The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  If Ev knew what I was up to, he would probably have killed me. Our quarrel the night before had been another version of the usual one about Scott, with Ev accusing me again of spoiling him stupid, of encouraging his dependency. “Someone has to make up for your coldness,” I said, already weary of our Ping-Pong game of blaming. Which one of us should take the credit for the two children who had turned out so well? Then Ev said, “Don’t try to throw this onto me, Alice. You’re the enabler here.” God, that psychobabble again—no wonder he couldn’t get published. The money I was about to squander was mine, some of it inherited and some of it earned. I didn’t need Everett’s or anyone else’s permission to help my own child.

  It was soothing to sit on a bench in my new, vast outdoor office, with a roasted vegetable sandwich in my hand and the sun beating down like a blessing on my scalp and eyelids. That uneasiness I’d felt since awakening was definitely gone. A Circle Line boat glided by in the distance; for good measure, its passengers waving gaily to those of us on shore, and I waved back. The pages fluttering on my lap were by a first-time novelist, a thirty-six-year-old machinist in Pontiac, Michigan, whose cover letter had simply stated, “I really need help with this.” But the opening paragraphs were exceptionally good.

  The woman next to me reserved her place in her book with one finger and glanced surreptitiously sideways, as I often do on buses and the subway when I want to see what my seatmate is reading. I imagined that she’d sensed my pleasure in the manuscript and was merely curious about it. She caught me catching her and smiled. “Are you an agent?” she asked, and her smile became wolfish. She probably had her own unpublished six-hundred-page novel stashed behind the gin in the cupboard.

  No, I wanted to say, I’m a doctor. Or, I’m a writer, like you, only better. But that would have been unreasonably mean, and a lie, besides. “An editor,” I finally answered, a half-truth, tilting the manuscript out of her line of vision, like a grind hiding the answers to a test, and she nodded brusquely and went back to Combray.

  I resumed reading, too, and as I turned the ninth or tenth page I was suddenly infused with joy and envy, the way I used to be in Iowa when someone presented a wonderful piece in the workshop. I hadn’t even finished the first chapter and the voice of this writer—this Michael Doyle— was singing in my head. The story line, written in the first person about a young man’s search for his missing sister, was fairly simple, even familiar, but the telling was unexpectedly vivid and complex. And it was funny, in a dark, yet sympathetic, way. Who did he remind me of—Salinger? Grace Paley? No, no one at all—that was the thing.

  Now I wanted to thrust the manuscript on the woman sitting next to me and say, Here, you have to read this! Of course I didn’t; I just kept on reading it myself, wondering why this naturally gifted writer thought he needed anyone’s help. By the middle of the third chapter, though, his narrative began to flag and flatten, as if he’d lost his way in the story, or maybe just his nerve. I felt deflated for a moment or two before the old excitement took over—this was where I came in, wasn’t it?

  Then the homeless man began to howl his familiar aria of despair, and that disturbance in my chest came back, full force—something is wrong— and I wondered if it was only the renewable pain of failure, in art and in life. Hastily, I gathered the pages and the sandwich wrapper and shoved them into my bag. As I walked away from the bench, the Proust woman called after me, like someone having the last, triumphant word in an argument, “Have a nice day!”

  2

  The first word Scott ever said was “no,” accompanied by a vigorous head shake, which I probably should have taken as an omen. But I was thrilled. He was so precocious—not even ten months old—and boys usually start speaking later than girls. I had just asked him one of those dumb rhetorical questions people ask babies, something like, “Does Scotty want to go bye-bye?” And he clearly, forcefully, said, “No!” Then he said it again, appearing as thrilled as I was with his new ability to communicate.

  How I admired that feisty show of independence. A couple of months earlier, before he could walk or even properly crawl, he’d managed to get across the entire living room on his belly to reach a toy. Ev, who had organized an antiwar rally when he was at Bard, remarked fondly that Scott looked like a combat soldier making his way under barbed wire. He called him “little scout” and “GI Joe.”

