The Children's Crusade (33 page)

She had worn a simple navy silk blouse and matching slacks, and she felt good about her choice, which blended well with what the
other women in the room were wearing.

But there weren’t many of them. Nor men—just five or six other couples in all. Bill felt awkward and murmured to Robert as they were offered drinks that they’d stay thirty or forty minutes and head home. Then Harold Lawson came over with a great, wide smile, and Bill felt a pang over not having seen his old friend in so long. The truth was, people didn’t have parties the way they used to. Bill and Penny had abandoned their annual party a few years earlier.

Bill occasionally saw Harold at medical staff meetings, but somehow seeing him out of the work context enabled or forced him to see how much Harold had aged. He was significantly Bill’s senior and must be approaching seventy. Mrs. Grant, his mother-in-law, appeared to be in her nineties.

Mary Lawson steered Penny to an empty spot on a sofa, and as Penny settled back she let herself study Phyllis Grant. Tiny and extravagantly wrinkled, she wore an expression of dazed curiosity that it took Penny several moments to chalk up to a long-ago face-lift. She was seated in a high-backed chair on the far side of the room, dressed in a pink tracksuit and bright white Keds.

“Wouldn’t consider another outfit,” Mary said, pushing a dish of cashews closer to Penny. Mary was tiny but smooth-skinned, with the neck of a woman in her thirties. “Do you still have your mother?”

“She passed a couple years ago,” Penny said, then immediately wished she could take it back and say “died” rather than “passed.” She didn’t want to be someone who would say “passed.” That was someone who’d say “down there” rather than “vagina,” and no artist influenced by Judy Chicago should do that.

Another woman, seated next to Penny, began to talk about her mother, and Penny let her mind drift to the question of what kind of opening statement she should make to Mrs. Grant. She would
have to circle the group to get to her, and as she was working out her route, Harold Lawson came over.

“You must be so proud of Robert,” he said, lowering himself onto the arm of the sofa. “And how nice that he’s back in California. But I hear you’re down to one child at home now. What are you doing with yourself?”

“Oh, I was never one of those women.”

Harold’s eyes widened slightly, and he ran his hand over the smooth dome of his head.

“I mean,” she went on, “it was never all I did. Your mother-in-law is looking well.”

“Isn’t she?”

They sat in silence. The conversational possibilities seemed to have been exhausted, but apparently Harold was too polite to leave. At last Penny mumbled something and got to her feet. Someone had just vacated a white silk ottoman next to Mrs. Grant’s chair, and Penny made a beeline for it. Once she was settled she smiled and introduced herself, and Mrs. Grant smiled and said nothing.

“My husband,” Penny said, “is a pediatrician. That’s him over there, see? Standing with our son. We met Harold and Mary when we first moved here from the city in 1964.”

Mrs. Grant continued to smile.

“Your granddaughter is older than our children. Mary says she just got engaged?”

Nothing from Mrs. Grant, so Penny explained that Robert was in his first year of medical school, and then moved on to Rebecca and Ryan. “And our youngest,” she said, “is in high school. I was just telling Harold, I have all this time on my hands these days.”

Still Mrs. Grant said nothing, and Penny began to think she must be deaf. “I love this room,” she added, louder.

Now Mrs. Grant leaned forward. She patted Penny’s knee and
said, “You’re a good girl.”

“I’m sorry?”

“No, I’m sorry. I never should have told him. I’m truly sorry, dear.”

Penny felt someone’s eyes on her and looked up. Mary was mouthing something and shaking her head.

Penny turned her palms upward and shrugged slightly.

Not all there,
Mary mouthed, pointing at her head.

Penny hesitated and then rose and crossed the room again.

“She’s gone,” Mary said. “Did she say she was sorry? She thinks all women are me and all men are my father, who by the way died during the Ford administration. For the last two years she’s been apologizing for something that happened in 1953.”

“Oh, dear,” Penny said. “I was going on and on.”

“Sorry, she’s purely ornamental at this point.”

“I was going to ask her,” Penny said, and then she paused. “I was going to ask her if she might want to take a look at a piece of mine.”

