A Montclair Homecoming

by Jane Peart

  The way Moira hugged her before she left warmed Joy’s heart. Moira had initially seemed to be so contained, so reserved, so in control. To see her like this, open and transparent, allowing her emotions to be revealed, was startling—a miracle in itself, actually. Healing could take place. Joy was sure of it.

  The solarium opened out onto a large circular deck where on clear days ambulatory patients and those in wheelchairs could go to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine. Some of them usually stopped to say a few words to Joy or just watch quietly as she painted. Joy became used to this and overcame both her reluctance to work with an audience and her feeling that she had to open a conversation. If questions were asked, she answered but did not initiate further exchange.

  One of the more frequent spectators was a man who regularly took advantage of the mild weather and came every morning when the sun was at its peak. He had first been wheeled out to the deck by one of the aides, then gradually had progressed to a walker. He was in his fifties, with gray hair and strong features. He was tall and well built, although with his present disability he had to lean heavily on the chrome walker, his massive shoulders bent forward.

  After pausing a few times at a short distance from her, then moving on, he began to linger. Joy acknowledged his presence with a smile, then went back to her painting. There was, however, something about his face that drew her. One morning, taking longer than usual to clean her brushes, she studied him. There was an expression that seemed strangely vulnerable.

  As he realized she had stopped work momentarily, he moved slowly forward. “Very nice, young lady,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling.

  “I don’t mean to appear ignorant, nor am I any art critic— in fact, I have to admit I know next to nothing about art. To tell you the truth, I was never much interested—never had the time, actually—but I’m guessing this has some kind of central theme?” He looked at her inquiringly. “These people in the painting, the shafts of light you’re placing them in—I don’t really get the significance…”

  “Each of the panels represents one of the healing miracles of Jesus,” Joy told him.

  Immediately she saw his eyes narrow, his cheek muscles twitch slightly. He nodded. “Oh, it’s a kind of religious thing.”

  “Well, you could call it that,” Joy said slowly. “But I like to think of it more as a symbol of hope, the light of faith…”

  “Hmm, I see,” he said in a noncommittal manner. “Well, I’ll go along now, leave you to your painting, young lady.”

  Joy watched him make his halting way back into the corridor and down the hall. Who was he? It seemed curious that he didn’t make the connection of the panels. Was it possible that a man of his age and obvious intelligence did not know about the healing ministry of Jesus?

  When she left to take her lunch break, she stopped at the nurses’ station and asked who the patient was. Aris Domingo was on duty and took one of the physicians’ charts out of the bin near her desk and checked.

  “That’s Mr. Kenan, Philip Kenan. Dr. Wallace’s patient. He’s recovering from hip replacement surgery.” She looked up at Joy. “Why did you want to know?”

  “He has a wonderful face—deep-set eyes, furrows in his cheeks, jutting jaw!” She laughed. “I’m always looking at faces as models, you know.”

  Aris affected a pose. “How about a beautiful Latino for one of the panels?” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “I would like to be immortalized on the walls of this hospital!”

  Joy laughed again. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Aris’s pretty face became suddenly serious.

  “I feel sorry for the guy. He never has any visitors. He checked himself in the day before he was scheduled for surgery. No one came to wait during his operation, nobody called about his condition, no flowers, no cards, and as I said, no visitors since.” She shook her head. “He’s got a private room and is staying here to recover. Weird. Most patients are eager to go home as soon as their doctor will discharge them. But Mr. Kenan seems perfectly content to stay on.” Aris shrugged. “Maybe he has no one or nothing to go home to.”

  Joy couldn’t get Philip Kenan out of her mind as she worked. Aris’s thumbnail sketch of him kept nagging at her. She was also intrigued by the complex face, a mixture of strength and…and…what? Sadness? Loneliness? He was seemingly a man without family or friends.

