You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read online

  Doctor Coursaget was telling Howard that either he or Doctor Joussaume would be checking in on Deirdre at least once every day. Howard moved away from the doctor, toward Deirdre. He saw Doctor Maubert reach inside Deirdre’s body, after which the room began to go dark, the floor to rise toward him.

  “Come with me, please,” Doctor Coursaget was saying, his hand gripping Howard’s elbow.

  Howard wanted to push the man away, but the only thing he could do was stare at the pair of pale gloved hands that were vanishing inside Deirdre’s stomach. And if she had known about Charlie—one of the medical students they’d been friends with would surely have given her the news—had she, then, proposed their ten days in France not out of her need to be comforted, but out of consideration for his feelings, so that, after she was gone, by having been able to make good on his promise, he would feel absolved of a measure of his guilt?

  He sat on a bench, his head between his legs, and could not recall having walked from the operating room to the corridor in which he was now sitting. Doctor Coursaget sat beside him.

  “It happens to all of us,” Doctor Coursaget said, a hand on Howard’s shoulder. “There is no need to be embarrassed.”

  Howard sat up, drank from the glass of water Doctor Coursaget offered.

  “We did the best we could,” Doctor Coursaget said again. “Your friend will be in the recovery room for a while, and you can visit with her there. We sedated her quite heavily, however, so I do not expect that she will wake for several hours.”

  A few minutes later, the doctor shook Howard’s hand and left, and as Howard walked toward the exit—he would retrieve the car keys, then go to the parking lot and get Deirdre’s suitcase—he realized that not only had no one asked for payment, or for either of them to fill out forms, but no one had even asked that he or Deirdre show proof of insurance.

  He stepped outside, and, momentarily blinded by the bright winter sun, felt as if he had walked straight into a wall of pure white light. He felt dizzy, held onto a railing, realized that if it was Charlie’s death that had inspired her to write to him, it was also possible that she had done so—that she had wanted him to be with her now and to see her like this—out of something other than kindness.

  Overseas

  My father and I sat at the kitchen table, old newspapers stacked high, and he went over maps and photos of the Normandy Invasion with me, explaining how and why we won the war in Europe. I was ten years old. I tried to memorize numbers, and then names of generals: 4000 transports, 800 warships, more than 11,000 aircraft; Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Ramsay, Leigh-Mallory, von Rundstedt, Rommel. My father showed me where our forces established beachheads, at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula—Utah Beach and Omaha Beach—and he drew a line where General Bradley’s forces cut off the peninsula, forcing the Germans to surrender.

  Then he pushed the newspapers aside and went through the day’s mail and tore up envelopes. He roughed my hair, put the shredded pieces of envelope in the garbage pail under the sink, and told me he’d heard a funny story at work he was thinking of sending to the “Can You Top This?” radio program. The story was about a man who, while taking his physical exam for the Army, pretended to be blind. Later that day the man went to a movie to celebrate being classified 4F, and found himself sitting next to one of the doctors who’d examined him. “Excuse me,” the man said, “but could you tell me if I’m on the right train for Jamaica?”

  My father laughed before he finished telling his joke, and while I laughed with him he coughed so hard blood began splattering out of his mouth, and he tried to stop it from staining the newspapers by covering his mouth with a handkerchief. I brought him a glass of water and a fresh handkerchief, and he started to thank me but this only made him cough more. He coughed from where metal had dug out sections of his lungs. Most of the fragments had been removed at a field hospital in Italy, but the doctors told him there were still small pieces of metal they had to leave inside for the time being, and my mother had been after him to go to a Veterans Hospital to have them taken out.

  “Always remember to tear up anything with our name on it,” he said. “If the garbage collectors spill our garbage into the street, or if dogs and cats do the same, and if a policeman finds a piece of paper with our name on it, we could be fined.” He reminded me that this had happened to him once, in the first month after he returned home from the war.

  My father went into the bedroom, and when he did my mother came into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of whiskey. “So what are you looking at?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Damned right. A lady can’t even take a drink anymore without her own son giving her the evil eye.” She reached into her housecoat, took out a Hershey bar and broke off a piece for me. “Come here.”

  I went to her. “I love you, Willy,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  She peeled back the silver foil liner of the chocolate bar, then kissed each of my eyes, and I imagined that we were both remembering how quiet it used to be at night while my father was overseas and it would be just the two of us sitting at the kitchen table the way we were now, flattening out the candy liners to make baseball-sized hard silver balls from them that I’d bring to the Armory to help the war effort.

  By the time I woke the next morning, my father was already gone, and Uncle Joe was in the bedroom with my mother. They were laughing, and playing Johnny-on-the-Pony and Ringalevio-One-Two-Three. I ate a piece of the coffee cake my father had brought home. He worked as a baker for Ebinger’s Bakery, and he said they were good people even though they were Germans. “An American is always an American,” he said.

  Uncle Joe was a policeman in downtown Brooklyn, where the A & S department store, and the Paramount, Fox, and Albee Theaters were, but before the war he was the cop on our beat, and he and my father had been good friends. I’d played boxball with them in front of our house, and sat with them on our stoop when they listened to baseball games on the radio.

