THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

  He had to go back there. It was not really a matter of volition. He had to look at the statue again, to be in its presence and feel its power. Even as he passed between the low, squat granite columns of the entrance, he realized that he was doing just what every murderer is supposed not to do, but inevitably does: he was returning to the scene of the crime.

  There it was: “Mississippi—Father of Waters.” And it was just another marble statue of a naked man, and even sillier than he’d first supposed. When he touched it, no power emanated from the stone, but from the other side of the lobby a guard called out, in a tone of routine prohibition: “Hey kid, get away from the statue!”

  42

  When she heard the car pull up to the house, Sondra lighted one of the butts in the ashtray and blew puffs of smoke about the living room, as though it were air freshener. She was probably the only person in the world who had to pretend to be a smoker instead of the other way round, pretending to have quit. It still amazed her how easy it had been, once she’d had the motivation. All those years she’d agonized over being unable to kick the habit, and now all at once, because she was pregnant, stopping smoking had been as easy as falling off a log. She had no more craving than if she’d never smoked at all. The taste of cigarettes actually repelled her. The reason she lit cigarettes and left them burning in ashtrays was that she didn’t want Ben to know she’d quit, not yet, not till she was ready to tell him she was pregnant. She’d always said that was the only thing that would convince her to give up smoking, and it he noticed she’d quit, he might guess why.

  It was a false alarm. The car pulling into the driveway hadn’t been Ben, but a pair of Judith’s fellow crusaders against abortion stopping by to see if she would come along to the Willowville mall to hand out leaflets. Sondra explained that Judith had extended her visit to Florida an extra week, but she didn’t volunteer the information that Judith was in the hospital. When the car drove off, it was as though its bumper sticker—ABORTION IS MURDER—had been dispatched to the house specially for Sondra’s benefit, a sign from on high.

  Personally Sondra did not share her stepdaughter’s unconditional horror of abortion. She had had an abortion the first time Ben had got her pregnant, and though at the time she’d let Ben assume that she was doing it for his sake and despite her own finer feelings, the fact was that the prospect of pregnancy and diaper pails had not been any more appealing to her than to him. But that was in 1970, when she’d been eager to make up for the time she’d lost by marrying Henry as soon as she was out of high school. This was 1980, and time had smoothed over the rougher edges of memory. Now it wasn’t the morning sickness or the nights of infant colic that she remembered, but the mystery and the amusement of having made another human being out of her own body, a little burbling milk-mad mammal that slowly evolved into a genuine human being. It seemed, once again, worth the effort. More than that, she had a craving to be a mother again, a physical lust to feel her belly filling with another child, to nurse it at her breasts, to see it crawl about this barn of a house, smearing food on the furniture and crayoning the walls and making it a home in those drastic ways that are the privilege and the genius of the very young. She didn’t care about its sex, it could be a boy or a girl, she just wanted a baby, and if she was to have one, it should be now. She wasn’t too old yet, only thirty-four, but with every year she let slip by the odds grew worse of some kind of irregularity.

  These were not feelings that Ben shared. Ben had no fond memories of fatherhood, and Sondra was sure he would want her to get an abortion. There would probably be fights, and almost certainly it would mean the end of the recent renaissance in their sex life. Ben had never been a great lover, certainly nothing like the Beauty-Rest gymnast Henry had been, but in the last few months since he’d been feeling his Cheerios again, Ben had actually advanced from Beginner to Intermediate. He’d even developed a taste for eating pussy, and if he was still a little tentative in the way he went about it, by comparison to the old days it was a genuine sexual revolution. At first she had suspected he was taking drugs (you heard all this talk nowadays about cocaine in suburbia), and then she thought the old dog might have learned his new tricks as a result of having a mistress, but the simplest explanation was that he was having his mid-life crisis. He was forty-five, and the articles she’d read said that that was the age when men were most likely to have a mid-life crisis and to take a fresh interest in sex. Whatever the cause, she enjoyed its effect and didn’t want to put a damper on it prematurely.

  It was a beautiful day, unusually cool for midsummer, and Sondra decided she would take a walk. From the first days of her pregnancy, even before she’d realized what was happening, she had been brimming with physical energy. Before Judith had gone to Florida to visit her mother and William had started his summer school classes, she’d taken them almost every day to the pool at the country club, and when she no longer had that excuse for exercise, she’d begun jogging! But when the tests showed she was pregnant, her doctor had advised her to discontinue that. Instead, for an hour every morning when there was no one else in the house, she did the stretching and breathing exercises recommended in the book on natural childbirth that she kept hidden among the paperback romances stacked sideways on the bookshelf in her bedroom. (Ben couldn’t make fun of the titles if he didn’t see them.) With William she had meant to have a natural delivery, but she’d got lazy about doing the exercises and when the time had come she had funked out and let them give her an anesthetic. She’d always reproached herself for that. It was like flying over the Grand Canyon in broad daylight and being asleep. This time she was determined to do it right.

