“But, chérie, it works that way only if someone is keeping score—if some Supreme Being will ratify your decision, or you’ll be rewarded for what you’ve done, or at least upheld.”

“No,” she said, choosing her words thoughtfully as she proceeded. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. Think of what I’ve said. I’m telling you something that is obviously new to you. Maybe it’s a religious secret.”

“How so?”

“There are many nights when I lie awake, fully aware that there may be no personal God, and that the suffering of the children I see every day in our hospitals will never be balanced or redeemed. I think of those old arguments—you know, how can God justify the suffering of a child? Dostoevsky asked that question. So did the French writer Albert Camus. We ourselves are always asking it. But it doesn’t ultimately matter.

“God may or may not exist. But misery is real. It is absolutely real, and utterly undeniable. And in that reality lies my commitment—the core of my faith. I have to do something about it!”

“And at the hour of your death, if there is no God … ”

“So be it. I will know that I did what I could. The hour of my death could be now.” She gave a little shrug. “I wouldn’t feel any different.”

“This is why you feel no guilt for our being there in the bed together.”

She considered. “Guilt? I feel happiness when I think of it. Don’t you know what you’ve done for me?” She waited, and slowly her eyes filled with tears. “I came here to meet you, to be with you,” she said, her voice thickening. “And I can go back to the mission now.”

She bowed her head, and slowly, silently regained her calm, her eyes clearing. Then she looked up and spoke again.

“When you spoke of making this child, Claudia … when you spoke of bringing your mother, Gabrielle, into your world … you spoke of reaching for something. Would you call it a transcendence? When I work until I drop in the mission hospital, I transcend. I transcend doubt and something … something perhaps hopeless and black inside myself. I don’t know.”

“Hopeless and black, yes, that’s the key, isn’t it? The music didn’t make this go away.”

“Yes, it did, but it was false.”

“Why false? Why was doing that good—playing the piano—false?”

“Because it didn’t do enough for others, that’s why.”

“Oh, but it did. It gave them pleasure, it had to.”

“Pleasure?”

“Forgive me, I’m choosing the wrong tack. You’ve lost yourself in your vocation. When you played the piano, you were yourself—don’t you see? You were the unique Gretchen! It was the very meaning of the word ‘virtuoso.’ And you wanted to lose yourself.”

“I think you’re right. The music simply wasn’t my way.”

“Oh, Gretchen, you frighten me!”

“But I shouldn’t frighten you. I’m not saying the other way was wrong. If you did good with your music—your rock singing, this brief career you described—it was the good you could do. I do good my way, that’s all.”