The Centaur (16 page)

There were two strange facts about Doc Appleton: he was a twin, and like me he had psoriasis. His twin was Hester Appleton, who taught Latin and French at the high school. She was a shy thick-waisted spinster, smaller than her brother and gray-haired whereas he was bald. But their brief hook noses were identical and the resemblance was plain. The idea, when I was a child, of these two stately elderly people having popped together from the same mother had an inexhaustible improbability that made them both seem still, in part, infants. Hester lived with the doctor in this house. He had married but his wife had died or disappeared years ago under dark circumstances. He had had a son, Skippy, years older than I but like me an only child; my father had had him in school and the boy had gone on to become a surgeon somewhere in the Midwest, in Chicago, St. Louis, or Omaha. Across the mysterious fate of Skippy’s mother there lay this further shadow: Doc Appleton belonged to no church, neither Reformed nor Lutheran, and believed, they said, in nothing. This third strange
fact I had picked out of the air. The second, his psoriasis, my mother had revealed to me; until I was born only he and she in the town had been blighted by it. It had kept him, my mother said, from becoming a surgeon, for when the time came for him to roll up his sleeves, the pink scabs would be revealed and the patient on the table in fright might cry, “Physician, heal thyself!” It was a pity, my mother thought, for in her opinion Doc Appleton’s great talent lay in his hands, was manipulative rather than diagnostic. She often described how he had painted and cured a chronic sore throat of hers with one fierce expert swab of a long cotton-tipped stick. She seemed to have thought, at one time in her life, a lot about Doc Appleton.

Now he stooped toward me in the dimness of his waiting-room, his pale round face straining to focus on my brow. He said, “Your skin looks fair.”

“It’s not too bad yet,” I said. “It’s worst in March and April.”

“Very little on your face,” he said. I had thought there was none. He seized my hands—I felt that fierce sureness of touch my mother had felt—and studied my fingernails in the light filtering from the brighter room. “Yes,” he said. “Stippled. Your chest?”

“Pretty bad,” I said, frightened I would have to show him.

He blinked massively and dropped my hands. He was wearing a vest but not a coat and his shirtsleeves above the elbow were clipped by black elastics like narrow bands of mourning. A gold watch-chain formed a shifting pendulous arc across the brown vest of his belly. He wore a stethoscope around his neck. He switched on a light, and an overhead chandelier of brown and orange glass held together by black leading plunged pools of shine onto the wash of magazines on the central table. “You read, Peter, while I finish with your Dad.”

From the consulting-room my father’s voice earnestly called, “Let the kid come in, Doc. I want him to hear what you have to tell me. Whatever happens to me, happens to him.”

I was shy of entering, for fear of finding my father undressed. But he was fully clothed and sitting on the edge of a small hard chair with stencilled Dutch designs. In this bright room his face looked blanched by shock. His skin looked loose; his little smile had spittle in the corners. “No matter what happens to you in life, kid,” he said to me, “I hope you never come up against the sigmoidoscope.
Brrough!
”

“Tcha,” Doc Appleton grunted, and lowered his weight into his desk chair, a revolving and pivoting one that seemed to have been contoured for him. His short plump arms with their efficient white hands perched familiarly on the accustomed curve of the carved wooden arms, which culminated in an inner scroll. “Your trouble, George,” he said, “is you have never come to terms with your own body.” To be out of their way, I sat on a high white metal stool beside a table of surgical tools.

“You’re right,” my father said. “I hate the damn ugly thing. I don’t know how the hell it got me through fifty years.”

Doc Appleton removed the stethoscope from around his neck and laid it on his desk, where it writhed and then subsided like a slain rubber serpent. His desk was a wide old rolltop full of bills, pill envelopes, prescription pads, cartoons clipped from magazines, empty phials, a brass letter opener, a blue box of loose cotton, and an omega-shaped silver clamp. His sanctum had two parts: this, the one where his desk, his chairs, his table of surgical tools, his scales, his eye-chart, and his potted plants were situated, and, beyond his desk and a partition of frosted glass, the other, the innermost sanctum,
where his medicines were stored on shelves like bottles of wine and jugs of jewels. To here he would retire at the end of a consultation, emerging in time with a little labelled bottle or two, and from here at all times issued a complex medicinal fragrance compounded of candy, menthol, ammonia, and dried herbs. This cloud of healing odor could be sniffed even in the vestibule that contained the mat, the print, and the stucco umbrella stand. The doctor pivoted in his swivel chair and faced us; his bald head was not like Minor Kretz’s, which declared in its glittering knobs the plates and furrows of his skull. Doc Appleton’s was a smooth luminous rise of skin lightly flecked with a few pinker spots that only I, probably, would have noticed and recognized as psoriasis.

