“Was it the seltzer? Your father says I shouldn’t have made a fuss.”

“The seltzer was dynamite, Ma. Glenna thought sending Tamara for the napkins was even better.”

My mother chuckled. “She’s clever, your Glenna.”

“Why don’t you like her?”

“What’s not to like? A girl going to be a doctor, she’s smart as a whip. And so pretty. I told Aunt Lil on the phone this morning how smart and pretty.”

“Ma?”

Opening the refrigerator, she said, “Glenna reminds me of your sister.”

“What’d you mean?”

“Elaine’s very smart and very pretty.”

“Dumb and ugly’s better?”

“Easier,” she said, bringing the creamer to the table and sitting down. “Today it’s easier. Like with Elaine. At Boston University she wants to be an anthropologist. She graduates and then gets a master’s in social work. She says she loves Boston, and the next week, she says a job in New York appeals to her, and maybe there’s one in Los Angeles she’ll take. So what does she do? She goes running around Europe. It was the same with her boyfriends. This fella’s swell on Tuesday, and by Wednesday he’s not, but there’s another swell fella she met on a train, and the fella she met in the park, he’s also swell. Girls like your sister, like Glenna, they have too many choices. They can’t make up their minds.” My mother put some cream in her coffee cup. “I don’t dislike Glenna, but I love you, and she’s a girl like your sister, and they …”

“They what, Ma?”

“They hurt men.”

Since my mom wasn’t in the habit of dispensing wisdom to hear herself talk, I should have considered what she had to say. But I couldn’t imagine Glenna hurting me, and being in bed with her night and day did little to stimulate the darker regions of my imagination.

Besides, 1968 wasn’t a very good year for listening to your mother.

Chapter 9

SO, WHEN DOES our story begin? After Glenna finished her psychiatry rotation and started playing doctor for real on the wards. If psych was a vacation, medicine and surgery were sentences to the rock pile, and Glenna had those two rotations back-to-back, beginning with medicine.

She was assigned to the team directed by Dr. Arthur Feldstein, coauthor of Internal Medicine, the specialty’s twenty-seven-hundred-page bible. Glenna described Feldstein as a diagnostic wizard with intelligent eyebrows, whatever that meant, and halitosis, a malodorous consequence of his postnasal drip. Monday through Saturday, Feldstein led his team on rounds, which jumped off at 7:00 a.m., and God help you if you were late. Feldstein was an acerbic taskmaster and greeted the tardy with nose-to-nose harangues, and with that breath of his it was like being trapped downwind from an elephant with a chronic bowel disorder. With Feldstein at the head of the column, the resident, interns, and students slogged from room to room, examining their twenty-odd patients, and presenting their cases and suppositions to Feldstein, who entertained himself by clearing his throat and picking lint off his tie. When his team was done, Feldstein generally responded, “It’s lamentable that sloth and ignorance cannot be readily treated,” and concluded by doling out the relevant pearls of wisdom and commanding his team to get to it.