Medicine Men (16 page)

“Really, though, why did we ever marry doctors—don’t you wonder?” Jane Stinger, wife of Dr. Mark, asked this not rhetorical question of Connie (Knowles) Sanderson, wife of Raleigh, over lunch at a health food restaurant out on Clement Street, in San Francisco. Both recovering alcoholics, the two women first met in a Sausalito AA meeting. The fact that both were married to doctors seemed one more linking coincidence. Also, it turned out that the same reasoning had led them both to this Sausalito meeting, rather than one in San Francisco: as prominent doctors’ wives—or, rather, wives of prominent doctors—they did not want to run into people they knew. Who knew them. They had not met each other before, although they might have done so at doctors’ cocktail parties, or some volunteer wives’ group. But both Connie and Jane had more or less dropped themselves out of all that. Too, since Jane and Mark were some fifteen or so years younger than the Sandersons, their circles did not quite coincide. Mark’s being Jewish would also have made a difference,
still
, in those doctor groups.

But in AA circles the two women had become strong friends; as they themselves would have said, they were supportive and caring of and for each other. And, having begun with the intense
and intimate revelations that were encouraged, the “sharing” at meetings, they had continued in that vein, on that level. Marriages, sexuality, children, drugs, politics, money—all that had at one time or another been viewed, and reviewed. And often laughed at; maybe the best of all was that each woman found the other reliably amusing. The very Bostonian Connie and Irish (from Queens) Jane McBride Stinger.

Certainly they could not have looked less alike, but perhaps that very dissimilarity formed another bond, as did the fact that each had basically disliked her own looks, her “type.” Jane was small and dark, pretty and voluptuous. Years back, on Mark’s insistence, she had had her nose “done.” She now felt that it had been overdone; it was very small and turned up, piquant. “My mother says I look like a typical mick—her phrase—and for once she’s right. But Mark said early on that since noses were right up there, up front, and his specialty, he couldn’t be married to one like mine. Big joke. He also said why did he have to marry a mick with a big Jewish nose? Well, that’s his problem. And now with more self-esteem I’d like my old nose back! It was more me. Well, of course it was.”

Connie was tall and straight and now, without booze, almost thin again. Her hair was vague, flimsy. Gray-blond. Her eyes large and dark gray-blue. Dry-skinned, tending to lines, but her skin too had improved from no drinks. Her nose (unfixed, though Raleigh too had made that suggestion) was long and finely modeled, somewhat overshadowing her small but sexy, plumpish mouth.

Although this was familiar ground, Why doctors? she answered Jane’s question anyway, more or less. “For one thing it was something we did, back then,” she said. “Marrying interns from Mass. General.” By “we” she meant Boston girls who came out the same year she did, or thereabouts. Interns had been very popular at those forties and fifties deb parties, the first lavish “real” big parties since the war. And though some of those interns came from what the girls’ mothers would have termed “no
background,” to the younger women they seemed genuinely more exciting and more adult than the Boston-Milton-Harvard boys they already knew. And medicine seemed a much more interesting direction than banking or manufacturing or Boston real estate. Just as, to the doctors from no background, the debs with their family houses on Chestnut Street or Brattle, in Cambridge, their summer places in Beverly or Ipswich—those girls, with their long blond hair and good white teeth and sailing tans looked both glamorous (though many were very flat-chested, but you can’t have everything, reasoned the doctors) and substantial. Perfect raw material for doctors’ wives, for mothers of doctors’ children (and a bunch of children might help in the breast department, they thought).

Since Jane was not from Boston, there was no point in Connie’s explaining all that, for the moment. Instead she said, in her confessional, sharing voice, “I thought Sandy was so terrifically sexy. You might say I married for sex.”

Jane laughed. “Me too, in a way. I thought Mark was so good-looking. Funny, it’s supposed to be men who marry for sex and good looks.”

“Oh, but they don’t really, do they?” asked Connie. Then, responding to her own question: “Or young men don’t. Certainly not ambitious young doctors.”

“Right. Those trophy wives must be for second or third tries, probably. First they get success, then sex.”

“Actually, Sandy married me for all the things I was trying to shake off,” said Connie. “My parents, all those big lavish lonely houses. The heavy silver.” She sighed.

“Is this just doctors or most men, do you think?” Jane mused.

“What I think is,” Connie pronounced, “doctors
are
most men, only worse. Well, that’s not fair, and it sounds awful,” she corrected. “I only mean they’re more focused than most men are. Eyes ahead. Not much peripheral vision.”

