The Saturday Evening Post (5 November, 1932)

Traditionally, the Coccidian Club show is given on the hottest night of spring, and that year was no exception. Two hundred doctors and students sweltered in the reception rooms of the old narrow house and another two hundred students pressed in at the doors, effectually sealing out any breezes from the Maryland night. The entertainment reached these latter clients only dimly, but refreshment was relayed back to them by a busy bucket brigade. Down cellar, the janitor made his annual guess that the sagging floors would hold up one more time.

Bill Tulliver was the coolest man in the hall. For no special reason he wore a light tunic and carried a crook during the only number in which he took part, the rendition of the witty, scurrilous and interminable song which described the failings and eccentricities of the medical faculty. He sat in comparative comfort on the platform and looked out over the hot sea of faces. The most important doctors were in front — Doctor Ruff, the ophthalmologist; Doctor Lane, the brain surgeon; Doctor Georgi, the stomach specialist; Doctor Barnett, the alchemist of internal medicine; and on the end of the row, with his saintlike face undisturbed by the rivulets of perspiration that poured down the long dome of his head, Doctor Norton, the diagnostician.

Like most young men who had sat under Norton, Bill Tulliver followed him with the intuition of the belly, but with a difference. He knelt to him selfishly as a sort of great giver of life. He wanted less to win his approval than to compel it. Engrossed in his own career, which would begin in earnest when he entered the hospital as an interne in July, his whole life was pointed toward the day when his own guess would be right and Doctor Norton’s would be wrong. In that moment he would emancipate himself — he need not base himself on the adding machine-calculating machine-probability machine-St. Francis of Assisi machine any longer.

Bill Tulliver had not arrived unprovoked at this pitch of egotism. He was the fifth in an unbroken series of Dr. William Tullivers who had practised with distinction in the city. His father died last winter; it was not unnatural that even from the womb of school this last scion of a medical tradition should clamor for “self-expression.”

The faculty song, immemorially popular, went on and on. There was a verse about the sanguinary Doctor Lane, about the new names Doctor Brune made up for the new diseases he invented, about the personal idiosyncrasies of Doctor Schwartze and the domestic embroilments of Doctor Gillespie. Doctor Norton, as one of the most popular men on the staff, got off easy. There were some new verses — several that Bill had written himself:

“Herpes Zigler, sad and tired,

   Will flunk you out or kill ya,

If you forget Alfonso wired

   For dope on h?mophilia.

Bum tiddy-bum-bum,

Tiddy-bum-bum.

Three thousand years ago,

Three thousand years ago.”

He watched Doctor Zigler and saw the wince that puckered up under the laugh. Bill wondered how soon there would be a verse about him, Bill Tulliver, and he tentatively composed one as the chorus thundered on.

After the show the older men departed, the floors were sloshed with beer and the traditional roughhouse usurped the evening. But Bill had fallen solemn and, donning his linen suit, he watched for ten minutes and then left the hot hall. There was a group on the front steps, breathing the sparse air, and another group singing around the lamp-post at the corner. Across the street arose the great bulk of the hospital about which his life revolved. Between the Michael’s Clinic and the Ward’s Dispensary arose a round full moon.

The girl — she was hurrying — reached the loiterers at the lamppost at the same moment as Bill. She wore a dark dress and a dark, flopping hat, but Bill got an impression that there was a gayety of cut, if not of color, about her clothes. The whole thing happened in less than a minute; the man turning about — Bill saw that he was not a member of the grand confraternity — and was simply hurling himself into her arms, like a child at its mother.

The girl staggered backward with a frightened cry; and everyone in the group acted at once.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, yes,” she gasped. “I think he just passed out and didn’t realize he was grabbing at a girl.”

“We’ll take him over to the emergency ward and see if he can swallow a stomach pump.”

Bill Tulliver found himself walking along beside the girl.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, yes.” She was still breathing hard; her bosom rose, putting out its eternal promises, as if the breath she had taken in were the last breather left in the world.

“Oh, catch it — oh, catch it and take it — oh, catch it,” she sighed. “I realized right away that they were students. I shouldn’t have gone by there tonight.”

Her hair, dark and drawn back to her ears, brushed her shoulders. She laughed uncontrollably.

“He was so helpless,” she said. “Lord knows I’ve seen men helpless — hundreds of them just helpless — but I’ll never forget the expression in his face when he decided to — to lean on me.”

