Part 12 (1/2)

You try to explain it to yourself and your friends and those who have you fish-hooked with deadlines, and they won't believe you, because you've been arrogantly productive all your writing life. And you exist there all alone, trapped out on the edge of your mind; gone suddenly black and empty. It's not that you don't have ideas. Oh, h.e.l.l, you have thousands of those. You're as articulate, as clever, as facile as you ever were. You just don't want to work want to work. You stare at the machine and it's loathsome.

And then, one day, for no reason you can discern, it breaks. The Block vanishes and you start bamming the keys again.

And at that moment, ANDREW J. CAPITALS AND ALL d.a.m.nED OFFUTT, and all of you dainty dilettantes out there reading this, who think writing is something any any schlepp can do, remember the words of Hemingway, who said, ”There are three conditions for becoming a writer. He must write today, he must write tomorrow, he must write the day after that...” schlepp can do, remember the words of Hemingway, who said, ”There are three conditions for becoming a writer. He must write today, he must write tomorrow, he must write the day after that...”

offutt's a writer. He writes. As this story, at long last, attests.

FOR VALUE RECEIVED.

andrew j. offutt .

Mary Ann Barber, M.D., was graduated from medical school at the tender age of 23. Her Boards score set a new high. No, she isn't a genius. You don't know about her? Where've you been? There have been Hospital Board Meetings and Staff Meetings and even discussions of her case in the AMA and the AHA. Most important medical case in American history; frightening precedent. She's been written up, with pictures, in LIFE, LOOK, PARENTS, THE JOURNAL OF THE AMA, HOSPITAL NEWS, TODAY'S HEALTH, READER'S DIGEST-and FORTUNE. Her father has turned down movie offers. He's also been interviewed by THE INDEPENDENT, PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, RAMPARTS, THE OBJECTIVIST NEWSLETTER, and PLAYBOY.

It started twenty-three years ago when Robert S. Barber won a sales contest and received a very healthy company bonus. That was just before his wife Jodie was due to present him with their third child. Feeling expansive, Bob Barber suggested a private room for Jodie's confinement. She agreed, with enthusiasm. Last time she had shared a room with Philomena, a mother of nine. Philomena had complained constantly about the horror of being a breeding machine. Jodie told her to have faith-and stop. Philomena advised her that her Faith was the source of her problem.

Jodie entered the Saint Meinrad Medical Center in a room all to herself, rather than sharing one with another new mother in the American Way. The room cost ten dollars a day more than the money provided by the Barber's group hospitalization insurance; privacy's expensive! Nevertheless the ID card got them past the Warder of the Gates, a suspicious matron at the Admittance desk whose job it was to admit all patients impartially-provided they either possessed insurance ID cards or were visibly and provably dest.i.tute. There wasn't any middle ground.

The baby, a hairless girl-at least she showed certain evidences of insipidly incipient femalehood-was born with the usual number of arms, legs, fingers, etcetera after a brief period of labor. She proved with gusto the proper functioning of her lungs and larynx. She also took immediately to breast-feeding as if it were the normal method. She throve without seeming to realize that her infantile neighbors wouldn't recognize a mammary if they saw one.

Meanwhile the girls in the nursery went about their job: spoiling the infants entrusted to them by parents who had no choice and who would wonder in a few days how it was possible for a child to be born spoiled. The second part of the job of all hospital personnel involved, then as now, keeping the male of the species from both his chosen mate and the fruit of his loins. Robert Barber objected to this. Why his presence was forbidden while Jodie nursed the baby was beyond him. He'd seen 'em before. As a matter of fact he considered them his.

The nun he asked failed to reply.

Ostensibly, visiting hours were to protect the patients from disturbances in the form of Aunt Martha (”Yaas, I knew someone who had the selfsame operation, my dear. She died, poor soul.”) and the like. But new mothers were not sick. It was obvious to Robert Barber that the prescribed hours-and the far greater number of proscribed ones-were for the convenience of a hospital staff whose mystique suffered from a surfeit of Commoners noticing their humanness. Naturally this a.s.sumption was strengthened by the fact that physicians, nurses, interns, residents, orderlies, Candy-Stripers, Gray Ladies, Pink Ladies, and the Lady pus.h.i.+ng the cart peddling magazines and tissues disturbed the patients far more than ”lay” visitors.

