Penny handed him the little flashlight.
“Forceps,” he said a moment later.
She handed him the forceps.
“Scalpel.”
She handed him the scalpel.
“Guitar.”
She handed him the guitar.
He held it between his legs and began strumming. Then he unloosed a very pleasant tenor voice and sang a rock-’n’-roll rendition of Down In The Valley. “Did you like that?” he asked Penny when the song was over, raising his head for the first time since he’d begun his examination.
“Oh, yes.” The darling girl clapped her hands. “You’re really very talented.”
“You have to be if you’re going to get any place in medicine today,” Quimbare told her. “Ever since that neurosurgeon Casey started warbling, every medico worth his salt has been taking voice lessons. Why, there’s even a movement to license the Beatles to practice. And you should hear them over at Johns Hopkins since the Hall Johnson Choir joined the staff!” Dr. Quimbare went back to his examination. “I see that you’re a virgin,” he said after a moment, sounding surprised. “We sure don’t get too many cases like that these days.”
“I am.” Penny fidgeted. “I really don’t see the purpose of this examination, Doctor,” she objected again.
“You never can tell,” he said. “Sometimes we find the damnedest things. Why, just the other day, I had occasion to examine a nurse in this very hospital. The poor girl had swallowed a razor blade and it had worked its way through the bloodstream until it lodged in the very area of my specialization.”
“How awful! What did you do?”
“Oh, we finally got it out all right. Still, it’s a shame she didn’t come to me sooner. You should never let those things go, you know. They can be dangerous.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Yes, indeed. By the time I’d removed the razor blade, we’d already had to treat an attendant for a cut finger, two interns for slashed lips and a resident who’d been castrated.”
“Terrible,” Penny said. “But I haven’t swallowed a razor blade—or anything else, for that matter. I haven’t really eaten since much earlier tonight, and I’m getting hungry. So won’t you please just finish up and let me get out of here so I can snatch a bite?”
“Dr vice-versa,” Dr. Quimbare murmured, still continuing his examination.
“What?”
“Notl1ing.” He straightened up. “Look here,” he suggested, why don’t I take you out for some later supper? I get off in about ten minutes.”
“Thank you,” Penny said. “I’d like that. I’m particularly grateful, you see, because I don’t have any money with me.
“Then it’s a date.”
A while later, Penny, the mink wrapped snugly around her, holding onto Dr. Quimbare’s arm, was being escorted into a Schraft’s restaurant. It seemed very crowded, and Dr. Quimbare commented on it to the headwaiter while they were waiting for a table. “It’s a college reunion,” he was told. “See the banner.”
Penny followed Dr. Quimbare’s gaze and saw a large banner reading “VASSAR—CLASS OF 1901” hanging from the ceiling. Beneath it was a group of doddering old ladies making merry. The headwaiter escorted Penny and Dr. Quimbare to a small table right next to the group.
". .. the first time I was unfaithful to my husband,” a little old lady was saying in a high-pitched, quavery voice, “Was in nineteen-and-oh-six. We had this St. Bernard and he caught me out back of the garage attached to the $35,000 home we had in Westchester and ravished me. After that first time we used to meet every Sunday afternoon. It was idyllic. I’ll never forget it. The smell of discarded caviar wafting over us from the trash cans. The soft brown eyes looking deep into mine. The feel of the soft fur as he pinned me to the ground. And always the sound of the buzzsaw from the garage as my husband worked at his do-it-yourself hobbies. It was my first affair, and after that —”
“Not so fast, Agnes!” A gray-haired octogenarian with a shawl over her shoulders and a shorthand notebook in her lap held up a quill pen to slow the speaker down. “I’m not getting it all.”
“I’m sorry, Mary, I’ll go slower. My next lover was —”
“Now you’ve hogged the spotlight long enough, Agnes,” a third of the ladies objected, holding up a crutch by way of protest. “Let me tell you about my last affair in Hecate County.”
“How could you have an affair, Matilda? You’ve been a paraplegic for fifty years.”
“Hell, in Hecate County, that’s an asset. Where there’s a will, you know? Actually, what my lovers used to do, they used to hang me by my harness from a clothes pole. That worked out pretty good, only—”
“Only?” Mary, the lady taking notes looked up questioningly.
“Only sometimes, afterwards, they’d forget to unhook me,” Matilda admitted. “They just aren’t turning out gentlemen the way they used to when I was a girl.”
“When you were a girl, you were a Lesbian, Matilda,” a fourth old lady reminded her. “Remember? We used to share a room together at Vassar.”
“Remember?” Matilda sighed. “How could I ever forget? Lights out at ten o’clock. Candles out at ten-oh-one. Young girls knew how to enjoy themselves in those days. They knew their place. These flibbertigibbets today don’t know what they’re missing.”
“Anyway,” Agnes resumed, “about my second lover—”
“You’ll have to hold off on that,” Mary interrupted. “We’re going to have to break up now. It’s time for my Geritol and I must be getting home. And anyway, here comes the waiter with the check.” She studied the bill a moment. “Now, Agnes,” she said, “You had the gruel and the Rob Roy. With the tip that’s $1.65. And Matilda had the soft-boiled eggs with two daquiris and I had Irish coffee and a corn muffin, so—”
“I only had one daquiri!” Matilda interrupted indignantly.
“No, Matilda, you had two. I saw you,” Agnes insisted. “You ordered the second one while Euphremia was telling us about how the acrobat seduced her on the flying trapeze. Remember?”
“No, I don’t,” Matilda grumbled. “Anyway, what does the check come to?” she asked Mary.
“Seventy-three dollars and fourteen cents. Do you think a seventy-five cent tip is enough?”
“Oh, leave a dollar. Let’s be generous. After all we’re Vassar girls.”
“All right,” Mary agreed. “A dollar it is. Now, will one of you girls wheel me out so I can get a cab?”
Smiling, Penny and Dr. Quimbare watched the group go. “It’s women like that,” Quimbare mused, “that restore my faith in geriatrics.”
“Bah!” grunted the waiter behind him as he pocketed the tip.
“Shall we go?” Penny asked as she finished her coffee.
“Sure. I’ll take you home. Where do you live?”
“Not far from here; only there’s a problem.”
“What sort of problem?”
Penny explained about being locked out of her apartment and her landlady not being home.
“But surely she must be back by now. It’s almost morning,” Dr. Quimbare pointed out.
“I suppose so. But she’s such an old harridan that I hate to face her.”
“I’d invite you up to my place to spend what little’s left of the night,” Dr. Quimbare, the dedicated gynecologist, said, “but I live with my mother and I’m afraid she’d object. You see, we’re quite attached.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I understand.”
“I’ve got it. Why not let me talk to your landlady? As a professional man, I’m sure I can smooth things over.”
“Oh, would you? Gee, I’d really appreciate that.”
As it turned out, the landlady was very much impressed by Dr. Quimbare. When he mentioned his mother, that clinched it. As far as the landlady was concerned, Penny might have been running around in a half-clothed condition deserving of gossip, but that gossip would be mollified by her been escorted home by such a nice, polite doctor who was good to his mother. So she scolded Penny in an almost motherly fashion for having lost her key, provided the darling girl with a passkey and gave a cluck of farewell rapport to the nice young doctor as he escorted Penny up the stairs.