Things Unsaid: A Novel (5 page)

That birthday dinner last night had been an obligation. Family matters. Celebrations for her were now long gone.
Some quiet time would be nice
, Aida thought as she pulled out her tape recorder and her old tapes, some wrinkled and partly unwound, from where they were carefully stored in a shoebox under the bed. She had loved playing those old recordings before her kids came home from school. A familiar ritual. She had been red hot and in her glory back in the day. It didn’t seem
that
long ago to her. Certainly not yesterday—not a flash ago. She had been so light hearted in those days. A pretty little thing. But now, she was only a diva on tape. Her signature song … how she loved the sound of her own voice. Singing was her meditation. It seemed like her kids had just left for Our Lady of Sorrows hours ago. Not almost forty years ago.

Aida had always tried to hide the shaker, cold and metallic, sweaty on the sides, before the kids got out of school.

“Mommy, where are you? Mommy, Mommy!”

Aida hated hearing Julia and Deirdre’s feet clambering up the stairs. Every day, incessantly.

“I’m in here, darlings.”

She saw her daughter look at her face, puzzled, perhaps a bit scared.

“What are you doing on the floor, Mommy?”

“Listening to my favorite song.” She knew her daughter could see the tape recorder before her, her legs curled under her. Her muffled voice singing “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly.”

“Oh,” Jules muttered. “Me and Deirdre are hungry. Can we have ice cream?”—and then Aida couldn’t make out what her daughter was trying to say after that. She felt a bit woozy, head spinning.

“What did you say?” she remembered asking, but her daughter looked blurry and kind of weird. She never could figure out how they were related. But her Jules did love to sing—just like her mama.

Singing with her friends at the annual talent show and theater productions at SafeHarbour—that’s what she had to look forward to now. How times had changed! With their debts, they would be lucky to have money to pay for dry cleaning soon. But Jules knew what to do—and Aida could count on her daughter. Her sense of obligation. Her duty. There was time to sort all that out later.

All those birthdays over the years, and what gratitude had been shown? Birthdays, birthdays—just a marker for the passage of time.

H
e had deserved better, so much better. Looking down at the beginnings of a potbelly, cultivated for over two decades now, Bob Whitman slumped over his chrome and red Formica kitchen table, hearing the crunch of the plastic seat cover as he shifted his weight. That kitchenette table and chairs reminded him of the diners in LA, the ones where he could only peek in the windows, watching diners eat hot turkey sandwiches on Wonder bread, the white gooey bread all soggy and covered with rich light brown gravy the color of candy caramels. When he first had the money to eat in a diner—in the Bronx, when he was a hospital resident—he had thought he had died and gone to heaven. Now, he wasn’t the moneymaking machine he had been for his family. The sacrifices he had made. If they only knew. Looking around the table at his teenage kids and wife in those days, no one ever made eye contact. Not even his wife. Especially not her.

Everyone should follow his passion. That was his mantra. Money hadn’t been an obsession. It had been his passion. There
was
a difference.

And now what did he have to show for a lifetime of hard work? Eighty-four years of life, reduced to this.

Bob sat at the computer, tapping rhythmically on the calculator side of the keyboard. The numbers just didn’t add up. Scrolling down through the pie charts from Fidelity Investments, the right-hand column, “Change Since Purchase,” was all in red. How had all his stocks gone south? Two thousand and eight was the worst year on record for him. The Great Recession had become the Great Depression,
and he certainly felt depressed. His wife’s birthday dinner at the Crab Pot hadn’t been worth celebrating either.

He hoped Jules could help. Aida was a liability: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours.” Bob had little that he could call his own.

It wasn’t easy to admit that he had become a doctor for the lifestyle—not to heal others. His mother had died while giving birth to his youngest brother in a ramshackle hovel near the Los Angeles oilrigs of the 1930s. He was only three. His drunk of a father mostly ignored him and his three other brothers, so the baby brother was sent to live with an aunt. Bob became the youngest who still lived at home, with his older brother Wilson watching over him. His father didn’t waste any time getting a housekeeper/stepmother who dressed him up in starched pastel-pink pinafores with lacy hems and hair bows, a stale memory. Soon all his friends called him “Barbie,” and that was way before Barbie dolls. His brothers had trouble saying “Bobby,” and the dreaded nickname stuck. Ever since, he had never been very comfortable around girls and then women. Only guys.

After their father died from an alcohol binge, Bob’s brothers took out huge loans to pay for his medical school tuition at UCLA, even though they themselves were living from paycheck to paycheck. Bob promised to pay them back by covering the tuition of any nephew who was accepted into a medical program. Charlie, his brother Wilson’s son, had only been an infant at the time, so no one knew, of course, if he would have to make good on his promise.

At Montefiore Hospital he became engaged to Nancy Sanders—not good looking by anyone’s standards, not even by a close girlfriend’s generous and kind opinion, but she was refined and came from a good family. So he would be happy enough with her. Besides, she was the head nurse, and studious. She was good company. Not too quiet, not too noisy. Like Goldilocks. And not dumb, like some of the others. She would be a fine mother for his children. With his intellect and her slightly lesser one, their kids wouldn’t be just average in the smarts department.

