The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  But it was like tapping on all the windows and doors of an abandoned house. And I was losing my own connection to the dream-memory I wanted to evoke, the thing in my chest that refused to travel to my brain. I watched him finish his coffee, letting the ice melt in mine until it was undrinkable. Then I wheeled him back to the home and turned him in again.

  20

  Michael still hadn’t given me any new pages, despite all his talk about the major breakthrough I’d inspired. He seemed a lot more interested in me now than in his novel, with a level of attention I found unsettling. When he called one morning and said, in a husky, urgent voice, that he wanted to see me, it sounded like the kind of remark usually accompanied by a knowing wink. Ever since I’d blithely told Dr. Stern that I didn’t think too much beforehand about the “visceral” thing between Michael and me, I had been thinking about it a lot, with a disagreeable mixture of guilt and apprehension. I told Michael that I’d meet him in the park, safely away from our sexual arena, and to please bring his copy of the manuscript.

  The neighborhood children were back in school, but there were still plenty of babies and old folks around, along with the regular procession of dogs and their walkers. Even the homeless man who screamed was in place, quiet at the moment but ready to go off like a car alarm at the slightest perceived insult. They were all perfect distractions and perfect chaperones.

  I’d been rereading the revised chapters of Walking to Europe. They were so much stronger than the first draft—why had he stopped? And why was I still displaying such saintly caution and tact when I was really growing impatient with Michael, with waiting for some resolution of the mysteries he’d raised? Those three tattoos of Caitlin’s, for instance, and Joe’s profession of guilt about her, that haunting but cryptic “What have I done?”

  We were sitting on a bench facing the river, and when Michael started to put a proprietary arm across my shoulders, I moved away and said, irritably, “What has he done, anyway?”

  “Who?” Michael asked.

  “Joe, of course,” I said. “He’s been yakking about Caitlin’s disappearance for almost two hundred pages, and he seems to take total responsibility for it. But we have no idea why. Obviously he knows something crucial—when are you going to let the rest of us in on it?”

  “Why do you sound like that?” Michael said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re angry with me about something. It can’t be about Joe.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a fictional character, Alice.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. And I could swear that thought hadn’t crossed my conscious mind until I heard myself say it.

  Michael grew pale and his upper lip glistened with perspiration. Everyone around us had receded into the background. Even the homeless man, who had indeed begun to scream, seemed remote and innocuous. “I don’t get this,” Michael said.

  “Yes, you do,” I said.

  “So now you’re editing my life?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Could we just go up to your place?” He had a doggy look about him again, but it was more beseeching now than playful.

  “What for?” I said. “It’s over.” I’d known that with certainty before I’d even left the apartment. That’s why I hadn’t worn any makeup or perfume, and why my hair, which he’d once tangled around his wrist until my scalp prickled, was pulled back so severely now with a rubber band.

  “Shit,” he said, and reached for his cigarettes. When he absently offered me one, I took it. It seemed the least I could do.

  But I inhaled too deeply and singed my throat. When I could speak again, I said, “Michael, I’m really sorry. I should never have let this happen between us.”

  “Why not?” he asked miserably.

  Because I’m the grown-up here, I almost said. And because it would be even more painful in the end if we continue, at least for me. Instead I stamped out the cigarette—I’d probably just given up smoking, as well— and I clasped my hands in my lap, so I wouldn’t try to take his hand or touch him in any other way. “Because it isn’t appropriate. And it interferes with our professional relationship.”

  “And you’re married,” he said.

  “Yeah, that, too,” I admitted, thinking that he wouldn’t have been such a good writer if he didn’t have so much insight.

  “Wasn’t it okay?”

  Okay. The understatement of the century, I thought. The term raw sex came easily to mind, for the obvious reasons, and as opposed to something gently simmered in the juices of a shared life. But I only said, “It was lovely,” a deliberately prim, past-tense description of something that still reverberated in all my nerve endings.

  “Shit,” Michael repeated, which I took as kind of a halfhearted acceptance of things.

  I waited awhile and then I said, “So, do you want to tell me about the manuscript?”

  “I thought I’m not supposed to do that, that I might ‘talk it out.’ ” He made exaggerated quote marks in the air as he spoke.

  “You might,” I said, trying to ignore both the sarcastic gesture and the bitterness of his tone. “But I think we’ll have to take that risk. Come on, let’s walk.”

  Once we were in motion, it became much easier to talk. Maybe that was because we could only look obliquely at each other, and because some of the nervousness we’d both been feeling was expended by our striding legs. I was also more direct with him, less afraid or superstitious about invading that sacrosanct creative field. I asked him when he’d started writing the book, and he said that it was begun—inside his stoned head, anyway—when he was still in high school. He thought about it obsessively, but he didn’t write anything down for years.

