He went back to bed but all hope of sleep was gone. He didn’t know the quotation. Surrendering finally, he dressed and went to the hospital library to consult Bartlett’s. It was by Aline Kilmer, whose husband Joyce had been killed while a young man and presumably still lovable. There were two more lines:

I’m sorry you are wiser,
I’m sorry you are taller;

I liked you better foolish,
And I liked you better smaller.

Despite himself he felt the stab, as his father had known he would. I should simply forget about him, he thought, write him out of my life.

Instead he sat down and wrote a short note and enclosed the fifteen dollars, sending it with an air mail stamp he stole from the nurses’ station while Helen Fultz pretended not to notice.

Gaby Pender.

She had him mesmerized, with her over-all tan and her juicy plum. He thought of her constantly, telephoned her too often. She had gone to the student health service, she told him when he asked; the lump had turned out to be nothing, not even a lump, just muscle and imagination. Gratefully, they talked of other things. He wanted to see her again, as soon as possible.

Susan Garland came between them by dying. Saving Joseph Grigio’s life didn’t make up for losing Susan Garland’s: he found that in medicine there was no such thing as evening the score.

His spirit became infected with a world-weariness that frightened him, but he couldn’t cast it off. Perhaps Gaby’s fear of mortality had made him more sensitive than was desirable, he thought. For whatever the reason, he discovered within himself a deep well of fury at their impotence to deal with the waste of beautiful lives.

For the first time since leaving medical school he felt great doubt as he made his rounds in the ward. He found himself seeking confirmation of professional opinions, shying away from making independent decisions that a few weeks before would not have caused him to hesitate.

He turned his anger inward, finding fault with everything about Adam Silverstone.

His body, for example.

The old diving days were gone but he was still young, he told himself peevishly, looking in the mirror and thinking of the soft white grubs his Uncle Frank used to spade up in the spring when he turned the soil for his tomato garden.

When he stood in his underwear and looked down he could see a soft roundness of belly, the kind of an abdomen that should belong only to a woman not long pregnant.

He picked up sneakers and a sweat suit at the Harvard Coop and began to run regularly, half a dozen times around the block whenever he finished a stretch of duty. At night the darkness gave him privacy but when he ran in the morning he sometimes galloped through a gauntlet of nurses’ titters.