Walter Converse prowled the hallway outside the staff lounge. If there was one thing he despised, it was waiting, but he knew that Diller stopped in here a few times a day for a cup of coffee and an appreciative look at the nurses. So Walter stalked back and forth, always keeping one gloomy eye on the lounge doorway, and as he paced, he thought about his daughter.
It was the greatest disappointment of his life that Sharlie had been born malformed. Well, not malformed exactly, but defective, even if the defect was someplace where nobody could see it. If she’d emerged from Margaret’s cold body missing an arm or a leg or with her face all twisted and grotesque like some of the children Walter had seen, well, he was a strong man, but he didn’t know if he could have put up with that.
He’d been grateful she was a girl. Any child of his would end up extraordinary, he’d see to that, and an extraordinary woman was far more interesting than an extraordinary man. Look at his mother, for instance.
But when they told him about Sharlie’s heart just an hour after the elation of her birth, Walter had been crushed. Then furious: furious with God—for which he’d later asked and been granted forgiveness—furious with the medical profession, furious with the poor frail infant herself, and particularly furious with Margaret. Could she never do anything right? The incredible incompetence of the woman. She had looked up at him from her hospital bed with such guilt, asking him with her eyes to forgive her for producing such a poor specimen of a baby. She had wanted to please him, he knew that. So he forced the anger back down inside, patted her hand, and pounded his rage out on the squash court and in his conferences with specialists in New York and Minnesota and Houston and just about every place in between.
Sure enough, in Walter’s obsession to learn all there was to know about his baby’s condition, he tracked down a genetic disorder in Margaret’s family that no one had ever spoken about because no one in that tight-ass, hot-shot bunch ever talked about things that happened in the, God forbid, body. But what, he wanted to know, was the point of blue blood if it pumped in and out of a fucked-up heart?
So while Margaret languished, grief-stricken and guilty, Walter set about to cure his daughter, lavishing time and money on the project as if there were no Converse & Mackin and no stock market to occupy his active days.
Maybe she wasn’t as lively as the other babies in the nursery, and maybe her skin had a slightly bluish tinge, but when he held the baby Charlotte, she seemed so beautiful to him, so soft and so perfect on the outside that you’d never know. When he held her like that, he made himself a fierce promise to give her the life he’d dreamed about during all those years of waiting for Margaret to produce.
His eyes snapped to the lounge doorway as someone in surgical gear went inside. But no, it wasn’t Diller. Walter began his pacing again, but more slowly now. Suddenly he realized that he was beginning to get discouraged. Here was Sharlie, twenty-six years old and basically an invalid. There had been so many disappointments, so many failed techniques, some so esoteric they were probably illegal, like the one where they blew carbon dioxide gas into the heart chamber through a tube. But each new test confirmed what the last one had indicated: Corrective surgery might repair Sharlie’s heart, but the risks were prohibitive.
After each new hope dissolved, Walter had always managed to replenish his superhuman store of energy and confidence. But today he felt the supply dwindling. As he looked toward the future, there was a kernel of dread mixed with the faith he’d kept alive all these years, and kept alive in his wife and daughter, too.
In the early days he’d pushed hard for surgery but couldn’t find anybody courageous enough to try a triple valve replacement on Sharlie. Goddammit, he wanted to cut her open and perform the frigging operation himself. And now, with each day of increased suffering, he became more convinced that a heart transplant was the only possible solution. What were the alternatives? Watch Sharlie disintegrate week by week, her spirit shattered like her shattered heart? Wait like Sharlie for the injection that came every now and then to ease the merciless, unremitting pain? Pretty soon the ever-narrowing slice of bearable time would disappear altogether, and that left only the choice of prolonging a tortured life or tossing out the pill bottles and letting her go.
He came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the sterile hall. God forgive me, he thought. Walter Converse considering the willful destruction of his own child. Mother, where are all your answers now?