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no patriotism like that of the grateful European immigrant.
    Thus Dr. Zajac would congratulate her on how good her English was, “considering,” and Irma would weep her heart out on the phone at night.
    Irma refrained from comment on the food the doctor bought every third Friday, nor did Dr. Zajac explain his instructions, every third Monday, to throw it al away. The food would simply be col ected on the kitchen table—an entire chicken, a whole ham, fruits and vegetables, and melting ice cream
    —with a typewritten note: dispose of. That was al .
    It must be connected to his abhorrence of dogshit, Irma imagined. With mythic simplicity, she assumed that the doctor had a dispose-of obsession. She didn’t know the half of it. Even on his morning and evening runs, Zajac carried a lacrosse stick, a grown-up one, which he held as if he were cradling an imaginary bal .
    There were many lacrosse sticks in the Zajac household. In addition to Rudy’s, which was relatively toylike in appearance, there were numerous adult-size ones, in varying degrees of overuse and disrepair. There was even a battered wooden stick that dated from the doctor’s Deerfield days. Weaponlike in its appearance, because of its broken and retied rawhide strings, it was wrapped in dirty adhesive tape and caked with mud. But in Dr. Zajac’s skil ed hands, the old stick came alive with the nervous energy of his agitated youth, when the neurasthenic hand surgeon had been an underweight but intensely accomplished midfielder. When the doctor ran along the banks of the Charles, the outmoded wooden lacrosse stick conveyed the readiness of a soldier’s rifle. More than one rower in Cambridge had experienced a dog turd or two whizzing across the stern of his scul , and one of Zajac’s medical-school students—formerly the coxswain of a Harvard eight-oared racing shel —claimed to have adroitly ducked a dog turd aimed at his head.
    Dr. Zajac denied trying to hit the coxswain. His only intention was to rid Memorial Drive of a notable excess of dogshit, which he scooped up in his lacrosse stick and flicked into the Charles River. But the former coxswain and medschool student had kept an eye out for the crazed midfielder after their memorable first encounter, and there were other oarsmen and coxswains who swore they’d seen Zajac expertly cradle a turd in his old lacrosse stick and fire it at them. It’s a matter of record that the former Deerfield midfielder scored two goals against a previously undefeated Andover team, and three goals against Exeter twice. (If none of Zajac’s teammates remembered him, some of his opponents did. The Exeter goalie said it most succinctly: “Nick Zajac had a wicked fucking shot.”) Dr. Zajac’s col eagues at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates had also heard him decry the
    “utter sil iness of participating in a sport while facing backward,” thereby documenting Zajac’s contempt for rowers. But so what? Aren’t eccentricities fairly common among overachievers?
    The house on Brattle Street resounded with warblers, like a woodland glen. The dining-room bay windows were spray-painted with big black X ’s to prevent birds from crashing into them, which gave Zajac’s home an aura of perpetual vandalism. A wren with a broken wing lay recovering in its own cage in the kitchen, where not long before a cedar waxwing with a broken neck had died—to Irma’s accumulating sorrows.
    Sweeping up the birdseed that was scattered under the songbirds’ cages was one of Irma’s never-ending chores; despite her efforts, the sound of birdseed crunching underfoot would have made the house an unwise choice for burglars.
    Rudy,
    however,
    liked
    the
    birds—the
    undernourished boy’s mother had heretofore refused to get him a pet of any kind—and Zajac would have lived in an aviary if he thought it would make Rudy happy, or get him to eat.
    But Hildred was so steadfastly conniving in tormenting her ex-husband that it was