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  I call Mt. Auburn and am told that, yes, Louie Cappetti is among the newly admitted. I am enormously relieved to discover his room number bears no relation to Professor O’Toole’s. “What’s wrong with him?” I ask.

  The voice is firm. “I’m sorry, but we are not allowed to discuss the nature of a patient’s personal injury.”

  The nature of a patient’s personal injury … The words trigger panic. I think immediately of Jake Barnes. Hemingway’s. My throat tightens. Katinka, be sensible, I tell myself. People don’t slip on the ice and break their penises. Logic doesn’t comfort. Logic has played no part in my life these last few weeks. Besides, I am guilty of favoritism, holding some areas of Louie’s anatomy more dear than others. If I were truly good, I would protest a damaged pinkie or a broken elbow as loudly as something more personally significant— like the Jains in India who value an ant as much as an aunt. Maybe this bad-mother flaw in my character is due its just deserts. Poor Louie. For a moment I can only think that whatever’s wrong with him is my fault. No tears, I order, until I know what to cry about. I pull on my boots. All that’s left is for me to get to the hospital.

  But how? I wonder when I’m finally outside. The streets are glazed. Ice coats the front stoop like the crust on a crłme brûlée. In OldTown we had chains on our car. The snow removal crew was as fiercely trained as the Green Berets. Here I don’t dare to drive. I plan to enter Mt. Auburn Hospital only through the doors marked visitor.

  On the walk in front of me a student slides along sideways as if he’s on a skateboard. He must be made of rubber, the way he bends into a curve. As for me, I’m suddenly all too aware of my fragile skeleton. I remember reading that the foot alone has almost thirty bones. Still I have no choice but to propel my thirty bones times two over this solid sheet of ice. Even if I decide to take a bus, I’ll need to walk to the Square to catch it. What’s important here is to get to Louie.

  I make it to the end of my street by holding on to the fences, hedges, a child’s swing set, a No Parking notice on a green metal rod. Crossing Mass Ave at the top of the Square is a free-for-all. A woman has fallen, and two people tumble themselves as they help her up. I stretch my arms out as if I’m crossing a high wire with no safety net. “Quite a feat,” we few brave and hearty pedestrians say to each other with a conspiratorial smile. There’s a sense of camaraderie, people pulling together the way they did in the London blitz.

  Through the center of the Square it’s not so bad. The merchants are out in front of their stores scraping and sanding. The shops are empty. It’s not a day to pick up a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Turning from Brattle onto Mt. Auburn Street, I decide against the bus. I’m on a roll. My technique is to hug the buildings and hobble like the wooden-sandaled geishas in period films about the Orient. I feel as if I’ve mastered a complicated dancing step. If only Louie could see me now, see how well I do, see what I will do to get to him.

  A Cambridge street person comes lurching toward me. He’s holding a tattered pizza box straight out in front of him. From the way he slips and slides, he looks exactly like a carhop on roller skates with a big tray. I hope he realizes it’s not the kind of weather in which to stop to negotiate spare change. He stops anyway. He shakes his head at me. His beard is tangled. Under his open jacket his sweatshirt says “Harvard” with one of the R’s torn out. “Those bozos in Washington have really screwed up this time,” he explains. “What losers.”

  I steady myself against a stone wall. I pull a five dollar bill from my purse and stick it under a corner of his pizza box. “Save the planet,” he says, and skates off.

  By the time I get to the post office I am out of breath. Considering the object of my mission, this seems the metaphorically appropriate place to take a rest. Inside it’s nearly empty, none of the usual lines snaking through the maze of ropes. At the overnight mail window two postal employees are shooting the breeze. “You’re my main man,” one says to the other and slaps him five. Once Louie and I were buying toothpaste at the Prescott Pharmacy. The door opened. “Where’s my main man?” a customer yelled to Barney Souza half-hidden behind his apothecary jars.

  I turned to Louie. “You’re my main man,” I said.

  “I’m your mail man,” was his reply.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” a postal clerk asks now.

  “Not really,” I say. “I’ve just dropped in to get warm.”

