by Belva Plain
Pa halted the buggy and tipped his hat.
“How are you, Mrs. Meig?”
“Very well, Doctor, thank you. And you?”
“The same, thank you.”
“Is this your boy, Doctor?”
“Yes, this is my son, Martin.”
“He’s going to be a handsome man.”
“Handsome is as handsome does.”
The lady laughed. Even her laugh was pretty. She had come quite close to the buggy so that you could smell her perfume. Narrow silver bracelets flashed on her wrists. Martin stared at her, then at the daughter who was just like her, except for the bracelets: the girl had a gold locket lying in the hollow of her throat. He looked at the other girl and quickly looked away; you weren’t supposed to stare at a cripple.
Pa tipped his hat again and clucked to the mare. It had all taken half a minute.
“Who was that?” Martin asked.
“Mrs. Meig. That’s their house.”
He twisted around to look back. The house was strong and dark, built of stone. It had a curlicued iron fence and starry flowers scattered on the grass.
“Did you see all those wild flowers, Pa?”
“Those are daffodils, and they aren’t growing wild, only made to look that way. It’s what they call ‘naturalizing,’ ” his father explained. He knew everything.
Suddenly Martin knew what was exciting him. The house looked like a castle in a book about knights! It was smaller, of course, but it was secretive like that. It made you want to know what went on inside.
“Have you ever been inside, Pa?”
“Yes, once. The parlor maid was sick and they couldn’t get Dr. Pierce. That’s how Mrs. Meig came to recognize me.” Pa grinned. “It was a miserable, wet night, I recall, and I guess Dr. Pierce didn’t want to go out just for a maid.”
“What’s a maid for, Pa?”
“Why, when you have a big place like that you need people to take care of it. The Meigs own the Websterware factory down by the canal where they make pots and pans, you know. I guess half the men in Cyprus work there.”
But Martin was thinking of something else. “What was wrong with that other little girl?”
“She can’t help the way she looks. She has a curvature of the spine.”
“What’s that?”
“Her spine wasn’t made right before she was born. You can be thankful it didn’t happen to you.”
True. It would be terrible. The kids would make fun of you in school. He shuddered.
Ma and Alice were already waiting on the porch when they drove into the yard. They had summer dresses on and white shoes. Alice wore a broad blue sash and bow.
“Don’t they look pretty, standing there?” Pa asked.
“That lady was prettier than Ma. And the little girl was a whole lot prettier than Alice.”
Pa rebuked him. “Don’t you ever say that, Martin, you hear me?”
“I only meant Ma and Alice haven’t got big white hats like those.” It was not what he had meant, however. “I wish they did, don’t you?”
“It’s not important,” his father replied.
His mother was in the mood of the holiday. She ruffled Martin’s hair, grazing his cheek with the harsh skin of her fingertips.
“Hurry up, you two!” she cried gaily. “You’ve ten minutes to wash and change.”
Ordinarily, passing his sister as he went into the house, Martin would have pulled open her sash. Just because she was a year and a half older, she needn’t think she was queen of the roost! Now, though, some sudden tenderness kept him from spoiling Alice’s careful bow. He could not have explained what it was that he saw in his mother and sister just then: something vulnerable and wanting, perhaps, although they were smiling at this moment and happy. He only felt the dim confusion of contrast: that startling glimpse, just a few seconds’ worth, of a house, of a fragrant, slender woman and a flowery girl-child; then this house and these two whom he knew so dearly. Something stirred in his heart, a kind of longing, a kind of pain.
Some days are marked for recollection, days which, on the surface, are not very different from all the other thousands in the chain of years. But seeds have been sown which will lie hidden quietly until their time, until a commanding shaft of light breaks through; then all the concentrated life in the seeds will stir and rise. Perhaps it was unusual for a boy only nine years old to make a resolution and have a revelation all in one day; perhaps more unusual still for him to know, as they were happening, that he would remember them. Yet it was so.
