Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor Page 4

  Kitty appeared carrying a now presumably dry and clean Victoria Margaret.

  “All is now sweetness and light,” Kitty said. “Julie’s on the phone to her mum and this wee dote’s half asleep.”

  Kitty looks so natural with that youngster, O’Reilly thought.

  She laid the wee one into her pram, turned it so the sleeping compartment was in the shade, grabbed the handle, and rocked the pram on its springs the while singing,

  I see the moon, the moon sees me

  down through the leaves of the old oak tree.

  Please let the light that shines on me

  shine on the one I love.

  Kitty smiled at O’Reilly and put a finger to her lips. She stopped rocking and whispered, “She’s asleep.” Kitty moved away from the pram and sat, legs folded under her skirt. She patted the grass beside her.

  O’Reilly joined her, and not to be left out, Arthur flopped down, head on outstretched paws, and yawned mightily. “I must say you looked very much at home with the babby, Kitty.”

  “I should do,” she said. “I’ve told you that I took some midwifery training, after we—” She sighed. “Well, after we went our separate ways before the war.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not so much as an apology as an expression of his own regret.

  She took his hand. “It’s all right. It took a while, but we’ve fixed it, haven’t we?”

  “Thank you for that, Kitty.”

  A tiny whimper came from the pram.

  Kitty shook her head. “Leave her. She’ll nod off.”

  “I wonder,” he said. “I wonder if we had got married back then…” He looked right into her eyes. “Do you mind not having children?”

  “Your children?”

  “Ours,” he said.

  She lowered her gaze, clearly lost in thought, smoothed her hair with one hand, then looked at O’Reilly. “Truth?”

  “Truth.”

  “Yes. I think I did for a while. All my friends had families. Back then it was what women were supposed to do. I was never one for standing out from the crowd, but as the years went by and I’d been to Tenerife, then specialised in neurosurgical nursing, I began to realise that I was having a fulfilling life and that children weren’t the be all and end all. But yes, if we had stayed together I’d like to have had ours, but I’m so happy to have you back now, and we both know we aren’t going to be parents so there’s no use fretting about it.” She glanced over at the pram. “And we can always enjoy other peoples’.”

  “And that’s about how I feel too, Kitty. I’m happy to be with you, my love, and content.” And that, he thought, just about says it all.

  They smiled at each other and it seemed to O’Reilly that neither he nor Kitty felt any need to talk anymore as they sat, close together, in the sun.

  The day was warm and he removed his tweed jacket to sit in his shirtsleeves and thick red braces. Arthur snored gently and bees murmured in the drowsy late morning. Overhead, from somewhere in the heavens, the notes of a skylark spilled in a silvery cascade onto a field of ripening barley, and the hoarse voice of a corncrake rasped from where the bird was hiding in an unmown hayfield.

  A far cry, he thought, from the sounds of the Dublin tenements.

  5

  Not All of These … Can Sleep So Soundly

  The waiting room of the Aungier Place Dispensary was much emptier than it had been an hour ago. Doctor Corrigan must have been seeing patients at a rate of knots, Fingal thought, as he knocked on the surgery door.

  A curt “Come in.”

  Doctor Corrigan ignored Fingal and stood legs apart, arms akimbo, fists on his hips in front of a woman of about twenty sitting on a hard chair. The parting in his toupee had moved to an east-northeast, west-southwest axis.

  She cradled a baby. Unusually for a sick child, except those who were desperately ill, the little one was lying perfectly still and quiet. Probably, Fingal thought, it’s fine and she’s the patient. The baby’s face was bright pink.

  Phelim Corrigan’s was puce. “Ye stupid, stupid, bloody woman,” he said. “I’d forgive ye if it was the first time and put it down to pure, unadulterated, bog Irish buck ignorance, but it’s not bloody well the first time, and ye knew exactly what ye were up to. Didn’t ye? Didn’t ye?”

