They all saw it at the same time, looking down into the cavity the surgeon had cut into his body – the mass of brackish gray covering almost the entire side of one kidney and threading its way in thin, radiating lines across the other.
Without raising his head, the surgeon dropped the two pieces of matter he'd snipped away onto the slides that Jennie held under his hand.
She gave the slides to a nurse standing behind her without turning around.
"Pathology," she whispered.
The nurse left quickly and Jennie, with the same deft motion, picked up two hemostats. The assisting surgeon took them from her hand and tied off two veins as the surgeon's knife exposed them.
"Aren't you going to wait for the biopsy?" Dr. Colton asked from his position next to the surgeon. The surgeon didn't look up. His fingers were busy probing at the mass. "Not unless you want me to, Doctor." He held out his hand and Jennie placed a fine curette in it.
He was working quickly now, preparing to remove the infected kidney.
Colton hesitated.
"Charles Standhurst isn't just an ordinary man."
Everyone around the operating table knew that.
At one time or another, the old man quietly lying there, could have been almost anything he'd wanted.
Governor, senator, anything.
With more than twenty major newspapers stretched across the nation and a fortune founded from oil and gold, he'd never really wanted anything more than to be himself. He was second only to Hearst in the state's pride for its home-grown tycoons.
The surgeon, a comparatively young man who'd rapidly become one of the foremost GU men in the world and had been flown out from New York especially for this job, began to lift out the kidney.
The nurse behind Jennie tapped her on the shoulder.
Jennie took the slip of paper from her and held it out for him to see.
She could see the typed words plainly.
Carcinoma.
Metastasis.
Malignant.
The surgeon sighed softly, and glanced up at Dr. Colton.
"Well, he's an ordinary enough man now."
Mr. Standhurst was awake the next morning when the surgeon came into his hospital room.
If he paid any attention to the teletype clicking away in the corner, it wasn't apparent.
He walked over to the side of the bed and looked down.
"I came in to say good-by, Mr. Standhurst.
I'm leaving for New York this morning."
The old man looked up and grinned.
"Hey, Doc," he said.
"Anybody ever tell you that your old man was a tailor?"
"My father was a tailor, Mr. Standhurst."
"I know," Standhurst said quickly. "He still has the store on Stanton Street.
I know many things about you.
You were president of the Save Sacco-Vanzetti Society at City College when you graduated in twenty-seven, a registered member of the Young Socialists during your first year at P. and S., and the first surgeon ever to become an F.A.C.S. in his first year of practice.
You're still a registered Socialist in New York and you'll probably vote for Norman Thomas for President."
The surgeon smiled.
"You know a great deal about me."
"Of course I do.
You don't think I'd let just anybody cut me up, do you?"
"I should think you'd have worried just a little knowing what you do about me," the doctor said.
"You know what we Socialists think of you."
The old man started to laugh, then grimaced in pain.
"Hell!
The way I figure it, you're a doctor first and a Socialist second." He looked up shrewdly. "You know, Doc, if you voted the straight Republican ticket, I could make you a millionaire in less than three years."
The doctor laughed and shook his head.
"No, thanks.
I’d worry too much."
"How come you don't ask me how I feel, Doc?
Colton's been in here four times already and each time he asked me."
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.