The Communist's Daughter (26 page)

I will admit to being a bit of a dandy in those days. You would probably laugh if you could see how I went about town wearing a wing collar, black tie, gloves and homburg, smoking a Dunhill pipe with an aristocratic French-turned bowl and carrying in my right hand a silver-tipped cane. I must have looked ridiculous, though it was all in keeping with the finer tastes and fashions of the day. I recall with some amusement now that I was asked to attend a number of dinners and parties at the great houses of many famous people, to whom I was introduced as one of London's most promising medical men. Some of these individuals were recognized as pioneers in their chosen fields—whether fellow physicians, business tycoons or professors—while others were famous only for the company they kept. I was not easily swayed or impressed by these social functions, though they were, as I say, an entertaining and pleasant diversion from the demands of establishing one's practice. In October 1923 I became the house surgeon at Great Ormond Street and gave myself over completely to my duties at the hospital. I withdrew almost entirely from the exciting if shallow demands of “society.” Of course, Frances and I were in greater demand as a result of my heightened prospects, but I was happily consumed by my work at the hospital and Frances herself had little time for socializing.

We were a pair to behold in those days. We shared our money with the old antique dealers of Portobello, the young painters of Soho and whoever else sparked our appetites, from the bohemians of Marble Arch and Brick Lane to the fine restaurateurs of Covent Garden and Piccadilly. In the hospital at Great Ormond Street I didn't think much about Frances, but once returned to our parallel world, I shared with her a grand opulence in our decision to marry, and then with the men who drove our horse cabs through Paris and Rome on our honeymoon we continued to share what money we carried, and with the waiters and barmen in Vienna, too. We shared first-class cabins with American tourists and stopped with them in somnolent French villages and at the boisterous Italian seasides. We amused ourselves with these travelling strangers until it was time to resume our own journey, always with names and addresses scribbled into dime-store novels and on train-ticket envelopes. This wealth and freedom provided us with a world of friends that soon, as in all romantic comedies they must, trickled to nothing when shortly after our return, our inheritance and optimism fell flat. Once the old man's money was used up we waited in London for a change for the better. Surely it would come.

We sojourned on Sunday mornings and drank champagne, trying in vain to recapture that sense of effortless motion, and the following year we made the decision so many were making then. North America was heaped before us like an unclaimed ante, and we would avail ourselves of it.

On the ship over, we took a modest cabin. We were a handsome couple, still finely dressed in cashmere and silk, now relegated to steerage. Much of the crossing we spent reading and playing cards. I might have written a poem or two. In the windowless cafeteria that served our class, we supped on bread and lentils, watched the old men at their dominoes, and waited.

The winter snows were heavy on the ground when we made port at Montreal, From there we journeyed to the small town of Stratford, Ontario, a sad forgery of the inspired original, where my sister had lived since marrying. We did not linger there. After a dreary car ride into Quebec scuppered the idea of settling in that small European outpost, we felt stranded in a wilderness bigger than France itself, and it became clear that the marriage would not last in this Precambrian waste.

We drove southwest and crossed the border into Michigan. We found an apartment at 411 Seldon Street, near the ravenous centre of Detroit. There, where I believed I would earn my fortune, I gained my first true understanding of the underclass—Southern Negroes, Hungarians, Italians, Yugoslavs, Poles, Russians, migrant workers from Mexico, all second-class citizens lured there by the promise of opportunity, as I had been, so few of whom would ever rise out of their impoverished and diseased neighbourhoods. What did I do? Still bewitched by the dream, I opened my practice to the richest of that city, determined to make my name and become rich myself. But it was to the needs of the poor that my heart began to be pulled.

