“Thank you. Don’t tell me any more.”
I squeeze her wrist, then follow the smoke down the hall. Turning right, I see my father through a cloud of blue haze rising from the Romeo y Julieta burning in an ashtray on his desk. His concentration is absolute as he pores over a patient’s medical record. Through the obfuscating cloud, I recognize the familiar clutter of his office, a room so packed with books and other objects that not even Melba’s constant labor can keep it in order.
At first glance, Dad’s inner sanctum looks like an exhibit at the Smithsonian: The Small-Town General Practitioner’s Office, Circa 1952. From the meticulously hand-painted Napoleonic soldiers in a glass cabinet to the 1/96th scale model of the USS Constitution on a bookshelf, from the red Dinky double-decker London bus on his desk to the P-51 Mustang suspended from the ceiling by fishing line, this room exudes the scent of history. On a credenza to my left sits a set of pistols that date to the Revolutionary War, and a Civil War surgeon’s kit with the long, gleaming knives used for countless amputations in the days before antibiotics and helicopters.
A casual observer might take the occupant of this office as something of an antique himself—the white beard and sagging flesh make it easy to do—but that would be a grave mistake. For the shelves of this room are lined with books that have kept my father’s mind sharper and more vital than those of colleagues half his age, who haven’t read a biography or literary novel since they left college. Skipping the medical library on the lower shelves, one quick perusal of the spines reveals biographies spanning three centuries of American history, weighted to the Civil War; a sprinkling of philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein; a set of the Greek tragedians; a treasured shelf of nineteenth-and twentieth-century novels, mostly by Russian and American authors; a dozen back issues of Foreign Affairs; a shelf covering the Middle East, with a focus on Islam and Iran; and assorted volumes on subjects from counterterrorism to Seymour Cray. Sadly, this office holds but a tiny fraction of his original collection. In essence, this room is a twelve-by-fifteen lifeboat containing the survivors of the fire that destroyed my parents’ home in 1998, and with it a library fifty years in the making.
“Melba?” Dad says, his eyes still on the chart. “This note says Drew put Jeanne Edwards on five hundred milligrams of Cipro b.i.d. She had a little reaction to Cipro the last time I put her on it, didn’t she?”
Expecting to see his nurse, Dad looks up and blinks in confusion. “Penn? Is it five thirty already?”
“Quarter to six.”
“Has Melba gone?”
“No. She’s still out there.”
I sit on the worn leather sofa Dad brought here from his downtown office against the fervent protests of the decorator who did the new office building. Whenever I sit on this smoke-cured artifact, I think of the secrets confided by the thousands of patients who sat here before me, and the prognoses, both hopeful and terrible, that my father gave them. Today, though, I’m wondering whether this familiar sofa is old enough that Viola Turner sat on it as a young nurse.
“Tell me about Viola,” I say softly.
Dad sighs heavily, then leans back in the leather chair behind his desk. No matter how aged and battered his body gets, his blue-gray eyes, like his mind, remain incisively clear. But this evening the bags under them tell me that he hasn’t slept for many hours, maybe even days. Fifteen years ago his face developed a healthy roundness over his bones. After his beard went white, children sometimes mistook him for Santa Claus in December. But now, seven weeks after a heart attack, he’s become gaunt and angular again. With his hollow cheeks and eyes, he reminds me of Mathew Brady’s photograph of Robert E. Lee, taken shortly after the surrender at Appomattox. The civilian clothes Lee wore in that photo could not disguise the solemn gaze of a man who’d endured loss of a magnitude known to only a few men throughout history. A shadow of that look darkens my father’s face now.
“I’m not going to talk about last night,” he says.
Stonewalling is no longer an option, but I’m going to wait a few minutes to tell him that. “I’m not asking about last night. I’m asking about Viola herself.”
His chair creaks as he leans farther back (at least I hope it was his chair; it might have been his joints). “Viola was a Revels, originally. That’s a famous name across the South. Hiram Revels was the first black U.S. senator, seated during Reconstruction. He represented Mississippi. I never knew whether or not Viola was descended from him, and she didn’t either, but I always suspected she was. Revels was a brilliant man, and Viola was pretty sharp herself.”
“Was she a trained nurse?”
“Not formally. She wasn’t an RN, or even an LPN. Back in those days, the docs would take on some of the smartest girls and train them right in the hospitals. And I’ll tell you, some of the nurses who came out of those programs knew more medicine than those I see getting out of the schools today. That’s how Esther was trained. Same program. It was hands-on from the first day, the way it was in the army.”