“I’m still going to be an intern.”

“Was it awful?”

“They rubbed my nose in it the way you do to a puppy.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. The world’s greatest living authority on the odontoid process.” Suddenly husky, he found himself babbling to her about the big fat soul sister and the sweetest little soft-assed well-hung baby boy delivered to life because Dr. Robinson was a fearless frontline physician.

“I love you, Spurgeon,” she said, very quietly but distinctly, and he could picture her standing there in the kitchen in her nightgown with her beautiful hand cupping the receiver and her mother hovering like a great dark butterfly.

“Listen,” he said. But loudly, not caring if Adam Silverstone or anybody else in the universe heard him. “I love you, too, even more than I want your nubile Nubian body. Which is a good deal more than considerably.”

“You’re crazy,” she said in her old maid school teacher’s voice.

“Uh-huh. But when your ticket into the great white middle classes is finally punched, I’ll be the canceling instrument.”

He thought she was laughing, but he couldn’t be sure because she had hung up on him. He blew a loud, wet kiss into the buzzing telephone.

9: Harland Longwood

9

Harland Longwood

As his illness wore on Harland Longwood became accustomed to it, as if it were an ugly and hated garment he couldn’t cast off for economic reasons. He found himself able to sleep less and less at night, a mixed misfortune since he accomplished his most effective writing when the apartment building in Cambridge was muffled in black velvet and the world intruded through his closed windows with a minimum of sound.

He wrote swiftly, using material accumulated with painstaking slowness over the course of many years, and completing a careful second draft of each chapter before proceeding to the next. When he had finished three chapters, he knew it was time for the test, and after a great deal of deliberation he chose three eminent surgeons, each living far enough from Boston so that word of Longwood’s illness would not yet have reached him. The chapter on thoracic surgery went to a professor at McGill, the chapter on hernia went to a surgeon at Loma Linda Hospital in Los Angeles, the chapter on surgical technique to a man at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

When their critiques arrived he knew he wasn’t simply chasing a foolish, ego-born dream.