Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (26 page)

· 21 ·

Several weeks later—at three in the morning on May Day—Orville sat at the nursing station in emergency, ear-sitting. In iced saline before him was a human ear, female, midfifties, waiting to hear if the surgeons at Albany Medical Center wanted it and its owner shipped up for reattachment. It was yet another medical event in the long story of the family Scomparza that seemed to be at the heart of so much disease, breakage, and death among the Columbians. Fiesole “The Bomber” Scomparza, the mayor's older brother and barber/bookie to the town, had taken a straight razor and sliced off his wife's ear “in some heavy love-play, you get me, Doc?” His wife, Lovely, wasn't talking about how the ear came off, except to say, “If youse can put it back on okay, elsewise I'm goin' home. I got another, don't I?” Both were “knee-walking” drunk. By that time, Orville had been awake on and off for two days and kept falling asleep between emergencies.

Since the hearing on the Worth, the medical practice had made a significant shift, from “beyond belief” to “beyond beyond.” Orville couldn't fathom how Bill managed it. Bill—and now he—was on call for thousands of Columbians, day and night, in solo practice. Sure, he could call in help if he needed it, but he couldn't count on any standard rotation of days off. Orville kept trying to arrange coverage, without much luck—there were few doctors who had time, and to send anyone to Dr. Edward R. Shapiro was a death sentence. Often the flow would go the other way, a Shapiro disaster landing in Orville's lap. One of them, two days ago, had been Mrs. Tarr.

Orville got a call from her via the nurse in intensive care in Albany Medical. She was on death's door and wanted to see him. He drove up at once. Besides their contact around the Worth, he knew little about her life—she was of old Nantucket stock, which had over many generations distilled the quality of WASP-reserve to a nutty essence. He knew that she lived with a spinster friend in the family's grand old house in Spook Rock, dangerously near Shapiro's office, and used him as her doctor. In intensive care Orville found her flat in bed, breathless, getting oxygen and IV fluids. She had gone to Shapiro with breathlessness a month ago. He did tests that he said were normal. Unfortunately for the unsuspecting Mrs. Tarr, to renew his medical license Dr. Edward R. Shapiro had taken a ten-day mail-order course in Freudian psychoanalysis. Lying her down on his examining table and analyzing her ruthlessly by rote, Shapiro found out that the breathlessness had begun around the fifth anniversary of her husband's sudden death when his chest was crushed by a hay baler; drilling deeper, he learned that when she was six she had almost suffocated when a feather pillow had burst in the night. Diagnosis? He told her she had “penis envy and depression” and sent her to Germantown Asylum. There her breathing worsened, and she was sent to Albany. The only abnormalities the Albany doctors found were decreased lung function, a diffuse X-ray with no specific diagnosis, and increased eosinophelia—blood cells indicating an allergic reaction. They tested her for every known allergenic substance; they treated her for infection; they even cut her open to get a morsel of lung for the hungry pathologist. Nothing. They had more or less given up, planning to send her home with a tank of oxygen, to die.

When Orville saw her, he was astonished. Thin and white and blue-lipped from lack of oxygen, she could barely talk. What to do? After months of treating Columbians, he had come to value Bill's long-held belief that taking a good history is the doctor's best tool, and that if you could trace the history back through generations, you might not find the disease, but you'd usually find the truth, and the treatment. Orville led her through her history, and that of her family, and while it was a historian's dream, nothing seemed medically significant. Finally, he gave up. They just sat and chatted—about the Worth, Miranda, Amy, her concerns about her garden, life, death, and if she died what would happen to the poor magician.

“Magician?” he asked.

“Why, yes. The one I took in last fall.” She said that at the Malden Bridge flea market she'd met “a destitute magician with a good heart” who was looking for a room. She felt sorry for him and took him in. He came with pigeons for his act. She let him keep the birds in cages in the basement.

“Where in the basement exactly?” Orville asked.

“Over the washer-dryer.” It turned out that whenever she ran the dryer the exhaust launched an aerosol of pigeon droppings up into the air, which she had been inhaling for months.

Orville rushed to the medical library, looked up “pigeons,” and there it was—“pigeon breeder's lung disease,” an allergic reaction to inhaled pigeon shit. Treatment? Get rid of the pigeons, and a course of steroids. Prognosis? Excellent.

