Elinor Lipman
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift

A NOVEL

Dedication

For Mameve Medwed,

dear and exemplary friend

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1: Tell the Truth

2: Later Classified as Our First Date

3: Leo Frawley, RN

4: We Entertain

5: A.k.a. the Transportation

6: Alice Makes Up Her Own Mind

7: Reveille

8: Leo’s House

9: Née Mary Ciccarelli

10: I (Nearly) Kill Someone

11: Now What Do I Do?

12: Clarification

13: Ms. Bravado

14: I’m a Normal Person

15: Advanced Social Outreach

16: Slow-Normal

17: Venues Not Available to Me

18: The Life of the Party

19: The Annals of Surgery

20: Saturday Night

21: Social Work

22: I Move On

23: Here Comes the Bride

24: Hiatus

25: Do It for Dr. Thrift

26: Plan A

27: The Opposing Argument

28: The Wife-Bride

29: We’re Engaged

30: A Free Woman

31: Alice Thrift, A.D.

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Acknowledgments

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Copyright

About the Publisher

1 Tell the Truth

YOU MAY HAVE seen us in “Vows” in The New York Times: me, alone, smoking a cigarette and contemplating my crossed ankles, and a larger blurry shot of us, postceremony, ducking and squinting through a hail of birdseed. We didn’t have pretty faces or interesting demographics, but we had met and married in a manner that was right for SundayStyles: Ray Russo came to my department for a consultation. I said what I always said to a man seeking rhinoplasty: Your nose is noble, even majestic. It has character. It gives you character. Have you thought this through?

The Times had its facts right: We met as doctor and patient. I digitally enhanced him, capped his rugged, haunted face with a perfect nose and symmetrical, movie-star nostrils—and he didn’t like what he saw on the screen. “Why did I come?” he wondered aloud, in a manner that suggested depth. “Did I expect this would make me handsome?”

“It’s the way we’ve been socialized,” I said.

“It’s not like I have a deviated septum or anything. It’s not like my insurance is going to pick up the tab.”

Vanitas vanitatum: elective surgery, in other words.

He asked for my professional opinion. I said, “There’s no turning back once we do this, so take some time and think it over. There’s no rush. I don’t like to play God. I’m only an intern doing a rotation here.”

“But you must see a lot of noses in life, on the street, and you must have an artistic opinion,” said Ray.

“If it were I, I wouldn’t,” I said for reasons that had nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with the nauseating sound of bones cracking under mallets in the OR.

“Really? You think the one I have is okay?”

“May I ask why you want to do this now, Mr. Russo?” I asked, glancing at the chart that told me he’d turn forty in a month.

“Let’s be honest: Women like handsome men,” he said, voice wistful, eyes downcast.

What could I say except a polite “And you don’t think you’re handsome enough? Do you think women judge you by the dimensions of your nose?”

Next to me he smiled. The camera mounted above the monitor played it back. He had good teeth.

“I haven’t been very lucky in love,” he added. “I’m forty-five and I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Is your date of birth wrong?” I asked, pointing to the clipboard.

“Oh, that,” he said. “I knock five years off when I’m filling out a job application because of age discrimination, even at forty-five. Bad habit. I forgot you should always tell the truth on medical forms.”

“And what is your field?”

“I’m in business, self-employed.”

I asked what field.

“Concessions. Which puts me before the public. Wouldn’t you think that if everything was okay in the looks department, I’d have met someone by now?”

I hated this part—the psychiatry, the talking. So instead of asserting what is hard to practice and even harder to preach in my chosen field—that beauty’s only skin deep and vastly overrated—I pecked at some keys and moved the mouse. We were back to Ray’s original face, bones jutting, cartilage flaring, nose upstaging, a face that my less scrupulous attending physicians would have loved to pin to their drawing boards. If it sounds as if I saw something there, some goodness, some quality of mercy or masculinity that overrode the physical, I didn’t. I was flattering him to serve my own principles, my own anti – plastic surgery animus. Ray Russo thought my silence meant I wouldn’t change a hair.

“Vows” would reconstruct our consultation, with Ray remembering, “I heard something in her voice. Not that there was a single unprofessional moment between us, but I had an inkling she may have been saying ‘No, don’t fix it’ in order to terminate our doctor-patient relationship and embark on a personal one.”

Reading between the lines, and knowing the outcome, you’d think something was ignited in that consultation, a spark between us, but I wasn’t one of those attractive doctors with a stethoscope draped around her shoulders and a red silk blouse under her lab coat. I was an unhappy intern, plain and no-nonsense at best, and hoping to perform only noble procedures once I’d finished my residency, my fellowship, my board certification—to reconstruct the soft tissue of poor people, to correct their birth defects, their cleft lips and palates, their cranial deformities, their burns, their mastectomies, to stitch up their torn flesh in emergency rooms so that no scar would force them to relive their horrible accidents. I’d hand off to my less idealistic and more affluent associates the nose jobs, the liposuctions, the face-lifts, the eye and tummy tucks, the breast augmentations, and all cosmetic procedures that make the marginally attractive beautiful.

Ray Russo should have consulted someone who would graduate from the program and set up a suite of sleek offices in a big city. I wished him well and sent him home with the four-color brochure that covers the gruesome steps of rhinoplasty.

Why did I take his phone call six months later? Because I didn’t remember him. He dropped the name of my chairman, which made me think he was a friend of that august family—as if he’d sensed I was worried about my standing in the department and my ambivalence toward my then chosen field. Of course, I am summarizing for narrative convenience. Why go into detail about our history, our motivation, our sweet moments, if I’m going to break your heart soon enough? I could add that I have a mother who worries about me, a mother whose motto is “Go for a cup of coffee. It doesn’t mean you have to marry him,” but I’m not blaming her. This is about the weak link in my own character—wishful thinking—and a husband of short duration with a history of bad deeds.

If I sound bitter, I apologize. “Vows” should revisit their brides and grooms a year later, or five or ten. I’d enjoy that on a Sunday morning—scanning the wedding announcements stenciled with updates: NOT SPEAKING. DIVORCED. SEPARATED. ANNULLED. CHEATING ON HIM WITH THE POOL-MAINTENANCE GUY. GAVE BIRTH 5 MONTHS LATER. IN COUNSELING. CAME OUT OF THE CLOSET—any number of interesting developments that reveal the truth about brides and grooms. Ray’s and mine could have multiple stamps, like an expired passport. It could say DIDN’T LAST THE HONEYMOON OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. Or, across his conniving forehead, above that hideous nose, succinctly and aptly, LIAR.

2 Later Classified as Our First Date

RAYMOND RUSSO’S SELF-IMPROVEMENT campaign began with a stroke of Las Vegas luck: He won a free teeth-bleaching, upper and lower arches, in a dentist’s lottery. It explained his too-easy grin and his drinking coffee through a straw during what would later be classified as our first date. We were side by side, on stools at the Friendly’s in the lobby of my hospital. Conversation was stalled on my medical degree, which evoked something close to reverence, expressed in boyish, gee-whiz fashion, as if he’d never encountered such a miraculous career trajectory. Was it not flattering? Was I not psychologically pummeled every day? Insulted by evaluations that described my performance as workmanlike and my people skills as hypothermic? Was I not ready for someone, anyone, to utter words of admiration?

“I can’t be the only woman doctor you’ve ever met,” I said. “You must have gone to college with women who went on to medical school.”

“Believe it or not, I didn’t.”

“There are thousands of us,” I said. “Maybe millions. A third of my medical school class were women.”

“Well, keep it coming,” he said. “I know I was happy when you walked into the examining room. It helped me more than some guy saying, ‘Your nose is fine the way it is.’ I might have thought he wanted to keep me homely—you know—to reduce the competition.”

I hoped he was joking, but humor comprehension was never my strong suit. I asked, “Did I take measurements that day, or a history?”

Still smiling, he said, “You don’t remember me at all, do you?”

I said, “It’s coming back to me. Definitely.” Studying his nose in profile, I added, “I’m not a plastic surgeon. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Just the opposite! Thanks to you, I’m going to live with this nose of mine and see how it goes. I know a couple of guys who had nose jobs—I’m not saying they were done upstairs—but I think they look pretty fake.”

I stated for the record—should anyone more senior be listening—“We have some true artists in the department. You could come up and look at the before-and-after photos. They’re quite reassuring.”

He waved away the whole notion. “I could die on the table, and then what? My obituary would say ‘Died suddenly after no illness whatsoever’? ‘In pursuit of a more handsome face’? How would my old man feel? It’s his nose I inherited.”

“General anesthesia always carries a risk,” I said, “and of course there’s always swelling and ecchymoses, but I doubt whether the hospital has ever lost a rhinoplasty patient.”

He smiled again. He tapped the back of my hand and said, “You’re a serious one, aren’t you?”

I confirmed that I was and always would be: a serious infant, a serious child, a serious teenager, a serious student, a serious adult.

“Not the worst quality in a human being,” Ray allowed.

I said, “It would help me in all the arenas of my life if I were a touch more gregarious.”

“Highly overrated,” said Ray Russo. “Any doofus, any deejay or salesman, or waitress, can be gregarious, but they can’t do what you do.”

It sounded almost logical. He asked if a cup of coffee was enough for dinner. Didn’t I want to move to a booth and have a burger? Or to a place where we could share a carafe of wine?

I didn’t.

“My car’s in the hospital garage,” he continued. “I slipped into a reserved space, figuring most does must’ve left for the day.” He took from his pocket a fat wad of bills, secured with a silver clip in the shape of a dollar sign. After much shuffling, he said he had nothing smaller than a fifty.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

The $2.10 tab must have been viewed as a silent acceptance to dinner, because soon he was helping me on with my parka and leading me up a half-flight of stairs and through the door marked GARAGE. Parked under RESERVED FOR DR. HAMID, Ray’s car was red and low-slung. Its steering wheel was wrapped in black leather.

“Seat belt secure?” he asked. “Enough leg room?” He patted the dash and said, “Just got my snow tires on today and my oil changed.”

I said, “I never learned to drive.”

He laughed as if I’d said something amusing, and turned to the parking attendant, who announced, “Three-fifty.”

The attendant studied the fifty, handed it back, agitated it when Ray didn’t take it. “C’mon,” he snapped. “This isn’t Atlantic City.”

Ray said, “Can I pay you tomorrow? She’s a surgeon here. I pick her up every night.”

Snarling, the man waved us through.

When we’d pulled away, I said, “I don’t like lying. I could have paid.”

“He doesn’t care,” said Ray. “He gets paid by the hour regardless of how much is in the till when he cashes out.”

After a few blocks in silence, he asked, “Do you have a roommate?”

“Why?”

He grinned. “I’m making conversation. A guy has to start somewhere. I could’ve asked about brothers and sisters. Teams you follow. Astrological sign.”

“Do you have a roommate?” I asked.

“Me? I’m forty-five. A guy with a roommate at forty-five probably wouldn’t be out on a date in the first place.”

So I’d been right: date. His intentions were personal. I asked what made him call me up after all this time.

“It’s what people do, Doc,” he said. “Guys take a chance, because all of us have pals who met someone on a bus or a bar stool and asked for her phone number. So you think, Have a little courage. What’s the worst she could do?”

“But why now? Why wait until I can’t even remember who you are?”

“There were complications,” he said.

I might have asked what they were, if only I had been curious, interested, or less exhausted.

By this time we were in front of the restaurant. Ray waved away the valet and said he’d take care of it himself—this was a parking lot for the patrons’ use, wasn’t it? Had he misunderstood the sign?

He didn’t like the first table the hostess offered, so we waited until something with the right feeling opened up, the proper footage from the kitchen and the restrooms. It was an Italian fish and chop house with a Tiffany-shaded salad bar and beer served in frosted mugs. Without consulting me, he ordered the appetizer combo plate and a carafe of the house wine. He turned to me. Red or white?

I started to say that the sulfites in red wine gave me—

“Good,” he said. He smiled the way you’d smile for an orthodontist’s Polaroid, clinically, a gum-baring grimace. “Just had a bleach job,” he said. “I’m supposed to avoid red wine, coffee, and tea.”

The waitress pointed to the wine list, under the leather-bound menus, with the end of her pencil.

“I’ll let her pick,” he told the waitress. “She must have good taste. She’s a doctor.”

“What kind?” asked the waitress.

I said the Australian Chardonnay would be fine for me. One glass.

“I meant what kind of doctor.”

“Surgeon,” I said. “Still in training.”

“Not your garden-variety surgeon,” said Ray. “A plastic one.”

The waitress did something then, squeezed her elbows to her waist so that her chest protruded a few degrees more than it had at rest. “I had plastic surgery,” she said, “but I didn’t go crazy. Would you have known if I didn’t tell you?”

I said no.

Ray said, “Isn’t it nice that you can speak about it so openly.”

“She’s a doctor,” said the waitress. “I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”

“I didn’t know you before, but they look great,” said Ray. “Did you feel that having larger breasts would improve your quality of life?”

“Yeah, I did,” said the waitress.

“And have they?” asked Ray.

“I like ’em,” said the woman. “I guess that’s what counts.”

Ray told the waitress that I had talked him out of a nose job and he’d done a complete one-eighty: He went in wanting one and came out a new man.

“Because she likes it the way it is?” asked the waitress. “Because when she looks at you she doesn’t see the shape of your nose but the content of your character?”

“Nope,” said Ray. “None of the above.”

