It quite possibly further occurred to Ash that this potential son-in-law had several years left to go in his medical education, years that traditionally required sacrifice and careful budgeting. If Joan really went through with a wedding, then Ash might help out with some of the bills, lend a hand now and then to keep the wolf from their door. Why, he could even offer the newlyweds a place to live. No need for them to camp out in somebody’s garage apartment. There was plenty of room upstairs in his very own new and spacious home.
And if such help would keep Joan at home, then so be it.
Myra Hill was the more difficult parent to persuade. John dreaded telling his mother that he was even serious about a girl, much less that marriage was on his mind. But, like Ash, she had known almost from the beginning. Julian, still inseparable from his older brother and his roommate at the boardinghouse, dispatched a letter to Edcouch a few days after the couple met. “John is dating a very pretty girl,” he wrote. “She is social, charming, and a lovely hostess. And she knows how to ride horses.”
Before they became engaged, Joan had revealed the facts of her two previous marriages. Though taken aback, John Hill responded by saying that what had happened before they met was of no consequence. But he chewed for weeks on how to break the worrisome information to his mother. Myra Hill was completely opposed to divorce. Her religion equated it somewhere on the level of drunkenness and child molestation. One she might be able to accommodate, but two? John elected to parcel out only the first divorce. Later on, long after they were happily married, he might mention the other. “Joan was very young and unready for marriage,” he told his mother. “It was over so quick it was almost an annulment.”
Nonetheless, Myra Hill voiced strenuous objection. Her son was too young, he had too many years left to go in his training, he possessed limited funds. How would he support a wife? A child, if one came? And a society wife at that who collected diamonds and furs and thoroughbred horses? “We love each other,” John answered. “We’ll work it out. That’s all that matters.”
One week before the wedding, as Myra and Raymond Hill prepared to leave the Rio Grande Valley for the long drive to Houston, an anonymous letter arrived at their farm. Myra read the letter over and over again, committing it to memory like a passage from the Bible. The anonymous informant wanted her to know that Joan Robinson had been married not once but twice, and that Ash Robinson had served time in the penitentiary for swindle and fraud. Although the latter accusation was incorrect, Myra was overwhelmed. She rushed to the field where her husband was working.
“Who wrote this?” he asked, finishing the letter.
“I don’t know,” answered his wife, “but we can’t let our son get into a situation like this. He may be destroying his whole life.”
Myra hurried to Houston as if on holy crusade, two days in advance of scheduled arrival. During the week of pre-wedding parties, Myra feigned illness, shepherding her strength each day to argue with her son against the marriage. It is not too late to cancel, she insisted. At least delay. Wait! Do this for your mother. Each night she lay awake in prayer, asking for strength to shatter the union.
For the first time in his life, John Hill stood up against his mother. On the day of the wedding, having resisted her exhortations for an entire week, he dressed in his tuxedo and was clipping on his bow tie when Myra entered his small apartment. Her face was as gray as a shroud. She had no more tears, but she made one last, desperate plea. “Your backgrounds are so different,” she said. “You live in two different worlds.” She reached into her fund of biblical verses to emphasize any point and she withdraw one from Amos. Can two walk together, except they be agreed?
“But we are agreed, Mother,” he said. “We agree that we love each other and want to get married.”
“But Joan’s father is an infidel!” cried Myra. On top of everything else, she had heard that he not only disbelieved in God, he blasphemed. “Your father and I haven’t raised you as a fine Christian son to let you get into a potential tragedy like this.”
With his wedding an hour away, John Hill paced the floor, annoyed that the day was marred by his mother’s onslaught. Across Raymond Hill’s face was consternation and sorrow. He was a man who rarely spoke, and John knew that he would not buck his wife.
“Mother, I must tell you that this is none of your business,” John said sharply. “I have made my decision. Let me be my own man. I’m twenty-six years old.”
Never had her son spoken in wrath against her. Myra Hill twisted her gloves. She sank into a chair. “Then,” she said quietly, “I just don’t think I can go to this wedding.”
