Last Dance, Last Chance

Debbie opened the door, hoping that it was just a hoax. Instead, she found a cassette recording, a letter, and a Christmas card. Her hands were numb as she opened the letter and the card, reading what seemed unfathomable to her. She played the tape, and there was no question that it was Anthony’s voice on the tape, obviously talking to another woman. There was no other way to view the items in the back seat beyond accepting that her husband had been having an affair.
    Debbie Pignataro might have been a loyal and patient girlfriend, and then a wife willing to work and postpone having a nice house to help Anthony through his years of residency and postgraduate training. She was a faithful wife, her marriage blessed in the Catholic church and sacred to her. But she was no doormat. Whatever else might be wrong with their relationship, she had believed in Anthony’s fidelity. Now, she had proof that he had been cheating on their marriage—and she erupted, as angry and hurt as she had ever been in her life.
    “Get home right now!” she shouted, when she got him on the phone.
    “He came home,” she said, “and I screamed at him and cried, and I hit him—not hard, but I hit him. I was so angry that he betrayed me like that.”
    Anthony was stunned, and shocked when he realized that Debbie actually intended to leave him. He didn’t call his father for advice this time; he called Debbie’s father and said, “Debbie wants to leave me, and take the baby.” Then he handed the phone to her.
    “What’s goin’ on?” Frank Rago asked her.
    “I don’t know, Dad,” she said, worried that this wasn’t at all good for her father’s health. Her dad had been going downhill since her wedding three years before. But he kept asking her what was wrong, and he was a very strong man, despite his illness. Finally, she told him that Anthony had been unfaithful to her.
    “Debbie,” her father said sternly after a long pause. “Listen to me. You forgive once. Now hang up and go make your marriage work.”
    Anthony certainly appeared to be truly repentant. He insisted that he loved her and the baby, and he could not bear the thought of losing her. The other woman didn’t matter at all—she was just some crazy girl. He would never see her again, and he begged Debbie to stay with him and go ahead with their plans until he got another residency. They had too much invested in their marriage—all those years together—to throw it away now.
    Her father’s words played over and over in her head: You forgive once.
    So Debbie did. She had loved Anthony for ten years; she still loved him—and she was pregnant again. She would stay in the marriage. And it wasn’t long before she believed that things were going to be all right again. She wanted so much to believe that.
    They had already decided to leave Baltimore after Anthony had lost his residency at St. Agnes, and it was too late to get into another residency program for the 1987–1988 year. They agreed to move back to Buffalo until Anthony found a better venue for his third year of residency. Debbie was relieved that they were going to be far away from the woman who had called her.
    Together, they packed everything they owned into their car and a rental truck and headed home to New York State. They could stay with the elder Pignataros until they found a place of their own.
    Anthony took a job at a walk-in emergency clinic, the Mercy Ambulatory Care Center, in Orchard Park, New York. In essence, he was a “Doc-in-a-Box,” but he was at least practicing medicine, and he certainly saw any number of injuries, maladies, and illnesses. It was a come-down for him, though; he was in the trenches instead of in the much more rarefied air of a Johns Hopkins’ satellite.
    Anthony began to keep a journal, documenting his reaction to the events of his life and putting forth his philosophies. It would one day become his book, M.D.: Mass Destruction —a paean to himself. This was the manuscript he later sent to me, telling me that his wife, Debbie, was the author. He must have thought it would be better received if someone other than himself wrote it.
    Two years later, he would have more than a hundred pages. The first page began with his accomplishments. Anthony seemed confident that his talent as an author was as brilliant as his skill as a physician. His style was a throw-back to novels from the nineteenth century. It was clear that he wrote with a thesaurus close by—he chose the