The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Suzy, let’s not spoil everything . . .”

  “It’s too late for that, Mom,” she said. Her eyes and her new diamond glittered with a similar glacial light. “Everything’s spoiled already. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said, somewhat ashamed of using that old, evasive saw. At least I didn’t say “Mind your own happiness,” which had also occurred to me, but would have sounded more like a rebuke than maternal caution.

  “So are you getting a divorce?” She wore the same alarmed and bossy face she’d worn as a child when she’d made us swear never to do precisely that.

  “We’re just living apart right now. We’re both angry about things, so it’s hard to be together.”

  “Do you have somebody else?” she said.

  Why did she only ask this about me? It probably wasn’t that she saw me as being more desirable than her father, but only as more treacherous. For the first time, I felt a throb of jealous curiosity about Ev. “No,” I said, because that really wasn’t any of her business. “Listen,” I continued, “I know our timing isn’t great. And maybe it was naïve, but we wanted you and George to have a perfect evening. It’s the first thing your Dad and I have agreed about for a while.”

  That earned me a small, bitter smile. “It’s your life, I guess,” she said at last, and then her arms came around me in an assault of angry love.

  Celia and Jeremy, who were staying overnight with friends, downtown, were the first to leave, taking their troubles with them. Then Suzy, fully composed now, took George away. He would comfort her, I knew; that was his role now. A few minutes later Scotty looked around him pensively and left, too, empty-handed.

  When Esmeralda came out of the clean kitchen, shutting off the lights, Ev said, “Come on, chica, I’ll put you in a cab.”

  I stayed up for a couple of hours after that, but he didn’t return.

  18

  Summer was finally over, and Dr. Stern was coming back. By Labor Day, every Duane Reade in the neighborhood featured notebooks and lunch boxes in its windows, replacing the water wings and the stacks of sunblock and mosquito repellent. Children went by with balloons from shoe stores and the beaten look of savages being forced into civilized society. All of the little greengrocers on York Avenue reflected the changing seasons, too: the resolute beauty of their final plums and nectarines proved to be only skin-deep, and pomegranates and pumpkins began to appear, a few of the latter grinning in early anticipation of Halloween. How we hustle into the holidays, I thought, how we hurry our entire lives away.

  I chided myself for being so maudlin, but I’d always felt a little melancholy at this time of year. When I was a child it meant the end of summer’s freedom and the beginning of a new school term, with all the daunting things I didn’t yet know, scholastically and socially. There was always the fear of never being able to catch up. And for many of my adult years, the calendar was neatly divided into the seasonal lists at Grace & Findlay. In early September the beach books were already heading for the remainder tables or the shredders, and the fate of those fall and winter contenders for serious reviews and literary prizes pretty much foretold. The manic or depressed moods of my authors seemed valid then, and highly contagious.

  So much had happened since I’d fallen out of Andrea Stern’s protective aura. Although I still hadn’t figured out the essential thing plaguing me, I had all this other news to report—about Ev, Michael, and Suzy—as if I’d deliberately jazzed up my life for fear of boring her when she returned. Not that I had kept everything to myself in the meantime. I’d finally told Violet about Ev leaving, but not about Michael and me. In my convoluted logic, it seemed disloyal to Ev for anyone else to know about my affair when he didn’t.

  Violet admitted that Ev had called to tell her about our separation a while ago, but that she had guessed as much, anyway. “He really sounds like shit,” she commented. “I think he’s having trouble sleeping.” Which was actually welcome news, delivered in more neutral tones than usual. Why should Ev be able to sleep when I was having so much trouble, myself ?

  I would carry my pillow from bed to bed in the apartment, like a graying Goldilocks still trying to find a place that was just right. Sometimes one of my writers would complain about the insomnia brought on by characters waking him to listen to their stories. That had always sounded suspect to me, and more than a bit affected. Perhaps I was only jealous of such round-the-clock inspiration, but Michael’s claim that his own writing tended to put him to sleep seemed much more honest.

