Raising the Dad Read online

  * * *

  The files were all frustratingly free of dramatic narrative. Meticulously noted numbers filled the forms—time of admission, body temperature, blood pressure, hourly notations of medications dispensed and urine passed—but it was hard to discern the story of the patient and the doctor. Nowhere—not once—was it recorded: “Dr. Husted burst into the room and, despite exhibiting a winsome air of regret at time not spent with his younger son, rolled up his sleeves to pull the patient back from the eternal chasm of death to the amazement of staff and the grateful embrace of humbled loved ones.”

  Not every patient made it. John began girding himself as he moved from file to file, wondering if line 25 on the patient form—the time of death line—would be filled in above his father’s signature. John found eight deaths in the first box of files alone for which Larry was the attending physician.

  Was eight a lot? John thought not, given the remarkable number of cases Larry probably took the lead on. The odds and the immutable appetite of mortality caught up to even the best doctors, but eight didn’t seem alarming. And maybe subsequent file boxes would see fewer die. Maybe John just happened to peer in on his father during a bad patch.

  * * *

  In the six cartons of records from 1975 to 1980, Larry Husted signed off on twenty-three patients who died in his care. Of those, John discarded most into a pile that indicated circumstances beyond his father’s control: car crash, gunshot wound, cardiac arrest. They were internal or external attacks on the body that did more damage than their doctor could rectify.

  Of the twenty-three terminal cases, nine left questions. The dead were on the young side (five were children), and none had endured traumatic injury or system failure at the time of admission. Again, the medical terminology and alarmingly poor handwriting of the notetakers made certain that a layman like John would never make sense of what transpired.

  Digging through Larry’s past would have just been a few nights’ diversion if not for one remaining file. It was much thicker than all the others, packed within a number of folders and bound as if intended for extensive reviewing. The powdery remains of a thick rubber band fell away as John retrieved the documents, and the top folder still had routing slips to the district attorney and Bob Schurmer, Larry’s friend and lawyer. The date of a subpoena was stamped imperiously in a corner.

  The pages inside had notes scrawled between notes, now in the more precise handwriting of lawyers. Words like negligence and misdiagnosis were discernible amidst the legalese. Questions from attorneys joined the initial questions of the doctors, and these seemed to press for answers. And a determination of responsibility.

  John sat at Larry’s bedside, looking from his silent father to the files closed tightly on his lap. And he began to read.

  Thirty-two

  The dead girl was Vicky Farragut. The Farraguts were one of those families that small towns seemed to breed so that everyone else had someone to look down upon. In the most generous terms they were a poor, rough-hewn lot. The numerous children were bullies and habitual flunkers whose parents sat pissed off and strange on their dirt patch front lawn for days at a time, surrounded by heaps of beer cans and cigarette butts. Randy Farragut was a Vietnam vet who came home broken in ’68 and intermittently ran his father’s Amoco station in what was becoming one of Holt City’s struggling black neighborhoods. He was an angry drunk and a worse speed freak, and everyone other than his wife, Holly, knew to stay out of his way. Randy and Holly would eventually set loose seven feral little Farraguts upon Holt City; Vicky was their second, born in the old hospital the year before John was born.

  She died in June 1980 at nine years old; John remembered when it happened. Not the details, but he could still call to mind the queasy, confusing waft of mortality that blew through the monkey bars when he heard about the death of a kid just about his age. Being a Farragut, the rumors on the playground were pitiless and fixed blame on the parents, which confused John even more.

  In the days that followed, as Vicky’s brothers and sisters started returning to school looking even more pale and vacant than before, John noticed that at least for a time the teasing stopped. At recess, most kids just stood in whispering packs and stared at them, imagining the funeral and a family worn raw by soul-searing crying and eventually a skeleton just about their size melting into the dirt out at Eastlawn Cemetery. Then they played keep-away until the bell rang.

  Back then, at eight years old, it didn’t take much to set John’s mind to racing to keep him from falling asleep at night. The day he heard of Vicky’s death, he recalled stirring in tangled sheets for hours. He now marveled to know that on that same night, just on the other side of his bedroom wall, the man who had overseen her death may have been awake as well.

  Did the death of a child in his care keep Lawrence Husted up that night, or was his professional detachment so absolute that he slept with ease in order to be rested and on his game for the patients he would try to do better by the next day?

  For the first time since John began massaging his father’s unknowable past into behaviors he found pleasing, John stared at Larry in his bed and had no idea how his father might have reacted to the death of Vicky Farragut. And for the first time, he realized it was dishonest to invent his own answer.

  * * *

  “Did you know Dad got sued for malpractice in 1980?” John asked Mike idly while raking their mother’s backyard.

  “Yeah,” Mike shrugged. “The Farraguts.”

  “Why don’t I remember this?”

  “Because you were eight and a dumbfuck. The old man tried to keep it from us, but I knew what was going on. I mean, he was on trial for weeks. It was on the front page when it was finally settled.”

  John was amazed that this all escaped him when he was a kid.

  “God, Johnny Farragut sold good weed,” Mike reminisced. “Got himself blown in half by a shotgun in Rockford, like in ’87. Used the money I owed him for dope to help buy our first PA.”

