The Pursuit of Alice Thrift

3 Leo Frawley, RN

IF YOU HAD seen my apartment, you would have guessed I was a clerk in a convenience store or a stitcher in a third-world sweatshop. I’m not bragging. I grew up in a three-story house with china and silver, a cleaning lady who came in every Thursday, and parents who sent me to college without financial aid. But four years later, I was sleeping in a bedroom that made me nostalgic for the claustrophobic shoe boxes I occupied in college. When I looked around my room and wondered why I said yes to the first place advertised on the housing board, I reminded myself of the extra twenty-five minutes of sleep I gained because of my proximity to the hospital, that I didn’t need a coat to run the three blocks to work if it was above 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and that Leo Frawley was an exemplary roommate.

Leo would have said the same about me: I barely used any utilities. I didn’t watch television, play CDs, or touch the thermostat; my presence, especially in the refrigerator, the medicine cabinet, and the kitchen cupboards, was negligible. I was never around or underfoot; when present, I slept deeply.

Signing a lease was an act of faith on my part. I knew nothing about Leo except for the superficial impressions I gleaned in our one cafeteria meeting. He was pleasant, well-spoken, and apparently popular. Coworkers greeted him, juggling trays across a single arm to hail him from all corners of the room.

“You have a lot of friends,” I observed.

“You will too when you’ve been here as long as I have.”

I said I would be quiet, considerate, and neat. I wasn’t the liveliest wire he’d find in the city of Boston—quite the contrary, in fact—but I’d never disturb his sleep or monopolize the phone or be late with my rent.

“This could work,” he said.

I asked if he could give me references, and he wrote a half dozen names and phone numbers on a napkin. The only local area code belonged to his mother, who he later told me had been prepped not to sound tightlipped and disapproving if women called about the ad. Mrs. Frawley reported that Leo was the cleanest of her whole brood, and that was saying something because among her thirteen offspring she had one priest, one nun, one actuary, one pharmacist, two librarians, and a lab technician for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And while she didn’t know why a girl would want to share an apartment and a toilet with a man, Leo would be the one of all her boys whom she’d recommend for the job. I thanked her and said she should be very proud of him. We were colleagues at the same hospital and he was clearly held in everyone’s high esteem.

“He’s named for a pope,” she told me.

Not wanting to discuss anything too personal or too statutory with Mrs. Frawley, I asked Leo himself whether he walked around the apartment in states of undress or thought it was important to knock before entering a roommate’s quarters.

“I might duck from the bathroom to my room with a towel wrapped around my middle. Is that what you meant?”

I said that was acceptable, certainly. I had lived in a co-ed dorm for one semester in college until I could be relocated.

“A guy who grew up with eight sisters knows how to knock,” he said. “He also knows that a bathroom isn’t available the minute he wants it.”

I should have dropped it then, but I pressed on. Had any women—specifically former roommates or coworkers—ever complained, formally or informally, about his personal conduct?

Leo said, “Have I done or said anything so far that suggests that?”

I liked the way he answered, with dignity, and I liked the slight offense he’d taken. And in many ways, my initial rudeness has made me a better roommate. I knew as soon as I’d seen the look on his face that I had needlessly challenged a man who, after all, could bathe neonates and give breast-feeding lessons to their postpartum mothers.

Once I had moved in, I asked Leo why he needed to advertise on the community bulletin board, given the hordes of admiring fellow nurses and his geographically desirable apartment.

“I didn’t want to live with another nurse,” he said.

I asked why.

“You know,” he said.

I said I didn’t. I wasn’t great at human-relations nuances. Was it because there would be too much shoptalk? Too much bringing the work home?

“Not so much the work,” he said. “More like the extracurricular stuff. There’s quite the grapevine. Let’s say I had a visitor. And let’s say someone from the NICU observed that guest coming out of my bedroom in the morning. Word would get around.”

I thanked him for what I thought was a tribute to my discretion. I said, “Not only am I uninterested in your social life, but I wouldn’t recognize a grapevine if I were harvesting grapes from it.”

