Things did not slow down until nearly four that afternoon, after Louis
and Richard Irving, the head of Campus Security, made a statement to the press.
The young man, Victor Pascow, had been jogging with two friends, one of them his
fiancée. A car driven by Tremont Withers, twenty-three, of Haven, Maine, had
come up the road leading from the Lengyll Women's Gymnasium toward the center
of campus at an excessive speed. Withers's car had struck Pascow and driven him
into a tree. Pascow had been brought to the infirmary in a blanket by his friends
and two passers-by. He had died minutes later. Withers was being held pending
charges of reckless driving, driving under the influence, and vehicular
manslaughter.
The editor of the campus newspaper asked if he could say that Pascow had died
of head injuries. Louis, thinking of that broken window through which the brain
itself could be seen, said he would rather let the Penobscot County coroner
announce the cause of death. The editor then asked if the four young people who
had brought Pascow to the infirmary in the blanket might not have inadvertently
caused his death.
'No,' Louis replied, glad to have the chance to absolve the four of them, who had
acted quickly and compassionately, of blame. 'Not at all. Unhappily, Mr Pascow
was, in my opinion, mortally wounded upon being struck.'
There were other questions—a few—but that answer really ended the press
conference. Now Louis sat in his office (Steve Masterton had gone home an hour
before, immediately following the press conference, to catch himself on the evening
news, Louis suspected) trying to pick up the shards of the day—or maybe he was
just trying to cover what had happened, to paint a thin coating of routine over it.
He and Charlton were going over the cards in the 'front file'—those students who
were pushing grimly through their college years in spite of some disability. There
were twenty-three diabetics in the front file, fifteen epileptics, fourteen paraplegics,
and assorted others: students with leukemia, students with cerebral palsy and
muscular dystrophy, blind students, two mute students, and one case of sickle
cell anemia, which Louis had never even seen.
Perhaps the lowest point of the afternoon had come just after Steve left.
Charlton came in and laid a pink memo slip on Louis's desk. Bangor Carpet will be
here at 9:00 tomorrow, it read.
'Carpet?' he had asked.
'It will have to be replaced,' she said apologetically. 'No way it's going to come
out, Doctor.'
Of course. At that point Louis had gone into the dispensary and taken a Tuinal
– what his first med school roommate had called Tooners. 'Hop up on the
Toonerville Trolley, Louis,' he'd say, 'and I'll put on some Creedence.' More often
than not Louis had declined the ride on the fabled Toonerville, and that was
maybe just as well; his roomie had flunked out halfway through his third
semester, and had ridden the Toonerville Trolley all the way to Vietnam as a
medical corpsman. Louis sometimes pictured him over there, stoned to the
eyeballs, listening to Creedence do 'Run Through the Jungle'.
But he needed something. If he was going to have to see that pink slip about the
carpet on his note-minder board every time he glanced up from the front file
spread out in front of them, he needed one.
He was cruising fairly well when Mrs Baillings, the night nurse, poked her head
in and said, 'Your wife, Dr Creed. Line one.'
Louis glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly five thirty; he had meant to be
out of here an hour and a half ago.
'Okay, Nancy. Thanks.'
He picked up the phone and punched line one. 'Hi, honey. Just on my—'
'Louis, are you all right?'
'Yeah. Fine.'
'I heard about it on the news. Lou, I'm so sorry.' She paused a moment. 'It was
the radio news. They had you on, answering some question. You sounded fine.'
'Did I? Good.'
'Are you sure you're all right?'
'Yes, Rachel. I'm fine.'
'Come home,' she said.
'Yes,' he said. Home sounded good to him.