Other Men's Daughters

by Richard Stern

  “What is it all about?” puzzled Dr. Merriwether, walking, absorbed, toward class, lab, home, or Holyoke Center. What is this terrific need to look special? Is it so hard to be anyone now? Why so much noise? Why were the demands on others so huge? Was it that there was so much expression in the world that one had to go further and further out to even think of oneself as a person? How he wished, how he wished.

  Poor Merriwether could not even get so simple a need to his lips—such simple physiology—he just drew them tight and peered in the bookstores at the bare-legged girls, stared at the flopping breasts, the bare bellies, and went home to puzzle the meaning of it all.

  “Truth comes as lightning strikes.” He read this gnomic splinter in the middle of the Charles, his smooth arms supported on the oar shafts, holding a paperback anthology of Greek poems. It was his only morning on the river that summer. He had stopped for breath and to rummage among the ancients. But though he was ready, Capital T “Truth” did not strike.

  Four, sometimes five mornings a week, he worked in the lab. Mostly out of the old discipline he’d begun thinking of as another propping habit. (“Habits get you through life, not into it.”) It had been two years since he’d published a paper, four or five since he’d done work that absorbed him. Yet research had been near the center of his life.

  He’d begun as a student of thirst, a dipsologist. “Funny name for a serious pursuit,” he told his graduate students. Like all drives which were called instinctive, thirst was a dense complex of chemistry and mentality. Dr. Merriwether had investigated its relationship to lactation, hemmorhaging, drugs (atropine, epinephrine, metallic oxides, opium), x-ray irradiations, inferior vena cava congestion, snake bites, salinity, fear, various exertions (including copulation), suggestibility and dreams. In twenty-one post-doctoral years, he’d published almost a hundred papers. He had believed that what Wolf called “the dipsologic triad,” thirst, drinking, satiety, was a primeval life pattern, that life, a sum of tropisms organized by the basic “drive” of self-preserving, could itself be regarded as a gigantic thirst. He’d even speculated that what he referred to in class as “cytologic coups d’état, the cancers,” could profitably be studied with dipsologic models.

  Yet he did not really buckle down to his research. His mice withered around the electrodes, he noted the salinity of carcinomic cells, he glimpsed certain interesting recurrences, but, in essence, he drifted.

  Of course, he was doing other things. The “doctoring”—his protective term for the moonlighting—took up nine hours a week.

  Even as a part-time doctor, he’d seen almost everything in the way of flesh and its common disorders, but he enjoyed the work as a form of theater, the encounters with students, the skill or clumsiness with which they described their ills, the emotional guises assumed in examination, and, occasionally, the surprise of a body.

  Even when he’d been most absorbed in research, Dr. Merriwether had liked at least the idea of being a physician. There was of course the real pleasure of relieving pain, but more, he’d long ago sensed an important relationship between the practice of medicine and that of the poets and sages whom even the most commercially minded Merriwethers respected. Many poets had been physicians or the children of physicians. Dr. Merriwether supposed the connection had to do with the importance of human crisis in both occupations. Doctors and poets had to do with essentials; they knew the confusion and mystery of suffering, the disproportion between the human being as complex chemistry and the human being unmade by death.

  The week before the astronauts took off for the first human touchdown on the moon, a stirring girl came up to Merriwether’s office for examination. In the magic suggestiveness of certain times, she had a lunar name, Cynthia. Her surname was Ryder.

  Dr. Merriwether rose for every entrant, an old courtesy learned early, but impressive to many patients, even those who, like him, had been raised amidst rituals and formalities. Miss Ryder was golden-haired but almost Indian dark, slimly full, tall, slightly prognathous, brown-eyed. Her hair waterfalled to the top thoracic vertebra, her tanned flesh issued from a laundered yellow corolla. A human sunflower. Dr. Merriwether said, “How do you do? Miss Ryder, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you feeling ill?”

  “No, sir.”

  Drawer Three, he thought. The Pill.

  “But you want to talk with a doctor.”

