What happens when a surgeon turns his eye from the operating room to crime fiction? In "Stone Hearts", Craig R. Smith, MD, cardiac surgeon and former Chair of the Department of Surgery, builds a medical caper rooted in transplant, intrigue, and the peculiar moral weather that hovers above and beyond the hospital.
Follow along each Friday as we release the novel one chapter at a time. You can also see more on Dr. Smith's Substack, Long Incision.
In Chapter Seven, the publicity interview with Ron Ellsworth concluded. Mr. Ellsworth described the end of the Woodstock festival and his safe return home. Lindsay elicited a description of an unusual meeting between Mr. Ellsworth and his donor’s family. The Director and Lindsay reviewed the complete interview and discussed ways to capitalize on the content.
Spring, 1974
The Bessette brothers sat at opposite ends of a couch in front of a year-old RCA color television set, sipping beer, intermittently distracted by Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai flickering by in black and white. Midnight was near. The Bessette parents were asleep upstairs, so the brothers were keeping their voices down. Each brother’s childhood bedroom had been prepared for reoccupation by their mother, after very short notice of this unexpected visit. Elias pushed himself free from the deep embrace of the couch, sat forward at the edge, and turned to face his brother. “I’ve got to make some more money,” he said.
“Is that why you came home this weekend?” asked Jean. “I didn’t hear that come up at dinner. What I heard was Friday holiday, no classes Monday morning.”
“That’s the opportunity. The objective is not a topic for dinner with Mom and Dad.”
Jean turned his head to face his brother with a look that compelled explanation. Elias complied, in an urgent near-whisper. “My Severance customers are all gone!”
“Customers?” Jean replied, playing dumb. “You’re selling something?”
Elias was impatient and unamused. “C’mon, man, don’t jerk me around. Your customers, originally. My class from Severance is mostly off to college somewhere. I don’t know any of the frosh. I’m not there to hang out under the bleachers anymore. Even the kids I still know found someone else.”
Members of Elias’s hometown peer group would have forgiven him for calling them customers. The Bessette family was admirably upstanding but conspicuously unwealthy—sure, Elias had his side hustles, his friends would say, but he was admired for his strong personal priorities, most conspicuously his drive since junior high to become a doctor. He was physically talented enough to play varsity football and lacrosse but never pursued either with the more common kind of abandon that might interfere with his primary goal. In between seasons Elias stayed fit, partied a bit, and studied hard. He had been rewarded for his efforts with early acceptance to Cornell and was now early in the second half of his freshman year. His plan had been to fit in lacrosse in the second semester if he was meeting his academic goals by January. On arrival in September, he discovered that Cornell’s nationally competitive Division One lacrosse team expected him to fit in premed, starting now, and he quit without regrets.
“Truth is, my Severance sales shouldn’t matter because I could be making a killing in the college scene around Ithaca. But I don’t have any product. As you perfectly well know.”
Jean smiled beneficently, enjoying the status adjustment that put big brother back on top for a moment. “Supply and demand, brother of mine! Supply has been enough for my steadies. I’m not a mind-reader, you know, and this is the first P&L I’m getting from the Elias Division!”
In all the cozy family rooms with new color televisions in the affluent suburbs north of New York City, late at night or any time of day, this topic of conversation would be considered uncommon. Less so, perhaps, for families whose grappling hooks had closed them for boarding with the USS Affluence more recently, families who felt like they were still fighting their way to the quarterdeck with cutlas and pistol. Jean and Elias were sitting in the modest, barely affordable 4-bedroom house bought by Clinton and Mary Bessette in 1962, in what was then a new neighborhood of an expanding suburb, unfashionably close to the railroad tracks. They had stretched the outer limits of their balance sheet for one reason—to provide their three children with the advantages of exposure to good education in a prestigious public school system.
For Clinton and Mary, and to a lesser extent their children, financial or social insecurities were buffered by awareness of how far they had come. Clinton Bessette had been born in Newport, Vermont in 1927, raised on the shores of Lake Memphremagog, in the impoverished Northeast Kingdom. He was one month too young to be drafted in World War II. Instead, he attended the University of Vermont, where he met Mary Ladue, born and raised in Plattsburgh, New York, on the shores of Lake Champlain. Mary, truly gifted in math, was studying economics and accounting. After marriage and graduation Clinton was hired by a rapidly growing auto supply company near New York City. Even a cheap apartment in a small town near the company headquarters felt like Paris compared to Newport or Plattsburgh.
