As the expression goes, there are some things most people should not know, one of which is the ingredients in sausage and the other the process of childbirth. I suctioned the mucus from the beet-red, squalling baby boy’s mouth then watched the nurse apply the clamp to the cord. Dr. Agnelli handed me the placental lifeline and showed me how to count the number of blood vessels inside its umbilical cord.
Another indelible memory: Mrs. Recalde, exhausted but smiling, took her new baby in her arms and looked up, saying, “Gracias, Dottore Agnelli. Gracias, Dottore Berto.”
When I reached the age of self-awareness, that difference in brain chemistry when perception of self versus others occurs—the beginning of adult socialization and trying to understand the motivations of others—I sought to understand Corrado Agnelli.
“Dottore, do you have any children?”
His face darkened, the creases on his forehead an inverted V.
“Berto, are you sure you want to know about me?”
I suddenly felt stupid, and my face must have shown my lack of understanding.
He looked at me, his head almost bald except for the monk’s tonsure of hair around the edges. It was an unusually quiet time, the waiting area clear of the ailing. He pulled up two chairs, straddled one backwards, folded his arms across the chair back and pointed to the other. I sat.
“Berto, I have dreaded this moment. I knew it would come, but I hoped it wouldn’t.”
I felt even more stupid.
He laughed at my facial expression then rested his head on his folded arms.
“I see the direction your life is headed, Berto. You remind me so much of myself back in Rome, following the famous dottores’ coattails and asking questions.
“My father was an avvocato, a lawyer, and my parents had always assumed I would become one, too. He had high hopes I would also go into politics. He would tell us stories of how he had been invited to lunch with King Victor Emmanuel and all the notable people of the Eternal City.
“My uncle was also a politician and, to my good fortune, a wiser man than my papa. Like your grandpapa Pasquale—yes, your father has told me the story many times—my Zio Marcello also heard the rising drumbeat of war. He was a wealthy man. He paid for my transport to the United States and set me up in boarding school then university.
“By the time I graduated from Columbia I had found a wife among the nursing staff. She had great plans for me.”
He stopped and stared into some distant past, his eyes filling with tears. He wiped his face on the sleeve of his white coat.
“Sorry, Berto, see what happens when you get to be an old man?”
He smiled at me, and I found myself staring into the soul of the man I idolized. Yes, Corrado, I am much older than you were then and I do understand—now.
He took a breath and continued.
“I told my wife I wanted to run a clinic for the poor. She knew I came from a wealthy family back home, but I had never told her of the beggars, the destitute who lined the back streets of Rome, and the priests in their finery who ignored them as they walked past. I swore that I would return God’s gift by working among the poor.
“And then I received word. My father had passed away and, shortly afterwards, so did my Zio Marcus. They left everything to me.
“It was a strange confluence of events. My wife Lizabetta had just given birth to our son Marcellus. She made it known that she expected me to open a practice in an affluent section of New York. Over and over she reminded me that our son would not grow up in squalor. And then those two damned telegrams and the Special Delivery letter arrived from the lawyers managing my father’s and uncle’s estates.
“Berto, you can’t even imagine the amount of money. It was so much that, had I so wished, I could have quit work forever!
“My wife saw the papers, and her eyes glowed.”
Dr. Agnelli stared at the worn tile floor of his clinic, seeing God only knows what past images in their reflections. His shoulders trembled slightly, and it shocked me to realize that the man I worshipped as a deity really was a man.
He looked at me, his eyes once again moist.
“Berto, she left me. My wife took my son and left me when she understood that my life was here. She called this place my ‘other woman.’
“I haven’t seen my son in fifteen years.”
Then I saw something else in his eyes: pity.
“Yes, Berto, I see in you a reflection of my own life. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.”
It was the first and last time we talked about such things.
I continued to walk in his shadow on the days I had to spare while traversing the pitfalls of high school and college.
Then it was my final day at home. I was leaving, against my father’s wishes, for medical school.
Those painful last words, Non ho figlio—“I have no son”—still rang in my ears, and I sought solace with my mentor.
Dr. Agnelli looked tired. He was sixty-two, and the life he led, the daily giving of all that he had, was taking its toll. His eyes drooped from fatigue, his spirit no longer quite ready to meet the next challenge. I noticed the fine tremor in his hands and the slight uncertainty in his gait. He grimaced as he sat down in the time-worn desk chair and rubbed his fingers. There was a faint aroma to his breath, as if he had been chewing gum.
I let out my feelings and, as I had hoped, he reaffirmed my dream of becoming a doctor and told me never to give up that dream. Then he bore into me with those penetrating, perceptive eyes.
“You see it, don’t you, Berto?”
“Yes, Dottore. Are you taking insulin for your diabetes?”
“What else, Berto?”
“You have early Parkinsonism and arthritis.”
“Bravo, boy,” he replied, his hands moving awkwardly in a clapping motion.
He smiled at me once more.
“Berto, I am going to work as long as I can. I had hoped to be able to turn this over to you one day…”
Pausing, he already knew the answer but asked the question anyway.