Her dark eyes shone with mirth and Bill saw that she was really self-reliant. He stared at her, and the impression of her beauty grew until, uncommitted by a word, by even a formal introduction, he felt himself going out toward her, watching the turn of her lips and the shifting of her cheeks when she smiled . . .

All this was in the three or four minutes that he walked beside her; not till afterward did he realize how profound the impression had been.

As they passed the church-like bulk of the administration building, an open cabriolet slowed down beside them and a man of about thirty-five jumped out. The girl ran toward him.

“Howard!” she cried with excited gayety. “I was attacked. There were some students in front of the Coccidian Club building —”

The man swung sharply and menacingly toward Bill Tulliver.

“Is this one of them?” he demanded.

“No, no; he’s all right.”

Simultaneously Bill recognized him — it was Dr. Howard Durfee, brilliant among the younger surgeons, heartbreaker and swashbuckler of the staff.

“You haven’t been bothering Miss —”

She stopped him, but not before Bill had answered angrily:

“I don’t bother people.”

Unappeased, as if Bill were in some way responsible, Doctor Durfee got into his car; the girl got in beside him.

“So long,” she said. “And thanks.” Her eyes shone at Bill with friendly interest, and then, just before the car shot away, she did something else with them — narrowed them a little and then widened them, recognizing by this sign the uniqueness of their relationship. “I see you,” it seemed to say. “You registered. Everything’s possible.”

With the faint fanfare of a new motor, she vanished back into the spring night.
II

Bill was to enter the hospital in July with the first contingent of newly created doctors. He passed the intervening months at Martha’s Vineyard, swimming and fishing with Schoatze, his classmate, and returned tense with health and enthusiasm to begin his work.

The red square broiled under the Maryland sun. Bill went in through the administration building where a gigantic Christ gestured in marble pity over the entrance hall. It was by this same portal that Bill’s father had entered on his interneship thirty years before.

Suddenly Bill was in a condition of shock, his tranquility was rent asunder, he could not have given a rational account as to why he was where he was. A dark-haired girl with great, luminous eyes had started up from the very shadow of the statue, stared at him just long enough to effect this damage, and then with an explosive “Hello!” vanished into one of the offices.

He was still gazing after her, stricken, haywire, scattered and dissolved — when Doctor Norton hailed him:

“I believe I’m addressing William Tulliver the fifth —”

Bill was glad to be reminded who he was.

“— looking somewhat interested in Doctor Durfee’s girl,” continued Norton.

“Is she?” Bill asked sharply. Then: “Oh, howdedo, Doctor?”

Dr. Norton decided to exercise his wit, of which he had plenty. “In fact we know they spend their days together, and gossip adds the evenings.”

“Their days? I should think he’d be too busy.”

“He is. As a matter of fact, Miss Singleton induces the state of coma during which he performs his internal sculpture. She’s an anaesthetist.”

“I see. Then they are — thrown together all day.”

“If you regard that as a romantic situation.” Doctor Norton looked at him closely. “Are you settled yet? Can you do something for me right now?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I know you don’t go on the ward till tomorrow, but I’d like you to go to East Michael and take a P. E. and a history.”

“Certainly.”

“Room 312. I’ve put your methodical friend Schoatze on the trail of another mystery next door.”

Bill hurried to his room on the top of Michael, jumped into a new white uniform, equipped himself with instruments. In his haste he forgot that this was the first time he had performed an inquisition unaided. Outside the door he smoothed himself into a calm, serious manner. He was almost a white apostle when we walked into the room; at least he tried to be.

A paunchy, sallow man of forty was smoking a cigarette in bed.

“Good morning,” Bill said heartily. “How are you this morning?”

“Rotten,” the man said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Bill set down his satchel and approached him like a young cat after its first sparrow.

“What seems to be the trouble?”

“Everything. My head aches, my bones ache, I can’t sleep, I don’t eat, I’ve got fever. My chauffeur ran over me, I mean ran over me, I mean ran me, if you know what I mean. I mean from Washington this morning. I can’t stand those Washington doctors; they don’t talk about anything but politics.”

Bill clapped a thermometer in his mouth and took his pulse. Then he made the routine examination of chest, stomach, throat and the rest. The reflexes were sluggish to the little rubber hammer. Bill sat down beside the bed.

“I’d trade hearts with you any day,” he promised.

