Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (23 page)

“Miss Brant?” he said. Kit was mouthing words like a mute:
Why
won't old Mr. Kesler ever get out of the hospital? “Miss Brant, do you know a young man named Harlan Booth?”

Miss Brant seemed mute herself now, and Kit whispered harshly,”
What?
What's wrong with him?”

“Cancer,” he whispered back.

“Yes.
What?”
said Margaret Brant. “Yes, I know Harlan Booth. What is the matter, please?”

“I am treating Harlan Booth for gonorrhea, Miss Brant,” Ronkers said. There was no reaction over the phone. “Clap?” Ronkers said. “Gonorrhea? Harlan Booth has the clap.”

“I know what you mean,” the girl said. Her voice had gone hard; she was suspicious. Kit was turned away from him so that he couldn't see her face.

“If you have a gynecologist here in town, Miss Brant, I think you should make an appointment. I could recommend Dr. Caroline Gilmore; her office is at University Hospital. Or, of course, you could come to see me. …”

“Look, who
is
this?” Margaret Brant said. “How do I know you're a doctor? Someone just left a phone number for me to call. I never had anything to do with Harlan Booth. What kind of dirty joke is this?”

Possible, thought Ronkers. Harlan Booth had been a vain, uncooperative kid who had very scornfully feigned casualness when asked who else might be infected. “Could be a lot of people,” he'd said proudly. And Ronkers had been forced to press him to get even one name: Margaret Brant. Possibly a virgin whom Harlan Booth disliked?

“You can call me at my home phone after I hang up,” Ronkers said. “It's listed in the book: Dr. George Ronkers … and see if it's not the same number you have now. Or else I can simply apologize for the mistake; I can call up Harlan Booth and tell him off. And,” Ronkers gambled, “you can examine yourself for any discharge, especially in the morning, and see if there's any inflammation. And if you think there's a possibility, you can certainly see
another
doctor and I'll never know. But if you've had relations with Harlan Booth, Miss Brant, I…”

She hung up.

“Cancer?” Kit said, her back still to him. “Cancer of what?”

“Lungs,” Ronkers said. “The bronchoscopy was positive; they didn't even have to open him up.”

The phone rang again. When Ronkers said hello, the party hung up. Ronkers had a deplorable habit of visualizing people he had spoken with only on the phone. He saw Margaret Brant in the girls' dormitory. First she would turn to the dictionary. Then, moving lights and mirrors, she would
look
at herself. What
should
it look like? she would be wondering. And perhaps a trip to the rack of medical encyclopedias in the library. Or, last, a talk with a friend. An embarrassing phone call to Harlan Booth? No, Ronkers couldn't see that part.

He could see Kit examining her walnut bruise in the multi-imaged mirror that was suspended beside the inverted cone — also suspended — that was the flue for the open-pit fireplace in their bedroom. One day, Ronkers thought, I will fall off the sleeping platform into the open-pit fireplace and run screaming and burning through the bedroom, seeing myself times five in that multi-imaged mirror. Jesus.

“One walnut sure makes a lot of bruises,” Ronkers said sleepily.

“Please don't touch it,” Kit said. She had wanted to bring up another subject tonight, but her enthusiasm had been stolen.

Outside, the doomed tree — the would-be amputee — brushed against their window the way a cat brushes against your leg. In that high room, the way the wind nudged under the eaves made sleep feel precarious — as if the roof might be suddenly lifted off the house and they'd be left there, exposed. The final phase of achieving perfect interior space.

Sometime after midnight, Ronkers was called to the hospital for an emergency. An old woman, whose entire urinary system Ronkers had replaced with bags and hoses, was suffering perhaps her last malfunction. Five minutes after he left the house, Kit answered the phone. It was the hospital saying that the woman had died and there was no need to hurry.

George was gone two hours; Kit lay awake. She had so much she wanted to say when George got back that she was overwhelmed with where to begin; she let him fall asleep. She had wanted to discuss once more whether and when they would have children. But the night seemed so stalked by mayhem that the optimism of having babies struck her as absurd. She thought instead of the cool aesthetics, the thin economy, which characterized her leanings in the field of architecture.

