He’d read the obituary in the Times that morning—in his sixties,
he’d started perusing the death notices, just as he’d once teased his own
mother for doing—and the name had startled him, although Arnold
Kappelschnitzer, MD, PhD, retired navy commander and chief of endocrinology at Mount Hebron Medical Center, was not a man easily startled. He’d believed himself to be the planet’s only living Kappelschnitzer,
at least since his late sister had married. The peculiar name, whose origins were long lost, meant “hat carver” in Yiddish, although “carving
hats” was obviously not an occupation. But Kappelschnitzer had never
married. The only Shirley he had known was his third grade teacher,
Mrs. Deutsch, and she’d be decades dead. He couldn’t recall having ever
visited the New York Botanical Gardens or any other botanical gardens,
for that matter, though when he was in his twenties, a fellow officer on
the Valley Forge had once dragged him to see the cherry blossoms at Nagoya. So the whole morning long at the hospital, Kappelschnitzer found
himself in the awkward position of receiving condolences from acquaintances—obituary-reading colleagues and patients of a certain age—for a
loss that was not remotely his own.
Kappelschnitzer was a man of scrupulous instincts, and during the
first few expressions of misplaced sympathy, he sought to set the record
straight, correcting an elderly patient with Graves’ disease who expressed
surprise to find him at the office and another who had survived a kidney
transplant but couldn’t manage to keep her diabetes in check. But when
the longtime desk clerk in the clinic, gum-snapping Gladys, asked how
he was holding up—it took him a moment to realize that she meant on
account of his “widowhood”—he merely replied, “As well as can be expected” and thanked her for her concern. The mistake was hers, after all.
Not his. Same with the nursing supervisor from the osteoporosis center
who sent him lots of “heartfelt” wishes over e-mail. Why did he have an
obligation to proclaim his bachelorhood to the world?
On reflection, the entire experience struck Kappelschnitzer as rather
alienating. These people weren’t lifelong friends, to be sure, but he’d always assumed (admittedly without evidence) that they were familiar
with the basic contours of his life; it came as rather a shock to realize
how little of him they actually knew. Of course, why should they know
more? He didn’t carry a placard that proclaimed his bachelorhood. And
the lack of knowledge ran both ways: He couldn’t speak to the nursing
supervisor’s marital status, couldn’t say whether Gladys enjoyed a life of
gum-snapping spinsterhood. Usually a cheerful soul, Kappelschnitzer
