Medicine Men (5 page)

But Henry and all his family drank and, though enormously, they did so with great discretion. At Molly’s wedding reception, which was naturally held at “the club,” there was considerable talk about how much these Yankees drank, and how well they did it. (Molly’s own parents were known for not holding it well at all.) “Those folks can really put it away. I never saw or heard a one of them give any sign” was the Richmond post-wedding verdict on the Starcks.

Except when you get to know them, was Molly’s inward response to that remark. Intimate exposure to the family soon taught her to read certain signs: when Henry’s mother said she was tired, was getting a headache, was going up to lie down, she meant that she was plastered, about to pass out. And when Dr. Starck, the father, shifted accents within the same sentence, Portland to Boston and back, that meant he was drunk. He was like an old railroad, Molly thought, the Boston & Maine.

“What happens if your father has to leave a dinner party for some emergency surgery?” she once asked Henry.

Stiffly: “I’m sure he could always perform as he should,” Henry told her.

Which is more than I can say for you, she did not say.

But such moments of malice directed at Henry were rare for Molly, which in a way was too bad; they might have had a certain
saving quality. Mostly she was very confused, and hurt. “I must truly be crazy,” she said to Dr. Shapiro, later on, referring both to Henry and to Paul.

“I really don’t think you are.”

Before Henry, though, there had been a few other “unwise” choices; even at St. Christopher’s, Molly managed to find ostensibly nice Southern boys who were seriously deranged. She wished that she could blame all those boys and later men on Boyd, her cold and raging, lethally handsome father, who was often incredibly charming, often drunk, and almost never warm. Or even on Angelica, her lovely, silly, and loveless mother, also a drunk, who during the sixties, the years of Molly’s adolescence and Angelica’s early middle age, took up smoking dope in a serious way. Dr. Shapiro, whose orientation was generally Freudian, took more than occasional swipes at both those parents. Molly’s own conclusion was that she simply had very poor judgment in terms of men. She was not at all smart; in that way her needs far outstripped her intelligence.

In any case, young as she was, and foolish, she knew better than to marry Henry; poor reader that she was, she could still read danger in his drinking, in his sexual diffidence, but she married him anyway. Perhaps she had meant to rape him, and certainly their marriage was a form of rape for Henry.

Despite the confrontational habits of their generation, Molly and Henry were quite unable to talk about sex, nor were they able to talk about their other, possibly more pressing problem, which was lack of money. Molly’s father, the hotshot lawyer, in the course of their many Vietnam fights, took the view that Molly was close to retarded in worldly matters, and he monkeyed around with a trust fund from Molly’s grandfather, Angelica’s parent, so that instead of getting her money at twenty-one she would have to wait until she was forty.

She investigated auditing courses at Harvard or Radcliffe, but even auditors’ fees were high. Since Henry already ranted
about their expenses, she did not dare to cross him in that way, but she found a cheap secretarial school in Belmont, a six-week course, after which temp jobs were guaranteed.

Which is how Molly Bonner became an ace secretary. She was very fast, and extremely neat (she could not have dared be otherwise); even Henry admired those perfect pages, almost as much as he admired her immaculate kitchen floors. She got a few jobs around Cambridge then, and in Boston, for more money. And, more importantly, she began to think of herself as self-supporting.

Henry was offered a job in a firm in San Francisco. A large, old, and excellent firm, he was told.

And Molly, who had never been anywhere west of West Virginia, was deeply excited. She looked at beautiful pictures of that most photogenic city, and romantically, youthfully, hopefully she imagined that such a shift in scenery would profoundly change their lives. Thousands of miles from Henry’s parents, his brothers (all those doctors) and his sister, and from Portland, Henry would be a new strong and free man. And Molly, on another coast, would be a more independent, liberated woman.

Inspired, perhaps, by sexy visions of San Francisco, their sexual life did indeed improve. Temporarily.

But then Henry decided that instead of San Francisco he would take a job back in Portland, with a good, big, and very old law firm there.

“San Francisco is probably ridiculous,” he said, by way of partial explanation. “All those silly cable cars and Victorian houses all painted up like tarts. And all that dumb flower-drug-love stuff in the sixties. Nothing like that ever went on in Maine.”