  “I want a prescription, sir.” A distant speech of soft vowels, southern, a speech restrained by shyness and courtesy, a pleasure for Merriwether whose own speech had almost Bostonian “a’s” and other piquancies of New England, derived perhaps from the tight mouth of skeptic reserve, the residue of generations of legal and theological hair-splitting. Or, perhaps, from the endemic New England constipation, the holding back as long as possible before going out to the icy latrine.

  “Please sit down.” The yellow skirt drew up, just concealing that for which she sought prescription. “As you know, a doctor can’t prescribe before he examines.”

  “Yes, sir. I want a prescription for the contraceptive pill.”

  “Have you had a prescription before?”

  “At school, but I didn’t get it renewed last time. I thought I could get it here in Student Health.”

  “Have you had a Pap test recently?”

  “In April.”

  “We make a point of talking a bit about these chemical contraceptives.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve had some talks about them.”

  “That’s fine. Have you noticed anything unusual since you’ve taken them?”

  “I think my breasts got bigger.” A wonderful smile, slow, the face finely engraved with parentheses outside the lips, a smile of intelligence and humor.

  “‘Expel Nature through the door, she’ll come back through the window,’” said Dr. Merriwether. Miss Ryder’s smile flowed into laughter, her face creased beautifully. An intelligent face. “For many girls it’s like simultaneously dieting and feasting. There’s an awful lot of nonsense about The Pill’s side effects. Some are serious, but researchers tend to stuff a mouse with a dose that’s a tenth its body weight, record the ensuing miseries, and then wave red flags. For the Reader’s Digest. You could kill someone with water on such an experimental base. My own view is that the chief side effects have to do with the new orderliness it introduces. As the white pills leave the blue dial, people chart their monthly psychophysical changes.”

  The lecture was directed to the sheared stone pipes of Memorial Hall. He looked back to Miss Ryder. Or, at least, to her yellow dress rising over a fine mesomorphic body, the bra-less breasts, full, finely nippled, whitely isolated by bikinied sun-tan sessions. He had seen many girls’ bodies and was habituated even to their surprises. Beauty would stream from what had appeared sheer adiposity; a slim virgin would simmer in dermal poison; another would unclothe a venereal monument, so munificent and warm that he had to force constraint into his palms on her chest and back.

  “I see you don’t have time to waste, Miss Ryder. But I think I won’t bother examining you today. I won’t even ask you the state of your feelings. Don’t report me.” And he turned from the perhaps-offering, perhaps-display and wrote the prescription.

  The dress was on one arm. Now it resumed its place, the golden hair disappeared and, reappearing, was tossed aside. The long, Indian-hued head hoisted, arched, tossed, an athlete’s movement. “Thank you, Doctor. It’s very nice of you.”

  “I hope everything works out well, Miss Ryder.”

  “It’ll be ok. Thank you. For everything.”

  Wolf’s book on thirst had an epigraph from Psalms: “My strength was dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; thou hast brought me into the dust of death.”

  After Miss Ryder left, Dr. Merriwether felt a little dust in his own body. “Foolish,” he thought. He found his eyes on themselves; in the small mirror over the sink. For a man of forty the face was remarkably ungrooved. Did the smoothness stand
for emotional triviality? Shouldn’t forty years of New England snow and sun have ground the flesh against its bones? What had he avoided? The hair too was a younger man’s, dark gold, with silver grain. The eyes, blue-green, smallish.

  A long, ordinary, blue-eyed face. Younger than its years. Had it been left aside for engagements with a later crop of faces? As if it were being given a second human trial?

  Dr. Merriwether’s life was surrounded if not filled with women. A distant, formal husband, a loving, distant father of two daughters. As for women lab assistants and graduate students, he was seldom aware of them except as amiable auxiliaries. Many such women felt their position depended on masculine style, which had meant brusqueness, cropped hair, white smocks, low shoes, little or no make-up. Fine with him. No woman was so despised here as the occasional student who strutted her secondary sexual characteristics. (The buried axiom was, “Don’t foul your professional nest.”) Though the women’s movement had begun to touch the biology labs, it went slowly, perhaps because there was a greater awareness of the complex spectrum of sexuality, the hundred components of sexual differentia.

