Honeydew: Stories (3 page)

Willa took the bottle from her apron. She shifted the baby to her lap and cradled him and stroked first his left cheek and then his right, and at last he opened his eyes and then his mouth and she inserted the nipple. Looking at her, he drank about two-thirds of the bottle. She could feel the heat draining from his body, feel his breathing become slower, feel the rasp in his chest grow still. He slept again. He smiled in his comfortable sleep. She got up and carried him into the kitchen. The contraption she had heard was an easel. The father was working at a drawing, intently using the side of his pencil to create shadows…

“Jack.”

He turned. “What! What!”

“The fever has broken.”

He took the baby from her. He was not ashamed to cry. But when she stared at the drawing—only a head this time, pointed ears and one eye missing and an open mouth, lipless—he gave an embarrassed snort. “It’s like an amulet; it’s to prevent catast—”

She touched his shoulder to show she understood. Then she moved to the sink and took the bottle from her pocket and unscrewed the nipple and tipped the thing, and the rest of the amber-colored potion poured out in front of his eyes and hers.

T
he hospital—red-brick High Victorian Gothic—had been built atop a low hill just after the Civil War. It was named Memorial Hospital but was soon referred to as the Castle. The structure had been modernized inside, many times, but the balustrades and turrets and long thin windows from which you could shoot arrows at your enemies—all these remained.

And, like a true medieval fortress, it cast its formidable shadow on the surrounding area. Everyone who worked in it or lived near it or occupied its rooms felt its spirit: benign maybe, malign maybe, maybe neither, at least for now. The place harbored secrets—electronic information, sneaky bacteria—and it was peopled by creatures who had wandered in or maybe had lived there since birth, like the AIDS babies, the short-gut babies, the babies lacking brain stems: all abandoned to the Castle by horrified parents who sometimes even fled the state. There were beautiful ladies-in-waiting—waiting to die; and crones whose futures were no happier; and tremulous knights; and bakers with envelopes of magical spices. There was an ugly guard with a kind heart.

Zeph Finn had lived for the past year and a half in the Castle’s domain, first in the residents’ quarters and now in the top flat of one of the nearby three-deckers. He rarely went anywhere: he shuffled from Castle to flat, flat to Castle. He had ventured forth tonight, however, to a potluck party. And now a pretty girl had asked him something, but for God’s sake what, he hadn’t heard—oh, what do they always ask. “I do regional anesthesia,” he guessed.

“Oooh, do you. What region—the Boston area? Do you move from one hospital to another hospital?”

Silent, Zeph moved from this guest to another guest. Most of the potluck people here were doctors and knew that a regional anesthesiologist specialized in nerve blocks. Many knew Zeph. Because of this familiarity he’d agreed to drop in, a box of cheese straws under his arm. The host, chief of the emergency room, was one of his few friends—his dogwalkers, he called them; they dragged him outside whenever he’d been noticeably unresponsive for a while.

He had no girlfriend at present. He never had a girlfriend for long. But there were some women who saw in his numbed silence, his reluctance to meet the eye, something to work with. They hoped to rescue him. Rescuing the rescuer, ha! A doomed enterprise.

“He’s married to his specialty,” somebody once said to somebody.

“Oh, no,” said the other somebody. “He’s engaged to his cart.”

Zeph had heard this joke and was not offended. Who wouldn’t feel an abiding affection for that cart of scrupulously ordered drawers with a disposal container attached to one side. Needles, syringes, label tapes, and IV catheters in the top drawer. More needles and ampoules in the second. Continuous-nerve-block sets in the third. Emergency stuff in the fourth, along with drugs whose names scanned like poetry, according to a would-be girlfriend who had memorized them as an aid to seduction. “Lidocaine, ephedrine, phenylephrine, epinephrine,” she began, and then got stuck on
atropine,
poor puppet.

When he left the party he walked home along half of the perimeter of the hospital grounds, looking up at the edifice every so often. A huge parking lot floated from the rear. Some old-timers—that is, docs who had been young in World War II—remembered the year-by-year expansion of the lot.

But long before that brutal felling of trees, neighborhoods were forming just beyond the fringe. At the beginning of the last century a subway station had been constructed near the Castle and the three-deckers were built. They became—they were expected to become—dwelling places for the poor. Birthed together like litters, block after block, the houses were clapboard, and each floor had a porch. There was a plot of land in the back of each to be shared by all three tenant families; Irish then, now folks from more faraway places: there were the Filipino blocks, the Venezuelan area, Little Brazil…Many adults worked in the Castle; others took the subway to jobs in town. Each neighborhood had a few restaurants, a bar, a grocery, a couple of day-care centers.