She lay awake a long time after George fell asleep, listening to the restless rubbing of the tree, hearing the patternless, breakaway falls of the walnuts hurtling down on them — dropping into their lives as randomly as old Herr Kesler's cancer, as Margaret Brant's possible case of clap.

In Ronkers's office, waiting for him even before his receptionist had arrived, was a bird-boned girl with a yogurt-and-wheat-germ complexion who couldn't have been more than 18; her clothes were expensive-looking and conservative — a steel-toned suit her mother might have worn. A cream-colored, softly scented scarf was at her throat. Ronkers thought she was beautiful; she looked as if she'd just stepped off a yacht. But, of course, he knew who she was.

“Margaret Brant?” he asked, shaking her hand. Her eyes were a complement to her suit, an eerie dawn-gray. She had a perfect nose, wide nostrils in which, Ronkers thought, hair would not dare to grow.

“Dr. Ronkers?”

“Yes. Margaret Brant?”

“Of course,” she sighed. She eyed the stirrups on Ronkers's examining table with a bitter dread.

“I'm awfully sorry, Miss Brant, to have called you, but Harlan Booth was not the most cooperative patient I've ever had, and I thought — for your own good — since
he
wouldn't call you, I should.” The girl nodded, biting her lower lip. She absently removed her suit jacket and her English buckle shoes; she moved toward the examining table and those gleaming stirrups as if the whole contraption were a horse she was not sure how to mount.

“You want to
look
at me?” she asked, her back to Ronkers.

“Please relax,” Ronkers begged her. “This isn't especially unpleasant, really. Have you had any discharge? Have you noticed any burning, any inflammation?”

“I haven't noticed
anything,”
the girl told him, and Ronkers saw she was about to burst into tears. “It's very unfair!” she cried suddenly. “I've always been so careful with … sex,” she said, “and I really didn't allow very much of
anything
with Harlan Booth. I
hate
Harlan Booth!” she screamed. “I didn't know he had anything wrong with him, of course, or I never would have let him
touch
me!”

“But you
did
let him?” Ronkers asked. He was confused.

“Touch
me?” she said. “Yes, he touched me …
there
, you know. And he kissed me, a
lot.
But I wouldn't let him do anything
else!”
she cried. “And he was just
awful
about it, too, and he probably knew then that he was giving me
this!”

“You mean, he just
kissed
you?” Ronkers asked, incredulous.

“Well,
yes.
And
touched
me, you know,” she said, blushing. “He put his hand in my pants!” she cried. “And I
let
him!” She collapsed against the bent-knee part of one stirrup on the examining table and Ronkers went over to her and led her very gently to a chair beside his desk. She sobbed, with her little sharp-boned fists balled against her eyes.

“Miss Brant,” Ronkers said. “Miss Brant, do you mean that Harlan Booth only touched you with his
hand?
You didn't have
real
sexual intercourse … Miss Brant?”

She looked up at him, shocked. “God,
no I
she said. She bit the back of her hand and kept her fierce eyes on Ronkers.

“Just his
hand
touched you …
there?”
said Ronkers; he pointed to the lap of her suit skirt when he said “there.”

“Yes,” she said.

Ronkers took her small face in his hands and smiled at her. He was not very good at comforting or reassuring people. People seemed to misread his gestures. Margaret Brant seemed to think he was going to kiss her passionately on the mouth, because her eyes grew very wide and her back stiffened and her quick hands came up under his wrists, trying to shove him away.

“Margaret!” Ronkers said. “You
can't
have the clap if that's all that happened. You don't often catch a venereal disease from someone's
hand”

She now held his wrists as though they were important to her. “But he
kissed
me, too,” she said worriedly. “With his
mouth
,” she added, to make things clear.

Ronkers shook his head. He went to his desk and gathered up a bunch of medical pamphlets on venereal disease. The pamphlets resembled brochures from travel agencies; there were lots of pictures of people smiling sympathetically.

“Harlan Booth must have wanted me to embarrass you,” Ronkers said. “I think he was angry that you wouldn't let him …
you
know.”

“Then you don't even have to
look
at me?” she asked.

