The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “I was in a lousy position,” I argued. “And I had to give Scotty the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Why? You knew in your heart what had happened.”

  She was so exasperatingly rational. Maybe she didn’t get it because she had no children of her own, but I wouldn’t give her the free pass I’d so wantonly handed Scotty. I was angry with Violet, too, now, and feeling even more isolated.

  A few days later Suzy came to see me after work—a rare occurrence in her busy life. I knew I couldn’t burden her with my marital problems, but it was oddly soothing just to see her there, to be reminded of previous domestic happiness. When she was in the first grade, Suzy had made Ev and me raise our right hands and solemnly promise that we’d never divorce, like the parents of so many of her schoolmates. Were we still bound by that oath?

  I suddenly decided to give her some things of mine that she’d liked and coveted since childhood, when she used to try on my clothes and jewelry as if she were auditioning for the future. We went into the bedroom and I began to open drawers and closets. “Why are you doing this, Mom?” Suzy asked, surreptitiously eyeing my red Bakelite snake bracelet. “You’re not sick or anything, are you?”

  “No, no, honey,” I assured her. “It’s just that I have too much stuff, it’s time to thin it out. And you’d look better in most of it, anyway.” I handed over the Bakelite bracelet, which was still one of my favorites. She slid it onto her slender, tanned wrist and I said, after struggling a moment with the opposing tugs of possessiveness and generosity, “That’s yours.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe I could just borrow it for a while.”

  “I’ll borrow it from you sometime.”

  Even when she was dying, my mother never spoke about the disposition of her worldly goods. Of course she had a will, in which I was bequeathed a sizable trust, and Faye a cash gift, but it didn’t specifically mention any items of sentimental value. Maybe she thought it wasn’t necessary, that it was clear the only heirs to everything she owned were my father and myself. Or maybe it was because she was still in denial, right up to the final moments of her life. I remembered reading about a young actress with terminal cancer who put her jewelry into individual sandwich bags, labeled with the names of her relatives and friends, and it seemed like such a civilized and courageous act.

  Still wearing the bracelet, Suzy turned the key on the Lucien Lelong bottle. The dancers started to slowly move in their intimate dance, and the tinkling music spilled out. The defining sound of my childhood, and of hers. As the mechanism wound down, Suzy gazed at a framed photograph on the dresser of my parents taken only a few years before my mother’s death. “They look so happy together,” she said.

  “They made it seem easy . . .” Had they done it with mirrors? I was suddenly, uncomfortably conscious of that feeling in my chest.

  “It’s not?” Suzy asked mockingly. Then she looked sharply at me. “What?”

  I hesitated. “Nothing,” I said. “I just miss them, that’s all.”

  She appraised me for another moment before turning her attention back to the photograph. “Grandma was really beautiful, wasn’t she?” Suzy said.

  I was thrilled by her reference to “Grandma,” a title my mother had never known. “Yeah, she was. I always wished that I looked like her.”

  “Me, too,” Suzy said.

  “Maybe you do, a little.”

  “No, I don’t.” She peered into the mirror above the dresser and made a series of grimaces that distorted her pretty face. “I look like Dad.”

  “You could have done worse,” I told her. “You could have looked like me.”

  “Mom,” she said. “You know I’ve always loved your hair.” She picked up my brush and began to slowly pull it through my flyaway hair, from the roots to the tips.

  I hadn’t been touched by anyone for weeks, and the drag of the brush against my scalp was a staggeringly lovely sensation. I sank down onto the bed, thinking that I could have fallen asleep right then, sitting up. “But my freckles,” I moaned.

  “They’re cute.”

  “Cute?” I said. “Do you mean like Howdy Doody?” But I was thinking of an unusually tender short story Ev wrote shortly after we were married, about a woman whose skin appears to have flecks of trapped sunlight under it.