“Excellent,” said Leo.

We followed the ground rules seamlessly: rent and utilities split down the middle; food separate, with both of us having the right to throw away leftovers growing mold spores. A chore wheel was posted on the refrigerator and rotated weekly. Suggested courtesy guidelines: seven minutes for showers; baths up to twenty minutes; no music after ten P.M. No dirty dishes left in the sink. Kitchen trash should be emptied and not allowed to overflow or smell. And after six months, he’d let me know if he thought our arrangement was amenable.

WHEN WE INTERSECTED at the hospital, Leo introduced me cheerfully. It was especially nice if he was with a smart little girl patient—just the three of us on an elevator—and then he’d say, “I’d like you to meet my friend Alice. She’s a doctor. In fact, she’s a surgeon. Isn’t that a great thing to be?”

If only I could have smiled like a good role model and said something inspiring. If only I could have looked approachable enough to prompt one dad in my department to ask me to join him and his sixth-grader for lunch on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

And did I mention that every female nurse in the hospital knew Leo? He was a friend to all—registered, practical, aide, candy striper—regardless of what floor or service or shift they worked on. If I were dispensing advice to men on how to meet women, how to be popular without having to be a matinee idol or ever leaving your workplace, I’d advise them to follow in Leo’s footsteps: Get a job in a teaching hospital. Allude often to your training in the medical corps of the U.S. Army. Wear scrubs. Smile often and easily. Attach a miniature stuffed koala bear to your stethoscope.

I myself was short of friends when I moved here for my residency. Apparently, if I believed my own reputation, I was not “fun.” Sometimes on Monday mornings in medical school I’d hear references to weekend parties, kegs, harbor cruises, but I didn’t experience them firsthand. When I decided to go into surgery, my lab partners—so-called people persons and future family practitioners—said, “How perfect.”

I graduated second in my class, which I thought was a good prognostic of how I’d perform as a resident, but apparently it was not. I had some trouble bridging the gap between the patient’s surgical site—that disembodied, exposed rectangle of skin awaiting a scalpel—and the patient’s mind, soul, and figurative heart. I thought it was helpful to disassociate the two, to forget I was cutting into a live human being; to pretend it was dead, formaldehyded Violet or Buster, my two cadavers from Gross Anatomy.

How had I gotten so appallingly ineffective with actual people? I thought I had a nice way about me—I was particularly adept at delivering good-news bulletins to relatives in the waiting room, but even that drew criticism. Once in a while, a next of kin complained that the frown on my face as I walked into the lounge scared him or her to death. But wasn’t it mere concentration? It was never enough—my excellent knowledge of anatomy, my openings and my closings, my long hours. What people want, I swear, is a doctor with the disposition of a Montessori teacher.

None of it is easy. Male patients are not thrilled to see you, especially in urology and vascular. Athletes want their bad knees, shoulders, ankles, and elbows fixed by doctors who look like them—Nordic, buff, handsome, confident, certainly not female. Everyone experienced in trauma works around and over you in the ER—faster, surer, nimbler, louder. I began to think that high marks in medical school were an indicator of nothing, and that a few parties along the way might have honed my socialization skills more than long nights at Countway Library.

I was the medical equivalent of the kid picked last for the kickball team: Honor roll doesn’t matter; sex, race, or national origin doesn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was if you could kick a ball over the head of the second baseperson and get someone else home.

AT THE SIX – MONTH juncture, during one of our rare synchronized breakfasts, it was I who asked Leo if he’d like to find a more compatible roommate.

“In what sense?”

“More fun. More charismatic.”

“Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

I said, “I think you’re too polite to tell me that it’s not working out. Everything is fine on the surface, but maybe you could find someone more suitable. You know—maybe we’re like those married couples who never raise their voices, but all the same aren’t happy.”

“I’m happy,” said Leo. “I think this is working out fine.” Then he asked if it was me—was I the discontented one looking for an out?