  The conviction grew that she could use him to good effect in one of the remaining panels. Which one? The centurion? No, too old. The Roman officer would be young, vigorous, muscular. Joy knew who she really wanted for that character. But Mr. Kenan might be right for the paralytic, the man who was lowered on a stretcher by his friends into the house where Jesus was healing. However, Philip Kenan had no friends. Somehow that struck Joy as the saddest thing about him. How would he feel about being asked to pose? Would he be insulted? She recalled the look that had come over his face when she explained the theme of the mural. Was it hostile, angry, puzzled, or was there something of longing and loss in it?

  Joy determined that the next time Philip Kenan stopped when she was working, she would engage him in conversation, try to find out more about him, tactfully suggest that he model for her. Would he be offended? There was only one way to find out.

  “Still here?” a voice demanded. “You keep long hours.”

  Joy recognized Dr. Wallace’s voice and turned. “I’m just quitting,” she told him. “Speaking of long hours, you’re here late, aren’t you?”

  “I had a patient in recovery, wanted to check on him after he regained consciousness,” he said shortly. “Have you eaten, or are you still ignoring medical advice and living on candy bars and soda pop?”

  Joy laughed but his remark reminded her that she hadn’t had anything but the bagel and coffee Ginny had brought her before she went off duty hours ago.

  “No, guilty again.”

  “What about getting a bite with me?” came the surprising suggestion.

  “In the cafeteria?”

  “Not likely. I know a great little place not far from the hospital that serves the best lasagna.”

  As Joy hesitated, Dr. Wallace said, “You have to eat.”

  Joy glanced around the solarium and saw that the light coming through the tall windows was fast fading. She was hungry and she did love Italian food. Besides, if she was eventually going to ask Dr. Wallace to pose for her, maybe this was a good way to get to know him better. Perhaps then she could ask him to be her model for the centurion.

  As if assured she would accept, Dr. Wallace glanced at his wristwatch. “I’ll change and meet you in the lobby in ten minutes, okay?”

  She nodded and watched him walk away. Then Joy cleaned her brushes, put away her paints, and took off her smock. After freshening up, she passed the nurses’ station on her way to the elevator. As she said good-night to the staff on the night shift, she wondered with some amusement what they would say if they knew she was meeting the aloof Dr. Wallace downstairs.

  He was waiting right by the elevator when she got off, as if impatient for her arrival. As they crossed the lobby toward the doors leading outside, he asked, “How is the mural going?”

  “Good, I think. I’ve got quite a bit more to do on the characters, though. By the way, I’m hoping to get a patient of yours to pose for me. Mr. Philip Kenan.”

  “Ah yes, Kenan.” Dr. Wallace frowned. “I doubt if you can convince him. But then, I suppose I should never underestimate an artist’s persistence. Mr. Kenan has nothing else to do. I wish you luck.”

  Joy thought it would take more than luck. Another miracle.

  In the parking lot Dr. Wallace walked briskly to the space reserved for physicians and unlocked the door to the passenger side of a gleaming red Porsche. Joy slid into the smooth leather seat, thinking it was quite a contrast to the lumpy seat of her old clunker.

  The restaurant Dr. Wallace had recommended lived up to his description. It turned out to be a charming, unpretentious place with rou
nd tables and bentwood chairs, filled with family groups. The two of them entered and were greeted by the sounds of laughter and lively conversation, the spicy smells of Italian food, and a warm welcome from a plump, smiling, dark-eyed woman who greeted Dr. Wallace by name.

  He introduced Joy. “This young lady is a talented artist, Mrs. Regli. She’s painting a mural at the hospital.”

  “It’s good to see the doctor not eating alone tonight,” the woman said, smiling at Joy as she showed them to a table. “Not good for the digestion to eat by yourself.” She snapped her fingers, and a young waiter came to take their order.

  When the waiter left, Dr. Wallace turned to Joy and said, “So tell me, how did you get into mural work in the first place?” He leaned forward, apparently quite interested.

