In the Land of the Living (5 page)

LAURA TOOK A
heavy course load that year so she could graduate early, at the same time as Isidore would graduate, just in case there would be some need for that, and kept quiet about having done so with a shrewdness unknown to most women in regard to the male psyche. And by the time the mild air of spring came around and began to revive the dead world of Boston, Isidore knew what he would do.

On Labor Day weekend of 1967, the last weekend before medical school was to begin at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, they went out to South Bass Island to join her parents and her sisters. As they waited on the roof of the ferry, Isidore kept saying they were late, and it was a shame to be late, and Laura kept saying it didn’t matter and why was he in such a weird mood.

“You can control what you can control,” she said. This was yet another distillation of her father’s Confucian wisdom, and it only made Isidore more nervous. He knew all her father’s sayings from Laura’s frequent quotations: my father says you must respect a patient’s denial; that most things get better by themselves; that a peach is best slightly underripe; that McCarthy stripped the State Department of all the brains on the Far East and that was why they got into Vietnam; that the key to life is recognizing what you can’t control, which is everything.

“Sorry,” he said, “I have a bug up my ass today. I don’t mean to.”

Isidore’s ass literally itched like there was a family of bugs up in it. He’d in fact bled from his hemorrhoids that morning.

“I think you’ll like our house,” she said. “It’s not Martha’s Vineyard, and it’s kind of ramshackle, but it’s a nice place to sit by the lake and have wine.”

Isidore watched the clouds over Lake Erie, aloft like airships high above their own shadows.

When they arrived, Dr. Neuwalder’s other two daughters and their boyfriends cheered and disentangled themselves from the picnic table in the yard. They came with red wine in paper cups, and Dr. and Mrs. Neuwalder came from their Adirondack chairs with books. There was still light in the sky.

“Let me get a good look at you,” Mrs. Neuwalder said, and put her glasses on. “What's wrong with him? He looks ill.”

“The famous Isidore Auberon,” Dr. Neuwalder said. He was gray at the temples, tall, with tan arms that were naked of hair, and chapped lips. The boyfriends called him Doc.

Isidore could barely stop himself from uttering some hosanna about how Doc had cured sickle-cell anemia in a test tube and invented gene therapy, which was the entire future of medicine. He had never seen Dr. Neuwalder outside the lab, and it was a little like seeing one of your teachers outside class in elementary school.

“Would you like bourbon? Or some ice wine?” Doc said. “It’s nothing special, but they make it right here on the island. No, you need the bourbon, I see. Evelyn, get him some bourbon, would you?”

Evelyn Neuwalder brought him some bourbon in a Mason jar. She was a child psychoanalyst.

“I always take my bourbon in a Mason jar, served by a psychoanalyst,” Isidore said. “How did you know?”

“Ha!” she said, and told him a dirty joke about a priest, a minister, and a rabbi taking the train to an ecumenical convention in Pittsburgh. The woman selling train tickets had big breasts, she said, and wore a low-cut blouse that showed a lot of cleavage and turned the clergymen into stuttering fools: the minister asked for his change in nipples and dimes; the rabbi asked for two pickets to Tittsburgh; but the priest would not be pushed on his heels and wouldn’t let the woman’s brazen apparel go without comment and declared, “When you get to Heaven, Saint Finger’s gonna shake his peter at you!”

Isidore was grateful for the bourbon and the bosoms, and he helped grill the walleye without feeling even a trace of garbageman. The clouds drifted unfettered across the sky, and sailboats crossed below.

After dinner, while the girls were upstairs washing up, Doc brought Isidore through a doorway lit up with red light from across Lake Erie and into a sitting room with a blue-and-white painting of many ship masts at harbor and a view of the water.

“Do you like boats?” Doc said.

“I’ve been in a rowboat,” Isidore said, looking out at the oceanic lake. “And I read
Moby-Dick,
but that’s as far as it goes. I imagine people sail a lot out here.”

“I don’t get out here as much as I’d like anymore,” Doc said. “But my brother sails in the merchant marine.”

“So he’s a real sailor.”

