It's 1960 and Daniel Pierce dies in his sleep.
BJ flies out for the funeral. It's the first time he and Trapper John have met each other. They don't become instant best friends, but they don't hate each other's company, either. The three of them get drunk after the funeral, the first time Hawkeye has been drunk in a long time.
There's the question of what to do with his dad's practice. The assumption in the town, of course, is that Hawkeye will take it over completely.
"Won't you?" BJ asks.
Hawkeye looks out the kitchen window. It's dark outside and the only thing he can see is his own reflection. "Awful lot of kids in this town," he says.
BJ and Trapper are silent, and when Hawkeye turns back he sees they are eyeing each other, having a wordless conversation without him.
"You sure you'll be all right?" BJ asks the next day. He has a thriving practice to get back to, a wife and two kids and a third on the way. But Hawkeye knows that if he says no, he's not all right, BJ will drop everything and stay.
He gives BJ what he hopes is an encouraging smile. "Go on, get out of here. Tell the kids I'll send them a box of lobster big as they are."
He sells the practice to Elliot Collins, a young man just out of residency who has come back to Crabapple Cove to take care of his aging parents. The court of public opinion condemns him for it. They bear no malice towards Elliot-a decent young man from good stock-but they've been going to a Pierce for their doctoring for half a century. They make sure Hawkeye knows just how deeply they feel betrayed by his actions. They hope he realizes just how badly he's let his father down.
He guesses his dad would be disappointed. But he doesn't think he'd be angry. After all, he hadn't come back to Crabapple Cove after med school-never thought about it, honestly, so eager was he to forge his way in the big city, to leave his indelible mark on capital-M Medicine. And his dad had let him go and never made him feel guilty for it.
He packs up the house. On the night before the new buyers take possession, he walks down to the sea one more time. His new apartment in Portland overlooks the bay. But it won't be his sea. It won't be his cove. He wonders fleetingly whether it's too late to back out now, buy back his practice, buy back his house. But he knows he won't. He doesn't really want to.
He thinks it will be difficult to settle into his new job at Portland General. He should have known better. Surgery was always what he wanted to do, what he always excelled at. Within the year he's appointed the head of trauma surgery. Soon he's being invited to Boston not to observe but to demonstrate.
He doesn't introduce himself as Hawkeye anymore. His colleagues and patients refer to him as Dr. Pierce. His new friends call him Ben.
...
It's 1963 and the times, they are a-changin'. There are two female surgical residents, which is a 200% increase from last year. Women are protesting all over the country. They want fair pay and equal rights. Hawkeye takes an avuncular sort of interest in their cause. He remembers the nurses at the 4077th, how they worked their sweet little behinds off for half of his own pay. And of course, he has his own reasons for supporting the Pill and other forms of legalized birth control.
One day, one of his residents, Beth-Dr. Leland-approaches him and asks, voice strained but spine straight-to please stop flirting with her, because it makes her uncomfortable.
Hawkeye is mortified. He thinks of Inga for the first time in years. She'd given him a lesson in humility that he thought he'd never forget. But he'd gone ahead and forgotten, let himself think he was being supportive without actually doing any supporting. Dr. Leland is a woman, a young, attractive woman, and flirting with women is something that Benjamin Franklin Pierce does as automatically as breathing.
He gives himself a good hard look in the mirror when he goes home that night. He's in his forties now, hardly over the hill, but a long way from the Lothario of a decade ago. His hair is more gray than black. There are spiderwebs at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He thinks of Margaret Houlihan, wonders what he would have said if she'd told him that his relentless flirting made her uncomfortable. He has the creeping suspicion that he would only have laughed.
He offers his sincere apologies to Dr. Leland. She accepts them with obvious relief and a kind of gratitude that makes him wonder just what kind of reaction she was expecting.
In November, Kennedy is assassinated. Hawkeye, along with the rest of the available staff and as many patients as are ambulatory gather around the television at the nurses' station. They are watching when Lee Harvey Oswald is shot. Dr. Leland cries, bewildered and afraid. She is not the only one.
