One True Thing (34 page)

“Your mother is disappeared, dead, gone, however you put it. What then?”

“Like how?” she said.

“Just think about it,” I said.

When I was in therapy as part of my training I told my therapist that since my mother had died I no longer knew who I was. I felt as though I had lost my connection to the past. The future seemed to me, as hers had been, the blink of an eye.

The irony was that before she was ill I had been so sure of who I was, of what I wanted. I was George Gulden’s daughter and I wanted to make him love me. And in many ways I am still very much like him. But I am also the last living member of the Gulden Girls Book and Cook Club, and I will never forget it, nor ever be the same for it. I will never again be able to think that Anna did the right thing when she closed the door and ran after Vronsky; I will always think of little Seryohza shivering in the hallway, waiting for Maman to return, as I sometimes wait for mine, pausing with the telephone receiver in my hand to make a call and then remembering that the woman I need to speak with has been dead for nearly a decade.

My mother left her mark on me at the very end, so that perhaps now I see my father as she did, admiring and covertly pitying at the same time. My father is not a bad man. He is only a weak one. And he only did what so many men do: he divided women into groups, although in his case it was not the body-and-soul dichotomy of the madonna and the whore but the intellectual twins, the woman of the mind and the one of the heart. Elizabeth and Jane Bennet. I had the misfortune to be designated the heartless one, my mother the mindless one. It was a disservice to us both but, on balance, I think she got the better deal.

Jules always says that someday I’m going to write a big blockbuster self-help book, that we’ll call it
Women Who Love Men Who Love Themselves
. My last year of medical school I fell in love with an intern named Jamie, a Californian with white-blond hair and hands so skillful that he was a cinch for surgery and infidelity. It took me six months to discover what everyone else knew, that his
mood swings were a function of methamphetamines and his favorite position was with a nurse in an empty single.

I like to think he was the last of the string.

Richard is an orthopedic surgeon, the medical equivalent of a carpenter. He has been my friend for a year and my lover for another and now he wants to be my husband and he will be, I suspect, if I can overcome the fact that I feel about him much the way I feel about my brothers. Once when I was fitfully cruising the living room of the chief of surgery’s apartment at a party, drinking too much wine and pretending not to notice the powerful chemistry between Jamie and the chief’s third wife, the one in the black strapless dress, Richard said to me roughly, “My problem is I’m too nice to you.”

“It’s my problem,” I said.

“You bet your ass it is, sweetheart,” he said, folding his brawny arms over his chest and kicking at the carpet.

He is nice. The night we went to the theater he had tickets for a Knicks game. I only knew because I found the tickets in the drawer in his kitchen where he keeps the scissors. And when my beeper went off, a dozen different men, even other doctors, would have frowned or fidgeted. He only squeezed my arm and sent me off. An adolescent psychiatrist does not have the same interruptions as, say, an obstetrician. But there are emergencies nonetheless. I am accustomed to them now.

There was only one pay phone in the lobby of the theater, off behind a column. A man in a double-breasted suit was using it. When he saw me standing behind him, he took a cellular from his pocket. “On the fritz,” he said with a mixture of ire and apology. And he began talking numbers, money, dealmakers and breakers with someone on the other end.

I paced a bit on the theater’s Oriental-patterned wall-to-wall and looked at my watch. Two minutes and I would tell him I was a psychiatrist with an emergency. Even an investment banker would hang up. People always did, envisioning a man on a rooftop, a girl with a razorblade at her wrist. I paced a little longer,
standing in front of the glass doors to Forty-sixth Street. On the other side, smoking a cigarette, stood my father.

He tossed the butt onto the ground and put it out deftly with his toe, then turned slightly toward the lobby and saw me there. He tilted his head—is that where I got it, that gesture I thought was only mine?—and then gave a half-smile, part recognition, part ironic distance and parted the glass doors with his elegant hands.

