Part 2
Ten minutes later Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Junior, strode through Ward B, Medicine Clinic. Beside him the fat interne sweated profusely. He was gasping:
“The morphia didn’t hold. She’s awake and raising ... raising....”
“Hell?”
The interne gave a relieved nod. The night nurse rocked her heels in tune with theirs. Cub turned to her and said:
“I understand. I understand. Nurse, you go back to your ward. Doctor, you may return to Ward A. I’ll tend to her myself....”
The interne hesitated and a fine hope glistened:
“Doctor Sterling ... are you ... is there to be a decompression?”
“Not unless absolutely necessary.” Cub’s voice was very grave, “I’ll call you if I need assistance, Doctor.”
The interne plodded helplessly off the ward. He thought the student nurse’s haughtiness was aimed at him.
Cub Sterling entered Room Two, pulled down the window shade of the glass inset opening onto the ward, and snapped on the wall light over the bed.
Then he gripped the bedside table and stared. Among the pillows, eyes wide with amusement, a wispy smile tracing the pale lips, was the head he had held in his hands three hours ago, alive, alert, intelligently vivid.
It was as though Cleopatra’s understanding had flowed into an Egyptian mask.
The lips moved slowly and she asked, in a monotone:
“Who are you? And where am I?”
“I’m the man who knows your father, and you are in my hospital.”
The composure ran out of her face. She muttered:
“Don’t be funny, please. My father died in the War.”
Cub Sterling straightened a pillow, slowly.
“Of course he did. Now you go to sleep again.”
A bitter wry smile began searing her lips:
“So you think I’m ‘nuts’, too. He did! He and she both did! They were reporters on _The World_.”
Cub caught the pride of the inflection, turned his back and adjusted the shade again.
The girl’s voice was husky and amused.
“Will you give me a cigarette, please?”
He swung around:
“Of course not! You are too sick to smoke! You’ve just been in a horrible automobile accident. You had a narrow squeak. Be quiet and behave yourself!”
Her pupils turned black with amusement.
She drawled:
“Used to having your way, aren’t you?”
Cub blushed slowly, then announced:
“Speaking of having your own way, the night nurse and interne say....”
“I’m a hell-raisin’-huzzy, Doctor?”
He bit his lip:
“What _have_ you been doing?”
Her eyes and voice dilated softly:
“Just asking questions. I’m a newspaper reporter, you know.”
Cub nodded grimly:
“Yes. I know.”
The girl overlooked the sarcasm. She asked levelly and with deference:
“Was it much of an accident? Did I lose my reputation or just a couple of teeth?”
Cub moved toward the foot of the bed and fenced:
“Publicly speaking, neither.”
She shot back, “Privately speaking, the teeth are permanent.”
He stood at the end of the bed and looked at her critically. She met the look and returned it. A short laugh finished her estimate. She said:
“Don’t you think it might be wise if we told each other the truth? You snap like a police dog, but your eyes are honest.”
Cub’s legs collapsed under him. He sat upon the bed. The girl continued:
“How bunged up am I? I’ve got to get out of here quickly, or I’ll be fired....”
Cub’s hands deprecated the statement. She sneered:
“What does a medical man know about life? Ever been poor and discriminating?” Then she threw the gesture back at him and ordered, “What’s the story?”
He swallowed twice and said:
“You are in this hospital because your father is supposed to be a medical man in a distant city, Newark, New Jersey, to be exact, and a friend of mine. You are recorded as the victim of a bus accident. The bus went ahead with your luggage and pocketbook. Your name is Sophie Merriweather. As for your injuries, I’m not certain myself ... yet.” His words were beginning to clip. “Does that satisfy you?”
The girl shut her eyes and lay silent. A minute later she opened them, cocked her head upon one side and gazed critically down her chin, at her body. Then she looked reprovingly at Cub Sterling:
“So-ph-ie. How could you? Sophie Merriweather, Newark, New Jersey! I haven’t got the breastworks for a Sophie!”
The belligerence flew from Cub’s face and his eyes began to dance:
“Breastworks, or no breastworks, madam, Sophie you are and Sophie you remain until you are well ... or else a famous elderly medical man and I get kicked in the pants....”
Without looking at him, she replied:
“You appeal to my finer feelings! I’ll be Sophie forever, Doctor, if you’ll promise me that the Attorney-General gets the kick and I get a cigarette, immediately!”