  “At the art institute,” she replied. “A guest speaker, John Feight, inspired me.”

  “Never heard of him. A famous artist?”

  “Yes. He’s a businessman, and also an artist, a poet, who got this idea of brightening the hours of cancer patients receiving radiation treatments, by painting beautiful scenes on the ceilings of treatment rooms. As you certainly know, patients have to be alone while they’re being treated, and it can be a lonely, depressing experience. He began in a Georgetown oncology department, and since then he’s painted in hospitals all over the country. He’s been an inspiration to other artists, who are now doing similar work. I volunteered with some of them at a local clinic, which is where I met Dr. Braden. When she first saw my work, she asked me to paint a mural in her pediatrics office.”

  Dr. Wallace was regarding her so intently that Joy began to feel uncomfortable. Then he said, “I envy you your talent.”

  “But you have a talent, too. You’re a brilliant surgeon. Everyone at Good Samaritan says so.”

  He made a dismissing gesture with his hand. “Technical skills are not art.”

  “I disagree. I think surgery is an art. It’s up here, isn’t it?” Joy tapped her forehead. “You have to see it in your mind, your imagination, before you can do it. It’s the same with painting. You visualize the scene, and then you try to put it down as you saw it. It takes skill, yes, and concentration, and more than anything else, the desire to do it well. That’s a talent.”

  Dr. Wallace smiled. “I never thought about it like that. You’ve given me something to consider, Miss Montrose.”

  Just then their waiter brought their food and set down their plates with a flourish. Afterward their conversation turned to lighter things, and Joy was surprised to find that Dr. Wallace had several other interests besides medicine. Music, for instance.

  After they left the restaurant and were back in the car, he slipped a cassette into the tape player, and the interior was filled with the sound of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  “I have season tickets to the community concert series. Perhaps sometime you’d like to attend a concert with me,” he said.

  She was so surprised that she could only murmur something that sounded like, “That would be nice.” It still seemed incredible to her that she was with Dr. Wallace and seeing an entirely new side of him.

  “Where to? What’s your address?” he asked as they moved onto the street.

  “Back to the hospital parking lot. I left my car there.”

  They covered the few blocks rapidly and pulled into Dr. Wallace’s space. Joy started to get out, saying, “Thank you very much, Dr. Wallace. You were right—that was the best lasagna I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Wait, where are you parked?”

  “Not far. I have a temporary parking permit for the staff parking lot.”

  “Well, I’ll walk you to your car,” he said.

  “That’s not necessary,” Joy protested, but he was already getting out of the car.

  As they crossed the parking lot, two of the fourth-floor nurses coming off shift exited the hospital building and saw them. From the shocked look on both women’s faces, Joy knew that the fact that she and Dr. Wallace had been seen together would be topic A at tomorrow’s coffee klatch.

  “Good evening, Dr. Wallace,” the two nurses said in unison.

  “Good evening,” he responded curtly.

  When they reached Joy’s car, he chuckled. “Well, that will provide some grist for the mill, won’t it? Oh, I know what they say about me behind my back. Cold fish. No social life. Well, this will give them something to talk about. I hope you don’t mind being linked with me as an item.”

  Joy laughed. “I don’t think it will come to that.”

  He helped her into her car and waited until she had backed out and turned. She tapped her horn lightly, then drove off, leaving him standing in the empty space, watching her leave.

  chapter

  9

  CONTRARY TO DR. WALLACE’S prediction, Philip Kenan agreed to pose for Joy. In fact, he seemed flattered when she approached him with the idea.

  To Joy’s immense pleasure, Mr. Kenan turned out to be an interesting raconteur. He told her about his nomadic early life as a kid of fifteen during the Depression. He regaled her with stories of his days spent hitchhiking across the country, riding in boxcars with out-of-work hoboes, earning money as a jack-of-all-trades, taking any kind of employment he could get.