Chapter 2
Long before sunrise Martin awoke with instant awareness that this morning was different He was leaving home. The college years close by at Hamilton had been little more than an extension of home, but this, he knew, would be a final departure. After four years at Cornell Medical College, after four years of New York City, the life of this house would be unfamiliar and he would be someone other than he now was.
The suitcases stood near the door, black shapes in the graying dawn. When they had been fastened shut and taken away, what would be left in this old room to which he had been brought on the day of his birth? The bed, with its loopy crocheted spread, the ink-stained desk and the maple dresser on which his toilet things had been placed in parallel lines, equidistant from the edge. Like his mother, he was compelled toward neatness and precision. He could never think constructively until everything was in order, notes arranged alphabetically in the notebook and papers in their folders. A neurotic trait! But one couldn’t help the way one was made.
Guilty and melancholy thoughts crossed his mind sometimes. If it had not been for the deaths of those other three, especially of the brother, he would not have been going away to become a doctor. Oh, then, what would he have become? Death and survival! One life thrives on the destruction of another! He had been thinking more often lately about those three. Perhaps it was because they lay in the graveyard not half a mile down the road, and would be lying there this morning when he passed to meet the train that was taking him away.
Pa knocked on the door and came in just as Martin swung his legs out of bed.
“You realize I haven’t been in the city since I arrived on the boat from Ulster? And I wouldn’t be going this year if riding down with you didn’t give me a reason.” He yawned widely. “Excuse me. Didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Excited?”
“Partly, and overtired, too. I was up most of Wednesday watching old Schumann die.”
“I remember him. Alice and I used to think he looked like Santa Claus.”
“Yes. Well, it’s sad that after eighty-seven years a human being can’t go out without a struggle. Even morphine didn’t help much.”
Martin, pulling on his sharply creased new trousers, thought: How will it be for me when I witness my first death?
“He went through some hard times, too. For a while there during the war some folks wouldn’t talk to him because he came from Germany. Said he kept the Kaiser’s picture on his parlor wall, which wasn’t true. Did I tell you I delivered his granddaughter’s baby last week? A hard birth, a breech. Takes some doing, a breech. I remember when I had my first one. That was back in the nineties. I’d never seen the patient before. There were no X-rays then, and I remember when I reached in and realized those were the feet presenting, I was scared to death. Never been so scared in my life.”
“And?”
“And I lost the baby. The mother was all right, but—it’s an awful thing to lose a new life, perfectly formed! They blamed me. Two of the woman’s friends deserted me after that. Went to Doc Revere, who didn’t know as much as I did. Had filthy hands, black fingernails. He hadn’t even heard of Semelweiss and gloves. But they thought it was my fault.”
“And was it?” That was one thing about his father: you could be straightforward with him.
“Might’ve been. A skilled man might’ve been able to turn the baby—I don’t know.” Enoch shook his head. “There’s an awful lot I don’t k
now.” He stood up. “Let’s go down for breakfast. Your mother’s got pancakes and sausage.” At the door he turned back. “Just one thing more I want to say. Martin, I envy you, born in a time when you’ll learn things I couldn’t dream of! The answers to dark secrets will come as clear as day. Maybe even cancer in your lifetime. Well, I’ll see you downstairs.”
Martin stood still in the center of the room. Point of departure. Yes, yes, he wanted to be a doctor! Yet he feared. What if he didn’t do well? Suppose he were to discover that it had been a mistake; that, after all, he wasn’t fitted for it! How then would he turn back? How would he face his father and face himself?
Sunlight, moving westward now, stained the whole rug bright blue. The closet door stood open, revealing empty hangers swinging from the rod. A child-sized baseball bat lay on the floor, along with a photo of the Yankee team and a pair of old sneakers. He stood a moment in the doorway, touching these things gently with his eyes, before leaving them behind. It was like what they said about drowning: a rush of memory, a whole life up to the last minute. Did everyone, departing, feel like this? He knew they must, but also that they didn’t, exactly. For each one is unique. Each one’s thoughts belong to him alone, and the way he will take belongs to him alone.
