NightScape

Bingaman set the long-stemmed ear piece onto the wooden wall phone in the front corridor of his home. Troubled, he shut off the overhead light and leaned against the wall, peering out his front-door window. Twilight was dimming. In the yard, fireflies began to twinkle. A Model T rattled past. On a porch across the street, illuminated by a glow of light from the living-room window over there, Harry Webster sat in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe.

"Jonas, what's wrong?"

Bingaman turned to his wife, Marion, whose broad-shouldered outline approached him in the shadows of the hallway. The daughter of a German immigrant, an ancestry that she avoided mentioning given the war in Europe, Marion had been raised on a farm in upstate New York before she received her nurse's training, and her robust appearance had been one of the reasons that Bingaman was initially attracted to her. Twenty-five years ago. Now, at the age of fifty-two, she was as robust as ever, and he loved her more than ever. True, the honey-colored hair that he enjoyed stroking had acquired streaks of silver. But then his own hair had not only turned silvery but had thi

"Wrong?" Bingaman echoed. "I'm not sure anything's wrong."

"You've been pensive since you came home for di

"It's a problem I've been mulling over. Joey seems to have bronchitis. His father thinks he got it from swimming in infected water this afternoon. But bronchitis takes several days to develop, and none of the boys Joey went swimming with is sick."

"What are you thinking?"

"Whatever it is, Joey must have gotten it somewhere else. But usually I don't see just one case of bronchitis. It spreads around. So where did he catch it if no one else in town has it?"

Rebecca Carter fidgeted at the open screen door, impatient for Bingaman to climb the front steps and enter the house. "I was afraid I wouldn't be able to reach you."

"Actually, when you telephoned, I was just about to drive over. Joey's the first patient on my list this morning."

Feeling burdened by the weight he had put on recently, Bingaman started up the stairs to the second level, then paused, frowning when he heard labored coughing from the bedroom directly at the top." Has Joey been coughing like that all night?"

"Not as bad." Rebecca's face was haggard from lack of sleep. "This started just before dawn. I've been giving him aspirin and sponge baths like you told me, but they don't seem to do any good."

The doctor hurried up the stairs, alarmed by what he saw when he entered the bedroom. Joey looked smaller under the covers. His face was much redder, but he also had a dark blue color around his lips. His chest heaved, as if he was coughing even when he wasn't.

Bingaman went urgently to work, removing instruments from his bag, noting that Joey's temperature had risen to a hundred and four, that his lungs sounded more congested, that the inside of his throat was inflamed, that his glands were more swollen, and that the boy didn't have the energy to respond to questions. The day before, Joey's pulse and respiration rate had been 85 and 20. Now they were 100 and 25.

"I'm sorry to tell you this, Mrs. Carter."

"What's wrong with him?"

"It might be pneumonia."

Rebecca Carter gasped.

"I know you'd prefer to keep him at home," Bingaman said, "but what's best for Joey right now is to admit him to the hospital."

Rebecca looked as if she doubted her sanity, as if she couldn't possibly be hearing what the doctor had just told her. "No. I can take care of him."

"I'm sure you can, but Joey needs special treatment that isn't available here."

Rebecca looked more frightened. "Like what?"

"I'll explain after I telephone the hospital and make the arrangements." Hoping that he had distracted her, Bingaman hurried downstairs to the wall phone near the front door. What he didn't want to tell her was that the dark blue color around Joey's mouth was an indication of cyanosis. The congestion in the boy's lungs was preventing him from getting enough oxygen. If Joey wasn't hooked up to an oxygen tank at the hospital, he might asphyxiate from the fluid in his lungs.

"It certainly has the symptoms of pneumonia," the Elmdale hospital's chief of staff told Bingaman. His name was Brian Powell, and his wiry frame contrasted with Bingaman's portly girth. The two physicians had been friends for years, and Powell, who happened to be in the emergency ward when Joey Carter was admitted, had invited Bingaman to his office for a cup of coffee afterward. In his mind, Bingaman kept hearing Mrs. Carter sob.

"But if it is pneumonia, how did he get it?" Bingaman ignored the steaming cup of coffee on the desk in front of him. "Do you have any patients who present these symptoms?"

Powell shook his head. "During the winter, the symptoms wouldn't be unusual. Colds and secondary infections leading to pneumonia. But in summer? I'd certainly remember."

" It just doesn't make any sense." Bingaman sweated under his suit coat. "Why is Joey the only one?"

"No." Rebecca Carter waited outside Joey's hospital room in the hopes that she'd be allowed to enter. Her eyes were red from tears. "Nothing different. It was just an ordinary summer. We did what we always do."

"And what would that be?" Bingaman asked.

Rebecca dabbed a handkerchief against her eyes. "Picnics. Joey likes to play baseball. We go to the park, and Edward teaches him how to pitch. And the movies. Sometimes we go to the movies. Joey likes Charlie Chaplin."

"That's it? That's all?"

"Just an ordinary summer. I have my sewing club. We don't often get a chance to do things as a family because Edward works late, taking advantage of the good weather. Why do you ask? Didn't Joey get sick from the water in the creek?"

"Can you think of anything else that Joey did this summer? Anything even the slightest bit unusual?"

"No. I'm sorry. I-"

She was interrupted by her husband hurrying along the hospital corridor. "Rebecca." Edward Carter's lean face glistened with sweat. "I decided to come home for lunch and check on Joey. Mrs. Wade next door said you and he had gone to…My God, Doctor, what's wrong with Joey?"

"We're still trying to find that out. It might be pneumonia."

"Pneumonia?"

The door to Joey's room opened. For a moment, the group had a brief glimpse of Joey covered by sheets in a metal bed, an oxygen mask over his face. Then a nurse came out and shut the door.

"How is he?" Joey's mother asked.

"Light-headed," the nurse answered. "He keeps talking about feeling as if he's on a Ferris wheel."

"Ferris wheel?" Bingaman asked.

"He's probably remembering the midway," Joey's father said.

"Midway?"

" In Riverton. Last week, I had to drive over there to get some special lumber for a job I'm working on. Joey went with me. We spent an hour at the midway. He really loved the Ferris wheel."

"Yes, patients with fever, swollen glands/ and congestion," Bingaman explained, using the telephone in Dr. Powell's office.

"A possible diagnosis of pneumonia." He was speaking to the chief of staff at Riverton's hospital, fifty miles away. "Nothing? Not one case? Why am I…? I'm trying to understand how one of my patients came down with these symptoms. He was in Riverton last week. I thought perhaps the midway you had there…If you remember anything, would you please call me? Thank you."

Bingaman hooked the ear piece onto the telephone and rubbed the back of his neck.

Throughout the conversation, Powell had remained seated behind his desk, studying him. "Take it easy. Pneumonia can be like pollen in the wind. You'll probably never know where the boy caught the disease."