  He posed for her several times, but Joy was having difficulty painting his face. Not the features but the expression. The paralytic should have a look of hopeful expectation; Philip Kenan’s face remained stoic, closed. Twice she wiped out what she had done and started over. There was something missing that she knew was there if she could only capture it.

  Mr. Kenan was in no hurry. He seemed, in a strange way, to enjoy the posing sessions. Joy recalled Aris’s comment: “Maybe he has no one, nothing to go home to.” Joy promised herself to ask him a question that might draw out some information, some emotion she could use in painting the paralytic’s face.

  But it wasn’t until they were nearly finished with the portrait that Philip Kenan told Joy the most important story of his life. One day he asked her, “You’re religious, am I right, young lady?”

  “Well, if you mean am I a believer, Mr. Kenan, I most certainly am. Religious—I’m not sure exactly what that means.”

  “You’re a Bible reader, right?” He pointed to her Bible beside her paint box.

  “Yes, sir,” Joy answered, wondering where all this was leading.

  “So was my mother,” Mr. Kenan said in a husky voice. “My mother died when I was a small boy. But I remember going to sleep at night hearing her singing…hymns, it must have been. ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ ‘How Great Thou Art.’ I think they must have somehow sunk into my child’s consciousness. But after her death my father and I lived a kind of roustabout life. He was in heavy construction, and we went wherever his jobs were. Sometimes he dumped me off with some relatives—never for very long, a few months of a school year—then he’d pick me up again and I’d go with him to the next site. We lived in motels or a company-owned trailer on the site. I was left alone a lot—but always on the fringe of the life he had with the other men. There wasn’t much religion in it. So I grew up with only the faintest memory of my mother’s beliefs. I was a smart kid, though, and when I was fifteen I had a teacher, someone who really took me under his wing and showed me that education was my way out of my father’s rootless lifestyle.

  “I don’t blame him, though. I’m sure he did the best he could, having been left with a little kid when he was still a very young man, and he made our living the only way he knew how. But what I’m saying is, I didn’t have what they’d call today a role model—that is, until this teacher came along. Mr. Emmons. To make a long story short, he showed me I had brains and how to use them. So I told my dad I wanted to stay and finish high school, then go on to college, if I could get in.

  “That’s where Mr. Emmons again helped. I got a scholarship to the state university. I had to work for room and board, but I did get through and graduate. Then I got a good job—” Mr. Kenan stopped. He was leaning
forward, hands clasped in front of him, pressed together. The knuckles were white. “Well, I guess you could say I had it all. The job, moving up on the ladder they call success, steadily getting ahead…I married, acquired the whole bit—the house in the suburbs, a summer cabin on the lake, two swell children…” He drew a long, ragged breath. “Then I blew it. I didn’t know I was blowing it. I was too concentrated on me. I thought it was for them. But my wife got tired of playing second fiddle to my ambition. She got tired of all the moving. You see, I picked up this restlessness from my dad—there was always a better job, a company willing to pay more. I didn’t care about neighbors, my kids’ friends, their team, or my wife loving a certain house, her friends, her place in the community…I never had time for any of those things.” He threw out his hands in a gesture of resignation—or was it helplessness? Joy couldn’t be sure. She was listening intently.

  “We got the divorce; she got everything. In a way, I was trying to make up for what she said I hadn’t given her in the marriage. As a result of the divorce, over the years I’ve lost contact with my children. I thought it was better to stay out of their new lives. I kept supporting them of course; I didn’t abandon my responsibilities. Then my wife remarried, and my kids…” His voice trailed off. “Anyway, that’s the story. I’m fifty-seven years old, and I’ve accomplished everything I set out to do, but—”

  Mentally Joy finished his sentence for him. “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his eternal soul?” She felt sorry and sad for Mr. Kenan with his empty life. And she felt true sympathy for his needs. How could she help? How to assuage the deep regret, the sorrow he felt, the suffering of broken dreams, of a misspent life?