Having planned to return to the Homer exhibition, Sally instead fled the museum. Without stopping even to try to clean up the chocolate stain, she climbed into her car and drove straight back to Stags Harbor. She wrote a note to her benefactor, Dr. Gordon Planter, as well as a check for $1.52, and that very evening— needing above all else to put the last of this disastrous day behind her—she and her son marched to the mailbox and posted it.
And there the story might well have concluded. A source of squirming embarrassment would have become for Sally, in time, a slapstick misadventure, a droll anecdote she might have told on herself some years hence . . . Only, the letter she wrote that evening—May 12, 1968—made something of an impression on Gordon. It was somehow not the follow-up gesture he would have expected from that chatty, hopeless woman in the museum.
It was a gracefully amusing note, written on good paper, in a lucid hand. Close inspection revealed that it had been inscribed with a fountain pen:
Dear Dr. Planter,
Well I am back in Stags Harbor, having learned my lesson; I shall never leave the town borders again.
How fortunate I was, when I made the mistake of thinking myself fit for outside society, to happen upon your indispensable assistance.
The enclosed check cannot fully square our accounts, I fear, but I am hoping that it, plus the assurance of my deepest gratitude, will leave you not fully regretting our comical encounter.
Yours sincerely,
Sally Sultan
As it happened, Dr. Gordon Planter, for all his air of unflappability, was at that period in his life a vulnerable and a susceptible man—and that phrase your indispensable assistance reverberated within him. Forty-three years old, he too was recently divorced, his wife having left him under circumstances both painful and humiliating. (She’d gone off with one of his more successfully recuperated patients.) It cheered Gordon to think that in the eyes of this singular woman with the singular name, this Sally Sultan, he’d come across as someone who might be described as—as indispensable. And there was, too, his recollection that the woman, for all her air of abstraction and distraction (her belongings raining down on the floor, a smear of chocolate on her blouse), had been quite pretty.
The letter sat on what he still thought of as his wife’s bedroom bureau. Gordon lived alone, in a big house in Grosse Pointe, two blocks from Lake St. Clair.
A few days went by and Gordon discovered, with some chagrin, that the encounter hadn’t faded from his mind. Nor had her letter, even if it had disappeared physically after a cleaning woman’s visit (eventually, after a thorough search, it turned up in the dining room). And on the Sunday following, two weeks after the meeting at the museum, Gordon woke up and resolved to do something highly atypical: He would drive up to Stags Harbor in search of Sally Sultan. Although he still couldn’t put his hands on her letter, he did have her address. It was on the check, which somehow he’d failed to cash. The check for $1.52.
Now, Dr. Gordon Planter was a man of rare virtues—a man generous and gentle, scrupulous and conscientious—but no one would ever have labeled him daring or adventurous. He was keenly, almost morbidly susceptible to the fear of “stepping wrong”: of proceeding where he wasn’t wanted, or presuming on more welcome than he should. The decision to drive to Stags Harbor was unlike him, to say the least.
Another fact about Gordon (one that he generally succeeded in concealing from the world) was that he was reflexively, unshakably superstitious. As a matter of habit, Gordon scoured the world for auguries and omens—most of which (it turned out) cautioned him to hesitate, to deliberate, to back off. Hence, it unsettled him that on the way to Stags Harbor he twice got lost. Wasn’t he being advised to head back home? Why had he set out in the first place? What was he after? He stopped in a coffee shop to clarify his thinking over a piece of Boston cream pie, during which it became evident that he didn’t know why he’d embarked on this errand, or what he was after. In other words, there were powerful, persuasive reasons for beating a prudent retreat . . . Then Gordon got back into his car and, flouting every single one of the plausible warnings in his head, he proceeded toward Stags Harbor—toward his new life. All of which is how, on the evening of May 26, 1968, Sally Sultan, hearing a timid knock on her door, opened it to discover, to her astonishment, Dr. Gordon Planter.
Gordon had intended to arrive midafternoon, but his various detours and deliberations had delayed him. To his deep dismay, he’d shown up just as Sally was cooking dinner.
