She could not remember ever feeling quite so rejected and isolated. She felt totally alone, and sudden fears of failure kept reoccurring in her compulsively conditioned brain. Waves of depression alternated with anger as she went over the conversations with McLeary and Oren. She yearned to talk with someone, someone whose counsel she could trust and respect Stark, Bellows, Chapman; each was a possibility but each had a specific disadvantage. Bellows’s objectivity would have to be suspect; Stark’s and Chapman’s overriding loyalties would be to their respective institutions.
Susan thought of the worst: being dismissed from medical school in disgrace. Not only would it be a personal failure but she felt it would be a failure for all women in medicine. Susan wished there were some woman doctor to whom she could turn, but she did not know any. There were so few on the medical school staff, and none in any positions that made them accessible for counseling.
In the middle of her tormented musing, Susan felt her right foot slide as she put her weight on it. She had to steady herself with her hand on a nearby building to keep from falling. Expecting the worst, she looked down to see that she had stepped in a large steaming pile of dog feces.
“God damn Beacon Hill.” Susan cursed Boston and all the literal and figurative shit a city government tolerated. Using the curb to dislodge most of the material, Susan choked on the odor. Still she couldn’t help but think about the symbolic aspect of her misfortune. Perhaps she had been stepping into a pile of shit, and as she was forced to do in regard to the actual shit in the city, she should try to ignore the whole affair. Just walk around it. Her responsibility was to become a doctor; that should take precedence over everything. The Bermans and the Greenlys were not her concern.
The rain continued and rivulets ran down her cheeks. She began to walk more carefully, prudently noticing the innumerable piles of dog crap that characterized Beacon Hill as much as the gas lamps or the red brick. She watched where she put her feet and the going was easier. But she could not dismiss her sense of responsibility to the Bermans and the Greenlys so easily. She thought about the age similarity between herself and Nancy Greenly. She thought about her own periods and the several episodes when she had bled more heavily than usual; how it had frightened her and made her feel helpless and out of control. She might have had to have a D&C herself, possibly at the Memorial.
But now she was out of the Memorial, maybe out of medical school. There was little that was up to her at that point, whether she wanted to pursue the problem or not. It was finished. It embarrassed her slightly to think of the frame of mind she had when she started the affair. “A new disease!” Susan laughed at her own vanity and deluded sense of ability.
Susan strolled down Pinckney Street, crossed Charles Street and headed for the river. As aimlessly as on her Beacon Hill wandering, Susan mounted the stairs to the Longfellow Bridge. The graffiti stood out in bold outlines and she lingered, reading some of the nonsensical phrases, the faceless names. In the center of the span she paused, gazing up the Charles River toward Cambridge and Harvard and the B.U. Bridge. The river was a curious pattern of ice patches and open water, like a gigantic piece of abstract art. A flock of seagulls stood motionless on one of the floes of ice.
Susan did not know what it was that drew her attention to the left, the way she had come. She saw a man in a dark overcoat and hat who turned toward the river and stopped when Susan looked in his direction. She returned to her undirected musing and the scene in front of her without giving the man in the dark overcoat a thought. But after five to ten minutes passed, Susan noticed the man had not moved. He was smoking and gazing up the river, seemingly as oblivious to the rain as was Susan. Susan thought that it was a coincidence to have two people standing on a bridge on a rainy day in February brooding over the river when as a rule the bridge was deserted even in nice weather.