“No,” Ronkers said. “I'm sure I don't.”

“I've never
been
looked at, you know,” Margaret Brant told him. Ronkers didn't know what to say. “I mean,
should
I be looked at? — sometime, you know. Just to see if everything's all right?”

“Well, you might have a standard examination by a gynecologist. I can recommend Dr. Caroline Gilmore at University Hospital; a lot of students find her very nice.”

“But
you
don't want to look at me?” she asked.

“Uh, no,” Ronkers said. “There's no need. And for a standard examination, you should see a gynecologist. I'm a urologist.”

“Oh.”

She looked vacantly at the examining table and those waiting stirrups; she slipped into her suit jacket very gracefully; she had a bit more hardship with her shoes.

“Boy, that Harlan Booth is going to
get
it,” she said suddenly, and with a surprising authority in her small, sharp voice.

“Harlan Booth has already
got
it,” Ronkers said, trying to lighten the situation. But tiny Margaret Brant looked newly dangerous to him. “Please don't do anything you'll regret,” Ronkers began weakly. But the girl's clean, wide nostrils were flaring, her gun-gray eyes were dancing.

“Thank you, Dr. Ronkers,” Margaret Brant said with icy poise.
“I
very much appreciate your taking the trouble, and putting up with the embarrassment, of calling me.” She shook his hand. “You are a very brave and
moral
man,” she said, as if she were conferring military honors on Ronkers.

Watch out, Harlan Booth, he thought. Margaret Brant left Ronkers's office like a woman who had strapped on those stirrups for a ride on the examining table — and won.

Ronkers phoned up Harlan Booth. He certainly wasn't thinking of warning him; he wanted some right names. Harlan Booth took so long to answer the phone that Ronkers had worked himself up pretty well by the time Booth said a sleepy “Hello.”

“You lying bastard, Booth,” Ronkers said. “I want the names of people you've actually slept with — people who actually might have been exposed to your case, or from whom you might even have
gotten
it.”

“Oh, go to hell, Doc,” Booth said, bored. “How'd you like little Maggie Brant?”

“That was dirty,” Ronkers said. “A rather young and innocent girl, Booth. You were very mean.”

“A little prig, a stuck-up rich bitch,” Harlan Booth said. “Did you have any luck with her, Doc?”

“Please,” Ronkers said. “Just give me some names. Be kind, you've got to be kind, Booth.”

“Queen Elizabeth,” Booth said. “Tuesday Weld, Pearl Buck

“Bad taste, Booth,” Ronkers said. “Don't be a swine.”

“Bella Abzug,” Booth said. “Gloria Steinern, Raquel Welch, Mamie Eisenhower

Ronkers hung up.
Go get him if you can, Maggie Brant; I wish you luck!

There was a crush of people in the waiting room outside his office; Ronkers peered out the letter slot at them. His receptionist caught the secret signal and flashed his phone light.

“Yes?”

“You're supposed to call your wife. You want me to hold up the throng a minute?” “Thank you, yes.”

Kit must have picked up the phone and immediately shoved the mouthpiece toward the open window, because Ronkers heard the unmistakably harsh
yowl
of a chain saw (maybe,
two
chain saws).

“Well,” Kit said, “this is some tree outfit, all right. Didn't Bardlong say he'd fix us up with a good
tree
outfit?”

“Yes,” Ronkers said. “What's wrong?”

“Well, there are three men here with chain saws and helmets with their names printed on them. Their names are Mike, Joe, and Dougie. Dougie is the highest up in the tree right now; I hope he breaks his thick neck.

“Kit, for God's sake, what's the matter?”

“Oh, Raunch, they're not a
tree
outfit at all. They're Bardlong's men — you know, they came in a goddamn
BARDLONG STOPS YOU SHORT
truck. They'll probably kill the whole tree,” Kit said. “You can't just hack off limbs and branches without putting that
stuff
“on, can you?”

“Stuff?”

“Goop? Gunk?” Kit said. “You know, that gooey black stuff. It
heals
the tree. God, Raunch, you're supposed to be a
doctor
, I thought you'd know something about it.”