Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  2

  FOR EACH OF Doc Roper’s retirement buffets, you could name the injury that inspired it: he had stitched shut the forehead of a child who somehow rammed his trike through Grandmother’s patio plate-glass. And if our teen daughter (speaking generally here) suddenly found herself in the family way, our general practitioner never took care of her himself; but Doc was sure to know the best man in Durham—who might just know somebody helpful.

  “What in hell will you do all day?” neighbors asked at Roper’s fourth surprise barbeque. Fellows sounded interested if irked. Others, close to ending their own work-years, felt scared of being idled. Then here came Doc—self-employed, braving that, eased-out only by himself and the wife.

  “Oh, boys,” he smiled at deacon faces fifteen years ago, “something’ll bob up. My kids gave me an Apple laptop, still in its crate somewhere. Our two in grad school sound scared I might come north, try taking classes with them. Funny, I do feel ready to finally become a good student! Last time, looks like I coasted on my . . . well, on my I-don’t-know-what! Luck? Always have hated sitting. Next week Marge here has us flying to Bermuda for twenty-one whole days. —Right, my li’l Margie? Lady put her foot down. Says she’s not having our usual weekend with me hooked to patients or the doggone phone. After that, we’ll see . . .”

  People said it was an American tragedy. He knew so much. And about us! Our septic innards, our secret chin-lifts, our actual alcohol intake in liters-per-day. Plus Doc never snitched. You could tell him anything, if you could only think something up!

  Made you wish science would hurry. Young geniuses should mastermind a brain-transplant procedure. When his time came, imagine downloading Roper’s gray matter into some strong new pink intern!

  Where is it written that a sane, vigorous man of seventy has to pack it in?

  Doc’s yellow hair had turned all white at age thirty; that set him apart somehow, a person sanitized if not quite priestly. He’d kept himself good and trim. Swam in our river almost daily just at dawn. Still jogged, shirtless. True, while running Doc’s torso was maybe more in motion than a man of forty’s. But, once stopped, everything rose up near where it’d started. He was just ten years my senior, as I likely already said. On myself, I’ve lately noticed how soon male-tenderloin can texture toward being beef jerky. At best!

  You’d often spy him at the club, fitting in a fast nine holes, if rarely played with the same duffers. He was too smart to be only perfect as you heard. It must get old, staying that observed, admired. Some days, yeah, he could act kind of testy. His jokes could have flint in them. If your accident-prone child lay bleeding on his exam table, some of Doc’s quips truly cut.

  “Bill?” Roper spoke (to me) over my young son’s compound fracture, “Bill, can’t you help your Billy boy here find any higher trees to fall out of? Hasn’t missed many in this county—now, have you, pal?” Ha ha. You see?

  Still, he was most everybody’s doctor. The competition wasn’t, and his waiting room was a salad bar of classes, races. Curious, Roper’s bills seemed to reach richer clients quickest and give the poorer recovery-time. Need be, he’d pass you on to specialists. Doc said he owed me a bit extra: how my own dad had perished in his care, in our company. So I’ve been Roper’s patient-dependent for, what? going on forty years be July tenth. I’ve counted on our standing weekly appointment, sunup Monday mornings. Had my own in-office coffee mug, a gift from Roper’s tough-talking nurses. Blanche, Sandy, and the other Sandy.

  SOMETIMES ENTERING OUR town’s country club I still worry I’m dressed goofy. These old tennis shoes too grass-stained? Slightly sunburned, don’t I look more a rural Baptist than any chess-playing Episcopalian? But I have belonged here on a donated legacy-membership for five decades! When will I not feel guest-on-approval? Blame our family’s slipping into Falls so late. We barely made the broad-jump from clay tobacco fields to red clay courts. And then only thanks to Dad’s strange good fortune.

  Riverside’s tulip poplars and water-dipping willows can keep our oasis fifteen degrees cooler than bordering farmland. My poppa, though born out there in sun-glare, loved hidden Riverside nearly to the point of being pagan. By June, fields the boy plowed were sun-blasted toward ceramic. Just to carve down in and plant your seed was about like breaking plates.

  Pop bragged he’d got born self-employed, lived to be indentured. Luck only came to Pop once he retired. If Doc Roper’s parents stayed the best-looking fox-trotters nearest the bandstand at the club, my dad barely glimpsed membership’s brick fortress, and then only over a hedge, from a public road.

