Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

by Julie Iromuanya

  “No,” Job said. “He is a Nigerian.”

  “He is an American.”

  He should say something about the silly way she filled the boy with hot dogs and pizza, about her insistence on only speaking English to him instead of Igbo, but he didn’t. How could he dignify her claim with a response? None of it mattered anymore. My boy, he will never be a man, Job thought.

  In a final stand, Ifi grabbed the squat center table and lunged forward with it. The table met the wall in a heavy thud that widened the hole that was already there. Surrounded by broken glass and papers, a huge, toothless mouth laughed at them.

  CHAPTER 18

  JOB THOUGHT IT FITTING FOR VICTOR’S REMAINS TO BE FLOWN BACK TO Nigeria and buried in his father’s compound among the ancestors, so that the boy could rest in peace. In his mind, the small boy’s mourning would be fit for a chief. They would mourn the old way. A caravan would follow the boy’s small casket through the village. Ifi would shave her head. Among the female relations of his village and family compound, she would ululate her grief through the night. Under her rigid stiffness, Job would at last witness Ifi’s beating heart.

  But these plans existed only in his mind. His wishes had been put to rest when Job woke to find Ifi’s date-stamped bereavement claim denied.

  In his foolishness, he still hoped right up until the last minute that Ifi would arrive at the airport, that all would go as it should, but the funeral was nothing like his dreams. His old father and his youngest sister arrived at the Port Harcourt International Airport to pick him up. The rainy season had just ended. The air was dry. Soon, the dusty Harmattan winds would start. But he would be gone by then. Although his father leaned heavily against a cane, he looked well. His youngest sister Jenny’s lips and fingernails were glossy with red paint. When she hugged him, he could feel the sharpness of her nails against the frayed skin of his back. She ordered around the driver, an ashy-faced boy of sixteen.

  After collecting all of Job’s suitcases, the driver motioned to the one remaining, the black leather briefcase containing Job’s stethoscope. “Docta?” the boy asked. “Me, I de take?” Although it was not a question, his voice rose at the end. After all, he was nothing but a houseboy dressed in a driver’s cap. He would also wash their linens and underpants, iron them too. The family had fallen that low. No more grand parties. No more visits from important diplomats. Just enough from Job’s monthly remittance to furnish the house and pay for a catch-all houseboy.

  As always, Job forgot to respond. It was the first time that Job felt the weight of his lie.

  “Docta?” the boy asked again as he reached out.

  Job recoiled, hugging the briefcase to his body, thinking of Victor’s life slipping away from him, thinking of the voices of the men who called him doctor that night. “No, no need.”

  Before heading to Abba, they spent the day in Port Harcourt making the last preparations for the funeral. His mother, sisters, and the housegirls filled the kitchen, preparing food for the feast that would follow the service. In a sad way, it was a joyous occasion, a reminder of the bygone wealth that had furnished Job’s trip to America to begin with.

  In the parlor, his junior brother, Obi, and his father accepted guests who came to pay their respects. Clay walls and stiff leather furniture made up the room. Three knotted curtains of muted pastels blocked out the fierce sunlight. An air conditioner blasted cold, ragged air into the room. Each voice shouted to be heard over the sound of the air.

  Among the visitors were a man and his boy, a relative of a relative, someone Job only knew vaguely, someone who had come to show his respects to the man who was celebrated up and down the street and in church once a year when they received his annual endowment. Clearly, the son was suffering from bowlegs. The father insisted that it was something more.

  “Doctor, he walks like k-leg, k-leg,” the man said, turning his legs out. “He sleeps with pain.”

  The boy’s hair was all tough, tight curls. He was thin, with gangly limbs and a belly like a ripe melon. He had arrived in his best slacks, and now he held them bunched at his knees.

  Job leaned heavily into his father’s low leather couch and beckoned. The boy came forward, and Job ran his fingers along the length of the boy’s legs. He looked nothing like Victor, half his size and nearly a foot taller, yet Job recognized in his shy smile the same pleasurable unruliness as his own Victor. He imagined the boy’s skinny legs ducking in and out of the housegirls’ thick calves as they prepared meals in the kitchen. He could see the boy dumping bowls of rice, upturning roots in the garden, yanking the braids of his sisters’ fresh and tender scalps. It nearly broke his heart even to examine him. Job took a deep breath and began, casting aside the images from that night.