  Suzy continued to brush my hair, which had risen in veils around my face and was sizzling with static by then, and she said, “Mom, I’ve met somebody.” The brush paused for just an instant before it began its mesmerizing work again. But I was fully alert now. So this was the reason for her visit.

  “Who is he?” I asked, wondering why this news made me feel so unpleasantly peculiar. Suzy had never wanted for boyfriends, and her popularity had always been a source of pride and even vicarious pleasure for me.

  “His name is George, George Levinson. He joined the firm a few months ago.”

  “Isn’t there an unwritten rule against that at Stubbs? About mixing business and pleasure?”

  “Yes,” she said. “So we have to be really careful.”

  I looked up and saw that she was smiling dreamily. The danger factor probably only helped to charge the eroticism of her relationship. I could certainly appreciate that feeling. When I was still keeping Ev a secret from my father, I was very nervous about his finding out about us, and sexually reckless at the same time, one sensation seeming to feed the other.

  “Tell me about him,” I said.

  She sat down beside me, and I took the brush from her lax grip and began to pull it through her dark, springy curls. “Well,” she said, “he’s very smart and funny. And idealistic.”

  “An idealistic corporate lawyer?” I teased, but I was already envisioning a Hepburn–Tracy movie romance, with the exciting added edge of competition between them. Like Ev and I used to be, I thought, and I understood then that I was envious of my own child, just starting out. The very sin I’d accused Ev of committing.

  “Mother,” Suzy scolded, bringing me back.

  “Is he handsome?” I asked.

  “Very, but not in the conventional sense. He looks a little like a gangster.”

  “They all do. So, is this serious?”

  She leaned against me, with the same absolute trust she’d displayed when she was very young, and I could feel her solid grown-up weight and the heat of her flushed skin. “Yes, I think so,” she said.

  “Darling, that’s wonderful,” I said, relieved to realize that I truly meant it. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

  When Ev and I got married, I was newly pregnant with Suzy. It wasn’t exactly a shotgun wedding—we had already decided to marry, only not right away. We were going to give our writing careers, our calling, a chance to develop first. But now this unknown baby became the abiding idea and the chief character in my imagination, while Ev was hustled into a suit and tie and his family’s printing business.

  My father will die, I kept thinking, my father will kill me. He was still in deep mourning, and I’d never dared to mention Ev to him, or ever really told him that Arthur was no longer in my life. My mother was the one I needed to tell. I was sure that she would have approved, and that she would have been the buffer between my father and myself.

  I called Violet and she immediately volunteered to come to Iowa to be our witness. She and Eli were still living in New Haven, because Eli had a teaching fellowship in the philosophy department at Yale. Their own young marriage was in trouble by then, although I don’t think Violet knew that yet.

  She tried to dispel my worries about my father. “He’ll get over it,” she said with a shrug when I picked her up at the airport. “Those old birds are tougher than you think.” My father wasn’t that much older then than we were now. “And you’re making him a grandfather, besides. Maybe you ought to give him the good news first.”

  We had both grown up overhearing every medical “bad news, good news” joke in the book, and we thought some of them were pretty funny, but I was afraid there would be nothing amusing about my f
ather’s reaction to the news of my marriage to Ev.

  I’d decided to do it in person. My father’s aversion to the telephone might influence his response, and how could he resist the irresistible presence of my delightful new husband? But even Ev’s good looks and witty charm, and our obvious love for each other, didn’t win my father over. He seemed to rise up out of his grief to attain a fresh level of disapproval of me. The worst part, he said, was that I had done this behind his back, and I had to acknowledge that there was some truth in that. I might have been a teenage girl again, caught smoking in the schoolyard. But I’d only held off his displeasure in order to hang on to my own bliss a little longer. All love affairs are private, anyway; they’re always behind someone else’s back.

  In retrospect, I realize that I probably should have broken everything to my father in slow, easy stages, even if the chronological order was off: the split with Arthur, Ev’s courtship, our wedding, my pregnancy. Or maybe Violet was right, and I should have leavened the rest of it by giving him the “good news” first. I don’t think any of that finally mattered, though. With my mother’s death, he’d lost control of his neatly ordered world, and this was only another blow, another challenge to his autocracy.

