"I'm a lawyer now, as most of you know," Andrews said after sipping at his glass, clearing his throat, and then sipping again. "I've had offices on Park Avenue for the last twenty-two years. But before that, I was a legal assistant in a firm of lawyers which did business in Washington, D.C. One night in July I was required to stay late in order to finish indexing case citations in a brief which hasn't anything at all to do with this story. But then a man came in--a man who was at that time one of the most widely known Senators on the Hill, a man who later almost became President. His shirt was matted with blood and his eyes were bulging from their sockets.
" 'I've got to talk to Joe,' he said. Joe, you understand, was Joseph Woods, the head of my firm, one of the most influential private-sector lawyers in Washington, and this Senator's close personal friend.
" 'He went home hours ago,' I said. I was terribly frightened, I can tell you--he looked like a man who had just walked away from a dreadful car accident, or perhaps from a knife-fight. And somehow seeing his face--which I had seen in newspaper photos and on Meet the Press--seeing it streaked with gore, one cheek twitching spasmodically below one wild eye... all of that made my fright worse. 'I can call him if you--' I was already fumbling with the phone, mad with eagerness to turn this unexpected responsibility over to someone else. Looking behind him, I could see the caked and bloody footprints he had left on the carpet.
" 'I've got to talk to Joe right now,' he reiterated as if he hadn't heard me. 'There's something in the trunk of my car ... something I found out at the Virginia place. I've shot it and stabbed it and I can't kill it. It's not human, and I can't kill it.'
"He began to giggle... and then to laugh... and finally to scream. And he was still screaming when I finally got Mr. Woods on the phone and told him to come, for God's sake, to come as fast as he could..."
It is not my purpose to tell Peter Andrews's story, either. As a matter of fact, I am not sure I would dare to tell it. Suf _ fice it to say that it was a tale so gruesome that I dreamed of it for weeks afterwards, and Ellen once looked at me over the breakfast table and asked me why I had suddenly cried out "His head! His head is still speaking in the earth!" in the middle of the night.
"I suppose it was a dream," I said. "One of those you can't remember afterwards."
But my eyes dropped immediately to my coffee cup, and I think that Ellen knew the lie that time.
One day in August of the following year, I was buzzed as I worked in the Reading Library. It was George Waterhouse. He asked me if I could step up to his office. When I got there I saw that Robert Carden was also there, and Henry Effingham. For one moment I was positive I was about to be accused of some really dreadful act of stupidity or ineptitude.
Then Carden stepped around to me and said: "George believes the time has come to make you a junior partner, David. The rest of us agree."
"It's going to be a little bit like being the world's oldest Jay-Cee," Effingham said with a grin, "but it's the channel you have to go through, David. With any luck, we can make you a full partner by Christmas."
There were no bad dreams that night. Ellen and I went out to dinner, drank too much, went on to a jazz place where we hadn't been in nearly six years, and listened to that amazing blue-eyed black man, Dexter Gordon, blow his horn until almost two in the morning. We woke up the next morning with fluttery stomachs and achy heads, both of us still unable to completely believe what had happened. One of them was that my salary had just climbed by eight thousand dollars a year long after our expectations of such a staggering income jump had fallen by the wayside.
The firm sent me to Copenhagen for six weeks that fall, and I returned to discover that John Hanrahan, one of the regular attendees at 249B, had died of cancer. A collection was taken up for his wife, who had been left in unpleasant circumstances. I was pressed into service to total the amount--which was given entirely in cash--and convert it to a cashier's check. It came to more than ten thousand dollars. I turned the check over to Stevens and I suppose he mailed it.
It just so happened that Arlene Hanrahan was a member of Ellen's Theater Society, and Ellen told me sometime later that Arlene had received an anonymous check for ten thousand four hundred dollars. Written on the check stub was the brief and unilluminating message: Friends of your late husband John
"Isn't that the most amazing thing you ever heard in your life?" Ellen asked me.
"No," I said, "but it's right up there in the top ten. Are there any more strawberries, Ellen?"
