‘Wow, congratulations,’ Seth replied. And quickly added, ‘Will one copy be enough, sir?’
The elder man smiled benignly. ‘Come on, Seth, how many times do I have to tell you to call me Tom – you’re not the office boy around here. And, yes, one copy will be fine. My wife has probably bought a dozen.’
‘Okay. Thank you – Tom.’
The midday elevator was crowded with nurses hungry for lunch and doctors hungry for them.
When Seth reached the ground floor he walked over to the newsstand, bought the paper, and was starting to leaf through a copy of The New Yorker when he noticed a group of pretty nurses passing by.
One of the trio turned in his direction and cried, ‘Oh, my God!’ Then she was smiling and – more than that – was actually calling his name.
‘Seth – Seth Lazarus – I can’t believe it. Is it really you?’
‘Hey,’ she addressed her friends, ‘would you believe, this is the guy I was just talking about? He finished our high school in three years and now look – he’s a doctor already!’
Only at this point did Seth remember that he was still wearing his white lab coat with a small rectangular plastic tag on his lapel misleadingly identifying him as ‘Dr Lazarus.’
‘Gosh, I can’t believe it’s really you, Seth,’ the girl continued to bubble. ‘And I bet you don’t remember me. But then why should you? I was taking Elementary Chem for the second time so I could go to nursing school and you were helping everybody – me especially – with all those lab experiments. And look – I actually became a nurse.’
Seth was unaccustomed to this sort of attention.
He was struck dumb – but not blind. He focused easily upon her name tag. And then summoned the savoir faire to make his debut as a ladies’ man. ‘How could I forget Judy Gordon – of the deliquescent eyes?’
The three nurses giggled. ‘What does that mean?’ one of Judy’s friends inquired.
‘Oh,’ Seth answered, somewhat embarrassed by his unwittingly florid rhetoric, ‘it’s actually a term we use in chemistry – it means to melt away.’
Judy smiled. ‘I’m really flattered you remembered me, Seth. And by the way, these are my friends Lillian and Maggie.’
‘Nice to meet you all,’ he said. ‘What department do you work in?’
‘The big “C,”’ Judy answered somberly.
‘Cancer must be rough.’ Seth nodded. ‘I don’t suppose you see many of your patients walk out the same door they came in.’
‘You’re right,’ she replied, ‘sometimes it can really get to you. There’s a pretty big turnover of nurses on our floor. How about you, Seth?’
‘I’m in the Path lab. And, by the way, I’m not a doctor yet. I’m just here for the summer.’
All during this dialogue, Seth was frantically running his cerebral motors. This was his chance and he was not about to lose it.
‘Are you on the way to lunch?’ he inquired.
‘Oh,’ said Judy disappointedly, ‘we’ve just finished. We’re due back in a minute. Maybe we could meet some other time.’
‘Tomorrow lunch?’ asked Seth.
‘Terrific.’ Judy Gordon smiled.
As all three nurses departed toward the elevator, she called out, ‘Meet you by the newsstand sort of twelve-fifteenish. Okay, Seth?’
He acknowledged her comment with a wave. Then the elevator enveloped them.
For a moment he stood there speechless. He not only remembered Judy, he even recalled trying to ask her out. Only he never got as far as opening his mouth.
As usual, Seth waited to go home till the rush hour had abated. At seven-thirty he boarded a bus that was relatively cool and had room for him to sit and read.
When at last he disembarked the sun was ebbing and the gentle rays of early evening bathed the lawns and flowerbeds of the houses in this unpretentious suburb. Seth knew all the inhabitants by name from the high school days when he had been a paperboy. Even now he remembered which homes had been generous and which housed the Ebenezer Scrooges of the neighborhood.
He reached the village shopping circle, where the Lazarus Meat & Grocery Market had been doing business since the nineteen-thirties. As he passed the front window he saw his father cutting Gouda cheese for Mrs Schreiber and he waved to both of them. He then went to the back of the store and opened the door that led to their apartment on the floor above. His mother greeted him affectionately.
