Life Expectancy

Rudy felt his heart sink at this, for it seemed that his dad’s brief clarity of mind had begun to give way to babble.

Asserting control of his patient again by once more gripping his chin, Dr. Pickett switched on the ophthalmoscope and directed the light in Josef’s right eye.

As though that narrow beam were a piercing needle and his life were a balloon, Josef Tock let out an explosive breath and slumped back upon his pillow, dead.

With all the techniques and instruments available to a well-equipped hospital, attempts at resuscitation were made, but to no avail. Josef had moved on and wasn’t coming back.

And I, James Henry Tock, arrived. The time on my grandfather’s death certificate matches that on my birth certificate—10:46 P.M.

Bereaved, Rudy understandably lingered at Josef’s bedside. He had not forgotten his wife, but grief immobilized him.

Five minutes later, he received word from a nurse that Maddy had experienced a crisis in her labor and that he must go at once to her side.

Alarmed by the prospect of losing his father and his wife in the same hour, Dad fled the intensive care unit.

As he tells it, the halls of our modest county hospital had become a white labyrinth, and at least twice he made wrong turns. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, he raced down the stairs from the third floor to the ground level before realizing that he’d passed the second floor, on which the maternity ward was located.

Dad arrived in the expectant-fathers’ waiting lounge to the crack of a pistol as Konrad Beezo shot his wife’s doctor.

For an instant, Dad thought Beezo had used a clown gun, some trick firearm that squirted red ink. The doctor dropped to the floor, however, not with comic flair but with hideous finality, and the smell of blood plumed thick, too real.

Beezo turned to Dad and raised the pistol.

In spite of the rumpled porkpie hat and the short-sleeved coat and the bright patch on the seat of his pants, in spite of the white greasepaint and the rouged cheeks, nothing about Konrad Beezo was clownish at that moment. His eyes were those of a jungle cat, and it was easy to imagine that the teeth bared in his snarl were tiger fangs. He loomed, the embodiment of murderous dementia, demonic.

Dad thought that he, too, would be shot, but Beezo said, “Stay out of my way, Rudy Tock. I have no quarrel with you. You’re not an aerialist.”

Beezo shouldered through the door between the lounge and the maternity ward, slammed it shut behind him.

Dad knelt beside the doctor—and discovered that a breath of life remained in him. The wounded man tried to speak, could not. Blood had pooled in his throat, and he gagged.

Gently elevating the physician’s head, shoving old magazines under it to brace the man at an angle that allowed him to breathe, Dad shouted for help as the swelling storm rocked the night with doomsday peals of thunder.

Dr. Ferris MacDonald had been Maddy’s physician. He had also been called upon to treat Natalie Beezo when, unexpectedly, she had been brought to the hospital in labor.

Mortally wounded, he seemed more bewildered than frightened. Able to clear his throat and breathe now, he told my father, “She died during delivery, but it wasn’t my fault.”

For a terrifying moment, my dad thought Maddy had died.

Dr. MacDonald realized this, for his last words were “Not Maddy. The clown’s wife. Maddy … is alive. I’m so sorry, Rudy.”

Ferris MacDonald died with my father’s hand upon his heart.

As the thunder rolled toward a far horizon, Dad heard another gunshot from beyond the door through which Konrad Beezo had vanished.

Maddy lay somewhere behind that door—a woman left helpless by a difficult labor. I was back there, too—an infant who was not yet enough of a lummox to defend himself.

My father, then a baker, had never been a man of action; nor did he become one when, a few years later, he graduated to the status of pastry chef. He is of average height and weight, not physically weak but not born for the boxing ring, either. He had to that point led a charmed life, without serious want, without any strife.

Nevertheless, fear for his wife and his child cast him into a strange, cold panic marked more by calculation than by hysteria. Without a weapon or a plan, but suddenly with the heart of a lion, he opened that door and went after Beezo.