  As for women encountered in doctoring, they were clearly more outside the emotional pale. Even part-time doctors know the danger of patients’ sexual invitations. The act of disrobing turns many a woman into her idea of a vamp. Miss Ryder’s quick strip was a familiar variation. Yet a gleam was with her; and left with her. Dr. Merriwether wished the day were over.

  There was another hour to go, a fractured rib, a case of jaundice—which he rushed into the hospital—and another Drawer Three, a fat, hypomanic girl from Davenport, Iowa, who had discovered her sexual potential in the infamous Interpersonal Relations Seminar in William James Hall. Dr. Merriwether understood—or misunderstood—that the routine included LSD on weekdays, penile massages on the weekends. “You feel that you are prepared to deal with the emotional consequences of this grave step, Miss Wongerman?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “Good luck then.” And God pity the ambitious lad who tried those alpic gorges.

  He saw Miss Ryder twice before he realized it was because she wanted him to see her. In a great straw hat ringed with blue and gold flowers, she stood in front of the old Wadsworth House across from Forbes Plaza. She wore blue levis and a flowered blouse, and was eating an ice cream cone. She might have been waiting for a bus.

  The third time he saw her, she waved. If she’d waved the first times, he hadn’t noticed. (Though who knows. Stu Benson had found that courtship activity continued in the decorticate cat with no observable alteration.) At any rate, he saw her this time, and instead of turning left and crossing the street at Billings and Stover, he crossed toward her. “Hi there.”

  “Hi, Doctor. How are you?”

  That modest southern speech, the least chiseled American speech, though in Miss Ryder’s mouth, exceptionally clear. He put his left hand to his right pulse. “I seem ok.”

  “Want a lick?”

  Dry as dust, Merriwether licked. “Thank you.”

  “You off to operate?”

  “I’m off to shower and play tennis.”

  “Can I walk with you?”

  “Glad to have company, Miss Ryder. I’m all alone this summer.” This small excess hung between them for a bit.

  Close as his house was to the Square, it was out of sight to all but Cambridge initiates. Once past the Loeb Theater, Cynthia Ryder was in strange territory. The country quiet of Ash Street, the romantic old moss of Cambridge, surrounded them.

  Dr. Merriwether’s uncle, Griswold Tipton, had been Professor of Geology, a pupil and successor of Alexander Agassiz, son of the great Louis. He’d built and died in the Acorn Street house. When Aunt Aggie’s son, Griswold III, was killed on Guadalcanal Island in the Second World War, Merriwether, an undergraduate then, left Eliot House and moved in with his widowed aunt, partly as caretaker, partly as companion. Mr. Stonesifer’s installation on the third floor relieved him of both chores. By then he was a graduate student and spending most of his time in the labs. In 1950, he married Sarah Wainwright, a graduate student in Romance Languages. They moved into an apartment on Ellery Street. When Aunt Aggie died in 1954—she’d left him the house—they moved in with three-year-old Albie and one-year-old Priscilla. (Mr. Stonesifer dismantled his electric toys and went off to New Hampshire.)

  Acorn Street was eleven houses each of whose windows were part of Dr. Merriwether’s inner landscape. The neighbors knew him, his gait, his clothes, his habits. When the Times mentioned his election to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, they congratulated him. He could borrow lawn mowers from these houses, perhaps even money—if there were no real need of it. The houses were his scene, what was permanent for him. Walking there with a twenty-year-old beauty, the familiarity became accusation.

  Merriwether talked fast, against the puerility of his feeling. He told Miss Ryder of the houses and their owners. This summer the street was a center of anti-ABM activity. His neighbors, George Bowen and Warren Defries, testified in Washington about the expensive futility of the system; in the Times letters columns, they countered the arguments of weapon-lovers; at night, walking dogs, they met under acacia trees to discuss interceptor rings, recognition patterns, megatonnage, silo costs. Defries, huge and bulbous as a parade balloon, spread over chain-smoking little Bowen. “It looked as if he were knighting him. He was just pushing off the smoke.”

  Miss Ryder asked him what ABM was.

  Summies.

