The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (27 page)

“How bad?” she asked, her voice hoarse. “Give it to me straight.”

I said, “It'll sound self-pitying. And I know you'll feel that it's your duty to—”

“Say it,” said Sylvie. “What did Ray diagnose that your colleagues missed?”

I didn't want to confess, but Sylvie was pressing. And Sylvie was back.

“How lonely I am,” I said.

28.
The Wife-Bride

IF I COULD UNDERSTAND WHY I FOUND MYSELF ON JUNE
29 walking down the aisle on my father's rigid arm, behind my sister, who was looking put-upon in sea-foam silk chiffon, toward Ray Russo, in white tie and tails—train tickets to Niagara Falls in his breast pocket—then perhaps I could describe, to an onlooker's satisfaction, the psychological contours of Alice Thrift's mind.

Bear with me.

The morning after my détente with Sylvie, Joyce and Bert drove up from Princeton without advance notice, and followed signs for the Department of Surgery. It had been a good day. At morning rounds, Mr. Parrish had glanced around the semicircle of residents' faces, smiled when he spotted mine, and announced, “Hey! There's my favorite doctor. Good morning!” Heads turned dubiously in the direction of his salutation—downward, to the bottom rung of the residency program—then back to Mr. Parrish with looks that said, Is the patient delusional?

I said brightly, “Good morning! How are you feeling?”

“Like we talked about. A little discouraged about the prognosis, but otherwise hanging in there.”

“You'd better hang in there,” I said.

“Dr. Thrift?” said the attending with a puzzled smile. “Could you give us an update on Mr. Parrish's post-op course?”

Stepping up to the bed with my best posture, head erect, I gave it all I had. I discussed his urine output, his test results, his meds, and, without blinking, showed all in attendance his neat, dry wound.

“Is it okay if she sticks around for a couple of minutes?” Mr. Parrish asked.

“We're doing rounds,” snapped a senior resident who'd never given me a break or thrown me a bone.

“I'll tell you what,” I said. “I'll finish rounds, then I'll come right back. Unless you think it can't wait.”

“It can wait,” said Mr. Parrish. “And I certainly don't want to get you into trouble.”

The same senior resident snickered.

I said to Mr. Parrish, “Don't mind him. He's amused by the notion of me ever encountering trouble.”

“Not that the rest of you aren't doing a great job,” Mr. Parrish said.

“He works with teenagers,” I explained. “He believes in positive reinforcement.”

“My wife's coming in at noon,” Mr. Parrish added. “Think you could drop by then and meet her?”

“Me?” asked the attending.

“I was pretty much thinking of just a social chat with Dr. Alice. Our younger daughter talks about going to medical school, and I thought . . .”

“Has your wife talked to the oncologist?” asked the surgeon, his sterling-silver pen tapping the clipboard.

Some of us sucked in our breaths audibly. Mr. Parrish's face changed. He was back to his lymph nodes, his diagnosis, his fear.

I said, “I'd love to meet Mrs. Parrish. And you never mentioned any daughters, let alone one who's thinking about medical school. You'd better give me her phone number so I can talk her out of it.”

He tried to smile.

Through the thin blanket, I squeezed an ankle. “Back in a jiff,” I said.

THE TRIP FROM
Princeton to Boston takes approximately six hours, which meant that my parents must have left Einstein Drive at one
A.M.
after digesting Ray's phone call, then not hearing from his intended. The department secretary paged me. “Your parents are here,” said Yolanda. “And I'm supposed to tell you that it's not an emergency. They're fine.”

I said I was still on rounds. Could she please send them to the cafeteria, and could they take seats by the door so I could find them? She repeated my directions. I heard my mother ask, “How long do rounds take?”

Yolanda said, “Interns don't take coffee breaks. Am I correct in assuming this is an unscheduled visit?”

My father said, “We're her parents. We didn't think it necessary to make an appointment to see our daughter.”

The secretary asked me, “Is it safe to say that you'll get there as soon as you can, but you can't name an exact time?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

I tried to concentrate, to answer the questions about electrolytes and medications and differential diagnoses that were the walking pop quizzes of my daily grind. I found myself murmuring to a junior resident, someone who'd never to my knowledge taken part in the sport of humiliating Dr. Thrift, “My parents are waiting for me in the cafeteria. I think they're here to talk me out of marrying the man I married.”

