The house of God

"Well, stop doing that, it's illegal!" yelled Fats.

"No sweat," said Eddie, "when Tina realizes that at night, when I'm on call, she's totally at my mercy, she'll sign, Fats, she'll sign."

Later that morning, Hooper and Fats and I were sitting at the nursing station. Fats was into his Wall Street Journal, and Hooper and I were watching the flow. We were still chuckling at having seen Lionel from HELP, paged by the nurse, checking out the room numbers and then, with a spiffy straightening of his Blazer and forelock, entering the room of the Lady of the Lice, the room crawling with the crabs. Eddie had been called to the Leggo's office, and we had been worried, but we were relieved to see the Leggo come walking down the corridor with him, his arm around Eddies shoulder. While we waited for the Fish so we could start rounds with our leggy Chief, Fats collared Eddie and rushed us all into the on?call room, locking the door behind us.

"All right, Eddie," said Fats, "you are in serious trouble."

"Whaddayamean? We dad a nice chat. Go slow with Tina, was all he said. He even put his arm around me as we walked back down here."

"Exactly," said Fats, "that arm around you. Did you ever look closely at the anatomy of that arm? Fingers like a tree frog's, with suckers on the ends. Arachnodaotyly, like a spider. Double joints at the knuckles, universal joints at the wrist, elbow, and shoulder. When the Leggo puts his arm around someone, often it's the end of a promising career. The last guy he put his arm around was Grenade Room Dubler, and do you know where he went for his Fellowship?"

"Nope."

"Neither does anyone else. I doubt if it was on the continental USA. The Leggo puts his arm around your shoulders and whispers in your ear something like 'Akron' or 'Utah' or 'Kuala Lumm?poore' and that's where you go. I don't want my Fellowship in the Gulag, get it?"

"Yours?" asked Eddie. "And what about mine? In Oncology." i'

"What? You? Cancer?"

"Natch. What could be better than a gomer with cancer?"

Chief's Rounds that day were introduced by the Fish, and the patient was one Moe, a tough truck driver who'd had to wait in the freezing cold during the gas crisis to fill up his rig. He had a rare disease of the blood call cryoglobulinemia, where with cold the blood clots small vessels, and Moe's big toe had turned as cold an white as a corpse on a slab in the morgue.

"What a great case!" cried the Leggo. "Let me ask few questions."

To the first question, a real toughie he asked Hooper. Hooper said, "I don't know," and so the Leggo answered the toughie himself and gave a little lecture it. To the next question,.not a toughie, to Eddie, Ed answered, "I don't know." The Leggo gave him benefit of the doubt and gave a little lecture none which was news to Eddie or to anyone else. The Fish and the Fat Man were getting apprehensive about what we were doing, and the tension rose as the Leggo turn to me and asked me an easy one that any klutz who read Time could answer. I paused, knit my brow, said, "I . . . Sir, I just don't know." The Leggo asked, "You say you don't know?"

"No, Sir, I don't, and I'm proud to say it."

Startled and troubled, the Leggo said, "In my day, the House of God was the kind of place where on Chief's Rounds the intern would be embarrassed to say 'I don't know.' What is going on?"

"Well, sir, you see, the Fish said that he wanted the House to be the kind of place where we'd be proud to say 'I don't know,' and, damnit, Chief, we are."

"You are? The Fish said? He . . . never mind. Let's see Moe."

The Chief fairly burned with the excitement of getting at Moe the Toe's toe, and yet at Moe's bedside, for some strange reason, he went straight for Moe's liver, poodling around with it sensually. Finally the Leggo went for Moe the Toe's toe, and no one was sure exactly what happened next. The toe was white and cold, and the Leggo, communing with it as if it could tell him about all the great dead toes of the past, inspected it, palpated it, pushed it around, and then, bending down, did something to it with his mouth. Eight of us watched, and there were to be eight different opinions of what the Leggo did with Moe's toe. Some said look, some said blow, some said suck. We watched, amazed, as the Leggo straightened up and, kind of absentmindedly fondling the toe as if it were some newfound friend, asked Moe the Toe how it felt and Moe said, "Hey, not bad, buddy, but while you're at it could you try the same thing a little higher upT»

"The Ten Commandments and Chicken?" I asked the Fat Man later that night as we awaited our admissions and the ten?o'clock meal.

"Right. Charlton Heston, Jews squashed under rocks, and then the House of God 'chicken with tire tracks.' And Teddy."

"Who's Teddy?"

Teddy turned out to be one of the horde of patients who loved Fats. A concentration?camp survivor, Teddy had been brought into the House E.W. bleeding out from an ulcer one night when Fats was on call. Fats had TURFED him to surgery, and, losing half his stomach, Teddy was convinced that Fats had saved his life. Teddy "owns a deli and is lonely so he comes in when I'm on call, with a bag of food. I deck him out in whites and a stethoscope, and he pretends he's a doctor. Sweet guy, Teddy." Sure enough, as Fats and I and Humberto, my Mexican?American BMS, sat down in the TV room to watch the MGM lion begin to roar, in walked a thin, worried?looking fellow in shabby black, in one hand a radio spewing a melancholic Schuma

"Of course I'm right. Harry's Private, Little Otto has worked out a method to keep Harry here indefnitely: whenever Harry's ready to be TURFED, Otto tells him he's leaving, Harry wills his heart into that crazy rhythm with chest pain, and Otto tells him he's staying. Harry's the only man in history to ha conscious control of his A?V node."

"The A?V node is never under conscious control," I said.

"For Harry the Horse, it is"

"So how do we get him to leave?"

"By telling him he can stay."

"But then he'll stay forever."

"So? So what? He's a landsman, a brother. Nice man."

"So you don't have to take care of him, I do," I said, irritated.

"He's no work for you. Let him stay. He loves it here. Who doesn't?"

"I do," said Teddy. "Here was the best six weeks of mine life."

As The Ten Commandments finished, we got a call for an admission from the E.W., and Fats gathered us to him and said, "Men, pray that this is our sleep ticket."

"What?" asked Teddy. "You need a ticket to sleep here?"

"We need an admission around eleven that's not too much work, so we can get to bed and the rotation doesn't hand us another admission at four A.M. Pray, men, pray, to Moses and Israel and Jesus Christ and the entire Mexican nation."

He heard. Bernard was a young eighty?three, not a gomer, and able to talk. He'd been transferred from MBH, the House's rival. Founded in Colonial times by the WASPs, the insemination of MBH by nonWASPs had taken place only mid?twentieth century with the token multidextrous Oriental surgeon, and, finally, with the token red?hot internal?medicine Jew. Yet MBH was still Brooks Brothers, while the House was still Garment District. For Jews at MBH the password was "Dress British, Think Yiddish." It was rare to get a TURF from the MBH to the House, and the Fat Man was curious: "Bernard, you went to the MBH, they did a great work?up, and you told them, after they got done, you wanted to be transferred here. Why