Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (46 page)

“You . . .” he started crying and so he blurted it out, “you've tried so hard to love me—and I you. We tried.”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes tearing up again, “we did.”

“And it ain't easy.”

“No. We did as best we could.”

“Yeah.”

They cried together. His face buried in her neck, hers in his. Tears wet their ears, their hair. He was leaving. It was over, and hopeless, and the hopelessness allowed them to tell their truth, like travelers holed up somewhere by chance or fate, for a time.

In that brief moment they understood that because they were parting, they could both be there. It no longer mattered that he would go and she would stay—they were held in the simple humility of who they actually were. Death was so much in the air that the future was irrelevant. They were forced into the present. With no future, there was no fear, no need to secrete away, to protect. The sorrow, shared, receded.

He sighed. “I . . .” He stopped, tried again. “Don't take this the wrong way—”

“How could I now?”

“When I look at my own life, at everything I've done, the grief I've caused, well . . .
I
feel crippled too.”

She found herself cherishing the moment, a kind of revelation that the past was past. “It's not how we're crippled,” she said, smiling at him, “it's how we walk.”

· 37 ·

The next morning Penny picked them up in her brand-new beige Lincoln. Cray insisted he sit with Orville and Penny in the front seat. Miranda and Amy had the roomy back to themselves. They threw Orville's backpack and small suitcase into the trunk, which was only slightly smaller than the Chrysler's, and headed around the corner of Courthouse Square and across Fourth and started down Washington toward the train station. The day was sunny and fine, with that autumnal crispness that lets you see a long way through the bare trees and makes you notice the little puffs of breath surrounding your words and prompts you to remember cozy times around fires and under comforters in the night.

“Milt's got the Hong Kong flu,” Penny said. “He was up at dawn for a meeting with Henry and went back to bed. He sends his regrets.”

As they approached Third they were rocked by a tremendous explosion. It shook the ground and perturbed the shock absorbers of the Lincoln. Just ahead rose a plume of smoke. People were shouting. They drove toward it until they were stopped by a bright orange sign:
DETOUR
.

Officer Packy Scomparza was directing traffic. They stared.

The General Worth was gone.

“Hong Kong flu, my ass!” Penny screamed. “I'll kill the sonofabitch!”

“That reeker!” screamed Amy. “That total creep!”

They stared.

The only piece of the 200-year-old hotel still standing was two stories of a part of the back wall. On the surface facing them, on the second floor, were the demarcations of two rooms painted an identical pink-and-yellow with vertical dark bands where the walls separating them had been. The bright colors of the twin rooms perched precariously above the rubble seemed to cry out to them like stranded children about to fall, or jump. What stories in those gay colors! Everything had happened in those rooms, everything! A porcelain sink still stuck to one wall, filled with what looked like glass from a shattered mirror. Bad luck.

To all of them, it was as if they were seeing a scandalous public display of the insides of the dead.

“Unreal,” said Amy.

“All too real, dear,” Miranda answered sadly.

“I'll kill him,” said Penny, looking around. “Where is he? And where's Henry?”

There was no sign of anyone except Jeffrey Liebowski and another member of Scomparza Demolition and Upholstery. They were sitting on two upturned soapboxes across the street in the weedy courtyard of the boarded-up Painted Lady Lounge, relaxing, having a smoke. Before them, like a portable electric organ, was the control panel for the explosives.

“It's like a person,” said Cray.

“Yes, it is, hon,” Miranda answered.

“And it
died.
The hotel
died.
”

“It was a great old hotel,” she said, her voice unsteady, “with a great old history. We'll try to remember the best of it.”

“The pigs are at the trough,” Orville said. He looked at his
NOW
watch. “We'd better go.”

They barely got to the station on time. The sleek train-animal was wailing from upriver and then gliding in around the bend from the north, its red, white, and blue
AMTRAK
logo looking like the Stars and Stripes stretched out in a funhouse and frozen in chrome.

The engine stopped just opposite them, the rest of the train stretching way out behind.

Their good-byes were mercifully brief. Hugs, kisses, tears, more hugs, final kisses, and hands slipping out of hands, finger by finger, losing touch, and then the race toward the open doorway far down at the other end of the train where a conductor had put down the steel stairs and was beckoning.

Orville took the high step up—reminding him of a time as a boy in Bill's office he'd seen an old man diagnosed with “Train Conductor's Knee,” a chronic subpatellar tendonitis caused by conductors repeatedly stepping up abnormally high to get into the train—and then he was in.