‘Hello, darling. What’s new today?’
‘Ma,’ he complained forcefully, for they had run this gamut every day, ‘nothing’s ever new where I work. In Pathology the patients are all dead.’
‘I know, I know, but maybe you discovered some new cure for death. It’s possible.’
He smiled. ‘You’ll be the first to know. Have I got time to take a shower before dinner?’
Rosie nodded and went back to the kitchen.
Despite the frequent water shortages of summer, long hot showers were professional necessities for Seth. The smell of death clung to his clothing and his skin and each evening when he came back from the hospital he would scrub himself intensely.
At nine o’clock Nat Lazarus closed the store, and five minutes later the family was at the table.
‘So, my boy,’ he asked, ‘what’s new today?’
‘I found a cure for cancer,’ Seth answered with a poker face.
‘That’s nice,’ his father mumbled, his primary attention on the box score of last evening’s baseball game. ‘I tellya,’ he suddenly announced, ‘if the Cubs could just get another starting pitcher we’d take the pennant – and that’s the truth.’
Buoyed up by his experience at noontime, Seth good-humoredly added, ‘I also found a cure for heart disease, and tomorrow I’ll develop something that will wipe out the common cold.’
Nat suddenly put the paper down. ‘Did I hear you say the cold? You’re onto something that could cure the common cold?’
‘How come that gets a rise out of you and my cure for cancer didn’t even make you blink?’
‘My boy,’ his father wisely explained, ‘you’re not a businessman, you don’t live in this world. Do you have any notion of how many of those useless snake oils I sell all winter? If you were really onto something that could do the job, we’d patent it and make a mint.’
‘Sorry, only kidding, Dad. The common cold’s the last frontier. It’s like the moon for astrophysicists. We’ll never reach it in our lifetime.’
Nat looked at him and smiled. ‘Seth, tell your father one thing, huh? Who was fooling who just then?’
‘The two of you are crazy with that vaudeville routine of yours,’ Mrs Lazarus announced. ‘Who wants seconds?’
They were digging into Rosie’s angel cake and ice cream (home-made, not from the store downstairs), when Seth casually remarked, ‘Actually, something did happen today. I ran into a girl I went to high school with.’
Rosie Lazarus’s ears perked up. ‘Oh yes? Anyone we know?’
‘Judy Gordon. She’s a nurse in the Cancer Ward.’
Nat glanced mischievously at his son. ‘Sethie, you just be careful not to get her pregnant.’
‘Please!’ said Rosie, ‘I’ll thank you not to talk that way in front of me.’
‘Excuse me, Madam Queen Elizabeth,’ her husband replied, ‘but may I just remind you that if I hadn’t gotten you pregnant, Seth wouldn’t be here.’ He turned to his son for verification. ‘Am I not right, Doctor?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Seth replied professionally. ‘Mom is what physicians call multiparous.’
‘And what is that in plain English, may I ask?’
‘It means you’ve had more than one child, Mom.’
And suddenly all grew silent. Cold and silent. For Seth had reminded them – and himself, most painfully of all – of Howie.
Howie, who had started life as Seth’s big brother but, though still alive, had not become a grown-up human being. For, many years ago while he was sitting in the front seat in his moth
er’s lap, there’d been an accident. Nat was driving and had braked fast in order not to hit a kid who’d run out from between two cars. And Howie had been thrown against the metal dashboard with his mother’s weight behind him.
Howie, who’d sustained such massive cranial damage that although he grew, barely learned to swallow food or sit up by himself. Who sometimes recognized his parents and sometimes did not. (But who could tell? For Howie kept on smiling all day long.)
Howie finally had to be sequestered in a hospital. Howie, whom they had to force themselves to visit two or three times every month lest they forget him and believe that their lives could ever be without the shadow of his pain. (Or did he even feel pain? – there was no way to ask him.)
Howie, a never-ending source of guilt, hopelessly crippled but obscenely robust in his lonely nonexistence. For he would not die, although he could not really live.