The years went by. I discovered a warren of rooms upstairs at 249B--a writing room, a bedroom where guests sometimes stayed overnight (although, after that slithery bump I had heard--or imagined I had heard--I believe I personally would rather have registered at a good hotel), a small but well-equipped gymnasium, and a sauna bath. There was also a long, narrow room which ran the length of the building and contained two bowling alleys.
In those same years I re-read the novels of Edward Gray Seville, and discovered an absolutely stunning poet--the equal of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, perhaps--named Norbert Rosen. According to the back flap on one of the three volumes of his work in the stacks, he had been born in 1924 and killed at Anzio. All three volumes of his work had been published by Stedham & Son, New York and Boston.
I remember going back to the New York Public Library on a bright spring afternoon during one of those years (of which year I am no longer sure) and requesting twenty years' worth of Literary Market Place. The LMP is an annual publication the size of a large city's Yellow Pages, and the reference room librarian was quite put out with me, I'm afraid. But I persisted, and went through each volume carefully. And although LMP is supposed to list every publisher, great and small, in the United States (in addition to agents, editors, and book club staffs), I found no listing for Stedham & Son. A year later--or perhaps it was two years later--I fell into conversation with an antiquarian book-dealer and asked him about the imprint. He said he had never heard of it.
I thought of asking Stevens--saw that warning light in his eyes--and dropped the question unasked.
And, over those years, there were stories.
Tales, to use Stevens's word. Funny tales, tales of love found and love lost, tales of unease. Yes, and even a few war stories, although none of the sort Ellen had likely been thinking of when she made the suggestion.
I remember Gerard Tozeman's story the most clearly--the tale of an American base of operations which took a direct hit from German artillery four months before the end of World War I, killing everyone present except for Tozeman himself.
Lathrop Carruthers, the American general who everyone had by then decided must be utterly insane (he had been responsible for better than eighteen thousand casualties by then--lives and limbs spent as casually as you or I might spend a quarter in a jukebox), was standing at a map of the front lines when the shell struck. He had been explaining yet another mad flanking operation at the moment--an operation which would have succeeded only on the level of all the others Carruthers had hatched: it would be wonderfully successful at making new widows.
And when the dust cleared, Gerard Tozeman, dazed and deaf, bleeding from his nose, his ears, and the comers of both eyes, his testicles already swelling from the force of the concussion, had come upon Carruthers's body while looking for a way out of the abbatoir that had been the staff HQ only minutes before. He looked at the general's body ... and then began to scream and laugh. The sounds went unheard by his own shellshocked ears, but they served to notify the medicos that someone was still alive in that strew of matchwood.
Carruthers had not been mutilated by the blast... at least, Tozeman said, it hadn't been what the soldiers of that long-ago war had come to think of as mutilation--men whose arms had been blown off, men with no feet, no eyes; men whose lungs had been shrivelled by gas. No, he said, it was nothing like that. The man's mother would have known him at once. But the map ...
... the map before which Carruthers had been standing with his butcher's
pointer when the shell struck ...
It had somehow been driven into his face. Tozeman had found himself staring into a hideous tattooed deathmask. Here was the stony shore of Brittany on the bony ridge of Lathrop Carruthers's brow. Here was the Rhine flowing like a blue scar down his left cheek. Here were some of the finest wine-growing provinces in the world bumped and ridged over his chin. Here was the Saar drawn around his throat like a hang-man's noose ... and printed across one bulging eyeball was the word VERSAILLES.
That was our Christmas story in the year 197-.
I remember many others, but they do not belong here. Properly speaking, Tozeman's doesn't, either ... but it was the first "Christmas tale" I heard at 249B, and I could not resist telling it. And then, on the Thursday after Thanksgiving of this year, when Stevens clapped his hands together for attention and asked who would favor us with a Christmas tale, Emlyn McCarron growled: "I suppose I've got something that bears telling. Tell it now or tell it never, God'll shut me up for good soon enough."