  After Suzy left, I waited impatiently for Ev to come home from work, and I told him about Suzy and George as soon as he walked in, as if I were giving him a conciliatory, homemade gift. “Guess what!” I said. “Suzy’s in love.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said coolly. “That’s good.” Nothing else.

  I don’t know what I expected—that Suzy’s love affair would somehow rekindle ours? No, of course not. Only maybe that he would be reminded of us, of the powerful connection we’d had that led to our having Suzy, and that eventually led her into the thrilling, risky business of giving yourself to someone else.

  Later, I heard him talking to her on the telephone in the boys’ bedroom, his voice full of the affection and enthusiasm he’d withheld from me. I went into our bedroom and shut the door. Then I sat down at my computer and sent an e-mail to Michael. “What’s going on?” I wrote.

  12

  The next morning the doorman buzzed me on the intercom to say I had a delivery, and did I want the package man to bring it up. My first foolish thought was that Ev had sent me flowers as a peace offering, although I knew that wasn’t his style. My father, on the other hand, had been a florist’s dream customer. He seemed to have had whole formal gardens decimated for my mother’s pleasure, his exotic offerings arriving regularly in a white van. Any flowers I’d ever received from Ev were delivered in person, clutched in his fist, and they had been bought from a street vendor on the impulse of love, or the onset of spring, or for no apparent reason at all. Daffodils and daisies, usually, that looked as if they’d just been plucked from a meadow.

  When he wanted to apologize—a pretty rare event—or to make up after an argument, he was more likely to ambush me with an embrace at the kitchen sink, or bridge the distance between us in bed with his entire body. “Let’s stop this, okay?” whispered huskily into my hair or my neck was the closest Ev ever came to an act of contrition.

  The delivery turned out to be a large carton filled with the back issues of Leaves I’d ordered. There was no note enclosed, only a standard packing slip buried under those Styrofoam peanuts that cling weightlessly to everything, especially your fingers. The journals themselves were so crisp, they might have come right off the press, except for a slight yellowing of the covers and the edges of the pages. Sunning, I think rare-book dealers call it, a cheerful word for the ravages of age.

  As he’d promised, Tom Roman had flagged those issues containing my mother’s poems, with yellow Post-its affixed to the pale gray covers. There were a number of them, and my hands trembled as I opened the earliest issue. Her poem, called “Minor Surgery,” about slicing radishes, was short and delicate, until the last line. I tried to imagine how she must have felt, seeing her name in print, and those broad, clean margins around the poem, like breathing space. I could almost hear her voice in my head saying the lines with me as I read them aloud. When I reached up to dab at my eyes, a packing peanut drifted silently out of my hair onto the page, like a comical sign from beyond.

  My mother’s contributor’s note in the back of the magazine said, “Helen Brill lives in Riverdale, New York, with her husband and daughter.” It was typical of new writers in those days—women, anyway—to identify themselves by their domestic arrangements.

  I scanned the other contributors’ notes for recognizable names and there were a few, including Phil Santo, our workshop leader in Iowa, and a poet whose single collection came out quietly, almost stealthily, from G&F in the 1980s. One or two writers were said to be have finished novels or volumes of poetry, but I guess they were never published. So much for fame and fortune, I thought, surprised that the bitter ache of rejection was still so easily revived.

  My mother’s poems in the other issues of Leaves were all familiar to me; there had been drafts of them in her accordion folder. I observed the way her contributor’s note had evolved over the years. For the issue with her third poem in it, she’d written, “Helen Brill lives in New York with her husband and daughter”—deftly discarding unhip, suburban Riverdale— and from then on, “Helen Brill’s work has appeared in previous issues of Leaves and other journals,” disposing just as neatly of my father and me. I also noted, on the copyright page, that Leaves had been published in Menemsha, Massachusetts. Wasn’t that on Martha’s Vineyard, right next door to Chilmark?

