Private Practices (14 page)

In front of him now, high up toward his left, he saw what must be the clinic, a large, rambling wooden house with wide verandas and a graceful peaked roof. An almost illegible sign on the main road said, “Howeville Clinic. Government Property,” and he swerved to the left to follow the tiny dirt road it indicated. There were soda cans and deep ruts marring the path; clearly the clinic was often visited on foot.

The small road went straight up a mountain and for a while he lost sight of the clinic building, then caught a view of it again when he came out, sun blinded, from under a tunnel of lianas. It seemed, from the distance, breathtakingly beautiful, the realized dream of Eden engineered by some long-vanished planter. He suspected that although there were miles of rain forest and banana plantations between the house and the sea, the turquoise waters would be visible from the estate's lawns.

Parking under a clump of flowering trees, with the house still higher up and to his right, he remembered to leave the windows open. It was late afternoon and the heat was pasting his white shirt against his skin. Now he could see that the verandas were lined with clusters of women and children. They were sitting squat-legged on the porches, some of them chatting, some of them dozing, some of them eating from nested tin casseroles.

To enter the building, he threaded his way through the crowd. Most of the women and children moved to make room for him to pass but one of the women sat motionless, her back against a porch pillar and her legs directly extended across his path. He looked down at her, annoyed at her rudeness, and waited for her to curl in her legs, only to realize she was not looking at him but at the brown, perspiring baby at her breast. There was something odd about the woman, about her concentration. Or was it the baby? Stepping across the woman's still-extended legs, he glanced back and watched the child suckling. It was naked, he noticed, and skinny. And the hand with which it clutched its mother's breast had only two stubby fingers. In between, there was a knot of twisted flesh. When the woman noticed his eyes on the baby's hand, she moved at last, pulled her legs under her, and draped a shawl over herself and the child.

A hand clapped his shoulder and he turned to see a slight white-coated man before him. “Dr. Zauber?” the man said. “I'm Dr. Neville.” He was short, his skin black but his eyes narrow and Oriental, and although his hair was gray, there were few wrinkles on his face.

“I'm afraid I've come at a bad time,” Ben apologized, glancing back at the patient-crowded veranda.

“It's always a bad time,” Neville said.

Indoors, his eyes adjusted slowly to the absence of sunlight. Neville was walking swiftly and he hurried to keep up with him. They entered a large, rectangular room, once the planter's parlor, he surmised, but now furnished spartanly with Neville's wooden desk and a few straightbacked chairs. “Dr. Zauber,” Neville was saying. “But not
the
Dr. Zauber.”

“I'm sorry,” Ben responded, automatic in his apology. “But you know how busy Sidney is.”

“Of course.” Neville's voice was cold.

“He was sorry he couldn't come himself.”

“I'm sure.” Neville sat down. “Well, what is it you want to do? Start looking over my material now?” He gestured impatiently to a stack of shabby, speckled notebooks and manila folders heaped on a corner of his desk.

“I thought I'd just introduce myself today, since it's already so late,” Ben said. “And then come back tomorrow to look over the material.”

Neville's voice grew less harsh. “Good. I was afraid you were going to try to rush through it all tonight. There's quite a bit, you know.”

“What exactly have you got?”

“Your brother didn't tell you?” Neville shook his head. “I've got detailed follow-ups on eighty women who were part of the Zauber pill study here at various times during the past three years and who later went on to become pregnant. They're women who dropped out of our program either because they changed their minds about having children or because they accidentally forgot to keep taking the pill.”

“How many of the offspring are defective?” Ben asked.

“Eight,” Neville announced, his tone once again unfriendly.

“How many would you expect to find in this population? What's typical?”

“Considerably fewer. A good two hundred percent fewer.”

“It could be a matter of chance,” Ben suggested.

“It could be. Sure. It could be. But I don't think it is.”

Ben shrugged. “The pill's been tested on six islands. The study's been going on for three years. No one at any of the other clinics involved has reported anything like this.”

Neville, his voice cool and matter-of-fact, said, “Maybe no one else was looking.”