“Oh,” Mary said. And then, with an entirely different and comprehending tone, “Ohhh.”

Penny looked around the room and wondered what she should say next. She caught Bill’s eye and watched unhappily as he whispered something to Robert and the two of them headed over. She could tell they were ready to leave.

“Really?” she said. “But I’m so enjoying myself.” She cast a desperate glance at Mary, who seemed to be eyeing another conversation.

“Well,” Bill said, “we have two cars. I’ll catch a ride with Robert and you can come when you’re ready.”

And so Robert and Bill left by themselves, Robert wondering a little at his father leaving his mother when she obviously wanted him to stay. His car was a limping old Nissan he’d bought from a
guy heading for a residency in New York, and he apologized to Bill about the stale-air-freshener smell and greasy seat belts. Julie Anne had always said he cared more about neatness than cleanliness, and now that he was truly living alone for the first time in his life, he had to acknowledge that this was true.

He cleared his throat, ready to tell his father what was on his mind. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he wanted to and substituted that old standby, his long-term career goals. “I definitely want to do primary care,” he said, “but children or adults? Pediatrics or internal medicine? I really can’t decide. I feel like I’d probably be okay at either.”

He waited for his father to say, as he generally did, that Robert would be
good
at either, good at anything, but Bill shifted in his seat and looked at him.

“Which would you enjoy?”

The question took Robert by surprise, and he was embarrassed that he’d never wondered. Which would he enjoy? He had no idea. “How do you know?”

Bill smiled. “I guess you don’t, son. The whole thing is a leap, isn’t it? Thinking you’ll be able to do it at all? I remember my grandfather’s waiting room, I’d sometimes be there when I was quite young, left to sit with the folks waiting for him. This was 1932, 1933—before I started school.”

“What do you mean ‘left’? By whom?”

“My mother. She suffered from headaches—migraines, I suppose, though she just called them headaches, or ‘sick headaches’ more often. On her bad days we would go to his office and he’d give her ergotamine and put her in a dark room for an hour. I’d sit and wait for her. He came into the waiting room to greet each patient, so I’d see him every fifteen or twenty minutes. He was always a very powerful figure to me, but I don’t think it was because he was my grandfather—it was because of how the people in that room viewed
him.”

“With awe?”

“With hope. With need.”

Robert considered. He knew all too well what his father meant about the difficulty of believing he’d be able to do it at all. His hands on another person’s body. That was the problem. How did you acquire the skill? The nerve? That he’d finally become intimate with a woman made it all the more difficult to imagine. Hands meeting skin: the purpose was pleasure.

He looked at his father. “You always say children deserve care,” he said. “Like pediatrics would be more noble.”

“It may be less noble,” Bill said. “It may be cowardly. Children get better. I’m shielded from a lot of pain.”

“A guy I know was talking about that. Saying you can’t make it in medicine if you feel too much.”

“Hmm,” Bill said.

“What?”

“I’d say the opposite is true. You can’t make it if you feel too little.”

“But you’re always talking about your colleagues who could as easily be diagnosing and fixing machines as humans.”

“I am?”

Robert knew his father liked to think of himself as generous-minded, and evidence to the contrary sometimes disturbed him. Robert could recall few instances of his father being truly upset, and they all revolved around unkind statements he’d made and then regretted. Once, when Robert was home from Michigan on a break, his father came in from work in an uncharacteristically tense mood and brooded for a few hours until, sitting down with Robert while the other kids did their homework, he confessed that he’d spoken harshly to a medical student who was rotating at his office. The student, whose role was to watch and learn, had not only interrupted
a mother describing her child’s illness, he’d been dismissive—rude, in Bill’s view. Bill told Robert about this without preamble, without the headline that he viewed himself as the party at fault. He simply narrated it, step by step—“and then I said,” “and then the mother said,” “and then the student said”—and as Robert listened, he thought the whole point was to caution him against crossing any lines during medical training. It was only when Bill arrived at the end of the story and explained that he’d scolded the young man after the visit that Robert realized the upset coming from his father had been generated not by anger but by remorse.

