The green Chevrolet was stalled at the corner of Washington and Pine Streets. Behind it, the truck driver felt his patience drain away until, with a curse, he shifted gears and rolled his huge truck backward. The protruding sheets of steel sliced through the Volkswagen behind him and through the head of the driver, John Phillpott Tanker.
The ambulance drivers who brought him in had little hope. The nurses in the Emergency Room had less. The residents struggled on, patching torn blood vessels, giving transfusions, wrapping his head in a new plastic bag, and trying every other trick any one of them could think of before they too admitted it was hopeless.
Walter Sturbridge heard about it Sunday evening when an old friend, an elevator operator at University Hospital, called him on the phone. Sturbridge set a record for the trip in. Trotting down the basement corridors toward the north side of the hospital, he saw old Loomis waiting for him.
“How is he?” Sturbridge said.
“He’s messed up pretty bad.” Loomis steered him toward his elevator. “Let’s take this thing up to three where we can sit and talk a bit.” They settled, lit cigarettes. Sturbridge waited.
“What they want, Mr. Sturbridge, is to transplant Mr. Tanker’s heart.”
Sturbridge slouched down in the oversized red plastic chair that he had pulled into the patch of light from the elevator door. He stared back at Loomis. The deserted hospital office, empty since Friday, still held the lingering smells of the girls who worked here.
“They got this fellow, Rowalski, they’re just achin’ to put a new heart in. Been in and out of here since high school. Four, five years ago they did a valve job. Worked for a little while,” Loomis said, “then went to pieces. These doctors do them transplants have to wait and wait. Sometimes work for days on someone and see them die before they can find what they need. They got maybe a dozen waiting, so they’re always looking.”
Was he a feature writer, Sturbridge thought, or a stupid cub reporter feeling sorry for himself? So it was a hot night and he had missed the Ed Sullivan Show. This was University Hospital and not the Tankerville Herald. When they said, “What can we do for Tanker?” and got back a big fat “Nothing,” someone had surely asked, “What can we do with Tanker?” A healthy thirty-two-year-old with his head smashed by a truck. And all Sturbridge could think about was that ten million dollars rated a mighty big funeral. But not the characters in here that looked for wrecks like Tanker.
Old Loomis wandered around the dark office looking for a wastebasket he could spit in. “Shakes you up when it’s someone you know,” he said. “They ain’t heartless, these fellers. Otherwise. Anything they could do for Mr. Tanker they would gladly do. But when it’s like this, they get to thinking about the ones needing transplants, and start nagging the office to get permission.”
Years of war and newspaper’ reporting had toughened Sturbridge outwardly, but he remained tenderhearted. Thinking of John Phillpott Tanker being cannibalized for spare parts like a wrecked car made him ill. When they had first seen him, they had known this was it. Right away someone had said, “Who owns Tanker? When he’s dead, that is.” Someone had said, “Get the papers signed so we’ll be all set to go.” As if Tanker were some casual bit of wreckage.
The elevator buzzed and the big “7” lit up. “They’re getting ready up there,” Loomis said. “I’ll drop you off on six.”
The corridors, crowded and endless, overwhelmed him with a dozen different hospital smells as he moved from ward to ward. What rankled in Sturbridge was that Hartman, that old poop of a family lawyer, had glimpsed this and brought along his partners to help with the family, while Sturbridge, the fair-haired boy of the Tankerville Herald, the lad from the big city, sat on his fat ass sketching out a flowery obituary.
Everybody else around here from old Loomis on up knew what was going on. Sturbridge ground his teeth so hard he bit his tongue. What a jerk he appeared! Kidding himself it counted to let the family see Walter Sturbridge on the job, while all the time these country cousins were getting ready to give Tanker the lead in a damn big show to which Sturbridge didn’t even have a ticket.
He had found a corner in the Visitors’ Room and taken off his coat, loosened his shoes and tie, stretched out in a chair and lit a cigarette when Hartman came hopping over. Lawrence Jennings followed, puffing his usual cigar. He was Sturbridge’s boss on the Tankerville Herald. The son of Tanker’s dead sister, he was ten years older than Tanker but was his nephew. He would be worth millions, Sturbridge thought, struggling to see Jennings from this fresh viewpoint.
“It’s this way,” Hartman said. “They hold out no hope for John. He may die any time. They want to use his heart and maybe other things for transplants. You get around. What do you think?”
Praise God, Sturbridge thought, Loomis had already told him. He didn’t have to sit there with his mouth open, like some country bumpkin being taken in by a shell game. “They can’t change their minds afterwards,” he said.
“I’m surprised at you, Walter,” said Jennings. “I thought you were more modern. This second-thought business cuts both ways. If we don’t say yes now, we can’t say it later. We think John would want us to say yes.”
Jennings chewed fiercely on his cigar and looked around the room. Sturbridge’s eyes followed, taking in the clusters of family. Ordinary people, he thought. They hadn’t expected to get anything except Christmas dinner out of John Phillpott Tanker until it was far too late to do them any good. He figured the hospital would have a downhill fight convincing this collection of heirs that they would be talked about as progressive citizens, freed of ancient superstitions, if they signed away all of Tanker that anyone seemed to want.
“Write something on this transplant business if you can, Walter,” Jennings said. “Everyone will be curious, and the family would like to see the right story in our own paper.”
Sturbridge nodded. “Anybody know Rowalski?”
Jennings did not reply. Hartman, whose eyes were shifting about the room, following his partners as they distributed releases for the heirs to sign, finally said, “Rowalski is about John’s age. His father was an engineer, worked for Crewes and Lloyd—you’ll remember them, down at the end of Water Street. The father died quite young. Accident, if I remember right. Anyhow, he left his wife with four small children and not much else. This one, Sidney his name is, has been sickly since high school.”
“Let’s hope this will be a break for him,” Jennings said as he moved away. “Call me tonight if anything bothers either of you.”