  Fingal couldn’t hear her whispered reply, but he flinched, partly for her because he hated to see anyone being bullied, but also for himself. This interview was turning into a roller coaster. Now it seemed the senior man had a God complex and was unashamedly insulting a patient. Rudeness to a colleague was one thing, this ranting another entirely. Did Fingal want to work with this tyrant? He glanced at the door. No reason why he shouldn’t simply leave now, but—but his curiosity was getting the better of him, and what about his plan to beard Doctor Corrigan about his earlier behaviour? Would it be possible to have a reasonable discussion with this man? And yet, John-Joe Finnegan had described Doctor Corrigan as a sound man.

  “How in God’s name could ye do such a horribly stupid thing again? Ye nearly killed wee Manus the last time.” The patients in the waiting room probably heard that, but the little one didn’t stir.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and hung her head. Her unwashed hair fell forward and Fingal couldn’t see her face.

  “Sorry, Mary Bernadette Foster? Sorry? Sorry be buggered.” He moved closer. “Give me the flaming child.” Fingal watched as the little doctor accepted the sleeping infant and held it as might a loving mother. He bent his head to it. “Come to me, wee dote, open your eyes for yer uncle Corrigan,” and his voice was soft, soothing. He carried Manus over to the couch and laid him gently on the sheet, smoothed his brow, and said, as if noticing Fingal for the first time, “Come here, Doctor O’Reilly. I’d like to show ye this poor wee mite.”

  Fingal, as he passed the mother, said, “Good day, Mrs. Foster.” But she refused to meet his eyes. He noticed a smell of damp underclothes and fresh stout.

  As he stood beside Doctor Corrigan, fresh smells assailed his nostrils. The wee one certainly had a dirty nappy, and yet he was still asleep?

  “All right,” said Doctor Corrigan, “I’ll give ye the history as it was told to me—with one critical omission. That stupid bowsie over there said she put little Manus, who’s three months and eight days old, and I know because I delivered the wee divil at four in the morning on a pissing wet April Fool’s Day, she put him down asleep into his cot, if ye can call an orange box lined with straw a cot, at ten this morning. Says he was fine then.” He spat the next words. “Fine? Fine my arse.” Doctor Corrigan fished out his stethoscope, slowly peeled back the baby’s grubby vest, listened all over the front of the chest, which was as pink as his face, sniffed and said, “At least he’s still breathing. The heartbeat’s about 120, but that’s not too bad for one this age.” He pulled the stethoscope from his ears. “Now, I’m not making up what I’m going to tell you next,” Doctor Corrigan said. “Once she’d got Manus down, she took her oul’ one’s wooden leg and pawned it for twelve shillings.”

  Fingal was not shocked. He knew enough about tenement life to understand that the pawnbrokers—“Uncle” in the parlance of the streets—were often all that kept many families going from one week to the next. The brokers would advance money on the most unlikely items, but pawning a man’s wooden leg was a new one to him.

  “Then, she took herself to the nearest boozer for a couple of hours,” said Doctor Corrigan, “and it wasn’t until half an hour ago what passes for her maternal instinct took over. She went home, and to her great surprise”—He scowled at the woman, but picked up the infant and cuddled it.—“found the wee one still asleep. And she couldn’t wake him up. Could ye, ye useless trollop? It was just like the last bloody time ye did it.”

  Fingal was baffled. He started to make a differential diagnosis of causes of what must be coma, and recurrent coma at that, in recently born children. But he had only got as far as meningitis and brain tumours, neither of which caused such pi
nkness of the skin, when Doctor Corrigan said, “Have ye ever seen such a bonny pink babby, Doctor?”

  “No,” said Fingal, “I have not.” He scrutinised the colour. “The child’s certainly not cyanosed, so it can’t be from oxygen lack.”

  “Huh,” said Doctor Corrigan. “Can it not? He’s been poisoned and he is oxygen-starved.”

  Fingal tried to remember his toxicology course, but for the life of him couldn’t remember any poison that caused pink skin.

  “You see, Mammy here wanted to go out for a jar and she wanted Manus to sleep, and he wouldn’t because she didn’t really know how to change a nappy nor had she the wit to ask a neighbour woman to show her, which is daft because the tenements are huge mutual aid societies.”

  “I do know,” said Fingal.

  “But ye don’t know what she did to get him to sleep before she put him in his cot, and it’s common practice in the Liberties.”

  Fingal shook his head. “I’ve no idea.”

