“Dr. Abeles is ready for you.”
Matt let go of my hand and answered the call, the high-pitched voice of a woman whose short peachy smock was strewn with lavender smiley faces, a nice complement to the receptionist whose white smock had an arrangement of unidentifiable pastel animals in human clothing. My mind wandered to the possibility of a new market: grown-up designs for hospital workers’ uniforms.
The book I’d brought along was another sign of my shift in interest to the life sciences. I’d picked up a new biography of molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin. Not the best choice, since Franklin died of ovarian cancer at thirty-seven, but I’d heard that the book shed light on Franklin’s role in the history-making double-helix model of DNA. The burning question: Did Watson and Crick take advantage of the low status of women at that time and steal her research? For a few minutes, the ongoing debate between methodology (Franklin) and intuition (Watson) kept my mind off the tiny biopsy gun I’d read about, and which Matt was now facing, with only a local anesthetic between him and severe discomfort.
Matt appeared after about a half hour, about twenty-five pages into the Franklin-Watson controversy. Just in time, since I was becoming upset again, this time at the conditions at Cambridge University in the 1950s—only males were allowed in the university dining rooms, and after hours Rosalind Franklin’s colleagues went to men-only pubs to brainstorm the direction of the next day’s work.
“All set,” Matt said, doing a good job of smiling. For my benefit, I was sure. “We’ll know in about three days.”
Three days—not long at all. Unless you’re waiting for a medical report.
Dinner at home was interrupted by several phone calls, all asking how Matt’s procedure went. George Berger phoned from the station, plus Rose, Andrea Cabrini—a Charger Street lab technician and my latest attempt at making a friend—and Matt’s sister Jean, who was still in denial that Matt and I lived together.
“Is Matt there?” she always asked immediately when I answered the phone. No “Hi, Gloria,” or any other gesture toward politeness. I’d tried different responses, from “One moment please,” in a detached, telephone-operator-like tone, to “Oh, Jean, it’s me, Gloria. How nice to hear from you.” The latter usually annoyed her.
Matt thought Jean’s aversion to me had nothing to do with me personally, but rather with her devotion to Teresa, his first wife.
“They were like sisters,” he’d tell me after each rebuff.
This, of course, only increased my feeling of inadequacy as potential sister material. I’d thought of buttering up her children, but I knew I’d feel guilty playing on the tension between teenagers and their mother.
Elaine Cody was the last to call, her time zone being three hours behind. Elaine and I had held each other’s hands through many such trials during our thirty-year friendship in Berkeley, and we continued now to be close, if three thousand miles apart.
“If you need me, I’m there …” I heard the snap of her fingers “ … in a minute. I know you have Rose and all your Boston friends.”
We both laughed. Elaine knew that “all my Boston friends,” like all my California friends, could fit into one curtained-off space at the North Shore Clinic. I’d never been very social as an adult, blaming my retreat into graduate work on the death of my fiancé, Al Gravese, right after I finished college. It seemed easier to never again get close enough to anyone you’d miss when they left. Between Elaine’s almost yearly change of significant other, and Rose’s extended family, I was happy enough, and busy enough, with a couple of friends on each coast.
We hung up after Elaine extracted a promise from me that I’d tell her if I needed her to come to Revere.
I looked across the table, past the large bowl of salad, the linguini in reheated clam sauce, and the bottles of mineral water, to where Matt buttered a thick slice of Italian bread, apparently comfortable on the tubular pillow we’d added to his chair. I couldn’t recall making a different decision about letting people into my life, but there he was.
“You look taller,” I said, my first attempt at lightening the mood.
He threw back his shoulders and smiled. “Do you like me taller?”
Not fair to give me that look when he couldn’t follow through.
For the next couple of hours, it seemed nothing could distract me from the image of Matt’s tissue samples on the way to a pathology lab for diagnosis. I hoped the pathologist was more than twenty years old, which was my estimated age of many professionals I’d dealt with recently.