  This was the affectionately contemptuous term for the Summer School Students. Miss Ryder was a Summie, not Harvard, not Radcliffe. The Summie Myth is that the girls are beautiful, ignorant, available. (The summer catalogue advanced the fiction.) Dr. Merriwether found Summies no different from what weren’t called Wintries; only barer. (The real Cambridge shift came when December released the gloom of New England’s winter.)

  Miss Ryder’s ignorance was easily repairable: Dr. Merriwether said, “It’s the acronym for anti-ballistic missile. It’s not a millionth as important as Macbeth. Though I suppose it could wipe out every copy and every reader of Macbeth.”

  “I do know Macbeth,” said Miss Ryder.

  They were in front of the little oval lawn, under the acacia tree. Miss Ryder had enormous, almost-black eyes, rounder and denser than Sarah’s. He put out his hand and thanked her for walking him home. No facial subtlety hid her disappointment.

  Dr. Merriwether felt a jolt of pleasure: he counted with this lovely person. Of course, students love to come into faculty homes, any faculty member, any home.

  “Can I come watch you play tennis?”

  “If I were good. Or even gracefully bad, yes. But I’m a hacker. Do you play?”

  A little. She’d been junior doubles champ of Eastern Carolina.

  “You certainly can’t watch. It would hurt your game and my vanity.”

  “You’re such a nice man, Doctor.” She leaned and kissed his mostly unprepared mouth, spun on her hard-to-spin-on sandals and walked off. A stunning sight in her flared blue pants, the only sight of that sort on Acorn Street since Priscilla went off to Maine.

  Dr. Merriwether’s tennis opponent, John Davison, was one of those fellows who come late to Harvard and can’t forget what it was like in the non-Harvard world. Half their life’s satisfaction came from the ever-astonished self-gratulation of being in Cambridge. Dr. Merriwether had watched a television “special” on the Royal Family of England. What amazed him was that most of the Royal Conversation had to do with royalty, with stories of Queen Victoria or of the surprise at other people’s surprise at the humanness of royal persons. He compared this odd provincialism with Davison’s.

  Dr. Merriwether had “discovered” Davison in the Journal of Experimental Physiology. A first-rate microscopist, Davison had worked out a scope which resolved features 2000 angstroms apart. His aim was to edit the genetic ribbon, and he was now working on the hemophiliac determinant. It was a job fit for a scientific Lancelot. It sho
uld carry its dignity to every part of a man’s life. It didn’t. Outside of the laboratory, Davison was childish. His only other modes of affection were tennis and Harvard. Harvard was his wife—though he had a fattish official specimen—and children—the world had been spared a junior Davison. Dr. Merriwether had thought of inquiring if there were a gene for Harvard-mania. (Its linkage would be with repressant narrowness. Perhaps Davison could edit it out of any future Davisons.)

  Davison was bald, thin, taller than Merriwether and a few years younger. He had an open, quizzical face. Puzzlement seemed its permanent set. When he aced Merriwether, or when he’d done something especially fine in the lab, the face spread into childish triumph. Merriwether felt a gap of attendance in Davison; but that afternoon he needed someone to talk with and Davison was the only one around.

  There were very few people anywhere with whom he could talk. Formerly, there was Sarah, and, for a few years, Albie and Priscilla (though the talk was mostly of Albie and Priscilla). There was Thomas Fischer, a pal of twenty years, but Fischer tended to fix their relationship as it had once been, that of wise senior to Merriwether’s amusing but respectful attendant; that did not always make for ease. There were Stu Benson and Maxim Schneider, but they were off for the summer. Which left Davison.

  Dr. Merriwether offered him his case. “Johnny,” he said, as they were putting their rackets into canvas covers, “you ever fooled around with a student?”

  “Fooled around with a student?”

  “Yes.”

  “I try to be completely straight with them. I don’t see your point.”

  He was tempted to say, “Davison, old prince, didn’t you ever tell yourself, ‘This girl is driving me wild,’ think of taking down her pants and popping her on the lab table?” The response would probably have been, “What for?”

  The physicist Wigner wished there were studies of the diversity of intelligence, plants to Shakespeare. He said that when he talked with John Von Neuman, he felt that he was asleep and Neuman awake. High I.Q. or not, Davison was asleep to the world beyond his microscope.