Flashback (1988) Page 2

  “That’s right, mop-face,” Zack said. “You get to escape for a while. But first …”

  He took a frayed paperback from between the seats and propped it up on the dash. Instantly, the dogs squirming stopped. His head tilted.

  “You appreciate, I can see, the price that must be paid for the freedom you are about to enjoy. Yes, dogs and girls, it’s time for”—he took the silver dollar from his shirt pocket and read from the page—“a classic palm and transfer, Italian style.”

  The book, Rufo’s Magic with Coins, was a 1950s reprint Zack had stumbled upon in a Cambridge secondhand bookstore.

  Amaze your friends … Amuse your family … Impress members of the opposite sex … Sharpen your manual dexterity.

  The four claims, embossed in faded gold leaf on the cover, each held a certain allure for him. But it was the last one of the group that clinched the sale.

  “Don’t you see?” he had tried to explain to a neurosurgical colleague, as he was fumbling through the exercises in Chapter One. “We’re only in the O.R.—what?—a few hours a day at best. We need something like this to keep our hands agile between cases—to sharpen our manual dexterity. The way things are, we’re like athletes who never practice between games, right?”

  Unfortunately, although the principle behind that thought was noble enough, the implementation had given rise to a most disconcerting problem. For while Zack’s hands were quite remarkable in the operating room, even for a neurosurgeon, he had as yet been unable to master even the most elementary of Rufo’s tricks, and had been reduced to practicing before mirrors, animals, and those children who were unaware of his vocation.

  “Okay, dog,” he said, “get ready. I’m going to omit the patter that goes with this one because I can see you eyeing those birches out there. Now, I place the coin here … and snap my wrist like this, and … and voila! the coin it is gone.… Thank you, thank you. Now, I simply pass my other hand over like this, and …”

  The silver dollar slipped from his palm, bounced off the emergency-brake lever, and clattered beneath the seat.

  The dogs head tilted to the other side.

  “Shit,” Zack muttered. “It was the sun. The sun got in my hands. Well, sorry, dog, but one tricks all you get.”

  He retrieved the coin and then reached across and opened the passenger door.

  Cheapdog bounded out of the camper, and in less than a minute had relieved himself on half a dozen trees, shambled down a steep, grassy slope, and belly flopped into the middle of a mountain stream.

  Zack followed at a distance. He was a tall man with fine green eyes and rugged looks that Connie had once described as “pretty damn handsome … in a thuggy sort of way.”

  He wandered along the edge of the slope, working the stiffness of the drive from his bad knee and watching as Cheapdog made a kamikaze lunge at a blue jay and missed.

  Do you know, boy? he wondered. Do you know that the rehearsal’s over? That we’re not going back to the city again?

  He squinted up at the mountains. The Rockies, the Tetons, the Smokies, the Sierras, the northern Appalachians—an avid rock climber since his teens, he had climbed at one time or another in all of them. There was something special, though, something intimate and personal that he felt in the White Mountains and nowhere else; they seemed to be giving him a message—that the world, his life, were right where they should be.

  The demands of surgical training had exacted a toll on every aspect of his existence. But of all those compromises and sacrifices, the unavoidable cutback in his climbing was the one he had accepted the most reluctantly. Now, at almost thirty-six, he was anxious to make up for lost time.

  Thin Air … Turnabout and Fair Play … The Widow-Maker … Carson’s Cliff … Each climb would be like rediscovering a long-lost friend.

  Zack closed his eyes and breathed in the mountain air. For months he had wrestled with the choice of a career in academic medicine or one in private, small-town practice. Of all the decisions he had ever made—choosing a college, medical school, a specialty, a training program—this was the one that had proved the most trying.

  And even after he had made it—after he had weighed all the pros and cons, gotten Connies agreement, and opted to return to Sterling—his tenuous decision was challenged. The ink was barely dry on his contract with Ultramed Hospitals Corporation when Connie announced that she had been having serious second thoughts about relocating from the Back Bay to northern New Hampshire, and in fact, that she was developing a similar case of cold feet over being engaged to the sort of man who would even consider such a move.

