Our Seas of Fear and Love

by Richard Shain Cohen

  “Don’t be foolish. We love each other. We’ve talked about this enough.” She looked up at him and said, “I told you you would fall asleep before I would and you objected with a firm ‘No.’ You were funny. You know men always fall asleep first. That’s the way they’re made.” While he was running his fingers through her hair, she raised herself to sit beside him, to kiss and hug him. “We’re bound.”

  What would Maureen have thought? Brigit worried more about her mother than her father. She was thinking of her mother before and after. She found it difficult not to think about them. However, with time, she knew that her love, no matter what she did, was her own, no one else’s.

  God? Well, God had given her freedom of thought and action. The nuns were wrong. Women have minds and will do what they think is right for them. And if Brigit never found a man she loved, then she should become a nun or do something that would not arouse her sexuality, not bring her in contact with men. And could she ignore the urgings of her body when thoughts occurred? Did the nuns? She would not dress her body in black and mourn her birth as a female. In fact, she would celebrate her femaleness in any way she decided. She was assuredly bound to Gregory.

  _______________

  I have grown weaker. Or is it my imagination? I’ll call Pamela and have her sit with me so I can think of something other than myself. Brigit! What have I done? Deirdre. You bitch. You leave our daughter to take care of me. Did you ever care? Or was it always that Étienne fellow? Is there anyone else? And despite what I did to her, Brigit comes over. A love that never dies.

  ~

  Gregory had now been ill for almost twenty years, had lived and worked to see the United States go to war again, first in Korea and now in Viet Nam, a useless war that killed men for what? A war that that gave no honor to those men as the country did to his generation. Disgusting.

  “Pamela!”

  “What is it, dad? Are you all right?”

  “Are you writing?”

  “Not quite. I feel sort of lazy. What’s wrong? Please tell me.”

  “Oh, I wish I were in the lab.”

  “You’ll be back there. I know it,” she answered, wanting to be encouraging.

  “Did I ever tell you about my last two years of med school? I was thinking about that too.”

  “Sort of.”

  “It’s just that there are things you talk about and others you think will bother people – sort of like not talking about war. Anyhow, I just wanted your company for a little while. Give me a hug, dear. Mmm. That’s good.”

  The girls obviously wanted to protect him. Melinda often called home from school. She swore to herself she would never be like her mother and hoped the same for Pamela who had little affection for Deirdre. It was Brigit who upheld his morale through school and more when he needed that support. The girls knew that. Had he told them?

  “Tell me, Pamela, are you angry about waiting for grad school?”

  “Oh, dad, stop that. I'll get there and when I decide. Let's stop talking about it. Repeating, repeating.”

  Hesitant, thinking she was harsh, she decided to return to his thoughts about medical school. “What was it like in medical school?”

  “Forget it.”

  Wanting levity, she added, “Yeah. But I bet you loved the nurses.” Immediately she was sorry she said it, thinking of Brigit.

  “Nurses are dedicated people. Well, there were some who were mean, especially to us students. Oh, not so much mean as stern.”

  “Is mom coming home tonight?”

  “I don’t know.” He tried to speak calmly. “She’s got lots to do.”

  “Yeah.” My mother is a bitch adulteress. I’ve heard her talking. Why doesn’t he divorce her? “O.K. I’m going back to my room. Call me if you need me.”

  Oh, how I remember. The emergency room seems to stick out, though there was that night in Ob/Gyn with the woman we thought we would lose when she had a miscarriage and bled so profusely. In the past, she would have died. I actually thought after that perhaps I wanted to change my mind and specialize in Ob. There are too many women’s needs that are ignored. Then again, it came back to research. There had to be more of it dedicated to women’s health care. It sickens me, the cancers that can erupt in those magnificent bodies of theirs and destroy them, breast (God the thought of what they must go through losing one or both), cervical, ovarian, vaginal. And men thinking ‘oh that body was made for me to enter.’ It reminds me of Chelsea and the guys looking at the nurses as just pieces of ass. It also reminds me of the nineteenth-century medicine and the primitive treatments women received. At least there was Lister and then chloroform. My dad told me a story about New York in his training when he used chloroform at a tenement and the husband thought his wife was dead and tried to kill my dad with a kitchen knife. Thank goodness relatives restrained the guy. Today, no one gets into the OR or delivery room unless they’re supposed to be there.

  And that emergency room, the stabbings, gunshot wounds, and killings, the fellow who came in shot through the heart muscle. I got to watch that operation because James was the surgeon before he moved away. The way the bullet creased the heart and missed anything worse. The tenseness in the OR. He recovered because of James’ superb surgery. I was so proud.

  The worst was the psychotic woman who came in after drinking methyl alcohol. When she wasn’t being watched for a time for some reason, she somehow loosened a long strap, wrapped it around her neck at the end of the bed, hanging herself. I still see her, her head drooped to one side and too late for anyone to do anything. Melinda will see it all studying medicine.

  And how exciting the isotope research. Brigit. Oh God, beautiful, enchanting Brigit.