He pointed his thumb at my father. “You see, George,” he said, “you believe in the soul. You believe your body is like a horse you get up on and ride for a while and then get off. You ride your body too hard. You show it no love. This is not natural. This builds up nervous tension.”

My stool was uncomfortable and Doc Appleton’s philosophizing always afflicted me with embarrassment. I deduced that the verdict had already been handed down and from the fact that the doctor felt leisure to be boring I deduced that the verdict had been favorable. Still I remained in some suspense and studied the table of wiggly probes and angled scissors as if they were an alphabet in which I could read the word. AI AI, they said. Among these silver exclamations—needles and arrows and polished clamps—there was that strange hammer for tapping your knee to make your leg jerk. It was a heavy triangle of red rubber fixed in a silver handle made concave to improve the doctor’s grip. My very first trips to this office that I could remember centered about that hammer, and the table of instruments took its center from this arrowhead of sullen
orange as if from something very ancient. It was the shape of an arrowhead but also of a fulcrum and as I watched it it seemed to sink, sink with its infinitesimal cracks and roundnesses of use and age, sink down through time and to be at the bottom sufficiently simple and ponderous to make there a pivot for everything.

“… know thyself, George,” Doc Appleton was saying. His pink firm palm, round as a child’s, lifted in admonition. “Now how long have you been teaching?”

“Fourteen years,” my father said. “I was laid off late in ’31 and was out of work the whole year the kid was born. In the summer of ’33, Al Hummel, who as you know is Pop Kramer’s nephew, came up to the house and suggested—”

“Does your father enjoy teaching? Peter.”

It took me a second to realize I had been addressed. “I don’t know,” I said, “at times I suppose.” Then I thought and added, “No, I guess he doesn’t.”

“It’d be O. K.,” my father said, “if I thought I was any good at it. But I don’t have the gift of discipline. My father, the poor devil, didn’t have it either.”

“You’re not a teacher,” Doc Appleton told him. “You’re a learner. This creates tension. Tension creates excess gastric juice. Now George, the symptoms you describe might be merely mucinous colitis. Constant irritation of the digestive track can produce pain and the sensation of anal fullness you describe. Until the X-ray, we’ll assume that’s what it is.”

“I wouldn’t mind plugging ahead at something I wasn’t any good at,” my father said, “if I knew what the hell the point of it all was. I ask, and nobody’ll tell me.”

“What does Zimmerman say?”

“He doesn’t say a thing. He thrives on confusion. Zimmerman has the gift of discipline and us poor devils under him
who don’t have it, he just laughs at us. I can hear him laughing every time the clock ticks.”

“Zimmerman and myself,” Doc Appleton said, and sighed, “have never seen eye to eye. I went to school with him, you know.”

“I didn’t know that.”

My father was lying. Even I had known that, Doc Appleton said it so often. Zimmerman was a chafe to him, a lifelong sore point. I was furious with my father for being so obsequious, for laying us both open this way to a long and often-chewed story.

“Why, yes,” Doc Appleton said, blinking in surprise that my father should be ignorant of such a famous fact. “We went all through the Olinger schools together.” He leaned back in the chair that fitted him so exquisitely. “Now when we were born here it wasn’t called Olinger, it was called Tilden, in honor of the man who got cheated out of the election. Old Pappy Olinger was still farming all that land to the north of the pike and east of where the cardboard box factory is now. I remember seeing him take his team into Alton, a little old fella not five feet tall with a black hat and a mustache you could have wiped your table silver on. He had three sons: Cot, who went crazy one night and killed two steer with a hand hoe, Brian, who had a child by the Negro woman they had to work in the kitchen, and Guy, the youngest, who sold the land to the real estate developers and died of trying to eat the money up. Cot, Brian, and Guy: they’re all beneath the ground now. Now what did I start to say?”

“About you and Mr. Zimmerman,” I said.