Angrily, John shot back, “Then I don’t think I can ever forgive you.”
Myra began to weep. The moment was unbearable. Uncharacteristically, Raymond Hill spoke his mind. Picking up his wife’s limp hand, he stretched it out to connect it as peacemaker with his son’s. “We’ll go,” he ordered quietly. “In fact, we’d better hurry. We’re late.”
Joan Olive Robinson and John Robert Hill became man and wife on a sparkling September afternoon in 1957 beside the swimming pool of Ash Robinson’s redwood home. The society pages described it accurately as a storybook wedding, the bride aglow in an elegant white lace gown with pinkish trim and a waist-length veil trailing from her princess cap encrusted with pearls. She had wanted to appear all in white, but her friend Joan Jaworski tactfully suggested that, for the third trip to the altar, a dash of color was more suitable. The groom seemed uncomfortable in his rented tuxedo and a severe new haircut that raised his sideburns above his ears and restored him to the farm-boy look he was anxious to shed. But he was as proud and as beaming as the first-prize winner at the state fair.
Myra Hill tried to smile for the wedding photographs, but her face was a container of worry. Ash Robinson was a most cheerful father of the bride. In later years he would say that he knew from the beginning that the marriage was ill fated. But on this afternoon so fraught with undercurrents, he was paterfamilias, courtly and benevolent. And why shouldn’t he have been? He well knew that after the honeymoon, for which he was paying, he would have his daughter living just upstairs with this latest son-in-law. He could keep an eye on them both. And he would always be there with money if they needed it, rather like a chain to keep errant pets in the yard, out of the street.
SIX
For six years John Hill and his wife lived in the upstairs bedroom at Ash Robinson’s home. While other doctors in training struggled to keep body, soul, wife, and children together on the $164 paid to residents monthly for eighty-hour work weeks, John Hill fared better. He ate food bought by Ash Robinson and prepared by Ash Robinson’s cook, for he promptly learned upon return from the honeymoon that his wife was not at home in a kitchen. “I can boil an egg, I think, and make chili, and that’s my repertoire,” she told him. He drove to work in an automobile given him by Ash Robinson, or, when it was being serviced, in a limousine whose chauffeur dropped him off at the hospital’s emergency room entrance and was there to fetch him at the end of the day. On such occasions the nurses took to sticking their heads out the window and applauding or cheering—some derisively whistling “Hail to the Chief”—as the handsome young doctor stepped briskly from the Cadillac.
For entertainment, there were catered buffet suppers at the Robinson home to which John was urged to invite his medical friends, or dinners for ten at the Houston Club, and the first nights at supper clubs and theaters where Joan was always invited by impresarios who knew that her presence would generate newsprint. John Hill became a creature-of-the-columns by marriage, his name appearing with such regularity that a senior doctor took him aside with the warning that the only papers physicians were expected to get their names into were scientific journals. If he continued to hawk his name about town like a male model selling shaving lotion, then the ethics committee might summon him for an explanation. John insisted that he never sought out publicity. Then duck when you see a flash bulb, suggested the older man, with a ti
ny layer of jealousy to his voice.
And, almost from the beginning, the doctor and his wife went their separate ways. Hardly back from the wedding trip to Mexico, Joan began planning for her spring and summer appearances in a dozen of the nation’s major horse shows. It would be Belinda’s next-to-last season, and the great gray mare would be shown in competitions at Atlanta, Lexington, Kansas City, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, San Francisco, and at Houston’s own Pin Oak, a lovely outdoor show in June with tens of thousands of fresh summer roses entwined about the arena.
