For a while both Max and Bob gaze, at first politely, heads aslant, as people will attend to other people’s photos. Max’s cheek is even propped reflectively on three fingers.
In my clinical voice — doctor showing slides at a medical conference — I explain the exemption of Fedville from treated water, the sodium-additive arrangement, the presenting behavior of Mrs. Cheney, the anal lesions of this child, her curious linguistic regression, the extraordinary I.Q. of that child — not omitting Ricky’s perfect score in Concentration.
“Ricky?” says Bob, not comprehending.
“Ricky is all right, Bob. He’s at Lucy’s house.”
“What?” says Bob. “Ricky?”
“I understood you wanted to have him in the program, Bob.”
“Yeah, but at first-level minimum dosage, to improve his — he was flunking math — Jesus, they didn’t — Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. He’s not injured. He’s with Claude at Lucy’s house. You can pick him up any time.”
“Thank God,” says Bob. “Thanks, Tom.”
“That’s okay, Bob. He’s with Claude at Lucy’s house.”
“Jesus,” says Bob.
Max seems not to be listening. His attention seems to be caught by one photograph, the one depicting Van Dorn supine, bearing the child aloft and impaled between his knees, the child’s expression, demure, as pleased as if she had just won the spelling bee, legs kicking up happily. The child is facing the camera and therefore appears to be looking at the viewer of the photograph.
As Max examines the photographs he falls into an old habit, hissing a tune between tip of tongue and teeth, which I remember him doing as house physician standing with a patient’s chart in the nurses’ station — a sinister, amiable hissing, the attending intern casting about: How did I screw up this time?
Max is also nodding in his old abstracted way. “So,” he says to no one.
Bob Comeaux has come alongside, head medically-comradely aslant, like the attending physician co-inspecting an X-ray with the chief on grand rounds. He too is nodding, hands in pockets, upper lip folded against his teeth.
“Bob,” he says in his old ominous-gentle, grand-rounds voice, head back, looking along his cheek. “Just what are we doing here?”
Bob is clucking back-of-tongue-from-teeth tck tck tck meditatively, resident considering case: it’s amazing how everything you do, even late in life, you did in school.
Silence, except for the spirituals.
“What are we doing here?” Max asks again.
“We are listening to the darkies singing,” I say.
“All I can say is this,” says Bob Comeaux. He’s squinting into the afternoon sunlight, hat in his hands, head leaning back against the jamb. “I don’t know about those, whatever they are”—he nods toward, without quite looking at, the photographs—“but I will say this, you try the best you can to help folks. And what do you get? I’ll tell you what you get. You get the same thing Lister got, Galileo got, Pasteur got. Ridicule. Did that son of a bitch use Ricky?” he asks in a different voice.
“Ricky’s okay, Bob.”
Silence, except for the singing.
I looked over Jordan and what did I see,
Coming for to carry me home.
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.
“Don’t tell me that’s not beautiful,” says Bob absently.
“Right, Bob,” I say. “Now here’s what we ought to do.” I exchange glances with Max — one of our “group” glances. We understand each other. We know something movies and TV don’t know. Here’s where movies and TV go wrong. You don’t shoot X for what he did to Y, even though he deserves shooting. You allow X a way out so he can help Y. X is going to have enough trouble as it is. Max already recognizes a tone in my voice, the clinical-helper voice of the “resource person” in group therapy. He and I have run many a group. It’s like two cops playing tough cop and softy cop.
“What’s that, Doctor?” asks Max in his tough cop voice.
“This is just an idea to kick around. I was thinking: Now that Blue Boy is closed down, wouldn’t it make sense to use the NIH discretionary funds and the Ford money to help Father Smith reactivate the hospice? The good Father is a nut, as we all know, but his place can be useful as a facility for your terminal cases — for one thing, save you an awful lot of money. He’s going to need all the help we can give him. I’m thinking of giving him a couple of afternoons a week.” Group strategy: Don’t shoot Bob Comeaux, use him.
We all appear to consider.
“Well, I don’t know,” muses Max, who is just beginning to grasp what has happened, is astounded, and is not showing it.
Bob Comeaux, still martyred, eyes still closed elegiacally, is actually attending closely. He almost nods.
“I was thinking too,” I say, not to Bob, but to Max. “You know, we’ve not only got a lot of toxic-abused children, overdosed on sodium 24, thanks to Van Dorn’s hapless experiment”—blame Van Dorn for now—“who’ve been knocked back to a cortical deficit, a pre-linguistic level like a bunch of chimps and are going to need all the help Father Smith and the rest of us can give them. I think it would also be a good place to transfer the euthanasic candidates and quarantined patients from the Qualitarian Center.”
Max rolls his eyes. Things are moving too fast. It’s all right for resource persons to fall out in group, stage mock warfare. But this! For Christ’s sake, Doctor, Max is saying, eyes rolled back, you’re pushing him too far.
“I for one,” says Max, switching to his nice-cop-versus-mean cop voice, “don’t think Dr. Comeaux should take that to mean you’re suggesting the transfer of all infants who are candidates for pedeuthanasia for one reason or another — hopeless retardation, Down’s syndrome, AIDS infants, status epilepticus, gross irreparable malformations, and suchlike — who have no chance for a life of any sort of acceptable quality — you’re not suggesting that they too should be transferred from the center to the hospice?”
“That’s what I meant. The hospice will take them all.”
Bob Comeaux has recovered sufficient footing to lever himself away from the doorjamb and face us both.
“You’re talking about violating the law of the land, gentlemen,” he says quietly. “Doe v. Dade, the landmark case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court which decreed, with solid scientific evidence, that the human infant does not achieve personhood until eighteen months.”
Max’s eyes are in his eyebrows. If his junior resource person insists on screwing up, he’s on his own.
“Not only that,” I go on in the same sociable tone, non compos but not hostile either, “we want all the so-called pre-personhood infants at St. Margaret’s by next week, plus all the terminal cases of any age, including adult AIDS patients who’ve been quarantined — plus your nursing staff until we can get organized.”
Why am I saying all this? Father Smith is a loony and can’t even take care of himself.
“Shit, Max!” Bob Comeaux, now altogether himself, collected in his anger, has squared off with Max. “He’s talking about shooting down the entire Qualitarian program in this area. No way.”
Max now, dropping group voice: this is serious. “Tom, we don’t want to get into a legal hassle. It is, after all, the law of the land.”