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  On this day, John Lepore was conscripting his son as a blood donor. Tim’s blood is O positive, the most common blood type, which meant that many of Marlborough’s ill or injured could benefit from what flowed from his veins. And every couple of months, Tim’s father would send Tim’s mother out to haul him into the hospital so he could give one patient or another better odds of staying alive. “He knew where I was, and it was quick and easy,” Tim recalls.

  Tim would also accompany his father to the hospital every New Year’s Day, where he would see trauma cases streaming into the emergency room, observe as X-rays were taken and developed by hand, and look over his father’s shoulder as he performed surgery in the OR—stopping only when his father took a break for coconut cream pie.

  “He could do anything,” it seemed to Tim. “He could fix the damn elevator. Literally, he would work on the elevator in the hospital, and then he’d fix some tools in the OR, and then he’d operate. He was very technically and mechanically talented, and he had very fast hands. He had a great curiosity.”

  John Lepore loomed so large in the world Tim inhabited that the son would invariably compare himself to the father. “I have a curiosity, but sometimes I end up with a couple of screws left over,” Tim thought. “He was much better than me.”

  It wasn’t only his father’s skill and reputation that made Tim feel that way. In some ways, from the moment he was born, Tim would be unable to measure up to an ideal—the angelic image of an older brother Tim would never be able to know.

  The first child of John and Edna Lepore was born on the last day of 1941, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor and a couple of months before John Lepore went off to war. Captain Lepore was thirty-one, older than most soldiers, but his battlefield accomplishments quickly drew notice: He was named surgeon in chief of a field hospital in Ireland and then landed at Algiers during Operation Torch, part of the first American contingent in North Africa.

  He received a commendation from the British and American armies, noting “he has apparently inexhaustible energy, has worked many long hours, has displayed very high surgical skill, has overcome difficulties which presented themselves, and altogether has shown himself to be an officer of exceptional ability.” Other commendations followed, including one praising his work “under adverse conditions with lack of sufficient surgical equipment and medical supplies in such a manner as to gain the confidence and admiration of every patient and member of his command.” The commendation quoted soldiers saying: “As long as officers like Captain Lepore are to be our surgeons, we don’t mind taking chances of being wounded in front line duty.”

  Captain Lepore took chances too. He scavenged wire from the Germans to provide electricity to tents where battlefield surgery was performed. He removed a fan motor from a car to fashion it into a suction pump, which he used to pump the stomachs of soldiers with abdominal wounds.

  Lepore wrote to his wife saying how much he missed baby Johnny. But in one of her letters back, when Johnny was two, Edna Lepore told her husband that their son had a bad case of measles (it would be about twenty years before the introduction of the measles vaccine). Johnny developed postmeasles encephalitis, swelling of the brain tissue as it tries to fight off an invader—it can cause brain bleeding and severe brain damage. Even today about half of all measles encephalitis cases result in death.

  With fluid building up in Johnny’s brain, destroying tissue and causing seizures, he was sent to Children’s Hospital Boston, where Edna Lepore was allowed to visit him only once a week.

  At first, John Lepore, nearing the end of his tour in North Africa, wrote his wife assuring her that “Johnny was fine,” according to their daughter Cheryl, nicknamed Sherry, who was thirteen months younger than Tim. “He was assuming that my mother might be exaggerating a little bit, overly worried about her firstborn.”

  As things got worse, though, Lepore headed for home before his tour ended, finagling passage on a series of boats and planes. But the decorated war surgeon could do nothing to save his own son, a child he had not seen since the boy was two months old. Johnny died in February 1944.

  Ten months later, Timothy James Anthony Lepore was born. When Tim was growing up in the house on Main Street, the catastrophic loss of the Lepores’ firstborn child was barely mentioned. There were no mementoes of Johnny in the house, and Tim never even saw a picture of him until after his mother’s death decades later. But each year, his parents visited and decorated Johnny’s grave. And “the day my mother died, she was talking about it.”