  And then those were the days when the country was mesmerized by the Berlin Airlift, cheering for the Air Force and the United States, the hatred of the Russians. I still despise them. James had more experience with those barbarians, meeting up with them in the southern part of Germany

  The airlift, though, the pride we felt, and the Russians defenseless against Truman’s determination. It all started in 1948 after the Russians blockaded. We refurbished the World War II planes so we had sufficient aircraft. That continued up through my last year of school, 1949. Also a year of decision for me. My internship. I keep thinking of the emergency room. It’s amazing how we learn to steel ourselves against illness’s ravaged bodies. Sometimes I thought I was back in the war. Well, in effect, it is a war. I wonder how many people think of it that way, doctors perennially at war against disease? That’s what in residency changed me. The epidemiologist who tutored me. We went over to the laboratories at the med school one day. They were doing research with isotopes. Maybe that was one thing the atom bomb did that was good for humanity, turning our focus away from the horrendous destruction of life to saving lives – eventually. My fellowship.

  _______________

  Gregory called Brigit at the ranch. He was so involved in his work, but he missed Brigit. They had only seen one another occasionally. Most of the time she returned east to Gregory’s apartment, because he could not get enough time to go to her. “I miss you terribly. It’s like a nightmare without you.” He laughed. “But I have dreams about you”

  “I’m probably one of your nightmares.” She imagined him waking, changing his pajamas. She felt a thrill, just the word dream, almost like the caress of a silk dress.

  “No nightmare, just annoyance at those dreams, you know, as if you’re here. At least in sleep you’re often with me. When are you leaving for good?”

  “Next month. The leaves will just about be turning in Maine. But Boston. We can go to the Public Garden. On a week-end we can go to Maine.

  “Greg, we thought my dad was having a relapse. He suddenly got weak. He’d been strong enough to work around the ranch. The end of last week I wrote you about it. Did you get the letter?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, they thought perhaps the cancer returned and was in his lymph nodes. We were so frighte
ned. It turned out the pain in his abdomen was from his bowel. He’ll be O.K. I think I can leave. I am going to leave unless he wants me to stay. You wouldn’t want me to leave.”

  “No.” He wondered if her father wanted to keep her close by. He would never truly reconcile himself to Gregory, despite her mother. It was so unlike the way Gregory was brought up. Not in his house would that have happened. But in Brigit’s house, how different. Maybe her father might reconcile himself to their marriage. Gregory hoped, because Brigit told him, how Maureen worked on Luke, telling him how Gregory would look after her, how her mother could see and feel it. But he doubted whether her mother could ever completely change Luke.

  “It turned out to be diverticulitis, Greg. Maybe I have been the one to bring him back to himself. You think?”

  “I know it. I’m not going to doubt your magic. You’ve used it on me.”

  “Greg, I’m lonely, miss you beside me. I’m thinking about, well you know. Sometimes when I’m alone in bed, I have a hard time falling asleep and then start imagining you beside me, I can feel your chest and the slight hair on it. I imagine running my fingers along your arms, watching the way you hunch yourself when I kiss you behind the ear. Do you feel me?”

  “And what do you imagine I think about?”

  “I’m not going to say it on the phone.”

  “You know what? When you get back, we’ve got to go to the symphony and museum. I’ll see if there’s a good play in town.”

  “I’m coming soon. I love you, dearest and have my arms around you. Feel them?”

  “Just get here. I’m going to look for an apartment near the hospital. I’ll also send you what’s available for nursing staff. Apply as soon as you get it or do it now. O.K.?”

  “Oh yes. Make sure there are two bedrooms, maybe three. You need a study. Maybe we’ll have guests, Mary, Lynne. Maybe even my sisters will come. O.K.?”

  “It sounds good. Love you.”

  ~

  He found an apartment on Beacon Street not far from his maternal grandparents’ home that Jocelyn, after moving with Aaron to Maine, gave over to her brother Joseph who had remarried several years after the war. His first wife, Elena, had been executed when caught spying against her home country Germany. So there was family close by. Gregory considered Joseph and Elena the real heroes of the family, both having been spies for the British and eventually only the Americans.

  From the back of the apartment they would be able to look out on the Charles River, a scene they always enjoyed. So, they would be located between his ancestral home and Lynne’s family, the Brocks. Lynne was now working in California. Perhaps she returned at times so Brigit would be able to see her. It was farther away from the hospital and labs, but he preferred it that way. There was comfort in thinking that his mother’s home was nearby. Perhaps it would make Brigit feel as though she were becoming part of the family.

  He gave little thought to family right now, however. Most of what was on his mind was how to use I 131 to help diagnose liver disease. In the laboratory where they had collected blood samples from animals, medical students who were paid $25 for allowing an injection and then giving blood samples, and also patients in one of the nearby hospitals who may or may not have volunteered. The samples were then placed in planchettes, dried in a high-degree oven, then submitted to tests and mathematical analysis. There were no computers then, but there was that marvel, the slide rule. Often Gregory would sit with one of the lead doctors and outdo with his mind the solution to a problem while the doctor was still sliding the glass along the plastic, numbered surface. They would laugh, look at the figures, chart by graph the results, and add them to a pile that would eventually become a paper published in a medical journal. Gregory did much of the writing until eventually he became a lead author.

