The Tennis Player from Bermuda (36 page)

I saw John’s father open the box, glance at the medal, close the box, and shove it onto the mantelpiece. It’s still there today. I don’t think it has ever been moved or maybe even touched.

The memorial service was full of military men, many tennis players, and friends of Claire and her parents. There were also a half dozen or so men in dark business suits, but none of them seemed to have a name. Just before the service began, Prime Minister Macmillan slipped into a pew in the back of St. Margaret’s. Claire asked me to read the twenty-third psalm, which I did.

As I walked out after the service, I saw Mark Thakeham, who had left the church and was waiting just outside.

“Hello, Fiona. I know you cared about him. My condolences.”

“Mark, thank you for coming to the service. It’s thoughtful of you.”

“I saw in
The Times
obit that he was awarded a VC. For ‘defending the realm,’ without any more detail.”

“Yes. Maybe some of the people here today know what happened to John, but I don’t.”

The brief obit in
The Times
had also said that it was “rumored” in Whitehall that John had been one of the senior officers of the secretive Special Boat Section. It said he was survived by his parents and by his sister, Claire Fitzwilliam Kershaw, who had been the 1960 and 1961 Wimbledon ladies’ champion – and that his “frequent companion” had been the 1962 Wimbledon ladies’ champion, Miss Fiona Hodgkin, of Paget, Bermuda. The newspapers didn’t know we had been engaged.

“Are you going to stay in London?” Mark asked.

“No. Claire asked me to stay here and transfer from Smith to University College. She wants me in London. I’ve thought about it, but I’ve decided to go back to Smith. I’ve already been away from my classes for a week and a day. I need to get back to Smith. I leave tomorrow for the States. But I’ve promised Claire I’ll come back to help when she has her baby.”

Then I asked him, “How is medical school?”

“I go on rounds and, after a resident presents a patient, I’m occasionally asked for my diagnosis. I give it and everyone chuckles. Then the consultant gives the correct diagnosis. So it’s going as expected, I suppose. You’re taking organic, I recall?”

“Yes, and, as you said, it’s rough. But it is interesting. I hope I haven’t gotten too far behind.”

“I never had the opportunity to congratulate you on Wimbledon.”

“Well, now it seems like a very long time ago, but I guess it actually was only last summer.”

We stood looking at one another for a few moments. Finally, he reached out, and we shook hands. His hand lingered on mine for just a second longer than would be customary.

“Well, again, my condolences to you. Keep in touch.”

“Certainly,” I said. “I will do so.” And we parted.

P
ART
F
IVE –

JOHNS HOPKINS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

1968
J
OHNS
H
OPKINS
S
CHOOL OF
M
EDICINE
B
ALTIMORE
, M
ARYLAND

At Smith, I never got around to having a boyfriend. I worked hard at chemistry, and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t leave me with much free time. Just before I left Bermuda for my senior year at Smith, Mother sat me down. “Fiona. The time has come when you need to be open to meeting new people. You have a life to lead. You need to find a boy you like.”

She didn’t say what I knew she was thinking, which was that I needed to forget John Fitzwilliam. The problem was that I didn’t want to forget John.

I promised Mother I would try to find a boyfriend, and I did make an effort. I went out with two or three boys, but nothing was serious. I even let one boy sleep with me, but that was a mistake. He had slept with other girls before me, but he hadn’t learned anything from his other girls. When we were in bed together, and I suggested to him how to go about pleasing a girl – specifically,
me
– he was offended.

I knew exactly how it should be done; John had taught me.

So not having a boyfriend was my fault; I just wasn’t interested.

I was in the spring of my second year at Johns Hopkins medical school when an intense, young pediatrician on the faculty lectured to my class on childhood vaccines. He was thin and wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses. I went up to the front after the lecture to ask him some question – I can’t recall what it was – and we talked for two or three minutes.

I thanked him and was leaving the lecture hall when he called me back: “Doctor?” he said. This was a purely courtesy title; I was two years away from my M.D.

I turned back to him. “Yes, Doctor?”

“Do you have a chemistry background?”

“I majored in chemistry in college.” Maybe whatever question I had asked reflected some knowledge of chemistry.

“I need a lab assistant. To assay an antibody. It’s part of a research grant I have, but I haven’t had time to do it myself. There’s a stipend. But not much. Do you want the position?”

That was easy. The medical students who got the few lab assistant positions were stars who had been marked by the faculty for Great Things. But I had gotten this offer by merely asking a question after a lecture.

The antibody turned out to be for chickenpox. My first afternoon in his lab, I asked him, “How do I get a sample of the antibody?”

“Did you have chickenpox?”

“Yes, when I was five or six.”

“Stick a needle in your arm. You’ll find plenty of the antibody. Your immune system never forgets chickenpox.”

A month later, I was working at my bench in his lab, and he stopped as he passed by. I expected him to ask how my work was progressing, but he didn’t.

Instead, he said simply, “Will you go out with me this Saturday night?”

I said yes.

That August, just after my summer rotation, and just before my fall rotation at Hopkins began, the lease on the flat in Charles Village that I shared with three other women medical students was about to expire, and so he and I spent a Saturday morning packing up my belongings to move me to his flat.

