The Doctor's Daughter (5 page)

And I could always pick out my father’s voice, even from a distance. That day it was especially easy because he was shouting my name, over and over, and, feeling surprisingly lighthearted, I rushed ahead of Ev and Suzy to reach his room. He was in a wheelchair at the side of his tightly made bed, and he looked up sharply when I came in. “Alice!” he cried. “Where have you been?” The old impatience was evident, as if I were late for dinner again, and Faye was keeping the roast warm in the oven.

“Daddy,” I said breathlessly. “I’m sorry, the traffic, but here I am.”

His eyes were shiny from the drugs, but clear—he’d had cataract surgery on the left one a couple of months before—and I noticed that his hearing aid was in place. He tended to pull it out and toss it somewhere, under the bed or onto his lunch tray—it had already been retrieved from the kitchen twice. I didn’t blame him; I’d want to shut off the din of that unit, too. Now he tapped the device and it beeped, so I knew I didn’t have to check the battery. All of his senses were honed to receive the horror of his situation. And yet he seemed better, less frantic than the last time I was there. And he knew who I was.

Suzy and Ev came into the room, and she bent to kiss the top of his head, where the red hair had thinned and faded to a pinkish gray. “Hi, Poppy, darling,” she said. “How are you?” His face registered pleasure, and a low, humming sound came from his throat, something like purring. I didn’t know if he recognized her, or if he was merely enjoying the attentions of a fragrant young woman. Before I was born, he’d hoped for a son, preferably a son delivered with a stethoscope coiled around his neck. But he seemed ecstatic when he had a granddaughter, and he’d always preferred Suzy, his “little crêpe Suzette,” to the boys.

Women had played one subordinate role or another all during his professional life. Parksie was his surgical nurse for thirty-eight years, until his retirement, and Miss Snow had come straight from a preppy sort of secretarial school to work in his office, staying until her marriage. There were various female clerks and technicians at the hospital, too, and female patients had dominated his practice. When I was a young girl and our family went to a restaurant or to the theater, it seemed as if some woman or another was always coming up to him, saying, “Dr. Brill? I’m so-and-so, you removed my gallbladder last May.”

They were very excited about seeing him out of his usual context, and a little shy, as if he were an actor sighted offstage and they were about to ask for his autograph. My mother referred merrily to his adoring gang of gallbladders, appendectomies, and hysterectomies as “your father’s harem.” He called them, one and all, “dear.”

Ev patted my father’s shoulder, and my father grasped his hand and said, “Doctor, it’s good to see you.” Years ago, that might have been taken for sarcasm; he’d wanted me to marry a doctor. I was
supposed
to marry a doctor, if I couldn’t become one myself, and I almost did. But instead of continuing a medical dynasty, I’d started an ordinary family, which wasn’t easy for him to forgive, especially because of the covert way I did it. Still, I could tell that his greeting to Ev was only the result of his confusion, and that Ev had not been offended.

I glanced around my father’s room, made clinical by the hospital bed and the bedside commode, despite those carefully handpicked remnants of his old life: the gray cashmere throw; his silver clock; a framed photograph of my mother and me taken forty years before in Chilmark; the certificate honoring him for his service as chief of surgery; a single medical book, illustrated with transparent colored overlays that peeled back to reveal all the invisible systems of the human body; the sparse jade plant that had once flourished on my parents’ sunporch.

What was he doing here? I had a sudden, insane notion that I’d let him down long ago, and now he was letting me down in return.
Something is
wrong.
Of course I understood that what had happened to him was purely mechanical. The neurologist had explained it carefully, as if he were peeling back sections of my father’s deteriorating brain. He used an automotive analogy, I remember, citing a tired engine, a busted carburetor. My father the car.

I was just about to suggest that we all go to the solarium when my father said, “Tell me, how is Helen?” Suzy’s hand went to her mouth, and she turned away. She was a grown woman, a lawyer who cleverly calculated the strategies of contracts and torts. But now she was reduced to uncertain girlhood. Ev didn’t look very happy, either.

“She’s doing all right,” I answered, in the casual tone I’d perfected. “Listen, Daddy, shall we go to the solarium?”

“I worry so about her, you know,” he said, and Suzy left the room. At that moment I was particularly glad she wasn’t an only child. Not, as I had once coyly told her, because it was lonesome, but because someday she would be able to share the burden of failing parents, of Ev and me, with her brothers.

I came up behind my father’s wheelchair and began to propel it through the doorway. Ev followed us out into the corridor, where other families pushed their elders in one direction or the other, or guided them, hand in hand, as they tried to walk. I’d thought the change of setting would distract my father, but he was stuck in that movie of his former life playing inside his head. “Is Helen coming, too?” he asked as we waited for the elevator.
Knock it off!
I wanted to shout, the way I used to when Scotty kept doing that maddening Woody Woodpecker laugh. “Is Helen coming?” my father asked again, a little louder this time, and I had a flash of Richard Widmark hurling his wheelchair-bound victim, screaming, down a flight of stairs.

