Those hours in Viola’s house were the most revelatory of Tom’s life. Viola had always seemed modest in the clinic, but in the privacy of her home she shed her modesty with her clothes. She had no difficulty granting Tom’s desire that she sit or stand and be stared at from all sides, while he tried to take in the profound simplicity of her beauty. Her skin was soft and without blemish. This perfection was partly youth, he knew, but even with young white women, whom he saw unclothed on a regular basis, he had the impression that no limb was quite aware of what the others were doing, that the whole was very much a collection of parts. Viola was all of a piece. Each part flowed into the next with seamless fluidity, so that medical terms like ventral, dorsal, medial, and distal blurred into meaninglessness.

Her abandonment of modesty extended much further than nudity. In her daily role as a nurse, Viola was a model of self-possession, politeness, and rectitude. With some adult patients she spoke only when spoken to; with others she was as intimate as a family member, providing comfort while moving things along without the patients becoming aware they were being “handled.” Throughout, her rich voice remained carefully modulated, like a cello being played by a master of control. In her own house, though, Viola spoke without restraint. She purred, keened, groaned, shrieked, sang—all without a trace of self-consciousness. The first time Tom heard her laugh with complete freedom, something in his heart leaped, as it had when hearing the trilling of a bird in the forests of his youth. It was then that he understood something of what those children must have felt when she focused all her attention upon them in the clinic, chanting softly, entrancing them with the Creole language of her girlhood.