“Dottore Berto, do you think I can make it until you finish school?”
I stared at the floor.
He stood up and extended his hand to shake mine. Then he hugged me and, before I could react, he had slipped ten twenty-dollar bills into my shirt pocket.
As I turned to leave, my eyes blurred, he said, “Buona fortuna, Dottore Berto.”
Twice during my freshman year at medical school I received telegrams announcing the passing of my papa and mama. I learned to hate those paper messengers of the dark angel as had Corrado.
I received a third one just as I finished that year. It was from one of his former nurses. Dr Agnelli wanted to see me.
He was missing one leg.
Diabetes had taken its toll, and the surgeon’s knife had removed the gangrenous limb. It didn’t help.
He was sixty-three then, much younger than I am now. He was alone, and he was dying. I was the only one there by his bedside. His wife and son had not returned.
“The price I paid for the life I led,” he half-whispered.
He turned his face away and cried quietly, a living cautionary tale for my own chosen path, then turned back to face me and asked, point-blank, “Do you really want to be like me?”
I held the hand of the man who had been like a second father
He smiled wanly, and I could barely make out his words.
“I knew you would come, Berto.”
I was beginning my sophomore year when a large manila envelope and a shipping box arrived at the Church Hill apartment in Richmond that I shared with my roommate, Dave. He sat with me as I opened the letter from a prestigious law firm in Manhattan.
Corrado Agnelli had named me his heir and trustee of the money left him by his father and uncle. We gasped at the eight-figure sum written on the bank statement. At last I understood how he had funded his free clinic for decades.
I opened the box. His death certificate lay o
n top, and under it his birth certificate. Under that, several albums of aged photos carried me back to pre-World War I Rome and the happy young boy staring intently at the camera. School and university diplomas testified to the superior abilities Corrado Agnelli had demonstrated.
Under more official documents and awards lay a faded, yellow newspaper clipping. It contained an article about a woman and her fifteen-year-old son found murdered in a crime spree through an exclusive New York neighborhood.
I called the attorney listed on the letterhead. I instructed him to contact Corrado’s alma mater and offer to establish the Agnelli Chair in Community Medicine. I specified that the school would be obligated to use the income from the trust fund to run free neighborhood clinics, Agnelli Clinics, staffed by interns and residents.
Then I sat back and cried.
There is a little church cemetery on the outskirts of Newark, New Jersey. Despite the surrounding neighborhood decay, it is preserved and kept in spotless condition—another proviso of the trust fund.
There is a special gravestone in that cemetery. It is six feet tall and casts a large and moving shadow as the sun traverses the heavens.
It is what Corrado Agnelli was to me—a Gnomon.
Has my own life cast even half the shadow, half the goodness and influence of this good and humble man?
The Tree
We moved in on that firecracker-hot Fourth of July.
We sat under the backyard maple, Cathy and I. It was our first house, our first home together.
The tree was there when we bought the place. Like the two of us, it wasn’t young, but it wasn’t old either.
It took truckloads of dirt to fill in and level off the never-before-cared-for yard. Remnants of decade-old construction debris lay scattered, sometimes erupting like deformed teeth from the dense, clay soil that allowed water to sit in dirty mud-lakes after a heavy rain.
Somehow, despite its environs, that maple tree had managed to sprout and grow, ignoring the ongoing commotion while the house was being built.
By now I had become a (young) middle-ager, still full of energy and strength—and hope. I had lost my first wife, Leni, while I was still in my twenties. Now Cathy had entered my middle ground to fill the void. I was strong then, strong enough to place the concrete benches I had purchased from the local stone mason around the tree's base at Cathy’s direction.
I had completed the circle.
In the summer the maple’s thousands of five-pointed leaves shaded us from the fierce Northern Virginia heat, amplifying even the slightest breeze into cooling air currents. And, like every love relationship, the tree and I had our off moments. A city kid like me did not appreciate its early spring dusting of pollen on my car windshield or the uncountable, whirligig seeds that coated the parking lot. In the fall, it did its best to give me aerobic exercise by casting a thick carpet of leaves to rake, as the chilly gusts presaged the cold winter to come.
Truth be told, I was annoyed that first autumn, venting my spleen at nature’s intrinsic messiness.
Berto the boy never had to rake leaves.
Cathy must have seen my frustration, because she walked out, put her arms around me and reminded me how hard our tree had worked to give us shade during the summer heat.
Her kisses always defused my ire.
“Besides,” she said as she patted my tummy, “you really do need the exercise.”
So I chased her around the leaf pile, until she let me catch her, and we both fell into it and laughed our heads off. Who says romance belongs only to the young?
That night, as we lay in bed, we talked about our tree. She was amazed that I grew up in a place devoid of such wonderment. I laughed and tried to make light of the tenacious, noxious weeds that grew through the cracks in the ancient sidewalk stones and substandard concrete that sporadically dotted my childhood territory.
“Well, Cathy, those weeds were green—sometimes—and they were survivors.”
