Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (5 page)

 

He stopped reading, astonished. She imagined that he was like her?

So here's your big chance, honey-bunny Luftmensch! And you can be with that other high-flier, sister Amelia, and that cute Amy. Over the course of the year and 13 days you'll be hearing from me from time to time by a secret method.

Love your mother

P.S. The enclosed document is your birth certificate, your real one. You were not born on July 24, 1944, but on August 6. The night of August 5 I had a bad dream about a big black dog and a Nazi. I got your dad to bribe the Air Force Registrar at Fort Bragg in North Carolina (the home of Wilbur and Orville's first flight!) and we had your birth certificate changed by a flyboy who was a forger named Arizona Lanquardo. And a year later on your real birthday wouldn't you know it but they dropped the Atom Bomb? You won't forgive me but your father and I and the Registrar and Arizona are the only ones who know and now we're all dead. That's why Sol and I might have acted just that little bit strange both on July 24 and on August 6 both. Is Leo better than Cancer? Do you believe in horoscopes and the astrology craze? Is it our stars or ourselves? The good news is that you're younger than you think—13 days younger in fact. Until I write again I remain, doll, with love,
Me!

 

Orville stared at the treetops, at the stars, mouth open in disbelief. Suddenly he had a palpable sense that she was there, behind him, hovering like a hummingbird in the dark thick air just off the roof. He turned quickly, as in that child's game of red light where you try to creep up behind someone and tag them. For the briefest instant he could have sworn he caught a glimpse of her, flapping her arms in that cobalt-blue satin ball gown, flying away over the green copper dome of the courthouse toward St. Mary's, a vision straight out of Chagall, or Marquez.

Terrific, he thought, you're seeing your dead mother flying around the treetops. And she's planning to write again? Who's got the letters and who's mailing them? Penny?

Rising, seeing again as if it was only yesterday—and it was only yesterday!—the red rowboat and the walk around the island with his beloved Celestina, he faced the dome of the courthouse and said, “No way, Mom. I'm gone.”

· 4 ·

W. STARBUCK, M.D.
OFFICE HOURS
9–10, 1–3,
P.M.
WED., 9–10

Orville stared at the sign in the window of Bill Starbuck's office in the small brick house at Fifth and Washington. It was the same sign that had been there ever since Orville could recall reading it, except that the 7–8 night slot had been crossed out. Bill had cut back.

It was the next afternoon. Penny was still dead set against him seeing Amy. Upping the ante, Orville had told her he'd made a reservation to fly to Italy the day after tomorrow. Maybe, he thought, knowing how important he and Amy were to each other, Penny would soften and change her mind.

Every time he came back to Columbia, Orville visited Bill. Now he opened the door, turned right into the waiting room, and was met with the familiar scent of sweat, tobacco, cheap perfume, ether, and pain. The small room was packed, the furniture insufficient, so that those who could stood against the walls. Children wailed, a demented man chattered about the FBI, old people creaked and sighed and groaned, and a slender man in a stunning Canali suit who, Orville figured, could only have been a New Yorker, stood reading
The New Yorker.

Bill had never had a receptionist or nurse. You arrived, sat, stared at the stained-glass door marked
IN
, and, despite your worry and pain, tried to focus on keeping track of your turn. Orville stood near the door, trying to avoid making diagnoses on the others, staring at the
YES SMOKING
sign.

The
IN
door opened. There was Bill, ready for the next patient. Orville's image of him, as always, was of a benevolent Humpty Dumpty.

“Orvy?” Bill broke into a shy smile. “Well, well, well.”

“Hi, Bill. I can wait my turn.”

“Folks, you all remember
Doctor
Orville Rose? I'm sure you wouldn't mind if he came in for a few minutes?”

In the instant of that first glance, both doctors did the dance of diagnosis on each other, scanning the body for new decay or disease.

Orville was startled to find signs of Bill being a lot further down the road than two years before. A short, oval-shaped man whose crisp white shirt and clasped tie billowed over his plump tummy, his rumpled dark slacks slumped over his only fashion statement, pointy Italian shoes. On his bald head and round face, which sat on his collared neck like an egg in a cup, were dark senile keratoses and other plants in the skin-garden of aging. A recently burned-off basal cell carcinoma glowed on his sharp nose. The lenses of his glasses had thickened several diopters—question, cataracts?—magnifying his eyes so that they seemed to be peering up out of deep water, big and roaming, the eyes, Orville was surprised to think, of what else but a whale. Bill's girlish lips were now tinged with blue, a trace of cyanosis, a sign of the lessened ejection fraction of Bill's heart. The only exercise this body had known was poker. And once, Orville recalled, at Penny's wedding at the Elks Club, this body had swirled his wife, Babette, around the floor with surprising lightness, gliding, smiling, an Arthur Murray athlete. The two hearing aids were new. Orville felt in Bill's handshake the old firmness and yet a new fragility, the bones afloat in the puffy skin.

