Family Pictures

by Sue Miller

  When they had finished and started to walk him out the door to the ward, he had another moment of panic, but Miss Lomassi put her arm around him and he relaxed against her. As they shuffled down the long hallway, David and the other residents emerged from the observation room. McGill was walking behind the head nurse and the patient, shifting his clipboard from hand to hand. David could smell the ripe odor of the old man as they passed, and he wondered at Miss Lomassi, whose head was bent, touching him.

  At the nursing station, Miss Lomassi asked another nurse to settle the man into the ward. Then she walked back to where David and the residents were clustered. For a few moments they stood together as a group, talking about the admission, how tough it had been. “We wouldn’t expect a first admission—any admission, actually—to be so difficult,” David said. “But we arranged it that way.” He smiled at McGill, and his voice was gentle. “Humility makes you receptive to learning.”

  The group laughed in nervous relief. Then David turned to Miss Lomassi. In an impersonal voice, a teaching voice, he said to her, “And I’ve been wanting to tell you how much I think we can learn from you, from the nursing staff, about how to manage patients.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Eberhardt,” she said. She shrugged. “I think you get an instinct for it, probably.” Though she was speaking to David, she too was actually addressing the residents. “In the end, I think you can just tell when a patient would be more comfortable with someone really taking charge of him. It’s just something that you feel … well … almost in your bones.” She laughed, and he thought for a moment of her flesh, the bones moving under it.

  The group of residents slowly broke up, but David stood by the nursing station for a few more minutes. He began to ask Miss Lomassi about herself, about when she’d come to the hospital, about where she’d worked before, where she’d trained. He was barely listening to her answers. Instead he looked at her mouth and hands, whose short, stubby fingers were in constant motion. As she spoke, a wispy loop of black hair, pulled loose from under her cap, slowly fell forward toward her cheek. Without thinking, David reached up and started to tuck it back.

  She stepped away from him, as though his touch carried a current. Her cheeks were burning, her eyes had widened. “I can manage that, Doctor,” she said. Then she smiled at him, a slow, radiant smile. “Thank you very much,” she said. And she turned and went into the nursing station.

  David was shocked at himself, and through the last activities of the day—a supervision, a closing round with other residents—he kept thinking of the way his own hand had looked rising toward Miss Lomassi’s face.

  He would do nothing about it, he told himself. He resolved this at least partly because of his feelings for Lainey—at odd moments they could still sweep him with a hard rush of love, and this was enough to keep him hopeful for both of them. Sometimes what triggered it was as simple as a gesture, an expression on her face: the intensity with which she focused on one of the children, speaking, or the way she pulled her legs under her when she sat in her favorite chair in the living room. But sometimes, too, it was a more elaborate circumstance, a chance event. There had been a day this past winter that worked this magic. On an impulse they had called a baby-sitter for the four youngest children and had taken Mack and Lydia ice-skating at the Midway. Lainey had learned to skate in her youth and was better at it than David. Once or twice she glided away from him and the children, and as David watched her quickly stroking across the gray ice in her old blue coat, lacing her way through the crowd, her legs pumping rapidly, her red scarf flapping brightly like a banner behind her, he felt an unselfish, surprised joy that she could still look so alive, so free.

  The day had been dark and cold, overcast. Several times they went with one or the other child into the wooden shed against the embankment to warm themselves by the stove. The last time, David and Lainey went in together and sat side by side on one of the long, narrow benches along the walls. It was steamy and noisy in the crowded low building. Children yelled and ran around in their loosened skates for the pleasure of the resonant thudding sound they made on the scarred wooden floor. Lainey said something to him, and David had to lean close to her to hear her speak. She smelled of the fire, of wet wool, and her cheeks were fevered splotches of color. He had a sudden vision of her goodness, of the way she must have been as a girl—a tomboy, innocent and strong. He wanted to hold her, to protect her. For days afterward he lived on that tenderness.

  But it was more than this that made him hesitate to do anything about Marie Lomassi. For David’s youth had been made difficult by his father’s chronic infidelities to his mother, and it was one of his deepest assumptions about himself that he would not repeat this pattern.

  David had grown up in a small mill town in southern New Hampshire. His father was a pharmacist. He owned the town drugstore, one of a series of shops housed in a wooden building with a wide arcade across the front. All through high school and during vacations in college and medical school, David had worked in the drugstore alongside his mother, selling pills and ointments and phosphates, looking out at the distortions in the passing life of the town through the huge dusty jars of colored water that sat in the drugstore window. In college he had often skipped classes for several days when his mother was working on an inventory, to go home and help her. Even much later in his life, he dreamed of the store once or twice a year—of its smell, of the clink of cheap metal spoons on the marble counter. His hands in these dreams reached up to adjust a display, to count the boxes of rose-scented soap, and when he woke he would wonder at the distance he’d traveled from that world; and sometimes for a few moments in his sleep haze, he’d feel an almost friendly nostalgia for the remembered objects, for the medicinally perfumed air.

