Summary:

This short play is set in rural Spain at the turn of this century. The characters, all women, exist in a cloistered household managed by a newly widowed mother of five daughters. Under the shadow of the church and the tyranny bred from a need to protect the reputation of the family, the matron (Bernarda Alba) represses her daughters by enforcing an eight year mourning period. The tensions build rapidly among the imprisoned women, with a demented grandmother playing a role resembling that of a Greek chorus. Eventually, the natural spirits of the daughters circumvent Bernarda, but the result is violence and a suicide.

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David Moray is a wealthy physician in his fifties who lives in a Swiss villa, where he indulges his passion for collecting art. He is contemplating a relationship with the stylish yet impoverished Frida von Altishofer, but an idle comment overheard at a party brings an intoxicating memory from his youth. As an idealistic medical student, he once loved and planned to marry Mary Cameron, a simple, highland lass. But first, David had to take a long sea voyage as a ship doctor to recover from tuberculosis; there he met pouting but provocative Doris, and her hopeful parents.

The prospect of a fabulous income in the family’s drug business makes him abandon Mary and a medical practice. He marries Doris but within a short time she is permanently committed to an asylum. The family semi-apologizes for not having told him of her illness. David compensates for his miserable marriage with material possessions that are a proxy for self esteem, until Doris dies and sets him free.

The overhead remark sends him back to Scotland only to discover that his jilted Mary, who had married a minister, is now dead. Her daughter, Kathy, is a nurse and the very spit of her mother. He falls in love all over again. Kathy will not marry him unless he returns to practice and joins her and her uncle as missionaries in Africa. Full of good intentions, he agrees. But he does not tell Kathy about Mary, and he forces himself on her against her will.

When he assimilates the very real dangers of mission work, he simply fails to show up for the appointed rendezvous; he will marry Frida and keep his cherished possessions instead. Told bluntly by Frida of the marriage and of her mother’s past, Kathy drowns herself. David must identify her body. He then hangs himself from a Judas Tree.

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Summary:

This collection of sixteen Chekhov stories brings together in one volume many of Chekhov’s finest tales about doctors. The chronologically-arranged collection includes the famous novella, Ward 6, as well as such shorter classics as An Awkward Business and A Doctor’s Visit. In all sixteen stories, the doctor is a major figure, often at the center of a moral conflict.

Robert Coles , in his thoughtful forward, notes that Chekhov raises the "big questions" about "the meaning and purpose of life and the manner it ought to be conducted (and why)." Himself the editor of William Carlos Williams’s doctor stories, Coles recognizes and honors the comparison between Chekhov’s and Williams’s works and their dual careers as physician-writers. Jack Coulehan, in his introduction and comments, provides interesting biographical information on the great Russian writer as well as insightful interpretations of each story.

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A skeletal figure - death - sits atop a horse and brandishes a scythe. His horse, presently in front of the viewer, runs the wrong way along the racetrack. The track stretches far into the distance, all the way to the horizon. The landscape and sky are of muted color; a solitary dead tree bordering the racetrack on the right side of the painting sets the emotional tone of the landscape. At the bottom of the painting, a snake winds its way along the ground.

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You went out with the turning tide --Addressing her dead husband, the poet mourns the fact that he has thrown out "the bound volumes of our years . . . . " She asks why did he end his own life, "What dark eye smiled from the bore?" But no answer is forthcoming; she must simply live with the loss and endure it.

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This remarkable book takes the reader into a Dutch nursing home where many of the 300 patients are terminally ill. The main protagonist is Anton, a competent, tough, and compassionate physician who tries to discover some meaning in the suffering of his patients, while at the same time disavowing any such meaning. Anton’s colleagues include Jaarsma, a somewhat detached and bureaucratic older physician, and Van Gooyer, a young physician who still believes that science has all the answers.

The first-person narrative consists of short, punchy segments (almost like an endless series of discrete physician-patient interactions) detailing the stories of Anton’s patients and his reactions to them. Many of these persons request assisted suicide or euthanasia. Anton reveals what he feels about these requests, how he goes about judging their validity, and the manner in which he actually carries out assisted deaths. A strong spiritual theme permeates the book; while Anton denies the relevance of God and religion, he seems constantly to be searching for a spirituality that "makes sense" of contemporary life.

