Dante's Dilemma (2 page)

A footman beat Boris to the town car's door and opened it for me, sending a wintery blast across my face.

“You want I come back later?” Boris asked from the front.

“No. I should be able to find someone who can give me a lift. Go home and keep Yelena company. Maybe it will put her in a better mood next week.”

The footman escorted me up a carpeted walk and into the lobby, where from the sound of things only a few other tardy arrivals were waiting for the elevator up. One of them was my colleague of six months, Alison DeWitt, who called my name and came over to peck me on the cheek.

“Thank God I'm not the only one who's late,” she said.

“We can always claim we got stuck on an ice floe,” I said. “How goes it with the new arrival?”

“Oh, Mark,” Alison said, sounding frazzled. “I'm so tired I can barely work up the energy to comb my hair. All he ever does is cry. Or spit up. And I'm not even the one who pushed him out.”

Alison and her partner, Gina, had recently welcomed the birth of their first child, a baby boy.

I tried to cheer her up. “It's brutal at first. But it will get better.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I know so,” I said, though my own history gave little evidence of that fact. “You just need to give it some time. It won't be long before he's smiling at you like there's no tomorrow.”

“What really worries me is what it's doing to us,” she confessed. “I hardly even recognize Gina these days. All we do is snap at each other—like animals in a cage. I'm starting to think I should have paid attention to all those studies saying childless couples are happier. And I'm feeling so guilty about leaving the two of them alone tonight.” She sounded on the verge of tears.

“There, there,” I said, moving back in to give her a hug. Up close she smelled of curdled milk and eau de Dreft. “Try to relax. You deserve some time out with friends. And motherhood certainly becomes you. You look beautiful tonight.”

She accepted the compliment without surprise. Possibly because she was a member of several minority groups herself—half African American and half Native American, as well as an uncloseted lesbian—Alison belonged to the minuscule population of people for whom my handicap was barely remarkable. It was another one of the reasons we were fast becoming close friends.

“But here I am all wrapped up in my own problems without giving a thought to yours,” Alison hastened to add. “Are you nervous?”

“At the moment, the only thing worrying me is whether my tie is on straight. It's been ages since I had to dress up like a penguin. Though it does make me feel more at home in the weather.”

Alison stepped back to survey me. “You look fine. But that's not what I meant, Sir Nonchalant. This change has to be rough on you.”

I shrugged. “I'm sure the new regime will be a model of truth, liberty, and justice for all.”

“Bullshit,” Alison said. “Jonathan hates your guts.”

“Don't overdramatize the situation. He'd like to see my guts being used to teach first-year anatomy.”

“And I'd like to see his—”

“Ssshhh,” I stopped her. “We're talking about our new Führer. His spies are everywhere. And if we don't head upstairs soon, it will be another black mark on our already-tarnished records.”

We took the elevator to the penthouse and deposited our coats with the coat checker, who nervously asked me whether I wanted to hang on to my cane. In answer, I folded it up and stuck it pirate-style in my cummerbund. Alison steered me over to the nametag table, where a young staff member was waiting.

“Dr.
Dante
Angelotti?” she asked after I had identified myself. Predictably, some overzealous assistant had inscribed the tag with my seldom-used first name.

“If that's the only ‘Angelotti' in your stack, I guess that's me,” I said.

“I can cross it out for you,” Alison offered.

“No thanks. It would only draw further attention to the fact that my father hated me. I'll just attend anonymously.”

“Fat chance of that,” Alison said, laughing.

We moved out into the ballroom, which was packed as tightly as a subway platform, with me hanging not so discreetly onto Alison's elbow. Here and there I could pick out a snippet of conversation above the partygoers' boisterous roar.
“Has to be good for the department. He'll bring some much needed discipline to the table.”
And
“The old boy should have relinquished the chair years ago. Too soft on the dissident faction. Angelotti and DeWitt, for example . . .”

