by Shem, Samuel
“She’s the one who should’ve left. Look into those eyes—do you see it?”
“What?”
“Everything! All of us! The girl’s hope. How the woman ends up. She’s just a child here, like Amy, Amy’s age. Like Cray. Like you.”
“You too.”
“What happens? Why all the grief? We—all of us—we start out turning toward, and then we turn away? When does it happen? How do we, yearning to be with, turn away?”
The sorrow grew, edged all around with pain. He felt her hand on his cheek. He leaned his face on her leg tenderly, from the slightness of it realizing it was her bad leg, and leaning more tenderly on it, for that. “Everything. It’s so sad.”
She put her hand on his head, feeling the warmth there. They sat still like that, his sorrow echoing hers. This is my story too, she thought. Our story.
After a while he raised his head to look at her. She had never seen him this way, so open, so raw. She was deeply touched. Frightened, too, about what she had come to say. She took a deep breath.
“There’s something I have to make sure you understand before you leave.” She looked away, unable to look him in the eye. “You know it already, in a way, but . . . Orvy, I’m so ashamed of what I did. To you, to us.”
He blinked, to clear the past, to stay with her now. “You don’t have to—”
“But I do. Every day, every single day, I relive it, I see it, I’m in it, the horror of it. I can’t let you go without you knowing, really, really, how sorry I am, how awful I feel. It was so stupid, so brutal, so selfish.” She pulled away from him, her fists clenched in her lap. “I thought by going away alone, in secret, I could protect myself and Cray—and ever since I’ve been back, trying to be with you, seeing it from your side . . . my God!” She took a deep breath, looked down into his eyes. “You have every right to hate me.”
He sat there on the floor looking up at her. The past few times with her, whenever they’d tried to talk about it, he’d felt angry, or deathly sad or even contemptuous—some feeling or other. This, now, was different. He wasn’t filled with feeling, no. What came over him was an awareness—of her being so merely human. And with it, just then, he loved her. Looking at her scarlet hair, white skin, and dark-circled eyes, her strong shoulders, and hearing the music of her voice bringing back their losing each other, his heart opened to her, like a fist opens to a palm. Something greater than him, maybe something of the tattered “we” that lay between them, moved.
“You, Miranda . . . you’re just a human being. We, you and me, we’re just human beings.”
She stared at him, at his light eyes so softened now that even though he was not crying you’d think they were made up wholly of tears. She understood.
“Yes,” she said, “living out our little histories.”
“Yes.”
“Not famous.”
“Not at all, no. Not even as advertised.”
“Doing the carpooling, the laundry, the weeding, the animals, the protesting.”
“The doctoring.”
“In a town known for breakage.”
They sat with each other, looking into each other’s eyes, seeing each other now not so much as separate beings but each as a member of this common, frail, flawed, and ordinary part of the whole. Connected by their flaws.
He felt, then, unworthy of being loved by her. His mind flew to the moment on that winter night outside her house when he’d found himself standing alone by the river, alone in the frigid cold, bent over shivering, when his eyes caught the glow of the light in her doorway and he realized that the two people he loved most in the world were inside. A moment of gratitude, even of grace.
“You . . .” he started crying and so he blurted it out, “you’ve tried so hard to love me—and I you. We tried.”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes tearing up again, “we did.”
“And it ain’t easy.”
“No. We did as best we could.”
“Yeah.”
They cried together. His face buried in her neck, hers in his. Tears wet their ears, their hair. He was leaving. It was over, and hopeless, and the hopelessness allowed them to tell their truth, like travelers holed up somewhere by chance or fate, for a time.
In that brief moment they understood that because they were parting, they could both be there. It no longer mattered that he would go and she would stay—they were held in the simple humility of who they actually were. Death was so much in the air that the future was irrelevant. They were forced into the present. With no future, there was no fear, no need to secrete away, to protect. The sorrow, shared, receded.
He sighed. “I . . .” He stopped, tried again. “Don’t take this the wrong way—”
“How could I now?”
“When I look at my own life, at everything I’ve done, the grief I’ve caused, well . . . I feel crippled too.”
She found herself cherishing the moment, a kind of revelation that the past was past. “It’s not how we’re crippled,” she said, smiling at him, “it’s how we walk.”