“I guess you could say that,” Doc said. His eyes twinkled as if to presage a laugh or the telling of a joke.

“I mean, I’m sure you’re a real sailor too,” Isidore said.

Doc crossed the Persian rug and put his jar of bourbon down on the shelf beside an old nautical instrument and blew the dust off the instrument and held it over the lamp.

“Was sickle-cell the first disease you tried?” Isidore said. “That was genius. The newspapers got it, but they have no idea how big it truly is.”

Doc looked at him with benevolence. “Edison forgot to mention luck in his inspiration-perspiration formula. But let’s have a vacation,” he said. “I want to show off my sextant here. This one belonged to Oliver Hazard Perry. You remember him? Of course you do, because you were in high school less than ten years ago. It’s been a little longer for me. Go ahead. Take a look.” Isidore took the instrument and Doc leaned up against the window and tapped on the windowpane behind him with the knuckle of his middle finger. “Perry repelled the British right out there in the Battle of Lake Erie, 1813. It happened. Isn’t that something? The sextant reminds me that it really happened. That the past really happened.”

Isidore couldn’t think of what to say so he said nothing. He wanted to ask Doc his question, but the question seemed to create its own weather and rocked his boat and upset his timing whenever he thought he would get the words out.

“There’s a huge painting of Perry in the capitol,” Doc said. “It’s crazy-looking. The canvas is probably three hundred square feet and all you can see are Perry’s eyes. Have you seen that?”

“No, sir,” Isidore said. Goddamn the question!

“It was given to me by a teacher of mine. He got it from his teacher, who got it from William Osler, who got it from Perry’s nephew or cousin or somebody who had goiter. ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours.’”

“You’re right,” Isidore said distractedly. “It’s like holding a piece of history in your hands.”

Doc turned around and leaned on the windowsill and looked out at Lake Erie. “There’s nothing like the sea, is there?”

“Cure for the November of the soul,” Isidore said, and he put the sextant back on the shelf. He felt emboldened by the thought of Herman Melville and almost asked what he had to ask. Instead he said, “Has your brother ever taken you aboard a freighter?”

“Me?” Doc said. “Oh, I was in the Pacific Fleet in the war. That was quite enough for me. I just tootle around in a Sunfish nowadays.”

“Oh, that. The war.” Isidore looked at the titles of the books behind the sextant, running from the floor high up above him:
The Axis 1945, Iwo Jima, Survival in Auschwitz
.

“Would you like the sextant?” Doc asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Take it.”

“No, no. I don’t have anyplace to put it in my bag.”

“I’ll send it to you.”

“That doesn’t make sense. I’ll forget to give it back.”

“I mean take it. To keep,” Doc said, and he drank a bit more bourbon and sang part of an old sea song. “‘From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues.…’ I’m drunk.”

At dusk, Doc led Isidore out onto the coarse wet grass. Windows shone yellow up and down the side of the dark house. Someone was playing records and in the window on the third floor there was a slim silhouette with big breasts, which must have been Laura’s. She looked like she was in front of the mirror and doing something to her hair. Isidore scratched his ankle on the thorns of a barberry bush.

Doc held up the sextant to the imperial blue of the evening sky and said with a cigarette clamped in his mouth, “Arcturus.”

He handed Isidore the sextant and Isidore peered through it uselessly. “I can’t see anything.”

“It hasn’t been cleaned since the Battle of Lake Erie.”

“I thought you saw Arcturus,” Isidore said.

“That’s just something I say when I look through a sextant.”

Isidore sat on the end of the picnic table bench, but Doc remained standing, and exhaled a stream of smoke with chin uplifted. Isidore stood again and he almost asked his question but instead he said, “They say the navy is the way to go. You think so?”

Doc looked at him in a calm and gentle way, as though no question could surprise or trouble him. And he hesitated, as if he had mixed feelings about giving a speech, but felt compelled to do it anyway because of the danger posed by Vietnam or because Isidore was nervous and wasn’t saying much or because of the special circumstance of marrying off his daughters before the electric dimness of the Great Lake and the barberry bushes fading into obscurity.

