13
9/23/75
Name: Glick, Daniel Francis
Address: RFD #I, Brock Road, Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine 04270
Age: 12 Sex: Male Race: Caucasian
Admitted: 9/22/75 Admitting Person: Anthony H. Glick (Father)
Symptoms: Shock, loss of memory (partial), nausea, disinterest in food, constipation, general loginess
Tests (see attached sheet):
1. Tuberculosis skin patch: Neg.
2. Tuberculosis sputum and urine: Neg.
3. Diabetes: Neg.
4. White cell count: Neg.
5. Red cell count: 45% hemo.
6. Marrow sample: Neg.
7. Chest X ray: Neg.
Possible diagnosis: Pernicious anemia, primary or secondary; previous exam shows 86% hemoglobin. Secondary anemia is unlikely; no history of ulcers, hemorrhoids, bleeding piles, et al. Differential cell count neg. Primary anemia combined with mental shock likely. Recommend barium enema and X-rays for internal bleeding on the off-chance, yet no recent accidents, father says. Also recommend daily dosage of vitamin B12 (see attached sheet).
Pending further tests, let’s release him.
G. M. Gorby
Attending Physician
14
At one o’clock in the morning, September 24, t nurse stepped into Danny Glick’s hospital room to give him his medication. She paused in the doorway, frowning. The bed was empty.
Her eyes jumped from the bed to the oddly wasted white bundle that lay collapsed by the foot. ‘Danny?’ she said.
She stepped toward him and thought, He had to go to the bathroom and it was too much for him, that’s all.
She turned him over gently, and her first thought before realizing that he was dead was that the B12 had been helping; he looked better than he had since his admission.
And then she felt the cold flesh of his wrist and the lack of movement in the light blue tracery of veins beneath her fingers, and she ran for the nurses’ station to report a death on the ward.
Chapter Five
BEN (II)
1
On September 25 Ben took dinner with the Nortons again. It was Thursday night, and the meal was traditional-beans and franks. Bill Norton grilled the franks on the outdoor grill, and Ann had had her kidney beans simmering in molasses since nine that morning. They ate at the picnic table and afterward they sat smoking, the four of them, talking desultorily of Boston’s fading pennant chances.
There was a subtle change in the air; it was still pleasant enough, even in shirt sleeves, but there was a glint of ice in it now. Autumn was waiting in the wings, almost in sight. The large and ancient maple in front of Eva Miller’s boardinghouse had already begun to go red.
There had been no change in Ben’s relationship with the Nortons. Susan’s liking for him was frank and clear and natural. And he liked her very much. In Bill he sensed a steadily increasing liking, held in abeyance by the subconscious taboo that affects all fathers when in the presence of men who are there because of their daughters rather than themselves. If you like another man and you are honest, you speak freely, discuss women over beer, shoot the shit about politics. But no matter how deep the potential liking, it is impossible to open up completely to a man who is dangling your daughter’s potential decoration between his legs. Ben reflected that after marriage the possible had become the actual and could you become complete friends with the man who was banging your daughter night after night? There might be a moral there, but Ben doubted it.
Ann Norton continued cool. Susan had told him a little of the Floyd Tibbits situation the night before-of her mother’s assumption that her son-in-law problems had been solved neatly and satisfactorily in that direction. Floyd was a known quantity; he was Steady. Ben Mears, on the other hand, had come out of nowhere and might disappear back there just as quickly, possibly with her daughter’s heart in his pocket. She distrusted the creative male with an instinctive small-town dislike (one that Edward Arlington Robinson or Sherwood Anderson would have recognized at once), and Ben suspected that down deep she had absorbed a maxim: either faggots or bull studs; sometimes homicidal, suicidal, or maniacal; tend to send young girls packages containing their left ears. Ben’s participation in the search for Ralphie Glick seemed to have increased her suspicions rather than allayed them, and he suspected that winning her over was an impossibility. He wondered if she knew of Parkins Gillespie’s visit to his room.
