The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (41 page)

He told her how once he’d had to make a crash landing in a barley field near the Rhine, his plane so full of dust he’d thought at first it was smoke. He had no idea whether or not he was behind enemy lines, so
he hid in a ditch until he saw a jeep coming down the road toward him, pulling a portable ack-ack, or antiaircraft outfit, two black men driving. When he saw the black men, he knew he was safe.

“Look. There’s one of your black men now!” Marylou said, pointing out Wilson’s window at a man sitting on the porch of a neat little house. “But now he’s old, just like you!”

Marylou, it had to be said, had a good sense of humor. Not everyone did. Lila hadn’t, but Verna Tommy had. Mary Conner he could barely remember. Wilson rolled down his electric window, and Buster popped up from the backseat and stuck his snout out into the wind. “Help, I’m being kidnapped!” Wilson yelled at the old man on the porch.

“Oh, quit,” Marylou told him.

The man on the porch lifted his hand in the all-purpose rural salute—kidnapping, apparently, being no big deal—and Marylou and Wilson and Buster left him behind.

They were now driving behind an open truck piled high with watermelons, which Marylou was tailgating. Wilson asked her (once, twice, seven times?) to please keep her distance; and Marylou, finally fed up, veered over onto the shoulder, jerked to a stop, and asked him if he’d like to drive.

He hadn’t been allowed to drive a car for a year, his license had expired and his family wouldn’t let him renew it because of his memory problems, but he didn’t tell Marylou any of that. He was pleased as could be to get behind the wheel of a car again, and thought briefly about hightailing it back to Tallahassee, now that he was in charge, but if he tried to do that, Marylou would raise a ruckus. So he took them the rest of the way through Alabama and then Mississippi and on up to Memphis, Marylou operating as navigator.

* * *

In Memphis, after stopping by Marylou’s house on Evergreen Street to drop off Buster and give the young people notice—he didn’t understand
who the young people were and why they were living in her house if they weren’t related to her—Marylou got behind the wheel again, even though they were both tuckered out, and drove him to the Memphis University Hospitals and Clinics, which had been remodeled, but was, behind the face-lift, recognizable.

“This is Dr. Wilson Spriggs,” Marylou told the nurses behind a reception desk. “He’s a very distinguished doctor who began his career here at this clinic. He wants to revisit his old haunts. It’s very important to him. I brought him all the way up here from Florida.”

One of the older nurses, with gray wings of hair framing her face, said, “I believe I have heard of Dr. Spriggs.” The other three nurses looked over at her, waiting for her edict. She furrowed her forehead. “You should’ve called ahead.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s five till five. What did you want to see?” she asked Wilson.

“He wants to see the OB clinic,” Marylou said.

“I want to see the labs,” Wilson said.

The nurse, after telling her underlings that she’d be back in a few, walked Wilson and Marylou to the elevators.

Wilson’s back felt stiff after his long ride in the car, but he was exhilarated, too. “Sixth floor,” Wilson said.

And the winged nurse, who was wearing a baggy yellow uniform, took hold of Wilson’s elbow and said, “That’s right, Dr. Spriggs! They’re still on the sixth floor!” and gave him a big smile. She might’ve been cute if her haunches had not been so large. “But this late on a Friday afternoon, I hope somebody’s still up there.”

Marylou, trailing behind them, looked like a forlorn white ghost. “Whatever happened to Nurse Bordner?” she asked, but nobody answered her.

The sixth floor, unlike the first floor and lobby of the hospital, was essentially unchanged—a coat of paint perhaps, new lighting. The locks on the doors looked sleeker and more efficient than the locks he remembered. There was the same smell, though, a smell
that came rushing back to him, slightly sweet with a layer of bleach underneath. Off the long hallway were the labs with the Bunsen burners and beakers and centrifuge machines, the lab techs bent over test tubes, siphoning away with their pipettes. His friend Ebb Hahn had worked in that room there, processing blood samples from Wilson’s radioactive iron study. What were they working on in there now? He had no idea.