  He asked the boy to spread his arms, and Job patted him down. He asked the boy to walk on his tiptoes, to jump, to kick. The boy did everything, his knees buckled from his bowed legs.

  Job produced his stethoscope and listened for the boy’s rabbit heartbeat. He told the father, “His heart is slow. It is not the boy’s legs. You must feed him coconut milk.”

  “Yes, yes.” The father nodded solemnly.

  But Job didn’t stop there. He sat back in the chair pensively, then tilted forward, arching his eyebrows in seriousness. “The coconut milk must be fresh. Not in a can. The enzymes will thicken his arteries so that they can pass more blood throughout his body. His body is thirsty for blood. Especially there.” He indicated the misshapen legs.

  The father agreed. “Yes, the enzymes.”

  “And,” Job could not resist, “tell the boy’s mother and his sisters that he must be left in peace if his legs are to grow properly.”

  “Eh?”

  “Let the boy play,” Job said softly.

  By evening, the arrival of guests had temporarily waned. Job escaped the parlor and disappeared into the dark hallway dividing the main quarters from the boys’ quarters at the back of the house. A tall portrait was positioned on the wall. With thick eyebrows and vicious eyes, his brother was no more than nineteen years of age in the photo. Standing before the portrait, Job trembled. Samuel’s eyes probed his with distaste. He laughed at the briefcase in Job’s hand. Doctor, the voice said mockingly, it is not even real leather. What a grand pretender you are.

  On the drive to the village in Abba, Jenny sighed and shouted her praises of Ifi. She wrapped her sharpened fingertips around Job’s hands. “Don’t mind, my brother. She is mourning. Our Jesus will not leave us.”

  But later, as he washed his face over the bathroom sink of the chapel, he overheard her in the hallway. Her voice overtook those of other parishioners. “Why my senior brother married such a woman, I do not know. He had many choices. A mother who will not bury her own son, oh. This is Satan. A-ah! This is abomination.”

  Jenny’s accomplices were other thirty-something women, fully regaled in ichafu headscarves, long dresses, and wrappers of various prints. His sister stood out among them in a tailored western suit. Job clutched Jenny at the elbow and led her away from the women. Flashing a sympathetic smile to her friends, she followed him to the other end of the hallway. Low overhanging bulbs elongated their shadows. A pool of light poured in through the exit door.

  “You are insulting my wife?” Job asked.

  “What is this?”

  Job turned his body to block the streams of parishioners making their way into the chapel. “She is not well. It’s not her fault. Can’t you see?”

  “Not well, oh. That is speaking lightly,” she said. “Do not deny it, brother. She is onye ara.”

  “Don’t speak of my wife in that way.”

  “This woman, who was as poor as a church rat, you take her to America and make her a queen, and it spoils her brain. But don’t worry, my brother,” Jenny said. “We will find you a new wife.”

  “She is a good woman,” Job said, suddenly reminded of his great joy in seeing Ifi smile. We will have another child, he told himself. We will go to another city. We w
ill begin all over again.

  “Your wife is a liar,” Jenny said. “Imagine this rubbish woman calling the day the son of my senior brother will be buried. Imagine such a woman calling to disgrace her husband. Imagine such a woman calling the father of her husband to share such lies. I tell you, this is Satan. I am not surprised if it is not juju that made you marry this woman.”

  “What are you talking about?” Job asked.

  “I do not need to repeat such nonsense,” Jenny said.

  His forehead swirled. Already he knew the answer.

  “But if you must force me, I will tell you.” Jenny looked around and bowed toward him. “She says that you are no doctor. She says you wipe the ass of diseased Americans. That you do not even have a first degree.”

  In silence, Job took it all in. He swallowed a deep breath through his nostrils. He could only listen.

  “I never liked that woman,” Jenny said, resuming her normal volume. “With her big nose and flat buttocks. It was juju. But don’t worry, my brother. We will find you a new wife.”

