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door had been staved in. She rushed to the hallway armed with the metal pot she had been preparingto put on the stove. Break-ins were rare in Southie, but Southie offered little to steal. Before she realized the intruder was her husband, she had steeled herself to defend every last stick of rented furniture in their rented flat.
    “I’ve done it!” Henry announced on seeing his wife. He circled her waist with his arm and drew her to him, painting her neck with kisses.
    “Darling!” she squealed. Her neck grew progressively damp. “What did you do?” She could not imagine what would inspire such high spirits, unless Henry had somehow graduated medical school early or convinced his father to raise his allowance.
    “I’m done with the whole business,” he murmured to her left earlobe.
    “Done with what?” She enjoyed standing in the hallway being kissed by her husband, even if his kisses were a little too wet.
    Unlike Ferdinand’s superb conjugal recall, Lydia’s sensory impressions of Henry have been effaced. Sadly, his kisses here are purely semantic.
    He held her at arm’s length in order to gaze into her face. “All of it,” he proclaimed. “The tedious lectures, the revolting dissections and surgeries. I feel like an immense weight has been lifted.”
    “I don’t know what you mean.” She examined her husband’s face for clues.
    “But of course you do!” he giggled. “After all, I was only taking your lead.”
    “I’m sorry, dear, but really I don’t understand.” She turned from her husband and entered the parlor. “Has something happened?” She felt the need to sit. Henry followed her in; he kneeled beside her as she rested on the settee.
    “Really, I don’t know how you tolerated me for as long as you did.” He beamed. “Sometimes I think Idon’t deserve you—you were criminally patient with me, listening to my complaints night after night, month after month, but I suppose you knew all along if you let me wander long enough in the desert, finally I’d come home.”
    “Henry,” she began carefully, trying to keep her voice calm in direct opposition to her fluttery stomach. “I think you ought to tell me exactly what you’ve done.”
    “You want to hear it from my own lips, don’t you?” He nodded as though she had answered him. “Well, I finally did it, my darling. I’ve resigned from medical school.”
    She smiled. “Tell me really.”
    “I just did, my love.”
    According to Henry, his wife embraced him at this moment. He has no memory of an argument and is certain of Lydia’s unstinting support for his new career.
    Her smile froze along with the rest of her. While she felt pinned to the divan, her thoughts flew at such a speed that the room might have been filled with other voices. “You didn’t,” she amended, her voice practically inaudible above the din inside her head. “You wouldn’t actually do that, not actually.”
    “But darling,” he countered, “it was you who showed me that this was what I was meant to do.”
    He was too skinny. Southie men were never as skinny as Henry, and if they were they found jobs as streetcar conductors or soda jerks or store managers, but she did not think he was suited for any of these. He certainly could not be an iceman or a factory hand. Lydia realized that she was still holding the pot she had grabbed from the kitchen. She wished the door
had
been broken in. She could have given the burglar a solid knock to the head and sent him on his way.
    “I did nothing of the sort,” she insisted.
    “But you did,” he averred. He sat beside her on the settee and reached for her hand, but she would not give it. When he spoke again his voice had softened. “You accomplished this feat by healing me in mind and body. Lydia, when I met you I was unwell. I had no strength, no stamina! My childhood was wasted on expensive doctors who achieved nothing at all. Then I met you. You believed in me; you appreciated me for who I was. You