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The narrator is an ICU (intensive care unit) resident. He describes his encounters with three patients: a 23-year-old woman, Kimberley, shot in the head by her fiancé before he killed himself; Mr. Wilson, the alcoholic into whom Kimberley’s liver is transplanted after she has been declared brain dead; and Mr. Griego who, in a failed suicide attempt, has shot off his lower jaw.

In the call room there is a poster that reminds the doctor of a lake in Vermont where his family had vacationed when he was a child. The lake, alive with fishes, had filled the boy and his brother with expectation: "We wanted something to happen, we wanted it to come gliding out to us, miraculous, powerful, full of wonder." (p. 56)

When the resident’s thoughts are interrupted by Mr. Griego, who has leeches attached to the wound where his chin is being constructed, his recollections shift to another lake. Overgrown with algae, it had insufficient oxygen, no fish, and when he and his brother swam in it, they emerged covered with leeches. He recalls the violence with which his brother tried to kill one of the creatures, pounding it with a rock. The lake had become "repugnant" but also "exciting."

These memories are juxtaposed with Mr. Wilson, who has Kimberley’s young liver in its new, "damaged bed." The resident finds himself withdrawing from Mr. Wilson, whom he imagines as a ghost that has haunted Kimberley’s life, drinking it away, or as a kind of monster rising up from beneath the surface of a lake.

The resident is called out a third time, to transfer Mr. Griego to the floor. The leeches have been removed and killed and his chin is healing well, looking both "clean and terrible." His new face will scare his little daughter, the resident thinks.

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The poet C. K. Williams enters the room where his father has just died and exclaims to the corpse, "What a war we had!" (p. 1) Soon thereafter, his mother comes into the room and quietly lies down beside her dead husband, their bodies close but not touching. Thus begins Williams's memoir about his parents' deaths and his grieving. In the process of working through his grief, the poet finally comes to "see" his parents and to understand the nature of his feelings toward them and their feelings toward each other.

"You used to be such a nice man," he remembers his mother once telling his father. Indeed, when Williams was a child (and the family poor), his father was engaged and attentive. But as he evolved into a very successful businessman, he emotionally withdrew from the family. Throughout Williams's adult life, he and his father were alienated, their interactions consisting of verbal warfare, made much worse by the young man's choice of profession (writing poetry). It was only after the father had his first "stroke" (indicating brain metastases) that he was able to declare a truce. At one point he said, bemusedly, to his son, "We were kids together, you and I" (p. 37). However, during this truce, Williams's father, unable to bear his suffering, repeatedly pleaded with his son to help him end his life, an act that Williams was unable to perform.

Williams remembers whispering "I love you," when he first viewed his mother's corpse. Yet during life he saw her as a "completely and unquestioningly self-centered" woman (p. 58) whose life was filled with constant anxiety that she wouldn't get enough out of life, or that she'd lose what she had. She was a careless mother and a fretful and vain person. Yet there was more than that. Williams connects with his mother as a suffering person during her final illness: "Someday I'll thank her for how much of herself she risked to have divided herself when she was so young, so unprepared, so vulnerable, into the double creature she and I were...and the linked beings we always would be." (p. 166)

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A smiling giantess of a woman fills the self-portrait. Her form is too large for the picture, and consequently her colorful wings and part of one antenna are cut off by the confines of the frame. Abundant bright colors and meticulous patterning give the artwork a buoyant, joyful feel similar to a church stained glass. In the far distance, past an impossibly aquamarine sea, stands a solitary mountain flanked by swirling clouds, its tip stretching up to just touch the top edge of the frame.

At the bottom right corner of the image are two figures: one, a bearded man who stands looking up at the flying woman; two, a young child--apparently a boy--with his hands behind his head, splayed out on a blanket and looking up. A long cord runs from the center of the flying woman’s neck down to the right hand of the man below.

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A 30 year-old woman describes with chilling power her three suicide attempts. She compares herself to a cat with nine lives and to a concentration camp victim; yet "dying / is an art . . . / I do it exceptionally well." The doctors/men that save her are the enemy, and she warns them to "beware."

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