Flash Memoir: House Call

House Call

Every year, around the first week in November, I would come down with strep throat. While this meant a week off from school, it also meant a house call from Dr. Royce, and a shot of antibiotics. I remember him as a tall, rangy man, with an angular face, thick, wavy brown hair, and an imperious manner. I knew that he was coming. I could look out of my bedroom window and watch him pull up in front of the house in his black Buick. Once I caught him as he mashed a cigarette butt on the sidewalk; then he pulled the collar of his overcoat up to ward off a cold, rain-lashed wind. He would walk up to our front porch, tap lightly three or four times on the door, and wait patiently for my mother to answer. He would greet her with a solemn “Good morning, Mrs. Walters,” and she in turn would welcome him in with a demure “Thank you for coming, Dr. Royce.” Then I would hear them come up the stairs, his heavy footfall mixing with my mother’s lighter step, the two of them talking about the weather or how so many children were getting sick this time of year.

He’d sweep into my room, remove his overcoat, and drape it across the foot of my bed. He always wore a dark suit, starched white shirt, and striped tie. When he greeted me, it was always, “How are you feeling, young fella,” though as I got older it became “young man,” which made me think that I ought to have outgrown this yearly ritual and that he thought so too. His hair had begun to thin, and it was graying along the sides.

He’d sit in a chair beside my bed and place his bag on the floor. He’d take my temperature and pulse, listen to my heart, peer into my ears and nostrils with a small pen light, and look down my throat, gagging me with a tongue depressor while I choked out an “ahhh.” He would lean back and pronounce that I did, indeed, have strep throat. Then he would open his bag for what I knew was coming next. He would swab my upper arm in alcohol, reach into his bag and produce the syringe, and without a moment’s hesitation expertly jab it precisely where he intended, humming in a soft, distracted voice. I’d try not to wince, and my mother would look on in sympathy. A few second later he would quickly withdraw the needle, dab away the small drop of blood, and toss the syringe into a pocket in his bag labeled “USED.” This would be followed by the usual instructions: “He can go back to school in a few days. Call me if he doesn’t get better.” And so on.

One day—I was older, and curious—I looked into his bag. It was a typical doctor’s bag, made of black leather that opened into two halves. On one side was a collection of syringes, lined up like stick soldiers with hats, held in place by small elastic bands. Each one was labeled with the name of the patient. Next to the syringes was an assortment of instruments: a reflex hammer, attachments for his pen light, tongue depressors, and other devices, shiny stainless steel ones that reflected the light, whose use I didn’t want to know about. On the other side were his stethoscope, rubber gloves, pill bottles, and more silvery instruments of what seemed to me dubious provenance.

Everything was neatly placed and secured, as carefully arranged as words might be into sentences and paragraphs, nothing out of place. The bag told a story. I could tell, for instance, that I was his fifth patient to get a shot, that he had been looking down throats by the jumble of tongue depressors in the “USED” pocket, that pills had been dispensed because one bottle lay empty at the bottom of the bag.

What I did not expect to see was the gun. It was tucked in an inside pocket in one end of the bag. When I looked at him, my eyes must have shown surprise, because he took it out and showed it to me. I was certain it was a toy, but it looked real, like the kind of pistol TV detectives used. He twirled it on his finger like a gunslinger and pulled the trigger. My mother and I flinched at the CLICK, which echoed around the room like the crack of a snapping tree limb. But nothing happened. He looked at me and smiled. I was about to ask him if I could hold it, but he slipped it back into its pocket and closed the bag. “You’ll live,” he said, patting me on the leg.

Dr. Royce made his house calls on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and I know now that he would go to his office early on those days and pack his bag. He would be especially careful in preparing the syringes: measure out the correct amount of drugs, label them in his precise block printing, clip them into his bag in the exact order of his rounds. He would sterilize his instruments and review his patients’ records and smoke a cigarette while he finished his coffee. And just before he left to see his first patient he would cooly aim the gun at a silhouette target on the wall, close his one eye and squinting along the barrel with the other pull the trigger, CLICK, and in his sonorous voice emit a satisfied “Bang! You’re dead, you son of a bitch!”

But I knew nothing of this then. I would get sick, my mother would make a phone call, and a day later he would appear, like a stranger in a movie coming home after a long absence, black bag in hand, potent and deadly. When I was home sick I would draw cartoon strips, wildly undisciplined stories, usually cribbed from Sergeant Rock comic books. I couldn’t really draw. My characters were stick figures with bloated torsos and skinny arms and legs, living and dying in a world luridly colored with reds and blacks, death and dismemberment everywhere they went. Some of my characters suffered bodily damage no doctor could heal. As I got older I switched from drawing comic strips to writing stories, no less fantastic, words just as lurid, bodies just as damaged, substituting for pictures. The homework I was supposed to be doing sat untouched on my dresser.

Flushed with pride, I read one of my stories to a child psychologist I was seeing. He listened passively then asked me if I had written any “happy” stories. When my mother came to pick me up, he asked her to step into his office. She nodded and went in and he closed the door. Fifteen minutes later she came out with a worried look on her face. She never said what they had talked about, but soon after this I stopped writing stories. I sensed, as if hearing a warning whisper in a darkened room, that I had transgressed.

Dr. Royce was right. I lived. When I returned to school, the teachers would invariably ask me if I had done the homework they’d sent to my home, and I would just as invariably answer no. “Then what did you do?” they would ask. I would shrug my shoulders and say, “Nothing.”