The Select (4 page)

Walter had gone around and
around with the board for years on this thing they had for males.
Sure, twenty years ago when The Ingraham first opened its doors,
males ran American medicine. But things were changing. Hell, things
had
already
changed. Women were gaining now, and their influence would
continue to grow. If The Ingraham was to maintain its status as a
premier training center, the Foundation's board would have to alter
its antiquated sex preference.

So far the board had paid him a little
lip service, but no new admissions directives had been
issued.

Well, he'd see what he
could do for this young thing. For some reason he could not quite
fathom, Walter felt attached to her. Maybe he'd seen something of
his old self in this youngster as she'd looked at those patients,
something in her eyes, the desire to do something for them,
the
need
to
act.

And then an epiphany: his daughter.
This girl reminded him of Clarice. Clarice was twenty-five in
Walter's mind. Would always be twenty-five. That was when a drunk
had run a stop sign and brought her life and her mother's to a
fiery end. A void had opened in him then. He still carried it with
him every minute.

"So, Miss Quinn Cleary," he said after
she'd seated herself across from him. He smiled to allay the
tension he sensed in her. "Let me ask you the question I must ask,
the question you know you're going to be asked, and get that one
out of the way: Why do you wish to become a doctor?"

"Because I..."

Her voice trailed off. She sat there
with a tortured expression, twisting her hands together.

"Is something wrong?" he
said.

"I...I had a whole speech prepared and
now I can't remember a word of it."

"Good. I've been listening to speeches
all afternoon. Let's deviate from the prepared text, as the
politicians say, and get down to the real you. Why a
doctor?"

"Because I can't remember ever wanting
to be anything else."

"That doesn't answer the
question."

"Well...because I know I can do it,
and do it well. I can be the best damn doctor you've ever
seen."

Walter couldn't help but believe
her.

"Now we're getting
somewhere. Because you can do it and do it well...I haven't heard
that one in a long time. I hear a lot of altruistic jimmer-jammer
but competence
is
the bottom line, isn't it. A doctor who can't get the job
done is no doctor at all. But what about helping people, bettering
the lot of your fellow man?"

Walter had heard
that
ad nauseam
this week...and last year...and the year before...

Quinn Cleary shrugged. She seemed to
be relaxing.

"That's important, I
guess."

"You guess?"

"Well, benefiting mankind is great,
but that's not what's driving me. I mean, you don't spend four
years in pre-med, four years in medical school, then two, three,
maybe five more years in a residency just to 'help' people. Plenty
of people need help right now, today, this minute. If helping
people is all you care about, why put it off for ten years? Join
the Peace Corps or go work in a mission feeding the
homeless."

How refreshing she was. Walter felt
his afternoon lethargy slipping away.

"You're not an altruist, then, I take
it?"

"I care a lot about people—sometimes
too much, I think— but there's got to be more to becoming a doctor
than that."

"Oh, yes," Walter said, allowing a
smile. "How could we forget? There's the status, the respect, and
maybe most important, the money."

The girl returned his
smile. "Money...that would be a new experience. But at the risk of
sounding holier than thou, when I visualize myself as a doctor,
it's not driving a Mercedes, it's in a hospital or an examining
room.
Doing
it—doing the job, and doing it
right
. That's what
matters."

Again, Walter found himself believing
her. But he made himself sound dubious. "Does it really
now?"

"Yes," she said, her cheeks coloring.
"And if that sounds corny or phony, I'm sorry, but that's the way I
feel."

Spunky too. Walter decided he was
going to do his damnedest to get this young lady into The
Ingraham.

But he could do only so much. A
lot—everything, one might say—depended on the test tomorrow. She'd
have to correctly answer those special questions. He couldn't help
her with those. Nobody could.

MONITORING

Louis Verran sat at the main console
in the monitoring room in the basement of the Science Center and
struck a match. Elliot and Kurt weren't due in for another thirty
minutes, so he had the place to himself. He held the flame to the
tip of his panatella and puffed. This was his domain, the only
place on the whole goddamn campus where he made the rules, and he
did not have one against smoking here. Never would. He savored the
coolness of the early puffs, even inhaled a little.

Nothing in the world like
an after-dinner cigar. All he needed was a snifter of VSOP to feel
one hundred percent mellow. But that would have to wait. No booze
while he was on the job.
His
rule.

He scanned the readouts, checking to
make sure the pick-ups were tracking their target data.

The dorm was hopping. The hopefuls had
all been fed—nicely stuffed on chicken francaise and all the
trimmings—and escorted to their rooms. Now time for them to settle
in, settle down, and go beddie-bye by lights out at
11:00.

Everything was operative. One hundred
and four sets of readouts, one for every room in the V-shaped
dorm's two wings. Half of them were occupied by hopefuls tonight. A
pair in each of those rooms. One hundred nervous, twitchy bodies in
all.

He decided to run some random checks.
He activated the audio in 241. A couple of girls in that
one...

CHAPTER THREE

"...think this could be some sort of
test too?"

It was the third time Trish had asked
that since dinner—which Quinn was still marveling at. She glanced
over at where her roommate for the night sat with an MCAT review
course manual open on her lap. Trish was pudgy, with long frizzy
hair and mild acne. The seams of her jeans, made for someone two
sizes smaller, were stretched almost to the breaking point over her
thighs.

"I don't know what you
mean."