They passed the biohazard labs, where the workers now wore goggles, caps, paper gowns, and latex gloves—fancier versions of the same old stuff—and the central supply room where two women loaded beakers into the steam machines. Martha Meharry used to work in there, perched on a stool between loads doing the jumble and crossword in the
Commercial Appeal
.

Their nurse stopped beside an office that said Nuclear Medicine on the door. “This here’s Dr. Wilson Spriggs,” she announced to the secretary inside, and then ducked off down the hall.

The secretary, a pinched-faced woman, sighed, then got up from her desk, disappeared into a warren of offices behind her. She emerged shortly with two doctors in tow, two doctors who looked remarkably, eerily, like Wally and Theodore Cleaver.

Wally and Beav, in their pressed plaid dress shirts and tasteful neckties, grinned at Wilson, who was wearing his yard clothes. They shook his hand—one of them shook it twice—and told him how much they admired him, how much they admired his work on the therapeutic use of radioactivity in the treatment of cancer. “This gentleman published the seminal articles on radioisotope therapy,” Wally informed the secretary, who was feigning interest while playing solitaire on her computer. Seminal articles! The adjective, one Wilson had used himself once upon a time, sounded absurd and pompous to him now.

The two doctors also mentioned Wilson’s work at the University of Iowa, his treatment of malignant effusions in lung and uterine cancer,
what a pioneer he’d been, how he had changed the field, and so on and so on.

Wilson, bleary-eyed from the drive, felt like he’d stepped into another dimension. He was unable to believe that these two men had heard of him and that he was being treated like something other than a pariah. He glanced at Marylou, who glared at him. She hadn’t come here to witness this. Wilson didn’t know how to introduce her so he just stood there like an idiot.

Finally Marylou spoke up. “Howdy, fellas.”

“This your wife?” Beaver asked Wilson, reaching for Marylou’s hand.

“I’m his guinea pig,” Marylou said, but she shook the Beav’s hand and then Wally’s. “Dr. Spriggs experimented on me in the fifties. Remember the radioactive cocktails?” She mimed drinking one. Thumb and pinky extended, head tilted slightly back, glug, glug, glug. “Yep, I drank the Kool-Aid!” When she made this gesture, when she mimed drinking the cocktail—the jauntiness of it, the self-mockery, and also the refusal to be denied—Wilson wanted to catch her up in his arms.

“Wow,” Beaver said, shaking his head, gazing at Marylou like she was a specimen. “Look at you now!” he said. “So many years later. You’re doing so well! Those experiments weren’t nearly as bad as the press tried to make them seem.”

“Everyone who knew anything knew they were only administering trace amounts,” Wally agreed. “The media just didn’t get that. She’s living proof. And the two of you are friends! Amazing.”

“It is amazing,” Wilson said, and he felt, for the first time, how amazing it was.

Marylou took a deep breath, and Wilson wondered if she was going to launch into her litany of woes, wondered if she was going to tell them the story of Helen’s death. He wouldn’t blame her if she did. Those two bozos deserved to have their bubble burst, at the very least. But, no, she surprised him again.

“What’s really amazing,” Marylou said, “is how boring the three of you are. You’re boring the socks off me right now.”

Wally and Beaver actually glanced down, whether out of embarrassment or to see if she really had lost her socks, he couldn’t tell.

Wilson knew he had a choice. He could stay here and bask in the false but gratifying praise or leave with Marylou, who wasn’t having any of it.

He took Marylou’s hand. “Actually, gentlemen, my friend here is not doing well at all. She hasn’t been doing well for a very long time. Thanks for your kind words. And good luck with whatever you’re doing. I’m sure it’s very important, but in my book you’re like a couple of blisters who’ve shown up after the real work’s been done.”

Marylou allowed him to lead her out the door, down the hall, down to the first floor, and out of the hospital, where they stood under the awning. “I’m ready for a little drinkie poo,” she said. “How about yourself?”