Jane agreed, “They sure are focused. Mark, honestly, he used
to make these lists, this stuff for me to do. God, I gave up nursing for that? And then he’d check things off. He didn’t like it a lot when I’d gone out for lunch instead. And got plastered. He didn’t even know about the other stuff.”

By “other stuff” Jane meant a lot of dope, and many, many lines of coke. Not to mention some LSD. And occasionally sex with various men who were doing those things too. She had “shared” all that recent history at meetings, so that by now she was able to allude to “stuff.” At the meeting she was encouraged to go and have some tests, which she did, and she came out all right, HIV negative, and no other bad signs. Her sponsor urged her to confess everything to Mark, to confront him with it, but Jane was able to argue reasonably, “Look, I’m probably going to dump him—I’m really working on that with my therapist too. I can’t afford to give him any more ammunition. Let him just think of me as a simple alcoholic. His mother was right about what happened if he married an Irish shiksa.”

Those were Jane’s vices, drink and drugs and fairly promiscuous sex, all of which she had now stopped doing. Mark’s vice, or one of them, was gossiping to Jane, things he should not have told her—names, illnesses, everything. This had begun fairly innocently when Jane was one of the nurses who knew those cases too. But he had gone on talking—boasting, sometimes. Thus, Jane knew all about his patient Molly Bonner, the friend of Felicia Flood, whom good old Sandy was in love with, or fucking—however one wanted to put it. So far, Jane had not told her friend Connie of this interesting gossip, and not telling was beginning to make Jane uncomfortable; it seemed a form of deceit. Although Connie pretty much knew about Felicia—good old Raleigh had seen to that.

At the moment, Connie was continuing her doctor theories, a topic she often attacked with gusto, like a long-hungry person at breakfast. “And in a way doctors are our earliest experience of sex,” she went on. “Examining you in all those forbidden places. I remember I had a big childhood crush on Dr. Wainwright,
my pediatrician. He was Jewish, but he’d been at Harvard with my father. No final clubs of course. He was what they horribly called a ‘white Jew.’ Can you imagine?”

“Too easily,” said Jane. “Mark was probably a white Jew too.”

“I should have married a Jewish doctor,” Connie mused. “There was one I really liked. Bob Weinberger. But I wouldn’t have dared. Someone from Cedar Falls, Iowa, was bad enough.”

In Cedar Falls, on their last trip there, as she looked into their room in the Bed and Breakfast that had been enthusiastically chosen by Raleigh’s mother (Belle Sanderson, from Raleigh, North Carolina), what Connie thought was, Damn him, he’s told his mother that we’re in trouble, marriage-wise, and she’s trying to fix things up with this horrible room.

For the room was indeed described as The Anniversary Waltz Suite. A pink-and-white room, with occasional touches of gold. White wicker chairs, settee, lamp stands, and magazine rack (Connie had to guess at some of these functions), and white wicker headboard for the giant-sized bed. Which was overlaid with a rose-and-gold counterpane. And above that fancy headboard, an even fancier arrangement of white net that was coyly held in place by some life-sized or larger plaster doves. (White plaster doves, thought Connie.) The windows were treated with more white net, and white lace, and rose-colored draperies.

In a large alcove, framed by yet more swatches of white lace, again held in place by white plaster doves, an oversized, round bathtub took up all the space. A Jacuzzi, actually; there were directions for controlling its flow. A Jacuzzi for two.

“Holy shit,” was what Raleigh-Sandy said, on viewing this stage set. “Where’s the phone?”

“Over there.” Connie had spotted a white princess (of course a white princess) telephone in a nest of pink roses.

“Do you think it works?”

“I certainly hope so.” For once, on this particular weekend, Connie was as concerned with a functioning phone as Raleigh was; she was expecting news of her (well,
their
) new grandchild. While he only wanted to hear from some nurse, or maybe that fat blonde secretary, Felicia Flood, whom he should be tiring of about now, although he did not seem to do so.

Raleigh strode over and pulled the instrument from its bed of roses, picked up the receiver. “Doesn’t make a fucking sound. Fucking thing’s dead.”

“Maybe that’s why it’s buried in roses.” Connie forced a laugh.

“Very funny. Just because you don’t need the phone—”

“Actually I do. Katie’s very pregnant, remember?”