For each of these shows, Joan was normally away from Houston for five days, from Wednesday until Saturday, and rarely did her husband go with her. His valid excuse was that he could not leave his hospital duties, but the truth was, if he had any spare time, it would not have been spent hanging around a horse barn and waiting for his wife to take home still another cup and ribbon. John’s penchant was music, particularly Sunday afternoon gatherings where musicians liked to gather and sight-read chamber works. He usually played piano or recorder at the genteel affairs, held in the company of elderly ladies, the refreshments punch and cookies. These were in decided contrast to the parties at Joan’s shows, where bourbon splashed generously in highball glasses, and liveried waiters passed caviar in beds of shaved ice, and the buffet table bent like a sway-back horse under burdens of roast beef and hams.
On the rare occasion when John attended a horse show, he could usually be found reading a paperback mystery while his wife promenaded before him. Once he actually fell asleep in the Robinson box, and when this example of indifferent manners was reported to Joan, she smiled. “That’s okay,” she said. “I nodded off during Haydn the other afternoon when he was playing.”
During their courtship Joan had explained how much time her hobby entailed. And, as was the pattern of her life in dealing with men, she offered to give up show competition. “You come first,” Joan had said. “If anything gets in the way of our happiness, then I’ll get rid of it.” John dissuaded her from the gesture: she could no more abandon horses than he could surrender music. In truth, both her husband and her father were anxious for Joan to continue her glory ride through the horse world. Ash was repaid in fatherly pride and reflected celebrity, and it gave him the opportunity to rub shoulders with a well-blooded group of people not only in Houston but across America. And Ash relished those weeks when his daughter was with him in Louisville or Atlanta. These were the hours when he did not have to share her with the man whose name she now bore.
John Hill learned that there was a great deal more to successful plastic surgery than a skilled pair of hands, the correct framed diplomas on the wall, a reputation for “judgment,” and the ability to withstand tedium and pressure. He could not just go out and open an office and wait for the wealthy to come around for wrinkle removal, or for a referring doctor to send over a patient with a shattered jaw for reconstruction. Like no other medical specialty, plastic surgery depends upon word of mouth, one contented patient telling another potential one, one satisfied GP speaking well in the doctors’ lounge of the new boy in town.
Several years after his training was completed, and when he was well established in his profession, John Hill found himself at a medical meeting and during a lengthy dinner he engaged his seat mate in conversation. She was the wife of a junior man, just starting out in plastic work. The woman would never forget what John Hill told her that night, for he seemed to have worked out a guaranteed success formula in the game. Cool and businesslike, he ticked off how to succeed in plastic surgery by really trying:
First, marry well, preferably a wealthy woman who can help you through the seemingly endless years of training. And it helps if she is coincidentally beautiful, because other women will look at her and speculate about whether the husband discreetly plied his trade on her face or breasts.
Secondly, encourage the wife to participate in civic and social affairs. Insist that she serve on committees, raise money for charity, play bridge at the country club. Each affluent friend she makes is a potential client.
Thirdly, live well. Don’t be afraid to drive a Cadillac or live in an imposing home in the best part of town. Patients do not worry about their fees going to support such luxuriance. They are, in fact, pleased that “my doctor” is doing well enough to feast that high on the hog.
Lastly, do not exactly run from publicity. True, it is unethical for a doctor to advertise or court the newspapers (a practice often flaunted in Houston, where some doctors are as famous as astronauts and employ aides to book them on national television shows and solicit the cover of Time magazine)—but if a man’s wife gets into print and, by association, so does he, then so be it.
The wife of the junior man listened attentively to her dinner companion. She would always wonder whether John drew up this remarkable list of specifications before or after he met Joan Robinson.
Beloved Belinda was retired with pomp and grace at Houston’s Pin Oak Horse Show in June 1959. The gray mare was concluding a career that had made her one of the most honored horses in the history of the amateur world and a favorite of Houston audiences. Pin Oak was a show closely bound to both high society and to medicine, for it was principally sponsored by the Abercrombie family, one of the city’s most prestigious oil clans, and the proceeds went to Texas Children’s Hospital, a world-acclaimed institution for pediatric care. Joan Robinson Hill was the undisputed Pavlova of this ballet, and she personally sold tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of tickets each year.