  Willowville was not a stroller’s paradise. Few of the houses had smooth concrete sidewalks, the preference being for paths of gravel or crushed rock, and there was rarely anything to take special notice of. People did their flower gardening, if they did any at all, around their patios in their backyards, and the front lawns featured evergreen shrubberies and trees just out of the nursery. She walked the length of Pillsbury Road until it veered west into Willowville Drive, then up Willowville as far as the Sheehy house, a center hall colonial with a full acre of lawn and the tallest trees in the neighborhood, seven huge willows that surrounded the white clapboard house like a shimmering dusky-green veil. Sondra envied the Sheehys their willows, but not their house, which was spacious only from the outside; inside it was old-fashioned and boxy. Though, of course, it helped with that many children (the Sheehys had three) to have a good supply of bedrooms. When the new baby came, Judith would have to move upstairs and take the room next to William so the baby could have hers, and then there wouldn’t be a guest room. Ben would object to that, but when did they ever had guests?

  She was tempted to cut across the Sheehys’ lot to her own backyard but, resisting the temptation, returned the way she’d come and was rewarded by discovering, under one of the low junipers that bordered the gravel path in front of 1232, a lost Frisbee. It was printed with the name of the company Mr. Sheehy worked for, TECHNO-CONTROLS, and with a motto in smaller letters, “Designing Machines with Souls.” Obviously, it was a promotional giveaway and just as obviously belonged to the Sheehy boy, who was a few years younger than William. Properly she ought to take the Frisbee back the Sheehys’ house and leave it somewhere in plain sight on their lawn, but the heft of it in her hand, its lightness and its promise of effortless flight, made her reluctant to return it without sailing it a few times across her own backyard. She returned home, Frisbee in hand, just as William was putting away his bicycle in the garage. “William!” she called out, and when he looked up, startled, she threw the Frisbee toward him on a slow lofting arc that hooked in its last mirror of flight right into the hand he lifted to receive it.

  “Hey, nice,” he said. “Techno-Controls? Where’d you get this?”

  “I found it in some shrubberies. I think it belongs to the Sheehy boy. Do you want to play with it a while in the backyard?”

  William seemed to
take as much pleasure as she did in tossing it back and forth. As they gained confidence, they sailed the Frisbee across wider and wider spans of lawn but without either of them having to trespass beyond the invisible boundaries of their own backyard. It was wonderful all the different flight paths you could make it trace. She had no idea what twist of wrist or flick of the fingers made it follow one trajectory instead of another. It was all done unconsciously but with such a strange precision. You’d almost think the plastic disc had a volition and intelligence of its own, as though it were some species of bird that had been fined down to this bare aeronautical minimum, a living discus skimming the lowest branches of the maple, whirling toward the patio and then veering away, settling down on the mown grass with a whoosh of deceleration like a waterfowl coming to rest on a lake. Before today she had only ever played Frisbee with Henry, and that was years ago, on days when they’d taken William, still in a stroller, to Brosner Park. Now William was almost as tall as his father had been then, and beginning to share his good looks. He’d be dating soon. Probably even off to college in another year: it was the hope of entering the U in the fall of ‘81, after only another year at St. Tom’s, that had lead him to take the summer school courses.

  Where did he get such ambition—at age thirteen? In that way he was much more like Ben than like Henry, but even Ben was in awe of the way the boy kept his nose to the grindstone. He was deliberately taking the very dullest course the school offered, Civics, because he wanted to get it over with. And the teacher, Lilah Gerhart, was apparently a real pill. Judith had had her this last year, and she would come home at least once a week infuriated with some new work of tyranny perpetrated by Miss Gerhart. But William, so far, had not breathed a word against her. He just memorized all the dull facts and figures about city government and state government (and really, was there anything as dull as Civics?), and wrote his term papers and book reports, and generally behaved like a prisoner bent on earning time off for good behavior. She wished there was a way to explain to him that he didn’t have to be so grim. High school—even one like St. Tom’s—could be fun, if you didn’t confuse it with getting an education. That could come later, but in the meantime the boy should really learn to throw a Frisbee better. A thirteen-year-old whose mother has better aim with a Frisbee than he does should be taking an exercise class, not a course in Civics.

  As though to confirm this judgment, William’s next throw went widely askew and the Frisbee came to rest, gracefully, high on the roof of the garage. Even standing on a lawn chair and reaching for it with a rake was no use.

  “I’m sorry,” William said. (Though it occurred to her that perhaps his aim hadn’t been wild at all, but perfectly accurate. Maybe he’d got bored with playing catch but didn’t want to say so.) “Do you want me to get the ladder?”

  “No, leave it. It was fun, but I’m tired. The doctor says I shouldn’t overexert myself now that—” She caught herself, but not in time. William was no dunce.

  “The doctor?” His eyes had narrowed.

  The embryo of the idea was already there. She might as well be candid. She couldn’t keep it secret much longer in any case.

  She nodded. “I’m pregnant.”

  William grinned and sprinted across the lawn to hug her and spin her around in a little impromptu polka. “Mom, that’s wonderful! When is it going to be?”

  “Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas most likely.”

  “That’s terrific. Can you feel it inside you yet? Is there a lump or something?”

  She smiled. “No, not yet. I’ll let you know as soon as there is.”