“You hear that,” I said to Alison. “You're already getting a reputation.”

“If so, I consider myself in good company.”

Halfway over to the bar, we were confronted by my other good friend and comrade in arms, Josh Goldman.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “They've been asking you to come to the mike for the last thirty minutes.”

“Just trying to live up to my reputation as a nonconformist. I'm on my way, but get me a double, will you? I'm going to need it when this is all over.”

Moments later, I was stepping cautiously onto a small platform, where one of the event coordinators pushed a microphone in my hand. I tested it and made an effort to appear as though staring blindly into a large audience was something I did every day. Which, in a way, it was.

I pulled my Braille notes from my pocket and got underway. “It's great to see all of you here this evening . . .” There were a few nervous titters. “Sep asked me to keep it short, which is good, because to paraphrase Shakespeare, I am ‘no orator but a plain, blunt man'”—heartier chuckles this time—and I'm here tonight ‘not to bury Caesar but to praise him.'” More laughter. “As you know, it has been our great good fortune that many years ago a young graduate of a second-rate medical school in . . . where was it again?”—I pretended to consult my notes—“ah yes, Cambridge, Massachusetts, that this young man from Peoria, with job offers from every major hospital in the country, turned them down to return to the state where he was raised . . .”

I proceeded to outline some of the highlights of Sep's career: his decorated service as a trauma specialist in a MASH unit during the Vietnam War; the dozens of cutting-edge studies he authored upon his return; his participation in not one, but three of the committees charged with revamping the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
; his numerous awards and recognitions, including the Miriam H. Taub Chair in Clinical Psychiatry at the hospital where we both worked; and last, but not least, the decades spent overseeing, developing, and raising our department to its present status as a leader in the field.

“I know I speak for all of us in praising these accomplishments as the life's work of both a brilliant physician and a great humanitarian. But I would also be remiss in not mentioning what I know for Sep was, and always will be, his greatest achievement: his thirty-year marriage to his beloved wife, Edna, who passed away a few years ago after a long battle with cancer. During her illness, and despite his overwhelming professional obligations, Sep was never absent from her side.”

I ended on a personal note. “In closing—because I can hear Sep harrumphing at me to get on with it—let me say that I have ‘neither wit, nor words, nor worth' to express what Sep has meant to me personally. Rarely have I had the privilege of working under a superior with such a temperate disposition”—very loud laughter—“or, one who, when confronted with extreme provocation, if not outright mutiny, was so capable of keeping a lid on his emotions. I have Sep to thank for the profound wisdom—some might say, rampant foolhardiness—that led to my finding a home here, and I will be forever grateful to him for the gentle scolding”—Sep, only a few feet away, nearly choked on this—“that prodded me back to work with my friends and . . . er, colleagues.” Gales of laughter this time. “Sep has been a true friend and mentor, and I hope you will all join me in toasting this outstanding leader and the finest human being it has been my privilege to know.”

The room erupted into thunderous applause.

“Good job,” Josh said, coming up to press a glass of bourbon into my hand. I downed it in a single gulp.

“Yes, very,” Sep said, announcing his presence with a hand on my shoulder. “Thank you, my boy. I'll be red-faced for the rest of the party.”

“I meant every word of it,” I said. “You'll be sorely missed.” By me, most of all, I thought morosely.

“Perhaps. However, while I shouldn't quibble with such unrestrained encomium, the references to
Julius Caesar
were a tad unsubtle.”

“You think he picked up on it?”

Sep lowered his voice. “I doubt it. He's too busy basking in the imagined glory of his new position. But if you'll take my advice, it's time to start mending your fences with him.”

“I don't see how—”

“No arguing,” Sep said. “Go over there right now and congratulate him. He's standing ten feet to your left.”

“Sep, I . . .”

“Just do it,” he commanded.

I followed his order—the last he would ever be in a formal position to give me—and went over to shake the hand of my new boss.