“Just the opposite,” I said. And then I tried to define my position, that I was proud to be his roommate because of the high esteem if not popularity he enjoyed at the hospital; proud to have my name on his answering machine’s outgoing message.

Instead of looking pleased he said, “But you have to be content inside your own skin.”

I said that wasn’t possible at this juncture. Work was all-consuming, especially while I was so bad at it.

“You’ll get better. Interns, by definition, are here to learn.”

“I may have made a terrible mistake,” I told him.

His expression grew alarmed: One of his neonates? One of his preemies? “When?” he asked.

“I don’t mean a specific terrible mistake. I meant, it was a mistake to think that good grades were transferable to the actual practice of medicine. I don’t have the aptitude in any of the areas they evaluate us in.”

Leo thought for a minute, then said, “You work hard. You haven’t ever taken a sick day, as far as I know. And you haven’t had any major goof-ups, correct?”

“No one would leave me alone long enough in the OR to take out the wrong organ or amputate the wrong limb,” I said.

“Do you want me to talk to someone?” he asked.

“Like who?”

“I know people,” he said. “I could feel them out for how you’re doing and where you stand. Maybe you’re worried about nothing.”

I said I knew how I was doing, and besides, I needed the truth more than I needed the anesthetic tact they would administer out of friendship to him.

Leo said he hadn’t always been this comfortable on the ward. I should have seen him on his first medevac flight. Boy, was that a scary couple of hours. And not much hand-holding for trainees.

I said I recognized that in a million years, or even if I spent a million dollars on therapy, I’d never have his personality, his good humor, his unflappability, or that way he could walk into a patient’s room and say just the right breezy thing to make his or her pain or nausea or approaching syringe recede.

“You notice all that?” he asked.

“I hear about it. It’s common knowledge. I think some of the pediatric residents steal your lines. And your patients, let’s face it, worship you. Babies, toddlers, girls, boys. Not to mention their mothers.”

Have I mentioned that Leo is handsome? Perhaps not when you break it down, feature by feature, and factor in some patches of facial seborrhea. But altogether it’s a successful package, with its curly blond hair, well-defined mouth, and pale blue eyes that look like they’ve just finished having a good laugh. He was probably a gawky teenager, and I do see vestiges of acne scars on his red face, but overall he bears that winning combination of an elfin face on a tall, broad-shouldered man.

He said then that his late father thought he was wasting those very talents I was referring to, the gift of gab, the ability to walk into a room and—pardon the bragging—win friends and influence people. “So you know what that means, right? To a Boston-Irish father?”

I shook my head.

“State senator or state rep with an eye to an eventual run for the governor’s office.”

“Is that what you’d like?”

“Absolutely not,” said Leo. “He didn’t like telling people that his son was a nurse. He used to say ‘orderly’ because he thought it sounded manlier, but I put a stop to that. He changed it to, ‘Leo trained in the army medical corps and works at a Harvard hospital. No, not married, but he dates a different nurse every night.’”

I said, “It’s not so much your gift of gab. It’s bigger than that. It’s a quality of mercy combined with your ability to make a joke.”

Leo smiled and said that was a nice compliment. Very nice. Thanks. Quality of mercy—wow.

“Maybe some of it will rub off on me,” I added.

He said—another tribute to his diplomacy—“You have other strengths, Alice.”

“Name one.”

“Brains, for starters. I mean, let’s say there was an entire hospital staffed by smiling volunteers, happy LPNs, and class clowns like me. It would certainly lose its state certification in a hurry.”

I said that was a ridiculous argument, but thank you.

“What exactly are you worried about?” he asked. “Your private life or your professional life?”

“Professional,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll be invited back for a second year. And then what? I’ll have to start over again. And what would that be? Who’s going to want a resident that was asked to leave?”

“Does that happen?”

“All the time. It’s a pyramid system. They start with seven, and prune every year.”

He sighed. Even Leo couldn’t put a positive spin on my prospects.

