But then disaster struck. So dazzled had we been – or most specifically Dr Ross – that a star of Miss Sommerville’s magnitude was making a guest appearance in our operating theater that an appropriate medical history had not been taken prior to the procedure.
Thus it was not realized that she was allergic to penicillin until she suddenly went into anaphylactic shock. As I was struggling to get her oxygenated, there was yet another catastrophe – cardiac arrest.
Here again Ross wasted no time and opened her magnificent thoracic area to massage her heart. The moments ticked by, she was still out – her perfectly chiseled features becoming bluer and bluer.
After several minutes I suggested to Ross that we stop our efforts, as it was a lost cause.
‘No, you a – hole,’ he shrieked at me. ‘We can’t let Luke Jamison’s wife die on our table – it would kill the hospital’s rep. And I’ll be socially blackballed all over town. Keep f – g pumping!’
I protested that even if we did revive her now there would be irreversible brain damage. He again told me to intensify my ventilation and shut the f – up.
After eighteen minutes and thirty-three seconds, June Sommerville’s heart began to beat again.
‘Thank God,’ I heard Ross exclaim to himself. Bad career move, I myself said to the Almighty.
As soon as her breathing had stabilized, Ross tore off his mask and headed at a sprint for the director’s office to convey the news to Mr Jamison that the operation had succeeded.
But if anybody wonders why June Sommerville has not made any films recently, it is not – as the press agents have put out – that she prefers the privacy of her Bel Air rose garden. It is because she is in a very exclusive nursing home where she is too brain-damaged even to recognize her award-winning husband.
I was kind of upset – especially when Steve Ross demanded that I give my write-up to him personally. Not being a total innocent I realized that Ross realized that even a first-year med student knows that after five minutes of cardiac arrest brain damage is inevitable. And there was no point in adding to Mr Jamison’s grief.
Subsequently I learned that he comes regularly to worship the living effigy of his wife, bringing her each time a bouquet of red roses.
But for some reason, however, Steve Ross never asked me to be his gas passer again.
As Bennett was wont to remark in moments of levity, which – except when Barney was visiting – were becoming rarer, his progress toward health was similar to the peeling of an onion. For every time they took a bandage off, there was another one beneath, and plasters covered plasters, so that it almost seemed there was nothing left of Bennett at the core.
After the fifth week of recuperation, the pain began to be less physical than mental. It was torture for him to be inactive and to worry about what was happening to his muscles under those casts.
‘I’m atrophying into nothing,’ he told Barney during one visit.
‘Listen, Landsmann,’ Barney joshed, ‘you’re the envy of the surgical residents’ world – you’ve already spent more time in bed than most of them do in ten years.’
‘I’d trade, you know I’d trade,’ Bennett murmured, irritated, annoyed, and frustrated. ‘That’s why I’ve used my irresistible charm on the orthopods to get me started on physiotherapy right away.’
‘Now? In all that plaster? What sport are you gonna go in for – parachute jumping?’
‘No, Dr Livingston,’ Bennett replied, ‘I’m just starting with two balls.’
‘Well,’ quipped Barney, ‘so do all the rest of us.’
‘If you don’t mind, I’ll start with squash balls.’
One day Jeffrey Kirk, Professor of Orthopedic Surgery, came to visit bearing instead of chocolates something else that Bennett had long been yearning for: his x-rays. They went over them together.
‘Well, Jeff,’ Bennett pronounced jauntily, ‘I can give you my professional opinion that this patient’s bones are healing beautifully.’
But then he came to the last set, pictures of the seven vertebrae that form the spine between the head and shoulders.
‘Hello there,’ he remarked, ‘I’ll bet this was a sticky wicket, Jeff. But the “reduction” you performed looks perfect. Now how soon till you let me out of here and back into the O.R.?’
The answer took him by surprise.
‘Is tomorrow morning soon enough?’
Except that both his legs were bandaged, Bennett would have skipped for joy.
‘I’ll be there with bells on, Jeff.’
