by W. A. Winter
THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS
THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS
a novel
W. A. WINTER
Published 2021 by Seventh Street Books®
The Secret Lives of Dentists. Copyright © 2021 by W.A. Winter. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover image © Shutterstock
Cover design by Jennifer Do
Cover design © Start Science Fiction
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Inquiries should be addressed to
Start Science Fiction
221 River Street
9th Floor
Hoboken, New Jersey 07030
PHONE: 212-431-5455
WWW.SEVENTHSTREETBOOKS.COM
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
978-1-64506-031-4 (paperback)
978-1-64506-024-6 (ebook)
This book, though inspired by actual events, is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
For my pal Dick Coffey
Who are these people, and what do they want? And why don’t we like them better than we do?
—David Owen,
“The Secret Lives of Dentists,” Harper’s, March 1982
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
—Gabriel García Márquez
SPRING 1955
CHAPTER 1
The skinny blonde isn’t working tonight.
The driver doesn’t know her name and doesn’t think it would be smart to ask her whereabouts, but he picks it up in the chatter between the Greek and his gimpy son. That’s what the driver does—watches and listens. The Greek, whose name is Anatoli Zevos, and Tony, the son, who has a hip full of Jap shrapnel and three kids of his own, presumably by the surly, heavyset woman who sits like a bad meal at the far end of the counter, run the place. Despite the wife and kids, Tony can’t keep his hands off the waitresses, which probably explains the rapid turnover during the short time, three or four weeks, the driver has been dropping in.
He’s seen the skinny blonde twice since she started working here a couple of weeks ago. She took his supper order the first time, the second time topped off his coffee. She didn’t say any more than she had to either time, but the smile damn near knocked him off his stool. Her smile and her ass—the driver, who believes he has a keen eye for such things, would argue that a combination like that is maybe one in a hundred, or five hundred, or a thousand. The Greek’s too cheap to buy tags for the girls, and the driver doesn’t have the nerve to ask her name. He picks up, though, on the details. She bites her nails and wears a tiny diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand.
Sipping his heavily sugared coffee at this end of the counter, the driver feigns interest in that afternoon’s Star and pictures Tony lurching up behind the blonde in the kitchen or down the basement where they keep the groceries, running his hands up the front of her uniform and shoving his crotch against her ass. The driver pictures her closing her eyes and smiling. Tony, who’s probably in his early thirties, is not a bad-looking guy, short and square with the neck of a stevedore and a thick head of curly black hair. Maybe the idea of a war wound excites the girl. The driver imagines that she likes the attention, yet is wary of being caught in flagrante by Tony’s old man. The Greek, all business and always in a foul mood, has no time for shenanigans. And if there was trouble, he’d blame the girl, not his horny son.
“Said she’s got a toothache, Pop,” the driver hears Tony say.
Frowning, the old man grabs a spatula and scrapes the grill as though the congealed grease and baked-on fat are the sins of the world. He doesn’t bother to reply. These girls are a dime a dozen. They come streaming out of the Greyhound depot on Seventh Street, a couple dozen a week, fair-haired farm girls from outstate Minnesota and the Dakotas and dark-eyed miners’ daughters from the Iron Range. They come here for a job and adventure, not necessarily in that order.
Listening to the Zevoses’ palaver, the driver learns that the skinny blonde hails from Dollar, North Dakota, wherever the hell that is. He pictures a windswept spot-in-the-road with a shuttered movie house, a couple of crummy bars, and three or four grain elevators standing like old ghosts beside the railroad tracks. Maybe an out-of-business five-and-dime and a worn-out Catholic church attended by a halfdozen old-timers. The kids have fled to the cities—Bismarck, Fargo, Minneapolis—where they believe a more exciting life is waiting for them.
The driver knows, too, that the skinny blonde, formerly of Dollar, North Dakota, now lives with her sister in this seedy south-of-the-Loop neighborhood of Minneapolis. He’s picked that up listening to the conversation.
