Requiem for the Bone Man (10 page)

“There are now two versions, the ancient and the modern. As many of you may know, the ancient version evokes the names of the Greek pantheon of gods who represented health and well-being.

“Today, however, we are honored to present to you the modern version, just written by Dr. Louis Lasagna, Dean of Tufts University Medical School. We are honored to be among the first institutions to attempt to bring modern-day relevance to this sacred oath. For the purists in the audience, though, I will take the liberty of reciting the first part of the ancient version before the actual recitation.

“We will now begin the awarding of the degree of Doctor of Medicine. Dr. John Adams …”

He heard the names being called off alphabetically. As each name was announced and family and friends in the audience applauded, whistled, and yelled out, Galen knew his name would be met with silence.

“Dr. William Crowley.”

He clapped loudly, knowing that Bill only had his mother there.

“Dr. Robert Galen.”

Nothing, but then he heard clapping, faint at first, then increasing.

Must be Dave’s folks.
Thanks for that!

He crossed the stage and accepted his diploma from the dean. He shook the man’s hand, then the chancellor of the university’s, and walked offstage to his seat.

After the full roster had been called, the dean again approached the microphone stand.

“I will now read to you the first part of the ancient Oath of Hippocrates. It is truly a work of poetry: ‘I swear by Apollo physician …’”

He listened as the dean named the ancient gods.

Are they still around watching us from Mount Olympus?

The dean stopped and looked out at his audience.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I now ask the Class of 1965 to stand and recite after me the modern-day version of this historic oath.”

The entire class stood, recited their oath in unison with the dean, then let out a cheer and as tradition dictated moved the green tassels on their mortar-board caps from right to left. It was now official. They had made it. The lights brightened in the large auditorium as the new doctors and their families moved out.

Galen stayed where he was. His friends would best be left with their families for the moment. He turned to put his diploma on one of the folding seats and it fell forward onto the floor.

“Dr. Galen, I believe you dropped this.”

He turned around to see a man bent over picking up his diploma. When he straightened up, he recognized his old professor.

“Dr. Basily! What are you doing here?”

Before the man could answer, he heard another voice.

“Young Dr. Galen, it would be more correct to ask what
we
are doing here.”

He turned again to see a second familiar face.

“Dr. Freiling!”

“We couldn’t let you go through this alone, Bob. And this prune-faced old weasel told me what you did for his granddaughter. By the way, do you notice anything different?”

“Your range of motion is normal, Dr. Basily. You’ve had the surgery.”

“Score one for the medical profession,” Freiling replied. “And I think now is the time when you should be calling us Harry and Jack, Dr. Galen. You are now one of us, with all the curses and disadvantages accrued.”

“Yeah, prune face gave me a C back in 1946 when I deserved at least a B in his class, so take what you can get from him, Bob.”

Freiling shot Basily a mocking glare, then said dryly, “You got exactly what you deserved and earned. In any event, Dr. Galen, our families are here, including a young girl who wants to thank you for being able to breathe. And we’d like to take you out for dinner, assuming that you understand our teaching salaries are still minuscule compared to what you are going to earn someday.”

Basily laughed. “What cheapskate is saying is, don’t order anything expensive.”

“By the way, Bob, where is that young lady you were telling me about?”

The two older men saw the response in his eyes and said no more.

He was covered with her blood.

He sat in the middle of their living room crying.

He couldn’t stop.

Ten minutes ago she got up from the table.

She said she had a surprise for him but had left it in the car.

He followed her to the door, but she told him to wait, it wouldn’t take long.

He watched her cross the street and open the driver’s side door.

The car came careening down the street, weaving from side to side.

He saw the impact before the sound hit his ears.

The car door screamed as it was torn off its hinges.

She made no sound.

He knew before he reached her.

He held her.

He heard her last words:
I love you, Tony
.

The stuffed toy dog lay in the road.

The little card tied around its neck lay open.

The words written on it would pierce his heart forever.

Tony, guess who’s going to be a daddy?

He couldn’t stop ruminating, twisting and turning his soul with memories. He was an attending physician, one of the big boys now. He had completed his residency and had started working in the Real World. The buck stopped with him. He was now the guy the students, interns, and residents came to when the fit hit the shan, and he loved it! This was what he had worked, groveled, and sweated to achieve for so long. But he also knew something was missing.

He had gotten burned once. He was a fast learner. After June had left for her residency in obstetrics, he had taken himself out of the ritual dating/mating game. In all other things, he hadn’t hesitated to put his hand back in the fire, but personal relationships hit too close to home. He hadn’t even managed to understand his parents, and now they were dead and gone, so he had left the fun-and-games stuff to his friends.

Dave and Connie and Bill and Peggy had tied the knot, and he had served as best man for both his friends. But, as Bill had surmised, The Bear wasn’t going to let his toes get burned again.

Not for a long time. Maybe never.