“That stuff isn’t happening anymore,” Molly told him firmly, as in secret she hoped that to some extent it was.

“We wouldn’t feel at home out there,” he told her.

But I would, I know I would, Molly’s inner voice insisted.

Curiously (or perhaps not curiously at all), Molly at this point came down with a serious case of flu, chills and fevers and aches and intestinal miseries. Odd, in that she was truly never sick. Her great good health from infancy on had always been a given, a source of pride for her parents, and for Molly a pleasant fact on which she could count, like clear skin and healthy teeth.

This illness, then, seemed to Molly to impart some message, and at first she thought, It’s simple, I am sick with disappointment, not going to live in San Francisco, which I imagined would solve everything.

She went to a doctor to whom she imparted this theory; he laughed. “I suppose you’ve been reading some feminist literature on the subject?”

“But no one in my family is divorced.”

Under the circumstances, which included in her case a serious fever, Molly could not laugh at this upright statement from Henry. Only later—when she told herself, He actually said that—did she laugh.

At the time, she only answered with the truth. “No one in mine either, but that doesn’t seem relevant, does it? We’re just not happy together. Neither of us is, I think.”

“I suppose you think you’ll be happy in San Francisco.”

“Well, I hope so.”

Despite the content of what he was saying, Henry’s voice still was compelling to Molly, the flat vowels of New England, and the very slight hoarseness (probably from too much booze). She was powerfully moved by his voice. Henry the eggshell, whom she had truly loved.

True to form, he was a perfect gentleman about the divorce; he and Molly competed as to who could be most accommodating. About possessions, all those silver and crystal wedding presents, they said: “You take this. Oh no, I couldn’t possibly use it.
You
have it.”

•  •  •

And Molly moved to San Francisco, where she found a very small apartment on Sacramento Street, near Fillmore, with a pretty view of gardens, and for quite a while she was happy.

Her half of the money she and Henry had saved would keep her going for a while; nevertheless, Molly registered at a temporary agency, took the requisite tests, and performed impressively. And despite her intentions to the contrary, she was given an offer she wouldn’t quite refuse, an immediate job in what was described as a hot new law firm, down on Union Street.

“But I’ve never done legal typing.”

“It’s okay. There’s one other woman, and she’s supposed to be a whiz.”

The other woman, the whiz, was Felicia Flood. Very tall, very blonde, with corn-silk hair, Felicia was what Molly had imagined as a Californian.

Her eyes were what you first noticed: amazing eyes, the most translucent azure, a dark, dark blue with long thick black lashes and lazy, languorous lids. Her smile was lazy too, slow and shy, somehow surprising; she was so very—so conspicuously attractive that Molly would not have expected either the shyness or the smile. A big blonde beautiful woman—who was also nice.

“The point about this place is that really there’s nothing to do,” she told Molly, right off, in the Ladies Room. And since there were only two ladies in the office any conversation at all was possible. “You just have to look busy, make them feel important.”

“They’re not?”

“Oh no, not at all. Just rich.” Felicia peered nearsightedly into the mirror at her perfectly pointed nose. “Shit, I look more like Pinocchio every day.” She sounded genuinely discouraged.

Doesn’t she think of herself as beautiful? Molly guessed that she did not.

“They split off from a much larger firm to go out on their
own,” Felicia went on, instructively. “Out on their own with gunnysacks of money. They don’t need two secretaries, they need maybe half of one.”

Which left a lot of time for Molly and Felicia to talk, which they did. They liked each other very much, from the start. Although they were in many ways very unlike, each might have described the other in similar terms. “She’s very smart and really funny, very up-front.” Felicia might have added, For a Southerner, she’s unusual.

Molly was on the whole happy, then. She knew she needed a much better, more demanding job, and eventually a larger place to live, but in the meantime it was good to be living away from Henry. Without his often-depressed and censorious presence she felt younger and lighter, stronger and smarter and funnier. (Henry had not much liked her jokes.)

Molly’s insurance company wrote that a change of residence and work required a new physical, and so she made an appointment with an internist recommended by Felicia.