The inescapable prayers on the loudspeaker every night were rather disturbing, too.

But Robert Barber was a determined man. He had noticed that there were two kinds of people in hospitals, aside from the patients: Those Who Belong, and Others. The Others visited and indeed seemed to exist only by the sufferance of anyone who wore white shoes or a lab coat. Or carried a little black satchel. All one had to do, Bob Barber decided, was to act as if one Belonged.

So he adopted protective coloration. Carrying his black briefcase and striding purposefully, he traversed the hallowed and antiseptic halls.

”Good-evening-nurse,” he said briskly, barely deigning to see the deferential girls who ducked respectfully out of his way. ”Sister,” he said to the nuns who were not quite so deferential: after all, doctor or no doctor, he was only a man, and a layman at that. But they nodded and rustled aside nevertheless.

Thus did the fiercely independent Bob Barber disregard Visiting Hours for four days running.

The fateful day arrived without portentous occurrence in the skies. Jodie Barber was p.r.o.nounced ready to go home by a duly authorized member of the American Magicians a.s.sociation. Thanking the kindly old AMA shaman-priest, Bob went down to settle with the cas.h.i.+er. She ruled a smallish domain separated from the world by a counter-c.u.m-window that reminded him of a bank. She regarded him with the usual expression: as if he had committed a crime.

He had not.

He was about to.

”You seem to have placed your wife in a better room than your hospitalization covers, Mister Barber.” Her tone was the same you've heard in movies when the prosecutor says, ”Then you were indeed at or near the scene of the crime on the night of March 21st!”

Bob Barber smiled and nodded. ”Yes. I should owe you about forty dollars, right?”

She nodded wordlessly, giving him an exemplary imitation of the gaze of the legendary basilisk.

Frowning a little, wondering if it were a communicable disease, Robert Barber also nodded, again. ”Uh, well...”

”Would-you-like-to-pay-the-balance-by-cash-or-check, Mister Barber?”

He hesitated, he told an interviewer years later, waiting for the words THIS IS A RECORDING. He had recognized good salesmans.h.i.+p; the room was ”better,” not ”more costly” than his insurance covered. Now he'd been given the standard ”fatal choice”: cash or check. ”Send me a bill, please. You have my address.”

”Mister Barber, our policy is that all bills are handled upon the release of the patient.”

He remarked on that word ”handled” later, too. Not ”paid.” She had had taken a course in salesmans.h.i.+p/semantics! ”Yes, well, you've got $237.26 coming from the hospitalization and $40 from me. Just send me a bill at the end of the month like everyone else, will you?” taken a course in salesmans.h.i.+p/semantics! ”Yes, well, you've got $237.26 coming from the hospitalization and $40 from me. Just send me a bill at the end of the month like everyone else, will you?”

His smile failed to bring one in return. ”We have a policy, Mister Barber, of not dismissing the patient until the bill has been settled in full.”

”We've got an out then, ma'm. My wife isn't a patient here. We merely came here because it's a more convenient place for our doctor to watch the baby being born. Now...my car is back by the Emergency Door, and my wife's all packed.” He gave her his very best boyish smile. ”Am I supposed to sign something?”

It didn't work. She sighed. ”Mister Barber, you just don't seem to understand. It's a rule rule, Mister Barber. A hospital hospital rule. We cannot dismiss the patient until the bill has been settled.” rule. We cannot dismiss the patient until the bill has been settled.”

Bob Barber shoved his hands into his trousers pockets and squared his shoulders. She not only hadn't a cerebral cortex, he thought, she was missing her ovaries and needed a heart transplant! He firmed his mouth. ”OK,” he said. ”If you must keep hostages, that's your business. But I'm sure one will do. Mrs. Barber and I are leaving in a few minutes. We are nursing the baby, so my wife will be coming back six times daily. The baby's name is Mary Ann, by the way.” He smiled in his confidence, enjoying her shocked look. ”When she's big enough to go to college we'll send you the tuition money.” He grinned and waited for the backdown. He was without doubt the first man in history to call her bluff.

