“Tell you what,” Nightingale said. “Forget all about that. Just sign me a few prescription blanks. I’ll get us some real bread.”

“So long, Speed,” he said.

“Damn good bread.”

As he passed the man behind the bar on his way out, the music-lover didn’t even look up from the glass-polishing.

He found catharsis in the music that made him looser in the OR, able to be sharper and more intense as a surgeon. Through comparison he discovered he was not bad. That Friday, he found himself scheduled for the operating room to assist Dr. Parkhurst and Stanley Potter. Inevitably he and the resident had to work together, but each occasion was an unpleasant experience with no banter and the time passing slowly.

That morning they grafted on Joseph Grigio, the burns case, transplanting fresh skin from the thigh to the chest. Then they had an appendectomy in a very obese patient named Macmillan, a sergeant in the Metropolitan District Commission police department. The man’s grossness forced them to cut through what seemed to be interminable fat, and then Dr. Parkhurst sliced off the worm and left them to tie the appendix stump and close.

Spurgeon was snipping while Potter held and tied. It seemed to him that the resident was pulling the Chromic O catgut too hard around the stump. He was certain of it when the suture began to disappear into the tissue.

“You’ve got it too tight.”

Potter looked at him coldly. “This is just the way I’ve always done it, very successfully.”

“The suture looks as though it may cut through the serosa.”

“It will be all right.”

“But . . .”

Potter was holding the suture, staring at him sardonically and waiting for him to snip.

Spurgeon shrugged and shook his head. This guy is a resident and I’m an intern, he thought. He snipped like a good little boy.

He didn’t go back to the Ace High. Instead, that Sunday he asked Mrs. Williams if he could practice once in a while on their piano. It was a bad instrument and driving to Natick wasn’t as convenient as taking the subway to Washington Street, but the music pleasured Mrs. Williams and it gave him a chance to see Dorothy.

On Tuesday evening, while outside the first winter snow fell, they sat whispering together in the living room, with her mother and father and the little girl all sleeping nearby behind partially closed doors, and she told him she knew something was eating away at him.

He found himself whispering hoarsely about the old lady who had died because of him and about the Death Committee and of the fact that he could always make a good living out of music.

“Oh, Spurgeon.”