I walked over to the counter and came back with the coffeepot. “Let’s just say my answer to that question had been ‘personal’ instead of ‘professional.’ Would you have some insights? Have you noticed me doing anything egregious during social exchanges?”

Leo upended the sugar dispenser and let several teaspoonfuls pour into his cup.

“Be honest,” I said.

He squirmed in his chair, closed one eye. “If you put a gun to my head, I’d probably say that at times you remind me of my sister-in-law Sheila.”

Leo had twelve siblings, so there was always a family member he could cite as a role model or bad apple. “I hasten to add that Sheila is probably the smartest of any of my brothers’ wives.”

“But?”

“But she’s not the person I’d marry if I had my eye on the governor’s mansion.”

I said, “Massachusetts doesn’t have a governor’s mansion.”

Leo closed his eyes, exhaled as if exasperated.

“Is your brother running for something?” I asked.

Leo shook his head.

I said, “I ran for office once, in high school, but I lost. I would have been perfect for the position of class secretary because I’d taken shorthand one summer and would have been able to take the best notes of anyone else, but apparently that mattered very little.”

“Everything in high school is a popularity contest—which can’t be a startling revelation to you.”

I tried to remember back to the three straight years I ran, and for the three straight years I was trounced by girls who weren’t even members of the National Honor Society.

“Don’t take this wrong,” said Leo, “and don’t answer if you don’t want to, but did you date in high school?”

He didn’t let me answer. He patted my hand and said, “No matter. What a stupid and shallow question, right? As if you’d even remember. My high school social life is certainly a blur.”

He poured himself a second bowl of cereal and filled it to the rim with milk. “The guy who calls here? Is he a friend?”

“I had dinner with him once.”

“And?”

“And he’d like to do it again.”

“Have you called him back?”

I said no.

“No, permanently, or no, not yet?” he asked.

“He’s not my type,” I said.

Leo offered no rebuttal, but I knew what he was thinking: How could Alice Thrift, workaholic wallflower, have collected any data or constructed a model on something as theoretical as her type?

4 We Entertain

THIS IS WHAT we imagined: Nurses and surgical residents conversing in civilian garb. RNs impressing MDs with their previously underappreciated level of science and scholarship. Exhausted doctors sipping beer while sympathetic nurses circulated with pinwheel sandwiches. Doctors asking nurses if they could compare schedules and find free Saturday nights in common.

When every nurse accepted our invitation and every resident declined, Leo and I had to scramble to provide something close to even numbers. I volunteered to call my medical school classmates who were interning in Boston—there were two at Children’s, some half dozen at MGH, a couple more at Tufts, at BU …

“Friends?” he asked.

“Classmates,” I repeated.

I know what was on his mind: my unpopularity. That the words party and Alice Thrift were oxymoronic, and now Leo was experiencing it firsthand. I said, “Let’s face it: I have no marquee value. My name on the invitation doesn’t get one single warm body here, especially of the Y-chromosome variety.”

“We’re going to work on that,” said Leo.

“On the other hand, since I’m not known as a party thrower, my invitees will expect a very low level of merriment.”

Leo said, “Cut that out. It’s not your fault. We’re aiming too high. Interns are exhausted. If they have a night off, they want to sleep.”

I said, “That’s not true of the average man, from what I’ve read.”

“And what is that?” Leo asked.

“I’ve heard that men will go forth into groups of women, even strangers, if they think there’s a potential for sexual payoff.”

“What planet are you living on?” Leo asked. “Why do you sound like an anthropologist when we’re just bullshitting about how to balance our guest list?”

We were having this conversation in the cafeteria, Leo seated, me standing, since I usually grabbed a sandwich to go. He didn’t think I ate properly, so after he’d rattled a chair a few times, I sat down on it.

“If I called my single brothers, not counting Peter,” he said, “and they each brought two friends, that would be six more guys.”

“Is Peter the priest?”

“No, Joseph’s the priest. Peter doesn’t like women.”

