The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Everyone seems to have one parent whose approval we crave our entire lives and never fully receive. I remember how I longed for and dreaded his gaze upon me, that fierce searchlight of attention when I was being clever or annoying. Once again, I had that desperate impulse to please, as his eyes skittered across my face to the offering I held out and then to the room at large. He was like a child with ADD, wanting to escape the tedious demands of school. “Sam!” I said sharply, and he looked directly into my eyes for the first time. “Here is your notepaper. Do you want to write to someone?”

  “Yes,” he said, his rusty voice rising from the unused plumbing of his throat. It gave me a thrill, as if I’d taught an animal to speak.

  “Who to?” I asked.

  In the old days, he would have promptly corrected me. “It’s to whom, Alice,” he’d say, even after whom fell out of common usage, but this time he simply ignored my impertinent question. Resorting to sign language, he mimed holding a pen and writing in the air.

  I dug a ballpoint out of my tote and arranged a sheet of the beautiful notepaper on top of the box. “Here,” I said, handing him the pen and putting the rest on his lap. I realized that I was holding my breath and I let it out slowly as he sat there, frowning at those suspect implements of communication.

  Just then the elevator doors slid open and Parksie came through them toward us, carrying a cake box by its string. She was in her mid-seventies now, plumped up in places, collapsed in others. Her eyes were still lined with smudged kohl, her hair that improbable shade of apricot. I jumped up to meet her and we hugged. She smelled of Jean Nate and baby powder, her bosom against mine as smothering and restful as a scented pillow.

  “Alice, how are you? And how is your dear family?” she asked, speaking softly and with genuine interest. I was happy to see her, but fearful that she would break my father’s fragile thread of concentration.

  I needn’t have worried. Years ago, I’d seen Parksie come to the threshold of his consultation room on her silent white shoes, and wait with remarkable patience while he finished examining a backlit X-ray or whatever he was reading at his desk, before she announced herself and the business that had brought her there. And he never acknowledged her solid, expectant presence in any way until he was good and ready. Now she stood a few feet from him in that same attitude, dangling the cake box from one pudgy finger. Hers not to question why. Dr. Brill was engaged and could not be disturbed.

  We both waited, as if at a performance (the theater of the absurd, I couldn’t help thinking), for the action to begin, and we were rewarded a minute or two later when my father began to write. He gripped the pen hard and wrote rapidly and with a characteristic flourish, line after line after line. He might have been trying to get it all down before he forgot what he wanted to say. His whole head trembled with the effort, but his hand was surprisingly steady.

  Soon, he’d covered both sides of the paper, and I was about to offer him a fresh sheet when he retracted the ballpoint with a decisive click and held the pen out to me. He was done. I took the pen and the box with the filled page floating on top of it, and he put up no resistance. In fact, I felt dismissed, because he turned his attention to Parksie then, beckoning with one crooked finger—her old cue—and she approached him. They were in the blurry background of my vision, Parksie crouching at his wheelchair, my father pulling at the string on the cake box, as I stepped off to the side and stared at the piece of paper.

  What he’d written with such furious intention was the word “Darling,” in a surprisingly clear and graceful script, followed by streams of erratic peaks and declivities, like the electrocardiogram of a heart in crisis. The pen had bitten through the paper in several places, as if he’d meant to emphasize some indecipherable lines more than the others. There were no other recognizable words or symbols on either side of the page.

  “Parksie,” I said. “Could I speak to my father alone for a minute?”

  She tilted her head inquiringly, but she didn’t say anything as I helped her up. She just walked across the room to a sofa near the murmuring television set and sat down among strangers. Hers but to do or die.