  “Lucky for me I work indoors. A dozen carriers have fallen in the line of duty and had to be hospitalized.”

  • • •

  When I finally climb the hill to the visitor’s entrance at Mt. Auburn Hospital, I feel as if I have conquered Everest. I stop at the receptionist’s desk to ask directions to Louie’s room. The woman looks up at me. “No brownies today?” she asks.

  “Brownies?”

  “You brought them once. They smelled so good.”

  “I remember. For Seamus, Professor O’Toole.”

  She nods.

  “They turned out to be burnt. Barely edible,” I have the need to say.

  “It’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?” She pauses. “Of course, today’s weather’s too bad for carrying anything.” She flashes me a sympathetic smile.

  But I don’t feel excused. Here I am visiting somebody in the hospital and I haven’t brought anything. I think of my mother. She never went anywhere without a box of mints, a package of cocktail napkins, a tissue-wrapped trio of lace-edged handkerchiefs. I turn my hands palm up, stunned by their emptiness.

  “There’s a gift shop at the end of the hall.”

  * * *

  Inside the gift shop I pick out a chocolate heart. I am considering the stuffed animals—there’s a cuddly teddy with a saucy grin—when I remember I gave away my last five dollars to the bum. I have nothing but loose change, not enough for the three ninety-nine chocolate heart. I buy a Peanut Butter Cup and a Milky Way. I try not to sound too sheepish when I ask for them to be gift-wrapped. The salesperson sighs but wraps them anyway in paper printed the egalitarian pink and blue meant for newborns. “I suppose you want a ribbon, too?” she asks, her voice a sullen grunt of disapproval.

  I nod. “Sorry, but yes.”

  * * *

  Louie’s room turns out to be on the same floor as Seamus’ but on the opposite end of the corridor divided in two by the nurses’ station. A nurse’s back is turned to me as she talks on the phone. On a shelf directly above her perky cap stands a row of African violets in terra-cotta pots. The leaves are yellow, the flowers droop, the stems are flaccid. Perhaps the nurses spend so much time nurturing their patients there’s none left over for their plants.

  Still I am incredibly relieved when the nurse hangs up the phone and tells me Louie broke his leg in three places and has already had surgery.

  “Thank God,” I sigh.

  She gives me a look. “It’s no picnic. He’s got a metal plate in there. He’s in traction. A terrible fracture. He’s got several screws.” She shakes her head. Her hat is attached with bobby pins. “In fact, you can’t see him now. He’s just up from recovery. Unless, of course…” Her voice is challenging, accusatory. “… you’re his wife.”

  “No.”

  “Then come back later this afternoon.”

  The prospect of renegotiating the icy streets makes me decide to stay put. I consider the cafeteria but realize I don’t have enough money for even a Diet Coke. Asking the nurse for a handout will only confirm her negative impression of me. I take the elevator down to the lobby where, given the weather, the people watching is skimpy but the People magazines plentiful. I become so absorbed with the marriages and divorces of celebrities that the hours fly by. My hunger is slaked by a three-page spread on Julia Child. When I go back upstairs this time, I notice a blond woman exiting the door of Louie’s room. It’s Cheryl I know immediately. Her coat is open on a pink sweater through which the outlines of two distinct nipples are clearly visible. I must begrudge her a certain prettiness. She has feathered blo
nd hair and a tilted nose. Traces of old acne scars, though, pit her cheeks. Unlike me, she did not spend her puberty slouching in chairs in the waiting rooms of dermatologists.

  “I see Mr. Cappetti’s already having visitors,” I complain like a ten-year-old protesting favoritism. Reluctantly, Cerberus lets me through.

  I open Louie’s door a crack and peek in. Three people are standing around Louie’s bed. Above them suspended in a network of pulleys and wires hangs Louie’s plaster-wrapped leg like a crane towering over a construction site. Beyond Louie’s bed lies another, this one almost completely curtained off. Is somebody in it, I wonder, trying to sleep? Clearly I should come back at another time. I am just about to close the door when an elbow shifts giving Louie a keyhole view. “Katinka!” he croaks.

  The room falls silent. So sudden is the quiet it could be the aftermath of an explosion in which a whole population has been wiped out.