“I don’t know him at all,” I said.

“It was an office visit,” said Ray. “I came for a consultation. And now I’m buying her dinner because she saved me ten thousand bucks.”

The waitress looked thoughtfully at her pad and said, “I’ll be right back with your drinks and your appetizer.”

I told him, “Everybody has a procedure on their wish list or a scar they want to show me.”

He asked if plastic surgery was more lucrative than the regular kind.

“It can be. Not if you volunteer your time and pay your own expenses to operate on the poor and the disfigured.”

“You do that?”

“I hope to.”

“I’ve seen those doctors who fly planes into jungles. The parents of these deformed kids walk, like, hundreds of miles to bring their Siamese twins to some American doc to separate, right?”

“Hardly that,” I said. “That’s major, major surgery, with teams of—”

“Maybe I’m mixing up my 60 Minutes segments,” he said. “But you know what I mean—the freaks of nature.” Our waitress returned with the wine and said she’d be back with the appetizer combo platter. Ray raised his glass. “Here’s to you, Doc, and to your future good deeds.”

I said, “I don’t understand why you wanted to have coffee with me, let alone a full-course dinner.”

“You don’t? You can’t think of any reason a guy would want to see you outside the hospital?”

I said, “If this is leading up to a compliment, I’d prefer you didn’t. I wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

He reached over and turned a page of the menu so “Pesce” was before me. “Doctors—they watch what they eat and they know about good cholesterol. What about a piece of salmon?”

I said fine, that would be fine.

“And here we go,” said Ray as the waitress made room on the table for our oval platter of deep-fried, lumpen morsels. “I’ll have the usual,” he said, “and the lady will have the salmon.”

“Cooked through,” I said.

Ray winked at me and said, “If she looks at it under the microscope, she doesn’t want to see anything moving.”

“Remind me what your usual is …”

“Vingole,” he said. “Red.”

The waitress asked if she could at some point talk to me in the ladies’ room. It would only take a sec.

“Ask her here,” said Ray.

“Can’t,” said the waitress. “She’s gotta see it.”

I said no, I couldn’t. I was in training. I wasn’t qualified. I’d only rotated through plastic surgery. No, sorry—shaking my head vigorously.

“Are you okay?” Ray asked her. “I mean, is there, like, an infection?”

I was immediately ashamed of my lack of even basic medical curiosity. Here a civilian was saying the right thing, exhibiting a bedside manner that years of schooling had not fine-tuned to any degree of working order in me. So I said, “Is something wrong, or did you just want to show me the results?”

She turned away from Ray and whispered, “One of the nipples. It looks different than before, a little off-kilter.”

“Did you call your doctor?” I asked.

“I’m seeing him in a week. So I’ll wait. It’s probably nothing.”

Ray broke off a piece of bread and dipped it into a saucer of olive oil. “How long could it take, Doc?” he asked.

THE NIPPLE WAS fine—merely stressed by an ill-fitting brassiere—but it gave Ray an early advantage, establishing him as a more compassionate listener than I. He was now drinking a glass of something that looked like a whiskey sour. Mathematically half of the appetizers were awaiting my return. “How is she?” he asked.

“Fine. But I’d like to explain why I resisted. It’s not like the old days. The hospital’s malpractice insurance doesn’t cover diagnoses based on quick glances in the ladies’ room.”

He smiled and said, “She could sign a release that said, ‘My patron at table eleven, Dr. Thrift, is held harmless as a result of dispensing medical advice to me in the ladies’ room of II Sambuco.’”

I said, “If I seemed a little cold-hearted—”

“Nah. You’d be doing this every time you left your house.”

I might have expanded then on my life: That when I left the house, it wasn’t with an escort at my elbow, introducing me left and right as Dr. Thrift, surgeon. I didn’t socialize. I worked long hours and went home comatose. The hospital was teeming with people who wanted to talk, idly or professionally—it didn’t matter. My day was filled with hard questions, half-answers, nervous patients, demanding relatives, didactic doctors. Why would I want to make conversation at night?

“Speaking of your house,” he said, “you never answered my question about roommates.”

“I have one,” I said.

“Another doctor?”

“A nurse, actually.”

“Are you friends?”

“We share the rent,” I said. “But that’s the extent of it. Occasionally we’ll eat dinner or breakfast together, but rarely.”

“How’d you pair up if you’re not friends?”

“An index card on a bulletin board. I think it said, ‘Five-minute walk to hospital. Safe neighborhood. No smokers.’”

“How many bedrooms?”

“Two. Small.”

He launched into a discussion of the rental market—about places I could probably afford that had health clubs, swimming pools, Jacuzzis, off-street parking, central vacs, air-conditioning, refrigerators that manufactured ice …

I tried to stifle a yawn. “I’m usually in bed by this hour.”

“Is she a good roommate?” he asked. “Considerate and all that?”

“It’s a guy,” I said. “Leo.”

“Gay?” he asked.

I said, “Not that I pay attention, or not that he’s flagrant in his dating habits, but when he does entertain guests, they’re women.”

This was what I deserved for agreeing to dine with a garrulous expatient. I asked if this was normal social intercourse for him—drilling virtual strangers about their home life and housemates.

“I’m getting to know you,” he said. “You’re welcome to ask me questions, too.”

So I asked, “Do you live in an apartment?”

“A house.” He bit his lip. “Alone. At least now.”

“Now?” I repeated.

He drained his whiskey sour and blotted his mouth with his big maroon napkin. “I was married,” he said. “And then I was widowed.”

The waitress was back with our entrées just in time to hear his declaration. After leaving the plates, she stayed, as if waiting for the next cold blast from my arsenal of bad manners.

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Ray. “How long ago?”

“A year and a day,” he said.

I said to the waitress, “I think we’re all set for now.”

“More bread when you have a chance,” said Ray.

I asked how his wife had died.

“Not from natural causes.”

“Automobile?”

“Yes,” he said. He raised his wineglass. “If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon not go into the details. It’s too upsetting.”

“Of course,” I said.

He scooped a littleneck from its shell and chewed it with something like rapture.

I dug in, too. My salmon was dry, but I’d brought that on myself.

“Good?” asked Ray. “Because I was hoping you’d really like this place.”

“Excellent,” I said.

And this is exactly how a woman agrees to see a man a second time after finding him neither interesting, intelligent, nor compelling: He announces that he is a recent widower, vulnerable, like a man without an epidermis. That you are his first plunge into the treacherous waters of the Sea of Dates. Thus, when he finds the courage to ask if you’d like to do this again sometime—try another place, maybe Chinese or Ethiopian, maybe take in a movie—you say yes or you say no, and you understand that the look on your face and the speed of your answer will harm him, help him, or possibly save his life.

3 Leo Frawley, RN

IF YOU HAD seen my apartment, you would have guessed I was a clerk in a convenience store or a stitcher in a third-world sweatshop. I’m not bragging. I grew up in a three-story house with china and silver, a cleaning lady who came in every Thursday, and parents who sent me to college without financial aid. But four years later, I was sleeping in a bedroom that made me nostalgic for the claustrophobic shoe boxes I occupied in college. When I looked around my room and wondered why I said yes to the first place advertised on the housing board, I reminded myself of the extra twenty-five minutes of sleep I gained because of my proximity to the hospital, that I didn’t need a coat to run the three blocks to work if it was above 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and that Leo Frawley was an exemplary roommate.

Leo would have said the same about me: I barely used any utilities. I didn’t watch television, play CDs, or touch the thermostat; my presence, especially in the refrigerator, the medicine cabinet, and the kitchen cupboards, was negligible. I was never around or underfoot; when present, I slept deeply.

Signing a lease was an act of faith on my part. I knew nothing about Leo except for the superficial impressions I gleaned in our one cafeteria meeting. He was pleasant, well-spoken, and apparently popular. Coworkers greeted him, juggling trays across a single arm to hail him from all corners of the room.

“You have a lot of friends,” I observed.

“You will too when you’ve been here as long as I have.”

I said I would be quiet, considerate, and neat. I wasn’t the liveliest wire he’d find in the city of Boston—quite the contrary, in fact—but I’d never disturb his sleep or monopolize the phone or be late with my rent.

“This could work,” he said.

I asked if he could give me references, and he wrote a half dozen names and phone numbers on a napkin. The only local area code belonged to his mother, who he later told me had been prepped not to sound tightlipped and disapproving if women called about the ad. Mrs. Frawley reported that Leo was the cleanest of her whole brood, and that was saying something because among her thirteen offspring she had one priest, one nun, one actuary, one pharmacist, two librarians, and a lab technician for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And while she didn’t know why a girl would want to share an apartment and a toilet with a man, Leo would be the one of all her boys whom she’d recommend for the job. I thanked her and said she should be very proud of him. We were colleagues at the same hospital and he was clearly held in everyone’s high esteem.

“He’s named for a pope,” she told me.

Not wanting to discuss anything too personal or too statutory with Mrs. Frawley, I asked Leo himself whether he walked around the apartment in states of undress or thought it was important to knock before entering a roommate’s quarters.

“I might duck from the bathroom to my room with a towel wrapped around my middle. Is that what you meant?”

I said that was acceptable, certainly. I had lived in a co-ed dorm for one semester in college until I could be relocated.

“A guy who grew up with eight sisters knows how to knock,” he said. “He also knows that a bathroom isn’t available the minute he wants it.”

I should have dropped it then, but I pressed on. Had any women—specifically former roommates or coworkers—ever complained, formally or informally, about his personal conduct?

Leo said, “Have I done or said anything so far that suggests that?”

I liked the way he answered, with dignity, and I liked the slight offense he’d taken. And in many ways, my initial rudeness has made me a better roommate. I knew as soon as I’d seen the look on his face that I had needlessly challenged a man who, after all, could bathe neonates and give breast-feeding lessons to their postpartum mothers.

Once I had moved in, I asked Leo why he needed to advertise on the community bulletin board, given the hordes of admiring fellow nurses and his geographically desirable apartment.

“I didn’t want to live with another nurse,” he said.

I asked why.

“You know,” he said.

I said I didn’t. I wasn’t great at human-relations nuances. Was it because there would be too much shoptalk? Too much bringing the work home?

“Not so much the work,” he said. “More like the extracurricular stuff. There’s quite the grapevine. Let’s say I had a visitor. And let’s say someone from the NICU observed that guest coming out of my bedroom in the morning. Word would get around.”

I thanked him for what I thought was a tribute to my discretion. I said, “Not only am I uninterested in your social life, but I wouldn’t recognize a grapevine if I were harvesting grapes from it.”

“Excellent,” said Leo.

We followed the ground rules seamlessly: rent and utilities split down the middle; food separate, with both of us having the right to throw away leftovers growing mold spores. A chore wheel was posted on the refrigerator and rotated weekly. Suggested courtesy guidelines: seven minutes for showers; baths up to twenty minutes; no music after ten P.M. No dirty dishes left in the sink. Kitchen trash should be emptied and not allowed to overflow or smell. And after six months, he’d let me know if he thought our arrangement was amenable.

WHEN WE INTERSECTED at the hospital, Leo introduced me cheerfully. It was especially nice if he was with a smart little girl patient—just the three of us on an elevator—and then he’d say, “I’d like you to meet my friend Alice. She’s a doctor. In fact, she’s a surgeon. Isn’t that a great thing to be?”

If only I could have smiled like a good role model and said something inspiring. If only I could have looked approachable enough to prompt one dad in my department to ask me to join him and his sixth-grader for lunch on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

And did I mention that every female nurse in the hospital knew Leo? He was a friend to all—registered, practical, aide, candy striper—regardless of what floor or service or shift they worked on. If I were dispensing advice to men on how to meet women, how to be popular without having to be a matinee idol or ever leaving your workplace, I’d advise them to follow in Leo’s footsteps: Get a job in a teaching hospital. Allude often to your training in the medical corps of the U.S. Army. Wear scrubs. Smile often and easily. Attach a miniature stuffed koala bear to your stethoscope.

I myself was short of friends when I moved here for my residency. Apparently, if I believed my own reputation, I was not “fun.” Sometimes on Monday mornings in medical school I’d hear references to weekend parties, kegs, harbor cruises, but I didn’t experience them firsthand. When I decided to go into surgery, my lab partners—so-called people persons and future family practitioners—said, “How perfect.”

I graduated second in my class, which I thought was a good prognostic of how I’d perform as a resident, but apparently it was not. I had some trouble bridging the gap between the patient’s surgical site—that disembodied, exposed rectangle of skin awaiting a scalpel—and the patient’s mind, soul, and figurative heart. I thought it was helpful to disassociate the two, to forget I was cutting into a live human being; to pretend it was dead, formaldehyded Violet or Buster, my two cadavers from Gross Anatomy.

How had I gotten so appallingly ineffective with actual people? I thought I had a nice way about me—I was particularly adept at delivering good-news bulletins to relatives in the waiting room, but even that drew criticism. Once in a while, a next of kin complained that the frown on my face as I walked into the lounge scared him or her to death. But wasn’t it mere concentration? It was never enough—my excellent knowledge of anatomy, my openings and my closings, my long hours. What people want, I swear, is a doctor with the disposition of a Montessori teacher.

None of it is easy. Male patients are not thrilled to see you, especially in urology and vascular. Athletes want their bad knees, shoulders, ankles, and elbows fixed by doctors who look like them—Nordic, buff, handsome, confident, certainly not female. Everyone experienced in trauma works around and over you in the ER—faster, surer, nimbler, louder. I began to think that high marks in medical school were an indicator of nothing, and that a few parties along the way might have honed my socialization skills more than long nights at Countway Library.

