Suddenly, I realized what was happening to me. I must have passed out for several minutes. When I came to, I was being lifted into an ambulance. Tears streamed down my face. My body was soaked with sweat.
The EMT woman kept saying, “You’re gonna be fine. You’re all right, ma’am.” But I knew I wasn’t.
I looked at her with whatever strength I could muster and whispered, “Don’t let me die.”
All the while I was holding the small stone tightly in my hand. The last thing I recall is an oxygen mask being slipped over my face, a deathly weakness spreading through my body, and the stone finally dropping from my hand.
So, Nicky,
I was only thirty-five when I had the heart attack in Boston. The following day I had a coronary by-pass at Mass. General. It put me out of action, out of circulation for almost two months, and it was during my recuperation that I had time to think, really think, maybe for the first time in my life.
I thoroughly, painfully examined my life in Boston, just how hectic it had become with rounds, research, overtime, overwork, and double shifts. I thought about how I’d been feeling just before this awful thing happened. I also dealt with my own denial. My grandmother had died of heart failure. My family had a history of heart disease. And still I hadn’t been as careful as I should have been.
It was while I was recuperating that a doctor friend told me the story of the five balls. You should never forget this one, Nicky. This is terribly important.
It goes like this.
Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you’re keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls — family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life.
Nicky, I finally understood.
Nick —
As you can probably tell, this is all pre-Daddy, pre-Matt.
Let me tell you about Dr. Michael Bernstein.
I met Michael in 1996 at the wedding reception for John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island, Georgia. I must admit that both of us had led pretty charmed lives up until then. My parents had died when I was two, but I was fortunate enough to have been raised with great love and patience by my grandparents in Cornwall, New York. I went to Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey, then Duke, and finally Harvard Medical School.
I felt incredibly lucky to be at each of the three schools, and I couldn’t have gotten a better education—except that nowhere did I learn the lesson of the five balls.
Michael also went to Harvard Medical School, but he had graduated four years before I got there. We didn’t meet until the Kennedy wedding. I was a guest of Carolyn’s; Michael was a guest of John’s. The wedding itself was magical, full of hope and promise. Maybe that was part of what drew Michael and me together.
What kept us together for the next four years was a little more complicated. Part of it was pure physical attraction, and at some point I want to talk to you about that—but not now. Michael was—is—tall and dashing, with a radiant smile. We had a lot of mutual interests. I loved his stories, always so droll, laconic, biting; I also loved to listen to him play the piano and sing anything from Sinatra to Sting. Also, we were both workaholics—me at Mass. General, Michael at Children’s Hospital in Boston.
But none of these things are what love is really about, Nicholas. Trust me on that.
About four weeks after my heart attack, I woke up one morning at eight o’clock. The apartment where we lived was quiet, and I luxuriated in the peacefulness for a few moments. It seemed to have a healing quality. Finally, I got up and went to the kitchen to make myself breakfast before I went off to rehab.
I jumped back when I heard a noise, the scratch of a chair leg against the floor. Nervously, I went to see who was out there.
It was Michael. I was surprised to see him still home, as he was almost always out of the house by seven. He was sitting at the small pine table in the breakfast nook.
“You almost gave me a heart attack,” I said, making what I thought was a pretty decent joke.
Michael didn’t laugh. He patted the chair next to him at the table.
Then, with the calmness and self-reverence I was used to from him, he told me the three main reasons why he was leaving me: he said he couldn’t talk or relate to me the way he could with his male friends; he didn’t think that I could have a baby now, because of my heart attack; he had fallen for someone else already.
I ran out of the kitchen, and then out of the house. That morning the pain I felt was even worse than the heart attack. Nothing was right with my life; I had gotten it all wrong so far. Everything!!!
I did love being a doctor, but I was trying to do it in a large, somewhat bureaucratic, big-city hospital, which just wasn’t right for me.
I was working so hard—because there was nothing else of value in my life. I earned about $120,000 a year, but I was spending it on dinners in town, getaway weekends, clothes that I didn’t need or even like that much.
I had wanted children all my life, yet here I was without a significant other, without a child, without a plan, and no prospects to change any of it.
Here’s what I did, little boy.
I began to live the lesson of the five balls.
I left my job at Mass. General. I left Boston. I left my murderous schedule and commitments be- hind. I moved to the one place in the world where I had always been happy. I went there, truly, to mend a broken heart.
I was turning endlessly around and around like a hamster on a wheel in a tiny cage. My life was stretched to the limit, and something was bound to give. Unfortunately, it had been my heart.
This wasn’t a small change, Nicky; I had decided to change everything.
Nicky,
I arrived on the island of Martha’s Vineyard like an awkward tourist, lugging the baggage of my past, not knowing what to do with it yet. I would spend the first couple of months filling cupboards with wholesome, farm-fresh foods, throwing out old magazines that had followed me to my new home, and I would also settle into a new job.