  “Red” Mabry was the son of a mule-driving tenant farmer from way on out in Person County. If his borrowed truck had not broken down he might never have discovered Falls’ quietest neighborhood. Red had been driving since age nine. Was then he finally grew tall enough to dance while standing on his left leg, his right one operating gas or brake as he clung to the wheel.

  Stranded along The River Road, awaiting some jackleg mechanic, Red wandered off into greenest luxury. (He later admitted he’d been seeking some nice quiet bush to pee on. But rich folks’ bushes were all trimmed up to look like man-sized chess pieces that seemed likely to pee right back at you.) Gardening crews had come at sunrise and left by 8 a.m. Like dew itself, maintenance refreshed then disappeared. The River Road in early June was all lipstick tulips against emerald lawns.

  I picture little Mabry—denim coveralls, red hair looking like his one cash crop, probably openmouthed with pleasure. He finally saw how industrial wealth, left alone amid its own upholstery, can choose to live. In 1938 no gates or guards kept anybody out.

  This son of sharecropping had never glimpsed lawns acres wide. Of no silage value. Hell, you couldn’t even bail stuff this short to feed your poppa’s cattle. Grass here meant to be a kind of moat. It would keep your white house hid-back awninged in blue eye shadow. A row of riverside homes looked shapely yet hard to please. They were bay-windowed big-fronted as Miss Mae West. Like Mae, they posed uphill, terraced onto hips, expecting farm boy stares, their stances still jack-hammer-resistant.

  Young Red noted folks’ driveways flagstoned then bar-bent U-shaped. One brand-new canary-yellow LaSalle convertible sat parked out front, keys left right in it! That summer day, owing to a busted axle, Red Mabry became another teen who’d fallen hard. Got his heart set, see. Not on some hellion Zelda debutante, thank God; fixed more on a neighborhood called “highly desirable.” Our hick was hooked on professional lawn care in that age of bamboo rakes before leaf-blowers; kid got fixed on having a third story set cute as a sailor-girl’s cap atop your regular roof. Mabry hoped to someday spring himself (and any future kin) from sharecropper’s usual, a rabbit-box of country shack.

  My dad, not a little bowlegged, had been called “Red” since the midwife’s first alarmed sight of him. Given his eighth-grade education, considering his poor health, the little fellow’s leap to being someone “town” was probably impossible.

  DR. ROPER, BEING fifty, but still looking thirty-eight, happened to be jogging past a kids’ swimming party. He heard screams from the Bixby twins’ sixth birthday. As neighbors, Janet and I had just popped in for cake. I became one of five men who waded out and found the little brothers’ cooling bodies. We laid them face-up onshore as Doc, dropping to his knees, barked, “Align. Heads. Please.” See, instead of wedging himself between them—where he must do lateral twists, wasting time—he knew to kneel up by their droopy noggins. Doc pulled both those heads onto his lap and bent across them from above. Shirtless himself, he huffed and heaved his air into our identical dead. A feeding, he pressed the Bixbys’ skulls so close together Roper seemed to pant into a single mouth.

  Boys had plunged under river-water hand-in-hand trying some weird twins’ pact or dare. Now Doc exhaled into Timmy, then Tommy, alternating. We all stood crying, holding on to one another. Three women supported the young mother. In minutes Tim coughed a quart of the River Lithium; then Tom sat up and pointed at his brother. H
e accused the other of breathing first, ruining the “speriment.” Roper laughed, shook his head. “What exactly was your plan, boys?”

  All of us, shaken, went direct from tears to cackling. Kids’ beautiful mother felt so grateful, so stunned at losing then regaining them, she—quiet, hysterical—knelt beside Doc and offered him . . . a kiss, openmouthed, the works. This happened in June and Katie Bixby filled out her Jantzen one-piece pretty good. All she could think to give Roper was herself. His own wife Marge had just come running, hearing shouts. Margie stood not ten feet off when Doc told Mrs. Bixby, “Thanks, dear girl, but you’re in shock. Y’owe me nothing. Go take yourself a goodly snort of brandy. Then stick these daredevils in a long, hot bubble bath—well-monitored, y’ hear?”

