(1995)

Hannah Rosenthal didn’t see how she could move reluctant members of Congress to vote for a universal healthcare bill, short of injecting large doses of compassion into their wizened hearts. Still, she made the long trip from Marquette, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to join several hundred other physicians in Washington for two days of reasoning, arguing, and pleading with any elected official who would listen. Ironically, in order to clear the time on her schedule, she’d had to cancel the free Saturday clinic she offered for uninsured patients, who crowded into her office from near and far, bearing their ailments with resignation, resentment, or shame.

Her last call in Congress was with a Michigan Senator who listened politely to her reports of diabetics losing limbs, elders suffering strokes, workers hobbling on crookedly knit bones, children going blind, street people dying from infections, all for lack of simple treatments they could not afford. The Senator, a jowly man who seemed a likely candidate for cardiac arrest, gave her five minutes or so, made a few notes, thanked her for sharing these concerns, and then rose to shake her hand. Hannah recognized the gesture as one she herself commonly used to inform a patient that a session was over.

Dismissed, with two hours before her flight home, she had just enough time to fulfill the other purpose of her trip, which was to visit her brother’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery. Although she had hunted up Ozzie’s grave on previous trips to Washington, she still had to consult a map before she could locate his headstone, for it was indistinguishable, except for the inscription, from tens of thousands of other white stone markers that stretched away in every direction, row upon row. It was as though all these dead soldiers and sailors were still wearing uniforms and marching in ranks. Hannah kept her eyes lowered, to avoid being reminded of so much loss. The April beauty of this place—the grass burnished by sunlight, the crabapples in rosy bloom, the trees gleaming with newly minted leaves—could not dull the ache she still felt for her brother, twenty-five years after he’d stepped on a landmine in Vietnam. But she had not come here to grieve, she’d come to remember, to keep Ozzie alive in her mind.

The inscription on Ozzie’s headstone showed his full name, his rank and military unit, his dates of birth and death, and, near the top, a Star of David. Her parents had insisted on the symbol, against her advice, for they saw it as an affirmation of Jewish identity whereas Hannah saw it as a target for vandals. And sure enough, on two earlier visits she had found traces of graffiti still legible on the marker after cleansing by groundskeepers. One time she could detect the ghostly scrawl of Christ killer, the other time, Fire up the ovens. Today, thank goodness, the white marble was unblemished.

From her shoulder bag she retrieved one of Ozzie’s matchbox cars, which she had rescued along with some of his other childhood toys when her parents moved from their grand house in Evanston to a condo. She also drew out a pebble of milky quartz she’d collected on the shore of Lake Superior near Marquette, a place Ozzie had come to love, as she had, from childhood summers spent in a cottage there. She balanced the pebble on top of the marker, and beside it the miniature car, a roadster with much of its red paint worn away to disclose bare metal. As a boy, Ozzie had imagined the water-polished beads of quartz were jewels, and she, the big sister, five years older and wiser, had played along. To humor him, to rouse his crooked grin, she had also played with his matchbox toys, rolling the tiny rubber tires in the dirt of backyards and the sand of beaches, across floors of oak and terrazzo and tile in the progressively larger houses the family moved into as their father’s musical career prospered. Their mother had given up her own singing career to stay home with Ozzie and Hannah while their father flew to concert halls around the world carrying two first-class tickets, one for him and one for his cello.

Songs their mother had sung to them as children came to Hannah now, and she quietly sang three of them, all in German, before Ozzie’s marble slab. When he was little, he would ask what the strange words meant, for he never learned the language their parents had brought with them from Vienna during Hitler’s war. What is Leben? What is Licht? Ozzie, Ozzie, so full of questions, so earnest. He often had a pinched look, such a worrier, but their mother’s singing would smooth the wrinkles from his forehead, the crimp from his mouth, and under the spell of music he would become a carefree boy.

Looking up after her own singing, Hannah blinked at the light of this April afternoon and at the scattering of other visitors strolling among the graves. There, Ozzie was alive again, if only in her mind, and she could return home. For a change, she had remembered to bring a camera along, and now she remembered to use it, snapping two pictures of the headstone with its pebble and car, one picture for her parents, who rarely traveled here from Chicago, and one for herself.