· 37 ·
The next morning Penny picked them up in her brand-new beige Lincoln. Cray insisted he sit with Orville and Penny in the front seat. Miranda and Amy had the roomy back to themselves. They threw Orville’s backpack and small suitcase into the trunk, which was only slightly smaller than the Chrysler’s, and headed around the corner of Courthouse Square and across Fourth and started down Washington toward the train station. The day was sunny and fine, with that autumnal crispness that lets you see a long way through the bare trees and makes you notice the little puffs of breath surrounding your words and prompts you to remember cozy times around fires and under comforters in the night.
“Milt’s got the Hong Kong flu,” Penny said. “He was up at dawn for a meeting with Henry and went back to bed. He sends his regrets.”
As they approached Third they were rocked by a tremendous explosion. It shook the ground and perturbed the shock absorbers of the Lincoln. Just ahead rose a plume of smoke. People were shouting. They drove toward it until they were stopped by a bright orange sign: DETOUR.
Officer Packy Scomparza was directing traffic. They stared.
The General Worth was gone.
“Hong Kong flu, my ass!” Penny screamed. “I’ll kill the sonofabitch!”
“That reeker!” screamed Amy. “That total creep!”
They stared.
The only piece of the 200-year-old hotel still standing was two stories of a part of the back wall. On the surface facing them, on the second floor, were the demarcations of two rooms painted an identical pink-and-yellow with vertical dark bands where the walls separating them had been. The bright colors of the twin rooms perched precariously above the rubble seemed to cry out to them like stranded children about to fall, or jump. What stories in those gay colors! Everything had happened in those rooms, everything! A porcelain sink still stuck to one wall, filled with what looked like glass from a shattered mirror. Bad luck.
To all of them, it was as if they were seeing a scandalous public display of the insides of the dead.
“Unreal,” said Amy.
“All too real, dear,” Miranda answered sadly.
“I’ll kill him,” said Penny, looking around. “Where is he? And where’s Henry?”
There was no sign of anyone except Jeffrey Liebowski and another member of Scomparza Demolition and Upholstery. They were sitting on two upturned soapboxes across the street in the weedy courtyard of the boarded-up Painted Lady Lounge, relaxing, having a smoke. Before them, like a portable electric organ, was the control panel for the explosives.
“It’s like a person,” said Cray.
“Yes, it is, hon,” Miranda answered.
“And it died. The hotel died.”
“It was a great old hotel,” she said, her voice unsteady, “with a
great old history. We’ll try to remember the best of it.”
“The pigs are at the trough,” Orville said. He looked at his NOW watch. “We’d better go.”
They barely got to the station on time. The sleek train-animal was wailing from upriver and then gliding in around the bend from the north, its red, white, and blue AMTRAK logo looking like the Stars and Stripes stretched out in a funhouse and frozen in chrome.
The engine stopped just opposite them, the rest of the train stretching way out behind.
Their good-byes were mercifully brief. Hugs, kisses, tears, more hugs, final kisses, and hands slipping out of hands, finger by finger, losing touch, and then the race toward the open doorway far down at the other end of the train where a conductor had put down the steel stairs and was beckoning.
Orville took the high step up—reminding him of a time as a boy in Bill’s office he’d seen an old man diagnosed with “Train Conductor’s Knee,” a chronic subpatellar tendonitis caused by conductors repeatedly stepping up abnormally high to get into the train—and then he was in.
He turned quickly left into the Pullman car, threw his suitcase and backpack onto the overhead rack, and slipped into a window seat that would allow him to wave good-bye to them as the train left. He couldn’t see them from the stopped train. They were too far up the track, at the station. He waited.
And waited.
The train was not moving. He looked at his watch. Late. Time seemed stalled. No information was forthcoming.
Miranda and Cray and Amy and Penny stood there, waiting for the train to leave. Miranda’s hand was on Cray’s shoulder. She could feel it tremble, felt her own heart break all over again.
It’s over. Bury it.
“Chilly,” Penny said. “Shall we go?”
“You think anything’s wrong?” Amy asked.
Orville sat there, starting to dull down, to resign himself to leaving, as he had resigned himself to so many leavings over the course of his life.