  Not two weeks later, the ring had arrived at his apartment in its original box, strapped to a bottle of Cold Duck.

  Zack sighed and combed his dark brown hair back with his fingers. They were striking, expressive fingers—sinewy, and so long, even for the hands of a six-footer, that he had taken to sending to a medical supply house in Milwaukee for specially made gloves. Early on, those fingers had set him apart in the operating room, and even before that, on the rock fece.

  He gazed to the northwest and swore he had caught a glimpse of Mirror, an almost sheer granite face so studded with mica that summer sun exploded off it like a star going nova.

  Lion Head … Tuckerman Ravine … Wall of Tears …

  There was so much magic in the mountains, so much to look forward to. True, life in Sterling might prove less stimulating than in the city. But there would be peace and, as long as he could climb, more than enough excitement as well.

  And, of course, there would be the practice itself—the challenges of being the first neurosurgeon ever in the area.

  In less than twenty-four hours, he would be in his own office in the ultramodern Ultramed Physicians and Surgeons clinic, adjacent to the rejuvenated Ultramed-Davis Regional Hospital.

  After three decades of preparation and sacrifice, he was finally set to get on with the business of his life—to show his world, and himself, exactly what he could do. The prospect blew gently across what apprehensions he had, scattering them like dry leaves.

  Connie or no Connie, everything was going to work out fine.

  Homemade bread and vegetable soup; goose paté on tiny sesame wafers; Waterford crystal wineglasses and goblets; rack of lamb with mint jelly; Royal Doulton china; sweet potatoes and rice pilaf; fresh green beans with shaved almonds; fine Irish linen.

  The meal was vintage Cinnie Iverson. Zack was aware of a familiar mixture of awe and discomfort as he watched his mother, wearing an apron she had embroidered herself, flutter between kitchen and dining room, setting one course after another on the huge cherrywood table, clearing dishes away, pausing to slip in and out of conversations, even pouring water; and all the while, skillfully and steadfastly refusing offers of assistance from Lisette and himself.

  The table was set for eight, although Cinnie was seldom at her seat. The Judge held sway from his immutable place at the head. His heavy, high-backed chair was not at all unlike the one behind the bench in his county courtroom. Zack had been assigned the place of honor, at the far end of the table, facing his father. Between them sat his older brother, Frank; Franks wife, Lisette; their four-year-old twins, Lucy and Marthe; and Annie Doucette, the Iverson’s’ housekeeper, now a widow in her late seventies and part of the family since shortly after Frank was born.

  In sharp contrast to Cinnie Iverson’s bustlings, the atmosphere at the table was, as usual, restrained, with periods of silence punctuating measured exchanges. Zack smiled to himself, picturing the noisy, animated chaos in the Boston Municipal Hospital cafeteria where, for the past seven years, he had eaten most of his meals. He had been raised in this house, this town, and in that respect, he belonged; but in most others, after almost seventeen years, it was as if he had packed up his belongings in Boston and moved to another planet.

  Of those at the table, Zack observed, Lisette had changed the most over the years. Once a vibrant, if flight); beauty, she had cut her hair short, eschewed any but the
lightest makeup, and appeared to have settled in quite comfortably as a mother and wife. She was still trim, and certainly attractive, but the spark of adventure in her eyes, once a focus of fantasy for him, was missing. She sat between the twins, across from Frank and Annie, and reserved most of her conversation for the girls, carefully managing their etiquette, and smiling approvingly when one or the other of them entered the conversation without interrupting.

  Lisette was a year younger than Zack, and for nearly two years—from the middle of his junior year at Sterling High until her one trip to visit him at Yale—she had been his first true love. The pain and confusion of that homecoming weekend in New Haven, the realization of how far apart just six weeks bad taken them, marked a turning point in both their lives.

  For a while after Lisette’s return to Sterling, there were scattered calls from one to the other, and even a few letters. Finally, though, there was nothing.

