“I didn’t see her,” Teddy said.
Doyle and Tip pushed in closer now and Sullivan was close behind them, all of them watching. Father Sullivan did not think of what it meant for Tennessee to have worked in the place that he lived, nor did he think of what it meant for Teddy to have missed her. For the moment he was only glad to see this woman he had been so fond of. She came not long after he had moved to Regina Cleri, and she had always taken good care of him. He had thought he was so sick in those days, too sick to stay in the rectory anymore, but in retrospect he had still been in the bloom of health. Sometimes in the afternoons she would sit with him for awhile before she went home, talk about politics and things they had read in the paper. She liked to go to college lectures that were open to the public, and sometimes, she had admitted, ones that weren’t open to the public, but it was easy to stay towards the back and no one ever asked her to leave. He remembered she brought him books from the library. How bright she was! Many times he had told her she should find a way to quit and go back to school, but when she left the job abruptly without coming back to tell him goodbye he felt unreasonably dismayed. With Tennessee there to visit, Regina Cleri had been bearable to him, and without her he felt like what he was: a useless old man who had been shelved away to die. “I missed you so much after you left,” he said.
“You too,” she said honestly, though it took so much effort to say the words.
Father Sullivan did not speak of her to Teddy, come to think of it. His longing and disappointment once she had gone had made him feel too childish. Hadn’t he even been worth a phone call, a note? It had bothered him for months, the unfinished quality of her departure, until finally he had disciplined himself not to think of her anymore. Now all this time later there was an answer, or at least a part of one. She was here. He pictured her coming into his room with his coffee in the morning. “Are you still in that bed?” she’d always say to him.
“Tennessee,” he said, and rested his hand against the calf of her leg where it lay beneath two sheets and a pale green blanket.
His vision turned gray and then white, a fuzzy blurring of everything that was before him, as if the room had all been snapped away in a sudden wall of bitter wind. The awful cold of it rose up his arm and spread through his body, a cold that was worse than anything he had ever felt or imagined, colder than he had been the winter he was nine years old and broke through the ice on the Charles. He remembered now that black water pouring into his ears and down his throat, flooding his nose and eyes, the blind choking panic that came before his older brother pulled him out by reaching his hockey stick over the jagged edge of ice and into the water. Colder even than he was on that walk home, shaking beneath his brother’s arm. He tried to open his ribs, to fill his lungs, but all the air inside him was frozen. His chest was frozen. There was nothing to breathe. It was as awful as any death is awful, like his own death would be awful, and then he wondered if that was what he was feeling, his own death now, surrounded by the people he loved. Tennessee had come back somehow to see him out of his life. He didn’t understand why this would be the case but then what experience did he have with his own death?
“Uncle Sullivan,” Teddy said, and put his hands beneath his arms to pull him up. He could hear Doyle’s voice from down the hall, the voice of never-ending authority, calling for a doctor. Teddy was there and Sullivan was there and Tip and this lovely child and they all seemed to be rushing towards him at once, everyone speaking to him, speaking over him, and then Teddy picked up both of his hands in his hands and raised them over his head and in that instant he let go of Tennessee’s leg and the air seeped in. He took a shallow, broken breath. The hard block of ice that was pressed against his heart receded an inch and then two inches and then he felt the sudden release of a weight removed.
“Can you hear me?” Teddy said.
Father Sullivan nodded his head, though his own head seemed like too much weight to hold anymore. He wanted to let go of it. He was ready, truly, to give his life away. Everything was rushing. His eyes were closed but he was moving through the door. “Help her,” he said, but he couldn’t even hear the words himself. He was drowned out by the voice of a woman who was scattering the rest of them behind her, scolding as she drove them from the room. “You never should have been in here in the first place,” she said. “She’s just come back from recovery.” And Father Sullivan heard this bit of news and he held on to it. The voice, or his memory of it, followed him all the way down the hall. You never should have been in here in the first place.
