Naked Came the Stranger (15 page)

The man in the driver's seat was alight with transcendental joy.
The aura of Gillian still filled the car. For the moment, at least,
Marvin Goodman was a winner.

Billy: Well, Gilly, there are a lot of pros and
cons involved. Abortion is a touchy subject.

Gilly: Obviously. I realize there is a definite question of
morality involved. But there are also human considerations.

Billy: No matter what the circumstances, Gilly, you are taking
a life when you perform an abortion.

Gilly: I know, Billy, but suppose the pregnancy endangers the
mother's life. Or suppose the mother is a teenage rape victim. Look,
those are only two examples. There are lots of others.

Billy: It's not an easy thing to decide.

Gilly: I mean, I can feel for these poor women you read about
who have to go to some sleazy practitioner – someone who's
doing that sort of thing on the side, and has all these dirty
instruments and everything.

Billy: I don't think there's much question that the law needs
to be liberalized. The problem is how. And how much?

Gilly: You have a real talent for summing up, Billy. Billy:
Thank you, dear. I think one of your most sterling qualities is your
ability to make a man feel important.

Gilly: Oh, but you are. I think all you men are just terribly
important.

Billy: We're all grateful.

Gilly: Actually, Billy, a panel discussion on abortion would
make a very interesting show.

Billy: I think that's a first-rate idea, hon. We could have
someone from the church and, perhaps, a representative from the
medical society.

Gilly: There's only one problem. Billy: What's that?

Gilly: I'm afraid we might have a little trouble finding an
abortionist.

Alan Hetterton is a beautiful name – the words
were a small song in Gillian's mind as she stepped from the shower.
Oh yes, a beautiful name is Alan Hetterton – she sang the song
as she toweled herself dry in the bedroom, sang the song as she stood
at the bedroom window, the towel over her shoulders, and stared out
at a faraway jet wheeling in the night sky toward La Guardia. Alan
Hetterton, in point of fact, was the name mentioned by Maxine of
Maxine's Beauty Parlor during a casual conversation on the subject of
abortionists she had known. Dr. Alan Hetterton is a beautiful name
– tra-la! – and the bedroom phone rang twice before
Gillian responded.

"Hello," she said.

"You got a pair of big ones," the voice said. "Who is this?" she
asked.

"I said you got a pair of big ones." Whoever he was, he was making
no effort to disguise his voice. "Big round ones and never mind who
this is."

The first time he had called, Gillian calmly placed the receiver
in the cradle, waited a second, then called the police. The police
had informed her there was nothing to be done, but should the calls
continue she might want to use the new automatic tracking device. It
had all seemed so much trouble.

"Are you coming to the point?" she asked.

"I come to a point," he said. "Don't worry about that. I come to a
point, same as anyone else."

Gillian remembered the full-page ads – so sober, so shocking
– telling women exactly what they must do if they get a
harassing phone call. Screw it, she thought. It was the first time in
a week she had not been concentrating on the baby beatnik in her
abdomen. She didn't hang up, not this time. Perversely, she lighted a
cigarette and kept talking.

"Why don't you tell me your name?" she said.

"When are you going to meet me in the hay?" the voice said. "When
are you going to step out of your step-ins and hop in the old
hay?"

"Please, why won't you tell me your name?" she said. "I may be
able to help you."

"You've heard of jack the Ripper," he said. "Well, I'm his cousin,
Jack the Fucker."

"Why don't you tell me all about it?" Gillian said.

"That's a very interesting name. If you tell me all about it,
maybe I can help you."

"You
hoooer!
" he screamed. "You wanna trap me. You wanna
keep me talking just so you can trap me."

"Maybe I just want to talk to you."

Click.
It took Gillian a moment to realize that he had hung
up on
her.
He had taken the action she should have taken.
Gillian giggled – she had a feeling that perhaps she had just
learned a lesson of importance.