When Mary Ann Barber was six years old her father picked her up at the hospital each day to transport her to school. Each Friday she brought him a bill. It had pa.s.sed $9,000 when she was partly through the first grade.

She entered the tenth grade at age fourteen. On her fourth day as a Junior, she handed her daddy a bill for $106,378.23. She was one of the brightest girls in high school, and one of the healthiest. She had absorbed a tremendous amount of knowledge and sophistication, talking with interns. And it was easy to remain healthy, living in a hospital.

She had been moved from Nursery to Pediatrics to Children's Ward to Second Floor. Then the interns had doubled up to make her a gift: a private room away from the patients. Her parents visited her twice daily, usually. At visiting hours.

There were the Staff and Board Meetings, the magazine and newspaper articles, the interviews. Offers to pay Mary Ann Barber's daily-increasing bill had come from all over the country, as well as from seventeen foreign nations and the governments of two. The hospital had offered to settle for ninety cents on the dollar. Then seventy-five. Fifty cents. Forty. Bob Barber said he was holding out for the same terms the Feds had given James Hoffa.

On her fourteenth birthday Mary Ann received one thousand, two hundred seventy-one cards. Shortly thereafter she received 1,314 Christmas cards. Her clothing came from one manufacturer, her shoes from another, her school books from two others. Her tuition arrived anonymously each year. Bob Barber solemnly invested it in an insurance annuity in his daughter's name. Most of the clothing she never wore; the parochial school she attended required s.e.xless, characterless uniforms of navy-blue jumpers over white blouses. And black shoes. And white socks, rolled just to here.

She was graduated from college at nineteen and entered medical school at once. The doctors had won; the nuns had tried to sell her on the convent, the nurses on being an airline stewardess or secret agent. Mary Ann was far too fond of interns.

On his daughter's twenty-first birthday Robert Barber received his now-monthly itemized bill. It was thirty-seven feet long, neatly typed by the hated machine he called an Iron Brain, Malefic. The bill totalled $364,311.41, very little of which was for anything other than room and board. The discount had been applied and figured for him as usual, although this time he noticed he was asked for only twenty cents on the dollar. Still, $72,862.28 was more than he had available. He sent the usual note: I agreed to forward the forty dollars outstanding on my daughter's bill at the end of the month of her birth. When the bill arrived it was for $130, including ten days at $9 for Nursery Care. I returned it, requesting a corrected total of $40. Had you responded I would have had a daughter all these years, like other people. You chose to advise that I owed you for the time she spent in the hospital past the day I took my wife home. I disagreed then and I disagree today; those additional ten days were spent in your inst.i.tution at your request, not mine. And not hers. Thus, since you claim to be a non-profit organization and the courts have refused to uphold me in prosecuting for kidnap-at-ransom, I am still willing to pay the $40. However I cannot do this until I receive a proper bill for that amount, so that I can account for it on my income tax return.

-Robert S. Barber PS: The enclosed check is to cover all expenses for my daughter's recent tonsillectomy. Actually, had I had a choice I would have chosen another hospital providing better care, but she advises your service was satisfactory.

-RSB.

It was signed, as usual, with a flourish. You can see for yourself; the hospital threw away the first few, but they have a file of 243 of those letters. Two hundred thirty-seven of them are printed.

There was another Board Meeting. The vote still went against bowing to Barber's request for a total bill of $40, although Board members calculated that the bookkeeping had cost them $27.38 a year. But-in the first place, What Would People Think if they learned hospitals are fallible, and admit errors? In the second, Eli R. Hutchinson, president of the biggest bank in town and a board member for thirty-six years, absolutely refused to agree to the $40 settlement unless it included interest. Simple interest on the original amount came to $50.40. Barber had rejected that six years ago.

As they left the Board Meeting William Joseph Spaninger, MD, was heard to mutter to Sister Mary Joseph, OP, RN, ”Well, Hutch can't live forever.”

Sister Mary Joseph shook her head and rattled her beads. ”You're a sinful man, Doctor Spaninger. Besides, Mister Hutchinson had a complete physical last week. He's in ridiculously good health.”