What came to his mind as he struggled to right the oxygen deficit in his lungs were those first two women who had come to see him in Regina Cleri, Nena and Helen, the ones he had supposedly healed, and he thought for the first time that he may indeed have helped them, because now he knew what it was to touch someone who was outside of help, to feel with what remained of your own life that which could not be saved. The doctor, in a horrible error of judgment, came to him and not to her, and the next thing he knew he was falling over the edge of the world, through the wondrous swirling sheets of snow and down deeper and deeper into sleep.
When Father Sullivan woke up again he was in a bed himself, a bed that was unfamiliar. There was a plastic tube lying flat across his body blowing oxygen into his nose, another tube dripping something into his arm, and Teddy was there sitting beside him. What he saw when he opened his eyes was Teddy’s relief, Teddy smiling hugely. “I thought I had killed you for sure,” he said.
Father Sullivan looked at him and knew from the simple expression of happiness on his face that whatever was coming had not yet arrived. “Where’s your mother?” he said.
Teddy hesitated for a minute but then he let it go. “She’s in her room.”
“Go back to her.” He tried to keep his voice calm.
Teddy shook his head. “I’ll see her later. I’m going to keep an eye on you for now. The doctor said you had an episode of ventricular tachycardia. He said that it could have happened anytime, but I know it was my fault, this has all just been too much. I was crazy to have brought you out like this.” Teddy hadn’t called Sister Claire yet, even though he knew that too much time had gone by and she would be anxious now, imagining some terrible scenario that in fact would bear a remarkable resemblance to what had actually happened.
“Go find her doctor,” Father Sullivan said.
“You want the doctor?” Teddy was already on his feet.
“Her doctor.” Every word spoken was a flight of stairs to run. He gave himself a minute to concentrate on the air. The oxygen burned his nostrils, and still he wanted more than what he was getting. “Go.”
Teddy eased back into his chair, picked up his uncle’s hand. “She broke her hip, do you remember that? She was hit by a car last night. But everything’s okay now. She came through the surgery fine.”
“I know what happened.” He waited, pulled in breath. “You brought me here to see her.”
Teddy shook his head. “I didn’t listen to you. You asked me not to do this and I just thought…I don’t know what I thought. I wasn’t thinking. She’s going to be fine. It’s just going to take some time.”
Father Sullivan tried to imagine what Tennessee would want at the end of her life. He didn’t know her well at all, and he didn’t know anyone well enough to answer a question like that. He only knew that she had been good company, that the time passed more slowly on the days she didn’t come in. He could picture her in his room as if she was walking towards him now, healthy and young. How she seemed to tower over him when he sat in his chair. “How are you feeling today, Father?” she would say to him. “Has your nephew been by to see you yet?”
“Get up now,” Father Sullivan said to Teddy.
Teddy did stand up and he pulled another blanket over his uncle’s legs. “Are you cold?”
“Why?” Father Sullivan felt a sob well up in his chest. He had wasted so much of his strength in life, run it out on nothing. If only he had the legs
to carry him back to her. Maybe there was something that could be done. He couldn’t save her but maybe he could find someone, a surgeon who could cut out whatever it was that was inside her. “Go.” He closed his eyes and pulled in every bit of air he could manage.
“Look at you,” Teddy said. “You’ve got to rest.”
“Then go.”
Teddy was stung but he refused to show it. His uncle was old and ill and confused. His oxygen saturation was low. He was not responsible for anything he said. “I’ll stay with you. I’ll keep everyone else out so that you can get some rest.”
Father Sullivan reached up for his nephew’s hand. He wished he had the strength to squeeze it tight, to hurt him just enough to make himself heard. Teddy whom he loved above all others. Teddy who was his comfort and delight. It would be the last time he would ever see him as a child, the last time before all of the guilt and regret came to sit with him for the rest of his life. “Listen to me, Teddy, I’m telling you.” His voice came out in nothing but a whisper. It was a strain to hear it at all over the hiss of the oxygen. “Go as fast as you can now. Run.”
