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‘“The Pediatrics of Trauma.” Subtitled “The Trauma of Pediatrics.”’
Judy gave him a half-amused, half-derisive glance before taking a crisp bite out of a piece of toast.
‘Everything should work out. If we have any luck, we ought to be able to find Underhill and settle things in a week or two. And an extra week is built into the tickets.’
When Judy kept staring silently at the television set, Michael asked, ‘Did you hear Conor’s message on my machine yesterday?’
‘Why should I start listening to your messages?’
‘Harry Beevers sent Conor a check for two thousand to cover his expenses.’
No response.
‘Conor couldn’t believe it.’
‘Do you think they were right to give Tom Brokaw’s job to Bryant Gumble? I always thought he seemed a little lightweight.’
‘I always liked him.’
‘Well, there you are.’ Judy turned away to place her nearly spotless plate and empty coffee cup into the dishwasher.
‘Is that all you have to say?’
Judy whirled around. She was visibly controlling herself. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Am I allowed to say more? I miss Tom Brokaw in the mornings. How’s that? In fact, sometimes Old Tom kind of turned me on.’ Judy had ended the physical side of their marriage four years before, in 1978, when their son Robert – Robbie – had died of cancer. ‘The show doesn’t seem as interesting anymore, like a lot of things. But I guess these things happen, don’t they? Strange things happen to forty-one-year-old husbands.’ She looked at her watch, then gave Michael a flat, sizzling glance. ‘I have about twenty minutes to get to school. You know how to pick your moments.’
‘You still haven’t said anything about the trip.’
She sighed. ‘Where do you suppose Harry got the money he sent to Conor? Pat Caldwell called up last week and said Harry gave her some fairy tale about a government mission.’
‘Oh.’ Michael said nothing for a moment. ‘Beevers likes to think of himself as James Bond. But it doesn’t really matter where he got the money.’
‘I wish I knew why it is so important for you to run away to Singapore with a couple of lunatics, in search of another lunatic.’ Judy tugged furiously at the hem of her short brocade jacket and for a second reminded Michael of Pat Caldwell. She wore no makeup, and there were ashy streaks of grey in her short blonde hair.
Then she gave him her first really honest glance of the morning. ‘What about your favorite patient?’
‘We’ll see. I’ll tell her about it this afternoon.’
‘And your partners will cover everybody else, I suppose.’
‘All too gleefully.’
‘And in the meantime, you’re happy about trotting off to Asia.’
‘Not for long.’
Judy looked down and smiled with such bitterness that Michael’s insides twisted.
‘I want to see if Tim Underhill needs help. He’s unfinished business.’
‘Here’s what I understand. In war, you kill people. Children included. That’s what war is about. And when it’s over, it’s over.’
‘I don’t think anything is ever really over in that sense,’ Michael said.
2
Michael Poole had killed a child at Ia Thuc, that was true. The circumstances were ambiguous, but he had shot and killed a small boy standing in a shadow at the back of a hootch. Michael was not superior to Harry Beevers, he was like Harry Beevers. There was Harry Beevers and the naked child, and there was himself and the small boy at the back of the hootch. Everything but the conclusion was different, but the conclusion was what mattered.
Some years ago Michael had read in an otherwise forgotten novel that no story existed without its own past, and the past of a story was what enabled us to understand it. This was true of more than stories in books. He was the person he was at the moment – a forty-one-year-old pediatrician driving through a suburban town with a copy of Jane Eyre beside him on the car seat – in part because of the boy he had killed in Ia Thuc, but more because before he had dropped out of college, he had met and married a pretty education major named Judith Writzmann. After he was drafted, Judy had written to him two or three times a week, and Michael still knew some of those letters by heart. It was in one of those letters that she said she wanted their first child to be a son, and that she wanted to name him Robert. Michael and Judy were themselves because of what they had done. He had married Judy, he had murdered a child, he had drunk it down, drunk it down. Judy had supported him through medical school. Robert – dear tender dull beautiful Robbie – had been born in Westerholm, had lived his uneventful ordinary invaluable child’s life in that suburban town his mother cherished and his father loathed. Robbie had been slow to speak, slow to walk, slow in school. Poole had realized that he did not give a damn if his son went to Harvard after all, or to any other college either. He shed sweetness over Poole’s whole life.
