You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz Page A

funeral had been held almost immediately, so Jonathan had gone to that, and this afternoon he had gone back to Brooklyn to pay a shiva call at the family’s apartment in Williamsburg. He would stay as long as he needed to stay, and then he would come here. That was all.
    Grace did not know the child’s name. She was not even sure whether it was a boy or a girl. When Jonathan told her about the patient, Grace had thought with appreciation of that barrier they both maintained, or labored to maintain, between the life of their home and family and his life of the hospital. Because of that slender barrier, the dead child was only the patient , the eight-year-old , which was bad enough. But how much worse, for her, if she’d known more?
    â€œI’m sorry,” Grace had said when he told her about the shiva call and that he would probably be late.
    And Jonathan had said: “Me too. I hate cancer.”
    And that had nearly made her smile. He said this very often and had said it for years, just like this: as a matter of fact, a matter of benign opinion. He had first said it to her many years before, in his dorm room at the medical school in Boston, though back then it had sounded like a battle cry. Jonathan Sachs, about to be an intern, one day to be a pediatric oncologist specializing in solid tumors, hated cancer, so cancer had better watch its back! Cancer’s days were numbered! Cancer had been put on notice, and payback was a bitch! Today, there was no bravado left. He still hated cancer, more than when he was a student, more with every lost patient, more today than yesterday. But cancer didn’t give a rat’s ass how he felt.
    Grace had hated having to remind him about A Night for Rearden, to distract him with that from the pain of children and the dread fear of parents. But she had to. The fund-raiser. The school. The Spensers. The three apartments combined into one: an urban McMansion, she had called it when she’d first described it for him weeks earlier. Jonathan remembered everything, only there was so much on his mind that it wasn’t always completely accessible. It needed to be called up, like a book at the New York Public Library. Sometimes it took a little time.
    â€œGrace,” he had said, “I hope you haven’t had to waste a lot of energy on this. Can’t you leave it to the women who don’t work? You have far more important things to do than raise money for a private school.”
    But it was about the participation, she had said tersely. He knew that.
    And they didn’t have enough money to mitigate her nonparticipation. He knew that, too.
    And all of it had come up before, of course. In a long marriage, everything has come up before: circulating currents of familiarity, both warm and cool. Of course they couldn’t agree on everything.
    He would just…get here when he got here. And if anyone wanted to know why he was not here, she would be glad to enlighten them, because her husband had a little too much on his plate to make time for everyone else’s sick fascination with what he did for a living.
    It was something no one else seemed to understand about Jonathan, that you had to dig such a small way into his general affability before you hit a man who was perpetually, brutally affected by human suffering. People felt emboldened by Jonathan’s matter-of-factness on subjects like cancer and the death of children, but when they broached these dreaded subjects, they did it in a way that was almost accusatory: How can you do what you do? How can you stand to see children in pain? Isn’t it terrible when a patient you have cared for dies of the disease? Why would you go out of your way to choose that specialty?
    Sometimes, Jonathan actually tried to answer these questions, but it never helped, because despite people’s obvious scrounging for the details, most of them just couldn’t handle the stuff he carried around all day, and they