The Road Taken (28 page)

Chapter Thirty-Five

In 1961 Peggy had her baby, a girl, a welcome companion for Marguerite. Peggy was a conventional housewife with an unconventional penchant for French names, so she named the new baby Angelique. Ed rather liked it. They would call her Angel. The new baby girl had brown hair and a strong nose; she looked like Rose and Ginger, not like Markie, Peter, Peggy, and Ed. In fact, everyone thought (and said, but not within Peggy’s hearing) that if you had to pick which one of Peggy and Ed’s children was adopted you would choose Angel in a flash.

When Angel was older and didn’t have to be attended to every two hours, the two sisters would share the same room, Peggy announced. She said she wanted them to be close. What was also unsaid was that she wanted her daughters to be unlike her and her sister Joan.

As if a room made the magic, Ginger thought ironically. She was taking psychology this year as one of her elective courses, and was fascinated by the factors that made people what they were: Genes and upbringing. Environment changed things, but genes won. Somehow she was not sure she agreed with that, but how would she know? Her mother said she did not have the faintest idea why all her children had turned out to be so different, but that she found the variety refreshing.

In 1962 Ginger entered her third year at medical school, and became a rotating gofer in the hospital. She drew blood, attached IVs, did spinal taps, questioned and wrote up patients for admissions, kept the records on their charts, fetched and carried, and as soon as she got off, before she collapsed into sleep, she went to the library to read about the meaning of the symptoms she had just recorded because she was sure to be quizzed on them the next morning at rounds.

She, like other medical students looking at symptoms, couldn’t help thinking of the most esoteric causes instead of the most obvious; partly, she supposed, because they all wanted to be heroes. It was an old hospital joke that if a group of doctors heard hoofbeats, all of them would think: “Horses,” except for the medical student, who would exclaim: “Zebras!” So the least likely affliction was called a zebra.

Everyone started out with the best intentions and boundless enthusiasm, but after working one-hundred-hour weeks, with thirty-hour shifts, surrounded by pain and suffering and death, existing on junk food, being treated as the lowest of the low (which she knew she was), a confused and frightened tourist, trying to hide her ignorance, Ginger realized she had to guard herself from changing into someone she didn’t recognize and maybe wouldn’t like. Someone heartless, inured to it all, like doctors she had seen? Someone hysterical, who collapsed into tears, which was totally unacceptable? And always, always, she was so tired, so sleep-deprived.

Attaching an IV was the hardest task for all of the new med students. Invading the body and causing pain, finding a vein even when the veins were good, was anxiety-provoking and you often missed. The saying was: “See one, do one, teach one,” but Ginger secretly rephrased it as: “See one, miss ten, teach one.” She finally learned, but she knew she was not as good at it as the nurses, and that she would always hate doing it.

She also learned to stitch a wound, and she was good at that, at least. Because of her wheelchair she could not work in the operating room, since she was the wrong height, and since surgery involved long hours of standing, even though the medical student never did anything more difficult than holding a retractor (not that this was easy) or snipping the ends of a knot. But you needed to pass surgery to become a doctor, so in a moment of humanity the authorities bent the rules for her and let her observe from above, through a window. It was the only time they ever made anything easy for her.

So long ago, it seemed now, when her class had arrived at medical school, a professor had told them: “Look at the person to the right of you and the person to the left of you. Next year one of them will be gone.” In Ginger’s case, both of them were gone; one flunked out, the other burned out. She knew she had to try harder than anyone else because she was a woman and handicapped; that these factors would be against her despite the permission to watch operations from afar.

One doctor hated her, but then, he hated and intimidated everyone indiscriminately. His name was Dr. Sweet, and behind his back the students called him “Dr. Sweat.” One time, during surgery, the intern who was assisting was so wet with nervous perspiration that his eyeglasses fell off into the sterile operating field. Dr. Sweat picked them up and threw them on the floor, and then furiously ground them under his heel. Ginger was shaking. What will he do to me? she wondered. Tip me out of my chair and tell me to crawl home and stay there? She thought med school was probably like the army; harassment was the name of the game.