  “Katinka, you came,” Louie says. His words are slightly slurred, their rhythm slowed. His face is the pale, suffering face of a Renaissance saint. “Come meet my family.”

  Three faces turn toward me. Still, if there are only three faces, I can’t help but notice that there are more than a dozen brightly wrapped and beribboned gifts piled on the table next to Louie’s bed. I add my own pathetic offering to the pile and extend my hand.

  Which in turn is shaken by Louie’s mother, Rosalie, his father, Sal, and his sister, Diane. Rosalie is short and plump with Louie’s eyes. Diane is a slightly taller slightly thinner version of her mother. Sal is Louie’s height and dapper. His hair’s slicked back like a matinee idol from an earlier time.

  Finished with the amenities, I hang outside the family circle not sure what to do. “Where are your manners?” Rosalie admonishes. “Give Louie’s visitor some room.”

  I squeeze between Rosalie and Diane to reach Louie. I have the sense not to bend to kiss him. He’s wearing a hospital johnny. Against its vee neck his chest hairs curl adorably.

  “Are you in pain?” I ask. I reach for his hand.

  “Not really. Not now.”

  Louie’s father is tinkering with the adjustments on his bed. He cranks Louie’s head up another ten degrees. “Any better?” he asks, and without waiting for an answer, cranks it down again. Louie’s mother seems to be concentrating on my hand. I pull it away.

  “Katinka’s my writing teacher,” Louie explains.

  “That’s nice, dear,” Rosalie says.

  “She’s a friend, too,” Louie says.

  “The teachers always loved Louie,” Rosalie says. She fusses with his pillows, smoothes his sheets.

  “It was the nuns,” explains Diane. “Louie looked like such a little saint.”

  “He didn’t act like one,” Sal chuckles.

  What does Sal mean by this? I wonder. Did Louie develop his sexual technique in parochial school? Perhaps it’s a natural talent, I comfort myself, like being a good dancer or having a special color sense.

  Sal cranks up the head of Louie’s bed another ten degrees. “Better?” he asks.

  “Fine, Dad.”

  “Hey, Chris,” Sal yells, addressing the draped bed over by the window. “Want me to adjust your headboard? I’ve just figured out how this gizmo works.”

  An ashen face peers out from behind the curtain like the ghost in the window of a haunted house. “No thanks, Sal. But if you wouldn’t mind helping me to the john … I can call for the nurse.”

  “Don’t you bother. I need a rest from all these girls.” Sal waves a hand toward us as if he’s introducing a chorus line. Then skips around to the other bed from which, after grunts and groans and rustling of sheets, he produces the pajamaed and bathrobed apparition. “This here’s Chris,” he says. “And this here’s one of Louie’s friends.” He points to me.

  “Katinka O’Toole,” I introduce myself.

  “Chris Smith,” he says with more a grimace than a smile.

  How young he is, not even thirty I think, but he walks like the thousand-year-old man. No, I look again, more like a cowboy who’s been glued to his horse. I remember the gross-out jokes book of my childhood: The Yellow Stream by I.P. Freely. Twenty Years in the Saddle by Major Assburn. I make a note to remember to tell them to Max. “Eeee,” Chris winces. From the look of him, Chris Smith’s passed Major Assburn’s twenty-year mark. He walks bowlegged, rolling on the sides of his feet.

  “Still hurts something terrible,” consoles Diane.

  “I’m a bit better today,” says Chris. His knuckles, where he is holding Sal’s shoulder, are ridged white knobs.

  We watch as he and Sal take their tortoise steps across the room and into the hall. When the door shuts, we all exhale.

  Rosalie is the first to speak. “That poor child,” she sighs.

  “He brought it upon himself,” Diane says.

  “What some people will do for love without any thought for the consequences.” Rosalie shakes her head.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I ask.

  “He’s marrying a Jewish girl,” Rosalie begins, then stops.

  Louie takes over. “And her family insisted he get circumcised.”