  David’s father drank too much. There was a special room behind the pharmacy section of the drugstore, where he shut himself in with the door locked unless there was a customer who needed a prescription filled. Then David or his mother pressed a doorbell-shaped button by the cash register—you could hear its muffled ring out back—and after a few minutes David’s father would emerge, smelling of peppermint. He was a tall, stout man with gray hair, which he slicked into an elaborate, foolish pompadour. He always wore a white smock, a bow tie. Though he rarely spoke to his wife or son, he was unfailingly polite to customers—unctuous, David thought. It seemed to him as a boy, and then as a young man, that the customers found his father contemptible. Sometimes he thought he saw a smirk or a lifted lip as the older man asked in his oily voice what he could do for them today.

  Once when he rang, his father came out of the back room and started to mix a prescription with a streak of dark lipstick smeared across his forehead.

  David had stepped close to him. “You’ve got something on your face,” he whispered. His back was to the customer, an old man David hated for his shameless nosiness, a Mr. Walkeley.

  “Don’t bother me now,” his father murmured irritably. He was bent forward over the counter, the red brand presented to anyone in the store who cared to look.

  “You’ve got something,” David said again. He was unable to bring himself to explain to his father what it was. “It’s all over your forehead.”

  David’s father reached up and rubbed his forehead. Some of the lipstick disappeared. “Satisfied?” he asked, turning to David. David smelled Brylcreem, his father’s minty breath, and behind it the complicated sour richness of liquor.

  When he started back to the cash register, he glanced at Mr. Walkeley. He was smiling; and for a moment David thought he saw on the old man’s face an expression of eager, contemptuous amusement. His heart burned with hatred for his father and for the town he lived in.

  It was David’s mother who actually ran the drugstore, which was open six days a week from eight-thirty until seven. She was a small, silent woman with pinched features and thin hair, and David could remember only a few conversations with her that didn’t have to do with the store.

  She was never open
ly critical of him, never discussed his life with him, but when she didn’t want him to do something he was talking about—to go out for the football team, to buy a car, to date a particular girl—she would say softly, “I’m very surprised to hear you say that.” And David would almost always reconsider.

  She had spoken those words, or nearly those words, years later, when he told her he was going into psychiatry. She had wanted him to be an internist, a general practitioner, the kind of doctor she was acquainted with, the kind of doctor whose prescriptions her husband had filled for years in the drugstore. She said she was surprised to hear of David’s change of heart.

  He told her he was sorry she felt this way but that his decision had been made. It had been made, in fact, nearly a year before, during the time he was in San Francisco, but David hadn’t been able to confront her with it then. Finally, well after his residency had begun, he’d made a special trip home from Chicago to bring her the news.

  They were having dinner together at the big dining room table, and for a while after he spoke, David didn’t eat anything. He was afraid that if he lifted his hands to his knife and fork, she would see how badly they were trembling. He sat with them in his lap and looked out through the curtains at the street, blurred and whitened through the net mesh. From in here, the houses across the way looked like those in old, sunstruck photographs. The only noise in the room was the ticking of the hall clock and the sound of his mother chewing and swallowing. His father was out “on business,” business that he no longer even bothered to name.

  David had been in analysis for several months. He’d been reading his way through Freud. Now he was thinking about his hands. He realized abruptly that their trembling was a symptom, a sign of his fear of his mother, the anger at her that he’d been coming back to again and again in his analysis. And he felt, suddenly, a sweep of painful gratitude, like the momentary awareness of the presence of grace, which was so intense it caused him to bow his head: gratitude for his accidental entry into this new knowledge, this understanding that had let him see the ways his mother’s long-suffering silent goodness had trapped and paralyzed him. When he raised his head again, he felt that he had achieved some new kind of compassion and pity for her. He was able to speak. He asked her about her arthritis, and then about the high school kid she’d hired to help her. He lifted his hands and began to eat.

  It was a moment David never forgot. It moved him from being only keenly interested in the ideas involved in psychiatry to understanding in some deep, emotional way how they could work. It made him a believer.

  The moment when he touched Marie Lomassi’s hair had for David some of that same powerful sense of revelation. In its aftermath, he felt as though a part of himself was waking up, some thick anesthesia painfully dissolving: suddenly he saw and felt what was there, what he had known since San Francisco was in himself, what he had refused to look at all around him.

  In 1947, Lainey and David had stopped one hot summer night by a small square on a street near their apartment. They had Mack and Liddie in the carriage, trying to lull them to sleep with its motion. They leaned against the low wood fence that ran along the sidewalk at the edge of the square, smoking and taking turns gently jiggling the carriage; and they watched the children of the street playing wildly, unsupervised, on the worn grass, until the rectangle of light above them, like a window to the sky, darkened and adult voices from up the street, pitched high and set rhythmically to carry over distance and the squall of the children’s games, began to call them in.

  About six months later, they bought their house, in this square, on this street. They couldn’t really afford it, even though it was cheaper than comparable houses in Hyde Park because the train tracks ran right behind it. But when Lainey saw the advertisement she remembered the square, she remembered that summer night; and she asked David if they could just go and look at it, just once.

