The Shoemaker's Wife(141)

“Dottore, I worry he’s growing too fast.”

“No such thing if he wants to keep up with the Finns,” Doc said.

The Scandinavian boys were known as power towers. Tall, strong, quick, and bright, they were stunning athletes. The sons of the local Italian immigrants had to work hard to compete with them.

Doc Graham checked Antonio’s lymph glands in his neck, then peered down his throat, into his ears and eyes, and took his pulse. “I pronounce you perfectly healthy.”

“I can play?”

“You can play.”

Antonio thanked the doctor and pulled on his shirt. “I’ll see you at home, Papa. I have practice.” Antonio bounded out the door quickly. Ciro stood, placing his hands on his lower back.

“How’s your back?” Doc Graham asked.

“Not any better than the last time,” Ciro said. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do. I take the aspirin, I lie on the floor with my legs in the air, and I soak in Epsom. I just don’t get any better, and sometimes it’s manageable, but the pain is always there.”

“Let me take a look.”

“Grazie, Dottore.” Ciro slipped back to his Italian, as he often did when a kindness was extended to him.

Doc Graham had Ciro remove his shirt. He pushed pressure points on Ciro’s back. One, right above the kidneys, caused Ciro to cry out.

“How old are you, Ciro?”

“Thirty-five.”

“Were you in the war?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Mostly in Cambrai.”

“Were you hit with mustard gas?”

“It was not significant.” Ciro straightened his back as best he could and pushed his shoulders back. He had long avoided discussing the war, and the last place he wanted to do it was in a doctor’s office. “I saw the men badly burned from it. My platoon was not. We died in more traditional ways. Stray bullets and barbed wire.”

Dr. Graham studied the skin on Ciro’s back, and followed it with a small blue light. He stopped and asked Ciro to breathe. “Ciro, I want to send you down to Saint Mary’s Hospital in Rochester. It’s part of the Mayo Clinic. They’re experts when it comes to health problems with veterans. I’ll call them, and call my friend in the clinic. He’ll see you right away.”

Doc Graham ripped the sheet from his pad and handed it to Ciro:

Dr. Renfro, oncologist

Saint Mary’s Hospital, the Mayo Clinic

Enza couldn’t sleep the night before Ciro went for his tests in Rochester. She was nervous for so many reasons. Ciro had never complained of pain in his body, just the occasional ache that comes with hard, repetitive work. But lately he had been hurting. There was a night a month ago when she had to help him out of the bathtub. There was another time when he woke up in the middle of the night with shooting pains radiating down his leg. She didn’t know if this was typical of growing older, though he was not yet forty, but all of it was of deep concern to her. She didn’t know where to put her feelings and she didn’t want to alarm her husband, so she wrote a letter to the doctor at the Mayo Clinic.

September 6, 1930

Dear Dr. Renfro,

Thank you for seeing my husband Ciro Lazzari. He will not give you much information, so my hope is that my letter might answer any questions you have. We have a young son and a shop to keep open, or I would have made the trip with my husband.

He has been suffering from back pain since we were married in 1918. Over the past year or so, the pain has escalated. The old remedies of camphor packs and Epsom salt soaks no longer bring him much relief. He is a shoemaker, so he often works on his feet ten hours a day, and that may contribute to the problem.

My husband is very intelligent. He will not, however, ask you important questions, nor will he inquire in any detail about how to follow whatever treatment you might prescribe. So please, if you don’t mind, send him home with an explicit list of things, and I will make sure they are done properly.

Sincerely yours,

Mrs. Lazzari

Rochester, Minnesota, was built on a raging river whose behavior was so precarious it took Franciscan nuns to defy the natural habitat and have the guts to build a hospital.

Saint Mary’s Hospital, operated by the Mayo Clinic, had grown from a small operation into the best medical center in the Midwest by the time Ciro Lazzari entered its pristine lobby. The stately red-brick campus, with new additions hiding beneath wings of scaffolding, was filled with state-of-the-art labs and examination rooms and the most sought-after doctors in the country. It resembled a bustling honeycomb.

The nuns, their black-and-white habits so similar to those of the sisters of San Nicola, gave Ciro a feeling of familiarity that completely relaxed him and gave him confidence. He joked with the sisters as they put him through the arduous tests.

Ciro was handed a file, and throughout the day he was moved from one small examination room to another. X-rays were taken, dye was drunk, he was poked and prodded and placed on a gurney, blood was drawn, bones were scanned; there was not a cell in his body that the doctors did not examine or discuss, or at least it seemed that way to Ciro.

At the end of the day, he was brought into an office to meet with Dr. Renfro. When a young man of thirty came into the room, Ciro was surprised. He had been expecting an older man, like Doc Graham.