Max Brand

Young Dr. Kildare

Warsaw 2019

Contents

I. THE COMING HOME

II. THE DARK POOL

III. FAREWELL

IV. THE WISE YOUNG MEN

V. AMBULANCE

VI. THE BREATH OF LIFE

VII. MY ART IS LIVING

VIII. ONE DROP OF POISON

IX. THE CRAZY WARD

X. FREE CLINIC

XI. THE REBEL

XII. YOUNG MEN. RASH MEN

XIII. BEDROCK

XIV. THE DREAM WEED

XV. THE HIDDEN ROOM

XVI. THE STARS AT NOON

I. THE COMING HOME

THE three who loved him had prepared the house for the homecoming of young Kildare. From front door to kitchen they had polished and rearranged, and the only room left free of summer flowers was the parlour. This sanctum of the New England home had been turned into an office so that Dr. Lawrence Kildare could have his medical headquarters on one side of the hall, as usual, and on the other side would appear the brass door-plate of Dr. James Kildare, his son.

To be without a parlour was something like being without a face but Lawrence Kildare was determined upon the sacrifice because, as he said, they were welcoming Jimmy home not only as a son but as a doctor. The twenty years of schooling had ended; he had received his degree; and now he must be made to feel that he entered this house upon an equal footing with the oldest man in it. That was the way the elder Dr. Kildare put it, modestly proud of his own humility.

So they had stripped away the flowered carpet for the sake of a tan rug, replaced the family photographs with Jimmy’s framed diplomas from grammar school, high school and college. For the bric-à-brac in the corner cabinet they substituted from the attic reserves a solid mass of battered medical journals and antiquated texts; above all the round table with its bronze bowl gave way to a big mahogany desk. Martha Kildare found it at Jefford’s secondhand store and her hands polished it brighter than new. Now she leaned to blow a speck of dust from the shining surface; with her handkerchief she scoured away the spot of mist which her breath had left; and then she gave her attention to Beatrice Raymond who was reading aloud, softly, the words which old Dr. Lawrence Kildare had written on the white scratch pad that lay in the centre of the desk-blotter. The gravity of the words had caused him to write them with care, like a schoolboy copying a text, but the tremor of his seventy years appeared in the capitals with which each word began:

Welcome Home To My Dear Son, For Ever!

As she finished reading, Beatrice Raymond lifted her head and murmured: “After all this, how terrible it would be–” but then she was stopped by the anxious, searching eyes of Martha Kildare. Beatrice wore a summer dress of organdy with a flowery pattern climbing dimly over it to her brown throat. Now she held out her skirt daintily and turned like a mannequin. “Do you think I’ll do, Aunt Martha?” she asked. For they were such close neighbours that they had to use family names.

“Darling!” breathed Mrs. Kildare. “But don’t you think you ought to wear the little jacket to the train? It has such a sweet ruffed collar.”

“It would cover my arms, though,” answered the girl, “and I think he ought to see how I’ve improved. I was all elbows, two years ago.”

“As though your points were to be counted, and you were a prize calf,” said Martha Kildare.

“Calves twenty years old generally are called cows,” remarked Beatrice.

“Beatrice!–But what do you mean?” asked Martha Kildare.

“I don’t know, exactly,” answered the girl, “only I hope it’s more than a calf affair–”

Old Dr. Kildare began to be nervous about train-time. They still had half an hour for the eight-minute drive, but then there is always the danger of a tyre blowing. He bundled his wife and Beatrice into the car which had done five years of slow service and would do five years more.

On the way to the station, the wind fluffed the organdy dress and whispered in her hair with a small voice of unhappy prophecy. When they reached the station the doctor looked gloomily around, saying: “You’d think some of the folks might have turned out to welcome Jimmy.”

“He never made many friends–but always fast ones,” said the mother.

“Well,” chuckled the doctor, “it’s true that he always hewed to the line and let his fists fall where they might. But maybe they’ve knocked some of the fight out of him back there in Hillsdale–What’s the matter, mother?”

“I forgot to baste the turkey before I left,” she exclaimed.

“You have the fire turned down low, haven’t you?” suggested the doctor.

“Yes, it’s down low.”

They got out and stood on the platform. It faced north, and even in August the shadow was iced with a remembrance of winter. An express-man wheeled out a hand-truck. Eccentric old Jim Carrington walked back and forth with a long stride, getting a good constitutional out of the ten-minute wait. Then Phil Watson and Jigger Loring and Steve Barney joined the doctor’s group, smiling, talking cheerfully about how fine it would be to have Jimmy back, and all the while their self-conscious eyes avoided the prettiest girl in town. If only Jimmy had not grown too big for the town!