It was then that Kirk announced the one proviso.
‘I don’t want all my beautiful reduction work to go for naught, Ben. You’re going to have to wear a halo apparatus.’
‘No. You’re kidding. I’d look like a man from Mars.’
‘That won’t matter,’ Kirk replied, ‘your colleagues think you are already.’
He did indeed look like a creature from another planet. They had put a metal band around his head and screwed it into his cranium. Another rigid metal strip went down to his shoulders. All this would immobilize his neck to kep him from reinjuring what Jeffrey Kirk had so expertly restored.
‘I tell you,’ Bennett remarked to Barney when they spoke that evening on the phone, ‘I’m like a copper replica of Tonto.’
‘I hope you’re taking pictures to send out as Christmas cards,’ Barney suggested.
‘No, my man, the Christmas card you’ll get will show me standing tall in Texas in a cowboy hat.’
Curiously, Bennett did not notice people staring at him in his halo apparatus. For by now he was inured to people looking oddly at a black man in a white man’s territory.
Until the brace was removed, he would have to be content with high-class scutwork: suturing – at best, perhaps a simple appendectomy incision. His squash-ball exercises had paid off for, if anything, his forearms looked more muscular than they had before the incident.
Finally, he demanded his reward. ‘Take this stupid thing off my head, or I’ll unscrew it by myself,’ he told Professor Kirk. ‘I want full flexibility so I can get back to some serious procedures.’
Kirk frowned. ‘From what I hear, you’ve passed the red light anyway, Ben. Walls have ears – even through the noise of the emergency room.’
‘Yeah,’ Bennett confessed with a sheepish grin. ‘There was a bus crash and they really needed me. Well, can I do it with a green light now?’
‘Yes,’ Kirk smiled, ‘as far as I’m concerned, you’re perfect.’
‘Come on, Doc,’ Bennett retorted, ‘nobody’s perfect.’ And then added, ‘but I’m sure as hell trying.’
Bennett was so elated by his clean bill of health that he found himself whistling a happy tune as he donned his surgical blues.
His first ‘real’ assignment was an extremely complex portacaval shunt, a procedure in which the portal vein in the liver is joined to the venacava inferior – the principal vein draining the lower portion of the body.
As Bennett approached the operating table, he noted that there seemed to be an unusually large number of surgical personnel present. In addition to his first assistant, Terri Rodriguez, he saw two senior surgeons, one the Chief of service.
He knew full well why they were there. They wanted to see if he still had it. Whether the severe trauma he had suffered had caused any loss of skill – or of nerve. Bennett told himself that it was just like a crucial athletic challenge – where the game would be won or lost by the guys who could keep their cool.
He was determined to give no outward sign of anxiety. And make no mistakes.
He smiled at his spectators and said breezily, ‘Good morning, all. This is going to be a long procedure, so I suggest we begin right away …’
After the first half hour, the Senior professors nodded to each other and unobtrusively left the room. They had seen enough.
Feeling triumphant, Bennett told Barney all about it on the phone that night.
‘Christ, Landsmann, you mu
st have nerves of steel. I would have been shaking in my boots. How the hell can you say you actually enjoyed it?’
‘Dr Livingston,’ Bennett replied affably, ‘be sure you put in that book of yours that most of us crazy surgeons actually groove on pressure.’
This book is one of the most important contributions to psychoanalytic thought in at least a generation. Surely it will occupy an important place in the literature of the entire discipline.
Barney perused the words excerpted from the most recent edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry – a publication not normally given to superlatives. The encomium had been reprinted on a poster in the entrance hall of the Psychiatric Institute announcing the forthcoming lecture of its distinguished author, Maurice Esterhazy.
‘Have you read it yet?’ asked Brice Wiseman, peering over his office mate’s shoulder.
‘It’s almost impossible to get hold of a copy,’ Barney replied, ‘and I’m dying to see it – that guy was my neighbor in Vanderbilt Hall.’