Chapter 3
In a copybook, between thick cardboard covers, Martin kept a diary. He liked to believe that when he was older, in more leisured hours, these pages written in the rapid hand that hardly anyone except himself could read with ease, would keep time from consuming him without a trace.
Turning his pages, then, flipping and skipping at random, the searching eye perceives the intimations and the forecasts.
My first week in New York is over. Pa stayed a day and a night, long enough to see me settled in. We had a very good dinner at Lüchow’s. I watched him counting out the bills. These years will be hard for him.
I took him to Grand Central to catch “the cars.” (He still uses that old-fashioned expression.) I never realized until we stood there together how small he is compared with me. The only feature we have in common is the nose, a profile like the ones on Roman coins. It gives the face an ascetic look. He says our noses are the result of the Roman occupation of Britain!
I waited until the train had left and all you could see was the taillight moving down the track. I shall miss him with his ragtag quotations, his stars and rocks and Greek mythology. There can’t be anything quite like him. Tender, feisty, absentminded little man!
I am on my own.
This was my first day in the dissecting room. I thought I would vomit and the humiliation scared me. Then I looked at my partner, Fernbach—we were assigned alphabetically to share a cadaver—and he looked sick, too. So we both began to laugh, a stupid, embarrassed laugh.
I tried not to look at the face. You can make believe that the rest of the body is a machine: it has no individuality. But the face is the person.
Maybe for the first time in my life I am really aware of man as a perishable thing. I guess I’ve just accepted without challenge what they taught in Sunday school—all those lofty, consoling words about man’s immortal soul. But the body of man can be crushed! It rots like any animal that has been run over and thrown to the side of the road. There is no dignity. All privacy is stripped away. The sphincters relax. I find a scar, a white rip across the shoulders. Was it from a childhood fall, a drunken scuffle or an accident while decently supporting a family? No matter now.
How ugly the body, on the table under the strong lights, invaded and marauded by strangers like me! Yes, and beautiful, too, as an equation or a snowflake is beautiful. Design, evolving and altering with subtle patience, for a hundred thousand years.
My floor is a league of nations. There are Napolitano, Rosenberg, Horvath, Gault and a fellow from Hong Kong, Wong Lee. His father owns a bank there. He doesn’t mention it, but everybody knows it.
My best friends are going to be Tom Horvath and Perry Gault. Tom reminds me of my father. That’s funny, because no two people could look less alike, Tom being six feet tall, with what they call a leonine head and a big homely face. His father’s Hungarian, his mother’s Irish. “Makes me a typical American,” Tom says. He’s a little bluff and opinionated, but I feel his honesty and gentleness. It is the gentleness that is most like Pa.
Perry is the brain. He’s got a photographic memory for everything from anatomy to baseball scores. He’s small and quick, with enough energy for any three people, a hot temper and a soft heart.
They think I’m superstitious because I have “feelings” about the future. I feel that Perry and Tom and I are going to be involved in life together, perhaps even in great struggles. Ridiculous? Maybe!
* * *
Six months already fled. I’ve been trying in such free time as I have to learn something about this enormous city. I have so much to learn beside the fine print in all my fat texts. There’s so much out there in the world! Went down to the Fulton Fish Market yesterday. Shoving crowds and red faces. Piles of iridescent fish, pink and gray under a gloss of wet silver. Thought of that Flemish artist Breughel I saw at the museum one Sunday.
Then I walked over to Fifth Avenue past the library lions—there’s a place where I could lose myself—and on uptown. What a treasury! Paintings in gilded frames. A model room with tall windows and a view of gardens. Pyramids of books. Photographs of Rome—umbrella pines and marble. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams: Was he right, or is the brain just chemistry, I wonder?