  When I woke in the middle of the night, it was because of heartache or maybe heartburn—it was sometimes hard to tell the difference, to identify exactly what was disturbing me. It might have even been simple hunger, and occasionally I’d get up and nibble some crackers and cheese. When Ev was still there, he would often sense my wakefulness and join me in the kitchen for a late, late snack. Or I wouldn’t get up at all; I would simply lie there with my face pressed against the warm loaf of his back, as if we were about to go off on a wild motorcycle ride instead of an uneventful journey into sleep. Maybe loneliness was what woke everyone up, and writers just try to fill that hollow space with imaginary friends. If it kept happening to me, I was going to ask the doctor for some sleeping pills.

  Despite all of these concerns, I’d managed to write a good part of the essay for the art show catalog, after Violet took me to a couple of the other artists’ studios. Greta Gordon’s paper collages were vividly bright, abstract miniatures. I thought of them as antidotes to Violet’s muddied, looming canvases, a bell-like chorus of hope against the darkness. Greta herself, who made her art in the kitchen of the Murray Hill apartment she shared with her husband and two children, referred to the collages as night lights. I considered using that as the title for the entire show, but it didn’t suit everyone’s work, and it would have been downright contradictory about Violet’s.

  After we left Greta’s place, we visited a photographer on Chambers Street who went only by the name of India, although the plate above the doorbell of her loft said RIZZUTO/MOSCOWITZ. I was dismissive of her one-name pretension, but Violet defended it as an assertion of originality, of self-generation. “It helped to set Cher apart, didn’t it?” she said. “Not to mention Madonna, and Sting.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, “and let’s not forget Leonardo.”

  India’s photographs won me over, though, with their utter weirdness and self-deprecation. As with Imogene Donnell’s work, there were obvious influences. Looking at India’s array of self-portraits, Cindy Sherman and Lucas Samaras came easily to mind. There wasn’t much role-playing, though, and, to my relief, no visible genitalia. India depended mostly on popular references to hunger and self-denial. She was a fat woman whose untouched, patently unflattering photos of herself were related to food in one way or another.

  Sometimes she was seen in close-up, the camera catching her at the very moment she bit into something juicy, like a hamburger or a ripe piece of fruit, and she was often posed nude at a Formica table, with a plate of something set before her and a napkin opened discreetly over her lap.

  In a series of other photographs, printed in strips like single frames of a film, she stood off to one side and stared wistfully at the items laid out on a tray—a pear and a slab of cheese and a dead pheasant—in a send-up of a classical still life. When you looked closely, you could see tooth marks in the pear, and a fork with a chunk of white meat impaled on it almost hidden on a shadowed corner of the table. The pheasant wore a defeated expression and a few singed tail feathers.

  I noticed a calendar on the wall in the background, and, using a magnifying glass, I saw that it was dated 1945, about twenty-five years before India was born. Violet explained later that India had found the calendar at a yard sale, and that it represented the year her grandparents had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen.

  I spoke to the other two artists in the show on the phone and looked at slides of their paintings and drawings,
which seemed sufficient for my purpose, and I made copious notes before I began the actual text of the essay. The thrust of it, which I discovered as I wrote, was that all of them, like Violet, had kept on going, right over history and the news of the day, the fickle fashions of the art world, and any received opinion about their own efforts. The first paragraphs flowed out, as if I had known all along what I’d intended to say, and just needed to get it down. I imagined telling Andrea Stern about the essay as substantiation of my mental health, my worth. See, it would say, I may have failed at marriage and motherhood, and I may be involved in an unseemly affair, but I’m not all bad. Something like showing off my reading skills to a new teacher, one who could still see directly into my evil, uneasy heart.

  But all the little fits and starts in my notebook of what I’d thought of as my real writing, that stuff of my poor, stingy imagination, had simply fizzled out. My inner critic had spoken, I guess, loudly and clearly. So why couldn’t I just give it up, the way I gave up my summery, succulent youth, with regret, surely, but without histrionics or resorting to plastic surgery? Something else to talk about in therapy.