  “Have you told Judith yet? She’s going to be so tickled. She used to tell me how she kept hoping you’d have a baby. So she would know what it was like to have a sister. She said she knew all she needed to know about brothers from me.”

  “So far, William, I haven’t told anyone but you. And I hadn’t intended to do that, it just slipped out. I suppose I’ll have to tell Ben tonight.”

  William crinkled his brow, and it was as clear to Sondra what he was thinking as if the thoughts had been printed out between the furrows on his brow. He understood what she feared and the reason she hadn’t spoken to Ben.

  She kissed the crinkle. “Don’t worry. It’ll work out. Ben may be a bit peeved at first. This wasn’t an event we were planning on. But it is—what’s the old expression?—a blessed event. Every baby is a miracle. But a woman probably has an easier time accepting the idea of the miracle. For a man it’s probably like when the angel came to Joseph to tell him what was in the works. It’s still a miracle, but it takes a while for the idea to sink in.” It sounded nice. She hoped it was true.

  43

  When Ben finally came to bed at ten-thirty after watching the local news on Channel 11, Sondra was there, sprawled on the bed listening to a tape on her Walkman. Her eyes were closed, and her pedicured toes flexed in time to the music. Ben stood in the doorway smiling, trying to imagine from the rhythm of her toes what she was listening to. It was never classical music, she had a reverse snobbery about that, but it wasn’t rock either; her toes were moving too slowly. Her Zampir tape, probably. She loved the sound of panpipes when she was feeling sexy. And so did he, for that matter. The problem was, he wasn’t feeling all that sexy, not after the day he’d had today. Though with a little encouragement he might get into the mood. For the last so long he’d been in a state of perpetual rut. Something had happened to his testosterone level. And the feeling was mutual: Sondra was a bitch in heat. Pheromones? Was it as simple as that?

  She opened her eyes, and turned off the Walkman, and smiled. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “I was just thinking about you.”

  “You looked upset when you got home. Did something happen at the office?”

  “Several things. When it rains, it pours. I finally got through to the attending physician at the hospital in St. Augustine, and it was like talking to a wall. According to him, Judith can’t leave the hospital for another two weeks, minimum. When I asked what treatment she was receiving, he tried to flimflam me, and then, when I started to ask about his financial relation to the hospital, an emergency developed very suddenly. Then I got a call from Rhoda, who wanted to know if I remembered what day it was.”

  “What day was it?”

  “Our anniversary.”

  “Yours and hers?”

  “Apparently she still celebrates it. It’s the source of all her alimony, after all. She was gloating.”

  “About your anniversary?”

  “About having Judith under her thumb. I’m probably going to have to fly down there myself and hire an attorney to spring her from that Blue Cross snake pit.”

  “I hope it’s not as bad as that. I mean, all doctors are a little greedy or they wouldn’t be doctors, but that doesn’t mean the hospital is a snake pit.”

  “There’s more. After the call from Rhoda, I finally got through to ATA. They’ve ‘declined’ to fund the research on skin staining I wrote up last spring. Kearns wasn’t there for the meeting when they made the decision, and when I asked why not, I couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone. So I called him at home, and you know what I found out? He’s gone to Mayo Clinic for a checkup. A checkup! No one flies halfway across the country for a ‘checkup.’ Anyone who goes to Mayo has got a damned good reason.”

  “Well, I’m sorry your project didn’t go through, but you said yourself it probably didn’t stand much of a chance. You’ll think of other ideas, you always do. But I’m more sorry to hear about Mr. Kearns. From the few times I met him he always seemed the nicest person at ATA. The only actual human being. What do you suppose is the matter?”

  “Cancer is what I suppose.”

  “Oh no, I hope not. Why immediately suppose the worst?”

  “Because everyone I talked to at ATA was so damned pussyfooting when I asked about him. They sounded worried, and what do you suppose the main worry is at ATA? The board members are all pushing
sixty, they’re all heavy smokers, and they know the odds.”

  “For getting lung cancer, you mean?”

  “Not Asian flu, honey.”

  “Well, it would certainly be ironic, but I hope you’re wrong about Mr. Kearns. There’s all sorts of things that can start going wrong at his age. Now, is that all the bad news?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  “Because if it is, I’ve got some good news.” She pushed herself up into a sitting position with her back against the headboard of the bed. “I’ve given up smoking.”

  “You have! Since when?”

  “Over a month now. I didn’t tell you before, because I wanted to be sure I’d really quit.”

  “Over a month? Honey, that’s terrific! Congratulations. Tell me your secret.”

  She smiled in an odd way, lowering her eyes down to her hands where they rested on her stomach, clasped together as though to cradle some small invisible animal. And when, after a long pause, she spoke, she seemed to address that animal and not Ben. “I’m pregnant.”

  Jesus, closing his eyes and slumping back against the doorframe, admitting defeat before the fight was even under way. From the tone of her voice he knew she would not be amenable to arguments or bribes. She meant to have the baby. The pregnancy had sprung some biochemical spring in her endocrine system, in some gland probably no bigger than a garden pea, and the result was a will enslaved to the needs of the fetus inside her, a faith as fervent and fanatic as any Shiite Muslim’s.