Beginners

  “Herb, for God’s sake,” Terri said. “This is depressing stuff. This could get very depressing. Even if you think it’s true,” she said, “it’s still depressing.” She reached out to him and took hold of his forearm near the wrist. “Are you getting drunk, Herb? Honey, are you drunk?”

  “Honey, I’m just talking, all right,” Herb said. “I don’t have to be drunk to say what’s on my mind, do I? I’m not drunk. We’re just talking, right?” Herb said. Then his voice changed. “But if I want to get drunk I will, goddamn it. I can do anything I want today.” He fixed his eyes on her.

  “Honey, I’m not criticizing,” she said. She picked up her glass.

  “I’m not on call today,” Herb said. “I can do anything I want today. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  “Herb, we love you,” Laura said.

  Herb looked at Laura. It was as if he couldn’t place her for a minute. She kept looking at him, holding her smile. Her cheeks were flushed and the sun was hitting her in the eyes, so she squinted to see him. His features relaxed. “Love you too, Laura. And you, Nick. I’ll tell you, you’re our pals,” Herb said. He picked up his glass. “Well, what was I saying? Yeah. I wanted to tell you about something that happened a while back. I think I wanted to prove a point, and I will if I can just tell this thing the way it happened. This happened a few months ago, but it’s still going on right now. You might say that, yeah. But it ought to make us all feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we were talking about, when we talk about love.”

  “Herb, come on now,” Terri said. “You are too drunk. Don’t talk like this. Don’t talk like you’re drunk if you’re not drunk.”

  “Just shut up for a minute, will you?” Herb said. “Let me tell this. It’s been on my mind. Just shut up for a minute. I told you a little about it when it first happened. That old couple who got into an accident out on the interstate? A kid hit them and they were all battered up and not given much chance to pull through. Let me tell this, Terri. Now just shut up for a minute. Okay?”

  Terri looked at us and then looked back at Herb. She seemed anxious, that’s the only word for it. Herb handed the bottle around the table.

  “Surprise me, Herb,” Terri said. “Surprise me beyond all thought and reason.”

  “Maybe I will,” Herb said. “Maybe so. I’m constantly surprised with things myself. Everything in my life surprises me.” He stared at her for a minute. Then he began talking.

  “I was on call that night. It was in May or June. Terri and I had just sat down to dinner, when the hospital called. There’d been an accident out on the interstate. A drunk kid, a teenager, had plowed his dad’s pickup into a camper with this old couple in it. They were up in their mid-seventies. The kid, he was eighteen or nineteen, he was DOA when they brought him in. He’d taken the steering wheel through his sternum and must have died instantly. But the old couple, they were still alive, but just barely. They had multiple fractures and contusions, lacerations, the works, and they each had themselves a concussion. They were in a bad way, believe me. And, of course, their age was against them. She was even a little worse off than he was. She had a ruptured spleen and along with everything else, both kneecaps were broken. But they’d been wearing their seatbelts and, God knows, that’s the only thing that saved them.”

  “Folks, this is an advertisement for the National Safety Council,” Terri said. “This is your spokesman, Doctor Herb McGinnis, talking. Listen up now,” Terri said and laughed, then lowered her voice. “Herb, you’re just too much sometimes. I love you, honey.”

  We all laughed. Herb laughed too. “Honey, I love you. But you know that, don’t you?” He leaned across the table, Terri met him halfway, and they kissed. “Terri’s right, everybody,” Herb said as he settled himself again. “Buckle up for safety. Listen to what Doctor Herb is telling you. But seriously, they were in bum shape, those old people. By the time I got down there the intern and nurses were already at work on them. The kid was dead, as I said. He was off in a corner, laid out on a gurney. Someone had already notified the next of kin, and the funeral home people were on the way. I took one look at the old couple and told the ER nurse to get me a neurologist and an orthopedic man down there right away. I’ll try and make a long story short. The other fellows showed up, and we took the old couple up to the operating room and worked on them most of the night. They must have had incredible reserves, those old people, you see that once in a while. We did everything that could be done, and toward morning we were giving them a fifty-fifty chance, maybe less than that, maybe thirty-seventy for the wife. Anna Gates was her name, and she was quite a woman. But they were still alive the next morning, and we moved them into the ICU where we could monitor every breath and keep a twenty-four-hour watch on them. They were in intensive care for nearly two weeks, she a little longer, before their condition improved enough so we could transfer them out and down the hall to their own rooms.”

