last for the kickball team: Honor roll doesn’t matter; sex, race, or national origin doesn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was if you could kick a ball over the head of the second baseperson and get someone else home.
AT THE SIX – MONTH juncture, during one of our rare synchronized breakfasts, it was I who asked Leo if he’d like to find a more compatible roommate.
“In what sense?”
“More fun. More charismatic.”
“Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
I said, “I think you’re too polite to tell me that it’s not working out. Everything is fine on the surface, but maybe you could find someone more suitable. You know—maybe we’re like those married couples who never raise their voices, but all the same aren’t happy.”
“I’m happy,” said Leo. “I think this is working out fine.” Then he asked if it was me—was I the discontented one looking for an out?
“Just the opposite,” I said. And then I tried to define my position, that I was proud to be his roommate because of the high esteem if not popularity he enjoyed at the hospital; proud to have my name on his answering machine’s outgoing message.
Instead of looking pleased he said, “But you have to be content inside your own skin.”
I said that wasn’t possible at this juncture. Work was all-consuming, especially while I was so bad at it.
“You’ll get better. Interns, by definition, are here to learn.”
“I may have made a terrible mistake,” I told him.
His expression grew alarmed: One of his neonates? One of his preemies? “When?” he asked.
“I don’t mean a specific terrible mistake. I meant, it was a mistake to think that good grades were transferable to the actual practice of medicine. I don’t have the aptitude in any of the areas they evaluate us in.”
Leo thought for a minute, then said, “You work hard. You haven’t ever taken a sick day, as far as I know. And you haven’t had any major goof-ups, correct?”
“No one would leave me alone long enough in the OR to take out the wrong organ or amputate the wrong limb,” I said.
“Do you want me to talk to someone?” he asked.
“Like who?”
“I know people,” he said. “I could feel them out for how you’re doing and where you stand. Maybe you’re worried about nothing.”
I said I knew how I was doing, and besides, I needed the truth more than I needed the anesthetic tact they would administer out of friendship to him.
Leo said he hadn’t always been this comfortable on the ward. I should have seen him on his first medevac flight. Boy, was that a scary couple of hours. And not much hand-holding for trainees.
I said I recognized that in a million years, or even if I spent a million dollars on therapy, I’d never have his personality, his good humor, his unflappability, or that way he could walk into a patient’s room and say just the right breezy thing to make his or her pain or nausea or approaching syringe recede.
“You notice all that?” he asked.
“I hear about it. It’s common knowledge. I think some of the pediatric residents steal your lines. And your patients, let’s face it, worship you. Babies, toddlers, girls, boys. Not to mention their mothers.”
Have I mentioned that Leo is handsome? Perhaps not when you break it down, feature by feature, and factor in some patches of facial seborrhea. But altogether it’s a successful package, with its curly blond hair, well-defined mouth, and pale blue eyes that look like they’ve just finished having a good laugh. He was probably a gawky teenager, and I do see vestiges of acne scars on his red face, but overall he bears that winning combination of an elfin face on a tall, broad-shouldered man.
He said then that his late father thought he was wasting those very talents I was referring to, the gift of gab, the ability to walk into a room and—pardon the bragging—win friends and influence people. “So you know what that means, right? To a Boston-Irish father?”
I shook my head.
“State senator or state rep with an eye to an eventual run for the governor’s office.”
“Is that what you’d like?”
“Absolutely not,” said Leo. “He didn’t like telling people that his son was a nurse. He used to say ‘orderly’ because he thought it sounded manlier, but I put a stop to that. He changed it to, ‘Leo trained in the army medical corps and works at a Harvard hospital. No, not married, but he dates a different nurse every night.’”
I said, “It’s not so much your gift of gab. It’s bigger than that. It’s a quality of mercy combined with your ability to make a joke.”
Leo smiled and said that was a nice compliment. Very nice. Thanks. Quality of mercy—wow.
“Maybe some of it will rub off on me,” I added.
He said—another tribute to his diplomacy—“You have other strengths, Alice.”
“Name one.”
“Brains, for starters. I mean, let’s say there was an entire hospital staffed by smiling volunteers, happy LPNs, and class clowns like me. It would certainly lose its state certification in a hurry.”
I said that was a ridiculous argument, but thank you.
“What exactly are you worried about?” he asked. “Your private life or your professional life?”
“Professional,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll be invited back for a second year. And then what? I’ll have to start over again. And what would that be? Who’s going to want a resident that was asked to leave?”
“Does that happen?”
“All the time. It’s a pyramid system. They start with seven, and prune every year.”
He sighed. Even Leo couldn’t put a positive spin on my prospects.
I walked over to the counter and came back with the coffeepot. “Let’s just say my answer to that question had been ‘personal’ instead of ‘professional.’ Would you have some insights? Have you noticed me doing anything egregious during social exchanges?”
Leo upended the sugar dispenser and let several teaspoonfuls pour into his cup.
“Be honest,” I said.
He squirmed in his chair, closed one eye. “If you put a gun to my head, I’d probably say that at times you remind me of my sister-in-law Sheila.”
Leo had twelve siblings, so there was always a family member he could cite as a role model or bad apple. “I hasten to add that Sheila is probably the smartest of any of my brothers’ wives.”
“But?”
“But she’s not the person I’d marry if I had my eye on the governor’s mansion.”
I said, “Massachusetts doesn’t have a governor’s mansion.”
Leo closed his eyes, exhaled as if exasperated.
“Is your brother running for something?” I asked.
Leo shook his head.
I said, “I ran for office once, in high school, but I lost. I would have been perfect for the position of class secretary because I’d taken shorthand one summer and would have been able to take the best notes of anyone else, but apparently that mattered very little.”
“Everything in high school is a popularity contest—which can’t be a startling revelation to you.”
I tried to remember back to the