As she headed back toward her rental car she could see to the east, rising above the tree line, the chalky obelisk of the Washington Monument. Braggart men, she thought, with their spears and missiles and phalluses aimed at the sky. Only a woman could have designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with its trench leading down into the earth.

After passing a sign urging “Silence & Respect,” Hannah noticed beside the path a young woman lying facedown before a grave marker, propped on her elbows, head bowed, sobbing. Was she a sister, a daughter, a lover, a wife? Exposed above the woman’s blue sundress, her shoulder blades hunched up in a way painful to see. The sobs sent tremors through her body. She had taken off her sandals, which lay in the grass nearby. Her feet were pointed and her legs clenched together like a diver’s, as if she were plunging into the stone. The scene brought back to Hannah with the force of a blow how it had felt when Ozzie’s death was fresh. She was not close enough to read the dates on the stone, but the marble appeared to be newly cut. Not wishing to intrude on the young woman, and not wishing to forget her, Hannah took a quick photograph and hurried on by.


 
Hannah’s decision to open a practice in Marquette after finishing medical school had displeased her parents, who wanted her to settle in Chicago. With Ozzie dead, who was going to provide grandchildren for weekend visits? Who was going to look after them in their old age? When Hannah and Ozzie were growing up, and the family vacationed August after August in a beach cottage on Lake Superior, alongside other exiles from Vienna who rented cottages nearby, Hannah’s parents had never imagined she would become so enamored of the place. For the parents, Simeon and Ingrid Rosenthal, these sojourns in Marquette had been merely an escape from the sweltering city, a chance to see childhood friends who’d also fled from Hitler, and a break for Simeon from his relentless round of concerts.

But the north country had seeped into Hannah’s imagination. She loved the sand dunes at Grand Sable, the rouge bluffs of Presque Isle, the panoramic view from atop Sugarloaf Mountain, the breakers at Laughing Fish Point. She loved the forests of maple, aspen, hemlock, and pine, where she and Ozzie took field trips from summer camp, coming across beaver lodges and stumps aglow with foxfire. She loved the rocky streams where camp counselors taught them how to fly-fish, and where she managed to catch and briefly hold and then release a few iridescent trout. She loved the blue distances over the lake, the gulls cruising, the buoys gonging, the freighters bleating in the fog or lit up at night beside the ore dock like constellations. She loved the cloudless nights when real constellations glittered with a hundred times as many stars as ever appeared in Chicago, and especially the rare nights that shimmered with the fiery veils of the northern lights.

While the stars were abundant up north, the people were scarce, and their works seemed ephemeral, mere scratches on the stony lip of the lake. Marquette’s low buildings and gabled houses huddled between forest and shore as though held in place by the burden of sky. Even the Landmark Inn, pride of the town, host over the years to Amelia Earhart and Louis Armstrong and the Rolling Stones, was only six stories high. And the Peter White Library, which had appeared so grand to Hannah when she and Ozzie used to enter through a doorway flanked by pillars to collect their weekly supply of books, was only half as high as the hotel. On the wooden houses, paint peeled, boards warped, porches sagged, gutters bowed. Even the buildings of brick and stone seemed in constant need of repair, just as boats needed overhaul in dry dock to undo the ravages of water and weather. Despite the web of roads, the pox of dumps, and the smear of ore-stained lagoons, the hold of people on the place felt tenuous, as if one more hard winter might force everyone to pack up and head south.

Still today, twenty years after beginning her practice in Marquette, when Hannah visited her parents they pestered her about moving back to Chicago, as they pestered her about finding another husband. They had given up hope of grandchildren, in light of her age, forty-nine this June. But they had not given up hope that she would marry again. Her parents must have scoured the city to find the Jewish widowers whom they invited for suppers during her visits—doctors and lawyers, an architect, two bankers, a professor, a pianist, even a rabbi, all carefully vetted and briefed, all angling for a new wife.