Once in a while, even from a distance, his friends would try to set him up. Dave would call from Florida, mentioning an eligible lady doctor who would be in his neighborhood for a conference. Bill, ever more subtle, had talked to him about his own life with Peggy, how she had filled a large void in it and how he now felt at peace with himself.

But Galen had become gun-shy. He had horrified the girl whose life he had saved back in college and then killed himself physically to buy a suitable ring for June, only to get shot down.

Nope, not now. Maybe not ever.

...

He had been run off his feet that long-ago day, what with patients in the office, patients in the clinic and nursing home, and finally hospital rounds. Thank God he was just about finished, except for the inescapable paperwork of writing on the patient charts.

He entered the nursing station and was about to sit down when one of the nurses approached him with a clipboard.

“Dr. Galen, would you do us a favor? One of the medical students had to certify a patient as dead, but we need an attending’s signature on the chart.”

“Okay,” he replied, “but I need to check for myself. Where’s the morgue cart?”

“It’s over by the wall, Dr. G.”

He picked up his scope, hooked it around his neck, and started toward the special domed cart used to transport the newly dead without upsetting other patients. He was about to open the upper end when he heard giggling coming from the nursing lounge.

Oh crap! I smell a rat.

He braced himself for another practical joke. He knew the staff thought he was a bit uptight and enjoyed seeing him startled. He wasn’t nasty or disrespectful, far from it, but they considered him aloof, never joining in the gossip and scandal mongering that goes on in any organization.

He opened the cart lid and looked in.

She was petite, a Dresden doll with a Jackie Kennedy hairdo. Her skin lacked the mottled ivory, blue-gray, and red coloration of the recently deceased.

Suddenly her eyes opened and looked directly at him.

They were lavender eyes. He’d heard that Elizabeth Taylor had lavender eyes, but he had never seen eyes like this. They seemed to twist his insides and bring on that flutter that only June had ignited in him.

He stared at her, steeling himself against the unwanted vibrations within, then turned to the crowd of nurses and attendants who were peering at him from behind the corridor wall.

“Yep, she’s a deader, no question about it! Must have died of terminal ugliness. Was it a man or a woman?”

“Help me up, you big idiot!”

“So, the dead can talk, can they?” he laughed as he easily picked her up out of the cart and set her upright on the floor. As he did so he felt the electricity, a tingling of self-awareness shoot through him. He watched closely as she smoothed out her nursing uniform, the pressure of her hands revealing her well-proportioned chest and hips, and read her name tag: LENNY.

He pointed at it, still fixed on those amazing eyes.

“Lenny is a boy’s name and you sure don’t look like a boy. What’s your real name?”

“Elena. Elena Jensen.”

“May I have your name tag for a second?”

She stared at the husky young man with the wavy brown hair and fair skin, who stood at least a head taller than her five feet four inches. He had sparkling eyes, not the muddy shade of most brown-eyed people she had known. There was something of the feral in his face, with a bit of pathos. Someone must have dealt him a blow in the past, she mused. And yet she felt gentleness in the way he had carefully picked her up out of the cart.

He was strong, too.

She detached the badge and handed it to him. He took it over to the unit secretary’s desk and grabbed a heavy black marker pen. He crossed out LENNY and printed LENI in big letters then handed it back to her.

She looked at him and slowly pinned the tag back on her uniform. She felt the rising flush in her face and was surprised to see the deepening blush in his.

The old African-American unit secretary let out a laugh.

“Sisters, we got us a forest fire in here!”

...

He sat a long time in the darkened room after her funeral. He had turned over his work to colleagues. He wasn’t sure he could go back or that he even wanted to.

They had made so many plans, testing each other’s feelings to be sure that each detail would work for both. He hadn’t wanted to leave anything to chance. He remembered that disastrous past proposal.

They had picked out a nice townhouse apartment near the hospital. His old place was just a bachelor pad more reminiscent of medical school digs than appropriate for someone rising in his field. He had tried to straighten and clear out the place, getting rid of accumulated grunge and airing out the rooms, even though the winter weather was brutally cold.

He went over the words a third time and then called her.

“It’s me.”

“Hi, me,” she giggled.

Even on the other end of the phone, he felt the heat of embarrassment.

“I … uh … would you like to have dinner tonight?”

“Sure! Your place or mine?”

Oh, geez, this is moving too fast for me!

He couldn’t think of a way to backpedal out of the corner he had painted himself into.

“Uh … well …”

Damn! Why was he so tongue-tied? He wasn’t a kid anymore.

“Well, how about I pick you up and we try that little Chinese restaurant near the hospital. You like Chinese? I mean, if you don’t we can go somewhere else, if that’s not okay.”

“That’s fine. See you at seven.”

She hung up and looked in the mirror. She felt shivery. She stared at the pictures of her parents and brother stuck in the upper corner of the vanity mirror. She was the only one to survive the auto accident ten years ago and had lived alone throughout her schooling.

