. His own head splintered with colliding fears—that even if the old man was crazy, he could destroy Hector’s career; that Hector ought to summon help; that he needed to soothe Stonds and make his escape as fast as he possibly could,
“Uh, sir, I wonder if you’re confusing me with someone else. I’ve never met Ms. Stonds.”

“How dare you?” In the dim light Stonds’s face seemed to swell like a giant shark in front of a stranded sailor. “When you told your clinic clerk to add her to your patient roster, that you’d see her without an appointment!”

“That was your granddaughter? I had no idea—she didn’t tell me her name—I’d never seen her before.”

Hector felt ill. After the events of last night … Had someone assaulted the Stonds girl? Had she come up with his name somehow, and decided to finger him for it?

“Hector Tammuz? That’s your name, isn’t it? Recommended by Dr. Hanaper to work at the Lenore Foundation’s clinic for the homeless?”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“And you’ve taken it upon yourself to get involved with a psychotic woman living around the foundation to the Hotel Pleiades, and to advise her on her legal rights?”

“No, sir. I know nothing about the law and would never give anyone legal advice.” Hector’s lips felt stiff and clumsy, as though they had been soaked in formaldehyde. “I have tried, unsuccessfully, to treat the woman for symptoms of acute schizophrenia and paranoia. I have tried to get her to leave the wall where she is living and come aboveground, but have failed in my efforts. That is the limit of my connection to her.”

“Don’t lie to me, young man!” Dr. Stonds hit his desktop again. “You gave your name to the man at the hotel garage. He told us he heard you advising this woman. He told us you said that the sidewalk was public property and the hotel could not force her to leave.”

In the middle of his fears Hector tried to remember the scene at the hotel garage. He spoke to so many people about so many things that the evening already belonged to the distant past. His clearest image was of the garage manager’s arm muscles bulging against his
jacket sleeves as he tried to justify the hotel’s harassment of Madeleine.

“I see you didn’t expect a witness to speak up, Dr. Tammuz.”

Dr. Stonds’s triumphant bark goaded Hector into speech. “One of the street people who brought me to see Madeleine Carter—the schizophrenic woman—made the point about the sidewalk being public property. I didn’t know that was the case. The guy from the garage probably thinks it was I who said it, because to him those women were ciphers. They’re homeless, one is black, so his memory is playing a kind of trick on him, putting information on the lips of the only person he recognized. I suppose you could call it a form of projection.”

Hector was amazed that he could speak so lucidly while the room rocked and bucked around him. Or maybe gibberish was coming out and he was too distraught to hear it. “But, sir, what does this have to do with your—with Ms. Stonds?”

“Don’t be insolent with me, young man! I’ve been hearing about you from Dr. Hanaper, that you’re a whiny crybaby who ducks his responsibilities, and I see how right he is: you try to pass off your own malfeasance onto a psychotic creature who wouldn’t know one end of the law from the other….”

As the diatribe continued Hector began calculating his debts, a technique for dissociation, since he made the same reckoning a dozen times a week. Ninety-seven thousand for education took first place, but there were lesser ones, including five grand for a used Honda. Rent was over six hundred a month. By the time he paid utilities, insurance, and his loans he had about two hundred dollars left for food, clothes, and entertainment—for those occasions when he could stay awake long enough to be entertained. If Stonds fired him, how long would it be before he joined Madeleine Carter under the crack in the wall? In fact, if he still had a job at the end of the afternoon, maybe he should invest in a sleeping bag so he wouldn’t have to wrap up in an old coat.

Dr. Stonds moved from Hector’s feeble character and inadequate
training to a description of his own sufferings at the First District police station. “Do you have any idea what it feels like to be roused in the middle of the night with the news that your granddaughter has been arrested for disturbing the peace?’

Of course I don’t, you stupid fart, Hector thought, when I haven’t got a child, let alone a granddaughter. “It must have been dreadful, sir, but I don’t understand what that has to do with me, or with Madeleine Carter.”

“Who the hell is Madeleine Carter?”

Hector tried to keep a hysterical scream out of his voice. “She’s the schizophrenic woman living by the Hotel Pleiades garage. The reason you wanted to see me.”

“Don’t you listen to anything anyone says, Tammuz? She got my granddaughter arrested. Thanks to your interference in matters you should stay well away from.”

Hector felt like a shipwrecked sailor, with land
in
sight but such swirling seas he couldn’t keep track of what direction to swim. “What did she—Ms. Carter—do? She’s very disturbed; she’s afraid of strangers and isn’t able to engage with people. Someone who isn’t accustomed to psychosis might be upset by her behavior. But, honestly, sir—I don’t know what happened last night. Why was your granddaughter arrested? And what happened to Madeleine Carter? Was she arrested as well?”

Hector imagined Madeleine offering the Virgin’s blood to Stonds’s granddaughter. When a psychotic homeless woman held out her rust- (or maybe blood-) stained fingers, the Stonds girl ran to the police screaming that Madeleine had attacked her.

“You claim to know something about the human mind.” Stonds changed tack, leaning across his desk in a plea for empathy. “You tell me why a girl given every advantage—
every advantage”
—slapping the desk again for emphasis—“of education, attention, money, would think she had to make a public spectacle of herself in order to humiliate me.”

Hector didn’t say anything.

“She went down to your wall, to your precious psychopath, to embarrass her older sister, the most talented, accomplished young woman in Chicago. And to try to embarrass me. She got embroiled with that damned singer, poor Harry Minsky’s sister, she assaulted the garage manager, and had herself arrested. Then came to the clinic just now to brag about it to you. And you still deny all knowledge of her?”

Hector made a feeble effort to speak. “Sir, the brief glimpse I had of Ms. Stonds in the clinic was the first time I ever saw her, and at that moment I had no idea she was your granddaughter. I didn’t know she was arrested last night. But she didn’t look like someone coming in to brag: she looked like a very unhappy girl who badly needed someone to talk to.”

His hands were shaking from the effort of speaking up to the old man. He stuck them in his pockets.

Stonds scowled at him. “You are not to talk to her. That is an order. I’ve scheduled an appointment for her with Hanaper: I can rely on him to give me an honest evaluation of her mental state, not to encourage her to wallow in self-pity.”

“Sir, with respect, she came to see me. Shouldn’t she—”

“I’ve had enough of your insolence, Tammuz. As long as I’m part of this hospital, patients will see who I think is best for them, even if they are my own family.”

W
HEN MARA WAS
little she liked to go to the hospital with Grandfather on Saturdays. The medical students let her listen to their hearts through their stethoscopes; after he finished rounds, Grandfather took her to the animal labs where she could pet the rabbits. Everywhere they went people stood respectfully to one side to let them pass, or displayed intense interest in the little girl because she was attached to Dr. Stonds.

When she was little, the respect he received made Grandfather even more important to her. Yes, she was scared of him when he got angry, but he was so important he was worth all the attention and fear he generated. She once told some dinner guests that her grandfather owned Midwest Hospital; everyone laughed, and Grandfather himself ruffled her thick curls with delight. That was during Harriet’s absence at Smith, when Grandfather briefly turned to Mara for a reflection of his glory.