The widowers seemed to Hannah like decent men, but so had her former husband, whom she’d met in medical school. On their fifth wedding anniversary, a date when they had agreed to begin trying to conceive a child, while she was preparing a celebratory dinner and her husband was supposedly finishing his rounds at the hospital, he called from the airport to say he was moving to Atlanta with one of his patients. “It’s nothing against you,” he told Hannah, “I just need a fresh start.” What he needed most, Hannah suspected, was a mate who wasn’t longing to have a baby.

Simeon and Ingrid Rosenthal could not understand why Hannah didn’t just forget the lout who’d abandoned her. Let him stew in his own juices, him and his floozy. Why didn’t she marry one of these prosperous widowers, give up her practice, abandon the wilds, move into the condo next door to theirs and ease their twilight years? In his seventies, Simeon still flew around the world for performances, one seat for him, one for his cello, but now the tickets were usually economy class and the concert halls were humbler, for arthritis had begun to stiffen his fingers. Decades after her last vacation in the cottage on Lake Superior, Ingrid spoke about Marquette as if it were a frontier town, a hangout for lumberjacks and sailors and Indians. She recalled the mosquitoes, the rude drivers of pickup trucks, the sand in every bite of food. Ingrid and Simeon would not consider flying up north to see Hannah, for all they had ever liked about those Augusts in Marquette were the Viennese friends and the cool breeze off the lake and the sight of their children romping outdoors. Now, Ingrid pointed out, with one child buried and the other married to work, there would be no more romping; air-conditioning made Chicago bearable, even in August; and most of those Viennese friends were homebound or dead.

So Hannah saw her parents only in Chicago, three or four times a year, as often as her nerves and schedule would bear. In between visits, she consulted by phone with their accountant, attorney, financial advisor, cleaning woman, mechanic, her father’s agent, and their various doctors, to make sure that her parents and their affairs were being properly looked after. She kept gamely meeting and then discouraging the widowers, a few of whom proposed marriage but none of whom, not even the retired ones, proposed joining her in Marquette. Had a smart and lively and tender suitor shown enthusiasm for moving north, she might have thought twice before declining his offer.


 
On the Saturday following her return from Washington, the stream of patients at the free clinic kept Hannah at her office, as usual, until well into the evening. Around seven, Colleen Fitzgerald, the nurse practitioner, brought in a plate of fettuccini from the Casa Calabria, and she refused to usher any more patients into the examining room until Hannah ate a few bites.

“You’re thin as a rail,” Colleen said. “And what kind of example is that for these anorexic girls you’re always treating?”

“I don’t starve myself,” Hannah said. “I just burn up everything I eat.”

“You miss too many meals, and you don’t sleep enough.”

Colleen herself was a buxom woman, who set a healthy example for the emaciated girls. Hannah lifted a forkful of noodles. “Well, I promise to reform, doctor.”

Colleen laughed. “Don’t you pawn off your M.D. on me. I’ve more than enough to do with my N.P.”

When Hannah finished the last of the paperwork, most of the fettuccini lay congealed on the plate. She scraped the food into the toilet and flushed it down and washed the plate, so Colleen wouldn’t have reason to chide her. It was true, Hannah thought, driving home: she didn’t take good care of herself. From hospital rounds beginning at six in the morning, through an unbroken day of appointments, to an evening of answering phone messages, and then a few minutes of reading medical journals before tumbling into fitful sleep, she rarely let up. It had not always been so. During the five years of her marriage, she and her husband had found time to see movies and dine out, to attend concerts and host parties, to canoe and camp and ski; but after the divorce, while she still walked along the moody lake and bicycled to the woods and went out occasionally with friends, she gave herself more and more entirely to work.

Arriving at the house, she found in the day’s mail a packet from the photo lab, which puzzled her for a moment, until she realized it was the film from her Washington trip. She tore open the envelope and riffled through the prints until she came upon the two shots of Ozzie’s grave. She set aside one of these for her parents, and then she turned to the photo of the grieving young woman. From bare feet to bowed head, the woman’s body stretched out on the grass like an arrow pointed at the headstone. The weight of the image pressed Hannah into a chair at the kitchen table, where she examined the picture more closely through reading glasses. Flanking the stone were a small American flag on a stick and a bouquet of red carnations. The inscription identified the year of death as 1989. So the woman’s grief was six years old. And whom had she lost? Tilting the photo to catch the light, Hannah read the name: Tommy Two Bears.

