Summary:

A chubby boy with a vivid imagination and a terminally ill man intent on suicide share an adventure in survival on an extremely cold day. Robin plays make-believe as he heads to a pond in the woods. In the distance, he spots an emaciated man who appears to be wearing only pajamas. Fifty-three year old Don Eber is dying from cancer that's in his brain. Surgery and chemotherapy have not prevented its progress. He's come to the woods on this frigid day to die with dignity.

Robin finds Don's discarded coat on the ground and is determined to return it to the stranger. While toting the jacket, the boy falls through the ice of the frozen pond. Don sees Robin struggling in the water and realizes it is his fault that the well-intentioned kid is in danger. With great difficulty, Don makes his way to the pond and pulls the boy out. He removes Robin's wet clothes and replaces them with his own dry pajamas and the coat. He revives Robin and encourages him to run home.

Don is now naked, shivering, exhausted, and alone in the woods. But he no longer wants to end his life. He now understands its value, how "there could still be many - many drops of goodness" [249].
As he reminisces about the past, Don senses he is in a warm place. It is Robin's house. The boy has sent his mother to retrieve Don, and she has successfully rescued him.

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Nora Kynd (born in 1825) was a central character in Barrett’s Ship Fever (in this database). She survived illness and quarantine at Grosse Ile, but lost contact with both her younger brothers, Ned and Denis. She reaches Detroit by 1848 where she learns about herbal remedies from a kindly landlady. She marries late and has a son, Michael, but never stops searching for her brothers. Her husband dies. One day in 1868, Nora sees Ned’s name as the proprietor of a hunting and fishing lodge in the Adirondacks. She packs up everything and moves there with her young son.

Ned takes Nora and Michael into his home. He carries on with the hunting business and taxidermy, but they increasingly cater to people with tuberculosis who come for “The Cure” of good food, fresh air, and lots of rest—as a reflection of the famous nearby sanatorium (unnamed but likely the Trudeau Sanatorium at Saranac Lake). In this capacity, they meet lodgers Clara and her two daughters Gillian and Elizabeth—the almost abandoned family of the naturalist Max from Barrett’s story “Servants of the Map” (also this database).

Young Elizabeth has a cough and an eye for Michael, but he has eyes only for Gillian whom he eventually marries. Together they take over Ned’s Inn. For her cough, Elizabeth becomes a resident of the sanatorium and finds her own husband in fellow invalid, Andrew. Together they open a nearby boarding house for other invalids and Nora joins them in the endeavor as the nurse, serving until her death. But Nora was difficult to replace and Elizabeth is now searching for a new nurse to help with the care of her ailing clients.

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In 1849, Jane Johnson is on a ship headed for Quebec City with her two children. She has had a relatively uneventful crossing – only one old man died and a child was stillborn. She cannot wait to be reunited with her husband Henry. Having left a year earlier, he is waiting for her eagerly. They both now think that they should not have separated. They each clutch the handful of barely literate letters. She has sternly told him that he must be at the ship to greet them. Fully intending to be there, he suddenly falls ill with uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea and is dragged to a hospital. It is cholera and he realizes that he will die without seeing his little family again. As the boat docks, she thinks she sees him in the crowd.

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Summary:

The doctor in question is Art Castagnetto, an obstetrician out for a morning jog who encounters a terrible accident. A young neighborhood boy has been pinned underwater by a concrete slab. Art rushes to a nearby house to summon aid, then tries vainly to move the slab, knowing by feel that the boy is still alive and struggling. The fire department arrives too late. Devastated by this death, Art realizes two days later that he should have improvised a snorkel from a garden hose and saved the boy.

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In 1877, the widowed Sarah Bell writes to the New York Children’s Aid Society to explain that poverty has driven her to leave her daughter Lily May in its care. Mr Bassett writes to the same office that he and his wife would like to adopt a little girl. They are given Lily May and change the baby’s name to Mabel.