Cub’s mouth and feet twitched. He rose and became professional:
“I’m sorry, Miss Merriweather. The cigarette is forbidden. Hospitals are pure places.”
“Rats! Ever look in the trash cans in a Nurses’ Home?”
“No, of course not, Sophie!”
She lay silent a minute and wiggled her toes. Then her voice grew small, and she said:
“Sounds like you’ve been very nice to me. Darned nice! But you have to know sometime and I guess you’d better know now that I haven’t any money to pay you. I’m really a waif.”
Her eyes blacked. She finished, “Respectable though ... very!”
“But you’re too loquacious! And you are pretty sick. Shut up and go to sleep!”
“How sick?”
“I told you I’d tell you tomorrow! As for your bills, they are being taken care of, so don’t worry.”
The mouth drew to a line, she demanded:
“Who’s paying them? The Attorney-General?”
Cub evaded:
“You were riding in his car when you were hurt, weren’t you?”
Sally Ferguson sat erect and put one hand quickly over her mouth. Sterling caught her by the shoulders and forced her back among the pillows.
“Where was it? Where did it hurt you?”
“Here,” she put her hand on her abdomen and groaned.
Cub began examining her carefully and thoroughly. When he stood up again he said:
“I’m sorry, Sophie! We’ll stop it if you want us to. The bills and the pain, too. Talk about them tomorrow. You must get some rest. Lie quiet. Be still....”
Her mouth fell into a fighting straightness. All of the childish freshness which had charmed him when he had first seen her was gone. She lay tense and hard under his hands. Suddenly he knew she was trying not to cry. Calmly he began talking again:
“Accidents knock a darned lot more out of you than you ever suspect at the time, you know. You see, Sophie, if you don’t help me, then ... if you get terribly sick and I have a consultation over you ... it’ll mean sending for your father ... and it’ll be a hell of a mess all around....”
Her body relaxed under his grip. She smiled again and gasped:
“May-I-please-have-a-drink-of-water?”
When the glass was empty Cub eased her into the pillows and she laughed:
“I didn’t mean to hiss in your ear, Doctor, but if I hadn’t completed the sentence in one breath, you’d have yelped: ‘NO!’”
Dr. Sterling ignored the remark and asked:
“Is that comfortable?”
Then Cub barked:
“You ought to have better sense than to antagonize your doctor!”
The patient responded:
“Extremely comfortable, thank you.”
The girl answered:
“The hair of the dog is good for his bite,” and before Cub could reply, she relaxed her eyes into his and almost whispered:
“Thank you ... for ... taking me ... in.”
With a brusqueness he switched off the light and bowed:
“Pleasure’s all mine! ’Night Sophie. When I look in later, please be unconscious again!”
After he was gone, she lay for five minutes convinced that she had been dreaming, and then she began to really dream....
»II« Murder
“The hospital is facing a future which cannot be prophesied. So far, we are running no more than the usual deficit and our problem will not be how to continue on our course, but rather how to meet the increasing demands which, in such a year, automatically become our lot. That, from the administrative side, is the situation, gentlemen.
“It is, of course, a condition of which you are too painfully aware; but I conclude the conference with the mention of it, because it has been upon the ability to cope with the desperate that the reputation of the Elijah Wilson has been founded....” Dr. Henry MacArthur hesitated, his eye-glasses carefully poised between his right thumb and forefinger. “Have any of you some special problem you wish the staff to consider? ... If not....” His penetrating blue eyes and pointer nose questioned. Men said he could sense a situation in the hospital with the certainty of a dog.
The doctors around the long mahogany table shifted in their chairs and prepared to rise, but Cub Sterling’s voice checked them:
“I have, Dr. MacArthur. A problem which I should like very much....” Cub began unwinding his body and adjusting his bushy head, unconsciously balancing that list in his left shoulder, Dr. Hoffbein, Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Elijah Wilson, noted.
“The matter you told me about yesterday?” There was a note of patience in Dr. MacArthur’s question. “Why not wait until you are certain, Ethridge?”
“No, sir. With your permission, I would rather....”
Words came out of his mouth as though shot by mental force. They were chosen with a clarity, spoken with a certainty and uttered with a velocity which tired the ears of these men whose minds had learned the defense of slow speech.
