328
RICHARD STERN
your great brow streaming, your wet palm grabbed tight by the
fierce little nurse, Miss Romeyne. Afterwards, on the couch, another
blow, Dr. Grant sitting beside you, your long legs dripping feet over
the edge, hand to your swelling jaw. "How does a hundred dollars
sound, Miss Wilmott? Pretty fair? Including post-operant care,
anaesthesia, the works. I know you're a teacher."
The pain lasted twelve days, unabated by Miss Blade's late
revelation that she had been charged a hundred and twenty-five
dollars. For this omission, Miss Blade would not get to know about
Dr. Hobbie. Not that she'd appreciate him anyway. Miss Blade
favored all the weak sisters in the department, the students with the
loudest line of gab and the worst minds who took so long with their
dissertations that they completed them and their scholarly life
simultaneously.
Miss Wilmott learned of Dr. Hobbie through her once-a-week
cleaning woman, Mrs. Spiders, whom she passed in the lobby of the
bank as she was on her way to request the bank to honor Dr. Grant's
hundred dollars, although her balance was zero until the first of
June. Mrs. Spiders was on her way to Dr. Hobbie. "Yeah,
Miss
Wilma, mah Hobbie's a grand tooth man." Mrs. Spiders' syntax
obscured identification, but she spoke of him now and then through–
out the year, so that when Miss Wilmott's second tooth began
cracking her head open the night after Epiphany, the vision of the
great dental surgeon soothed it till morning, when she phoned him
up and got a noon appointment. Dr. Hobbie was seldom too busy
to squeeze in a sufferer. Half his business was "street business"
anyway, delivery boys feeling pain between the first and fifth floors,
taxi-drivers from the Yellow Cab Stand, sales people from the local
stores, even receptionists from other dentists' offices in the building.
A good sign. Not that Miss Wilmott needed confirmatory signs.
Except for that first day. An initial visit to Dr. Hobbie was
disconcerting, especially if your appointment came on Wednesdays.
Every Tuesday, he danced at the Tall Girl's Club till three a.m., and
Wednesday was one long yawn for him. An unrepressed yawn, for
Dr. Hobbie repressed no habit that any normal dentist would. No
dentist with a smart practice walked around with
his
smock so loosely
tied that a skinny, peppermint-colored back exposed itself to
his
patients' gaping faces. No normal dentist worked in a shelveless
