Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (16 page)

     And that was what had sold her. The nearest kids were down in the valley, eight thousand feet below.

     "Judy?" Zoey said. "Would you like to meet your patients?"

     Judith said, "Yes," looking around again, avoiding her reflection in the glass of the surgical cupboard. Whoever that woman was, whoever she had been, she no longer existed. Judith Isaacs was no longer the
other
Judith Isaacs. She had come up here to bury herself in the snow and she was never going to leave. "I also want to make some changes around here. Starting with no more smoking," she said, indicating the overflowing ashtray. "And I would like that label removed," she added, pointing to the Tits cupboard. "By the way, do you own a uniform?"

     "Sure. But it really isn't necessary here," Zoey said. "I mean, it's not as though we're a real clinic, is it? The patients all know who I am."

     "I would like you to wear a uniform whenever you're on duty. And if you don't mind," Judith said, "I would appreciate it if you addressed me as Dr. Isaacs for now. Shall I call you Nurse or Ms. Larson?"

     "Just Zoey is fine," she said, turning frosty. "Is there anything else?"

     "I would like to see my patients now."

     "Yes, Dr. Isaacs."

     They left the clinic, which had once been guest bedrooms, and walked down a darkly paneled hall. As Judith followed Zoey, her medical bag in hand, she thought of the movie
Jane Eyre
, when Orson Welles as Mr. Rochester said to Joan Fontaine, "Do you faint at the sight of blood?"

     "The first patient," Zoey said as she stopped before a door and handed Judith a chart, "came in for chest implants a week ago."

     "You mean breast implants."

     "No,
chest.
The patient is a man."

     When Judith saw him, he was vaguely familiar to her, the star of a popular TV sitcom. His torso was wrapped mummylike with tight pressure
bandages. Muscle-shaped silicone pads had been inserted under his chest to give him a body-builder look; it was a variation on the breast implant procedure, and it was becoming the latest thing for men to have done.

     "Our next patient," Zoey said as she and Judith continued down the hall, "was admitted three days ago. Dr. Newton performed surgery on him day before yesterday, and he's been in a lot of pain all day. I've had Dr. Newton paged, but he hasn't answered yet."

     Judith read the patient's chart as she walked along. "Mr. Smith," the chart said—not his real name. When she saw the real name she was momentarily taken aback. "Mr. Smith" was a screen legend, known mainly for playing romantic leads in swashbuckling and adventure films; Judith had grown up on his movies. Coming from a small community in northern California, she wasn't used to dealing with famous people.

     "Does he have a fever?" she asked as they neared his room.

     "Vital signs were normal an hour ago," Zoey said.

     "Does he have any difficulty urinating?"

     "No. I suspect his problem is with the incision, but he won't let me look at it."

     Judith scanned the chart again. According to Dr. Newton's notes, Mr. Smith was sixty-nine years old, six feet one, 195 pounds, well nourished, and in good health. Treatment: abdominal liposuction.

     Zoey knocked on the door and said, "Mr. Smith? The doctor's here."

     As with the previous patient, Judith was startled when she entered the room. She had expected to find a gloomy setting with a monstrous four-poster bed draped in heavy velvet curtains. These rooms didn't look at all like they belonged in the Castle, nor did they look like hospital rooms, with pale peach wallpaper and airy curtains, white carpet, plush desert-tone furniture, and Southwest paintings on the walls. But the subtle hospital signs were there: the oxygen outlet in the wall near the bed, the hookups for monitors, the track in the ceiling for drawing a curtain around the bed, and of course the bed itself, which was a standard hospital bed.

     And then she saw the man sitting up in that bed. With his silver hair, tanned good looks, and monogrammed silk pajamas, he added the final touch of elegance to the room.

     Judith hesitated for a split second. There was a time when this man had been her screen idol.

     "Who are
you?
" he asked in his famous cultured Scottish accent.

     "I am Dr. Isaacs, the new resident physician."

     "I'll wait for Dr. Newton," he said, waving her away.

     Zoey said, "We're trying to locate Dr. Newton, Mr. Smith. But it'll take a while. He's down in Palm Springs."

     Judith approached the bed and said, "Since your personal physician is unavailable at the moment, Mr. Smith, perhaps I can help." Closer up, she saw the fine dew of perspiration on his forehead, the shadow of pain around his eyes.

     "But you're a woman," he said.

     "Zoey tells me you're in pain."

     "It can wait for Dr. Newton."

     Aware of Zoey's eyes on her, Judith said, "It's important that we determine the source of your pain, Mr.—" She stopped herself before saying his real name. "If the pain is being caused by something that is interfering with your blood circulation, then there is danger of losing the affected area."

     "Losing it?" he said, looking at her.

     "Yes. A body part that isn't receiving blood will die." She held up her hand and squeezed the base of the little finger on her right hand. "Like what happens with frostbite."

     He murmured, "Good God," then he said, "I suppose you know who I am?"

     Yes, she did. She couldn't stop thinking of her favorite movie of his, when he had played a pirate and Rhonda Fleming was his unwilling captive, back in the forties. "You're my patient," she said. "And one," she added more gently, "who is in a great deal of pain. Now please, I'll just take a look and see what I can do."

     "I don't feel right about a woman taking care of this," he said unhappily.

     "Mr. Smith," Judith said, "for years women have gone to male gynecologists. Would you have been surprised if they had complained?"

     "That's different."

     "Why?"

     He gave her a wary look. "Are you a real doctor?"

     She smiled. "Of course I am. What a question."

     "In my experience," he said, "which is considerable, real doctors don't work in places like this. Doctors on cruise ships, for instance. Aren't they doctors who can't make it in the real world?"