Jean-Charles Bessette was born in 1951, at the crest in the long swell of the baby boom, on the day that Catcher in the Rye was released, in the year that both Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays played their first major league games. Jean’s siblings were neatly spaced in his wake. Alice was born in 1953, followed by Elias in 1955. Clinton fought his way to upper-middle management and Mary worked as an accountant. Clinton and Mary had scraped together enough savings to anxiously pledge twelve years of college tuitions, but the children knew they were on their own for all other expenses. Time and lives marched on, and in early 1974, with Elias off to Cornell, Clinton and Mary were six months into an empty nest and had only to survive a few more years of college tuition. Alice was on the west coast and seldom seen, and it was a joy to have their boys drop in for a visit. After years of practice, they had learned not to allow nagging questions about the sources of Jean’s conspicuous cash flow to sully their pleasure in his visits.
Elias was painfully aware that his failure to land a scholarship at Cornell distinguished him as the most expensive of his siblings. Jean had set an affordable precedent with three inexpensive years in the SUNY system. Alice, who had inherited her mother’s gift, had been awarded a generous scholarship to Wellesley, where she majored in math. After a dazzling start, halfway through her sophomore year she’d suddenly married a young physicist on the faculty at MIT. They moved to Seattle for lucrative jobs in aerospace. Elias would never complain to his parents about all the other expenses hanging over his head, but on this visit home he was determined to be very explicit with Jean.
“I can’t cover all my room and board for this semester,” Elias confided. “The Financial Aid Office can give me enough work-study jobs to fill that gap, but I have nothing for anything else. Plus I can’t be working all the time, I need to study. The first two years of premed, it’s a meat grinder!”
“You’ve always had me beat at grinding meat, my man! Are you asking me for a loan?”
“Never! I want to earn it, somehow, together, like we’ve done before.”
“I assume you mean our leisure products—”
“You know perfectly well that’s what I mean! Why are you being so fucking coy?”
“Shhhh, brother, keep your voice down! I’m still making some money there, but I’ve had to keep digging up new suppliers. Too many trust-fund hippies who don’t know shit about business. Or how to cover their own asses. The feds nailed one of them in October.”
“Good thing you’re still living off your day job, right? I know you quit Salomon, but the new one—what is it—with a B?”
“It’s Bache, brother. Or it was Bache, for about nine months. We parted ways over philosophy.” Jean snorted dismissively. “They think aggressive means reckless.”
Slowly shaking his head, Elias rose and tip-toed to the kitchen. Jean heard the faint popping sounds of bottle cap removal, then Elias returned with two more beers. Their attention was diverted for a moment by noble, self-sacrificing Samurai on the TV screen, then Jean picked up the conversational thread. “Salomon and Bache are like two pistons in a V-8, nothing but long hours and hard labor for suckers. I’m day-trading on my own now. A decent living, but no salary.”
“You think I should be day-trading too? Takes a lot of time, no?”
“Time, for sure, but don’t get ahead of yourself, I was just completing my resume for you. And maybe you intellectuals didn’t notice the market was down 45% last year? So my cash flow hasn’t been great.” A dark cloud seemed to pass over Terra Jean, then the sun broke through again. “But when it starts coming back up I’ll be holding some very strong positions!”
Phenotypically, all the Bessettes were frequently mentioned as examples of strong family resemblance. Jean Bessette looked very much like his brother—tall and athletic, with tastefully long black hair, strong features, a confident chin, and cerulean blue eyes that offered reciprocity. But unlike Elias, Jean was an indifferent athlete who didn’t care for breathing too hard or getting hit. He was an even more indifferent student but had enough native intelligence to coast to a B-minus average.
