On most evenings when Glenna wasn’t on call at Presbyterian, we sat side by side in bed, Glenna reading The Merck Manual while I hunched over the lapboard she’d given me writing stories. Sometimes, when Glenna finished up her surgical rounds early, I met her at the hospital, and we caught the subway to Chinatown and ate sesame noodles or went to the movies or explored the Village.

As my relationship with Glenna progressed, my interest in Vietnam waned, but the luster of the war was further dulled for me as it became apparent that I could be a writer without getting shot at. The profile I’d done on Dan Kamminski, the beer-selling bookie at Madison Square Garden, had caused a small stir. The local New York TV stations had featured Kammi on the news, citing my Long Island Press piece, and Mack Grunch jumped my fee from twenty bucks an article to thirty and heaped assignments on me.

Ultimately, though, I viewed journalism as an apprenticeship for fiction, and I began turning out one short story every two weeks. Glenna read each of them, frequently over my shoulder as I sat at her desk typing the final draft on my Smith-Corona.

“Gordo, did your father really take your mother to see the Patterson-Johansson fight at the Polo Grounds for their anniversary?”

“He also took me and my sister.”

“That’s funny.”

“My mother didn’t think so.”

“No, I mean the story. It’s very funny. I know somebody’s going to publish it.”

Because this was our glorious winter, I let myself believe that Glenna was right, and on this particular evening, after I rolled the last page out of the typewriter, we went into the city for Irish coffee at the West End Bar, then strolled along the river, the snowflakes glazing the hills and hollows of Riverside Park. The night was like many other nights that winter. The streetlamps always seemed to be on, and the smoky-blue darkness was always descending as softly as the snow, through which Glenna and I lightly stepped, with a delicious symmetry to our wills and our wishes that would not survive the spring.

IN MARCH, Glenna and Robin traveled to Albany with a busload of NYMSRAL members to lend support to Biff, who was testifying before the Joint Legislative Committee on Public Health. NYMSRAL had issued a voluminous report on the health risks of illegal abortions, and when Assemblyman Cohane, the sponsor of the reform bill, read it, he invited Biff to testify. According to Glenna, Biff was at his didactic best when he summarized the report, bowling over the committee with a ghastly litany about the cases of endometriosis that occurred when untrained hands punctured a uterus, an excruciating mishap whose outcome was often sterility for the patient. He cited the gruesome statistic that in New York City, 74 deaths per 100,000 resulted from illegal abortions, while in nations that legalized the procedure, the rate plummeted to 3 per 100,000.

Biff was so enthralled by his performance that he decided to throw a party. Robin and Glenna were also psyched about it, and when the three of them got done with the guest list, they had invited every member of NYMSRAL, Biff’s fellow residents, and the 1970 graduating class of the med school.