In the years I had been coming to 249B, I had never heard McCarron tell a story. And perhaps that's why I called the taxi so early, and why, when Stevens passed out eggnog to the six of us who had ventured out on that bellowing, frigid night, I felt so keenly excited. Nor was I the only one; I saw that same excitement on a good many other faces.
McCarron, old and dry and leathery, sat in the huge chair by the fire with the packet of powder in his gnarled hands. He tossed it in, and we watched the flames shift colors madly before returning to yellow again. Stevens passed among us with brandy, and we passed him his Christmas honorariums. Once, during that yearly ceremony, I had heard the clink of change passing from the hand of the giver to the hand of the receiver; on another occasion, I had seen a one-thousand-dollar bill for a moment in the firelight. On both occasions the murmur of Stevens's voice had been exactly the same: low, considerate, and entirely correct. Ten years, more or less, had passed since I had first come to 249B with George Waterhouse, and while much had changed in the world outside, nothing had changed in here, and Stevens seemed not to have aged a month, or even a single day.
He moved back into the shadows, and for a moment there was a silence so perfect that we could hear the faint whistle of boiling sap escaping from the burning logs on the hearth. Emlyn McCarron was looking into the fire and we all followed his gaze. The flames seemed particularly wild that night. I felt almost hypnotized by the sight of the fire--as, I suppose, the cavemen who birthed us were once hypnotized by it as the wind walked and talked outside their cold northern caves.
At last, still looking into the fire, bent slightly forward so that his forearms rested on his thighs and his clasped hands hung in a knot between his knees, McCarron began to speak.
II
The Breathing Method
I am nearly eighty now, which means that I was born with the century. All my life I have been associated with a building which stands almost directly across from Madison Square Garden; this building, which looks like a great gray prison--something out of A Tale of Two Cities-is actually a hospital, as most of you know. It is Harriet White Memorial Hospital. The Harriet White after whom it was named was my father's first wife, and she got her practical experience in nursing when there were still actual sheep grazing on Sheep Meadow in Central Park. A statue of the lady herself stands on a pedestal in the courtyard before the building, and if any of you have seen it, you may have wondered how a woman with such a stem and uncompromising face could have found such a gentle occupation. The motto chiselled into the statue's base, once you get rid of the Latin folderol, is even less comforting: There is no comfort without pain; thus we define salvation through suffering. Cato, if you please... or if you don't please!
I was born inside that gray stone building on March 20th 1900. I returned there as an intern in the year 1926. Twenty-six is old to be just starting out in the world of medicine, but I had done a more practical internship in France, at the end of World War I, trying to pack ruptured guts back into stomachs that had been blown wide open, and dealing on the black market for morphine, which was often tinctured and sometimes dangerous.
As with the generation of physicians following World War II, we were a bedrock-practical lot of sawbones, and the records of the major medical schools show a remarkably small number of washouts in the years 1919 to 1928. We were older, more experienced, steadier. Were we also wiser? I don't know... but we were certainly more cynical. There was none of this nonsense you read about in the popular medical novels, stuff about fainting or vomiting at one's first autopsy. Not after Belleau Wood, where mamma rats sometimes raised whole litters of ratlings in the gas-exploded intestines of the soldiers left to rot in no man's land. We had gotten all our puking and passing out behind us.
The Harriet White Memorial Hospital also figured largely in something that happened to me nine years after I had interned there--and this is the story I want to tell you gentlemen tonight. It is not a tale to be told at Christmas, you would say (although its final scene was played out on Christmas Eve), and yet, while it is certainly horrible, it also seems to express to me all the amazing power of our cursed, doomed species. In it I see the wonder of our will... and also its horrible, tenebrous power.
Birth itself, gentlemen, is a horrid thing to many; it is the fashion now that fathers should be present at the birth of their children, and while this fashion has served to inflict many men with a guilt which I feel they may not deserve (it is a guilt which some women use knowingly and with an almost prescient cruelty), it seems by and large to be a healthful, salubrious thing. Yet I have seen men leave the delivery room white and tottering and I have seen them swoon like girls, overcome by the cries and the blood. I remember one father who held up just fine... only to begin screaming hysterically as his perfectly healthy son pushed its way into the world. The infant's eyes were open, it gave the impression of looking around... and then its eyes settled on the father.
