Wonderland (60 page)

“Good morning, Doctor,” someone was saying.

No, he would read the letter afterward. When the danger was past. It might bring news of Dr. Pedersen’s death. In that case he would not be able to operate and would have to run out of the hospital; everyone would stare after him. Dr. Perrault would be notified. The patient—who was the patient? who was going to be operated on this morning? what was the trouble?—the patient would be under the anesthetic already and Jesse would run away from him, away from the sawing, the blood, the brain, the tumor, he would run out onto the street weeping, and so it would be better not to open the envelope now. After the operation, when everything was over, he would take it into the lavatory and read it there.

He left his mail in the surgeons’ lounge.

He scrubbed and got dressed and felt reassured when he saw the patient actually up where he was supposed to be, at nine-thirty, with plenty of blood on hand and an anesthetist he respected, even a scrub nurse he liked, a middle-aged woman devoted to Perrault. Jesse had inherited all Perrault’s likes and dislikes. He slipped into them as he slipped into his hospital clothes, into his gloves and mask, leaving the trembling Jesse outside in the corridor. Better not to think about that
envelope and the letter inside. Better not to think about Jesse, waiting back in the corridor, nervously licking his lips and wondering what would become of him. Better to think only of the job ahead, a few hours’ hard work.… Lyle Carter was his assistant for the operation. Jesse felt much older and luckier than Lyle, though they were about the same age. Now that Jesse was in private practice, safely taken care of, he did not feel uneasy in front of him; Lyle was not going to take his place with Perrault; no one would take Jesse’s place with Perrault. He was safe, absolutely safe. That was why he spoke so quietly with Lyle, telling him what he intended to do. He was quiet, passionless, modest with everyone.

Because he was away from the hospital so much, Jesse had lost track of its hierarchy except at the very top. The small army of interns and residents were strangers to him. The interns looked boyish and undependable. He knew a few of the first- and second-year residents, but he hesitated to trust them with his own patients. He checked and double-checked his own patients, worried that other people would make mistakes with them and that they would die: he remembered his own confusion as an intern. Now he did not trust anyone.
Did not trust anyone
. Jesse stared down at the man he was going to operate upon and it occurred to him that the man might die, might die under the anesthetic, might bleed to death, might spurt blood up onto the lighting fixtures, might sit up with a laugh and knock the instrument out of Jesse’s hand.… The nurse was looking at him. At Jesse. Lyle was standing near him, watching, ready to watch. Ready to learn what Jesse had to teach him. The body was waiting. The tumor was waiting.

Jesse began, moving jerkily. This was not his usual style. But he had to get started, he couldn’t stand there all day while people stared at him. A body, a skull, the interesting profusion of nerves and tissue and bones knit together into a shield. Well, attack it and open it. No fooling around. No time to waste.

A simple removal of a tumor. Jesse had to slow himself down, he had to keep his hands going slowly, slowly. The tumor peeled out so nicely: it was surely benign. Simple and benign. Jesse was therefore bringing life, bringing a gift of life, to the body on the operating table. A droplet of sweat fell from Jesse’s forehead onto his own arm. Like a tear. Jesse worked in silence, going slowly. Lyle hung over him. He wanted to know everything. Wanted to learn everything. Well, let him watch, let
him learn, Jesse had no secrets. The intern assigned to the operation had nothing to do but watch. He was a nice-faced boy with a crew cut, very young. Jesse glanced at him from time to time. The boy looked very tired. Wanted to get out of here, wanted to run out into the street weeping, sick of the odor of anesthetic and blood.… Jesse thought of Perrault and of how swiftly the old man worked, especially when he was in a bad mood. And so he forced himself to slow down. He would be slow, methodical, passionless.

The patient? A man of about thirty-five. Referred to Perrault by a neurologist in Dayton: headaches, small spasms of the right arm, a stony, plain face, too rigid to show fear. A hulking body of the sort Jesse had seen often on the psychiatric ward; typical schizophrenic thickness, a premature stoop to the shoulders. He was the son of a wealthy Ohio industrialist. He was the “son” of someone with money, therefore he lay unconscious on this table while Jesse picked inside his skull and saved his life. Not a person for Jesse, not really. A body and a brain. A large container of blood—was the blood too dark? too light? Jesse always worried about blood—that had to be kept percolating or Perrault would be furious with him.

