MASH 14 MASH goes to Moscow (9 page)

“There is reason to believe that sending him to Moscow may not be such a good idea, sir,” the Admiral said.

“Of course it’s a good idea. I promised that Russian, the one with the blue hair, that I’d send him.”

“There are certain little details concerning the gentleman, sir,” the Secretary of State said, “of which I feel, in order to make a sound judgment, you should be fully apprised.” ‘

“There you go again, Cy-Boy. When I offered you that job, you promised that you would speak English like a normal American. Now say that again, and simple.”

“Mr. Korsky-Rimsakov has—what shall I say?—a rather difficult personality.”

“So does my brother. You learn to live with things like that.”

“Sir, may I suggest that we give you a quick rundown on the gentleman and the problems he may pose?” the Admiral said.

“Just make it quick,” Jim-Boy said. “I’ve got other things to do, too, you know.”

While Dr. Benjamin
Franklin Pierce, F.A.C.S., was well aware that his bride might be a little surprised to have him walk in the door of his home at half past two in the afternoon, he was not prepared for the reaction he got.

Mary Pierce, dabbing at her eyes with a soggy Kleenex, threw herself, sobbing, into his arms and announced, “Oh, Benjamin, how glad I am to see you!”

“Do I intuitively feel that something is amiss?” Dr. Pierce inquired.

“Martha-Jane does have gangrene after all,” Mary Pierce said.

“I’m really sorry to hear that,” Dr. Pierce replied. “Did the Pleasant Valley General Hospital Laboratory make another mistake?”

“You know about it, then?” Mary Pierce inquired, having regained enough control of herself to be able to blow her nose.

“Those things get around,” Dr. Pierce said. “Makes it a little tough on Martha-Jane, doesn’t it, with her in the family way, expecting triplets, her lover-and-soon-to-be-husband, Dr. Jerome Dashing, lost on the Upper Amazon, termites in her wooden leg, and now this diagnosis of gangrene of the bosom
…”

“Who said anything about termites in her wooden leg?” Mary Pierce snapped. “Benjamin, I would hate to think that you were mocking me. You know how I hate being mocked!”

“Perish the thought!” Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce said. “You know that I have come to think of Martha-Jane almost as a member of the family.”

“If you really felt that way, you wouldn’t make jokes about her having termites in her wooden leg,” Mary Pierce said.

“Life must go on, you know,” Hawkeye said, somewhat piously. As his father had told him years before, the one verity of life was that females were different from men.

“My advice to you, Hawkeye, when the time comes, and you enter what is sometimes jocularly known as the blissful state of matrimony, is that you expect your beloved to have at least two screws loose. If you can learn to live with those two loose screws, you may live through it.”

For the first formative years of their union, Hawkeye had watched Mary carefully so that he would be able to identify the two loose screws as they came undone and be prepared to cope with them. He had, as the result of calm and scientifically objective analysis, just about come to the conclusion that his Mary was going to be the exception that proved the rule. She had gone through the end-of-the-honeymoon trauma and first (and second and third) pregnancy and delivery without even a hint of a hint of a loose screw. She had even passed through the whirlpool of the Seven-Year Itch and Sending-the-Baby-Off-to-Kindergarten trauma demonstrating a mental stability and all-around level-headedness and practicality that at once astonished him and permitted a degree of self-congratulation on his choice of a mate with whom to skip hand in hand down life’s rocky path.

But then, eighteen months before, without warning, the first screw had come loose. Mary Pierce, together with some 41,890,078 of her gender, had innocently come in contact (Mary while waxing the kitchen floor) with the trials and tribulations of Martha-Jane
McSweeney
and immediately become what Dr. Pierce thought of as a hopeless addict, beyond any reasonable hope of cure or even remission.

Martha-Jane
McSweeney
was the central character in a daytime television drama (or soap opera) entitled “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II.” Martha-Jane’s social, physical, psychiatric, and moral dilemmas occupied Mary’s thoughts from two to two-thirty every weekday.

Dr. Pierce was well aware that if Mary knew what he really thought of Martha-Jane generally and “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II” specifically his previous happy marriage would come to an abrupt and painful end. For, the law of averages being what it is, of the other 41,890,078 other faithful female fans, at least two dozen could be found at any given time inside the Spruce Harbor Medical Center, where Dr. Pierce functioned as chief of surgery. Some “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II” addicts were patients and some were members of the staff. Indeed, Mr. T. Alfred
Crumley
, Spruce Harbor Medical Center’s somewhat less than beloved hospital administrator, was, in Dr. Pierce’s judgment, one of the worst of what he thought of as the “Little Agonies Freaks.”

Mr.
Crumley
had gone so far as to write offering his services, absolutely free of charge, to the Pleasant Valley General Hospital. He was “professionally equipped,” he wrote (c/o the Amalgamated Broadcasting System, New York City), to straighten out not only the Pleasant Valley General Hospital’s laboratory but their personnel office as well. The Pleasant Valley General Hospital did not reply, a happenstance Mr.
Crumley
ascribed to shame and remorse. Any hospital with a laboratory which had great difficulty differentiating between gangrene and measles (not to mention that between mononucleosis and a certain social disease involving spirochetes*) would not want to come right out and admit it.