I was the medical equivalent of the kid picked last for the kickball team: Honor roll doesn’t matter; sex, race, or national origin doesn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was if you could kick a ball over the head of the second baseperson and get someone else home.

AT THE SIX – MONTH juncture, during one of our rare synchronized breakfasts, it was I who asked Leo if he’d like to find a more compatible roommate.

“In what sense?”

“More fun. More charismatic.”

“Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

I said, “I think you’re too polite to tell me that it’s not working out. Everything is fine on the surface, but maybe you could find someone more suitable. You know—maybe we’re like those married couples who never raise their voices, but all the same aren’t happy.”

“I’m happy,” said Leo. “I think this is working out fine.” Then he asked if it was me—was I the discontented one looking for an out?

“Just the opposite,” I said. And then I tried to define my position, that I was proud to be his roommate because of the high esteem if not popularity he enjoyed at the hospital; proud to have my name on his answering machine’s outgoing message.

Instead of looking pleased he said, “But you have to be content inside your own skin.”

I said that wasn’t possible at this juncture. Work was all-consuming, especially while I was so bad at it.

“You’ll get better. Interns, by definition, are here to learn.”

“I may have made a terrible mistake,” I told him.

His expression grew alarmed: One of his neonates? One of his preemies? “When?” he asked.

“I don’t mean a specific terrible mistake. I meant, it was a mistake to think that good grades were transferable to the actual practice of medicine. I don’t have the aptitude in any of the areas they evaluate us in.”

Leo thought for a minute, then said, “You work hard. You haven’t ever taken a sick day, as far as I know. And you haven’t had any major goof-ups, correct?”

“No one would leave me alone long enough in the OR to take out the wrong organ or amputate the wrong limb,” I said.

“Do you want me to talk to someone?” he asked.

“Like who?”

“I know people,” he said. “I could feel them out for how you’re doing and where you stand. Maybe you’re worried about nothing.”

I said I knew how I was doing, and besides, I needed the truth more than I needed the anesthetic tact they would administer out of friendship to him.

Leo said he hadn’t always been this comfortable on the ward. I should have seen him on his first medevac flight. Boy, was that a scary couple of hours. And not much hand-holding for trainees.

I said I recognized that in a million years, or even if I spent a million dollars on therapy, I’d never have his personality, his good humor, his unflappability, or that way he could walk into a patient’s room and say just the right breezy thing to make his or her pain or nausea or approaching syringe recede.

“You notice all that?” he asked.

“I hear about it. It’s common knowledge. I think some of the pediatric residents steal your lines. And your patients, let’s face it, worship you. Babies, toddlers, girls, boys. Not to mention their mothers.”

Have I mentioned that Leo is handsome? Perhaps not when you break it down, feature by feature, and factor in some patches of facial seborrhea. But altogether it’s a successful package, with its curly blond hair, well-defined mouth, and pale blue eyes that look like they’ve just finished having a good laugh. He was probably a gawky teenager, and I do see vestiges of acne scars on his red face, but overall he bears that winning combination of an elfin face on a tall, broad-shouldered man.

He said then that his late father thought he was wasting those very talents I was referring to, the gift of gab, the ability to walk into a room and—pardon the bragging—win friends and influence people. “So you know what that means, right? To a Boston-Irish father?”

I shook my head.

“State senator or state rep with an eye to an eventual run for the governor’s office.”

“Is that what you’d like?”

“Absolutely not,” said Leo. “He didn’t like telling people that his son was a nurse. He used to say ‘orderly’ because he thought it sounded manlier, but I put a stop to that. He changed it to, ‘Leo trained in the army medical corps and works at a Harvard hospital. No, not married, but he dates a different nurse every night.’”

I said, “It’s not so much your gift of gab. It’s bigger than that. It’s a quality of mercy combined with your ability to make a joke.”

Leo smiled and said that was a nice compliment. Very nice. Thanks. Quality of mercy—wow.

“Maybe some of it will rub off on me,” I added.

He said—another tribute to his diplomacy—“You have other strengths, Alice.”

“Name one.”

“Brains, for starters. I mean, let’s say there was an entire hospital staffed by smiling volunteers, happy LPNs, and class clowns like me. It would certainly lose its state certification in a hurry.”

I said that was a ridiculous argument, but thank you.

“What exactly are you worried about?” he asked. “Your private life or your professional life?”

“Professional,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll be invited back for a second year. And then what? I’ll have to start over again. And what would that be? Who’s going to want a resident that was asked to leave?”

“Does that happen?”

“All the time. It’s a pyramid system. They start with seven, and prune every year.”

He sighed. Even Leo couldn’t put a positive spin on my prospects.

I walked over to the counter and came back with the coffeepot. “Let’s just say my answer to that question had been ‘personal’ instead of ‘professional.’ Would you have some insights? Have you noticed me doing anything egregious during social exchanges?”

Leo upended the sugar dispenser and let several teaspoonfuls pour into his cup.

“Be honest,” I said.

He squirmed in his chair, closed one eye. “If you put a gun to my head, I’d probably say that at times you remind me of my sister-in-law Sheila.”

Leo had twelve siblings, so there was always a family member he could cite as a role model or bad apple. “I hasten to add that Sheila is probably the smartest of any of my brothers’ wives.”

“But?”

“But she’s not the person I’d marry if I had my eye on the governor’s mansion.”

I said, “Massachusetts doesn’t have a governor’s mansion.”

Leo closed his eyes, exhaled as if exasperated.

“Is your brother running for something?” I asked.

Leo shook his head.

I said, “I ran for office once, in high school, but I lost. I would have been perfect for the position of class secretary because I’d taken shorthand one summer and would have been able to take the best notes of anyone else, but apparently that mattered very little.”

“Everything in high school is a popularity contest—which can’t be a startling revelation to you.”

I tried to remember back to the three straight years I ran, and for the three straight years I was trounced by girls who weren’t even members of the National Honor Society.

“Don’t take this wrong,” said Leo, “and don’t answer if you don’t want to, but did you date in high school?”

He didn’t let me answer. He patted my hand and said, “No matter. What a stupid and shallow question, right? As if you’d even remember. My high school social life is certainly a blur.”

He poured himself a second bowl of cereal and filled it to the rim with milk. “The guy who calls here? Is he a friend?”

“I had dinner with him once.”

“And?”

“And he’d like to do it again.”

“Have you called him back?”

I said no.

“No, permanently, or no, not yet?” he asked.

“He’s not my type,” I said.

Leo offered no rebuttal, but I knew what he was thinking: How could Alice Thrift, workaholic wallflower, have collected any data or constructed a model on something as theoretical as her type?

4 We Entertain

THIS IS WHAT we imagined: Nurses and surgical residents conversing in civilian garb. RNs impressing MDs with their previously underappreciated level of science and scholarship. Exhausted doctors sipping beer while sympathetic nurses circulated with pinwheel sandwiches. Doctors asking nurses if they could compare schedules and find free Saturday nights in common.

When every nurse accepted our invitation and every resident declined, Leo and I had to scramble to provide something close to even numbers. I volunteered to call my medical school classmates who were interning in Boston—there were two at Children’s, some half dozen at MGH, a couple more at Tufts, at BU …

“Friends?” he asked.

“Classmates,” I repeated.

I know what was on his mind: my unpopularity. That the words party and Alice Thrift were oxymoronic, and now Leo was experiencing it firsthand. I said, “Let’s face it: I have no marquee value. My name on the invitation doesn’t get one single warm body here, especially of the Y-chromosome variety.”

“We’re going to work on that,” said Leo.

“On the other hand, since I’m not known as a party thrower, my invitees will expect a very low level of merriment.”

Leo said, “Cut that out. It’s not your fault. We’re aiming too high. Interns are exhausted. If they have a night off, they want to sleep.”

I said, “That’s not true of the average man, from what I’ve read.”

“And what is that?” Leo asked.

“I’ve heard that men will go forth into groups of women, even strangers, if they think there’s a potential for sexual payoff.”

“What planet are you living on?” Leo asked. “Why do you sound like an anthropologist when we’re just bullshitting about how to balance our guest list?”

We were having this conversation in the cafeteria, Leo seated, me standing, since I usually grabbed a sandwich to go. He didn’t think I ate properly, so after he’d rattled a chair a few times, I sat down on it.

“If I called my single brothers, not counting Peter,” he said, “and they each brought two friends, that would be six more guys.”

“Is Peter the priest?”

“No, Joseph’s the priest. Peter doesn’t like women.”

“Okay. Six is a start.”

I unwrapped my cheese sandwich, and squeezed open the spout on my milk carton. “I know someone,” I finally said.

“Eligible?”

I nodded. So eligible, I thought, that he was pursuing Alice Thrift. “Not young, though. Forty-five. And widowed.”

“Call him. Forty-five’s not bad. Maybe he could bring some friends.”

I said, “Actually, he’s the one leaving those messages.”

“He’s been crooning Sinatra on the latest ones,” said Leo. “What’s that about?”

“Trying to get my attention.” I took a bite of my sandwich.

Leo said, “No lettuce, no ham, no tomato?”

I pointed out that I never knew how long lunch would languish in my pocket before consumption, so this was the safest thing to take away.

Leo paused to consult our list of women. Finally he said, “I see a few of my colleagues who would be very happy with a forty-five-year-old guy. And even more who would pounce on the widower part. How long ago did he lose his wife?”

“A year and a day.” I looked at my watch’s date. “As of now, a year and two weeks.”

“Call him. Tell him you and your roommate are putting together a soiree of hardworking primary-care nurses, who—studies have shown—sometimes go out on the town looking for a sexual payoff just like the males of the species.”

I said, “I wasn’t born yesterday. I know people have sexual relations on a casual basis.”

Leo studied me for a few seconds, as if there was a social/epidemiological question he wanted to ask.

I said, “I’ve had relations, if that’s what your retreat into deep thought is about.”

“I see,” said Leo.

“In college. Actually, the summer between my junior and senior years. I was a camp counselor and the boys’ camp was across the lake.”

“And was he a counselor, too?”

“An astronomy major at MIT, or so I believed. He knew all the constellations.”

“Sounds romantic,” said Leo.

I said, “Actually not. I had wondered what all the fuss was about, so I decided to experience it for myself.”

“And?”

I swallowed a sip of milk and blotted my mouth. “Not worth the discomfort or the embarrassment or the trip into town for the prophylactics. And to make it worse, he expected follow-up.”

“Meaning?”

“That we’d do it again.”

“What a cad,” said Leo.

“I found out later he wasn’t an astronomy major at all, but studying aerospace engineering. And in a fraternity.”

“Did you ever see him again?

I said no, never.

“So that would be … like five years ago?”

I shrugged. After a pause, I wrapped the remains of my sandwich in plastic and put it in my jacket pocket.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” said Leo.

I said I had to run. Would catch him later—I had the night off so I’d do some vacuuming.

“Alice?” he called when I was a few paces from him. I returned to the table.

“I want to say, just for the record, as a fellow clinician, that the fuss you’ve heard about? With respect to relations? The stuff that, according to movies and books, supposedly makes the earth move and the world go round? Well—and I say this as your friend—it does.”

I didn’t have an answer; wasn’t sure whether his statement was confessional or prescriptive.

“What I’m getting at,” he continued, “is that you might want to give it another shot someday.”

RAY BROUGHT HIS cousins George and Jerome, two men in leather jackets over sweaters knit in multicolored zigzags. “Missoni,” said Ray when he saw me studying them. He repeated in his introductions to everyone, “Cousins? Absolutely. But like brothers. No, better than brothers—best friends.” Or—whichever suited the race or ethnicity of the nurse he was addressing: “Paisans.” “Confrères.” “Homies.”

Not to say he was ignoring me. Quite the opposite. He helped in the manner of a boyfriend of the hostess. He stomped on trash, refilled glasses, wiped up spills, chatted with the friendless, who would have been me but for the refuge offered by a kitchen and hors d’oeuvres – related tasks. Ray may have watched too many situation comedies in which suburban husbands steal time from their guests to peck the cheek of their aproned hostess/wife. I had to say repeatedly, “Why are you doing that?” disengaging him in the exact manner that my mother swatted away my father. It hardly discouraged him; if anything he was inspired to discuss what he perceived as my discomfort with/suspicion of intimacy.

I said, “I know men have very strong drives, and I know you’ve been lonely, but I think you’re being overly familiar.”

Happily, guests were interrupting us. Leo poked his head in every so often to remind me that there was a party going on in the other rooms and that I should leave the dishes for the morning.

“Let’s go see how our guests are faring,” Ray said cheerfully.

Leo had indeed dipped into his supply of brothers for the occasion, which was of great genetic interest to all observers. One had black hair and the fairest, pinkest skin you’d ever see on a male old enough to have facial hair; another had Leo’s build and Leo’s ruddy complexion, but an angular face and brown eyes that seemed to come from another gene pool. The Frawleys were mixing warily with the Ray Russo contingent. One red-haired brother asked a cousin, “So, how do you know Leo?”

“My cousin’s going out with his roommate,” he answered. I corrected the misapprehension. Ray and I were acquaintances, I said.

The cousin grinned. “If you say so.”

I explained to the brother that Ray had lost his wife a year ago and only now was getting out socially.