  Uncle Joe’s holster was on top of the ice box, but he’d taken his gun into the bedroom with him, and I was frightened that if my mother went wild the way she did sometimes, and scratched him, he would whack her with the gun. During the two years my father was in the Army, Uncle Joe had stayed with us most nights.

  “Your father’s a good man who served his country well,” Joe said to me while he strapped his holster back on.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because somebody had to keep the home fires burning, kiddo.”

  “Anyway, Joe was too old,” my mother said.

  “He could have lied about his age,” I said.

  Joe winked at me. “Honesty’s the best policy,” he said.

  “Look who’s talking,” my mother said, and she poured herself a glass of whiskey.

  “Hey, put that bottle away,” Joe said. “It’s too early.”

  He tried to grab the bottle, but got my mother’s arm instead.

  “I can do what I want,” she said. “It’s a free country, ain’t it?”

  I saw how deep Joe’s fingers were into her arm, so I let out words I’d been holding inside me: “You should have beat up on the Nazis and not on my mother.”

  “And you mind your own goddamned business!” my mother said, and she pushed Joe away.

  “Make me!” I said. “It’s a free ccountry, ain’t it? You always do what you want!”

  “Like hell I do,” she said, and she slapped me.

  “Easy on the boy,” Joe said. “Go easy now, sugar. Easy.”

  “What kind of rotten son am I raising?” my mother said. “Tell me that. What kind of a mouth does the boy have on him, huh?”

  I felt a ball of tears rolling up through my throat, but I kept it from reaching my eyes.

  “Ah, he’s a good boy,” Joe said. “He knows how to keep a secret. He knows what’s good for him, right?”

  After Joe left, my mother tried to make up to me. Sh
e kept telling me how sorry she was—how if life was perfect we’d all be angels floating on clouds above the rooftops. She drank her glass of whiskey in one swallow, then walked around the kitchen, the way she did during the war, holding the glass to her cheek and singing the song she used to sing me to sleep with: “Over there. Over there. We’re coming over. We’re coming over. And we won’t be back till it’s over, over there…”

  “Jesus, Willy,” she said, when she stopped singing. “What am I gonna do, huh? What am I gonna do?”

  I imagined her floating over a trench in Italy, with my father below, shivering, hungry, and covered with mud. I saw her drifting down to him, at night, when all the other soldiers were asleep or dying, and she looked as beautiful as a movie star to me—as if her eyes and mouth were twenty or thirty times their regular size so that you could lie down inside them if you wanted.

  That night I heard her explain to my father that he left too early for work, so that when she got out of bed to go to the bathroom or have breakfast with him, she was still groggy and bumped into things. That was where her bruises came from. All she wished was for him to be kind with her the way he used to be. “We can’t keep blaming everything on the war, Jake,” she said. “After all, we won the war, right?”

  “Sure,” my father said. “We won the war, but like they say, we lost a few battles.”

  “Yeah,” she laughed. “You could say that too, couldn’t you?”

  She spotted me watching from the foyer. “Hey Willy,” she called. “Did you hear what your father said? We won the war but we lost a few battles too. Ain’t he got a way with words, our old man?”

  She leaned over my father then, while he ate his roll and butter, and when she kissed him on the back of the neck, his head snapped up straight, as if she’d rammed him with one of her knitting needles.

  The next morning he did what my mother wanted. He stayed in bed late, and while she took a bath, he came into my room and told me he would never stop loving her, no matter what.

  “She kept me alive over there,” he said. “Just remembering how she’d take my face in her hands and, her eyes shining, tell me, ‘I love you, Jake!’—that was what kept me alive and enabled me to come home and see you both again.”

  “Over there you were a real hero,” I said, “weren’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “Not at all. I did my job and was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. I was able to kill a few of our enemies, and my fellow soldiers were able to save my life. We’re talking about chance, Willy—about minutes and miles. If I’d moved a minute earlier or later. If the bullet had been an inch lower or higher. If the field hospital had been a mile further away. If the doctor had been more fatigued or less skilful. You can take any moment in time and think of all the contingencies, and see how fortunate we are, and thereby come to understand our obligations.”

  “I don’t understand you when you talk like this,” I said.

  “I think you do, Willy. Tell me: What have I taught you?”

  “That I should always tear up envelopes. That an American is always an American. That you’ll never stop loving my mother.”

  “You’re the best son a father could wish for, and someday you’re going to be a fine man,” he said. “For a while you may be the only man in your mother’s life, but I have great confidence in you. Here are three dollar bills. You get started now. You take your mother out to breakfast, and see that she has a good meal. Leave a generous tip. It never hurts to be nice to people.”

  I went into their bedroom and told my mother that father was still at home, but that he’d switched his shift and wouldn’t be leaving for a while, and that I wanted to take her out to breakfast.

  When she finished brushing her hair dry, she stood in front of the mirror and pinned her maroon felt hat onto the side of her head. Its feather was the golden brown color her hair was in the summer. She said it made her look and feel old to have a son grown up enough to take her out to eat, so I told her how pretty she was, and I repeated jokes I knew, and I tried to act in a way that would make her look younger—the way I imagined she’d looked inside my father’s head during those times when she’d been saving his life.

