As a child, being sick had not been altogether a bad time for Stern. He would lie in his mother's bed and listen to radio shows all day, and then at night, when his fever rose, he would pull up the covers and wait to hear his father's whistle down the street, meaning he was back from work. A minute or so after the whistle, his small, round-shouldered father would stand at the bedroom door and say, "Jesus Christ ... hmmph ... oh, Jesus Christ," and shake his head sympathetically. Then, the first night of the sickness, Winkel would come, his hulking body supported by reedlike legs, and thump gravely at Stern's chest and back with thin, businesslike fingers. He liked cherry sodas, and Stern's mother would always have one ready for him after he finished up and washed his hands. She was a tall, voluptuous woman with dyed blond hair who wore bathrobes whenever Stern was sick. "Do you know what I would do for that man?" Stern's mother would say after Winkel had left. "I owe him my life. He's some guy." Stern's mother would then send Winkel a pair of tickets for the opera. When Stern got older, he would say, "But you paid him for coming," and his mother would answer, "You can't really pay a man like that, can you? You've got a lot of growing up to do." Winkel was always grave and unsmiling with Stern, and once when Stern had a stubborn pimple above his eye, Winkel squeezed it with what seemed to Stern like hatred and said, "Love sweets, don't you?" Though Winkel later specialized in gynecology, he continued to treat Stern in his teens, and Stern's mother said, "I thank my lucky stars ten times a day I have a man like that. You have a man like that, you don't need anyone else." Nine out of ten of Stern's boyhood friends were planning to become doctors, and there was a time when Stern considered the idea too. His mother told Winkel and the doctor said, "Why doesn't he ever come up and talk to me? All the other boys come up and we have long talks." Stern did not like the sound of those long talks and never went up. He knew a little about chromosomes and Ehrlemeyer flasks, but he could not imagine ever filling up a long talk with Winkel. Later, when Stern went to college, he heard that Winkel had gone on to great eminence, giving talks on television. "I can still get him, though," his mother would say. "I'm the only one he'll still come to." Winkel had been married to a woman whose frugality supposedly made him insane. Driving from Newark to the opera one night, Winkel and his wife, so the story went, had gone off the road and into a tree, the windshield shattering and glass getting into Winkel's head. With half an hour remaining to curtain time, his wife left him in the car, forehead red, hands locked about the wheel in shock, and went to redeem the tickets. Weeks later, he ran amok while performing an appendectomy and cut two deep crosses in his kneecaps with a scalpel. Now he sat in a room, his practice gone, coming into