Startled, she set the photo down and looked out her kitchen window at the twilit waters of Marquette Bay. She had known Tommy Two Bears, or at least she had treated a boy with that name. And how many others could there be? She still treated the boy’s mother, Teresa Two Bears, and still flinched when she remembered the last time she had allowed him in her office. She had begun seeing him early in her practice, when he was a shy boy with chronic ear infections, and she had continued seeing him over the years for the usual things, rashes and gashes, a broken bone or two, no doubt other ailments or injuries which his file could remind her of. But she needed no reminding of the last time he had come to see her, on the eve of his joining the Navy.

Tommy must have been eighteen or nineteen that day when he showed up with a fever and a hacking cough. When she entered the room he was seated on the exam table with his shirt off, and the muscles of his upper body were as sharply defined as those in the anatomical chart on the wall. She seemed to recall he was a celebrated athlete of some sort, perhaps a wrestler, before he dropped out of high school to work on freighters. As a teenager, he had worn his dense black hair in a braid, but this day it was cut short, as if he had already visited the Navy barber.

As she closed the door behind her, he broke into a coughing fit that brought the blood to his angular, half-Chippewa face. Bronchitis, she guessed. She asked him the usual questions and he replied in a grudging voice, for he had only come to the office because his mother had insisted. He shivered when Hannah pressed the head of her stethoscope against his chest. She listened to his lungs as he took deep breaths, and then she moved to the other side of the exam table to listen through his ribcage from the back. As she came around the table, however, she stopped short, glimpsing on his left shoulder blade the pitch-black tattoo of a swastika.

She jerked away, as if the tattoo were a spider as large as a hand, and then with a muttered excuse she hurried from the room and down the hall to her office, trembling. Colleen Fitzgerald followed her there to ask what was the matter, and Hannah explained. They both whispered, glancing in the direction of the boy whose coughs echoed through the walls. What to do? Hannah was so frightened by the swastika, so repulsed by it, that she thought of sending Tommy away. Colleen balled up her fists and offered to run him off. No, no, Hannah replied, regaining her composure. She couldn’t send a sick boy away without treating him. Then I’ll come along with you in case he tries anything, said Colleen. But again Hannah said no. She would gather herself, finish the exam, give him a prescription, and then tell him he must find a new doctor, for she would not continue treating anyone who bore such a symbol of hate on his body. And that is what she did.

“It’s not a symbol of hate,” Tommy grumbled when she told him.

Hannah ignored him as she wrote out a prescription.

“It’s not,” he repeated. He dipped his bare shoulder and turned it to her. “Here, let me show you.”

She looked away. “I’ve seen enough.”

“Just let me explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain. Now please put on your shirt.”

Still grumbling, he pushed his arms into the sleeves of his blue work shirt. “Tell me one thing,” he said. “Are you a Jew?”

In spite of her fear, Hannah glared at him. “I am.”

“What is it with Jews? You think you invented suffering.”

“I think nothing of the sort.”

“Read up on what’s happened to Indians, and then we can talk about suffering.”

“I don’t wish to argue.” Shaking with fury, she held out the prescription to him. “Now take this and leave or I will call for help.”

He snatched the paper and stalked out, shirt still unbuttoned, and she could hear him coughing all the way down the hall.

And that was the last Hannah ever saw of Tommy Two Bears, except for the photograph of him in his Navy uniform that showed up in the newspaper when he died in the Persian Gulf, in some sort of accident on an aircraft carrier. That was six years ago, according to the headstone, yet she could still see the swastika vividly, the ink jet-black, the surrounding skin puffy and red, as if the needles had only just finished their work. Whether Tommy had ever told his mother about the incident, Hannah didn’t know. She had never brought it up with Teresa Two Bears, whom she continued to see with some frequency for treatment of diabetes, and Teresa had never mentioned it to her.