The resident said, “I'm not good at stuff like that.”

We could exchange only one sentence at a time, cryptically, between patients' rooms, and sometimes less if the chief resident was nearby. During my next opportunity I asked, “Can third parties get marriages annulled?”

“My wife's a lawyer,” said the resident. “I'll ask her tonight.”

I said, “By tonight, I'll probably be on the psych floor.”

“I get it,” he said. “As an inpatient. It was a joke.”

“Correct,” I said.

I returned to Mr. Parrish's room as soon as I could. “I know that you weren't trying to play favorites or put a gold star on my forehead during rounds,” I told him, “but I want you to know how much it meant to me.”

He pushed the button that made the head of his bed rise. “Alice? Are you crying?”

I said, “I didn't tell you I was on probation. I have two weeks left before they decide whether I stay or I go. And even though I'm improving, I doubt whether anyone has noticed.”

Mr. Parrish smiled hopefully. “Are you saying that because I was happy to see you this morning, I might have raised your stock a couple of points?”

I said, “This isn't very professional of me to be discussing any of this. Especially with you worried about your own health.”

“Bullshit,” said Mr. Parrish. “What else can I do to help?”

I plucked a tissue from the generic gray hospital box. “Not a thing,” I said. “Just get well and completely cured and dance at your daughters' graduations and weddings.”

“I wouldn't mind dancing at
your
wedding,” he said. “As long as we're being unprofessional.”

“Too late,” I said. “Remember? I eloped on Friday.”

“Eloped,”
he repeated. “Now, there's a word you don't hear very often.”

I confided that my parents were downstairs, and that in a few minutes I'd have to sit down with them and—

“They were up for the wedding, and now they're taking off?”

I nodded weakly. How much could I burden Mr. Parrish with? Too much already, I feared. The whole patient I was treating in this room was turning out to be me.

I NEGLECTED TO
slip off my wedding ring, so the principal reason for the parental mission—“Don't do anything rash”—evaporated as I lifted a Styrofoam cup of coffee to my lips.

“What's that thing on your left hand?” my mother gasped.

A better liar might have had an answer ready or, thinking ahead, a naked finger. I said, “Oh, that. My wedding ring.”

“Do you mean an engagement ring?” she asked.

My father reached over to inspect the offending item. “Where's the diamond?” he asked.

I pointed out that, in the course of a day, I peeled several dozen pairs of exam gloves off my hands, and that a diamond would make my life that much more difficult.

My mother asked, her face hopeful, “So you went out immediately and bought the wedding bands, and you're wearing them in advance as some sort of promissory gesture?”

I could have agreed vigorously, but I remained silent.

“So he popped the question?” my father prompted.

“Why didn't you call us?” asked my mother.

I took the ring off my finger. “This isn't a gesture. It's a bona fide wedding band.”

My ever-polite father did something that astonished me. He plucked the ring from my fingers and bounced it on the linoleum. “The hell it is,” he said. “You didn't marry that drifter! You'd never do that to us.”

My mother continued to smile, but it hauled a worried question behind it: That's it? We're too late to derail a future wedding?

“Are you saying that you ran off and got married after your boyfriend spoke to us last night?” my father demanded.

I said no. We went to City Hall on Friday.

“Dating the man is one thing . . .” my mother said.

I asked, “Let me understand: Is it the not telling you or the basic marrying that's got you so angry?”

“Pick up the ring, Bert,” my mother said. She turned back to me and said, “Do you think we're so superficial that our grievance is not being able to spend twenty or thirty or fifty thousand dollars that is earmarked for your wedding? On seeing our only non-gay daughter in a beautiful dress and train and veil, walking down the aisle? Or do you think it's an unprovoked marriage to a total stranger?”

“The latter?”

“Who is he anyway?” my father demanded. “And I'm praying you know the answer to that. Because, frankly, I worry that you'd take up with the first guy who lavished attention on you—”

“Or not even
lavished
!” my mother cut in. “Because I'm not sure you know the difference between lavish attention and . . . and . . . perfunctory dating.”

