I stood up, tapped my watch, and pointed across the hall to the bathroom.
He hung up quickly and asked, “How was yesterday? Awful?”
“Very sad. And the minister was a complete stranger, so that didn’t help.”
“I guess I meant, how did Ray work out as an escort?”
“Good and bad.”
He pointed to the chair I’d just vacated and I sat back down. “Good as transportation. Good at taking my side in a family fracas. Bad at being grammatical and appropriate.”
“I could have predicted that,” said Leo. “There’s something slimy about him. And he tries too hard. He’s clearly waging a campaign to win your hand.”
“My hand?” I repeated. “You mean, as in marriage?”
“Of course. He’s not a kid. He’s a widower. Don’t you read magazines? Men who were once married get hooked up again as soon as they can because they know single men die younger than married men. Ask any actuary.”
I said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then you’re blind. He’s looking for his next wife and he thinks her name is Alice.”
I took a long gulp of coffee. “Okay. Maybe he is. But it’s only human nature to look for someone who can return his feelings, and when he realized I couldn’t, he finally gave up.”
Leo said, “I don’t want to make you any later than you already are, but I think I have more to say on the subject of Ray—namely that he kept coming back without any encouragement, so why would he bow out now?”
I said, “Maybe you and I can grab a sandwich in the cafeteria.”
“If my five minutes overlaps with yours, you mean.”
“Or tonight.”
“Can’t tonight,” said Leo.
“Same woman?”
“Dinner with my mother,” he said. Mutha was how he said the word: Dinna with my mutha.
I waited, thinking he might sweep me up into the party, in that way of large families with boardinghouse tables and bottomless stews.
“You didn’t want to come home and have dinner at my house, did you?” asked Leo. “Is that what I’m reading in your face? ‘Leo, invite me to your house because I haven’t had a really stringy piece of meat in months, and I’m dying to be interrogated about my life, my sleeping arrangements, and my grandmother’s last days on earth.’”
I said, “Actually, I’d welcome the opportunity to observe you in a family context.”
Leo said, “Is that Thrift-speak for ‘Excellent! I’ve been dying to meet your mother, Leo’?”
I didn’t see the difference, but I said yes, it was.
WE TOOK THE Riverside Line to Kenmore Square, then switched to a Boston College car, outbound. When stymied by a turnstile, I had to confess that I hardly ever took public transportation.
“Why not?” Leo asked.
“Too busy working to go anywhere.”
“You know what?” said Leo. “I’m sick of hearing that. I work hard, and I know a lot of residents who do, too, but they get out. They wear beepers. Yet you seem proud of the fact that you have no life.”
Was he right? Was I going to be like Dr. Perzigian, chief of thoracic surgery, famous for making rounds at five A.M.; for getting married in scrubs in the hospital chapel; for missing the birth of his son while repairing a knife wound close to the aorta of a philandering city councilman?
“Because,” Leo continued, “it’s getting a little monotonous.”
I said, “Then I’ll have to be monotonous because all I care about is getting invited back next year and eventually becoming chief resident and after that getting into a plastic surgery program.”
Wouldn’t you think a speech like that would provoke a statement of support? Instead, to my shock and to the fascination of the two teenage girls sitting in front of us on the trolley car, Leo said, “I chose that word deliberately because I’m in charge of the social development of Alice Thrift.”
I harrumphed. The high-schoolers turned around in frank fashion to assess me. I stared back schoolmarmishly so they would mind their own business. Leo tapped one of them on the shoulder and asked in his friendliest pediatric bedside fashion, “Don’t you think my friend here should spend a little more time worrying about life outside of work and less about preserving her reputation as Alice the overworked?”
The two girls, both of whose hair was streaked maroon, looked at each other and smirked.
“No, really. Don’t give me attitude,” said Leo. “I grew up with a houseful of sisters, so I’m not deterred by a couple of funny looks.”
The one next to the window asked smartly, “Haven’t you ever heard of, ‘Don’t talk to strangers’?”
“I’m a nurse and she’s a doctor,” said Leo, “so that doesn’t apply, especially in the middle of a trolley car, surrounded by potential Good Samaritans.”
“They’re probably fourteen years old,” I muttered.
“Fifteen,” said the one in the aisle seat.
“A good demographic,” said Leo. “I have a couple of nieces around that age and I can always depend on them for an honest appraisal of my shirt, my tie, my hair, my shoes, my date, my taste in music, you name it.”
One mumbled, “Music?”
Leo named people or groups or albums—I’d heard of none of these entities—which broke whatever final layer of ice needed melting with these two strangers in front of us, their eyebrows pierced and their fingertips stained orange from some triangular chiplike snack they were sharing.
Do you see what Leo represented in our arrangement? Charm of the easy, fluent, unaffected variety—meant to be instructive, but a constant reminder of my own unease.
LEO HAD WARNED me, but still I was shocked by the quantity of Jesus iconography on his mother’s walls and horizontal surfaces. She lived in Brighton, in the same house in which he’d grown up, still containing some of the thirteen children she’d raised there: Marie, the divorced special-ed teacher, a foot shorter than her brother and 50 percent more freckled, had his round, elfin face; Rosemary, the travel agent, from the dark-haired side of the family, wearing a fashionable and no doubt expensive suit with a double strand of pearls; and Michael, the baby, age twenty-six, wearing a T-shirt bearing the name of a gym.
Mrs.
