Private Practices (7 page)

Wandering through the park, his legs finally grew so weary that he felt grateful. He would be able to sleep now. Able to sleep even without the pills. He didn't want to have to take them. Not tonight, when at any minute the Kinney baby might die and he would have to break the news to Annette. Stamping through the snow onto an unfamiliar windy corner, he hailed a cab and rode to his apartment.

But he couldn't sleep. Lying exhausted on the living room couch, he kept thinking that if the Kinney baby died, he would blame himself fiercely for its brief labored life. And even if it lived, if it was in any way damaged, he would still blame himself, no matter whom Sidney blamed officially. And he would blame himself for whatever happened to Diehl, would have Diehl on his conscience too.

But he had no choice. As Sidney had said, he had too much to hide to risk a malpractice suit. Such a suit might dredge up his addiction and possibly result in suspension from the hospital. As long as he was taking his pills, he'd have to do what Sidney advised. And he couldn't give them up. They were the jewels with which he courted his beloved sleep.

Lying on his back, he withdrew the container from his pocket and spread a few yellow capsules on his palm. Golden and shiny in their clear jell covers, they seemed to him jewels indeed, and he held them gently and then at last got up and went into the kitchen to fill a glass of water. There was no point in fooling himself; he needed the pills.

Far below, outside the kitchen window, was a wide landscaped courtyard and, as he ran the water in the sink, he could hear sounds carried upward through the yard, music, a child crying, a door slamming, other people's lives being lived. He lifted the pills toward his mouth but suddenly his eyes narrowed and his fist tightened around them. Holding them hidden, he thought of the story Sara still told about her childhood in Russia, about how on a moonlit snowy night she had tossed a necklace of pearly white beads out of the window, expecting, or so she told it, that when the spring sun shone and melted the snow, the beads too would disintegrate into pale gray rivulets. Instead, she had found the necklace in the spring, the chain on which the beads were strung rusted and green, but the beads themselves still a pearly vivid white against the new grass.

Raising the courtyard window, he abruptly scattered his fistful of pills out into the snow. Then he dug in his pocket, took out the container, unscrewed it and shook out the rest of the smooth, golden capsules, watching them scatter into the wind.

That morning at seven-thirty the pediatric resident called him from the hospital. “You know the Kinney baby?” Ben held his breath. “It's off the oxygen. And it looks as if there's nothing else wrong. For now, at least.”

“Does Mrs. Kinney know?” His misery of the night before was evaporating.

“Not yet. We thought you'd want to know before we told her.”

“Great,” Ben said. “Good work. I'm coming over right now. Don't tell her. I'd like to tell her myself.”

He felt, as he walked swiftly to the hospital, that once again he was in his flying dream, his body weightless and perfect. He felt it still when he swirled open the curtains around Annette Kinney's bed.

She was sitting up, using the breast pump, and he was glad that he had thought of that distraction for her. But she was drawn-faced and there were tear streaks on her cheeks. “Now why are you crying?” he asked, scarcely able to contain his excitement. “Didn't I tell you not to let yourself get all upset?”

“I'm just so terribly worried,” Annette said. “So scared.” She set down the little rubber pump and covered herself with the rough sheet, wiping her eyes with a corner of it.

“Well, you don't need to be,” he beamed. “And you'd better pull yourself together right away. You've got this happy, healthy baby out there that needs you.”

Annette stared at him, her eyes going wide with disbelief.

“They'll be bringing the baby to you for the eleven o'clock feeding,” Ben went on. “You haven't missed a beat.”

Comprehension and relief began to spread across Annette's face.

“Shall we walk over and see him together? Or do you want to call Frank first and tell him?”

Annette had her feet over the side of the bed already. “After,” she said, stumbling into her slippers.

He gathered up her orlon robe and helped her into it, standing formal and dignified behind her as if he were wrapping her in an evening coat.

“Let's go see the baby first,” she said, and took his arm.

They promenaded together down the corridor. “I told you it would be just a matter of a day or so,” he said. He loved the almost palpable happiness that seemed to suffuse her, making her skin bright, and refrained from telling her how worried he still was. Only time would reveal whether the baby had received any permanent damage as a result of its oxygen deprivation.