Dr. James Harrison raised his shaggy brown eyebrows which had not turned gray with his fringe of hair and his beard and reached for his watch. Twenty years ago a smart-alec student had said he looked like Christ in a Derby hat. But even that didn’t stick. A man whose hazel-brown eyes had spent sixty-eight years laughing at life received no permanent nicknames. After thirty years of urology and literature, he still believed that the wages of sin were occasionally a damn good living.
Cub moistened his lips and hunched forward.
Dr. Harrison stroked his Vandyke beard and measured the intensity of young Sterling’s excitement. Since Monday staff meetings usually lasted from four to five and that was an hour when nobody ever died, he could give the boy fifteen minutes. After five, the really sick patients didn’t wait for an audience....
“Perhaps the best way to state the situation we suspect is through the facts.” The eyes of the other seven members of the General Staff of the Elijah Wilson Hospital turned to Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Junior, temporarily Physician-in-Chief, aged thirty-eight, whose present importance came about through the premature death of Dr. Merritt at fifty-two, and the natural advantage of being his father’s son.
Cub continued, “Two patients in Medicine Clinic, B Ward, have died of causes which seem to our staff not natural in origin and which cannot be traced.”
Dr. Harrison snapped his watch shut and interrupted:
“Ethridge, isn’t it possible you are taking your Hippocratic oath too seriously, son...?”
“Please, Dr. Harrison!” There was a note of almost childish pleading in the man’s voice. “Dr. MacArthur has gone over all of this too, and he thinks it is....”
MacArthur took his hands from his graying temples and stated: “The deaths have occurred in the same bed.”
With that phrase the waters parted, and Cub’s father, Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Senior, Dr. Harrison and Dr. Barton braced themselves for the nervous antagonism which was rising in Doctors Peters, Paton and Hoffbein.
“The same bed?” Doctors Peters and Hoffbein inhaled the phrase as a patient does the ether.
Cub gave one of his quick, emphatic nods and continued:
“The first was a goitre I was preparing for Father. Normal case with a good prognosis. Basal average, and nerves in excellent shape, considering the nature of the ailment. The patient died suddenly and unexpectedly.”
“Who attended her?” cut in Flannel-feet Hoffbein, as he was known to medical students, and Dr. Otto Hoffbein, Psychiatrist, to the world.
Cub Sterling’s internal barometer began to rise. The antagonism between these two men was like that between a mule and a shetland pony.
“Dr. Mattus, resident, saw her Thursday morning, Father and I saw her between seven and nine Thursday night and Dr. Sarah James saw her about ten-thirty. She was dead by dawn.”
A grunt escaped the set lips of Dr. Harold Barton, Pediatrician-in-Chief.
“Dr. James came to us from the Johns Hopkins Medical School and is one of our best,” Cub defended.
The men held their peace.
“And the other death?” Dr. Virginus Peters, Ophthalmologist-in-Chief, asked, fingering his Sons of Cincinnati rosette which in the private opinion of the majority of the staff should have been a dollar mark. His face was as open as a peach blossom.
With a careful politeness Cub Sterling answered:
“The second was a heart case of a certain type. Also a very good prognosis. Nothing to interfere with an ultimate and complete recovery. She was put in the bed the night after the goitre died. A whole day was given to a complete and thorough examination and the findings were as stated. Upon the second night, Saturday, the nurse saw her at twelve and at one. She died, suddenly, between then and daylight.”
“Any autopsies?” Dr. Peters’ face photographed emotions as a stage does lighting effects. It now held interest.
Cub stalled for self-control by lighting a cigarette. MacArthur and Bear Sterling watched carefully. When the cigarette was smoking Cub replied:
“No, Dr. Peters. Not on the first one. We thought that was a ‘fade-out.’ Upon the second there was a thorough autopsy. Father did it.”
Princeton Peters turned his lavender eyes upon Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Senior.
The only man in the room who appeared to have no interest in the question was Dr. Harrison. He was scrutinizing the shadows of the afternoon sun upon the tops of the trees outside.
Doctors Peters, Hoffbein, Barton, and Paton sat, as much as their respective builds allowed, upon the edges of their chairs, and looked at Bear Sterling.
Bear Sterling resembled his famous nickname. But as the years wore on, it should have been changed to Polar-Bear. He riveted his decisive steel-gray eyes into Peters and growled:
“There were no findings.”
The sentence fell upon the table.
