“No Listerine and lots of bad breath?” I said.

Glenna and Robin laughed. Biff ignored them and said, “Before Lister, doctors didn’t wash their hands or clean their instruments. Infections were rampant. Lister used phenol to kill bacteria and drastically lowered the rate of postsurgical infection.”

Now Biff ignored me and, shifting his gaze between Glenna and Robin, said, “It’s the moral thing to do.”

“It’s dumb,” Robin said, and cleaned another mound of ice cream off her spoon.

“Dumb?” Biff replied. “Is it smarter to pretend you’re going to start a revolution in the most materialistic society in history? Or stop a war that will not end until Nixon gets good and ready to end it?”

Robin said, “I’ll still be a doctor.”

Biff said, “There are more important things than being a doctor.”

By this point, I thought Glenna would have spoken up, but she just sat there, staring down at the wide-pine floor.

Chapter 20

ON JULY 1, Glenna entered her last year of med school. I knew that if I wanted to be with her after she graduated, I’d have to get a real job or feel like a freeloader next summer when she began her internship. My best prospect was to catch on as a staff reporter with the Long Island Press. I asked Mack Grunch about it, and he said, “All our new hires got diplomas. Don’t mean these pinheads can read and write, but they got a sheepskin. You get one, kid, I’ll hire you.”

I registered for summer courses at Brooklyn, figuring that I could keep doing freelance pieces and complete the last thirty-seven credits for my degree by the end of next summer. For now, I was no longer worried about the draft. The war was winding down, and on December 1, men between nineteen and twenty-six would have a number assigned to their birthdays by lottery, and this would determine the order in which you were called. Estimates were that in 1970 only the top third of the list would have to report for physicals, and the bonus was that if you weren’t summoned during the year, you were done with the draft. All I’d have to do is draw a lucky number, ditch my 2-S, and wait.

Life should have been easier for Glenna—the pressure on fourth-year students is not as intense as on the third-years—but she had a new distraction. I heard about it on an overcast Sunday afternoon when we were walking on a path along the bank of Spuyten Duyvil Creek.

“Palmer rented the second floor of a town house on Madison,” she said. “Between East Ninety-Seventh and Ninety-Eighth.”

“Biff’s moving out?” I replied with phony good cheer, knowing that she meant he’d selected a site for his clinic.

“It’s less than a block from Mount Sinai Hospital,” Glenna said. “Palmer says Andy Westrich messed up being in Riverdale. It’s too residential. With Mount Sinai nearby our area’s loaded with doctors, med students, and nurses. We won’t stick out.”