"Just get rid of him!" the chief of medicine would scream at the residency program director. But Wexler remained. What saved him was the fact that, by universal acclaim, he was a gifted physician. "I don't know what Wexler's secret is," the program director growled, "but it's a good thing for him that he's got it!"

I began my internship on Wexler's service. Never more than a few steps away, he guided me through those first terrifying days. By the end of that week, just when I started to believe that both my patients and I would survive, Wexler graduated from the residency program and left without a trace. No one knew where he had gone, although there were rumors of a trek through Nepal. He didn't say good-bye to me, but he left me an unusual gift: his outpatient clinic.

All doctors attract different kinds of patients, and Wexler collected very strange people: street preachers, Mafia goons, old blues musicians, geriatric communists, a transvestite clown. His charts were in meticulous order, and on the inside the cover of each one he had taped little notes to me. They ranged from the practical ("Check BP before she starts complaining about her landlord"), to the cautionary ("Incurable minor ailments; NO MORE TESTS"), to the metaphysical ("Ars Longa, Vita Brevis"). There were also quotes from Hippocrates, William Osler, William Carlos Williams, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

At first, this bizarre parade of humanity intimidated me, but I noted that they all shared a common trait: In an indigent clinic where more than half the patients failed to show up, all of Wexler's patients appeared on time; all were taking their medicines correctly; and, despite their multiple chronic aliments, all were doing about as well as could be expected. Soon, more than anything else, it was seeing Wexler's clinic patients that made me feel like a real doctor.

One morning I was called to the wards to admit a Wexler patient I had yet to meet. Magnolia McClure was an enormous black woman, 20 years older than me and almost 200 pounds heavier. She was also flagrantly psychotic. She believed that she was still in her apartment and that I was a burglar.

"Help! Police! Po-liiiiice!" she screamed.

I retreated to the intern's office to review her chart. I saw that at one time she had been on antipsychotic medications but had stopped because she couldn't afford them. There was also a cryptic note from Wexler: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear ... (1 John 4:18)."

"Do you think we should restart her anti-psychotics?" I asked my resident, as I watched her thrash against her restraints.

"You're the doctor," my indifferent colleague replied.

So I gave her haloperidol and prayed that I would not be responsible for some fatal toxic reaction. It calmed her immediately, but there was one remarkable side effect, not listed in any text.

"Horace! Lover Man! You've come back to Momma!" Mrs. McClure declared, her arms outstretched to embrace me, as I approached her bedside on rounds the next day.

"Uh ... Excuse me?" I stammered as my team tittered behind me. "I'm your new clinic doctor."

"Now why you be pretending to be someone you ain't, Horace?"

To the howling delight of the ward team and my intense mortification, as Magnolia McClure had emerged from her psychotic fog, some set of memory traces had crystallized into an unshakable delusion that I was her rogue lover, Horace, come back from my wanderings to claim her. My face reddened as she recounted the long history of our turbulent affair and declared her passionate love for me. She took my protestations as sure evidence that I either had amnesia (because, after all, I was known to favor the bottle) or was purposely tormenting her (in keeping with my general low-down ways). No matter, she loved me anyway.

Mercifully, Mrs. McClure quickly recovered and was discharged after a few days. But now I dreaded her first clinic visit.

"Sugarbaby!" she screamed out as I called her name at the waiting room door. Then, clutching me tightly, she strolled me arm in arm down the hall to the examining room, exclaiming to all we passed-the secretaries, the nurses, the medical students, the patients-that I was "the most NATURAL man in Chicago."

My first order of business became quashing her embarrassing singular delusion. Titrating her antipsychotic medication was to no avail: On a slightly higher dose she became violently dystonic, and on a slightly lower dose her hallucinations returned. The only functional dose was the one that maintained her conviction that I was Horace.

A furtive attempt to transfer her care to a neighborhood clinic fared no better. That same night, the telephone jolted me awake at four o'clock in the morning. I staggered to the phone, confused and disoriented, as I was sure I was not on call.

"Whatch' you doin', Sugar?" I knew the voice well.

"Mrs. McClure! It's the middle of the night!"

"Best time for lovin', Sugar."

"Mrs. McClure, you can't call me here! If you have a problem, call me at the clinic."

"Why you trying to send me away? Are you messing with that outside woman again? You think I don't know how to please my man."

"I'm sure you do, Mrs. McClure, but ..."

"Call me Magnolia."

"Okay, uh, Magnolia, but I am not your boy-friend! I'm your doctor!"

"Oh Horace! You don't know nothing'bout no doctoring."

