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"Gotcha!" Mr. Rose said, smiling.
But it was Rose Rose who'd really gotten him; Angel staggered back to the apple mart and into the fancy house as if he'd been struck by a boulder.
Who was the baby's father? Angel Wells wondered. And where was he? And where was Mrs. Rose? Were Mr. Rose and his daughter all alone?
Angel went to his room and began to compose a list of names--girls' names. He took some names he liked out of the dictionary, and then he added other names that the dictionary had overlooked. How else do you impress a girl who hasn't been able to think of a name for her baby?
Angel would have been a blessing to St. Cloud's, where the practice of naming the babies was a little worn out. Although Nurse Caroline had contributed her youthful energy to the nearly constant occasion, her rather political choices had been met with some resistance. She was fond of Karl (for Marx), and Eugene (for Debs), but everyone balked at Friedrich (for Engels), and so she had been reduced to Fred (which she didn't like). Nurse Angela also complained about Norman (for Thomas)--to her it was a name like Wilbur. But it was difficult to know if Angel Wells could have kept his passion for names intact when the task was almost a daily business. Finding a name for Rose Rose's daughter was a devotion quite unexpected--yet it was typical of a boy's first love.
Abby? thought Angel Wells. Alberta? Alexandra? Amanda? Amelia? Antoinette? Audrey? Aurora? "Aurora Rose," Angel said aloud. "God, no," he said, plunging into the alphabet. The scar on the face of the young woman he loved was so extremely thin, so very fine--Angel imagined that if he could kiss that scar, he could make it disappear; and he began working his way through the B's.
Bathsheba? Beatrice? Bernice? Bianca? Blanche? Bridget?
Dr. Larch was facing a different problem. The dead patient had come to St. Cloud's without a scrap of identification--she'd brought only her burning infection, her overpowering discharge, her dead but unexpelled fetus (and several of the instruments she--or someone else--had put into herself in order to expel the fetus), her punctured uterus, her unstoppable fever, her acute peritonitis. She reached Dr. Larch too late for him to save her, yet Larch blamed himself.
"She was alive when she got here," Larch told Nurse Caroline. "I'm supposed to be a doctor."
"Then be one," Nurse Caroline said, "and stop being maudlin."
"I'm too old," Larch said. "Someone younger, someone quicker, might have saved her."
"If that's what you think, maybe you are too old," Nurse Caroline told him. "You're not seeing things as they are."
"As they are," said Wilbur Larch, who closed himself off in the dispensary. He'd never been good about losing patients, but this one, Nurse Caroline knew, was quite lost when she'd arrived.
"If he can hold himself responsible for a case like that," Nurse Caroline told Nurse Angela, "then I think he ought to be replaced--he is too old."
Nurse Angela agreed. "It's not that he's incompetent, but once he starts thinking he's incompetent, he's had it."
Nurse Edna would not contribute to this conversation. She went and stood outside the dispensary door, where she repeated, and repeated, "You're not too old, you're not incompetent, you're not too old," but Wilbur Larch could not hear her; he was under ether, and he was traveling. He was far away, in Burma--which he saw almost as clearly as Wally ever saw it, although Larch (even with ether's assistance) could never have imagined such heat. The shade that he saw under the peepul trees was deceiving; it was not really cool there--not at that time of the day that the Burmese refer to as "when feet are silent." Larch was observing the missionary Dr. Stone making his rounds. Even the noonday heat would not keep Fuzzy Stone from saving the diarrhetic children.
Wally could have informed Larch's dream with some better detail. How slippery the bamboo leaves were when one was trying to walk uphill--for example. How the sleeping mats were always damp with sweat; how it seemed (to Wally) to be a country of submagistrates, corrupted by the British--either into being like the British, or into being consumed by their hatred of the British. Wally had once been carried across a plateau shot through with sprouting weeds and befouled with pigshit; on it was a former tennis court, built by someone British. The net was now a magistrate's hammock. The court itself, because of the high fence that enclosed it, was a good place to keep the pigs; the fence, which had once kept tennis balls from being lost in the jungle, now made it more difficult for the leopards to kill the pigs. At that way station, Wally would remember, the magistrate himself had instrumented his urinary tract for him; a kindly, round-faced man with patient, steady hands, he had used a long, silver swizzle stick--something else the British had left behind. Although the magistrate's English was poor, Wally had made him understand what the swizzle stick was for.
"British ees crazy," the Burmese gentleman had said to Wally. "Yes?"
"Yes, I think so," Wally had agreed. He hadn't known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to--and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter.
The silver swizzle stick was too inflexible for a proper catheter, and the top of the thing was adorned with a kind of heraldic shield, Queen Victoria's stern face presiding (in this one case, she was observing a use of the instrument she adorned that might have shocked her).
"Only British ees crazy enough to make something to stir a drink," the magistrate said, chuckling. He lubricated the catheter with his own saliva.
Through his tears, Wally tried to laugh.
And in the rounds that Dr. Stone was making, wouldn't many of the diarrhetic children suffer urinary retention, wouldn't Dr. Stone have to relieve their little, distended bladders, and wouldn't his catheter be proper and his method of instrumentation sound? In Wilbur Larch's eyes, which were over Burma, Dr. Stone would be perfect--Fuzzy Stone wouldn't lose a single patient.
Nurse Caroline, understanding that the coincidence of the woman dying without a name would not sit well alongside the recent "evidence" submitted to the board of trustees, knew it was time for her to write to Homer Wells. While Dr. Larch rested in the dispensary, Nurse Caroline worked with a vengeance over the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office.
"Don't be a hypocrite," she began. "I hope you recall how vehemently you were always telling me to leave Cape Kenneth, that my services were more needed
here--and you were right. And do you think your services aren't needed here, or that they aren't needed right now? Do you think the apples can't grow without you? Just who do you think the board's going to replace him with if you don't step forward? One of the usual cowards who does what he's told, one of your typically careful, mousy, medical men--a little law-abiding citizen who will be of absolutely NO USE!"
She mailed that letter at the same time she alerted the stationmaster that there was a body at the orphanage; various authorities would have to be sent for. It had been a long time since the stationmaster had seen bodies at the orphanage, but he would never forget the bodies he had seen--not his predecessor, after the sternum shears had opened him up, and certainly never the fetal autopsy from Three Mile Falls.
"A body?" the stationmaster asked. He gripped the sides of the small table where the constant television revealed to him its blurry, fade-in and fade-out images--any one of which the stationmaster found preferable to the more vivid picture of those long-ago bodies.
"Someone who didn't want to have a baby," Nurse Caroline told him. "She butchered herself, trying to get the baby out. She got to us too late for us to be able to do anything about it."
Unanswering, and never taking his eyes from the snowy, zigzagging figures on the TV screen, the stationmaster clung to the table as if it were an altar and the television was his god--at least, he knew, he would never see on that television anything resembling what Nurse Caroline described, and so the stationmaster continued to watch the TV instead of looking into Nurse Caroline's eyes.
