The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner

set my niece’s collarbone properly after she fell from that high ladder—I’m sure of it, it’s clicking in and out of place when she tries to wash the dishes—will you take a look?” And some of the islanders, like the Mazzu and Dacosta families, openly mistrusted the new doctor’s judgment and came to the bar to obtain Amedeo’s opinion on every cough and fever. These islanders still referred to Amedeo quite openly as
signor il dottore,
calling Dottor Vitale only
il ragazzo nuovo,
the new boy.
    This presented a dilemma. The man was qualified, Amedeo assumed, but he lacked a certain gravity, and he had almost no experience—he had never splinted a man’s broken femur in a waterlogged trench by candlelight, or delivered a baby on a straw-covered floor. And when in doubt—Signor Mazzu had told Amedeo this with the deepest disgust, leaning over the counter to hiss the accusation as though reporting some scandal or infidelity—when in doubt, the young doctor pulled great books out of his attaché case and consulted them!
Books!
Dottor Esposito had never needed to carry a great book about with him!
    “Yes, but I consulted books,” said Amedeo. “And medical periodicals, and all kinds of written matter.”
    “But not in front of your patients! How is anybody to trust him? Books—there’s something indecent about it!”
    Eventually Amedeo resolved the matter by dispensing advice for free with coffee and pastries, over the counter of the bar, or—for more serious cases—within the cool dark of his study at the top of the house, packing away his medical instruments afterward in an old Campari liquor case to avoid suspicion. Since he was paid principally in vegetables and eggs and the occasional live chicken, he reasoned with himself that to continue to advise the islanders like this was not the same as practicing medicine. For the purposes of conscience he was now merely a bartender—and if he offered the occasional benefit of his advice, he was certainly not the first in the history of bartenders to do so.
    In those years, they began to live more comfortably. The house was still crumbling, but now he had the money to turn the current a little, to fix new hinges to the shutters and paint over the damp patch in the corner of the boys’ room that had previously kept him awake whenever they coughed or sighed. Pina’s relative Pierino, who worked as a fisherman when there were fish to be caught, and the rest of the time as whatever anyone in the town would hire him for, cleared the weeds from the veranda and repaved it with old tiles salvaged from the kitchens of the ruined houses outside the town walls. These tiles, red and deeply mottled, seemed to possess maps of the world beneath their surfaces. They pleased Amedeo, and he had Pierino install them in the washroom of the old house, too, which would eventually, he hoped, be converted into a modern bathroom with the hot and cold running water to which Pina aspired. Amedeo trained the bougainvillea and it bloomed profusely, so that each time the swinging door of the bar opened or closed, the rush of hot air that entered carried its perfume.
    When Tullio was four, Flavio a fat toddler, and Aurelio still an infant, Pina fell pregnant again.
    This child was different. Amedeo had not seen Pina suffer with any of her pregnancies the way she did during this one. For the first time she began to be flattened, oppressed by it. Her ankles swelled so that she hobbled; her hands were arthritic and stiff; she no longer ate properly, only in small mouthfuls from the plates of the boys. She fell accidentally asleep across the bed on hot afternoons, so that shrieks and roars would summon him at a run from the bar to some distant part of the house where the boys, left to their own devices, were making joyous war. Then he would have to prize apart Flavio and Tullio, or retrieve the bawling Aurelio from beneath the laundry basket where the others had stuffed him, or pick cicadas from