Then the train was there on them, swaying its tall forehead around the bend, looking as important as a trans-continental limited. The engine shut off. It rolled on momentum; the brakes took hold, passing an electric shudder of vibration into the steel rails; the train stopped. A dozen people were dismounting.

“Beatrice, he couldn’t have missed it!” whispered Martha Kildare.

But there he was getting down last of all with a time-bitten suitcase in his left hand and a book in the right, the forefinger keeping a place. That suitcase had been quite fresh and leather- looking when she helped to pack it two years before. Jimmy had changed, too.

He himself was aware of the alteration as he stepped down the platform, but he felt that the cool of the wind which fingered through his clothes was seeing him more clearly than human eyes. He had a new body. Physical labour had built him up and stressed the important muscles like underlined words on a page of print. He was not proud of that body which his clothes masked but it gave him a more secure and comfortable sense of equipment for the world he was entering.

He put the suitcase down, which gave him a left hand to shake with the three high-school friends. They said: “Hi, Jimmy?” and “Whacha say, old boy?” and “You look great!” Then his mother got to him. She was sixty years old, for Jimmy was a late-born child. She had a high-blood-pressure look, reddish purple high up the cheeks. She was too fat. Between elbow and shoulder the flesh bagged down against the sleeve. Age puckered her eyelids and the weariness of woman was in the eyes. He held her close a moment then turned to grip his father’s hand. The old man was standing too straight. A blow would break him now, for he could not bend. His old-fashioned, professional mask of sharp-trimmed moustaches and pointed beard seemed detached from the face like a wig that barely adhered.

After that he kissed Beatrice. She stood up on tiptoe and turned her cheek like a child being kissed by an older relative. They went on to the car. In the rear seat, he stood up his suitcase between their knees and made sure that his finger had the right place in the book. He made doubly sure by glancing at the page.

... after the fever has persisted with severity or even with an increasing intensity for five or six days the crisis occurs. In the course of a few hours, accompanied by profuse sweating, sometimes by diarrhoea, the temperature falls to normal or sub-normal.

The crisis may occur as early as the third day or may be delayed to the tenth; it usually comes, however, about the end of the first week. In delicate or elderly persons there may be collapse...

“What do you think of your Beatrice now?” asked his mother, who was turned about to gloat over him.

“Beatrice? She’s great,” said Kildare.

“‘It usually comes about the end of the first week,’” he was rehearsing in his mind, and there had been a thought knocking right behind his teeth, except that his mother’s interruption checked it. He would have to pray that it might return; perhaps it was the diagnosis that he searched for. The question made him look again at Beatrice. She held up her chin and turned her head for him, fixing her smile.

“Don’t be silly,” said Kildare.

“It’s only a prop smile,” admitted Beatrice, “but it’s brand new and I thought it was quite good.”

“See the new wing on the hospital?” asked Lawrence Kildare.

“No,” said Kildare.

“He’s thinking about something,” decided Beatrice. “What are you thinking about, Jimmy?”

“Look back and you’ll see it,” insisted the father. “More than fifty thousand dollars went into that. It’s going to bring surgery right up to date in our town.”

Kildare looked through the back window. The hospital had a block to itself, surrounded by trees which were set adrift by the motion of the automobile; the top branches obscured the highest roof of the building. His eye glanced on up into the empty blue of space.

“They’re all set for you over there,” remarked the father. “You’re going to have a happy interne year in our hospital, my boy.”

“Ah?” murmured Kildare.

“What are you thinking about, Jimmy?” asked the girl.

“Children hate questions,” said he.

“That’s right. Be nice and mean. Be yourself,” she answered.

He watched her relax, suddenly, with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes considering him impersonally. She had a special way of slipping into herself and looking out at the world.

Then he was walking up the path towards the house, carrying his suitcase, the marked book still in his right hand. The others fell away so that he had to step first into the front hall. All the hours of preparing were wasted on him. His eye found the brass door-plate which announced ‘Dr. James Kildare’ and remained on it.

“It was all your father’s idea–oh, Jimmy,” said his mother, “if you ever grow up to be half as good and wise as–There! See what we’ve done!”

“Well, look at that,” commented Kildare. He took an idle step or two into the room. “How did you get rid of the old-fashioned funeral that used to be in here?”

