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California Street
by Niven Busch
Part I
The Waiting Room
“Some generations are close to those that succeed them;
between others the gulf is infinite and unbridgeable.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter 1
“All right, dear,” the pretty pinklipped nurse said, “now we’ll just slip off our clothes and tumble into bed,” and Jessica said, “I presume from your use of the plural, nurse, that you intend slipping out of your clothes too,” and the nurse thought that was priceless. She repeated the remark to all the other nurses.
It was a fine sunny morning and beyond the high hospital window the city lay sumptuodus on its eleven hills and the traffic flickered over the red bridge and the silver bridge, the gulls circled over the harbor and the salt crystals splintered in the air like bullets. It was a fine sunny morning in the city of San Francisco and they came and got her out of the house she had lived in so long and wheeled her up the ramp, down the corridors and taped the intravenous feeder to her vein and turned the gadget on the door to no visitors. “Are you more comfortable now, Mrs. Saxe?” they asked and she said, “Oh, yes, I am much more comfortable,” hating the nurse for no reason at all. And Dr. French came and Dr. Whatshisname, the San Diego man, and the stiff sullen little prod of the needle in her flesh because a little sedation was indicated. “Take me,” she said to the shadows standing in the corners of the room, the furies with their secret faces blurred a little now because of the needle, “take me then if that is what you want but get it over with.” It would have been so much better in the house than in this alien place, smelling of unknown smells, better in the great sleighbed with the smooth, brown mahogany coil of the footboard carved like benign twin serpents, so much better there in the great house which Gertrude Atherton said looked as if it had been designed by a number of competent architects in violent disagreement. But the release had to be signed first, the pinklipped nurse holding it apologetically, extending the ballpoint pen at the same time. Ridiculous really. Just a hospital rule she had to give them permission to operate, and Jessica wrote her name with a wobbly hand, looking at them with her blazing captive eyes. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she’d said in the old days, “I’ll go to my end with black hair. I can’t stand gray, and there’s no reason to as long as they manufacture dye.” So every other day after the first operation a man came from Mister Louie’s and once she’d even had a wax job. She’d gotten to like wax jobs, they were so frivolous, the sweet soothing little torments one suffered for beauty like the throes of love itself. So much better the following week and on the last night of all such a good sleep although not a sleep at all really just an elevator dropping, and The Thing they wheeled in level with the bed and a nurse, not the pinklipped one but a new one, young and strong and soapy with straight serious eyes. She wouldn’t fool you, not this one, honesty was her form of kindness. She said, “I’m afraid it’s time,” and they wheeled Jessica Saxe out into the hall.
Chapter 2
Any attorney worthy of the name had to foresee the long-range consequences of his work — the more so if, in addition to his professional position, he happened to be a personal friend of the client involved. All his life George Dudley had been aware of this tenet of his trade and he had tried to adhere to it. Frequently — and it seemed more and more as he grew older — people came to him requesting some procedure which appealed to them but of which he disapproved, and in such cases he not only refused to do what they wanted but often talked them into adopting quite a different course of action.
He had tried to do this very thing with Jessica Saxe. He had tried and he had failed. Jessica could be a very stubborn person in some ways, just as she was also a very proud and independent person. She had not been able to see his point of view at all.
Dudley regretted his failure with Jessica. He would have liked to use in her behalf the skill he had acquired in a lifetime spent in law practice; he could, he felt, if given the chance, have set up her estate so that the Will would have done for the family after her death what she had always done for it in person while she was alive.
There was, of course, the question of whether his devices would have proved successful. The essence of Jessica’s achievement — its true greatness — lay in the fragility of its structure. That kind of fragility made a lawyer’s job more difficult, just as it made a banker’s job more complicated. To use law or money effectively you had to be dealing with a pattern based on law and money, and the house which Jessica had built depended, for its strength, on neither; it was upheld by the lift of Jessica’s spirit and the fire in her slender, desiccated bones. There was a good chance that when she was no longer there to look out for it, the whole affair would fly apart at the touch of the first angry hand.
Dudley hoped this wouldn’t happen. Experience told him that the prognosis wasn’t good but he hoped for Jessica’s sake. Both because he was so deeply fond of her and because, even after she had fallen ill, there might still be an opportunity of reopening the matter of the estate, he called regularly at the California Street house and continued his visits after she was taken to the hospital. He undertook small errands and assumed responsibility for little chores which she would have ordinarily done herself and which she worried about, as sick people will, while she lay in bed. Getting a Revere cream pitcher to Shreve’s to have a dent taken out of it. Making a trip to Bekins for a cherrywood desk Jessica had promised Sharon, her youngest daughter, for the house in Burlingame. Trifling jobs like that, assignments for a friend rather than a lawyer, easily falling into the compass of one who was both, trifling only to him, not to Jessica, on whose narrowed horizons, through the empty wastes of the past and present and conjoined night and day along which her mind now moved, they had a greatly exaggerated importance. Also, since there was no one else to do it — it hardly seemed worth while putting them through her husband’s office — he handled the household and medical bills and had his secretary prepare checks for Jessica’s signature.
Being thus in almost daily touch with her, he was asked to undertake a final, less agreeable piece of work when Jessica’s condition suddenly turned critical. What happened was that Sister Dominica, the Sister in charge of the fifth floor at St. Ann’s, where Jessica had her room, asked Dr. French as he was on his way to surgery whether the family should be called. Dr. French, stepping into the elevator, merely nodded — or possibly he did not nod. Sister Dominica wasn’t sure. From what had developed that morning she, personally, felt that the family should be called, but just in case the doctor hadn’t nodded, and what had seemed to be a nod had simply been an unintentional wobble of his head — if, perhaps, he hadn’t even heard her question — it would be well to have somebody else take responsibility for making the calls. She thought of Mr. Dudley, whom she had come to know during his visits to the patient, and after looking up his number in the telephone book she called his office and told him what had happened. She did not, of course, make any suggestion about what should be done. The fact that she was making the call, she felt, would be enough. She could leave the next step up to Mr. Dudley. “I wasn’t sure from what Doctor said,” Sister Dominica stated — it seemed better to suggest a conversation with Dr. French rather than go into the matter of the nodding — “just what he wished me to do. I thought you would know best.”
She was pleased when Mr. Dudley indicated that she’d done the right thing in calling him.
“Thank you very much, Sister Dominica,” he’d said. “I’m very grateful that you called me. Please let me know immediately, when anything further develops.”