They finished supper and as Seth helped Rosie clear the table, Nat turned on the television. Fortunately there was baseball on the tube, an anodyne for the ever-gnawing pain of Howie’s plight.
As they were in the kitchen, Rosie washing and Seth drying, he inquired, ‘How is Howie, by the way?’
‘How is he? – what a question. How could he be? Maybe when you get to be a real doctor you’ll discover something to repair a broken brain.’
She was not joking that time. And Seth knew she lived in constant hope that doctors somewhere, sometime, would invent a miracle to bring her lost-but-living son back to his family. Meanwhile, try as she did, she could not lavish her love on Seth. Because he was not Howie.
Seth could walk and talk, could dress and feed himself, while Howie needed help for everything.
When they were through in the kitchen, Seth went out and took a walk to clear his mind so he could complete the paperwork he’d brought home from the hospital. When he returned, his mother had already closed the bedroom door and Nat was jeering loudly at the Cubs’ shortstop who had maladroitly muffed a double play.
Aware that Nat was mercifully sedated by his black and white sixteen-inch opiate, Seth did not disturb him. Instead he climbed up to the room which, as a child, had been his own domain, his kingdom – and was now his laboratory. He switched on his desk fluorescent light and plunged himself into the world’s pathologies. For this was his way of forgetting Howie.
‘I’d recommend the tuna fish or chicken salad,’ Judy Gordon said. ‘They taste about the same – in fact I have had suspicions that they really are.’
‘Why don’t we have one of each and then compare,’ suggested Seth.
She nodded and he flagged a waitress to take their order.
‘So,’ she said, ‘I guess we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’
‘I guess.’
They reminisced and joked all through their indistinguishable salads. She had a way of making him relax, perhaps because she was so calm, so confident and outgoing.
He ordered chocolate ice cream for dessert, she ordered Jell-O. (‘I’ve got to be careful – it’s the bikini season, after all!’)
Curiously, Seth could not conjure up an image of her in a skimpy bathing suit, although his knowledge of anatomy enabled him to picture her naked – which was nice enough.
‘Do you still live at home?’ she asked as they were finishing their coffee.
‘Yeah. Guess I’m kind of socially retarded. I still live with Mom and Dad, but I’m only here for the summer.’
‘Too bad,’ she murmured, half to herself.
And Seth immediately wondered, What’s too bad? The fact I’m living home or that I’m going back to Boston?
As they walked toward the bank of elevators, he mustered the confidence to ask, ‘Can we maybe go to dinner sometime?’
‘Sure. How about tomorrow night?’
‘Fine. That would be fine.’
‘I’ve got a car – if you could call it that,’ she said light-heartedly. ‘But at least it takes me where I want to go. What time do you get off?’
‘That’s really up to me,’ he answered. ‘The patients up in Path don’t get upset if we leave early.’
‘Let’s say half-past six? And if there’s some emergency I’ll phone you in the lab.’
‘Sure, great. I mean, that’s fine,’ he repeated.
They had an elevator to themselves. Judy pressed five – the Cancer Ward, then eight for his lab.
‘Tell me, Seth,’ she asked, ‘does working with dead people ever get to you? Do you sometimes feel like you’re going crazy?’
‘No, I think you’ve got the harder job. I get them when their suffering is over. You have to watch them die. Isn’t that depressing?’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, and I go home every day and realize how damn lucky I am just to be alive.’
They discussed it over dinner at Armando’s venerable North Rush eatery, where Seth had never been and still could not afford to be. But this was special.
‘You’d be amazed how perfectly normal people are petrified of a dying relative,’ Judy said. ‘They shy away because they somehow think that death’s contagious. Families force themselves to come, but old friends always seem to have some excuse. So these patients I look after are unbelievably grateful for the slightest kindness we show them. Anyway, if I were on my deathbed I’d sure as heck be grateful to have someone – even if it’s a nurse I barely knew – to hold my hand in those last minutes. And frankly, if you’ll excuse the insult to your profession – you rarely find a doctor there if he can possibly avoid it.’
