The Doctor's Wife

by Elizabeth Brundage

  “No,” he said softly, slightly spurned by the comment. He’d given to her, hadn’t he? He’d saved her. He’d given her plenty. But he said, “No, Lydia, I suppose it’s not.”

  “But you’re an artist,” she reminded him. “You give differently.”

  “How very generous of you to put it that way.”

  She flashed a grin and sipped her tea.

  “You look very pretty today. It’s a pity I never see you.”

  She smiled richly, obviously flattered. “I work like everybody else,” she said, her girlish enthusiasm betraying every attempt at seeming womanly. “That’s the best part. I’m just another employee, not Simon Haas’s wife. It feels good to just be me for a change.”

  He nodded, uncomfortable suddenly. “And after work. What takes you so long to get home?”

  “Church meetings. Stuff like that.”

  “What stuff?”

  Her eyes darted this way and that, minnow-quick. She was deciding whether or not to tell him the truth. It was an expression he knew well when it came to his wife. “You may as well know I’m part of Life Force, the pro-life movement.”

  “You mean those people who protest in parking lots?”

  “We fight for the lives of the unborn.” Her voice sounded dead.

  “What the hell for? What interest do you have in that?”

  She summoned tears to her eyes. “We could have had that baby, Simon.”

  “Don’t bring that up. Jesus.”

  “We didn’t have to kill it.”

  “Oh yes we did.”

  “You made me do it. That awful woman. What was she, a prostitute?”

  “A dubious line of work, but it pays.”

  “You forced me.”

  “The hell I did. You were fourteen.”

  She shook her head, tears falling thickly onto the kitchen table. “We could have saved it. We could have taken care of it.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Lydia, you were raped.”

  Her back went stiff and she gazed at the window, where darkness had pulled down its heavy shade and only a sliver of orange remained.

  “I could have taken care of it.” Her voice quavered. “That place she took me to. It was horrible. It was the worst experience of my life.”

  “Worse than being raped?”

  “It was a life, Simon. It was a gift. How it got there makes no difference.”

  “Boy, they’ve done a good job on you.”

  Furious, she shoved the chair violently against the table. For a moment she just stood there, as if she was surprised at herself, amazed even, her chest heaving with anger. Then she raced up the stairs and slammed the door. A moment later he could hear music playing, some Christian rock group, so loud that the walls trembled. He sat for a moment, but the music annoyed him. How dare she, he thought. Climbing the stairs, he wondered what he would find behind the door of their bedroom. He opened it, but the room was empty, and he walked in searching for her but found himself alone. She’d opened all the windows and the cold air blew in, swirling the curtains. He turned off the music and closed the windows. A moment later he heard a door slam downstairs. How she’d gotten down without him seeing her eluded him. He glanced out the window and saw the flash of her taillights as she turned the corner and vanished behind the trees.

  Where in hell was she going? he wondered.

  Back in the kitchen, he made himself a supper of bread and cheese and poured himself a glass of whiskey. He noticed her canvas bag on the back of the chair, full of newspapers and magazines, all rolled up together. Curious, he shuffled the papers out onto the table and put on his bifocals. There was a Time magazine, the cover of which showed Wally Nash and the president at their debate podiums. Lydia had drawn the horns of the devil on the president and an angel’s halo above Nash. Rolled up inside it was a catalog from McMillan & Taft. On its front cover, which showed an oppressively happy couple strolling in the autumn woods, was a little cloud containing the words Delectable Intimates. He scrambled through the pages to the very end, amazed to find a whole section of photographs of models in high-end lingerie. It did not take long to find the identical negligee that only hours before he’d admired on his lover’s body. Someone had circled it with black pen. Suddenly, his appetite was gone. The spit of rage filled his mouth.

  Lydia had sent it to Annie. He was sure of it. She knew.

  39

  LYDIA’S FATHER had compared the sensation of dying to that of falling into quicksand. Over and over again during those long months, she imagined the gritty warmth enveloping him, suffocating him. He lay in bed, thin as a bundle of sticks, his skin the color of mustard. His manner was caustic and disagreeable, as if he’d swallowed lye. She fed him whiskey off a spoon, but that only made him sicker. Sometimes she dreamed of smothering him under his pillow. She’d play it all out in her head. Putting the pillow over his trembling face. The terror in his eyes. The way his legs would twitch and go quiet. Finally, she called a doctor, who came over at once. The doctor wanted to put him in the hospital, but her father wouldn’t hear of it, brandishing a flyswatter in the man’s face.

