The Dutch House (16 page)

The first day of orientation took place in a lecture hall with stadium seating. Various faculty laid out impossible cases and told us that by the end of the year we would be able, if not to solve these cases, then to at least discuss them knowledgeably. The head of cardiac surgery took the stage to extol the wonders of the cardiac surgery program, and the boys who had told their mothers they were going to be heart surgeons whistled and hollered and clapped, each one thinking that this was going to be him one day: the lord of it all. Then a neurologist came out and other members of the audience cheered. One by one every organ had its moment in the sun: Kidneys! Lungs! Oh, how they beamed! We were the smartest bunch of idiots around.

When I was in medical school I had a telephone in my apartment. We all did. Even in our first year they wanted us to know we could be called to the hospital at any hour. My phone was ringing when I came in the door during my second week of school.

“I have the
most
fantastic news,” Maeve said. Long-distance rates went down at six o’clock and then again at ten. The clock read five past ten.

“All ears.”

“I had lunch with Lawyer Gooch today, strictly social, he thinks he’s supposed to be my father now. Halfway through the meal he mentions that Andrea had contacted him.”

There was a time when this news might have perked me up but I was too tired to care. If I started my homework immediately I might be asleep by two in the morning. “And?”

“She called him to say she thought that sending you to medical school was excessive. She said she’d been given to believe that the trust was for college only.”

“Who gave her to believe that?”

“No one. She’s making it up. She said she hadn’t complained about Choate because you’d just lost your father, but at this point she feels we’re bilking the trust.”

“We are bilking the trust.” I sat down in the single kitchen chair and leaned against the little table. The phone was in the kitchen, what I called the kitchen closet. I tracked the path of a cockroach as it wandered down the front of the yellow metal cabinet and slipped beneath the door.

“He told me she’d looked up the cost of Columbia and that it was the single most expensive medical school in the country. Did you even know that? Number one. She said it’s her proof that this is all a plot against her, and that you could go to U-Penn for half of what Columbia costs and leave some money for the girls. She told him she simply wasn’t going to pay for Columbia anymore.”

“But she doesn’t pay for it. The trust pays for it.”

“She perceives herself to be the trust.”

I rubbed my eyes and nodded to no one. “Well, what does Lawyer Gooch say? Does she have any case?”

“None!” Maeve’s gleeful voice was loud in my ear. “He said you can stay in school for the rest of your life.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You never know. There are lots of fascinating things to pursue. You could live the life of the mind.”

I thought of the endless maze that was the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, our professors in their white coats sailing down the hallways like gods in their heaven. “I don’t want to be a doctor. You know that, right?”

Maeve didn’t miss a beat. “You don’t have to
be
a doctor, you only have to study to be one. Once you’re finished you can play a doctor on television for all I care. You can be anything you want, as long as it requires a great deal of schooling.”

“Go help the poor,” I said. Maeve taught an evening class on how to make a budget through Catholic Charities and on Tuesday nights she stayed up late to grade their notebooks and correct their math. “I need to study.”

“I wish you could be happy about this,” she said. “But the truth is it doesn’t matter. I’m happy enough for both of us.”

Happiness had been suspended for the foreseeable future. I was taking Human Histology, Embryology, and Gross Anatomy. The lessons of chemistry that Dr. Able had drilled into me held fast: I answered every question at the end of every chapter and in the morning I woke up and answered them again. We were put in groups of four, given a cadaver, a saw, and a scalpel, and told to go to work. The only other dead person I’d seen until that point was my father, and I found it far too easy to picture a group of white coats perched like vultures around his bed, waiting to open him up. Disassemble, reassemble. Our cadaver was older than my father, a smaller, brown-skinned man. His mouth was open in the same horrible way, as if it were the universal last act to try and fail to gasp a final breath. I would have thought that in order to cut a man apart and label him I would have needed at the very least some degree of curiosity, but that wasn’t the case. I did it because it was the assignment. Some of my classmates vomited in the lab that first day, others made it to the hall or even the bathroom, but the carnage of our work didn’t hit me until I was outside again, the sweet-sick smell of formaldehyde still painted in my nose. I threw up on the sidewalk in Washington Heights along with the junkies and the drunks.

I had seen Celeste from time to time during my junior and senior years of college. I had seen other women, too. Dating was an activity that required thoughtfulness and planning and time, and in medical school I had none of those luxuries. Going out with Celeste felt the least like dating. She asked almost nothing of me and she gave the most in return. She was agreeable and cheerful, pretty without being distracting. When I went to Philadelphia on the train she came with me. Maeve and I would drive her to Rydal but Celeste never insisted that I spend time with her family. Maeve and Celeste were still affectionate with each other in those days. Maeve was happy because Columbia Medical was expensive, had top rankings and offered me no financial aid. Celeste was happy because it was farther north than Columbia’s main campus and therefore easier for her to get to from Thomas More, where she was still an undergraduate English major. My tiny apartment was two blocks from the medical school, and Celeste would come down from the Bronx after her last class on Friday afternoon and stay with me until it was time for her to work her shift at the front desk in the dean’s office Monday morning. When I was an undergraduate, we worked around my roommate’s schedule, but in medical school we fell into a kind of three-day-a-week marriage, which, in retrospect, was probably as much marriage as we were capable of. We lived under the rules that had been established when we met on the train: I had to study and she had to let me. But we also lived in the America of 1969: the war was grinding on, protestors filled the streets, students still commandeered administrative offices, and we had as much guilt-free, diaphragm-protected sex as time allowed. I will forever associate the study of human anatomy not with my cadaver but with Celeste’s young body lying naked on my bed. She let me run my hands across every muscle and bone, naming them as I went along. The parts of her I couldn’t see I felt for, and, in doing so, learned how best to bind her to me. The little fun I had in those days I had with Celeste—the splurge of Szechuan noodles in white paper cartons eaten on the roof of the hospital late at night, the time she got free passes to see
Midnight Cowboy
from her French professor who had meant for her to go with him. Everything went so well for us until she turned her attention to her impending graduation. She wanted to start making plans for the future. That was when she told me we’d have to get married.

