by Sue Miller
David watched his son’s face enlarge in pain as she swabbed vigorously: his eyes and nostrils widened, he clutched his striped bathrobe across his narrow chest. Behind David, far down the corridor, there was a shout, and then distant footsteps, running.
The nurse looked up and frowned. Then she turned back to Macklin. “Boy, you are brave,” she said, stroking the bleeding cut. “A lot of grownups, even, flip their lids when you clean a cut like this. Not you, though, huh?”
“No,” Mack said weakly, obediently.
She wet a fresh piece of gauze and worked a minute more. Mack sucked his breath in sharply and closed his eyes. Then she patted Mack’s shin and said gently, “I’m done now, honey.” Her tone when she turned to David was businesslike. “Okay, you can see that that started it up a little again. I want you to just keep this clean gauze on it”—she showed a stack of the squares to David—“and squeeze it for a while. It should slow right down. But if you have any problems, come and get me.”
“It’s okay, I’m a physician,” David said. He took a brief pleasure in the lift in her face.
“Oh, great!” she said. “Okay, then, Doctor. Well, as I say, it’s probably going to be … oh”—she raised her freckled arm and looked at her watch—“maybe even an hour or more.” She turned and smiled at Mack. “But we’ll be back, honey, as soon as we can. Get you home to those presents, right?” She disappeared before Mack had finished nodding.
David sat down at the foot of the gurney. He held the gauze with a steady pressure. “Merry Christmas,” he said gently after a moment. “When we get this bleeding stopped, I’ll have to call and see how everyone’s doing at home. And let them know you’re going to live.”
Mack, lay still awhile. Then he asked abruptly, “Do you think they’ll open the presents without us?”
“I’m pretty sure not. Your mother always likes Christmas to be just the same. I bet they’ll wait.”
“They’ll cook dinner, probably,” Mack said after a silence.
“Using your chemistry set.”
Mack laughed. Then his face shifted. “Is it a chemistry set?”
“If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise.”
Mack looked defeated.
“But if you want me to tell you, I will. You can choose.”
Mack’s eyes swung away, around the bare, ugly room. Then he looked at David. “Do you think you should tell me?” he asked earnestly.
David shook his head. “You have to decide.”
“It’s too hard for me to decide. You decide.”
“No. I don’t think that will work.”
“Why?” Mack’s voice was whiny. “Why won’t it?”
David shrugged. “I can’t win if I decide. Either way you’ll be mad at me. If I say yes and tell you, you’ll be mad that I did, that I ruined the surprise of it—and that’s part of the fun, don’t you think? But if I don’t tell you, you’ll be mad and you’ll feel that really you do want to know. So. You decide.”
They sat quietly. David found himself wishing for a cigarette. He patted his various pockets with his free hand, but he hadn’t brought any with him.
“What do you think they’re doing now?”
David squinted. “Let’s see. Probably … probably everyone’s getting dressed. Lydia’s got her third costume on and it’s still not right, so she’s gone back up to try again.”
Mack grinned. His big second teeth were lopsided in his mouth.
“Randall’s is perfect. Delicious. He’s chewing away at his cuff and wishing your mother allowed ketchup on clothes.”
Mack laughed.
“Your mother hates the way she looks.” He made his voice as dramatic as Lainey’s. “Simply despises it. This frumpy dress, the only thing that fits. It’s monstrous. Oh, who cares? Who cares about me?’ She brushes her hair. ‘This rat’s nest. But who’s going to look at me anyway?’”
David’s eyes were on Mack’s eager face as he continued. “Nina and Mary are helping each other. It’s a disaster. Everything they’re wearing is inside out or upside down. Not only are their shoes on all the wrong feet, but each of them is wearing one of her own and one of the other’s.”
“Yeah,” Mack said.
“And they’re buttoned up crooked. They’ve got both legs coming out one leg hole so they can barely walk, their socks are bunched down in their heels, and their bows are undone in back.”
