Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  “It’s me,” Greta said.

  “How’s tricks? What’s the news of the hour?” Anna looked at the purple fingerprints on the sheet music, a casualty of the Wright’s stain used for medical slides that never seemed to completely wash off. She checked her cello to make sure none of it had marred the wood. Anna prized this cello, a gift from Hugh when she started playing again, right around the time she turned forty. It was Austrian, and its tone was lovely and somber and full, the golden whole notes of a lake loon.

  “Are you terribly busy?” Greta said.

  “I’m just sitting here about to spread my legs for Sergei, the sullen S.O.B.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Rachmaninoff. I’m about to start practicing.”

  “Oh. Okay, then. I’ll let you get back to it.”

  “No, wait. I’m also desperate for distraction. What’s up?”

  “Mike needs to go into the office for a few hours, and I need to get to my rehearsal. My car is in the shop again.”

  Greta’s group, the No-Tones, was opening the Boston symphony’s summer season. Anna couldn’t remember when the first performance was. “Can I borrow your car?”

  “Sure. If you have it back by two.” Anna had selected one of her students to oversee the AIDS patients’ extra group time, and she had an appointment with the student and Nick Mosites later in the day. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll drive you into the city, then come pick you up later. I have to be at the hospital for a meeting anyway.”

  “Are you sure?” Greta asked.

  Anna said that she was.

  Greta’s rehearsals were in Cambridge, in an old warehouse near Harvard Square. There were probably twenty or thirty children, Anna guessed, ranging from ages six to ten. She sat in one of the folding chairs—might as well stay for part of the rehearsal—with the parents off to the side, some of whom were wearing earplugs. When the music started she understood why: the bass was turned all the way up so the children could feel the vibrations. This was for rehearsal only; during the actual performance, Greta told her, the bass would be equalized and the children would rely on counting instead of the rhythm.

  “Okay, parents,” Greta called across the room. “This is the first dress rehearsal, so I hope by now everyone has purchased a costume for his or her child. Also, for those in the Beethoven sequence, don’t forget to tease out the gray wigs. Think big. Think bird’s nest. Think half-crazy genius.” Greta held up a picture of Beethoven, his hair going every which way. “This is the look we want.” Greta turned back to the children who were filing in. The older ones were in costumes of giant foam-rubber ears, their faces painted black and surrounded by Spanish moss to represent the opening of the auditory canal and the cilia within. The little kids were dressed as ears of corn.

  The music was in a 2/2 time signature and turned up so loud Anna’s eardrums ached.

  The ears of corn swayed in a line at the front like a field with wind rippling through it, albeit a kind of rap wind, Anna thought. The children in front sang loud, with a pitch that Greta taught them to feel first in their diaphragms before sending the vibrations up to recreate the sounds in their throats. Anna was amazed. The harmonics were remarkable given no child had any idea what the next child was singing.

  The kids in front sang: “We are corn. We can hear. We listen to the kernels around our ears.”

  The older kids, the human ears, stood behind the ears of corn and sang in counterpoint to the child in front. This was the part that was especially difficult, Greta had told Anna. The human ear singers couldn’t lip-read to determine where, lyrically, the ears of corn were. The vibrations the human ears felt had to be mostly ignored, since they indicated the main melody line, not the harmony they were singing. But Greta had, miraculously, managed to pull it off. The whole production, Anna understood, was about faith, each child believing the vibratory sounds he made would harmonize with the whole.

  A girl representing the wind—long diaphanous streamers tied to a gauzy gown—scampered around the stage and pretended to whisper to the ears of corn. The human ears bent toward the vegetable ones then began to dance and sing, this time without music. The story line here was something about how silence was the way of animals and plants, and the manner by which wisdom was channeled from heaven to earth. The creatures who used language heard only dumb mumbling.

  The finale showcased three Beethovens who entered from stage left, one with a viola and two with violins. The trio played the first movement of Beethoven’s fifth. Eyes straight ahead, without sheet music, and without any mistakes that Anna could hear. The performance ended with the wind coming back and announcing: “Magic is the child of Faith.”

  “Okay,” Greta said, and signed, clapping along the whole row of children to show her appreciation. “Very, very good. Beethovens, perfect. Let’s do it one more time through.”

  Anna caught Greta as she was rewinding the cassette tape. “I’ll be back to pick you up before five.”

  Greta nodded. “Nifty, huh?” she cocked her head toward the children and grinned.

  “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is.”

  Anna still had over two hours before her meeting at the hospital. Insomnia always accelerated her pace; she moved faster through the world, did things in less time than when she was fully rested. She drank a cup of coffee, then went into an enormous bookstore and wandered aimlessly through the aisles for an hour before landing in Travel/Adventure. A book of essays written by women who hunted big game caught her eye. The cover depicted a middle-aged woman beside a dead bison, holding up the animal’s head as though she expected it to smile. Anna skimmed through it, put it back, then picked it up again and tucked the book under her arm. There was another about a woman who had hunted antelope in Africa. She would buy this one, too. She had never in her life been interested in hunting, very rarely even ate meat, so why she was buying these two books—three, now, as she spotted an autobiography of a woman deer hunter—or why she was picking up a flyer attached to a shelf about a women’s hunting group, was a mystery to her. Something about watching Greta’s children had taken her outside of herself. Those pitch-perfect Beethovens, especially.