When the lawyers left, Sturbridge glanced at his watch —quarter of eleven—he had been in the hospital an hour and a half. Dimly he recalled there were two real good movies on the late shows. By twos and threes, the heirs slipped away. Soon Sturbridge was alone in the Visitors’ Room. They would write themselves a little note to remember the funeral and flowers, he thought, and so much for John Phillpott Tanker.
He stubbed out his cigarette, tied his shoelaces, and went to the men’s room to wash his face. Glasses off, he stared at himself in the mirror, cheered because he was still very much among the living. He tried to remember whether he had left a razor in his car.
He got into Tanker’s room by following two aides wheeling a big machine. Concealed by a swarm of doctors who were tapping needles, muttering at the blinking lights, and peering into the green faces of cathode-ray tubes, the man on the bed had become plain Tanker. Though barely alive, he was a patient, and a rich one. The blood would continue to drip, the needles to flicker, and the oxygen to hiss through the hoses until the very end. There would be no fooling about that. Sturbridge saw a nurse staring at him and left.
To kill time, he went down to the bottom floor and bought a sandwich at a vending machine. It was cool down there; he slipped off his coat and tie and walked around to the small waiting room by the emergency office. Old Loomis was inside, eating sandwiches, with a young fellow wearing a white uniform. Loomis called out, “Come over with us, Mr. Sturbridge. Want you to meet Danny Gruber, he’s one of our technicians’ up on seven. Told him about you. Can I get you some coffee?” The old man scuttled away.
“Pretty busy up there, ain’t you?” Sturbridge asked.
“We’re about ready now. We’ll really clean house tonight, if they don’t fool around too long in Recovery.”
“You just have to wait until he dies, don’t you?”
“Until he’s pronounced dead. Can’t say just when the end is.”
“How come?”
“Well, when is a man dead—when he stops breathing, or his heart stops beating, or when there’s irreversible brain damage, or what? In the old days, no problem. You could just let the body lie around until the neighbors came in with the police. That was when you could let a person get really dead dead, Mr. Sturbridge. But the liver, kidneys, heart, and all that don’t wait around. They get dead dead pretty fast, too. You’ve got to be pretty spry. Not so spry there’s any loose talk about murder or manslaughter, but still spry enough so that you have some chance your transplant might take. They have a committee,” Gruber added.
Great suffering God, Sturbridge thought, another committee. A committee to decide if you were dead. Not dead dead. Just dead enough.
Loomis came in with coffee. He poised there for a moment like a startled old seagull. “Gotta get back,” he said.
“Can you take a minute,” Sturbridge asked, “and tell me about Rowalski?”
“Gruber here knows him better. I just see him in the elevator, but Gruber here, his wife and Rowalski’s wife, both nurses here one time. About four years ago when he had the valve job done, looked like he was going to be fine, and he and this nurse fall for each other. Nice girl, she was. Got two kids, ain’t they?” He looked at Gruber, who nodded. “Sure hope he does well tonight.” He tottered off toward his elevator.
Sturbridge lit another cigarette. Gruber didn’t smoke. “When does the committee get in on a business like this?”
“Been in close to an hour,” Gruber said. “Five of them. They cover everything. All kinds of electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms, and down on the second floor there’s a special little lab for tests.”
Sturbridge looked at his feet. That was how it was done, he thought. Sitting in the middle of all this data, they were pretty certain just how alive a fellow like Tanker was. The tough part was to decide how little alive Tanker needed to be in order to be dead enough to be legal. Committee members allied with the surgical transplant teams, with millions of dollars in malpractice insurance standing between them and any finger-pointers, might see death come earlier than others.
He looked at Gruber. “You wait until they make up their minds?”
“For the final green light,” Gruber said, “but our spies tell us when it’s getting close.”
“So it’s not close now?”
“No. If it was, that little light would be blinking sevens instead of fours. If it started on seven I’d be out of here like a bullet. I’m going back up anyhow, Mr. Sturbridge. Would you like to come up and see a little bit of what getting ready is like?”
Leaving the service elevator, they stepped over a recent litter of empty cartons and bottles. Gruber opened a small door and eased Sturbridge in. The place was like a gigantic airplane cockpit with the odor of intricately processed wire and metal, smelling like nothing else whatever, and he breathed this in like fresh air on a mountain-top. His gaze swept across the precise confusion of this array of dials, lights, meters and gauges, blended into that incredible symmetry possessed only by things that somehow worked. Gruber moved along the panel with a technician’s certainty. He pushed a button. “Is everything all right. Miss Lord?” he said.
“Fine, Mr. Gruber, but Dr. Lutz wants the temperature of the liver tank raised one degree.”
“O.K., Miss Lord, I’ll take care of it.”
He was busy for a minute adjusting dials. Then he beckoned. Standing beside him, looking through the plate-glass viewing port, Sturbridge could see the entire operating room. Doctors and nurses, masked, gowned and gloved, stood ready.
The waiting men and women reminded Sturbridge of a painting of communicants at some ancient rite. Here they stood, patiently, many barely out of childhood, with years spent in training, eager to wield the instruments and say the words which are the incantations of their modern magic. Their faith had saved and would save again. In his mind Sturbridge saw other men and women gathered in remote rooms the world over, communing with those powers whose force they respected, waiting, waiting for someone like Tanker. The idea was so overwhelming that his mouth would only say something silly. “What if someone has to take a leak?”
“No problem. Someone is always scrubbing. They go to the john, drink coffee, yak a little, the young ones may get in a little necking, and then they scrub and gown up again. It may go on for hours.” He smiled. “You know, my wife was a nurse here, and my brother is one of the doctors out there somewheres. I get it from all sides.”
Christ, Sturbridge thought, this transplantation business was how Gruber made a living. He liked it. I bet the first thing he’ll tell his wife will be how he raised the temperature one degree on the liver tank.
A door slammed on the other side of the partition behind them. “What do you mean visible, you goddamned fool?” a gruff voice said. “That polymyograph they hooked onto him is so damned sensitive, it would give a higher reading hooked onto an old horse turd than it’s giving hooked onto Tanker. You scientific hotshots give me a pain in the ass.”