“The navy?” he said. “Well, Izzy—can I call you Izzy? Do you mind? This mess in Vietnam is a whole different war from the one I was in. You should stay out of it. You have a deferment for now, and there’s military money at NIH. Hard to get, but I’ll talk to you more about that, I think you could get it. I’ll help you to get it. Now, World War Two was a different conflict, you see, but you should be glad to be away from any war there ever was and you should steer clear of any war there ever will be, even if it’s against Nazis. The military is like anything else made out of people, which is to say, sometimes very great, and usually very badly fucked up. But it’s different from anything else in that it’s a bunch of fuckups with guns that can blow your head off. I knew a few great military men and not all of them were former civilians, either, some of them were career men who not only cared about their work but thought about it too—you know, men of honor who used all that power they had wisely, prudently, and on behalf of good causes. A navy can move a mountain and come to the rescue. But even in that just war against gangsters and murderers, I spent ninety-eight percent of the time doing complete chickenshit for men with salt in their brainpans and the other two percent I felt like we were running into each other like football players in blindfolds. And that’s before we even got near the enemy.”

Doc waited to see if Isidore would talk. He didn’t.

“The navy is supposed to be safer, I guess, but it didn’t seem safe at the time. You felt the threat of extinction from zeros and submarines all the time, while you played cards, in the john, in your sleep. People say you should live every day as if it’s your last—and maybe that works for people who have no idea what a last day on earth is like. I say, you live every day like you’re gonna live forever. Which means, by the way, stay out of wars. The
Thomas Jefferson
was an attack transport, so we were shelled. One guy I knew, who later got killed, described it as having a speeding train thrown at you from out of the sky. And I treated some of the kids who came off the beaches at Okinawa. The ones that had prerenal failure or got hit in the liver. It seems to me since then that a person’s a homunculus, and the child is the greater part of the self, and everything that comes after in life is by comparison a veneer. It’s easily stripped away and then the child is right out there, out of its shell, quivering and bleeding. But then those boys were actual children. And the ones who go home feel old whether they can grow a beard or not. They feel separate because the facts of life have come to roost directly in their kitchen window and they know the secret of the universe now, about death and the homunculus. I see it in the hospital, too. There’s a lot of death in the world. The world is a brutal enough place without inviting any more trouble from it. So no, there is no branch of the armed services that’s the way to go. The best branch for you is NIH. Laura told me about your mother, I hope you don’t mind. She told me because I was in a foster home too, and my mother died when I was three. You sure you don’t want to smoke?”

Doc smoked for a little while. Isidore asked Doc about his mother and Doc said he guessed she’d had enough babies and tried to get rid of the last one with a wire hanger, yours? Isidore said cancer of the stomach, and they both laughed a good laugh about their little punch line, but it hurt Isidore to laugh and Isidore guessed it hurt Doc, too.

Doc offered Isidore a cigarette again and smoked for a while longer. Then he said, “Have you ever seen an eagle in the wild? You know why an eagle is a war emblem? Because you get the sense a pigeon might get a joke, and a sparrow might make one, but an eagle would do neither. An eagle has no sense of humor. That’s why he’s on the national seal. When I was in California, I saw an eagle eating a fish on the limb of a tree. I’ll never forget him, the way he straightened his plumage and refolded his wings when he was done pulling at the fish carcass, how he retested the wind and prepared himself for the next thing. An eagle has skill. That’s all expertise is, you know? It’s training and knowledge you get because you need it to survive. Nature makes an expert out of you if you want to survive. That’s a war. Just like life. Just trying to survive. You know, I don’t feel awe when I see an eagle. I feel sad. I feel sorry for him. There he is, him and me and you, experts in our jobs, because of the constant threat of extinction. In my view, war is just like life, only more of it per square inch.” Doc examined the end of his cigarette and pulled the ash off bit by bit with his fingers as though he were debriding it. “Well, you asked a simple question a while ago and I told you the story of my life! Forgive me, it’s unlike me. I drank one too many bourbons! And I have only daughters, you know. You seem like a fine young man, is all, and I wouldn’t like to see you go to Vietnam. But you have a deferment.”