The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Sometimes Ev or one of the children reluctantly accompanied me to the Hebrew Home for the Aged to see my father. Violet went there with me only once, and then begged off from future visits, saying she preferred to wait until it was her own turn to be addled and incontinent. We were back in Manhattan, at a Starbucks, rewarding ourselves with coffee and pastries, and I said, “Imagine, Violet, my father—my famous, fastidious father—in diapers! If that ever happened to me, I’d want to be shot.” Violet sipped her coffee and said, completely deadpan, “Not me, I’d want to be changed.” Then we both laughed so hard, coffee went up our noses, and we kept bursting into nervous laughter that whole afternoon for no reason at all.

  Most of the time I went to see my father by myself, dragging my feet all the way there. He had a few other visitors. Leo and Marjorie showed up about twice a month, close to their old schedule with my parents for bridge and dinner, and so did Parksie, who had to take the tram from Roosevelt Island, and then an express bus to Riverdale. Three of my father’s former surgical fellows used to travel together to see him, in a sort of pilgrimage, but they stopped going after their personal god failed to recognize them. His ability to remember who people were ebbed and flowed, just like his orientation in time and to place, and his fits of agitation.

  I felt guilty about staying away for three whole weeks, but I kept excusing myself from duty. I had so much work to do, I didn’t feel too great— that ominous feeling in my chest had taken root there like a strangler weed—and I called the nursing desk on his floor nearly every day to check on him, in lieu of visiting. Mostly, I just wanted the uninterrupted routine of my own life, or to live in the more compelling world of Walking to Europe. Michael had taken my most urgent editorial suggestions seriously, and he’d sent some solidly revised pages that put me back under the spell of the manuscript.

  Caitlin, his hero Joe Packer’s sister, had been unemployed and living with a darkly moody boyfriend, one in a series of difficult men she was drawn to, when she disappeared. I could see the generic furnished room they’d shared, his transient’s eyes already ogling the door, while Joe looked around for some evidence of where she might have gone, or that she’d even ever been there.

  As I suspected, Michael loved Scott’s title and wanted to know all about him. In my e-mail I only said that Scott was a terrific kid with an imaginative bent. I avoided mentioning his age, and knew it was because it might reflect on my own. I was so easily distracted from my father’s needs; what would he think of me if he were able to think straight? He was very strongly principled about obligation. You did things because you were supposed to, not because they were pleasant, whether it was performing surgery on a malodorous, abscessed liver or sending a thank-you note to your great-aunt for that ugly hand-knit sweater. Attending to the father who had so faithfully attended to you was surely the embodiment of that law.

  The Sunday after my lunch with Violet, I was sitting opposite Ev in the living room, doing the Times crossword puzzle, when he put down his section of the paper and said, “You can’t keep putting it off like this.”

  Oh, yes I could. It was raining out, I wanted to go back to bed. I had been sneaking glimpses, over my puzzle, of Ev’s broad hands on the newspaper, and the swell of his thighs in his pajamas, and thinking that I might invite him back to bed with me.

  “Come on, Al,” he said, pulling me up from the sofa. “I’ll go with you.” The strength of his grip and the sweetness of his offer aroused me further, but Ev went right to the phone to call Suzy and arrange for her to meet us in the main lobby of the nursing home.

  Suzy’s hours at Stubbs, White were erratic and long, and I knew that weekends were especially precious to her. She had a habit of being late for most occasions, but she was waiting there when we drove up, and I felt that familiar shock of happiness on seeing her, the way I used to when I’d spot her in a crowd of children swarming out of All Souls or Brearley. Could there ever possibly be a time when I wouldn’t know my own, beautiful daughter? Like Scott, she has Ev’s strongly defined coloring—Jeremy is the only other redhead in the family—and an original, heart-shaped face. “Mom! Dad!” she called, sounding equally pleased to see us, and we hurried across the lobby toward her.