  “At first it was going to be a memoir,” he said. “Do you want to hear the opening line? ‘My sister Donna was named for a girl in a series of books my mother loved when she was young.’ ”

  “Donna Parker,” I said right away, “I loved them, too.” I knew that I’d just recklessly crossed over the border into his parents’ generation. That, and the corroborating fact of my naked face in sunlight, must have helped to ease the sting of my rejection. It didn’t matter that those books had stayed in print for years and then been reissued; that Suzy had read them all, too, although not without considerable disdain. I was too old for him; he could surely see that now.

  But Michael wasn’t even looking at me; his mind was elsewhere. “I called her Donna Duck,” he said, “because she waddled when she first learned to walk. We actually were sixteen months apart. I used to quack into her neck, and it broke her up.”

  “ ‘Cake’ was an imaginative leap, then,” I said.

  “Well, you triggered that. I was really happy when you wanted those kinds of backstory details about Joe and Caitlin. It reminded me of the truth, and it empowered me to be inventive at the same time.”

  “Is she dead, Michael?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “And did she live with one abusive man after another, like Caitlin?”

  Michael wobbled a little and stopped walking. We faced each other. “No,” he said. “She never lived with anybody but me and our mother and father.”

  “What do you mean?” I thought of devastating disease, of retardation.

  Michael was crying. I had to grab his hand and lead him to a bench. There was no one else there; we were at the last curve of the promenade before you come to Gracie Mansion. We sat down and this time I put my arm around him. “Wait,” I said. “It’s all right.” And, “Take your time.”

  A tugboat pushed a long garbage barge slowly past us before Michael spoke again. “She died when she was four years old,” he said. “It was my fault.”

  “How can that be?” I asked. “You were, how old—five? Six?”

  “I was supposed to be watching her.”

  “Michael, that’s crazy, you were just a baby yourself.”

  “But I was good at it,” he insisted. “My mother had a migraine; ‘the
hammer,’ as she called it, had conked her in the head, and she had to lie down in a dark room with a wet compress over her eyes. I made it for her. And I was used to watching Donna—it was like my job.”

  I needed a villain, someone besides this grieving man sitting next to me, still sheltering a grieving boy, and I felt a swell of rage at his mother, coddling her complaint in a darkened bedroom, relegating her own job to little children. But then she lost one of those children. “What happened?” I asked.

  “It was August and hot as hell, normal for Pontiac, though. One of our neighbors had a round aboveground pool. It wasn’t that deep, but there was a little ladder of three or four stairs leading to it. I went up them and Donna followed, the way she always did.” Stepping on his heels. “The water was scummy, I remember that. Like cold soup with wrinkled fat on top. There was a white rubber ring—it said ‘USS something’—floating around the edge of the pool. I could read.”

  I didn’t need to hear the rest. I didn’t want to hear it, either, but I had asked, so I was obliged to listen. “I leaned in and pushed the ring around with a stick for a while,” Michael said, “and then I went down the stairs, past Donna, who was in my way. There were other kids in the yard, things going on. Wash hanging that we ran through like curtains, a tied-up dog that kept barking.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. They told you that, right?” And I remembered “The Stone Boy,” a story by Gina Berriault, in which a mother won’t forgive her younger boy after he accidentally shoots and kills his brother. The boy stands naked outside her closed bedroom door, waiting vainly for the absolution of her love. “What about the tattoos?” I asked, because I needed to get away from the pictures in my head.

  “The blue circle for the pool, the white bracelet for the life preserver, the yellow crescent for the moon reflected on her back,” he recited quickly, in a monotone. “Although it was daytime and the moon was only a little sliver of white. I remembered being surprised that I could see it and the sun at the same time. Pretty corny symbolism, right?”

  “I like the moon stuff, not the rest,” I said, and we sat silently for a few beats, as if we were both merely contemplating editorial changes in the manuscript. And then I said, “In the book, you let Caitlin live to grow up. I think I understand that. But why did you give her such a terrible life?”

  Michael shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe to show that she’d have been better off dying young?”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to tell us that in the end? And that Joe invented her whole adulthood?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you think I should?”

  “I don’t know, either,” I confessed. “But it’s something to think about, a possible way around what you’re unable to write.” Maybe it was the only way around it, but I had reverted to my old, careful nondirective self. It was his book, his life.

  We stood up at the same time and started walking again, and after a while Michael escorted me back to my building. I thought about asking him to come upstairs with me once more, to try to make up for art’s failure to console or even properly explain anything. But I was weary, and I imagined that I looked something like his mother when she was being pounded by one of her “hammers.” In fact, I wanted to lie down in a darkened room, myself, with a soothing compress across my brow. So we hugged and parted.

  There was a message on my machine from a woman named Ruth Casey. I’d contacted her, suggesting she call me about a manuscript she’d submitted, her account of raising a severely autistic child. The market was overrun with books on the subject, but this one was different. Ruth was a single mother, for one thing, and she was a professional writer. There was no self-pity in her writing voice, or false cheer. Her book, which she called Perfection, began, “It took seven years, three surgeries, and one in-vitro fertilization before David and I conceived Rose, so of course we expected the reward of perfection. But nothing is ever promised or owed.” By the end of the manuscript, David is long gone and Rose is thirteen, her body relentlessly maturing while she remains emotionally undeveloped and unreachable. Ruth Casey lived with Rose in the city, on the Upper West Side. I scribbled a note to myself to call her back to discuss the project. Maybe I’d just offer some free publishing advice.

