In the nurses’ quarters she ran up the stairs to my mother's room. When she knocked there was no answer, but the door was unlocked. In the darkened room she saw Sister Mary Joseph Praise under the covers, her face turned toward the wall. “Sister?” she called softly, and when my mother moaned, the probationer took that to mean she was awake. “Dr. Stone sent me to tell you …” She felt relieved to have remembered all the parts of the message. She waited for a response, and when my mother didn't volunteer one, the probationer imagined that my mother might be annoyed with her. “I only came because Dr. Stone sent me. I'm sorry to disturb you. I hope you feel better. Do you need anything?” She waited dutifully, and after a while, she eased out of the room. Since there was no return message for Dr. Stone, and since her pediatric nursing class was about to start, she did not return to Theater 3.
IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON by the time Stone went to the nurses’ quarters. He had finished the appendectomy, then two gastro-jejunostomies for peptic ulcer, three hernia repairs, one hydrocele, a subtotal thyroid resection, and a skin graft, but by his standards it had been tortuously slow. An ordeal. With knitted brow he ascended the stairs. He understood that his swiftness as a surgeon depended to a large degree—more than hed ever imagined—on the skills of Sister Mary Joseph Praise … Why did he have to think about these things? Where was she? That was the point. And when would she be back?
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 his cue—she'd said nothing. And what had he done all these years? Only taken her for granted. Mary, Mary, Mary. Even the sound of her name was a revelation to him since he'd never called her anything but Sister. He was sobbing, terrified of losing her, but that, too, he saw was his selfishness, his need for her manifesting itself again. Would he have the chance to make amends? How stupid could a man be?
Sister Mary Joseph Praise barely registered his touch. Her cheek was hot against his. He lifted the sheet. A generous swelling of her belly met his eyes.
It was an axiom of his that any swelling in a woman's abdomen was a pregnancy until proven otherwise. But his mind overrode that thought, refusing to consider it—this was a nun, after all. Instead he came to a snap diagnosis of bowel obstruction … or free fluid in the peritoneal cavity … or hemorrhagic pancreatitis … some sort of abdominal catastrophe …
Maneuvering through the door frame, then trying not to bump her feet on the banister, his sobs changing to grunts of effort, he carried her out from her quarters, and then down the path to the operating theater. She felt heavier to Stone than she had a right to be.
There was a question the chief examiner had posed to him when he appeared for the Royal College of Surgeons viva voce after passing his written examinations in Edinburgh: “What first-aid treatment in shock is administered by ear?” His answer “Words of comfort!” had won the day. But now, in place of reassuring and soothing words that would have been humane and therapeutic, Stone yelled for help at the top of his voice.
His shouts, taken up by the keeper of the virgins, brought everyone including Gebrew the watchman, who came running from the front gate, along with Koochooloo and two other unnamed dogs at her heels.