“For me it’s Staffordshire.”

“My advice would be to call Dr. Haim and then go out and treat yourself to a couple of great Staffordshire pieces. Ones you’ve always wanted. Call me later. Here’s my home and cell phone number.” Frankie gave her a card.

“Thank you, Dr. Weissman.” Pippa got up.

“Let’s hear from the specialists before you talk to Alex.”

“Should I talk to Arnie Berkowitz?”

“That’s up to you.” Frankie tried to answer nonchalantly.

“You don’t like him.”

“I’m not going to step on his toes.”

Frankie handed Pippa her son’s brain scans and called for her nurse.

“Irina, how behind am I?”

“I’d say forty-five minutes.”

“All right. No lunch. Let me see the next patient.”

If pediatrics was a seasonal practice, Frankie believed there were also days that seemed like nuclear winter. After Pippa Rose left, Frankie diagnosed and hospitalized a third of her East Harlem patients with asthma, which was consistent with her current figures that East Harlem had the city’s highest pediatric asthma hospitalization rate at 23.3 percent. In addition, she sent a six-month-old baby to an emergency room with a collapsed lung, found lead poisoning in three eight-year-olds, got positive test results for an eleven-year-old Dalton student with lymphoma, and received a call that a former patient, a Harvard student and heir to an aluminum fortune, had died of a heroin overdose.

Frankie had promised to stop in to take a look at Abraham, but the lingering effects of Judy Tremont’s tantrum and the day’s prognoses made a walk down Fifth Avenue and perhaps a drink with Jil seem far more preferable. On the other hand, she didn’t want to disappoint Abraham. She liked the idea that perhaps he would still notice that she came.

“Hi, Dad, it’s me.” She smiled at him when she entered the room and found him watching a CNN documentary featuring the president.

“Terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

As the president continued, Frankie tried again to speak to her father. “Dad, how are you doing?” He shushed her.

“By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

“Do you know him?” Abraham asked Frankie.

“What, Dad?”

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“No, Dad, that’s the president of the United States.”

“This is a stupid war.” He suddenly shut off the television.

“I think so, too, Dad.”

Frankie was thrown by her father’s lucidity.

“Can you please get the doctor for me?” Abraham turned his full attention to Frankie. “I haven’t seen him yet today.”

“Do you need to see a doctor?” Frankie asked her father.