  On the news, mothers of rapists and murderers always say, with apparent sincerity and bewilderment, “He was a good boy. He never hurt anybody, ” momentarily forgetting, I suppose, the little sister he molested and the immolated cat. But I knew that Scott truly was a good kid, just misdirected and lazy. It probably had something to do with being the baby of the family, coming as a happy surprise when Suzy was seven and Jeremy five. And his “crimes” were petty—smoking pot and pushing a little of it in high school, mostly to his own friends.

  There were also a few minor incidents of shoplifting. The stupid things he took! A Mets key chain, when he was a die-hard Yankees fan. A roll of Tums. He said he’d thought they were LifeSavers, that they accidentally fell into his pocket, that his friend Kenny had dared him to do it.

  The good thing was that he always eventually admitted his guilt, although he tended to put a little spin on the circumstances. And lots of teenagers commit those sorts of senseless infractions. Even Dr. Connelly, the psychologist at Fieldston, conceded that when she interviewed Ev and me right after Scott was suspended. But then she reminded us that he was also underachieving scholastically, failing two subjects and just squeaking by in the others. We didn’t need to be reminded. Ev had said gloomily the night before that he just couldn’t picture Scott in college. “You were sure he’d never be toilet trained, either,” I said.

  “We know, believe me, and we’re on top of it,” I told Dr. Connelly, an earnest, heavyset young woman with a faint blond mustache. “He’s being tutored in math and science, and we’ve grounded him until his grades pick up.” Ev had insisted on that particular punishment, and I suppose it was the most practical way to focus Scott’s attention on his schoolwork. But I hated the word grounded almost as much as he did. It made me think of a bird cruelly deprived of flight.

  Dr. Connelly nodded skeptically and proceeded to grill us about Scott’s emotional history, starting with my pregnancy and labor and working her way up to his present difficulties. She seemed to be reading from a check-list on her pad. I assured her that his birth wasn’t particularly stressful—not for him, anyway. The protracted deliveries of my older children had eased his entry into the world, just as Jeremy’s academic success would later ease Scott’s entry into that expensive but desirable private school. Suzy got into Brearley on her own merits.

  “Has Scott ever tortured an animal?” Dr. Connelly asked—a startling shift of subjects—but we were able to answer, in complete honesty, that he hadn’t. He loved animals; in fact, he was the only child in his kindergarten class who’d cried when their pet snail died.

  Dr. Connelly continued. “Does he suffer from sleep disturbances, like night terrors or insomnia? Has he ever done any sleepwalking?”

  I stared at her for a moment, fixated on her mustache, but Ev laughed. “I only wish I could sleep as well as Scotty,” he said. “That’s never been a problem for him.”

  This was true, as well. When the children were young and we went into their rooms to check on them before we went to bed ourselves, Scott lay so still, I was sometimes compelled to lean down and listen for his breathing.

  “How about his siblings?” Dr. Connelly said. “Does he get along well with them?”

  I thought of the physical fights between Scott and Jeremy, and the name-calling: pizza-face, peanut-breath, dickhead, fag. And of all the times Suzy said, after Scott had offended her—by deliberately burping at the dinner table, or by mimicking her telephone voice—that she wished she’d been an only child, like me.

  “Oh, but you’d be so lonely, Suzy Q,” I once cooed, and she gave me the dirty look I deserved.


  “The typical love–hate relationships,” I told Dr. Connelly.

  “More love than hate, though,” Ev added, and I gave him a grateful glance as she bent to scribble something into her notebook. Then she looked up again, her pen poised over the page. “Would you say that he’s changed lately?” she asked.

  Tell me, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa. Have you noticed anything different about Gregor? Actually, there wasn’t any particular moment of profound change in Scott, no distinct sense of before and after. So much of what boys that age do is clandestine, anyway, and so much of ordinary adolescence seems like madness. The closed bedroom door with the thumping music behind it, like a heartbeat out of control; that harsh, barking laughter; the simultaneous eruptions of acne and anger.

