One True Thing (33 page)

It took me a long time to find a job after I moved in with Jules that spring eight years ago. Perhaps I could have found another berth in journalism, even had my old job back at the magazine. But I would have been hired as an oddity, a talking point, book-party gossip.

Besides, I knew too much about the business now from the other side of the notebook. It was not just the stories that had been written about me during the investigation, and afterward,
too, nor the fact that Jon sold a first-person account of our relationship to a magazine which put it on the cover along with the omnipresent photograph of me, the inappropriate effect of my Mona Lisa smile.

It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other people’s traumas, crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard. Jules left, too, went into book publishing because she said that hard covers had a dignity that slick glossy paper and flimsy newsprint did not. Every New Year’s Eve she offered me a million dollars to write the story of my recent life, and every New Year’s Eve I called her a fucking slug, and then we got drunk together. I love Jules. Every New Year’s Eve she says if I were not a woman she would marry me tomorrow. She says when they change the laws we should do it anyway.

Afterward some people said—and a few wrote—that it was inevitable that I would go to medical school, but the truth was that I did not think about it until I began visiting AIDS patients at the hospital around the corner from my apartment. I stayed with Jules for six months and then got a place of my own, paid for it with temp work and an evening job as a waitress at a fairly famous bar and grill, where I waited on young Wall Street types with incipient paunches beneath their custom-cut shirts, as well as the occasional up-and-coming movie actor.

I slept with a lot of men during those months, just to feel something. Several of them reminded me of Jonathan, but not one of them reminded me of Chris Mortensen. Perhaps that’s why I had no regrets about them. When Jeff told me nearly two years after that Easter weekend that Chris Mortensen, from high school, remember him?, short guy, had been killed in a head-on collision between his pickup and the McNultys’ dump truck—the McNultys, naturally, were not even scratched, although they folded their garbage collection business because the younger lost his license for driving while intoxicated, something the elder had
done the year before—I searched his face carefully for something hidden there. But he looked guileless. Maybe it was just a bit of Langhorne gossip. Maybe not.

I was lonely, that first year back in New York. Except for Jules, I had only two kinds of friends—those who had abandoned me because of what had happened and those who took me up only because of it. I was also approached by those who wanted me to champion the right to die, assisted suicide, passive euthanasia, to become a poster girl for the cause, as though there had been no denials, no dropped charges, no insistence that I had not done what they believed I should be so proud of doing. One doctor devoted to helping people with multiple sclerosis die by hooking a hose to a car’s exhaust pipe came in person to my apartment, hose in hand. I closed one of his fingers in the door.

My decision to become a doctor had nothing to do with any of that. Not long after I moved into my own place, a studio with a stove and small refrigerator hidden behind louvered doors in a closet, the man across the hall, an actor, began to lose flesh from his long bones, in a deadly progression that seemed so natural to me that I scarcely registered it at first. When I went to see him in the hospital in October, bright blotches now disfiguring the face that had once brought him soap-opera roles and coffee commercials, I was importuned by the head nurse to visit some of her other patients. When she asked me twice to spell my name—Gulden? Gulden? Oh, like the mustard—something relaxed inside me.

I did it for myself, the visiting, because I was so lonely. And perhaps for Brian, too. After our mother died he avoided me, and I assumed that it was because he, too, disbelieved my denials. But then one day he came into the city from Philadelphia on the train. I met him on the platform at Penn Station, the air warm and faintly tinged with gray, as though we were lovers in some old movie coming together again after many years, crowds eddying around us as we caught one another’s eyes. And we did catch one
another’s eyes, staring full into each other’s faces, and then he smiled, that sweet bright smile, and I held him for so long a time that people would have been justified in thinking we were lovers.

“Oh, El,” he repeated over and over again.

At dinner that night at the restaurant where I worked, where they fed us free, he told me that he was gay, that he thought sometimes that his quiet all his life had been a way of holding back the words that frightened him so. All the time I thought he hated me for something I hadn’t done, he believed I would be repelled by what he was doing. It was joy, knowing both of us were wrong.

Even today he has still not told our father. But that night, as we sat for hours over coffee, this seemed less important to him than the sure knowledge that our mother would have accepted him.

“She wouldn’t have cared,” he said.

“No,” I said, “she wouldn’t.”

That’s not exactly true, of course. My mother would have cared very much, would have cared that her best beloved baby was assigned a path that might cause him pain and ridicule, that his life might be harder because of it. She would have cared very much about the daughter-in-law she would never have had—quiet, pretty, so dear, she surely would have imagined her—and the grandchildren there would never be. But it was simpler to say that she would not have cared. We made her simpler after she was dead. No, that’s not true, either. We’d made her simpler all her life, simpler than her real self. We’d made her what we needed her to be. We’d made her ours, our one true thing.

It’s all anyone wants, really, to make life simple. Sometimes people have wondered why I’m not more bitter about what happened to me. And I was bitter for a long time, but at base I understand. Death is so strange, so mysterious, so sad, that we want to blame someone for it. And it was easy to blame me. Besides, when people wonder how I survived being accused of killing my mother, none of them realizes that watching her die was many, many times
worse. And knowing I could have killed her was nothing compared to knowing I could not save her. And knowing I’d almost missed knowing her was far more frightening than Ed Best and his little army of shrunken suits.

In all that time in New York, finding my way again, inventing a new one, I never saw my father. In the beginning it did not seem to be deliberate. I no longer celebrated holidays; he rarely came into town. For a year he was a visiting professor in England; for my last two years of med school I worked so hard that I sometimes went for days seeing no one but my classmates and whoever happened to be admitted to the hospital.

I have never gone back to Langhorne. I don’t believe I ever will.