Birth is wonderful, gentlemen, but I have never found it beautiful--not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe it is too brutal to be beautiful. A woman's womb is like an engine. With conception, that engine is turned on. At first it barely idles... but as the creative cycle nears the climax of birth, that engine revs up and up and up. Its idling whisper becomes a steady running hum, and then a rumble, and finally a bellowing, frightening roar. Once that engine has been turned on, every mother-to-be understands that her life is in check. Either she will bring the baby forth and the engine will shut down again, or that engine will pound louder and harder and faster until it explodes, killing her in blood and pain.
This is a story of birth, gentlemen, on the eve of that birth we have celebrated for almost two thousand years.
I began practicing medicine in 1929--a bad year to begin anything. My grandfather was able to lend me a small sum of money, so I was luckier than many of my colleagues, but I still had to survive over the next four years mostly on my wits.
By 1935, things had improved a bit. I had developed a bedrock of steady patients and was getting quite a few outpatient referrals from White Memorial. In April of that year I saw a new patient, a young woman whom I will call Sandra Stansfield--that name is close enough to what her name really was. This was a young woman, white, who stated her age to be twenty-eight. After examining her, I guessed her true age to be between three and five years younger than that. She was blonde, slender, and tall for that time--about five feet eight inches. She was quite beautiful, but in an austere way that was almost forbidding. Her features were clear and regular, her eyes intelligent... and her mouth every bit as determined as the stone mouth of Harriet White on the statue across from Madison Square Garden. The name she put on her form was not Sandra Stansfield but Jane Smith. My examination subsequently showed her to be about two months gone in pregnancy. She wore no wedding ring.
After the preliminary exam--but before the results of the pregnancy test were in--my nurse, Ella Davidson, said: "That girl yesterday? Jane Smith? If that i
sn't an assumed name, I never heard one."
I agreed. Still, I rather admired her. She had not engaged in the usual shilly-shallying, toe-scuffing, blushing, tearful behavior. She had been straightforward and businesslike. Even her alias had seemed more a matter of business than of shame. There had been no attempt to provide verisimilitude by creating a "Betty Rucklehouse" or whomping up a "Ternina DeVille." You require a name for your form, she seemed to be saying, because that is the law. So here is a name; but rather than trusting to the professional ethics of a man I don't know, I'll trust in myself. If you don't mind.
Ella sniffed and passed a few remarks--"modern girls" and "bold as brass"--but she was a good woman, and I don't think she said those things except for the sake of form. She knew as well as I did that, whatever my new patient might be, she was no little trollop with hard eyes and round heels. No; "Jane Smith" was merely an extremely serious, extremely determined young woman--if either of those things can be described by such a Milquetoast adverb as "merely." It was an unpleasant situation (it used to be called "getting in a scrape," as you gentlemen may remember; nowadays it seems that many young women use a scrape to get out of the scrape), and she meant to go through it with whatever grace and dignity she could manage.
A week after her initial appointment, she came in again. That was a peach of a day--one of the first real days of spring. The air was mild, the sky a soft, milky shade of blue, and there was a smell on the breeze--a warm, indefinable smell that seems to be nature's signal that she is entering her own birth cycle again. The sort of day one wishes to be miles from any responsibility, sitting opposite a lovely woman of one's own--at Coney Island, maybe, or on the Palisades across from the Hudson with a picnic hamper on a checkered cloth and the lady in question wearing a great white cartwheel hat and a sleeveless gown as pretty as the day.
"Jane Smith's" dress had sleeves, but it was still almost as pretty as the day; a smart white linen with brown edging. She wore brown pumps, white gloves, and a cloche hat that was slightly out of fashion--it was the first sign I saw that she was a far from rich woman.