The area had one unexpected feature, discovered when the three-deckers were erected. This was a stream, mostly underground, but running for a while through a little wood. The earth was more swamp than soil; strange bushes and spindly, widely spaced trees thrived in it; nothing could be built on its softness, you couldn’t even hide there. The city, acknowledging the piece of land unprofitable, might have embellished it a bit, put up markers to identify the vegetation, made a sanctuary of it for people and birds. But the city left it alone. The two public schools among the neighborhoods of the Castle each had a playground and a basketball court, and one had a baseball field. And so kids ignored the little forest. The only people to visit it during the day were peculiar children, perhaps shunned by their boisterous fellows, perhaps preferring isolation. Zeph went there occasionally to smoke and very occasionally to snort.

This summer the woods were being explored by two sixth-graders from the Filipino community, Joe and Acelle, Joe because he liked plants and insects, Acelle because she liked Joe. Every afternoon Joe tolerated Acelle’s almost wordless presence. Her chief occupation when school was out was helping her only sister—their mother was dead. When not busy with that task she followed Joe, obeyed him, adopted his ideas. Sometimes, though, she just lay down and listened to the birds.

“My house is too quiet,” she explained.

“Mine isn’t.”

Acelle’s flat held three people at its most crowded; Joe’s was occupied always by a festival of relatives. Even the basement had been taken over. The only real silence was in the doc’s place on the third floor. Joe could go there anytime, even when it was empty; and when Zeph was there it was as good as empty.

For a few hours each day these children waded, climbed trees, chased rabbits, dissected worms, and built a kind of teepee, which they called Castle 2.

There were three entrances to Castle 1. The wide one, designed for horse-drawn wagons, was now used by ambulances. Another served the parking lot, and had become willy-nilly the main entrance. The former main entrance, with its five arches—four windows and a door—welcomed people who came on foot or by bus, who walked up the numerous stairs to the door or were wheeled up a winding ramp by a feeble relative or, if their arrivals coincided with his, by Zeph.

This was the access that Zeph preferred. At dawn the morning after the party, he climbed the stairs, carrying a knobby walking stick, his legacy—his only legacy—from his father. He went through the big doorway into the old beamed hall and then into an old-fashioned elevator like a cage, and then down to the surgical suites, thoroughly up-to-date. He began the ritual of changing his clothes and scrubbing up. Zeph had a limited wardrobe—he was still paying off college and medical-school debts, would be doing so for years—but he always wore a jacket and tie to work. You would expect these garments to smarten him up. In fact they made him seem more shambling and unaware: a tall loose-limbed guy carrying a stick for no apparent purpose.

“Your stick—maybe there’s a sword hidden inside,” a resident had suggested.

“I’ve never looked,” he fibbed.

As for his head: he had brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze on one side of your neck or the other. “Make contact,” his preceptors had urged. “Look at me,” pleaded women of all types.
Contact? Look?
Not in his repertoire. He had been self-sufficient all his life. He’d gotten through medical school by virtue of a good memory and deft fingers. And despite that continuing interest in the sides of patients’ necks, he didn’t flunk bedside manner; the soft voice and the thoughtful answers to their questions told patients he was in their corner even if he didn’t meet their eyes. Some patients may have even preferred the averted glance.

Zeph’s eyes, if you did get a glimpse of them, were dark blue. When he was giving general anesthesia—he occasionally got nonregional assignments—he leaned over the patient and asked him to count backward from ten and there was a kind of cobalt flash just before seven. But mostly Zeph’s job was regional, continually administering exactly the right amount of blocking drugs to exactly the right nerves, and delivering a little sedation too. The less stuff given, the better, but there must be enough of it to keep pain at a safe distance. Zeph considered all pain his mortal enemy, all patients of either gender his suffering mother, all surgeons dragons indifferent to the cruelties they were practicing. The patients’ conversation during this partially sedated state included long sleepy pauses between phrases and sometimes between words, but the talk only occasionally turned into jabberwocky. The dialogue began in a confidential mode and soon acquired a tone of intimacy, though the topics were unromantic. Bird-watching. Jazz. Immigrants, too goddamn many. Zeph’s responses were invitations to say more, continuing the palaver while his hands and eyes kept busy.
What color is the bobolink? You prefer Bird to Coltrane? Yes, many people here were born elsewhere; have you traveled yourself?
—a reply intended to blur insult if anyone had heard it; often the entire surgical team was made up of fellows from the Asian rim or the subcontinent, though the surgeon in charge was usually Yankee. Or Jewish. Sometimes Irish. Zeph was Irish on both sides, though his father had not been a surgeon, not any kind of doctor, just a feckless hippie who named his one child Zephyr and willed him a walking stick and did talk jabberwocky.