  “She has a coal gas cooker so she turned on a ring and held the mite over the gas until he nodded off. And it’s the second time in a month she’s done it. That’s why I’m so bloody furious.”

  “Good God,” said Fingal. “Carbon monoxide poisoning.” The gas dissolved in the blood, displaced oxygen from the haemoglobin, and combined with it to form the pink compound carboxyhaemoglobin, which accounted for the baby’s colour. No wonder the child had passed out. It was lucky he hadn’t died. Fingal looked at the mother and shook his head. How could anyone treat a child that way? Perhaps Doctor Corrigan had some justification for his anger.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll ask Miss Jackson to run the wee one over to Baggot Street Hospital in my car. They can put him in an oxygen tent. Little Manus hasn’t died yet, so the carbon monoxide hasn’t displaced all the oxygen, some is still getting to the tissues, indeed the minute she stopped waving him over the gas he’d have been starting to recover. He’s certainly not getting any worse now. If I’d seen him a couple of hours ago I’d have had him straight into the hospital and given him oxygen. There’s not the same urgency now, but even so an hour in a tent will bring him round quicker, reduce the chances of permanent organ damage.” He glared at the mother. “Then they’ll wipe his arse, put some Vaseline on his nappy rash, give poor wee Manus a clean diaper, and probably a good feed when he wakes up.” He held the child gently and said, “Doctor O’Reilly, would ye please go and get Miss Jackson, third door on the right, and ask her to come here while I have a short discussion with the sainted Madonna here about my responsibilities to babies with respect to making reports to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Sisters of Charity, and the Garda Siochána.”

  Fingal headed for the door. That last remark at least brought a response. “Och, you’d not, Doctor, sir. You’d not tell the Peelers, would you?”

  Fingal didn’t hear the reply. He strode down the hall. The mention of Baggot Street Hospital had distracted him into thinking again of Kitty. He’d be seeing her tomorrow evening. He relished the thought, but before that he had to make up his mind about taking up the position here. The recent outburst, even if there had been real provocation, was not much of an argument for taking the job.

  On his left he passed a hatch where a patient was collecting a bottle of a dark fluid that looked like either a tincture or a decoction of some medicinal plant. Behind the hatch must be a room where commercially prepared medicines from the pharmaceutical companies like Bayer or May & Baker were stored, and in-house preparations—the powders, papers, pills, capsules, infusions, wines, and oleoresins—were made up and handed out, or “dispensed.” It was from this function that dispensary practices got their name.

  Miss Jackson, a motherly looking woman in her fifties, looked up from where she was weighing a baby. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Doctor O’Reilly. Doctor Corrigan needs you in his surgery, Miss Jackson.”

  “Fine.” She handed the infant back to a beshawled woman who had a three-year-old boy by the hand and what looked like a two-year-old girl in a rickety pram. “Young Mickey’s doing well, Moira. Can you bring him back in a month?”

  “I will.” She put the baby into the pram beside his sister. “T’anks very much.”

  “I’ll just be a minute.” The midwife washed her hands. “Come on,” she said, “and I’m sorry I missed your name, Doctor—?”

  “O’Reilly. Fingal O’Reilly.” He followed her into the hall.

  “The new graduate who’s thinking of working here?”

  More accurately “was,” Fingal thought, after having experienced Doctor Corrigan’s current display, but he nodded and said, “That’s me.”

  “You could do a lot worse.” Her voice softened. “Phelim Corrigan’s a remarkable man.”

  6

  One Law for the Rich … Another for the Poor

  When Fingal returned to the surgery, the “remarkable” Doctor Corrigan was still cuddling young Manus and handing a hanky to a tearful Mary Foster. “All right, Mary,” he said gently, “all right, lass, dry yer eyes. Manus is going to be all right.” He rummaged in his pocket and handed Miss Jackson a set of keys. “Here, Irene, run Mary and Manus over to Baggot Street. Tell the houseman to admit the chissler and pop him in an oxygen tent. Accidental coal gas poisoning.” He stressed the word “accidental.” So, no reports would be made to the Gardai or the nuns.