My mother had been dead for so many years. She died when I was in graduate school, not in the unimaginably distant future, as she had promised. She’d developed breast cancer while I was still at Swarthmore, and my father told me about it in a phone call, at the end of finals week. The fact that he was using the phone at all should have alerted me, but somehow it didn’t. “Mother isn’t well,” he began. His usually rich and sonorous voice had thickened and grown faint.

“What?” I asked, thinking distractedly of a cold or the flu. He sounded funny; maybe he’d caught it, too. But my mind was elsewhere, on some academic prize or social event.

“Alice, darling, she’s in the hospital. She’s had a mastectomy.”

For a moment, I couldn’t make sense of the word. Did it have something to do with the ear? But I held one hand against my own breast, where I’d already registered the news. “But why didn’t you tell me!” I wailed. “I would have come home.”

“We didn’t want to upset you before your exams. She’s doing very well,” he said. “Harvey Wagner did the procedure.” The
procedure
! I pictured a younger Dr. Wagner cutting precisely into a pink lamb chop at our dining room table.

She did do very well for what seemed like a long while, and I let myself be seduced into solace and calm. My father was a doctor, after all, and he loved my mother as fiercely as I did. I came home to see her and then went back to school, where I fell in love, with a series of books and boys and the possibilities of my own potential. I worried about her, of course I did. But she was on the borders of my concentration, not in its center. Only I resided there.

In the solarium a volunteer banged out sprightly show tunes on an upright piano, and for several minutes we were relieved of the burden of conversation. After the last number, a merciless rendition of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” there was some halfhearted clapping, like the applause in my parents’ living room after I’d recited my poems. I was about to suggest we take my father back down to his room when he leaned toward me and looked into my eyes, more directly and intensely than he had in years. His speckled talon poked me in the chest. “You should take care of that lesion, dear,” he said.

5

As soon as Ev left for the office on Monday, I put my mother’s accordion folder on the kitchen table and reheated the coffee. I had looked into the folder from time to time since my father had given it to me, but I’d hesitated to really explore its contents. Privacy had always been a priority of my mother’s—you knocked on closed doors, you allowed people the sanctity of their thoughts. And she’d become more discreet about her poems after that first publication. She kept writing, though, and after a while she began to publish occasionally in more respected journals, like
Poet Lore
and
Prairie Schooner.

She was so modest, she didn’t even mention those acceptances until copies of the issues with her poems in them arrived. My father had apparently taken his cue from her to be more low-keyed about her latest successes, too. There were no more delirious waltzes around the house, and no grand announcements or ribbon-tied copies of literary magazines distributed as table favors to friends. I can only remember his playful warning to her, after she’d been paid fifty dollars for one of the poems, “Well, Helen, don’t spend it all in one place!”

I had been missing her with something like the old, pervasive longing lately, and I’d begun to associate that revived ache with the peculiar feeling in my chest. Was there a clue to the link between them, or at least some consolation, to be found in her writing? Or maybe there was no mystery at all; maybe it was just that the hole in my life could only ever be filled by her, and that things had just gotten worse since my father’s emotional vanishing act. I was still troubled by the strange thing he’d said to me in the solarium the day before, and his calling me “dear” that way, as if I were one of his groupie patients.

After Ev and I came home from the nursing home, we went straight to bed and made love—you would think we had planned it in advance. Life against death. We took things more slowly this time and were less grasping than we’d been; for once we tried to please each other as much as ourselves. And I was fully there with him. Recently, helping myself to satisfaction, I’d had a fantasy about Joe Packer, the lanky, droll hero of
Walking to
Europe.
That was the first time I’d conjured up a fictional lover since I was thirteen and Edward Rochester rode into my imagination on his black horse.

Sunday afternoon, Ev’s and my kisses were leisurely and deep, rather than desperate, but when he began to caress my breast, I stilled his hand and hissed at him, “What are you doing?”

“I’m
touching
you, Al, that’s all. God, you’re so lovely,” he murmured, and he lowered his mouth to my nipple.

Later, we talked a little, about my father’s decline, how pretty Suzy had looked, our separate plans for the following day, and how we’d meet up again in the evening. Not love talk, exactly, more like married talk, which offers its own pleasures. In that domestic closeness, I told Ev that I’d asked Esmeralda about his missing paperweight, and that she said she hadn’t seen it. She had seemed insulted by the question, as if I’d accused her of taking it, reminding me of how awkward I often am around household help. I still hadn’t mentioned my evil thoughts about Scott and the Clichy to Ev.