Jeff did not attend his own college graduation. He said that he thought ceremonies were stupid, but I wonder whether he wanted to keep my father and me apart. A month after Jeff graduated I received a letter addressed in that familiar sprawling angular hand. I was on my way to work when I picked up the mail and I put it in my backpack to read later; for days it haunted me amid the detritus at the bottom of my bag, the ChapStick, the spare change, the keys. Then one day I went to look at it, to hold it in my hand and consider slitting it open and letting the words tumble out. And it had disappeared.

I searched my tiny apartment, but could find it nowhere. I pulled books from the shelves and flapped them wildly, hanging on to their spines. I looked in the crippled folds of my pullout couch and in the kitchen cabinets. But I never found it.

Perhaps I pulled a subway token from the bottom of my bag as I ran toward a turnstile, and the letter fluttered to the cement floor and from there to the tracks. Maybe I took out my wallet, distracted in the delicatessen, and it dropped down between the ice-cream case and the counter, to be found and discarded during a remodeling years later.

As we psychiatrists like to say, there are no accidents.

I see my brothers often, and perhaps they see my father but do
not say. Brian left Penn and runs a framing store in Philadelphia, and seems happier than he ever did, although he is still looking for someone to love. Jeff went to summer school after I was cleared, or exonerated, or whatever you call it when no charges are brought against you for something everyone really believes you did. He went to law school and now he is a prosecutor in Manhattan.

Neither of us misses the irony of that, although I like to think he did it because he wanted to make sure the right people got indicted. It’s the same office in lower Manhattan where Jon worked that summer, but although he performed well Jon was not offered a job at the D.A.’s office, nor did he get any of the clerkships for which he applied.

In the newspaper accounts, which I read one summer day on microfilm in the New York Public Library, just before I began med school, when I was between a temporary receptionist’s stint and two weeks playing handmaiden to the executive vice president of an ad agency, he had said that his legal training made him understand keenly the moral need for him to come forward when my mother’s death was ruled suspicious. But Jeff told me that many of the lawyers in his office had thought it was “low rent,” as one put it, to testify against your lover, no matter what she might have done. Besides, they found his ambition fearsome. “Walk over his mother in golf spikes,” one said.

Ah, Jon’s mother. How his life would have been different had she reconciled herself to boredom in Brooklyn and carted him to PBA picnics and the Aquarium at Coney Island. He is at one of the big firms now, although not the one with the atrium. I presume that no one there much cares that he ratted me out. There walking over your mother in golf spikes is probably a term of art. There he puts in his seventy hours a week.

I put in mine each week now, too. I am as driven as I was before those months I spent at home; I am simply not as sure of myself or of all the things I once believed. When I enrolled in medical school one of the tabloids put my picture on page five, a
photo of me sitting in the cafeteria that was obviously taken by one of my fellow students,
ANGEL OF DEATH NOW A DOC?
the headline read, and although there was a flurry of protest and a visit with the dean, I was allowed to finish. After a while people seemed to forget.

I never forget. My remembering has gotten more vivid as the years go by. I never considered going into oncology. I knew enough, after my rotations, to know that my mother was in every way a typical patient except that she died more quickly than many with her kind of cancer. But she would have died nonetheless. If I had been her doctor I would have treated her just as Dr. Cohn did, with precisely the same results. I would have asked for the autopsy, too, just as Dr. Cohn did, the professional curiosity that so changed all our lives.

“As her daughter, would you have behaved differently?” my therapist asked once, with an unaccustomed gleam in her eye. And the answer is that, knowing then what I know now, I would have. I would have given her more opportunities to talk, to complain, to fantasize, to weep, to speak. But that is what I am in the business of doing now, and it sounds easier in retrospect. I did the best I could at the time. We all did, I think, even my father, with his distance, his terror, his spoonfuls of rice pudding.

Sometimes still I think I see her in crowds, see that shiny crown of burnished hair bobbing along just a few heads away, just a little too far away to reach. The other day, thoughtlessly, I bought an old recording of
South Pacific
. I remembered that we had watched the movie one night when the pain in her back was especially bad, but somehow I had forgotten being a small girl, sitting in front of the stereo while she taught me to sing: “I’m stuck,/like a dope,/with a thing called hope,/and I can’t get it out of my heart …”

Sometimes things leap out at me now, a funhouse of memory, some forgotten, others supressed. Even at the theater that night, just before my beeper went off, a few bars of music had made me
think that I should call her when I got home. Sometimes I even pick up the phone and begin to dial. The sunflower pillow is on my couch. “Do you needlepoint?” the occasional female guest asks. “No,” I say.

“George Eliot!” my brothers and I yell, when it’s late and we’ve had too much to drink, and we all laugh. They help me remember, and I help them.

Most of my patients are young women embarked on a quest for perfection, eaten up by it. Early on, one of them, a brilliant girl who had tried to starve herself to death the summer between Exeter and Yale, said to me in the middle of a session, when she was getting a little too close to some personal truth, “My mother says people say you killed your mother.”

“Does she?” Her mother was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, the trophy wife of a financier who had herself recently been shed for a younger trophy. She always had swatches of fabric in a big velvety leather bag, and gold pens, and gold-bound books with room layouts on graph paper inside them and her name embossed in gold on the covers. Once it crossed my mind that, had my mother been wealthy and idle and cold, she would have been this woman. But if my mother had been wealthy and idle and cold, she would have been someone else entirely.

“She said you got off on a technicality.”

A slight tilt to the head, a nod. That’s what I do when I want the patient to go on.

“I can understand why you’d want to. I’d love to get rid of my mother.”

I looked at her poor transparent arms, sticks in the sleeves of the T-shirt she wore as a rebuke to the silk blouses in her closet, and thought that the person she was trying to kill was surely not her mother.

“But if you did it,” I said, “what next?”

“What?”