MacArthur, who had sat by judicially, started to close the conference.
Prissy Paton, who had been an obstetrician and gynecologist so long that the staff had grown to consider him partly feminine, blocked MacArthur’s move with his high, soothing purr:
“What do you think is back of it, Ethridge?”
“Can’t seem to find anything, physically, sir.”
Dr. Harrison continued contemplating the leaves. Dr. MacArthur realized the thing must be seen through and settled back in his chair.
Dr. Hoffbein, Psychiatrist, who was perfectly aware that the staff didn’t think so much of “black magic”, therefore enunciated his words with an incisive clarity and leaned forward:
“What is your personal impression, Sterling?”
He inserted his sentences the way other men did hypodermics.
Cub Sterling gave himself an angular brace and replied:
“Must be something other than natural causes, Doctor. Everything has been checked. Everything! Dr. MacArthur and I have combed the department. The superintendent of nurses has checked the supervisor, the head nurse, the graduate floor nurse, and I’ve gone over my internes thoroughly ... man by man ... and woman by woman.... The reason I’m bringing it before the staff is I’m stumped. Your experience ... then, too, medical patients are often in the hospital six weeks to two months. We can’t have the thing repeated....”
“Fear psychosis,” Hoffbein grunted.
Bear Sterling heaved his thick shoulders and began fingering his key ring. Hoffbein and his foolishness!
This small oddly shaped brass key, and people dying when you least expected, made him think of the door to the cupola of the Administration Building: the door nobody had ever entered since that night so many years ago when he had fixed Flossie Matthews for Ted Longstreet ... before he was old enough to see why a reputable surgeon never had any business....
Ted had held the chloroform rag, and after giving her a transfusion of his own blood, had fainted and fallen against his operating hand so that the scalpel punctured her femoral artery ... and Flossie hemorrhaged; and Ted lay in the pool of blood. When he came to, she was dead ... of chloroform. In the meantime he had tied the artery, somehow....
“Gone” ... he could still hear Ted’s voice and see that hoggish splotch of blood his coat made upon the white plaster wall as he leaned against it and stretched his slim hands out toward the lids of Flossie’s staring blue eyes.
Murder! Murder! He’d slipped in operations since, but Ted Longstreet was the first man he ever heard cry. That night, even now ... they were all so young! She was a Tribly, Ted an interne, and he....
Not all the honors in the world would ever make him forget how they got the cadaver down the obscure winding stairway behind the Director’s office, the Nursing office, the pharmacy, into the elevator and down to the old cadaver vat.... Whew!
It was before they began ticketing stiffs and just after they changed from the hook system and the vat was a slimy mass of bodies, under which they were pushing, sliding, hiding....
Then that vile job of cleaning up the cupola. That blotch of blood Ted’s back had left and which wouldn’t come off and Ted’s saying:
“Sterling, every sunset the sky will reflect that I’ve broken my Oath and murdered....”
And the next day Longstreet had committed suicide.
He had never been back to that cupola! Nobody had been there. The only key remained upon his ring day and night. Since he was famous, he had tried to believe that the blotch was faded, but there came spells still where he’d lose the key in his dreams and hunt and hunt; when he couldn’t make himself enter the hospital by the main entrance; when he would be unable to look at the cupola.
It took ten years of dissecting medical students to finish Flossie; even then her legs were perfect enough to carry over to the new pathology building. They had a curve, even to the last ... an irresistible curve....
Why couldn’t he ever learn that he must not look backward? If he had looked backward _then_, he could never have married old Dr. Jemison’s daughter and been the proud father of Cub and honorary this and that.
The only people who had ever known were dead. Long dead....
Dr. Sterling was cut back into the tense antagonism which was rising between his son and Hoffbein, when Hoffbein remarked:
“Have you no private conclusions, Ethridge?”
“This is no psychiatric examination, Hoffbein,” said Bear. Bear’s eyes also knew the hypodermic trick.
“My son has told you the facts, and asked the staff’s aid. He suspects an unnatural situation in his department, and asks, in relation to the hospital, how our experience would lead us to handle it. That’s simple, and like all simple things, complex enough, isn’t it?”
Dr. Harrison took his eyes from the leaves, looked at his watch and rose. He had said nothing for minutes. His action had the effect of a seine upon minnows.
They were caught in his force. He said:
“What is being done with the bed now, Ethridge?”
