His young soul was rent between the pious superstition of the old lady and the father who carefully remained sober each Yom Kippur so for some important secret reason he could go fishing. Her superstition and her religion had their attractions, but too much of what she said was transparently silly. For the most part he voted silently with his father, perhaps because he was searching so hard for something within the man that he could admire.

And yet, when in her eightieth year and his fifteenth year she sickened and began to fail, he ached for her. When Dr. Calabrese’s long black Packard began to be parked in front of the tenement house on Larimer Avenue with increasing regularity, he prayed for her. When she died one morning with a coquettish smile on her lips he cried for her and realized at last the real identity of the Harlequin. He no longer wished to impersonate the jester-inamorato who was death; instead he decided that some day he would drive a long new car like Dr. Calabrese and fight L’Arlecchino all the way.

He said goodbye to the old lady at the finest funeral offered by her Sons of Italy insurance, but she never completely left him. Years later, when he had become a doctor and a surgeon and had done and seen things she had never dreamed about in Petruro or even in East Liberty, his initial reaction to misfortune was an instantaneous subconscious search for the Harlequin. If one of his hands was in his pocket the fingers involuntarily assumed the sign of the horns. His father and his grandmother had left him with an unending internal conflict: bullshit, the man of science mocked, while the little boy was whispering, scutta mal occhio, poo-poo-poo.

Now in the men’s room of the diner he stowed away his toilet articles and then like an ungainly waterfowl, first one leg raised and then the other against the filthy danger of the unpleasant floor, divested himself of the jeans and then of the blue workshirt. The shirt and suit that he dug from the B-4 bag were somewhat wrinkled but presentable. The tie looked not nearly as good as it had eighteen months before, when it was secondhand-new, purchased from a third-year student who was a bad poker player. The dark shoes that replaced the sneakers retained a fair shine.

As he walked back out through the diner the cow behind the counter switched her tail and stared as if trying to decide where she had seen him before.

Outside, it was lighter. A taxi hummed a quiet mechanical song at the curb, the driver lost behind the racing form, dreaming the eternal dream at 8 to 1. Adam asked if Suffolk County General Hospital was within walking distance.

“County Hospital? Sure.”

“How do I walk there?”

The cabby allowed one quick grin to break his lips. “The hard way. Way the hell cross town. Too early for a bus, nowhere near a subway.” The man put down the racing form, confident of a fare.