“They all say I’ve got a good heart,” agreed the man. “What did you think of Hoover’s speech?”

“I thought you were tired of politics.”

‘That’s true, but I got thinking of Hoover while you went over me.”

“About Hoover?”

“About me. What did you find out?”

“We’ll want to make some tests. But you seem pretty sound really.”

“I’m not sound,” the patient snapped. “I’m not sound. I’m a sick man.”

Bill took out a P. E. form and a fountain pen.

“What’s your name?” he began.

“Paul B. Van Schaik.”

“Your nearest relative?”

There was nothing in the case history on which to form any opinion. Mr. Van Schaik had had several children’s diseases. Yesterday morning he was unable to get out of bed and his valet had taken his temperature and found fever.

Bill’s thermometer registered no fever.

“Now we’re going to make just a little prick in your thumb,” he said, preparing glass slides, and when this had been accomplished to the tune of a short, dismal howl from the patient, he added: “We want just a little specimen from your upper arm.”

“You want everything but my tears,” protested the patient.

“We have to investigate all the possibilities,” said Bill sternly, plunging the syringe into the soft upper arm, inspiring more explosive protests from Mr. Van Schaik.

Reflectively Bill replaced his instruments. He had obtained no clue as to what was the matter and he eyed the patient reproachfully.

On a chance, he looked for enlarged cervical glands, and asked him if his parents were alive, and took a last look at throat and teeth.

“Eyes normally prominent,” he wrote down, with a feeling of futility. “Pupils round and equal.”

“That’s all for the moment,” he said. “Try and get some rest.”

“Rest!” cried Mr. Van Schaik indignantly. “That’s just the trouble. I haven’t been able to sleep for three days. I feel worse every minute.”

As Bill went out into the hall, George Schoatze was just emerging from the room next door. His eyes were uncertain and there was sweat upon his brow.

“Finished?” Bill asked.

“Why, yes, in a way. Did Doctor Norton set you a job too?”

“Yeah. Kind of puzzling case in here — contradictory symptoms,” he lied.

“Same here,” said George, wiping his brow. “I’d rather have started out on something more clearly defined, like the ones Robinson gave us in class last year — you know, where there were two possibilities and one probability.”

“Unobliging lot of patients,” agreed Bill.

A student nurse approached him.

“You were just in 312,” she said in a low voice. “I better tell you. I unpacked for the patient, and there was one empty bottle of whisky and one half empty. He asked me to pour him a drink, but I didn’t like to do that without asking a doctor.”

“Quite right,” said Bill stiffly, but he wanted to kiss her hand in gratitude.

Dispatching the specimens to the laboratory, the two internes went in search of Doctor Norton, whom they found in his office.

“Through already? What luck, Tulliver?”

“He’s been on a bust and he’s got a hangover,” Bill blurted out. “I haven’t got the laboratory reports yet, but my opinion is that’s all.”

“I agree with you,” said Doctor Norton. “All right, Schoatze; how about the lady in 314?”

“Well, unless it’s too deep for me, there’s nothing the matter with her at all.”

“Right you are,” agreed Doctor Norton. “Nerves — and not even enough of them for the Ward clinic. What’ll we do with them?”

“Throw em out,” said Bill promptly.

“Let them stay,” corrected Doctor Norton. “They can afford it. They come to us for protection they don’t need, so let them pay for a couple of really sick people over in the free wards. We’re not crowded.”

Outside the office, Bill and George fastened eyes.

“Humbling us a little,” said Bill rather resentfully. “Let’s go up to the operating rooms; I want to convince myself all over again that this is a serious profession.” He swore. “I suppose for the next few months we’ll be feeling the bellies of four-flushers and taking the case histories of women who aren’t cases.”

“Never mind,” said George cautiously. “I was just as glad to start with something simple like — like —”

“Like what?”

“Why, like nothing.”

“You’re easily pleased,” Bill commented.

Ascertaining from a bulletin board that Dr. Howard Durfee was at work in No. 4, they took the elevator to the operating rooms. As they slipped on the gowns, caps, and then the masks, Bill realized how quickly he was breathing.