‘Well,’ he answered, his admiration for her growing by the second, ‘there are all kinds of doctors, just the way there are all kinds of nurses.’ Damn, he cursed himself, she’ll probably think I’m a callous bastard.
‘Is Pathology the kind of medicine you want to always do?’ she asked.
‘I’m still not sure, to tell the truth. First it was just a summer job I knew would help me get to Med School, then it seemed like it would give me a head start in anatomy. And I’ve really learned a lot this past year.’
Shyness prevented him from mentioning that Professor Lubar had given him an A-plus – the only time in recent memory that such an honor had been bestowed. ‘Dr Matthews thinks our work can ultimately be of use to help prevent some of the things we find as cause of death.’
‘Oh, I admire that,’ Judy commented. ‘But don’t you think you’re missing something – you know – the emotional aspect that brought us to medicine in the first place?’ She sighed and continued, ‘I think there’s nothing more gratifying in the entire world than to hear “Thank you” from a patient you’ve been kind to.’
Well, he told himself, that’s a pretty overt denigration of my work. But do I dare defend myself?
And for the second time in as many days, he found himself saying something that emanated from a part of him he obviously could not control. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m afraid.’ Why the hell did I say that?
‘You mean of losing a patient?’ she asked. ‘I know a lot of doctors are that way. It’s only human, Seth.’
‘That isn’t what I’m scared of,’ he confessed again. ‘It’s – it’s – the suffering. I think I like Pathology because whatever agony the person’s gone through is all over. Even if they’re riddled with carcinomas they don’t feel it anymore. I just don’t think that I could bear to watch a patient in excruciating pain or hooked to a machine that kept him breathing while the rest of him was dead. I guess I don’t have the guts to be a real doctor.’
As Judy drove him home, Seth became increasingly convinced that he suffered from some rare psychiatric aberration – like a variant of the Gilles de la Tourette’s syndrome – which forced him to say things his conscious mind could not suppress. Honest things. But when the hell did honesty impress a girl?
As they neared the bus terminal, he thought it best to liberate her from his craven company.
‘It’s okay, Judy, I can walk from here.’
‘No, that’s all right. It’s nothing for me to
take you one or two more blocks.’
He nodded and she drove the additional distance again without making conversation. She stopped in front of his parents’ grocery, the window illumined only by a neon ad for Schlitz, ‘the beer that made Milwaukee famous.’
‘Thanks for the ride,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you around the hospital.’
‘No, Seth,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to let you go that easily.’
Seth was surprised to learn that passion could compensate for inexperience. As she brought her lips close to his, he put his arms around her and held her close as they kissed.
After a moment, as they both came up for air, he asked, ‘Can we do this again sometime?’
‘Which part? The dinner or my shameless pass?’
‘Are they mutually exclusive?’ he asked. ‘In any case, I’d better warn you, next time I’ll be the one who makes the first move.’
‘Fine. Who knows where that might lead? ’Night, Seth, and thanks again.’
And, had his parents not been asleep, he would have danced all the way to the third floor in an ebullient imitation of Fred Astaire.
If ever a list were compiled of where not to be in the United States during the month of August, Boston would certainly make the top ten. Of course, Pfeifer’s lab was airconditioned – to maintain a constant scientific environment. But Vanderbilt Hall was not. And it was logical. Certain specimens if over heated would be irreplaceable, whereas lab assistants were a dime a dozen.
As she toiled well into the night, Laura began to entertain the paranoid fantasy that Pfeifer obviously counted on the weather to further his research by keeping his minions in the refreshing comfort of the lab as long as possible.
At first she suffered pangs of conscience over Palmer, which she tried to assuage by reminding herself that at least it wasn’t wartime. Still she knew he would be dissipating some of the best years of his life polishing his boots, cleaning his rifle – and perhaps even the latrine as well – although she was not sure whether officers ever had to do that sort of thing.
Then gradually she began to think that she had done what in the long run would be best for them both.