Now, seated at her kitchen table, gazing out at the lights of freighters gliding over the darkened lake, Hannah felt certain this Tommy Two Bears must have been the one whom the young woman was grieving for in Arlington Cemetery. She looked down at the image of the prostrate body, the bowed head, hunched shoulder blades, clenched legs, and bare feet. The woman could not have been Tommy’s sister, for he was an only child, and she was not his daughter, for she looked to be nearly as old as Tommy would have been, had he lived. So she must have been his lover or wife. What did she think of his tattoo? Did it make her cringe? Did it give her a thrill? Was it anything more to her than an inky design she casually touched while rubbing his shoulders or making love?


 
When Teresa Two Bears came for an appointment a few weeks later, Hannah waited until the exam was completed before asking where Tommy was buried.

As if searching for a name, Teresa peered into the willow basket she held in her lap, one of the traditional Chippewa designs she made. She wore beaded moccasins, another of her crafts, and a flower-print dress the color of mustard. “He’s buried in that big cemetery they’ve got in Washington,” she answered.

“Arlington?”

“Yes, that one,” Teresa replied, with a nod that set her long gray braids to swaying. She was a large woman, her body swollen by diabetes and, Hannah suspected, by a poor diet. A bag of peppermints and a box of cookies jutted from the basket. “Why do you ask about Tommy?”

Seated on a stool at the counter, Hannah spoke while jotting notes in Teresa’s file, as if she were only making polite conversation. “Oh,” she said, “I came across a headstone with his name on it when I was in Washington not long ago.”

“I went there one time to see,” Teresa recalled. “So many white stones lined up, like teeth. There is a flame where John Kennedy lies, but not for my son. Tommy said to bury him there if he died on the Navy ship. He worked all over the Great Lakes, and was never afraid, but he had a dream of drowning in the ocean. Then stay home, I told him. But he would not listen. He was headstrong, even as a baby.”

“So he drowned?”

“No. An airplane landed crazy on his ship and crushed him.”

Hannah winced. “How awful,” she said, and gave up the pretense of jotting notes.

Teresa curled her thick fingers around the handle of the basket. “It is done.”

When Hannah was a little girl, her father used to say she had midnight eyes, because they were so dark, as were her stubborn curls. But Teresa’s eyes were darker, almost black, and they were hard to read. Or perhaps it was Teresa’s face that was hard to read, the creases seemed so fixed in place.

“I took a picture of his grave,” Hannah said. She drew from the pocket of her white coat the photograph she had brought from home to show Teresa.

Setting her basket on the floor, Teresa laid the photograph in her lap and stared at it for a long time without speaking. Her face did not lose its customary stolid expression, but her eyes soon brimmed with tears.

Hannah, realizing she had caused pain when she had only meant to satisfy her curiosity, regretted having asked about Tommy. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said.

Teresa ran a blunt forefinger over the figure of the woman in the picture. “That is how it feels,” she said. “You want to crawl into the earth after him.”

That is how it feels, Hannah thought, her own eyes watering. Ozzie, Ozzie. She knew it was not proper to have such a conversation with a patient in her office, but she couldn’t resist asking, “Do you know who she is?”

“Some girl who loved him.”

There was a tap at the door, which would be Colleen signaling that the afternoon appointments were backing up. “Another minute,” Hannah called out. Then to Teresa she said quietly, “He wasn’t married?”

“He asked a girl once, and she was willing but her parents said no. Too Indian, they said. I’m only half, he told them. That’s half too much, they said.”

“Could it be a friend from Marquette?”

Teresa shook her head. “I knew all his friends here. She is a stranger.”

“Then could it be someone he met when his freighter was in port?”

“He knew many girls in ports.” Teresa kept stroking the photograph. “Whenever he came home, I asked if he’d found a sweetheart. And he would say, oh, there is this girl who’s pretty and that one who’s funny and this one who’s rich. But I only heard love in his voice once, for a girl he got in trouble.”

Now Hannah knew she was being unprofessional, prying into a patient’s life. But again she could not hold back. “What kind of trouble?”