The whistle blew. The engine cleared its throat. The train rocked, ready to move.
Don’t spread more suffering around.
Orville was stunned. The phrase echoed inside him.
Whatever you do, don’t spread more suffering around.
The train moved.
The boy reached up for his mother’s hand. Penny put her arm around Amy’s shoulder, and Amy leaned into her. As the train started to ease out, tilting to stay steady around the first curve out, they all turned away and began to walk, at Miranda’s pace, back to the car.
Orville jumped up from his seat and grabbed his backpack and suitcase and ran to the door. Locked. He tried the other side, the one tilting away from the town, and put his shoulder to it. It gave, opening. The train was moving and he had seen too many disasters of Columbians jumping from moving things like cars, tractors, bikes, and, yes, trains, but the choice was not a choice and he gauged the movement and jumped and seemed to fly out into thin air and hit hard rolling, and rolled up against the second set of tracks, and caught the acrid scent of creosote, the scent of that something else finally here finally now.
Looking up over the rails he could see the train vanishing around the bend. Far down the tracks the little group was moving away. They seemed beaten down, stooped over, hunched together, deadened. Penny’s arm around Amy, Amy’s hand in Cray’s, Cray’s in Miranda’s—all matching her slow limp toward the peeling brick station with the sign announcing the Carribean outpost of OLU B A.
Orville jumped to his feet. “Hey! Hey!”
They couldn’t hear him. He snatched up his backpack and suitcase and ran a few steps and then stopped and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Hey, I’m here!”
They heard. They turned. He saw their bodies shift as they realized, shift from hunched and hardening to softer, straighter, and the wind being against them he couldn’t hear their cries but he saw Cray break free first and run full tilt toward him in that funny way he ran with his body stiff except for his hands pumping like pistons making his legs move fast, and he saw Amy start to run too with that pinwheel run of older girls and women the knees pinwheeling out because of the inward tilt of the femurs down from the widened childbearing pelvis, and then he saw Miranda hesitate a second and then she too started to run, actually run!—a lopsided galumphing run bringing to mind at that moment of all things a cowboy of his childhood Hopalong Cassidy she was actually running!—and even Penny ran too and he expected to see Selma flying low above it all but no, he’d learned in his time in the town that she wouldn’t fly in the face of love, and in no time they were close enough so that their cries to each other to the new in each other could be clearly heard, as if all those present are coming back from the dead.
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© Nubar Alexanian
Samuel Shem is a doctor, novelist, playwright, and activist. A Rhodes scholar, he was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for three decades. Shem has been described in the press as “easily the finest and most important writer ever to focus on the lives of doctors and the world of medicine,” and it has been said that “he brings mercy to the practice of medicine.” The Lancet called The House of God “one of the two most significant medical novels of the twentieth century.” Its sequel, Mount Misery, about training to be a psychiatrist, has been reviewed as “outrageously funny, a sage and important novel by a healer and a Shakespearean” (The Boston Globe); Fine is about a psychoanalyst.
His 2008 novel, The Spirit of the Place, about a primary care doctor in a small town, was reviewed as “The perfect bookend to The House of God.” It won the 2008 Best Book Award in General Fiction and Literature from USA Book News and the Independent Publishers National Book Award in Literary Fiction for 2009.
With his wife, Janet Surrey, he wrote the Off-Broadway hit play Bill W. and Dr. Bob, about the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, which won the Performing Arts Award of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence in 2007, and the nonfiction book We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues Between Women and Men, winner of the 1999 Boston Interfaith Council’s Paradigm Shift Award.
He has given over fifty commencement speeches on “How to Stay Human in Medicine,” and he and his wife, daughter, and dogs live in Boston and Costa Rica. Visit his website at www.samuelshem.com and www.billwanddrbob.com.
Works by Samuel Shem
Novels
THE HOUSE OF GOD
MOUNT MISERY
FINE
THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE
Plays
BILL W. AND DR. BOB (WITH JANET SURREY)
ROOM FOR ONE WOMAN
NAPOLEON’S DINNER
Nonfiction (with Janet Surrey)
WE HAVE TO TALK: HEALING DIALOGUES
BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN
