Chapter Thirty-six

It was toward the evening of this day of cross-currents in the affairs of Schuylers, that Henry, shaking down his pot-bellied stove, climbing out of his seersucker into the gray herring-bone one with the shiny shoulder-blades, and wrapping a gray wool string of a scarf about his throat against the chill of the long ride home on the dairy-truck, was interrupted by a final visitor, old Dr. Dan Kiskadden, who brought him tidings that made the long, tired brackets around Henry’s mouth cut grimly deeper.

For forty-five years, the Kiskadden brothers, like their father before them, had practiced medicine in Centralia. Two months before, Eli, the younger, had fallen over dead while he was writing a prescription for a patient in the office he shared at one end of the old red-brick double dwelling which the Eli and Dan families had occupied since the two brothers had married the two Dinwiddie sisters at a double wedding that had gone to make Centralia folk-lore.

“Doctor Dan,” as five counties knew him, had a high comb of thin, black hair, which lay on top of his otherwise bald head in a fat finger-curl. On his pipe-like legs, that were too slender and short for the paunch of his torso, he did sort of a running-walk, his neck darting in and out after the fashion of a rooster pecking gravel. His voice, completed the analogy. It rose and fell in hollow clucks, with the dartings of the neck. A squeaky little voice, emanating shrilly from the bantam little body.

Sometimes Henry and Doctor Dan passed each other as often as three and four times a day along High or Sycamore Streets, occasionally drifting to a standstill for an exchange of local gossip that had to do with business or politics.

The doctor was usually carrying on dietetic experiments with guinea-pigs and rats in a laboratory he had rigged up, by courtesy of the school board, in a small room adjoining the zoölogy laboratory of Tallahassee High School. Sometimes, on Sunday mornings, Henry walked or got a lift into town, to pore over the doctor’s charts with him in the deserted, chalk-smelling school-building.

When Henry was seventeen, Doctor Dan had fought through a close case of double pneumonia with him. A warm, curiously impersonal friendship had persisted, although it was only the second or third time Doctor Dan had ever appeared in his office.

In an age of specialization in medicine, there was something as antiquated about the general practitioner as a horse-car. In the little cubby-hole behind his office Doctor Dan still pulverized with his own mortar and pestle, and measured out physic in an ungraduated glass. Sometimes, for weeks, his prescription-pad lay untouched.

Their experiments in the fields of biometrics and dietetics had from time to time brought one or the other of the Kiskadden brothers, usually Eli, before frequent conventions and in important contributions to scientific journals. An instrument for determining nerve-heat in connection with caloritropic observation, called the Kiskadden fork, is in common use.

But in the main, it was the older generation in Centralia still called in Doctor Dan. The younger sought out more modern outer-office, with white trained-nurse attendants and card-index systems. Those who could afford it journeyed as far as Springfield, Chicago or Rochester for diagnosis.

Doctor Dan still opened his own office door to the ring of a patient. He neglected to send bills, except occasionally a mussy one made out by his wife, when the ex-chequer loomed bare. He answered night bells. He seldom operated for a pain in the side. He had a range of instruments along the shelves of a glass case, but usually he preferred to probe about in that sore throat with the handle of an old silver spoon he kept lying about his desk. As a rule, but not invariably, he washed his hands, between patients. His little grandson Denny’s kiddie-car had a habit of cluttering up his office, and it was not unheard of for Doctor Dan to commit the ethical breach of ministering to a sick dog or cat. It was town lore that he had once answered a midnight call for Harriet, Forbes’s three-legged cat, Timp. Doctor Dan kept no card-index filing-system and he never inquired deeply into a patient’s history. Usually he knew it beforehand, or did his best to figure it out for himself.

He, and particularly his late brother, considered the wave of vegetarianism sweeping the country as pernicious, in its way, as the immoderate use of red meat. Rigorously ethical in his practice, he none the less openly advocated birth-control, and was one of the first physicians in good standing, in his state, to become actively affiliated with the movement, and still keep that standing.

Every once in a while, he packed his bag and went off to Rochester to watch the Mayos operate.

He entered Henry’s office with curt preliminaries.

“See you a minute, Henry?”

“Sit down. Glad to see you, Doc.”

“Henriette Simpson came to my office today after school. Have you seen her since?”

“No.” A kind of pallor flickered along under the leathery toughness of Henry’s skin. In streaks, as if it could not all get through. “Nothing wrong, is there, Doc? She was well as usual when I saw her Saturday.”

“Wrong as wrong. Thought I ought to talk to somebody. Not asking too much, is it, Henry, but I guess you’re about the first in line. Not a relative to her name, so far as I know.”

“Right.”

“She’s a pretty sick woman.”

“Seemed all right. Don’t remember ever hearing her complain.”

“Astonishing constitution. Nasty cardiac condition there. Chronic endocarditis. Enormously enlarged heart. Fluoroscope reveals half the chest-area covered. Valvular leakage. One of those cases where she can go any minute, or outlive us all. Seen it happen. Look at old lady Beattie, up Middleton way. They were writing her burial certificate twenty years ago, and she’s outlived her grandchildren.”

“You—didn’t tell Henriette of this?”

“No.”

“Right. Right.”

“That’s why I’m here. Told her there was nothing much to worry about, and I’d drop in to look her over again in a day or so. Nothing to worry about! There’s damn plenty to worry about.”

“What’s to be done?”

“How’s she fixed?”

“She’s still paying off on that little old house over on Ludlow Street her father left mortgaged to the hilt. It sucks up her salary like blotting-paper.”

“She’s got to quit teaching. Every inch of strain on that little body of hers is to the bad. May outlive us all if she’s handled right. What you say about her affairs don’t gee-up any too good with the situation, but there it is.”

“I see ...”

“What ever became of that old friend of the family, ’Liza Simpson, used to live with them so many years?”

“’Liza’s out in Arizona, Doc, taking care of her brother’s children. Henriette sends what little she can spare, out there.”

“Nice woman, Henriette is,” said Doctor Dan, and sat with his bandy-legs dangling, and his eyes, from which all fluids seemed long since to have been drained, as twisted-looking as water being sucked through a drain-hole.

“Leave it to me, Dr. Dan. I’ll take the matter in hand.”

“Thought you would. You understand the situation. Care, leisure, ease, and she can live to be a hundred. Maybe. Maybe not. School-teaching’s out of the question.”

“I’d rather you didn’t tell her anything until after I drop by there this evening. And when you see her in the morning, just let her know enough to see to it that she realizes the care she must take of herself. I’ll find a way to break the news to her about the teaching part myself. Telling her the truth would about kill her. Most independent temperament in the world.”

“Sorry, Henry. Know what a friend—of yours, and of your family’s, she’s been.”

“We’ll take a hand, Doc. Don’t worry.”

“S’long, Henry.”

“S’long, Doc.”