I resigned myself to my weird fate. At least she's coming to clinic and taking her medicines, I told myself. Magnolia's past remained a mystery. I could never get her to tell me anything about herself ("Why you askin' me things you already know, Horace?") Some thought she might once have been a jazz singer because at times she would break into classic torch songs in an incredibly strong, articulate voice. She was also a superb cook, and she brought me shopping bags full of succulent barbecue, fried chicken, and sweet potato pie, enough to feed the whole clinic. The staff was on her side. "Oh doctor ... Your girlfriend's here to see you," the nurses teased me.

I wasn't too bothered by my colleagues' ribbing, but Magnolia's declarations of love disquieted me. They engendered an ineffable mixture of emotions-concern, embarrassment, guilt. At times I felt that the depth of her feelings had to be an elaborate charade, but at other times it seemed certain that they were genuine.

At one visit, she pinned a strange boutonniere of dried herbs to my white coat. Noelle LaCroix, a clinic nurse who had grown up in Haiti, knew what it was. "Oh doctor, she's put a gris-gris on you! Ooooh! You won't escape now." I shuddered to think that some potent voodoo spell might render me charmed by this huge psychotic woman.

But in a way, I already was. I looked forward to seeing her each month, and I even began to enjoy our grand entrance stroll down the hall. And she was doing well. She had lost some weight and her blood pressure was under good control. Although I felt a bit uneasy that she might be doing these things just to please me, she was healthier for it regardless of her motivation. And I really loved her barbecue.

Shortly before Christmas she presented me with a small box. Inside was an antique ring.

"Horace, it's time you do me right. I want you to be my husband."

"That's not possible, Magnolia, you know that."

Her eyes filled with tears. "Why don't you love me? I've done all a woman can do. Is it because I'm too big? I can lose some weight. Is it because I'm colored? Lots of white boys have loved me. Why are you throwing my love away?"

And as I sat there at a loss for words, she slowly got up and, humming an old Billie Holiday tune, walked sadly out of the clinic.

On the morning of her next scheduled visit, the sky was a dark slate gray. The radio predicted the blizzard of the century. For the first time since I had met her, Magnolia didn't show up in clinic. Worried, I called her home, but found that the phone had been disconnected. As the day wore on and the storm intensified, my concern grew. I started calling homeless shelters and emergency rooms, but no one had seen her. Finally, as snow drifted over the city streets, I set out in a taxi to her apartment in a part of town where I obviously didn't belong. There was no answer to my knocking. A neighbor opened her door a crack and said, "She's gone."

By the time I returned home, the city was shutting down. I was terrified that she had stopped her medicine and was wandering the streets in this killer blizzard, and I felt tremendously guilty that it was all my fault. I called hospitals and police stations for hours. Finally, late at night with no place left to call, I fell into a fitful sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night the phone rang. I jumped to answer it.

"Hello, Sugar."

"Magnolia!"

"Are you warm tonight, Sugar?"

"Magnolia, are you all right? I've been calling and looking for you all over town. I took a cab to your apartment, but you were gone."

"You did that for me, baby? That's sweet."

"I was afraid something had happened to you. I'm so glad to hear that you're okay. Where are you?"

"Sometimes a woman has to go away, Horace. I'll be staying down South for a while."

"I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings last time in clinic."

"Don't you fret none, baby. I can tell you really love me. When you miss me bad enough I know you'll come down to find me."

"Magnolia, please take your medicine and please take care of yourself," I said, but the line had gone dead.

I sat in the dark, suffused with a bittersweet melancholy, and watched the snow swirling in the wind under the street lights, all sound muffled by the drifts covering the streets. And I was transported back to my first day of medical school. The dean had escorted a frail emeritus professor to the podium in the grand lecture theater where we were assembled for orientation. With a creaky voice, he began a rambling dissertation on the history of the school and the great physicians who had passed through its halls. Then his voice strengthened.

"You will learn many things here and in the course of your career," he said. "But the secret to this ancient profession, ladies and gentlemen, is love. I entreat you: Love yourself, love your patients, and love medicine. If you discover this wisdom, my friends, you will know happiness that few can imagine."

"This old coot's even more long-winded than the dean," my seatmate whispered. "Yeah, give him the hook," I whispered back. "Let's get on with the real stuff." Such had been my ignorance.

But now I suddenly understood Wexler's secret: He loved his patients. Not as one loves a parent or a brother, or a friend or a lover. But with a physician's love. Neither brazen, nor careless, nor wanton, nor abandoned. But gentle and caring and deliberate, carefully measured, each according to his need.

And in that moment of exquisite silence I could hear the voice of my heart, and I realized that I did, too.

In the practice of our art we are each like a solar system, our patients revolving around us like planets around a sun. Some whirl furiously in close orbits, seeking our warmth; others circle more lazily at a distance; and others, like comets, streak through our reach only once in a lifetime. What keeps them all from spinning off into the cold and lonely vacuum of space is the gravity of our love.