     "Well," she said, "I'm the only doctor here at the moment, real or not." She paused and added, "I was also married for fourteen years. Does that help?"

     Judith asked Zoey to leave the room, then she set her medical bag down and drew Mr. Smith's blanket down to just below his navel. While she inspected the pressure dressing that had been secured around his pelvis like a girdle, explaining that she was looking for subcutaneous bleeding and signs of infection, Smith kept his eyes on the window, where snowflakes gently fell. He saw the silhouette of alpine forest against the night sky. He willed himself far away from the pain, and the embarrassment. "I promise you," Dr. Newton had told him before the surgery, "that you will come out of this with the abdomen of a younger man."

     "Such torture," he said now with a sigh. "All for the sake of vanity."

     Judith gave him an encouraging smile. "Everything looks fine," she said as she drew the blanket back up. "I'll give you something for the pain. If you have any more discomfort be sure to call for the nurse at once." She smiled and touched his shoulder. "I know it's uncomfortable, and I'll do whatever I can to relieve it. Our main concerns are infection and bleeding. It is essential that the incision be kept clean and that this pressure dressing be kept in place."

     "I'm aware of the seriousness, Doctor," he said. "It's my vanity that galls me. The fear that a paunch will destroy my reputation. Not that I really had a paunch, but I saw the signs. For the first time, exercise wasn't helping. May I ask your name, Doctor?"

     "Dr. Isaacs," she said. And then added, "Judith Isaacs."

     "And may I call you Judith?"

     "If you wish."

     "The nurse says you're just starting here, a new job. Now I'm curious. Where does an experienced and clearly competent physician suddenly materialize from? I mean, what have you left behind in order to serve the cream of humanity up here?"

     She reached back to make sure her hair was still neatly braided—a nervous, self-conscious gesture. She didn't answer him.

     "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Judith?"

     "It depends," she said.

     "What is a young, pretty woman like you doing in this isolated place? Why aren't you out in the world, getting involved with life?"

     "I was involved with life, Mr. Smith. And now I want to try something else."

     He gave her a searching look. "I sense something closed about you," he said.

     She looked at him, remembering when she had been fourteen and had first seen him on late-night television, in an old black and white movie with Olivia de Havilland. Young Judith, adolescent and hormonal, had fallen desperately in love.

     And now, thirty-eight-year-old Judith was stunned to experience the same swift sexual charge. "I'll check on you later," she said, starting for the door.

     "I'm sorry if I've embarrassed you," he said. "I don't know why I suddenly got so nosy. I don't normally ask personal questions like that." He smiled charmingly, although a ripple of pain distorted it. "Especially on the first date."

     She came back to the bed, amazed to feel how she was reacting to him, and afraid of it. "I won't be far," she said quietly. "I'll be having dinner with my new employer, so if you should have any more trouble, or if you"—
just want some company
—"need something to help you sleep, have the nurse come and get me. I'm on twenty-four-hour call."

St. Bridget's Convent School, Tiburon, California, 1950

C
HRISTINE SAT IN THE PARLOR AMID THE LEMON-POLISHED
furniture and vases filled with fresh flowers, her only companion a white plaster statue of Saint Bridget, patroness of Ireland, standing in a holy niche with daffodils at her feet. The open windows admitted sunlight, bay breezes, and the sounds of girls enjoying an afternoon visit with friends and relatives. This was the seventh day in a row, since her arrival a week ago, that Christine had sat patiently and silently in the visitors' parlor, waiting for her father to come, the suitcase, as always, on the floor beside her, her coat laid neatly over it.

     Christine looked again at the clock on the wall. The minutes were inching by at a phenomenally sluggish pace. Surely time had never been this slow in the past, not even when she had languished in the penthouse, waiting for her father to come home. She went to the window and looked out at the driveway entering the convent grounds, expecting to see a familiar black
limousine coming through the gates, because she knew for sure that her father would come today, this being Saturday, the one day of the week when visitors were permitted on the grounds. He would arrive at any minute and say, "Okay, Dolly, everything is taken care of. I got us a house in the marina, and I've taken a job on Montgomery Street so we'll never be apart again."

     Christine watched with envy the girls on the lawn and in the formal gardens, talking and laughing with parents and brothers and sisters, picnicking on the grass with their families, or sitting on white wrought-iron garden chairs, drinking tea, chatting with the nuns. She felt a pain radiate out from the center of her breast, a deep, lacerating pain that hadn't eased since the day her father had left her here, one week ago.

     She didn't like St. Bridget's. Since she was only a temporary student and not permanently enrolled, she had not been put with the other girls, but instead had been given a room by herself in the wing where the novices lived, away from the students, away from the staff of religious sisters who ran the convent, as if she were a kind of pariah, contaminated in some way. The novices' wing was maddeningly quiet, the young women in simple gray habits moving down the halls whispering prayers, under strict rules neither to speak nor to look at someone unless it was absolutely necessary. Christine felt cut off from the world. She had cried herself to sleep every night, trying to understand what had happened, what she had done to cause this.

     The incident with Hans, the way he had attacked her, the things he had said, his hands on her body...Had she somehow caused it? Was it her fault that he had done what he did? Christine thought about the time she had overheard Mrs. Longchamps gossiping with the doorman of their apartment building about a woman in the neighborhood who had been sexually attacked. "I'll tell you what I think," the housekeeper had said. "She was asking for it." How did a woman "ask for it?" Christine wondered. Was
I
asking for it?

     The bells in the tower chimed and Christine, startled, looked at the clock. It was already time for the visitors to leave! She watched the girls hug and kiss their guests good-bye, and she wanted to shout, No, don't go yet! My daddy is still coming!