“Knocked up, you know. Her parents had a bar in Cleveland and she worked there. He saw her for a week, while his ship was docked for repairs. He cried when he told me about her. Marry her, I told him, and you two live here with me, and I will take care of the baby. But she was too young and too white and he was afraid her parents would say no and shame him again. So he joined the Navy to get away.”

“What became of the baby?” Hannah asked.

Teresa let the tears run down her face without wiping them. “I do not know. Maybe she got rid of it. Maybe she gave it birth. Maybe she is a good mother or a bad mother. I only know the child is lost to me.”

“You can’t remember the girl’s name or the name of the bar?”

“No, Tommy would not say.”

Again came the tapping at the door, and this time Colleen opened it a crack to inquire, “Is anything the matter, doctor?”

“We’re just finishing,” Hannah said, rising from her stool, brushing her cheeks with the back of a hand. Teresa rose as well. She laid the photograph on the counter, picked up her basket, and tucked the braids back over her shoulders.

“Well, then,” Hannah said. “See me in three months. And watch your sugar.”

“I will, doctor.” Teresa glanced at the sweets in her basket.

“Would you like to keep the photograph?”

“No. I remember the pain without a picture.”

“Of course.” At the door, Hannah squeezed Teresa’s plump shoulder, and felt compelled to say, “My brother is buried not far from Tommy. He died in Vietnam.”

The creases around Teresa’s black eyes softened. “So you know how it is. War steals our men.”


 
Hannah framed the photograph and mounted it above her desk at the office, alongside other pictures that spoke to her affections—Ozzie seated at a grand piano for his senior recital, her parents dancing at the Jewish Community Center, her mother as a girl in Vienna singing in a lace dress, her father bent over his cello at Carnegie Hall, she and the man she would marry donning their white coats for the first time in medical school, the campsite where they honeymooned on Isle Royale, holiday cards showing the grinning children of friends, scenes from the forests and rivers and shores of the Upper Peninsula. When she sat at the desk doing paperwork after a day of seeing patients, worn out and scattered by their many needs, Hannah would often glance up at these photographs to regain a sense of who she was.

The photograph of the unknown woman at Tommy’s grave was chastening to Hannah, as was her conversation with Teresa, for if they loved this menacing boy so keenly, how could she despise him? How could she imagine him as just an aimless, muscular youth like the thugs whom Hitler enlisted to carry out his poisonous plans? Perhaps the swastika meant no more to Tommy than a sign that he was a tough guy. In an anthropology textbook Hannah had read in college, Margaret Mead argued that every society must figure out how to harness the aggression of teenage boys and young men in their early twenties, or they would tear the society apart. The most common solution to this problem, and also the worst, according to Mead, was to make these young males into warriors, give them weapons, and turn their aggression against the “enemy”—whoever the political or religious authorities deemed the enemy to be.

Ozzie had never been a tough guy, preferring to read books or draw pictures or make up scenarios with his matchbox cars rather than engage in rough-and-tumble play. While other boys went out for sports, he devoted himself to the piano. After studying music at Interlochen during the summers of high school, he decided, at their parents’ urging, to spend a year working in Chicago with a private instructor, one of the Viennese exiles, before enrolling at Juilliard. He had not realized that by interrupting his schooling he would lose his student deferment. He wept when the draft notice arrived.

And yet, when Ozzie returned home on leave after basic training, bronzed and lean, something had gone hard in him. He spoke of the men in his platoon as if they were brothers he would die for. True, one guy made a crack about Jews being pussies, but the sergeant let them work it out with their fists, and Ozzie broke the guy’s jaw. He proudly displayed for Hannah his bruised knuckles. He couldn’t wait to land in Vietnam and show what he was made of. After he did land, and began making patrols out from the base at Danang, his letters home took on a cocky tone that didn’t sound like her brother. He spoke of calling in ordnance, humping a load, torching the bush, smoking tunnels, and other harsh matters Hannah didn’t always understand. In the last letter he wrote before stepping on a landmine, he bragged that he had not touched a piano for over a year, and he didn’t miss music one bit, now that he had tasted what it meant to be a man.