There was a real world outside of medical school, but she and the other students had little time to notice it. The popular dances were the Twist, the Watusi, the Mashed Potato, and the Loco-Motion. There was still enough innocence in the country for a song called “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen” to be in the top ten. That summer Ginger got a job as an assistant in a lab. So did Chris, but still in Boston, of course. In August Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, with rumors of foul play, and Uncle Hugh was devastated. Marilyn had apparently been having affairs with both Kennedys: the President and the Attorney General.

Beautiful actresses who wore tight glittery dresses and had affairs with famous men were so removed from Ginger’s life that they might as well have existed only on the screen. She hardly ever went to movies, and if she did, she fell asleep in them, and the only television show she watched, and not often, was
Dr. Kildare.
Rivalry among the students, and desperate, blatant ambition were rampant. On New Year’s Eve she went to a party, without a date, where some of the male med students claimed to have put human breast milk into the eggnog; but despite occasional moments of goofiness and fun, everyone Ginger knew was afraid of doing something wrong. They often did, they were publicly humiliated for it, and yet they still fantasized about finding a cure for cancer or making a ton of money.

Some of the boys she knew at medical school were getting married. People were getting married young anyway, and this way the wives, who usually had no career ambitions of their own, could work to pay the husband’s tuition bills, and of course do the laundry, the cooking, and clean the apartment. It was worthy, and expected, for a woman to help her man achieve his dream, the dream that would provide for both of them: the practice, the money, the lovely house, the cars, the kids; and then she could retire and become Peggy. The few female medical students Ginger knew were getting married too, usually to other med students who understood them, who didn’t think they were too smart to be feminine; and their parents helped them out with living expenses.

Seeing all this, the pairing off, Ginger felt alone and different, socially naive and inept, too young for grown-up life because no one wanted her, and at the same time getting older every minute until it seemed grown-up life might pass her by.

The idea of transferring to Boston to be near Chris for her internship and residency began to seem more and more realistic, even achievable—her first chance. Her parents, when she broached the subject, were anxious about it, but they said, finally, that it wouldn’t hurt for her to take a trip to Boston and look, even though it was a little premature. Maybe she would change her mind, they said, but they didn’t want her to think she had missed something.

By now, Ginger’s parents knew that when she set her mind to something there was very little they could do to talk her out of it. All these years they had willingly paid for her expensive education and what it cost to get by decently on her own. It was their investment in her survival. Rose and Ben prided themselves on being kind, modern parents, and besides, they knew Ginger had little chance of achieving a conventional destiny, and they admired her courage and her wish to help people. They would not be around forever, and it was important that she should become equipped to take care of herself.

So, on a sunny September weekend, Ginger went to Boston with Hugh and Teddy, in the station wagon they had bought for the weekends they sometimes spent at country inns. “Maybe I should stay a bachelor too,” Ginger joked. “All that money just for me and my good times.”

“You know I’m not a bachelor,” Hugh said. “I’m a married woman.”

“Well, of course,” Ginger said. “I keep forgetting.”

“And so will you be too,” Teddy said to her. “You’ll see. You’ll find a man worthy of you.”

“I just want Chris.”

“Still? Ah, well. Then perhaps it’s destined,” Hugh said.

Of course Christopher knew they were coming, and he had volunteered to help her sightsee and look at hospitals, residential neighborhoods, all of it, in his new car. How independent we both are, Ginger thought hopefully. We’re not freaks, the way we thought we would be when we were kids. We’re part of the community. We will do great things. With a good night’s sleep behind her, her love for him fired her with courage and dreams. Driving past Cambridge, on the way into the city where she would meet him soon, Ginger noticed the sculls on the Charles River, the Harvard boys in them, paddling hard, skimming gracefully over the water, and she felt her heart leap with such crazy optimism that she thought: I could do that! I have so much upper body strength. . . . Never mind that girls couldn’t, that she would not have time anyway. In this new future life she envisioned for herself she could do anything.