  With her father sick and unable to work, there was little money. Lydia’s teacher, Sister Louise, secured a job for her at the nursing home in Gloversville. They paid her four dollars an hour under the table, since she was underage. Each day after school she rode her bike to work, where they used her in the kitchen to help prepare the meals. There was the red-faced cook with his bloodsucker veins. The smell of boiling sugar beets, wilted onions. Salisbury steak and peppers. Other girls worked there, girls like her, who were poor, who at the ages of fourteen and fifteen were already brittle and indifferent. Lydia would smoke with them on break among the old people drooping in wheelchairs. Sister Louise believed Lydia was performing a godly task. She said Jesus had chosen Lydia, but on some days it was hard for Lydia to see the benefits of her service. Pushing around the cart at feeding time, tying on the bibs, forcing the cook’s slop down their throats. The black-skinned women who cleaned the bedpans, murmuring complaints, the scandalous odors of the body’s decay permeating the walls.

  One afternoon Lydia discovered the small room where they kept the medicines. She soon realized that it was not difficult to slip a bottle of aspirin into her pocket, or even the tiny yellow pills they gave to the more disagreeable patients. When she got home, she crushed a few of the pills into her father’s food, in an effort to ease his pain, and he never suspected. The pills gave him an easy, glassy-eyed look, and he didn’t bother her so much, didn’t scold her. He’d gaze out the window at the fields, or stare blankly at the television. Weeks passed, and little by little the hard lines of her father diminished, and he became someone else, a befuddled stranger. Without him bugging her all the time, she felt a new sense of freedom and now it was she who snapped at him, tugging at his sheets, shutting off the TV. Sometimes she even got lazy and would forget to feed him, or change his clothes, which had the foul odor of his excrement, but he never complained, not once.

  The cook singled her out to do certain tasks. He made her clean the ovens, and he would supervise her and inspect her work and if it was not done to his satisfaction he would make her do it again. One day after work he called her into the kitchen. He took her hand and brought her into the pantry. She did not like the look in his eye, sweat forming quickly on his brow. He grabbed her knapsack, rifled through it, and pulled out the stolen pills. Almost instantly she began to cry. “Do you know it is a crime to steal?” he asked her. “These are narcotics, Miss Crofut. Do you know you’ve committed a federal offense? I could turn you in. I could have you arrested.” She cried, dropping to her knees. “You’ve caused me nothing but trouble,” he told her. “You’re a foolish, insipid girl and you’ll never amount to anything. You don’t do anything right. Even the simplest tasks.” He took down a can of lard and opened it. He shook his head as though he were sorry for her. He grabbed her and lifted her skirt and bent her over the piled sacks of flour, roughly tuggin
g down her underwear. He used the lard, smearing it liberally the same way he greased the pans for corn bread, then took her with a brooding force. When he finished, he withdrew from her, wheezing and stumbling, and fired her. “One word about this and I’ll call the police,” he said. “I’d hate to see a young girl like you spend the rest of your life in prison.”

  Riding home on her bike, she found it too painful to sit down on the seat. She could hardly see through the blur of her tears. The gray houses tumbled behind her. She did not understand why the man had done such a thing, but she knew it had been a sin, a terrible sin. The next day she concentrated on chores, ignoring the pain the man had caused. Trying to forget it. To stuff it deep in her heart where she’d never look again. First she mowed the lawn. It was hard work, the sweat pouring out of her. Then she washed her father’s sheets, soiled with sweat and piss. She filled the washtub with water from the hose and let it warm in the sunlight. Then she gathered the sheets and brought them outside and pushed them deep underwater, holding them there, holding her breath. She could not go on like this much longer. Taking care of him. She could not. She pinned the sheets on the line. Wet, they reminded her of the cool damp skin of her dying mama, and she wrapped herself up like a mummy, waiting for her mama to whisper. If only she would, Lydia thought. If only.

  Shortly after the rape, Lydia went to confession and told the priest of the awful event. Afterward, the priest sighed and spoke in a doleful voice. “You will spend your entire life trying to rectify this act.”

  Lydia went home and looked the word up in the dictionary. To set right; to correct. To correct by calculation or adjustment. To refine or purify. Lydia did not have any idea how she could possibly do any of those things and lay awake every night going over the incident in her head. Had it been her fault? Why hadn’t she done something—why hadn’t she fought back?

  Oh, yes, Lydia knew about sin. Jesus had never forgiven her.

  A week later Simon Haas knocked on their door. The minute she saw him she knew that he would be the one to save her.

  They’d buried her father in the cemetery, next to her mother. After the burial Simon moved in with her. He’d brought his things from the city. He didn’t have much, just his paints and a small suitcase, two pairs of trousers, three shirts, four pairs of socks. He set his few belongings out on her father’s dresser: a leather pouch that contained his money and a small, ornate box that had been his mother’s. He had in his possession a small green bottle of aftershave, a razor, a tortoiseshell comb with several teeth missing, and a tin that contained a special tobacco that, he said, he used to calm his nerves. People thought they were related, that’s how he got them to stay away. And they lived like that. He said he was willing to keep her, to take care of her like a relative, in exchange for almost nothing.

  Simply the opportunity to paint her.