Ben looked at him and saw unblinking eyes and a firm, immobile mouth, and thought irrelevantly that Neville reminded him of someone. Tiny but intransigent-looking, he radiated extraordinary self-confidence. “If the implications of my study are correct, the Zauber pill could be thoroughly discredited.”

Ben continued to stare at him. Then, suddenly, he felt an odd nervousness, almost an excitement, surge through his body. His hands felt sweaty and his breath short. But he swept his nervousness aside. It was foolish to be nervous about the Zauber pill. Sidney never made mistakes. Whatever he turned his mind to, he accomplished with dazzling success. Only a year ago, Ben recalled, Alithorn had jokingly said that he wished Sidney would make a few more misdiagnoses, or even lose a patient, if just to make him less susceptible to going to pieces the first time he did.

“Well, I'll certainly be glad to look over your material,” he said to Neville. “Though I doubt you've got anything going for you but chance.”

“That's fine,” Neville said, rising from behind his desk. “All I want is a fair reading.”

“I can certainly promise you that.”

“Good.” Neville reached for his hand and shook it. “Till tomorrow, then. Tomorrow will be excellent. It'll give me the time to get my material a bit better organized.”

It was still light when Ben reached the hotel although already he could hear the tinkling sounds of a steel band and see suntanned guests gathering for cocktails in the thatch-roofed lounge opposite the lobby. Heading for the seaside cottages in which the hotel accommodated its guests, he skirted the lounge and made his way along the deserted beach. Over his head, palm trees rustled and beneath his feet surreptitious sand crabs delved. He paused for a moment to stare at the sun, hovering low and dominant on the horizon. Then suddenly the sun, a celestial swimmer, dived into the sea and it was night. Streamers of orange, pink and purple still emanated from the place where the sun had been, but they began to melt into each other, to drift and disintegrate, and at last they were gone altogether, vanished without a trace.

He stood at the water's edge and, watching the sunset, felt the excitement he had experienced earlier in the day increase, grow intense in the enveloping blackness. He was happy, he realized with a start. He had completely gotten over the numbness of body and spirit his visit to his mother had produced, and he was feeling vital and energetic. Running, he began heading up the beach, seeking the cottage he, Naomi and Petey had been assigned.

Naomi wore a backless yellow dress to dinner and they danced to the steel band and watched a floor show of agile limbo dancers who undulated and slithered and finally seemed almost to liquefy as their bodies slipped beneath ever-lowering rungs of flame. His hand on Naomi's smooth back, his eyes on the velvety stomachs of the limbo dancers, Ben enjoyed himself so enormously that even Petey seemed less of an encumbrance than he had earlier in the day. The boy was asking Naomi about the exotic fruits and vegetables laid out on a flower-decorated buffet table behind them, and Ben took a stab at interesting him by telling him the story of how Captain Bligh, before his men had mutinied, had brought breadfruit to the islands. To his surprise, the story captured the boy's attention and he listened to it without fidgeting.

Later, when Naomi went back to the cottage for a few moments to get herself a shawl, Petey reciprocated by telling Ben a story of his own. “I caught a crab down on the beach this afternoon,” he said. “A real big one. And you know what? The lifeguard took it and said if I'd let them, the hotel could use it tonight for crab races.”

“No kidding! That's wonderful. We'll have to bet on it!”

Petey grimaced. “The races are late. After the dancing. My mother said I'd have to go to bed.”

“That's terrible,” Ben said, and saw the boy warm to his sympathy. “Tell you what. I'll fix it so you can stay up.”

“You will?” Petey's dark eyes widened.

“Sure I will.”

When Naomi returned and Ben led her back onto the open-air dance floor, he told her what he had promised Petey. “I don't mean to interfere,” he said. “I suppose you don't want to let him get in the habit of staying up late. But after all, this is special. He caught the crab.”

Naomi, swaying rhythmically, said, “Are you sure it's all right? I didn't want him staying up late because I was afraid you'd feel he was in the way.”

“Oh! But I don't feel that way. I thought I would, but somehow I don't.”

“I'm glad,” Naomi sighed. “I was upset this afternoon when I saw you two weren't getting on.”