Mack snorted and giggled, watching his father. After a moment he said, “You didn’t do Sarah.”
“Ah, Sarah!” David said. “How could I forget? Sarah. Our little last straw. Sarah is wearing the most gorgeous, glorious, brand-new, spanking clean diaper you ever saw. She doesn’t care that her hair looks glued to her head, she doesn’t care that her skin is yellow, that there are lumps and bumps all over her skull. She prances, she twirls, she curtsies on her wobbly yellow sticks, our Sarah.”
Mack looked suddenly uncomfortable. “That one’s dumb, Dad,” he said.
David saw that he’d gone too far. That something in his description of the baby, or in his tone, perhaps, had frightened Mack.
“No doubt,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “But that’s why we like it.”
Mack lay still. David listened to the muffled noises of disaster down the hall. He was aware, abruptly, of feeling real pleasure in being so close to this old familiar world, pleasure in the sounds of its drama, its life. He remembered his rotation in the emergency room during his internship, he remembered the sense of moving beyond everything ordinary in life—the giving over of dailiness, of personality, to the needs and the demands of the moment.
“But what do you think they’re doing?” Mack asked.
“I don’t think they’ll open the presents without us, Mack,” David said gently.
Mack swung his head impatiently back and forth on the pillow. It made David intensely aware, abruptly, of how far apart his feelings were from his son’s.
“They might be doing the dishes,” David suggested after a moment.
Mack watched him.
“Or maybe they’re singing carols.”
“Yeah. I bet they’re singing carols.” Mack smiled. His eyes rounded, imagining it. “I bet they are.”
David changed hands on the gauze pad. “I bet they’re singing ‘Silent Night,’” David said. And after a minute he began to sing it, softly, pitched a little too high. When he was finished, he started “Joy to the World,” lower this time. And for a while he sang to Mack, doing all the verses he could remember to “Deck the Halls,” to “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” to “Away in a Manger.” His throat began to ache pleasantly.
“Do ‘On the First Day of Christmas,’” Mack said.
“All right. You start.”
In a thin voice, high and pure as an angel’s, Mack began to sing: “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me …” David joined in, harmonizing: “A partridge in a pear tree.”
As Mack went through the song, David tried to sing with him, missing half of it but doing better and better as they went along. They finished with a prolonged ritardando, very loudly, and David swung his arm out in a theatrical gesture. In the little wake of silence after their last full note, David heard again, from far down the hall, the thump, the raised voices, of something going very wrong. Then quiet.
Mack seemed to have sung himself into a peaceable state. He looked dazed and dreamy, like a much smaller child ready for a nap. For a while they sat without talking. Then David stood up. He opened the gauze pad and looked at the shriveled white papery edges of the cut. “You looked cured,” he told dreamy Mack. “I think I’ll go call your mother. Be sure everything at home is all right.”
Mack nodded.
At the door, David turned. “If someone comes, tell them you’re not an orphan. Insist that you’ve got a father who’ll be right back.”
Mack smiled wanly. “Dad,” he protested.
Lainey answered the telephone. Her voice was quick with concern.
>
David told her it would be a while. “Is everyone behaving herself? And him?”
“It’s all a little aimless.” She sounded tired, suddenly. “But they’re all right. How’s Macklin doing with it? How’re you?”
“Oh, we’re having a fine time, actually. A kind of Christmas Day adventure.”
There was a long silence. Then she said, sourly, “Well, bully for you.”
David felt a wave of intense anger. He had an impulse to hurl something ugly back at her—to remind her she could still be resting in the hospital, to bring up again the accident of Sarah’s birth. But he kept his voice calm. He said, “Mack wants to know whether you’re opening the presents without him.”
“Oh, tell him of course not.” She’d brought her voice under control too. “Tell him we wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Good,” David said. “Well, we’ll see you when we see you, then.”
“Fine,” she said coolly. “We’ll be here.”
