Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [18]
There was no answer when he knocked. It was the corner room on the second floor. The compounder's wife came charging up to protest this trespass by a male. Though Matron and Sister Mary Joseph Praise were the only nuns at Missing, the compounder's wife acted as if she had been denied her true calling. With a sash low over her brow and a crucifix as big as a revolver, she looked like a nun. She considered herself a quasi warden of the nurses’ hostel, the keeper of the Missing virgins. She had a spider's sense for a male footstep, an incursion into her territory. But now, seeing who it was, she backed away.
Stone had never been inside Sister Mary Joseph Praise's room. When she typed or worked on the illustrations for his manuscripts, she came to his quarters or to his office adjoining the clinic.
He turned the handle, calling out, “Sister? Sister!” He was met by a miasma at once familiar and alarming, but he couldn't place it.
He groped for the switch and swore when it eluded him. He stumbled to the window, bumping into a chest of drawers. He swung the glass-paned portion of the window in, and then pushed back the wooden shutters. Daylight flooded the narrow room.
On top of the chest of drawers was a heavy mason jar that drew the sun's rays. The amber fluid within reached all the way to the chunky lid which was sealed with wax. At first he thought the jar might hold a relic, an icon. A carpet of gooseflesh swept down his arms, as if recognition came to his body before it came to his brain. There, suspended in the fluid, the nail delicately pivoting on the glass bottom like a ballerina on tiptoe, was his finger. The skin below the nail was the texture of old parchment, while the underbelly displayed the purple discoloration of infection. He felt a longing, an emptiness, and an itch in his right palm which only that missing finger could relieve.
“I didn't know—” he said turning to her bed, but what he saw made him forget what he was going to say.
Sister Mary Joseph Praise lay in agony on her narrow cot. Her lips were blue. Her lusterless eyes were focused beyond his face. She was deathly pale. He reached for her pulse, which was rapid and feeble. An uninvited memory from the Calangute voyage of seven years before came flooding over him: he recalled the feverish and comatose Sister Anjali. A cold sensation spread from his belly to his chest. He was overcome by an emotion that as a surgeon he had rarely experienced: fear.
His legs could no longer support him.
He fell to his knees by her bed. “Mary?” he said. He could do nothing but repeat her name. From his lips, Sister Mary Joseph Praise's name sounded like an interrogation, then an endearment, then a confession of love spun out of one word. Mary? Mary, Mary! She did not, could not, answer.
An old man's palsy overtook his hands as they reached for her face. He kissed her forehead. In that extraordinary and unstoppable act he realized, not without a twinge of pride, that he loved her, and that he, Thomas Stone, was not only capable of love, but that he had loved her for seven years. If he'd been blind to his love, perhaps it was because it had happened as soon as he met her on those slippery stairs, it had happened when she had nursed him, bathed him, tried to revive him on the Calangute. It had happened when she'd held him in her arms and wrestled and dragged his dead weight to a hammock and then spoon-fed life back into him. It had happened as they crouched over Sister Anjali's body. But love reached its apogee when Sister Mary Joseph Praise came to work alongside him in Ethiopia, and then it had never wavered. Love so strong, without ebb and flow or crests and troughs, indeed lacking any sort of motion so that it had become invisible to him these seven years, part of the order of things outside his head which he had taken for granted.
Did Mary love him? Yes. Of this he felt certain. She had loved him, but following his cue—always following