“Jimmy Kildare!” whispered Beatrice, fiercely.

“Why, it’s great,” said Kildare. He wandered about the room with the book still in his hand. “Look at all these!” He flicked his fingers over the old journals in the curio case. He leaned at the desk. There it seemed to take him minutes to read the words which the meticulous pen of his father had written on the scratch pad. After that he looked up at the surprise and pain in his mother’s face. He straightened himself with a jerk. “Who could want a better office than this?” he demanded of the world at large.

“Well, you’ve got sun, and air, and room for your thoughts,” remarked the old doctor. “More than I had when I hung out my shingle. A good deal more. You remember, mother?”

But Mrs. Kildare was hurrying out towards her kitchen, and the doctor took his son into the vegetable garden to look over the shining rows of young onions. It was his belief that in the onion were locked up vital secrets of health and strength and long life. “Sulphur and iron turn the trick,” declared Lawrence Kildare. “And so I’ve got an iron sulphide worked into the soil. You’ll have some of those onions with your turkey dressing. Come to think about it, Jimmy, was there ever a great nation that got along without onions? Greece? Rome? When they grow rich, the onion disappears from the table; weakness of the soul and the body follow, decadence. Look at Egypt. Egypt, too. Wherever you find civilised man, you find onions–”

Afterwards, when Martha called that dinner was ready, he was saying: “I’m at the age which begins to get a bit weak in the knees, Jimmy, but with plenty of open air and with you to spell me, I’m going on for another decade, my lad.”

“Of course,” muttered Kildare.

He came into the dining-room with his father as a horse whinnied behind the house, beyond the vegetable garden. Kildare looked out the window at a big shining bay in the pasture.

“That’s that Maggie mare of yours, of two years ago,” he said to Beatrice.

“She’s just six now, and full of beans,” answered Beatrice. “I’ve taught her to jump because I know you like short-cuts across country. Try her later on and see if you’d like to keep her.”

“Keep her?” exclaimed Kildare. He looked sharply at the girl, sticking his head out as though he were searching for offence and ready to find it. He said nothing more.

“But, Jimmy,” his mother reproved, “don’t you think it’s the most lovely gift?”

“It’s too lovely. I won’t take her horse,” declared Kildare.

“Why, James–” said the old doctor, amazed.

But Kildare had fallen into a brown study over the soup. He had hardly tasted it twice before he jumped up, exclaiming: “I have to send a wire. Maybe I’ve got it! Maybe I’ve nailed it down!”

“What, my lad?” asked the doctor.

“Oh, an old fellow in the hospital back there in Hillsdale. He’s sick a month with recurring fever and nobody’s been able to spot it.”

Then they could hear his voice at the telephone in the hall, giving an address and adding for a message: “Suggest Bed Eight has relapsing fever please advise what results.”

“Isn’t Jimmy a little strange, Larry?” suggested the mother.

“Boys have to grow up,” answered the old man, “and a grown brain needs occupation.”

Jimmy came back into the room with the distant consideration of thought gone from his eyes. He smiled on them all one by one, as though he were seeing them for the first time. At his mother’s chair he leaned a moment to say: “It’s great to be back.”

The mother and father shone with happiness. Only Beatrice kept examining him with a studious intentness.

Old Dr. Kildare said: “What have you fixed on? You’ve never said what it’s to be–medicine, surgery, research, obstetrics–”

“I don’t know,” answered Kildare.

“Ah, but you have a preference by this time!”

“No, I haven’t. I’m not so keen on any of them,” said Kildare.

“Not so keen–” breathed the old man. “Ah, well,” he went on, relaxing, “it simply means that you’re ideally suited to the life of the country practitioner–a well-rounded business that keeps your hand in everything. Lots of good minds are looking favourably on general practice instead of this eternal, infernal specialising...”

II. THE DARK POOL

AN owl started going ka-pooo-pooo, a fool of an owl who might have known that her sounding horn would frighten every young rabbit into hiding and turn the field mice into motionless little brown stones. No wind stirred to set the stars trembling, for the moon had turned the world to ice and covered the fields with silver; under every blade of grass its shadow was frozen fast in place. That was how it seemed to Kildare as he stood at his window, sleepless, but the night was as hot on his face as it was cold to his eye.

He turned, his monstrous shadow twisting before him on the floor. A fragrance of mignonette made the heat of the night more palpable. Once in his boyhood he had spoken of liking that perfume; a dozen years later his mother still remembered and that was why the jar of it bloomed on the corner table. He was stifled suddenly by more than the still heat of the night. He threw off his pyjamas, stepped into swimming trunks and tennis shoes, and walked out under the moon, his feet finding their own way along the path that moved crookedly through the adjoining empty lot.

