The People in the Trees Read Online Free PDF

“I’m surprised your mother hadn’t killed herself,” he said. “God knows I would have were I your parent.” His eyes shone with triumph and anticipation.
    It didn’t bother me, what he said, but he must have mistaken my silence for hurt, and, satisfied, he knocked the ash out of his pipe into a tidy anthill on the table and left through our front door, banging it shut behind him. As he walked down the path, I could hear him whistling, until the sound grew faint and then disappeared altogether, leaving only the purr of a flock of summer insects. It was the first time I had been spoken to as an adult.

    But it was also John Naples, this small-town, smug, fifth-rate doctor, who truly sparked my interest in disease. He did this inadvertently—I don’t believe he told me about my mother’s death in such blunt terms because he intended to speak to me as an adult; indeed, he was a petty, cruel man, and I am certain he was attempting to do nothing more than stun me into tears—but in his harsh and erroneous explanation, he offered me my first glimpse into the world of disease and its exacting, brilliant puzzle.
    Even at that age, Owen was interested in words: he read dictionariesand all manner of books and loved any sort of wordplay—anagrams, puns, palindromes. He could amuse himself all day with strings of rhymes he had discovered or created. And although I too enjoyed reading, I never loved the sport of language the way Owen did. This was because to me, language had no native intelligence of its own—it was created by man and was given meaning by man, and therefore clever writing often seemed to me little more than a Chinese puzzle box of contrivances. Writers are praised for having a facility with something man-made, something that can be changed or manipulated at will; but why is augmenting a man-made construction considered an act of brilliance? But perhaps I am not making sense here, so let me put it another way: language has no inherent secrets.
    But science, specifically the science of disease, was all delicious secrets, dark oily pockets of mystery. Language could be misinterpreted, misconstrued, its rules imposed or ignored at whim. There was no discipline to it. It seemed sometimes a sort of game made up by man to amuse himself with, much as Owen did. But a disease, a virus, a wiggling string of bacteria, existed with or without man, and it was up to us to fathom its secrets.
    John Naples, of course, did not think about disease this way (a good sign of a weak mind is the doctor who insists that it’s the patient, not the disease, on whom one’s efforts should be concentrated), but I credit him for appearing in my life as a cautionary figure, the sort of person with whom I would now be interacting had I not chosen to pursue research medicine. Even then, I knew I would not be satisfied with imperfect explanations. I was simply too impatient.

    Naples, thankfully, was not to have the last word. My father may have been a lazy man, but he wasn’t foolish, and in this matter he proved surprisingly competent. Later that afternoon, after telephoning his sister in Rochester (he had overlooked the matter of informing Owen, which I had to do myself when he at last padded down to the kitchen, rubbing his eyes and grousing), he called a medical school classmate of Sybil’s who lived in Indianapolis, who called a friend of his who lived in Crawfordsville, a town fifty miles to theeast of us. This doctor—a Dr. Burns—arranged for my mother to be transported to his clinic for an autopsy.
    The next week he sent us his report, which stated that my mother had died not of Chinese flu (“I myself am not familiar with the illness, though I must also admit that as a pathologist, I am perhaps not as well versed in local afflictions as my esteemed colleague Dr. John M. Naples,” Burns wrote diplomatically in his letter) but of an aneurysm. An aneurysm! After Sybil explained it to me, I pictured it often, all but heard the