Chapter 11
DOYLE HAD INSISTED ON ARRIVING EARLY. They each had a ticket but the seating was open and he wanted to be sure they could all find seats together. The ceremony was held in the symphony hall downtown, and while the entire auditorium offered good acoustics, acoustics were not what Doyle was there for. He wanted an unobstructed view of Tip crossing the stage and collecting his medical degree from Johns Hopkins.
“We should have packed a meal,” Sullivan said, crossing in front of the knees of parents who were even more neurotic than his own and so had arrived earlier.
“I’ve got some Life Savers in my purse,” Kenya said and patted the white leather bag at her hip.
“Always prepared,” Sullivan said.
Teddy dropped into the seat beside his father and opened his program. He rested his finger beneath his brother’s name. “Look at that, Thomas O’Neill Doyle—Warfield T. Longcope Prize in Clinical Medicine. Now that’s something.”
“He should have gotten the convocation address,” Doyle said and looked at the two names above Tip’s. “He almost got it.”
“He didn’t want it,” Kenya said. “You know Tip doesn’t make speeches.”
“They should have given it to Teddy,” Sullivan said. “The first non–medical school graduate to give the convocation address.”
Teddy rose to the call without hesitation. “‘Duty—honor—country,’” he said in the voice of an old white man who’d been battered by war. “‘Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points; to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.’”
“Old patients never die,” Sullivan said, “they just fade away.”
“You’re going to need to start quoting yourself,” Kenya said to Teddy. “Forget about all these dead people. Kids are going to want to hear Teddy Doyle speeches, wearing their Teddy Doyle T-shirts.”
Teddy smiled but shook his head. “Nothing like that.”
“You should listen to your sister,” Doyle said. It was what he said about most things these days. It made no sense to him how Teddy could have turned himself towards politics and still be shy, and yet it seemed to be his very shyness that people found themselves attracted to. He won both his junior and senior class presidencies without regarding a word of Doyle’s advice. He led the Student Coalition Against the War. He spent two summers working for the Massachusetts senator for whom he was named without letting Doyle put in so much as a phone call, and in fact it was that same senator and not Doyle who was so devoted to Teddy that he used all of his considerable sway to get him a spot in Georgetown law school in the fall. Contrary to all logic, the softer Teddy spoke, the more the room quieted down to listen.
“When Teddy’s sworn in as president, will we have to get there early to stake out our seats or do you think he’ll save them for us?”
Kenya shook her head. “Saving seats isn’t very presidential.”
“I don’t want to be president,” Teddy said.
“You don’t know what you want yet,” his father said.
“That’s true. I don’t know what I want. I only know what I don’t want.” Teddy was working as an advocate for the homeless in Albany now, and while he had come to accept the fact that he needed the law degree, he was starting to think that political life was not necessarily a matter of elected office.
“I can see it now,” Sullivan said. “Teddy will be the president, Tip will be the surgeon general, and Kenya will sweep the Olympics.”
Doyle was reading the program. He did not look up. “Something like that.”
Teddy and Kenya both turned to look at Sullivan, but Sullivan only dropped his eyes and became interested in the program himself.
The addition of Kenya to the family had had the unexpected effect of giving Teddy much more sympathy for Sullivan than he had ever had before. He saw now how easily Doyle’s attention had turned away from Tip and himself as it settled on her, just as it had turned away from Sullivan twenty-five years before. The difference was that Kenya was magically exempt from everything the boys had had to endure. She didn’t have to go to Kerry’s fund-raising breakfasts. She was never once sent into the cold to hand out leaflets or canvass door to door. Politics, just at the moment that Teddy had finally picked it up, had ceased to be his father’s driving interest. He had Kenya’s spring meets now, her fall meets, her state championships, Junior Olympics, trophy halls. There was a never-ending stream of races for Doyle to follow now, and while they might not be for congressional seats, it could nearly be counted on that the gazelle of Union Park was going to win.