Jean’s straight-A’s in French at Severance High were distinctly anomalous and proof of overall underachievement to his frustrated teachers, who may not have taken into account that Bessettes were important in the earliest phases of French immigration into eastern Canada and northern New England, more than two hundred years Ante Jean-Charles. The vast Bessette clan was still having occasional family reunions during the peaceful, prosperous-feeling period after the Korean War. They would gather in high summer at some affordable lakeside campground near the border. Clinton and Mary attended several times with their young family. Jean was one of the older boys, and a ringleader among platoons of cousins who revered the tall, confident boy from New York. Hearing his Canadian cousins chatter away in both French and perfect English made Jean determined to do the same. He had kept in touch with some of his Bessette cousins into adulthood. When he visited them in Montreal he was proud to show off his French, and they admired him for making the effort.
The Ivy League was never in reach for Jean, nor was that an aspiration. After Severance High Jean pursued an inexpensive degree in Business and Marketing at SUNY Purchase. He dropped out at the end of his junior year and elbowed his way into Salomon Brothers past Ivy League graduates who lacked his brazen ambition.
“Let’s get to the point.” Elias said, shaking his head definitively. “I never thought day-trading made sense for me. You want to call them ‘leisure products,’ fine, I want to know if we can rev up that business.” Elias knew the college-student market in Ithaca and environs was large—it included Cornell, Ithaca College, and Wells College. Concentrations of college students in Cortland, Binghamton, and Elmira weren’t far away. “I’m telling you, the market is there!” Elias said. “It’s like a Permian Basin of demand for our ‘leisure products’.”
The leisure product business had grown out of Jean’s gift for the commercial side of any venture, facilitated by his relative comfort operating in what he liked to think of as legal gray zones. Through the late 1960s into the 1970s Jean had applied those talents to dealing marijuana—certainly not a legal gray zone, but in those permissive years it was popular in a way that that made it feel socially sanctioned. He soon dominated the local market. When Jean was a senior at Severance High he realized he could double his unit price and quintuple his sales by taking his product to some of the colleges in the greater New York City area. That highly profitable market expansion taught him more about supply-chain management than he would later learn at SUNY Purchase. Personally, Jean could take or leave recreational alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs—his disinclination to overindulgence gave him a business-discipline advantage over most of his competition.
Through Jean’s college years he maintained his high school book-of-business by employing his younger brother. Beginning in his sophomore year Elias became Jean’s primary Severance High front man, dealing marijuana in rolled joints, nickel and dime bags, and one-ounce Zips. Jean covered the wholesale end and did all the packaging, so for Elias it was a relatively neat and clean little cash business; the sale of the soul in $2-joint increments is hard to notice. Sure, Cornell was a different league but it was the same game. Elias had already decided that if his future depended on selling some recreational drugs, what’s the harm?
Jean replied “Yeah, I get your point, you want more business. Like I just said, partner, I’ve been having a supply problem. Here’s the deal—if I can count on your sales efforts as a force multiplier, I’ll find some more sources.”
Without hesitating, Elias reached over and vigorously shook his brother’s hand. “Consider your force multiplied!”
Seven Samurai was over and they’d had enough beer. Elias carefully gathered up the four empty bottles, tip-toed back into the kitchen, and gently laid the empties in the trash. The brothers slipped up the stairs, regressed to their bedrooms, and sank gratefully into Mother-made beds, surrounded by familiar artifacts of adolescence that were invisible in the dark.
The prospect of a new venture with specific and understandable deliverables released Jean from the stress of limitless options, and he fell asleep immediately. In the room across the hall, Elias was finding the same venture less soporific. Clean, crisp sheets, so unlike Cornell dormitory sheets, made him oddly restless—perhaps he was unsettled by the maternal impulse behind this carefully tended nest. Did his secretive visit betray that most unconditional of forces? He ruminated over the moral calculus of their new venture, and over his moral flexibility in ventures past. What did all of that foreshadow? Am I a good person who does bad things, or a bad person who does good things? Even that irresolvable old conundrum was eventually overcome by sheer fatigue, and Elias was sleeping soundly well before dawn.
Previous chapters:
Related:
- A Conversation with Dr. Craig Smith on His Novel “Stone Hearts,” the Art of Writing, and the Surgeon’s Imagination
- Lessons Learned: Surgeon Craig Smith Reflects on Career in the OR
- Nobility in Small Things: A Look Back at The Leadership of Craig Smith, MD