Sally was dismayed, too—to discover on her doorstep the doctor from Detroit in his gray suit and red necktie and gray felt hat. She was wearing a dusty brown housedress. She’d had a trying day. Luke had awakened her in the night complaining of stomachache, which in the morning turned into diarrhea, one trip after another to the bathroom. In the afternoon, to comfort him, she’d allowed him to draw with ink, which was always a mistake. He’d smudged not only his hands but, in a child’s slapdash way, his cheeks and chin and lips as well.
In those first frozen moments when Sally opened the door to Dr. Gordon Planter, his explanation for his presence in Stags Harbor (something about being in the neighborhood, a consultation with a fellow doctor in nearby Bay City) made no sense to her. This was partly because Sally felt so flustered at the thought of the wreck of an apartment at her back (the place had no ventilation, and still smelled of Luke’s diarrhea), and partly due to the onset of an attack of Gordon’s stuttering. But after some hesitation, she invited him in. Gordon, having now found his voice, began to tell her about his sister and brother-in-law, both of whom liked Detroit so much, they were thinking of leaving Chattanooga. Gordon talked so enthusiastically, in fact, that Sally forgot about dinner—until a reproving black cloud billowed from the stove. She’d burned the grilled cheese sandwiches.
One stammering voice contended with another . . . Declaring himself responsible for the ruin of their meal—he’d shown a simple lack of manners in arriving at suppertime—Gordon announced that he would take the two of them out to dinner. Sally protested that Gordon would do nothing of the kind. Gordon insisted. Sally was more insistent yet—she made it clear that for her a matter of principle was at stake. Despite what she’d shown him so far, she was no mooch. Nor was she the sort of flibbertigibbet who tossed out her dinner when it wasn’t cooked to perfection; no, Sally Admiraal wasn’t the sort to let a bit of charred bread dismay her. The sandwiches were perfectly edible. They needed merely to be scraped. And she would be happy to make Gordon a sandwich, too—it was the least she could do. An unburned sandwich. (And Gordon? Though fearing he was once more “stepping wrong,” he accepted—what else could he do?)
And so the doctor sat down at the kitchen table with the homely, unhealthy-looking, inky-faced little boy, Luke, who had been instructed not to start eating until the guest’s food was ready. On the boy’s plate were carrot sticks, applesauce, a burned and scraped cheese sandwich, and a hill of gray-green peas, rapidly cooling . . .
Sally confided that her son had had a stomachache in the night and Gordon delicately asked whether he might have a look at the boy. Sally consented. Gordon studied the whites of the boy’s eyes, peered down his throat, felt the glands of his neck. Not exactly a robust specimen . . . Sally left the stove and came over to observe Gordon’s various ministrations. He asked her a variety of medical questions—Did the boy drink milk? Did he have allergies? When had the asthma begun? Did the boy also have eczema? Had his blood been tested? Did he ever take vitamins?—and the two of them entered into a discussion that persisted until halted by an angry, acrid smell.
Oh my. Sally had burnt another sandwich.
This time, she grew extremely flustered. She announced that this sandwich was fit only for the garbage. A new one would take her just a moment.
And now it was Gordon’s turn to demonstrate a little stubbornness. That was his sandwich, the black one in the pan, and he intended to eat it.
That’s nonsense, you’re my guest. I’m not going to
serve you a burned sandwich, Sally told him.
And here lay the doctor’s opportunity likewise to stand on principle: He was going to eat what the rest of them ate. He was the seventh of eight children, you see, and he wasn’t about to ask for special treatment.
And seeing how adamant and righteous he was, Sally could only laugh with approval (showing Gordon, for the first time, what a pretty smile she had). Then she said, All right, let’s all sit down to our feast together.
And so the family (or this threesome that would in time become a family) enjoyed their first meal together: They dined on Sally’s burned and scraped grilled cheese sandwiches.