Maybe that was the one sure way to get rid of all the nuts in the
world – try to understand them. She rested back on the bed and
discovered, almost to her surprise, that the call had had a strange
effect: It had excited her. She found herself sensually aroused,
strangely warm, and perhaps there was a lesson there as well. Gillian
didn't dwell on this.

She reached instead for the Three Towns Directory. Hetley,
Hetterich… there, Hetterton, Alan, M.D. – office 131
Thompson Lane – KI 1-1377. This time it was the voice at the
other end of the line who asked the questions. An operation? Would
she care to specify what kind of an operation? No? Would she care to
say who had referred her to him? No? Maxine Schwartz? Oh, yes, would
Friday evening be satisfactory?

It had not been an easy road that Alan Hetterton had traveled. The
road from Kings County to King's Neck was uphill and bumpy. He had
known even in medical school that he was not destined to be much of a
doctor. The sight of blood saddened him, sometimes reduced him to
tears. To this day he was not certain which was the tibia and which
was the fibia. But somehow he had stumbled through medical school,
finally acquiring the M.D. after his name – the M.D. that his
parents had treated with a reverence he could never understand. Most
of Alan's classmates went on to postgraduate work, but Alan was not
one to press his luck. (At times, even then, he thought he might
still go into his father's brassiere business, learning it, as the
old man might say, from the inside out.) He settled, instead, for the
life of a general practitioner. One of the few on Long Island that
found it economically necessary to make house calls. And perform
abortions.

In time Alan met Gerda, the sister of a nurse who had helped
pulled him through his period of interning. Gerda, tiny and
small-boned with fair skin and a large mouth, was everything Alan was
not: extroverted, adventurous, bubbling with idle conversation. It
was she who had been the aggressor, she who had provided the rubber
contraceptive during their first fumbling encounter one night in June
on the fourth tee of the Plandome Country Club. But even there he had
failed. Four weeks later Gerda tearfully announced that she was
"preggy," to use her imperishable term. Six weeks later they were
married. Married for eighteen years, eighteen years of relative
poverty (whenever Alan encountered a statistical study of average
incomes for doctors in the United States he shook his head sadly,
wonderingly), and the fruit of their union was an eighteen-year-old
boy, who was seriously considering a life as a Country-and-Western
vocalist, and a house a mile from the water in one of the less
prestigious sectors of King's Neck.

Alan had never actually regretted marrying Gerda – but there
were moments. Moments when he was lancing an ugly boil or giving an
enema, and then he would reflect on his marriage. What had they in
common? Other than a slow-witted long-haired son who fancied cowboy
boots with silver spurs – a boy who had perhaps been the
foremost reason for Alan's first having risked performing an
abortion. Well, what had they in common? Gerda's never-ending quest
for Louis XV mirrors bored and impoverished him; her genteel habit of
eating prune Danish with knife and fork (which at first had seemed so
charming) now irritated him. For her part, Gerda stolidly accepted
his refusal to trade in their Rambler station wagon for a Jaguar XKE
or to grow what she called an "unobtrusive little Vandyke." Gerda
would, of course, accept almost anything because Alan had fathered a
son she found entirely beautiful.

On Friday Bill announced a weekend trip to Chicago, a conference
with a prospective sponsor, and Gillian was appropriately grateful.
She decided against hazarding the drive herself and called Station
Taxi. The cab driver dropped her at a drugstore at the end of town
and she walked back the few short blocks to the corner of Thompson. A
small unobtrusive sign beside a lamp post identified the doctor's
office. The low brick building was set back from the road and was
modestly landscaped – it seemed to serve as a buffer between
the business buildings to the south and the split levels and spaced
ranch homes to the north. A Rambler station wagon, its chrome running
to rust, was parked beside the building. It had M.D. plates.

The foyer was dimly lit. To her right was the waiting room. She
sat opposite the door to the doctor's office. She studied with amused
interest a grouping of pictures over the deep green leather couch.
Marin's Lower Manhattan fought mood, color and style with Renoir's Le
Pont Noeuf. Beside the paintings was a Louis XV mirror that Gillian
would have sworn was authentic. A copy of a G. H. Davis World War II
sketch of German and American fighter planes in aerial battle hung
tastelessly with the others. The room furnishings were less expensive
than one might expect in a King's Neck office, and the imbalance of
color and style was unsettling.

