The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  My father had given her volumes of poetry on occasions like Valentine’s Day or their wedding anniversary. These were usually supplementary gifts, accompanying the main offerings of jewelry or furs. He had chosen books by poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Sara Teasdale, or anthologies of love poems, and he’d written inscriptions on the flyleaves of most of them. “Darling Helen, let me count the ways.” The ones she’d bought for herself included Cavafy, Bishop, Dickinson, and Larkin, and she’d annotated those pages with underlined passages, asterisks, question marks, and exclamation points. I began to see a contradiction among the things that had most moved or interested her—despairing irony and determined joy—and a favoring of interior rhymes and ambiguous phrases.

  She’d kept a careful record in a green ledger of the submissions of her own poems, when and where they were sent, and returned or accepted. Some responses from editors were among her papers, including those that began, “I’m happy to inform you . . .” or “We’d like to publish . . .” The kinds of letters I’d once dreamed of receiving myself, though from more significant places.

  There were a few standard rejection slips, but they were either hand-signed or had personal notes appended. “We’re swamped now. Can you send these back in the spring?” “This came close. What else do you have?” I had sent similar notes in the past to young writers I’d wanted to encourage and cultivate, and even started long correspondences with a few of them.

  My mother seemed to have had the same sort of vigorous exchange with someone named Thomas Roman, the poetry editor at a quarterly review in Massachusetts called Leaves that was now defunct. “Helen,” he wrote in one letter dated in March 1972, “it’s been a crappy winter, but I am considerably brightened by your latest offerings, which restore the possibility of greenness to me. I’m taking ‘Mountain Day.’ How is your back, love? Yours always, Tom.”

  The ease between them was so palpable, I felt like a voyeur. I touched my own lower back, as if I were testing it for vicarious pain. I wondered if my father had ever read that letter or any of several others from Tom Roman in her folder, and what he might have made of them. Well, I’d never be able to ask him now. He hadn’t ever specifically spoken about my mother’s work to me, although he did say, in a letter I received at college, that she was “still scribbling away.”

  I was reading a long poem of hers, either a first or final draft, because it was unmarked by her red pencil, when I found that my hand had crept inside my robe to touch my left breast, the breast Ev had bent to so passionately the night before. I continued reading while I lifted my arm and began the standard breast examination, moving my fingers in concentric circles, from the nipple outward. I did this once a month, usually in the shower, with wet lather on my fingertips to make the process smoother. That morning, two things happened at the same moment. I read a line in the poem that arrested me, and I felt a thickening under my fingers. The line was the final one: “Then the goose ate that feathery / thing and flew away.” “Oh,” I said, not certain of what I was responding to.

  I got up from the table and went to the mirror in the dining room, where I opened my robe and peered at my breasts. They’ve held up fairly well, that midlife reward for the agony of underdevelopment in adolescence. I raised my left arm again, and retraced the area where I’d felt something before, but I couldn’t detect it now. False alarm. “Alice,” my father would chide, “you’ve let your imagination run away with you again.” Whenever he’d said that, after a bad dream had seemed real to me, or my worry over something trivial grew out of bounds, I would picture myself eloping with some fabulous, multicolored creature. This seemed like a similar escalation of fear.

  Closing my robe, I went back to the kitchen and my mother’s poem. I didn’t think she’d ever published it. In fact, it seemed so unpolished, she might not have even revised it. Unless she’d kept a later draft somewhere else. I poked deeply into the back pockets of the folder, searching for another version, but all I came up with was a small square envelope addressed to my mother from The New Yorker. I was immediately struck by the date on the postmark: November 18, 1963—my own birthday, my tenth birthday.