How could he ever forget that phone call? His fate. Dismissing his class at the sound of the bell, he had been bone tired, too tired to go back
to his apartment for a can of warmed-over Campbell’s soup. Massaging the bone at the nape of his neck, his temples tender, but not exactly painful, he had cranked his neck back and forth, left to right, listening to it crack. From bending over cadavers in the medical examination hall—probably from showing the nurses the various vertebrae of the spine. He did have a big head.

“Hello, this is Bob Whitman, calling for Nancy Sanders. Is she in?” It was so irritating having to identify himself. All the nurses in that dorm were either in his lecture class or his seminar and he didn’t like their knowing his business. Especially not his dating life. Nancy was discreet and he appreciated that. She was gentle and soft spoken, the ideal woman for him.

“Nope, don’t know when she’ll be back.” Whose voice was that? He thought he recognized her theatrical, almost-singing voice—but it had an alarming association for him. What was it, exactly?

Of course. It had to be Aida Longo, the one all the other residents laughed about. He never could quite figure out why. Perhaps because she was something of a drama queen. She did resemble Elizabeth Taylor a bit. Was an attention getter. And her voice always seemed several decibels too high whenever he called on her in class. She never knew the answer. He figured she just liked to raise her hand. Aida would make anyone look good escorting her. Nancy—not so much. Bob felt his face get inflamed and hot.

Within two months of their marriage, he and Aida had purchased a huge white Dutch Colonial on a West Akron hillside, the “good side” of town: Crestview Avenue. Elms and oak trees framed stately homes, set back to look down on those who drove by in envy. Each home had a long, steep driveway that showcased the latest models of luxury cars.

The house was built in 1927—the same year Dr. Whitman was born, as he liked to boast. A good year for coming into the world. An omen for their future happiness. He hoped so, anyway. He felt mostly settled down by then. Except for the mountain of bills and the huge mortgage—but he trusted that they would be paid off in time. Their future was their own to construct. And yet.

Aida had volunteered to help him move into his new office. She
bought magazines, placed a few ashtrays on side tables, and put up a bulletin board with health tips sent to him by the American Medical Association. With his shiny new x-ray machine, his antique black-walnut desk that telegraphed his power and status, and his black-leather examining table, complete with the highest-quality stainless steel stirrups, he felt complete. Then, she told him.

“Oh, sweetheart. You know, I haven’t been feeling myself lately. And now my period’s late.”

Elated, Bob went in to hug her.

Dodging him, blocking him with her right shoulder like a defensive back, Aida said, “It’s too early to start a family. Way too early. And we haven’t even settled in yet, Barbie.”

Bob hated her adoption of his family nickname, especially when she said it in that false, saccharine voice of hers. “You have your practice to think about. It’s not the right time.”

Of course, his wife had been right, he now admitted reluctantly. Neither of them had talked about starting a family, and they needed to save more money. But her words had felt like a slap. They could have managed, if they both had wanted to.

But in that moment, he could see in his wife’s face just how unfit she would be as a mother. She bit her arm hard. Bright red teeth marks flared up on her forearm, alarming him.

“An abortion’s the
only
option,” Aida said. “A baby now would ruin any chance for happiness.”

And so he had given her a dressing gown, had her slip her feet in the stirrups—she was the first patient to christen them—and performed the procedure.

Aida rested as he moved brand-new equipment into his office. Lots of new vinyl furniture—tough, so kids couldn’t ruin it. But their own kids wouldn’t come until later.

Sometimes, over the years, Bob had felt like a shadow dad, a ghost of a dad, an outlier in his own home. Like his own father had been. Hardly ever saw them, and now his middle-aged son and daughters had moved
on with their own lives and families. Raising kids had not been heart healthy. No one ever says that.

What he’d really wanted was to be a writer, an author of a how-to book:
Beat the Wife and Save the Marriage
. He kept this to himself, or at least the title. Never knew when someone would steal his idea before he found the time to write. But he never started the first paragraph. Too tired and too angry, he guessed. Just never found the right moment to begin. He had thought there would be time after he had more financial security. There never was enough time. There never was enough money either. What had happened to their marriage, anyway?

All those decrepit virgins he had forced himself to visit. For over thirty years he had driven to the convent. The promised Sunday-morning house call. Our Lady of Sorrows had once been the O’Neill family estate. Devout Catholics with too much money, the O’Neills were also founders of one of the four major tire companies. They donated their Gothic stone mansion for a girls’ school focusing on etiquette and good posture—rather ironic for the sixties. The convent halls, though imposing and haunting, were somehow pinched, starved in decor with their dusty-heavy curtains—probably relics from the O’Neills’s days there—and the rows of statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Only the statue of the Infant of Prague had fabric; glistening and regal, the mantle, which baby Jesus wore upon his shoulders, almost matched the draperies.

Being there was like viewing the “picture of Dorian Gray.” The white wimples the nuns wore—like chin straps, bandaging the entire border of their faces—were so tight they left deep creases that cut into their skin, red and raw. And when they uncinched the wimple, my God … their faces collapsed! Frightening. Instead of forty-five, they looked seventy-five. The wimple was like a religious form of facelift. Still, he never passed the obligation on to another doctor. Bob knew his obligations. He supposed he did care about the discount on his daughters’ tuition, too. December, though—flu season—that was the worst month.