You Are My Heart and Other Stories (17 page)

A young man, clipboard in hand—his ID tag identified him as Clément Hémon, M.D.—asked Howard to tell him what happened. Howard began, quickly, to give the doctor Deirdre's history, to tell him about the cramps, the headaches, the pain, the vomiting.

A woman in a white lab coat was probing Deirdre's stomach, asking her questions, in English: Did this hurt? When had she last moved her bowels? How often had she been throwing up?

Doctor Hémon thanked Howard, conferred with the woman in the white lab coat. Howard went toward them but was held back by an aide who told him that Doctor Joussaume—the woman who was examining Deirdre—could speak with him later on if he wished.

Doctor Joussaume took Deirdre's hand in her own. “We're going to take you into surgery as soon as we can,” she said. “We'll sedate you. Do you have any allergies? Do you know your blood type? We will test for it, of course, but if…”

Other personnel now entered the room, two of them transferring Deirdre to another gurney, rolling her away. Deirdre waved to Howard, who started toward her, but was held back by another man.

“I'm Doctor Rosenthal,” the man said, in English.

Howard spoke in French, as clearly and rapidly as he could, telling the doctor what he had told Doctor Hémon: that he was a physician, that Deirdre had cancer of the ovaries—
cancer des ovaires:
the words were cognates—virtually identical, Howard explained—that she had exhausted all the usual lines of treatment, and that during their drive to Saint Rémy she had begun throwing up fecal matter. Deirdre was a physician, he continued, and had been his student at The George Washington School of Medicine, in Washington, D.C.

Doctor Rosenthal made no attempt to interrupt Howard, and Howard wondered why he couldn't stop talking. What Howard wanted to know—he
would
get to the point, he added apologetically—was if he could be present when they performed the surgery. Doctor Rosenthal said that they had paged Doctor Coursaget, an
excellent
surgeon, who would arrive within a half hour. If Howard wished to attend the surgery, he would of course grant him this courtesy. Howard thanked the doctor and suddenly realized that all the while Doctor Rosenthal was talking to him in English, he had been talking to the doctor in French.

The doctor shook Howard's hand. “Your friend is very sick,” he said, “but we will do our best for her.”

 

It had been at least a dozen years since Howard had attended a major surgical procedure and, feeling like a small boy allowed into the world of grown-ups, he watched with fascination as Doctor Coursaget and his assistants opened Deirdre's belly, found the dilated loops of bowel through which nothing—neither liquids nor the gaseous content of her intestine—was flowing, located the tumors that were blocking the intestines, and cut them away.

The music coming from the speakers was slow jazz, a woman—Sarah Vaughn? Dinah Washington?—singing a song Howard thought was called “Dreamy.” Doctor Coursaget, humming to the tune, was now removing his gloves and his mask, nodding to an assistant, asking the assistant to finish up.

The assistant gestured to a nurse, who pressed a button, the music changing to something louder, and with a more savage, driving beat: what Howard assumed was called hard rock.

“We did the best we could,” Doctor Coursaget said to Howard. “Your friend will need to stay in the hospital for four or five days, and I believe she will, for a while at least, benefit from some alleviation of pain. After that…”

The doctor shrugged, gestured with his hands, palms upturned, in a way that indicated there really was not much that he or anyone else could do for Deirdre.

“It is often quite difficult to close up a woman after this particular surgery,” he said. “So, as you can see, I have left the truly demanding work to my younger colleague, Doctor Maubert, in whom I have great confidence. We made a decision not to remove her uterus, by the way—a consideration of the extra time involved and possible post-operative complications. These would be negligible in most instances, but given your friend's condition, if we…”

Howard had stopped listening. He looked around: the operating suite was impeccably modern—as high-tech as any he had ever seen. But why was he surprised? He watched Doctor Maubert bend down over Deirdre's stomach and imagined Charlie stitching up soldiers in a tent in Iraq, and he wondered: If he had known the day would end this way, would he have chosen to tell Deirdre about Charlie? Yet when he had, he realized, she had shown little surprise, and the obvious occurred to him for the first time: that she had already known about Charlie, and that his death was the reason for her decision to write to him.

