surgery, not write prescriptions. For the next forty years he addressed neurological disorders, physical malfunctions within the nervous system. He became an expert on certain procedures.
The sunlight here was dazzlingly bright, and the long grass hissed mildly in the wind. It reminded Edward of Cape Cod, his parents' house, the old saltbox on a low rise among the cranberry bogs. Those runty scrub pines, stunted by the wind. The air there smelled of the pines, and of the sweet, tangy bayberry; even, faintly, of salt, though the house was several miles from the beach.
Here, salt was heavy in the air, drifting up from the shore. The tides were high—he liked that about Maine, the great sweeping shifts of its waters, the brimming heights, the draining lows. The brutal iciness of the sea, closing like a fist around your heart. You couldn't swim here, there was no thought of it.
He'd never see the Cape house again. When Katharine could no longer manage the steep slope of the lawn, they'd stopped going there. Rather than leave it in his estate to be taxed, he'd asked Harriet if she'd like it, she'd always used it the most. He'd never thought to ask her to keep it, and two years after he gave it to her, she sold it to a developer.
It still made him angry, he felt it now in his throat. When he found out about it, Harriet told him coldly that she'd had no choice. She couldn't afford the taxes and the maintenance. She wasn't using it much, and she needed the money to start her practice. But if she'd only told him, of course he'd have paid the taxes.
Edward didn't want to see it now, crowded by other buildings, the bogs drained. He wanted to hold it in his mind as he'd known it, on its small hill, the old silvery-barked cedar trees on the front lawn, the high thick tangle of wild sweet pea and honeysuckle cascading down the hill behind it.
In the pond were snapping turtles. Once, when he was rowing across it, a turtle had clamped itself invisibly onto the oar, hanging on. He'd been small, only eight or nine. He remembered the sudden inexplicable weight, like a spell cast on the left oar. The smell of the flat green water, the stand of pines on the far hillside: mornings in that house had been pure and blue, silent and untouched. His father, in white duck trousers and faded blue sneakers, walking back and forth on the wiry grass, spreading the sails out to dry. Edward helped, tugging the heavy canvas from its damp folds.
No, he didn't want to see the place again. It was safe in his memory. Did it matter if it existed nowhere but in his mind? His memory seemed a better and better place to live. As he grew older, what was stored there grew more and more different from the world around him. The worlds diverged—did it matter? He wondered how Julia's sons were doing.
“Now, tell us, how are the children?” Katharine asked.
Edward thought, confused, that she'd just asked that question. Or had he just asked it? He looked sideways at Julia, to see if Katharine had repeated herself. Julia wouldn't say so, but her voice would be slow and patient. Edward hated people being patient with him, it was so patronizing.
“The boys are both fine,” Julia said, frowning, looking out over the pink grass.
Julia wouldn't say if they weren't. She never did, though Edward knew things had been pretty bad at times. Both with the children and her divorce: she led a chaotic life, as far as he could tell. She never talked about it. I'm fine, she always said forbiddingly. She wanted privacy, he understood that. He didn't want to know everything, either. Hearing about other people's lives was either tedious or frustrating, they made so many mistakes. Katharine, of course, heard all those things; she was interested.
Edward had disapproved of Julia's divorce. He didn't know why Wendell had left Julia, and he supposed no one would ever tell him. Wendell was married now to someone else, so it had probably been woman trouble. Of course you had these urges, everyone did, but you didn't leave your wife. People were so ready now to give up, throw everything away, but divorce was the solution to nothing. It made everything worse, usually. Look at Wendell, off with some inferior woman, Julia on her own now. For good, probably, her face turning lined and leathery.
He'd never wanted to divorce Katharine, though he'd been interested in other women. He'd had flings. But he'd never have left her. His marriage was part of himself, like being a surgeon. Each day he had waked up married to Katharine, and a surgeon.
Surgery had been the thing, the center of everything. The operations he'd performed were still part of his consciousness. He could go through each step of each one. They were like the house on the Cape— still there, still real, ready for him to inhabit.
Surgery had been his life. He'd done thousands of operations, over nearly four decades. It had engaged him utterly, it had given him his greatest pleasure. There was nothing more serious, more crucial, more delicate. He'd welcomed the challenges. He'd welcomed risk—he liked it—and often taking a risk was the right thing to do. He'd been good and he'd been lucky, and he'd been rewarded for both. Young doctors came to train with him, he'd been twice head of the National Association of Neurosurgeons, which he'd helped found. Surgery had been his life, a continuing challenge, one he always rose to. It had been intoxicating: the excitement, the urgency, the thrill of commencement.
Pushing through the swinging doors into the operating theater he entered a separate world, self-contained, professional, purposeful. The clean, cold, invigorating room. The bold, caustic smell of antiseptic, and the draped motionless body, stark and shadowless beneath the bright lamp. The pale, exposed, shaved skin, brilliant in its glowing pallor, vulnerable and still. The body was now defenseless, its mind absent. The body was no longer the house of the soul but the site of the performance. All of them drew near, the nurses, the assisting surgeons, the anesthesiologist. All of them ready.
Gowned, masked, gloved, costumed as his professional self. That first moment of infinite possibility: making the first incision, the bright metal edge sliding easily into the elastic skin, as he entered his world. Once the opening incision was made, everything else fell away. Then everything was in his grasp.
The crimson interior of the body was his landscape. Cutting through the dense carapace of bone, removing its protective helmet, exposing the secret tissues of the brain: soft, intricate, pulsing, full of their own mysterious life. Here was the true center of the organism, this rosy, glistening, underground labyrinth, coiled, folded, furled, lobed, branched, and connecting, each a part of the quick, mysterious response to life.
Standing under the lamp, leaning into the terrible exposure of the wound he had made, Edward was focused and intent, drawn into himself, to a place without connection to the rest of his life. He felt utterly aware, calm, capable. Masked people stood silently by, all of them part of it, ready to suction out blood, hand him instruments, take them away, raise or lower the level of consciousness. The thudding heartbeat steady on the monitor, a bass line of reassurance. Edward heard the sound without attending to it, aware only when it changed. His own breathing was muffled and magnified by his mask. He probed delicately among the glistening tissues; he took a narrow-bladed instrument.
All this was present for him still, but gone now, vanished from the real world like the house on the Cape. He had saved people's lives, their senses, their movement—but it was now like a movie about someone else.
His skills were gone, his hands were mitts. Edward could no longer even shave himself properly. It still looked all right, or at least he hoped it did, but his cheeks were unevenly smooth, rough in places, though he drew the razor carefully across them every day. He passed his hand across his jaw. It was worse on the left, the stubble coarser there. That was the side away from the window. He turned his head slightly, offering the others the smoother side of his jaw. It was humiliating. The flesh had no business betraying him.
“What are they doing right now?” Katharine asked.
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