Cousin George said, “He was really faithful to her memory. He didn’t do a thing until she was legally pronounced dead.”

I told him what Ray had told me: the accident, the head trauma, the coma, the life support, the horrible decision. I asked if any of her organs were donated and George said, “Um. You’d have to ask Ray.”

I asked if she’d been wearing a seat belt.

George said, “I doubt it.”

Leo was now doing what he had threatened to do during our planning phase if things didn’t coalesce on their own—dance. He was taking turns with a flock of nursing students, all undergraduates from the same baccalaureate nursing program, and all friends. They looked alike, too: Their hairdos were the ballerina knots, streaked with blond, that were popular with pretty teenagers. I didn’t think we should invite anyone under twenty-one because we were serving beer and wine, but Leo had prevailed. Now they were taking turns being twirled, and each one’s raised hand revealed a few inches of bare midriff and a pierced navel.

“Wanna dance, Doc?” Ray asked.

I shook my head resolutely.

“Would it make a difference if it was a slow dance? You must have learned a few steps of ballroom dancing for those teas at that fancy college.”

I didn’t remember telling him where I’d gone to college, but I must have mentioned it over dinner. I said, “Okay, a slow dance.”

“I’ll talk to the deejay,” said Ray. He turned to his cousin. “Georgie—put something on that the doc might enjoy dancing to.”

“Will do,” said George.

A little human warmth generated from a clean-shaven jaw can go a long way. I may have exaggerated my ineptitude on the dance floor; any able-bodied person can follow another’s lead when his technique constitutes nothing more than swaying in place. It helped that he didn’t talk or sing, and that his cologne had a citric and astringent quality that I found pleasing.

If Ray said anything at all, it was an occasional entreaty to relax. “You’re not so bad, Doc,” he said when the first song ended. “In fact I think you might like another whirl.”

He hadn’t let go of my hand. I looked around the room to see if we had an audience. Leo was consolidating trays of hors d’oeuvres, but watching. He arched his eyebrows, which I interpreted to mean, Need to be rescued?

I shrugged.

A nurse with closely cropped hair dyed at least two primary colors took Leo’s hand and led him out to the patch of hardwood that was serving as the dance floor. “Having a good time?” Leo asked me.

“You better believe it,” Ray answered, flashing a thumbs-up with my hand in his.

A PHONE CALL woke me. Was I in my own bed or in the on-call cot? It took a few seconds to orient myself in the dark before remembering: I had the weekend off. Good. This would be the hospital calling the wrong resident.

But it wasn’t. It was my mother, her voice choked.

“Is it Daddy?” I whispered.

“It’s Nana,” she managed, discharging the two syllables between sobs.

“What about Nana?”

“Gone! One minute she was alive and the next minute, gone! Pneumonia! As if that wasn’t curable!”

My grandmother was ninety-four and had been in congestive heart failure for three months and on dialysis for nine. I said, “The elderly don’t do well with pneumonia.”

I looked at my bedside clock: 3:52 A.M.

“My heart stopped when the phone rang because I knew without even answering,” my mother continued. “Here it was, the phone call I’ve been dreading my whole life.”

“Is Daddy there?” I asked.

My father came on and said, “I told her not to wake you. What were you going to do at four in the morning except lose a night’s sleep?”

“Ninety-four years old,” I said quietly. “Maybe in the morning she’ll realize that it’s a blessing.”

“I tried that,” he said. “Believe me.”

“Tried what?” my mother asked.

“To point out to you, Joyce, that your mother lived to a ripe old age, was healthy for the first ninety-three of them, and any daughter who has a mother by her side at her sixtieth birthday party is a pretty lucky woman.”

“It’s not the time to count my blessings,” I heard. “I’m crying because she’s gone, okay? Do I have to defend myself?”

“Be nice to her,” I said.

“I am,” he said. Then to my mother, “I know, honey. I know. No one’s mother can live long enough to suit her children. It’s always too early.”

My mother raised her voice so I could hear distinctly, “Some daughters hate their mothers. Some mothers hear from their daughters once a week if they’re lucky. I talked to mine every day. Twice a day. She was my best friend.”

“When’s the funeral?” I asked.

“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” said my father. “She still has to call her sisters.”

“I called you first!” I heard from the far side of their bed.

“Sorry to wake you,” my father said. “I couldn’t stop her. You’re on her auto dial.”

“I have to get up in two hours anyway,” I said.

I BRING UP this relatively untraumatic and foreseen death because Ray counted my grandmother’s funeral as our third date. He was a genius at being there for me when I didn’t want or need him. He called the Monday after the party and got Leo. “Her grandmother died, so I don’t know when she’ll get back to you,” he said.

Ray paged me at the hospital, and without announcing himself said, “I’m driving you wherever you need to go.”

I said that was unnecessary. I had relatives in Boston who were going to the funeral, and my father had worked out the arrangements.

“Absolutely not. What are the chances that they’ll want to leave when you can leave and return when you have to return? Zero.”

I said, “But, Ray: I don’t know you well enough to bring you to a funeral.”

“I’ll wait in the car,” he said.

“It’s not an hour or two. There’s the service, then the burial, then I’m sure there will be a lunch for the out-of-town guests back at my house.”

He said quietly, “I know all too well the number of hours that a funeral can consume.”

I said I couldn’t talk. Someone’s ears needed tubes. To end the conversation, I yielded. I said he could pick me up at six A.M. And just in case he didn’t spend the whole time waiting in the car, he should wear a dark suit.

I also said, “Ray? I don’t want you to construe this as anything but what it is—transportation. I’m being completely forthright here. If you want to drive me all the way to Princeton as a friend, I’d appreciate it, but otherwise I’ll make arrangements with my cousins.”

“I get it,” he said. “I think I was a little too pushy at the party, coming on too strong in the kitchen. But I know that. That’s why I called your apartment—to apologize. Besides, I have my own guilt to deal with.”

“Guilt? Because you went to a party?”

“More like, if I ever told my parents that I had feelings for a woman so soon after Mary died, they’d be furious.”

I asked, “Your parents? Or are you talking about your parents-in-law?”

Ray said, “Let’s not talk about parents, especially with your mother just having passed.”

“Not my mother, my grandmother.”

I heard a low chuckle in my ear. “You did sound kind of blasé for a gal whose mother just died.”

“She was ninety-four and comatose,” I said.

“God bless her.”

I was at the nurses’ station on Fletcher-4. I caught one nurse rolling her eyes at another. They’d been listening.

I hung up the phone and stated for the record, “My grandmother died last night, unexpectedly.”

“We heard,” said one, not even looking up from her fashion magazine. “Unexpectedly, despite being ninety-four.”

“No one’s sympathetic when they hear ninety-something,” I said. “They think that makes it easy, as if it’s overdue and you should have been prepared.”

They exchanged looks again. I wanted to say, What am I doing wrong? Did I sound brusque or unfeeling? Have we met before? Instead I said, “I’m Dr. Thrift. This is my first night in ENT. You probably know my housemate, Leo, from pediatrics. Leo Frawley?”

The younger one sat up straighter and hooked stray blond tendrils behind her ears. “I know Leo,” she said.

“And you are?”

“Roxanne.”

“I’m Mary Beth,” volunteered her deskmate. “I used to work in peds.”

“We’re sorry for your loss,” said Roxanne. “I’d be, like, devastated if my grandmother died—no matter how old she was.”

I took a tissue from their box, touched it to each eye, and said with uncharacteristic aplomb, “I’ll be sure to tell Leo how kind you were.”

5 A.k.a. the Transportation

HAD I REALLY thought that Joyce Thrift’s social reflexes and nuptial dreams would fail her on that January day, just because she was laying her mother to rest?

Ray whistled appreciatively when we pulled up to my parents’ house, a sprawling Dutch Colonial, previously white, now yellow with pine-green shutters—a new color scheme they’d forgotten to tell me about.

“How many square feet in this baby?” Ray asked, squinting through his tinted windshield.

I said I had no idea. One doesn’t think of one’s childhood home in mathematical terms.

“How many bedrooms?”

“Five.”

“Five! For how many kids?”

“Two. But one is a guest room, and another’s my mother’s studio.”

“For what?”

“Fiber art,” I confessed.

Ray looked engaged, which was his psychological specialty: filing away facts that would later make him seem uniquely attentive. “You mean like weaving?” he asked.

“Weaving’s part of it. She incorporates different elements—wool, feathers, newsprint, photographs, bones.”

“Human or animal?”

I said he could ask her himself. She’d be thrilled to discuss it since her relatives and friends had grown tired of her shaggy wall hangings, both as a topic of conversation and as an art form.

“Maybe on a future visit, but I certainly wouldn’t bring it up today,” said the master of funereal etiquette. He pointed to the silver van in the driveway and read approvingly, “Fêtes by Frederick.”

“The caterer. People will be coming back after the cemetery.”

“Buffet, you think?”

“Something low-key. When my grandfather died, we had finger sandwiches and petits fours.”

“So what’s the plan? I meet you back here?”

I looked at my watch and calculated aloud, “Funeral at eleven, then to the cemetery, then back here for an hour. How does one-thirty sound? I’ll come out to the car.”

“Doc,” said Ray. “That’s terrible. You’re not going to run in and run out like you’ve been beeped. This is your grandmother who died, not some second cousin twice removed.”

“Two-thirty, then?”

“I wouldn’t mind going to the church,” said Ray. “I find that even if I don’t know the deceased, I get a lot out of it.”

What could I do but include him after the gas and mileage he’d invested in the trip and his curiosity about fiber art? I said, “I think I’ll be riding with the next of kin in the limousine. But if you want to go to the church, I’m sure that’s fine.” I reached for the door handle. “I should probably have this time alone with my mother, though.”

“Absolutely,” said Ray. “I don’t want to be underfoot while she’s getting dressed.”

I wasn’t worried about my mother, who could be gracious in any tragedy. But I needed to take her aside and explain that the rough-hewn man in the red car was a mere acquaintance and—not that she’d ever entertain such thoughts on a day like today—wholly unsuited to any other role. And the Swarthmore sticker on the back windshield? Not applicable; a relic from the previous owner.

“Mind if I run in and use the toilet?” Ray asked.

I said okay. There was a powder room just inside the front door.

“Thirty seconds, and that includes the hand-washing,” he promised.

He took his gray pin-striped jacket from its hanger, put it on, tugged at his cuffs, smoothed his silver tie against his sternum. “Not bad, huh?” he asked.

Already on my way up the stone walk, I didn’t look back. I opened the front door and called, “Anyone home?”

Ray was right behind me. “Wow. Nice place.”

There was a party-sized coatrack in the foyer, bearing so many wooden hangers that I stopped to ponder the scope of the after-funeral fête. I pointed to the half-bath and Ray darted toward it.

My father appeared at the top of the stairs in a black velour bathrobe and hospital-blue terry-cloth slippers. When he reached the bottom step I gave him a hug that was slightly longer than our semiannual perfunctory squeeze.

“You okay?” he asked.

I said I was, of course, sad, but still, when one saw as much untimely and sudden death as I did, then it’s hard to view ninety-four as—

“We were able to get Frederick on practically no notice at all,” announced my father. “I mean, we only wanted tea sandwiches and a few salads, but he was Johnny-on-the-spot.”

Ray emerged from the bathroom in the promised thirty seconds, his right hand outstretched. “Ray Russo,” he said, “a.k.a. the transportation.”

“We left at six,” I said.

“Luckily I make my own hours,” said Ray.

My father smiled uncertainly.

“First-Prize Fudge,” said Ray.

“Fudge?” I said.

“Mostly to seasonal concessionaires. I have a box for Mrs. Thrift in my car, if you think that’s not a frivolous gift at a time like this.”

My father turned toward the stairway and yelled, “Joyce! Alice is here! And a young man.”

Within seconds my six-foot mother was descending, buttoning a black dress with chiffon kimono sleeves. She forgot, in her role switch from grieving daughter to hostess, to kiss me. We weren’t much for public or private displays of affection anyway, but I patted her back and checked her fastenings. “You missed a few buttons,” I whispered.

I could tell from the way her vertebrae were aligned that she was greeting Ray bravely, ambitiously. “I’m Joyce Thrift,” she said. “And you are …?”

“Ray Russo,” Ray and I pronounced in unison.

“Are you a colleague of Alice’s?” Her glance dropped to his feet and to shoes that were too pointy for a man in medicine.

“He drove me,” I said.

Ray bowed his head and took two obsequious steps backward. “I think it’s best if I wait in the car so as to give you your privacy,” he said.

“Absolutely not! Alice? Take Mr. Russo into the kitchen and see what goodies Frederick is willing to part with.”

I said, “Mom—Mr. Russo actually drove me as a favor. He wouldn’t even let me pay for the gas.”

When she looked to each of us for clarification, my father added, “She means this gentleman is not a car service. Mr.…”

“Russo,” I supplied.

“Mr. Russo is in sales,” said my father.

“Which reminds me,” said Ray. He made it to the door in three long strides and was back in twenty seconds—time that passed in silence among the Thrifts—holding a gift-wrapped box that could have housed a VCR.

“Milk chocolate marshmallow, Black Forest, and penuche,” said Ray. “No nuts, just in case anyone’s allergic.”

“Fudge,” said my mother. “I’ll be taking great comfort in this over the next few weeks.”

“Or maybe,” Ray said with a nudge to her elbow, “once you taste it, over the next few days.”