  Eventually, she moved away to Montreal and made brief stabs first at college, then marriage—to a podiatrist or optometrist, Zack thought. Following the breakup of her marriage, she had returned to Sterling, and within a year was engaged to Frank. Zack had been best man at their wedding and was godfather to the twins.

  Like Lisette, Annie kept pretty much to herself, picking at, more than eating, her food, and speaking up only to bemoan, from time to time, the arthritis, or dizzy spells, or swollen ankles which kept her from being more of a help to “Madame Cinnie.” It was difficult, and somewhat painful, for Zack to remember the wise, stocky woman of his boyhood, hunkered over a football then hiking it between her legs to Frank as he practiced passing to his little brother in the field behind their house.

  One of the curses of being a physician was to see people, all too often, as diagnoses, and each time Zack returned home and saw Annie Doucette, he subconsciously added one or two to her list. Today Annie looked more drawn and haggard than he had ever seen her.

  Frank, of all those in the room, had changed the least over the years. Now thirty-eight, he was in his fourth year as the administrator of Ultramed-Davis Hospital. He was also, if anything, slimmer, handsomer, and more confident than ever.

  “What are the possibilities,” Zack had once asked a genetics professor, “of two brothers sharing none of the same genes?”

  The old man had smiled and patiently explained that with millions of maternal and paternal genes segregating randomly into egg and sperm, all siblings, brother or sister, were, in essence, fifty percent the same and fifty percent different.

  “You should meet my brother sometime,” Zack had said.

  “If that’s the case,” the professor had countered with a wink, “then perhaps I should meet the family milkman, instead.”

  In the end, science had prevailed, although the notion that he and Frank were fifty percent alike was only slightly less difficult for Zack to accept than the possibility of his mother having had a child by any gene pool other than the Judges.

  It was nearly seven o’clock and the meal was winding down. The twins were getting restless, but were held in place by Lisette’s glances and the prospect of Grandmama’s apple pie. Although snatches of conversation had dealt with Zack’s upcoming practice, most of it had centered around golf. The Judge, blind to anyone elses boredom with the subject, was on the sixteenth green of a hole-by-hole account of his match with Frank.

  “Thirty feet,” he said, nudging his wineglass, which in seconds was refilled by his wife. “Maybe forty. I swear, Zachary, I have never seen your brother putt like that—Marthe, a young lady does not play with her dress at the dinner table. He steps up to the ball, then looks over at me and, just as calmly as you please, says ‘double or nothing.’ It was—what, Frank, three dollars …?”

  “Five,” Frank said, making no attempt to mask his ennui.

  “Mon dieu, five. Well, I tell you, he just knocked that ball over hill and dale, right into the center of the cup for a three. The nerve. Say, maybe next weekend we can make it a threesome.”

  “Hey, Judge,” Frank said, “leave the man alone. He’s an Ultramed surgeon now. It’s in his contract: no golfing for the first year.” He turned to his brother, his hands raised in mock defense. “Just kidding, Zack-o, just kidding. You play any down in Boston?”

  “Only the kind where you shoot it into the whales mouth and out its tail,” Zack said.

  Annie laughed out loud and choked briefly on a piece of celery.

  “We played that, Uncle Zack,” Lucy said excitedly. “Mama took us. Marthe hit herself in the head with her club. Will you take us again sometime?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “You’re not going away like all the other times, are you?”

  “No, Lucy. I’m staying here.”

  “See, Marthe. I told you he wasn’t going away this time. Will you take us to McDonald’s, too? We never get to go except when you take us.”

  Zack shrunk in his seat before Lisette’s reproving glare. “They get confused sometimes,” he said.

  “I spoke to Jess Bishop,” the Judge went on. “He’s membership chairman at the club. You remember him, Zachary? Well, no matter. Jess says that being as your father and brother are members in good standing, you won’t even have to go through the application process.”

  “Thank goodness,” Zack said, hoping, even as he heard his own words, that the Judge would miss the facetiousness in his voice. “So, who finally won today?”