Wilson was momentarily confused. Where was he? He knew he should know. How could he have left the familiar labs and then stepped outside and not known where he was? Where was home now? Where was he supposed to go? How was he supposed to get there? Would Verna Tommy be there waiting for him? Would anyone be expecting him?

“Oh God,” Marylou said, jerking on his hand. “Listen. I’ve got to tell somebody. I did something horrible.”

“You?” Wilson said. “I can’t believe it. You couldn’t even bring yourself to kill me.”

And she told him about Buff.

Rather than going back to her house on Evergreen Street to spend the night, she decided they should splurge and stay at the Peabody Hotel, since she’d never stayed there, and because, for some reason, this was turning into a pleasure trip rather than an abduction. Wilson told her that being kidnapped by her was the best time he’d had since Verna Tommy died—which she was thrilled to hear, even though odds were he couldn’t remember good times even if he’d had them. She herself felt as if, even though she was achy and bleary-eyed from the car ride and disappointed by the hospital visit, the foreign phrase
having a good time
could be applied to her as well.

Instead of feeling weighed down by her past, as she’d often felt when she was home in Memphis, the fact that she was in the company of the wicked Wilson Spriggs, the last person on earth she’d ever imagined hanging out with, and that the two of them were fixing to shack up at the touristy Peabody Hotel, a place she’d never thought she’d stay, made her practically giddy.

Grinning like imbeciles, she and Wilson reserved room 624. After nine-dollar glasses of wine in the lobby while the Peabody’s famous ducks waddled out of the fountain and over to the elevator to ride up to their penthouse coop, after listening to the player piano play Cole Porter songs and pretending that an invisible black man was at the keys (for a time they called him Topper and they became George and
Marion), after dinner across the street at Automatic Slim’s Tonga Club (coconut shrimp for Marion, sassafras smoked chicken for George), when they were both lying in their separate beds, with the orangey lights of downtown Memphis seeping through the gauzy curtains of room 624, Wilson told her again that two slices of cake laced with antifreeze would only have made Buff sick but wouldn’t have killed him.

She already knew he’d been sick. As she and Wilson had driven away from her house back in Tallahassee, raindrops just beginning to fall, she’d glanced over and seen Buff staggering around in his side yard, wearing his bathing trunks, throwing up in some bushes.

Wilson promised to tell no one, ever, what she’d done.

In a way, his knowing about her evil deed created the tit-for-tat situation she’d been hoping to achieve when she moved to Tallahassee in April. It wasn’t the same kind of tit-for-tat—his life for Helen’s—but, in this new version, she knew all about his reprehensible experiment, tit, and he knew that she’d tried to kill someone, tat. She hadn’t known how much antifreeze would kill Buff, but killing him had been her aim. If Buff was dead right now, she’d be a murderer. And only Wilson knew.

Before they fell asleep, wearing their clothes, Wilson said, from his double bed beside hers, “I went for months, years, without talking about that study. I’d think about it sometimes, feel sick about it. It made me even sicker when I realized how much I
didn’t
think about it. Just tucked it away somewhere in my mind and went about my business. But I needed to talk about it. I feel better talking about it.”

“Just call me Oprah,” Marylou said. But then she told him that he was the only person left in the world she could talk to about Helen, the only other person she knew personally who’d been involved with the experiment, even if they’d been on opposite sides.

He admitted that his was the wrong side, but he said there had been a cold war going on and he was scrambling to get grant money. He
was an ambitious young scientist trying to get data, a doctor trying to help determine how much radiation was safe. Back then, these sorts of studies were being conducted all across the country. They knew virtually nothing about radiation, but they’d all thought that small amounts had to be safe.

She listened, forcing herself to remain silent. Part of her understood. Part of her never would. But it made her feel calmer to hear his side.

Unlike Teddy, who’d had to detach from the past to go on living, she realized that she didn’t feel alive, unfrozen, unless she held the past as close to her as possible, so she could take it out and examine it whenever she wanted to, with someone who’d been there, too. That was why she felt comforted by the presence of Wilson Spriggs. That, and she’d always, from the first time she saw him, found him to be attractive, that foppish dandy in his bow tie.