The Doctor's Daughter (10 page)

Esmeralda was putting the vacuum cleaner away when I came home. The coins from Ev’s pockets that she’d retrieved from under the sofa cushions were piled up on the kitchen counter as irrevocable proof of her honesty. But she seemed to have forgiven me for asking her about Ev’s missing Clichy, as she cheerfully offered a rundown of current domestic events. Mr. Carroll was in the park, taking a walk. The phone had rung many times during the day, but, as instructed, she hadn’t answered it. We needed Windex and Lemon Pledge and Mr. Clean. Scott had come by that afternoon to get some stuff from his old closet. I’d just missed him—such a cute boy.

I still stored various things for all of the children—from high school yearbooks to baseball card collections—although I periodically threatened to throw everything out if they didn’t come to claim it. I briefly wondered what Scott had repossessed and why he didn’t wait to see us. Then I went to the park.

Ev was sitting, asleep, on a bench near the river, with his face turned up, and I sat next to him and kissed him on the lips. He kissed me back before he even opened his eyes. That evening in Iowa City, when he first kissed me, a few people around us
had
noticed, and for some reason I was perceived as the aggressor. One woman with an overzealous imagination thought that I had
bitten
him, and after that we were sometimes referred to, with mocking envy, as Sylvia and Ted. Maybe they were also thinking about the fireworks between us in the workshop.

Now Ev said, “Did your father like the notepaper? Did he know who you are?”

“He loved it,” I told him. “And it doesn’t matter who I am.”

“Yes, it does,” he declared, and to hide my immoderate pleasure, I ducked my head into the curve of his neck and said, “So how was tennis?” Ev played every Saturday morning with two men from his office, on the indoor courts on 89th Street.

“Good. We got three sets in, and I beat Bradley’s ass.”

He was competitive, that was all. Even as a kid he’d always tried to catch up to his older brother, in school and in sports. It was just his nature; it really had nothing to do with me.

“Did you see Scotty today?” I asked.

“Where?”

I hesitated. “Anywhere,” I said slyly.

Ev laughed. “Are you drunk, Al?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

We walked home holding hands. The apartment smelled of disinfectant and the last of the Lemon Pledge. I inhaled deeply, as if I needed that chemically pungent air in order to live. Then I rummaged in the refrigerator for the components that would become our supper. Lettuce, eggs, butter, cheese. Ev scooped up the coins on the counter and put them back into his pocket. Later, he would lie down on the sofa and they would fall out again. I decided that I would show him my father’s inscrutable note when we were in bed that night. Maybe I’d even finally admit that something intangible was troubling me. If Ev was naturally competitive, it was also in his nature to empathize and want to help when someone he loved was in distress. I would just keep my notebook jottings to myself.

So this is happiness, I thought, seconds before I noticed Ev’s blue-and-white paperweight behind the sheer curtain on the kitchen windowsill, catching the last glints of western light.

10

“Hey! Look what’s here,” Ev said. He had come to the door of the kitchen just as I noticed the Clichy, and he went right to the windowsill and picked it up. “It wasn’t here this morning, was it?” He seemed to be talking to himself and to me at the same time.

We had eaten breakfast together that morning in the kitchen; one of us would have noticed it if it had been there. “No, of course not,” I said, ripping lettuce into the salad bowl, and groping for a benign and reasonable explanation for the paperweight’s reappearance.

Ev polished it, like an apple, on his T-shirt, looking happy but perplexed. “So where did you find it?” he asked.

I contemplated saying that Esmeralda was the one who’d discovered it, on the rug under the side table in the living room, when she was vacuuming. He knew that she had been at the apartment that day, which would have made it a credible lie. But I recalled how offended she’d become when I asked her if she’d seen it, and what if Ev decided to thank her? The two of them were so damned cozy. I might have told him the truth, that I really didn’t know where the paperweight had been all this time, and that its recovery was as much a mystery to me as it was to him. But that would have been merely a legal truth. Beneath all the layers of denial, I
did
know; it was just that my usual maternal instincts had kicked in, along with my new talent and propensity for deceit.

“Under the side table in the living room,” I said. “It must have gotten knocked off somehow.” I took a tomato from a bowl on the counter and chopped it with the celerity of a TV chef. I wouldn’t have been all that surprised to find a few fingers in the bloody pulp on the cutting board.

“No scratches, no chips,” Ev marveled, holding his treasure up to the light.

“Well, it landed on the rug,” I said. “Lucky.” My face was torrid, my heart was cold.

Ev put the Clichy back on the windowsill. “I like it there,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. And that was that, or at least I thought it was.

The next day I made two phone calls, the first one to Scott, informing his recorded self that I was coming down to his place at six that evening, that it was important and he had better be there. Ev was going to be working late, so I didn’t have to make up yet another story to tell him.

The second call was to Jeannette Joie, my mother’s oncologist. I was relieved to find her in a recent telephone directory, still alive and still in practice—she was in her early forties when I knew her—although she’d moved from Mount Sinai to NYU. I didn’t reach her, either, but I left my name and number with her service, explaining that I was the daughter of a former patient, and that I would like to speak to her.

