The Stars Are Fire(29)

“No,” she says. “I need to talk.”


“Were you in the war?” she asks.

“I was. A medic. I was in my second year of medical school when war broke out. I finished the year and enlisted.”

“What a horrible time you must have had.”

“It was pretty bad.”

“Do you ever speak about it?” she asks.

“If someone wants to know.”

“It’s funny, because my husband hardly ever mentioned the war. It’s been my experience that most men our age won’t.”

“You can’t blame them. No one wants to revisit horror. Or guilt.”

“Why do you say guilt?”

“You’re given orders you don’t think are right, but you have to do them anyway. Every day, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one.”

“What’s a selfish one?”

“Triaging a man you guess won’t live past noon though he’s in line for surgery. Then you struggle with that decision for weeks.”

For a moment, Grace is silent. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you end up here?” she asks.

“After the war, I finished up med school, then just recently set out to hang my shingle. You get a map, and you shop for towns. If you’re lucky, someone takes you in and grooms you. I didn’t want hospital work. I’d seen enough of wards. I wanted a small-town family practice. After the fire, I’d heard that the local doctor’s house had burned down, and that he had a temporary practice here, in this hut. I came here to visit him and to offer my help, and I could see he was in a state. I told him what I was looking for, and he seemed immensely relieved. We brought the lawyers in, and I bought the practice.”

She scans the Quonset hut, the metal rivets showing. “I hope you didn’t pay a lot for it.”

He laughs. “The government owns the building. It’s temporary. I hope to build a house with an office attached.”

“In Hunts Beach?”

“That’s the idea.”

“You’ll have an awfully small practice,” she says.

He glances at Claire, puts the back of his hand to her forehead. “If Hunts Beach were inland, I’d agree with you. Few families would want to rebuild in a place with no infrastructure. No schools, police, fire department. But Hunts Beach will always be valuable land because it’s coastal. It will repopulate. Whether it will be with the original inhabitants, I can’t say.” He pauses. “It’s as if you’re part of a diaspora now.”

Grace is unsure of the word.

“A scattering of a people from their homeland. Displaced.”

She nods. The Jews. She has seen the movie reels. Horrifying and unimaginable.

She glances out the window. The snow is still falling. Will her children be taught about the Jews at school?

“But what about you?” he asks.

Grace tells him about her father, the secretarial course, meeting Gene at the small college to which they both commuted, and marrying him before they’d started their second year. She doesn’t tell the doctor that when she met Gene she thought him handsome and serious, in contrast to the boys she’d been meeting at parties, and she took that seriousness for depth of character. She doesn’t tell him that they married when Grace discovered she was pregnant and that Gene began to shake with either anger or great happiness. This is good, this is what I’ve always wanted, she told herself. And if it wasn’t as romantic or as heedless as she had once hoped for, it was fine.

“You mind if I smoke?” the doctor asks.

“Not at all.”

He offers her one, and she takes it. He crosses his legs and hangs an arm over the chair. He looks casual and very long. “Tell me more about your husband.”

“He’s a surveyor on the Turnpike project. His mother died recently. I expected him to mourn, but I didn’t expect the silence.” She takes a pull on the cigarette. “I used to count up the number of words he said to me in a given day. Sometimes it was only two. When I was a girl, I always thought I’d marry the strong, silent type. But what a bore, really.”

“You have friends?” he asks.

“I used to have a very good friend. But after the fire, she and her husband and children went to live in Nova Scotia.”

“There you go, the diaspora. Why so far?”

“They have family there. Rosie was wonderful. She made me happy every day.” She pauses. “Nearly everyone in Hunts Beach is now homeless. Many are destitute.”

“There’ll be no charge for tonight.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” she’s quick to say. “I’ll pay. Of course, I’ll pay. You can’t very well start a practice without the patients paying.”

“I’m going to set up a sliding scale. When I’ve assessed the general income level of the patients, I’ll determine my fees.”

“Is that legal?”

“It’s time-honored.”

“You’ll have a bookkeeping mess,” she says.

“You know bookkeeping?”

“I do. And I’ll pay the standard rate because you just saved my daughter’s life.”

“You saved your daughter’s life by getting her here. Seizures can be very dangerous.”