From the time I was five until I was seventeen, I had spent summers with my grandparents on Martha’s Vineyard. My grandfather was an architect, as my father had been as well, and he could work from his home. My grandmother Isabelle was a homemaker, and she was gifted at making our living space the most comfortable and loving place I could begin to imagine.
I loved being back on the Vineyard, loved everything about it. Gus and I often went to the beach in the early evening, and we sat out there until the light of day was gone. We played ball, or sometimes with a Frisbee for the first hour or so. Then we huddled together on a blanket until the sun went down.
I had negotiated for the practice of a general practitioner who was moving to Illinois. We were switching lives in some ways. He was going to Chicago just when I was exiting city life. My office was one of five doctors’ offices in a white clapboard house in Vineyard Haven. The house was more than a hundred years old and had four beautiful antique rockers on the front porch. I even had a rocker at the desk where I worked.
Country doctor resonated with a wonderful sound for me, like recess bells of an old country school. I was inspired to hang out a shingle that said as much: SUZANNE BEDFORD —COUNTRY DOCTOR —IN.
I began to see a few patients in my second month on Martha’s Vineyard.
Emily Howe, seventy, part-time librarian, honored member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, hard, steadfast, and against everything that had occurred since about 1900. Diagnosis: bronchitis; Prognosis: good.
Dorris Lathem, ninety-three, had already outlived three husbands, eleven dogs, and a house fire. Healthy as a horse. Diagnosis: old
gal; Prognosis: will live forever.
Earl Chapman, Presbyterian minister. General Outlook—always his own. Diagnosis: acute diarrhea; Prognosis: possible recurrence of what the Lord might call getting even.
My first patient list read like a who’s who of a William Carlos Williams poem. I imagined Dr.Williams walking the streets of the Vineyard on his appointed rounds, an icy wind blowing from the distant hills, milk frozen on every landing, the famous wheelbarrow soldered into the winter mud. There he’d be, making a late-afternoon call on the boy who fell off his sled and broke an arm along with his pride.
This was for me. I was experiencing a fantasy that was a million miles away when I lived in Boston.
But, in fact, it was just down Route 6 and across the water.
I felt I had come home.
Nicholas,
I had no idea that the love of my life was here— just waiting for me. If I had, I would have run straight into Daddy’s arms. In a heartbeat.
When I first arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, I was unsure about everything, but especially where to settle. I drove around looking for something that said “home,” “you’ll be okay here,” “look no further.”
There are so many parts of our island that are beautiful, and even though I knew it in some ways, it sang out differently to me this time.
Everything was different because I felt different. Up Island was always special to me, because this is where I had spent so many glorious summers. It lay like a child’s picture book of farms and fences, dirt roads, and cliffs. Down Island was a whirl of widow’s walks, gazebos, lighthouses, and harbors.
It was a turn-of-the-century boathouse that finally stole my heart. And still does. This truly was home.
It needed to be fixed up, but it was winterized, and I loved it at first sight, first smell, first touch. Old beams—which had once supported stored boats—crisscrossed the ceiling. Upstairs I eventually put in corner portholes to let the sun come in hoops of light. The walls had to be painted robin’s egg blue because the whole downstairs opened to a view of the sea. Big barnlike doors slid port and starboard to bring everything that was once outside, inside.
Can you imagine, Nicky, living practically right on the beach, like that? Every part of me, body and soul, knew I’d made the right decision. Even my practical side was in agreement. I now lived between Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs. Sometimes I’d be working out of my home or making house calls, but the rest of the time I’d be at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital or the Vineyard Walk-In Medical Center in Vineyard Haven. I was also doing some cardiology rehab at the Medical Center.
I was alone, except for Gus, living a solitary life, but I was content for the most part.
Maybe it was because I had no idea what I was missing at the time: your daddy and you.
Nicholas,
I was driving home from the hospital when I heard a funny noise. What’s that? Shhhhh... bump shhhhh... bump shhhh... bump.
I had to pull over onto the shoulder of the road. I got out of my Jeep to take a look.
Shitfire and save matches. The right wheel was as flat as a pancake. I could have, and I would have, changed the tire if I hadn’t taken out the spare in order to make room for all my other stuff when I was moving.
I called the gas station from my cell phone, mad at myself for having to call a garage. A guy answered and condescended to me a little; another guy would come to fix the flat. It made me feel like “such a girl,” and I hated that. I knew how to change a tire perfectly well. I pride myself on self-sufficiency and independence. And good old-fashioned stubbornness.
I was standing against the passenger-side door, pretending to admire the beautiful landscape and making it seem to passing cars that I had pulled over for that reason, when a car pulled up right in back of mine.
Clearly it wasn’t from the gas station.
Not unless they’d sent a forest green Jaguar convertible.
“You need some help?” a man asked. He was already walking slowly toward my car, and honestly, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“No, thanks . . . I called the Shell station in town. They’ll be here soon. Thanks, anyway.”
