He remembers her blouse, damp with his tears—no, both their tears.
He remembers clinging to her, pressing his face to her bosom, sleeping, waking, clinging, weeping, sleeping again. She asks again and again,
He remembers a lull, a startling silence which is a change in the pattern. Her blouse has opened.
Like a surgeon working to develop a tissue plane under the incision, he wills the blouse to open farther, and perhaps his nose, his cheeks, help it along. Her nipples stir from the coins on which they lie, and now her breasts escape her blouse to meet his lips. Her face must be a mirror of his because what he sees in it is fear coupled with desire.
She hovers over him, naked, her breasts full and reassuring, tears of relief on both their faces, their kisses devouring each other to make up for time lost. Then he is above her, and she looks up at him as if he is the Savior. When he enters her, he is anchoring himself to her goodness, a goodness and innocence he lost so young, from which he has drifted away, and which he vows never to let go …
Sitting on his bed in his New Jersey exile, the world outside muted in a canopy of snow, his heart is racing, a dangerous tachycardia, his shirt soaked with sweat despite the cold. There is a dull ache under his breastbone. How he wishes that he could recall the exact feel of her lips, of her breasts.
But he recalls
He recalls how he loses himself in her, pulling her like a soft lamb coat over him. She settles on him, smothers him like nightfall over a meadow. In their coming together they thwart the demons, his and hers, and when his cry of release comes it punctuates her soft exclamations. Order is restored. Proportion returns. Sleep comes as a blessing.
HIS CURSE IS THIS (and he weeps in New Jersey at the recollection, he beats his head with his hand): when he wakes from his Missing Period, he senses only a perturbation in space, a gap in time, a deep embarrassment and shame, the reason for which he cannot recall, but which he can only heal by throwing himself into his work anew. He has blocked out what came before.
How cruel it is that this memory should surface in a winter storm so long after she is dead. How cruel to have this fleeting, fragmented vision, seen through an ice-crusted window, then to wonder if it is real, or if it is the perturbation of a brain undone by alcohol. He has reassembled the memory like a shattered relic, and it is finally whole; and still he has doubts. He will never see her more clearly than that night at 529 Maple. When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her,
“You saved my life,” he says aloud to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, seated on his small bed in New Jersey “And my stupidity, my indecision, my panic, caused you to lose yours.” Though it is much too late to say it to her, he knows it must be said, and though he is a nonbeliever, he hopes that somehow she is listening. “I cannot love any human being more than I love you.” What he cannot bring himself to mention is the children; he feels he can do even less for them than he can do for Sister Mary Joseph Praise; they exist, two boys, twins, he knows, he remembers, in a universe even more removed than the one in which Sister resides.
But it is too late to say all this to Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Even this memory of her, beautiful and erotic, cannot arouse him or fill him with joy. Instead, when he sees her nakedness, his engorgement, the miscibil-ity of their parts, what he feels is a violent jealousy, as if another person occupies his naked body and straddles the woman he loves, an
47. Missing Letters
THOMAS STONE STAYED IN MY ROOM past midnight. At some point he became one with the dark shadows, his voice filling my space as if no other words had ever been spoken there. I didn't interrupt him. I forgot he was there. I was inhabiting his story, lighting a candle in St. Mary's Church in Fort St. George, Madras, holding my own in an English boarding school, seeing how an unroofing of memory might lead to a vision of Mary. And if visions could happen in Fatima and Lourdes and Guadalupe, who was I to doubt that a secular vision of my mother had not appeared to him in a frost-rimmed rooming house window, just as I had seen and felt her in the autoclave room as a young boy? His voice walked me into a past that preceded my birth, but it was still mine as much as the color of my eyes or the length of my index finger.
I became conscious of Thomas Stone only when he was done; I saw a man under the spell of his own tale, a snake charmer whose serpent has become his turban. The silence afterward was terrible.
THOMAS STONE SAVED our surgery program.
He did it by making Our Lady of Perpetual Succour an affiliate of Mecca in Boston. All it took was his affixing his signature to a letter saying it was so. But Our Lady of Perpetual Succour was no mere paper affiliate of Mecca. Each month, four medical students and two surgical residents came down from Mecca to do a rotation with us. “A safari to see the natives killing each other, and to catch a few Broadway shows,” is how B. C. Gandhi put it when he heard about the plan. But each of us also had opportunities to do specialty rotations up in Boston.
I finished my internship and began my second year of residency. The most important result of our affiliation with Mecca was that it allowed Deepak, the Wandering Jew of surgery (as B.C. referred to him), to finish. He was now a board-certified surgeon and could have gone anywhere to set up practice. Instead, he stayed on at Our Lady with the title of Director of Surgical Training; he was also appointed Clinical Assistant Professor at Mecca. I had never seen Deepak happier. Thomas Stone, true to his word, paved the way for publication of Deepak's study on in juries to the vena cava. That paper in the
Popsy's dementia no longer needed to be concealed. He roamed safely throughout Our Lady, wearing scrubs, and with a mask dangling from his neck. He was turned away every time he wandered into the operating room, or tried to leave the premises, but he didn't seem to mind. He would sometimes stop people and declare, “I contaminated myself.”
LATE ON A FRIDAY EVENING, a few months after Thomas Stone's first visit to my room, I heard a knock at my door. There he stood, tentative, embarrassed, and unsure what his reception would be.
My father's long confessional had changed things for me; it had been much easier to stay angry with him, to trash his apartment and violate his space, before I heard his story. Now his presence felt awkward and I didn't invite him in.
“I can't stay but I wondered … want to ask if … would you care to join me for dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant in Manhattan tomorrow, Saturday? … Here's the address—about seven?”
This was the last thing I expected from him. If he'd invited me to go to the Met, or to dine at the Waldorf- Astoria, I would have declined without any hesitation. But when he said “Ethiopian restaurant,” it conjured up the sour taste of
On Saturday I emerged from the subway and I saw Thomas Stone at a distance standing outside the