“Okay. Six is a start.”

I unwrapped my cheese sandwich, and squeezed open the spout on my milk carton. “I know someone,” I finally said.

“Eligible?”

I nodded. So eligible, I thought, that he was pursuing Alice Thrift. “Not young, though. Forty-five. And widowed.”

“Call him. Forty-five’s not bad. Maybe he could bring some friends.”

I said, “Actually, he’s the one leaving those messages.”

“He’s been crooning Sinatra on the latest ones,” said Leo. “What’s that about?”

“Trying to get my attention.” I took a bite of my sandwich.

Leo said, “No lettuce, no ham, no tomato?”

I pointed out that I never knew how long lunch would languish in my pocket before consumption, so this was the safest thing to take away.

Leo paused to consult our list of women. Finally he said, “I see a few of my colleagues who would be very happy with a forty-five-year-old guy. And even more who would pounce on the widower part. How long ago did he lose his wife?”

“A year and a day.” I looked at my watch’s date. “As of now, a year and two weeks.”

“Call him. Tell him you and your roommate are putting together a soiree of hardworking primary-care nurses, who—studies have shown—sometimes go out on the town looking for a sexual payoff just like the males of the species.”

I said, “I wasn’t born yesterday. I know people have sexual relations on a casual basis.”

Leo studied me for a few seconds, as if there was a social/epidemiological question he wanted to ask.

I said, “I’ve had relations, if that’s what your retreat into deep thought is about.”

“I see,” said Leo.

“In college. Actually, the summer between my junior and senior years. I was a camp counselor and the boys’ camp was across the lake.”

“And was he a counselor, too?”

“An astronomy major at MIT, or so I believed. He knew all the constellations.”

“Sounds romantic,” said Leo.

I said, “Actually not. I had wondered what all the fuss was about, so I decided to experience it for myself.”

“And?”

I swallowed a sip of milk and blotted my mouth. “Not worth the discomfort or the embarrassment or the trip into town for the prophylactics. And to make it worse, he expected follow-up.”

“Meaning?”

“That we’d do it again.”

“What a cad,” said Leo.

“I found out later he wasn’t an astronomy major at all, but studying aerospace engineering. And in a fraternity.”

“Did you ever see him again?

I said no, never.

“So that would be … like five years ago?”

I shrugged. After a pause, I wrapped the remains of my sandwich in plastic and put it in my jacket pocket.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” said Leo.

I said I had to run. Would catch him later—I had the night off so I’d do some vacuuming.

“Alice?” he called when I was a few paces from him. I returned to the table.

“I want to say, just for the record, as a fellow clinician, that the fuss you’ve heard about? With respect to relations? The stuff that, according to movies and books, supposedly makes the earth move and the world go round? Well—and I say this as your friend—it does.”

I didn’t have an answer; wasn’t sure whether his statement was confessional or prescriptive.

“What I’m getting at,” he continued, “is that you might want to give it another shot someday.”

RAY BROUGHT HIS cousins George and Jerome, two men in leather jackets over sweaters knit in multicolored zigzags. “Missoni,” said Ray when he saw me studying them. He repeated in his introductions to everyone, “Cousins? Absolutely. But like brothers. No, better than brothers—best friends.” Or—whichever suited the race or ethnicity of the nurse he was addressing: “Paisans.” “Confrères.” “Homies.”

Not to say he was ignoring me. Quite the opposite. He helped in the manner of a boyfriend of the hostess. He stomped on trash, refilled glasses, wiped up spills, chatted with the friendless, who would have been me but for the refuge offered by a kitchen and hors d’oeuvres – related tasks. Ray may have watched too many situation comedies in which suburban husbands steal time from their guests to peck the cheek of their aproned hostess/wife. I had to say repeatedly, “Why are you doing that?” disengaging him in the exact manner that my mother swatted away my father. It hardly discouraged him; if anything he was inspired to discuss what he perceived as my discomfort with/suspicion of intimacy.