“I can’t get married after my first year of medical school,” I said, not mentioning the fact that I didn’t want to get married. “Things are going to get harder, not easier.”

“But my parents won’t let us live together, and they won’t pay for me to get my own place and wait here while you finish school. They can’t afford something like that.”

“So you’ll get a job, right? That’s what people do after college.”

But as soon as I said it I understood that
I
was supposed to be Celeste’s job. The poetry courses and the senior thesis on Trollope were all well and good but I was what she’d been studying. She meant to keep the tiny apartment clean and make dinner and eventually have a baby. Women had read about their liberation in books but not many of them had seen what it looked like in action. Celeste had no idea what she was supposed to do with a life that was entirely her own.

“You’re breaking up with me,” she said.

“I’m not breaking up with you.” What I wanted was what I had: three nights a week. And to be perfectly honest, I would have been happier with two. I didn’t understand why she had to sleep over on Sundays and then get up so early Monday morning to catch the train back to school.

Celeste sat down on the bed and stared out the window into the dirty air shaft and the brick wall beyond. She was sitting with her spine rounded, her pretty blond curls tangled over her slumped shoulders, and I wanted to tell her sit up straight. Everything would have gone so much better for her had she been able to sit up straight.

“If we aren’t going forward then you’re breaking up with me.”

“I’m not breaking up with you,” I said again, but I didn’t sit down on the bed beside her and I didn’t hold her hand.

Her impossibly round blue eyes were brimming over with tears. “Why won’t you help me?” she asked, her voice so small I could barely hear her.

Maeve said she had an emergency pack of cigarettes in the glove box and we decided that this was a good time to relapse. The leaves and flowers of early spring were already crowding out our view of the Dutch House. Wrens patrolled the sidewalk, looking for twigs. “You can’t marry her a year into medical school. That’s insane. She has no business asking you for that. And even when you’re finished with school, once you’re in your residency, things are only going to get worse. You’re not going to have any time until you’ve finished.”

As it stood now, medical school made my undergraduate education look like one long game of badminton. I wasn’t so sure how I was supposed to hold it all together once things got worse. And things would always get worse. “When I’ve finished training I’m not going to have any time,” I said. “I’ll be starting a practice, I’ll be working. Or I won’t be starting a practice because I have no intention of being a doctor, so then I’ll have to go out and find a job and
that
won’t be the right time. I can say that for the rest of my life, can’t I? This isn’t the right time.” Though Dr. Able had told me it wasn’t like that. He said the first year was the hardest, then the second, then the third. He said it was all about learning a new system of learning, and that the farther along I went, the more fluid I would become. I hadn’t told Dr. Able about Celeste.

Maeve peeled the cellophane off the pack. Once she lit her cigarette I could tell she hadn’t really quit. She looked too natural, too relaxed. “Then the question isn’t about timing,” she said. “You deserve to get married and the timing will always be bad.”

“Diabetics shouldn’t smoke.” I was far enough along in school to know that much. In fact, that was knowledge that had nothing to do with medical school.

“Diabetics shouldn’t do anything.”

“Have you tested your sugar?”

“Jesus, you’re going to start asking me questions about my blood sugar? Stick to the topic. What are you going to do about Celeste?”

“I could marry her over the summer.” I had meant it to sound snappish because she’d snapped at me, but as soon as I said it I had a surprising glimpse of the practicality. Why not? A clean apartment, good food, loads of sex, a happy Celeste, a level of adulthood I hadn’t yet imagined. I repeated the words just to feel them leave my mouth. It sounded worldly somehow.
I could marry her over the summer.
All the various scenarios I’d played out in my mind up until now involved disappointing Celeste—she’d be hurt and I’d feel guilty, and then, after it was over, I would miss the naked girl in my bed. But I’d never considered the possibility of saying yes, of simply seeing this as one inconvenient time in a long string of inconvenient times ahead. Maybe marrying now wouldn’t be worse. Maybe it would be better.

Maeve nodded as if this was what she’d expected me to say. “Do you remember when Dad and Andrea got married?”

“Of course.” She wasn’t listening to me.

“It’s strange, but my memory always conflates their wedding and the funeral.”

“No, I do that, too. I think it has to do with the flowers.”

“Do you think he loved her?”

“Andrea?” I said, as if we could have been talking about someone else. “Not at all.”

Maeve nodded again and blew a long stream of smoke out the window. “I think he was tired of being alone, that’s what I think. I think there was this big hole in his life and Andrea was always there, telling him she was the person who could fill it up, and eventually he decided to believe her.”

“Or he got tired of listening to her.”

“You think he married her just to shut her up?”

I shrugged. “He married her to end the conversation about whether or not they should get married.” As soon as I said it, I understood what we were talking about.

“So you love Celeste and you want to spend your life with her.” She wasn’t asking me a question. She was just making sure, finishing things off.

I wouldn’t get married in the summer. The idea slipped off as quickly and completely as it had arrived, and the feeling I was left with was everything I had imagined: sadness, elation, loss. “No, not like that.”

We sat with the final decision for a while. “You’re sure?”

I nodded my head, lit a second cigarette. “Why don’t we ever talk about your love life? It would be a huge relief for me.”

“It would be for me, too,” Maeve said, “but I don’t have one.”

I looked at her square on. “I don’t believe you.”

And my sister, who could outstare an owl, turned her face away. “Well, you should.”