  Anna had been at her peak, musically, at twenty-three, but hadn’t known it at the time. Her playing was the best it would ever be, though her technique sharpened and became more sophisticated over the years. She’d played Rachmaninoff occasionally as a young woman, along with Saint-Saëns, who used to be one of her favorites but whose music she hadn’t touched in thirty years. Something to do with emotional complexity; nuances of tone and pitch had been more accessible when she was young, though that seemed counterintuitive. She’d have imagined that the somber weight of, say, late Beethoven or the measured sorrow of Bach’s cello suites would become more familiar over time.

  She remembered playing Saint-Saëns one late afternoon in her junior year in college, ditching her biology class in a sudden fit of melancholy. She stood by her window, watched the slant of October light shimmer over the quad. Back then, she could stand on any note and let herself sink down to the bottom.

  She walked out to her car. What if she really was the kind of woman who wanted to hunt lions in Africa? A woman of independence and ferocity, not worrying about social conventions or niceties, oblivious to personal and professional failures, focused on the thrill and danger of dusk falling on the Serengeti. A version of herself she often longed for but couldn’t be: the Anna who loved humanity and read books about safaris and knew how to field-dress a moose. Maybe a boyfriend for her elderly years, quiet days and drives up-country on weekends. The Anna of even emotion and even-temper, of peaceful sleeps and hearty appetite. I am not Prince Hamlet and have never been—stray lines of corrupted poetry from long-ago college literature classes, swirling around her head. I am not a pair of claws scuttling along the bottom of the ocean.

  Anna spotted her student, Amy, and Nick Mosites sitting in the corner of the hospital cafeteria.

  According to the criteria
Nick had given Anna—a student with a good working knowledge of basic immunology, compassionate, bright—Amy had seemed the obvious choice. But here in the hospital with the smells of sickness and Betadine and formaldehyde, Anna’s nose went into panicked overdrive and she second-guessed herself. Amy was young, but that wasn’t it. It was that she was too eager to help. The compassion necessary for facilitating an AIDS support group probably had nothing to do with embracing alternative lifestyles or empathizing with another’s suffering, and everything to do with seeing how things like support groups didn’t matter a damn in the long run, then proceeding anyway.

  “Anna,” Nick said, and waved her over.

  “Howdy,” Anna said, and sat. “You’re early.”

  Nick tapped his watch. “No, actually, you’re late. We said one o’clock.”

  Anna rarely got meeting times mixed up, but it was possible that she had misunderstood. “Apologies,” she said.

  “Perfectly all right. Amy and I were just reviewing what her role will be.”

  Anna turned to her smiling, freshly scrubbed student. “And are you comfortable with it? Does it seem like something you can manage?” Anna asked.

  Amy nodded. “I think so. I mean, yes.”

  Anna listened as Nick spent a half an hour reviewing the objectives of this support group, and how to recognize when it was her job, as a moderator, to steer the discussion into a different direction if necessary. “You’ll do fine. Occasionally patients might ask you for medical advice, but you’ll remind them that you’re not a physician. The focus should be on living with AIDS, not dying from it. A chronic life-threatening illness, not an immediate death sentence.”

  Amy said she understood.

  “This is really just an overflow meeting, remember, at the patients’ request. So, your primary duty is to defuse the occasional outburst. Most of these group members have known each other for years. If there’s anything you’re unsure about, call one of us.”

  Amy nodded. Anna looked at Nick. “Us? Who’s included in that pronoun?”

  Nick said, “Me, Dr. Klein, the psych resident, and you.”

  “Me? What kind of assistance would I be?”

  “Oh, just in the capacity of Amy’s mentor,” Nick said.

  Anna felt her temper flare a little; she’d told Nick from the beginning that she had little interest or belief in support groups. But, she turned to Amy. “That’s fine. I’m sure you’ll be terrific, but you can always call me if you need to.”

  “And I was hoping you wouldn’t mind just sitting in on the first meeting, which starts at three. I reserved the conference room on the third floor for today and next week. Subsequent meeting places yet to be determined. Maybe here, maybe not. I’ll let you know.” Nick looked at his watch. “Okay, Amy, if you want to head upstairs, Anna will join you in a few minutes.”

  Amy stood, gathered her papers. “Thank you, Mrs. Brinkman,” she said to Anna. “For agreeing to help me the first few weeks.”

  Without missing a beat, Anna said, “It’s my pleasure, dear. This is a good opportunity for you.” She smiled, waited until Amy was gone, then turned to Nick. “You’re a jackass.”

  “Anna—”

  “I didn’t agree to anything other than to provide you with a student, who by the way, from what I can tell will be nothing more than a glorified babysitter.”

  “Now, Anna—”

  “My husband was a physician. I know how hospitals run. Risk management probably wouldn’t agree to let you have the extra time unless you provided them with a coordinator. Which is in name only.”

  “That’s not true, Anna.”

  “Someone from the janitorial staff would also qualify. Or one of the clerks in the gift shop.”

