Murder! Murder! He’d slipped in operations since, but Ted Longstreet was the first man he ever heard cry. That night, even now ... they were all so young! She was a Tribly, Ted an interne, and he....
Not all the honors in the world would ever make him forget how they got the cadaver down the obscure winding stairway behind the Director’s office, the Nursing office, the pharmacy, into the elevator and down to the old cadaver vat.... Whew!
It was before they began ticketing stiffs and just after they changed from the hook system and the vat was a slimy mass of bodies, under which they were pushing, sliding, hiding....
Then that vile job of cleaning up the cupola. That blotch of blood Ted’s back had left and which wouldn’t come off and Ted’s saying:
“Sterling, every sunset the sky will reflect that I’ve broken my Oath and murdered....”
And the next day Longstreet had committed suicide.
He had never been back to that cupola! Nobody had been there. The only key remained upon his ring day and night. Since he was famous, he had tried to believe that the blotch was faded, but there came spells still where he’d lose the key in his dreams and hunt and hunt; when he couldn’t make himself enter the hospital by the main entrance; when he would be unable to look at the cupola.
It took ten years of dissecting medical students to finish Flossie; even then her legs were perfect enough to carry over to the new pathology building. They had a curve, even to the last ... an irresistible curve....
Why couldn’t he ever learn that he must not look backward? If he had looked backward then, he could never have married old Dr. Jemison’s daughter and been the proud father of Cub and honorary this and that.
The only people who had ever known were dead. Long dead....