Tony, now a girl short at dinnertime, refills the driver’s cup and removes the chipped pie plate with its purple streaks of congealing blueberry filling. A dirty fork slides off the plate and clatters on the drab linoleum floor.
“Where does a person go to get a toothache fixed on a Friday night?” the driver asks. It’s a reasonable question, nonchalantly stated, something a guy might wonder about in casual suppertime conversation, masking his prurient interest.
Tony looks at him as though he just noticed the customer who’s been sitting on the stool behind the coffee and pie for the past thirty minutes. The driver appreciates the fact that he’s one of those people other people walk past and don’t remember three seconds later. What’s to remember? There’s no Jimmy Durante nose or Dumbo the Elephant ears, no stammer, drawl, or highfalutin vocabulary. He’s neither tall nor short, beefy or gaunt. There’s no swagger, hop, or buckle in his walk. If he didn’t drive a bright yellow car with a light on top, you wouldn’t notice him at all. Even then, it’s the car—Canary Cab No. 313—that you look at, not the driver.
“There’s a Jew dentist on the next block, open nights and weekends,” Tony says, dragging his bum leg in the direction of the kitchen door. “That’s prolly where she went.”
He dumps the driver’s pie plate and fork into a tub of greasy water behind the counter. “Do I give a shit?” the driver hears him mutter. “Not hardly.”
The girl’s name is Teresa Hickman, and at this moment—five minutes to seven, on Friday evening, April 8, 1955—she’s killing time until her seven-thirty dental appointment. Teresa’s sister, Grace Montgomery, put her on to Dr. Rose. Grace has gone to him a dozen-odd times during the past year. She went to him at first because her teeth needed work and because his office was around the corner from the Montgomerys’ apartment, and later because she developed a relationship with the man.
Tonight will be Teresa’s fifth visit to Rose since she moved to Minneapolis in December. The first time, in January, her jaw was sore and swollen; she had an infection that required urgent treatment. The second time, ten days after the first, she said she was still having pain, though the swelling was gone. The third and fourth visits she had no complaints and hasn’t mentioned the visits to Grace. This evening she told Grace she has another toothache and called the luncheonette to say she can’t come in on account of it. Grace thinks she’s probably lying, but decides not to make it an issue.
“I hate the dentist,” Ter
ry said before the first visit, in January. She wasn’t referring to Dr. Rose, whom she hadn’t met, but to the dentist as a scary archetype, like Jack Frost, the Headless Horseman, or the Devil, though she wouldn’t have thought to use the word archetype.
Grace had laughed and said, “Everybody hates the dentist, sweetie.”
Physically, the sisters have little in common. Grace has a mop of tightly curled ginger hair, unremarkable brown eyes, and twenty pounds more than blonde, saucer-eyed, lithe and lissome Terry. Grace is twenty-seven, so almost seven years older than Terry, and, by most accounts going back to their Dollar public school days, at least marginally smarter. As if that was any kind of advantage.
The sisters share a small-town experience that included visits to a sadistic silver-haired dentist in the neighboring town of Hartford (there has only recently been a three-day-a-week dentist with an office in Dollar), who instilled in them, their two brothers, and their local contemporaries a fear of Dr. Piet Vermeer at least equal to the man’s malice and shaky incompetence. Vermeer, as it happened, had it in for the children of Walter and Marva Kubicek, treating them, even more than his other young patients, rudely and rough, often withholding the novocaine. The popular explanation for this extra nastiness was an unrequited love for Marva, a high school classmate, and cancerous jealousy of Walter, another classmate, who married her.
This evening, after Grace’s husband, Bud, leaves for his night shift at the Moline tractor factory on East Lake Street, the sisters wait without fear for Terry’s seven-thirty appointment. Terry’s eighteen-month-old toddler is fussing with his bottle, and Grace is in an off mood, but they can’t resist some reminiscence.