He went on down McKinley Street and into the open country with trees walking slowly overhead between him and the moonlit sky. There in the clear the moon had the world to itself again until he reached the tangle of shrubbery and great willows by the river. It was a mere trickle at this time of the year but it was no spendthrift; it husbanded all its resources and spread them out like a purse of silver to make the big swimming pool. It was a famous pool. The boys drove twenty miles to come to its green banks; and he saw, at the bend where the pool turned out of sight, the sleek dark mark of the slide which had been used in the old days. In the centre of the water, the same old derelict of a tree showed the tip of its shoulder and one desperate, upflung arm.

He climbed to the top of the dead tree which made the highest platform for the bravest of the divers. It slanted out from the bank over a deep part of the pool–unless time and the soft current had drifted the sand-bank closer to the shore. He kicked off the tennis shoes and stood up straight. When he was ten he had stood there like that, showing his teeth with terror and hoping the other lads would think it a smile. They had thought so, as a matter of fact; that high dive plus the hardness of his fists had simplified his earlier years in the village school, but now he forgot the distance beneath him as he looked out over the trees at the little village. The street lamps were dim yellow jewels against the white dazzle of the moonlight. There was hardly enough of the town to fill the palm of the hand.

He gripped his body harder with his arms, then dived with a strong outward bound that left the stump shaking behind him. He thought he saw, as he shot down, a dimness of shadow under the face of the pool. Perhaps that was the loom of the sand-bank. But he made no effort at a shallow dive, cleaving deep until the tips of his fingers touched the ooze of the bottom; then he shunted himself up to the surface. The water yielded as life does not yield. He cut into it savagely, swimming a fast crawl, and then let himself drift face up. There was a bright star up near the zenith. He forgot the movement of the water and watched that single point of brightness until it began to shiver into rays; that was when he turned his head and saw the white figure sitting at the turn of the lagoon.

He stood up, treading water, and called: “Hi–Beatrice?”

“Hi,” said the girl.

He swam to the shore and sat down on his heels, the water from his body pattering down.

“What’s the idea?” he asked.

“I thought I’d cool off,” said Beatrice. She was in perfect repose, leaning against a rock with her hands clasped around one knee. Her bare legs meant that she had a swimming suit under her dress, no doubt.

“Girls never come here,” he pointed out.

“This girl does,” she answered, and let it go at that, making one of those familiar pauses in which she was always so at home, and he so ill at ease.

He drew a little closer.

“Don’t drip on me, Jimmy,” she cautioned in that calm voice of hers.

“The shadow covers up your eyes,” he said to explain his crowding. “I never know what you’re all about unless I can see your eyes.”

She made a slow gesture, drawing her hair back from her forehead so that the moonshine poured freely over her face. While he studied her, another long moment of pause came between them and the frogs began to sing their chorus of soprano, alto, and bass, point and elaborate counterpoint that dizzied the ear.

“It’s no good,” commented Kildare. “You’re being sour.”

“No, I’m not being sour.”

“You’re being sour. You always could subtract yourself from any scene from the first time I can remember.”

“What’s the first time you can remember?” she wanted to know.

“Ten years ago. I was sixteen. How old would that make you?”

“Ten.”

“You had straight knees; and your socks never fell down in wrinkles. Your hair was brighter then.”

“I’m sorry the hair went wrong.”

“It isn’t bad, when the sun hits it... You didn’t have that mole on your cheek, then; you had two dimples instead of one; there wasn’t any cleft in your chin; when the wind hit your hair it simply exploded all over the place and that always started you laughing. You had a sweet way of laughing, for a little kid... Are you only twenty, Beatrice?”

For some mysterious reason she required another pause before answering this simple question. “I’m twenty,” she agreed at last, and seemed to have a little difficulty in getting out the words. “Why ‘only‘ twenty? Am I producing too many moles and cleft chins and things? Do I seem a lot older?”

“No, but you’re sort of filled out. I mean–well, I don’t know. Let’s have a swim and I can tell better.”

He stood up and faced the water, stretching his arms up over his head and yawning some of the day’s weariness out of his body, some of the trouble out of his brain. Behind him her clothes rustled. The dress fell to the ground like a patch of moonlight. She walked past him and tried the water with one foot.

“You look fine,” said Kildare.

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