Dad sighs heavily, then leans back in the leather chair behind his desk. No matter how aged and battered his body gets, his blue-gray eyes, like his mind, remain incisively clear. But this evening the bags under them tell me that he hasn’t slept for many hours, maybe even days. Fifteen years ago his face developed a healthy roundness over his bones. After his beard went white, children sometimes mistook him for Santa Claus in December. But now, seven weeks after a heart attack, he’s become gaunt and angular again. With his hollow cheeks and eyes, he reminds me of Mathew Brady’s photograph of Robert E. Lee, taken shortly after the surrender at Appomattox. The civilian clothes Lee wore in that photo could not disguise the solemn gaze of a man who’d endured loss of a magnitude known to only a few men throughout history. A shadow of that look darkens my father’s face now.

“I’m not going to talk about last night,” he says.

Stonewalling is no longer an option, but I’m going to wait a few minutes to tell him that. “I’m not asking about last night. I’m asking about Viola herself.”

His chair creaks as he leans farther back (at least I hope it was his chair; it might have been his joints). “Viola was a Revels, originally. That’s a famous name across the South. Hiram Revels was the first black U.S. senator, seated during Reconstruction. He represented Mississippi. I never knew whether or not Viola was descended from him, and she didn’t either, but I always suspected she was. Revels was a brilliant man, and Viola was pretty sharp herself.”

“Was she a trained nurse?”

“Not formally. She wasn’t an RN, or even an LPN. Back in those days, the docs would take on some of the smartest girls and train them right in the hospitals. And I’ll tell you, some of the nurses who came out of those programs knew more medicine than those I see getting out of the schools today. That’s how Esther was trained. Same program. It was hands-on from the first day, the way it was in the army.”

Esther Ford worked for my father longer than any other nurse, nearly forty years, and by the time she retired last year she was a physician assistant. Four months after she retired, Esther died of a stroke in her sleep. I’d give almost anything to have her around to question about Viola’s relationship with Dad.