  Folded inside was a printed rejection slip for something she must have submitted to the magazine. She’d always subscribed to The New Yorker, but I hadn’t known she’d ever tried publishing there. It seemed so uncharacteristically ambitious. Scrawled at the bottom of the slip, in pencil, was the single line: “Try us again!” and the initials “C. W.” Had she? There were no signs of it, no further correspondence from anyone at the magazine. The paper looked fragile, especially at the crease, as if it had been opened and refolded innumerable times. It was really just another turndown, with the bonus of the handwritten postscript, but I had the sense of having uncovered a key piece of my mother’s history.

  Except for that final, cryptic line of the unmarked poem, it was fairly straightforward narrative verse about sitting near the lake in Central Park, feeding the ducks and geese. That was something she and I often did together when we went into Manhattan. Faye would save the crusts for us from the stale loaves she used in her banana bread pudding. The poem was untitled. I read it again and found myself trembling. I knew it wasn’t poetic quality that had gotten to me, though—my mother had written much better stuff than this. It was the poem’s particular content or its language that made me feel the way I did: troubled, anxious, as if I were about to receive unwelcome news.

  The reference to Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers” was easy enough to decipher; at some point my mother had experienced a loss of hope. I doubted that it involved a literary disappointment. When the goose ate it and flew away—that must have been when she’d first learned about her cancer. My hand went back to the opening in my robe, but didn’t venture inside this time. Or was it when she realized that the treatments could no longer stem the disease?

  The poem wasn’t dated, so there was no way to really know. The hungry, honking geese at the lake, I remembered, had originally migrated from Canada. Their droppings were as big as a small dog’s, and we had to scrape our shoes on the curb after we left the park.

  I sipped my cooled coffee, and scanned the pages of the ledger, to see if there was any indication that my mother had sent this poem anywhere. Maybe she’d titled it later, after it had been taken. There were no probable matches among the recorded acceptances or rejections, though, and I didn’t have copies of any of the journals in which her poems had appeared. I’d asked my father if I might have them after he’d moved to Scarsdale and downsized his possessions, but they seemed to have vanished during the packing or the move itself.

  Suddenly, I lost interest in playing detective. It seemed futile now, and a little boring, but I took my notebook from my purse and jotted down a few things, anyway. “C. W. New Yorker, Nov. 18, ’63,” “Thom. Roman,” “Central Pk.” “Thing with feathers?”

  Then I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bagel and some Swiss cheese. I realized that I was famished and there were things I had to do: get a haircut; send Parksie some flowers for her birthday, the way my father always did; and then go to the park and work on the bioethics manuscript and on the latest installment of Walking to Europe. In the evening Ev and I were going to meet at a church in Chelsea, where Jeremy and Celia’s chamber group would perform. I tucked everything neatly back into the accordion folder—making sure I put the note from The New Yorker just where I had found it—and carefully retied the ribbon.

  I lingered in the shower, turning the hot water up a notch every couple of minutes, until the enclosure felt like a sauna. Without really thinking about it, I closed my eyes and lavishly soaped my breasts. Then I began to examine the left one in the usual circular pattern. Bingo. It definitely felt more like a thickening than a discrete lump. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? Jesus. I started trembling again in the overheated stall, and all that steam was affecting my breathing.

  I got out of the shower, wrapped myself in a bath sheet, and sat d
own on the closed toilet seat. My mother’s mother, the grandmother I’d never known, had died of cancer, too, when my mother was eighteen. It was so widespread by the time it was discovered that no one was exactly sure where the primary lesion had been. The thought of the word lesion chilled me even further. Was my father confusing me with my mother when he’d used it the day before?

  He had found her tumor himself, and I could only imagine the circumstances of that discovery—sexual delight turned to abject terror. She was a doctor’s wife with a family history of malignancy; didn’t she do regular self-exams? And why hadn’t he found it earlier, before the metastasis? His fingertips were attuned to that kind of blind discovery. I wondered if there had been a rift between my parents, like the one between Ev and me, that was finally resolved in bed. I hadn’t noticed any lapses in their paradise, but I was away at school most of the time then and, as I’ve said, fairly preoccupied. “Let me count the ways,” he’d written to her, while she had underlined Larkin’s “Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.” My poor mother, my poor father.

