The Wednesday Daughters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  —FROM The Tailor of Gloucester BY BEATRIX POTTER

  EVENING WAS FALLING FAST AS ANNA PAGE SET OFF UPHILL FROM THE Ainsley’s End pier—to steal a few herbs from Graham’s garden for an omelet, she claimed, although what she really meant to do was to get Graham to renew his offer of accommodations for her mother. She needed to walk off the tension she still felt despite the soothing taste of scones and hot cross buns, anyway. What Julie had said in the Lucy Cooks kitchen about Anna Page being jealous was true—not in the way Julie had meant it but in other ways, even she would grant Julie that. Anna Page would grant Julie anything, really: that Julie understood better than anyone how Isaac’s grief felt, that they shared the want of Jamie’s touch and smile and laughter, the press of her lips against her Deruta cups. That loving Jamie’s husband and son sometimes felt like loving Jamie, that it was the closest any of us would get to having Jamie back. That filling the void felt better than leaving it empty, except when it didn’t. That there was nothing to do when it didn’t except crack open a chest and pull out the sick thing that was someone else’s heart, and pour your grief into that small saving act.

  Graham was in the garden when Anna Page ducked through the passage in the stone wall, between the rose garden and the too-perfect geometry of the herbs. Napoleon came bounding over to greet her, and she stooped down to return his affection, a far easier thing than looking Graham in the eye. This would be awkward; none of us had seen him since the dinner disaster. But it would be less awkward than shoehorning her mother into the overcrowded cottage or convincing her to stay across the water, in Bowness or Ambleside.

  Graham held a sprig of rosemary out to her, and she inhaled the sweet-spicy aroma she knew from the community garden back in Eleanor Pardee Park, where we played as kids. It was the herb her mother used to put into scalloped potatoes, which she made only for Sunday dinners, when Anna Page’s father was sure to be home.

  She stood, and smiled, and apologized for the abrupt way we’d left the other night. She thought to try to explain the misunderstanding about him, but there was no way to do that without scraping at the hurt of us having had no idea of him before we came. She thought to try to explain the rest—Julie and Isaac—but he wouldn’t know who Isaac was. So she told him about Lucy Cooks and making hot cross buns.

  “My mother comes tomorrow,” she said finally.

  “Tomorrow?” Graham replied.

  “Earlier than originally planned,” she said.

  “I’ve a room ready for her anytime,” Graham said. “What time is she scheduled to arrive?”

  “Sheduled” rather than “skeduled.”

  Anna Page said she would be on the first train.

  “And she’s traveling without your father?”

  “She’s here on business,” Anna Page responded, surprised that he didn’t know about her parents’ odd situation when he knew so much else about us. She supposed it was something the Wednesday Sisters had ceased talking about years ago, even among themselves.

  “Pardon,” he said. “I didn’t mean to— Your father, he hasn’t passed, has he? I can’t recall Allison speaking of him.”

  Passed. It meant such different things in different contexts, but in her life, it so often meant what he meant here, that someone was dead. She’d known when she went into heart surgery that some patients would die in her hands, but it’s one thing to know it and another to face it every morning when you scrub.

  “Why don’t you come for breakfast at the cottage tomorrow morning?” she said, thinking she would need to do something to bridge the gap opened at that dinner, although she had no idea what.

  In Graham’s dark eyes she read concern. “I’d like that,” he said. But she hadn’t fooled him by changing the subject.

  “Daddy and Ma have been separated for decades,” she said.

  He nodded. “I see.”

  He couldn’t see, of course; not even the Wednesday Sisters understood why anyone would stay in a marriage that was such a sham.

  “Daddy had affairs,” she told Graham, feeling the need to explain that it wasn’t her mother’s fault, that he ought not to think less of her mother for what her daddy had done.

  She ought not to have loved her daddy for doing that to her ma, she knew that, and yet she’d always loved him best.

  “Not affairs. Another woman. When I was growing up.”

  Napoleon returned to Graham’s side and nudged his hand.

  “My father took a second wife,” Graham said. “He was married to Mum, but he took a second wife.”