My mother handed me the box. “Tell Frederick … I don’t know: the blue Wedgwood platter?”

“This size comes with its own serving tray,” said Ray.

My mother looked down and blinked at her stockinged feet. “I should finish dressing,” she murmured.

My father turned her toward the steps. “She’s barely slept since we got the news,” he said.

“Maybe Alice could write me a prescription for something.”

I understood that this was my mother putting an MD at the end of my name. “You know I can’t write prescriptions yet,” I said. “Let alone in New Jersey.”

“She doesn’t need any sedatives,” said my father. “She’s exhausted. She just needs this day to be over.”

“Warm milk works for me,” said Ray. He winked. “Especially with a shot of brandy in it.”

“Let me give this to Frederick,” I said. “It weighs a ton.”

“There’s five pounds in there,” said Ray. “Which means more than a quarter pound of Grade A sweet creamery butter and at least a quart of evaporated milk. We list the ingredients on our Web site.”

“Perhaps I will lie down,” my mother said.

“You have a beautiful home,” said Ray, crossing the foyer to inspect a bronze death mask, reputed to be of Pocahontas.

“Of course you’ll come to the funeral, Ray,” my mother said.

He said, his back to us in connoisseurship, that he didn’t want to intrude.

It was then that I saw a glance pass between my parents, and I realized that the invitation was not hospitality but fear that a purveyor of carnival fudge might, if left alone, pillage the mourners’ residence. “We insist,” she said.

“Whatever feels right to you,” said Ray, now studying one of my mother’s canvases. “I can stay here or I can slip into a pew that’s a good distance from the immediate family. That way, no one is going to ask, ‘Who’s the guy?’”

My mother said, “I think anyone who drives seven hours—”

“It took us under six,” I said.

“Anyone who drives five-plus hours to a stranger’s funeral should absolutely attend the service,” she continued. “And if anyone jumps to conclusions … that’s the last thing I’m concerning myself with today.”

“I’d be honored,” said Ray. As he turned back toward us, his voice and face slumped. “You’d think I’d have an aversion to funerals after my personal misfortune, but it’s quite the opposite.”

“Misfortune?” echoed my mother.

“Ray was recently widowed,” I explained.

“No!”

“Automobile accident,” he said.

“When?” asked my father.

“A year ago Inauguration Day—ice, snow, sleet, you name it,” said Ray. “The car had four-wheel drive and traction control. I thought it was foolproof.”

“Air bags?” my mother asked.

Ray said, “I can’t even discuss that aspect of it because it makes me shake all over with rage. Suffice it to say, they didn’t deploy.”

“You poor man,” said my mother, flexing the fingers of one hand in the direction of the powder room to mean, Someone get me a tissue.

“I insist you lie down,” said my father. “There’s a long day ahead, and lots of people wanting to discuss their own mothers’ deaths, and it’s going to take a lot out of you, sweetie.”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t bring up my own tragedy,” said Ray. “And if someone starts talking about theirs? You give me a sign and I’ll come over and I’ll be your ears so you don’t have to listen to their story, okay? Would you let me do that much?”

“Yes, I will,” said my mother. “I only wish you’d been here to answer some of the phone calls.”

“We had to let the machine pick up,” said my father.

Ray shook his head. “People. Why is it so hard for them to use their brains?”

“Exactly,” said my mother. “This has been like taking a graduate course in psychology. People you barely know send you fruit the minute they see the obituary, while some of your best friends don’t even call.”

“They don’t want to bother you,” I said. “Or maybe they hung up when they got the machine.”

My mother began her climb to her bedroom, both hands on the banister.

FREDERICK WAS ALONE in the kitchen, wearing chef’s full regalia plus striped pantaloons and red plastic clogs. When I announced the fudge delivery, his lip curled; he pointed to a remote pantry counter.

“My mother wants it put out,” I said.

“I have truffles,” he snapped.

Perhaps it was then that I felt a twinge of something for Ray—call it sympathy, loyalty, charity—born of a caterer’s condescension. “A guest brought it,” I said. “A guest who got up at five A.M. this morning so I wouldn’t have to take a bus.”

With the edge of a linen towel, Frederick wiped a drip of red goop from a platter. “And you are?”

“Alice.”

Frederick said, “The problem is, Alice, that this isn’t a pot-luck dinner. Everything is planned, down to the color of the sugar cubes. Serving fudge with truffles is like serving steak with roast beef.”

“It’s the guest’s livelihood,” I said. “And no one but you will notice if there’s a surfeit of chocolate.”

Just outside the kitchen door my father was giving Ray loud directions. “Cool,” Ray repeated after each prescribed left or right turn.

There was a pause on our side. Finally Frederick asked, “You’re the older daughter?”

I said that was correct. We’d met at my mother’s sixtieth—

“The doctor?”

I said yes.

He smiled benignly, then asked, “And where does a doctor cross paths with a fudge salesman?”

I couldn’t muster an answer; couldn’t even choreograph my own exit as I pondered what it was about me that invited caterers to condescend.

“Must be serious, judging by the color of your cheeks,” Frederick continued.

I said, “Any color on my face is utter astonishment and, and, dismay, and frankly—”

The door swung open and Ray was at my side. At first I thought the object of his survey was the grandness of the built-in appliances and the curve of the granite countertops, but he was looking for his gift.

“In the pantry,” said Frederick.

Ray popped a pastry triangle in his mouth. “Spinach,” he said.

“Spanokopita,” said Frederick. “Though not fully defrosted.”

“Not bad,” said Ray. “Not what I expected. I thought it was going to be sweet—a miniature turnover, like with fig inside.” Ray chewed, swallowed, popped another triangle in his mouth. “You Greek?” he mumbled through the phyllo.

Frederick shook his head in the smallest possible arc, and turned back to the sink.

Ray looked at me: You see that? You gonna let the kitchen help diss your guests?

I said, “Frederick? My mother wanted you to make up a nice plate for Mr. Russo.”

Frederick crossed to the refrigerator, returned with a plastic bag of some curly purple vegetal matter. “She didn’t mention this to me,” he said.

“We’ve been on the road since six A.M.,” I said.

Ray helped himself to a deviled egg, then another. “Don’t bother. I’m gonna head out so I can get a good seat.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about a crowd,” said Frederick. “She outlived every one of her friends.”

“I lost my wife at a young age,” said Ray, slipping an arm around my waist. “So good genes mean everything to me.”

I moved a discreet step away and said, “My other grandmother died at sixty-two of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

“I did the brunch,” said Frederick.

I said I might lie down for a short rest myself before the limo arrived, if they’d excuse me.

Ray grinned. “These doctors! They can catnap on a dime. I swear—ten minutes of shut-eye, and she’s up for a triple bypass.”

Frederick smiled knowingly.

Ray’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not saying that I’m well versed in this lady’s personal habits—if I read that smirk correctly.”

Unfazed, Frederick blinked and turned to me.

“I’ve never done a triple bypass,” I said. “I’ve never even watched.”

6 Alice Makes Up Her Own Mind

COVERING FOR OUR vacationing pastor was a woman with a crewelwork stole, who ruined the funeral by eulogizing my grandmother as “Barbara.”

At the fourth or fifth misstatement, my mother barked from behind her handkerchief, “Betty!”

The minister looked up; smiled indulgently at the grieving heckler.

“Her name wasn’t Barbara,” clarified a male voice in the back.

Everyone knew it was the homely pin-striped stranger who’d arrived ahead of everyone else and whose signature was first in the guest book: Raymond Russo, Boston, Mass.

“Betty,” repeated the minister. “How careless of me.” She smiled again. “My own mother was Barbara. I think that must say something, don’t you?”

My mother was having none of it: Her stored grief found a new cause, a new enemy, in the rainbow-embroidered figure of the overly serene Reverend Dr. Nancy Jones-Fuchs, who was told in the recessional, in frigid terms, that her services would not be needed graveside.

Ray was the only one who had thought to slip the Book of Common Prayer beneath his overcoat. My aunt Patricia suggested we honor my grandmother Quaker-style, which was to say, in silence. After several minutes, Ray opened the prayer book. We looked over. He offered it to my mother first. “I couldn’t,” she said. Nor could Aunt Patricia, which left my father, who looked to me.

“I could read a psalm,” Ray offered. “Or just say a few words. Whatever you think she’d like.”

“Read,” I said.

“The Twenty-third Psalm is on page eighty-two,” whispered the funeral director.

Ray’s recitation was from memory, eyes closed, and more heartfelt than I expected. When he finished he said, “I didn’t know Betty, but I wish I did.” His voice turned breezy; he tapped the coffin genially with the corner of the prayer book. “Sorry you have to have a virtual stranger here, Betty, reading the last prayer you’ll ever hear, but I guess I know you at least as well as that lame minister did. Boy, was that annoying. And I think you and I would’ve been great pals if we’d crossed paths earlier.” He looked to my mother, who nodded her permission to continue. “I should be an old hand at this, but I didn’t have the composure to say anything at my wife’s grave. She passed away around this time last year. So maybe this is God’s way of giving me another shot at it. Which reminds me—if you run across Mary up there, maybe you can buy her lunch and tell her it’s from Ray.” He raised an imaginary glass. “So here’s to you, Betty: Ninety-four rocks. You had, what? Like, twenty presidents? Four or five wars? I hope you kept a journal or you talked into a tape, ‘cause I’d love to hear the high points.”

“She did,” said my mother.

“Which?” asked Ray.

“Videotaped. On her ninetieth birthday.”

“God bless her,” said Ray.

“Amen,” said the funeral director.

“Amen,” we echoed.

“Now what?” asked my mother.

EACH LUNCHEON ATTENDEE was called upon to share her indignation: What an insult. What a besmirching of Betty’s memory. Imagine living for ninety-four years and getting eulogized under another name. And who the hell was Barbara?

When the crowd thinned and the cousins drove away, Ray and my mother moved on from ministerial misdeeds to fiber art. I had to remind him that we had a long drive ahead, and that I had to be back at work at six A.M.

“You’re not staying over?” my mother cried.

“We’ve discussed this,” I said.

“One day off for the death of a grandparent?” my father said. “What kind of hospital is that?”

“A five-hundred-bed teaching hospital,” I said.

“The show must go on,” said Ray.

“Call her department. Let them page the goddamn head of surgery,” my mother said. “Tell him it’s an outrage. I need my daughter here.”

I darted between my father and the kitchen door. “Dad,” I said. “Please don’t. It’s not like a regular job. We don’t take sick days. No one asks for a day off unless it’s life or death.”

“Which this is,” my mother said.

Ray took her hand. “Mrs. Thrift? What if we stayed for another coupla hours?”

“Alice makes up her own mind,” she said.

Ray guided her to a dining room wall where they stood in front of “Flotsam and Jet Set.” “Of the ones on the first floor, this is my favorite,” said Ray.

In docent fashion, my mother asked if he could explain why.

“The seaweed. The lobster claw. It reminds me of home.”

“Can you tell that the wood is charred? I think it must have been kindling for a clambake.” She pointed to a crumpled piece of paper. “This was a contrivance on my part, but I’m not apologizing for it.”

Ray moved closer, cocked his head, and read, “Nokia Issues a Profit Warning.”

“From The Wall Street Journal, obviously. Which I found in the trash and not, strictly speaking, on the beach.”

“Do all your canvases tell a story?” he asked.

My mother said they did, but not her story. The beholder’s. Each composition was a Rorschach test. If someone saw, for example, capitalism or disorder or impotence—whatever one would call it—that justified her flexing her artistic muscles to add, for example, a piece of newsprint that wasn’t necessarily organic to the site.

“I’m all for flexing artistic muscles,” said Ray.

“The majority of my pieces are pure fiber. This one’s atypical, and for some reason I felt it belonged here, around food.”

Ray said he’d entered this room solely for the artwork, but as long as he was here, he’d have a few shrimps for the road. What a spread. What generosity. What a wonderful family we were.

I FOUND FREDERICK and my father at the stove, drinking scotch and eating Frederick’s signature spiced nuts directly from the sauté pan.

“Way too much food,” said my father in greeting.

“I told Joyce that people don’t eat after a funeral, but she’s always afraid of running short,” said Frederick.

“How’s this: Next time you’ll pretend to follow her orders, but you’ll only make what you think is the right amount,” said my father.

“Just what Frederick needs,” I said.

“What’s that?” asked my father.

“More authority.”

“Your daughter’s employing irony,” said Frederick. “She thinks I wasn’t as obsequious as I should have been with her boyfriend.”

“Ray is not my boyfriend,” I said.

“I just can’t see it,” he explained. “Someone as serious as Alice—not just academically but also in the joie de vivre sense—who takes up with a traveling salesman. Your parents didn’t send you to MIT and Harvard so you could practice medicine from a trailer,” said Frederick.

I told my father I had to speak to him in private. He led the way to the pantry and I followed. “You know what he’s basing all of these insults on? Fudge! Isn’t that ironic? Someone makes a living cooking little pastry triangles and decorating platters with dots of liquefied fruit pulp, and that makes him a judge and jury.”

“Can someone earn a living in fudge?” asked my father.

I said I had no idea. None. In fact, we had never discussed the fudge business before this trip.

“I’m not siding with Frederick,” my father said. “What if people judged me on my wife’s product?”

“Don’t be rude, you two,” called my mother from the doorway. “People are leaving. They want to say good-bye.” And to Frederick, “Alice and her father always had this bond …”

“I think we both know she’s the son he never had,” said Frederick.

