But I went on to town, to the Little Napoleon tavern where I greeted Leroy Ledbetter, the owner, and other old friends, sipped a few toddies and soon felt better. From the Little Napoleon I telephoned an acquaintance, Dr. Yamaiuchi of Osaka Instruments, with whom I had been in correspondence and who had my specifications, and placed an order for one hundred lapsometers, certified check to follow upon his estimate. The pay phone in the Little Napoleon cost me $47.65 in quarters and nickels.
Leroy and my pals did not find the call remarkable and fed me coins: old Doc is making a call to Japan, scientific medical business, etcetera, keep the money coming, fix him a drink.
Max and Colley, just back from birding, are sitting in the chief resident’s office. Max has donned his white clinical coat but hasn’t changed his boots. Colley, still wearing bush jacket and bermuda shorts, lounges in a tattered aluminum chaise, puffing a briar that sends out wreaths of maple-sugar smoke.
Max is glad to see me, Colley is not Colley is a super-Negro, a regular black Leonardo. He is chief encephalographer, electronic wizard, ornithologist, holds the Black Belt in karate, does the crossword in the Sunday Times. A native of Dothan, Alabama, he is a graduate of Amherst and N.Y.U. medical school So he lounges around like an Amherst man, cocking a quizzical eyebrow and sending out wreaths of maple-sugar smoke, or else he humps off down the hall like a Brooklyn interne, eyes rolled up in his eyebrows, shoes pigeoning in and going squee-gee on the asphalt tile. Yet if he gets excited enough or angry enough, the old Alabama hambone shows through. His voice will hit up into falsetto and he might even say aksed instead of asked.
When I was in the open ward and working on staff, he was very good to me. He immediately saw what I was getting at and helped me wire up my first lapsometer, read my article and refused to take credit as coauthor. “Too metaphysical for me,” he said politely, knocking out his briar. “I’ll stick to old-fashioned tumors and hemorrhages”—and off he went humping it down the hall squee-gee.
But we were always wary of each other. Our eyes never quite met. It was as if there was something between us, a shared secret, an unmentionable common past, an unacknowledged kinship. We were somehow onto each other. He recognized my Southern trick of using manners and even madness guilefully and for one’s own ends. I was onto his trick of covering up Alabama hambone with brave old Amherst and humping it like a Brooklyn interne. What is more, he knew that I knew and I knew that he knew. We were like two Jews who have changed their names.
Max sits behind his desk in his perfectly fitted white coat, erect as a young prince, light glancing from the planes of his forehead. But when he rises, like Toulouse-Lautrec he doesn’t rise much.
Colley drums his fingers on his pith helmet in his lap, Jungle Jim after the safari.
“Well well,” says Max with pure affection, an affection without irony. He loves me because he saved my life. “The prodigal has returned.”
“Prodigal or prodigy?” asks Colley quizzically-Amherstly.
We’re all three prodigies. Max is a prodigy. His performance on grand rounds is famous. There he stands at the foot of my bed in the ward, the small erect young prince, flanked by a semicircle of professors, psychiatrists, behaviorists, love counselors, reminding me of the young Jesus confounding his elders.
He saved me twice. Once the night before by suturing my arteries. The next morning by naming my terror, giving it habitation, standing at the foot of my bed, knowing the worst of me, then naming it with ordinary words, English common nouns, smiling and moving on.
A bad night it had been, my wrists bandaged and lashed to the rails, crucified, I by turns exalted, depressed, terrified, lustful. Miss Oglethorpe, a handsome strapping nurse (she’s now my nurse) came on at eleven and asked me what I wanted. “I want you, Miss Oglethorpe. You are so beautiful and I need you and love you. Will you lie here with me?” Since she was and I did, was beautiful and I did love and need her, and she being a woman knew the truth when she heard it, she almost did. She almost did! But of course she didn’t and instead made a horrid nurse-joke about how I couldn’t be so bad off what with chasing the nurses etcetera, but what a good nurse!
Later, lust gave way to sorrow and I prayed, arms stretched out like a Mexican, tears streaming down my face. Dear God, I can see it now, why can’t I see it other times, that it is you I love in the beauty of the world and in all the lovely girls and dear good friends, and it is pilgrims we are, wayfarers on a journey, and not pigs, nor angels. Why can I not be merry and loving like my ancestor, a gentle pure-hearted knight for our Lady and our blessed Lord and Savior? Pray for me, Sir Thomas More.
Etcetera etcetera. A regular Walpurgis night of witches, devils, pitchforks, thorns in the flesh, unkneed girl-thighs. Followed by contrition and clear sight. Followed, of course, by old friend morning terror.
There stood Max at the foot of my bed flanked by my former colleagues, the ten o’clock sunlight glancing from the planes of his forehead and striking sparks from the silver of his reflex hammer and tuning fork in his breast pocket, Max smiling and spreading the skirts of his immaculate white coat and saying only, “Dr. More is having some troublesome mood swings — don’t we all — but he’s got excellent insight, so we hope we can enlist his services as soon as he’ll let us, right, Tom?” And all at once it, the terror, had a habitation and name — I was having “mood swings,” right, that’s what they were — and the doctors nodded and smiled and moved to the next bed. And suddenly the morning sunlight became just what it was, the fresh lovely light of morning. The terror was gone.
That, sirs, is love.
In a week, I got up cheerfully and went about my business. Another week and, lying in my bed, I became prescient and clairvoyant, orbiting the earth like an angel and inducing instant angelic hypotheses. Another week and I had made my breakthrough.
“The prodigal returns,” says Max, smiling his candid unironic smile (Max, who is from Pittsburgh, doesn’t know all the dark things Colley and I know, so is not ironic). “This time to stay, I hope.”
“No,” I say quickly, taking a tiny shaft of fright. For I’ve just remembered that legally I’m still committed and that they could, if they wished, detain me.
“Yeah, very nice,” says Colley, shaking hands without enthusiasm. He appears to knock out two pipes at the same time. The smoke has leveled out in a layer like leaf smoke in Vermont.
“What can we do for you, Tom?” asks Max, his princely head shedding light.
“I’ve a favor to ask.”
“Ask it.”
For some reason I frown and fall silent.
“I thought you’d come by to prepare for The Pit,” says Max.
“The Pit?”
“Sure, Tom,” says Colley, cheering up at my confusion. “You’re down for Monday. This is the last go-round of the year for the students, you know, the annual Donnybrook.”
Max hastens to reassure me. “You’ve got quite a following among the students, Tom. You’re the new matador, Manolete taking on Belmonte.”
Buddy Brown, my enemy, must be Belmonte. O God, I had forgotten. The Pit is a seriocomic clinic, an end-of-year hijinks put on by the doctors for the students. Doctors, you may know, have a somewhat retarded sense of humor. In medical school we dropped fingers and ears from cadavers on pedestrians. Older doctors write doggerel and satirical verse. When I was a young man, every conservative proctologist in town had a cartoon in his office showing a jackass kicking up his heels and farting a smoke ring: “LBJ has spoken!”