He turned quickly left into the Pullman car, threw his suitcase and backpack onto the overhead rack, and slipped into a window seat that would allow him to wave good-bye to them as the train left. He couldn't see them from the stopped train. They were too far up the track, at the station. He waited.

And waited.

The train was not moving. He looked at his watch. Late. Time seemed stalled. No information was forthcoming.

Miranda and Cray and Amy and Penny stood there, waiting for the train to leave. Miranda's hand was on Cray's shoulder. She could feel it tremble, felt her own heart break all over again.

It's over. Bury it.

“Chilly,” Penny said. “Shall we go?”

“You think anything's wrong?” Amy asked.

Orville sat there, starting to dull down, to resign himself to leaving, as he had resigned himself to so many leavings over the course of his life.

The whistle blew. The engine cleared its throat. The train rocked, ready to move.

Don't spread more suffering around.

Orville was stunned. The phrase echoed inside him.

Whatever you do, don't spread more suffering around.

The train moved.

The boy reached up for his mother's hand. Penny put her arm around Amy's shoulder, and Amy leaned into her. As the train started to ease out, tilting to stay steady around the first curve out, they all turned away and began to walk, at Miranda's pace, back to the car.

Orville jumped up from his seat and grabbed his backpack and suitcase and ran to the door. Locked. He tried the other side, the one tilting away from the town, and put his shoulder to it. It gave, opening. The train was moving and he had seen too many disasters of Columbians jumping from moving things like cars, tractors, bikes, and, yes, trains, but the choice was not a choice and he gauged the movement and jumped and seemed to fly out into thin air and hit hard rolling, and rolled up against the second set of tracks, and caught the acrid scent of creosote, the scent of that something else finally here finally now.

Looking up over the rails he could see the train vanishing around the bend. Far down the tracks the little group was moving away. They seemed beaten down, stooped over, hunched together, deadened. Penny's arm around Amy, Amy's hand in Cray's, Cray's in Miranda's—all matching her slow limp toward the peeling brick station with the sign announcing the Carribean outpost of  
OLU
 
B
 
A
.

Orville jumped to his feet. “Hey! Hey!”

They couldn't hear him. He snatched up his backpack and suitcase and ran a few steps and then stopped and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Hey, I'm here!”

They heard. They turned. He saw their bodies shift as they realized, shift from hunched and hardening to softer, straighter, and the wind being against them he couldn't hear their cries but he saw Cray break free first and run full tilt toward him in that funny way he ran with his body stiff except for his hands pumping like pistons making his legs move fast, and he saw Amy start to run too with that pinwheel run of older girls and women the knees pinwheeling out because of the inward tilt of the femurs down from the widened childbearing pelvis, and then he saw Miranda hesitate a second and then she too started to run, actually run!—a lopsided galumphing run bringing to mind at that moment of all things a cowboy of his childhood Hopalong Cassidy she was actually running!—and even Penny ran too and he expected to see Selma flying low above it all but no, he'd learned in his time in the town that she wouldn't fly in the face of love, and in no time they were close enough so that their cries to each other to the new in each other could be clearly heard, as if all those present are coming back from the dead.

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© Nubar Alexanian

Samuel Shem
is a doctor, novelist, playwright, and activist. A Rhodes scholar, he was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for three decades. Shem has been described in the press as “easily the finest and most important writer ever to focus on the lives of doctors and the world of medicine,” and it has been said that “he brings mercy to the practice of medicine.”
The Lancet
called
The House of God
“one of the two most significant medical novels of the twentieth century.” Its sequel,
Mount Misery
, about training to be a psychiatrist, has been reviewed as “outrageously funny, a sage and important novel by a healer and a Shakespearean” (
The Boston Globe
);
Fine
is about a psychoanalyst.

His 2008 novel,
The Spirit of the Place
, about a primary care doctor in a small town, was reviewed as “The perfect bookend to
The House of God
.” It won the 2008 Best Book Award in General Fiction and Literature from USA Book News and the Independent Publishers National Book Award in Literary Fiction for 2009.

With his wife, Janet Surrey, he wrote the Off-Broadway hit play
Bill W. and Dr. Bob
, about the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, which won the Performing Arts Award of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence in 2007, and the nonfiction book
We Have to Talk: Healing Dialogues Between Women and Men
, winner of the 1999 Boston Interfaith Council's Paradigm Shift Award.

He has given over fifty commencement speeches on “How to Stay Human in Medicine,” and he and his wife, daughter, and dogs live in Boston and Costa Rica. Visit his website at www.samuelshem.com and www.billwanddrbob.com.