“As you’ve doubtless noted with great disapproval, I’ve substituted cigarettes for liquor,” he said, without preamble.

“Great—keep the liver, lose the lungs. A winning equation.”

“Age does not wither nor custom stale your sharp tongue.”

“Actually, it has. That was the old me talking. I think you should give up smoking but I also think giving up drinking is an excellent idea.”

“Your medical opinion.”

“Yes.”

“I never imagined you would be a doctor,” he said, looking at me closely, as though it would have changed my face. Or perhaps he was looking for my opinion of him in my eyes. Instead I wore the studied neutrality of my profession.

“And an alienist,” he added.

I threw back my head and laughed, and so did he, and for just a moment I thought nothing has changed, nothing.

“Only you would use that term,” I said. “So Victorian.”

“And you work with children,” he said.

“Adolescents,” I said. “Depression, suicide, other manifestations of despair.”

“The stuff of fiction,” he said.

“No, not really,” I said. “On paper you can make them do what you want. In practice you have to convince Anna not to throw herself in front of a train.”

We stared at one another. “You’re looking well,” he finally said.

“And you,” I replied.

“You like the play?”

“Not much,” I said. “I’m surprised you’re here.”

“I have a friend who studies set design,” he said. “Her teacher did the scenery.”

The banker hung up the pay phone. “It’s all yours,” he said to me. “Emergency,” I said to my father as I lifted the receiver.

It was not much of one: a young woman who’d tried to drink herself to death at a small liberal arts college in Ohio and who’d just begun taking antidepressants wanted to double the dose because they weren’t working. “I told her it takes a while for them to take effect, but she won’t settle down until she’s heard it from you,” said one of the nurses on the psychiatric floor.

“Tell her I will see her first thing in the morning,” I said. “And tell her the antidepressants should begin to work by the end of the week or I will change her dosage or her medication. And remind her that I’d assigned her to read
Wuthering Heights
along with the medication.”

He was still there when I got off the phone. I knew he was. I would have felt it if he had left. His eyebrows were raised.

“You assign the Brontës to the mentally ill?”

“It will help her understand compulsion,” I said, “and it will take her mind momentarily off her own. And despite what you think, I always liked the Brontës.” I smiled. “I have to get back to my seat.”

“I would like to say one thing,” he said, and the look on his face was stripped, frozen, like the look on his face that day we hit the deer.

“It’s not necessary,” I said.

“I would like to,” he said. “It’s important that you believe what I said in my letter. That I never, ever blamed you. I would have done what you did in your position. Perhaps I should have.”

“What?” I said.

“I never blamed you for what you did. It was the right thing to do. It took a good deal of courage. Real courage. Valor. I couldn’t say that at the time because of the circumstances. Perhaps I said
it badly in the letter. I never blamed you. I wish I’d done it myself.”

I looked into his face and there was nothing there, no guile, no subterfuge, nothing except the truth of what he was saying.

“Oh, Papa,” I said.

“I admire your courage.”

From inside I heard the first plangent strains of a violin sketching out the beginning of a love song. Two fools, I thought, looking at him. Two brilliant fools: he thinking it was me, me believing it was him. Like an O. Henry story, except that it had blighted both our lives. Suddenly it seemed incredible that all this time I had thought him either courageous or cunning enough, depending on his motives. It was too dirty, too real life, those crushed pills, that bowl of custard, that crystalline moment of decision. Neither of us could have managed it.

But in the end what was important was not that we had so misunderstood one another, but that we had so misunderstood her, this woman who had made us who we were while we barely noticed it. Sometimes I try to reconstruct it now. Maybe after I heaved her from the bath she began to horde her pills, to ask for them when she did not need them, to keep them in a cache beneath her underwear or in a box with her anniversary pearls, so that some winter morning, when the light was gray, she could gulp them down and sleep easy.