On the evening of her horse’s last appearance, Joan dressed a final time in the gray riding costume that blended perfectly with the mare. After a fanfare, the lights were lowered and there came the pause of anticipation, the moment of high theatrical suspense. Then, with spotlights dancing on the ring entrance, horse and rider burst forth for one last turn. In the glare, the horse was pale, its mistress almost washed away. There was darkness all around them; they seemed figures suspended in time and space. Joan began to weep, and her tears spilled down her cheeks and onto the bodice of her gray coat. But that did not matter, for she would never wear it again. Six thousand people rose and cheered. Ash Robinson stood at the fence near the riders’ entrance, and he cried as he could not remember having done since he was a child. He was transfixed, mesmerized, and he hoped that people damn well knew who bought that mare and who raised that girl.
When she had concluded the last figure eight, Joan dismounted and tenderly removed Belinda’s saddle. In its place she put a blanket of fresh red roses. Then, sobbing, she gently led Beloved Belinda around the ring for a solo as the orchestra played “Auld Lang Syne.” A black groom standing near Ash Robinson and his wife murmured, “Abe Lincoln hisself didn’t have a funeral as good as this one.”
When it was all over, Joan led her horse out of the glare and into the barn. People swarmed about her, full of the emotion of the moment. Ash embraced his daughter and kissed her proudly. Ma did the same. Joan looked about for her husband but he was nowhere to be seen. Later she learned that John was in a corridor discussing a musicale scheduled for a few weeks thereafter. He had not even watched his wife in her supreme moment. Joan was deeply hurt, but she did not speak of it. Not this time.
On June 14, 1960, in John Hill’s last year of general surgery residency, his wife was delivered of their first child, a son, after a difficult carriage and birth. She had grown frightened during the last month of pregnancy because of kidney trouble, and the pain of anticipation and delivery was great. Her husband had not been enthusiastic over the prospect of a baby, for he was still earning less than two hundred dollars a month and there were two years of specialty training before him. “I don’t care if he’s ready or not,” answered Ash Robinson when his daughter revealed her husband’s concern. “We’re very happy.” Ash had watched over his daughter and his grandchild-to-be like a benevolent dictator. When Joan craved ice cream in the middle of the night, her father, not her husband, rose to fetch it.
At t
he moment of the baby’s birth John nonetheless was bursting with rare excitement. Known in the hospital as a cool, reserved doctor who displayed little emotion, he shouted, “It’s a boy!” as he ran down the hospital corridors informing nurses and patients of his good fortune. He even picked up the phone and told the switchboard operators who so often paged him. One nurse could not shake the impression that John Hill seemed too enthusiastic, that he was somehow performing, not living the moment.
The boy was named Robert Ashton Hill, in honor of his maternal grandfather. But hardly was the baby home than he was in Ash’s arms. The old man was laughing and tender and he cried, “We’ll call you Boot. Boot Hill!”
Ash opened his pocketbook even wider for his grandson. His checks paid for diaper service, formulas, a twenty-four-hour-a-day nurse who was engaged to watch the frail infant during a lengthy period of sickness in his first year. Everything he had done for Joan as a baby he repeated now, three decades later. When Ash announced plans to buy Boot a horse the moment his mother felt he was old enough to be lashed in the saddle alone, Joan laughed. “You are the most outrageous grandpa in the history of the world. You are going to spoil my kid rotten, just like me.”
The established physicians who hold faculty positions at medical schools keep a close eye on the men in training, not only to supervise their education and to keep them from carving up patients improperly, but to spot those new men who might be worth taking in as partners. Dr. Nathan Roth watched John Hill carefully over the six years he studied general and plastic surgery. Roth was a corpulent man with a forbidding air about him from a distance, but one who, upon close association, grew both charming and philosophical. He liked to ruminate like a rabbinical scholar, an unusual trait for doctors in Houston, who traditionally are so busy and so consumed that they have scant time for reflection.
Blood and Money Page 7