  The Wednesday I went back, I took the bus across town, and I looked out at the trees in the park with a feeling akin to homesickness. Maybe that’s because some of those trees were actually the same ones that had gone by the windows of my father’s car all those years ago. The bus windows were tinted, too, giving the whole moving scene a strange but not unpleasant reality, like early Technicolor.

  The patient whose hour preceded mine skimmed past again with hummingbird speed, and I was safely inside the shelter of the waiting room, and then in the office itself. Dr. Stern had a tan, and she looked rested, although there were threads of silver in her hair I didn’t remember seeing a month before. Was that possible?

  “How are you?” she asked after we were seated. It was not a rhetorical question, and my throat was brimming with answers, about my family and Michael, the essay I was writing and the books I was editing—all the vicissitudes of my shaky, stupid life; she would be stunned by how much had gone on since I was last here, in this room as oddly familiar as any of my own. I felt almost exultant about having all that accelerated history to spill like gold coins between us. But when I opened my mouth only a high-pitched, abbreviated wail came out—something like a dolphin’s squeak— and then I burst into tears, just as I’d done the very first time I’d faced her. Dr. Stern waited quietly, as she’d done then, while I gulped and sobbed and blew my nose noisily into one of the proffered Kleenex.

  When I was calm again, I gave her a condensed version of recent events, as if I were reading tabloid headlines aloud. WOMAN HARBORS MYSTERIOUS DEMON. HUSBAND LEAVES. WOMAN TAKES LOVER. DAUGHTER BECOMES ENGAGED. And I tried to summarize how I felt about everything, but words like guilty and confused and even happy and unhappy had the trite, impersonal sound of psycho-speak.

  The questions Andrea Stern asked were straightforward and sensible, the equivalent of the questions a policeman might ask at the scene of an accident, to determine the extent of someone’s injuries. No, I hadn’t figured out what had been plaguing me all these months, although I suspected that it had something to do with my mother. Yes, I still had feelings for Ev, some of them rather harsh, some of them confused by longing, and yes, I was still going to bed with Michael, although I understood, at least intellectually, that it was a bad idea. “It’s pretty visceral,” I said. “I don’t really think a lot about it first.” I thought about it a lot afterward, though, especially when I caught an unexpected glimpse of my glowing, rejuvenated face in a mirror. The only thing missing was a big scarlet “A” plastered across my breast.

  I didn’t tell Dr. Stern that Michael had moved out of the Y into an apartment share in Long Island City, and that he’d taken a job as a machinist in a dental tool factory there. Or that both of these changes made him seem like less of a transient in my life. And I didn’t mention his blurted declaration of love on the telephone; that would have only been hearsay in this court of emotional justice. When Michael had repeated it later, in the throes of a sexual spasm, I’d said, “No, you don’t,” the way you’d correct an outspoken child, and he hadn’t really argued the point, or demanded a reciprocal declaration. Just as well, since I couldn’t have even faked such a thing. It was all visceral, just as I’d said, as if the mind and the body were completely independent entities. Dr. Stern seemed neither approving nor disapproving—I could see that that sort of moral judgment would be left entirely up to me.

  When I spoke about the engagement dinner, I felt buoyant until I came to the place in the story where Michael called and I rose from the table, having that peculiar string of disparate thoughts. “Where did that all come from?” I asked. And then I answered myself, dubiously. “Maybe I just stood up too quickly and all the blood went to my feet.” She made no comment, so I went on. “Of course, some of it makes sense, in a way. I mean, thinking about Esmeralda, and then, seconds later, about Faye.”

  “They were both your family’s housekeepers,” Dr. Stern said.

  “Uh-huh. But Esmeralda is a day worker and Faye lived in.” Her lamp-lit room. The slosh of bathwater, the rough caress of the towel. I sighed. “So Faye couldn’t live with her son because she lived with me.”

  “You feel responsible for that, for their separation?”

