Cecile smiled.
'There might have been something one semester,' she said, 'sophomore year. It was an eight o'clock class, and it wasn't crucial, you know, like suturing, so a lot of us probably rested.'
'You feel like shit for a long time. And if you're a big, strong, tough guy like Hawk, you're not used to it, and you hate it. And you hate being hooked up to the hat rack, and you hate that you can't walk to the bathroom alone. But you know that will pass. You know you'll get it back. All it takes is patience and work. And you know you can wait and you know you can work. So you know, in a while, you'll be what you were.'
'So you shut up about it,' Cecile said. 'And do what you can and wait.'
'I recall that I whined some to Susan,' I said.
'And when you got well enough you put the matter right,' Cecile said.
'Hawk and I.'
'And then you were whole.'
'Something like that.'
'And that's what you and he are doing now,' Cecile said.
'Yes.'
Outside my office window the snow was coming fast now, swirling a little as the wind eddied down Berkeley Street. We both looked at it quietly for a while.
'He's never talked to me about this.'
I nodded.
'Have you ever talked to Susan about this?'
'Yes.'
'Why can't he talk to me about these things? For Christ's sake, I'm even a damned doctor.'
'It's not a medical matter,' I said. 'My identity, if I may be permitted the tired phrase, is me and Susan. Hawk's is still Hawk.'
'You're saying he doesn't love me.'
'No. If I thought he didn't love you, I'd have said, 'He doesn't love you.' We talked about this before. Hawk and I grew up different. I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, in a house where my father and my two uncles loved me and looked out for me. Hawk grew up on the streets in a ghetto, and for a long time he looked out for himself, until Bobby Nevins found him when Hawk was fifteen. He ever tell you about Bobby Nevins?'
'No.'
'Ask him to. It's interesting.'
'Are you actually explaining the black experience to me?' Cecile said.
'I'm explaining Hawk. Nevins trained him, but no one, as far as I know, ever loved him. Hawk is what he is because he has found a way to be faithful to what he is, since he was a kid.'
'I love him,' Cecile said.
'For him, that's a learning experience.'
'And he won't change,' Cecile said.
'If he changed he might cease to exist,' I said. 'He's with you now.'
'Not all of him.'
'Probably not.'
'Do you think I'll ever have all of him?'
'Maybe not,' I said.
'And if I want to be with him, I have to accept that possibility,' Cecile said.
I smiled at her as encouragingly as I could and nodded my head. The snow was coming so hard now that it was difficult to see the FAO Schwarz store across the street.
'Yes,' I said. 'You do.'
19
HAWK AND I sat with a State Police captain named Healy in his office at 1010 Commonwealth, talking about Marshport.
'Bohunks run it since the Pilgrims,' Healy said. 'Then after the war it began to shift. All that's left is one Ukrainian neighborhood, where Boots is from. The rest is mostly black, mostly Caribbean black. We think of them all as Hispanic. Or black. But they don't. They think they're Puerto Rican, Jamaican, Haitian, Costa Rican, Dominican, Guatemalan.'
'So even though they a majority, they don't have think so because they don't think they all the same.'
Healy nodded.
'So the Bohunks still in charge,' Hawk said.