  Herb stopped talking. “Here,” he said, “let’s drink this gin. Let’s drink it up. Then we’re going to dinner, right? Terri and I know a place. It’s new place. That’s where we’ll go, this new place we know about. We’ll go when we finish this gin.”

  “It’s called The Library,” Terri said. “You haven’t eaten there yet, have you?” she said, and Laura and I shook our heads. “It’s some place. They say it’s part of a new chain, but it’s not like a chain, if you know what I mean. They actually have bookshelves in there with real books on them. You can browse around after dinner and take a book out and bring it back the next time you come to eat. You won’t believe the food. And Herb’s reading Ivanhoe! He took it out when we were there last week. He just signed a card. Like in a real library.”

  “I like Ivanhoe,” Herb said. “Ivanhoe’s great. If I had it to do over again, I’d study literature. Right now I’m having an identity crisis. Right, Terri?” Herb said. He laughed. He twirled the ice in his glass. “I’ve been having an identity crisis for years. Terri knows. Terri can tell you. But let me say this. If I could come back again in a different life, a different time and all, you know what? I’d like to come back as a knight. You were pretty safe wearing all that armor. It was all right being a knight until gunpowder and muskets and twenty-two pistols came along.”

  “Herb would like to ride a white horse and carry a lance,” Terri said and laughed.

  “Carry a woman’s garter with you everywhere,” Laura said.

  “Or just a woman,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Herb said. “There you go. You know what’s what, don’t you Nick?” he said. “Also, you’d carry around their perfumed hankies with you wherever you rode. Did they have perfumed hankies in those days? It doesn’t matter. Some little forget-me-not. A token, that’s what I’m trying to say. You needed some token to carry around with you in those days. Anyway, whatever, it was better in those days being a knight than a serf,” Herb said.

  “It’s always better,” Laura said.

  “The serfs didn’t have it so good in those days,” Terri said.

  “The serfs have never had it good,” Herb said. “But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn’t that the way it worked in those days? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone else. Isn’t that right? Terri? But what I liked about knights, besides their ladies, was that they had that suit of armor, you know, and they couldn’t get hurt very easy. No cars in those days, man. No drunk teenagers to run over you.”

  “Vassals,” I said.

  “What?” Herb said.

  “Vassals,” I said. “They were called vassals, Doc, not vessels.”

  “Vassals,” Herb said. “Vassals, vessels, ventricles, vas deferens. Well, you knew what I meant anyway. You’re all better educated in these matters than I am,” Herb said. “I’m not educated. I learned my stuff. I’m a heart surgeon, sure, but really I’m just a mechanic. I just go in and fix things that go wrong with the body. I’m just a mechanic.”

  “Modesty somehow doesn’t becom
e you, Herb,” Laura said, and Herb grinned at her.

  “He’s just a humble doctor, folks,” I said. “But sometimes they suffocated in all that armor, Herb. They’d even have heart attacks if it got too hot and they were too tired and worn out. I read somewhere that they’d fall off their horses and not be able to get up because they were too tired to stand with all that armor on them. They got trampled by their own horses sometimes.”

  “That’s terrible,” Herb said. “That’s a terrible image, Nicky. I guess they’d just lay there then and wait until someone, the enemy, came along and made a shish kabob out of them.”

  “Some other vassal,” Terri said.