  I sat down, too, right next to my father. “Daddy,” I said, and he deigned to look at me while his fingers caressed the cake box in his lap. I held the sheet of paper inches from his face. “Is this for me?” I asked, realizing as I said it that I used to ask my children that precise question whenever they’d finished another piece of refrigerator art. But then the question was merely rhetorical—all of their drawings were for me. Addressing a child’s first creative efforts was a delicate process every young parent quickly learned. You never asked what a drawing represented; instead, like a canny, nondirective therapist, you said, “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  I knew that I would have to approach my father the same way in his hideous new childhood. “Is this for me?” I asked again, waving the paper at him, and he snatched it from my hand and said, “No!” How had this monosyllabic statue of my father ever conveyed his wish for notepaper to Mrs. Hernandez? Maybe I was the only one he wasn’t talking to.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” I said, and my tears rose up and spilled over. He didn’t seem to notice, and he didn’t answer. His expression wasn’t blank, though; it was bold, almost rebellious.

  “Is it for Mother?” I persisted. “Sam, is it for Helen? My heart was banging to get out, while he held those hieroglyphics hostage in his fist. A surge of anger came on like a speeding car. I wanted to hit him. “Tell me,” I demanded. “Tell me!” And I imagined him standing up and shouting, Alice, go to your room!

  People were glancing at us. I could see Parksie on the other side of the solarium, pretending to watch the game show on the television screen, but her face reflected my shocking impropriety. I was making a scene. I was bullying a helpless, senile old man in front of witnesses.

  “Daddy,” I said in a more subdued voice. “Who is the letter for? Don’t you want me to deliver it for you?” They were the magic words, or he’d simply given up the fight, because his hand unclenched and the paper fell soundlessly at my feet. “Thank you,” I said, bending to pick it up. “Now, to whom should I give your letter? Won’t you please tell me?”

  Again he didn’t answer, and his eyes had become unfocused and as flat as pennies. When I snapped my fingers, he barely blinked, and I slumped in defeat.

  Somehow, Parksie knew that it was time to come back across the room. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “We’re fine.” And suddenly I remembered how she’d looked long ago in her pristinely white, starched uniform, like the bride of the god of suffering, with that dove of a hat poised on the back of her head, ready to fly off. Then the goose ate that feathery thing and flew away. “Parksie,” I said. “Something is bothering me.”

  “What is it?” she asked with concern.

  “That’s the problem, I don’t actually know. It’s just that I feel bad, or guilty, about something.”

  Her eyes glistened with sympathy. “Everyone feels that way when their parents fail,” she said. “We always think we haven’t done enough.” For the first time I wondered who her parents were, and if she believed she had failed them. Like Faye, she seemed to have come to my family without personal history, without her own needs and desires, as if we’d invented her. Her real name was Eleanor. Had anyone ever called her Ellie? She was the unmarried aunt in the family, the governess in Victorian literature whose story turns out to be at the center of everything.

  “It’s not that,” I said, “or at least not only that. Although I think it has something to do with my mother.” I felt as if I were feeling my way blindly along the edge of a cliff.

  “Oh, but you never let her down, Alice,” Parksie assured me. “She absolutely adored you. Why, you were her life.”

  “But there was Daddy, too,” I said, “and her poetry.” My jealous sibling, was my unbidden thought.

  “You came first,” she insisted
, and a swell of gladness flooded that rough place in my chest. How intuitively kind Parksie was.

  “Did she ever talk to you about her work?” I asked.

  “Do you mean her poems? No, she never did.”

  Of course she hadn’t. And she would never have spoken to Marjorie Steinhorn, either, about her poems or anything else essential to her, or private. They weren’t friends, exactly; they were simply two women who happened to serve on the same committee, a committee dedicated to the success of their husbands’ careers. My mother had nobody like Violet in her life. I went on, anyway. “Did she ever happen to mention anyone she corresponded with about her poetry, anyone called . . . Tom?” I made it sound as if I had just plucked his name from a hat.

  “I don’t think so,” Parksie said. “Who is he?”

  “No one, really. It’s not important.” I thought fleetingly of asking her about the thickening in my breast. She was a well-trained surgical nurse, and her opinion could be trusted, but I’d remembered someone else I could approach about that. I decided to just leave and let Parksie and my father share the angel food cake or the babka she’d brought—why did elderly people have such a craving for sweets? She would probably try to soothe away the turmoil I’d caused him. Then she’d go back to Roosevelt Island, to the high-rise apartment she’d moved into after she retired.

