All the King's Men (67 page)

Before answering, the Boss stepped back to the chair and sank into it. Then he looked at me. “Take her down to Room 305,” he directed. He spoke dully, and apparently without interest now, as though in a railway waiting room answering foolish questions about the schedule for some traveler.

So I took her down to Room 305, where the body lay like a log under the white sheet and the breath labored through the gaping mouth. At first, she did not approach the bed. She stood just inside the door, looking across at it. I thought she was going to keel over, and put my arm out to prop her, but she stayed on her legs. Then she moved to the bed and reached down with a timid motion to touch the body there. She laid her hand on the right leg, just above the ankle, and let it test there as though she could draw, or communicate, some force by the contact. Meanwhile, the nurse, who stood on the other side of the bed, leaned down to wipe from the brow of the patient the drops of moisture which gathered there. Lucy Stark took a step or two up the bed, and, looking at the nurse, reached out her hand. The nurse put the cloth into it, and Lucy finished the job of wiping the brow and temples. Then she handed the cloth back to the nurse. “Thank you,” she whispered. The nurse gave a sort smile of professional understanding out of her plain, good, anonymous, middle-aged face, like a light flicked on momentarily in a comfortable, shabby living room.

But Lucy wasn’t looking at that face, but at the sag-jawed face below her where the breath labored in and out. There wasn’t any light on there. So after a while–the nurse said D. Stanton wouldn’t be back for some little time and she would notify us when he did come–we went back to the room where the Boss sat with his heavy head in the middle of th floral design.

Lucy sat in another chintz-covered chair (the waiting room was very cozy and cheerful with potted plants on the window ledge and chintz on the chairs and water colors on the walls in natural-wood frames and a fireplace with artificial logs in it) and looked at her lap or, now and then, across at the Boss, and I sat on the couch over by the wall and thumbed through the picture magazines, from which I gathered that the world outside our cozy little nook was still the world.

About eleven-thirty Adam came in to say that the doctor from Baltimore who was coming for the consultation had been forced down by fog and would fly in as soon as the ceiling lifted.

“Fog!” the Boss exclaimed, and came up out of the chair. “Fog! Telephone him–you telephone him–tell him to come on, fog or no fog.”

“A plane can’t fly in fog,” Adam said.

“Telephone him–that boy in there–that boy in there–my boy–” The voice didn’t trail off. It simply stopped with a sound like something of great weight grinding to a stop, and the Boss stared at Adam Stanton with resentment and a profound accusation.

“Dr. Burnham will come when it is possible,” Adam said coldly. Then after a moment in which he met the resentment and accusation, he said, “Governor, I think that it would be a good thing for you to lie down. To get some rest.”

“No,” the Boss said hoarsely, “no.”

“You can do no good by not lying down. You will only waste your strength. You can do no good.”

“Good,” the Boss said, “good,” and clenched his hands as though he had tried to grasp some substance which had faded at his touch and dissolved to air.

“I would advise it,” Adam said quietly, almost softly. Then he turned and inquiring glance upon Lucy.

She shook her head. “No, doctor,” she almost whispered. “I’ll wait. Too.”

Adam inclined his head in acceptance, and went out. I got up and followed him.

I caught up with Adam down the hall. “What is it like?” I asked.

“Bad.” he said.

“How bad?”

“He is unconscious and paralyzed,” Adam said. “His extremities are quite limp. The reflexes are quite gone. If you pick up his hand it is like jelly. The X-ray–we took a skull plate–shows a fracture and dislocation of the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae.”

“Where the hell is t?”

Adam reached out and laid a couple of fingers on the back of my neck. “There,” he said.

“You mean he’s got a broken neck?”

“Yes.”

“I thought that killed them.”

“It usually does,” he said. “Always if the fracture is a little higher.”

“Has he got a chance?”

“Yes.”

“To just live or to be all right?”

“To be all right. Or almost all right. Just a chance.”

“What are you going to do?”

He looked at me directly, and I saw that his own face didn’t look much different from the way it would have looked if somebody had kicked him in the head, too. It was white and drawn.

“It is a difficult decision,” he said. “I must think. I don’t want to talk about it now.”