  “Married her?”

  “Purported to.”

  “My daddy only lived in sin,” Anna Page said. “He still does, actually.” She twirled the twig of rosemary in her hand. “We all pretend it doesn’t matter.”

  Graham stroked Napoleon’s head with a tenderness that surprised her. “It’s what one does, isn’t it?”

  Your heart will beat three billion times for you, Anna Page likes to tell people. “Even if it’s sick, if I take it out to replace it,” she says, “it will beat on the tray, trying to keep going for you.” It’s something she learned from her father even before she started medical school, before she chose heart surgery, and Stanford, the world of her father and the other Kath.

  She didn’t want to be a pipe layer, she wanted to do transplants, and Norman Shumway was at Stanford, she will tell you. “It’s easy to forget everything but the patient on the table with the whole team looking the same under the surgical gowns and caps, the shoe covers, the masks,” she’ll say, as if it’s easy to ignore that the person with whom she most often shares the OR is her father’s lover. Once, when Jamie responded to what she called “Anna Page’s faux toughness” by pointing out that in all that getup, nothing covers a person’s eyes, “the window to the soul,” Anna Page assured Jamie that the surgeons wear Clark Kent glasses with magnifiers on them. “Thick black plastic rims,” she said. “I think that was when I knew I wanted to go into heart surgery: when I realized I’d never have to wear mascara to work.”

  The eyes may be the windows to the soul (“life’s dim windows of the soul,” Julie would correct us, with a lecture on how the saying probably originated with some French poet we’d never read but should), but if the soul is anything more than a construct of religious literature, the heart is where it resides, Anna Page also likes to say. Even doctors used to think the heart couldn’t be operated on, lest the soul be set loose from the body. Anna Page rather likes that: the idea that it’s up to her to set souls free.

  She loves the whole routine of surgery and has from the start, from the first operation she ever did, assisting the other Kath in a mitral valve repair. She had arrived at the hospital before dawn to find Catherine eating yogurt on a bench by the door nearest the parking lot; Catherine had wanted Uncle Lee to be with Anna Page when she walked that first terrifying walk to the OR, but Lee thought Anna Page would take his presence as a reminder of what she had to live up to. So Catherine was the one to insist that Anna Page eat a second yogurt Catherine pretended to have brought for herself. They might be in the OR for five hours, or ten, or fifteen, she said. Always the last thing you did before you scrubbed was fill your stomach and empty your bowels.

  Catherine had been the one to scrub with Anna Page—seven long minutes of nails, hands, wrists, forearms. “Ablution, is that the word?” Catherine had said as she knocked the faucet off with her elbow. “The scrubbing is my psychological passageway into the OR.”

  “Like a warrior putting on armor,” Anna Page said. “Blood sport.”

  “Except the goal is to shed the least blood possible rather than the most.” Catherine laughed then, her gentle, sophisticated laugh that Anna Page tried to emulate. Jamie used to tease Anna Page about that. Jamie was a big believer in the beauty of an openmouthed guffaw.

  Catherine introduced Anna Page to their “congregation”: Nurses who draped them in sterile gowns, tied masks on their faces, slipped latex gloves over their clean, short-naile
d fingers. Anesthesiologists who smiled behind their own masks. Two fusionists on the heart-lung machine whom Catherine called “my favorite confusionists.” At least they weren’t refusionists, one had answered affectionately, and Catherine’s cheek pads had lifted slightly under her mask and loupes and headlamp, leaving Anna Page wondering if the two had ever slept together, or might. Wondering if the other Kath was faithful to her father, and if he was faithful to her.

  Anna Page knew which suckers saved the patient’s blood and which didn’t, she’d observed countless times, and she knew how to work with the hair-thin suture material so like the fishing line on which she used to string bait all those summers they spent in South Carolina with her ma’s family and her daddy’s. But everything seemed new that morning. All these things that were supposed to be so familiar seemed overwhelmingly real.