(Sally’s story has come to a fitting and familiar stopping place. She reaches toward her purse, for a cigarette, then thinks better of it. Across the pond, the boy and girl have vanished. Its surface remains unbroken—nobody has been hurled into it, nobody either rescued from it or drowned. The pond is so still, there’s little to distinguish scenery from reflection, the real world from the model world set at ninety degrees to it. I check my watch. It’s three o’clock. Or nine in the morning, a Monday morning, in Manhattan. The mathematician in me relishes the notion that New York’s a world also set at ninety degrees to this one—or so that six-hour time difference suggests. My former colleagues are beginning another workweek. And Sally concludes her tale.)
At the end of the evening, with every last crumb of the burned grilled cheese sandwiches conscientiously consumed, Gordon proposed that he return the following weekend. Would it be all right if he took them out to dinner next Sunday? And Sally, still feeling fresh from her divorce (though it was now a few years behind her), and extremely chary of all entanglements, and of course needing to be careful about appearances, explained apologetically that she didn’t think that would be a good idea. Well, as a doctor, Gordon was also concerned about the boy’s condition—could he come by next weekend to check on him?
And how was Sally to refuse the doctor that?
So Gordon dropped by on the following Sunday, in the middle of the afternoon. He sat in the living room, under the Winslow Homer reproduction, and drank seven cups of tea and, with only a little help from Luke, consumed an entire box of ginger snaps. But he did more than merely sit. This time he gave the boy a real once-over.
Clearly, Luke was in only middling health at best. So Dr. Gordon Planter proposed that the following Saturday he escort the two of them to Wake Hospital, in Saginaw, where Gordon had a friend, Dr. Paul Chapman, who was one of the finest pediatricians in the state.
And the following weekend he drove the two of them, in his elegant charcoal-gray Lincoln Continental, over to Saginaw, to see Dr. Paul Chapman. And the Sunday following that, Gordon arrived on Downward Lane in a state of exhilaration. He had spoken to Dr. Chapman, who had confirmed Gordon’s suspicions. Luke was, among other things, anemic. Gordon, looking as jolly as any Santa Claus, brought forth from his sack some iron pills, as well as a new contraption, complete with a breathing tube, which he thought might alleviate the asthma.
It was a joyful moment. Gordon’s ebullience was infectious and this time Sally readily assented to his proposal that the three of them celebrate with dinner out. They drove to Saginaw, to a restaurant Gordon had somehow heard of, which turned out to be alarmingly expensive. (Sally didn’t wish to deepen her indebtedness any further.)
Even so, after a month of visits, she was discovering a certain relief in the doctor’s presence. She had originally believed that Dr. Planter, with his stutter and ungainliness, was a man of few words, but it turned out that Gordon had quite a bit to say, chiefly about his divorce. He did most of the talking, she most of the listening— it was a gratifying relationship. Gordon, it became clear, was a haunted man. He hadn’t recovered from the collapse of his marriage and his ex-wife crept into his every conversation. It was all Margie, Margie, Margie.
To Gordon’s credit, he carried out such talk discreetly, elliptically—there was nothing in what he said that Luke shouldn’t have heard. Not that the boy gave much indication of listening to Gordon anyway. Habitually timid with strangers, particularly male strangers, Luke seemed to spend the major portion of Gordon’s visits in rapt concentration over his various drawings. (The boy was particularly fond of puzzles and mazes—never happier than when he’d situated himself within some elaborate winding labyrinth, from which he would eventually extricate himself.)
Sally sensed that in providing a listening ear she just might be doing Gordon some good. She wanted to help him. And the fact was, there was comfort for her as well in placing herself in his capable custody—in being chauffeured about in his luxurious Lincoln, in watching his fine doctor’s hands undertake the humble task of replacing a faucet washer, in seeing him steer so assuredly through the nurses and the medical forms of that other sort of labyrinth, the winding corridors of a modern hospital.
But if there was comfort for Sally, there was also nervousness in the very essence of any such comfort. Gordon seemed intent on guiding her toward a world that wasn’t her own. So that on the evening when the three of them drove to Saginaw for dinner, a number of things were troubling Sally.
She was unnerved by the expensiveness of the restaurant.
