“Well?” she said, when her clothing and her dignity had been restored.

“I think you’re probably a pretty good diagnostician,” he said. “My guess would be a duodenal ulcer. But I’m going to make an appointment for you to have a G.I. series.”

“Ah, what a lot of bother.” She shook her head, unable to thank him, but she smiled at him again. “I had a good time last night, Dr. Meomartino. Your wife is very beautiful.”

“Yes,” he said. Unaccountably, for the first time since the news of Guillermo’s death, he felt behind his eyelids a sharp salt sting which he ignored until, like everything else, it went away.

14: Spurgeon Robinson

14

Spurgeon Robinson

When Adam moved into the apartment on Beacon Hill, Spurgeon had been left all alone and lonely on the sixth floor and he began to play the guitar more and more to the old walls, the music a fun-house mirror that distorted his soul’s reflection. He was desperately in love, he should have been ecstatic. But the songs he played chortled with the kind of joy that meant he was so sad he couldn’t bear to think about it. To make happier music he would have had to buy a banjo and work in the fields.

It was everywhere around him and each day he saw it more clearly.

“Can you tell me,” Moylan asked him one morning, “how something like this can happen here?” He was looking at a baby with a fascination compounded of horror and fear, the kind of expression Spurgeon remembered on the faces of medical students examining for the first time the textbook photographs of abnormal fetuses.

This baby was colored. It was hard to determine his age, because malnutrition had eaten away the infant fat that is a birthgift, leaving the spare, wrinkled visage of an old man. His muscles had atrophied and he lay there weak and dying, his matchstick limbs accentuating the swollen little belly.

“It can happen anywhere,” Spurgeon said. “Anywhere at all where a kid doesn’t get enough nourishment to stoke the fire.”

“No. I can understand how you might find something like this in a sharecropper’s cabin in Mississippi,” Moylan said.

“Can you, man?”

“Hell, you know what I mean. But here, in this city . . .” He shook his head and they walked away from the sight together.

Spurgeon couldn’t flee far enough.

When he was through with his thirty-six hours, almost against his will he took the elevated into Roxbury and got off at the Dudley Street station and started to walk, passing the Ace High without going in, continuing destinationless until he no longer saw a face that was white, only skins that were tan to black in many in-between shades.