Trish rolled her eyes and sighed as if
it were all so obvious.

"This." She gestured around her. "This
room. Spending the night in the med students' rooms. They could be
testing us to see how well we respect their rules. What do you
think?"

A handsome room—a two-room suite,
actually. Cedar paneled walls, a thick rug on the floor, and their
own cheerfully tiled bathroom. The outer room had the beds and a
view of the woods; the elaborate headboards looked like mahogany
and were built into the walls, with drawers and bookshelves and
compartments of various sizes; two huge closets also built in. The
inner half was a sitting room with two built-in desks that also
seemed like mahogany, plus a neetly upholstered, Laura
Ashley-looking couch, a round table, and two comfy chairs. A far
cry from the cinderblock box she called home at U. Conn.

"Isn't this the most incredible dorm
room you've ever seen?" Quinn said.

"Got to be. Do you think it's true
about the daily maid service?"

"That's what I've heard."

"But do you think they're testing us
by putting us in here?"

"Could be. They certainly have enough
rules around here."

The Ingraham, she'd heard,
had a reputation of exerting an unusual amount of control over its
students, and that seemed to stretch to its applicants as well. All
applicants—and they reminded you endlessly that you'd been
invited
to be an
applicant—had to attend the full orientation and spend the night
prior to the test in The Ingraham's dorm.

As soon as she'd arrived, Quinn had
been handed an orientation booklet which had laid down the rules in
no uncertain terms. And in bold type had been the requirement of
spending the night here. As if to say, if you don't stay the night,
don't bother showing up for the test. Why, Quinn wondered, were
they so adamant about that?

And these dorm rooms, all that stuff
about not opening any drawers or closets, respecting the residents'
belongings and privacy, as if she had any intention of prying into
people's drawers.

Quinn was grateful for the free room
and board. But why were they so strident?

"Well, the whole thing beats me,"
Trish said, "but I'm going to keep my hands off everything in here.
Not even going to use the desk lamp."

"Maybe we shouldn't even
get
in
the beds,"
Quinn teased in a near whisper. "Maybe we should just leave the
spreads pulled up and sleep on top."

"You think really so?"

"Or maybe should sleep on the floor,"
Quinn continued, wondering when Trish would catch on. "That way we
won't wrinkle the spreads."

"Oh, I don't..." Finally she caught
it. She smiled. "You're putting me on, aren't you! I must sound a
little nuts, huh?"

"No. Just nervous. Like
me."

"You too? You don't show
it."

Next to Trish anyone would look calm,
but she saw no need to point that out.

"I guess I have a different way of
showing it."

"So, aren't you going to
study?"

"I don't think this is the kind of
test you can study for. But you go ahead. I think I'll take a
little walk."

She strolled out into the hall and
headed for Matt's down on the first floor. The hall was almost like
an expensive hotel corridor, well lit, carpeted, and clean—no
graffiti, no cigarette burns, no litter. She wondered at the size
of the maintenance crew it took to keep things in this
shape.

Tim and Matt had somehow
finagled a room together. Quinn begrudgingly admitted to herself
that she had warmed to Tim over dinner. She'd actually had fun
laughing at his unsuccessful attempts to conjure up some white wine
to go with the chicken francaise. She found him stretched out on
the couch, reading a
Cerebus
comic—and still wearing his shades. Matt sat with
his feet up on the table, listening to his Walkman. He looked up
and waved.

Tim said, "Ah, the Mighty
Quinn. Welcome!" He plucked up a fold of a new sweatshirt he was
wearing emblazoned with
The
Ingraham
. "How do I look?"

"'Like a patient etherized upon a
table.'"

"Ah! A T.S. Eliot fan."

"But what poem?"

"'The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock'—first stanza." He lifted his sunglasses and looked at her
cross-eyed. "You saw the comic book and thought you'd slip one by
me, huh?"

"Not if it's a
Cerebus
,
but isn't it hard to read with those
things?"

"Very. Especially at night."

"Then why wear them?"

Matt lowered the headphones to the
back of his neck and answered for his roommate. "Because as Andre
Agassi says, 'Image...is everything.'"

Quinn had her own idea about that:
Image had nothing to do with it; Tim Brown was hiding behind those
lenses.

"How'd you two manage to get assigned
to the same room?" she asked, dropping into a chair.

Tim said, "I traded with the guy who
was originally here."

"You sure there's isn't a rule against
that?" Quinn said.

"I didn't see one," Matt said, "but
I'll bet there's one somewhere."

Tim put down his
Cerebus
and sat up.
"Hell of a lot of rules, don't you think?"

"Their ball, their gloves, and their playing
field," Matt said. "So they call the shots."

"Yeah," Tim said, "but
what's this deal with you've
got
to sleep over in the dorm the night before the
test? Where's that come from? If you don't like institutional food,
or you'd rather stay in the Holiday Inn, why should they
care?"

Quinn had been thinking about that.
"Maybe they want us all to start off tomorrow morning on equal
footing. You know, same dinner, same amount of sleep on the same
kind of mattress, same breakfast, that sort of thing. Another level
of standardization for the test."

Matt nodded. "Maybe. Their booklet
does say they've learned over the years that they get the best
results from their applicants under these conditions."

"Well, I don't know about you guys,"
Tim said, "but this kind of thing makes me feel like some sort of a
lab rat."