New York is a feast and I am so greedy, I want to know it all. After an hour of roaming I don’t want to go back to my small room and memorize the course of the brachial artery. But I do!
My second year! I’ve been watching some surgery and it’s very, very sobering. There are stars here: Jennings, Fox, Alben Riker. Saw a radical mastectomy on a woman about my mother’s age. Quiet, resigned face. Knows she will not beat this illness. Watched Riker remove a tuberculous kidney yesterday. A master, with golden hands.
Wouldn’t it be marvelous to be a surgeon? But where and how to get the training? One has to make a living. Who can afford it? I do believe, though, that the day will come when there will be more specialists than general men. Medicine is growing more and more complex, Tom disagrees. Anyway, he says he can’t wait to be finished, to open an office and marry his girl, Florence. He says I’m lucky to have my father’s practice to step into. He’s right about that, I know.
Tom worries because at the end of my second year I still don’t have a girl. The thing is, he’s happy with Florence—they’ve been going together since high school—and thinks I ought to do the same. It’s generous of him, but I don’t want a girl right now. Problem is, “nice” girls want to get married. It’s understood that if you hang around with one for six or seven months, she has a right to know what you plan to do next. Even the parents get that look on their faces, either too warm and friendly or else ever so slightly cool. In either case, you know what they’re worried about, that she’s wasting her time. To be fair about it, I can see their point.
But I’m not wasting my time, either—what little time I have! Met a nurse up from North Carolina—Harriet, red-haired and rosy-pink. A strawberry. Looked so innocent. It took me all of twenty-five minutes to find out she isn’t Luckily, she’s got an older sister with an apartment in the Village.
My time is racing so, I can’t believe it! I’m three-quarters of the way toward writing “Doctor” in front of my name. They say young people think they have all the time in the world, but it’s never been like that for me. Sometimes I feel as if I’d just been born and other times I’m in a panic because I’m already twenty-four—a third of my life gone by—and I’ll never do or see everything I want to do and see. I didn’t know there was so much; how could you know, living in a place like Cyprus? Yet, it’s true that there are people living here in the city who could be happier living in Cyprus.
I’ve heard Edna St. Vincent Millay read poetry in the Village. I’ve gone to the opera—stan
ding room, of course, but it’s worth it. My God, how splendid it is! The lights and the sudden darkness; the curtain rising and the music pouring …
I’ve been reading about a man in Canada, a Dr. Banting, who has discovered help for diabetes through injections of insulin. He’s had astounding success. Imagine being a discoverer, a benefactor like that! How must he feel with the whole world’s eyes turned on him? To be like that! Oh, not for admiration, but to know! To know that you know! Martin, Martin, is there an ugly streak of vanity in you? I hope not.
But I wish I didn’t have this itch. I feel that if I don’t do something big, discover something or develop some stupendous skill, I will have failed. They say, of course, that most beginners are romantic about themselves, that it’s only naivete and youth. I wonder.
The folks want me home again for the vacation. Pa says I can ride around on house calls with him and that now it will all mean a lot more to me. Two months will be too much, though. I figure on a month before I come back here and gird myself for senior year. They’re reorganizing the main library and I can get a job lugging books. I need the money. Can do a lot of reading, too.
Home on vacation. A curious thing happened today. I went with Pa on a call to one of those fussy Cyprus houses with the turrets and the iron deer that I used to think so grand. The man of the house had a bad case of grippe. I waited in the library while Pa went upstairs.
It was a dreadful room with too much heavy oak furniture and, over the sofa, an awful picture of a barefoot running nymph with windblown scarves carefully arranged to cover genitals and breasts. I was staring at it when someone spoke.
“Horrible, isn’t it?”
I jumped. Then I saw who it was: a small girl barely five feet tall. She was about twenty years old with a sweet face, a fine head of dark curly hair and a curvature of the spine.