“As if I could—oh, fuck. I’m going downstairs to check it out.”

He stalked out. She could hear him heavily on the stair, and then his voice, not words by the angry sound. When Raleigh was angriest he spoke most slowly, pretending patience and control. But at any moment he might give in and shout.

In the meantime Connie unpacked for them both.

In addition to the Jacuzzi there was a perfectly straightforward bathroom, Connie noted with relief. A shower (single), a double basin, and toiletry shelves. She was tidily arranging things, his shaving equipment, her pale-green Clinique jars, when Raleigh with all his noise returned.

“You’re not going to believe this, Jesus Christ! She thought we might want a private line—now there’s good thinking—but it can’t be installed until tomorrow. In the meantime, in effect, we have no phone.”

He stared at Connie as though she had had some part in this outrage.

Intending helpfulness, she asked him, “Couldn’t you call in to your office, on her phone?”

“How brilliant of you. Yes, I plan to, in an hour.” He looked
at his watch. “God in heaven. I told her that I’m a doctor, which she must have known—Mom wouldn’t pass up that chance—but I meant that I had to have a phone. But, she told me all about her daughter’s ulcerative colitis! Holy shit! Colitis. No wonder I left home. How does old Durham stand it here, that’s what I want to know.”

It was a trip that began by being bad, and got worse. The men who came from the phone company to connect the phone were unable to do so. When Connie at last reached Katie, their daughter, from the manager’s phone, Katie said that her doctor had said it might be another week. Raleigh fumed, and went out to make phone calls. And it rained, a mean bleak cold rain, with angry spurts of wind—as Connie trudged along unfamiliar streets, in search of the local AA meeting.

She was thinking bitterly of the romantic echoes set off in her silly young mind by the name Cedar Falls when Raleigh had first pronounced it. She was thinking too, No wonder he’s sometimes mean, his native weather is vicious.

Even from some distance she could see that a large note, a message, was tacked to the church’s downstairs door. And she knew more or less what it would say: No meeting here today. Sorry.

Connie’s soul shrank, like something left out in the rain and cold overnight. She felt herself shrivel as her mind contracted into one single thought: I will have to have a drink. Just one perfect martini—well, maybe a double, in a nice clean sparkling glass. One perfectly chilled double martini, in a dim-lit, warm, and welcoming morning bar (there used to be many such bars in Boston, if you went out to the right neighborhoods; Connie acquired a special wardrobe for those bar days, cheap, friendly, inconspicuous clothes, in which she looked like a nice old middle-class drunk, who was running to fat). She could see herself now in such a place, rescued from the awful cold and rain, shrugging off her Burberry, and taking that magic first sip.

She headed fast from the church over to the tacky, two-story main street, where she passed no bars, nor for that matter any bookstores—none at all. She walked and walked and walked, until suddenly before her was the B and B where they were staying, and then, cold and dazed, she was back in the white dove suite, feeling more defeated than triumphant; after all, she had not exactly decided not to have a drink, she just had not found one, and she was not quite able to believe that any Higher Power had prevented her from coming upon a bar.

Raleigh’s mother was sick that weekend, too sick to see anyone but her son the doctor. “I just feel so terrible, and then there’s all this rain, and you all came all the way out here to see me,” said Belle (Bates) Sanderson, formerly of Raleigh, North Carolina.

But then the next day the skies all cleared, and the sun shone, brilliant if not warm, and Connie walked, and walked, and walked all over the semi-familiar ugly little town. Its shabby, general charmlessness was occasionally broken by a graceful, broad-porched Victorian, with spreading roofs and low-branched leafy trees. The people that Connie passed, those also out walking, seemed fatter and unhappier than most people—than people in California, certainly. She felt a wave of compassion, then, for poor Raleigh, growing up in this stunted town. No wonder he was dazzled by Boston, even by her.

“I think Raleigh and I were exotic to each other,” Connie told Jane Stinger, continuing her theme. “It’s funny, but we were. I was actually the most boring, conventional Boston girl you could imagine, but he’d never met one before. And all that stuff that bored me silly, the deb things, the teas and dances and breakfast parties, turned him on. I think he thought the Ritz Bar was really glamorous, and the Napoleon Club, and Lafayette—all those tired old places. And he certainly turned me on, he was really sexy, and not afraid of girls like those ultra-nice Boston
boys from St. Paul’s or St. Mark’s. Maybe all Midwestern high school boys are like that, but I didn’t know any.”