Mama, Papa, Glen, I think I love him. I hope that’s all right with you.

The old saying was true: An hour after you eat Chinese food, you feel hungry again. But this wasn’t the hunger of an empty belly. She had invited him back to her place, another efficiency like his—but much better kept. They sat on her small lilac-colored couch and awkwardly talked about their families and their past lives. He called her Leni and she, demanding equal time, wanted a name for him.

“Not Bob,” she said. “We need something special, just for us. What’s your middle name?”

“Anthony,” he replied, a little embarrassed.

“No,” she said, “it’s Tony.” And she leaned over kissed him. His left arm, already around her shoulder, tightened its hold. The evening was still young, and so were they.

They moved into their new home the same day they went to the courthouse for their marriage license. Neither one was big on ceremony. There was no family left to eat rubber chicken reception dinners, and they hadn’t told their friends. He bought her a ring. He didn’t want to jinx things by using the one he already had. No, that was for memory, to remind him not to be such an uptight asshole.

Their hospital associates didn’t know either, though they noticed the difference in the two, especially when they were on the same floor.

“Elena, I thought you hated green. Where’d you get that sweater?”

The nursing supervisor had worked there thirty years and knew all of her girls. She guessed what was going on when the young woman just smiled back.

“Dr. G., we’re having a going-away party for Mary and we’re taking up a collection.”

Normally he would just have pitched in a dollar, so he flabbergasted her when he took out a ten-dollar bill and stuffed it into the box she held.

That early spring morning she felt queasy but didn’t tell him. She went to the hospital lab with a urine sample and asked her friend to run an HCG level—human chorionic gonadatropin—the gold standard for pregnancy.

The rest of the day she floated through her rounds, trying to think of a fun way of telling him. She signed out and headed down the stairs, exiting at the waiting room area. She walked over to the little gift shop and peered in the window looking for inspiration. Staring back at her was the stuffed toy beagle dog, its overlong nose and ears and sad-sack eyes calling out to her,
Take me home with you.

She sat in her car and carefully wrote out what she wanted to say on the little gift card hanging from the toy dog’s neck.

Oh, my, he’s going to be in shock!

And this was going to be the happiest night of her life.

Over and over he played it:
Pavane pour une infante défunte
.

Ravel had it right, he thought, as he stared at the wall. He got up to replay it when the voice echoed in his head.

Tony, you have to go back. I’ll always be with you.

He turned off the record player and started to clean up the room.

Philosophers have said that time heals all wounds. But wounds don’t heal as normal tissue. They form scars. You don’t bleed anymore, but the tissue is no longer the same.

He returned to his schedule, putting in more time than ever before. He needed to work. He had to work. Time alone meant thinking, ruminating. But, inexorably, time did pass.

He grew older, got involved in the medical side of government as well as his practice. He worked thirty hours a day, eight days a week—patients in the office, patients at the free clinic, and rounds at the hospital, at nursing homes, and at certain unnamed government facilities.

And he grew older alone.

...

He found himself walking the ninth floor corridor.

Finished! No more tonight.

He turned the corner quickly heading to the stairway and collided with someone. He looked down and saw one of the floor nurses lying flat on her back. He was so tired he almost laughed at the wordplay: floor nurse floored.

He didn’t recognize her. Must be new, he thought, as he reached down to pull her upright. She brushed off her uniform and glared at him. Not bad-looking, probably in her late thirties or, like him, early forties. Her face relaxed into a smile as he stared at her. He started to apologize and looked into her eyes, those same lavender eyes. He looked at her name tag: CATHY. He stood there dumbfounded as she stared back.

In his mind he heard the voice saying,
Yes, Tony.

He looked at her. She hadn’t said anything.

“Do … you need any help?” he stuttered.

Cathy Welton had no family. She had been orphaned at age five and her foster parents were long gone. She had put herself through nursing school by work and scholarship and found that her true forte was oncology. She had the rare ability to combine compassion and competence in a field where emotional burnouts were common.

Optimism can carry you only so far when you are surrounded by inevitability, but she had cared for her patients tirelessly for more than sixteen years, dealing with the classic
Kübler-Ross
confrontational stages against the Fates no matter how they presented. Her colleagues often said she did her patients and their families more good than any preacher. And for each one, she was there when the thread of life was severed.

Each saw in the other the same theme of intertwining grief and loss, and they were drawn together because of it. No need for soul searching. They both knew the signs. It wasn’t long before she asked him what he wanted her to call him. She also wanted something other than Bob, something close and personal. He was reluctant to tell her, maybe for fear of the same outcome, but in the end he relented.

“Call me Tony.”

It was
déjà vu
all over again, as Yogi Berra used to say. They planned, and planned together. He couldn’t bear living in the apartment with its crushing memories, so he bought two homes side by side. He lived and worked in the one house while he fixed up the other for the two of them. She decided to quit her hospital job and work with him full time in the office.

“Tony, did that dinner bother you in any way?”