How could he say that? He must have known that my younger sister, Julie, was too short-haired and pierced for my mother’s taste, and that I was, by default, increasingly her hope for a wedding and grandchildren.

My father and I ventured back.

“I’m coming up to visit you soon,” my mother said.

“Me?”

“In Boston. Do you realize I haven’t taken one day off since Nana went into the hospital? It took me this long to realize that with a mother’s death, the umbilical cord is finally cut. Not that I resented it. I loved that umbilical cord. I used to brag about it: that ours—mine and Nana’s—was made of some space-age material. Indestructible and indomitable. Now I have to form new alliances and visit some museums.”

I said, “You have Julie, too. She’s a good candidate for a new alliance. I think she’s got an easier schedule than I, so it might be more satisfying for you.”

“Julie,” said my mother, “thinks that I don’t like her friends.”

“You don’t,” said my father.

“All I know,” said my mother, “is that Julie had boyfriends all through high school, that she was even a little boy crazy, and now I’m supposed to forget that and embrace her … so-called lovers.”

“It could be a phase,” said my father.

“It’s biochemical,” said Frederick. “It’s not a choice.”

“Please,” said my mother. “It’s all about sisterhood and politics.”

The kitchen door swung open to reveal the politely inquisitive face of Ray. “Someone must have taken the wrong coat,” he said. “There’s one left on the coatrack and it doesn’t belong to …” He looked toward the foyer, then pronounced, “Mrs. Gordon.”

“Gorman. I’ll handle this,” said Frederick.

We waited. The dispossessed Mrs. Gorman raised her voice and cried, “In January? I’ll catch pneumonia with nothing more than a coat thrown over my shoulders.”

“Why me?” moaned my mother. “What kind of idiot goes home in the wrong coat?”

“Frederick’s taking care of it,” said my father.

“Maybe we’ll leave now,” I said.

“Unless we can help with the coat mix-up,” said Ray.

“You’d be doing us a favor if you took some food back to Boston,” said my father.

“No problem,” said Ray.

Frederick came back through the swinging door and went straight to the phone. He punched some numbers, tapped his foot, fixed his eyes on the ceiling, and whispered to us, “She knew exactly what the problem was: two black Max Maras, same fur trim, different sizes.”

“Polly’s?” asked my mother.

“Polly’s,” Frederick confirmed.

My mother said, “Let them work it out on their own turf.” She opened the door and said, “Marietta? Polly’s not home yet. Can you just swing by her house tomorrow and swap the coats? I’m exhausted.”

“Hers is enormous,” said Marietta.

“Maybe a size ten,” Frederick whispered. “More likely a twelve.”

“Can’t you just roll up the sleeves?” asked my mother. “Or borrow something for the ride home?”

“I can’t believe she could even get into mine,” Marietta whined.

I left the kitchen and said to Marietta—the bridge partner famous for wearing a size zero and having quadruple-A feet—“I know it wasn’t your fault, but you might consider name tags or a laundry marker.”

Marietta burst into tears, prompting my mother to do the same.

“You two aren’t crying over the coats, are you?” I asked.

My father joined us and demanded to know what I’d said to my mother to provoke this outburst.

I said, “She’s crying because Marietta’s crying.”

“Take your mother upstairs,” he said. “I’ll drive Marietta home.”

“You didn’t bring your car?” I asked her.

My father said, enunciating carefully, “Alice? I don’t think you understand that Marietta lost her own mother last fall, and sometimes when someone’s crying about a lost coat, it’s not about a lost coat at all.”

How was I supposed to know that Marietta’s mother had died? All I’d ever heard about Marietta was that her life was an endless, frustrating search for clothes and shoes that didn’t fall off her body. I said, “I’m very sorry for your loss. I hope it wasn’t painful or prolonged.”

Marietta sank a little, so my father propped her up by her bony shoulders.

He shook his head and mouthed a string of indistinct words that turned out to be amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

“Which was hell for her and hell for me,” Marietta shouted. “So I haven’t had much time to sew name tags in my clothes.”

“Alice didn’t know,” said my father.

Ray joined us by the coatrack. “Hey!” he said. “I could hear you from the back porch! What are you yelling at Alice for?”

I told him that Marietta’s mother had succumbed to a long, drawn-out, and debilitating disease, which no one had told me about until now.

“Then take a page from my book,” he told her. “My wife died recently but I know how to conduct myself at someone else’s funeral.”

My father was trying to console Marietta at the same time that he was signaling Ray to refrain from uttering one further syllable.

Now barefoot and seated on the stairs, my mother murmured, “It never fails.”

“What never fails?” I asked.

“Your social graces,” she said. “Or lack thereof.”

“Maybe Alice is too busy devoting her brain to medical science to bother with some of the niceties that other people have time for,” said Ray.

“I have friends who are doctors who could be anchorpeople,” sniffed Marietta. “Or social directors on cruise ships.”

“Are they surgeons?” I asked.

My mother sighed. My father looked to Ray.

“Maybe I’ll take Alice home now,” he said.

WE STOPPED TWICE for coffee. I didn’t say much—even less than usual—because I was working up to something like an expression of gratitude. Between sips I said, “I don’t go home a lot because I usually manage to say something tactless, and everyone stays mad for a couple of weeks.”

“Until?”

“Until my mother calls and complains about my sister. No one apologizes. It just goes away.”

“I’ve heard of worse things,” said Ray. “In some families, people stay mad. No one calls and pretends everything’s okay because they all hate each other’s guts.”

I told him this trip was different. I always left like this—earlier than planned. But no one ever walked through the door with me. No one ever came to my defense or pointed out that the Mariettas of the world were the ones deficient in social graces.

“And?”

“I guess that was me saying thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

A few miles later he asked, “Who did this to you?”

I asked what he meant.

“Your parents? Is that who? Did they ever build you up? Tell you you were smart and pretty—their precious daughter, their pride and joy?”

“Pride and joy, sure,” I said. “But because of what I did and not the way I looked.”

I could see that he was studying my profile, searching for a diplomatic counterpoint. “What a pity,” he finally said. “To think that all these years—how many? Twenty-five?”

“I’ll be twenty-seven in two months.”

“To think that in all these years you’ve been carrying around this image of yourself as—how would you define it? Unattractive?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t want to hear that anymore,” he said.

I didn’t flinch when his hand moved to my knee, an act that seemed more brotherly than sexual. Or so I thought. He left it there until he had to downshift, a good fifteen miles later. When it found its way back, higher on my leg and decidedly less fraternal, I let that pass, too. I was only human. No one else was driving me out of state or banishing derogatory adjectives from my vocabulary. No one else’s pupils dilated as I described my two weeks in a remote village in British Honduras with the Reconstructive Surgeons Volunteer Program, aiding the shunned. In a few years I’d be thirty. My sister was a lesbian. I was a heterosexual with the potential to be the favorite child. And here in the adjacent bucket seat, stroking my unloved leg, was a man.

7 Reveille

“WHAT I MEANT by ‘stay,’” said Ray, “is pretty much universally understood to mean not go home. As in sleep over.”

I explained, just inside the front door of my building, that overnight parking was prohibited on Brookline Avenue, and, furthermore, overnight guests were not allowed under Leo’s and my covenant.

Ray said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing! Whatever happened to consenting adults? Is this a halfway house or something, with rules about sex, drugs, and firearms? C’mon. Who are you kidding? You’re making this up, aren’t you? Why not just tell the truth? Why not say, ‘Ray? I’m scared to have a man in my bed.’”

“I’m not,” I said. “I just think this is premature and unwarranted.”

“‘Premature and unwarranted,’” he parroted. He moved closer and took my hand. “But I’m a red-blooded guy who’s pretty good at translating body language and I seem to recall you didn’t mind having my hand on your knee earlier this evening between Sturbridge and Natick on the Mass. Pike.”

I said maybe, but that was depression authorizing what appeared to be intimacy. Physical contact didn’t have to be sexual, did it?

“Pretty much,” said Ray.

I confessed that I wasn’t a red-blooded gal. I didn’t know the signs and didn’t seem to be endowed with the hormonal cues that the rest of the population possessed. “Frankly,” I said, “I’m baffled as to why you want to see or drive or sleep with someone who gives nothing back.”

It was then he declared, “It’s so obvious, Alice: I want to spend time with you and make love to you and wake up next to you because I’m crazy about you. And I have been ever since I walked into that examining room and found that the doctor was a woman, no wedding ring on her finger, and with a pretty uncluttered field once I asked around.”

“Whom did you ask?”

“The secretary! She said you weren’t married.”

I said I doubted that very much. Yolanda would never entertain personal questions about me or any other house staff. Even if she wanted to she couldn’t because we’d never discussed anything remotely extra-departmental.

Ray grinned. “I wheedled it out of her. It wasn’t so hard.”

“Was fudge involved?” I asked.

Ray didn’t answer.

“She has a notorious sweet tooth. Everyone teases her about it and bribes her with Godiva truffles.” Everyone but me, that is. Yolanda was overweight, sedentary, and had a family history of Type 2 diabetes.

“So how about a kiss?” he asked.

I waited, shrugged, switched my pocketbook to the opposite shoulder, announcing finally that a kiss would be acceptable. I closed my eyes.

Nothing happened. I heard him step away, and when I opened my eyes he was three respectful paces back, tightening the knot in his tie. “You know what?” he said. “I’m not going to force you. Your expression is like a kid biting into a fish stick when he was expecting a French fry. I have more pride than that.”

I asked, as any good clinician would, “Was it what I said, or the way I said it?”

“What does it matter? I wanted to kiss you, and now I don’t.”

It was excellent psychology: In an instant he was the hurt party and I was the villain.

“Not sixty seconds ago I said I was falling in love with you,” he continued, “and all I get in return is a blank look and the third degree about which secretary said what.”

“Not blank,” I said. “Surprised, or maybe just exhausted. And you’re the one who brought up Yolanda.”

“Either way, it’s not very flattering,” said Ray, “although I don’t expect much from this life anymore. Me, Ray Russo, average ordinary widower without a bachelor’s degree, let alone an MD or a CPA after my name, thinking he can turn the head of Boston’s most eligible doctor.”

I mumbled something to the effect that anything was possible. I’d seen in my own circles a famously obnoxious second-year resident chafe daily against her equally disagreeable chief resident, yet at the Christmas party they announced their engagement.

“Are you saying there’s hope, or are you saying, ‘Let’s be friends, Ray. You and I are from different worlds, and even though this is America, where everyone is allegedly equal, and even though you dress well and drive a cool car and own your own business, I’m looking for a guy who I could take to a doctors’ dinner party and wouldn’t embarrass me or get drunk or talk back to the host.’”

Of course I had to counter with something democratic and egalitarian. I said, “I took you home, didn’t I? And, by the way, I really appreciated your talking back to my father today, which I think demonstrates your high self-esteem as well as your ability to think on your feet.”

“My street smarts, you mean?”

“That, too. Definitely. And your pluck.”

“Gee, thanks. That’s what I want people to think: That guy has pluck.”

“Are you mad?”

“Nope. Not mad. Discouraged, maybe. And still lonely, but don’t you worry. That’s my cross to bear.” He walked to the door and said, barely mounting a wave, “See ya.”

“See ya,” I said.

He opened the door, but hesitated on the threshold. “Good luck with everything, Doc. I hope you have a great life and you get to fix, like, every harelip along the Amazon.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.

LEO’S BEDROOM DOOR was closed. His voice and that of an unidentified female’s could be heard in what sounded like playful conversation. As a courtesy, I knocked on his door and said, “I’m home,” to save all of us the embarrassment of louder noises or their spilling into the hallway in any state of undress.

I should have been thinking of my deceased grandmother as I fell asleep, or agitating over my most recent evaluation, but instead I was puzzling over how I’d thrown cold water on Ray’s torch. Was there a book I could read on the subject: How to Restore a Man You’ve Rejected to His Previous Station as Platonic Friend? On Your Own Terms, Without Leading Him On?

Did I owe Ray an apology? Should I be thinking, Fruit? A gift certificate? A presidential biography on tape?

Leo would know. I’d ask him in the morning.

HE KNOCKED ON my door at 5:45 A.M. “Aren’t you supposed to be across the street in fifteen minutes?” he yelled.

I groaned. I had hit the snooze button twice and fallen back into a deep REM sleep, stuck in a dream filled with cousins and stained glass. “Coffee’s on,” said Leo. “I think if you take three minutes for a shower, two minutes to get dressed, five minutes to eat your cereal, you’ll have another five minutes to cross the street and get up to the floor. If you get your ass in gear this second.”

None of this—reveille or raisin bran—was typical of our arrangement. Immediately I grasped what was happening: He was playing the solicitous and thoughtful roommate because he had an adoring audience.

“Is your guest still here?” I asked. When he didn’t answer I said, “I thought I heard a woman’s voice coming from your room last night.”

I was sitting on the edge of my mattress now, staring dully at my feet. There were specks of mauve polish left on a few toenails, remnants of a summer spruce-up. I probably had some nail-polish remover somewhere. “I’m up,” I called. Then louder, “Leo? You still there?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Alone?”

“She didn’t stay over, if that’s what you mean.”

I put my robe on, a souvenir in thin yellow cotton from a VA rotation, over surgical scrubs and took a seat at the kitchen table. I said, “I think I’ll have that coffee before my shower.” I shook a cupful of flakes into a bowl. “Was it someone nice?” I asked. “Someone new and exciting?”

