Internes Can’t Take Money - ebook

JIMMY KILDARE used to get away from the hospital every afternoon and go over to Tom McGuire’s saloon on the avenue. He always drank two beers. An interne in the accident room has to have the brains in his fingertips in good order all day long, but two beers don’t get very far between a man and himself if he has a bit of head on his shoulders, and Jimmy Kildare had.

McGuire’s saloon was comfortable in a dark, dingy way. The sawdust was swept out only once in two days, and the floors were never scrubbed except the evening before Election Day. Just the same, it was a good place. It made Jimmy Kildare think of the barn out on the old farm. The faces of the bums and crooks and yeggs who lined up at the bar were sour, just like the faces of the cows and horses that were lined along the mangers of the barn–long, and all the lines running down except for their arched eyebrows with the fool look of the cows.

When Jimmy Kildare leaned an elbow on the worn varnish of McGuire’s saloon, it was always easier for him to think of home. The future to him was a great question mark, and New York was the emptiness inside the loop of the mark. Add a few strokes to the question mark and you get a dollar sign.

Jimmy Kildare used to think about that but he never dared to think very far because, when he began to dream, he always saw himself back on the farm in the frosty stillness of an autumn morning where every fence post and every wet rock said to him, “Jimmy, what are you doing away back here?”

The only times that he escaped entirely from those dreams were when he was working at the operating table, all scrubbed up and masked and draped in white. But even when he was going through the wards and looking into the life or death that brightened or shadowed the eyes of his patients, the old days and the terrible sense that he must return to them used to come over him.

He always wanted more relaxation from his work than those two beers in McGuire’s saloon, but he knew that his purse would not stand it. The hospital paid for his laundry. It gave him three meals a day of soggy food. Otherwise, he had to find himself entirely, except for an occasional lift from famous Doctor Henry Fearson. Fearson from his height had noticed Kildare in medical school and had made it possible for him to carry on when home funds ran out.

Perhaps it was pity that moved Fearson to make those loans. Perhaps it was a quiet belief that there was a talent in the youngster. Kildare never could decide what the motive was, but he loved Fearson. During the interneship Fearson’s loans became almost negligible, possibly because an absent-minded genius like Fearson forgot that an interne is an unpaid labor slave. A lot of the other lads were the sons of affluent doctors, and they were always going places on days off, but they never took Kildare and he could not afford to take himself. He wasn’t a very exciting companion; he wasn’t good-looking; he wasn’t stylish.

There was only one day at the hospital for him to write down in red, and that was the occasion when he had assisted at a kidney operation. In the blind red murk the scalpel of the operating surgeon made a mistake and a beautiful fountain of blood and life sprang upward. Jimmy Kildare snatched a forceps and grabbed at the source of that explosion. He reached through a horrible boiling red fog and clamped down. The fountain ceased to rise. Afterward the artery was tied off, and a blood transfusion brought the patient back to life.

That day the great Henry Fearson stopped Jimmy in a corridor and gripped him by the shoulder and said, “You’ve got it, Kildare!”

Jimmy shrugged and hooked a thumb. “That back there? That was just luck,” he said.

But Fearson answered: “Surgery is like tennis. There’s no luck except bad luck.”

Afterward, Jimmy Kildare went to his bare concrete cell and sat for a long time looking at the wall until the wall opened and showed him a brief glimpse of heaven. Then he said: “Henry Fearson–by God!” and a great promise began to live along his blood stream.

Then the trouble started at McGuire’s saloon.

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