Doctor Coursaget was telling Howard that either he or Doctor Joussaume would be checking in on Deirdre at least once every day. Howard moved away from the doctor, toward Deirdre. He saw Doctor Maubert reach inside Deirdre's body, after which the room began to go dark, the floor to rise toward him.

“Come with me, please,” Doctor Coursaget was saying, his hand gripping Howard's elbow.

Howard wanted to push the man away, but the only thing he could do was stare at the pair of pale gloved hands that were vanishing inside Deirdre's stomach. And if she had known about Charlie—one of the medical students they'd been friends with would surely have given her the news—had she, then, proposed their ten days in France not out of her need to be comforted, but out of consideration for his feelings, so that, after she was gone, by having been able to make good on his promise, he would feel absolved of a measure of his guilt?

He sat on a bench, his head between his legs, and could not recall having walked from the operating room to the corridor in which he was now sitting. Doctor Coursaget sat beside him.

“It happens to all of us,” Doctor Coursaget said, a hand on Howard's shoulder. “There is no need to be embarrassed.”

Howard sat up, drank from the glass of water Doctor Coursaget offered.

“We did the best we could,” Doctor Coursaget said again. “Your friend will be in the recovery room for a while, and you can visit with her there. We sedated her quite heavily, however, so I do not expect that she will wake for several hours.”

A few minutes later, the doctor shook Howard's hand and left, and as Howard walked toward the exit—he would retrieve the car keys, then go to the parking lot and get Deirdre's suitcase—he realized that not only had no one asked for payment, or for either of them to fill out forms, but no one had even asked that he or Deirdre show proof of insurance.

He stepped outside, and, momentarily blinded by the bright winter sun, felt as if he had walked straight into a wall of pure white light. He felt dizzy, held onto a railing, realized that if it was Charlie's death that had inspired her to write to him, it was also possible that she had done so—that she had wanted him to be with her now and to see her like this—out of something other than kindness.

M
y father and I sat at the kitchen table, old newspapers stacked high, and he went over maps and photos of the Normandy Invasion with me, explaining how and why we won the war in Europe. I was ten years old. I tried to memorize numbers, and then names of generals: 4000 transports, 800 warships, more than 11,000 aircraft; Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Ramsay, Leigh-Mallory, von Rundstedt, Rommel. My father showed me where our forces established beachheads, at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula—Utah Beach and Omaha Beach—and he drew a line where General Bradley's forces cut off the peninsula, forcing the Germans to surrender.

Then he pushed the newspapers aside and went through the day's mail and tore up envelopes. He roughed my hair, put the shredded pieces of envelope in the garbage pail under the sink, and told me he'd heard a funny story at work he was thinking of sending to the “Can You Top This?” radio program. The story was about a man who, while taking his physical exam for the Army, pretended to be blind. Later that day the man went to a movie to celebrate being classified 4F, and found himself sitting next to one of the doctors who'd examined him. “Excuse me,” the man said, “but could you tell me if I'm on the right train for Jamaica?”

My father laughed before he finished telling his joke, and while I laughed with him he coughed so hard blood began splattering out of his mouth, and he tried to stop it from staining
the newspapers by covering his mouth with a handkerchief. I brought him a glass of water and a fresh handkerchief, and he started to thank me but this only made him cough more. He coughed from where metal had dug out sections of his lungs. Most of the fragments had been removed at a field hospital in Italy, but the doctors told him there were still small pieces of metal they had to leave inside for the time being, and my mother had been after him to go to a Veterans Hospital to have them taken out.