She, Hugh, and Teddy were staying at the calm and elegant Ritz. Across the street was the Common, with the lake, and the swan boats, about to be put away for winter. It had been a long trip and she was tired. The three of them unpacked and ordered a late lunch from room service. Her room was next to theirs, with a view of the trees and gardens. As soon as she checked in she had called Chris, and he said he would come by to meet her at five o’clock, they could have a drink in the bar and talk, then tomorrow morning they could devote to seeing whatever she wanted.

Ginger took a bath and put on makeup, the first time she had worn makeup in so long she almost couldn’t remember. Although she and Chris had been overworked and exhausted, they had managed to telephone and commiserate with each other nearly every week, like soul mates, and on holidays they even sent photographs, like family watching each other grow up and mature, but they hadn’t actually laid eyes on each other in seven years. It was hard to believe, and she would be ashamed to tell anyone. She thought that anyone else would consider her persistent infatuation with him deranged. Yet, they spoke to each other more often and at greater length than she spoke to any other friend, and they had become a fixture in each other’s lives. It was Victorian, anachronistic, romantic. She knew he dated, although not much, and he probably thought she did too, on the same level. But none of his interludes were ever serious—who has time? he said—and he always came back to her. “No one else understands me like you do,” he would say. “You’re a part of me. We’ll see each other soon. We’ll work something out.”

Well, now she was working something out. She wondered why she hadn’t done it before. But she had been too young, too immature and afraid to uproot her life, and so had he. His parents weren’t as sophisticated as hers. Unlike hers, it was clear that his called the shots because they controlled the money and he was in a wheelchair. Christopher had finally gotten his own apartment too, just last year, but he’d told her it had been hard to convince his parents, and the only reason they’d given in was that he needed to be nearer med school because of the long hours and they were afraid he would fall asleep at the wheel.

It was not considered odd for a young man with paralyzed legs to live at home, although in Ginger’s opinion it was as crippling as their polio. In many ways Chris was not like other people his age, and she thought that their friendship and exchange of ideas had probably saved him from being, in some way, destroyed. He needs me just as much as I need him, Ginger thought; perhaps even more. I would never admit it to him or to anyone else, but if you had to decide, I’m the strong one. It didn’t make her love him less; in a way it enhanced her tenderness for him.

She was sitting in her wheelchair next to a small table in the dark, cool bar when Chris rolled in. “I can’t believe it’s you!” he exclaimed.

“I can’t believe it’s you, either.”

They hugged, and then he kissed her on the lips and Ginger felt the electricity go through her whole body. He was larger somehow, more mature, more muscled, more a grown man, and although she had memorized his latest photograph with the passion of a grieving wife, he did look different. But his eyes and smile were the same. “How pretty you look, Ginger,” he said.

“Thank you.” She couldn’t stop smiling, nor could he; they were glowing there in that artificial twilight and he took her hand and wound his fingers around hers. I could stay here like this forever, she thought, but she knew there was more.

“What are we drinking?” Chris asked.

“I haven’t ordered yet.”

“How about champagne?”

“Champagne?”

“Why not?” he said happily. “We have lots of things to celebrate.”

Their waiter brought a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and opened it. “To us,” Ginger said, holding up her glass.

He touched hers with his. “To us, forever.”

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said.

“And I to see you. You’re staying at a very fancy hotel,” he added.

“Did you have a problem parking?” she asked, to deflect the inference that she was richer than he was.

“Actually, a friend dropped me off.”

“Good, then we can get drunk. We never did, do you realize? We never had a drink together.”

“We were too young. It was illegal.”

“And now we’re too busy.”

They beamed at each other again and sipped their champagne. “So you’re going to try for B.U. Hospital,” Chris said.

“Yes, and Peter Bent Brigham. Of course I’d have to see them. But I would take your advice, I trust you. I’d go where you go.”