There was a pause before a softer, smoother voice replied, “If that boss of yours wasn’t so damned anxious to get a new kidney into that worthless son of old man Krillus so he can nick him about twenty thousand, you wouldn’t be breathing down all our necks to pronounce this poor devil dead.”
“You miserable hypocrite. Would you play God and pass judgment on Krillus’ boy just because he had a little tough luck, and deny him a chance to live? We’ve had both his kidneys out for a week now.”
“I’m not hypocrite enough to say this man’s dead when a student nurse can look at the dials and see he’s alive.”
“Dials, my butt. Pull that damn plug out of the wall, and that whole show will stop in two seconds. We’ve got seven operating rooms ready to go up here, with nurses and doctors killing time playing with each other until you make up your feeble mind this man is dead.”
Gruber smiled. He walked along checking the panel, humming happily. “Things always get a little tight in the committee at the end,” he said.
Committees were committees, Sturbridge thought. When the high priests of Egypt got together in a back room of the temple, they probably had things to say to each other. He said, “Tell me about Rowalski.”
“Good man, always trying. We both studied electronics, and took some courses together. He’s a solid technician. After he had the valve job and got married, things looked good for a while and he thought some of getting a job with us here.”
“So what does he do?”
“He has a little radio and TV repair shop at home. Picks up a few dollars but not a living. The agencies help him out.”
“Not much of a life,” Sturbridge said.
“He lost his gumption after the valve job went bad, and hasn’t been the same Rowalski. His wife has the jitters and takes four kind of tranquilizers and smokes three packs of cigarettes a day. She can’t sleep, so things have been going to hell. There’s a lot of us wishing him luck tonight.”
Sturbridge nodded. “I never thought of it from Rowalski’s point of view. Just Tanker’s.” He rose. “You’ve been kind,” he said, shaking hands, “and thanks, but I better get out of your way now.”
Back on Recovery, Sturbridge tried to mix in and get inside Tanker’s room for a quick look, but a nurse spotted him and shooed him away. He sat in a phone booth trying to reach his paper and heard outside, “John, for Christ’s sake, old man, we’ve been set up there for over three hours. Good God Almighty, how long is it going to take you to convince these stupid bastards—” The doctors moved away.
They were working men with a job to do, Sturbridge thought. They knew Tanker’s goose was cooked. They had all these cases in here needing transplants, and ever since Tanker was tagged It, they’d been going. Taking blood out of Tanker for matching as fast as they ran it in. How did they know they were matching against Tanker and not some skid-row bum who had swapped his blood for a few dollars? Probably did the best they could. In ancient days they robbed graves so they could study bodies. Now, upstairs, they waited, poised like a suspended shot on television, aiming to cheat death when they started. He was an alien standing there: still he could sense the pressure as it seeped down the stairways and down the elevator shafts and flowed into Recovery.
He yawned. Despite the air conditioning, his clothes were sticky. He needed a shave. Most of all he was tired, tired really of being an onlooker, sneaking peeks through keyholes and unshaded windows.
Perhaps he could see Rowalski, he thought. He dialed the hospital. The central desk said no. Maybe he’d gone up.
Back in the Visitors’ Room, he found the little light but now it was flashing three. They weren’t on top yet, he thought. He went through his coat, tie, shoes and cigarette routine like an enfeebled actor, condemned forever to rehearse an unsatisfactory and misunderstood role. He pulled out a notebook and did the one thing he knew how to do.
He took off his glasses to rub his eyes, lit a fresh cigarette, and felt sorry for himself. The little light was flashing sevens. So now it was close. Upstairs the last cups of coffee were being drunk, last visits to the john were being made, sleepers were being awakened. Around the high sinks it was scrub, scrub, scrub, as each crew’s reinforcements moved up, kidding and joking to ease the tension of the hours ahead, like troops, in the last hour before dawn, moving up to the line of battle.
He didn’t try to get close to Recovery. Outside Tanker’s room three doctors stood in a small, tired, and solemn cluster. Soon there was a fourth. It was 4:15. Sturbridge wondered if all the patients waiting for Tanker were already on seven, or if they were now saying goodbye to their tearful families. Near him an elevator came up and was locked with open door. Aides appeared with long low carts and reels of electric cable.
Then Sturbridge felt a surge of pity and understanding for the fifth man on that committee, who now must be excruciatingly aware that his own squeamishness, conscience, or sense of fitness had condemned him to be the one who finally said Tanker was dead enough. Sturbridge could picture him dragging himself from one dial to another, staring at one group of flashing lights and then another, hoping to find there some mechanistic magic that would relieve him of his burden. For he must know full well that by now University Hospital waited on him.
Sturbridge saw him come out. Hours earlier, he must have been called from a dinner party. Now in his disheveled suit he resembled a sad and bedraggled penguin. He stepped toward the other four and with an oddly appealing gesture threw up his hands.
The long low carts, the reels of cable, more doctors, more nurses, moved into Tanker’s room and soon, as if moved by a will of his own, Tanker’s bed appeared, still covered and surrounded by tubes and needles, tanks and flashing lights. It moved, in what seemed to Sturbridge a poignantly solemn procession, past the tormented five and into the waiting elevator. The door closed.
Sturbridge heard the nurse. “Desk,” she said, “this is Recovery. Patient John Phillpott Tanker expired four thirty-seven a.m.”
* * * *
Sturbridge called his paper and gave them the time of death. Driving through the early dawn, he thought it would be nice to get home where he could take off his clothes and be comfortable.
When he had typed about half a page, the smell of frying bacon overwhelmed him. God, he hadn’t realized he was that hungry. As he ate, he told Maisie all about it. Then he fell asleep over the typewriter. Maisie let him doze a little while, then woke him and he finished the piece. He called it “The Night John Phillpott Tanker Died,” and Maisie took it down to the paper while he went to bed.
