One day as Heyes came up the stairs to the clinic a few minutes earlier than usual, he overheard Polly the receptionist and the chatty middle-aged nurse Tabby Booth teasing Elizabeth Warren about something. Heyes didn't want to embarrass Beth Warren by walking in on this, so he took his time coming down the hall, pausing behind a filing cabinet where the women couldn't see him while he intentionally dropped his pen and bent down to pick it up. Heyes kept trying to stay out of awkward situations around the clinic, but they kept turning up. Just the day before, he had stumbled across the buxom Beth Warren flirting outrageously with the charming, handsome young therapist Dr. Bartholomew. Plenty was said about that man behind his back! The very blonde, blue-eyed Dr. B (as he was called by even those who had no trouble with speech) was known to frequent dangerous parts of the city. He went around with a variety of leggy dancing girls and improper actresses – all simultaneously. Apparently other people had noticed the same incident that had so embarrassed Heyes and they were much less kind to his normally reserved tutor about it.
He overheard Polly saying, "Oh Beth, how can you say that? Don't be silly! Of course he's handsome, no one could deny that, but would you feel safe alone with him? You know what they say about those dangerous places he goes and the low women he sees. . ."
Tabby said archly, "Oh Beth, why even think about that beautiful young man. You haven't got a prayer with that sort – they're all for flashy clothes and long legs. A smart woman like you is far beyond him."
"Oh, I don't know . . ." Said Miss Warren and Heyes heard her open the door to her office and walk in, while the other women went giggling down the hall in the other direction.
Only then did Heyes dare to emerge from behind the cabinet to go to Miss Warren's office for his lesson. She was still a little flushed from this suggestive conversation when her student walked in the door. As Heyes got started on his math lesson for the day, in the back of his mind he realized that he almost wished that the women had been talking about him. He knew that he was not, and had no wish to be, a beautiful young man. He wasn't really that young anymore and beautiful was not in the realm of possibility. That was the way women had always seen the golden-haired Kid, not his dark partner. Heyes had never thought of Beth Warren as romantic material, but he enjoyed the sparkle in her eyes when she made a joke. Just for the sake of his tender and needy male ego, it would have been nice for her to have found him attractive. But obviously, this was not the case. She never flirted with Joshua Smith, just joked around with him like a girl might with her little brother. To her, Joshua Smith was merely one more student in a long procession who had worked hard to impress the formidable Miss Warren.
And, as the months went by, Joshua Smith did impress his tutor, and his doctors. As he frantically labored away at his studies as well as his therapy, he even started to impress himself sometimes, greatly to his surprise. His classes with Miss Warren and the helpers she called in allowed just the kind of learning that had always appealed to Heyes and that had seemed utterly impossible out west. When he had first gone to New York, he had not thought about anything except getting well.
But now Heyes found himself, as when he had stood on the Brooklyn Bridge, crossing over from a place he knew in his life to a new place where he felt utterly unsure. Somehow, just as Lom Trevors had speculated to the Kid, having to recover from his shattering loss was allowing Heyes to take a new look at himself – at what he could do and what he wanted to do. He discovered what he thought he wanted the most. Nothing that Heyes wanted that much would be easy – it never had been. With his lingering problems speaking, it would be even harder. But he still wasn't sure if it was right or wrong even to try. He and the people he cared about stood to lose so much if he failed – or perhaps even more if he succeeded.