Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink Page A

home. She didn’t
     cook. Although she was beautiful, funny, and sociable by nature, at age forty-nine
     her life revolved around her surgical career.
    She hadn’t always known she would be a doctor, buteven her elementary-school classmates had predicted that the caring girl with the
     good grades would follow in her father’s footsteps. Dr. Frederick Pou was a Dominican
     Republic–born, New Orleans–raised internist, well known in the community but often
     absent from the family’s large, two-story white colonial on Fontainebleau Drive. His
     wife, Jeanette, was the daughter of Sicilian immigrants. She gave birth to eleven
     children, and he worked tirelessly to provide for them.He treated patients in a corner house in the Bywater, a working-class neighborhood
     on the opposite side of town. He sometimes scheduled office appointments until ten
     p.m. and returned home for dinner after midnight.
    Frederick Pou made weekend house calls, and his wife sent Anna Maria and her siblings
     along with him on alternating weekends so theycould spend more time with him. In this way, Pou learned early what a doctor’s job
     was.
    The children helped raise one another. Anna was the seventh, and her older siblings
     doted on her when she was little. One liked to dress her up in doll clothing and lead
     her across their lawn and the broad, tree-shaded street to show her off at St. Rita
     Catholic School. Later, as a grade-school student there, Pou listened closely to the
     nuns who taught her. They talked about purgatory and the importance of being good.
     A nun held up a picture of a snowman. That was the soul, pure and white. She drew
     an ugly black mark on it. That was what sin did.
    Pou went to a Catholic all-girls high school, Mercy Academy, where the mascot was
     a high-stepping poodle. Pou and her siblings were popular, attractive kids, petite
     in stature like their father, the smallest in his family. Most of the siblings strongly
     resembled one another with brown hair, prominent eyelids, and full brows that contrasted
     with peach-hued skin. Anna had the wide, dimpled smile of a prom queen. She frequented
     the Valencia Social Club, mingling with other local teens who stopped by after school
     for a snack at the diner and partied to the beat of live bands in the evenings.
    As Pou grew older, it became her turn to help mother the younger ones, driving them
     to after-school activities and helping prepare meals. Taking care of others was a
     family value, taught and modeled by her parents, a way of doing good. When friends
     of Pou’s younger brothers came over to play, she treated them sweetly. Some of the
     boys developed crushes on her.
    At Louisiana State University, Pou had started out pre-med, but then changed her major
     against her father’s advice. Instead of a doctor she became a medical technologist
     in a hospital laboratory, running tests for infections. This switch in her professional
     direction disappointed her father. He told her she wouldn’t be satisfied.
    One warm day in the late 1970s, Pou attended a party that spilled across the grounds
     of a restored plantation house a half hour’s driveacross Lake Pontchartrain from the city. The attendees were college-age kids and twentysomethings—the
     “uptown group” as they referred to themselves—private-school and Catholic-school graduates
     who had been raised, like Pou, in the graceful homes on the city’s western curve along
     the Mississippi.
    The cool waters of a long swimming pool beckoned. One young man challenged another.
     Who could swim the farthest without coming up for air? They took sips of their gin
     and dove in.
    The two thrashed out one long lap. In the middle of the return lap, the challenger
     surfaced. His competitor trounced him, swimming to the end of the lane, then rubbing
     it in by floating in place without lifting his head.
    A friend jumped in and playfully shoved the macho victor underwater. He stayed down.
     It took a