But he had to be careful about saying things like that. “He’s the sensitive one,” his mother was in the habit of telling her friends, half proud, half rueful. Her favourite picture of him was the one in his choirboy surplice, taken the year before his voice cracked. His oldest brother was supposed to be the handsome one, his middle brother was the smart one, Rob was the sensitive one. For this reason it was necessary, he knew, to appear as insensitive as possible. Lately he had begun to succeed, and his mother was now complaining that he never talked to her any more. He found even her moments of solicitous interest painful.

She trusted the others to make their own way, but she didn’t trust him, and secretly Rob agreed with her estimate. He knew he could never be a doctor, although he felt he wanted to. He wanted to be good at baseball too, but he wasn’t, and all he could see ahead for himself at Medical School was catastrophe. How to confess that even the drawings in his father’s medical books, those interiors of bodies abstract as plaster models, made him queasy, that he’d actually fainted—though no one knew, because he’d been lying down anyway—when he’d given blood this year at the clinic and had seen for the first time the hot purple worm of his own blood inching through the clear tube across his bare arm? His father thought it was a great treat for his boys to be allowed into the observation bubble at the hospital while he was doing open heart surgery, but Rob was unable to turn down the offer or admit his nausea. (Red rubber, it’s only red rubber, he would repeat to himself over and over, closing his eyes when his brothers weren’t watching.) He would come away from these ordeals with his knees jellied and his palms scored with the marks of his jagged, bitten nails. He couldn’t do it, he could never do it.

James, the handsome one, was already interning, and the family made jokes at the Sunday dinner table about pretty nurses. Adrian was cleaning up the top marks in third year. Both of them fit so easily into the definitions that had been provided for them. And who was he supposed to be, what had been left over for him when they were dishing out the roles? The bumbling third son in a fairy tale, with no princess and no good luck. But friendly and generous, kind to old women and dwarves in the forest. He despised his own generosity, which he felt was mostly cowardice.

Rob was supposed to go into Pre-Meds in the fall, and dutifully he would do it. But sooner or later he would be forced to drop out, and what then? He saw himself on top of a boxcar like some waif from the thirties, penniless, fleeing his family’s disappointment, heading for some form of oblivion so foreign to him he could not even picture it. But there was no one he could talk to about his knowledge of his own doom. A year ago his father had taken him aside for the pep talk Rob was sure he’d had with both of the others. Medicine wasn’t just a job, he told Rob. It was a calling, a vocation. One of the noblest things a man could do was to dedicate his life selflessly to the saving of others. His father’s eyes gleamed piously: was Rob worthy? (Speedboat, Rob thought, summer place on the bay, two cars, Forest Hill house.) “Your grandfather was a doctor,” his father said, as if this was the clincher. His grandfather had been a doctor, but he’d been a country doctor, driving a sleigh and team through blizzards to deliver babies. They had often heard these heroic stories. “He wasn’t very good at collecting his bills,” Rob’s father would say, shaking his head with a mixture of admiration and indulgent contempt. This was not one of his own weaknesses. “During the Depression we lived on chickens; the farmers gave them to us instead of money. I had only one pair of shoes.” Rob thought of the shoe rack that ran the length of his father’s triple-doored closet, the twinkling shoes arranged on it like testimonials.

He would not be able to take the scene when they found out, he would just disappear. He thought of the final catastrophe as happening in a classroom. They would all be dissecting a cadaver, and he would suddenly begin to scream. He would run out of the room and down the corridor, reeking of formaldehyde, he would forget his coat and the galoshes that were a fetish of his mother’s, it would be snowing. He would wake up the next morning in a greenish-grey hotel room, with no recollection of what he had done.

It was his family who had chosen this job, this camp. They felt it would be good practice for him to spend the summer with crippled children; it would be part of the it he had to learn to take. His father knew the Director, and it was all arranged before Rob was told about it. His father and mother had been so enthusiastic, so full of their sense of the wonderful opportunity they’d arranged for him, how could he refuse? “Use your powers of observation,” his father had said to him at the train station. “I wish I’d had this chance when I was your age.”

For the first week Rob had had nightmares. The dreams were of bodies, pieces of bodies, arms and legs and torsos, detached and floating in mid-air; or he would feel he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and he would wake up with his skin wet from effort. He found the sight of the children, especially the younger ones, unbearably painful, and he didn’t understand how the other staff members could go around all day with expressions of such bluff professional cheer. Except that he did it himself. Though apparently with less success than he’d thought, since Pam the physiotherapist had come over to sit beside him in the staff lounge after the second-day orientation meeting. She had dull blonde hair held back by a velvet band that matched the blue of her plaid Bermuda shorts. She was pretty, but Rob felt she had too many teeth. Too many and too solid. “It’s rough working with kids like this,” she said, “but it’s so rewarding.” Rob nodded dutifully: what did she mean, rewarding? He still felt sick to his stomach. He’d been on shift for dinner that evening, and he could barely stand the milk dribbling from the bent plastic feeding tubes, the chair trays splattered with food (“Let them do as much for themselves as they can”), the slurps and suction noises. Pam lit a cigarette and Rob watched the red fingernails on her strong, competent hands. “It doesn’t do them any good for you to be depressed,” she said. “They’ll use it against you. A lot of them don’t know the difference. They’ve never been any other way.” She was going to do this for a living, she was going to do this for the rest of her life! “You’ll get used to it,” she said, and patted his arm in a way that Rob found insulting. She’s trying to be nice, he corrected himself quickly.

“I know your brother James,” she said, smiling again with her solid teeth. “I met him on a double-date. He’s quite the boy.”

Rob excused himself and got up. She was older than him anyway, she was probably twenty.

But she’d been right, he was getting used to it. The nightmares had gone away, though not before he’d aroused the interest of the boys in his cabin. They nicknamed him “The Groaner.” They had nicknames for everyone in the camp.

“Hey, ya hear the Groaner last night?”

“Yeah. Uh. Uh. Getting his rocks off good.”

“Ya have a good time, Groaner?”

Rob, blushing, would mumble, “I was having a nightmare,” but they would hoot with laughter.

“Oh yeah. We heard ya. Wish I had nightmares like that.” They were the oldest boys’ cabin, fourteen– to sixteen-year-olds, and he’d had trouble with them from the first. They weren’t like the younger children, polite, eager to enjoy themselves in whatever way they could, grateful for help. Instead they were cynical about the camp, about the Director, about Bert (whom they nicknamed “Bert the Nert”) and about themselves and their lives. They drank beer, when they could get hold of it; they smoked furtive cigarettes. They kept girlie magazines hidden under their mattresses, and they told some of the foulest jokes Rob had ever heard. They divided the world into two camps, the “crips” and the “norms,” and for the most part they accepted only the crips. The norms were seen as their oppressors, the dimwits who would never understand, who would never get it right, and whom it was their duty to war against and exploit. It gave them a bitter pleasure to outrage norm sensibility whenever possible, and they’d found Rob an easy target.