The pathologist’s report came back in fifteen minutes: good news. The tumor was benign.

“Ah, thank God,” Jesse said. He wanted to weep, this was such good news.

Now Jesse had Lyle work. He stared at Lyle’s hands, at his mannerisms. Who was Lyle imitating? Jesse himself? Perrault? Jesse dreaded the operation coming to an end. Outside, the letter waited for him; but in here, in this confined, chilly room, he was safe. He knew what he was doing and what he had done. He trusted himself. He trusted Lyle. Nothing could go wrong now. Lyle’s hand would not slip, it was impossible that he should make a mistake.… Once, as an intern, Jesse had assisted a surgeon who had opened a chest with one cutting of the knife, an extraordinary fifteen- or sixteen-inch incision to get at a hernia in the diaphragm, filling up with blood, bubbling with blood, and the instruments had been enormous, like mechanic’s tools, crunching and spreading the ribs, making a huge hole in the chest. Minutes had expanded and contracted like the pulsations of the exposed heart and the lung, spongy and moving and slippery, an uncanny sight. Jesse had stared down into that hole, into someone’s chest opened up … opened
up like that for five and a half hours … and after that stint Jesse had great faith in the body’s ability to withstand anything, any kind of battering and crunching and snipping.

It was not possible that this man would die. Jesse kept telling himself that, sweating, anxious to the point of pain. Other men died, other patients of his and Perrault’s died, but not this man, not today, not when Jesse was so feeble and exposed.…

Afterward, he withdrew shakily. It looked all right. He praised Lyle, backing away from him, anxious to get away and back to the lounge. Lyle remained to dictate the account of the operation. Jesse thanked the scrub nurse and the others and backed away, went out to the lounge again—there was his pile of mail, still—no one had walked off with it—

Jesse picked up the letter and closed his eyes.

What if Dr. Pedersen was dead?

He did not dare look at the return address on the envelope. Instead, he opened it hurriedly; roughly he drew out a piece of thick paper that rattled as he opened it; he read in a rush, in a panic, standing there in his green gown: “… estate of William H. Shirer … bequeathed to Jesse Vogel (Jesse Pedersen) … a sum of $600,000.…” This made no sense. He forced himself to go back and read it over again. It appeared to be a formal statement from a Lockport attorney notifying him that he had been left certain assets and investments totaling $600,000 by his grandfather, William H. Shirer. The attorney had been searching for him as Jesse Pedersen and had been informed at the University of Michigan that Jesse Vogel was Jesse Pedersen, and now … and now he had been bequeathed $600,000 by the late William H. Shirer … who had died at the age of ninety-one in Lockport, New York.…

Someone was speaking to Jesse. Jesse nodded, edged away, and read the letter over again.

He looked at the back of the letter: nothing. His eye could not take even that in, not exactly. So he remained staring at it for several seconds. There were very small, very light, almost imperceptible dots on the back of the white paper, made by periods and semicolons on the other side that had pressed through with more force than the other typed letters. Jesse turned the letter back over and, when his vision cleared, read the first paragraph again. Each word seemed to make sense and flowed smoothly into the next; but the sentences themselves
did not seem to go together. One sentence stood out:
Mr. Shirer expressed a wish to remember you for your kindness and sympathy concerning his daughter. He did not elaborate upon this point with me, but I assume you understand his meaning
.

Jesse saw a fat woman, massive and fluttery, and an enormous waddling fat boy, the two of them hurrying through a hotel lobby. The two of them cringing as a telephone rang. The two of them opening packages of Chinese food, their mouths watering fiercely, desperately.…

Jesse began to tremble.

“Is it bad news, Dr. Vogel?” someone asked.

The young intern. Jesse stared at him wildly.

“Is it … bad news?” the intern asked.

“No, good news. Good news,” Jesse said blankly.
A fat woman and a fat boy on Ontario’s fish-strewn shore, opening a picnic basket, their eyes narrowing sharply with hunger, with lust
.…

He would have to remember all of that life. He was doomed to relive it.