Ushering Orville in, Bill's hand was on his shoulder. As always. Bill was a toucher, a great toucher. You might forget what he told you was wrong with you or what he was going to do about it, but you remembered that touch. Hours later the place he'd touched still felt special. Warm in winter, cool in summer.

“Good t'see you, son,” Bill said, settling in behind the big cluttered desk and another
YES SMOKING
sign. His words came out in a calm, deliberate way, with significant torsion of his lips, as if each word was being molded as delicately as an egg and required care to survive. His greeting blew the scent of fresh scallions at Orville. Bill's other addiction, besides nicotine, was fresh scallions. When in season, his rural patients kept him supplied. Bill “the Scallion” Starbuck. Bill shook a Camel free and lit up, blowing out two dragons of smoke in that relieved way that always reminded Orville of Bill delivering Amy by an emergency C-section.

Ten years ago, the summer that Sol died, Selma was holed up in her bedroom, weeping and growling, over and over, “How could he do this to me?” Penny, too, was in rough shape. Orville, an internist in New Jersey, heard that Penny was in labor and came back. To Orville, the labor seemed to be going along easily, more quickly than you'd expect for a nulliparous woman.

But all of a sudden Bill said to Orville, “Somethin's wrong. I'm goin' in.” Milt, terrified, lost his spine and went catatonic, unable to talk or move. When Amy was delivered, Milt was in the men's room vomiting. Bill, clad all in surgical green, handed the baby to Orville. “Gotta go back in,” Bill said. “Total hysterectomy.”

That moment, that first real moment in Amy's life, was with Orville. In his arms, she
looked
at him. Her face all wrinkled and red like a little old lady in no apparent distress, the baby kept right on looking into his eyes. Quietly, merely, looked. And he looked back. His heart twisted on its spindle like a ripe fruit on a tree of ribs, and he fell in love. He would never forget the feel of that eye contact. It was the beginning of their special bond. “I was imprinted on you, Uncle O.,” Amy would say, as she grew up with the story, “like a duckling on a duck.”

She was the only family member he loved absolutely. After Bill had finished the hysterectomy, he came out bloodied as a butcher and motioned Orville to walk him out into the hospital parking lot. There, Bill snapped out a Camel and lit up, blowing those two spirals of dragon fire out through his nostrils, relieved.

“Paper-thin,” Bill had said, holding up two fingers close together. “The wall of that uterus was paper-thin. Never saw a thinner, more porous uterus. On the edge of rupturin'. Don't know how that baby ever made it to term in that paper bag of a womb. Reckon it's a miracle.”

“How'd you know to go in?”

“Didn't. I got lucky. That's the damn thing about doctorin'—you're always making one hundred percent of the decision on fifty percent of the data.”

From then on Orville and Bill called Amy “the Miracle.” Every time Bill lit up and sighed with relief reminded Orville of it, and her.

Now, sitting in the patient's chair, Orville looked around the oak-paneled room, once the living room of the small house. From the time he was in high school, Orville had hung around with Bill, spending a lot of time in this office with him, learning what a small-town doctor did. Now it seemed so familiar, so well-worn, so much his real—the word came to him untarnished—home.

Over the fireplace was the fourteen-point buck, tilted a little, and on the wall was the photo of the man in the cowboy hat and scowl, his handlebar moustache drooping down, his arms crossed over his chest, and a revolver clasped in one hand, pointing up past his ear.
Josiah Macy, Columbian Doctor, 1834–1861.

“Died in a gunfight,” Bill always said with a measure of pride, “shot by a husband catchin' him in bed with his wife on a house call, heh heh.”

In the corner was the massive old safe like you see in the saloon in a Western, and behind the curtain of the examining room Orville glimpsed the metal stirrups of the examining table. All of this—the fourteen-point buck, the lascivious gunslinger, the saloon safe, the stirrups—made it seem that you were getting doctored in a frontier town of the Wild West. Behind Bill, reaching to the high, stamped-tin ceiling, was the glassed-in medicine cabinet that seemed to hold everything, from musty old textbooks to bottles of medicine to boxes with red crosses now gone pink from the sunlight to chrome instruments that may have been put down five minutes ago, or five years.

