Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [237]
CHAPTER 47
Missing Letters
THOMAS STONE STAYED IN MY ROOM past midnight. At some point he became one with the dark shadows, his voice filling my space as if no other words had ever been spoken there. I didn't interrupt him. I forgot he was there. I was inhabiting his story, lighting a candle in St. Mary's Church in Fort St. George, Madras, holding my own in an English boarding school, seeing how an unroofing of memory might lead to a vision of Mary. And if visions could happen in Fatima and Lourdes and Guadalupe, who was I to doubt that a secular vision of my mother had not appeared to him in a frost-rimmed rooming house window, just as I had seen and felt her in the autoclave room as a young boy? His voice walked me into a past that preceded my birth, but it was still mine as much as the color of my eyes or the length of my index finger.
I became conscious of Thomas Stone only when he was done; I saw a man under the spell of his own tale, a snake charmer whose serpent has become his turban. The silence afterward was terrible.
THOMAS STONE SAVED our surgery program.
He did it by making Our Lady of Perpetual Succour an affiliate of Mecca in Boston. All it took was his affixing his signature to a letter saying it was so. But Our Lady of Perpetual Succour was no mere paper affiliate of Mecca. Each month, four medical students and two surgical residents came down from Mecca to do a rotation with us. “A safari to see the natives killing each other, and to catch a few Broadway shows,” is how B. C. Gandhi put it when he heard about the plan. But each of us also had opportunities to do specialty rotations up in Boston.
I finished my internship and began my second year of residency. The most important result of our affiliation with Mecca was that it allowed Deepak, the Wandering Jew of surgery (as B.C. referred to him), to finish. He was now a board-certified surgeon and could have gone anywhere to set up practice. Instead, he stayed on at Our Lady with the title of Director of Surgical Training; he was also appointed Clinical Assistant Professor at Mecca. I had never seen Deepak happier. Thomas Stone, true to his word, paved the way for publication of Deepak's study on in juries to the vena cava. That paper in the American Journal of Surgery became a classic, one that everyone quoted when discussing liver injuries. Though Deepak was getting a consultant's salary, he continued to live in the house-staff quarters. Courtesy of the Mecca surgical residents who came down to the Bronx for rotations, we had more manpower and Deepak got more sleep. In an unused basement space, Deepak researched the effects of different interruptions to the blood supply of pig and cow livers.
Popsy's dementia no longer needed to be concealed. He roamed safely throughout Our Lady, wearing scrubs, and with a mask dangling from his neck. He was turned away every time he wandered into the operating room, or tried to leave the premises, but he didn't seem to mind. He would sometimes stop people and declare, “I contaminated myself.”
LATE ON A FRIDAY EVENING, a few months after Thomas Stone's first visit to my room, I heard a knock at my door. There he stood, tentative, embarrassed, and unsure what his reception would be.
My father's long confessional had changed things for me; it had been much easier to stay angry with him, to trash his