“And what's this nonsense about him calling me up and asking for your hand
ex post facto.
Am I in a time warp?”

I picked the ring up myself and put it back on my finger. I handed them my keys. “I cannot spend one more minute away from the floor. If you need to discuss this further, you can go to my apartment. Mom knows where it is. Take a nap or go out and have a drink. I'll try to leave here by six.”

“Six tonight?” asked my father.

“We're too upset to nap,” said my mother.

“I could nap,” said my father. “We left in the middle of the damned night.”

“Eleven-G,” I said. “You'll have to lower the Murphy bed.”

“Will he be there?” asked my mother.

I said, “I honestly don't know.”

I PAGED SYLVIE
. I said, “If you get home before I do, could you knock on my door? My parents came up this morning, and the earliest I can get out of here is six.”

“And you want me to do what?”

“I don't know. Charm them? Entertain them? Show them what a nice, healthy friendship I can have with a normal person?”

“Did they come up to kidnap you or do an intervention?”

“Something along those lines.”

“How much do they know?”

“They saw the wedding band. They're appalled.”

“I'll do my best as hostess,” said Sylvie, “but I can't promise any support for lover boy. I mean, if they ask what I think of him, I'm not going to give a testimonial.”

“You could say, ‘I don't know him at all,' or, ‘Let's wait for Alice.' ”

“Or, ‘I hear noises coming from the apartment which indicate a rather rambunctious conjugality.' ”

“Go ahead,” I said. “My mother wouldn't blink.”

“Now I'm curious,” said Sylvie.

I FOUND MYSELF
alone in an elevator with Dr. Charles Greenleaf Hastings. “How's your back?” I asked.

He snarled, “I'm not intimidated by your veiled references to that misbegotten and regrettable night.”

“How's your back?” I repeated.

He jabbed the elevator button marked 6 repeatedly with his thumb.

“Yoga's good,” I said. “But of course nothing beats bed rest.”

“Aren't we clever,” he said.

The door opened at 4 to admit a transport worker and his elderly, wispy-haired wheelchair patient holding a sleeve of X-rays. Hastings fled prematurely, pushing past the new passengers without apology.

“Don't mind him,” I said once the doors had closed. “He's famously rude.”

“Surgeon, right?” asked the transport worker.

“He had to escape because I intimidate him,” I explained.

“Cool,” said the transport worker.

“
She's
chatty,” said the patient.

“I'm really not,” I said.

A NOTE SAID
, “We're across the hall. Needed more chairs. S.”

I knocked and entered. My parents were on her couch. Sylvie was perched on its arm, a pan of fudge on her lap. All three were listening to the defense, dressed in a blue blazer and a button-down shirt, apparently presenting his opening argument. Never before had I heard Ray Russo more sincere, more earnest, more unguarded in his salesmanship. When he saw me in the doorway, he looked up. He didn't rush over to embrace or kiss me for court-room effect. Instead, he offered an apologetic smile that said, Do you believe what I walked into? Tough audience. I'm going for it. I'm pulling out all the stops.

“Don't get up,” I said.

The presentation stopped just the same while everyone greeted me. Ray brought a chair from the kitchen. Sylvie pretended to take my coat, a ruse to get my ear. “Ray didn't know that
they
knew the wedding had happened, so he was pitching ‘Why I Want to Marry Alice' and digging himself deeper.”

“How was your day, hon?” Ray called.

“Sit down,” said my father. “Mr. Russo was about to explain this whole mess.”

“Anyone want another drink before we resume?” asked Sylvie.

“Water,” I said.

“Alice has heard all of this,” Ray began, “so I'll be brief. But here goes: My mother was a kid when she had me. She and my father eloped because her parents wanted her to give the baby—me—up for adoption. But they were madly in love. No one thought they were going to make it because both sets of parents cut them off without a cent. My dad got a job pumping gas at an Esso station, and my mom worked the lunch counter at Kresge's five-and-dime until she got too big to hide her stomach. In those days, people didn't like pregnant women out in public like they do now. So she went back to their one-room apartment, even smaller than this—”