  They left the children with a friend and met the agent at his office on Fifty-seventh Street. When the agent walked them through, David could feel Lainey’s eagerness. The rooms were large, with high ceilings and carved woodwork. There were five bedrooms on the second floor, enough for each of the children and a study besides for David. The family that owned the house had heavy drapes on the windows, dark furniture, dark wallpaper, dark rugs. But Lainey kept murmuring about the colors they could paint it, about how little work it would take to lighten it up.

  To David the house looked too much like the one he’d grown up in—cheerless, airless, crammed with possessions. But when Lainey turned to him on the walk home and asked what he thought, he tried to believe in her version of things. She had stopped him with a gloved hand on his arm. Their breath made clouds between them. She was two months pregnant with Randall. Her blue coat was pulled tight across her belly already, and she hadn’t buttoned the bottom two buttons.

  “I think we should go ahead,” he said.

  Her face lifted in excitement. “We should buy it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She had stepped forward then, to embrace him, he thought. He was tensed, a little embarrassed to show such affection in this public place. One hand lifted to take his hat from his head, the other to encircle her. He felt the bulge of her rounded belly against his abdomen, he bent to kiss her cheek. But then her arms tightened muscularly around him, and he felt his weight rock forward. She was lifting him! His feet left the ground, and she twirled him fully around before she let him down, before they stood panting and laughing, looking at each other with pleasure.

  They moved in in March. With the first warm day a few months later, several young mothers appeared parked on blankets on the grass in the square. Lainey, who was still painfully shy sometimes, barely needed to exert herself to get to know people. She just opened the front door and stepped out with Mack and Liddie into her new life. That first day she moved from blanket to blanket like a bee among flowers; and when David came home that night, she reported on their neighbors to him. There was Jane Gordon, whose husband worked downtown at the Art Institute and who had three kids, the youngest Liddie’s age. There was Tony Baker, with a little boy just Mack’s age and a baby born only a month or so ago. And over the next days, weeks, there were new names: the Lees, the Rosenbergs, the Murphys, the Masurs.

  Within days they were all calling on each other—for coffee, for lunch, for drinks in the late afternoon: women with cigarettes tucked in their shirt pockets, babies on their hips, toddlers in tow. They left older children at home to run their own universe—to set up elaborate pecking orders, violent vendettas, to rifle through drawers and medicine chests in search of the answers to formless questions—while their mothers smoked and drank and talked. They talked about their children, about their husbands, their pregnancies, about the election, about the Kinsey Report, about wallpaper. Like Lainey, most of the other women had one or two little ones, and more than half were in varying stages of pregnancy. They treated their fecundity as a sort of combined blessing and practical joke, and Lainey felt relaxed among them.

  David quickly came to anticipate that several times a week he’d arrive home to see a note from Lainey on the newel post, telling him at whose house he could find her. He’d walk across the square, down the block, and be greeted by the meandering children, the other couples, the pitcher of martinis or the g&t’s or the bottle of bourbon set on the coffee table. Later he would think of those years as the happiest period of his life. And these would be his children’s earliest memories—of playing with other children in their houses as it got dark, of being fed pickup meals while the grownups laughed and talked; of being dragged home by their parents in the twilight that rang with the shouts of older children still at play. Or of curling up in strange beds with other children of the street, and then being carried home half asleep late at night through the silent dark, their parents smelling of party, different from their daytime smell, and the grownups’ muted calls to each other—good night, good night—a kind of lullaby.

  By the time
Randall was four or so, the group was most often at David and Lainey’s house, because he wouldn’t sleep in strange places, because he had to have things happen in a certain, predictable way. Often they fed one of the pickup dinners to a group of six or eight children and almost as many adults. But by then this social life had become a necessity for them and they were its hub, made animated and energetic by their need not to be alone together, by their need to turn away from the increasing difficulty of their married life.

  Lainey in particular would rise to these occasions, moving smoothly through the myriad steps of getting the odd meal on the table, of keeping everyone’s glass full, of keeping the conversations, the arguments, the games going. She was capable of a desperate flirtatiousness within the group. Once she called Lew Rosenberg back with the promise of a strip-tease if he’d stay another half hour. While the record played through a scratchy version of “Love for Sale,” she slowly and seductively removed her belt, extracted by degrees a wadded Kleenex out of her pocket and threw it carelessly over her shoulder, draped herself in an afghan her mother had knitted and walked in and out of it, and finally, doing a bump and grind, unhooked her necklace and tossed it backward into a corner of the dining room.

  It was only a few days after he’d lifted Miss Lomassi’s hair gently off her cheek that David realized for the first time what had developed for the others along with all that hard-drinking conviviality. They were at the Masurs’ house, and David had stayed on after Lainey and a few other wives had gone home to get the children to bed. It was a Tuesday evening, and there was a sense that they needed to break up soon—everyone had work the next day. But no one really wanted to go. There was a small group of them sitting around the living room, talking desultorily, telling political jokes, gossiping. Someone had met Stevenson’s ex-wife, knew some interesting details about the marriage. David picked up his glass, which had only a swallow of gin left. He got up and went back to the kitchen. Tony Baker was there, talking with Erica Masur. “Where’s Freddy?” David said. “I want another martini.”