As the Chrysler flew from Albany back down to Columbia, Orville felt part of one of those rare moments when the spirit of good medicine comes alive, when sustained attention, and listening without an agenda or decision tree, saves a life. How rarely do we really listen, and think! She would live to picket again. He basked in the glow.

It didn't last. His afternoon out of town had produced a backlog at home. Mrs. Tarr was a bright spot in a long shadow of cruelty and carnage and horrific breakages for the next two days, ending with him sitting, staring numbly at that ear in that ice. In the blur, there were the ordinary cases: drug and alcohol and rage-filled car crashes and clubbings and beatings and attack with “shod shoe” and knives and guns and the crazies and psychopaths and of course the normally walking worried with diagnoses of mental illness that were so common among the Columbians that the adult assessment scores, like the consistently abnormal APGARs at births, had to be recalibrated to a fallen normal. But some cases stuck in his mind.

Sigmund Basch, the town dentist, was a meek, obsessive, and scared man who looked like a mouse and loved golf to death and was known around town for always going up a set of stairs or down counting the steps to make sure he landed on the last one with his right foot. He had just come out of the bank counting and landing when he noticed a pit bull had broken from its leash and, canines bared, was coming at him. The dentist took off, the pit bull gained quickly, the dentist thought he saw a cavity in the traffic and ran into the street and was hit by a ten-ton truck hauling cement from the Universal Atlas. By that time Orville was so tired he was seeing two dentists, but with a little superhuman effort revived Basch and shipped him up to Albany for reconstructive surgery.

The leitmotif
through the violence was the sudden surfacing of a suppurative trail of venereal disease that had begun a month ago in a furtive visit from Mayor Scomparza, and that had since wended its way through that family and their playthings, all over the city and county like a bunny-hop at an Italian American wedding. The latest among those appearing at the emergency room were an odd duo—with a “third member” hiding in the waiting room—Greenie Sellers and Blinky the Clown. Greenie was high on coke and spouting what sounded like Norwegian but what a nurse said was Latvian, and Blinky—an alcoholic ageless refugee from Barnum and Bailey who marched in all the parades and entertained at all the school shows and private birthday parties—was low on quaaludes, and they both stayed histrionic even when Orville, using the double-gloved technique, milked their
putzes
for pus. At two in the morning, prescriptions in hand, they left gaily as if leaving a party or a show and Orville, with a morbid curiosity, went to the waiting room to check out the third member of the sexual ménage. Faith Schenckberg, of the sunburnt-offering Schenckbergs of the summer.

At least these provided comic relief, but fleeting relief, as he went back to a heroin-addict mother delivering a premature baby. The newborn was tiny, skin sallow, pupils pinned, sclera jaundiced, twitching all over in withdrawal as every cell in her body cried out for the narcotic. Just as Orville was trying to recall the correct dosage and schedule for managing withdrawal, his old friend Whiz, Hayley's son, a recovering addict in AA, brought in another Vietnam vet named Timmo Schaffran, who was dying from Agent Orange and, half-crazy from the cancer in his brain, had attacked President Reagan on TV with an ax. Whiz helped Orville figure out the dosages for the withdrawing preemie. Afterward, Orville jumped at the chance to get out of the hospital on a house call. Relishing the privacy of the Chrysler, he drove to a hovel in the armpit of the county where he discovered an old woman who'd been dead for a while and was partially eaten by her trapped dog and whose pony was so neglected that its hooves curled back under its legs and it looked like a rocking horse but couldn't walk. He turfed the pony to the vet.

Just after the ear and its owner left, in came Seraphina Rock, the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of the hospital nurses Orville had known since grade school. Seraphina had been fished out of the Hudson River at dawn by a coal barge near Catskill, ice cold, dead. Her belly was ripped open, she was badly broken up—she'd jumped from the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, a distance he knew from his toll collector days to be 157 feet plus or minus 3 for the tides. A desolate sight. Her intestines had exploded out of her bright-red prom dress, a gold bracelet still sparkled on a horribly contorted arm. Orville called her mom, a widow.

“I have terrible news, Pam,” he said. “Your daughter is in the hospital.”

“Oh my God! Is she all right?”

“I'm afraid not, dear. Please come right away.” He heard her cries and hung up.