Even Lawrence Jennings went out of his way to flatter him. “They keep telephoning, Walter. They like it. We need some more. Can you keep them coming?”
Gruber’s brother, other doctors, and a lawyer friend coached him. He explained the problems so the ordinary man could see them. He called his second article “Legal Death.” Letters poured in screaming, “A man is dead when he’s dead and any fool knows that.” Others showed more understanding.
He visited families made wretched by their burdens: invalids who neither died nor recovered nor adjusted. Instead they lived with the hopes and monstrous despairs of the near-dead, bound to life by an umbilical cord woven by modern science. He knew these families well. He wrote and wrote, and called it “The Hopeful Supplicants.”
All supplicants might not be equally deserving. In Gruber’s control room, the night Tanker died, he had heard the name Krillus. Faintly he recalled a scandal, but could not pin it down. One of the regular reporters, Hank Coggins, filled him in.
“That boy Krillus is a completely no-good son of a bitch. Not just raping three teenage girls and killing two people with his car. Let’s face it, some kids are pretty wild. A young boy, full of piss and vinegar, he can do a lot of rough things, but eventually, if he grows up a decent sort of man, people forgive him. But this Krillus boy, Tony they call him, he’s just a mean bastard. Always has been. Gutted cats. Beat up small kids. His daddy’s money bought him out of everything. But he got sick and ended up with lousy kidneys. They got infected, and a week or so before Tanker died they either had to take his kidneys out or he was going to die. And they took them out.”
Sturbridge nodded. “I’ve seen the artificial kidney machine they used to keep him alive until Tanker showed up.”
“That right? Well, Krillus only had this one boy. His wife’s dead years now. He’s just a contemptible old fart himself, no self-respecting doctor would put his kidney in anything but a dirty pickle jar, and anyhow he’s too old and they had to wait.” Hank paused to light a cigarette. “Early that morning when Tanker died, they put one of his kidneys in Tony Krillus and it just worked fine. He takes medicine and some kind of treatment, but three weeks after they put it in, he was running around like you and me and has been ever since.”
Sturbridge tried to interview Rowalski, who was doing well, but the hospital would permit no visitors. He drove out one day to see Rowalski’s wife. The heat wave had broken; there had been rain and the trees and fields were green. Rowalski’s lawn was a litter of bottles, papers, old tires, discarded plastic toys, and a broken cart struggling valiantly to hide the rampant weeds. The iron gate hung awry from a broken hinge. Beyond the cracked and pitted concrete, the porch door stood ajar.
To the left a bench, some tools, and a few disemboweled and dust-covered television sets marked the limits of what had once been Rowalski’s shop. A battered baby carriage, a cot, a small basket filled with apples, another filled with tomatoes now intruded on these. On the cot a huge yellow tiger cat Hashed green eyes filled with suspicion at Sturbridge, but collapsed into purrs when petted.
He heard the house door open, and turned. The cat repaid this neglect by sinking two large claws into his hand. He made his peace and introduced himself. There were no chairs, so he sat with the cat. Mrs. Rowalski brought out the baby which she put in the carriage, a small child which she sat on the porch, a coffee percolator and the necessary things, a bottle for the baby, cigarettes, and finally a camp stool for herself. She was only about twenty-five, he thought, but he could see how the grinding years had etched her face. They sat there enjoying their smoke, the nice afternoon, the quiet children, and waited for the coffee.
Her hair was brushed back and tied with a piece of candy-box ribbon. She was clean but unadorned. He asked her about her childhood.
Her pregnant mother had fled Germany while the rest of the family were on the way to the gas chambers, and died in Brooklyn of tuberculosis when the little girl was four. From orphanage to foster home to foster home had been the child’s dreary round until she became a student nurse at University Hospital.
Her cheerless childhood had left her dull in social situations. She could not joke or flirt easily. Unlike the other student nurses, she had not flexed her emotions by falling in love with at least two medical students, interns, residents, laboratory technicians, elevator operators, or personable male patients.
When Sidney Rowalski was admitted for repair of a defective heart valve, her needs and his met. Their marriage was a monument testifying that he and she had made it. If the valve job had held up, they would have done as well as most.
She checked the baby, then brought out a glass of milk and a cookie for the little girl.
“How do you feel about things now?” he asked her.
She looked at him seriously. He could see the fatigue lines around her eyes and lips. “I can’t be sure,” she said. “If I could just believe we could be happy.”
“And can’t you believe this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
On the way home he stopped at the chain drug store. Bill would be coming home from military school this weekend; he bought a box of peanut brittle. Then he went to the corner where the old man sold flowers, and bought a big bunch of yellow roses. Maisie would feel faintly jealous and suspect him of patting some secretary at the Tankerville Herald. He couldn’t help that.
Publication of “The Hopeful Supplicants” changed Sturbridge’s life. Lawrence Jennings stopped him in the hall to pound him on the back and say, “Man, you can really write.” The lawyer, Hartman, stopped him on the street, took him to lunch, and talked and talked about how much he and his wife had enjoyed the articles. Things were looking up, Sturbridge thought; at least it didn’t look as if he had to worry about his job. Then UPI asked to syndicate his articles. At last, Sturbridge admitted, he could taste money, he could smell money, and, God willing, he would damn soon have some.
He was working hard on his fourth article, which he called “By These Hands.” He hoped to convey something of what he had glimpsed through the window in Gruber’s control room the night Tanker died. And the things Gruber and his brother had told him since. At the Hartmans’ for dinner, the Sturbridges met a nurse from University Hospital, Gladys Peterson, an old friend of Mrs. Hartman’s. “Mr. Sturbridge needs your help, Gladys,” Mrs. Hartman said. “He needs to know just what went on.”
Gladys took a big swallow of her bourbon and started in. She was a big blond blustery sort of girl, good-natured and willing. She had an eye for what counted. She took Sturbridge through the developing drama of the operating floor as the patients came up. She followed them as they were moved to different rooms and told him what the rooms contained. With the arrival of the body of John Phillpott Tanker, the overall show faded out, because she was in the room where the heart transplant from Tanker to Rowalski was being done.