Perhaps it just came to her, that afternoon, when I went out to find my father and he was on his way home to her and she found herself alone. Perhaps she pulled herself to the table by the window where I kept the vial. Perhaps she bit them, chewed them to bits, and waited for dark to fall.

Maybe they were even in the rice pudding after all; maybe her last domestic act in that pretty kitchen was to grind the pills to a powder and mix them in the little container that she knew, eventually, would make her last dessert. Now that I know, now that I’m not so blind, I can imagine her thinking to herself, as surely as I made this little world with my own two hands, with the turpentine
the paint the yarn the floor wax the tung oil the flowers the kindness the care the need the fear the love so I will leave it.

“What then?” I’d asked my patient about the fantasy death of the woman who’d made her out of her own body, and now I had to begin asking myself all over again. The only thing sadder than life, Edith Wharton once said, is death. But sometimes it seems she had it backward.

My father looked old and empty, like the skin of a cicada, the illusion of the thing. I suppose in some strange way he honored me with his assumption and I was damned if I would tell him otherwise. Let him think of me as a heroine from some little story. He became part of the crowd that night, the great throng that believed speaking the truth was inconsequential, a cover for what I had really done. It was easier when I believed I was covering for him. Now I would have to reinvent him.

And her too. Sometimes now I say to myself, logically, that I could not have known, that the knowledge that she had asked my help convinced me that she could not help herself, that at the end I had every reason to believe that she was too sapped, too weak, too far gone.

But the truth is I didn’t really think she had it in her. And being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.

I wondered as I made my way back down the aisle in the theater, and I’ve wondered since, who I should tell about what I now know. Bob Greenstein wouldn’t care; if my job is to search for truth, his is to seek scenarios. I wonder whether knowing what really happened would help Jeff smooth over his differences with our father. But perhaps those differences go back much, much further than any question of pills or responsibility, back to those days when the two of us, my father and I, would move into his den and
leave the boys on the porch, leave them to the love of their mother.

Mrs. Forburg? Teresa? When I see them now, we never talk about the past. We talk about Mrs. Forburg’s travels around the country, where she teaches retired adults about the Great Books in elder hostels. We talk about Teresa’s daughter Gina and how hard it is for her husband the pediatrician to make time to see the little girl when he is spending so many hours each day taking care of other people’s children.

If I could tell anyone what I know now, perhaps it would be the woman in the blue suit. Somehow I feel that she deserves to know it, so that the story for her can have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And someday I will tell my father. Someday soon, I imagine, although there is a great temptation to leave the man I once thought the smartest person on earth in utter ignorance. When we parted he had asked, “May I call you?” like a suitor. And I had handed him my card, as though our meeting was a piece of unfinished business.

It never occurred to me, in the dim light of the theater lobby, to blurt out the truth as I had suddenly discovered it. I have learned my profession well. Before I tell him what really happened, as far as I know it, I need to understand it myself. I need to understand how, learning as much about my mother as I did during those long days we spent together, I had somehow missed her essence. And he, the person who should have known her best in all the world, had missed it, too. Or perhaps she had only duped him, with the deft and docile ways she found to make his life just what he wanted it to be, duped him into thinking that there was less to her than met the eye.

I will find a way to make it parse, as Jules still says. Doing what I do now, I surely should understand that all our lives have some mystery at the core, and many of them go unsolved. If I had not come to that play on that evening, if I had gone to the Knicks game with Richard instead, if my patient’s medication had taken
effect, if the nurse had not called, if the banker had not been on the phone, if my father had not taken up smoking, if, if, if, if, my own story would have ended with a different sort of father, a different sort of mother, and, of course, a different sort of daughter.

When I went back to my seat Richard took my hand and smiled in the darkness. When the lights came on after the curtain call, he kissed my cheek. As I looked at him I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display. I realized that Richard was nothing like my father but very much like my mother. And I thought that I would marry him very, very soon and take my chances with all the rest. Perhaps then I could afford to know my father again, to fall within the now truncated circle of his thrall.