“Always remember to tear up anything with our name on it,” he said. “If the garbage collectors spill our garbage into the street, or if dogs and cats do the same, and if a policeman finds a piece of paper with our name on it, we could be fined.” He reminded me that this had happened to him once, in the first month after he returned home from the war.

My father went into the bedroom, and when he did my mother came into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of whiskey. “So what are
you
looking at?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Damned right. A lady can't even take a drink anymore without her own son giving her the evil eye.” She reached into her housecoat, took out a Hershey bar and broke off a piece for me. “Come here.”

I went to her. “I love you, Willy,” she said. “You know that, don't you?”

“Yes.”

She peeled back the silver foil liner of the chocolate bar, then kissed each of my eyes, and I imagined that we were both remembering how quiet it used to be at night while my father was overseas and it would be just the two of us sitting at the kitchen table the way we were now, flattening out the candy liners to make baseball-sized hard silver balls from them that I'd bring to the Armory to help the war effort.

By the time I woke the next morning, my father was already
gone, and Uncle Joe was in the bedroom with my mother. They were laughing, and playing Johnny-on-the-Pony and Ringalevio-One-Two-Three. I ate a piece of the coffee cake my father had brought home. He worked as a baker for Ebinger's Bakery, and he said they were good people even though they were Germans. “An American is always an American,” he said.

Uncle Joe was a policeman in downtown Brooklyn, where the A & S department store, and the Paramount, Fox, and Albee Theaters were, but before the war he was the cop on our beat, and he and my father had been good friends. I'd played boxball with them in front of our house, and sat with them on our stoop when they listened to baseball games on the radio.

Uncle Joe's holster was on top of the ice box, but he'd taken his gun into the bedroom with him, and I was frightened that if my mother went wild the way she did sometimes, and scratched him, he would whack her with the gun. During the two years my father was in the Army, Uncle Joe had stayed with us most nights.

“Your father's a good man who served his country well,” Joe said to me while he strapped his holster back on.

“Why didn't you?”

“Because somebody had to keep the home fires burning, kiddo.”

“Anyway, Joe was too old,” my mother said.

“He could have lied about his age,” I said.

Joe winked at me. “Honesty's the best policy,” he said.

“Look who's talking,” my mother said, and she poured herself a glass of whiskey.

“Hey, put that bottle away,” Joe said. “It's too early.”

He tried to grab the bottle, but got my mother's arm instead.

“I can do what I want,” she said. “It's a free country, ain't it?”

I saw how deep Joe's fingers were into her arm, so I let out words I'd been holding inside me: “You should have beat up on the Nazis and not on my mother.”

“And you mind your own goddamned business!” my mother said, and she pushed Joe away.

“Make me!” I said. “It's a free ccountry, ain't it? You always do what
you
want!”

“Like hell I do,” she said, and she slapped me.

“Easy on the boy,” Joe said. “Go easy now, sugar. Easy.”

“What kind of rotten son am I raising?” my mother said. “Tell me that. What kind of a mouth does the boy have on him, huh?”

I felt a ball of tears rolling up through my throat, but I kept it from reaching my eyes.

“Ah, he's a good boy,” Joe said. “He knows how to keep a secret. He knows what's good for him, right?”

After Joe left, my mother tried to make up to me. She kept telling me how sorry she was—how if life was perfect we'd all be angels floating on clouds above the rooftops. She drank her glass of whiskey in one swallow, then walked around the kitchen, the way she did during the war, holding the glass to her cheek and singing the song she used to sing me to sleep with: “
Over there. Over there. We're coming over. We're coming over. And we won't be back till it's over, over there…
”

“Jesus, Willy,” she said, when she stopped singing. “What am I gonna do, huh? What am I gonna do?”

I imagined her floating over a trench in Italy, with my father below, shivering, hungry, and covered with mud. I saw her drifting down to him, at night, when all the other soldiers were asleep or dying, and she looked as beautiful as a movie star to me—as if her eyes and mouth were twenty or thirty times their regular size so that you could lie down inside them if you wanted.