“A thing like that is real exciting, Mr. Sturbridge. I mean even when you’ve worked around hospitals for years like I have, still there’s something about putting another heart in a person that makes the shivers run up my spine. I’m just not tough enough, I guess.” She paused for a swallow of her bourbon, a quick fluff fluff to her hair, a glance around to see that she was holding her audience.
“They had Rowalski up in the operating room for, oh, a good hour or more before Mr. Tanker finally died. They were checking up all the time back and forth with Recovery, because they had to get Rowalski connected to the heart-lung machine in plenty of time, but yet not too early because it don’t do them any good to be on one of those heart-lung machines a minute longer than they need to.” She finished her bourbon and Mrs. Hartman brought her another. Gladys took a good swallow. “I tell you, Mrs. Hartman, I just couldn’t be a scrub nurse today. I just couldn’t stay with it. When I was a scrub nurse, just one doctor did the operating and the other doctors helped him by keeping things back out of the way so he could see what he was doing. And if they started in trying to do any of the operating, they got a good sharp rap on the fingers from the doctor that was doing it. But it’s not like that now. What with hooking up the heart-lung machine and maybe doing a tracheotomy, that’s putting a tube in their neck to hook up to the anesthesia machine, and then opening them up so you can get at the liver or kidney or heart or whatever you are going to transplant, why you may have three or four people cutting and sewing at the same time. There is so much to do and it goes fast, fast, fast, and the girls that are scrubbed just have to be quick and pay real strict attention, because when those young squirts stick out their hand for something they want it right now. A nurse may have been out necking with that same doctor the night before, but she better be right on her toes in that operating room. She won’t be out necking with that doctor and she won’t be in there giving him the wrong instruments, either, if she can’t stay with it.
“You know, Mr. Sturbridge, the really spooky part for me was when they had taken Rowalski’s heart out but they hadn’t put Mr. Tanker’s heart in yet. That’s when you really looked at that heart-lung machine over there with the blood running down through the big cellophane bag and the oxygen bubbling up through it. You can hear the pumps going chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk, and see the blood flow into those plastic hoses that run from the machine down across the floor to Mr. Rowalski. Then they take Mr. Tanker’s heart out of the perfuser and they have it up there trimming it so it will fit exactly and you know I wanted to holler at those pumps—don’t stop—don’t stop—don’t stop—because you could just see that that pump was all there was.”
* * * *
“By These Hands” was reprinted across the country, and Sturbridge had the rare and delightful pleasure of seeing and hearing himself quoted. When Readers’ Digest wrote requesting reprint rights, he found that even the fullest cup could hold a little more. Sturbridge’s style had appeal. UPI asked him to write a column, once a week to start, on transplant problems. UPI felt it might go if he wanted to give it a try.
His concern for Rowalski’s family was genuine. Lawrence Jennings agreed to give plenty of publicity to any local groups that would help out, and between the veterans’ organizations, the lodges, the churches, and Rotary, they made a howling success of cleaning up and painting the place. The Legion rearranged its car lottery so that Mrs. Rowalski, with everyone forewarned, got one of the cars. Rowalski, doing well, was being considered for a trial visit home.
Later that week the reporter, Hank Coggins, came up. “That Krillus boy ain’t changed none. Killed another kid this morning with his damned car.”
“What happened?”
“He hit a kid named Andrews. Family lives down by the brick kilns. Killed him instantly.”
The next day Hank was back. “There’s more to that story if you want it.”
“Dump your bag,” Sturbridge said.
“It’s a mixed-up deal. Tony Krillus had a row with his old man and moved in with a friend in the old Packer Apartments down by the railroad station. Usually if a family has money, there isn’t too much trouble about killing a kid down in that neighborhood. But this time old man Krillus wasn’t having any. Seems Tony had his own car and he’s over twenty-one and the old man either canceled the insurance or it run out, so there isn’t anything to pay the Andrews family with. So the family got a lawyer, that new fellow, Yates, and he’s had Tony Krillus arrested until he posts bond. Yates swears somebody is going to pay.”
Sturbridge wrote a column on the hazards of keeping criminals or insane people alive by transplants. The liver transplant died, and he did a little more work on his fifth big article, which he called “On Borrowed Time.” Then one day he saw Hartman boil up the stairs as if outrunning a subpoena server and duck into Lawrence Jennings’ office. A few minutes later Sturbridge’s phone rang and Jeninngs asked him to come over.
Jennings’ face was flushed, his lips tightly pursed. “Walter,” he said, “you’re the nearest thing to an expert we’ve got around here on this transplant business. Have you ever heard anyone argue against declaring a man dead because his kidney or heart was still alive in someone else?”
Sturbridge stared at him. “Well, no. The early transplants were kidneys taken from identical twins, and the question didn’t come up. When they started doing hearts and lungs and more and more kidneys, they had to use organs from people who were legally dead, but they had to work fast. Of course all kinds of releases are signed, and I’ve never heard of any legal tangle about it.”
“I told you so,” Hartman cried, jumping up and waving his hands at Jennings. “John Phillpott Tanker was legally dead. Five doctors at University Hospital said so. No whiz-kid lawyer can change that.”
“Is that so?” said Jennings. “Well, how about the fellows who were hung by the neck until some doctor said they were dead, but the relatives took them down and revived them; how about the ones that came to in an undertaker’s shop after some trusty sawbones said all was over; do they have to stay legally dead? Hell, no. You know that and I know that.”
“The whole body was revived,” Hartman cried. “The same person was still there. The doctor’s mistake was obvious.”
“Does it have to be the whole body?” Jennings demanded.
“How about filling me in?” Sturbridge said. “I can hear the shooting but what are you shooting at?”