 
Two months after that troubling conversation with Teresa Two Bears, on the last Saturday in July, Hannah stepped from the clinic at dusk into a wind so stiff it made her stagger on her way to the car. Coming from the north, off the lake, it should blow up some lusty waves by tomorrow. She had always loved big weather, so she drove home with the car windows open. By the time she reached the house, her hair, an unruly profusion of curls at the best of times, was a hopeless tangle. She tugged at it with a brush and pinned it back into a semblance of order with barrettes. There was nobody here to care how she looked, and had not been since her husband walked out, yet she still could not allow herself to look a fright.

Sitting at the kitchen table over a cup of chamomile tea, she remembered what it had felt like to have someone welcome her home, or to welcome that someone, his chin raspy against her cheek at the end of the day, his arms encircling her, his eyes giving back the tiny reflections of her face.

Hannah shook herself to banish the memory. She looked out the kitchen window at the backyard hemlocks thrashing in the wind. Beyond the hemlocks, far out in the darkening bay, great swells would be gathering. She could imagine how the combers would break against the bluffs at Presque Isle. Thinking of the spray shooting up and mist on her face, she grew too excited to stay at the table, and so she got up and paced around the house. Instead of sitting at home tomorrow to catch up on bills, as she had planned, why didn’t she bicycle out to Presque Isle and perch on the rocks and watch the waves? With a book to read, a bag lunch, and a bottle of water, she could stay there until sunset. When had she last spent a whole day outdoors?

Before going to bed, she went into the garage to pump up the tires and oil the chain on her bicycle. The energy that sent her pacing around the house made her itch to climb on right then and wheel out into the darkness. But she resisted, and went to bed, and was a long time in falling asleep.

Soon after daybreak she packed a rucksack and set off. The wind had dropped, but there was still enough of a breeze to make her legs burn as she pedaled north on Lakeshore Boulevard. She encountered little traffic until she neared the park, where she was surprised to see vans and pickups and cars with trailers converging so early on a Sunday. Then she noticed the booths and banners, and she realized this was the weekend for the annual fair at Presque Isle called “Art on the Rocks.” She and her husband used to come every year, chatting with the craftspeople, admiring the handiwork, buying a bowl or a weaving or a basket to mark their anniversary, which also fell in late July. After the divorce, Hannah gave away all of those items, including a birchbark basket they had purchased from Teresa Two Bears. She meant to replace them with purchases of her own, untainted by memories of her husband, but as the years went by she lost track of the fair, as she lost track of many things outside of work.

Dismounting, she rolled her bicycle through the avenue of booths as vendors tightened guy ropes on canopies that shuddered in the wind. On tables weighted with stones they uncovered their wares—jewelry, paintings, photographs, woodcarvings, pottery, stained glass, leather goods, clothing—so much careful and skillful work. Hannah scanned the booths to see if Teresa might be here, and sure enough, off to the right of the pavement, there was the big woman in the familiar mustard yellow dress, unloading boxes onto a blanket in the shade of an ironwood tree.

Hannah called to her, “Oh, Teresa, I must have one of your baskets!”

Kneeling on the blanket, Teresa lifted her calm face. “You look happy, doctor.”

“I’m going to watch the waves. I haven’t done that in ages.”

“It is a good day for waves. The breakers are loud.”

Hannah listened, but heard only the rustle of ironwood leaves. She laid the bicycle in the grass and drew closer. It was a Hudson Bay blanket Teresa knelt on, scarlet with wide black stripes near the edges, and it was covered with an array of beaded moccasins and woven baskets. There were coiled baskets made from sweetgrass, square ones made from split ash or oak, round ones made from willow, but none of birch. “Do you still make baskets from birchbark?” Hannah asked.

Teresa lowered herself into a folding chair with a sigh. “No more. Tommy collected the bark for me, and I have used it all.”

Hannah had not thought of mentioning Tommy, but the buzz of energy from the night before still tingled in her this morning, and the question she had long wanted to ask suddenly burst out: “Speaking of Tommy—did you ever see his tattoo?”