So he turned from me, and squared his shoulders, and went off down the hall, over the polished composition floor, which glittered in the soft light like brown ice.

I went back to the room where Lucy Stark sat across from the Boss, in the midst of the chintz and potted plants and water colors. Now and then she would lift her gaze from her lap, where the hands were clasped together with the veins showing blue, and would look across the intervening distance into her husband’s face. He did not meet her gaze, but stared into the heatless illumination of the artificial logs on the hearth.

After one o’clock a nurse came down to the room with the message that the fog had cleared and that Dr. Burnham’s plane was on the way again. They would let us know as soon as it came in. Then she went away.

The Boss sat silent for a minute or two, then said to me, “Go down and call up the airport. Ask what the weather is like here. Tell ‘em to tell Sugar-Boy I said for him to get here quick. Tell Murphy I said I meant quick. By God! By God–” And the oath was left suspended, directed at nothing.

I went down the corridor and down to the telephone booths on the first floor, to give that crazy message to Sugar-Boy and Murphy. Sugar-Boy would drive like hell anyway, and Murphy–he was the lieutenant in charge of the motorcycle escort–knew he wasn’t out there for fun. But I called the port, was told that the weather was lifting–a wind had sprung up–and left the message for Murphy.

When I stepped out of the booth, there was Sadie. She must have been hanging around in the lobby, probably sitting on one of the benches back in the shadow, for I hadn’t seen har when I entered.

“Why didn’t you say boo and give me real heart failure and finish the job?” I asked.

“How is it?” she demanded, seizing my coat sleeve.

“Bad. He broke his neck.”

Has he got any chance?”

“Dr. Stanton said he did, but he wasn’t wreathed in smiles.”

“What are they going to do? Operate?”

“There is another big-shot doctor coming in from Johns Hopkins for a consultation. After he gets here they will flip a nickel and find out what to do.”

“Did he sound like there was a real chance?” Her hand was still clutching my sleeve.

“How do I know?” I was suddenly irritated. I jerked my sleeve out of her grasp.

“If you find out anything–you know, when the doctor comes–will you let me know?” she asked humbly, letting her hand fall.

“Why the hell don’t you go home and quit spooking around here in the dark? Why don’t you go home?”

She shook her head, still humbly.

“You wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, and now you hang around and loose sleep. Why don’t you go home?”

She shook her head slowly. “I’ll wait,” she said.

“You’re a sap,” I affirmed.

“Let me know,” she said, “when you find out anything.”

I didn’t even say anything to that, but walk on away, back upstairs, where I rejoined the party. Things hadn’t changed in the atmosphere of the room.

After a spell, a nurse came back to say that the plane was expected at the port in about thirty or forty minutes. Then a little later she came back to say that there was a telephone call for me.

“Who is it?” I asked the nurse.

“It’s a lady,” she said, “but she wouldn’t give her name.”

I figured that one out, and when I got to the phone at the floor desk I found I was right. It was Anne Stanton. She had stood it as long as she could. She didn’t seize me by the sleeve, for she was a few miles away in her apartment, but her voice did pretty near the same thing. I told her what I knew, and answered her repetitious questions. She thanked me and apologized or bothering me. She had had to know, she said. She had been calling at my hotel all evening, thinking I would come in, then she had called me at the hospital. There wasn’t anybody else she could ask. When she had just called the hospital and had asked for news, they had been noncommittal. “So you see,” she said “so you see I had to call you.”

I said I saw, all right, and hung up the phone and went back down the hall. In the room nothing had changed. And nothing did change till toward four o’clock, when the Boss, who had been sunk in the chintz chair with his gaze on the artificial logs, suddenly lifted up his head, the way a drowsing dog does on the hearth to a sound you can’t even hear. But the Boss hadn’t been drowsing. He had been listening for that sound. One instant he held his head up intently, then swung up to his feet. “There!” he exclaimed raspingly. “There!”

Then I heard it, for the first time, the far-off wail of the siren of the motorcycle escort. The plane had got in.

In a minute a nurse came in and announced that Dr. Burnham was with Dr. Stanton. She would not say how long before they would give an opinion.