Although his imagination spun a thousand bloody scenarios in mere seconds, he says that he did not anticipate what was about to happen, and of course he could not foresee how the events of that night would reverberate through the next thirty years with such terrible and astonishing consequences in his life and mine.

2 (#u65731e56-00ea-565c-9cfc-82642fc347a5)

At Snow County Hospital, in the expectant-fathers’ waiting room, the inner door opens to a short corridor with a supply room to the left and a bathroom to the right. Fluorescent ceiling panels, white walls, and a white ceramic-tile floor imply impeccable antibacterial procedures.

I have seen that space because my child entered the world in the same maternity ward on another unforgettable night of incomparable chaos.

On that stormy evening in 1974, with Richard Nixon gone home to California, and Beezo on a rampage, my father found a nurse sprawled in the hallway, shot point-blank.

He remembers almost being driven to his knees by pity, by despair.

The loss of Dr. MacDonald, although terrible, had not fully penetrated Dad, for it had been so sudden, so dreamlike. Mere moments later, the sight of this dead nurse—young, fair, like a fallen angel in white raiments, golden hair fanning in a halo around her eerily serene face—pierced him, and he absorbed the truth and the meaning of both deaths at once.

He tore open the storage-closet door, searching for something he might use as a weapon. He found only spare linens, bottles of antiseptic cleaner, a locked cabinet of medications …

Although in retrospect this moment struck him as darkly comic, at the time he thought, with grave seriousness and with the logic of desperation, that having kneaded so much dough over the past few years, his hands were dangerously strong. If only he could get past Beezo’s gun, he surely would have the strength to strangle him.

No makeshift weapon could hope to be as deadly as the well-flexed hands of an angry baker. Sheer terror spawned this lunatic notion; curiously, however, terror also gave him courage.

The short hallway intersected a longer one, which led left and right. Off this new corridor, three doors served a pair of delivery rooms as well as the neonatal care unit where swaddled newborns, each in his or her bassinet, pondered their new reality of light, shadow, hunger, discontent, and taxes.

Dad sought my mother and me, but found only her. She lay in one of the delivery rooms, alone and unconscious on the birthing bed.

At first he thought that she must be dead. Darkness swooned at the edges of his vision, but before he passed out, he saw that his beloved Maddy was breathing. He clutched the edge of her bed until his vision brightened.

Gray-faced, drenched with sweat, she looked not like the vibrant woman he knew, but instead appeared to be frail and vulnerable.

Blood on the sheets suggested that she’d delivered their child, but no squalling infant was present.

Elsewhere, Beezo shouted, “Where are you bastards?”

Reluctant to leave my mother, Dad nonetheless went in search of the conflict to see what help he could provide—as (he has always insisted) any baker would have done.

In the second delivery room, he found Natalie Beezo upon another birthing bed. The slender aerialist had so recently died from the complications of childbirth that her tears of suffering had not yet dried upon her cheeks.

According to Dad, even after her agony and even in death, she was ethereally beautiful. A flawless olive complexion. Raven hair. Her eyes were open, luminous green, like windows to a field in Heaven.

For Konrad Beezo, who didn’t appear to be handsome under the greasepaint and who was not a man of substantial property and whose personality would surely be at least somewhat off-putting even under ordinary circumstances, this woman was a prize beyond all reasonable expectation. You could understand—though not excuse—his violent reaction to the loss of her.

Stepping out of the delivery room, Dad came face to face with the homicidal clown. Simultaneously Beezo flung open the door from the crèche and charged into the hall, a blanketed infant cradled in the crook of his left arm.

At this close range, the pistol in his right hand appeared to be twice the size that it had been in the waiting room, as if they were in Alice’s Wonderland, where objects grew or shrank with no regard for reason or for the laws of physics.

Dad might have seized Beezo’s wrist and, with his strong baker’s hands, fought for possession of the gun, but he dared not act in any way that would have put the baby at risk.

With its pinched red face and furrowed brow, the infant appeared indignant, offended. Its mouth stretched open wide, as though it were trying to scream but had been shocked silent by the realization that its father was a mad clown.