There was something familiar about this guy. I wondered if I had met him in one of the stores around the island. Or maybe at the hospital.
But he was tall and good-looking, and I thought that I’d have remembered him. He had a nice, easy smile and he was kind of laid-back.
“I can change the tire,” he offered, and somehow managed not to be condescending when he said it. “I know I drive a fancy car, but I’m not really a fancy person.”
“Thanks, but I took my spare out to make room for more important things like my stereo and my antique candlestick collection.”
He laughed . . . and he was so familiar. Who was he? Where did I know him from?
“I’m flattered, though,” I continued. “A man in a shiny convertible willing to change a tire.”
He laughed again—a nice laugh. So familiar. “Hey, I’m vast. . . . I contain multitudes.”
“Walt Whitman!” I said—and then I remembered who this was. “You used to say that all the time. You quoted Walt Whitman. Matt?”
“Suzanne Bedford!” he said. “I was almost sure it was you.”
He was so surprised—bumping into me like this after such a long time. It must have been almost twenty years.
Matt Wolfe looked even handsomer than I remembered him. At thirty-seven, he had grown up very nicely. He was slender with closely cropped brown hair and an endearing smile. He looked in great shape. We talked on the side of the road. He had become a lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency as well as a fine-arts dealer. I had to laugh when he told me that. Matt used to joke that he would never become an entremanure, as he called businesspeople back then.
He wasn’t surprised to learn that I was a doctor. What surprised Matt was that I wasn’t with someone, that I had come back to Martha’s Vineyard alone.
We continued to catch up on each other’s life. He was funny, easy to talk to. When I had dated Matt, he was eighteen, I was sixteen. That was the last year my grandparents had rented for the summer on the Vineyard—but obviously, I never forgot the island or its many treasures. I’d been having dreams about the ocean and beaches on the Vineyard ever since I could remember.
I think we were both a little disappointed to see the bright yellow Shell tow truck pull in behind us. I know that I was. Just before I turned to go, Matt mumbled a few words about how nice this was—my flat tire. Then he asked me what I was doing Saturday night.
I think I blushed. I know I did. “You mean a date?”
“Yes, Suzanne, a date. Now that I’ve seen you again, I’d like to see you again.”
I told Matt I would love to see him on Saturday. My heart was pounding a little, and I took that to be a very good sign.
Nick,
Who the heck was sitting on my porch? As I drove up late that same afternoon, I couldn’t really tell.
It couldn’t be the electric guy, or the phone guy, or the cable guy—I’d seen all of them the day before.
Nope, it was the painting guy, the one who was going to help me with everything around the cottage that needed a ladder or an outlet or a finish.
We walked around the cottage as I pointed out several of the problems I’d inherited: windows that wouldn’t close, floors that buckled at the door, a leak in the bathroom, a broken pump, a cracked gutter, and a whole cottage that needed scraping and painting.
What this house had in cute, it lacked in practical.
But this guy was great, took notes, asked pertinent questions, and told me he could fix everything by the millennium. The next millennium. We struck a deal on the spot (which gave me the distinct feeling I’d made out pretty good).
Suddenly, life was looking a lot better to me. I had a new practice that I loved, I had a house-painter with a good reputation, and I had a hot date with Matt.
When I was finally alone in my litt
le cottage by the sea, I threw up both arms and shouted hooray.
Then I said, “Matt Wolfe. Hmmm. Imagine that. How terrific. How very cool.”
Nick,
Just about everybody has an occasional fantasy about somebody they really liked in high school, or maybe even grade school, coming back into their life. For me, that person was Matt.
Who knows, maybe he was a small part of what drew me back to Martha’s Vineyard. Probably not, but who can tell about these things?
Nevertheless, I was nearly an hour late for our date on Saturday night. I had to get a patient admitted, run home and feed Gustavus, get pretty, and find my beeper all before I left. Plus—I must confess—I can be a bit disorganized at times. My grandfather used to say, “Suzie, you have a lot in your mind.”
When I entered Lola’s which is a neat spot on the beach between Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs, Matt was waiting with a bottle of pinot noir. He looked relaxed, and I liked that. Also handsome. I liked that just fine, too.
“Matt, I’m so, so sorry,” I said. “This is one of the negatives about dating a doctor.”
He laughed. “After twenty years . . . what’s twenty minutes? Or fifty? And besides, you look beautiful, Suzanne. You’re worth the wait.”
I was flattered, and a little embarrassed. It had been a while since someone had paid me a compliment, even as a joke. But I liked it. And I eased smoothly into the evening like someone slipping into satin sheets.
“So, you’re back on the Vineyard for good?” Matt asked after I told him some, but not all, of the events that had led up to my decision. I didn’t tell him about the heart attack. I would, but not yet.
“I love it here. Always have. I feel like I’ve come home,” I said. “Yes, I’m back here for good.”
“How are your grandparents?” he asked. “I remember them both.”