  When a child turns out well, you often think that it’s just remarkably good luck, practically a miracle. So many things might have gone wrong and haven’t. At other times you take too much pride in having successfully launched a person separate from, yet somewhat like, yourself. A new and improved version: intense without the neurosis, self-confident without the solipsism. Ev and I have always been at peace with each other in Suzy’s company, perhaps because we were still so much in love when she was born. I felt safely flanked by the two of them as we rode up in the elevator to the Alzheimer’s unit.

  Whenever I went there alone, the dread set in even before the ascent began. The place itself is attractive and well kept; my father was right, irrespective of his contempt, in calling it the “Cadillac” of nursing homes. Ev and I had looked into a few other facilities closer to our apartment before committing him there. They were all pretty shabby and drab in comparison, and that reek of urine and cafeteria cooking assailed us as soon as we walked in the front door. Yet the day we brought him to the Hebrew Home I was filled with misgiving. All I could think of was the distinguished person, the personage, my father had been in his prime, and how revolted he’d always been by the idea of institutional life.

  Ev had put his arm around me and said, “Remember how you and Jer clung to each other the first day of preschool?” But I brushed off his embrace and the comparison; that was a beginning and this was an end. I tried to tell the nurse on duty about my father, while the aides undressed him and put him to bed, and she said, “Oh, honey, everyone here was somebody once.”

  Despite the relative luxury of the Hebrew Home, and the comfort of having Ev and Suzy beside me, I felt that swooning aloneness as soon as the elevator doors opened onto my father’s floor and the noise reached my ears. There were fewer men than women in residence—we outlive them, a doubtful blessing—but their commanding baritones dominated the sopranos in that chorus of the damned. “Help!” they called. “Jesus!” “Shitfuck!” “Mama!” Or they simply let loose a yowling of misery beyond language, like the homeless man in Carl Schurz Park.

  And I could always pick out my father’s voice, even from a distance. That day it was especially easy because he was shouting my name, over and over, and, feeling surprisingly lighthearted, I rushed ahead of Ev and Suzy to reach his room. He was in a wheelchair at the side of his tightly made bed, and he looked up sharply when I came in. “Alice!” he cried. “Where have you been?” The old impatience was evident, as if I were late for dinner again, and Faye was keeping the roast warm in the oven.

  “Daddy,” I said breathlessly. “I’m sorry, the traffic, but here I am.”

  His eyes were shiny from the drugs, but clear—he’d had cataract surgery on the left one a couple of months before—and I noticed that his hearing aid was in place. He tended to pull it out and toss it somewhere, under the bed or onto his lunch tray—it had already been retrieved from the kitchen twice. I didn’t blame him; I’d want to shut off the din of that unit, too. Now he tapped the device and it beeped, so I knew I didn’t have to check the battery. All of his senses were honed to receive the horror of his situation. And yet he seemed better, less frantic than the last time I was there. And he knew who I was.

  Suzy and Ev came into the room, and she bent to kiss the top of his head, where the red hair had thinned and faded to a pinkish gray. “Hi, Poppy, darling,” she said. “How are you?” His face registered pleasure, and a low, humming sound came from his throat, something like purring. I didn’t know if he recognized her, or if he was merely enjoying the attentions of a fragrant young woman. Before I was born, he’d hoped for a son, preferably a son delivered with a stethoscope coiled around his neck. But he seemed ecstatic when he had a granddaughter, and he’d always preferred Suzy, his “li
ttle crêpe Suzette,” to the boys.

  Women had played one subordinate role or another all during his professional life. Parksie was his surgical nurse for thirty-eight years, until his retirement, and Miss Snow had come straight from a preppy sort of secretarial school to work in his office, staying until her marriage. There were various female clerks and technicians at the hospital, too, and female patients had dominated his practice. When I was a young girl and our family went to a restaurant or to the theater, it seemed as if some woman or another was always coming up to him, saying, “Dr. Brill? I’m so-and-so, you removed my gallbladder last May.”