“It’s the damnedest thing,” Jennings said. “You know about Tony Krillus. Well, Yates is determined to get money. Old man Krillus won’t part with any. Holly here— he pointed at Hartman—is in Probate Court starting on John’s estate. Yates has brought in this New York fellow, and Holly can’t even get the death certificate admitted. They argue that it is an inaccurate and unsatisfactory statement inasmuch as Tanker just isn’t totally dead.”
Hartman snorted. “I never expected in all my days to sit in a courtroom and hear it argued that a man wasn’t totally dead when he’s been out in Spring Valley for months with a big marble stone on top of him. I feel like I’m watching one of those way-out television shows.”
“Damn it all, Holly,” Jennings said, “transplanting hearts and kidneys was way-out television just a damned short while ago. I don’t want any calm superior legal air about this. This is my ass. I expect to inherit a damn big chunk of John’s estate as you both well know. Anything, and I mean anything, God damn it, that threatens to get in my way is a matter of deep personal concern.”
There was a pause.
“What does Yates hope to gain with all this hoopla about the death certificate?” Sturbridge asked.
“Now you’re getting to the nub of it,” Jennings said. “My spies tell me that Yates has dreamed up the idea of filing suit against the Tanker estate. He is going to claim that without Tanker’s kidney Tony Krillus would be dead. So what Yates is going to say is that if Tony Krillus killed the Andrews boy, he did it only because Tanker’s kidney kept him alive to do it. So he is going to sue the hell out of Tanker. So what I am asking Holly is, does the whole body have to be revived? I’m worried as hell about this. A man can lose an arm or a leg or even both arms and both legs and his eyes and the Lord knows what else and still be John B. Citizen. But can a kidney or a heart lose everything else and keep on living and be John B. Anybody? Or just what the hell is the situation?”
Sturbridge couldn’t take his eyes off Hartman. God, he thought, he’s really got the wind up. He watched a muscle jump in Hartman’s cheek beneath the handkerchief he was rubbing over his face.
Hartman cleared his throat and got a grip on himself. “I think you are getting excited without good reason, Lawrence. Judge Cotton has to let them present whatever arguments they want, but you’ll see he’ll throw the whole business out fast enough. The estate will be settled just about as you expect.”
“I’m not sure Judge Cotton gives a damn,” Jennings said. “He’s due to retire soon. What do you think, Walter?”
“He’s going to be sitting on a case that’s hotter than the Scopes monkey trial,” Sturbridge said. “If the old boy has to write new law or change old law, he’s going to do his damnedest to make sure the Supreme Court finally says he’s right.”
“Damn it all,” Jennings said, “my wife will skin me alive. And you too, Holly. We figured we were all set. Now everything makes me feel worse and worse. Holly, how little of a person is still that person? Hell, with accidents and operations nowadays you lawyers must have some irreducible bit in mind.”
“No,” Hartman said. “As long as there’s anything there it’s a person. They can be deaf, dumb, blind, and completely paralyzed and still be a legal person. But with this transplant business, I just don’t know. I want to call up a few people and do a little reading. I’ll find something.” He stood up, watching Jennings.
“O.K., Holly, do the best you can.” Jennings waved him away and watched him out of the office. “He’s damn near as scared as I am, and I’m not kidding you one single bit, Walter, when I tell you I’m scared as hell. Last few months you’ve had a little taste of money, the way those articles of yours have been selling. I see your new car and things like that and I’m glad for you. But just ask yourself, Walter, how you’d feel if you had been looking at five million dollars as being so nearly your own that you could feel it in the way people spoke to you, the way your wife treated you, the way you treated yourself, and then you just begin to smell faintly, like a far-off forest fire, the chance that you may lose it.”
He lifted his big body out of the chair and went into his office and returned with two cold bottles of beer. He looked at Sturbridge. “Got any ideas, Walter?”
“None that are much help,” Sturbridge said. “I’m no lawyer but my first guess would be that transplants will be thrown out and the estate will be whacked up in the usual fashion.”
“I’d like that,” Jennings said. “But how’re they going to throw it out? You might like to disown your father or your brother but you can’t do it. The relationship is a fact. Tony Krillus is part John Tanker. Tanker was worth ten million bucks. It’s new. It’s different. But I don’t see how you can say they’ll throw it out.”
Sturbridge held up his hand. “What I really meant to say is that it’s just going to be too confusing. Next thing you’ll be saying this Tony Krillus is somehow related to the fellow that got Tanker’s other kidney or even his heart or liver.”
“That’s just the point,” Jennings said. “Isn’t he? What do we mean by related? Events don’t care how confused we are. The lawyers might figure a Martian space ship should be covered by the laws of trespass, but will that make any damn difference to the Martians? You have a new kind of person here and the lawyers are just blowing smoke out their ears when they talk as if present law will cover everything.”
Jennings looked tired, but he was able to pound the table with his half-empty beer bottle. “I have to face it, Walter,” he said. “That bunch of quacks at University Hospital is so damned anxious to get a Nobel Prize, they’d put the balls from a bull on a refugee eunuch and lease him out for stud if they thought that would do it. Why, Christ, from what I read in our paper, they can’t even say for sure Tanker was dead and make it stick. When I think of that smoothie from the hospital office giving us that ‘everything for science’ bit and rolling his eyes toward the ceiling like some damned undertaker’s assistant, while all the time John was in Recovery fighting for his life, I tell you, Walter, it makes my blood boil. The fact is I’ve been screwed—and my wife and all my relatives will soon be shouting it at me—I’ve been screwed. Should have listened to you at the hospital that night. You smelled a rat—probably just instinct. But Holly, he was so damned happy with all those papers and being the big father advisor, he never even stopped to wonder what he might be getting my ass into.”
Jennings finished his beer and struggled to his feet. “Might as well go home and face the music.”
Sturbridge told Maisie later, “Believe me, Jennings has really got it in for the hospital. Figures it’s all their fault If Tanker had been allowed to die complete and natural as God intended, there wouldn’t be any trouble, as he sees it. He’s lining up all the heirs and if this deal costs them money, they’ll get it out of the hospital if they can. Legal costs, mental anguish, loss of time—they’ll hit them for all of that and any money they may lose from the estate.”
