Harry Frank - Alas, Babylon

“I don’t think Elizabeth will mind if you sit in on this,” Dan said. “Practically one of the family by now, aren’t you?”

Going upstairs Randy decided that Dan, too, should know of Mark’s warning. If anybody ought to know, it was a doctor. And at the same time Randy realized he had not included drugs in his list, and the medicine cabinet held little except aspirin, nasal sprays, and mouthwash. With two children coming, he should’ve planned better than that. Anyway, Dan was the man to tell him what to get, and write the prescriptions.

Randy mixed Dan a drink and said, “Our medic is here to see you, Lib, not me. When he’s finished talking, I’ve got something to say to both of you.”

Dan looked at him oddly. “Sounds like you’re about to make a pronouncement.”

“I am. But you go first.”

“It’s nothing urgent or terribly important. I was just making the placebo circuit and dropped in to see Elizabeth’s mother.”

“The what?” Lib asked. Randy had heard Dan use the phrase before.

“Placebo, or psychosomatic circuit—the middle-aged retirees and geriatrics who have nothing to do but get lonely and worry about their health. The only person they can call who can’t avoid visiting them is their doctor. So they call me and I let them bend my ear with symptoms. I give them sugar pills or tranquilizers—one seems about as good as the other. I tell them they’re going to live. This makes them happy. I don’t know why.”

At thirty-five, Dan was a souring idealist. After medical school in Boston he’d started practice in a Vermont town and in his free hours slaved at post-graduate studies in epidemiology. His target had been the teeming continents and the great plagues—malaria, typhus, cholera, typhoid, dysentery—and he was angling for a World Health Organization or Point Four appointment. Then he’d married. His wife—Randy did not know her name because Dan never uttered it—apparently had been extravagant, a nympho, a one-drink alcoholic, and a compulsive gambler. She’d recoiled at the thought of living in Equatorial Africa or a delta village in India, and pestered him to set up practice in New York or Los Angeles, where the big money was. When Dan refused, she took to spending weekends in New York, an easy pickup at her favorite bar in the Fifties. So he’d been a gentleman and let her go to Reno and get the divorce. When her luck ran out she returned East, filed suit for alimony, and the judge had given her everything she’d asked. Now she lived in Los Angeles and each week shovelled the alimony into bingo games or pari-mutuel machines, and Dan’s career was ended before it had begun. A World Health or Point Four salary would barely pay her alimony and leave nothing for him, and a doctor can’t skip, except into the medical shadowland of criminal practice. He had come to Florida because the state was growing and his practice and fees would be larger and he thought he’d eventually accumulate enough money to offer her a cash settlement and suture the financial hemorrhage.

In Fort Repose, Dan shared the one-story Medical Arts Building with an older man, Dr. Bloomfield, and two dentists. He lived frugally in a two-room suite in the Riverside Inn, where he acted as house physician for the aging guests during the winter season. His gross income had doubled. While he delivered babies for Pistolville and Negro families for $25, he balanced this with ten dollar house calls on the placebo circuit. In a single two-hour sweep up River Road, handing out placebos and tranquilizers, he often netted $100. It did him no good. He discovered he was inexorably squeezed between alimony and taxes. Taxes rose with income and the escalator clause in his alimony order took effect. Once, he and Randy figured out that if his gross rose to more than $50,000 a year he would have to go into bankruptcy. Dan could imagine no combination of circumstances that would allow him to amass enough capital to buy off his former wife and set him free to fight the plagues. So he was a bitter man, but, Randy believed, a kind man, perhaps even a great one.

Lib said, “You don’t consider our house a stop on the placebo circuit, do you?”

“No,” Dan said, “and yes. Your mother does have diabetes.” He paused, to let her understand that was not all that was wrong. “She called me today. She was very much upset. She wondered whether she could change from insulin to the new oral drug. You’ve been giving her her insulin shot every morning, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Lib said. “She can’t bear to stick herself and she won’t let my father do it. She says he’s too rough. Says Dad jabs her like he enjoys it.”

This was something Randy hadn’t known before.

Dan said, “She wants me to get her oranise because she says you’re talking about leaving her.”

Lib said, “Yes, I do intend to leave. I’m going to leave when Randy leaves.”

Randy started to speak, but checked himself. He could wait a moment.

Dan wiped his glasses. His face dropped unhappily. “I don’t know about experimenting,” he said. “Your mother is balanced at seventy units of insulin a day. A pretty solid shot. I don’t want to take her off insulin. She’ll have to learn to use the hypodermic herself. Now, let’s move on to your father.”

“My father! Nothing’s wrong with Dad, is there?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. He’s turning into a zombie, Elizabeth. Doesn’t he have any hobbies? Can’t he start a new business? He’s only sixty-one and, except for a little hypertension, in good shape physically. But he is dying faster than he should. The better a man is at business, the worse in retirement. One day he’s running a big corporation and the next day he isn’t allowed to run anything, even his own home. He wishes himself dead, and he dies.”

Lib had been listening intently. She said, “It’s even harder on Dad. You see, he didn’t retire by choice. He was fired. Oh, we all call it retirement, and he gets his pension, but the board eased him out—he lost a quiet little proxy fight—and now he doesn’t think he is of any use to anyone at all.”

“I felt,” Dan said, “it was something like that.” He was silent a moment. “I’d like to help him. I think he’s worth saving.” Now Randy knew it was time to speak. “When you came in, Dan, I was about to tell Lib what Mark told me today, out at McCoy. He is afraid—he is sure—that we are on the verge of war. That’s why Helen and the children are being sent down here. Mark thinks the Russians are already staged for it.”

Randy watched them. Comprehension seemed to come first to Elizabeth. She said, softly, “Oh, God!” Her fingers locked in her lap and grew white.

Dan’s head shook, a negative tremor. He looked at the decanter and Randy’s half-empty glass on the bar. “You haven’t been drinking, have you, Randy?”

“First today—since breakfast.”

“I didn’t think you’d been drinking. I was just hoping.” Dan’s massive head, with the coarse, wiry, reddish hair at the temples, bent forward as if his neck could no longer support it. “I guess that makes everything hypothetical,” he said. “How soon?”

“Mark doesn’t know and I can’t even guess. Today—tomorrow—next week—next month—you name it.”

Lib looked at her watch. “News at six,” she said. A portable radio no larger than a highball glass stood at the end of the bar. She turned it on.

Randy kept the portable tuned to WSMF (Wonderful San Marco, Florida) the biggest station in the county. The dance music faded and the voice of Happy Hedrix, the disk jockey, said:

“Well, all of you frozen felines, I’ve got to take the needle out of the groove for five minutes so the cubes—a cube is a square anyway you look at him, hah, hah—can get hip with what cooks around the sphere. So let’s start in with the weather. It’s sixty-nine outside our studios right now and the forecast for Central Florida is fair and mild with light to moderate east winds tomorrow, and no frost danger through Tuesday. That’s good fishing weather, folks, and to prove it here’s a story from Tavares, over in Lake County, Jones Corkle, of Hyannis, Nebraska, today caught a thirteen pound, four-ounce bigmouth in Lake Dora to take the lead in Lake County’s Winter Bass Tournament. He used a black eel bait. A UP item from Washington says the Navy has ordered preventive action against unidentified jet planes which have been shadowing the Sixth Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean. At Tropical Park today, Bald Eagle won the Coral Handicap by three lengths, paying eleven-sixty. Careless Lady was second and Rumpus third. Now, turning to news of Wall Street, stocks closed mixed, with missiles up and railroads off, in moderate trading. The Dow-Jones averages…”