Doctors Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 …”
    Barney could not help feeling frightened. He had never heard Luis—and certainly not his father—so out of control.
    “I guess they’re really gonna finish the whole two bottles, huh, Laura?”
    “I don’t care …” She paused a moment and then said, “All I can think of is the times I was mean to her. Last Sunday I yelled and called her a stupid little brat.
Last Sunday!
”
    Barney leaned forward and whispered, “You had no way of knowing.”
    Then she began to sob.
    “I should be punished. I should be the one who’s dead.”
    Without a word Barney rose, walked over to where she was sitting, and put his hand gently on her shoulder.
    Throughout the rest of that hot, stifling summer, Laura, Barney, and Warren played endless games of basketball, relieved only by their Saturday visits to the air-conditioned Savoy. AndBarney did not remember hearing Laura mention her sister’s name even once. Until the first day of school when the three of them were walking toward P.S. 148.
    “Isobel was supposed to start first grade,” she said matter-of-factly.
    “Yeah,” said Barney. And Warren could but echo, “Yeah.”
    The death of a child is never a finality. For she lives vividly on in her parents’ minds. And the ache of loss increases with each passing year—as birthday after birthday brings new haunting, agonizing thoughts: “She would have been ten next week. She would have loved seeing the circus.…”
    And thus Isobel never left the Castellano household. The anguish of her absence was a constant presence.
    Laura watched with mounting anxiety as her parents moved in different spiritual directions, leaving her abandoned in a love-less vacuum. Each of them sought relief in prayer: Inez for eternity and Luis for oblivion.
    Inez began her pilgrimage to reconversion by reading and rereading Saint John of the Cross, the mystical poet who could put the ineffable into words: “
Vivo sin vivir en mí
”—I live without really being alive; “
muero porque no muero
”—I die because I am not dying.
    She who, as a young rebel, had denounced the church because it had supported Franco’s Fascists, now sought shelter in its all-forgiving sanctuary. For it alone could offer explanation of why her daughter had to die. The local priest was more than generous in reinforcing Inez’s own conviction that she had sinned against the Lord and this had been her punishment.
    In a certain sense, Luis was also seeking God. But to confront Him with his anger. How
dare
You take my little daughter? he railed in his imagination. And then, when his nightly drinking liberated what few inhibitions he had left, he spoke aloud, shaking his clenched fist at the Almighty in savage fury.
    As a doctor he had always felt alone, despite the confident facade he assumed because his patients needed it. Now he felt that he was shipwrecked in a life that had no meaning. And the pain of isolation could be assuaged only by a nightly dose of analgesic—alcohol.
    Even when on Saturdays the elder Castellanos went off for walks in the park, he was brooding, she silent, together only in their separateness. Laura gladly joined Barney in the literary sessions, newly established by Estelle.
    *    *    *
    Each month, Estelle would choose a book that they would read aloud together and discuss after breakfast on Saturdays. The
Iliad
shared pride of place with masterpieces like
The Last of the Mohicans
, and bards like Walt Whitman—he a former Brooklyn resident!
    Harold would sit and smoke, listening quietly, sometimes nodding in approval if Barney or Laura made a particularly clever observation. Warren was still young enough to be allowed to stay outside and play basketball. But he soon grew jealous of his sibling’s seminars and insisted upon being permitted to sit in.
    Life at P.S. 148 went on uneventfully. Barney and Laura did a lot of their studying together, so it was not surprising that they ended up with almost identical