Sturbridge leaned on his elbows. “The hell of it is, three weeks ago that bunch of heirs were thick as thieves going over plans for new houses and picking out interior decorators, and now they hate each other. Everyone thinks someone should have stopped the transplants. And they all agree it’s Jennings’ and Hartman’s fault. But I was feeling a little teed off that night because they were going to get all that money, so I didn’t sound very enthusiastic. Now they all think if they had listened to me they’d be home free. And they would. So we’re ahead. Maisie, let’s go to bed.”
Sturbridge basically did not care whether the Tanker heirs or the Tanker transplants got the estate, or how they shared it. With Tony Krillus, however, he had to recognize that a transplant wasn’t just a surgical stunt ending in success or failure. After stewing it over for several days, he wrote a fifth article. “They Live Again” was syndicated nationwide and brought in sacks of mail. He had touched a nerve.
The Tanker case became the subject in Tankerville. To get an expert opinion, place a bet, or get your face kicked in for expressing your own view too freely was easy. Believing that in union there was strength, Yates had everyone who had received a transplant from Tanker convinced he was entitled to part of the estate. Those patients who had died were represented by their families. Anyone who had kept part of Tanker alive or was still keeping part of him alive was a relative; this was the line on which the battle would be fought.
The hospital called and asked for a conference. Sturbridge was relieved, because Jennings had been getting more and more fidgety. They met in Lawrence Jennings’ office: five of them. Dr. Wingate, Chief of Surgery; Cutler, Chief Attorney; Hartman, Jennings, and Sturbridge.
Jennings said, “None of us have any idea where we really stand, so no sense sitting here trying to bluff each other. Do you agree with me that what we want is some way to kill this whole silly lawsuit? If we can do that, we have no problem. If we can’t, we won’t know for several months or years, and then we can settle down to our mutual bloodletting.”
There was a certain amount of huffing and puffing by the lawyers, during which Jennings distributed drinks and beer and put out potato chips and peanuts; then he called the meeting to order by saying, “Bullshit, Holly. Let’s get down to real cases. Can the hospital make the diagnosis of legally dead stand, and if they can will you lawyers be able to get the court to accept it so we can go ahead and probate Tanker’s will?” He looked around. “What do you think, Doc?”
Dr. Wingate was a spare alert man in his early forties. His eyes twinkled. “I think we’re being led up a damned daisy trail by this lawyer, Yates,” he said. “To the legal mind a man is either dead or alive. Not so. We’ve got instruments sensitive enough to detect electrical and chemical changes in a dead man in the ice box in the morgue. The law says when a licensed physician pronounces a man legally dead, he is dead. Doctors have made mistakes and can still make mistakes. Everyone in the transplant business is afraid of arguments about this. So we set up a committee. Just remember that, Mr. Jennings, five of our best doctors said Mr. Tanker was dead. If the court says that won’t do, that we have to wait until every possible evidence of activity is gone, then that is the end of the transplant business.”
“I don’t want to be unpleasant,” Jennings said, “but suppose they come right out and say you were a little bit quick about taking parts out of John. What then?”
“They’ve been through this in other places,” said Cutler, the hospital attorney. “The releases they sign are pretty comprehensive.”
Jennings looked at the two lawyers. “Do you fellows feel that with the permits and the evidence of the five doctors you can knock this out of court?”
The two lawyers buzzed together, then Hartman said, “As the law stands now we’re in. If the judge decides to dream up a new law, then God alone knows.”
Jennings took a swallow of beer, wiped his mouth, and looked around the table. His gaze settled on Sturbridge. “Walter,” he said, “you got anything to offer?”
“Yes,” Sturbridge said, “but it doesn’t help any and you won’t like it.”
“I can’t see how we can be any worse off,” Jennings said. “Shoot.”
Sturbridge said, “I’m not a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief but I am a reporter, and I would like to ask Dr. Wingate a few questions to clear up what I want to say.”
“Go to it.” Dr. Wingate said.
“Everyone, subconsciously, thinks of a person as actually living in his head somewhere. Certainly not in his liver or heart. We were talking about it and realized that a person can lose arms, legs, gall bladder, spleen, appendix, and can be deaf, dumb and blind but we regard them as still being the same person. But suppose you take their head off and keep all the rest of the body living—would it still be the same person. Dr. Wingate?”
“We’ve never done that,” Dr. Wingate said.
“Just suppose. Doctor.” Sturbridge said.
Wingate looked at him and smiled. “I’ll be damned if I know.”
Sturbridge turned to the lawyers. “How about you?” he asked.
They buzzed some more. “Maybe,” they said.
“Then let’s take it a step further,” Sturbridge said, “and imagine that Dr. Wingate and his team over at University Hospital take the head off John Brown and put it on the body of Bill Smith and the operation is a perfect success. What’s the name of the survivor? What are his legal rights to the two estates, to the estate of John Brown, whose head he has, and to the estate of Bill Smith, whose body he has?” He looked at Hartman.
“He’s still John Brown and he owns whatever John Brown owned and that’s it,” Hartman said.
“Now let’s imagine that John Brown, who contributed the head, isn’t worth a nickel, but that Bill Smith, who put in the body, is worth ten million dollars. How would you feel about that?” Sturbridge looked at Cutler, the hospital attorney.
Cutler stuck his lower lip out. “There would be one hell of a lawsuit.”
“That’s what you’re going to have,” Sturbridge said, looking around. “While I’m being my poisonous self, I’ve got one more. Tell me, Dr. Wingate, doesn’t any bunch of cells whether they’re in a plant, or a heart, or a kidney have a natural right to live by whatever means they can?”
“It’s the struggle for existence,” Dr. Wingate said. “All evolution depends on it.”