  Suzy and Jeremy had each gone through a similar stage. That’s how I thought of it then, as an unfortunate but necessary stage on the road to maturity. Jeremy and Scott had shared a bedroom until Jeremy went off to Oberlin, and it was a continuous mess in there, with an aggregate boy-stench of feet and farting and dried semen and pot.

  In the cab on the way to work after our meeting with Dr. Connelly, I was checking for messages on my cell phone when Ev said, “Well, I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I demanded. I thought that things had gone pretty well, considering the circumstances. We had put up a united front of concerned parenthood, but not too concerned, and I had just been about to make a little joke about sending Dr. Connelly a thank-you gift of a bottle of Nair. I peeked at my watch; I had canceled two morning appointments with authors and there was a meeting about the fall list in the afternoon that I had to make.

  “You know exactly what I mean, Alice. You indulge that kid,” Ev said. “You let him get away with murder.”

  There was some truth in that; I did often try to ameliorate the tensions in Scott’s life that seemed to overwhelm him, from social hassles to too much homework. But that’s what parents do, isn’t it? They help their children to endure in a difficult world. “Look,” I said, “I’m not trying to whitewash this—Scotty has problems and we’re dealing with them. But we’re not talking about the Son of Sam here.”

  “That’ll be next,” Ev said grimly.

  “If you say so,” I snapped back. And that was the way it went. We hunkered down in separate corners of the cab and fired shots at each other until we got to Ev’s office, where he thrust a few bills at the driver and got out, without giving me even a cursory kiss goodbye.

  That was four years ago. As Ev had predicted, Scott didn’t go on to college—not yet, anyway. But he didn’t become a serial killer, either. He managed to graduate from high school, six months behind his classmates, and we all agreed that he needed some time off after that. So we helped him find a share in a low-cost apartment and a job in the mailroom at a small publishing house. Minimum wage, of course, but we thought he could work his way up if he made a genuine effort.

  Scotty was always an enthusiastic reader—sometimes he even poked through a manuscript I was editing—and he’d written some funny little essays for school. I confess that I daydreamed about a writing or editorial career for him. When he lost the mailroom job, a few months after getting it, for coming in late too often, I was disappointed, but not crushed. And he found something else on his own in a couple of weeks, in the stockroom at Tower Records.

  We supplemented his income, as we had supplemented Jeremy’s and Suzy’s when they first started out on their own. Before long Jeremy was supporting himself modestly, playing the French horn in a chamber orchestra in Philadelphia and sharing household expenses with Celia Peretti, his violist girlfriend. Suzy would probably be able to support all of us in grand style one day, when she made law partner at Stubbs, White, Kline and Moomy, where she was the newest associate. I had quietly upped the monthly ante for Scott a while ago—the cost of living had risen faster than his meager income—and Ev was annoyed when he found out. He’d worked out a careful budget with him, so much for rent, for food, for laundry, for haircuts. Scott’s hair was longer than mine then.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” Scott told Ev, frowning at the numbers, as if they were written in Sanskrit. “Like, expenses fluctuate.”

  “And you allow for that,” Ev said flatly, “by putting something aside when you’re flush.” He kept underlining the final figure in the budget until his pencil broke.

  Now Scott was coming to the apartment, on his day off, to pick up the money I’d withdrawn for him behind Ev’s back. At first he was reluctant to meet me there; he and Ev weren’t speaking, and I had to assure him that his father would be at work. The thought of Scott’s company cheered me, a diversion from that determined trumpeting of doom in my chest.

  “Come for lunch,” I coaxed. “I’ll make soup, and those cheesy corn dogs you like,” wondering when the balance of power between parents and children shifted. Once, Scott was our devoted shadow, and now he lived with two roommates in a tenement in Alphabet City, as far away from us as he could get without falling into the river.

  I wasn’t going to go down there carrying five hundred dollars—why did he need that much, anyway? And Scott refused to take checks, which he claimed, vaguely, weren’t his “thing.” Maybe no one would cash them for him, or maybe he just liked the feel of a big roll of bills on his person. It would have been much easier if he’d had a bank account, so that I could simply transfer funds from my own, but bank accounts apparently weren’t his thing, either.