“What do you suppose happened?” Annette asked happily.

“Who knows?” he hedged. “There are so many mysteries about birth. There's so much we don't know.”

The baby was in a nurse's arms, being diapered. Ben hardly recognized it except for its dark thatch of hair. It was red-cheeked and howling and unblemished. Annette dropped Ben's arm and pressed close to the glass. She had forgotten about Ben.

He couldn't forget about her. The incident haunted him. Although he had been taking barbiturates regularly for several years now, he had never before slept through a call to the hospital or endangered the health of a patient or a patient's baby. He had thought himself immune to such possibilities because he had monitored his habit carefully. He had never, until the night he had learned of Claudia's pregnancy, taken more than the tolerance-producing dose of six hundred milligrams a day. Never allowed himself the street addict's ignorant climb to ever higher and higher amounts. But despite the educated way he had handled his habit, it had put someone in peril. He made up his mind to stay off the drugs.

It was difficult, more difficult than the abrupt withdrawal itself. That was accomplished after three days of stomach cramps, nausea and weakness. He told Cora he had the flu, had her cancel all his appointments and stayed at home, shivering. In a corner of his bedroom was an overstuffed armchair from which one night, he didn't remember which or at what hour it had been, he had crazily ripped each cloth-covered button and held them in a sweating palm and at last put a few in his yearning mouth and swallowed, gagging before he vomited them onto the carpet.

But he hadn't fainted, hadn't had convulsions. Indeed, he hadn't experienced any of the more extreme effects that sudden withdrawal could produce in those who took higher doses of the drug. His real difficulties set in later, once the physical dependence was conquered. He was anxious, tremulous, and totally incapable of sleeping. His insomnia was a mutiny against his body, a nightly tossing and twisting of his limbs that left him feeling whipped and beaten toward morning and always, in those silent hours just before dawn, utterly abandoned and alone. He came to long for the very thing he had once most hated, the 4 or 5
A
.
M
. call to hurry to the hospital for a delivery.

But no matter how acute his insomnia and loneliness became, he didn't let them drive him to writing himself a new barbiturate prescription. Every dawn, awake and brooding, he kept picturing Annette Kinney's tear-streaked face and hearing Diehl's agitated voice. He remembered his own residency and didn't agree with Sidney that no harm would befall the young man if he were blamed for the delay in the baby's birth. At the very least, his reputation would be stained, so that he would be starting his career with a serious mark against him.

Shouldering the blame himself would also stain a reputation, Ben thought. His own. But his career, such as it was, was already established. He had sufficient patients, and had colleagues who would continue to recommend others to him, no matter whether he won or lost a malpractice suit. As for his addiction, he doubted he could be suspended for it, once it was in the past. And so he lay awake at night, waiting for his insomnia to fade, as he imagined it would in time.

The loneliness was another matter. It was loneliness that had first caused his love affair with sleep. And unless he conquered it now, he would once again be seduced. But he couldn't look to Sidney for help in this. If anything, Sidney would want to see less of him, not more, once the baby was born. He would have to manage on his own. Would have to develop other distractions. One morning, lying in a tangle of sheets and watching a rainswept dawn that was nearly as dismal and dark as the night that had preceded it, he decided that he was going to marry Naomi.

CHAPTER THREE

MARCH

Emily Harper set down her grocery bags, turned the key in the lock and undid her bra even before picking up the bags again and entering her apartment. Her breasts hurt. Alternately plaguing and awe-provoking, they no longer seemed a part of herself but something separate, purposeful. Slamming the door, she thrust the bags into the kitchen and went into the bedroom where she slipped off her sweater and the irritating bra and donned one of Philip's loose workshirts. Then she returned to the kitchen, lit the oven and began putting away the groceries, all the while peering down at herself to marvel at her new majestic size.

The oven heating, she set the table, gathering plates and glasses into her arms and thinking as she arranged them that most likely she would nurse. Just last night she had read another book which argued that breast-fed babies were psychologically healthier than their bottle-fed peers. Sliding straw table mats into place, she made a mental note to ask Dr. Zauber what he thought of
Nurse Me! I'm Yours
!