  Esmeralda was putting the vacuum cleaner away when I came home. The coins from Ev’s pockets that she’d retrieved from under the sofa cushions were piled up on the kitchen counter as irrevocable proof of her honesty. But she seemed to have forgiven me for asking her about Ev’s missing Clichy, as she cheerfully offered a rundown of current domestic events. Mr. Carroll was in the park, taking a walk. The phone had rung many times during the day, but, as instructed, she hadn’t answered it. We needed Windex and Lemon Pledge and Mr. Clean. Scott had come by that afternoon to get some stuff from his old closet. I’d just missed him—such a cute boy.

  I still stored various things for all of the children—from high school yearbooks to baseball card collections—although I periodically threatened to throw everything out if they didn’t come to claim it. I briefly wondered what Scott had repossessed and why he didn’t wait to see us. Then I went to the park.

  Ev was sitting, asleep, on a bench near the river, with his face turned up, and I sat next to him and kissed him on the lips. He kissed me back before he even opened his eyes. That evening in Iowa City, when he first kissed me, a few people around us had noticed, and for some reason I was perceived as the aggressor. One woman with an overzealous imagination thought that I had bitten him, and after that we were sometimes referred to, with mocking envy, as Sylvia and Ted. Maybe they were also thinking about the fireworks between us in the workshop.

  Now Ev said, “Did your father like the notepaper? Did he know who you are?”

  “He loved it,” I told him. “And it doesn’t matter who I am.”

  “Yes, it does,” he declared, and to hide my immoderate pleasure, I ducked my head into the curve of his neck and said, “So how was tennis?” Ev played every Saturday morning with two men from his office, on the indoor courts on 89th Street.

  “Good. We got three sets in, and I beat Bradley’s ass.”

  He was competitive, that was all. Even as a kid he’d always tried to catch up to his older brother, in school and in sports. It was just his nature; it really had nothing to do with me.

  “Did you see Scotty today?” I asked.

  “Where?”

  I hesitated. “Anywhere,” I said slyly.

  Ev laughed. “Are you drunk, Al?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  We walked home holding hands. The apartment smelled of disinfectant and the last of the Lemon Pledge. I inhaled deeply, as if I needed that chemically pungent air in order to live. Then I rummaged in the refrigerator for the components that would become our supper. Lettuce, eggs, butter, cheese. Ev scooped up the coins on the counter and put them back into his pocket. Later, he would lie down on the sofa and they would fall out again. I decided that I would show him my father’s inscrutable note when we were in bed that night. Maybe I’d even finally admit that something intangible was troubling me. If Ev was naturally competitive, it was also in his nature to empathize and want to help when someone he loved was in distress. I would just keep my notebook jottings to myself.

  So this is happiness, I thought, seconds before I noticed Ev’s blue-and-white paperweight behind the sheer curtain on the kitchen windowsill, catching the last glints of western light.

  10

  “Hey! Look what’s here,” Ev said. He had come to the door of the kitchen just as I noticed the Clichy, and he went right to the windowsill and picked it up. “It wasn’t here this morning, was it?” He seemed to be talking to himself and to me at the same time.

  We had eaten breakfast together that morning in the kitchen; one of us would have noticed it if it had been there. “No, of course not,” I said, ripping lettuce into the salad bowl, and groping for a benign and reasonable explanation for the paperweight’s reappearance.

  Ev polished it, like an apple, on his T-shirt, looking happy but perplexed. “So where did you find it?” he asked.

  I contemplated saying that Esmeralda was the one who’d discovered it, on the rug under the side table in the living room, when she was vacuuming. He knew that she had been at the apartment that day, which would have made it a credible lie. But I recalled how offended she’d become when I asked her if she’d seen it, and what if Ev decided to thank her? The two of them were so damned cozy. I might have told him the truth, that I really didn’t know where the paperweight had been all this time, and that its recovery was as much a mystery to me as it was to him. But that would have been merely a legal truth. Beneath all the layers of denial, I did know; it was just that my usual maternal instincts had kicked in, along with my new talent and propensity for deceit.

