Peace, he decided years later.

That peace was shattered now by the ringing of the telephone, which, still asleep, he answered.

“Adam? Spurgeon.”

“Yo,” he said, yawning.

“We may have a kidney donor, pal.”

He was less sleepy. “Yeah?”

“I just brought a patient in. Compound depressed skull fracture with lots of brain damage. Meomartino’s assisting Harold Poole with the neurosurgery right now. He said for me to tell you the EEG showed no electrical activity at all.”

Now he was wide awake.

“What’s the patient’s blood type?” he said.

“AB.”

“Susan Garland is AB. That means this kidney goes to Susan Garland.”

“Ah—Meomartino says to tell you the patient’s mother is in the waiting room. The name is Connors.”

“Goddammit.” The task of securing legal permission for transplantation was left to the Chief Resident and the Surgical Fellow. Invariably, he had noticed, Meomartino, the Fellow, was busy with other urgent duties when it came time to talk with the next-of-kin. “I’ll be right down,” he said.

Mrs. Connors was sitting with her pastor, only slightly prepared by the fact that her son had been given Extreme Unction. She was a life-worn woman with a talent for disbelief.

“Ah, don’t be telling me something like that,” she said, with filled eyes and a tremulous smile, as if she could reason him out of the entire thing. “He isn’t,” she insisted. “He isn’t dying. Not my Paullie.”

She was technically correct, Adam thought. By that time, to all intents and purposes, her boy was already dead. The Boston Edison Company was keeping him breathing. Once the electric respirator was switched off, within twenty minutes he would be gone entirely.

He could never tell them he was sorry; it was so inadequate.

She began to weep, achingly.

He waited the long interval until she had regained some control and then as gently as possible he explained about Susan Garland. “Do you understand about the little girl? She’ll die, too, unless we give her another kidney.”

“Poor lamb,” she said.

He didn’t know whether she meant her son or the girl.

“Then you would sign the permission slip?”

“He’s been torn up enough. But if it will save some other mother’s child . . .”

“We hope that it will,” Adam said. The permission secured, he thanked her and fled.

“Our Lord gave up his entire body for you and for me,” he heard the priest say as he walked away. “For Paul, too, for that matter.”

“I never said I was Mary, Father,” the woman said.

Depressed, he felt it would help his spirits to see the opposite side of the coin.

In Room 308 Bonita Garland, Susan’s mother, sat in a chair and knitted. As usual when the girl saw him from her bed she pulled the sheet up to her neck over nightgowned acorn-breasts, a gesture he carefully refrained from noticing. She was propped against two pillows and reading Mad, which somehow relieved him. Weeks earlier during a long sleepless night when she was hooked up to the splashing dialysis machine that periodically washed her blood free of the poisons accumulated because of her ruined kidneys, he had seen her leafing through Seventeen and had teased her about reading the magazine when she was scarcely fourteen herself.