She called me back in less than an hour. I remembered then that she had limited her practice in order to always be able to return phone calls from patients, and to give them time for real conversation during their office visits. My mother and she had been on a first-name basis. “If not now, when?” Dr. Joie used to say, and my mother once referred to her, without irony, as “my new best friend.”

“I’m Helen Brill’s daughter,” I said on the phone. “She died so many years ago, I don’t really expect you to remember . . .”

“But I do,” she said, after the briefest pause. “She was a poet, wasn’t she? And you were a little redhead.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. It was as if a mentalist had just performed an uncanny feat of perception.

“How is your father?” Dr. Joie asked. “I imagine he must be retired by now.”

“Yes, from surgery and from the world in general. He’s in a nursing home, with senile dementia.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“But I’m really happy that you’re still practicing, although I have to confess that’s partly for selfish reasons.”

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

I told her about the change in my breast, how I had managed to screw up my appointment for the mammogram, and that I was sorry now and frightened. She asked me to hold on for a minute, and when she got back on the line she said that she could see me in her office the next day, at five o’clock, after her last scheduled patient of the afternoon.

That evening I went downtown on the subway to Scott’s apartment. He was there, and so were his two roommates, Amy Lowe and Jeffrey Green-berg. At the beginning of their shared tenancy in that tiny space, I speculated about various possible sexual arrangements among them, including a ménage à trois, but all of my conjectures turned out to be wrong. Amy was gay, and both she and Jeffrey had girlfriends living elsewhere. Scott was straight and currently unattached.

Everyone was in the living room—which doubles as Jeffrey’s sleeping quarters—when I got there. You would think I’d been invited to a social gathering. The usual clutter was gone—no soda cans, shoes, loose CDs, or remnants of meals. Jeffrey’s sofa bed had been folded and covered with a brown-and-orange afghan his grandmother must have crocheted. The three of them were lined up on it, as expectant as heirs to a will, leaving the place of honor, the shaggy, bear-like black velvet chair they’d found at a thrift shop, for me. There was a plate of Pepperidge Farm cookies on the coffee table. The doors to the two minuscule bedrooms, where I was sure the debris had been hurriedly stored, were prudently closed.

I was impressed by the tidy domestic scene they’d managed to effect in the few minutes since they’d all come home from work, and annoyed that Scott hadn’t figured out from my message that I wanted to speak to him alone. Or maybe he
had
figured it out and having his roommates around was his line of defense. I ate a cookie, declined a drink, and stood up. “Let’s take a walk, Scott,” I told him. When he stood, too, I saw that his T-shirt said SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH OR I’LL KILL YOU.

His seedy street was becoming gentrified, with interesting little restaurants every few doors, it seemed. Scott tried to use my glancing interest as a delaying tactic. “The neighborhood’s really picking up,” he said, conversationally, “isn’t it?”

I stopped dead and he almost went past me. Then he did a goofy little double take and shuffled to my side, but I didn’t smile. “Scott,” I said. “Listen to me. I’m very upset and I think you know why.”

He looked miserable, I was glad to see, pale and slack-jawed. “Ma,” he said, “it was stupid.”

“Yes, it was. Are you doing drugs, Scott? Tell me the truth.”

“No. No, not really. I mean me and Jeff and Amy do a little pot now and then, but that’s all.”

“So why did you take the paperweight?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I told you, it was stupid.”

“But what were you thinking? Were you planning on selling it?”

He appeared shocked. “No!” he protested.

“Well, was it because you were angry with Dad? I’m really trying to understand this.”

“Listen, Ma,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about anything. I just saw it there on the table, and it was like there was a light inside it, sort of blinking at me? And . . . and I put it in my pocket.”

“Scotty, you’re nineteen now, not twelve. You don’t just act on every crazy impulse. And that wasn’t some candy bar or key chain you took; it was your father’s precious possession. It was in our
home.
” I thought of Ev’s innocent joy in finding his missing paperweight, and how the home I’d mentioned with such solemnity had changed. The lies I’d told the night before had disqualified me from confiding my secrets to Ev, of receiving his understanding in return. Some of that, anyway, was Scott’s fault.

And he looked guilty. “I know, I know,” he said, pacing around me. “I feel like shit. I’m really sorry.”

I felt like shit, too. Scott’s eyelashes were spiky and damp, and his pallor had turned to an agitated pink. But I didn’t have the familiar urge to patch things up, to make him feel better at any cost. “I’m not covering for you anymore,” I said, grabbing his arm roughly to make him stand still. “Do you hear me?” Both of us were close to tears.

“Yeah,” he said in a muffled voice. “I hear you.”

“Okay, then. I’m going home now.” And I hailed a cab and ran to it, without kissing him first, without even saying goodbye.

The following afternoon I went downtown again, to Dr. Joie’s office at NYU. I would never have recognized her out of a medical context; she was Ingrid Bergman playing Golda Meir. Her nurse was gone for the day, she told me, and she sent me right to a dressing cubicle to put on a gown.