At five, Robbie’s headaches took him into his father’s hospital, where they found his first cancerous tumor. Later there were others – tumors on his spleen, on his liver, on his lungs. Michael bought the boy a white rabbit, and the child named it Ernie after a character on ‘Sesame Street’. When Robbie was in remission he would haul Ernie around the house like a teddy bear. Robbie’s illness endured three years – years that seemed to have had their own time, their own rhythm, unconnected to the world’s time. In retrospect, they had sped past, thirty-six months gone in at most twelve. Within them, each hour lasted a week, each week a year, and those three years had taken all Michael’s youth.
But unlike Robbie he lived through them. He had cradled his son in the hospital room during the quiet struggle for the last breath: at the end, Robbie had given up his life very easily. Michael had put his dear dead boy back down on his bed, and then – again, nearly for the last time – embraced his wife.
‘I don’t want to see that damned rabbit when I get home,’ she said. She meant that she wanted him to kill it.
And kill it he nearly had, even though the command was like that of a vain evil queen in a tale. He shared enough of his wife’s rage to be capable of the act. But instead he took the rabbit to a field at the northern edge of Westerholm, lifted its cage out of his car, swung open the little gate, and let the rabbit hop out. Ernie had looked about with his mild eyes (eyes not unlike Robbie’s own), hopped forward, and then streaked off into the woods.
As Michael turned into the parking lot beside St Bartholomew’s hospital, he realized he had driven from his house on Redcoat Park to Outer Belt Road and the hospital, through virtually all of Westerholm, with tears in his eyes. He had negotiated seven corners, fifteen stop signs, eight traffic lights, and the heavy New York-bound traffic on the Belt Road without properly seeing any of it. He had no memory of having driven through the town. His cheeks were wet and his eyes felt puffy. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.
‘Don’t be a jerk, Michael,’ he said to himself, picked up the copy of Jane Eyre, and got out of the car.
A huge irregular structure the color of leaf mold, with turrets, flying buttresses, and hundreds of tiny windows punched into its façade, stood on the other side of the parking lot.
Michael’s first obligation at the hospital was to look over all the babies that had been born during the night. As he had once a week for two months, the period of time Stacy Talbot had been confined to a private room in St Bartholomew’s, he made this duty last as long as he could.
When the last baby had been examined and after a quick tour of the maternity floor to satisfy his curiosity about the mothers of the infants he had just seen, Michael got on the elevator to go up to the ninth floor, or Cancer Gulch, as he had once overheard an intern call it.
The elevator stopped at the third floor, and Sam Stein, an orthopedic surgeon of Michael’s acquaintance, got into the car with him. Stein had a beautiful white beard and hulking shoulders and was five or six inches shorter than Michael. His massive vanity allowed him to convey the impression that he was peering down at Michael from a great height, though he had to tilt his beard upward to do it.
A decade ago, Stein had badly botched a leg operation on a young patient of Michael’s and then irritably dismissed as hysteria the boy’s increasing complaints of pain. Eventually, after disseminating blame amongst every physician who had treated the child, especially Michael Poole, the orthopedist had been forced to operate on the child again. Neither Stein nor Michael had forgotten the episode and Michael had never referred another patient to him.
Stein glanced at the book in Michael’s hand, frowned, then glanced up at the lighted panel above the door to see where he was going.
‘In my experience, Dr Poole, decent medical men rarely have the leisure for fiction.’
‘I don’t have any leisure, period,’ Michael said.
Michael reached Stacy Talbot’s door without encountering another of Westerholm’s approximately seventy doctors. (He figured that about a quarter of these were not presently talking to him. Even some of those who were would think twice about his presence on the Oncology floor. This was just normal medicine.)
Michael supposed that for someone like Sam Stein what was happening to Stacy Talbot was also just normal medicine. For him, it was very much like what had happened to Robbie.
He stepped inside her room and squinted into the darkness. Her eyes were closed. He waited a moment before moving toward her. The blinds were down and the lights were off. Flowers from the shop on the hospital’s ground floor wilted in the dense dark air. Just visible beneath a welter of tubes, Stacy’s chest rose and fell. On the sheet next to her hand lay a copy of Huckleberry Finn. The placement of the bookmark showed that she had nearly finished reading it.
Michael stepped toward her bed, and her eyes opened. It took her a moment to recognize him, and then she grinned.
‘I’m glad it’s you,’ she said.
Stacy was not really his patient at all anymore – as the disease rampaged throughout her brain and body, she had been handed off to one specialist after another.
‘I brought you a new book,’ he said, and put it on her table. Then he sat down next to her and gently took her hand in his.