  “What happened in the trial?” John asked impatiently.

  “The girl died and her scuzzy parents said it was Dad’s fault,” Mike said, then scoffed cynically. “Like those rednecks had a chance against the great Larry Husted.

  “But it went on longer than him and his lawyers thought it would, I know that. Larry was freakin’ for a while, which was sweet to see.”

  “Where was I during all this?” John pleaded.

  “Watching cartoons.”

  “That’s not all I did!”

  “Were you beating off yet?”

  “No!” John said, mortified.

  “Then you were watching cartoons. That’s all you did back then. Once you started beatin’ off you were in your room all the time, and then I could watch what I wanted to watch on TV.”

  “So what was he accused of? Why did it take so long to settle it?”

  “I don’t know, it was over thirty years ago!” Mike grumbled. “The kid had something wrong and they took her to the emergency room and he didn’t take the time to figure out if she was allergic to something, and whatever he shot her up with killed her. Or that’s what they said. The judge finally said it was bullshit.”

  “But not right away,” John reiterated.

  “Larry’s nuts were in a vise for a while there,” Mike sighed. “Good times.”

  Thirty-three

  The Holt City Gazette had put the past several years of archives on their website, but John knew that the era he needed to revisit was going to send him to microfilm. He started spending his days—between tending to Larry and around his grant projects—at the library, piecing together the story.

  Vicky’s medical charts gave him a timeline to follow. He started with the date of her death and scrolled his way to the next day’s Gazette, which included her starkly worded obituary: Randall and Holly Farragut’s nine-year-old daughter Victoria Denise died at Holt Memorial, where she was admitted after several days of illness. Cause of death was undetermined. Vicky left
behind five brothers and sisters. Mr. Farragut, the obit noted dryly, managed the Amoco station on East Becker Road. Funeral arrangements were unknown.

  The date of the subpoena and the log of record requests as the files shuttled between lawyers’ offices told John when the lawsuit was filed. The June 26 edition of the newspaper broke the news about the suit filed against Holt Memorial and Dr. Lawrence Husted.

  The paper gave the story only two column inches on page three. John instinctively deduced that the paper favored the hospital and the highly regarded Dr. Husted over the lowly Farraguts, whose perpetual flaunting of the law and decent behavior was a staple of the paper’s coverage. As John scrolled through day after day of old issues of the Gazette, he was bemused to observe how often a Farragut was caught driving drunk or selling dope or irking neighbors by dismantling junked cars on their front lawn at two in the morning.

  John leaned into the eye-straining glow of the projector screen and tried to glean what he could from the short article about the lawsuit.

  Vicky’s parents brought her to the emergency room after days of either ignoring the fact that she ran a fever and had pains in her abdomen, or believing they could treat it themselves. When they finally brought her in the diagnosis was an appendix about to burst, but the claim stated that what should have been a routine procedure unexpectedly led to internal bleeding that killed her. The suit charged that Lawrence Husted, the attending physician at the time, was negligent in his treatment of the girl.

  The paper reported that a lawyer named Henry Getch represented the Farraguts and was going after Larry and the hospital for $1.7 million. He pictured Randy Farragut salivating at such a sum in exchange for his daughter’s life and knew he’d find that to be more than a fair trade. It was a tragedy and all, but he still had plenty of little Farraguts left over.

  * * *

  John was able to retrieve trial transcripts from the county archives. It all boiled down to the internal bleeding that killed the girl. As the ER physician on call when Vicky was brought in, Larry immediately diagnosed the inflamed appendix and removed it. He was concerned about low blood pressure that didn’t right itself after the surgery, so he prescribed a blood thinner to flush the catheter and prevent clots. This was within accepted practice, but not a routine procedure for such a young patient.

  The problem was that Larry failed to note in her admission records that for the four days in which her parents tried to treat her fever and stomach pains on their own, they gave her an outrageous amount of aspirin. This thinned her blood to a dangerous degree, which became lethal when Larry unknowingly compounded it. The little girl immediately began to bleed out and while Larry apparently struggled valiantly to save her, there was nothing he could do.

  John squirmed at feeling pretty certain that his father fucked up. The nurses ask you all those questions at admission for a reason. The doctors need to know what they’re dealing with. Larry’s lawyer tried to divert blame—the admitting nurse should have alerted Larry, she should have pressed the parents for more specifics about the aspirin consumption instead of merely noting “high vol. asp.”—but Getch, the Farragut’s lawyer, insisted that it was ultimately Larry’s responsibility to know the facts.

  Henry Getch, in his late twenties at the time and probably no more than an ambulance-chasing gnat to a well-connected and prosperous attorney like Bob Schurmer, apparently scored blows Larry’s lawyer had not anticipated. So after spending several days calling doctors and patients to publicly testify on behalf of Larry’s medical skills, Schurmer turned his sights on the Farraguts.