  Doctor Corrigan turned back to Mary Foster and handed her the child. “Now,” he said, “I’ve given ye an earful, Mary, and I meant every word. I know he’s yer first—but Miss Jackson and Miss O’Donaghugh are here to help. Bring the babby here when he gets out of hospital. They’ll show ye how to change a nappy, won’t ye, Irene?”

  “Of course. And I’ll arrange for a nursing sister to call every day for a while until Mary gets more comfortable with Manus.”

  “If I’d had any wit I’d have done that myself the last time.” He shook his head. “Och well, we all make mistakes.”

  The change in the man from hectoring ogre to a seemingly calm and caring physician, and one willing to admit his failures, had false-footed Fingal, who had been steeling himself for a confrontation.

  “T’ank you, Doctor, sir, and I’m awful sorry. I’ll never do it again, honest til God.”

  “Ye won’t,” said Doctor Corrigan, scowling, “because, by Jasus, if ye do, so help me God, it’ll be Manus for the Sisters of Charity Orphanage taken away from ye for child neglect, and yerself for Mountjoy Gaol for the same crime. Do ye understand, Mary Bernadette Foster? Do ye?”

  The edge was still in Doctor Corrigan’s voice. He must stand up to this man.

  “Yes, Doctor, sir.”

  “Run along now with Miss Jackson.”

  As the two women left, he turned to Fingal. “Just be a tick. I’ll go and explain to the other customers that I’ll be in consultation with a colleague for a while. Have a pew.”

  Fingal was still clutching the offending bag, so he set it back in its place beside the door. That aspect of his potential relationship with Doctor Corrigan needed to be sorted out as much as, if not even more than, Corrigan’s bedside manner.

  Fingal gritted his teeth. He had his own reasons for wanting this job, and most of them were, at least on the surface, altruistic. Ma had taught him her brand of caring since he’d been old enough to understand that not everybody lived as comfortably as the O’Reillys. He did want to help what his classically educated father would call the hoi polloi, the common people. Yet he also recognised that the obverse of altruism was the selfish inner glow that came from the doing of “good deeds.” A reasonable question to ask himself: Was the feeling of satisfaction making correct diagnoses and giving proper treatments, those “good deeds,” any less if performed for patients with money who could pay a damn sight more than a dispensary doctor’s salary?

  Probably a lot less. The truly affluent had no difficulty getting medical help. What physician wouldn’t prefer to take sherry in a drawing room af
ter a consultation as opposed to searching for the fleas that often attacked anyone who went into a tenement? The money was with the upper class and the newly emerging “middle class” of accountants, managers, teachers, doctors, nurses, and civil servants. Like the cream of society, most of them would patronise the more fashionable physicians. The crying need for good medical help was here in the Liberties.

  And to be ruthlessly practical, even if he’d wanted the carriage trade, those jobs were not the easiest to come by for recently qualified doctors, and usually were had by purchasing part or all of the principal’s practice. Fingal was in no position to buy in. He needed a job like this, at least as a start to his career in general practice. But with this Doctor Corrigan? Perhaps.

  Corrigan returned and climbed up on his high stool. “I’m sorry about that scene. Silly wee girl.” He shook his head. “How did ye get on with the tram accident?”

  The whole thing dismissed just like that? Fingal clutched the seat of the chair and stiffly leant forward. “Doctor Corrigan, I’m very new at this, and there’s probably something I don’t understand.” Fingal hesitated, realising that being placatory might well be the road to defeat before he even got started. He straightened and looked the senior man in the eye. “I think you were cruel to that patient. Very cruel.”

  Corrigan inclined his head. “Do ye now?”

  “Yes, I do. And I didn’t like being ordered around, being told to ‘Carry my bag.’”

  “Did ye not?” Something akin to a smile flickered on the little man’s lips. “Well, well.” He folded his arms and leant back.

  Fingal felt as if he’d delivered his best punch and Doctor Corrigan had let it whistle by into thin air. Nor had he mounted a defence or a counterattack. Fingal would have to forge ahead again. “I just don’t think seniors should treat the juniors like personal servants.”

  “Go on.”

  Fingal took a deep breath, folding his arms in front of his chest. “I came here expecting to be treated as a colleague. I don’t think being ordered to carry your bag as if I were a footman is very collegial.”