Stacy’s dehydrated skin emanated heat. Michael could see each brown spike of her eyebrows propped against a pad of red flesh. All of her hair had fallen out, and she wore a brilliantly colored knit cap that made her look vaguely Middle Eastern.
‘Do you think Emmaline Grangerford had cancer?’ she asked him. ‘I suppose not, actually. I keep hoping I’ll read a book some day that has someone like me in it, but I never do.’
‘You’re not exactly an ordinary kid,’ Michael said.
‘Sometimes I think all of this stuff couldn’t really be happening to me – I think I must have just made it all up, and I’m really lying in my bed at home, doing a spectacular job of staying out of school.’
He opened her folder and skimmed through the dry account of her ongoing catastrophe.
‘They found a new one.’
‘So I see.’
‘I guess I’ll get another dent in my head.’ She tried to smile sideways at him, but failed. ‘I sort of like going to the CAT-scan, though. It’s tremendous travel. Past the nurses’ station! All the way down the hall! A ride on the elevator!’
‘Must be highly stimulating.’
‘I get faint all over and have to lie down for days and days.’
‘And women clothed in white minister to your every need.’
‘Unfortunately.’
Then her eyes widened, and for a moment she closed her hot fingers over his. When she relaxed, she said, ‘This is the moment when one of my aunts always tells me that she’ll pray for me.’
Michael smiled and held her hand tightly.
‘At times like that I think that whoever is in charge of listening to prayers must be really sick of hearing my name.’
‘I’ll see if I can get one of the nurses to take you out of your room once in a while. You seem to enjoy elevator travel.’
For a second Stacy looked almost hopeful.
‘I wanted to tell you that I’m going to be doing some traveling myself,’ Michael said. ‘Toward the end of January I’ll be going away for two or three weeks.’ Stacy’s face settled back into the mask of illness. ‘I’m going to Singapore. Maybe Bangkok, too.’
‘Alone?’
‘With a couple of other people.’
‘Very mysterious. I guess I ought to thank you for giving me plenty of warning.’
‘I’ll send you a thousand postcards of men waving snakes in the air and elephants crossing against rickshaw traffic.’
‘Swell. I visit the elevator, and you visit Singapore. Don’t bother.’
‘I’ll bother if I want to.’
‘Don’t do me any favors.’ She turned her head away from him. ‘I mean it. Don’t bother.’
Michael had the feeling that this had happened before, in just this same way. He leaned forward and stroked her forehead. Her face contorted. ‘I’m sorry you’re angry with me, but I’ll see you again next week and we can talk about it some more.’
‘How could you know what I feel? I’m so stupid. You don’t have any idea about what goes on inside me.’
‘Believe it or not, I have some idea,’ he said.
‘Ever see a CAT-scan from the inside, Dr Poole?’
Michael stood up. When he bent over to kiss her, she turned her head away.
She was crying when he left the room. Michael stopped at the nurses’ station before escaping the hospital.
3
That evening Poole called the other men about the charter flight. Conor said, ‘Wild, sign me up, man.’ Harry Beevers said, ‘Outstanding. I was wondering when you were going to come through for us.’ Tina Pumo said, ‘You know what my answer is, Mike. Somebody’s got to mind the store.’
‘You just became my wife’s hero,’ Michael said. ‘Well, anyhow…would you mind trying to find Tim Underhill’s address for us? His paperback publisher is Gladstone House – somebody there ought to know it.’
They agreed to have a drink together before the trip.
4
One night the following week, Michael Poole drove slowly home from New York through a snowstorm. Abandoned cars, many of them dented or wrecked, lay along the side of the parkway like corpses after a battle. A few hundred yards ahead the light bar on top of a police car flashed red-yellow-blue-yellow-red. Cars crawled in single file, dimly visible, past a high white ambulance and policemen waving lighted batons. For a second Poole imagined that he saw Tim Underhill, in the snow very like a giant white rabbit, standing beside his car in the storm, waving a lantern. To stop him? To light his way forward? Poole turned his head and saw that it was a tree heavy with snow. A yellow beam from the police car flashed through his windshield and traveled across the front seat.
9 In Search of Maggie Lah (#ulink_7f798b97-9727-5696-9c07-8caba2e7d6d3)
1
All at once everything seemed to be going wrong, Tina Pumo thought, all at once everything was falling apart. He hated the Palladium and the Mike Todd Room. He also hated Area, the Roxy, CBGB’s, Magique, Danceteria, and the Ritz. Maggie wasn’t going to show up at the Mike Todd Room, and she wasn’t going to be at any of those other places either. He could stand at the bar for hours, drink until he fell down, and all that would happen was that hundreds of little night people would stomp him on the way to their next bottle of Rolling Rock.