  “Under the side table in the living room,” I said. “It must have gotten knocked off somehow.” I took a tomato from a bowl on the counter and chopped it with the celerity of a TV chef. I wouldn’t have been all that surprised to find a few fingers in the bloody pulp on the cutting board.

  “No scratches, no chips,” Ev marveled, holding his treasure up to the light.

  “Well, it landed on the rug,” I said. “Lucky.” My face was torrid, my heart was cold.

  Ev put the Clichy back on the windowsill. “I like it there,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. And that was that, or at least I thought it was.

  The next day I made two phone calls, the first one to Scott, informing his recorded self that I was coming down to his place at six that evening, that it was important and he had better be there. Ev was going to be working late, so I didn’t have to make up yet another story to tell him.

  The second call was to Jeannette Joie, my mother’s oncologist. I was relieved to find her in a recent telephone directory, still alive and still in practice—she was in her early forties when I knew her—although she’d moved from Mount Sinai to NYU. I didn’t reach her, either, but I left my name and number with her service, explaining that I was the daughter of a former patient, and that I would like to speak to her.

  She called me back in less than an hour. I remembered then that she had limited her practice in order to always be able to return phone calls from patients, and to give them time for real conversation during their office visits. My mother and she had been on a first-name basis. “If not now, when?” Dr. Joie used to say, and my mother once referred to her, without irony, as “my new best friend.”

  “I’m Helen Brill’s daughter,” I said on the phone. “She died so many years ago, I don’t really expect you to remember . . .”

  “But I do,” she said, after the briefest pause. “She was a poet, wasn’t she? And you were a little redhead.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. It was as if a mentalist had just performed an uncanny feat of perception.

  “Ho
w is your father?” Dr. Joie asked. “I imagine he must be retired by now.”

  “Yes, from surgery and from the world in general. He’s in a nursing home, with senile dementia.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “But I’m really happy that you’re still practicing, although I have to confess that’s partly for selfish reasons.”

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I told her about the change in my breast, how I had managed to screw up my appointment for the mammogram, and that I was sorry now and frightened. She asked me to hold on for a minute, and when she got back on the line she said that she could see me in her office the next day, at five o’clock, after her last scheduled patient of the afternoon.

  That evening I went downtown on the subway to Scott’s apartment. He was there, and so were his two roommates, Amy Lowe and Jeffrey Green-berg. At the beginning of their shared tenancy in that tiny space, I speculated about various possible sexual arrangements among them, including a ménage à trois, but all of my conjectures turned out to be wrong. Amy was gay, and both she and Jeffrey had girlfriends living elsewhere. Scott was straight and currently unattached.

  Everyone was in the living room—which doubles as Jeffrey’s sleeping quarters—when I got there. You would think I’d been invited to a social gathering. The usual clutter was gone—no soda cans, shoes, loose CDs, or remnants of meals. Jeffrey’s sofa bed had been folded and covered with a brown-and-orange afghan his grandmother must have crocheted. The three of them were lined up on it, as expectant as heirs to a will, leaving the place of honor, the shaggy, bear-like black velvet chair they’d found at a thrift shop, for me. There was a plate of Pepperidge Farm cookies on the coffee table. The doors to the two minuscule bedrooms, where I was sure the debris had been hurriedly stored, were prudently closed.

  I was impressed by the tidy domestic scene they’d managed to effect in the few minutes since they’d all come home from work, and annoyed that Scott hadn’t figured out from my message that I wanted to speak to him alone. Or maybe he had figured it out and having his roommates around was his line of defense. I ate a cookie, declined a drink, and stood up. “Let’s take a walk, Scott,” I told him. When he stood, too, I saw that his T-shirt said SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH OR I’LL KILL YOU.