  ROPER’S FATHER HAD it bad for gambling. Dapper fellow, looked like he owned Shell Oil while goading any shoeshine boy to wager: “Freddy, tell me, since you know a lot. How late you figure today’s freight train’s running?” Neighbors swore that one midnight Roper, Sr., came home naked, shoeless, wearing just a hotel blanket. Also missing, the family Chrysler. His poor wife had to go out and pay the cab. Drake Roper’s 007 manner got him into those very club games he could least afford.

  And Doc’s mom? A true beauty forced to teach local brats piano. We’d hear her tapping out our five-eight time, seated behind the bench where we slaved over our Czerny; we’d hear Mrs. Roper toy with her pearls, turn toward the window, sigh a lot.

  DOC’S OWN GROWING kids often heard from townsfolk how fortunate they were. They’d glaze right over, snort at each other. You sensed the dad must’ve been pretty darn human, once finally home at seven p.m. Controlling maybe? Cold? You could only guess which usual problem was his.

  Roper’s son and daughter were loyal enough never to say one thing against him, at least nothing you could quote. They’d been shipped early off to Northern prep schools (as if to help them keep Dad’s secrets). The daughter was now big into African-American art history; the son at Harvard, I think in the divinity-theology line. Blond lookers, both of them. We rarely saw them, even certain Thanksgivings. Sad that no new young Dr. Roper would be rushing south to try replacing him.

  Though one decade older than I, Doc had a better memory. In his office, he recalled verbatim my last year’s wavering blood work. At his fingertips my Dow Jones good cholesterol gone bad. Man never needed to speed-read the fat manila folder Nurse Blanche left opened for him every Monday anyway.

  OUR PART OF North Carolina is so darned flat we’ll do most anything to stir up some variety. Mystery, please. If not adultery, how about a hill? Oh, to have experienced some cloud-high risks. We’d even court a few pit-of-hell lows. —Results? Mostly golf courses.

  The berg nearest ours named itself for a pile of mill-side stones, “Rocky Mound.” Didn’t that sound too bland to merit a post office? So town fathers upscaled it to: “Rocky Moun-t.” One letter seemed to shoot the town hundreds of feet above sea-level. And us? We’ve always had this placid river chockablock with Ice Age stones. So, those few jagged rocks that babbled audibly? we upgraded. To a word nearly-Niagaran: “Falls”!

  Tourists ask to see our waterfalls. Our what?

  Residents couldn’t bear to call themselves the “Fallsites.” (Didn’t that sound like some minor form of feldspar, like the word falsies?) That’s when our early nineteenth century membership had several drinks and dubbed itself “the Fallen.”

  “How long have you been among the Fallen, or were your people born that way?”

  MY DAD STUCK out eighth grade till Christmas vacation. After that, Red hammered his way to being a contractor miles from Falls. County jobs proved spotty, as rural pay was poor. Still, folks trusted him on sight. Mabry gave honest estimates, simply said what he meant. That came out surprising, funny, finally kind of rare. Inheriting the weak heart that’d killed his dad, he stayed down nearly-child-sized. He had to hire subcontractors, older, able-bodied men. And yet, he chose to marry the prettiest honor student from a one-room crossroads school. Nine months later to the day, they welcomed their towheaded baby, me. And Red Mabry—officially an invalid, exempt from soldiering in WWII—somehow supported us.

  He swore our finally getting into Falls was God apologizing. For making our family tradition be terrible health. Red had strict doctors’ orders to never lift a tool heavier than his clipboard and, yes, okay, its pen.

  His very ears were freckled like concert tickets punch-holed. His cracked grin made you laugh at, alongside, then with it. The man pretty much radiated enthusiasm. For belief, most any belief. Faith in his own faith and others’. Love is one thing. Red’s belief, being general and village-sized, seemed less private and selfish than romance. A heart in trade. A heart like some shop sign hung right out front.

  WHILE ROPER’S PARENTS played tourney bridge or spiral-peeled lemon zests for drinks, my dad and mom still rocked me on the porch of our tin-roofed farmhouse. They took turns fanning yellow jackets off baby-me as Red talked a blue streak about Falls’ tree cover. “Streets like ‘forest glades,’ the best blocks.” His county tone could swan-dive up into an Irish dreamer’s. Pop got crushes on certain words. “Glade,” “mitered” and “half-timbered Tudor” each held pride-of-place there for a while.

