One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

“You bet your ass it is, sweetheart,” he said, folding his brawny arms over his chest and kicking at the carpet.

  He is nice. The night we went to the theater he had tickets for a Knicks game. I only knew because I found the tickets in the drawer in his kitchen where he keeps the scissors. And when my beeper went off, a dozen different men, even other doctors, would have frowned or fidgeted. He only squeezed my arm and sent me off. An adolescent psychiatrist does not have the same interruptions as, say, an obstetrician. But there are emergencies nonetheless. I am accustomed to them now.

  There was only one pay phone in the lobby of the theater, off behind a column. A man in a double-breasted suit was using it. When he saw me standing behind him, he took a cellular from his pocket. “On the fritz,” he said with a mixture of ire and apology. And he began talking numbers, money, dealmakers and breakers with someone on the other end.

  I paced a bit on the theater’s Oriental-patterned wall-to-wall and looked at my watch. Two minutes and I would tell him I was a psychiatrist with an emergency. Even an investment banker would hang up. People always did, envisioning a man on a rooftop, a girl with a razorblade at her wrist. I paced a little longer, standing in front of the glass doors to Forty-sixth Street. On the other side, smoking a cigarette, stood my father.

  He tossed the butt onto the ground and put it out deftly with his toe, then turned slightly toward the lobby and saw me there. He tilted his head—is that where I got it, that gesture I thought was only mine?—and then gave a half-smile, part recognition, part ironic distance and parted the glass doors with his elegant hands.

  “As you’ve doubtless noted with great disapproval, I’ve substituted cigarettes for liquor,” he said, without preamble.

  “Great—keep the liver, lose the lungs. A winning equation.”

  “Age does not wither nor custom stale your sharp tongue.”

  “Actually, it has. That was the old me talking. I think you should give up smoking but I also think giving up drinking is an excellent idea.”

  “Your medical opinion.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never imagined you would be a doctor,” he said, looking at me closely, as though it would have changed my face. Or perhaps he was looking for my opinion of him in my eyes. Instead I wore the studied neutrality of my profession.

  “And an alienist,” he added.

  I threw back my head and laughed, and so did he, and for just a moment I thought nothing has changed, nothing.

  “Only you would use that term,” I said. “So Victorian.”

  “And you work with children,” he said.

  “Adolescents,” I said. “Depression, suicide, other manifestations of despair.”

  “The stuff of fiction,” he said.

  “No, not really,” I said. “On paper you can make them do what you want. In practice you have to convince Anna not to throw herself in front of a train.”

  We stared at one another. “You’re looking well,” he finally said.

  “And you,” I replied.

  “You like the play?”

  “Not much,” I said. “I’m surprised you’re here.”

  “I have a friend who studies set design,” he said. “Her teacher did the scenery.”

  The banker hung up the pay phone. “It’s all yours,” he said to me. “Emergency,” I said to my father as I lifted the receiver.

  It was not much of one: a young woman who’d tried to drink herself to death at a small liberal arts college in Ohio and who’d just begun taking antidepressants wanted to double the dose because they weren’t working. “I told her it takes a while for them to take effect, but she won’t settle down until she’s heard it from you,” said one of the nurses on the psychiatric floor.

  “Tell her I will see her first thing in the morning,” I said. “And tell her the antidepressants should begin to work by the end of the week or I will change her dosage or her medication. And remind her that I’d assigned her to read Wuthering Heights along with the medication.”

  He was still there when I got off the phone. I knew he was. I would have felt it if he had left. His eyebrows were raised.

  “You assign the Brontës to the mentally ill?”

  “It will help her understand compulsion,” I said, “and it will take her mind momentarily off her own. And despite what you think, I always liked the Brontës.” I smiled. “I have to get back to my seat.”

  “I would like to say one thing,” he said, and the look on his face was stripped, frozen, like the look on his face that day we hit the deer.

  “It’s not necessary,” I said.

  “I would like to,” he said. “It’s important that you believe what I said in my letter. That I never, ever blamed you. I would have done what you did in your position. Perhaps I should have.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I never blamed you for what you did. It was the right thing to do. It took a good deal of courage. Real courage. Valor. I couldn’t say that at the time because of the circumstances. Perhaps I said it badly in the letter. I never blamed you. I wish I’d done it myself.”

  I looked into his face and there was nothing there, no guile, no subterfuge, nothing except the truth of what he was saying.

  “Oh, Papa,” I said.

  “I admire your courage.”

  From inside I heard the first plangent strains of a violin sketching out the beginning of a love song. Two fools, I thought, looking at him. Two brilliant fools: he thinking it was me, me believing it was him. Like an O. Henry story, except that it had blighted both our lives. Suddenly it seemed incredible that all this time I had thought him either courageous or cunning enough, depending on his motives. It was too dirty, too real life, those crushed pills, that bowl of custard, that crystalline moment of decision. Neither of us could have managed it.

