The Shadow of Your Smile (2 page)

He nodded.

“Do we have the right to continue to hide the truth?” she asked, looking at him intently. “Mother thought she did. She intended to take it to her grave, but at the very end when only you and I were there, she felt compelled to tell us. It became for her a matter of conscience. And with all the enormous good Catherine did in her life as a nun, her reputation has always been compromised by the insinuation that all those years ago, just before she entered the convent, she may have had a consensual liaison with a lover.”

Hadley studied Olivia Morrow’s face. Even the usual signs of age, the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, the slight tremor of her neck, the way she leaned forward to catch everything he said, did not detract from her finely chiseled features. His father had been her mother’s cardiologist, and he had taken over when his father retired. Now in his early fifties, he could not remember a time when the Morrow family had not been part of his life. As a child he had been in awe of Olivia, recognizing even then that she was always beautifully dressed. Later he realized that at that time she had still been working as a salesgirl at B. Altman’s, the famous Fifth Avenue department store, and that her style was achieved by buying her clothes at giveaway end-of-the-season sales. Never married, she had retired as an executive and board member of Altman’s years ago.

He had met her older cousin Catherine only a few times, and by then she was already a legend, the nun who had started seven hospitals for handicapped children—research hospitals dedicated to finding ways to cure or alleviate the suffering of their damaged bodies or minds.

“Do you know that many people are calling the healing of a child with brain cancer a miracle and attributing it to Catherine’s intercession?” Olivia asked. “She’s being considered as a candidate for beatification.”

Clay Hadley felt his mouth go dry. “No, I hadn’t heard.” Not a Catholic, he vaguely understood that that would mean the Church might eventually declare Sister Catherine a saint and worthy of veneration by the faithful.

“Of course that will mean that the subject of her having given birth will be explored, and those vicious rumors will resurface and almost certainly finish her chance of being found worthy,” Olivia added, her tone angry.

“Olivia, there
was
a reason neither Sister Catherine nor your mother ever named the father of her child.”

“Catherine didn’t. But my mother did.”

Olivia leaned her hands on the arms of the chair, a signal to Clay that she was about to stand up. He rose and walked around his desk, with quick steps for such a bulky man. He knew that some of his patients referred to him as “Chunky Clay the Cardiologist.” His voice humorous, his eyes twinkling, he counseled all of them, “Forget about me and make sure you lose weight. I look at the picture of an ice cream cone and put on five pounds. It’s my cross to bear.” It was a performance he had perfected. Now he took Olivia’s hands in his and kissed her gently.

Involuntarily she drew back from the sensation of his short, graying beard grazing her cheek, then to cover her reaction returned the kiss. “Clay, my own situation remains between us. I will tell the few remaining people who will care very soon.” She paused, then, her tone ironic, she added, “In fact I’d obviously better tell them
very
soon. Perhaps fortunately, I don’t have a single family member left.” Then she stopped, realizing that what she had just said wasn’t true.

On her deathbed her mother had told her that after Catherine realized
she was pregnant, she had spent a year in Ireland, where she had given birth to a son. He had been adopted by the Farrells, an American couple from Boston who were selected by the Mother Superior of the religious order Catherine entered. They had named him Edward, and he had grown up in Boston.

I’ve followed their lives ever since, Olivia thought. Edward didn’t marry until he was forty-two. His wife has been dead a long time, and he passed away about five years ago. Their daughter, Monica, is thirty-one now, a pediatrician on the staff of Greenwich Village Hospital. Catherine was my first cousin. Her granddaughter is my cousin. She is my only family, and she doesn’t know I exist.

Now, as she withdrew her hands from Clay’s grasp, she said, “Monica has turned out to be so like her grandmother, devoting her life to taking care of babies and little children. Do you realize what all that money would mean to her?”

“Olivia, don’t you believe in redemption? Look at what the father of her child did with the rest of his life. Think of the lives he saved. And what about his brother’s family? They’re prominent philanthropists. Think what such disclosure will mean to them.”

“I am thinking about it, and that’s what I have to weigh. Monica Farrell is the rightful heir to the income from those patents. Alexander Gannon was her grandfather, and in his will he left everything he had to his issue if any existed and only then to his brother. I’ll call you, Clay.”

Dr. Clay Hadley waited until the door of his private office closed, then picked up the phone and dialed a number that was known to very few people. When a familiar voice answered he did not waste time in preliminaries. “It’s exactly what I was afraid of. I know Olivia . . . she’s going to talk.”

“We can’t let that happen,” the person on the other end of the line said matter-of-factly. “You’ve got to make sure it doesn’t. Why
didn’t you give her something? With her medical condition, no one would question her death.”

“Believe it or not, it isn’t that simple to kill someone. And suppose she manages to leave the proof before I can stop her?”

“In that case we take out double insurance. Sad to say, a fatal attack on an attractive young woman in Manhattan is hardly an extraordinary event these days. I’ll take care of it immediately.”

2
 

Dr. Monica Farrell shivered as she posed for a picture with Tony and Rosalie Garcia on the steps of Greenwich Village Hospital. Tony was holding Carlos, their two-year-old son, who had just been declared free of the leukemia that had almost claimed his life.

Monica remembered the day when, as she was about to leave her office, Rosalie phoned in a panic. “Doctor, the baby has spots on his stomach.” Carlos was then six weeks old. Even before she saw him, Monica had the terrible hunch that what she was going to find was the onset of juvenile leukemia. Diagnostic tests confirmed that suspicion, and Carlos’s chances were calculated to be at best fifty-fifty. Monica had promised his weeping young parents that as far as she was concerned, those were good enough odds and Carlos was already too tough a little guy not to win the fight.

“Now one with you holding Carlos, Dr. Monica,” Tony ordered as he took the camera from the passerby who had volunteered to become the acting photographer.