  I hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks and I was both eager and apprehensive right before he showed up, almost an hour after he’d promised he would. I’ve always loved his looks, so much like the young Ev’s—the mass of dark curls and that sudden, witty smile. But I wondered if he would be wearing sunglasses to hide dilated eyes, and I worried that he would appear ill in some way, too thin or too pale. He’s slightly built and he’s my shortest child, probably a recessive trait from my father’s side of the family, since Ev and I are both tall.

  When he was fourteen, Scott sent away for a stretching contraption he saw advertised in the back of a comic book. It was called the Big Boy and it looked like some torturous sexual device, all black rubber tubing and metal rings. I was completely baffled after I found it under his bed, until I discovered the instruction booklet in his nightstand drawer. ADD UP TO SIX INCHES IN TWO WEEKS! There were side-by-side photos, ostensibly of the same man, looking like Hervé Villechaize in one and Wilt Chamberlain in the other.

  Scott must have had the Big Boy delivered to a friend’s address; I’m sure I would have noticed a package like that. And he’d probably sent cash through the mail for it, cash taken from my purse. That knowledge was retrospective, though. All that occurred to me then was a surge of pity for my secretive, undersized boy.

  The doorbell rang, and I was relieved to see that he looked handsome and healthy in a clean pair of jeans and a Phish T-shirt, and the embrace he gave me was sweetly affectionate. “Ma,” he said. “Whassup?”

  Something awful, I might have replied, and the worst part is that I can’t figure out what it is. He was the child of my heart, after all, and empathy had always run back and forth between us like an electrical current, but I knew it hadn’t been a serious question. “Oh, the usual,” I told him. “We’re plugging along. Dad’s working too hard.” As if he’d asked about Ev, as if he cared.

  Scott handed me a Tower Records shopping bag—why was he bringing me a present when he was so broke?—and then he went through the foyer into the living room and looked around, his thumbs hooked into his front jeans pockets. I had an abrupt, uncomfortable notion that he was casing the place. We’d accumulated some good things over the years—the Chinese rugs, a couple of Jacob Lawrence drawings, Ev’s collection of antique glass paperweights. I felt a little light-headed; what kind of mother has such thoughts? I opened the shopping bag and saw that Scott had brought me a couple of old CDs I liked, but wouldn’t have thought of buying for myself: The Supremes’ Greatest Hits and Jimmy
Cliff’s The Harder They Come.

  We ate lunch together in the sunlit kitchen, the way we did when Scott was little, and afterward I handed him the first chapter of Michael Doyle’s manuscript. He started reading it at the table while I cleared our plates and loaded the dishwasher. He laughed a few times as he turned the pages, rapidly it seemed. “This is great,” he said at one point, without looking up. “Who is this guy?”

  “America,” I said, “and I’m Christopher Columbus.”

  “Cool,” Scott said, and continued to read.

  I’d written an e-mail letter to Michael Doyle that morning, asking him to send me any other pages he had. Like his novel’s hero, he worked on the line at GM, and for the first time I offered a reduced, flat fee for my services. In my comments about his writing, I was careful not to be too flattering or too critical. I told him there was considerable work to be done to pick up the energy and charm of his earliest pages, and that literary first novels aren’t most publishers’ first priority. The list leaders at Grace & Findlay during my last season there were, oddly enough, a celebrity cook-book and the memoir of an anorectic.

  When Scott had finished reading the chapter, he asked me what the novel was going to be called. The title page simply said “Untitled.”

  “What would you call it?” I asked him.

  He thought for a moment and then he began shuffling through the pages until he came to the passage he was looking for, where the hero, Joe Packer, says that he’s been searching so hard for his sister, he feels as if he’s been walking to Europe. “That’s it, right there,” Scott said, tapping the page. “‘Walking to Europe.’ It comes out of the guy’s own mouth and it sounds really weird, but in a good way. I mean, people would remember it.”