Senseless death. Fear and pain. He wonders just how much the times have changed after all.
...
It's 1968 and people are protesting again, but this time, it's young men.
People are already calling Korea the "forgotten war." But Hawkeye isn't sure that's true, not really.
He was angry back then, so angry, and everything seemed so simple, so black-and-white. Just stop the war. Just stop firing. Just let everyone go home. What the hell are we doing here? This is pointless. This is empty. Boys are dying, and for what?
It's been fifteen years and he's still angry; angrier still when he thinks of Vietnam and the sinking knowledge that humans will always find reasons to kill and maim each other. But he has perspective now, cynical perspective, but perspective all the same. He understands how Korea happened. He understands how a country, flush with the victory of WWII and the defeat of its clear-cut villains, would be ready to throw its support behind anything the military thought necessary. The Second World War gave the US and its allies the moral high ground. Why wouldn't people assume that the next war was more of the same? Just switch the Commies for the Nazis. Recycle the old slogans. Buy War Bonds!
It's not like that now. It's not like that with Vietnam. But Hawkeye thinks it might have been, if not for Korea's hard lesson. Maybe the young people he sees on the news with placards and flowers aren't thinking about Pork Chop Hill or the Pusan Perimeter. But people seem to have absorbed the fact that Korea was not a victory, moral or otherwise, and that gives them the wherewithal to publicly oppose a remarkably similar war.
Erin Hunnicut graduates from high school; she intends to enter Stanford's pre-med program, just like her dad. The photograph BJ sends him shows a tall young woman with long blond hair and big white teeth grinning underneath her mortarboard, one arm slung around BJ's shoulders. BJ looks like he might burst with pride.
Kathy McIntyre joins the Peace Corps. Her dad gets battered letters from a village in Costa Rica. They're digging wells and building schools. This, they agree, is a corps they can get behind.
Is it selfish, Hawkeye wonders, to be grateful that they are not men?
...
It's 1969 and he goes to Hannibal, Missouri for Sherman Potter's funeral.
He's ashamed of himself, looking around the crowded church. Virtually the only person he still keeps in contact with from the 4077 is BJ; the only person he really sees from the same is Trapper. He hadn't even bothered to answer Radar's last letter. What was there to say, anyway? I'm still a surgeon, I'm still in Maine, I haven't slipped off my rocker lately.
There are a great many people there who aren't from the 4077th, of course-family and extended family, neighbors and colleagues, patients and friends. He meets Mildred for the first time, a formidable, dignified lady. Grandkids and great-grandkids run around underfoot.
He approaches the knot of people next to the table of cakes and jello salads with something like trepidation-him, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, almost afraid to talk to the people who practically used to live in his pocket. He's put into his place when they greet him with as much joy as is seemly given the circumstances.
How could he have let these people fade away?
How could he have let himself forget the gentleman farmer from Iowa, the one with a twelve-year-old son named Edward Benjamin? Klinger and Soon-Lee herd half-a-dozen kids through the refreshments line and he does not even know the names of the youngest three. Kealani Kellye's hair is shot through with white. Why does he have to come all the way to Missouri to see Charles, who lives in a city he visits all the time?
And Margaret. Lieutenant Colonel Margaret Houlihan, to be precise. Jesus, it had been over a decade since he'd spoken to her. Inexcusable.
How could he have fooled himself into believing that he didn't need these fine people?
He resolves to do better. They stay up all night sort of playing poker, but mostly shooting the breeze and catching up. He was wrong. There is so much to say.
"We gotta make this regular," Radar says when it's time for them to go their separate ways. They each of them agree with alacrity. They all collect addresses. It seems he's not the only one with resolutions.
When he gets back to Portland, the Chief of Surgery calls him into his office. Hawkeye is a little afraid he's in trouble. He bears fools at fifty about as well as he did at thirty, and he manages to step on toes on the regular. But he's not in trouble-this time. Instead, Dr. Tolliver tells him that the hospital is going to set up a pediatric surgery department-the first in Maine-and he wants Hawkeye to organize it and then head it up.