He said I might as well move in since I spent most nights there anyway.

While we were packing, he found the photograph of me just after I had won Wimbledon, in its cheap plastic frame. I had never mentioned this part of my life to him. As far as I knew, he’d never held a tennis racket.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a tennis match I won. A long time ago.”

“You look awful.”

“Thanks.”

He and I worked together, sitting side by side at the lab bench. His bench skills were far better than mine, and he took the time to show me how to conduct delicate assays without contaminating the samples.

Then he taught me how to prepare a scientific paper on my findings. I sat at my typewriter drafting the paper, revising it, revising it again, and again. Late at night, over our usual dinner of take out Chinese food, I reworked the text and tables of data until, at last, I submitted it for publication.

In early 1968, my paper finally appeared in
The New England Journal of Medicine
: ‘Humoral immune response to ∞ herpesvirus 3. Hodgkin FA. From the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.’

For a medical student, life doesn’t get any better than that.

A week or so after our paper came out, I was walking down the main hallway of the hospital when the imperious Dean of the medical school passed me going in the other direction. I had never spoken to him, and I assumed he had no idea who I was. The Dean generally did not acknowledge the existence of individual medical students.

But he stopped. “Miss Hodgkin?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“An interesting piece of work.”

He didn’t need to tell me that he meant the paper that had just been in
The New England Journal
. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“I asked my secretary to check on your marks. She tells me you’re near the top of the third year class.”

“Yes.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“Your plans?” This was medical school code for what specialty I planned to go into.

“My father is a pediatrician, and I hope to be a pediatrician as well.”

By pure luck, the Dean was a pediatrician himself. But how could he possibly treat children without frightening them? He certainly frightened
me.

“Good. An interesting piece of work. Keep it up – ” He paused for an instant and then said, “Doctor Hodgkin.”

Purely a courtesy title. He turned and continued walking down the hall.

One evening during my pediatrics rotation, I came into my boyfriend’s lab. I had spent the day being trained in how to care for ill children, and now I had hours of lab work in front of me.

I sat down beside him at our bench. He had made lemonade for himself, and he poured some for me into a glass beaker. We routinely ignored all the signs that warned against taking food or drink into the biomedical laboratories; we barely had time to eat as it was. He no longer saw patients but supported himself (and me, for that matter) entirely with research grants.

“Don’t you miss treating children?” I asked.

He shrugged. “My clinical skills aren’t strong.”

I was included in his circle of research friends at Hopkins. Probably most of them had never heard of Wimbledon; that wasn’t part of their lives. I never mentioned it. Our friends and colleagues assumed that my boyfriend and I would eventually marry and spend our careers at Hopkins. This was a compliment to me, because it implied that I had what it took for a career of research at Hopkins.

My boyfriend would be at Johns Hopkins permanently; he was a research star.

Late in the spring of my third year, my boyfriend took me out to a fancy dinner at a new restaurant in Baltimore, Tio Pepe. This was out of character for him, and I should have known something was up. In the middle of dinner, he asked me to marry him. He had even bought an expensive engagement ring for me. I told him that I was only 25 and wasn’t ready to get married yet, or to make any commitment, which I intended as a gentle way of saying, “No.”

I thought to myself guiltily that I had been plenty ready to be married when I had been only 19, and that the difference between then and now wasn’t my age, but that I had been in love with John. I wasn’t in love now. My boyfriend was disappointed and hurt, and so after dinner, even though I was tired, I took him by the hand, led him back to the flat, took off my clothes, and did my best to make it up to him.

Nearly two decades later, I was making dinner for my daughters, and I happened to turn on the television to catch the evening news. I was startled to see on the news a lecture room at Hopkins that I knew well from my medical student days. He was standing in the front of the room, just as he had the day he lectured to my class on vaccines. But now the lecture room was full of reporters, not medical students. He was still thin, but his hair was gray. He was just as intense as ever. He wore stained khaki trousers and a ragged sweater.

Earlier that day, the Karolinska Institute had awarded him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on childhood vaccines.

I hadn’t seen him since I had taken my M.D. in 1969. We hadn’t spoken since the late Saturday afternoon in July 1968 when I had talked with him by telephone from Claire’s kitchen in Belgravia. When I returned to Baltimore, he already had left for 10 days to give a seminar at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. We had planned to make that trip together. I let myself into the flat and packed my medical textbooks, Rachel’s old sweater, the framed photo of me after my final with Claire, and my other things.

As I was leaving, I locked the door and pushed my keys to the flat and to our lab through his mail slot.

I was going to chuck my career at Hopkins to become a pediatrician on Point Finger Road in Bermuda.

A reporter asked, “How did you start this research?”

He blinked his eyes for a moment. “I began this work with a colleague, Fiona Hodgkin, who was a medical student here at Johns Hopkins at the time.” He stopped to think. “We used her blood as a starting point. She had chickenpox as a child. She published a paper about the antibody in her blood. In ‘68, I think. In retrospect, an important paper. Doctor Hodgkin deserves part of the credit for this prize they’ve given me.”