She was forever storing up questions about her reading or anecdotes about her job at the neighborhood center to tell him and when she saw her friends she talked about him all the time. On her second visit to him, she had decided he was every bit as understanding as her old doctor, Mulenberg, and actually a good bit more intriguing, indeed, a fascinating man. Philip, who had read a lot of Freud, didn't see it. He said her absorption in the obstetrician was just another facet of the self-preoccupation of pregnancy. The obstetrician was a concretization of narcissism. But she told Philip he was just being jealous.

Finished with the table, Emily seasoned the chicken, shoved it into a roasting pan, and was just bending to slide the pan into the oven when she felt a familiar stickiness between her legs. She slammed the oven door on the chicken and still half-standing, half-squatting, pulled up her skirt and looked at her panties. There was a bright red stain on the white nylon. She swayed and nearly sat down right on the linoleum floor. And then she vaulted for the telephone.

It was five-thirty. She called Dr. Zauber at his office, trying to stay calm. But her usual self-possession was deserting her. Her fingers slipped and she dialed the wrong number, reaching a laundry instead of her obstetrician.

She sat down on the edge of the bed before she dialed again and this time pressed her finger hard into the plastic dial, making sure she didn't make another mistake. At last she was rewarded with the doctor's reassuring voice saying, “Hello. This is Dr. Zauber.”

“Oh. I'm go glad I got you,” she cried. “I was afraid you'd be gone already.” But his voice went on in tandem with her own. “I am sorry I cannot speak with you right now, but if you will leave your name and number I will get back to you.”

Embarrassed at having been so nervous as to mistake his tape recording for the doctor himself, she rattled her name and number into the machine and then, hanging up, unexpectedly began to cry.

The tears, burning and copious, astonished her even more than the bleeding had. She blotted them with the bottom of Philip's shirt, yet they continued to flow, until finally she had to acknowledge to herself what she had never before acknowledged, had to admit that although the baby had been Philip's idea, it had now become as important to her as ever it had been to him. The thought of losing it was suddenly unbearable and, lying back against the pillows, she began to sob uncontrollably. She wanted nothing but to keep the baby inside her. Crying, she wrapped her arms around her chest and clenched her legs together, wondering wildly whether this would help.

She was still crying when the phone rang fifteen minutes later and Dr. Zauber, in his soothing, quiet voice, asked her why she had called. She told him and was terribly ashamed of herself for crying, particularly when he assured her, “It's probably nothing. Twenty percent of all pregnant women have these bleeding episodes and fewer than half of them miscarry. Their bleeding just stops and that's all there is to it.”

Still, it took her a while to calm down. “Shouldn't you examine me?” she worried.

“No. Not just now, though I will later tonight if the bleeding gets worse. Call me if it does. Otherwise, we can wait until tomorrow morning. In fact, I'd like you to come in then whether it's remained the same or it's stopped. And try not to worry too much. Chances are it will stop.”

“But isn't there anything you can do now?” she implored. “Can't you give me medicine? An injection?”

“No. You know that, Mrs. Harper. If there's anything seriously wrong, it's just as well we find it out now.”

“There must be something,” she pleaded.

“Yes,” he said finally, responding to her insistence. “There's something
you
can do.” She heard him pause. “You can lie down. You can try to relax. Get your husband to watch TV with you. Or read to you. That's always nice.”

Grateful, she wiped away the last of her tears, and as soon as he had hung up, obeyed his instructions, stretching out on the bed and pressing the remote control for the television. She didn't stir. And she tried very hard not to start crying again, even when she remembered that Philip had told her he was taking a group of his Social Studies pupils on a tour of City Hall this afternoon and wouldn't be home until late. Still, she was basically a self-controlled woman, one who despised tears and tantrums and the tendency of many others she knew to panic under stress, to mishear instructions on exams, misread job applications, mistrust or misconstrue the remarks of lovers and husbands. Willing herself to think positively, to concentrate on the fact that Zauber had said there was, at least, a 50 percent chance she wouldn't miscarry, she at last began to regain her composure.