“Right,” Sturbridge said. “So tell me, who has the authority to sign away this natural right of Tanker’s heart or kidneys to try and keep on living? Even if the only way they can find to do it is to get Dr. Wingate to put them in somebody else? Does anybody? And if nobody can, then why can’t Tanker’s heart or kidney look to Tankers estate for food, shelter, amusement and medical care, even though the host Dr. Wingate selected—even if it’s Tony Krillus—has to receive all these things at the same time?”
“Your question makes me realize I’m just a surgeon and damn glad of it.” Dr. Wingate said.
A few nights later, Maisie invited the Hartmans and Gladys Peterson to dinner. “That Sidney Rowalski was back for a checkup,” Gladys said. “When I think of the times I’ve seen him lying in an oxygen tent ready to breathe his last, and now, my, he looks good.”
Mrs. Hartman sniffed. “Poor thanks the Tanker family are getting, after all they did for him.”
“The lawyers will have to find a way to take care of that.” Gladys said. “People aren’t going to keep on burying perfectly good hearts and lungs and kidneys, if they got sick kids or relatives that can be kept alive by using them. Stands to reason. People will settle this and settle it right.”
Her certainty impressed Sturbridge. He wanted to finish his sixth article, which he called “On Borrowed Time.” He knew he would have to say a great deal about the medical and legal difficulties associated with transplants, but he did not want to say anything that would keep the work from going ahead. The idea that the people would decide what was right became the keystone. It was wonderfully well received.
Some weeks later the word seeped around that old Judge Cotton was finally going to come up with a decision. Sturbridge met Jennings outside the old courthouse. Together they climbed the dirty wet granite steps, bending their heads to the gusts of wind and rain, until they reached the huge doors, which opened reluctantly into the wind to let them slide through into the lobby.
Sturbridge was struck once again by the contrast between the dream of justice and its working reality. Lawyers and clients were scattered about, dripping from their sodden coats. The marble walls were discolored with smoke and grime. The light from the dirty bulbs in the huge candelabras disappeared into dingy darkness.
The bailiff, red-cheeked and puffy with his moment of importance, was shouting, “Hear ye—Hear ye—” and they scrambled to their feet. The coughing ceased. Judge Cotton was a small man nearly lost behind the huge oaken bench, until he clambered into view on a high stool. He turned and nodded at the bailiff, and Sturbridge noticed the dandruff scattered over the back of his faded robe. “Even though he’s retiring pretty soon, he could loosen up enough to buy a new robe,” Jennings said, as they sat down again.
The judge was perched up there between the flags, which hung listlessly from their poles. Behind and above him a huge gilded eagle had moulted in great white patches. The judge looked up. A sigh and then silence as everyone waited. Then a glut of lawyers and clerks surrounded the bench: the dank audience, condemned to limbo, picked their noses, loosened their ties, and squirmed in the eternal human effort to fit a hard bottom to a hard oak seat.
Then another sigh. The lawyers and clerks had been driven back. The judge was alone. Silence fell.
“I find in the case before us,” he said, in a voice as dry and serene as the whispering of leaves in the early morning, “that the recipients of tissue transplants from John Phillpott Tanker should share with the legitimate heirs in the distribution of his estate. They cannot replace these heirs but they cannot be excluded. The degree of sharing will be determined by future argument before this court.”
Jennings looked at Sturbridge and sighed with relief. “I was scared, Walter, that he might leave the family out entirely. This I can live with. We’ll have to work out a settlement because none of us will want to wait forever. I have to call my wife.”
That night Sturbridge watched Sidney Rowalski on television. Rowalski was asked about the lawsuit. “After all,” he said, “God knows, I’m grateful I got Mr. Tanker’s heart. I’d be dead probably if I hadn’t, because I couldn’t have hung on much longer. I had rheumatic fever when I was a boy and what heart I had left was going to pieces. But still I feel queer. Part of me is really Mr. Tanker and most of the rest of Mr. Tanker is gone. It’s different somehow from having a plastic or a metal heart, I think. I never had one, but you could imagine it being part of yourself, like glasses, or false teeth. But my heart belongs to Tanker and I’m not trying to be funny.”
Later he was asked about the money. “Well, I’m glad,” Rowalski said. “At first, I admit I had a funny feeling. I was being ungrateful somehow and that just getting Mr. Tanker’s heart should be enough. My wife argued with me, pointing out that although I felt pretty good right now I had no way of telling what lay ahead. And then there was the children. If I was going to keep myself going I had to take care of Mr. Tanker’s heart, and if Mr. Tanker’s heart was going to keep going it had to take care of me. We were both in me together. I never knew Mr. Tanker, but I finally decided he would want his heart and me mighty well taken care of.”
Right on the heels of his column on the court decision, Sturbridge was notified he had won the Pulitzer Prize. Lawrence Jennings told him at work, sent out for sandwiches and coffee for everyone, and gave Sturbridge a cold glass of beer. Sturbridge called Maisie and she cried. There at the paper everyone came up to his office and it was a nice party.
He went home and petted Maisie until she stopped crying. Bill had gone AWOL from military school and thumbed his way home. The afternoon paper carried Sturbridge’s picture and then people started coming. Everybody. Bringing food, bringing liquor, bringing good wishes. They came from the hospital led by the Grubers, from the paper led by Lawrence Jennings, and from the town led by the Hartmans. Sturbridge was completely and utterly satisfied. It was three in the morning before they were gone. He was in a tremendous glow. He could hear Maisie reclaiming her kitchen, which the other women had taken over for the evening. Bill was trying to finish one last piece of chocolate cake. Sturbridge looked at him with great affection.
“You know, Bill,” he said, “if you put a heart and a lung, and a kidney and a liver there on the table I doubt if I could tell them apart. But I’m mighty grateful to them, yes sir, mighty grateful. They sure did all right by me.” He pulled himself up and started for the stairs.
Maisie called from the kitchen, “I’ll be right up, dear.”
“You better be,” Sturbridge said.
And Bill laughed as only a sixteen-year-old can laugh.