  That afternoon there was a letter from Thomas Roman in the regular mail delivery. He said that he had been thinking about my request for anecdotes about my mother. “I wonder if the following might be useful for your memoir.” I had almost forgotten that particular lie. “In one of her early letters, Helen told me that you’d contracted chicken pox, and how difficult it was to keep you from scratching at the rash. ‘My poor little Alice,’ she wrote. ‘It comes over her in a frenzy, and I have to hold her hands and sing to distract her. Songs like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” seem to work best, although by the third or fourth round, I’m usually starting to itch, myself. Thank goodness she bites her nails!’ ”

  This excerpt from my mother’s chatty letter gratified and disappointed me at once. I realized how eager I was for anecdotes about my early days that I could no longer hear from my parents, and I was pleased that she had chosen to write about me to a literary friend. But at the same time I felt strangely let down by the bland familial content of the letter. I was still looking for passionate secrets, the parts of her life I didn’t know about. Maybe Tom Roman had kept the more significant letters to himself.

  I could vividly recall having chicken pox, the violent itching, those unsightly spots. I’d caught it from Violet, like all the other childhood diseases, and despite my mother’s best efforts to keep me from tearing at my own flesh I still bear two faint scars, one on my chin and the other just under my hairline. The mention of my bitten nails reminded me of what a ticky child I was—the way I twirled one particular strand of hair until it finally fell out, and that blinking I did in my tenth year.

  What was it I hadn’t wanted to see? So many things, starting with my own scowling, pale face in the mirror, those nearly invisible eyelashes and eyebrows. I looked something like Pinky, the pet rabbit in my classroom at Chapin. I practiced wrinkling my nose the way he did, but that, at least, was one tic I didn’t acquire.

  “It wouldn’t kill you to smile, Alice,” my father used to say, unsmilingly. And, “Watch out, or your face will freeze that way.” I took him literally, of course, believing that my sour expression might be forever fixed, especially in winter, when everything was frozen into place. Blink, blink, and he would be gone, along with his ominous predictions. But there was another unsavory sight that refused to rise to the surface, that dove under the skin of memory and made my chest tighten whenever I tried to think of it. Why couldn’t I remember
what that was?

  When the phone rang, I found myself hoping that it would be Ev, even if he’d only called on the pretext of some household matter. I still felt alienated from him, but I also missed him, perversely enough, and nothing had been resolved between us. Or maybe it was Scott; I’d hardly spoken to him since that painful conversation on his street. Despite Ev’s cynicism, I’d tried to assign purer motives to Scott’s unexpected visit to Carroll Graphics than merely copping a plea, and I had put in a call to him the night before, leaving a message on his tape. “Hi, Scotty, it’s Mom. I just wanted to say hello, and that I’m really happy you went to see Dad the other day.”

  It was only Violet on the phone, but I was even glad to hear from her— I guess I couldn’t stand being at odds with everybody at once. She didn’t apologize for siding with Ev and criticizing me; she just resumed talking to me as if nothing had ever been wrong between us. And I didn’t really mind. As Violet herself once remarked, too much time and energy are wasted on the social graces.

  “Violet,” I said. “Do you remember when you gave me the chicken pox?”

  “You never forget a favor, do you?”

  “No, listen. I got a letter from this man my mother used to know, Thomas Roman. He was the editor of a small literary magazine about a million years ago. It was called Leaves.”

  “How come he wrote to you?”

  “It’s a long story. Actually, I wrote to him first. He published several of my mother’s poems. Anyway, I don’t know why, but I think she may have had an affair with him.” Was that something I wished had happened?

  “My God,” Violet said. Then, “But what does that have to do with the chicken pox?”

  “Nothing, really. But you know that something has been bothering me, right?”

  “Duh, yes.”

  “Well, maybe this is it.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “You’ve completely lost me now.”