They were there when I arrived that morning, but so were two other people: John Naples, the town doctor, and Reverend Cunningham, the town minister, all of them talking quietly. As I entered, their conversation ceased. My father was an impassive man, stoic and not given to emotionalism. (He had a large, square face and eyes the dull olive of caper berries.) Therefore, whenever he did evince some sort of emotion, it was cause for alarm, or at least curiosity. In fact, I remember his expression from that morning — a mix of surprise, consternation, and bewilderment — rather better than I do his actual face.
“Your mother’s dead,” said my father. He sounded calm and grave, and he spoke in normal tones, which belied his expression — indeed, his voice reassured me.
“Really, Joseph,” said Reverend Cunningham.
“It’s best he hear it this way, straightforward,” said my father. He had looked directly at me to tell me the news. Now he looked away and spoke to somewhere over Reverend Cunningham’s head. “I assume you’ll take care of the body, Reverend. Do whatever … she wanted done.” Then he slapped his hands together once, in a neat, conclusive gesture, and wandered out the back door into the yard. Lester, after giving me a long, dolorous look, trotted out after him, leaving me with Reverend Cunningham, who sighed, and John Naples, who scowled.
“You!” Naples said to me. “Don’t you have a brother someplace?”
He knew I did. The previous summer, Owen and I had trapped a mess of green grass snakes and fed them, one slithery strand at a time, through Naples’s clinic’s letter box. It was a bit of childish fun, but he had been enraged and had never forgiven us. He was a bitter, angry man, made corrosive by his disappointment with the world, the sort of man who on the street kicked up puffs of dust in the direction of children simply because he knew they’d have few means of retaliation. “Aren’t you interested to know how your mother expired?” he asked me.
“Naples!” said Reverend Cunningham.
Naples ignored Father Cunningham. “Those mosquitoes that crowd around your creek,” he continued. “It’s my medical opinion that they carry a strain of Chinese flu. Mosquitoes carry disease, and your mother wandered into a cesspool of teeming bacteria and caused her own demise.” He leaned back against his chair, satisfied, and puffed on his pipe. “And if you and your brother don’t avoid that creek, you’ll meet with the same death.”
Reverend Cunningham looked aghast. “Really, Naples,” he said, and then, having exhausted his resources on that one rebuke, he left through the back door as well. I was not surprised, and had expected little from him — not simply because he was a minister, but because he looked so diminished. He had the sort of face that was memorable for its absences rather than its presences: cheeks so gaunt and cadaverous that it looked as if someone had reached in, scooped out the meat in two quick movements, and sent him on his way.
Naples shrugged. He, unlike the others, seemed to have no intention of leaving. Owen and I had noticed that when we talked to adults as if they were a bit slow, even inferior — as if they were nuisances we’d learned to tolerate — they were often shocked into giving us information and speaking to us in tones they would never normally use with a child. Such a technique, however, did not have the same effect on Naples; his arrogance had lent him a sort of immovability that proved very inconvenient.
“What the devil is the Chinese flu?” I began.
Naples puffed away. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said rudely.
“I think you made it up.”
“And I think you’re an insolent brat. You and your brother both.”
“You did make it up, didn’t you?”
“Watch yourself, boy.”
“But what is it?”
There were a few more rounds of this — me asking, Naples threatening — until he finally sighed and yielded. “A kind of airborne disease spread by mosquitoes. One bit your mother and she got sick and died.” It seemed a logical explanation, and I was quiet. For a minute we sat in silence, each of us, I imagine, contemplating her somehow disappointing demise. But then Naples remembered how he had been manipulated into answering my question and recovered himself. “I’m surprised your mother hadn’t killed herself,” he said. “God knows I would have were I your parent.” His eyes shone with triumph and anticipation.
It didn’t bother me, what he said, but he must have mistaken my silence for hurt, and, satisfied, he knocked the ash out of his pipe into a tidy anthill on the table and left through our front door, banging it shut behind him. As he walked down the path, I could hear him whistling, until the sound grew faint and then disappeared altogether, leaving only the purr of a flock of summer insects. It was the first time I had been spoken to as an adult.
But it was also John Naples, this small-town, smug, fifth-rate doctor, who truly sparked my interest in disease. He did this inadvertently — I don’t believe he told me about my mother’s death in such blunt terms because he intended to speak to me as an adult; indeed, he was a petty, cruel man, and I am certain he was attempting to do nothing more than stun me into tears — but in his harsh and erroneous explanation, he offered me my first glimpse into the world of disease and its exacting, brilliant puzzle.
Even at that age, Owen was interested in words: he read dictionaries and all manner of books and loved any sort of wordplay — anagrams, puns, palindromes. He could amuse himself all day with strings of rhymes he had discovered or created. And although I too enjoyed reading, I never loved the sport of language the way Owen did. This was because to me, language had no native intelligence of its own — it was created by man and was given meaning by man, and therefore clever writing often seemed to me little more than a Chinese puzzle box of contrivances. Writers are praised for having a facility with something man-made, something that can be changed or manipulated at will; but why is augmenting a man-made construction considered an act of brilliance? But perhaps I am not making sense here, so let me put it another way: language has no inherent secrets.
But science, specifically the science of disease, was all delicious secrets, dark oily pockets of mystery. Language could be misinterpreted, misconstrued, its rules imposed or ignored at whim. There was no discipline to it. It seemed sometimes a sort of game made up by man to amuse himself with, much as Owen did. But a disease, a virus, a wiggling string of bacteria, existed with or without man, and it was up to us to fathom its secrets.
John Naples, of course, did not think about disease this way (a good sign of a weak mind is the doctor who insists that it’s the patient, not the disease, on whom one’s efforts should be concentrated), but I credit him for appearing in my life as a cautionary figure, the sort of person with whom I would now be interacting had I not chosen to pursue research medicine. Even then, I knew I would not be satisfied with imperfect explanations. I was simply too impatient.
Naples, thankfully, was not to have the last word. My father may have been a lazy man, but he wasn’t foolish, and in this matter he proved surprisingly competent. Later that afternoon, after telephoning his sister in Rochester (he had overlooked the matter of informing Owen, which I had to do myself when he at last padded down to the kitchen, rubbing his eyes and grousing), he called a medical school classmate of Sybil’s who lived in Indianapolis, who called a friend of his who lived in Crawfordsville, a town fifty miles to the east of us. This doctor — a Dr. Burns — arranged for my mother to be transported to his clinic for an autopsy.