‘Oh, come off it, Livingston. Harvard can’t claim every genius in the field. The flyleaf explicitly says that Esterhazy did all his training at the Maudsley Hospital in London.’
‘Okay, I’ll quit waving the flag. But I do know the guy. Anyway, have you read his book?’
Wiseman nodded. ‘I was up till three last night – I just couldn’t put it down.’
‘That means you could lend it to me so I can be insomniac this evening,’ Barney suggested.
‘Sure, I’ll bring it to the office tonight.’
‘Thanks, Brice,’ Barney replied. ‘It’s amazing just to think that a medical book might be that exciting. But then, even the title is provocative.’
‘Freud’s Legitimate Daughter – it almost sounds like a novel.’
The two men parted, each to make rounds at his particular hospital.
It was a clear winter day and Barney decided to walk to Bellevue. In truth he wanted to be alone with his thoughts. To ponder the astonishing metamorphosis of Maury Eastman, whom he had last seen fifteen years ago as a tortured would-be suicide, his soul all but incinerated by electroshock, into Maurice Esterhazy, distinguished graduate of what was arguably the best psychiatric hospital in the world.
He tried to disentangle his web of feelings. Joy for Maury, of course. But even stronger, gratification bordering on Schadenfreude that a downtrodden son could achieve such remarkably appropriate revenge on the father who had persecuted him. For, despite his rank in the American Psychiatric Association, the elder Eastman had published many articles but never an entire book. And certainly nothing with the spectacular success Maury’s was enjoying.
He was so anxious to read Maury’s masterpiece that he canceled his dinner date with the nubile first-year resident in Cardiology who had recently arrived from Holland.
He made himself a nutritionally dubious baloney and cheese sandwich, sat back in his favorite chair, and began to read.
The cover said it all. Freud’s Legitimate Daughter was subtitled ‘The Psychology of Melanie Klein.’
The controversial British psychoanalyst who had died a few years earlier had begun her career as a strict Freudian before going on to make pioneering insights into the psychology of children far younger than Freud believed could possibly be analyzed.
Much to Klein’s chagrin, the patriarch of analysis rejected her theories, somehow unable to recognize they were merely carrying his own work an important step further.
Maury’s dramatic title encapsulated his subject’s dilemma. For there had been a constant hostility between Klein and Freud’s own daughter, Anna, who understandably considered herself to be the true perpetuator of her father’s theories. Maury not only demonstrated that Klein was the better ‘Freudian,’ he also presented powerful justification of Kleinian theory buttressed with insights of his own.
It was one-forty-five when Barney read the last page. He had been so spellbound by Maury’s book he had failed to notice that the needle on his hi-fi had been grating on the label of the last of his stack of records.
The next afternoon brought another surprise: a phone call from Fritz Baumann, whose tone was collegial.
‘Barney, I suppose you know that Esterhazy is lecturing at the Institute next Thursday. Elsa and I are giving a little dinner for him afterwards, and he specifically requested that we invite you. Can you make it?’
‘Absolutely,’ Barney replied, ‘I look forward to it.’
He hung up and thought, Christ, my own analyst has asked me to dinner!
Barney had never seen the auditorium at the Institute so packed. Many had come up from as far as Baltimore and down from as far as Yale. It was Standing Room Only, with perhaps twenty candidates standing in the back, notebooks open. Fritz Baumann introduced Maury as ‘probably the most innovative analytical thinker of his generation.’
Barney was taken aback by Maury’s change in appearance – and accent. The former Maury Eastman looked like an English don – long hair, wire glasses, and a corduroy suit that looked very much lived-in. And he radiated confidence. One could feel that he was completely at ease with his audience. And with himself.
Maury began with a few lighthearted quips about the difference in orientation between British and American psychiatrists – and said that his own position could be described as ‘somewhere over Greenland.’ The audience was charmed.
Then he began to discuss ‘The Paranoid-Schizoid Position in Early Infancy.’ Speaking mainly without notes, he occasionally referred to the single index card he had brought with him. And to his watch to make certain he did not exceed the time limit.