“It is in use, sir. A patient of Father’s.”
“Excellent.”
Then with the steady stroke of a masseur, he went on:
“I see nothing the staff collectively can contribute which Ethridge and Dr. MacArthur have not already covered. Mysteries in medicine are more frequent than recoveries and Ethridge has my profound respect for acknowledging himself up against one. When one has toyed with homo sapiens as long as Bear and I have, one realizes that they are so damn full of mystery ... after all, people will die!”
“After the most beautiful operations!” Bear exploded.
“And the ugliest babies,” Prissy Paton’s life-long impulse to fawn had tricked him again.
With his remark, the opposition collapsed.
The most respected and the weakest member of the staff had declared themselves. There was nothing more to be said.
With several passing pats upon Ethridge’s shoulders the meeting broke up.
Bear Sterling lowered his iceberg brows at the utterly self-righteous bows with which Hoffbein and Princeton Peters retired and growled:
“Come on out to dinner, Mac, and I’ll tell you about the golf I shot yesterday.”
Flannel-feet Hoffbein drew his half-expended smile back into his facial muscles and slithered out of the Administration Building and to the right down the long corridor.
Princeton Peters pulled on his gray gloves and sailed into the main lobby, past the statue of Elijah Wilson, founder, through the front door of the Administration Building and into his waiting Packard. As the car slid down Wilson Boulevard he turned his stately head and gave the Administration Building a regretful stare. The architects had been at variance about the period and the structure screamed their different tastes. The four corner turrets were the desire of Elijah Wilson’s engineering-brother. The cupola was the addition of a New York consultant; and Princeton’s educated-man’s knowledge of the arts was always upset by the bastard byzantine building. If he had been on hand forty years ago....
The car slid down hill and he folded his hands sorrowfully.
Dr. Harold Barton squared his stocky body which had never outgrown the reach of any child’s hand, and forged to the right down the corridor behind, well behind, Hoffbein.
Prissy Paton stuck his smooth, pudgy and wonderfully capable hands into his vest pockets, turned down the long corridor to the left and in what his students called his “delivery walk,” caught up with the lengthy stretch of Cub Sterling’s legs.
“Remember, Ethridge, my boy, we are behind you. We have every confidence in....”
A group of internes passed and Prissy’s green eyes noted that Ethridge barely acknowledged their greeting. Then that report about his never speaking to anybody except with a nod was true. Too bad! Too bad! He had been against his elevation from the first. Too young! Told Peters and Hoffbein so; tried to tell MacArthur, but the meeting came the day, the very hour the Governor’s wife....
“Great confidence, Lad,” he purred paternally and pattered away.
Cub gave the door of Medicine Clinic a shove and strode into the elevator.
Two minutes later he walked into Room Two, off Ward B, and closed that door. The inclination to be comforted, when harassed, was new to him. He thought he was being medical and “carrying on.”
Sally Ferguson turned over languidly and slit her eyes slightly.
She was damned tired of being poked at by that Jew resident and that hen medic; of figuring out a career and a medical school for her famous father; of taking cascara and mineral oil; of being a sport and trying to like it.
Her long lashes raised. The slits widened.
Cub forgot his irritation and gazed helplessly.
Her lips began to part scornfully and she said:
“Well ... at last! Unchaperoned and alone! Can I believe my own eyes? Give me a cigarette while I regain my composure.”
“No, Miss Merriweather. You are much better, but you mustn’t smoke!”
She turned her back and lay utterly silent. Then in a husky pleading voice she began:
“Of course you are too famous to be human! I didn’t know you were famous. I ought to though! Famous, dictatorial, and snappish. So overbearing flies won’t even bite you! One of these pure-women-men. No smoking allowed in His Presence!”
Cub laughed spontaneously, and the girl flopped over furiously.
The eyes blacked and the lashes began to wilt:
“Shut up!”
Her voice had tears in it. Cub’s amusement fell through his lips:
“Sophie!”
She sat bolt up and every curl on her head shook:
“You devil! You....” Her face changed desperately and she fell backward.
“Where? Where was it?” Cub leaned over and demanded.
“In my leg. My left leg....” She sighed.
He threw back the sheet and began examining. His brows had knit heavily. His mouth was inexpressive and controlled.
The girl bit her lips, but when her eyes caught his, she said, flatly:
“Come on. The truth. What is it?”