The Doctor Stories Read online

  They had the kitchen already rigged up as an operating room, a plain deal table with a smaller one at the foot of it with blankets and a sheet over them for the old man to lie on. There were sterile dressings, the instruments were boiling on the gas stove and everything was in good order as far as I could make out.

  As soon as I had entered, Rivers called into the hall for the old fellow to come on along, we were ready for him. He had been in bed in the front of the house and I shall never forget my surprise and the shock to my sense of propriety when I saw Frankel, whom I knew, coming down the narrow, dark corridor of the apartment in his bare feet and an old-fashioned nightgown that reached just to his knees. He was holding his painful belly with both hands while his scared wife accompanied him solicitously on one side.

  The old fellow was too sick for that sort of thing but Rivers just motioned him without a word uttered to climb up on the table where they put another sheet over him and I was told to start the anesthetic. I did so, silent, and not too well pleased with the way things were going.

  Rivers asked the wife if she had any more of that good whisky about the place. She brought it out. He poured himself nearly a tumblerful, filled the glass with water at the sink and, while he was drinking, held up the flask with the other hand toward his confrere and to me, gesturing. We refused. With that he finished his glass, plugged the cork in the bottle and dropped it into the side pocket of his coat which hung nearby on a chair.

  He was in his undershirt and suspenders, sleeves rolled up. From this time forward, things went ahead normally and properly, more or less, according to the usual operating-room technique of the time.

  Rivers made the incision. He took one look and shrugged his shoulders. It was a ruptured appendix with advanced general peritonitis. He shoved in a drain and let it go at that, the right thing to do. But the patient died next day.

  I tell you there was a howl about the town: another decent citizen done to death by that dope fiend Rivers. Several of my friends cautioned me to watch my step. You may be sure, in any case, that I thought carefully over what had occurred but I did not come to any immediate conclusion.

  And yet the man could be—often was—kindly, alert, courteous. Most interesting it is to hear that he played the violin excellently and would often spend an evening, in the early days, playing duets with the one musician of any note that could be encountered in the neighborhood—the organist at the nearby cathedral.

  When little Virginia Shippen, aged five, had a kidney complication following scarlet fever, Rivers came in day and night, did—as he thought—everything that could be done to save her. Still she remained unconscious, dropsical; the kidneys had ceased to function. One evening Rivers told them that he was through—that she would be dead by morning.

  At this point, the mother asked if he would object if she made a suggestion. She wanted to try flaxseed poultices over the kidney regions. Go ahead, said Rivers.

  The next day the child’s kidneys had started slowly to function, sanguineous, muddy stuff, but she was conscious and her fever had dropped. Rivers was delighted, praised the mother and told her that she had taught him something. The child grew up and lived thirty years thereafter.

  He was short with women:

  Well, Mary, what is it?

  I have a pain in my side, doctor.

  How long have you had it, Mary?

  Today, doctor. It’s the first time.

  Just today.

  Yes, doctor.

  Climb up on the table. Pull up your dress. Throw that sheet over you. Come on, come on. Up with you. Come on now, Mary. Pull up your knees.

  Ooh!

  He could be cruel and crude. And like all who are so, he could be sentimentally tender also, and painstaking without measure.

  A young woman, one of my early friends and patients, spoke to me of his kindness to her. Her foster parents—for she was an adopted child—would never have anyone else. For months she went to him, two and three times a week, while he with the greatest gentleness and patience treated her. It was a nasopharyngeal condition of some sort, difficult to manage. Little by little, he brought her along till she was well, charging them next to nothing for his services.

  Money was never an end with him.

  The end was, he made this girl, who was frail and gentle, one of his lifelong admirers.

  But on another occasion in the drug store one day a boy about ten came up to him with a sizable abscess on his neck. They had not been able to find the doctor in his office so the boy had followed him there.

  Come here, said Rivers, Let’s see. And with that he took a scalpel out of his vest pocket, and made a swipe at the thing.

  But the boy was too quick. He jerked back and the knife caught him low. He turned and ran, bleeding and yelling, out of the door. Rivers chuckled and paid no further attention to the incident.

  Naturally there were certain favorite places which he’d visit more often than others. First of all was the Jeannette Mansion in Crestboro, two miles above Hazleton north along the ridge, where a number of French families had settled sixty or eighty years previously.

  They were rather a different class, these Fench, from some of the other inhabitants of the region and showed it by keeping a great deal to themselves in their large manor houses surrounded by the billowy luxuriance of tall trees.

  A fence, the beginning of all culture, invariably surrounded the property as a frame, giving a sense of propriety and measure. Ease and retirement seemed to blossom here, though naturally this was often an appearance only.

  Not, I think, that these things meant anything consciously to Rivers, but they were there and he passed among them. In that way they must have influenced him more than a little. For he liked it all, obviously. Though, of course, it was the people really who attracted him.

  He was a Frenchman, an Alsatian—I can’t think of his name, said my informer, old Dr. Trowbridge. When you get older, your memory is not so good. Wait a minute. No, well, anyway, he went back to France. So and so lives in the house now. He had several daughters—they were a very gay family.