  During Tim’s childhood, the devastation of his brother’s death was forever in the shadows, lurking.

  “At Passover you set a place at the table for the prophet—it was sort of like that,” recalls Tim, who was raised Roman Catholic. “It would come up occasionally as the great unspoken. It would come up—like a summer storm—come up and go away. My father and mother were very closed-mouthed about it. It was always there, sort of like the place setting.”

  Tim says he wasn’t particularly conscious of being compared with his brother or of carrying the weight of having to make good. But he was aware of the idealized impression that parents carry with them of a child lost so young. “When you die at two years, two months, you’re always at the top of your game. They don’t want to borrow the car. They haven’t screwed up in school or knocked somebody out. A two-year-old is all promise.”

  Bob DiBuono, Tim’s closest childhood friend, who happened to have the same birthday as Johnny, says that Tim would mention Johnny, sometimes wistfully. Bob, who had an older brother, recalls that “when Tim and I would get into a fight, we used to punch each other, and when we were duking it out, Tim would say, ‘Oh I wish I had an older brother like Johnny. I wish Johnny was still alive. He would beat the crap out of you.’”

  And, Bob says, Tim intuitively saw the maddening irony and frustrating limitations of becoming skilled in medicine: “when your father is a doctor and he couldn’t do anything about it.”

  The insidious power of disease colored Tim’s early life in another way—this time involving his mother, Edna Lepore. Tim’s first memory of his mother is of visiting her in a medical facility, a sanitarium where she spent a year when Tim was about four, causing her to miss a chunk of his early childhood.

  She had severe tuberculosis, which Tim now believes she may have become vulnerable to during the postpartum depression she suffered after the births of Tim and Sherry. Because of the tuberculosis, she had one lung removed, plus the lobe of the other lung.

  She would likely have died if the antibiotic streptomycin had not been discovered and made available just before she got sick. “But she was always a little deaf from it,” Tim says. She was also given an infinitely refillable prescription for another drug, Isoniazid, which kills bacteria but can be toxic to the liver in large or long-term doses, especially in women. “Now, they only let you take it for six months to a year,” Tim notes. “She refilled that prescription for thirty years.”

  While Edna Lepore was hospitalized, her husband played her wire recordings he made of Tim and Sherry talking. He played the children recordings of their mother speaking too. That was the only way they knew her for what seemed like a long time. “She was just this voice,” Sherry recalls.

  Then one day, a woman walked into the house and asked, “Do you know who I am?” Sherry didn’t know. Tim did, though. “You’re my mother.”

  The mother Tim knew was a shadow of the woman she had been before her illness. Pioneering and outspoken, Edna Maria Granitsas was the daughter of a man from the mountains of Greece and a woman from Sweden. The couple came to America after Granitsas’s mother’s father was trampled by horses. They joined a tide of Greek, Italian, and Irish immigrants who settled in Marlborough, about twenty-five miles west of Boston, a shoemaking stronghold that stayed that way long after other factory towns wilted. Marlborough, often accidentally or deliberately misspelled without the “ugh,” was the hometown of Horatio Alger Jr.; perhaps Alger’s up-by-the-
bootstraps ethos influenced Granitsas.

  She was a trailblazer early on: graduating from high school at sixteen, the youngest in her class at Boston University, racking up a master’s degree before she turned twenty-one. Then, while studying for a doctorate at Radcliffe in 1935, she decided to run for school committee, the first woman ever to seek political office in Marlborough.

  “Do Voters Like Blondes?” asked a headline in the Boston Evening American, accompanied by big photos of Granitsas in coy poses, with her dogs “Tina and Cookie and the puppies” and at the Pine Grove Inn, a roadside restaurant and dance hall her parents ran. “Five foot two eyes of blue; But, oh, what those five feet could do!”

  The article about Granitsas, written by a woman, noted that “there was a young man named Peter who was constantly consulted during the interview. Naturally curious about a possible romance, I asked about it. ‘Romance!,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I haven’t time for any.’” Asked if a woman could be as effective a school committee member as a man, Granitsas replied: “Better.”