  As they worked, Catherine explained all the things Anna Page knew and had practiced, all the things she wouldn’t need to be told if she weren’t as overwhelmed as she suddenly was. “A razor-straight incision on the outside is a good omen you can control,” Catherine said as she marked the patient’s skin in two places. She had Anna Page hold a piece of dental floss to mark the line—unwaxed, so it wouldn’t slip against the latex gloves—before calling out “Incision!” to let the room know as she began to cut. In what seemed both an eternity and no time at all, Anna Page was suturing the cannulas in place for the heart-lung machine, her fingers shaking as she remembered the first time she’d held a fishing line, her daddy shouting at her and her being so startled by the fish flopping that she’d dropped the rod off the pier, losing both the fish and all opportunity to catch another that long, hot summer.

  “See, it’s as easy as sewing spaghetti end to end,” Catherine said. She de-aired the tubes and connected them to the bypass circuit tubing and told the room, “Go on pump.” She turned to Anna Page and said, “You have your father’s fingers, long and graceful and strong. You’re going to be great at this.”

  And she is. Anna Page is a terrific surgeon. She’s one of those people who, through sheer willpower, would be good at anything she committed to, even if there weren’t the element of needing to be better than her father’s lover. But as often as she tells that story, she never seems to realize how often she does tell it, how badly she needs to be great at what she does. She never stops to think that she had her choice of colleges and medical schools, her choice of residencies and internships and fellowships and jobs, and every time she picked Stanford. She picked cardio-thoracic surgery at Stanford, knowing she would have little choice but to learn how to mend a heart from the woman who had broken her mother’s. Anna Page, she is at least as complicated as her parents are, and probably more.

  She never tells the end of the story, either, not since the night she told my mom at our dining room table while I watched from the stairs. Home on break from Smith, I woke to Mom’s and Anna Page’s voices in the dining room, and I headed down in my nightgown, imagining myself grown up enough finally to join in their intimate conversations. But something in the sight of Anna Page’s blood-blackened scrubs made me settle on the stair where I’d so often eavesdropped on them as a child.

  “… a bottom-drawer adventure, that’s what my friend John calls it, as if he’s talking about a carnival ride,” Anna Page was saying. “A mitral valve repair ruptured in the surgical ICU, and I was the first doctor there.”

  I could see Anna Page sitting at the table, but Mom sat tucked behind the wall, a disembodied voice that gently chided, “A mitral valve resting by its poor little self in the hospital bed?” But she didn’t suggest Anna Page take a deep breath.

  “The chest-cracking cart was there, at least,” Anna Page said, “but I had to slice the chest open in the bed, with a kid waking up in the guest chair and me yelling at him like he’s a nurse who ought to know how to help. I’ve got three fingers on the left atrium, and still blood is pouring out with every damned heartbeat, running warm all over my hands.”

  She’d climbed onto the bed for better purchase, trying to stem the bleeding for so long that her thighs burned from holding herself in place. By the time she was doing the bed ride to the OR, a male nurse was running alongside her, holding her up because her thighs had quit.

  “Her blood starts running cold on my hands, then—no time to warm the stuff from the blood bank, so it’s going in cold and it’s coming out the same way, it’s not inside her long enough to warm up. And this nurse is holding me, and I’m holding this damned heart, I’m palpating the aorta and it’s softening and I’m communicating that to the nurses calmly, like I’m not screaming inside, I’m trying to stay calm because for one thing the kid is following us, and anyway, if I panic, everyone else will. I’m talking like it’s a dinner-party conversation, saying I need a bigger pop of epinephrine and we’re only in the elevator, the door closing on the kid who looks like he knows it’s the end. Then we get to the OR and we all breathe out, we all think, Thank God, thank God. And it …”

  The whole house was so quiet that you could almost hear Anna Page trying to gather breath to form the words.

  “… it quits,” she finally managed to whisper. “This heart I’ve been holding in my hands for all that time, that kept going all the way to the OR where I could maybe do something, it just quits.”

  Mom said nothing, Anna Page said nothing, no sound of weeping although my eyes were pooling at the ache in Anna Page’s voice, or at the sight of their fingers intertwining, Mom’s untidy nails laid over Anna Page’s, which were cut to the quick, and clean, no trace left of all that blood.