Monica reached for the squirming two-year-old, who had by then decided he’d smiled long enough. This will be some picture, she thought as she waved at the camera, hoping that Carlos could follow her example. Instead he pulled the clip at the nape of her neck and her long dark-blond hair fell loose around her shoulders.

After a flurry of good-byes and “God bless you, Dr. Monica,
we wouldn’t have made it without you, and we’ll see you for his checkup,” the Garcias were gone with one final wave from the window of the taxi. As Monica stepped back inside the hospital and walked to the elevator bank, she reached up to gather the strands of her hair and refasten the clip.

“Leave it like that. It looks good.” Dr. Ryan Jenner, a neurosurgeon who had been in Georgetown Medical School a few years ahead of Monica, had fallen in step with her. He had recently come on staff at Greenwich Village and had stopped for a moment to chat the few times they had run into each other. Jenner, wearing scrubs and a plastic bonnet, had obviously been in surgery or was on his way to it.

Monica laughed as she pushed the button for an ascending elevator. “Oh, sure. And maybe I should drop into your operating room while it’s like this.”

The door of a descending elevator was opening.

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind,” Jenner said as he got into it.

And maybe you would. In fact you’d have a heart attack, Monica thought as she stepped into an already crowded elevator. Ryan Jenner, despite his youthful face and ready smile, was already known to be a perfectionist and intolerant of any lapses in patient care. Being in his operating room with uncovered hair was unthinkable.

When she got off on the pediatric floor, the wail of a screaming baby was the first sound Monica heard. She knew it was her patient, nineteen-month-old Sally Carter, and the lack of visits from her single mother was infuriating. Before she went in to try to comfort the baby, she stopped at the nurses’ desk. “Any sign of Mommy dearest?” she asked, then regretted she had been so outspoken.

“Not since yesterday morning,” Rita Greenberg, the longtime head nurse on the floor, answered, her tone as annoyed as Monica’s. “But she
did
manage to squeeze in a phone call an hour ago to say she was tied up at work and ask if Sally had had a good night. Doctor, I’m telling you, there’s something odd about that whole situation.
That woman acts no more like a mother than the stuffed animals in the play room do. Are you going to discharge Sally today?”

“Not until I find out who will be taking care of her when the mother is so busy. Sally had asthma and pneumonia when she was brought to the emergency room. I can’t imagine what the mother or the babysitter was thinking, waiting so long to get medical attention for her.”

Followed by the nurse, Monica went into the small room with the single crib, to which Sally had been moved because her crying was waking up the other babies. Sally was standing, holding on to the railings, her light brown hair curling around her tear-stained face.

“She’ll work herself into another asthma attack,” Monica said angrily, as she reached in and plucked the baby from the crib. As Sally clung to her, the crying immediately lessened, then evolved into subdued sobs and finally began to ease off.

“My God, how she has bonded to you, Doctor, but then you’ve got the magic touch,” Rita Greenberg said. “There’s no one like you with the little ones.”

“Sally knows that she and I are pals,” Monica said. “Let’s give her some warm milk, and I bet she’ll settle down.”

As she waited for the nurse to return, Monica rocked the baby in her arms. Your mother should be doing this, she thought. I wonder how much attention she gives you at home? Her tiny hands soft on Monica’s neck, Sally’s eyes began to close.

Monica laid the sleepy baby back in the crib and changed her wet diaper. Then she turned Sally on her side and covered her with a blanket. Greenberg returned with a bottle of warm milk but before she gave it to the baby, Monica reached for a cotton tip and swabbed the inside of Sally’s cheek.

In the past week, she had noticed that several times when Sally’s mother came to visit, she had stopped at the large courtesy counter in
the lounge area and then brought a cup of coffee with her into Sally’s room. Invariably she left it half empty on the nightstand by the crib.

It’s only a hunch, Monica told herself, and I know I have no right to do it. But I’m going to send word to Ms. Carter that I must meet with her before I will discharge Sally. I’d love to compare the baby’s DNA with her DNA from the coffee cup. She swears she’s the birth mother, but if she’s not why would she bother to lie about it? Then reminding herself once more that she had no right to secretly compare the DNA, she threw the swab into the wastebasket.

After checking her other patients, Monica went to her office on East Fourteenth Street for her afternoon hours. It was six thirty when, trying to conceal her weariness, she said good-bye to her last patient, an eight-year-old boy with an ear infection.

Nan Rhodes, her receptionist-bookkeeper, was closing up at her desk. In her sixties, rotund, and with unfailing patience no matter how hectic the waiting room, Nan asked the question Monica had been hoping to put aside for another day.

“Doctor, what about that inquiry from the Bishop’s Office in New Jersey, asking you to be a witness in the beatification process for that nun?”

“Nan, I don’t believe in miracles. You know that. I sent them a copy of the initial CAT scan and MRI. They speak for themselves.”

“But you did believe that with brain cancer that advanced, Michael O’Keefe would never see his fifth birthday, didn’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

“You suggested his parents take him to the Knowles Clinic in Cincinnati because it’s the best research hospital in brain cancer, but you did it knowing full well they’d confirm your diagnosis out there,” Nan persisted.

“Nan, we both know what I said and what I believed,” Monica said. “Come on, let’s not play twenty questions.”

“Doctor, you also told me that when you gave them the diagnosis,
Michael’s father was so upset, he almost passed out, but that the mother told you that her son was not going to die. She was going to start a crusade of prayer to Sister Catherine, the nun who founded those hospitals for disabled children.”

“Nan, how many people refuse to accept that an illness is terminal? We see it every day at the hospital. They want a second and third opinion. They want more tests. They want to sign up for risky procedures. Sometimes the inevitable is prolonged, but in the end the result is the same.”