As he emerged from the wooden booth, the nurse called to him from the front desk. He went over to her. She was holding a telephone receiver against her shoulder. She’d taken off her white cap, and her flattened red hair looked artificial, strange, wiglike. “I just wanted you to know that someone will be there in a minute.”
“Good,” he said. “Have things calmed down a little, then?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking. One patient’s up in surgery. And …” Her mouth twisted painfully, as though she’d tasted lemon. “We lost the other one.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. A kid too. Twenty-two years old.” Her voice roughened, and she stopped for a moment and pressed her lips together. She shook her head. “Can you imagine? On Christmas? On their way to some family get-together, probably.” She heard something from the receiver and lifted it to her mouth, her ear. “Yes?” she said. “Is this the Novicki residence? Does Dennis Novicki live here?” David was watching her intently. She put her hand to her forehead and turned away from him. “Well, is your mother home?” she asked.
David walked away, down the empty corridor. “Honey, can you get your mother, please?” he heard her saying.
David stood in the doorway to Mack’s cubicle and looked at his son, sleeping. He was tall for an eight-year-old, but he looked tiny in the middle of the adult-sized gurney. There were football helmets of different colors on his pajamas. The bottoms of his feet were dirty, except for a wide white circle around his cut. David felt a sudden wash of powerful gratitude for his health, for the sweet domestic size of his accident. He crossed to Mack and touched the boy’s arm.
Mack’s eyelids rose instantly. His dark eyes swam unseeing for a moment, then focused on his father.
“Hi,” David said.
Mack licked his lips. “Hi,” he answered. “I wasn’t asleep.”
“I never dreamed you were.”
Mack lay still. Then he said in a tiny voice. “Are they opening the presents?”
“No,” David answered. “They’re going to wait for us.”
After a minute Mack frowned. “But how much longer is it going to take?”
“The nurse said pretty quick.”
Mack looked intently at his father for a moment. Then he said, “Dad, how come you just can’t do stitches and stuff? How come we always have to go to Dr. Peabody or come to the hospital?”
“You know I’m not that kind of doctor.”
“But you know how, don’t you?”
“Yes; I was trained to know how to do those things. But there’d be a couple of problems if I practiced on you.” David moved Mack’s feet over carefully and pulled himself up onto the end of the gurney again. “One: I’m a little rusty, since psychiatry is a rather different specialty. I’m not sure how well I’d do. Two: there are all kinds of new techniques and medicines that I haven’t kept up with: That I don’t know about. And three: it’s really not a good idea to do medicine on your own family. In fact, there are actually rules against it.”
“Because why?”
“Because, mostly, it’s hard to be good professionally with someone you know very well, and love, and are worried about. You’d be too nervous. You might sew their foot to their knee, for example.”
“Dad!” Mack wanted to be serious.
“No; it’s just better not to.”
David watched Mack. He lay quiet, tensed, thinking. “Is that why you don’t cure Randall?” he said suddenly.
David inhaled quickly, slowly let his breath out. “Ah. Well, that’s a complicated one also.”
“But that’s why? Because of those rules?”
“Well, yes. Partly. Of course. Randall is my son, just as you are, and it wouldn’t be a good idea. But also, I’m not trained, really, in the kind of medicine that Randall needs. He has a disease that only a few people really know how to treat, and even then the treatment lots of times doesn’t work. But in any case, it’s not my kind of psychiatry.” David wished again for a cigarette. Uselessly, he checked the same pockets he’d checked before.
Mack turned on his side, tucked his palm under his cheek. He was frowning again, working hard at something. “If I grow up and become a doctor … if I become a psychiatrist”—he looked up at his father—“the right kind: will they still not let me cure Randall?”
“Oh, Mack.” David reached out and laid his hand on his son’s skinny leg.
“What? Will they or won’t they?”
“There are just too many answers to that question.”
“But what are they? That’s what I want to know.”
David felt a helpless confusion that made him momentarily angry. “Well, first of all, I don’t think you should be thinking of your grownup life in terms of Randall. Your mother and I are in charge of Randall. You should just be thinking about you, about what it is that you want to be, best of anything you could choose from. Not thinking about rescuing your brother. Or anything like that.”