“Sorry about your mother, Orvy,” Bill was saying, shaping his words slowly. “Massive MI. Went quick. I know you didn't have the . . . the perfect relationship with her, and that can make it all harder now. I'm sorry. Real sorry, son.”

Sensing Bill's caring, Orville felt sadness rise in his throat, gritty, tingling his lip, his nostrils, presaging real tears. As he fought them down, he sensed how his whole life had been caringly held by this kind, maybe wise old man. He remembered himself as a sick child, body burning with fever, thrashing around unable to breathe, and hallucinating in the middle of the interminable night in his parents' bed wondering if the terror of breathlessness would ever end, and dimly sensing the arrival of Dr. Bill in a cloud of scallions and tobacco and feeling the cooling stethoscope like a friendly flat hand on a riled burning chest and then turned facedown, butt up, holding someone's—Sol's?—hand for the shot, the strange bite of the needle not hurting as much as you feared but just when you thought it was over the searing rush that seemed to last and last, like your butt was a hot skillet, and you tried to fight away the hand doing it to you and then it was over and the pain was being massaged to a dull ache by Bill and it was soporific and you eased down into the featherdown of sleep. And as a teenager embarked on a course of rank failure—his grades mediocre, too short and chubby and slow to make sports teams and too pimply and shy to get a girl—when he refused to talk with Selma or Sol or Penny about anything close to his heart, he was sent to Bill for advice.

Bill never gave any advice. He sat and smoked and told stories of the fourteen-point buck and the gunslinging doctor and the stirrups and what was in the safe. The summer after a desolate sophomore year when Orville was bored half out of his mind and depressed out of the other half, Bill began to take him around with him, let him help out in the office, go on house calls out in the county, learn about medicine. What a time that had been. Deliveries, deaths, and everything in between. The shy boy opened up to the kindly man.

Orville had been enthralled by the realness
of doctoring, the intense contact with people at the crucial times of their lives that often helped them heal. Coming out of a family where nothing much ever seemed to take place between the sighing and the silence, it was incredible for the boy to see that things actually happened in life, actually got done.

Now, staring across the desk at the old doctor, Orville realized that for Bill, too, given his suffering with his handicapped only child who had died young, their friendship had been not only an opening, but a rejuvenation. Bill got in the habit of calling Orville when there was a particularly interesting house call or emergency. Some of it was rough for a boy—the accidents, the sights on the pathology slab of severed legs or hands or breasts or eviscerated viscera. The morgue itself was off-limits.

Have I ever felt more at peace, Orville wondered, than in the dawn light alongside Bill in his black Caddy on the drive home from delivering twins somewhere out in a godforsaken shack in the middle of nowhere? This man had grown him up. After that first summer with Bill, Orville began his junior year at Columbia High wanting to understand biology and science and math—and people. Even though he didn't make the basketball team, he managed the team—kind of doctored the team, really. And with the status (even if second-rate) of being the manager of the Fish Hawk hoopsters, he got the girls. But his grades only got him into his safety school, Syracuse, where, away from Bill, he plunged into pot and lethargy and watched the '60s protests from the sidelines. He managed to graduate but was rejected by every American medical school. It was Bill, through an old doctor friend in Ireland, who got him admitted to medical school at the working-class, Catholic, University College Dublin. There he bloomed. He did well in down-to-earth medicine and met and fell in love with Lily Wolf, an English major from
NYU
on an exchange program at the snooty, Anglican, Trinity College. They married, he interned back in New Jersey, set up a general practice, tripped over the hamster egg and watched the marriage detonate, and ran like hell around the world.

All in an instant.

From behind his desk Bill was smiling at him serenely, on a nicotine high.

“I'm leaving the day after tomorrow,” Orville said. “Going back to Italy.”

“Italy? Jeez!”

Orville told him about Celestina Polo. Bill smiled in delight. “I know there's this rumor going around, about my staying, joining up with you in your practice, and I'd love to, Bill, but it isn't true.”

“You'd be crazy to stay here. I always told Babette the same thing—‘I'm leavin' the day after tomorrow.' Now I'm finishin' up fifty-four years. Heh heh. Came here in '29. Bad year. Babette wants me to retire down to Boca Raton, but what the hell's a fella like me gonna do in Boca Raton? Golf? Surf? Shop? Son, get out while y'can.” He stubbed out his butt. “Stuff that walks in here? Today I saw a girl—one of the Rope Alley half-wits? She's been tryin' to get pregnant, and last week on ultrasound we see somethin' in her uterus. So today she comes in and says to me, ‘I told Spike I had somethin' in my uterus and he goes, Great, must be my Yankees cap. Been lookin' for that sucker for weeks!'” They laughed together.