  “Yeah, I think I do. But I didn’t hire her, you know, I was just a kid.” A junior slaveholder. What I didn’t say was that I’d had trouble ever since then with anyone doing my dirty work. It had to do with issues of race and class, of power and subjection, but it never stopped me from having household help. My consciousness of all this was my real sin, and it was my punishment, too.

  “And I was an only child,” I said, “so I’ve always been spared all that sibling rivalry my own kids went through. But I had an invisible sibling all along, an absent brother.” I fumbled through memory and found the photograph on Faye’s dresser, his dark face squinting in sunlight, the green, shingled house behind him. Roger.

  “Is that how you think of him?”

  “Now I do, anyway.”

  “And what about Esmeralda?”

  “Well,” I said immediately, self-righteously. “She’s always favored Ev.” As soon as I said it, I saw the adolescent Suzy spring up from the dinner table, jostling Scotty’s arm in the process, and his fork falling with a clang, the way mine did that other night. And I remembered Suzy yelling, “You always take his side!”

  “Wow,” I said, sinking back in my seat. “Ev, too? I’ve suddenly got all these brothers, all this competition.” I looked at my watch then, aware of the elapsing minutes, and that I badly wanted to talk about something else before it was too late. “I’ve had this disturbing notion,” I said, “that my father may have sabotaged my mother’s career.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, very subtly. For one thing, he referred to her—he still refers to her as a ‘poetess.’ ”

  “Couldn’t that be mere semantics, a generational thing?”

  “He used to call her his very own poetess laureate. That would have really limited her audience, wouldn’t it?”

  “Did she take offense?”

  “My mother? She must have, but she never expressed it. She once got fifty dollars for a poem, and he told her not to spend it all in one place. She just laughed.”

  “It doesn’t sound as if she was traumatized by it. Yet you think he broke her spirit.”

  “It was a slow, erosive process,” I said. “In a letter he wrote when I was away at college, he mentioned that she was still ‘scribbling away.’ But she was publishing in decent little places by then. Now it seems like a put-down to me.”

  “Why do you think he’d want to do that?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I mean he had such a fabulous career, himself. Wasn’t that enough for him? Couldn’t she succeed, too?”

  “We can speculate,” Dr. Stern said, “but only your father really could have answered that.”

>   “And now he never will.” I felt rudely shut out of knowledge, excluded, as if the grown-ups were talking over my head. After a moment, I said, “The last of those crazy thoughts I had at the dinner party—about my father’s locked office door—that was more of an image, really.”

  “Something from memory?” she asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It could have just been a dream, couldn’t it?” Whatever it was, the picture was fixed inside my head: the solid oak door with its embossed brass knob; his name above, spelled out in gold.

  “Was the door usually locked when you were there?”

  “Well, closed at least, anyway, if there was a patient inside. And I was taught to knock.”

  “So this was from when you were a child,” she said.

  “I guess so. Yes. I knocked, and when he didn’t answer, I jiggled the doorknob and it was locked.” I looked around uneasily. Was the door behind me now, the one to the waiting room, locked?

  “What are you thinking?” Dr. Stern asked.

  “Do you lock that door?”

  “No. Are you concerned that someone might interrupt us?”

  “Not really,” I said. But I was concerned, even though I knew there was no one out there, and that she would have to buzz the next patient in. The trouble was, I didn’t want her to have a next patient. What I wanted then was to be an only child again.

  19

  My father was lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, something he had never permitted me to do when I lived under his roof, except when I was sick enough to run a fever. And whenever he’d succumbed to a nap in this place, it was in his wheelchair. He would refuse to get into bed, insisting that he hadn’t been sleeping at all; he had merely shut his eyes for a minute.

  He certainly wasn’t sleeping now; his head swiveled toward me like a sentry’s as soon as I entered his room. “Daddy,” I said, “what’s going on? Don’t you feel well?” He didn’t answer, but he looked all right, only a little disheveled, and no one had called me to report a problem. I pulled a chair up to his bedside. “What are you doing in bed at this hour?” I asked, taking his hand in mine. As if time really mattered here.