He asks if he can think about it. Tolliver is clearly surprised by his lukewarm reaction, but says only that he'll need an answer by the following week.
Back in his apartment, Hawkeye stands at the picture window and watches the sky darken over the bay. He likes his apartment, likes having a place of his own to come back to, likes inviting the occasional lady up to admire this same view. He likes his job with its challenges and rewards. He's been asked to give lectures and a couple of times even to publish. He's friends with his colleagues, except for the stupid ones. He likes Portland. He likes his life. It's a good life.
He thinks about the job Tolliver is offering. He has a reputation at the hospital for getting things done without being fussy about how they get done, a method one of his superiors called "blunt force navigation." "Pierce," the man had said, half frustrated and half admiring, "you'd rather smash three roadblocks, an oak tree, and a little old lady carrying her groceries across the street rather than take the long way round."
"The long way takes too much time!" is what he'd said in response.
But that's not the only reputation he has in the hospital. It's well known that he has a "way" with families, so much so that he gives yearly training seminars to the new residents on bedside manner and how to deliver news, both good and bad, to loved ones. He supposes it's these two qualities taken together that led Tolliver to choose him. He knows it's an honor to be asked, that it demonstrates the trust the hospital has in him and his talents. But.
But.
He's operated on children before, of course. But what Tolliver has evidently never noticed is that he's never the one to reassure the child beforehand, never the one to talk to the parents after. Whenever he has a child on his docket, he always asks for an assist, preferably a resident, whom he can deputize to do these things for him. As part of their training, of course.
But if he took this job, he'd be operating exclusively on children. He'd see them pre- and post-op. All day he'd have frightened children to talk to, worried parents to soothe. Inevitably, there would be deaths, maybe even under his own knife.
His breath comes quickly, his hands grow damp. Kim. Ho John. Park Sung. The baby who was almost Radar's. The half-Korean son of a Jewish GI. The kids with their arms and legs blown off from scouring the minefields for souvenirs to sell. Sister Teresa's orphans, Nurse Cratty's orphans, maimed and frightened and traumatized victims of a war they couldn't hope to understand.
And the baby
The baby
The baby who-
But-
But that-
But that wasn't the only baby, was it?
There was another baby. She was left on the doorstep of the Swamp. They passed her from hand to hand. Klinger built her a cradle. Father Mulcahy showed rare distress, explaining to them why she couldn't go to an orphanage. They'd tried-they'd tried to get her sent to America, but no one would help them. And that story had ended with a bell in the night and a long, silent drive home.
He remembers that Major, that high-and-mighty horse's backside, asking why they cared so much about this little nothing baby. "Unless one of you is the daddy?" he'd said, smarmy and insinuating.
He watches Portland bay and wishes, wishes with all his might and main, that he'd used that smart mouth of his for good for once and said, "yes, that's right. I am the daddy."
Maybe
Maybe
Maybe then...
He drops his head into his hands. He knows why he let his friendships with the others in the 4077 all but atrophy, as if doing so would make what happened there somehow less real. As if erasing those friendships would erase everything else.
He knows he can't take the job. He knew it the minute Tolliver asked. He stays up all night rehearsing his refusal. He'll recommend that Dr. Leland head it up instead.
He likes his life. It's a good life.
But sometimes he's still on the bus.
...
It's April 1970 and he meets someone.
BJ laughs at him over the phone when he tells him. "Whatever you say, Hawk," he says.
Hawkeye doesn't blame him for laughing. There have been a thousand someones before. For reasons he has trouble explaining, this is different.
Her name is Elva and even though she hasn't been home to Kentucky since she was twenty years old, she still retains the soft twang and rounded vowels of her upbringing. It's adorable, and that's the least thing he likes about her.