  I had been asking the old doctor how it was that Rivers began to take the dope. Oh, he must have been taking something before he came here. I don’t know how else to explain his eccentricity. Anyway, when he went to Europe, to Freiburg to study with Seibert, the pathologist (I don’t think he studied very much), this man, oh, what is his name? he had gone back to France—had to give Rivers the money to return to America.

  Jeannette, that’s it—he was a high liver. He built himself a greenhouse in the back and put all kinds of plants in it. He must have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on it. He would sit out there and play cards with his friends. Not difficult surely to understand the attraction this had for the tormented doctor. For, if Jeannette was a voluptuary, his friend Rivers was no laggard before any lead which he could find it in his conscience to propose.

  To play cards, to laugh, talk and partake with the Frenchman of his imported wines and liquors was good. After a snowstorm, of a Sunday morning, to sit there at ease—out of reach of patients—in a tropical environment and talk, sip wines and enjoy a good cigar—that was something. It was a quaint situation, too, in that crude environment of those days, so altogether foreign, incongruous and delightfully aloof.

  It would take a continental understanding—reinforced as it is by centuries of culture—to comprehend and to accept the complexities and contradictions of a nature such as Rivers’. Not in the provincial bottom of the New Jersey of that time had the doctor found such another release.

  The man was now at the height of his popularity and power.

  Intelligence he had and force—but he also had nerves, a refinement of the sensibilities that made him, though able, the victim of the very things he best served. This was the man himself whom the drug retrieved.

  He was far and away by natural endowment the ablest individual of our environment, a serious indictment against all the evangelism of American life
which I most hated—at the same time a man trying to fill his place among those lacking the power to grasp his innate capabilities.

  I don’t believe Jeannette doped. It cannot have been other than as to a last hope, a veritable island of safety, that Rivers went to the mansion. The only influence that might possibly have saved him, as they say, had it but been known. In any case, they were gay and the time passed; at the mansion he was free, enlivened—then when that was finished, he was again beaten.

  The mansion was relaxation to him, but he couldn’t live there and his restlessness would in the end pass beyond it.

  No doubt, there would be periods when he didn’t hit the dope for months at a time. Then he’d get taking it again. Finally he’d feel himself slipping and he’d head off—overnight sometimes—leaving his practice as it might lie—for the woods.

  This flight to the woods or something like it, is a thing we most of us have yearned for at one time or another, particularly those of us who live in the big cities. As Rivers did. For in their jumble we have lost touch with ourselves, have become indeed not authentic persons, but fantastic shapes in some gigantic fever dream. He, at least, had the courage to break with it and to go.

  With this pressure upon us, we eventually do what all herded things do; we begin to hurry to escape it, then we break into a trot, finally into a mad run (watches in our hands), having no idea where we are going and having no time to find out.

  He wanted to plunge into something bigger than himself. Primitive, physically sapping. Maine gave it. To hunt the deer. He’d bring them home and give cuts of venison around to all his friends.

  But that, too, ended pretty badly. After his eyes had been affected, by abuse and illness, he one day by accident shot his best friend in the woods, a guide he always followed, shot him through the temples as dead as a door nail.

  Characteristic of the man is it that he made amends to the unfortunate’s family faithfully as best he could, everything that was asked of him, to the last penny. And then, when the last payment had been made, he invited a young doctor of his acquaintance to dinner with him in New York—for a rousing celebration.

  Rivers made a hobby one time of catching rattlesnakes, which abound in the mountains of North Jersey. He enjoyed the sport and the danger, apparently, while there was a scientific twist to it in that the venom they collected was to be used for laboratory work in New York.

  A patient of mine gave me an impression of his office as it looked in those days:

  There were six of us kids, brothers and sisters. I myself must have been about ten years old. We used to go up and sit there Sunday mornings. We’d be crazy for it. We used to like to look at his trophies. He had ’em too, moose and deer heads up on the wall and fish of all kinds.

  He was a great hunter. I remember one time he was telling my father how he was bitten by a rattler, on the arm. Being a doctor, he knew what he was up against. He asked his guide to take his knife and cut the place out. But the guide didn’t have the nerve. So the Doc took his own hunting knife in the other hand and sliced it wide open and sucked the blood out of it. I suppose he took a shot of dope first to steady himself. We were in the office with my father and he rolled up his sleeve and showed us the cut—right down the middle of his arm.

  It was about this time too that he once had Charlie Hensel in to see him, one evening when there were quite a few others besides, out in the waiting room. Put on the gloves, Charlie, he said—he always had a couple of pairs of them lying around the place somewhere—and let’s see what you can do.

  But Charlie was good in those days and he knew the Doc was in no shape for him to be roughing it up with. He shook his head and said, No, not tonight, Doc.

  That nettled Rivers. Scared? he said. What’s the matter, a young fella like you? Come on, put’em on.

  All right, said Charlie in his sweet, easy voice. Just as you say. He told me the story shortly after it happened.

  So they started in to spar after pushing back the desk and clearing a little space for themselves.

  Charlie tapped the old boy lightly on the face a couple of times keeping away from the body. At this the Doc let go a hot one for Charlie’s middle.