"Hello, I'm Dr. Hetterton. And you are Mrs. Brown, I believe."

"That's right."

Gillian looked into the full face of a man who was medium tall,
maybe five feet ten, and of stocky build. He wore his graying hair in
a modified crew cut, and Gillian guessed he was on the far side of
forty-five. He returned the glance and gave no indication of his
thoughts.

"Mrs. Brown, isn't it?" he said.

"Yes, doctor," she said.

"I have a remarkable number of Mrs. Browns on file," he said.

"That is remarkable," Gillian said. "I have no relatives
here."

"Just so," he said.

"Aren't you going to ask me in?"

The doctor cleared his throat and stepped inside the small office,
then led her into an examination room off to the left. He handed her
a surgical gown and gestured toward a curtained-off sector of the
chamber. Gillian was thankful that he had dismissed his nurse. She
disrobed quickly and poked her head through the curtain.

"Come on out," the doctor said. "I don't bite."

Following his directions, Gillian climbed onto the examining
table. The doctor rolled a large machine over to the table. He draped
a cloth over Gillian's legs and gently placed her feet in the
stirrups at either side of the table. Then, less gently, he plunged
the speculum into her. He completed the check in silence, then leaned
against the wall and ignited a cigarette.

"Two months," he said. "Two months into a first pregnancy."

"That's right – almost to the day. Didn't I tell you that on
the phone?"

"You know" – he seemed not to be listening to her –
"the women in France have babies right out in the field and then go
on with their day's work."

"Bully for them." If it weren't for that damn gadget tearing at
her insides, Gillian would have walked out of the room.

"I just want to be sure," the doctor said. "I don't want you to do
anything you're going to regret."

"How long is this going to take?" Gillian said. "Let's just get it
over with. Are you going to give me anything?"

Dr. Hetterton pressed down on the foot pedal that opened the
sterilizer. Steam billowed up the wall. He reached over to a plastic
container in which forceps rested in an alcohol bath. Then he seemed
to have second thoughts.

"Stretch your arms straight down and clasp the edge of the table.
This will be over in a few seconds."

He switched on the diathermy machine and firmly clasped the
cautery gun. The intense heat spread through Gillian and she bit her
lip to stifle a cry. She fought the nausea welling up in her
throat.

"Easy," he said. "There, that should do it."

"You mean it's all over?"

"All over now." Dr. Hetterton handed her a prescription pad and
pencil. "Here, write your name, address and phone number. Your real
name. You may need me and I'll have to have the correct facts. It
should happen within twenty-four hours. Call me as soon as it does."
Gillian did as she was told, precisely as she was told. Not glancing
at the paper, the doctor thrust it into his trouser pocket and called
the taxi. The two of them sat there in the office waiting, not
speaking, and Gillian wished for something appropriate to say.

For once she was wordless. At parties she employed a selection of
icebreakers that seldom failed to work – a small smorgasbord of
existentialism, Zen and little known facts about obscure students of
Bellini. Don't you think Sartre is very much the twentieth-century
man? she would ask. Kirkegaard has a marvelously fey quality about
him, don't you think? she would say. Wouldn't you say that sex is
simply the last resort of two people who can't communicate? she would
offer.

But none of them – nothing seemed appropriate. The doctor
looked like the kind of man who would forget to zip up his trousers,
a man on the edge of going to seed.

"Why do you do this?" she asked.

"I'm a doctor," he said. "I help people."

"Seriously," she said.

"Seriously, I need the money," he said. "Why do you do it?"

"Seriously, I don't need the baby," she said.

"You don't look to be suffering," he said. "You are married,
aren't you? is the baby your husband's?"

"No," she said. "And as long as we're being honest, I have no idea
who the father is."

"
No
idea?" he said.