  What could he say in defense of such a charge, of such a glaring fact? At once he hated Ifi for her truths and hated his sister for so completely believing his lies. At the same time, the ache in Job’s chest swelled into a feeling caught between hate and love. How could she expose me? he thought. Suddenly remembering the look on her face that night as she watched Job’s slippery fingers lose their grip on Victor’s life, Job bristled at the accusation in her expression.

  A hand clutched at Job’s elbow. His heart thudded in his ears. He started to push the figure away, but he heard his father’s voice. “Bia, come,” his father said, “the service will begin.”

  With great difficulty, Job followed.

  The service took place in a cooled chapel filled with those Job had known nearly his entire life and those he barely knew at all. Stunned into silence, Job felt the absence of the most important person of all, Ifi, and the shame began to crystallize into hate. As Victor was eulogized, the air conditioner rattled in the background between bursts of loud air. The pastor was a red-faced white man, no doubt commissioned by Job’s family on behalf of Doctor. The pastor pronounced Victor’s full name slowly, with difficulty. With the correct pronunciation, Job repeated his son’s name in his head: Victorious Ezeaku Ogbonnaya. His first son, who was supposed to grow to be the victorious king Job could never be for his own father.

  He thought of Samuel. Samuel had been careless. He was the first son. He was not supposed to try to be the hero. He should have left the heroism for Job, the second son, the one who could make mistakes and be forgiven. But now, forever, Samuel would be nothing more than a set of accusatory eyes in a portrait, aged no more than nineteen years. Samuel would live forever in all of Job’s failures.

  For the first time, Job wondered about his father. All those years ago, how had his father been able to cope? What had it meant to bury his dreams along with his first son?

  Throughout the service, the pastor pressed a handkerchief to his temple. After the viewing, the casket was closed and dumped into the ground. Once covered, the plot swelled with dry earth. No one ululated for the boy. On Ifi’s behalf, Job’s mother quaked and sighed next to his rigid father, two sisters, and younger brother, mourning the boy whose growth they had only witnessed through photographs. They knew nothing of his Spider-Man, Wolverine, or his Big Wheel. They knew nothing of the clunky sound of Igbo in the small boy’s mouth.

  After the funeral, the mourners ate tureens of jollof rice and moi moi. One parishioner after another shared condolences. Women embraced Job thickly. Men clasped his hands in theirs. By now, everyone had witnessed Ifi’s absence. In her place Job’s mother stood, her face wet with tears. She grasped Job’s hands in hers and held them through the day.

  But Job could only imagine Ifi, with unmoving eyes, curled in front of the television. He willed the tears to spill from her eyes. But the harder he tried, the angrier he became at her resistance.

  And then the anger turned into humiliation. What kind of father allows such a thing to happen to his son? he thought. What kind of doctor is it who cannot save lives?

  One by one parishioners stood before Job, each nodding furiously. “Doctor, God is good, oh. We cannot understand his ways. The boy is in His kingdom.” Always, they asked after his wife’s health. Always, they began each statement with “Doctor.”

  Eventually, a tall old man stood before Job. His wife was a small woman. She supported the sagging man with her shoulder.

  “Doctor, this cough will not allow my husband to sleep, oh.”

  A hard lump knotted in Job’s throat. Thinking of his Victor, thinking of the sliver of life in his palm, he tried to swallow it away. “I am sorry.”

  “Doctor, please treat my husband.”

  “Leave me, oh,” Job said. I can’t do this again. Not now, he thought. He had never been meant to be the doctor. That was for Samuel. Job had been playing an expensive game for far too long. If Samuel had stood over his son that night, Victor would still be alive. Even as it pained him, he decided that he must own up to it. When he was finally alone, he would throw the stethoscope away. He would finish this game. Once and for all.

  “I am not lying,” the woman insisted.

  “I do not have my tools,” Job explained to the husband.

  When the woman still wouldn’t listen, his voice broke. “I am not a doctor.”

  As if she had not heard, she continued, her voice growing shrill. “I beg of you. My husband will pay.” She lifted her purse and sifted through, finding ragged naira notes bound by rubber bands. She began to lower herself to her old, cracking knees to bow in supplication.