The first time he talked his way past the doorman into the vast barnlike room that the Palladium used for publicity parties and private gatherings he had come from a marathon meeting with Saigon’s accountants. He was wearing his only grey flannel suit, purchased before the Vietnam War and small enough to pinch his waist. Pumo wandered through the crowd searching for Maggie. He noticed eventually that nearly everybody looked at him sharply, just once, then stepped away. In an otherwise crowded room, he was surrounded by a sort of DMZ, a cordon sanitaire of empty space. Once he heard laughter behind his back, turned around to see if he could share the joke, and saw everybody turn to stone, staring at him. Finally he went up to the bar and managed to catch the eye of a skinny young bartender with mascara on his face and a tangle of blond hair piled up on top of his head.
‘I was wondering if you knew a girl named Maggie Lah,’ Tina said. ‘I was supposed to meet her here tonight. She’s short, she’s Chinese, good-looking –’
‘I know her,’ the bartender said. ‘She might be in later.’ He retreated to the other end of the bar.
Tina experienced a moment of pure rage at Maggie. May be Mike Todd, Maybe not. La-La. He saw that this message was a trick followed by mocking laughter. He stormed away from the bar and found himself standing in front of a blonde girl who looked about sixteen, had stars painted on both cheeks, and wore a shiny, slinky black chemise. She was exactly his type. ‘I want to take you home with me,’ he said. The girl opened her flowerlike mouth and solved one mystery by saying, ‘I don’t go home with narcs.’
That had been a week after Halloween. For at least two weeks afterward, he kept the city at bay while he tore his kitchen apart. Every time he and the exterminators took down another section of wall, a million bugs scrambled to get out of the light – if you killed them in one place, the next day they surfaced on another. For a long time they seemed to be concentrated behind the Garland range. In order to keep the fumigant from spoiling the food, he and the kitchen staff taped thick sheets of clear plastic between the range and food preparation surfaces and wherever they were trying to exterminate the insects. They pushed all three thousand pounds of the Garland eight feet out into the middle of the kitchen. Vinh, the head chef, complained that he and his daughter couldn’t sleep at night because they heard things moving inside the walls. They had recently moved into the restaurant’s ‘office,’ a little room in the basement, because Vinh’s sister was having another baby and needed their room in her house in Queens. Normally the office was furnished with a desk, a couch, and boxes of files. Now the couch belonged to Goodwill, the desk was jammed into a corner of Pumo’s living room, and Vinh and Helen slept on a mattress on the floor.
This temporary, illegal situation looked as if it was becoming a permanent illegal situation. Helen not only couldn’t sleep, but she wet the bed – the mattress – whenever she did doze off. Vinh claimed that the bed-wetting got worse right after the child saw Harry Beevers sitting at the bar. That Harry Beevers was a devil who put curses on children was mystical Vietnamese hysteria, pure and simple, but they believed it, so for them it was true. Pumo sometimes felt like strangling Vinh, but if he did he’d not only go to jail, he’d never get another chef.
Headache upon headache. Maggie did not call or send word to him for ten days. He began having dreams about Victor Spitalny running out of the cave at Ia Thuc covered with wasps and spiders.
The Health Department issued him a Second Warning, and the inspector muttered about misuse of nonresidential space. The little office reeked of pee.
The day before Maggie put another ad in the Village Voice, Michael Poole called again, asking if he had time to see if anyone at a place called Gladstone House knew where Tim Underhill lived. ‘Oh, sure,’ Tina grumped, ‘I spend all day in bed reading poetry.’ But he looked up the number in the book. The woman who answered referred him to the editorial department. A woman named Corazon Fayre said she knew nothing about an author named Timothy Underwood, and referred him to a woman named Dinah Mellow, who referred him to Sarah Good, who referred him to Betsy Flagg, who claimed at least to have heard of Timothy Underwood, was it? No? Let me transfer you to publicity. In publicity, Jane Boot referred him to May Upshaw who referred him to Marjorie Fan, who disappeared into limbo for fifteen minutes and returned from it with the information that ten years ago Mr Underhill had written requesting that his circumstances and whereabouts be kept secret on pain of serious authorial displeasure, and that all communications, fan mail included, be directed to him through his agent, Mr Fenwick Throng.