  Red swore that Riverside’s constant sound of flowing water would cool us off and heal us up. Red rattled on about the charm of rich people generally: how they had doctors as good as any U.S. president’s; how they could make just some weekday the occasion for a party worth uncounted shrimp platters, real Chinese lanterns. Dad swore that even Falls’ oldest sickest rich folks, why, they never looked near so ham-colored, sweaty, or plain-bad as his many heavyset cousins out this way.

  Dad had memorized street numbers along The River Road, near-catechism. He mapped so much about which fine family lived where since when. In my later decades spent among the Fallen, Red’s start-up bloodline flowchart proved infallible. It saved me much embarrassment among cousins. Except for me, they all were. Cousins. One town girl was named Whitson Whitson and her brother bled.

  If my dad had to die early, he got lots done beforehand. Our first week in Falls, Red started hunting medical help for the both of us. Pop found two town doctors far superior to a near-veterinarian who’d treated us as full-fledged members of the rural poor. Then Dad sought even better care as far away as a new college hospital over in Greenville.

  Finally internist-generalist Roper returned to his hometown. There was a party in honor of that, too. He’d just finished at New Haven. At last, with this new-minted grad just turned twenty nine, with me a shy nineteen, with Dad one feisty if twisted forty-seven, Doc accepted us as clients. Then, slower, Roper took us up as friends. He was the first to understand, then explain, what-all was wrong with us. Nobody till then could say what we had.

  Past my condition, I never understood Roper’s own. Why, with his skill and looks and Yale MD, come back to Falls? Was that not a relapse?

  And why would such a one stay?

  3

  FORTY YEARS AFTER signing on as Dad’s doctor and mine, after all those years of human holding and mending, Roper folded. He had given Falls a full six months’ notice. Claimed his wife had made him do it. “Marge showed me the kitchen calendar and asked if I recognized one date and when I told her I’d turn seventy then she said it’d also be the day she got me back. ‘Patience finally wins out over patients.’ So be it. Marge has asked for so little.” Still, when it hit, his disappearance felt overnight. The last appointments were completed (except last stragglers bearing cookies, photographs).

  The notice Scotch-taped to his locked office door was just a piece of typing paper handwritten by Doc’s head nurse:

  Will no longer be seeing patients as of today, folks. Sorry. It has sure been real.

  Roper sold his local practice to a recent Emory grad. That poor kid had his work cut out for him. Doc acted unsentimental. Every grocery aisle held damp-eyed wheezy well-wishers trying not to show him their new rash. How could any future a
vocation compete? What’d ever be alive and grimly funny as our community these last four decades?

  If he took to his rocking chair, he’d surely sit there missing office hours crowded with our small-beer woes and charms. Looking back, maybe we all felt a little jealous . . . of whatever he’d take up next. His clearing out made us feel we’d been ditched. We might all be his plain steadying first spouse, the gal who slaved at catering to put her go-to guy through med school.

  Though widely admired, Roper was odd in having no one best friend. Never even seemed to miss one. (Were there a few leading candidates? Oh, sure. His cross-the-way neighbor, yours truly, lived, watchful, among them.) Sure, I’d have “hung with him,” as our grandkids said till recently. But from boyhood up, solitude appeared a part of Roper’s plan. His dad had been a much-watched loner forever waiting for some CIA assignment or midnight game. And our doctor had just such stand-apart power. I respected that. Pretty much had to.

  But about his golden years ahead, people predicted the worst.

  “Since kindergarten, always our class do-er, Marion. Retired? He’d best stay busy. ’Cause soon as one of those sits down? In about a year you’ve got yourself a goner.”

  DOC, RETIRED, WAS back from Bermuda and had found his future! At our golf club bar, he spied old chums, made time to perch, tell us what he would be “majoring in” for his life’s remainder.

  Doc explained how, into that Bermuda resort, a decoy convention had just migrated. Dallas-based game hunters, sports-paraphernalia collectors. Too many Hemingway beards. Texas successes made high-octane boasts in an English teatime hotel.

  Twenty-one days of beach can stretch out quite some distance. Doc said he’d already read the eight novels Marge brought, special. Those books just didn’t seem real “lifelike,” he groused to her. “Brands of cars in here I recognize but not what any of these crazy lazy people do all day. I’m bored for ’em.”