When I came out, she was waiting for me. “Let’s take a look at you,” she said. “We can talk later.”

Then she led me into the sonogram room and told me to lie on the table. She examined my breasts quickly and lightly with long, cool fingers. I was reminded of touch typing. I sat up, I lay down again, I raised my arms and lowered them, and she made a few little X’s on both of my breasts with a black marker. “Do you drink much coffee?” she asked. “Do you like chocolate?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Do you feel something?” A dumb question with all those tattooed X’s circling my nipples.

“Lots of things, nothing in particular. Now show me what you felt.” And I took her hand and guided it to the thickening on my left breast. She closed her eyes as she explored the area, as if to visualize what she was feeling. “Let’s skip the mammogram and go right to the sonogram,” she said.

“Do not pass Go,” I said, inanely. “Do not collect two hundred dollars.” Why hadn’t I told Ev about this, at least? He would have been here with me.

“This will be cold,” Dr. Joie said as she squeezed jelly onto my breast. She pushed the probe around the right breast and then the left, and I watched on the bedside screen as the shadowy images changed, and something that sounded like a paparazzo’s camera clicked and clicked.

“Look at this,” she said, holding the probe still and painfully deep on the outer rim of my left breast, and I saw a cluster of darkness that made my breath catch. “These are only cysts. All that caffeine, I’ll bet. You don’t have cancer.”

“Really?” I said, as she wiped my breasts briskly with a paper cloth. The cold jelly felt oddly like the cooling fluids of sex, and that moment held something like the bitter sweetness of postcoital tristesse.

“Get dressed,” Dr. Joie said, patting my shoulder, “and we’ll talk.”

This wasn’t the room in which she’d talked to my mother, but that other one couldn’t have been very different: the family photographs, the medical books, diplomas and licenses from Montreal and Chicago and New York. My mother’s news had been bad, and mine was good. The relief of it filled me like helium, and I expected my voice to be high and silly. “Thank you,” I said, sounding surprisingly normal and inadequately grateful.

I was waiting to be dismissed with some standard reminders about the caffeine and a follow-up visit, but Dr. Joie leaned back in her chair and said, “You were in school when your mother became ill, weren’t you?”

For the first time I could see vestiges of the doctor’s younger self in her eyes, in their open, frank expression. “Yes,” I said. “I was at Swarthmore. When she died I was in graduate school.”

“What did you study?” she asked.

“Writing. I was going to be a writer.”

“And?”

“And I wasn’t good enough.”

“That must have been hard,” she said. “What did you end up doing?”

I hesitated. Book doctor, that sly title I’d taken, seemed especially frivolous and fraudulent in that setting. “I became an editor,” I said at last. “As close to the kingdom as I could get. And I have a family.”

She smiled, and I remembered a phone call from my mother when she was recuperating from her mastectomy. “I have a wonderful new doctor,” she’d said.

“What’s so wonderful about him?” I asked, disdaining my mother’s thrall to the princes of medicine.

“Her,”
my mother said. “Do you know the first thing she asked me, Alice? ‘What do you want to do with the rest of your life?’ ”

I didn’t see anything so remarkable about that, but sitting in Dr. Joie’s office, I realized how atypically friendly and nonclinical her question was, and that by asking it she had given my mother hope of
having
more life.

“My mother really liked you,” I said.

“I was fond of her, too.”

“Then, how do you do what you do?” I asked. “I mean, when people die.”

“Helping people to die is in the job description.” She paused, and then she said, “You know, your father and I disagreed at the end about your mother’s care.” I sat forward a little. “He let her go on too long.”

“Yes,” I said. “Why do you think he did that?”

She shrugged. “His training, maybe, you know, life
über alles.
But lots of things motivate people to hang on beyond reason—the complications of love, of guilt, or just an inability to let go.”

“Did you ever read my mother’s work?”

“Yes, I did. She gave me a couple of journals with her poems in them. I liked them.” My eyes grazed the bookshelves behind her, and she said, “They’re in my library, at home.”

“Dr. Joie, did you happen to read a poem of hers about feeding the ducks and geese in Central Park? I think it was also meant to be about losing hope.”

She was thoughtful, and then she shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”

“I know. Of course.”

“She never spoke directly about giving up, you know. I think she was afraid of disappointing your father. But maybe she did put it into a poem.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And you never raised the subject with her?”

“That’s a dance where I always let the patient lead.”

“I have one more question, if you don’t mind.” She nodded, and I said, “Do you remember telling my mother to listen to her body, that sometimes it knows something is wrong, even before there are any symptoms?”

“That sounds like me. Why?”

I took a shaky breath. “I’ve had this peculiar feeling, since April.” I put my hand to my chest. “In here. It’s a sort of hollow aching, as if something is really wrong. I thought it might be breast cancer—an atypical symptom—because of my mother, my family history—and now I know it isn’t. But it wasn’t just the
fear
of having cancer, either, because the feeling’s still there.” And it was, adamantly there, even as I spoke.