  Routinely, he woke early, before dawn, and went walking in the long grass behind the house. He liked to witness the rising sun and the wailing geese crossing the red sky. Lydia would watch him through the kitchen window, a large man in a leather coat, confronting the new sun like a dare. During those moments, when they were separate, she tried to understand him, to get inside his mind. But he had told her nothing of his life or his past. He’d come in and shake off the cold, hang his coat on the hook, and wait for her to serve his breakfast. He liked strong black coffee with sugar, and took his bread dry, without butter or jam. He moved slowly through the day, observing the various details of their life in the house. The way the cream fell from the pitcher. Her hands as they poured his coffee. He said her hands reminded him of birds. He’d take them in his own and warm them at his mouth. Or the sun crawling across the table. The light attracted him as much as the darkness. Each was important, he told her, and one could not survive without the other.

  He followed her around like a lost dog with his paper and his pencils. His charcoal. Her only escape from him was the bathroom, the narrow room that dripped and hummed. The little birds in the tree by the window. The smell of peppermint soap. Sometimes she would stay a long time just to torture him, to make him wait for her, and when she’d finally emerge he’d study her as though she had changed somehow, as though she’d transformed in some powerful way.

  Afternoons, he sketched her all around the house. At the window, looking out at the trees. At the table buttering bread. The time dragged, and she longed to be back in school, but Simon wouldn’t let her leave the house. He told her he couldn’t bear her being out of his sight. At first, she felt special and important, almost like a princess. But then she saw his obsession, she saw that he was using her, and she began to hate him for it.

  To occupy her, he gave her chores. He taught her things: how to stretch the canvas, how to prepare the colors. Dissatisfied with the paint he brought back from the city, he took to concocting his own pigments and taught Lydia how to mix them, too. She didn’t mind mixing colors. She liked the way a color could make her smile. He was particular when it came to his supplies and she’d dutifully stand at the sink, scrubbing his brushes until they shone, the turpentine ripping up her hands, the colors running off her fingers like blood. After what she’d done to her father, she knew her life had become the consequence of that awful sin, and she believed this with all her heart. Jesus was letting her off easy.

  Simon ripped down the velvet drapes that her mama had sewn and burned them in the yard with all her father’s things. Now the sun filled the old house. His easel and his paints all over the living room. He was not a good housekeeper; she found herself picking up after him endlessly, his plates left on the couch, a banana peel in the bathroom, a bottle of milk spoiling on the back porch. He painted constantly. He painted whatever he saw that interested him. If she ate an apple he painted the core and the pits and the bruised petals. He painted her father’s house from every angle, the windows and their changing light. He painted the old wrinkled woman who walked the road in her black coat, pulling her three-legged dog. The men in flannel shirts, painting the barns. The smirking redheaded boy who mowed the big field across the road, high up on the big green tractor.

  Two months later she took ill. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. She knew there was something wrong with her, and she suspected it had something to do with the cook at the nursing home, but she didn’t dare tell him. One afternoon Sister Louise came to the house for a visit. Simon answered the door in his undershorts, his naked chest covered with paint. He had a look in his eye all the time, a madman. “There’s something wrong with her,” Lydia heard him tell the nun. “Maybe she’ll tell you.”

  Sister Louise came into the room and shut the door. She had a long face; she rarely smiled. Like Lydia, she had grown up without her mother. At school, Lydia had been her pet and Sister Louise used to bring her presents. Once she gave her a tin of shortbread. She sat on the edge of the bed and took Lydia’s hand. “Lydia, tell me what’s wrong?”

  Lydia broke down and told Sister Louise about the cook and what he’d done to her.

  Sister Louise’s face went pale and her blue lips trembled. She called Simon into the room and told him what had happened. “She’ll have to go to a home for unwed mothers,” she said. “Take her to a doctor at once. If you don’t, I’ll call the police and they’ll think it’s yours. You’ll go to jail. It’s still against the law to have relations with a minor.” With that she left.

  The next morning they closed up the house and left for New York. “I don’t want to go to a home,” she kept saying.

  “You’re not going to any home,” he told her. “I’m not putting you in a goddamn home.”

  He took her to his friend Grace’s apartment. It was a tiny room that smelled of sweat and lilacs. Grace looked at her and shook her head. “Naughty boy,” she said to Simon.

  “It’s not what you think,” Simon told her. “Somebody else did this.”

  “Sure they did, honey, sure they did.”

  That afternoon Grace took Lydia to a clinic that was located on the
third floor of a building with no elevator, over a veterinary hospital. Lydia could smell the dogs and cats as she climbed the stairs. They had to wait two hours. Lydia had to answer questions. She had to lie about her age. Then Grace paid them in cash. They took Lydia into a small room and put her feet up and spread her legs and took the thing that was making her sick out of her body. They sucked it out and she could hear it getting sucked, like a vacuum, and it made her sick, too, the idea of it. She could still remember the Oreos they gave her afterward, and berry punch. She was crying. She didn’t know why she was crying but she couldn’t stop. It wasn’t that she wanted it, really—she didn’t know what she wanted. But still, she felt sad. Deep, deep sad.