Yes, he thought, it's true what Bill says, that as a doctor to the Columbians you get to lift up the lid and see all the secrets. Okay, and just
how
is that good for the world?

As he waited for Seraphina's mom to come in, he tried to get ready for the rest of Saturday. Having gotten coverage, he was spending the day with Miranda, Cray, and Amy. He was feeling apprehensive. Ever since the close call on the trestle, Miranda had seemed mopey and, as he had gotten more swamped with work, moody. On the surface everything seemed pretty okay, and when he tried to ask her about it she'd always said she was fine, just a little tired. But he felt a slight distance opening between them—even when they were making love—as if a part of each of them was not really there. He was worried about it, wanting to get back to the seamless “we” that they'd had, that energized them both. But he didn't know how to do it, and he didn't have much energy to try.

He finally left the hospital at noon, feeling only half-alive. But in the parking lot he blinked in the hazy warm sun, and, being back in contact with the ongoing natural world, he felt a touch better. He lifted his face to a spring drizzle, soft and promising. The time of year when the river is flowing freely and an evening surprises you with its lingering light.

When Amy saw him she said, “Your eyes are bright red. You look terrible!”

“Terrible, right now, would be good.”

On the drive out to Miranda's house, over and over the white lines started to wobble, and he had to stop for more coffee, figuring he'd find a way to catch some sleep during the day. Seeing him, Miranda, too, looked startled. Cray asked how he was.

“Happy as a dog's nose in spring!” he said. What the hell was he supposed to do, start the day off by telling them he felt like shit?

They drove a long way out to the edge of the county, a historical site in Lebanon, the grave of Samuel Tilden. Tilden, Miranda told them, was the ill-fated Columbian elected president of the United States in 1876 by a majority of the popular vote, but who had suffered a breakage in American history: the presidency was taken away by the corrupt electoral college, which overturned the people's choice. On his rowboat-sized granite memorial was carved a final nostalgia:
I STILL TRUST THE PEOPLE
.

From there they went to lunch at the diner—four “Whaleburgers and French fries”—and then to the new film at the Half Moon Theater,
A Passage to India—
featuring great scenes of festive elephants. Cray glommed on to Orville the whole day, which was fine with him, given Miranda's gray mood, but Cray was nasty to Miranda and even to Amy. At one point, refusing to walk down the street next to Amy, he announced that “girls are radioactive—you can't get too close!” Amy was hurt by the rejection but took it with her usual resiliency and high spirits, saying, “Hey, a lot of boys I know feel that way, but it's
their
loss, not us girls'.”

Cray even turned on him once, during Animal Guessing Game. Orville's first guess was “a Himalayan snow leopard,” and Cray, mimicking what he had done to him, taunted Orville, then pretended to think it over, and said, finally, “I
was
thinking of a Himalayan snow leopard!” Miranda gave both Cray and Orville a look. Things got tense.

Orville stopped off at home to change and pick up the mail before going back out to Miranda's for the night. Big mistake. There was another letter from Selma.

Hi, flier!

I'm in a good mood—I'm always in a good mood coming home from someone
else's
funeral. Today's was Sam Schenckberg, Faith's father. (Jewish, but horrid.) We all sat there at the service and no one would speak, no one could think of anything nice to say. Even Rabbi Werlin—he's
such
a pro at funerals—zilch. Finally somebody in the back stands up—I think one of the Athens Rosenblatts—and he jabs his finger up at God and shouts: “His brudder vas vorse!”

I can't wait to hear what they say about me. (Make that
said
.)

For some reason I'm remembering your hands: those long fingers, those soft palms. You always disappointed me in your choice of medical specialty. A GP?
Bill
is a GP! With hands like that, you could have been a gynecologist.

Which brings me to the question of your being normal. In a lot of ways you seem to be. Fine. But all in all I vote no. Your sister and your father and even your niece lately—and of course Milt—have voted no. There is one big way in which you are abnormal: your total selfishness. (Penny, who's had oodles of therapy, asked her psychiatrist about you once and he said that you fit the diagnosis of a “narcissist.”) Oh sure, you're saying, who isn't selfish? Why, no one isn't, no one isn't at all. Even I have my moments. My dream was always to have my photo, with me smiling, on the front page of The New York Times. So instead of the
Mayflower
, we came over on the
Jewflower
? So
I
should settle for The Forvitz?