  No one can ever convince me that the term a good death is anything but an oxymoron. The last-ditch chemotherapies, a few years later, after the cancer had reached my mother’s bones, offered their own, additional torments—neuropathies that numbed her hands and feet and left a perpetual taste of metal in her mouth, as if she’d been sucking pennies. She had no appetite, anyway. Faye or my father or I spoon-fed her broth and Jell-O, which she vomited into a basin soon after, while one of us held and stroked her clammy, bristly head.

  “Sweetheart, you shouldn’t be seeing this,” she once said to me in her hoarse new whisper, but I couldn’t take my greedy eyes off her. She had always tried to shield me from things that might be offensive or frightening. At scary movies she would cover my eyes with her own hand, that cool, fragrant blindfold, and I got into the habit of protecting myself, of turning away from things I didn’t choose to see. Bad training for a writer, I suppose. Was the compulsive blinking I did at ten simply another manifestation of that?

  Dr. Augustus Strange, my father’s medical school mentor, had worshiped two deities: the preservation of life and the genius of research. The idea was to keep the patient alive until something was developed in the laboratories that could save her. My father was torn between love and love, his love for my mother and his love for the ethical precepts that guided him. He let her suffer longer than he should have, I was positive of it, and just as certain that the choices he’d made, and his flash memories of their consequences, incited his current bouts of anger and depression. Imagining her still alive was only a mitigating aspect of his dementia, a respite from all that oppressive guilt.

  I was due for my yearly mammogram in June, only a few weeks away. I could probably move up the appointment if I called and said that I’d found something in my breast. Something that was most likely nothing at all. But my mother’s oncologist, Jeannette Joie—oh, the paradox of that name!— had once told her that one should listen to one’s body, that intimations of illness and disease are sometimes available to the patient long before any real symptoms. Was this what I’d been trying to tell myself since that disturbing April morning?

  I flipped through my notebook, looking for something to support that theory, when I remembered that Dr. Joie was from Montreal—a Canada goose! I made a note of that, too. The appointment at East Side Radiology was at 10 AM on June 13, Friday the thirteenth, as it turned out, but I’m not superstitious. I’d made it months ago, and I knew the receptionist would become cross and difficult if I tried to change it. A couple of weeks probably wouldn’t make a difference, anyway, and my own schedule was pretty busy.

  Soon I was sitting in the park reading Michael’s newest installment. Most of it was very good, although there was still an occasional sense of something vital withheld, or skirted. But the characters were consistently, divinely rendered, especially Joe Packer, and I did something I frowned upon when one of my authors did it—I started to cast the movie.

  Joe would be played by Matthew McConaughey, who’d have to grow a mustache for the part, and that beautiful red-haired actress, Julianne Moore, would play his girlfriend, the older woman he meets in the bus station after she runs away from her unhappy marriage. I didn’t write to Michael about any of this, for fear of sounding like some starstruck idiot, and because I didn’t want to distract him from his own vision of his characters and their story.

  He’d called unexpectedly one afternoon the week before, saying that he just wanted to hear my voice, to make sure he hadn’t dreamed me up. He sounded as appealing on the phone as he was on the page. “I figured I’d probably reach some suicide hotline,” he said, “but that would just be pretty convenient.” His voice was both rough and honeyed, the way I’d imagined Joe’s would be. There was a lot of noise in the background, some kind of grinding machinery.

  “You sound like you’re in Michigan,” I said.

  “Everyone tells me that,” he said, and we both laughed.

  The relative intimacy of a telephone conversation after all that e-mailing made me loosen my reserve, and I told him more candidly how much I admired his writing. The revisions were strong, I said—and he’d addressed all of my smaller concerns, about oft-repeated words or similes that seemed forced—but it was important not to hold back emotionally, as he still sometimes tended to do. He kept saying, “Yes, I know. You’re right about that. I’ll fix it.”