He shook his head. “Just someone to watch a movie with.”

“Was it a funny movie?”

“In places,” said Leo.

“Because I heard laughter.”

He was at my elbow, holding our phone and dialing a number. He handed me the receiver and said, “Here. It’s ringing. Tell them you came back by train this morning and you’ll get there as fast as you can. Mention the word funeral so they’ll remember it wasn’t a vacation day.”

Yolanda answered. I told her I was doing my best to get there for rounds but would undoubtedly be late.

“Funeral,” Leo whispered.

I nodded. “I think you probably remember that I was at my grandmother’s funeral all day yesterday.”

Yolanda said without any indulgence in her voice, “So when should I tell them you’ll get here?”

“Maybe fifteen minutes, if I run.”

Leo held up his hands and flicked both sets of fingers three times.

“More likely thirty. I just got in. And my roommate is in the shower so I have to wait my turn.”

Leo flashed a thumbs-up.

“The most I can do is pass on your message,” said Yolanda.

I looked up and mouthed, Not happy. Leo reclaimed the receiver and said, “Yolanda? It’s Leo Frawley, soaking wet. Look, she’s in no shape to make rounds. Can you finesse this? I mean, like a half hour? It’s not like she was out partying last night and couldn’t get out of bed this morning—you know what I’m saying?”

She must have said something like, “Dr. Thrift? Partying? That’s a good one,” because Leo answered, “Yeah, well, there’s a lot to be said for keeping your nose to the grindstone when you’re expected to work eighteen-hour days.”

I stood up, tapped my watch, and pointed across the hall to the bathroom.

He hung up quickly and asked, “How was yesterday? Awful?”

“Very sad. And the minister was a complete stranger, so that didn’t help.”

“I guess I meant, how did Ray work out as an escort?”

“Good and bad.”

He pointed to the chair I’d just vacated and I sat back down. “Good as transportation. Good at taking my side in a family fracas. Bad at being grammatical and appropriate.”

“I could have predicted that,” said Leo. “There’s something slimy about him. And he tries too hard. He’s clearly waging a campaign to win your hand.”

“My hand?” I repeated. “You mean, as in marriage?”

“Of course. He’s not a kid. He’s a widower. Don’t you read magazines? Men who were once married get hooked up again as soon as they can because they know single men die younger than married men. Ask any actuary.”

I said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then you’re blind. He’s looking for his next wife and he thinks her name is Alice.”

I took a long gulp of coffee. “Okay. Maybe he is. But it’s only human nature to look for someone who can return his feelings, and when he realized I couldn’t, he finally gave up.”

Leo said, “I don’t want to make you any later than you already are, but I think I have more to say on the subject of Ray—namely that he kept coming back without any encouragement, so why would he bow out now?”

I said, “Maybe you and I can grab a sandwich in the cafeteria.”

“If my five minutes overlaps with yours, you mean.”

“Or tonight.”

“Can’t tonight,” said Leo.

“Same woman?”

“Dinner with my mother,” he said. Mutha was how he said the word: Dinna with my mutha.

I waited, thinking he might sweep me up into the party, in that way of large families with boardinghouse tables and bottomless stews.

“You didn’t want to come home and have dinner at my house, did you?” asked Leo. “Is that what I’m reading in your face? ‘Leo, invite me to your house because I haven’t had a really stringy piece of meat in months, and I’m dying to be interrogated about my life, my sleeping arrangements, and my grandmother’s last days on earth.’”

I said, “Actually, I’d welcome the opportunity to observe you in a family context.”

Leo said, “Is that Thrift-speak for ‘Excellent! I’ve been dying to meet your mother, Leo’?”

I didn’t see the difference, but I said yes, it was.

8 Leo’s House

WE TOOK THE Riverside Line to Kenmore Square, then switched to a Boston College car, outbound. When stymied by a turnstile, I had to confess that I hardly ever took public transportation.

“Why not?” Leo asked.

“Too busy working to go anywhere.”

“You know what?” said Leo. “I’m sick of hearing that. I work hard, and I know a lot of residents who do, too, but they get out. They wear beepers. Yet you seem proud of the fact that you have no life.”

Was he right? Was I going to be like Dr. Perzigian, chief of thoracic surgery, famous for making rounds at five A.M.; for getting married in scrubs in the hospital chapel; for missing the birth of his son while repairing a knife wound close to the aorta of a philandering city councilman?

“Because,” Leo continued, “it’s getting a little monotonous.”

I said, “Then I’ll have to be monotonous because all I care about is getting invited back next year and eventually becoming chief resident and after that getting into a plastic surgery program.”

Wouldn’t you think a speech like that would provoke a statement of support? Instead, to my shock and to the fascination of the two teenage girls sitting in front of us on the trolley car, Leo said, “I chose that word deliberately because I’m in charge of the social development of Alice Thrift.”

I harrumphed. The high-schoolers turned around in frank fashion to assess me. I stared back schoolmarmishly so they would mind their own business. Leo tapped one of them on the shoulder and asked in his friendliest pediatric bedside fashion, “Don’t you think my friend here should spend a little more time worrying about life outside of work and less about preserving her reputation as Alice the overworked?”

The two girls, both of whose hair was streaked maroon, looked at each other and smirked.

“No, really. Don’t give me attitude,” said Leo. “I grew up with a houseful of sisters, so I’m not deterred by a couple of funny looks.”

The one next to the window asked smartly, “Haven’t you ever heard of, ‘Don’t talk to strangers’?”

“I’m a nurse and she’s a doctor,” said Leo, “so that doesn’t apply, especially in the middle of a trolley car, surrounded by potential Good Samaritans.”

“They’re probably fourteen years old,” I muttered.

“Fifteen,” said the one in the aisle seat.

“A good demographic,” said Leo. “I have a couple of nieces around that age and I can always depend on them for an honest appraisal of my shirt, my tie, my hair, my shoes, my date, my taste in music, you name it.”

One mumbled, “Music?”

Leo named people or groups or albums—I’d heard of none of these entities—which broke whatever final layer of ice needed melting with these two strangers in front of us, their eyebrows pierced and their fingertips stained orange from some triangular chiplike snack they were sharing.

Do you see what Leo represented in our arrangement? Charm of the easy, fluent, unaffected variety—meant to be instructive, but a constant reminder of my own unease.

LEO HAD WARNED me, but still I was shocked by the quantity of Jesus iconography on his mother’s walls and horizontal surfaces. She lived in Brighton, in the same house in which he’d grown up, still containing some of the thirteen children she’d raised there: Marie, the divorced special-ed teacher, a foot shorter than her brother and 50 percent more freckled, had his round, elfin face; Rosemary, the travel agent, from the dark-haired side of the family, wearing a fashionable and no doubt expensive suit with a double strand of pearls; and Michael, the baby, age twenty-six, wearing a T-shirt bearing the name of a gym.

Mrs. Frawley had ginger-colored ends on her gray hair and bobby pins serving as barrettes. She introduced herself as Mrs. Morrisey. When she excused herself to check the oven, Leo explained that her friends and her priest had convinced her that marrying Mr. Morrisey a few years back—also widowed, also lonely, the owner of a red-brick duplex in Oak Square—was a good idea. The new Mrs. Morrisey had decided rather quickly that her friends were wrong; that being a wife to Mr. Morrisey involved duties beyond housekeeping and companionship that she’d been led not to expect.

The less said the better, Rosemary confided once we’d taken our seats in the dining room. “He calls once in a while but Ma won’t come to the phone.”

“And you don’t ask her for an explanation?”

Marie said, “She moved into his house after the wedding, and was back here in less than a month.”

“She implied that he raised his hand to her,” Michael whispered, “but we think it had to do with the bedroom.”

“Wouldn’t she tell you outright?” I asked. “Or file charges if he really did hit her?”

The four Frawley children twisted their mouths in various directions, all telegraphing the same thing: Enough said.

Leo added, “We think part of the deal up front was separate bedrooms, which Ma took to mean no wifely duties and no honeymoon.”

Marie put her finger to her lips and everyone but me nodded in complicitous agreement.

Raising her voice so it would carry to the kitchen, Rosemary said, “Leo tells us that you’re a surgeon.”

I said yes, I was. But just starting out, and it was a long road ahead, much competition, much narrowing down of the field.

“She worries about everything,” said Leo.

Mrs. Morrisey came back through the door with a roasted chicken on a cutting board. “The plastic thing popped up like it was supposed to, but I left the bird in because the baked potatoes weren’t ready. It might be a little dry,” she announced. “And, Rosey, get the vegetables out of the microwave, please. Use the Fiestaware.”

“Need another set of hands?” Leo called after his sister.

“You stay here with our guest,” said his mother. “Marie will get the drinks.”

“The chicken looks delicious,” I said.

“I hope there’s enough,” said Mrs. Frawley. “Leo didn’t tell me until this morning that he was bringing a guest.”

“The choices seem to be milk or water,” Marie said from the doorway.

“Milk,” I said. “And don’t worry about having enough to go around. I don’t eat much; in fact a baked potato would be fine.”

“You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” Marie asked.

Leo turned to me with a grin. “Are you? I don’t even think I’d know the answer to that.”

I said no, I wasn’t. I liked everything.

“Why wouldn’t you know that?” Michael asked his brother.

“Because she works all the time, and when she’s home, that’s the night I’m out. Which is why we’re perfect roommates.”

“Out working,” asked his mother, “or out carousing?”

He grinned. “Carousing.” He got to his feet and approached the roast chicken on its ancient cutting board, cracked and wooden, the very kind that health officials ask consumers to replace with hygienic plastic.

“Who wants white meat who isn’t a Frawley?”

“Maybe a small slice,” I said.

Leo said, “You’re our guest. You’re going to get several slices because I can scramble myself a couple of eggs or make myself a bologna sandwich if need be.”

Marie said, “I would’ve picked up another chicken on my way home if Ma had called me.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” murmured Leo.

Mrs. Morrisey said, “I have an apple pie and a half-gallon of harlequin ice cream.”

“Pass the plates, please,” said Leo.

We said grace, and thankfully we didn’t have to clasp hands around the table. Mrs. Morrisey looked at me for a long few seconds before picking up her knife and fork.

“Go ahead, Ma, ask,” said Leo. Then to me, “She’s dying to know if you’re Catholic.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not.”

Leo said, “And …? That’s only half an answer. She wants to know what brand of church you belong to.”

“I was raised Unitarian.”

“She’s heard worse,” said Leo.

“How’d you and Leo get together?” asked one of the sisters.

I explained that Leo had posted an ad on a hospital bulletin board and I answered it.

“She called Ma for a reference,” Leo said, and laughed.

“What did you say?” Michael asked his mother.

Mrs. Morrisey, unamused, said, “That I didn’t see why a girl would want to share an apartment with an unrelated man, but if that was her only option, then Leo was polite and clean.”

“Thanks, Ma.”

“And named after a pope,” I said.

It was not the right thing to say. Mrs. Morrisey concentrated very hard on sliding her peas off her fork between tight lips.

“Which is a historical fact I found very interesting,” I added.

“All my children are named after saints or popes,” she said.

“I’m named after an aunt who was a WAC in World War Two,” I volunteered.

“Did she make it back alive?” asked Michael.

“Definitely. And lived to ninety and died in a veterans’ hospital.”

Mrs. Morrisey asked, “Was it the VA in Jamaica Plain?”

“No,” I said. “The VA in Loma Linda, California.”

“The children’s father died at the VA in Jamaica Plain, which turned out to be a blessing because Cardinal Law happened to be visiting the day he slipped into a coma, and it was the cardinal who performed his extreme unction.” Mrs. Morrisey held her napkin under the tip of her nose.

“We were there,” said Marie. “We all met him.”

“I heard about your grandmother,” said Mrs. Morrisey. “I’m very sorry for your loss. Was it very sudden?”

“It was and it wasn’t. I mean, all death is sudden from the medical standpoint that one second a person’s alive and the next second he or she is dead.”

“I never thought of it that way,” said Mrs. Morrisey.

“She had a lot of things going on medically, but the official cause of death was pneumonia.”

“Old man’s friend,” said Leo.

We all looked up for an explanation.

“Old man’s friend,” he repeated. “That’s what pneumonia’s called. Because it ends the suffering.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” his mother sniffed. She squeezed her baked potato so its insides erupted. Without being asked, Rosemary passed the margarine.

Nor had I heard of such a thing. I asked Leo if that was a common expression on the wards.

“Probably not,” said Leo. “It’s just one of those things doctors mumble when the shoe fits.”

I put my fork down. “Do you mean because the patient’s old and feeble and on life support, and his family’s trying to decide whether to remove the feeding tube or take him off the respirator? That pneumonia settles the question for them?”

Leo said, “Maybe we can discuss the fine points later.”

“Are you saying nobody would even start IV antibiotics?”

His eyes darted to his mother and back to me. “We do everything that’s humanly possible. Then it’s in God’s hands,” said Leo. “If you catch my drift.”

His mother grumbled, “Don’t think I don’t know what goes on in these big-city hospitals with their Jewish doctors and their Congregational chaplains. Which is why I want to die at Saint Elizabeth’s.”

“I know, Ma,” Leo answered. “We all know that. Can you pass the oleo back this way?”

“You’re giving Alice the idea that you don’t like Jewish people,” said Rosemary.