  “That’s right, some other vassal,” Herb said. “There you have it. Some other vassal would come along and spear his fellow knight in the name of love. Or whatever it was they fought over in those days. Same things we fight over these days, I guess,” Herb said.

  “Politics,” Laura said. “Nothing’s changed.” The color was still in Laura’s cheeks. Her eyes were bright. She brought her glass to her lips.

  Herb poured himself another drink. He looked at the label closely as if studying the little figures of the beefeater guards. Then he slowly put the bottle down on the table and reached for the tonic water.

  “What about this old couple, Herb?” Laura said. “You didn’t finish that story you started.” Laura was having a hard time lighting her cigarette. Her matches kept going out. The light inside the room was different now, changing, getting weaker. The leaves outside the window were still shimmering, and I stared at the fuzzy pattern they made on the pane and the Formica counter under it. There was no sound except for Laura striking her matches.

  “What about that old couple?” I said after a minute. “The last we heard they were just getting out of intensive care.”

  “Older but wiser,” Terri said.

  Herb stared at her.

  “Herb, don’t give me that kind of look,” Terri said. “Go on with your story. I was only kidding. Then what happened? We all want to know.”

  “Terri, sometimes,” Herb said.

  “Please, Herb,” she said. “Honey, don’t always be so serious. Please go on with the story. I was joking, for God’s sake. Can’t you take a joke?”

  “This is nothing to joke about,” Herb said. He held his glass and gazed steadily at her.

  “What happened then, Herb?” Laura said. “We really want to know.”

  Herb fixed his eyes on Laura. Then he broke off and grinned. “Laura, if I didn’t have Terri and love her so much, and Nick wasn’t my friend, I’d fall in love with you. I’d carry you off.”

  “Herb, you shit,” Terri said. “Tell your story. If I weren’t in love with you, I damn sure well wouldn’t be here in the first place, you can bet on it. Honey, what do you say? Finish your story. Then we’ll go to The Library. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Herb said. “Where was I? Where am I? That’s a better question. Maybe I should ask that.” He waited a minute, and then began to talk.

  “When they were finally out of the woods we were able to move them out of intensive care, after we could see they were going to make it. I dropped in to see each of them every day, sometimes twice a day if I was up doing other calls anyway. They were both in casts and bandages, head to foot. You know, you’ve seen it in the movies even if you haven’t seen the real thing. But they were bandaged head to foot, man, and I mean head to foot. That’s just the way they looked, just like those phony actors in the movies after some big disaster. But this was the real thing. Their heads were bandaged—they just had eye holes and a place for their mouths and noses. Anna Gates had to have her legs elevated too. She was worse off than he was, I told you that. Both of them were on intravenous and glucose for a time. Well, Henry Gates was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through and recover, he was still very depressed. Not just about the accident itself, though of course that had gotten to him as those things will. There you are one minute, you know, everything just dandy, then blam, you’re staring into the abyss. You come back. It’s like a miracle. But it’s left its mark on you. It does that. One day I was sitting in a chair beside his bed and he described to me, talking slowly, talking through his mouth hole so sometimes I had to get up to his face to hear him, telling me what it looked like to him, what it felt like, when that kid’s car crossed the center line onto his side of the road and kept coming. He said he knew it was all up for them, that was the last look of anything he’d have on this earth. This was it. But he said nothing flew into his mind, his life didn’t pass before his eyes, nothing like that. He said he just felt sorry to not be able to see any more of his Anna, because they’d had this fine life together. That was his only regret. He looked straight ahead, just gripped the wheel and watched the kid’s car coming at them. And there was nothing he could do except say, ‘Anna! Hold on, Anna!’ ”

  “It gives me the shivers,” Laura said. “Brrrr,” she said, shaking her head.