He saw HER before he saw anything else in the room, except the bright vermilion spot of the operation itself, breaking the universal whiteness of the scene. There was a sway of eyes toward the two internes as they came into the gallery, and Bill picked out her eyes, darker than ever in contrast with the snowy cap and mask, as she sat working the gas machine at the patient’s invisible head. The room was small. The platform on which they stood was raised about four feet, and by leaning out on a glass screen like a windshield, they brought their eyes to within two yards of the surgeon’s busy hands.

“It’s a neat appendix — not a cut in the muscle,” George whispered. “That guy can play lacrosse tomorrow.”

Doctor Durfee, busy with catgut, heard him.

“Not this patient,” he said. “Too many adhesions.”

His hands, trying the catgut, were sure and firm, the fine hands of a pianist, the tough hands of a pitcher combined. Bill thought how insecure, precariously involved, the patient would seem to a layman, and yet how safe he was with those sure hands in an atmosphere so made safe from time itself. Time had stopped at the door of the operating room, too profane to enter here.

Thea Singleton guarded the door of the patient’s consciousness, a hand on a pulse, another turning the wheels of the gas machine, as if they were the stops on a silent organ.

There were others in attendance — an assisting surgeon, a nurse who passed instruments, a nurse who made liaison between the table and the supplies — but Bill was absorbed in what subtle relationship there was between Howard Durfee and Thea Singleton; he felt a wild jealousy toward the mask with the brilliant, agile hands.

“I’m going,” he said to George.

He saw her that afternoon, and again it was in the shadow of the great stone Christ in the entrance hall. She was in street clothes, and she looked slick and fresh and tantalizingly excitable.

“Of course. You’re the man the night of the Coccidian show. And now you’re an interne. Wasn’t it you who came into Room 4 this morning?”

“Yes. How did it go?”

“Fine. It was Doctor Durfee.”

“Yes,” he said with emphasis. “I know it was Doctor Durfee.”

He met her by accident or contrivance half a dozen times in the next fortnight, before he judged he could ask her for a date.

“Why, I suppose so.” She seemed a little surprised. “Let’s see. How about next week — either Tuesday or Wednesday?”

“How about tonight?”

“Oh, not possibly.”

When he called Tuesday at the little apartment she shared with a woman musician from the Peabody Institute, he said:

“What would you like to do? See a picture?”

“No,” she answered emphatically. “If I knew you better I’d say let’s drive about a thousand miles into the country and go swimming in some quarry.” She looked at him quizzically. “You’re not one of those very impulsive internes, are you, that just sweep poor nurses off their feet?”

“On the contrary, I’m scared to death of you,” Bill admitted.

It was a hot night, but the white roads were cool. They found out a little about each other: She was the daughter of an Army officer and had grown up in the Philippines, and in the black-and-silver water of the abandoned quarry she surprised him with such diving as he had never seen a girl do. It was ghostly inside of the black shadow that ringed the glaring moonlight, and their voices echoed loud when they called to each other.

Afterward, with their heads wet and their bodies stung alive, they sat for awhile, unwilling to start back. Suddenly she smiled, and then looked at him without speaking, her lips just barely parted. There was the starlight set upon the brilliant darkness; and there were her pale cool cheeks, and Bill let himself be lost in love for her, as he had so wanted to do.

“We must go,” she said presently.

“Not yet.”

“Oh, yet — very yet — exceedingly yet.”

“Because,” he said after a moment, “you’re Doctor Durfee’s girl?”

“Yes,” she admitted after a moment, “I suppose I’m Doctor Durfee’s girl.”

“Why are you?” he cried.

“Are you in love with me?”

“I suppose I am. Are you in love with Durfee?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not in love with anybody. I’m just — his girl.”

So the evening that had been at first ecstatic was finally unsatisfactory. This feeling deepened when he found that for his date he had to thank the fact that Durfee was out of town for a few days.

With August and the departure of more doctors on vacation, he found himself very busy. During four years he had dreamed of such work as he was doing, and now it was all disturbed by the ubiquity of “Durfee’s girl.” In vain he searched among the girls in the city, on those Sundays when he could go into the city, for some who would soften the hurt of his unreciprocated emotion. But the city seemed empty of girls, and in the hospital the little probationers in short cuffs had no appeal for him. The truth of his situation was that his initial idealism which had been centred in Doctor Norton had transferred itself to Thea. Instead of a God, it was now a Goddess who symbolized for him the glory and the devotion of his profession; and that she was caught up in an entanglement that bound her away from him, played havoc with his peace of mind.

Diagnosis had become a wor............