“I’ll never forget those stairs,” Terry says from the bedroom, where Harold Hickman Junior sucks on his bottle’s nipple. Vermeer’s office was situated above Hartford’s Main Street hardware store. To reach it, you’d climb sixteen steep, linoleum-clad steps, the fumes becoming more pungent with each step. The insect whine of the dentist’s drill grew louder, too, and as you neared the top you’d sometimes hear the poor sap in the dentist’s chair let loose a blood-chilling scream.
Neither sister has to mention the experience at the top of the stairs: the windowless waiting room with only a stack of used-up coloring books to take your mind off the horror to come and crabby, blue-haired Mildred Rasmussen behind the receptionist’s desk. Then, through another door, there was the big white-and-black chair, the corded drills, and tray full of hooks and needles and clamps, and Vermeer’s scowling hatchet face, his tiny eyes like green marbles behind rimless spectacles, and Sen-Sen on his breath.
If Vermeer said anything at all to the whimpering patient during the ordeal that followed, it was, “Sit still, child! And, for the love of Mike, be quiet!”
“Dr. Rose isn’t like that,” Grace had told Terry in January. “He’s odd, but nice. If he thinks you need it, he’ll give you a pill that puts you to sleep, or almost asleep. You’ll feel funny afterward, but you won’t feel any pain. And when he’s done, you’ll be rid of your toothache.”
Now Terry returns from the bedroom with her son in the crook of her arm. The child is red-eyed and squirming, his upper lip glazed with snot. With her free hand, Terry reaches for Grace’s cigarette, takes a drag, and hands it back. She’s run a comb through her hair and freshened her lipstick. This evening she’s wearing a green pullover, plaid skirt, and black pumps. She has straight white teeth and a dazzling smile.
Grace stares at her sister through the cigarette smoke. She knows Terry better than anyone in the world, certainly better than their parents and their brothers ever did, and better than Terry’s husband does now. Grace knew about the “secret” boyfriends back home, and that trouble at the Hartford Ben Franklin that disabused Grace of the belief that she was the only shoplifter in the family. Then there were the summer nights when Terry and her pal Connie Canfield stripped naked and walked down County Road 6 in the headlights of Cullen Hanson’s pickup, and the time Terry got “drunk and crazy” with Kenny Landa’s married brother and a couple of the brother’s Navy friends when Kenny was in a Grand Forks hospital with appendicitis.
Still, there have been the occasional surprises. Two days ago, while Terry was at work, Grace came across a half-dozen photographs tucked beneath the bras and underpants in Terry’s dresser.
That evening, after Bud left for work, Grace dropped the photos on the coffee table and fanned them out in front of her.
“Where did these come from, hon?” she asked.
Terry actually colored a little.
“A guy I met at the Palace,” she said. “His name is Richard, and he does weddings and yearbook photos. Some fashion stuff on the side.”
Grace looked at the photos again, one after another.
There is Terry perched on a tall wooden stool with a cheesy-looking curtain as a backdrop. She’s wearing a sleeveless blouse and tight white shorts that Grace recognized but hadn’t seen for a while. In one of the photos the blouse is unbuttoned and Terry is barefoot. In another she’s wearing high heels, has turned her back to the camera, and is looking over her bare shoulder like Betty Grable in the photo that a million GIs tacked up in their barracks during the war. The photos are black and white, and, in Grace’s opinion, not very accomplished for a professional.
“‘Fashion stuff,’ huh?” Grace said, handing them to her sister. She smiled knowingly, the way a big sister would smile in this situation, but knew that her face betrayed her envy.
“Hal’s been begging for pictures,” Terry said with a shrug. “So when Richard asked if I wanted to pose, I said, ‘Sure. Maybe I’ll send some photos to my husband.’ We went over to Richard’s place in Stevens Square. The studio, so-called, was just the little living room in his apartment, with a sofa bed, a couple of chairs, and that stool. But he was nice and didn’t charge me. Afterward, he said, ‘You owe me,’ and I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m good for it.’”