When Zeph paid his postoperative visits a few hours after the surgery, the patients did not seem to remember these conversations, and sometimes they did not even remember the man now standing beside their bed with his eyes on their neck. Being forgotten didn’t trouble him. He’d learned also to tolerate the next string of visits to the next day’s batch of surgical patients, though he always entered the room as if he were metal and had neglected to oil himself. He swiveled his eyes until they briefly met the eyes of the person in the bed. He said his silly name. He shook hands if the patient seemed so inclined. He was here to answer questions no matter how trivial they seemed. He sat down, preferably on a chair, on a stool if necessary, indicating that he was in no hurry. He answered the queries and he wrote a note or two on his clipboard, and when the questions were done (though some were repeated and repeated) he took over the conversation, explaining in the simplest lay terms possible the nature of the dope, its duration, its possible side effects, the probability of nasal intubation, and the unavoidable necessity of tethering the patient’s wrists to the side rails. “I’ll be taking care of you,” he said. And then, with a little less effort than earlier, he met the patient’s eyes again. And shook hands, maybe, and said good-bye.

Now, at 6:30 in the morning, he walked in his paper slippers to the OR anteroom, where he was the first doctor to arrive but the second member of the team there; the scrub nurse was always waiting. She helped him into his mask and gloves and he entered the pearl and silver sanctuary. He checked the treasures in his beloved cart. The other docs padded in. Then the first patient, supine on wheels. Things began.

This patient was an overweight man of fifty-seven with diabetes and a raging need for a knee replacement.

“I’m going to insert the needle now, just as I explained,” Zeph said, and even as he spoke, the needle was reaching the necessary nerve. Zeph lowered his head toward the patient’s head so they could speak and Zeph could meanwhile watch the monitors and not get in the way of the surgeons, already clustered at the knee like jackals. “Are you feeling anything in your left foot?” Zeph said, and a nurse scratched its sole. “No,” the man replied. The nurse pinched his thigh. “Do you feel anything in your left thigh?” Zeph said. Another “No.” Zeph announced, “Ready,” in a firm voice never yet heard outside of the operating room.

The patient told Zeph about sailing: “Nothing like it, you are master, you are jubilant, you yourself are the…are the…”

“Wind?” Zeph suggested.

“Out of body…out of mind…you are made of air and sky.”

“Water?”

“Marshmallow…peanut butter.”

Zeph reduced the Versed.

“Come out with me sometime, Doc.”

“Love to.”

The next patient was so talkative that Zeph added diazepam to her IV, then joined in her complaints about children and grandchildren; you would think, if you heard his responses, that dealing with recalcitrant offspring was his life’s interest. The third, a boy with a supposedly operable tumor in his abdomen, was a general. Zeph, unable to communicate with this child sunk in artificial sleep, noted that the tumor was extensive and not completely excisable. The final surgery was a lumpectomy, nice and clean. The woman on the table flirted with him and he flirted right back, kept her as close to full awareness as possible. “Have you ever been in love, Blue Eyes?” she giggled.

Afterward, a mute shower, his second of the day, while the chatter that had clung to him drained into the hospital’s sewer.

One day, shortly after a rain, something unfortunate happened. While sliding on her backside down the bank toward the stream, Acelle was stabbed by what felt like a dagger. It was in fact only a bit of narrow branch. It would have done little damage had she been wearing jeans, but today she’d worn last year’s party dress. Below the striped mini her legs were bare and her upper thigh and even part of her buttock were vulnerable to the miniature weapon; worse yet, the thing had its own pointed twiglet, which had entered the flesh easily enough but, Joe saw, would be a bitch to dislodge.

“It’s like a fishhook, pointing backward,” Joe explained to Acelle. “They make fishhooks that way on purpose…so they can’t be pulled out the way they came in, and the fish can’t get loose.”

She was lying on her stomach. “Pull it out anyway.”

He bent and looked closely at the little bit of tree that seemed to be feeding on her tenderness. “No, the fishhook will rip you. It went in slanted, like a splinter. It’s very near the…skin, the surface. Maybe I could cut your skin and lift it out.”