Little Jeanne was right outside the bedroom door, rapping on it. With her frantic small fists. She thumped against it, banging her shoulder against it so that one of them would have to call out, “Jeanne! Don’t hurt yourself!”

Helene sprang to her feet, then hesitated. She stared toward the door as if she did not know what to do. Jesse called out, “Jeanne, don’t hurt yourself—stop that—”

Silence. Jeanne’s giggling.

Jesse stared at his wife. Her face was turned from him, in profile—stunned, joyless.

“I’d better let her in,” Jesse said.

Helene did not reply.

“I didn’t mean to … didn’t mean to upset you so.… This won’t change our lives,” Jesse said.

Jeanne began rapping on the door again. Maybe she thought this was a game: her mother and father hiding on her.

“You never told me that you had a grandfather who had so much money,” Helene said slowly.

“I didn’t know it myself. I mean, that he had so much,” Jesse said evasively.

The letter lay on the bed where Helene had let it drop. She turned to look at him; her gaze was level, suspicious, frightened.

“Helene, why are you so unhappy?” Jesse said.

Her face seemed to collapse.

“This won’t change our lives.…”

“Won’t it?” Helene said.

Jeanne was calling to them. Her small, petulant, frightened voice:
Mommy, Daddy.
Jesse went to the door. He picked up his daughter in his arms and hid his face against her, so that she giggled in surprise, squirming.

“Daddy, let me down! Let me down!”

But when he tried to put her down she hung onto his neck, still giggling. Jesse bounced her in his arms; he did not dare turn back to Helene for several seconds.

“Won’t it change our lives?” Helene said.

“What do you mean?” Jesse asked.

“Won’t you want to leave now? Pay off your debts here and leave?”

“My debts?”

“To my father. To me. Pay us off and leave.…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jesse said.

Helene picked up the letter again and tried to read it. Then she let it fall back onto the bedspread; Jesse saw that her eyes were bright and bitter with tears.

“You’re in love with someone. I know it,” Helene said.

“Don’t talk like that,” Jesse said angrily, “not in front of—”

“Go to hell,” Helene said.

Jesse carried his daughter back out into the living room and sat down with her in the large armchair near the window, “his” chair, and forced himself numbly to listen to her chatter—shrill, hurried chatter, because Jeanne sensed his love for the new baby, her parents’ preference for that newer, smaller baby. He forced himself to listen. He kept seeing Helene’s tight, anxious face, the absolutely straight part in her black hair, and beyond her familiar face, as if transforming it, the warmer, younger face of Reva, Reva’s eyes and their restlessness, Reva’s mouth.…

When Helene came out she had washed her face. She brought the baby with her, trying to smile, as if nothing had passed between them in the other room. Michele. Jesse stared at the baby.
Michele and Jeanne. His daughters
. He had wanted other children, sons, but he would not have them; Helene could not have any more children.

Staring at the baby, Jesse said, “I could never leave.…”

Helene smiled stiffly at him.

He could not eat dinner, couldn’t bring himself to sit down. Nervously, apologetically, he backed away and thought wildly of something to tell this woman, this wife of his, some excuse to offer to her—he had to go back to the office, he had forgotten to bring home a chapter of that book Perrault was working on. “I’m supposed to go over it for him. I forgot to bring it home,” Jesse said.

“All right,” said Helene.

“It won’t take me long.…”

He drove out and parked somewhere and sat for a while in his car. Then he went to a telephone booth, though he knew Reva’s name would not be in the directory. He leafed through the big Chicago directory, listlessly, in a kind of daze, thinking of
that enormous woman and that enormous son of hers, the son taking the hinges off the bathroom door, the hinges off the door, off the door
. No Reva Denk in the directory. No Reva Denk. She did not exist: not as Reva Denk. Standing on the street corner, in public, with her arms folded primly, protectively over that belly of hers. Still flat, he had thought. Girlish and flat. Mrs. Pedersen had been swollen as if with a pregnancy that had bloated her entire body, her entire being, making her cheeks bell out with a flirtatious alarm. Ah, pregnant women.… Jesse could not remember whom he himself had impregnated. Did it matter? What did it matter? His sperm or another man’s sperm, all of it clotted and anonymous, what did it matter?