On the fringes of this wealthy city lived people whose only means of survival was luck, guile, criminality or some combination of the three. Detroit soon seemed to me a Petri dish for the doomed experiment of Capitalism. I remember well the night I spent at the railyard, working to save a Mexican labourer's baby. The families gathered outside the boxcar in the dark waiting for word about the mother and her newborn. The small fires they'd built along the edge of the tracks glowed and flickered. The men slowly passed a bottle among themselves. I told the husband to close the boxcar door, and then he knelt again beside his wife and began muttering his prayers. I knew this man, who cleaned the office building across from the Seldon Street apartment. The baby was in the breech position. When I delicately attempted to turn the baby around, the mother fainted from the pain. Her husband kept praying.
“Dios,”
he said again and again. Perhaps he was praying for the American Dream to shine down on his family and rescue their child, or maybe for enough money so his wife could deliver his child in a regular hospital, like the white people whose offices he cleaned. Filled with sleeping bags, utensils, paper bags and backpacks, the boxcar was home to the families waiting outside in the switching yard. He spoke some English, and I told him, “Do not watch this.” I removed a blade from my bag. “Do not watch this.” I cut the woman's abdomen, down through the skin and fat and muscle and into the membrane of the uterus, then scooped their baby boy out of his mother's suffocating womb like a blind blue fawn.

*

Today is my birthday. March 4. Somehow Ho found out about it and attempted to make something special. Well, his resources are limited, as you know. At the evening meal he produced a rice cake with a small candle stuck into it. He sprinkled a half-spoonful of sugar over it and presented me with it while Mr. Tung and a number of others gathered round and attempted an uneven if not unrecognizable rendition of “Happy Birthday.” It was the best present I could have asked for. After a bit of light-hearted banter we got back to work.

Now I am alone, thinking through the day. It's past midnight.

I have been thinking about how there's a point in your life when a birthday becomes a sad marker of time passed rather than a pleasant survey of times to come. Do you know what I mean? We get closer to death with each passing year, and it affects people. But not me. I'm glad Ho found that silly candle and helped celebrate the day. I suppose I'm still amazed by the rapturous wonder of being alive. I hope you will understand the gift that being alive is, even in the hardest times.

There are so many moments in your life I have missed already. Your first tooth. Your first step. I never even got to hold you. But I'm thinking about that now, and I want you to know that I understand what I have missed in your life, and in mine. This is something I regret very deeply. I have delivered a number of babies in my day and birth has always seemed a miracle beyond any sane man's comprehension, but I don't think I ever truly understood the pure ecstatic wonder of birth simply because those beautiful babies I helped into the world were not mine.

Now I close my eyes and think of you running through swells of field grass whooping and hollering with all the power of your young lungs, muscular and celestial. Though you are yet an infant, as I write this I see you moving through the fields—an image that gives me great joy. And tonight I will sleep with you in my arms.

*

We were quarrelling over money. How clearly I recall it! We quarrelled over every aspect of our life together, over the tilt of my hat and the shine on my shoes. Something had to give, I suppose. Now, in retrospect, I'm glad it did. Frances went off to Nova Scotia to visit a girlfriend from Scotland, and from there she journeyed to California to conspire with her brother, or so I thought, in the land of sunshine and freedom.

How I envied her! It was an extended holiday away from her husband, and from grim, desolate Detroit. While she was away I wrote artful letters of contrition, blame, compromise and reconciliation. I wrote what I thought love was, what it was that bound us together. I sent only the graceful ones. I have no doubt she was sincere in her original premise—simply some time away, nothing more. What spouse doesn't dream of such escapes? Perhaps you will know this yourself one day, and realize that longings don't necessarily foreshadow the end of love but perhaps invite a new beginning for a tired and hurt love. But by then she'd felt entitled to call me overbearing more than once. Perhaps time away was not a sufficient cure. I was not an easy man. We hoped to close this chapter of our life and resume our love affair, as a reader returns to a difficult book after a restful sleep, refreshed and eager to see its hero through to the end. I wrote often. I needed her, I said, but also needed some time alone before I could love her again. My letters, you see, were an elegant batch of contradictions.