Petey was slumped in his chair, his eyes half-closed, when at last the band stopped playing and the crab races were announced. A tuxedoed master of ceremonies intoned the name and color of each crab and pointed out that the one with the orange stripe on its back had been caught by one of the guests. “The young man over there,” the MC said, gesturing at Petey, who shivered with delight and sprang to his feet.

Ben could feel his expectancy. It was almost tangible, a current forcing the thin body to bob up and down and the feet in blue sneakers to shuffle and leap, all lethargy gone. Pushing back his chair, he grabbed Petey's hand and they maneuvered their way through the throng gathered around the MC, Ben weaving in and out and Petey treading on his heels. Then he shoved Petey forward, giving him two five-dollar bills, and said, “Quick now. Give the MC a five for you and a five for me.”

By the time the bell was rung and the glass bowl was lifted so that the creatures could begin their sluggish exodus up and over one another toward the perimeter of the racing circle, Petey could no longer stand still. Around and around the circle he tore, rushing from Ben to whichever side of the ring his orange-striped crab approached, giggling and veering sharply whenever the crab changed directions. Finally his crab was out and away from the others and from far across the circle Ben could hear him shouting encouragement to it. Leaving the spot where he stood, he hurried around the circle and came up behind Petey just as the boy, arms flailing, shouted, “We did it! We did it!” Ben knew he meant himself and the crab, but he hugged the boy tightly and, echoing his sentiments, said with him, “We did it! We did it!”

After they had collected their winnings, he and Petey, hand in hand, headed back to Naomi who hugged them both. “Let's swim before we go to bed,” he said to Naomi. “Let's skinny-dip down at the end of the beach. I want to do all the corny things.”

“Me too,” she whispered. “As soon as Petey's asleep.”

They put Petey to bed, walked hand in hand on the deserted beach, tried acrobatically to make love in the still-warm water but were defeated by the lapping waves which kept forcing them apart. At last they gave up and lay on an enormous beach towel on the sand. Twice Naomi asked him how things had gone at the clinic but both times he said, “Sssh” and put his fingers to his lips and afterward, his lips to hers. To talk about Sidney and his pill and the clinic, even to think about them, might rob him of the exquisite happiness he was feeling. “Let's swim again,” he suggested after a while, deflecting conversation. But Naomi was chilled and tired.

He wasn't. He left her sitting on the beach towel and probed his way energetically into the shallows, then let his feet relinquish security and began kicking boldly. There was no moon and the stars were hidden behind clouds. But he felt no fear in the water, only a delicious exhilaration.

That night, in bed with Naomi, she seemed to him a magnet that was drawing him to her. He didn't have to plan his caresses or his thrusts, didn't, even for a moment, have to urge his body to follow the dictates of will. He made love to her twice and afterward he still wanted her a third time. “You're manic,” she said. “We've been screwing for hours.”

“I have so much time to make up for.”

But he could see that she was tired and he let her rest. They still had tomorrow. And who knew? Tomorrow might possibly be even better than today.

He rose early the next morning, eager to get through Neville's records and have some time in the afternoon with Naomi and Petey, who were still asleep. He had coffee at the terrace dining room and took off for the clinic at once. But when he arrived, Neville was nowhere in sight. “It's his abortion morning,” a nurse in a miniskirt explained to Ben as he climbed up the steps to the clinic's veranda.

“Will he be long?”

“I don't know, but he left word for you to join him.”

He nodded and followed behind her to the back of the sprawling wooden house where she paused, opened a door and started down a cinder-block corridor that had been added onto the house. At its far end, he saw swinging doors and, beyond, a small, quite modern operating suite.

“There's a labor and a recovery room too,” the nurse said proudly. “Dr. Neville started his clinic here, right in the house, before independence, and then afterward, the government gave him the money to modernize.”

Neville, wearing surgical dress, nodded good morning as Ben entered. “You're just in time. I was waiting for you. I have a patient here who was one of the test women.” There was a young, vaguely familiar woman stretched out on the operating table, her body covered by a large, multi-patched sheet. Turning away from her, Neville said in a low voice, “She gave up the Zauber pill about six months ago, got pregnant soon afterward, then came in here asking for an abortion a few days ago. I tried to discourage her. I hate doing these late ones, don't you?”