  They were very excited about seeing him out of his usual context, and a little shy, as if he were an actor sighted offstage and they were about to ask for his autograph. My mother referred merrily to his adoring gang of gallbladders, appendectomies, and hysterectomies as “your father’s harem.” He called them, one and all, “dear.”

  Ev patted my father’s shoulder, and my father grasped his hand and said, “Doctor, it’s good to see you.” Years ago, that might have been taken for sarcasm; he’d wanted me to marry a doctor. I was supposed to marry a doctor, if I couldn’t become one myself, and I almost did. But instead of continuing a medical dynasty, I’d started an ordinary family, which wasn’t easy for him to forgive, especially because of the covert way I did it. Still, I could tell that his greeting to Ev was only the result of his confusion, and that Ev had not been offended.

  I glanced around my father’s room, made clinical by the hospital bed and the bedside commode, despite those carefully handpicked remnants of his old life: the gray cashmere throw; his silver clock; a framed photograph of my mother and me taken forty years before in Chilmark; the certificate honoring him for his service as chief of surgery; a single medical book, illustrated with transparent colored overlays that peeled back to reveal all the invisible systems of the human body; the sparse jade plant that had once flourished on my parents’ sunporch.

  What was he doing here? I had a sudden, insane notion that I’d let him down long ago, and now he was letting me down in return. Something is wrong. Of course I understood that what had happened to him was purely mechanical. The neurologist had explained it carefully, as if he were peeling back sections of my father’s deteriorating brain. He used an automotive analogy, I remember, citing a tired engine, a busted carburetor. My father the car.

  I was just about to suggest that we all go to the solarium when my father said, “Tell me, how is Helen?” Suzy’s hand went to her mouth, and she turned away. She was a grown woman, a lawyer who cleverly calculated the strategies of contracts and torts. But now she was reduced to uncertain girlhood. Ev didn’t look very happy, either.

  “She’s doing all right,” I answered, in the casual tone I’d perfected. “Listen, Daddy, shall we go to the solarium?”

  “I worry so about her, you know,” he said, and Suzy left the room. At that moment I was particularly glad she wasn’t an only child. Not, as I had once coyly told her, because it was lonesome, but because someday she would be able to share the burden of failing parents, of Ev and me, with her brothers.

  I came up behind my father’s wheelchair and began to propel it through the doorway. Ev followed us out into the corridor, where other families pushed their elders in one direction or the other, or guided them, hand in hand, as they tried to walk. I’d thought the change of setting would distract my father, but he was stuck in that movie of his former life playing inside his head. “Is Helen coming, too?” he asked as we waited for the elevator. Knock it off! I wanted to shout, the way I used to when Scotty kept doing that maddening Woody Woodpecker laugh. “Is Helen coming?” my father asked again, a little louder this time, and I had a flash of Richard Widmark hurling his wheelchair-bound victim, screaming, down a flight of stairs.

  My mother had been dead for so many years. She died when I was in graduate school, not in the unimaginably distant future, as she had promised. She’d developed breast cancer while I was still at Swarthmore, and my father told me about it in a phone call, at the end of finals week. The fact that he was using the phone at all should have alerted me, but somehow it didn’t. “Mother isn’t well,” he began. His usually rich and sonorous voice had thickened and grown faint.

  “What?” I asked, thinking distractedly of a cold or the flu. He sounded funny; maybe he’d caught it, too. But my mind was elsewhere, on some academic prize or social event.

  “Alice, darling, she’s in the hospital. She’s had a mastectomy.”

  For a moment, I couldn’t make sense of the word. Did it have something to do with the ear? But I held one hand against my own breast, where I’d already registered the news. “But why didn’t you tell me!” I wailed. “I would have come home.”

  “We didn’t want to upset you before your exams. She’s doing very well,” he said. “Harvey Wagner did the procedure.” The procedure! I pictured a younger Dr. Wagner cutting precisely into a pink lamb chop at our dining room table.

