On the day of the appointment, he was pruning deadwood from Valencias in a grove near De Luz when Oscar de la Cueva picked him up early. Ansel was glad of that. It afforded him time to wash up and change into fresh clothes before walking to the little cottage that served as a hospital. Alone in the small examination room, he took off his shirt as the nurse had asked him to do, and sat down on the metal table. The facing wall was covered with framed diplomas and commendations issued to Morris A. Quigley from Boston College and the University of California. The room must have once been the pantry or some such. There wasn’t a window to look out of; all there was to look at were the gilt-lettered commendations. Presently Dr. Quigley entered, smiling in a friendly way and saying, “Mr. Price,” and drawing a folder down from a cupboard. Friendly, and yet he had not offered his hand.
Ansel had met Quigley, of course, but their dealings had never gone beyond a nod and hello. Ansel regarded Quigley’s shoes, which looked right out of the box, though he knew they weren’t. Neva had told him that Dr. Quigley wore two pairs of shoes, one to and from the office and another that he wore only at the office so they never got dirty. The doctor’s chin was dimpled and, though he looked to be no more than forty, his hair was already silvery. He was a widower—a quiet, serious one, according to Ellie, who set aside a piece of lemon meringue pie every day so he wouldn’t be disappointed when he came in after the café was closed. Quigley called it his standing order, and Neva said he was a good tipper and nice to everybody, “especially Mama.”
“You know that lemon meringue pie your wife bakes?” Quigley said now as he labeled the folder with Ansel’s name. “Sometimes I’ll be thinking about that pie all day long.”
“It’s good pie,” Ansel said. He always knew which days Quigley came and which days he didn’t, because when he didn’t come, Ellie gave the leftover pie to Ansel. Those days, he’d noticed, were few.
Quigley leaned over his folder with pencil in hand and asked for Ansel’s full name, date of birth, and past medical conditions.
“I don’t get sick much,” Ansel said. “Only this little cough of mine.”
Quigley nodded and wrote. “Your last visit to a doctor?”
“Thirty-six years ago,” Ansel said. “Got kicked in the head by a milk cow.” He grinned. “I was fine and would not have gone. It was my mother’s decision.” He paused and smiled. “That milk cow was saucy.”
Quigley gave this a polite laugh, not the broad, knowing laugh Kansans generally gave it. He closed the folder, and hooked his stethoscope over his ears. It felt strange and unpleasant to sit bare chested on the table and breathe the scent of another man’s hair oil while he listened to you inhale. Quigley wore a blue bow tie and the knot looked intricate. The only man Ansel had known in Kansas who knotted a bow tie was Fitzimmons the banker.
After a time, Quigley sat back. “Have you ever coughed up blood?”
Ansel shook his head, but from the expression on Quigley’s face, Ansel guessed that Ellie had told him about the handkerchief. “You’ll need to give me a sputum sample,” he said. “We just need to rule out tuberculosis.”
Even before Ansel could absorb the shock of hearing the word spoken to him, straight out, from a doctor’s lips, Quigley was handing him a paper titled Rules to Be Observed for the Prevention of the Spread of Tuberculosis. He scanned the set of rules that followed. Patient’s utensils marked and separated. Patient must spit only into sputum cups. Sputum cups boiled every day for 10 minutes. Contents burned.
Ansel looked up. “I don’t have tuberculosis,” he said, and extended the paper back to the doctor, but Quigley wouldn’t take it. “It’s just a bad cold. I’ll recover.”
“I imagine you’re right, Mr. Price, but we’d better do the test.”
Ansel felt a sudden need to buy time, to figure out how to get out of here. “Kind of an old-fashioned illness, isn’t it? Tuberculosis I mean,” he said.
“It’s come back into fashion,” Quigley said. “Especially where you’re from. All the dust.”
“What about Neva? Did you do the test on her?”
Quigley’s expression relaxed as he nodded. “Of course. She’s negative.”
He’d done the test on Neva? Ellie had told him that Dr. Quigley had said that Neva was fine, but she never said anything about taking a test for tuberculosis. Ansel got up and reached for his shirt. “This is all kind of sudden,” he said. “Just give me a day or two to get used to the idea.”
“There’s nothing here to get used to, Mr. Price,” Quigley said. He took a deep breath. “It’s not just your own health we’re talking about.” He paused so that this could sink in. “Without a negative finding, you should be immediately quarantined.”
Quigley’s fingernails were flat and clean, just like McNamara’s. There was nothing wrong with Quigley and McNamara, except for their clean fingernails and the smoothness of their lives. Ansel knew this, and yet it did little to moderate his resentment of either one of these men. Quigley went to the cupboard behind him and took out a piece of cardboard, which he folded to form a rudimentary cup. “Just spit into this,” he said, “so you can prove me wrong.”
“It’s just a cold,” Ansel said, buttoning his shirt, “and if it isn’t gone in a day or two, I’ll come back.” In a day or two, he would be gone and he could forget all this.
“Mr. Price,” the doctor said. His voice was firmer. “If the health department thinks the café might be a source of TB, they’ll shut it down, no ifs, ands, or buts.”
The doctor stood holding the improvised cup. Ansel wanted out of this room and this town but between him and the door stood Quigley with his little cardboard cup.
What if I told you I don’t give a tinker’s damn about that restaurant? Ansel thought about saying and then pushing him aside and stepping through the door, but that wasn’t really true. He wanted Ellie to be happy. He wanted a good life to be hers if he left.
He took the cup and spat into it.
Since opening the café, Ellie had begun serving the family supper on the table closest to the kitchen. Often she would make a casserole or potpie with leftovers from the day’s cooking. Tonight it was a beef pie topped with browned biscuits that everyone except Ansel ate with relish. Charlotte and Neva and Clare kept up a stream of newsy chatter—a broken window at the Practice House, a perfect score on a history test, an unwed girl going to Los Angeles to get swallowed up in who knew what. When there was a respite, Clare asked how many lunches they’d served that day, a question he always asked.
“Twenty-four,” Ellie replied quietly.
Clare looked up from his beef pie in surprise. “Twenty-four?” His face was brimming with approval. “That’s swell, Mom. That’s a record, right?”
Ellie nodded and laughed. “And one of the bankers said he wanted to patent my Duchess Potatoes.”
Charlotte and Clare both gave small laughs; Neva wanted to know how you patented a potato, which brought more laughter.
Ansel could not help but marvel at his wife. She would even hum popular tunes now—“It’s Only a Paper Moon” was the one he heard the most—while doing the dishes. Always before he’d found her bustling cheer discouraging, but now he found a certain compensation in the transformation: it was one more reason that argued for his leaving.