  “Won? Why, me, of course,” the Judge said, shifting his bulk in his chair. His Christian name was Clayton, but even his wife rarely called him anything but Judge. He was, like both his sons, over six feet, but his athlete’s body had, years before, yielded to his sedentary job and rich tastes. A civic leader and chairman of the board of Davis Regional Hospital until its sale to Ultramed, the Judge had no less than six plaques tacked up in the den proclaiming him Sterling Man of the Year. He was also, though in his mid-sixties, a ten handicap. “It was close, though, Frank,” he went on. “I’ll give you that.”

  “Close,” Frank humphed. “Judge, you’re the one who pounded it into us that close only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes.”

  Again, Annie Doucette laughed out loud, and again her laugh was terminated by a fit of coughing. This time, Zack noted, she was massaging her chest after she had regained control, and her color was marginally more pale than it had been.

  “You okay, Annie?” he asked.

  “Fine, I’m fine,” the woman said in the Maurice Chevalier accent she had never shown the least inclination to change. She lowered her hand slightly, but not completely. “Now you just stop eyeing me like you want to take out my liver or something, and go on about your talking. There’ll be plenty of time for you to play doctor starting tomorrow. All my friends are busy thinking up brain problems just so they can come in and see you in your office.”

  Before Zack could respond, Cinnie Iverson reappeared, a pie in each hand, and began her rounds of the table, insisting that everyone take a slice half again larger than he or she desired. Annie flashed him a look that warned, “Now don’t you dare say anything that will upset your mother.” Still, there was something about her color, about the cast of her face, that made him uneasy.

  Dessert conversation was dominated by the twins, who competed with each other to give “Uncle Jacques” the more complete account of what had been happening in their lives. Completely Yankee on one side of their family and completely French-Canadian on the other, the girls were interchangeably bilingual, and as they became more and more animated, increasingly difficult to understand. What fascinated—and disturbed—Zack was the lack of outward interaction between the twins and their father, or, for that matter, between Frank and Lisette.

  Perhaps it was the seating arrangement, perhaps Franks preoccupation with issues at the hospital, in particular the arrival of his younger brother as the new neurosurgeon on the block. Whatever the reason, Zack noted that Frank had spoken scarcely a word to the girls and none, that he could recall, to
Lisette. In all other respects, Frank was Frank—full of plans for expanding the scope and services of Ultramed-Davis, and tuned into every potential new real estate development and industrial move in the area.

  Watching the man, listening to him expound on the risks and benefits of entering the bond market at this time, or on the possibilities of developing the meadows north of town into a shopping mall, Zack could not help but be impressed. Frank had overcome one of the most difficult obstacles in life: early success. And, Zack knew, it hadn’t been easy.

  A legend in three sports at Sterling High, voted class president and most likely to succeed, he had gone to Notre Dame amidst a flurry of press clippings touting him as one of the great quarterback prospects in the country. His high school grades and board scores were only average, if that, and his study habits were poor, but the coaching staff and administration at the Indiana school had promised him whatever tutoring help he might need to keep him on the field. And help him they did—at least until his passes began to fall short.

  Midway through Franks sophomore year, the angry, defensive calls and letters home began. There were too many quarterbacks. The coaches weren’t paying enough attention to him. Teachers were discriminating against him because he was an athlete. Next came a series of nagging injuries—back spasms, a torn muscle, a twisted ankle. Finally, there was a visit to Cinnie and the Judge from one of the assistant coaches. Although his parents had never made him privilege to that conversation, Zack was able to piece together that Frank had developed an “attitude problem” and had become more adept at hoisting a tankard than at directing an offense.

  By the middle of Franks junior season, he was back in Sterling, working construction, complaining about his ill treatment at Notre Dame, interviewing with the coaches and administration at the University of New Hampshire, and partying. A knee injury midway through his first season at the state school put an end to his athletic career.

  And as if those failures weren’t enough, Frank had to endure the rising star of his younger brother, whose participation in all sports except climbing had been curtailed by a vicious skiing injury. Following that accident, Zack had suffered through a brief period of depression and rebellion, and then had quietly but steadily built a grade-point average that enabled him to be accepted at Yale—the first Sterling graduate to be so honored.