  When Granitsas won, becoming the youngest woman on any school committee in the state, the Boston Post called her “blonde, pretty and not a grind,” a woman who did not believe “Latin and solid geometry should be choked down the throats of children.” She stated that “teachers should be quite as exciting to their pupils as movie actresses,” and “if a child wants to yell out in class, the teacher should not throttle the child. Let the child yell until it decides not to yell.”

  Granitsas made her own voice heard, pledging to eradicate Communist sympathizers from the schools and pushing to require teachers to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Perhaps conscious of her foreign-sounding name, she asserted: “I am 100 percent American.”

  And in 1938, she led the charge to remove two statues from Marlborough’s high school, a copy of the Venus de Milo and a statue of Apollo, because their nakedness made them too scandalous and “indecent” and might inappropriately affect the morals of students. The removal of the statues, which had perched in front of the school’s assembly hall for nearly fifty years and were nicknamed Venie and Pol, was ridiculed in newspapers and editorial cartoons.

  “With the lady having no arms, it was hardly hand-in-hand, but Venus and Apollo were driven in disgrace from the old homestead,” one paper wrote. “Venus and the boyfriend have suddenly become sinister threats in Marlboro High school life.... Venus wears the more clothing, being about 50 per cent draped, but Apollo is clad in the L street bathhouse mode.”

  A Boston minister came to the rescue, offering by telegram to “provide shelter and decent exposure for the ostracized Apollo and Venus” in his Congregational church. “Original Apollo statue is in the Vatican in Rome. If it is decent enough for the Vatican, it is decent enough for our young people to see and admire.... And as your Venus is a copy of the Venus de Milo in the Louvre, it will give me joy to present her grace and beauty to people who believe, and hope, that the human body is one of God’s fairest creations.”

  Granitsas’s blunt opinions and verve would be echoed in her son, Tim, who decades later became an unceremoniously candid member of the Nantucket school committee. Tim would also inherit Granitsas’s political independence and inability to be pigeonholed; despite some staunch conservative stances, Granitsas was quoted in the papers supporting birth control, following the death of a close friend from a back-alley abortion. “It was rather scandalous at the time,” Sherry notes.

  In 1940, in what one paper called “a wedding of much interest,” Granitsas married John Lepore. They had met in high school and dated over the objections of her father, who wanted her to marry someone Greek. If Granitsas’s father hadn’t died while she was still single, “he would have shot my father with a Smith and Wesson .44,” Tim says.

  Lepore’s parents were Italian immigrants from the Adriatic village of Corfinio, where the soil was so poor that Tim described them as “rock farmers.” Lepore, a surname derived from the Italian word for rabbits, was a nickname for a fleet-footed person. John was one of thirteen children who survived infancy. (“I think they had two or three Patricks and gave up on that name when they died,” Sherry says.)

  As a child, John Lepore loved tinkering and “almost blew his brother up” when he was playing around with blasting caps, said Tim, who would inherit his father’s interest in mechanical things. And a defining moment for John Lepore occurred at sixteen, when he and some friends fell through the ice at a reservoir. Lepore managed to swim ashore and summon help, so that most of the boys could be rescued, but one, a police officer’s son, drowned.

  Broad-shouldered and quick, Lepore became a star Marlborough High School fullback and played semipro football in Marlborough during the summers. Helped by football and scholarships, he became the only one of his siblings to attend college; in just three years he took enough courses to qualify for medical school.

  “I think my mother said he had to make something of himself,” Tim said. “My mother wasn’t going to marry a sluggo.”

  Lepore was hardly a slacker. He would spend mornings in surgery and see patients at his home office in the afternoons and evenings. In the summer, when the family rented a cottage on Cape Cod, Lepore would commute to Marlborough, a hundred miles away. Patients of limited means could pay in lasagna. Priests, rabbis, and other community leaders were treated for free.