My archenemy, Jonathan Frain.

TWO

My father didn't hate me, but he didn't know what to do with me, either: a scrawny, rebellious child who reminded him all too painfully of the wife he had lost to childbirth. In those days, nobody gave any thought to spankings, and we weren't the only warring family in our Queens neighborhood, where the small houses stood so close together that the daily soap operas were as hard to ignore as the smell of
ragù
emanating from a neighbor's kitchen. Especially among Catholics, it was considered a parental virtue to give snot-nosed children their due, and I was far from unique in the number of times I showed up at school with a blackened eye or a swollen lip. Unlike other children, however, I had no mother to wipe away my tears, no siblings to blunt the rage of my father's bitter disappointments. From the time I was small, I was at the mercy of his fists, and it taught me well how to run.

Over the years, this developed into an emotional armor I'm not proud of. It prevented me from ever really knowing him, and later enabled the selfish act that left my own family in ruins. Oddly, though, the same trait that kept me at a distance from my loved ones also proved an asset in my job. If I couldn't look clearly into my own heart, I was nonetheless very good at looking into the hearts of others. Perhaps it was this talent that Sep had instinctively recognized when he took a chance on hiring me. Maybe only the walking wounded are capable of seeing the pain experienced by their fellows. As the old saying goes, it takes one to know one. And on that score, I was as good a psychiatrist as they come.

All of this is a long way of saying that my troubled relationship with Jonathan Frain didn't spring from an absence of skill, much less professionalism, on my part. True, in my self-destructive fashion I often went out of my way to get his goat. Pompous, small-minded people always bring out the worst in me, and I wasn't above reacting negatively when he was trying to impose yet another one of his asinine preferences on the entire department. If there were a prize for making a workplace as joyless as a North Korean labor camp, Jonathan would have taken it every time. But the real problem for me was his elevation of form over substance, his attention to the letter of every rule, and his inability to grasp the conditions under which creativity flourishes and breakthroughs occur.

Exactly the qualities, I figured, that had led to his selection as our new administrator.

Ever since the announcement, I'd been torturing myself with all the ways he could make my life as miserable as a post-downpour slog through the Chicago Deep Tunnel. They weren't difficult to imagine. Assign me to the hospital's diversity committee—a posting I'd only narrowly avoided thus far and that had roughly the same appeal as being named Differently Abled Employee of the Year. Nitpick my grant proposals until they appeared as fresh and enticing as the salad bar on offer in the basement cafeteria. Require me to remove all traces of my personality from my office. (Jonathan's was all glass and steel, and about as welcoming to visitors as the Fortress of Solitude.) The list went on and on.

As it turned out, I had grossly underestimated him.

When I arrived back at my office the following Monday, I was already in a poor mood. The alarm-company representative had proved to be one of those well-meaning but clueless people who equate low vision with a corresponding deficit in brain cells, and it had taken longer than necessary to convince him that all I needed was a keypad with larger buttons I could stick some Braille labels on. On the walk to work, I'd also been accosted by members of a group handing out Bibles, who were keen on me knowing that my blindness would be cured if only I would accept Jesus into my heart. (“Thanks for the tip,” I said to the one who insisted on following me halfway down the block. “I'll be sure to try it on my next visit to Lourdes.”) To top things off, there was a package waiting for me when I walked in the door of my suite.

“This just came for you,” Carol, our receptionist, informed me. “It's from a law office.”

“Which one?” I asked, expecting it to be related to one of the cases I was working on.

“Nobody local. Some firm with a fancy-sounding name in Connecticut. And marked confidential.”

My insides immediately clenched up. I'd been waiting to hear from Annie, my ex-wife, about an issue concerning our son, and the fact that she'd chosen to communicate through legal channels wasn't a positive sign. My heart sank even further when Carol handed me the envelope and I could judge its thickness—half an inch, at least. Where lawyers are concerned, I'd learned that bad things usually come in big packages.