She's been sent to Portland General to overhaul the ER's nursing procedures. For this reason, everyone is prepared to hate her. But no one does-at least, no one who matters. Five foot naught, thin as a lathe, sharp when she has to be, gentle when she needs to be; within six months of her arrival, the efficiency rating of Portland General's ER department skyrockets.
As the head of trauma surgery, he has a lot to do with the ER, and from the moment he meets her he has a visceral desire to impress her. But not with the patented Benjamin Pierce charm. No, that's suddenly not enough-not by half. He doesn't want her to jump into bed with him-at least, not right now. He wants her to respect him.
So he asks her to detail her plans for the nurses. He listens attentively and asks questions. He makes sure that his own procedures integrate with hers, the better to make the transition from the ER to his own department.
"Nurse York has been asking about you," the chief perioperative nurse tells him one day.
"Is that right?" he asks, feigning indifference. "What's she asking?"
"What kind of surgeon you are, how you are with patients. That kind of thing." Edith looks at him with a wry sort of smile. Not much gets by Edith. "She says you've gone out of your way to make her life easier with the surgical departments. I told her, what do you expect from a fellow Korea vet?"
He looks at Edith sharply. "She's a vet?"
"You didn't know? She retired from the Nurse Corps at the end of last year. You ought to talk to her about it. I bet you two have a lot in common."
He doesn't particularly want to trade war stories with Elva York. But there's no denying he wants to get to know her better. When she agrees to go on a date with him, he's determined to make it the perfect evening. He plans everything to the last detail. The only thing he forgets is to make reservations at the restaurant.
"Honey," she says, when they're turned away at the door, "I know for a fact that y'all've not got spiderwebs for brains."
Which he interprets to mean, "wipe that mortified expression off your face and think of something else for us to do."
If she were any other woman, he would have said something glib: "It's just as well. The meal was just an hors d'oeuvre anyway." He would have invited her up to his apartment. And he would have been satisfied. But he doesn't do that tonight. Not with her.
"You haven't been in Maine long," he says. "You had a chance to try lobster fresh from the bay?"
In the falling twilight of a Maine summer evening, they sit on a bench by the pier, balancing paper plates of lobster tails on their knees and trying not to drip butter on their fine clothes. He tries to show her how to tear the fins off so the meat will slip out, but she waves him away. "Just like a crawdad," she says. "You never forget how."
Not just like a crawdad, evidently, because he relishes the way her eyes close when she tastes that first sweet mouthful. She chews, swallows, smiles. She smiles with her whole face, every single tooth and most of her gums, too. Just like he does.
They talk. They eventually get around to Korea. She started and ended the war at Tokyo General, with a foray in the middle at the 5026th. "I wanted to stay," she says, "but my younger brother was killed on the front. They transferred me back to Tokyo after that."
"I'm really sorry," he says.
"Well, me too," she says. "But it was a long time ago." She looks at him sidelong. "So," she says, "the infamous four-oh-seven-seven."
He discovers it isn't difficult to trade war stories with Elva York after all.
A month later, the hospital is buzzing. Dr. Pierce and Nurse York! No! Really? I wouldn't have pegged her for his type! Too skinny. Not young enough...you know? Well, he's not getting any younger either...
He takes her to meet Trapper. She and Louise get along like a house on fire. They sit on the couch with glasses of wine and chat like they've known each other forever while he and Trapper are left at the kitchen table picking at the remains of an apple pie. "They're talking about us, you know," Trapper says.
"All good things, I'm sure," Hawkeye says. He's always Hawkeye with Trapper-and BJ, and the rest of the 4077. But with Elva, he's Ben. Or sometimes Benjamin, depending on if she's annoyed with him or not.
"This is the first lady you've ever brought over," Trapper says. "And she's not like any lady I've ever seen you with, either."
"No," Hawkeye says, "she's not."
Trapper looks at him, that knowing half-smile on his face. "You're really serious this time, aren't you?"
"Trap," Hawkeye says, "I'm going to marry that woman."