  The Gazette articles now deemed the story deserving of front-page attention as Bob Schurmer turned the trial into an indictment of Randy and Holly Farragut. The jury was all locals; they knew the Farraguts. And Schurmer didn’t miss a thing: Randy’s dope arrests in high school and, with greater and greater frequency after he returned from Vietnam. Holly’s long list of petty offenses, like shoplifting, public intoxication, and fighting. And an endless string of police calls to the family’s home, usually for noise or some boorish fracas, but often enough with concerns about the well-being of their children. Neighbors reported often finding little Farraguts straying into their yards in filthy clothes and helping themselves to fruit from their trees, seemingly unfed.

  Henry Getch finally got the judge to rule the attacks on the parents irrelevant and out-of-bounds, but Schurmer got enough read into the record to set him up for the kill. He called Randy Farragut to the stand.

  Schurmer focused on the four days leading up to finally bringing Vicky to the emergency room. How could the parents have allowed their daughter to writhe in pain for four days before getting her help? How could they have ignored a fever that spiked at 102? How could they not know that handfuls of aspirin for days were the worst thing to give a kid suffering from stomach pains?

  Were they just ignorant, or was there some other reason they needed to keep their daughter out of the hospital? As John read he could almost feel the ice water in the lawyer’s veins as he let go with the kill shot.

  “Was it true,” he began dryly, reading from a document, “that at the time that your daughter took sick, there was a civil action against you, ordering you to pay Kingston Auto twelve hundred dollars for car repairs you hadn’t paid for? And that if you had taken your daughter to the emergency room, you risked having that order enforced if the police were brought in?”

  “She was my kid, goddammit!” Randy said forcefully. “I wouldn’t see her hurt for twelve hundred bucks!”

  “But,” the lawyer slinked, “if you and your wife could cure her yourself, with your aspirin, twelve hundred bucks could buy a lot of beer and cigarettes.”

  Randy’s lawyer objected.

  “No further questions,” Larry’s lawyer said as he took his seat.

  The jury deliberated for almost three full days but when they came back, they cleared Larry and the hospital of all charges. The picture on the front page of the Gazette showed that after the verdict was read, Randy and Holly Farragut held each other and cried.

  Larry Husted was in the background of the photo shaking his smiling lawyer’s hand. Larry’s back was to the camera, leaving John to imagine the emotions on his father’s face.

  Thirty-four

  “Hey, what do you remember about this?” John asked Rose casually, having brought a copy of the Gazette article with him for a lunch of chicken salad in the old house. It was the front-page verdict story, the headline declaring “Physician, Hospital Cleared in Malpractice Suit.” John was curious what his mother would remember from the event, now thirty-five years ago. He observed that distant memories, sometimes arcane ones, had a way of fixing themselves forever to the minds of Alzheimer’s patients. While essential data and elemental knowledge from a half hour ago failed to find a home no matter how many times it was repeated.

  John detected the unease as his mother was unexpectedly pulled backward in time. She stared at the photo on the front page, her husband visible but not quite there.

  “That was your father,” she said, her finger touching his image. The details of the case began filtering back to her. “He was in trouble. Somebody sued him.”

  “I know,” John said. “I read the story. It was that Farragut family.”

  The name triggered something complicated in Rose. She diverted her attention to the photo in the paper from Larry to the hugging, crying parents in the foreground.

  “The Farraguts!” she recalled with a kind of wonder. “Do you know, back when I did my volunteer work for the hospital, we were dealing with them all the time? Those parents, they were just awful. And the children…” She stopped herself.

  She studied the article as if to read it, but John could tell by the way her eyes fixed in middle distance that it was coming back to her through her own muddied recollection of events.

  “We knew that little girl,” she whispered.

  “Vicky.”

  “Vicky,” she said wistfully. “There were a
lot of them. And then, after the trial, it just got worse. The parents got worse. One of them was always in jail or would disappear, for weeks at a time. But the babies kept coming. We were always taking up collections for them: food, clothes, toys—whatever we could get our hands on.”

  A fact returned to her. It still hurt. “After what happened, after the trial, someone decided I shouldn’t go out to their house anymore to drop the things off. It was upsetting the parents,” she said, an uncommon tone of derision in her voice.

  “So I organized the drives, made the rounds of garage sales to get what we needed,” she said, shaking her head with sad bemusement. “I kept buying back all the things we had already given them. The parents were turning around and selling some of it off to pay for God knows what.”

  “That was really nice of you to keep helping,” John smiled. “Considering.”

  “Those children didn’t deserve to do without just because their parents were so terrible.”

  He returned to the newspaper article. “So, what happened?” he asked tonelessly, without revealing his suspicions. “The Farraguts said Dad was responsible for their daughter dying?”

  Despite the decades, a defense instinctively went up. It was a spouse’s undiminished insistence on the truth of the matter.

  “The jury found him innocent. You read the article,” she said sharply.

  “I know, but … If you really look at it…” John said, cutting himself off the moment the words left his mouth. The medical records, the court documents—Rose would have never seen what John had discovered, and they would have meant nothing to her if she had. Rose’s man was innocent, and that was that. Retrying the case now to get Rose to let go of her undiminished loyalty would be cruel.

  But maybe there was still something John could learn here, to shape this new perspective of his father he was discovering.

  “Do you think he might have felt responsible, in some way?” John asked delicately. “I mean, I know the jury said he didn’t do anything wrong. But…”