  Then I explained how a novel had to be pitched these days, maybe in one compelling sentence, and how crucial the sales department was to the fate of any book. It wasn’t my usual style to bring up commerce in the middle of a discussion about craft, but I felt a little reckless and giddy that day. “When the time comes,” I said, “I might be able to help you place it.”

  Michael said that at the rate he was going, he’d probably have a draft done by the end of the summer. He proposed delivering it to me then by hand, and I warned him not to rush things, to let the writing follow its natural flow.

  The evening of Jeremy’s concert, Ev was already waiting in the church when I got there. To my surprise, Scott and Suzy were there, too. Jeremy had invited them, and I was elated by this evidence of our children’s autonomy, and that they had outgrown the ferocious hostilities of childhood. They were still so different from one another—Suzy avidly read the program notes, while Scott went through some cards in his own wallet and then checked out a prayer book and the donation envelopes in a pocket in our pew—but now they were civilized beings temporarily bonded by music and family occasion.

  A truce must have been called between Ev and Scott, as well, because I saw Ev lean over to whisper something in Scott’s ear, making him laugh. Poulenc and Debussy were on the short program. My clone, Jeremy, blushing under the spotlight at the altar, gave us a shy little salute before the group started tuning up, just as he used to do at school concerts and plays. His girlfriend lifted her bow and waved, too. Scotty and Suzy sat between Ev and me, separating and uniting us, as they did on Sunday mornings in our bed when they were children, and we smiled at each other over their heads as the music began.

  6

  My uneasiness around household help was probably a throwback to my childhood, when it began as a kind of love affair. Faye Harriet White was born in Beaufort, North Carolina, and came to New York City in search of work when she was thirty years old. My mother had just been confined to bed with the threatened pregnancy that was to result in my safe delivery, and so it was my father who hired Faye, through the auspices of the Maid-Rite Employment Agency (renamed Domestic Arrangements in a more politically correct era), to replace their part-time cleaning woman, to live with them and run their household.

  When the story of Faye’s hiring was first related to me, I pictured something like an adoption agency in a Shirley Temple movie, with various orphaned maids lined up, each one yearning to be picked, and my father, with his infallible eye and knowing heart, choosing the one shining person in their midst.
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br />   Faye was securely in place when I was born, so I can’t recall a time before her presence in my life. Our three-story, gray gabled house in Riverdale required a great deal of maintenance. There were gardeners and yardmen, and men who came in on a regular basis to do the heavy work, the window washing and floor polishing. Some of the laundry—like my father’s white lab coats, our bed linens, and the curtains—was sent out to a professional service, but Faye attended to everything else inside the house.

  I remember doing my homework at one kitchen counter while she chopped onions or punched down bread dough at another, and I can still hear the sputtering hiss of her steam iron in the basement, where she smoothed out the tangles of our personal laundry. But my sharpest memories of Faye involved her care and feeding of me, and served to strengthen the conviction I held then that she was, somehow, exclusively mine.

  I was almost ten years old and in the fourth grade at the Chapin School in Manhattan, to which I commuted every day, along with Violet, in a yellow school bus. My study group was doing a unit that term on the Civil War, and our progressive textbooks were filled with hard facts about slavery in easy-to-read language. I examined the illustrations of a slave ship, with its shackles and chains; of an auction at a slave block in South Carolina, where a half-naked woman stood, bound and disconsolate, on a platform, while a man in buckled shoes raised one finger in chastisement or to place a bid; and of the separate, minimal slave quarters on plantations.

  Faye, of course, lived right in our house with us. She had her own room and bathroom, off the kitchen. I wasn’t permitted to enter her room— another fallout from my mother’s commitment to privacy. But sometimes Faye left the door ajar and I could see her single bed with its pebbly chenille cover, the small white television set on her dresser, and one arm of the pink linen lady’s chair my mother had had moved in there when she redecorated her own sitting room.