She was faintly annoyed at Gordon’s air of self-congratulation in having come forward as Luke’s medical savior, which she couldn’t accept without a sense of self-reproach: Why in the world hadn’t it occurred to her that the boy might be anemic?
And she was chafing a little at a remark Gordon had made as they’d climbed into his car. She’d used the expression comme il faut. And he’d looked at her in some puzzlement and pointed out that the phrase was French. Well, true enough, Gordon—no denying that. And he’d said, Where in the world did you ever come by a phrase like that? (Or had he in fact said, Where in the world did you ever come by a phrase like that? . . . The words continued to fester.)
In the restaurant, Gordon ordered the house specialty, a one-pound pork chop, with mashed potatoes and garlic bread; he clearly made no effort, unlike the ever-vigilant Wes, to watch his waistline. Sally, as a matter of principle, ordered the second-cheapest item on the menu, which fortunately turned out to be fried whitefish, a dish she was fond of. She tried to order a hamburger for the boy, but Gordon—high-handedly—overrode her. He ordered the boy the most expensive item on the menu, an immense T-bone steak—as “a source of iron.”
Was there any more iron in the aristocratic cut of a T-bone steak than in the plebeian grind of a hamburger? Sally doubted it— and watched as the boy, manfully battling with fork and steak knife, tried to subdue a slab of meat nearly as big as his head.
Of course Luke couldn’t begin to eat it all. Before long, he’d pushed his plate aside and turned over his place mat; he commenced another picture.
Gordon had a second martini and then ordered the cherry cobbler. Neither Luke nor Sally wanted dessert. Gordon insisted they try the apple pie.
While they waited for their desserts to arrive, Gordon happened to glance over at the boy’s drawing. Identifying what seemed to be an elephant, he asked, “Are you drawing a zoo?”
(And at this point in her tale, Sally’s glee and relish are so great, it would be a shame not to let her narrate it directly . . .)
“So then Gordon said to you, ‘Are you drawing a zoo?’
“And you looked up, this little anemic seven-year-old boy who had again gotten ink on his face, and you said, ‘I’m drawing Hannibal. And his brother Hasdrubal. Crossing the Alps.’
“And Gordon looked from you to me, from me to you, eyes bugging in his head. Things were not quite adding up. He didn’t know what to say. But finally he asked me, ‘Where in the world would the boy ever have learned such things?’
“And I told him you must have read it in the library—that you were a great one for taking mountains of books from the library.
“But Gordon still couldn’t contain his amazement. The truth is, Luke, he hadn’t paid you much mind, up until then—except for your m
edical state. I suppose he had too many problems of his own to work out. In any case, that’s when he uttered the fateful words. And that’s when I really let him have it. Poor Gordon, even now I can’t believe what an ingrate I was. I’m so ashamed.”
(But of course Sally looks far less ashamed than jubilant.)
“That’s when Gordon said, ‘Where would a boy of his background ever have learned such a thing?’
“Well. That did it. Of course it was that word background — that’s what did it. It triggered what has always been my besetting sin, Luke—my ungovernable pride. Because all of a sudden it seemed clear as day. Just how Gordon saw us. Background. We were these, if you’ll excuse the expression, these Tobacco Road folks he’d come in to rescue. We were these, excuse an even worse expression, white trash. He thought he was dealing with a couple of slum-dwellers who didn’t know in which direction the sun rose in the morning.
“Well. I suppose it was one thing if Gordon saw me as some sort of charity case. I was in need of charity in actual fact, living as I was in the worst apartment in Stags Harbor. But it was another thing if he was regarding my little Luke as some sort of gutter waif.
“I was feeling guilty, of course, about not figuring out the anemia. And about housing an asthmatic child in such a terrible apartment. And about accepting so many favors. And now suddenly my weakness came to the fore, and so I sat right up and I said (oh it mortifies me even now to think of it!), I said, ‘You may not realize it, Dr. Planter, but I’ll have you know that tonight you are dining with the valedictorian of Restoration High School, class of 1956.”
A Few Corrections Page 11