  “And I … God, Aunt Ally, I was so exhausted that all I could do was lie back on the bed next to the bitter, metal smell of losing that heart.”

  “Of course you did,” Mom said.

  Anna Page closed her eyes and sat back in the dining room chair, her fingers still intertwined with Mom’s, Mom leaning forward slightly so that her forehead occasionally bobbed into view only to disappear again behind the wall. The dining room table beyond them was the usual mess of Mom’s writing, all that failure that had begun to mortify me sometime in middle school. Are we all uncomfortable with our mothers when we’re young? Was that why Anna Page confided in my mom rather than her own?

  “I’m lying there, too tired to imagine telling the kid,” she said. “I’m not even thinking of the kid. I’m just empty. I’m thinking I will close my eyes and nap for five minutes. Just five. And that’s when Catherine shows up.”

  The quiet moment of Mom absorbing the name—Catherine—gave way, and she gently squeezed Anna Page’s hand.

  “She was the other Kath’s patient,” Mom said, not quite a question.

  “Catherine stands there at the door to the OR. She doesn’t say a word. She just stands there and stares at me like I’m crazy to be lying beside a corpse, and she turns and walks away.”

  Mom leaned forward, a bit of her face visible to me. I quietly slid down a stair to see her short dark hair, her pale face. Rain began falling gently on the roof as she reached up and traced a finger along a patch of dried blood on Anna Page’s right arm, the one that had pressed for so long on the dying heart.

  “There was nothing left for me to do but pull the sternal wires from the bottom drawer,” Anna Page said. “You can close the skin over the open bone, but I put the breastbone back together over the heart. I know it was dead. I know it didn’t matter. But I couldn’t bear to leave it unprotected.”

  “Tell me her name,” Mom said gently.

  In the silence, tears began to pour down Anna Page’s cheeks.

  “She’s not a heart, Anna Page,” Mom said. “She’s a whole life. And you didn’t help her any less because she was Catherine’s patient, don’t go talking yourself into thinking that. You’d have saved her if she could have been saved. Now name her, and honor her, and let her go.”

  “Alice Memmer,” Anna Page sobbed. “Mrs. Memmer, but I called her Mrs. Memorable.” With tears streaming down her cheeks, she whispered,
“Her heart tried so hard for her.”

  Mom put her arms around Anna Page, pulling her head to the chest she’d forever covered with a washcloth when I’d intruded on her baths, tucking her face down into Anna Page’s wild hair.

  “Nobody can save everyone,” Mom said. “You can’t and Catherine can’t and your father can’t, either. Most of us can’t even save ourselves.”

  “But that poor heart,” Anna Page said. “That poor, generous heart tried so hard.”

  From the Journals of Ally Tantry

  12.11.2009, Ambleside. This is what Graham says. I’m writing it down the way he’s told it to me. It makes no sense, and yet the pieces fit as smoothly together as the sliding panels of a personal secret box.

  Graham is half Indian, like Hope and Sammy are; that’s how the conversation started. His father went to India in the 1930s, like many British second sons needing to make fortunes they weren’t in line to inherit, and he fell in love there, and he married. An Indian woman, a Brahmin, from a good family, like Jim and me, only decades earlier and in reverse.

  Like Jim and me, his parents—Graham’s grandparents—declined to recognize the marriage. They accepted that Graham’s father had taken an Indian woman as his lover; he wasn’t the first British man to do that, or even the first British man from a prominent family to. But that was all. He was called back to Britain under threat of being cut off financially, so what choice did he have? India hadn’t provided even the prospect of a reasonable living, and this was all before his brother’s death in World War II left only him to inherit Ainsley’s End. So when Graham’s grandparents insisted his father marry a proper British wife, Graham’s father began attending balls.

  He selected an appropriate young lady and proposed to her. He stood at the altar and said “I do” a second time, and in short order, his brother died and the newly minted second Mrs. Wyndham moved into Ainsley’s End. She moved into his house and into his bed, thinking she was his wife, not knowing Graham’s father already had a wife and daughter. They were living in Manchester, where he spent most nights.