“What I don’t like is this talk of pulling plugs at my table.”

“Mom’s internist is Jewish and she loves him. Don’t you, Ma?” said Marie. “He’s on the staff at Saint E’s.”

“Dr. Goldberg,” said Mrs. Morrisey.

“Goldstone, actually,” said Leo.

I said, “I shouldn’t have quizzed Leo about the pneumonia protocol at the table. I get anxious when I hear something I think I should have learned in my medical ethics elective—such as, Would you begin a comatose geriatric on a course of antibiotics?—because I want to find my own medical lacunae and fill them in.”

“What Alice is trying to say is that this is her first year, so there’s lots of gaps in her knowledge. And when she hears something she doesn’t know, she loses all sense of time and place and what’s appropriate dinner conversation in order to launch a tutorial,” said Leo.

“I do?”

“I’m teasing you,” said Leo. “Sort of.”

“I think it’s the truth,” I said. “I do panic when I hear something I think I should have retained.”

“Don’t they give you tests?” asked his mother.

“Every day’s a test,” I said.

“Not literally,” said Leo. “She means that she always has to be on her toes.”

“Why would you put yourself through something like that?” asked Marie. “Is it worth it? All these long hours and blood and people dying?”

“Surgeons make a lot of money,” said Michael. “Maybe you work straight out for a couple of years, but then it’s someone else’s turn to burn the midnight oil, which is when you start seeing some real money.”

“Alice isn’t in it for the money,” said Leo.

“What do you see yourself doing when you’re graduated or certified or whatever it’s called?” asked Michael.

“Reconstructive plastic surgery in the Third World.”

“And who foots the bill for that?” he asked.

I explained that one might have to perform cosmetic surgery on the well-to-do for, say, six months of the year, and their money would support the philanthropic endeavors.

“What if you had a family?” asked Marie. “Would you take them with you to the Third World or would you leave them at home with your husband?”

I said, “I can’t think in terms of a conventional nuclear family.”

“Maybe her husband could be a missionary and they could do their work together,” suggested Mrs. Morrisey.

“What a good idea,” said Leo. “Do you know any eligible missionaries you could introduce Alice to?”

“Don’t be fresh with me,” said his mother.

“Actually, Alice has an admirer,” said Leo.

Everyone turned to me. I said, “Leo is exaggerating.”

“Leo thinks he’s a creep,” said Leo.

“What does Alice think?” asked Rosemary.

I sighed. “This man’s wife died a year ago and his pursuit, I think, is largely sexually motivated.”

Mrs. Morrisey huffed and muttered something to herself.

“I didn’t mean that it was reciprocal or that I encouraged him. I was just trying to explain his attentions.”

“All men want the same thing,” said Mrs. Morrisey, “and that particular thing is not dinner-table conversation either.”

“You had thirteen children,” said Michael.

Mrs. Morrisey slapped her fork onto her place mat. “Leave the table!” she barked.

Leo laughed.

“You, too!”

“Ma! He’s twenty-six years old. You can’t ask a grown man to leave the table because he alludes to your having had carnal knowledge.”

“We have company,” murmured Rosemary, “and I’m sure it’s very awkward for her to be in the middle of a family squabble.”

“My family fights every time I go home, and it’s usually provoked by something I say. So don’t worry about me.” I tried to affect the smile of a good guest. For added amenability, I said, “I don’t think this chicken is dry at all.”

“This one was fresh. You lose a lot of the juices when you defrost a frozen bird.”

“My mother doesn’t cook much,” I said. “Especially now that it’s just the two of them at home.”

“How many sisters and brothers do you have?” asked Michael.

“One sister. Who lives in Seattle.”

“Is she married?” asked Mrs. Morrisey.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Can we get back to whatever it was we were talking about before Michael had his mouth washed out with soap?” asked Leo.

Marie—clearly the family mediator and diplomat—turned to me. “I think we were talking about the demands on you at work, and I was asking, Is it worth it? Is all the hard work and sleepless nights and—you said it yourself—the panic worth it for some kind of professional dream that might be unattainable?”

The most unexpected thing happened at that point: I felt like crying. I disguised the quaking of my lips by taking two long swallows of milk from my glass, then by blinking rapidly as if the problem were ophthalmologic.

“Are you okay?” Leo asked.

“I didn’t mean—” began Marie.

“I must have been thinking about my grandmother,” I said.

“Of course you were,” said their mother. “But she’s in Jesus’ house now and free of pain, God rest her soul.”

Still, I was hoping to prove myself the kind of pleasant conversationalist who gets invited back. “Where does purgatory come in?” I asked. “I mean, under your afterlife guidelines, wouldn’t she still be there?”

All the Frawleys were taking sips from their respective milk glasses or searching inside their potato skins for neglected morsels.

“Alice needs a weekend off,” said Leo.

9 Née Mary Ciccarelli

I KNOW THAT some people are equipped to analyze their failings and to pose leading questions such as “Did I do something wrong?” or “Are you upset?” to the silent person in the seat next to them, but I had neither the vocabulary nor the inclination. As the trolley car negotiated the twists and turns of Commonwealth Avenue, Leo kept his eyes shut until I heard him say, “Just to play devil’s advocate for a minute …”

“About?”

“About your job. Whether you really have no aptitude for surgery, or whether it’s your former A-pluses talking.”

I asked what that meant, and how did he know what my grades were?

“I’m guessing you’re one of those people who moaned and groaned about how badly they did on their organic chemistry exam until it came back with a big red hundred and five on the top of the page because you got everything right including the extra-credit question.”

Calmly I said, “I’m the worst resident they’ve had since the legendary one in the eighties who was asked to leave even though he was engaged to the niece of the head of the hospital.”

Leo said, “You don’t have to be asked to leave. You could decide for yourself.”

I said I didn’t understand.

Leo coughed into his mittened hand. “Have you ever thought of dropping out of the program?”

Only ten times an hour and with every withering look and every truthful evaluation, I thought. “Not really,” I said. “I can’t imagine giving up my goals for something as trivial as professional humiliation. When I start thinking about my shortcomings, I say, ‘You graduated second in your class in medical school. How can you be so bad? If you study harder you’ll get better.’”

“What about the fact that you feel like a failure every minute of the day?”

“I can improve,” I said. “It’s still early in the year. It could all click into place tomorrow.”

“Doctors switch fields,” he said. “Surgeons go into anesthesiology. Internists become allergists. You earned your degree. No one would take that away from you.”

“No,” I said. “I’m no quitter.”

“I’m only being hypothetical,” Leo said. “I’m only thinking of you and what could make you a happier person.”

“In the short run,” I snapped.

“No,” said Leo. “In the long run.”

“I’m no quitter,” I repeated.

RAY WAS WAITING on the stoop when we returned, smoking a cigarette that he snuffed out as soon as I appeared. He was wearing a shiny black quilted parka and a black watch cap that did nothing but suggest burglar and call attention to his nose. He stood up and said, “I paged you, but you didn’t answer.”

“I wasn’t at the hospital.”

“You remember me, I’m sure,” said Leo.

“The nurse,” said Ray. “Of course. How ya doin’?”

I pointed to the streak of ash on the granite step behind him and asked if he’d been smoking.

“First time in a decade,” he said, “which I blame on some very disturbing news I received one hour ago.” He stared at Leo for several long seconds before adding, “It’s kind of personal. I was hoping to talk to Alice in private.”

I said, “Leo’s very easy to talk to. Much better than I am.”

“I hope no one died,” said Leo.

“Nothing like that,” said Ray. “It’s closer to an emotional crisis—some facts that have come to light. And I didn’t have any supper, so I was hoping Alice might keep me company while I grab some nachos grande and a beer.”

Leo checked with me. I nodded once reassuringly, and he trudged inside.

THERE WERE THRONGS of well-dressed people at the bar, businessmen and -women, many drinking from martini glasses; many laughing in that brittle, automatic way that substitutes for meaningful discussion. “Straight ahead,” said Ray, steering me from behind, his hands on my shoulders, his body swaying as if I had agreed to lead a conga line. “The dining room’s in the back,” he instructed.

When we were seated at a small, far-off table, and the dour hostess had left, Ray said, “No people skills. None. Would it have killed her to smile? And why Siberia? There’s a dozen better tables.”

I said, “Don’t make a fuss. It’s quiet back here and we can talk. Let’s just order.”

Ray was suddenly distracted and grinning at some new piece of sociology. He cocked his head toward a smart-looking twosome, smiling tentatively at each other over their menus. “I’d put money on the fact that they just met out front, he bought her a drink, they decided they had a little thing going on, and one of them said, ‘Wanna grab a bite?’”

“You know that from merely looking at them?” I asked.

“Doesn’t take that much,” said Ray. “No offense.”

“How do you know they’re not married, or siblings, or coworkers having a tax-deductible dinner?”

He leaned over and asked, “Doc? Have you ever been to a bar before?”

I said, “Of course.”

“Has anyone ever approached you and asked if you’d like a drink?”

“Other than a waiter?”

Ray patted my hand. “I mean, has anyone ever flirted with you? Asked you to dance? Asked if you’d like to go someplace quiet and talk?”

I knew where this interview was leading: from not terribly personal queries to the carnal questionnaire—if ever, when, with whom, how did I like it, and, worst of all, how did I feel?

By way of answering, I opened my menu. Finally, when I looked up and saw he’d held the same stare of cross-examination, I tried, “Your bad news? Can we discuss that instead?”

He took a sip from his water glass, swallowed, bit his bottom lip. “Stop me at any point if this gets too uncomfortable for you. But my wife, Mary? She had a boyfriend.”

“When?”

“When we were married! For the whole time, in fact. Some guy she worked with.”

I said, “I never asked you what she did.”

“She was assistant manager of the Kinko’s near Northeastern. But you’re missing my point, which is that I’m devastated.”

I asked how he’d found out and he said, “From my former sister-in-law.”

“That doesn’t sound right. Why would anyone besmirch the memory of her dead sister, especially after the fact?”

“Because it was eating away at her all these years—that Mary was cheating on me and thinking she was getting away with it.”

“But why now?”

“Because she has a big mouth and I was talking to her on the phone and I told her I’d met someone—actually I might’ve said I was in love with someone—and out came the whole ugly truth, which I think was her way of encouraging me to move on.”

I said, “Even if it is the truth, what does that change in the here and now?”

“Everything! I visit her grave and I go to church like clockwork. Do I continue in that vein—Mary the saint—or do I get to the bottom of what Bernadette told me?”

“This Bernadette’s no friend of yours,” I said. “Why would you take anything she said at face value?”

Ray leaned toward me, his voice even. “Because it has the ring of truth.”

“Well, just forget about it,” I advised. “Order some food and a glass of beer and we’ll change the subject.”

“I don’t think you get it: This isn’t some little piece of gossip that has no bearing on anything. This is a huge piece of news. Throughout my marriage, for the entire three years we were together—”

Now it was my turn to look up from my menu and stare. “Did you say three years?”

“We knew each other for three years. We were actually married for sixteen months, which I’d always looked back on as one long extended honeymoon.”

I said, “I guess I assumed—”

“Because of how shaken up I was? And how saddened I was for a whole year since her demise?”

I pointed out that sixteen months was hardly a lifetime, so if Mary had been cheating over the course of the entire marriage, it was a relatively short period of infidelity.

Ray took a paper napkin from the dispenser and blew his nose. “I took my marriage vows very seriously and I’m a little surprised that you’re taking Mary’s side.”

I said I most certainly was not taking Mary’s side. I was just trying to examine all facets of the situation. “Maybe she had no choice,” I offered. “Maybe it was sexual harassment.”

“Baloney! Sexual harassment. Mary was as tough as nails. No one messed with Mary if they didn’t want a boot in the groin.”

Another mental adjustment was needed, this time from docile wife and mother of Ray’s future children to extremely tough cookie. I asked how old Mary was when she passed away.

“Twenty-eight,” said Ray. “She liked older men. This guy, Patrick, from work? Would you believe fifty-two? She had a father thing, but I didn’t care. If I had fifteen years on her and that’s what she liked—hey, why not?”

A waitress was finally at our side. “I’m going to have the burger with Muenster and caramelized onions, no lettuce, no tomato,” said Ray. “And whatever you have on draft.”

A dozen breweries and seasonal batches were described before he heard the right name.

I said I’d have nothing now; maybe a piece of pie later.

“Nothing to drink?” asked the waitress.

“She’s a doctor,” said Ray. “No drinking when she’s on call.”

“We get a lot of doctors here,” said the waitress, and cocked her head in the direction of my hospital.

When she’d gone, I said, “I’m not on call. You don’t have to make up excuses.”

“You know why I do that? I’m just so friggin’ proud that you’re a doctor. I guess I look for any occasion to announce it.”

If it weren’t for his previously announced emotional distress, I might have said that I took exception to his use of the adjective proud—that it was a word for parents, for teachers, for mentors; for one’s own self to admit in the privacy of one’s head. “We’ve discussed this before,” I said, “but maybe I need to say it again: I’d prefer that you didn’t lie.”

“Lie?” he repeated. “Because I tell the waitress you’re on call? Isn’t that true? Don’t you work around the clock? Didn’t you work all day today and aren’t you going back there at dawn?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“Okay. That’s settled: no lie.” He smiled as the waitress delivered his frosted mug. “After the day I’ve had, you wouldn’t believe how good this looks,” he said to her.

She said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What kind of day did you have?”

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