My impudent impatience was not lost on him; he looked over my father’s shoulder at me and his lower lip slid thoughtfully to one side and then to the other. “Ah, yes,” he pronounced,
and spoke to my father. “Well, Louis and I went through the grades together when they were scattered all over the borough. First and second grade was over by Pebble Creek where they put the parking lot for the new diner; third and fourth grades were in Mrs. Eberhardt’s barn that she rented the town for a dollar a year; fifth and sixth were in a stone building on what they used to call the Black Acres, because the loam was so deep, over beyond where the race track used to be. Whenever they’d hold a weekday race, on Tuesdays usually, they used to let us out of class because they needed boys to hold and comb the horses. Then for those that kept on past sixth grade, by the time I was the age they had built the high school at the Elm Street corner. Now didn’t that look grand to us then! That’s the building, Peter, where you went to elementary school.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, trying to atone for my rudeness before.

Doc Appleton seemed pleased. He relaxed into his creaking chair so deeply his creased high-top shoes dangled, just touching their toes to the threadbare carpet. “Now Louis M. Zimmerman,” he went on, “was a month older than myself, and a great hand with the girls and the old women. Mrs. Mettzler, that was our teacher in the first and second grade, a woman not an inch under six feet tall and with legs like the siding slats of a tobacco shed, took a shine to Louis, and for that matter so did Miss Leet and Mrs. Mabry that followed her; all his way through school Louis had the best of attention, while of course nobody thought a second thought about an ugly duckling like Harry Appleton. Louis always had that edge. You see: he was quick.”

“You said a mouthful,” my father said. “He’s always a jump ahead of me, I’ll tell you that.”

“He never had, you see,” Doc Appleton continued, making curious ambiguous motions with his plump scrubbed hands, pressing the palms together, lightly chopping the knuckles of one hand with the edge of the other, “the adversity. He always knew success and never developed the character. So he spreads, you see,” and his white fingers crabbed through the air, “like a cancer. He’s not a man to trust, though he gives the Bible lesson every Sunday up at the Reformed.
Tcha
. If he was a tumor, George, I’d take a knife”—he shifted his hand and held up his thumb and it did seem very stiff and sharp—“and cut him out.” And his thumb, sickle-shaped backwards with pressure, scooped a curt divot out of the air.

“I appreciate your being frank with me, Doc,” my father said, “but me and those other poor devils up at the high school are stuck with him forever as far as I can see. Three out of four people in this town swear by him—they worship that man.”

“People are foolish,” Doc Appleton said, and lurched forward in his chair so that his feet softly plopped on the carpet. “That’s one thing you learn in the practice of medicine. People are by and large very foolish.” He tapped my father’s knee once, twice, three times before continuing. His voice assumed a confidential wheeze. “Now when I went to medical school down at Penn,” he said, “they thought, you know, a country boy, dumb. After that first year they weren’t saying so dumb any more. It might be I was a little slower than some but I had the character. I took my time and learned the books. When the class graduated, who do you think was at the head? Heh, Peter—you’re a bright boy. Who do you think?”

“You,” I said. I didn’t want to say it but the word was forced from me. That’s how those Olinger bigwigs were.

Doc Appleton looked at me without nodding or smiling or in any way showing that he had heard. Then he looked into
my father’s face, nodded, and said, “I wasn’t at the head, but I was up there pretty well. I did all right for a country boy supposed to be dumb. George, have you been listening to what I’ve been saying?” And without warning, in that strange way monologuists have of ending a conversation as if
their
time has been wasted, he got up and went into his inner sanctum and made tinkling noises out of sight. He returned with a small bottle of cherry-colored fluid that from the way it danced and gleamed seemed more mercurial than liquid. He pressed the bottle into my father’s wart-freckled hand and said, “A tablespoon every three hours. Until we have the X-rays we won’t know any more than we know now. Get rest and don’t think. Without death, now, there couldn’t be life. Health,” he said with a little smiling roll of his lower lip, “is an animal condition. Now most of our ill-health comes from two places—the brain and the back. We made two mistakes; one was to stand up and the other was to start thinking. It strains the spine and the nerves. It makes tension and the brain makes the body.” He angrily strode toward me and roughly pressed my hair back from my forehead and stared intensely at my brow. “You’re not as bad on your scalp as your mother,” he said, and released me. I flattened my hair forward again, humiliated and dazed.