  When Uncle Joe came to our apartment that morning and got into bed, my father was waiting in the bedroom. My father shot Uncle Joe, and then he shot himself. When I came home from breakfast, the apartment was quiet. I went into the bedroom first, and then I brought my mother in, to show her what had happened.

  The State of Israel

  When Ira opened his good eye, the men were still there, staring down at him. Doctor Chehade, who had performed the eye surgery the day before, reached under the sheet and took one of Ira’s hands in his own.

  “It was as I thought,” he said, speaking in English. “Several of your arteries had significant occlusions. In addition, there is evidence of a prior myocardial infarction—a silent heart attack, I believe you call such events. Am I correct, Doctor Guérard?”

  A lime-green surgical mask dangling around his neck, Doctor Guérard nodded, then spoke to Ira in French. Struggling to comprehend what he was saying—the words came to him as if through heavy gauze—Ira asked the doctor to speak in English.

  “Ah yes, well when I saw what was occurring with the occlusions, I did the angioplasties. Three. Coated angioplasty—stents, you call them, yes?—so there should be minimal fibrosis—scar tissue from the inflammatory, yes?—and for the rest, I am not worried.”

  “Why should you be,” Ira said. “It’s not your heart.”

  “Je ne comprends pas.” Doctor Guérard turned to Doctor Chehade. “Did I use the wrong languages?”

  Doctor Chehade explained that Ira had been making a joke.

  “Ah—tu rigoles avec moi! ” Doctor Guérard exclaimed. “That shows that your spirit is remaining vital. It is always a good warning when the patient is to joke with the doctor. Donc. It was my correct decision to not open your chest to do the pontages— the grafts—yes?”

  “Where am I?” Ira asked.

  Doctor Chehade explained that Ira was lying on a gurney in a hallway until a new room could be assigned to him.

  “When can I get out of here?” Ira asked. “Out there—dehors, là-bas—people are dying—”

  “In here too,” Doctor Chehade said, and turned to Doctor Guérard, who said that he wanted Ira to stay in the hospital for at least one more night to allow time for the anesthesia to wear off.

  “Then I can go?”

  “Perhaps,” Doctor Guérard said, and added that he would visit Ira later in the day to talk with him about a cardiac rehabilitation program, and about “le stress ”—about Ira’s work schedule in the United States.

  Ira shifted a lever so that he was in a sitting position on the gurney, and he became aware, for the first time, of a weight on his leg. He lifted the sheet, saw that a sandbag had been placed over his thigh where a catheter had been inserted into the femoral artery. He looked over his shoulder, expecting to see a nurse’s station, but saw only a long, dimly lit corridor, the pale glow of television sets coming from rooms on both sides of the hallway, but without sound. Was everybody asleep already? Had they forgotten he was there? Had he died and been transported to some medical purgatory where he would spend eternity waiting in a silent corridor—a world without words—for a bed?

  He considered climbing down from the gurney in order to find a nurse, but if he did, he was afraid he might bleed onto the floor, or become dizzy and pass out. A world without words : wasn’t that what his wife Hannah had named the hours they were able to spend together—hours they cherished—when they took walks together, hand in hand, or when they sat and read, evenings, in their living room, without music or television.

  Ira, a pediatrician with a practice in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, had arrived in France three days earlier, to attend an international medical conference in Nice, and it was at this conference that he had become friendly with Doctor Chehade. Doctor Chehade had inq
uired about the patch Ira wore over his eye, and Ira had explained that it was the result of being hit in the eye by a tennis ball several weeks before. He and Doctor Chehade talked easily with each other, and Ira quickly learned that the doctor had worked and studied, early in his career, at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, where Ira had also spent time. On two evenings, he and Doctor Chehade had had dinner together—had talked about Hadassah Hospital, about Israel, about their families, their work—and it was to Doctor Chehade’s hotel room that Ira had gone at once, earlier in the day, when he experienced sudden tell-tale flashing signs at the periphery of his vision, signs that he knew were symptomatic of the beginnings of retinal detachment.

  “Yes, I agree that sleep is of utmost importance at a time like this,” the man was saying, “and so I am grateful that you have slept so well. We French, you know, still believe in the cure de sommeil , which I understand finds little favor in your country even though it has proven quite effective, especially for women.”

  Ira was not aware of when this man, dressed in suit and tie, had arrived, or of how long he had been there. The man was explaining that of course one utilized medications—combinations of anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications, along with hypnotiques—but that what was essential to the sleeping cure was that patients be removed from the ordinary anxieties that pressed upon them, that they be put into prolonged states of calm in which they would be cognizant not only of the sanctuary the doctor was providing, but also of the real world that could be perceived, if at a distance, through the veil of sleep and dreams.

  “Who are you and why are you telling me this?” Ira asked.

  “But I am Doctor Chehade,” the man said. “I was waiting for you to awaken so that we might have a conversation before I leave for home. Also, I would like to take a look at your eye again. So come—I will take you to your room.”