taut. Howie cracked: 'Y?y?yes,. Chief, Sir, I'm sorry, but it's true. It was the gomers: one named Harry and a flatulent woman named Jane. See, it's my admitting days that kill me. Each admitting day?knowing that the total age of my admissions will be in the four hundreds?I get depressed and I want to kill myself. The tension had been incredible: those M and M Conferences where I get roasted every two weeks for my mistakes?I can't help making mistakes, can I, Chief??and then Potts splattering and his mess being spread around so we had to park right on him, and all these gomers. And then the young patients dying no matter what we do. The truth is, Chief, well . . . well, since September I've been on antidepressants, Elavil. And I'm staying on here; imagine how the other guys feel. Like the Runt: he used to be a fun guy, and now . . . why, just look at him.'
We all looked at him. The Runt was staring at the Leggo with a gaze as ferocious as Crazy Abe's. The Runt looked extraordinarily mean.
The Leggo, shocked, asked, 'You mean you don't look forward to your admitting days?'
'Look forward?' said Howie. 'Chief, two days before my admitting day?just after my last admitting day?I'm nervous, and I up my dose of Elavil twentyfive milligrams. One day before my admitting day, I add fifty of Thorazine. On my admitting day, as I start to see the gomers, I start to shake, and . . .' Shaking, Howie took out a silver pillbox faced with mother?of?pearl and popped a Valium into his mouth. '. . . and it's Valium all the way. On real bad days . . . well, it's hits of Dex.'
8o that was Howie's smile: the guy was a walking Pharmacopoeia.
The Leggo had gotten stuck on something Howie had said, and asked the Fish: 'Did they say they don't enjoy their admitting days?'
'Yes, sir,' said the Fish, 'I do believe they said that, sir.'
'Strange. Boys, when I was an intern, I loved my admitting days. All of us did. We looked forward to them, we fought for those 'toughies' so we could show our Chief what we could do. And we did damn well. What's happened? What's going on?'
'Gomers,' said Howie, 'gomers are what's going on.'
'You mean old people? We took care of old people too.'
'Gomers are different,' said Eddie. 'They didn't exist when you were a tern, 'cause then they used to die. Now they don't.'
'Ridiculous,' said the Leggo emphatically.
'It is,' I said, 'and it's true. How many guys have seen a gomer die under his own steam this year, without medical interference? Raise your hands.'
No hands went up.
'But surely we help them. Why, we even cure.'
'Most of us wouldn't know a cure if we found one in a Cracker Jack Box,' said Eddie. 'I haven't cured anybody yet and I don't know an intern who has. We're all still waiting for number one.'
'Oh, come, now. Surely. What about the young?'
'They're the ones who die,' said the Crow. 'Most of my posts were on guys my age. It was no picnic, Chief, winning your Award.'
'Yes, well, you are all my boys,' said the Leggo as if he had forgotten to turn on his hearing aid that day, 'and before I close this meeting I'd like to a few words about the year. First, thanks for the terrific job. In many ways it's been a great year, one of the best. You'll never forget it. I'm proud of each every one of you, and before I end, I'd just like to say a few words about one of you who isn't today, a physician with a tremendous potential, Dr. Wayne Potts.'
We stiffened. Leggo was asking for trouble if he messed with Potts.
'Yes, I'm proud of Potts. Except for some defect that led to his . . . accident, he was a fine young physician. Let me tell you about him. . . '
I tuned out. Instead of anger, I felt sorry for the Leggo, so stiff and so clumsy, so out of touch with the human, with us, his boys. He was another generation, that of our fathers, who in restaurants before paying, added up the arithmetic of the check.
'. . . maybe this year has been a little difficult, but all in all it was a pretty typical year, and we lost one in the middle, but sometimes that happens, and the rest of us will never forget him. Yet we can't let our dedication to medicine suffer because . . .'
The Leggo was right: it had been your standard internship year. All across the country, at emergency lunches, terns were being allowed to be angry, to accuse and cathart and have no effect at all. Year after year,
'. . . and so let's have a moment of silence for Dr. Wayne Potts.'
After about twenty seconds the Runt blasted off again, shouting, 'DAMNNIT, YOU KILLED HIM!'
'What?'
'YOU KILLED POTTS! You drove him nuts about the Yellow Man, and you didn't help him when he was crying for help. If an intern sees a shrink, you stigmatize him, you think he's nuts. Potts was scared that if he saw Dr. Frank it would damage his career. You bastards, you eat up good guys like Potts who happen to be too gentle to 'tough it out' It makes me want to puke! PUKE!'
'You can't say that about me,' said the Leggo sincerely, looking crushed. 'I would have done anything to save Potts, to save my boy.'
'You can't save us,' I said, 'you can't stop the process. That's why we're going into psychiatry: we're trying to save ourselves.'
'From what?'
'FROM BEING JERKS WHO'D LOOK UP TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU!' screamed the Runt.
'What?' asked the Leggo shakily, 'what are you saying?'
I felt that he was trying to understand, and I knew he couldn't but that he was crying inside because we'd pushed the button that had him hearing the tapes of all his failings, as father and son, and I said as kindly as possible, 'What we're saying is that the real problem this year hasn't been the gomers, it's been that we didn't have anyone to look up to.'
'No one? No one in the whole House of God?'
'For me,' I said, 'only the Fat Man.'
'Him? He's as kooky as Dubler! You can't mean that, no.'
'What we mean, man,' said Chuck forcefully, 'is this: how can we care for patients if'n nobody can for us?'
At that, for the first time, the Leggo seemed to hear. He stopped, still. He scratched his head. He made gesture with his hands, as if to say something, but nothing came out. He bent at the knee, and sat down. He looked hurt, a kid about to cry, and as we watched his nose twitched and he dug into his baggy trousers for his handkerchief. Saddened, sobered, yet still mad, we filed out. We'd played for keeps. The door closed behind the last of us, leaving our Chief alone. Boozy, babbling, Nixon was coming apart in public places. People were filing out. What he was feeling, no one wanted to know.
Berry, Chuck, and I were at the mansion of Nate Zock. We sat in the fake Elizabethan garden basking in the late?afternoon summer sun, looking back up toward the multimillion?dollar palace, a mixture of millennia of architectural vogue. Nate finished retelling the 'Basch's a tough guy, don't cross him' story. Berry and I excused ourselves to play tennis, leaving Chuck to booze it up with Nate and Trixie and the overweight bovines grazing on the hors d'oeuvres and low?calorie celery tonic. The tennis court was wind?sheltered by beech and poplar, and roses coated the fence enclosing it. The splash of color and waves of scent made it like playing tennis inside a rose. We sweated. We stopped, and Nate urged us to cool off in the indoor pool. We hadn't brought swimsuits.
'That's OK,' said Nate, 'no one's going to watch.'
'And no one's keeping track of the time,' said Trixie, 'we know all about the sex lives of our young Dr. Kildares.'
We wandered up the lawn to the house, and I realized that unlike the rich, I was unused to privacy, to