  She did do very well for what seemed like a long while, and I let myself be seduced into solace and calm. My father was a doctor, after all, and he loved my mother as fiercely as I did. I came home to see her and then went back to school, where I fell in love, with a series of books and boys and the possibilities of my own potential. I worried about her, of course I did. But she was on the borders of my concentration, not in its center. Only I resided there.

  In the solarium a volunteer banged out sprightly show tunes on an upright piano, and for several minutes we were relieved of the burden of conversation. After the last number, a merciless rendition of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” there was some halfhearted clapping, like the applause in my parents’ living room after I’d recited my poems. I was about to suggest we take my father back down to his room when he leaned toward me and looked into my eyes, more directly and intensely than he had in years. His speckled talon poked me in the chest. “You should take care of that lesion, dear,” he said.

  5

  As soon as Ev left for the office on Monday, I put my mother’s accordion folder on the kitchen table and reheated the coffee. I had looked into the folder from time to time since my father had given it to me, but I’d hesitated to really explore its contents. Privacy had always been a priority of my mother’s—you knocked on closed doors, you allowed people the sanctity of their thoughts. And she’d become more discreet about her poems after that first publication. She kept writing, though, and after a while she began to publish occasionally in more respected journals, like Poet Lore and Prairie Schooner.

  She was so modest, she didn’t even mention those acceptances until copies of the issues with her poems in them arrived. My father had apparently taken his cue from her to be more low-keyed about her latest successes, too. There were no more delirious waltzes around the house, and no grand announcements or ribbon-tied copies of literary magazines distributed as table favors to friends. I can only remember his playful warning to her, after she’d been paid fifty dollars for one of the poems, “Well, Helen, don’t spend it all in one place!”

  I had been missing her with something like the old, pervasive longing lately, and I’d begun to associate that revived ache with the peculiar feeling in my chest. Was there a clue to the link between them, or at least some consolation, to be found in her writing? Or maybe there was no mystery at all; maybe it was just that the hole in my life could only ever be filled by her, and that things had just gotten worse since my father’s emotional vanishing act. I was still troubled by the strange thing he’d said to me in the solarium the day before, and his calling me “dear” that way, as if I were one of his groupie patients.

  After Ev and I came home from the nursing home, we went straight to bed and made love—you would think we had planned it in advance. Life against death. We took things more slowly this time and were less grasping than we’d been; for once we tried to please each other as much as ourselves. And I was fully there with him. Recently, helping myself to satisfaction, I�
��d had a fantasy about Joe Packer, the lanky, droll hero of Walking to Europe. That was the first time I’d conjured up a fictional lover since I was thirteen and Edward Rochester rode into my imagination on his black horse.

  Sunday afternoon, Ev’s and my kisses were leisurely and deep, rather than desperate, but when he began to caress my breast, I stilled his hand and hissed at him, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m touching you, Al, that’s all. God, you’re so lovely,” he murmured, and he lowered his mouth to my nipple.

  Later, we talked a little, about my father’s decline, how pretty Suzy had looked, our separate plans for the following day, and how we’d meet up again in the evening. Not love talk, exactly, more like married talk, which offers its own pleasures. In that domestic closeness, I told Ev that I’d asked Esmeralda about his missing paperweight, and that she said she hadn’t seen it. She had seemed insulted by the question, as if I’d accused her of taking it, reminding me of how awkward I often am around household help. I still hadn’t mentioned my evil thoughts about Scott and the Clichy to Ev.

  I untied the black grosgrain ribbon on my mother’s folder. There were handwritten copies of several of her poems inside, with words crossed out and replaced in red pencil, in the same small, neat, girlish hand, her hand. My heart knocked at the sight of it, at the thought of what remains, but I examined the poems themselves at first with a more detached editorial curiosity. Habit, I suppose. I’ve always enjoyed trying to follow the trajectory of a writer’s revisions; why the specificity of “January” instead of “winter,” the decision against alliteration in one poem and the indulgence of it in another. I noted all the references to nature, and looked for literary influences.