  But in the end what was important was not that we had so misunderstood one another, but that we had so misunderstood her, this woman who had made us who we were while we barely noticed it. Sometimes I try to reconstruct it now. Maybe after I heaved her from the bath she began to horde her pills, to ask for them when she did not need them, to keep them in a cache beneath her underwear or in a box with her anniversary pearls, so that some winter morning, when the light was gray, she could gulp them down and sleep easy.

  Perhaps it just came to her, that afternoon, when I went out to find my father and he was on his way home to her and she found herself alone. Perhaps she pulled herself to the table by the window where I kept the vial. Perhaps she bit them, chewed them to bits, and waited for dark to fall.

  Maybe they were even in the rice pudding after all; maybe her last domestic act in that pretty kitchen was to grind the pills to a powder and mix them in the little container that she knew, eventually, would make her last dessert. Now that I know, now that I’m not so blind, I can imagine her thinking to herself, as surely as I made this little world with my own two hands, with the turpentine the paint the yarn the floor wax the tung oil the flowers the kindness the care the need the fear the love so I will leave it.

  “What then?” I’d asked my patient about the fantasy death of the woman who’d made her out of her own body, and now I had to begin asking myself all over again. The only thing sadder than life, Edith Wharton once said, is death. But sometimes it seems she had it backward.

  My father looked old and empty, like the skin of a cicada, the illusion of the thing. I suppose in some strange way he honored me with his assumption and I was damned if I would tell him otherwise. Let him think of me as a heroine from some little story. He became part of the crowd that night, the great throng that believed speaking the truth was inconsequential, a cover for what I had really done. It was easier when I believed I was covering for him. Now I would have to reinvent him.

  And her too. Sometimes now I say to myself, logically, that I could not have known, that the knowledge that she had asked my help convinced me that she could not help herself, that at the end I had every reason to believe that she was to
o sapped, too weak, too far gone.

  But the truth is I didn’t really think she had it in her. And being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.

  I wondered as I made my way back down the aisle in the theater, and I’ve wondered since, who I should tell about what I now know. Bob Greenstein wouldn’t care; if my job is to search for truth, his is to seek scenarios. I wonder whether knowing what really happened would help Jeff smooth over his differences with our father. But perhaps those differences go back much, much further than any question of pills or responsibility, back to those days when the two of us, my father and I, would move into his den and leave the boys on the porch, leave them to the love of their mother.

  Mrs. Forburg? Teresa? When I see them now, we never talk about the past. We talk about Mrs. Forburg’s travels around the country, where she teaches retired adults about the Great Books in elder hostels. We talk about Teresa’s daughter Gina and how hard it is for her husband the pediatrician to make time to see the little girl when he is spending so many hours each day taking care of other people’s children.

  If I could tell anyone what I know now, perhaps it would be the woman in the blue suit. Somehow I feel that she deserves to know it, so that the story for her can have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  And someday I will tell my father. Someday soon, I imagine, although there is a great temptation to leave the man I once thought the smartest person on earth in utter ignorance. When we parted he had asked, “May I call you?” like a suitor. And I had handed him my card, as though our meeting was a piece of unfinished business.

  It never occurred to me, in the dim light of the theater lobby, to blurt out the truth as I had suddenly discovered it. I have learned my profession well. Before I tell him what really happened, as far as I know it, I need to understand it myself. I need to understand how, learning as much about my mother as I did during those long days we spent together, I had somehow missed her essence. And he, the person who should have known her best in all the world, had missed it, too. Or perhaps she had only duped him, with the deft and docile ways she found to make his life just what he wanted it to be, duped him into thinking that there was less to her than met the eye.

  I will find a way to make it parse, as Jules still says. Doing what I do now, I surely should understand that all our lives have some mystery at the core, and many of them go unsolved. If I had not come to that play on that evening, if I had gone to the Knicks game with Richard instead, if my patient’s medication had taken effect, if the nurse had not called, if the banker had not been on the phone, if my father had not taken up smoking, if, if, if, if, my own story would have ended with a different sort of father, a different sort of mother, and, of course, a different sort of daughter.

  When I went back to my seat Richard took my hand and smiled in the darkness. When the lights came on after the curtain call, he kissed my cheek. As I looked at him I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display. I realized that Richard was nothing like my father but very much like my mother. And I thought that I would marry him very, very soon and take my chances with all the rest. Perhaps then I could afford to know my father again, to fall within the now truncated circle of his thrall.

  “Everything okay?” Richard asked.

  “Is everything ever okay?” I said.

  “Is it really true that a psychiatrist can only answer a question with another question?”

  “I don’t know, what do you think?” I said. I squeezed his big hand, walking out into the night air, and then I added, “The patient is fine. I prescribed Cathy and Heathcliff until her medication kicks in.”

  We stopped on the sidewalk. The audience eddied around us, dissecting the play, but I did not see my father again.