  “Put your money away, Aunty,” a voice boomed from behind Job. The voice belonged to his father. His father dipped and leaned into his cane until he was standing to the right of Job. “My son is humble. He will treat you.” With that, he produced Job’s briefcase and unclasped it. All that filled the briefcase was Job’s accomplice, the stethoscope.

  With wavering palms, Job touched the man’s heaving chest. He pushed in and out and asked him to breathe in deeply. The man struggled through coughs. Job plugged his ears with the eartips. All he could hear was the suction of empty air. As his father watched him fumble with the stethoscope until he found the man’s heartbeat, Job felt his own thorough disgrace. Thuds pounded in his brain. He fought for the words that would interpret the tall man’s maladies. He struggled for the words that would make the man go home with hope. Wasn’t this why his father stood alongside him, urging him to continue his charade?

  “Your lungs,” Job started.

  He felt his father’s breath over his shoulder as he looked on.

  “You see?” the wife asked. “You see. As God is my witness, I am no liar.”

  The cough, Job had noticed, was wet and thick like a rag. “Your lungs are filled with fluid instead of air,” he said, though his heart was not in it. “Your lungs are two balloons filled with water.” He thrust out his chest and sucked in air to demonstrate. “You must take,” Job paused for a word that would produce the proper sentiment, a clinical word that rang with finality, professionalism.

  “Acid-o-mana-phin.”

  “Yes, doctor, yes,” the man said through a cough.

  CHAPTER 19

  FOR THE PAST THREE DAYS, THE PHONE HAD RUNG. IFI DIDN’T ANSWER. IT must be Job. Now we are even, she said to herself. Was there such a thing? Now that the world knows he is nothing in America, like me, a mother without a child, what will he become? she thought. What was left of nothing? What had brought her here to begin with? His lies.

  Seduction was an art Ifi knew little about. Yet, she must have understood its ways. She must have mastered it before she even met Job. Yes, in the photograph that Aunty had mailed to his family without her knowledge, she had seduced him. Perhaps it was an innocent glance that presented her. Perhaps without knowing it, Ifi had exercised the subtleties of grace and coyness during that awkward meeting with Job
in Uncle and Aunty’s living room. She had, in a way, collected him as he had collected her.

  Now there was nothing, only an assortment of objects, and she would let it all go. Letters, bills, phone calls. Forget them all, she thought. This house and all its holes and all its creaking noises. She had never wanted the ugly house to begin with. Job had simply presented it to her as her own, as he had done with every single aspect of her life, beginning with his first lie. Now it would go to the dogs. It would crumble to the ground before all of them. And Ifi would watch it.

  Trilling birds outside. A brutal sun. A thud from the newspaper boy delivering the paper. Ifi stretched out on the living room couch, staring at the gaping hole in the wall, taking in the exhausting heat through her nostrils until her head swam and she drifted to sleep.

  As she slept, she saw the house from the outside—a chipped door, gray windows. Nothing more than a large mouth full of rotting teeth. This mouth was hungry and consuming. It chewed what was inside and swallowed. We’re all just meat, she mused. Job, Ifi, and Victor. They were nothing more than meat. This house, it spat the bones outside and left them for the wind to scatter.

  A small brown face glared through the window. Ifi bolted up. The eyes, the nose, the mouth. Her fingers came to her face. They covered her lips. Her heart pumped loudly in her chest. She rushed to the window and pressed her face against the glass. She struggled to lift the window. It was stuck. Another problem with this stupid house. A hard yank and it opened. Ifi pried off the screen. She reached out and grasped the face with her hands.

  “Victor.”

  “Let me go!”

  “Let him go!”

  She pulled the face in to her. A brief struggle. Ifi lunging this way, the face that way.

  “Free him!”

  He was free.

  Gladys toppled backwards and landed hard on her rear, her legs splayed open like used scissors. Her tote bag was on its side. Loose change was dumped everywhere. A cascade of braided ringlets flopped to one side on her head. Short tufts of her hair peeked from under the wig. She readjusted it. One sandal remained on her foot. The other, who knew where?