  “At his age?” I am astonished. A few years ago I was invited to the circumcision of Milly’s son. He was eight days old, and it was a party held in her living room. There was food and drink. High spirits. Everyone gathered round. I couldn’t watch. “Come on, Katinka,” Milly had laughed. “At this age, it doesn’t even hurt.”

  At Chris’age, however, it looks like some advanced form of torture. I think of The Sun Also Rises. Of Louie under the fig leaf of his sheet. How much do people do for love? How much am I prepared to do for love? And damn the consequences. What are the consequences? Do I love Louie? If I love Louie, would I, if I were appropriately equipped, be circumcised for him? Would I declare him my main man and give up all minor ones?Would I forsake all other dinner dates to reheat the chicken Divan? Could I love him enough to tell my mother about him? To kiss him in front of his mother?To take him to the reunion of my Radcliffe class? To enjoy him in my writing class? What is the correct answer to this multiple choice test? “What some people will do for love,” Diane says again as if she’s read my thoughts.

  “We know what some people will do, then live to suffer for their sins,” cautions Rosalie.

  Sal comes back into the room and touches her arm. “Not that again. Not after all this time and when our boy’s just had surgery.”

  “Enough, Ma,” Louie says.

  “Well, this circumcision—I think it’s a sign,” Diane says.

  “A sign?” I ask.

  “Yeah, like some people shouldn’t be together.”

  “That’s right,” Rosalie adds. “Some people need to know their place.”

  I hold my breath, then exhale. I think of crossed stars, uncomplementary signs. Are they trying to tell me something? What is the message here? But their faces seem open, pleasant. No judgments cloud their dark eyes, their generous mouths. Once in England, Seamus and I were waiting at the Cambridge train station to go back to London after a lecture he’d given at the university. We shared a bench with a couple who were visiting their daughter who’d just won a scholarship there. “How wonderful,” I’d exclaimed.

  The father knit his brows. He pulled his ear. “We’re working-class,” he’d confided in a cockney Professor Henry Higgins would have loved. “No good’ll come of it.”

  His wife had agreed. “Some people need to know their place.”

  Meaning me, I think now. Or meaning Cheryl? I look at Louie.

  Louie looks at the table next to his bed. “How about I open some of these presents?” he asks with the diversionary tactic of a talk show host.

  “Here?” My heart sinks.

  His lovely spatulate fingertips unwind ribbon, rip off paper. He receives a box of chocolates, lotion for dry skin, slippers, a Walkman, a sports almanac, a tortoiseshell comb, and—my heart plummets to my toes—the saucy-grinned teddy bear. “From Cheryl,” an
nounces Diane, who reads the accompanying card.

  “Now whose is this?” Louie asks as he holds up my pink and blue wrapped package which seems the size of a postage stamp. At this moment Sal and Chris come through the door, just in time to stand as two more witnesses.

  Louie tears off the wrapping on one Peanut Butter Cup, one Milky Way. Immediately I notice just how much candy bars have shrunk since I was a kid. But they must look big enough to Louie. “What I love!” he exclaims. He sounds genuinely touched though I can’t help suspecting the false enthusiasm of a kindergarten teacher who has just been handed a mud pie.

  “How nice,” says Diane in a voice which says cheapskate.

  “How thoughtful,” says Rosalie in a voice which says poor teachers make even less than postal clerks.

  I start to explain, then hold my tongue. Never explain, never complain was a motto my mother once told me was embroidered on a pillow on the Duchess of Windsor’s bed. I never admired the Duchess of Windsor though I envied her rumored arcane knowledge of oriental lovemaking techniques. Besides I’m not sure how the assembled will take my giving my last dollars to a person bad-mouthing our government. Somehow Louie and I haven’t yet got around to discussing politics.

  “Thanks again, Katinka,” Louie says now.

  “It’s nothing,” I announce with Duchess-like dignity.

  Sal points to his watch. “Better get going, girls. We’ve all taken enough time from work. And Louie needs his rest.”

  We say our good-byes. Rosalie squeezes my hand. “It was nice meeting you, Corinna,” she says. “When Louie gets out of the hospital, maybe you can come and have supper with us sometime. Sal and I, well, we always like to get to know Louie’s friends.”

  “That would be lovely,” I say.