(* This came up when Dr. Jerome Dashing, home from one of his frequent trips to the Upper Amazon, had a physical check-up at Pleasant Valley General and the lab reported he had an advanced case of social disease involving spirochetes. Before their error was discovered, and his illness properly diagnosed as mononucleosis, Martha-Jane had for the sixteenth time seriously considered suicide, and Dr. Dashing had had to go through the embarrassment of suggesting to Heloise
Horter
, the wife of his best friend, Dr. A.
Satchwell
Horter
, that as the result of her rather warm greeting of him on his return, he had to suggest that she seek medical attention, and seek it far from Pleasant Valley General, so that the nature of her distress would not become fodder for the Pleasant Valley gossips.)

A rather serious free-for-all brawl had taken place in the geriatric ward between two octogenarians, one of whom had violently objected to the other’s referring to Martha-Jane as a “one-legged hooker” and begun the affray by crashing into him with his wheelchair.

And there were other unfortunate incidents as well, involving practically everybody from Inez
Heidenheimer
, the Spruce Harbor Medical Center telephone operator, to the Honorable “
Moosenose
” Bartlett, mayor of Spruce Harbor, who violently insisted that a scheduled surgical procedure (involving the removal of a wart from his nose) be delayed until after “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II” had been telecast. “I simply couldn’t risk my life under the surgeon’s knife without knowing whether fatherly Reverend
Kenman
had really been making those obscene telephone calls to Martha-Jane or whether it was really the chief of police.”

Only three people at Spruce Harbor seemed immune to “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II.” Dr. Pierce was immune, and so were his professional associates and close friends, Dr. John Francis Xavier McIntyre, F.A.C.S., and Esther Flanagan, R.N., chief of nursing services. Among themselves they had worked out a rather simple solution to the problem: From 2:00 until 2:30
P.M.
weekdays no hospital procedure more complicated than changing bedpans was scheduled. Emergencies, of course, arose from time to time during the telecast. These were handled by hospital personnel on a roster basis, amid muttered references to the effect that while they had fully expected to make sacrifices in the course of their medical careers, they had really expected nothing like this.

Dr. Pierce was thus not especially disturbed to find his wife sobbing into a soggy Kleenex over “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II.” What really worried him in his heart of hearts was when he could expect the other screw to come loose and what would happen when it did. His father, who was a wise man and who had never lied to him, had spoken of loose female secrets in the plural.

As he comfortingly patted his wife’s shoulder, he could see the boob tube screen. The day’s episode was over. As the studio organist enthusiastically thumped out some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s more melancholy musical passages, the screen showed the “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II” trademark. The camera pulled in close on the Mona Lisa, mounted on a slowly moving pedestal standing in a sea of fog. It pulled closer and closer until only Mona’s face was visible. The viewer could then see a solitary tear run down Mona’s face. Mona then began to fade as the “credit drum” rolled.

Created by Wesley St. James.

A Wesley St. James Production.

Executive Producer, Wesley St. James.

Filmed Before a Live Audience at the Wesley St.

James Studios.

Hollywood, California.

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Any Infringements of Copyright will be Personally Prosecuted by Wesley St. James.

Finally the screen went momentarily dark.

Then, as the words appeared, one by one,* an announcer with a deep, if somewhat lisping, voice intoned, “Now stay tuned for ‘The Globe
Spinneth
,’ a Wesley St. James Production.”

(* It is an article of faith among the folks in the television industry that at least half of their audience is illiterate. Hence the practice of having announcers slowly read what words appear on the screen as they appear. This is known as taking positive action to meet the public need.)

“It’s over, dear,” Hawkeye said. “And I am here to console you in your hour of need.”

“So you are,” Mary Pierce said. Her tone of voice suddenly changed. She suddenly pushed free from her husband. “Knock that off,” she said. “What if one of the children should come home unexpectedly from school?”

“But you said you were glad to see me,” Hawkeye said.

“Not that glad,” she said. “You men are all alike. You-know-what is all you ever think about.”

“Aren’t you even going to ask what I’m doing home in the middle of the afternoon?”

“I don’t have to ask,” she said. “The answer is no.”

“Then why did you say you were glad to see me?”

“I wanted to see you before supper,” Mary said.

“I should, I suppose, be flattered, but I sense a curve ball in there somewhere,” Hawkeye said.

“I wanted specifically,” Mary said, “to catch you before the regularly scheduled afternoon conference of the chief of surgery and staff began. To make sure, in other words, that you came home from work smelling of nothing stronger than mint Life Savers.”

“What’s the occasion?” Hawkeye asked jocularly. “Are we having Brother ‘Born-Again Bob’ Roberts for supper?”

Brother “Born-Again Bob” Roberts was one of the more visible and audible clergypersons in the Spruce Harbor area. He and his wife, popularly known as “Sister Wilma” and even more popularly as “Weeping W
ilm
a ” had come to the Rock Bound Coast from somewhere in the Deep South with the announced intention of driving Satan’s favorite dark angel, John Barleycorn, out of Maine even as St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.

To accomplish this end, they acquired controlling interest in a radio station which had been going rapidly broke broadcasting what is known as classical music. Thirty minutes after he had handed over the check (Brother Bob paid cash, the revival business being one of the more lucrative professions south of the Mason-Dixon Line) and acquired title, the programming of The Cultured Voice of Spruce Harbor was interrupted in the middle of Felix
Mendelsshon-Bartholdy’s
Sonata No. 2 in D Major for Cello and Piano, Opus 58.