Jason could well imagine. “Please,” he said. “It could be important.”
“All right. Let’s say two P.M. Where?”
“How about the Hampshire House?”
“Okay,” Carol said, gathering up her bags and umbrella. With a final smile she left the café.
Glancing at her watch, Carol quickened her step. The impromptu meeting with Jason hadn’t figured in her tight schedule, and she didn’t want to be late for the meeting with her PhD adviser. She’d spent the late evening and early afternoon polishing the third chapter of her dissertation and she was eager to hear her professor’s response. Carol took the escalator down to the street level, thinking about her conversation with Dr. Howard.
It had been a surprise to meet the man after hearing about him for so long. Alvin had told her that Jason had lost his wife and had reacted to the tragedy by completely changing his environment and submerging himself in his work. Carol had found the story fascinating because her thesis involved the psychology of grief. Dr. Jason Howard sounded like a perfect case study.
The Weston Hotel doorman blew his whistle with a shriek that hurt Carol’s ears, making her wince. As the taxi lumbered toward her, she admitted that her response to Dr. Jason Howard went a bit further than pure professional interest. She’d found the man unusually attractive, and realized that her knowledge of his vulnerabilities contributed to his appeal. Even his social awkwardness had an endearing quality.
“Harvard Square,” Carol said as she got into the cab. She found herself looking forward to brunch the following morning.
Still seated in front of his cooling coffee, Jason admitted to being totally bowled over by Carol’s unexpected intelligence and charm. He’d expected an unsophisticated small-town girl who’d somehow been lured away from high school by money or drugs. Instead she was a lovely, mature woman quite capable of holding her own in any conversation. What a tragedy that a person with her obvious assets had become mixed up in the sordid world she inhabited….
The insistent and jarring sound of his beeper snapped Jason back to reality. He switched it off and looked at the LCD display. The word “urgent” blinked twice, followed by a telephone number Jason did not recognize. After seeing his medical identification, the Au Bon Pain manager allowed Jason to use the phone behind the cash register.
“Thank you for calling, Dr, Howard. This is Mrs. Farr. My husband, Gerald Farr, has developed terrible chest pains and he’s having trouble breathing.”
“Call an ambulance,” Jason said. “Bring him to the GHP emergency. Is Mr. Farr a patient of mine?” Jason thought the name sounded familiar but he couldn’t place it.
“Yes,” Mrs. Farr said. “You did a physical on him two weeks ago. He’s the senior vice president of the Boston Banking Company.”
Oh. no, Jason thought as he hung up the receiver. It’s happening again. Deciding to leave his car on Beacon Street until he’d handled the emergency, he ran from the café, dashed over the pedestrian connection to the hotel side of the Copley Plaza complex, and leaped into a cab.
Jason arrived at the GHP emergency room before the Farrs. He told Judith what he expected and even called anesthesia, pleased to learn Philip Barnes was on call.
When he saw Gerald Farr, Jason knew immediately that his worst fears were realized. The man was in agonizing pain and was pale as skim milk, with crystalline beads of perspiration on his forehead.
The initial EKG showed that a large area of the man’s heart had been damaged. It was not going to be an easy case. Morphine and oxygen helped to calm the patient, and lidocaine was given for prophylaxis against irregular heartbeats. But, despite everything, Farr wasn’t responding. Studying another EKG, Jason had the feeling that the infarcted area of the heart was expanding.
In desperation, he tried everything. But it was all for naught. At five minutes to four, Gerald Farr’s eyes rolled up inside his head and his heart stopped.
Unwilling as usual to give up, Jason commanded the resuscitative efforts. They got the heart to start several more times, but each time it would slip back into a deadly pattern and fail again.
Farr never regained consciousness. At six-fifteen, Jason finally declared the patient dead.
“Shit!” said Jason with disgust at himself and life in general. He was unaccustomed to swearing, and the effect of his doing so was not lost on Judith Reinhart. She leaned her forehead against Jason’s shoulder and put her arm around his neck.
“Jason, you did the best you could,” she said softly. “You did the best anybody could. But our powers are limited.”
“The man’s only. fifty-eight,” said Jason, choking back tears of frustration.
Judith cleared the room of the other nurses and residents. Coming back to Jason, she put her hand on his shoulder, “Look at me, Jason!” she said.
Reluctantly, Jason turned his face toward the nurse. A single tear had run down from the corner of his eye, along the crease of his nose. Softly but firmly she told Jason that he could not take these episodes so personally. “I know that two in one day is an awful burden,” she added. “But it’s not your fault.”
Jason knew intellectually that she was right, but emotionally it was another story. Besides, Judith had no idea how badly his inpatients were doing, especially Matthew Cowen, and Jason was embarrassed to tell her. For the first time, he seriously contemplated giving up medicine. Unfortunately, he had no idea of what else he could do. He wasn’t trained for anything else.
After promising Judith that he was okay, Jason went out to face Mrs. Farr, steeling himself against the expected anger. But Mrs. Farr, in the depths of her grief, had decided to take the burden of guilt on herself. She said her husband had been complaining of feeling ill for a week, but that she’d ignored his complaints because, frankly, he’d always been a bit of a. hypochondriac. Jason tried to comfort the woman as Judith had tried to comfort him. He was about equally successful.
Confident that the medical examiner would take the case, Jason didn’t burden Mrs. Farr with an autopsy request. By law, the ME didn’t need authorization to do a postmortem in cases of questionable death. But to be sure, he called Margaret Danforth. The response was as expected: she indeed wanted the case, and while she had Jason on the phone, she spoke to him about Holly Jennings.
“I take back that snide comment I made this morning,” Margaret said. “You people are just having bad luck. The Jennings woman was as bad off as Cedric Harring. All her vessels looked terrible, not just the heart.”
“That’s not a lot of consolation,” Jason said. “I had just given her a physical showing everything was fine. I did a follow-up EKG on Thursday, but that showed only minimal changes.”
“No kidding? Wait till you see the sections. Grossly the coronary vessels looked ninety percent occluded, and it was disseminated, not focal. Surgery wouldn’t have done a damn thing. Oh, by the way, I checked and it’s okay for us to give you small specimens from Jennings’s case. But I should have a formal request in writing.”
“No problem,” Jason said. “Same with Farr?”
“Sure thing.”
Jason took a cab back to his car and drove home. Despite the fog and rain, when he got home, he went for a jog. Getting mud-spattered and soaked had a mild cathartic effect, and after a shower he felt some relief from his burdensome emotions and depressive feelings. Just when he was starting to think about food, Shirley called and asked him over for dinner. Jason’s first response was to say no. But then he recognized he felt too depressed to be alone, so he accepted. After changing into more reasonable clothes, he went down to his car and headed west toward Brookline.