“I just mean,” Robert said, “it seems like there are plenty of successful doctors who don’t—who aren’t emotionally invested.”

Bill was silent for a moment. “I guess we’d have to back up and define successful,” he said at last.

They’d arrived at a row of businesses that included a gas station, and Robert pulled in and stopped at the first pump, then thought of his father’s long-ago instruction always to pull forward in case someone came in behind you and advanced a few yards. While the gas pumped he washed the windshield and then the windows, taking time to rub clean each of the side mirrors. His father looked very serious. He’d been the only man wearing a necktie at the party, and Robert wondered at the conservatism that seemed to define him. Not political—it was a moral conservatism, a personal conservatism. In many ways he stood with his heels dug into the hard ground of an earlier time. This was something Robert thought he might discuss with Rebecca someday when they were both home. Which would happen soon, for Ryan’s birthday.

He got back in the car and they rode along in silence. On Robert’s mind was a pain he’d developed in his groin, most likely a strained muscle (this was all but certain), but just when he thought it was gone it would come back, nagging at him with its diffuseness,
its resistance to description. Was it throbbing? Stabbing? Piercing? Shooting? Cramping? Gnawing? At different times each of these words was right. It was nothing, he was sure. But—but!—groin pain was on the differential for testicular cancer. He was absolutely, completely positive he didn’t have testicular cancer—he had medical student’s disease, it was so obvious, defined as unwarranted anxiety about one’s own health—but there was a small voice that every now and then spoke up and said,
Boy, will you feel terrible if you do have testicular cancer and could have discovered it early.

He also was experiencing a persistent cough that was a nuisance, nothing more, but he had to acknowledge that a persistent cough could be a symptom of something very serious.

On the other hand, there was no way he had two terrible diseases, which somehow reduced the likelihood that he had one.

Soon they were home and he hadn’t said a thing about his health.

James lay on the couch watching TV. “Robbo,” he said, barely looking up. “What’s the matter, no lives to save?”

“Fuck you, too,” Robert said, but low enough so that their father couldn’t hear him.

“Mom?”

“Still at the party.”

A throw pillow lay next to James, and without looking at Robert he tossed it aside, making space. Robert looked into the kitchen, saw his father at the table reading, and joined James.

“Good weekend?”

“Very funny.”

Robert took a closer look at his brother. His hair lay helter-skelter on his scalp, unwashed, uncombed. He looked as if he hadn’t been out all day.

“What happened?”

“Nice try.”

“James, whatever it was, I didn’t get the report.”

“A kid at a party passed out and Dad took him to the hospital.”

Slowly, the story came out. It made sense to Robert that James had turned to Rebecca, since she was close by while Robert was nearly an hour away, especially when you considered how hard parking was in his Inner Sunset neighborhood and how often he had to leave his car blocks away from his apartment. Still, he didn’t like the idea of Rebecca getting to help, especially with something medical.

Their father came out of the kitchen. “I think,” he said, “that I might go to bed.”

Robert glanced at his watch. It wasn’t even eight o’clock.

“I had a late night Friday night. I’m more tired today than yesterday—like a toddler.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, children tend to show the effects of a late night a day or two afterward.” He raised a hand in farewell and headed for his room, leaving James and Robert looking after him.

“It’s not my fault he’s tired,” James muttered. “It was his choice.”

“You’re so self-centered,” Robert said, though he was thinking his father’s early bedtime meant there’d be no discussion tonight about his worries.

James headed for the bedroom hallway. Robert tried to make sense of James’s TV show for maybe thirty seconds, then turned it off. He’d last talked to Julie Anne Wednesday evening, a phone call that hadn’t gone well. It had been close to midnight in Ann Arbor, and she’d been asleep. She said, “It’s okay, I had to get up to answer the phone,” but without a trace of humor.

He headed for his father’s room. Bill’s legs were under the covers, but he was sitting up holding a magazine, though the magazine, Robert noticed, was closed. “Son,” Bill said. “I’m sorry to be such
an old man.”

“Hey, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“What?”

“Geriatrics.”

“Come have a seat. Now that I’m actually here, I’m not quite so sleepy.”