Over the years, Sarah keeps writing to ask for news of her child; when she remarries she begs to have her daughter back. With evident alarm, the Bassetts tell of the good care they have given the girl; they love her and will not relinquish her. Lily/Mabel has no idea that she is adopted and will never be told.

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A 50-year-old man is showering when he experiences pressure in his chest and throat associated with profound fatigue. An ambulance is called, and the emergency medical personnel inform him that he is having a heart attack. As he lays bare on his bed, his emotions switch from shock to indifference to a sense of calm with acceptance of impending death.

The narrator is a poet and a foreigner. In the hospital, his complicated name gets truncated to "Me'med" for convenience. He emigrated with his family from Zagreb to America in 1996, but still wakes from sleep haunted by memories of Kalashnikovs firing in Sarajevo.

He has stents placed in two obstructed coronary arteries and is immediately asymptomatic. At the Washington, D.C. hospital where he is treated, the narrator encounters a collection of fellow-foreigners: an elderly Slovak roommate suffering from Alzheimer's disease, a young Somali nurse, an African echocardiographer, and an Indian physician. A few days later, when he is discharged from the hospital, he feels fear and insecurity even though his medical problem has been fixed.

The narrator's world is now different. He is no longer who he was. When he returns to his apartment, hints (cigarettes and ashtrays) of his prior life are missing. He has a chance to change, another opportunity to restart his life.

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The Matisse art work which forms the center for this story is the painting, "Le Silence Habité des Maisons," which shows a parent and child with featureless faces sitting at a table while looking together at a book. This painting is described as the reader is introduced to a family of artists and their unusual housekeeper, Mrs. Brown.

The mother is the design editor of a magazine, A Woman’s Place, and the father is a rigid, relatively unsuccessful painter. There are two children in the family. Mrs. Brown provides the cement to keep the family together and learns from them ways to develop her own unusual kind of art. Interpersonal relationships are fragile and personal needs are great. There is a surprise ending.

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This is the story of the experiences of a middle aged university teacher when visiting her regular beauty salon. A copy of Matisse’s painting, "Rosy Nude" is part of the decor of the salon and is actually what attracts her to the salon in the first place. The main character’s self image and her desire to maintain a natural appearing hairstyle are central to the story.

Her relationship with the owner, who is her personal hair dresser, is also central and the body images of him and others who work in the shop or are customers add interest and color to the story. The conclusion is theatrical and unexpected and points out the many differences in the way we view ourselves and the way in which we are viewed by others.

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Summary:

This is a story of the interactions of an art student and her assigned mentor, with whom she is at odds, and the interactions of the mentor with a university professor who has been given the task of arbitration between the student and the mentor. The problem for the student and the mentor is that they have totally divergent views of Matisse as a painter of women's bodies.

The mentor sees these paintings as beautiful but they are abhorrent to the student, who has developed an eating disorder as part of her rebellion against the emphasis on female pulchritude. The painting "La Porte Noire" is used to describe the mentor's great admiration for Matisse's amazing use of color.

The university professor brings to the encounter with the mentor her astute understanding of the problem, but also some of her personal issues; this interaction includes a subtle description of the many possible reasons for suicide attempts. The story skillfully describes academic conflict, unhealthy human behaviors, and the importance of skillful arbitration.

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Summary:

Fat Louise, with an eating disorder since she was nine, would diet in public and sneak candy and peanut butter sandwiches in private. Her parents pitied her and were embarrassed by her. Her college roommate caught her at the secret eating and offered to help her get control of her eating. The diet and exercise ritual, combined with smoking, brought her weight down 60 pounds and made her beautiful and eligible to be married. Her parents were proud. She got married. But often she felt "no one knew her"--that she really wasn't this slim 120 pound beauty.

Then during her pregnancy she lost the discipline and ate compulsively and secretly. After the baby was born she continued to eat--her husband disapproved and didn't want to touch her, her mother scolded. The marriage, based on appearances, started to fall apart; she looked forward to being alone with her child and able to eat anything she wanted without other people judging her.

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