  Herb nodded. He went on talking, caught up in it now. “I’d sit a while every day beside the bed. He’d lay there in his bandages staring out the window at the foot of his bed. The window was too high for him to see anything except the tops of trees. That’s all he saw for hours at a stretch. He couldn’t turn his head without assistance, and he was only allowed to do that twice a day. Each morning for a few minutes and every evening, he was allowed to turn his head. But during our visits he had to look at the window when he talked. I’d talk a little, ask a few questions, but mostly I’d listen. He was very depressed. What was most depressing to him, after he was assured his wife was going to be all right, that she was recovering to everyone’s satisfaction, what was most depressing was the fact they couldn’t be physically together. That he couldn’t see her and be with her every day. He told me they’d married in 1927 and since that time they’d only been apart from each other for any time on two occasions. Even when their children were born, they were born there on the ranch and Henry and the missus still saw each other every day and talked and were together around the place. But he said they’d only been away from each other for any real time on two occasions—once when her mother died in 1940 and Anna had to take a train to St. Louis to settle matters there. And again in 1952 when her sister died in Los Angeles, and she had to go down there to claim the body. I should tell you they had a little ranch seventy-five miles or so outside of Bend, Oregon, and that’s where they’d lived most of their lives. They’d sold the ranch and moved into the city of Bend just a few years ago. When this accident happened, they were on their way down from Denver, where they’d gone to see his sister. They were going on to visit a son and some of their grandchildren in El Paso. But in all of their married life they’d only been apart from each other for any length of time on just those two occasions. Imagine that. But, Jesus, he was lonely for her. I’m telling you he pined for her. I never knew what that word meant before, pined, until I saw it happening to this man. He missed her something fierce. He just longed for her company, that old man did. Of course he felt better, he’d brighten, when I’d give him my daily report on Anna’s progress—that she was mending, that she was going to be fine, just a question of a little more time. He was out of his casts and bandages now, but he was still extremely lonely. I told him that just as soon as he was able, maybe in a week, I’d put him into a wheelchair and take him visiting, take him down the corridor to see his wife. Meanwhile, I called on him and we’d talk. He told me a little about their lives out there on the ranch in the late 1920s and during the early thirties.” He looked around the table at us and shook his head at what he was going to say, or just maybe at the impossibility of all this. “He told me that in the winter it would do nothing but snow and for maybe months at a time they couldn’t leave the ranch, the road would be closed. Besides, he had to feed cattle every day through those winter months. They would just be there together, the two of them, him and his wife. The kids hadn’t come along yet. Th
ey’d come along later. But month in, month out, they’d be there together, the two of them, the same routine, the same everything, never anyone else to talk to or to visit with during those winter months. But they had each other. That’s all and everything they had, each other. ‘What would you do for entertainment?’ I asked him. I was serious. I wanted to know. I didn’t see how people could live like that. I don’t think anyone can live like that these days. You think so? It seems impossible to me. You know what he said? Do you want to know what he answered? He lay there and considered the question. He took some time. Then he said, ‘We’d go to the dances every night.’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Pardon me, Henry,’ I said and leaned closer, thinking I hadn’t heard right. ‘We’d go to the dances every night,’ he said again. I wondered what he meant. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I waited for him to go on. He thought back to that time again, and in a little while he said, ‘We had a Victrola and some records, Doctor. We’d play the Victrola every night and listen to the records and dance there in the living room. We’d do that every night. Sometimes it’d be snowing outside and the temperature down below zero. The temperature really drops on you up there in January or February. But we’d listen to the records and dance in our stocking feet in the living room until we’d gone through all the records. And then I’d build up the fire and turn out the lights, all but one, and we’d go to bed. Some nights it’d be snowing, and it’d be so still outside you could hear the snow falling. It’s true, Doc,’ he said, ‘you can do that. Sometimes you can hear the snow falling. If you’re quiet and your mind is clear and you’re at peace with yourself and all things, you can lay in the dark and hear it snow. You try it sometimes,’ he said. ‘You get snow down here once in a while, don’t you? You try it sometimes. Anyway, we’d go to the dances every night. And then we’d go to bed under a lot of quilts and sleep warm until morning. When you woke up you could see your breath,’ he said.