Teresa nodded gravely. “He was my boy. I saw every inch of him.”

“I don’t mean to pry. But this has bothered me for years. Do you know why he got it?”

“For good luck, to protect him when he went to sea.”

The hideous shape rose in Hannah’s memory. “How could it protect him?”

“By wrapping him in the arms of the four winds,” said Teresa, crossing her own arms over her ample bosom.

“I don’t understand.”

“The tattoo, it shows the four winds.”

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, baffled. “We must be thinking of different tattoos.”

“No, he had only one. Here, look.” Teresa picked up a round willow basket and turned it over. With her thick forefinger she traced on the bottom of the basket the intersecting strands that formed a broken cross. “See, the weaving begins with the sign of the four winds. This is because when the willow grew, the wind swirled it around. It is also the sign of the four seasons and the four directions, a holy sign. That is what Tommy wore on his back. But the medicine was not strong enough to keep him alive.”

Hannah stared at the pattern in the basket. It formed a swastika, but with the bent arms at the tips of the cross pointing counterclockwise, not clockwise as in the Nazi symbol. She had been too repulsed by her glimpse of the tattoo to look at it closely, and she had not allowed Tommy to explain. She had banished him from her care, and all these years she had thought of him as hateful, as if he were in league with the brutes who’d driven her parents from Vienna and the vandals who’d painted taunts on Ozzie’s gravestone. How appalling, to condemn a boy in haste and loathe him forever after. “I see it now,” she said quietly. “A wheel of winds. I had imagined something else.”

“The Creator gave this sign to the Chippewa in the beginning, and also to the Hopi, Navajo, Inca, and other nations, to remind us how the world moves.” She drew a circle in the air with her finger. “Like the sun and moon. Like the year.”

“Like the wheel of life,” Hannah said, “turning from birth to death to birth.”

Teresa gazed at her intently, as if puzzling something out, before saying, “You lost your brother. I lost my son. Is that why you ask about Tommy?”

Hannah considered a moment. “That’s one reason, I suppose.”

“It is good of you to carry Tommy in your mind. But you have many others to carry, all the sick people who need you. Tommy is mine to carry. You can let him go.”

“You’re right,” Hannah said. “You’re absolutely right. I’ll try. I promise.”

Teresa rose from the chair and held out the basket. “This is for you.”

Hannah shrugged off the rucksack and fumbled for her wallet. “No, really, you must let me pay.”

“The people you treat on Saturdays, you do not let them pay. You make a gift of what you know how to do. And so I make a gift to you.” She wrapped the willow basket, as small and round as a bird’s nest, in tissue paper. “To hold your happiness,” she said, bowing her head.

Hannah bowed in return as she accepted the basket. She tucked it away carefully in the rucksack, retrieved her bicycle, gave a parting wave to Teresa, and went pedaling off toward the point of Presque Isle. She could hear the breakers well before she reached the rocks. She clambered up through a scattering of weather-beaten white pines, birches, and maples to her favorite spot, on a gray outcrop that was as cracked and furrowed as the hide of an ancient elephant. The stone, she knew, was older than the whole tribe of elephants, older than any life on land, nearly half as old as the earth. Up here she caught the full force of the wind, which swirled her hair and whistled in her ears. Whitecaps broke far out in the bay and came rolling in as giant waves to pound the shore, shooting up spray and lofting a mist that licked her face.

Opening the rucksack, she took out the basket and unwrapped it from the tissue paper and set it on the rock before her. Except for the hoop handle, it might really have been a nest, for it had been woven of willow shoots as slender and brown as dried grass. To keep the basket from blowing away, she dug from a crevice a handful of pebbles. “For Ozzie,” she whispered, laying a pebble of milky white quartz in the basket. She added a stone for her mother, one for her father, and then the rest of the handful for her patients and friends, until the basket was weighted down by these mountain bits that had been polished to the smoothness of eggs. Deeper in the crevice Hannah found a few pinches of grit, which she scooped up and clutched in her palm. After thinking of all she wished to let go, she uncurled her fingers and gave the dust to the wind.