I untied the black grosgrain ribbon on my mother’s folder. There were handwritten copies of several of her poems inside, with words crossed out and replaced in red pencil, in the same small, neat, girlish hand,
her
hand. My heart knocked at the sight of it, at the thought of what remains, but I examined the poems themselves at first with a more detached editorial curiosity. Habit, I suppose. I’ve always enjoyed trying to follow the trajectory of a writer’s revisions; why the specificity of “January” instead of “winter,” the decision against alliteration in one poem and the indulgence of it in another. I noted all the references to nature, and looked for literary influences.

My father had given her volumes of poetry on occasions like Valentine’s Day or their wedding anniversary. These were usually supplementary gifts, accompanying the main offerings of jewelry or furs. He had chosen books by poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Sara Teasdale, or anthologies of love poems, and he’d written inscriptions on the flyleaves of most of them. “Darling Helen, let me count the ways.” The ones she’d bought for herself included Cavafy, Bishop, Dickinson, and Larkin, and she’d annotated those pages with underlined passages, asterisks, question marks, and exclamation points. I began to see a contradiction among the things that had most moved or interested her—despairing irony and determined joy—and a favoring of interior rhymes and ambiguous phrases.

She’d kept a careful record in a green ledger of the submissions of her own poems, when and where they were sent, and returned or accepted. Some responses from editors were among her papers, including those that began, “I’m happy to inform you . . .” or “We’d like to publish . . .” The kinds of letters I’d once dreamed of receiving myself, though from more significant places.

There were a few standard rejection slips, but they were either hand-signed or had personal notes appended. “We’re swamped now. Can you send these back in the spring?” “This came close. What else do you have?” I had sent similar notes in the past to young writers I’d wanted to encourage and cultivate, and even started long correspondences with a few of them.

My mother seemed to have had the same sort of vigorous exchange with someone named Thomas Roman, the poetry editor at a quarterly review in Massachusetts called
Leaves
that was now defunct. “Helen,” he wrote in one letter dated in March 1972, “it’s been a crappy winter, but I am considerably brightened by your latest offerings, which restore the possibility of greenness to me. I’m taking ‘Mountain Day.’ How is your back, love? Yours always, Tom.”

The ease between them was so palpable, I felt like a voyeur. I touched my own lower back, as if I were testing it for vicarious pain. I wondered if my father had ever read that letter or any of several others from Tom Roman in her folder, and what he might have made of them. Well, I’d never be able to ask him now. He hadn’t ever specifically spoken about my mother’s work to me, although he did say, in a letter I received at college, that she was “still scribbling away.”

I was reading a long poem of hers, either a first or final draft, because it was unmarked by her red pencil, when I found that my hand had crept inside my robe to touch my left breast, the breast Ev had bent to so passionately the night before. I continued reading while I lifted my arm and began the standard breast examination, moving my fingers in concentric circles, from the nipple outward. I did this once a month, usually in the shower, with wet lather on my fingertips to make the process smoother. That morning, two things happened at the same moment. I read a line in the poem that arrested me, and I felt a thickening under my fingers. The line was the final one: “Then the goose ate that feathery / thing and flew away.” “Oh,” I said, not certain of what I was responding to.

I got up from the table and went to the mirror in the dining room, where I opened my robe and peered at my breasts. They’ve held up fairly well, that midlife reward for the agony of underdevelopment in adolescence. I raised my left arm again, and retraced the area where I’d felt something before, but I couldn’t detect it now. False alarm. “Alice,” my father would chide, “you’ve let your imagination run away with you again.” Whenever he’d said that, after a bad dream had seemed real to me, or my worry over something trivial grew out of bounds, I would picture myself eloping with some fabulous, multicolored creature. This seemed like a similar escalation of fear.

Closing my robe, I went back to the kitchen and my mother’s poem. I didn’t think she’d ever published it. In fact, it seemed so unpolished, she might not have even revised it. Unless she’d kept a later draft somewhere else. I poked deeply into the back pockets of the folder, searching for another version, but all I came up with was a small square envelope addressed to my mother from
The New Yorker.
I was immediately struck by the date on the postmark: November 18, 1963—my own birthday, my tenth birthday.

Folded inside was a printed rejection slip for something she must have submitted to the magazine. She’d always subscribed to
The New Yorker,
but I hadn’t known she’d ever tried publishing there. It seemed so uncharacteristically ambitious. Scrawled at the bottom of the slip, in pencil, was the single line: “Try us again!” and the initials “C. W.” Had she? There were no signs of it, no further correspondence from anyone at the magazine. The paper looked fragile, especially at the crease, as if it had been opened and refolded innumerable times. It was really just another turndown, with the bonus of the handwritten postscript, but I had the sense of having uncovered a key piece of my mother’s history.