Dr. Douglas Macklin was very tall and thin, very Bostonian-sounding; his voice awakened various nostalgias in Molly, even a little for Henry—at least she had always liked his voice. Seated in his office, she was asked the usual questions. Family illnesses? Really none. Her own health problems? None. And then he asked how she liked living in San Francisco.

“I like it, but it’s an awfully self-conscious city, don’t you think?”

“Oh, indeed I do. And parochial. Provincial.”

They continued in that vein for quite some time, going on about the terrible newspaper, inadequate bookstores. Kitschy postcard views. Molly was aware of exaggerating the negative aspects of her response to the city, and perhaps he was too (after all, he had lived here for quite some time, she gathered), but this more or less set the tone for later encounters. Since Molly was always in perfect health, they continued this rather self-congratulatory city-bashing—even after Molly had to a great extent
changed her mind, or her feelings—after she had met Paul in that (very good) bookstore, and fallen in love and married. They went on and on, she and Dr. Macklin, amusing each other, Molly mostly listening—until she was really sick, and attention had to be paid.

Paul had grown up in Montana—to Molly, more distant and exotic than California had ever been. His father had been a professional guide. Both parents had recently died; there was one brother, Matthew, about whom Paul only said, “He’s sort of a problem for me. He’s really what we used to call square, and he married this awful Joanne, a lawyer. He lives in Chicago and sells insurance, if you can imagine. But sometimes he goes scuba diving. I think he’s a little confused.”

Paul spoke of the sweeping Montana plains, and the colors of the light. All the greens. The beautiful west fork of the Bitterroot River. The trees, the trout. The
space.
Big skies, wide-open highways.

In San Francisco, Paul lived on Russian Hill, one huge book-lined room with a narrow view of Coit Tower, Treasure Island, the bay, and sometimes Oakland. Molly moved in with him; unable to control the impulse, she tidied up, which seemed to enlarge the space—but they were hardly there. Paul at that time was writing a film on the Spanish Civil War, and so they were often in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona, in Saragossa, Guadalajara. Their life was fairly frantic, and often romantically beautiful, in those settings. They were very sexually charged; always, whenever and wherever possible, they made love.

And more or less incidentally Molly learned Spanish.

In all their time together (later, it seemed very short to Molly), they shared a high, exuberant energy, and splendid health; neither of them had much patience for sickness.

Looking for bad signs, combing through those months and years, Molly saw in Paul much impatience, small tolerance for
delay, postponement, for any form of enclosure. Crazy in heavy traffic, for example. But wasn’t that normal in a man who had grown up in great open space?

And, seemingly unrelated, he was hyper-friendly (you could have called it flirtatious) with waitresses. Once, noting some flicker of discomfort (call it jealousy) on Molly’s face, he had laughed, “It’s the Montana way, babe. Get used to it, you’re not with some tight-ass Easterner anymore.” All true enough; also, some Southern men, in their fashion, did that too. Boyd had liked to kid a pretty waitress—infuriating Angelica, embarrassing his young daughter, shy Molly.

And Paul did mention quite often strong feelings about turning forty in a year or so.

But did any or all of that add up to wanting out of a marriage?

“I did something funny today,” Paul told Molly, during one of their rare times in San Francisco. “I may have made you a millionairess.”

“Oh, really? Good.” They had been on the verge of sleep when he spoke; Molly wanted to go back.

“Yes I did. I told you that I had lunch with Matthew?”

“Yes.” Molly had forgotten even that Matthew was in town.

“I took out a policy. If I die in some accident you’ll be really rich.”

“Seems hardly worth it.” She laughed. “But thanks.”

He mused, “I hope old Matt has one for himself. With all that diving he’s a lot more in accident range than I am.”

“He must have insurance,” murmured Molly, not caring, and caring even less for Matthew’s wife, the dread Joanne.

“It won’t cost much. My policy, I mean. At my young age.”

“Oh, good.” Her emphasis was ironic; what she meant was, Now can we sleep?

“And if we break up I can always change it.”

“Terrific. Now can we go back to sleep?”