  By this time, he was gaining notice in the daily seminars that the labs held at the medical school. This was one of his most relaxing times, when they would drink tea or coffee while one of the researchers would talk, answer questions, and sometimes end up defending his work. Yet, there was never the nastiness that one would expect.

  In the lab next to his, they were already studying the effects of smoking on the lungs. Pieces of lung were taken and subjected to the isotope being used. What was fascinating to Gregory was the grayness of the tissue, proving even in the early part of the 1950s that smoking was hazardous. Yet, there were the many years that passed before recognition of the effect of smoking and the rush to stop people from using tobacco.

  Meanwhile, in his early introduction to research, Gregory awaited Brigit’s return. She already had a position in the hospital near the labs.

  ~

  “Greg. I got a position without even having to come for an interview. I’m going to be on the OR floor. They offered me OB, which I guess I should have taken, but after the ordeal with my father, I decided on OR. I know I was meant for OB. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll change, if they let me. How’s that? Oh, I’m excited. We’ll be together soon, darling.” While she talked, I can feel him, his hands on my body, the arousal from his touch and leaning against me. She touched one her breasts while they talked.

  “I’ll pick you up at Logan. Hurry. You’re going to love the apartment.”

  “You never told me where it is. That’s mean.”

  “That’s your surprise.”

  A few days later, her mother and father reluctant to let her go, and her sisters, all at the El Paso airport, watched her board a Continental plane, Maureen and her daughters with tears, Maureen drying her cheeks, listening to Luke roughly talking to himself. “She’ll be back.”

  Maureen heard. “Yes. She’ll come home once in a while.”

  He turned angrily to his wife. “I mean, she’ll be back.”

  “You’re terrible. I won’t listen to or have that. Grow up, man.” She almost said, “She’s not only an older woman, but she’s not your virgin child any longer.”

  But she did add aloud, “You get over it, Luke. She’s going to marry Gregory, and I won’t listen any longer to your religious nonsense.” She wanted to shock and tell him she’d no longer go to church. She knew she would, though, believing in her religion as she did. Then there was Sister Angelina, Anne, my oldest. She was the hardest birth, the contractions lasting for, what, two? three? days and breach. I was so weak for so long. But now. There she is. A nun. I’m proudest of her and Brigit. Shouldn’t be. Oh well.

  “I won’t listen to your grumbling any longer. Grow up.” She was still a lovely woman to look at, despite the years, and hadn’t broadened too much, her hips still curving outward to reveal the woman from which her present body grew.

  Luke started to answer, looked at his wife, an elegance she would always hold for him, stopped. “Maureen, do you realize what an eye-full you still are for me, always will be?” He leaned closer to her to smell her perfume. She smiled, listening to, “You win. I’ll try. I really will.”

  The plane took off and all stood there with more tears, waving, knowing she could not see them, but that she would feel them. Despite the excitement of the trip, she, too, was tearful, holding a handkerchief to her eyes, trying to hide her face from hostesses or other passengers. It seemed that ever since the war everything was departure, arrival, sadness, even if they did not know the men or women flying planes or being nurses, and the glorious happiness when it ended. Brigit was fortunate she stayed in the United States, though she had wanted to be on a hospital ship. And now, in Korea, having started in September, 1950, was another war, more sadness and hatred of an enemy. Along with another war, the country was subjected to a battle within started by self-seeking Joseph McCarthy culling out the Communist menaces in our country and government, a libel of people stopped for the most part by Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine who in a fifteen minute speech to the Senate brought McCarthy down with the words that berated McCarthy as being on a political “vilification’s ride the equivalent of ‘The Four Horsemen of Calumny, Fear, Bigotry, and Smear’.” At
about the same time, there was the egomaniacal General Douglas MacArthur who refused to follow the orders of President Truman, his Commander-in-Chief and was therefore fired. Thus the country was in turmoil once more. The people often did not know what to think or what to do or whom to support. Yet, we cannot know the future, people would often say, but they could be stunned by it. They could, however, admit to one another or to themselves that one should expect distress aside from the delight of apparent harmony and love.

  It was in this family discomfort and national turmoil that Brigit and Gregory moved into their new apartment kept rather bare by Gregory until Brigit could decorate it. As she had asked, one room was for Gregory’s office with some space for her, if she needed it. The rest was distinctly family comfort. He had, alone but by consultation with her, bought a bed. When she saw it, to herself, He bought what I hoped he would. I can see the two of us now lying there, making love, sleeping, waking in the morning and rushing to get ready. Perhaps we can shower together to make it faster, oh, but that would be too exciting. We’d be. Yup. We wouldn’t be able to resist. O.K. Separate showers except, perhaps, after lovemaking.

  She walked about the apartment with him, looked out from the back on the Charles and toward MIT where she always watched for the large sail boat that would return in late spring and anchor until summer’s end, her barometer of changing seasons; her feeling of self-mystery that lay within her world and being. Allure that she could create or recall.

  “You like it, sweetheart?” he asked