Except for that final, cryptic line of the unmarked poem, it was fairly straightforward narrative verse about sitting near the lake in Central Park, feeding the ducks and geese. That was something she and I often did together when we went into Manhattan. Faye would save the crusts for us from the stale loaves she used in her banana bread pudding. The poem was untitled. I read it again and found myself trembling. I knew it wasn’t poetic quality that had gotten to me, though—my mother had written much better stuff than this. It was the poem’s particular content or its language that made me feel the way I did: troubled, anxious, as if I were about to receive unwelcome news.

The reference to Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers” was easy enough to decipher; at some point my mother had experienced a loss of hope. I doubted that it involved a literary disappointment. When the goose ate it and flew away—that must have been when she’d first learned about her cancer. My hand went back to the opening in my robe, but didn’t venture inside this time. Or was it when she realized that the treatments could no longer stem the disease?

The poem wasn’t dated, so there was no way to really know. The hungry, honking geese at the lake, I remembered, had originally migrated from Canada. Their droppings were as big as a small dog’s, and we had to scrape our shoes on the curb after we left the park.

I sipped my cooled coffee, and scanned the pages of the ledger, to see if there was any indication that my mother had sent this poem anywhere. Maybe she’d titled it later, after it had been taken. There were no probable matches among the recorded acceptances or rejections, though, and I didn’t have copies of any of the journals in which her poems had appeared. I’d asked my father if I might have them after he’d moved to Scarsdale and downsized his possessions, but they seemed to have vanished during the packing or the move itself.

Suddenly, I lost interest in playing detective. It seemed futile now, and a little boring, but I took my notebook from my purse and jotted down a few things, anyway. “C. W.
New Yorker,
Nov. 18, ’63,” “Thom. Roman,” “Central Pk.” “Thing with feathers?”

Then I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bagel and some Swiss cheese. I realized that I was famished and there were things I had to do: get a haircut; send Parksie some flowers for her birthday, the way my father always did; and then go to the park and work on the bioethics manuscript and on the latest installment of
Walking to Europe.
In the evening Ev and I were going to meet at a church in Chelsea, where Jeremy and Celia’s chamber group would perform. I tucked everything neatly back into the accordion folder—making sure I put the note from
The New Yorker
just where I had found it—and carefully retied the ribbon.

I lingered in the shower, turning the hot water up a notch every couple of minutes, until the enclosure felt like a sauna. Without really thinking about it, I closed my eyes and lavishly soaped my breasts. Then I began to examine the left one in the usual circular pattern.
Bingo.
It definitely felt more like a thickening than a discrete lump. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? Jesus. I started trembling again in the overheated stall, and all that steam was affecting my breathing.

I got out of the shower, wrapped myself in a bath sheet, and sat down on the closed toilet seat. My mother’s mother, the grandmother I’d never known, had died of cancer, too, when my mother was eighteen. It was so widespread by the time it was discovered that no one was exactly sure where the primary lesion had been. The thought of the word
lesion
chilled me even further. Was my father confusing me with my mother when he’d used it the day before?

He had found her tumor himself, and I could only imagine the circumstances of that discovery—sexual delight turned to abject terror. She was a doctor’s wife with a family history of malignancy; didn’t she do regular self-exams? And why hadn’t he found it earlier, before the metastasis? His fingertips were attuned to that kind of blind discovery. I wondered if there had been a rift between my parents, like the one between Ev and me, that was finally resolved in bed. I hadn’t noticed any lapses in their paradise, but I was away at school most of the time then and, as I’ve said, fairly preoccupied. “Let me count the ways,” he’d written to her, while she had underlined Larkin’s “Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.” My poor mother, my poor father.

No one can ever convince me that the term
a good death
is anything but an oxymoron. The last-ditch chemotherapies, a few years later, after the cancer had reached my mother’s bones, offered their own, additional torments—neuropathies that numbed her hands and feet and left a perpetual taste of metal in her mouth, as if she’d been sucking pennies. She had no appetite, anyway. Faye or my father or I spoon-fed her broth and Jell-O, which she vomited into a basin soon after, while one of us held and stroked her clammy, bristly head.

“Sweetheart, you shouldn’t be seeing this,” she once said to me in her hoarse new whisper, but I couldn’t take my greedy eyes off her. She had always tried to shield me from things that might be offensive or frightening. At scary movies she would cover my eyes with her own hand, that cool, fragrant blindfold, and I got into the habit of protecting myself, of turning away from things I didn’t choose to see. Bad training for a writer, I suppose. Was the compulsive blinking I did at ten simply another manifestation of that?