I remember one evening, not long after she returned, sitting at the kitchen table working over some lecture notes. Frances was sitting in a deep chair by the living room window. I'd heard her turning the pages of a novel. After working for quite some time, I rose to stretch my legs. When I entered the living room she looked up. I remember her closing the book, slowly, over her finger, and smiling. In her I saw a woman who just then, as if in a moment of revelation, had given herself over to her husband, completely and absolutely.

“Do you have something to tell me?” I said.

“Silly man. Like what?”

What she wanted was to live as a good wife should. The metamorphosis was startling. It was as if she'd been seized by the American Dream. This is what I always wanted, she seemed to say, and with the man I always wanted. To be together, here, in this place, or any place. There was in this emotional embrace all I feared and hated in the world. Instead of a loving wife content to live in the misery of this grey existence, I saw a total, unabashed surrender. I saw pity, falsehood, the embrace of second best. And eventually I came to see a spirited woman willing, finally, to submit to me. How had I destroyed her? That restlessness that burned within her—and within both of us—along with a refusal to submit was suddenly replaced by a smiling, pathetic contentment .

“But I'm so happy,” she said, “with what we have. I realize that now.”

I stood frozen. Here, in the squalor of our life, in one of the few truly benign and peaceful moments she'd ever offered me, I had the desire to obliterate her from my sinful heart. I would have preferred saucers and plates shattering against the dingy wallpaper to her coquettish smile. But there she sat, her face framed by a dark-paned window, smiling that lovely smile. I thought her more beautiful than ever. She leaned slightly back into her chair, then stood, and I strode across the room to take her in my arms. I didn't know if this was love or a selfish act that was a kind of revenge. Afterwards, I realized how desperately I did not want her in my life. The invented domesticity of home-life suddenly sickened me. The entire world awaited me: that was one truth I was sure of. She spoke to me softly, questioningly, while I watched the ceiling of our bedroom, and soon I returned to my lecture notes.

Was that the evening our life changed? Was it then, as my fingers touched her, that she saw the hard, distant man she'd married? The brilliant facade crumbles as eventually it must. I had used my gifts against her—I know this now—as an adversary might, to deceive a woman who was willing to believe in me.

The next morning, as she prepared breakfast, I said, “I didn't tell you last night.” I was sitting at the table.

“That you love me? I noticed.”

“I've been feeling poorly,” I said. I shifted in my seat. “Fatigued. I had it checked while you were away.”

“Why didn't you tell me sooner? What? What is it?”

“There is tuberculosis in my left lung.”

She sat in a chair across from me and took my hand.

“We might be able to do something about it.”

“How advanced is it? How long—?”

“A man at the College, a Doctor Amberson, speaks highly of a sanatorium in the Adirondacks. I might be able to get a place there. There's a chance.”

“You see? Yes, a few months of bedrest,” she said, caressing my face. “That's all you'll need.”

“Please don't cry.”

“You've been working too hard,” she said.

“Yes.”

“A few months and you'll come back better.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And then there'll be babies and everything will be all right.”

“Please don't cry,” I said again.

I didn't know how long I had to live. It might have been six months. The TB spiders, as I thought of them, had already firmly housed themselves in my left lung. It was likely they would take up residence in the right one, too, if I weren't admitted somewhere quickly.

The Trudeau Sanatorium had been founded in 1884 by a doctor from New York named Edward Livingstone Trudeau and quickly recognized as one of the best of its kind. Trudeau had been drawn from New York to the Adirondacks by the promise of clear air and untouched forests. These, he thought, were the ideal climatic conditions to help heal the afflicted lungs of a TB patient. In October I went there alone to place my name on the wait list, then headed north over the border to pass my days at the Calydor Sanatorium in Gravenhurst, Ontario. At the time I was unable to sidestep the grim irony of returning to the sawdust town of my birth with the distinct possibility of dying there. My life, bookended by the narrow prospects of that sleepy, insular place, would prove deadeningly, pathetically inconsequential. I lay there confined to a bed, writing letters to Frances while waiting for a space to open at the Trudeau, never sure that I would go out into the world again. It was a misery, but the pained romantic and brooding poet in me relished the solitude.