  Then I went into Suzy’s old room and scanned the shelves until I found my original dog-eared copies of the Donna Parker books. Donna Parker in Cherrydale. Donna Parker in Hollywood. Donna Parker, the Mystery at Arawak. That girl really got around. I closed the window blinds and got into Suzy’s maidenly bed, along with a couple of the books, the ones that, miraculously, still had dust jackets, as frayed and faded as they were. Donna herself looked archaic, with her brunette version of the Doris Day flip and that dorky hair band.

  I opened Donna Parker in Hollywood to the first page. Even with the blinds shut, there was enough afternoon light in the room to read by. “Donna Parker closed the lid of the suitcase triumphantly and looked around her bedroom.” As soon as I began reading, I remembered how Violet and I used to act out the books, and that she had always insisted on being Donna, consigning the supporting role of Donna’s best friend, Ricky West, to me.

  I put up a protest each time—I didn’t want to be a mere sidekick to the girl who won hearts and solved mysteries wherever she went, who could even feel triumphant after closing a suitcase—but Violet prevailed, as she usually did in our arguments, by firing a steady stream of logic at me, like an automatic pistol. Wasn’t I a redhead, like Ricky, and didn’t Donna have dark hair, just like herself? Besides, Violet had actually been to Hollywood once.

  Never mind that she was only an infant on that trip, or that Violet’s electrified frizz was nothing like Donna’s smooth coif. My own counterlogic— my father and Donna’s were both named Sam (her mother was mostly known as Mrs. Parker), and it was only fair to take turns—seemed weak, even to me. What bothered me more than anything was that Ricky’s mother was dead. I couldn’t bear to identify with that definitive fact of her life, even if it all was only make-believe, and not the most persuasive writing in the first place.

  Later that night, I called Violet and asked her why we had loved those books so much, and she couldn’t explain it, either. She wanted to know what made me bring them up, and I told her that this guy I was editing mentioned that his mother had loved them, too. I spoke carefully, like a drunk afraid of slurring her words, but for one panicky instant I wondered if I’d actually said, “this guy I was fucking.”

  The most peculiar thing was that Violet remembered letting me be Donna once in a while in our game. “But you didn’t!” I cried. How could she edit memory that way?

  “Well, you can be her now, if it’s that important,” Violet said drily.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, “but it’s a little late. I’m Ricky forever.”

  “I let you be Jane Eyre, though, remember?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but that was so you could be Mr. and Mrs. Rochester.”

  Violet changed the subject then, as she does on those rare occasions she fails to have the last word. She asked about my progress on the art show essay, and then she told me, in an offhand manner, that Ev had offered to print the invitations to the opening and the catalogs, as a gift.

  “That’s nice,” I said, trying to ignore the sudden commotion I felt in my chest. “So, is he seeing anybody?” I asked. If she could change the subject, so could I.

  There was an agonizing pause. What is it that lawyers say? Don’t ask a question if you don’t already know the answer. “How should I know?” Violet finally muttered. “Why don’t you ask him yourself? You are talking to each other, aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “We’re both civilized.” As I said it, I pictured Ev, draped in a fur pelt and carrying a big club, dragging me by my hair across York Avenue. I let out a yipping laugh, and Violet said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Everything.” And right then both
of those opposing assessments seemed true.

  21

  Ev and Al, Al and Ev. Our names had never been on everyone’s tongues, like Helen and Sam’s, except for our brief, scandalous fame in Iowa after that first kiss. Once, newly married, we were at a large party, and the host introduced us to another couple, who immediately reversed our names. That moment, in which we could have easily corrected them, flitted by. One of us still might have said something, but when the man turned to Ev, saying, “So, what do you do, Al?” Ev and I exchanged conniving smiles over his head, and let the mistake continue all evening. “So, what do you do, Al?” I said to him later, in bed. And he turned to me with a gaze of concentrated desire and said, “I do this, Ev, and this, and this.”

  We were rather smugly comfortable with our assigned genders and their complicated components. I’d already recognized what I thought of as the male, the “Ev” in me—that aggressive itch in arguments, my desire not to just defer to anyone louder or bigger. And Ev wasn’t afraid to display what I saw as his feminine side, especially the nurturing kindness he was capable of in a crisis. I still cling to some of those easy sexist notions.

  The next time I saw Dr. Stern, I told her about that long-ago party and our switched identities. I wasn’t sure why I’d brought it up. There were so many things to talk about, so many events and incidents, dreams and memories. Our lives seem brutally short until you calculate all the crowded minutes and try to choose the ones that best define you. During that same session, I told her about ending the affair with Michael. Somehow I expected her approval for my good behavior, even though she had never evinced disapproval before. I guess I was spoiled by past rewards in my life—lavish praise for a childish poem, a big bonus for landing a big book.