“Hal’s not going to like them,” Grace said, thinking about the unbuttoned, barefoot shots and wondering if there were other poses that this Richard kept for himself.
“Hal will be jealous,” Terry replied with that smile. “But that’s okay.”
When Terry leaves for Dr. Rose’s office, Grace checks on the baby, lights another one of Bud’s Pall Malls, and in her mind’s eye follows her sister downstairs, out the front door, and around the corner onto Nicollet Avenue. She can’t see Terry from her windows, which face Fifteenth, but in her mind’s eye she sees her clearly. Grace knows the short trip by heart.
Terry walks a half block south on Nicollet, wending her way through the leering drunks and drooling stumblebums idling in front of the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club, drawing wolf whistles, catcalls, and, if she doesn’t move quickly enough, their grabbing, grasping, pinching hands. Loud music pours out of the club’s front door, driven by a thumping bass and chased by a saxophone’s carnal shriek, along with shouts and hollers and the kind of language you hear in a Navy yard. Another few steps and she sees a short list of businesses and professionals on a pair of double doors, including H. DAVID ROSE, DDS, and hurries inside.
Terry will run up a narrow flight of stairs that reminds her of the steps leading to Piet Vermeer’s torture chamber in Hartford. When she reaches the top, the street noise has faded a little. There’s a door with the word WELCOME stenciled on the frosted glass and beyond that door a short, dimly lit, faintly chemical-smelling corridor with two more doors on either side. The first, on the left, says A. O. FISCHER / CHIROPRACTOR, the second REYNARD & RIDGEWAY / DANCE INSTRUCTION FOR ALL AGES. Across the hall there’s a door with no markings at all, and finally there’s Dr. Rose’s.
The only sound, at seven-thirty on a Friday night, is the raucous music, up here muffled by the beams, trusses, and plaster walls and ceilings of a prewar commercial building, from the club downstairs. The other second-floor offices are dark and silent behind their closed doors.
Terry opens the last door and steps into a small waiting room. T
here’s no whining drill, no fish-eyed receptionist, only a slipcovered settee, three or four wooden chairs, a small end-table bearing stacks of Readers Digest and Saturday Evening Post, and a spindly floor lamp weakly illuminating a worn brownish carpet. The chemical reek is faint, but unmistakable.
Terry will be mildly surprised—as she was on previous visits, as was Grace on her visits—that the waiting room is empty. Above the muffled noise from downstairs, the stillness is thick as cotton batting. Then, almost immediately, there’s a soft footfall in an adjoining room and yet another door opens and, in the doorway, a slightly stooped, dark-haired, long-faced man in a white jacket appears, smiling.
“Teresa, dear,” Dr. Rose says. “Won’t you come in?”
At the apartment, Grace sits down, rubs out the cigarette, and closes her eyes.
The driver hauls a flatulent middle-aged businessman from the Curtis Hotel on Tenth Street to the airport, twenty minutes away, and then heads back downtown with the windows lowered in his empty cab. He hopes he’s had enough coffee to stay upright behind the wheel until ten or eleven, at which time he’ll either go home or hit an all-night diner for another shot of joe.
Cruising through Uptown and then north on Hennepin toward the Loop, he sees plenty of what he looks for this time of night: girls and young women, between fifteen and thirty, with or without an escort, and with that ineffable look that tells him they would enjoy what he has to offer. But it’s early April, so it’s still chilly in the Twin Cities, and the girls are still bundled up in overcoats and kerchiefs. This time of year he kicks himself for not living in Florida.
He ignores a couple of fares waving at him along Hennepin, and then returns to Nicollet, where he parks near the corner of Fifteenth Street, kitty-corner from the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club, rolls the windows up, and turns off his roof light. It’s only a quarter to ten, but he’s done with taxi business for the night.
