The child of nature, with a sunburned stomach and dirt on its wrists, had followed the wrong fur sleeve at the supermarket. He was now quite lost. He began to sob, wetly, hysterically — not like a scared, lost child but in the manner of a tyrannical, mean, accusatory brat. “You’re not my mother,” he began to shout, a natural informer, at the pale, wrong lady in the near fur coat, and then, “She’s not my mother,” when he had gathered a sympathetic little crowd. “Lady, are you this kid’s mother?” the supermarket manager asked the lady. She said she wasn’t. He said, “Well, then why don’t you leave him alone?” When Sally, one of our legal reporters, went to the hospital for a hysterectomy, we visited her by turns. Carl was there on the second afternoon. When the nurse asked him to leave the room for a moment, he naturally left. “Now, Mother, here we are,” the nurse said. She brought somebody’s baby in. Sally, who does have two children, was confused. She said, “Wait, just a minute.” The nurse cooed. Sally pointed out that the baby wasn’t hers. “Now, Mother,” the nurse said, “in large hospitals we often think that. But baby knows. Baby has a wristlet.” Then she looked at the wristlet, said “Oh, now,” one last time, and, holding the baby, walked out.
“Harry,” the blonde said, waving her drink and putting out her cigarette, “do you realize you have made yourself into a person that one has to lie to?”
“Janine,” he said, “you know I’m very tired of your aperçus?”
What was mortifying was the limbo dancing. What was mortifying was the fat, hot, drunk, sunburned and flattered man at whom the calypso lyrics were directed. What was mortifying was the way his wife danced with the famous, tense, witless insult comedian. What was mortifying was the insinuating child who recited “Horatio at the Bridge” in its entirety. “Sweetie,” the blonde screamed from the dance floor to her adolescent grandson, “isn’t this fun?”
I never liked him, and now he is dead. Perhaps I should wish that I had liked him better. But I do not wish it. And I did not like him. I was not asked, which is just as well. What he was, was asleep. So they should not have buried him. Hindsight is easy. Mistakes will happen. It was one of a series of errors that marked his whole life. Not the last error, it now seems. His will is under litigation. The penultimate error, perhaps.
It was his misfortune to die during the strike of the Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendants Union — oddly enough, in this city, Local 365. I covered the meeting at which the strike ended. The men had not tended a grave or buried a body in months. The head of the local, in describing his problems, with the diocese, the bereaved, the bureaus of public health and sanitation, spoke eloquently of “this tragic backlog” and “this extra grief.” At Mount Carmel, Calvary, Cyprus Hills, there had been vandalism. The unburied coolly bided their time. The trouble is he was our candidate, Jim’s candidate really. It can’t be helped. That is all.
Our anachronism. The young uptown doctor found his standard of living drastically threatened by the change in the law. He had worked hard through his schooling, internship, and residency. He had married a girl he had met at a mixer, at Goucher. They had settled in Rye. Every Thursday night, beginning at midnight and ending at eight in the morning, he had been performing abortions, for years. The rates he had charged had not been steep, when compared with the cost of a trip to some other country. Occasionally, for a young actress out of work or some other demonstrably poor patient, he had done the operation for free. On some Thursday nights, there were only two patients. Sometimes, in the fall, there were seven. His preferred number for any Thursday night was four. He called all his patients — the Thursday night ones and those in his regular practice — by their first names. He insisted that they call him Ned. When abortion in New York became legal, Ned, never having thought of the problem in these terms, faced the prospect of having his income reduced by two thousand dollars a week, cash.
He had never been a man without scruples. The legal risk he had taken, through the years, for his patients, a sense that sane, prosperous men did not pay taxes on cash income, and a vague liberal perception that it was not altogether right to support an already too powerful government — these had combined in Ned’s thoughts into a moral certainty that his Thursday-night income was not subject to the income tax. He had, anyway, of late been taking losses in the market. Sheila, his wife, was in analysis. His two daughters were in therapy. His son — he did not know what to think about his son. At five, the boy already lacked stamina, lacked ambition. He seemed a happy little boy, but there was no question that he was far behind Doug and Netta Forster’s five-year-old in intellectual development and motor control. He was also far less tall. Doug was Ned’s best friend, and Ned had hated him since their earliest childhood. Doug had been something of an athlete. Doug had won full scholarships for college and medical school. It was true that Ned had not required scholarships, but the fact was that he had not had them. In the Army, Doug had met somebody with whom he had invested in real estate in Arizona. Ever since, it seemed clear that he was marginally richer than Ned had ever been. To conceal this fact, this disparity, had so far been the most expensive proposition of Ned and Sheila’s lives.
When the law changed, Ned had to consider these and other enormous pressures. He decided to make no concession whatever to that change. He needed the money. He had ten years of Thursday-night patients as evidence that, when they needed him, he was a good and kindly man. Patients trusted him, just as they always had, just as they should have. When a girl or a woman now came to him, not wanting to be pregnant and believing that she was, he told her to come to his office Thursday night. In a very short time, he found himself instructing patients to do this, whether the tests showed they were actually pregnant or not. He justified this to himself in a number of ways. He was busy. They were anxious. For patients beyond their early twenties, the operation might be advisable anyway. Or he could use the occasion to install an intrauterine device.
The result of this rationalization was that, on Thursday nights, Ned’s waiting room was a perfect anachronism. The women, girls usually, who arrived there were nervous, embarrassed. They did not want to be seen by the others. At the same time, each thought that the others looked legitimate. Perhaps they really were there for that intrauterine device. The receptionist had a bright and unwavering poster smile. She sat there, with country-and-western music blaring from her transistor, checking people in. By eleven-fifteen, when the last patient had usually come in, the receptionist left.
On any given Thursday, there might be a fifteen-year-old, shy, not pretty, accompanied by an overbearing, overcheerful mother; another young woman, perhaps a grade-school teacher, evidently religious, miserable, praying, removing her rosary from a purse and then replacing it, uncertain whether she could use a rosary on such a day or not. One young, engaged couple. One apparently adulterous young wife, alone. But whereas what had brought people to Ned’s office before the law changed was usually something savvy, something knowledgeable in having gotten such an address at all, what the people in Ned’s office now had in common was ignorance, and perhaps shame. Just as he put each one of them to sleep, with his own special intravenous formula, he said, “Just you wait. You’ll find this a kind of high.” Then he worked on his patients, one by one, through the night. None of them had complications. None of them died. The jet, the Xerox, the abortion law, and of course, of course, the tape recorder — these advances in terms of the reversible and the irreversible are one line, one still fuzzy line, between our set and the last set and the next.