The Boss had not sat back down, after the first sound of the siren. He had stood in the middle of the floor, with his head up, hearing the siren wail and fade and wail again and die off, then waiting for the steps in the hall. He did not sit back down now. He began to pace up and down. Over to the window, where he snatched back the chintz curtains to look out on the blackness of the lawn and off across the lawn, where no doubt, a solitary street light glowed in the mist. Then back to the fireplace, where he would turn with a grinding motion that twisted the rug under his heel. His hands were clasped behind him, and his head, with the forelock down, hung forward sullenly and seemed to sway a little from side to side.

I kept on looking at my picture magazines, but the solid tread, nervous and yet deliberate, stirred something back in my mind. I was irritated, as you are when the memory will no rise and be recognize. Then I knew what it was. It was the sound of a tread, back and forth, back and forth, caged in a room in a country hotel beyond the jerry-built wall. That was it.

He was still pacing when a hand outside was laid on the knob of the door. But at that sound, the first sound of the hand on the knob, he swung his head toward the door and froze in his tracks like a pointer. Adam walked into the room into the clutch of that gaze.

The Boss liked his lower lip, but he controlled the question.

Adam shut the door behind him, and took a few steps forward. “Dr. Burnham has examined the patient,” he said, “and studied the X-ray plated. His diagnosis and my own check absolutely. You know what that is.” He paused as though expecting some reply.

But there was no reply, not even a sign, and the gaze on him did not relinquish its clutch.

“There are two lines of action possible.” he resumed. “One is conservative, the other radical. The conservative line would be to put the patient in traction, in a heavy cast, and wait for some resolution of the situation. The radical line would be to resort to surgical procedure immediately. I want to emphasize that this is a difficult decision, a very technical decision. Therefore I want you to understand the situation as fully as possible.” He paused again, but there was no sign, and the gaze did not relax.

“As you know,” he began again, and now his tone carried a hint of the lecture room, of academic precision, “the plate showed in lateral view a fracture and dislocation of the fifth and six cervical vertebrae. But the X-ray cannot show the condition of the soft tissue. Therefore we cannot know at this moment the condition of the spinal cord itself. We can learn that only by surgical action. If upon operating we discover that the cord is crushed, the patient will remain paralyzed for the rest of his life, for the cord has nor regenerative power. But it is possible that a displaced segment of bone is merely pressing upon the cord. In that case we can, by performing a laminectomy, relieve the pressure. We cannot predict the degree of benefit from such procedure. We might restore some or we might restore almost all function. Of course, we should not expect too much. Some muscle groups might remain paralyzed. You understand?”

This time, Adam scarcely seemed to expect any response, and this pause was only momentary. “I must emphasize one consideration. This operation is very near the brain. It may be fatal. And the chances of infection are greater with the operation. Dr. Burnham and I have discussed the matter at length and are in agreement. I myself take full responsibility for advising the operation. But I want you to know that it is radical. That it is the outside chance. It is the gambler’s chance.”

He stopped, and in the silence, the Boss’s breath rasped two or three times, in and out. Then he said, gratingly, “Do it.”

He had taken the outside chance, the gambler’s chance. But that was no surprise to me.

Adam was looking inquiringly at Lucy Stark, as though he wished corroboration from her. She turned her eyes from him and looked at her husband, who had walked over to the window to look out over the black lawn. For a moment, she studied the hunched shoulders, then returned to Adam Stanton. She nodded her head slowly, while her hands worked together on her lap. Then she whispered, “Yes–yes.”

“We shall operate immediately,” Adam said. “I had ordered arrangements made. It does not have to be done immediately, but in my judgment it is better so.”

“Do it,” the grating voice over the window said. But the Boss did not turn around, not even when the door closed behind Adam Stanton.

I went back to my picture magazines, but I turned the pages over with the greatest care as though I couldn’t afford to make a sound in the special kind of devouring stillness there was in the room. The stillness lasted a long time, while I kept on looking at the pictures of girls in bathing suits and race horses and scenes of natural beauty and long files of erect, clean-faced youths in some kind of shirt or other lifting their arms in a salute and detective stories acted out in six photographs with the answer on the next page. But I wasn’t paying much attention to the pictures, and they were always alike anyway.