Not that it mattered. Teddy was as proud of Kenya as Doyle was, and despite what anyone might say when he wasn’t in the room, he hadn’t turned to politics to please his father. He had turned to politics in hopes of pleasing God. It was the pledge he had made in the hours before his mother’s death, his second mother, or his first one, depending on how you counted them. While they waited for the outcome of her second surgery of the day, Teddy went into the stairwell of the hospital alone and swore to take on the heaviest mantle he could imagine. His hope was that God might forgive him, that God might even choose to spare the people Teddy loved. Teddy was responsible for what had happened, and his responsibility lay in the fact that he hadn’t listened to anyone. The chance to do the right thing, say the right thing, spring into considerate action had presented itself again and again, and from the moment the car came bearing down on Tip in the snow Teddy had not moved fast enough. He did not think of reneging on his promise later that evening when Tennessee Moser died, nor did he think of giving it up the following summer when he lost his uncle. While Teddy had hoped for God’s favor, it was not the contingency of the deal. His decision was his penance, in the same way medical school had been Tip’s penance, though neither brother spoke of it as such. But both of them could see there would have been a benefit to being more like Sullivan, who had dealt with the mistakes of his life by setting himself adrift. Teddy and Tip had chosen the opposite course instead. Their punishment was to nail themselves down.
The lights in the symphony hall lowered and Sullivan whispered to Kenya, “Here we go.” One by one the various deans and professors approached the podium and scattered their perfunctory pearls of wisdom over the graduates’ heads. When they were finished the convocation speaker took the stage, a tiny Indian girl who had to bend the microphone as far down as she could in order to make herself heard.
“For four years we have worked alongside each other,” she began. “And tonight we share a common dream.”
Tip, who sat in the first row of graduates by virtue of his placement in the alphabet, was fairly certain they did not, unless all of his classmates had in fact been privately dreaming of fishes. That was no
t to say they were all thinking noble thoughts of medical science. Most of them, he knew them well enough to say, were probably thinking of dinner about now, about cleaning out their apartments and getting the hell out of Baltimore. But Tip alone was seeing the members of the faculty on the stage decked out in their doctoral hoods and bright academic finery as a pulsing reef of stoplight parrotfish, scrawled filefish, bright blueheads, and yellowhead wrasse. He was always seeing people as fish. He saw his patients as mackerel, as bass, that was how he remembered them. It was the device he used to endure their suffering and steel his interest in their complaints. And as he listened to little Soma Choudery, who had been his cadaver partner in pathology, and who but for that fact he might have dated, drone on about the nobility of their chosen profession, he realized medicine was not the profession he cared to choose at all. It was not helpful, normal, or beneficial to anyone for him to continue on with this particular mistake, no matter how far down the road he had taken it. It was at that moment, somewhere between Soma’s charge that they never cease to learn from what their patients had to teach them and her hope that they would someday move towards a single-payer system, that Tip decided to return to ichthyology. He had always gotten his best thinking done during speeches. It came to him clearly and for the first time that he did not have to go through a residency and internship. He did not have to practice medicine in order to prove any more completely how sorry he was. At the end of the day what his father had always suspected about him was true: he did not find human beings as interesting as fishes. Their bodies lack the grace, the fluidity of motion. There were no new species of human to discover, and if there were Tip hoped that they would be left alone.
Not that he could completely regret what he had done. If medical school had not cured him of his grief, it had at least tempered it. His decision to shoulder this cross in the first place had come to him as quickly and certainly as his decision to lay it down: four and a half years ago in the waiting room of Mount Auburn Hospital when a nervous young girl in a lab coat that said “Dr. Spruce” on the pocket explained that, unbeknown to anyone, there had been a slight laceration to the spleen at the time of the accident. Tennessee Moser, on her second brief appearance in Tip’s life, was then rushed back into surgery and it was there that she died. She left behind a coat, a purse, a dark green hat, two yet-again-motherless sons, and one freshly minted motherless daughter. He could still see Kenya when she first came to live with them. For months she would only sit on the very edges of the furniture, looking like a girl who meant to leap up from the house on Union Park and run as fast as she could for home the minute they turned their backs.