It was a performance all the more spectacular for its total lack of flamboyance. In calm, leisurely tones, he presented his own theories of child analysis, which impressed even the most reactionary of Freudians.
The question period was long and spirited and demonstrated the breadth of Maury’s medical knowledge.
The dinner at Fritz Baumann’s home was restricted to the gray eminences of the Institute, with three exceptions. Maury and Barney were under forty, and Maury’s wife, Antonia, was under thirty. She was also strikingly handsome. And herself a neurobiologist.
At the cocktail session before dinner, Maury was encircled by analysts deferentially asking him questions. He remained the sedate Englishman until he saw Barney. At which point he broke through his ring of admirers and rushed to embrace him, calling out, ‘Livingston, it’s great to see you.’
As they still had their arms about one another, Barney whispered, ‘Maury, could you tell me your secret? Is it something simple like eating Wheaties every morning?’
‘No, try seven years of analysis. And a good woman,’ he replied affectionately. He then turned to his host. ‘Dr Baumann, I hope you’re proud to have this wonderful chap in your Institute.’
Barney looked at Baumann, who was pleased.
And Maury continued to address his old friend as if no one else in the room mattered.
‘You must have dinner with us tomorrow night, or I’ll take irreparable umbrage.’
‘Of course, Maur,’ Barney replied, ‘and I’ll even give you a copy of my own book. In fact I’ll give you ten – since nobody seems to have bought it.’
‘I read it, and thought it was an insightful piece of work. So did Antonia. But we’d be grateful for a signed copy. Oh, and please bring a guest. Are you married?’
‘Only to my work,’ Barney answered, feeling slightly self-conscious.
‘Actually I was sure you would end up marrying Laura the Magnificent. Whatever became of her?’
‘That’s a long story, Maur—’
Just then the other Dr Esterhazy, Antonia, came up behind Maury and whispered, ‘Darling, your presence is being clamored for. Why don’t you go and scintillate while I talk to Barney?’
Maury kissed her on the cheek and went off to rejoin the senior psychiatrists.
‘Maurice has spoken so affectionately of you,’ Antonia said as soon as they were alone.
‘Apparently you were the only one who gave a damn about him when he was in trouble.’
‘I was only being human,’ Barney answered shyly. Then suddenly Antonia changed the subject.
‘Could we possibly have a quick word in private?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ Barney replied. They stepped into the still-unoccupied dining room.
‘Have you ever met his father?’ she whispered.
‘Not exactly, but you could say we’ve encountered one another. Why do you ask?’
‘Maurice is speaking in San Francisco next week. Frankly, I’m worried what might happen if the wretched man actually appears at the lecture.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ Barney agreed. ‘Why the hell did Maury agree to it?’
‘I suppose he needs to prove something to himself,’ she replied. ‘But I think it’s playing with fire. Don’t you?’
‘No,’ Barney replied. ‘I’d say it was more like playing Russian roulette – with five bullets in the gun.’
I’m not a human being.
This was the conclusion Barney reached as he lay on his bed later that evening after having watched Maurice Esterhazy, brilliant psychiatrist, loving husband, and father – in other words, a total mensch.
It was scarcely believable that the individual he saw tonight had once been so manic-depressive that he had needed electroshock treatment.
It made Barney realize yet again that what he had achieved – or not achieved – was so unsubstantial, superficial by comparison.
Yeah, he told himself, in Robert Frost’s words, I’ve got ‘miles to go before I sleep.’
Bennett had been working like a demon, as if to make up whatever ground he had lost while ‘benched,’ as he put it, because of injuries. To the residents with on-call duties on the weekends, he was a veritable Santa Claus – offering them a sleighful of free time. The extra assignments actually made him feel less tired, since he was repairing the damage to his confidence that had kept him awake all those nights he was recuperating.
On several of the more violent New Haven Saturdays, he even managed to perform emergency cardiac procedures – psyching himself up for next year’s big challenge.