“But I do want to be a doctor.” The skin on Mack’s forehead tightened in his seriousness.
“Well, fine. That’s fine, then,” David said. He could hear the irritation in his own voice. “If it’s really your choice.”
“It is.”
They were silent, not looking at each other, both unhappy with their agreement.
When the doctor came in, David slid off the gurney. He was a young man, and he looked tired. He was wearing surgical greens, with the mask dangling, like a child’s bib, on his chest. He shook David’s hand and introduced himself. When he turned to Mack, his voice rose in false cheerfulness. “Well, young man, what have we here?”
He made bright small talk to Mack as he looked at his foot, as he set up the tools of his trade on the end of the gurney. David noticed a brown thumbprint of blood on the shoulder of his green shirt. He was bent forward, readying the needle where Mack couldn’t see it. “You’ll just feel a prick,” he said to Mack as he lifted the boy’s foot.
As soon as they got outside again, Mack began to cry. “You said it wouldn’t hurt,” he moaned. David was carrying him, wrapped in a blanket he’d borrowed from the nurse, and Mack hid his face in it against his father’s chest. “It did hurt. It hurt a lot.”
“I’m sorry, Mack.” David was aware of the coolness in his tone. “Sometimes the cure seems worse than the disease, I know. But I don’t think it was that bad.” David walked carefully, holding his son. Their shadows on the snow were bluish now, and his steps crunched loudly on the frozen crust. He had to set Mack on the hood of the car to open the door, and when he turned back to him, the boy was wiping his face with the back of his hand. “I’m freezing,” he said. His voice was thickened, but he’d gained control of himself. David felt a quick pulse of guilt: his lack of sympathy had exacted this of Mack.
“I know,” he said. “Let’s wrap you tighter.” He tucked the blanket close around Mack’s chest and set him in the car on the passenger side. When he slid in behind the wheel and looked over at his son, he saw that Mack’s eyes were
reddened and his teeth had begun to chatter. David started the engine.
They didn’t talk for a few minutes. The car’s tires bit loudly on the rutted snow in the street. The Midway was a vast blank tundra. Then Mack said, “I wish this didn’t have to happen on Christmas.”
“What day would have been better?”
“Any day.”
They passed a solitary walker, a man carrying a big package wrapped in green paper.
“In my experience, no day is great for an accident,” David said. “It always stinks.”
“But if it happened on a schoolday, I could get to stay home.”
“Ah. There is that.” David smiled. After a moment he said, “If it happened on a trash day, you wouldn’t have to take out the cans.”
Mack tilted his head back against the seat and looked over at David. “Yeah. If it happened on a Wednesday, I wouldn’t have to have my piano lesson.”
They made a long list of better days for an accident, and by the time they turned onto Harper Avenue, Mack had forgotten his pain.
Lainey opened the door for them, still in her bathrobe. But David saw at once that she’d washed her hair, that she’d put on lipstick and rouge, and he felt grateful for her effort. The house smelled of cooking spices, of evergreen.
“Hi,” he said. “I’ve brought a Christmas present for you.”
She clapped her hands and squealed. “Oooh, just what I always wanted. A Mackie-boy.”
Macklin was smiling in embarrassed pleasure as David carried him into the living room. Lainey followed, and when he’d set Mack down, she bent over him, shifted his foot this way and that, exclaiming about his bandage, about his bravery. She pulled the pillows out and tucked them all around Mack to make him more comfortable.
In the hallway, David shed his coat. Then he went back to the kitchen to find a cigarette, to fix himself a drink. He could hear Lainey talking to Mack, and the high-pitched, excited murmur of his son telling her all about it. Then she was in the hall, calling upstairs to summon the girls and Randall.
David came back and sat down in the living room. The girls were dressed, dancing around, talking to Mack and David. Lainey had gone to find paper and pencils to make thank-you lists as they opened the presents.