  Come on, come on, he kept saying.

  But Charlie could see that the Doc was getting winded so he tapped him again and was going to say he guessed that would be enough for tonight when the Doc drove in a swift one which caught Charlie on the temple just as he was going to drop his hands. Come on, come on, he said once more, a young fella like you.

  So Charlie, wanting to end the business, feinted, just easy and then lifted the Doc one under the chin that sent him staggering backward to the wall. There he sat down unexpectedly in the consultation chair they had placed back out of the way. It shook the building.

  The trouble with you, Charlie—the trouble with hitting you, Charlie, said the Doc slowly after a while, is that you ain’t got any belly at all. Which was true enough. Charlie was very narrow across the middle then—like a sailor.

  He’d have spells when his brother even could do nothing with him. He would go completely mad. He put in several sessions at the State Insane Asylum—six months or more—on at least two occasions.

  When he’d been there a month or so, he’d begin to ask the Superintendent, who was a friend of his, whether he didn’t think he could go out to work again. You’re as good a doctor as I am, old man, would say this one finally. If you think you can make it, go ahead. And back he’d turn again to the old grind.

  Then one winter he got so low with typhoid fever that it looked as if this time the game was up. They wanted a nurse; he refused to have one. And nobody wanted him as a patient either. He was completely gone with dope and the disease. Finally he himself asked for a girl he had known some years before at Blockley Hospital, a nurse he had once seen there and admired.

  She took on the case.

  He married her when he was able to be up and about again, and they went to Europe on a honeymoon. No doubt, she loved him.

  Yes, I can remember his wife, said a lady to me. When she first came out she was a pretty little thing, just like anybody else. But I can still see her one day when she came into the store knocking against the counters, first on one side then on the other; she was covered with diamonds, her hands and her neck—she didn’t seem to know where she was going. Her face didn’t seem to be bigger than the palm of my hand.

  A great many of his more respectable friends left him now. They’d still call him—if he was right—but he was too greatly distrusted.

  You know how it used to be, said one of my best friends to me one day much to my surprise. You’d get some doctor and fool around with him for a while and get another and they’d all say something different and you wouldn’t know where the hell you were. And this is the story he told me:

  Well, this happened many years ago. I was sick and my old man was worried. Finally the druggist tipped us off. Get Rivers, he said. He’s a dope but when he’s right you can’t beat him. And I tell you what I’ll do—because he knew the old man well and he himself had been something of a rounder in his day—I’ll call up Rivers and get him down here at the store. And, if he’s right, I’ll send him up.

  So he did.

  Later in the day when the Doc came into the room he took one look at me. This boy’s got typhoid fever, he said. Just like that—that’s how he did it. And I’ll tell you what I’ll do. To prove it, I’ll take his blood now and send it in to my brother—he was doing nothing but blood work at that time—and I’ll let you know in a few days.

  Sure enough, he was right. He had the jump on the thing. The result was I had a light case and we had Rivers for years after that as our family physician.

  He’d sit at the table writing a prescription and you could see his head fall down lower and lower—he’d go to sleep right there, right in front of your eyes. My old man would shake him every once in a while and finally he’d get up and go out.

  When he started to hit the dope,
his brother did his best to get him into some hospital in the city. He knew he was good and, if he could get him in there in a proper atmosphere, he thought he could save him. But the old boy was too foxy. He liked it out here, his friends, the life or whatever it was and they couldn’t move him.

  The thing, one of the main things, that got the other doctors down on him was his habit of going off—just disappearing sometimes. He liked to go fishing, and he was a crack shot. He’d have important cases, or anything. But that didn’t make any difference. You’d call him up to find out why he hadn’t been there and they’d say, He’s gone away for a few days, we don’t know where.

  All you could do was get another doctor.

  A couple of years after that, one summer when my old man had gone off on a trip somewhere, he sent me down to the only boarding house in town—you know where I mean. He’d left me in the house alone the year before and he wasn’t any too satisfied with some of the things we pulled off while he was away. Well, this time Rivers heard of it and wanted me to come over and live with him.

  I don’t know how he got me out of there, but he did. The old gal who ran the place didn’t want to let me go, knowing my father and all that. But Rivers persuaded her that I was sick, I guess, and needed treatment and that the best way for me was to live at his house where he could keep his eye on me. So I got my things together in two minutes, you can bet, and into his buggy I hopped and over we went.

  My old man hasn’t forgiven him for that to this day.

  Sunday mornings were the times. It was a regular show. Because most of his patients were poor people and they could come only on Sunday. I’m telling you you never saw an office like it. He had the right idea, he was for humanity—put it any way you like. They’d be sitting all over the place, out in the hall, up the stairs, on the porch, anywhere they could park themselves.

  When it was somebody that didn’t know me, he’d say I was a young doctor. I was just seventeen then. He’d give me a white coat and tell me to come on. Jesus! Naturally I thought he was great. And I’ll tell you in all those four months I never used to see any of those butcheries they’d talk about. Everything he did was O.K. I suppose I’d think different now, but then I thought he was a wonder.