"You and Nikki are safe with this giant German corporation. It's like bourgeois royalty. I wonder, did they use slave labor during the war?"
Because his arms were wasted, Ravelstein's hands looked unnaturally big as he lit one of the cigarettes Rosamund had brought him. Then as he put it down in the ashtray and waved away the smoke, I was aware that someone had entered the room.
It was Dr. Schley-Ravelstein's cardiologist. He was my cardiologist too. Dr. Schley was short and slight, but his slightness was not a sign of weakness. He was stern. He was backed by his seniority in the hospital-its chief heart-man. He didn't say much. He didn't have to.
"Do you realize, Mr. Ravelstein, that you're just out of intensive care? Only hours ago you weren't even able to breathe. And now you're pulling smoke into your weak lungs. This is most serious," Schley said, with a cold side-glance at me. I should not have allowed Ravelstein to light up.
Dr. Schley, too, was entirely bald, white coated, and his stethoscope, sticking out of his pocket, was gripped like a slingshot by his angry hand.
Ravelstein didn't answer. He declined to be intimidated-but he wasn't yet strong enough to fight back. On the whole he cared little for doctors. Doctors were the allies of the death-dreading bourgeoisie. He was not about to change his habits for any doctor, not even for Schley, whom he respected. As Rosamund understood when she went to buy the cigarettes, Abe would do what he had al ways done. He'd never play the valetudinarian.
"I ask you, Mr. Ravelstein, to give up your cigarettes until your lungs are stronger."
Ravelstein answered nothing, he only nodded his head. But not in agreement. He wasn't even looking at Dr. Schley-he looked past him. Schley wasn't his primary physician. The primary was Dr. Abern. But of course Schley was part of the team; more than that, he was one of its leaders. As for me, Schley liked me well enough-in my place. You would never hear Dr. Schley say as much, but if you were any good at mental sonics you got the message soon enough. Ravelstein was a major figure in the highest intellectual circles. It wouldn't be too much to say that Ravelstein was genuinely important. By contrast I was good enough, of my sort. But it was a far from important sort.
Generally Schley talked to me about keeping up the quinine level in my system to control my heartbeat. I was subject to fibrillations and sometimes short of breath. The big doses of Quinaglute he prescribed deafened you, I was to discover down the line. Anyway my minor cardiac complaint was virtually all that connected me to Schley. Ravelstein, on the other hand, fascinated him. He saw Ravel-stein as a great fighter in the cultural and ideological wars. After Abe had given his sensational Harvard speech, telling the audience that they were elitists disguised as egalitarians-"Well!" Dr. Schley said to me. "Who else had the learning, the confidence, the authority to do this! And so easily, so naturally!"
As for Ravelstein, he would never simply have a doctor. He had to know what to think about everyone with whom he had to do. He had a relentless curiosity not only about the students he attracted but also tradespeople or high-fidelity engineers or dentists or investment counselors, barbers and, of course, physicians.
"Schley is the boss doctor here," he said. "The single most influential one. He's the one who makes policy. He polices all the departments and refers patients to his own people-just as he's done for me. But then there's his domestic life…"
"I never thought about his home life."
"Have you ever met his wife?"
"Never."
"Well, by all reports it's a women's kingdom over there. The wife and daughters are absolutely in control. His real life is here in the clinics and labs."
"Is that so? It's often the case with strict people…"
"Like yourself, Chick. You ought to know, you've plenty of experience in that line." I said, "One more case of the son of man having no place to lay his head."
"Well, don't go feeling sorry. You set it up yourself, all of it. Nothing to complain about," said Ravelstein. I couldn't dispute this. All I could say was that the doctor had no friend, no Ravelstein, to set him straight. "Poor Schley becomes more and more medically correct," Ravel stein went on. "His wife is a toughie, and then there are the two unmarried daughters. Activists, all three of them, busy with causes like feminism, environmentalism. So the doctor is a tyrant in the clinic and the odd man out at home."
"I made him furious too," I said. "A real friend would have taken your cigarette away!" I wasn't telling Ravelstein anything he didn't know. He didn't miss much.
The BMW 740 was ready-delivered an hour before Nikki arrived. He came immediately to the hospital. Ravelstein was still un able to walk and had only the partial use of his arms and of his hands. He could smoke, he could dial numbers on the telephone-otherwise he was, in the French expression he preferred, _hors d'usage__. As soon as Nikki arrived, Rosamund and I left and waited outside.
After a time Nikki came out with tears on his face. He very seldom discussed Ravelstein with me or other friends. He accepted us because we had been vetted by Abe. We were the people Abe talked to about matters he, Nikki, was not interested in. Of course, Nikki had his own views of each and every one of us. And Abe had learned to take his judgments seriously. "You have to go down right this minute and take possession of your new car," Rosamund said.
We went below with him and saw Nikki get behind the wheel. The company driver had waited and given him a briefing, Nikki later explained, about all the special features of the glamorous 740. I glanced at the switches and lights of the control panel-it looked like the cockpit of a fighter plane. The whole thing was beyond me-I couldn't have turned on the defroster or released the hood.
Ravelstein of course wanted to divert Nikki from the medical facts with this tremendous toy. He only partially succeeded. There was a certain pleasure in sliding into the driver's seat, but Nikki told me that he wouldn't be going back to Switzerland. All this was now on hold. He'd have to drop the hotel training course.
When the time came to go home, Abe said he didn't want to ride in an ambulance. He said that Nikki would drive him in the new 740. Dr. Schley's position was that since Ravelstein couldn't walk, couldn't sit up, he'd have to be wheeled out on a gurney. Abe said there was no need for gurneys or stretchers or ambulances. Students and friends would transfer him from a wheelchair to the 740.
Schley put his foot down on this. He wouldn't sign Abe out, he said. Abe submitted in the end and they lifted him, bedding and all, onto the gurney. He was silent throughout, but not sullen or rancorous. He didn't have the sullenness or moodiness of the sick.
The 740 was already garaged. A phone call would bring it to the door within minutes. I was re-reading the Keynes memoirs that Ravelstein had recommended as the model I should follow. There was always a book to fill up the hours in the lounge of the intensive care unit, or when the patient was asleep or silently reflecting-seeming to sleep. While waiting for the ambulance I sat in the courtyard of Ravelstein's apartment building with Rosamund, reading J. M. Keynes.
The question at issue in Keynes's memoir was the release of gold by the Germans in 1919 to finance the purchase of food for the blockaded, starved cities. The commission charged with the execution of the Armistice convention had its seat at Spa, the fashionable watering place on the Belgian frontier, which had been the Grand Headquarters of the German Army. Ludendorff's villa was there, and the Kaiser's villa and Hindenburg's-you felt at once that Keynes was writing esoterically for his Bloomsbury intimates, not for the newspaper-reading masses.
The Belgian ground was haunted, he said. "The air was still charged with the emotions of that vast collapse. The spot was melancholy with the theatrical Teutonic melancholy of black pine woods." I was greatly interested to learn that Keynes held Richard Wagner directly responsible for World War I. "Evidently the Kaiser's conception of himself was so molded. And what was Hindenburg but the bass, and Ludendorff but the fat tenor of third-rate Wagnerian opera? "