  “Anna!”

  She stopped.

  “I did tell you that your student’s role would not be as an official mental health worker. It’s true that it’s hospital policy to have an appointed leader for any gathering, but it is certainly not true that I am using her as a glorified baby-sitter.”

  Anna took a deep breath. “And is it also true that I’m sitting in on these meetings for the first few weeks?”

  “Well, that was unfair of me not to ask you. I’m sorry. But I told you I wouldn’t be available Saturdays. I’d supervise today’s meeting except that I’m filling in for a colleague on hospital rounds. For which,” he said, and looked at his watch, “I’m late. Also, Anna, I do think Amy will be more likely to admit any problems or concerns to you than to me or Klein.” He paused. “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Oh? What did you have in mind?”

  “Dinner?”

  Anna snorted. “Pass. But I wouldn’t say no to five or six new Bausch & Lomb microscopes for my lab. Or a box of rare specimen slides of viruses from far-flung places.”

  “Done,” Nick said.

  Anna stood, turned to go.

  “Oh, hey Anna.” Nick held out the book she had left on the table, frowned at the title, Women Who Roar: A Pride of Women Hunting in Africa.

  She took the book from him and headed upstairs.

  The next hour was such a disaster that even Anna was tempted to walk out fifteen minutes into it the way Amy herself did.

  How was she supposed to anticipate this? She’d been around medicine most of her life, had helped people, including her own husband, through sickness and dying. She’d softened the blow of bad news, and helped the convalescing, but this illness, apparently, didn’t gentle and humble most people the way something like cancer did. Anna was half-expecting exhausted patients propped up in chairs and their equally exhausted caregivers. Instead, she heard them from halfway down the hall when she first walked up. The room was filled with a riot of personalities and the sugar-saturated energy of a kindergarten class.

  As soon as Anna walked in, Amy brightened and introduced herself. “Hello, I’m Amy,” she’d said, and the group of them, in unison, replied, “Hi, Amy,” as though it were an AA meeting. Things tumbled downhill from there. They interrupted her, talked over her, and ignored her attempts to moderate the discussion. Anna remained silent; she didn’t want Amy to feel undermined.

  Then fifteen minutes into the meeting, Amy walked out. Anna stayed and finished out the hour, then went immediately to find Nick on his rounds.

  “Hi,” he said, writing in a chart. “How did it go? Where’s Katie?”

  “Amy. She had the good sense to leave.”

  “Shit,” he said, and snapped the chart closed. “Was it as bad as all that?”

  “Worse than all that. Those men gave her a hard time.”

  “I’m sorry. They’re lively it’s true. I thought I told Allie that.”

  “Amy. You did, but she’s out of her depth here.”

  “Maybe I should have prepared her better.” He waved over a group of residents, who were huddled together at the nurses’ stations like a flock of starlings on a telephone line. “I have to finish rounds, but can we talk about this later? I’ll call you tonight, okay? We’ll sit down with the next student you give me for a few hours. I should have stressed one of the unique features of this illness. Assholes become complete assholes as they get sicker. This is the single most difficult thing the patient’s caregiver has to deal with. Their partners were always a little demanding and obsessive, for instance, but now when they’re really sick, it gets out of control. I’ll call you later.”

  “No,” Anna said. “Sorry, but I don’t think any of my students are adequately trained for this. Why don’t you ask one of your students to run it?”

  Nick glanced over Anna’s shoulder. “Dr. Lee, start the rounds without me. Room 405, sixty-year-old Caucasian male who presented with abdominal pain. Hypertensive, previous M.I.” Nick waited for the group to walk past. “I told you, Anna. My residents are ridiculously overworked as it is. I can’t ask them to take on extra duties. Well, I did ask, but none of them agreed to help out. If you don’t want to commit another student, I’ll just tell my patients that there will be no
overflow Saturday group until I can find another moderator. They’ll have to adjust. Sorry to have involved you in this.”

  “Okay,” Anna said. “Good luck with finding someone. By the way, why did you come to me in the first place?”

  He shrugged. “Hugh used to talk about how bright you were, how much you loved medicine and how good your instincts about people were.”

  Anna caught her breath. “You knew my husband?”

  He nodded. “We were on-call together a lot when we were residents. He talked about you all the time. We were all envious of him. Of how lucky he was to have a wife who understood the demands of the job.”

  Anna leaned against the doorway of a supply closet. From inside, a panoply of odors reached her, the most prominent of which was Xylene, the chemical used to clean microscopes and slides. Hugh used to tease her about how much she loved the scent of it.

  “Let me think things through. I’m not promising anything, though. But it seems to me that if I give you another student, I should give you a lion, not a lamb.”

  Nick looked at her over the top of his glasses. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you don’t need someone with a surplus of compassion, you need someone with an edge who can deflect all the insults. Edges, I understand. The touchy-feely-weepy instinct is one I never had.”

  “You might be right,” he said. “Incidentally, was there one person in particular who drove Amy away?”

  “Well, sort of. Two men. They were having a fight about blue socks.”

  “Alan and Michael. I would have guessed that. I’ll speak to the two of them. They’re almost always keyed up.”