  The Lepores weren’t rich, but they were comfortable enough to afford a small boat and a new Buick every couple of years. John Lepore once ordered an Alaskan dog sled, which he attached to his car to tow his children through snowy streets. They were financially generous to friends and family, sending nieces, nephews, and friends’ children to college or medical school. “They helped people,” Tim recalls.

  To Bob DiBuono, Tim’s best friend, John Lepore “could do no wrong. In my eyes, at the time, he was kind of like John Wayne.” Bob considered his own father, who sold dairy equipment, was a Marlborough city councilman, and was a violinist who learned to play saxophone in a big band, to be a “dud” by comparison.

  Bob experienced John Lepore’s skill firsthand. Once, during one of Bob and Tim’s regular frog hunting excursions, when the boys were about eleven, Bob was holding a frog the boys had shot with a bow and arrow. He was trying to saw off the back legs with a knife so the boys could bring the legs home to Bob’s mother, who would cook them. “I cut the frog and my thumb at the same time.”

  His thumb dangling, he was rushed to the hospital, where, while “stinky, muddy water was pouring out of my boots,” John Lepore stitched the thumb back on. A year later, Bob was making a knife, using another knife to pin the handle down so he could attach it to a blade. The knife slipped and tore through the back of his hand. “It was pouring blood.” John Lepore came to the rescue, closing the five-inch gash on Bob’s right hand.

  “I have not seen another man like him,” Sherry asserts. “He could sing; he could recite poetry; he was in plays; he could build a car; he did all the architectural renderings of the house we lived in; he did all the electricity. He made all of my dresses when I got married. If Timothy feels a little inadequate, it could be because they don’t make people like my dad.”

  It could also be because John Lepore, despite being good with children in general, sometimes kept his own son at a distance. He had a huge collection of electric motors, scooped up from neighbors’ junk piles, that he used to build an extraordinary American Flyer train set, rigged to run on three levels, with lights and a drawbridge. It was so impressive that it was displayed at a Shopper’s World store, but so intricate that “I couldn’t play with it much,” Tim remembers. “My father could be a little bit cold except about electric motors. When he died he still had a wall full of electric motors that he had salvaged.”

  Tim found his father unsentimental about other things. For instance, “he destroyed all of his letters to my mother” that he had written during World War II. The only letter he saved was telling too: it was “pretty syrupy t
alking about baby John and how much he missed him.” Tim was also “locked out” of his father’s workshop, a paradise of salvaged metal and junk that John Lepore protected with a door with chicken wire strung over the top. Tim would “figure out ways to break into it. I used to sneak over the chicken wire, but I was always too noisy, and he could hear me.”

  Tim’s father wouldn’t run up and catch him, though. He would wait until dinner, where “my father sat at the head and I sat next to him. If I had screwed up, that was when the hand would be coming down. He’d put his finger underneath my collarbone and pull me down on the floor. It wasn’t horribly painful, but it was an attention getter. It was ‘This is my house, these are my rules, you do not know anything, and if I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.’”

  Once, “he was giving me a shot of penicillin for something, and I can remember telling him I didn’t want this injection. I got a slap in the ass, and then I got the shot. Sitting and telling my father I didn’t want to do something he wanted me to do—not a good idea.”

  Lepore was gentler with his daughter, but he could apply his medical expertise with a kind of no-pain-no-gain approach. Sherry recalls that he “used to bring me to visit every sick person he could, saying, ‘I want you to get whatever it is they have—chicken pox, mumps, measles—because someday you’ll be pregnant and I want you to be exposed so things don’t happen to the fetus.’ And I got infected with all of it.” Tim said his father’s experience in World War II made him more conservative, even dogmatic about some things as time went on. “Back in the early ’50s, around Korea, I can remember him suggesting that perhaps bombing them all is not a bad idea. He would talk about it at the kitchen table. My mother did not agree with him. My opinions were generally not solicited.”

  With only part of a lung left, Edna Lepore could not work. For a while, she stayed close to bed, and her husband built a sunroom onto the house so she could rest on the first floor.