“My God, Tony, did you hear what you just said?”
For her, as it was with my beloved Leni, I would always be Tony. I raised an eyebrow and whispered, “Who’s this Tony? I’m Berto.”
She giggled, and I tickled her toes with mine.
“Berto is a kid’s nickname, and from what I’ve seen, you ain’t no kid no mo’!”
She turned toward me, her eyes wide.
“You really don’t see it, do you?”
I do a good imitation of stupid—so good it's hard to tell the real from the acting.
Sometimes even I wasn’t sure. I opened my mouth but she placed a finger over it and said, “No, Tony, don’t deny it. In your own way you just described yourself!”
My wonderful Cathy began to cry.
Why do women do that?
No amount of levity, no gross comparisons of forest animals with tenement rats, cockroaches, and flies, could sway her.
What could I do? A husband does not ignore a crying wife. I kissed her and held her, as we fell asleep.
I tried to dream that night. I sought respite and insight in my childhood, but this time Berto’s world eluded me.
Why?
The question was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla sitting at the edge of my consciousness, as I went through my routine of patient care the next day. As lunchtime approached, I asked my secretary, Virginia, to give me ten uninterrupted minutes while I stepped outside.
I walked down the asphalt pathway toward the backyard parking lot and stopped in front of the maple. Most of its leaves were down now, and I was glad that I had worn my pullover sweater. The late-fall breezes were brisk, moving the bare limbs like some invisible conductor at a spirit concert.
Four sturdy, major branches extended upward for about ten feet above the main trunk in a voiceless hallelujah. The tree was stocky, like me, not tall but not short, its base over two feet in diameter.
I moved toward the trunk and ran my hand over its corrugated bark. I patted it and whispered, “I’m sorry I yelled at you yesterday.”
I turned back up the walk, looking at the final remnants of flower husks in the patch of garden I had cultivated as a memorial to Leni. I bent over and picked up one of the maple whirligigs that had lain there all summer and placed it in my pocket.
Nothing stays the same. The universe continues its inexorable march toward entropy, sometimes slow, sometimes inexplicably fast. Despite my best efforts the years passed, and with each change of season I would faithfully rake up the leaves from the tree that brought Cathy and me respite during those hot summer days and evenings.
That particular fall was a gentle one, but still chilly enough to prompt the neighbors to light up their fireplaces. I had finished collecting the leaves and carefully placing them in the mulch bin to compost for next year’s garden. I went back to give my ritual tree trunk pat when I saw the loosened bark on one large limb. Something was wrong.
The next day the arborist shook his head and told me he needed to remove the limb. He described it as something akin to cancer and said removal was the only way to save our tree.
Cathy and I watched, as the man excised the twelve-inch-diameter branch and carted it away.
She cried, and so did I.
The following spring Cathy walked in after a visit to the garden.
“Tony, I think another limb needs to come off.”
The remaining two limbs did yeoman work that summer and seemed even more filled out than usual. We did not lack for shade.
Three more years passed and, foolish human that I am, I assumed that our lives had achieved some balance, some homeostasis where nothing changed except the hours of the day and the days of the week. And then I heard Cathy’s words that quiet dinner time.
“Tony, I don’t feel well.”
Technology confirmed my worst fears. My mind fixed on one thought: If Cathy had only been a tree then the part of her inhabited by the malignant crab could have been removed as easily as a maple's limb.
Three months later, I sat under our
tree after Cathy’s funeral. It was raining but the remaining two limbs were an umbrella against nature’s tears … but not my own.
I entered the slippery slope of old age alone. Now my memorial garden served to remind me of Leni and Cathy, and the maple tree continued its yearly cycle of death and resurrection … and I understood.
Then the rain intensified. It grew monsoon-like and persistent—strange for our locale. By then the maple was in full leaf, and for several days it bravely withstood the wind gusts and sheets of water. Safely inside I stared out the back window and wondered whether it was time for me to build an ark.
That evening I sat listening to Moussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” The pelting rain kept time against the windows. And then I heard a muffled “whumfp.”
Sometimes on the battlefield that’s all you hear before the explosion sends its lethal burst of shell fragments to carry your friends to Valhalla.
I ran out the back door, ignoring the drenching downpour. The outside house light illuminated the carnage.
I moved toward the maple, now lying across the lawn, its branches still quivering. I held them until they stopped moving. And then I sat down beside it until dawn.
I could not watch as the arborist removed it the next day.
The rain had stopped. After the workmen had gone I put on my pullover sweater and walked outside in the early evening. There was a void where my friend had been. I reached into my pocket to warm my hand against the damp chill.
I felt something.
I pulled it out.
It was that little maple seed.
I planted it.
R.A. Comunale is a semi-retired physician in family practice and specialist in aviation medicine who lives and works out of his home office in McLean, Virginia. He enjoys writing, gardening, electronics, pounding on a piano, and yelling at his dimwitted cat. He describes himself as an eccentric and iconoclast.
The cat has taken out a restraining order.
Berto's World_Stories Page 17