  Richard reached down and checked my pulse. “And how is my patient?” he said.

  “Have you ever had the feeling that you had things all figured out and then suddenly you find yourself back to square one?”

  “I’ve never felt that I had things all figured out,” he said.

  “You are a better person than I am.”

  “Simpler.”

  “Better.”

  “Have it your way,” Richard said, and we began to walk. A black man with rheumy eyes asked for a quarter. “No change,” I said. Richard dug into his pocket and gave him a dollar. “Get a cup of coffee, guy,” he said.

  “Life’s a bitch,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Richard said, “but consider the alternative.”

  “Is that George Burns or Émile Zola?” I said.

  “I thought it was me, actually. C’mon, I’m starved; let’s go eat.”

  “Food,” I said. “That’s what I need.”

  A CONVERSATION WITH

  ANNA QUINDLEN

  Question: Where did you come up with the idea for such a complex story? How did you do your research on the medical and legal aspects of the novel?

  Anna Quindlen: Odd as it may seem to some readers, I wanted to write a novel about the lives of women at the end of the twentieth century, in light of the modern feminist revolution. To me, Kate and Ellen represent the two polar ideas of women that arose at that time: the traditional woman, who embraced life as wife and mother alone; and the new woman, who rejected those roles in favor of a life in the world. Of course, as we all know now, what works for so many people is a synthesis, something closer to the center. And I wanted to explore a series of events that would take Ellen there, or at least place her closer to some more balanced sense of what it means to be female. Originally I had the idea of the mother and daughter; it was only after some consideration that I decided to introduce the notion that the mother was dying, and the mystery about how she ultimately died. The first was an attempt to sharpen the characters of all involved. I believe that in fiction, as in life, people become most themselves under pressure. The second was to explore the notion of that traditional woman, and the probability that beneath the surface there was more steel and strength than met the eye.

  I did no research on either the medical or legal aspects of the story. In fact I have never done any research for any of my novels. In this case I knew a lot about issues surrounding cancer and euthanasia, and it was helpful from a legal standpoint that my husband is a longtime trial attorney.

  Q: How did you create the members of the Gulden family? Did you know from the beginning how their characters would take shape?

  AQ: I was pretty clear on Kate and Ellen from the very beginning, although in the natural order of things you always learn a great deal about your characters as you move along. It’s a little like a friendship; you understand much more at five years than you do at one year. George developed over time. I think hugely nurturing people sometimes create monsters around them: they give and give and so produce people who know only how to take. And then of course, the Oedipal triangle encompassing mother, father and daughter means that qualities developed in each that I tried to illuminate. My greatest challenge as a writer was to not make Ellen too likable. I don’t think, especially in her earliest incarnation, that she’s a particularly likable person. It was difficult to channel her because of that, and I might have despaired had I not known that she was going to grow, learn and soften. But in the early days I kept having to rewrite scenes in which I’d lapsed into making her nicer. I suppose that’s a stereotypical female response. Or maybe it’s because I knew the reader might see her as my surrogate.

  Q: Was it hard to write about such a painful topic? How did you balance the difficult aspects of the story (Kate’s illness, the deteriora
tion of Ellen’s relationship with her father, the trial, etc.) with the overall hopeful message?

  AQ: I think readers who are familiar with a bit about my life assume that the book was more difficult than it was. Sometimes they will come up to me and say, “Oh, I loved the book about you and your mother.” It is true that my mother died of ovarian cancer when she was forty and I was nineteen, and of course that made it easy to evoke many of the details of Kate’s illness and death. But I used that in the way you might use a city you’d lived in as the backdrop for a story, or give a character a profession you’d once practiced. It was useful and important, but I don’t think of it as what the book is about.

  It probably would have been painful had I tried to write this a short time after my mother died, and I can say unequivocally that I would have been unsuccessful, both because I would have lacked the emotional wherewithal to work with the material and transform it properly and because I wasn’t introspective enough to tell a story of this sort. But One True Thing was written twenty years after those events in my own life. There were scenes that were quite draining. The scene in which Kate is in the bathtub was pretty terrible to write. I wept through most of it. But I did the same with emotionally charged scenes in all three other novels as well.

  I tend to be an optimistic person and writer, but in this case if there is a hopeful message it is with good reason. Ellen has been well-mothered, and I know enough about the world to know that that is both relatively rare and absolutely pivotal. So I think she is going to be able to incorporate the life of the mind that her father bequeathed her and the full heart her mother left her and be a whole human being.

  Q: You’ve written fiction and nonfiction, news columns and novels—what is the most difficult to write? The most fun? The most rewarding?

  AQ: I have been a journalist for so long and have written so many hundreds of columns that it is just easier for me than writing novels. Columns are also bite-size; one of the things that makes a novel so challenging is that there’s so much of it. Having said that, if I had to choose a single form tomorrow, I would choose novel writing. I’m lucky; I don’t have to make that choice.