The Doctor's Daughter (20 page)

But on the way back to Riverdale, we got stuck in stop-and-go traffic on the West Side Highway. There was a grisly accident—an overturned SUV and a small, accordion-pleated sports car—that we approached at a funereal pace. My father was in the backseat of our car, craning to see, like everyone else, as we crawled past the glitter of ground glass, the sputtering flares.

When I turned around to reassure him, I saw the nervous glimmer of the emergency vehicle lights play across his pale, altered face. “I’m a physician, you know,” he said, and his hands plucked fretfully at his seat belt. “Stop the car, driver,” he ordered Ev, although we were at a complete standstill at that moment. He wanted to get out, to offer medical assistance.

It was something he’d done at least once before, in Chilmark, more than forty years ago, when he and my mother and I were coming back from a dinner party. There’d been a collision then, too, and the driver of one of the cars, a young woman, had suffered a crushed windpipe, which my father punctured with his pocketknife before inserting the empty tube of someone’s ballpoint pen, enabling her to breathe until the ambulance arrived to take her away.

I’m sure I didn’t see any of that—my mother would have shielded me from it—yet my recall of the scene is graphic in its detail. The impromptu surgery was done by flashlight, the victim’s face dramatically lit, as in a Sargent portrait. She sounded as if she were gargling. This memory was probably fostered by my imagination and the excited stories I overheard at the beach the next day. My father was a great hero. For all I knew, he was responsible for the fiery sun and the flying clouds and the surf that crashed and sucked at our feet.

But that day after his birthday lunch, he was only a bewildered old man who’d been overstimulated and fed too much rich food. All the charm he’d managed to muster at the table had completely vanished. “Let me out of here!” he kept shouting, long after we’d gone past the accident. “Why am I being tied up? Untie me, you bastards!” And between these outbursts, he kept belching loudly, the way Scotty used to do at dinner to annoy Suzy.

Later on, Ev would speak ruefully of “our noble experiment” and say how sorry he was that I’d had to go through it—the excursion had been his idea in the first place—but then he was hunched anxiously over the wheel, muttering to himself as he drove, things like, “This is just great,” and “Oh, fuck,” while I alternately jabbered at my father as if he were actually listening, and wept, wiping my eyes and nose on the sleeve of my down jacket. It was the saddest event of my life, even though no one had died; maybe because no one had died. By the time we got to the nursing home, I wanted nothing more than to turn my father back over to his keepers. You would think there was a bounty on his head.

The neighborhood near the home is residential and upscale. As I pushed his chair along the street, a woman in a bathrobe came out of her house and collected her mail. Another woman had two beribboned poodles on leashes at the curb. “What are you waiting for, girls?” she said to them. “Don’t you want to go shopping?” It was the sort of scene that would have amused my father once. But now his profile could have been on the prow of a ship, or on the face of a coin. His expression was fixed yet unfocused.

Still, I didn’t concede defeat. When we came to a coffee shop a few blocks away, I tamed his hair and then mine with the same comb, and wheeled him inside. We were hot and thirsty from our adventure, and I ordered tall glasses of iced coffee with whipped cream for both of us. As he slurped his noisily through a straw, I said, “I wanted to continue talking to you, Daddy, without any interruptions.”

He blotted his lips on a paper napkin and bent to the straw again. “You kept the door to your office locked sometimes, didn’t you?” There were two doors, I remembered then, one in the reception area where Miss Snow sat, and the other in Parksie’s office. He looked up at me, with foam dissolving on his lips, giving nothing away. I knew that I was being too direct, too impatient. The earlier rapport between us was totally gone, and I wasn’t doing anything to reestablish it. I sounded more like a cop grilling a suspect—
that
metaphor again—than a daughter trying to revive nostalgic moments with her old dad. But it was already late in the day, and he looked exhausted. I was tired, too. Damn those trees. Damn the Steinhorns. “Your
office,
” I repeated, insistently.

“Office,” he echoed, and in a worried tone, “I don’t have my keys.” He patted the pockets of his windbreaker, carefully at first, and then frantically, as if he were frisking himself.

“That’s right, you don’t have any keys,” I said sharply. “So just stop looking for them, okay?”

He put his hands obediently on the table, and I stroked them in a feeble attempt at conciliation. “But you used to,” I said. A whole clangorous ring of them, denoting possession and authority. “Keys to the house on Morning Glory Drive and to the Lincoln. Keys to your vault at Chase. And keys to your offices at the hospital. Please try to remember, Daddy, won’t you?”

But it was like tapping on all the windows and doors of an abandoned house. And I was losing my own connection to the dream-memory I wanted to evoke, the thing in my chest that refused to travel to my brain. I watched him finish his coffee, letting the ice melt in mine until it was undrinkable. Then I wheeled him back to the home and turned him in again.

20

Michael still hadn’t given me any new pages, despite all his talk about the major breakthrough I’d inspired. He seemed a lot more interested in me now than in his novel, with a level of attention I found unsettling. When he called one morning and said, in a husky, urgent voice, that he wanted to see me, it sounded like the kind of remark usually accompanied by a knowing wink. Ever since I’d blithely told Dr. Stern that I didn’t think too much beforehand about the “visceral” thing between Michael and me, I had been thinking about it a lot, with a disagreeable mixture of guilt and apprehension. I told Michael that I’d meet him in the park, safely away from our sexual arena, and to please bring his copy of the manuscript.

The neighborhood children were back in school, but there were still plenty of babies and old folks around, along with the regular procession of dogs and their walkers. Even the homeless man who screamed was in place, quiet at the moment but ready to go off like a car alarm at the slightest perceived insult. They were all perfect distractions and perfect chaperones.

I’d been rereading the revised chapters of
Walking to Europe.
They were so much stronger than the first draft—why had he stopped? And why was I still displaying such saintly caution and tact when I was really growing impatient with Michael, with waiting for some resolution of the mysteries he’d raised? Those three tattoos of Caitlin’s, for instance, and Joe’s profession of guilt about her, that haunting but cryptic “What have I done?”

We were sitting on a bench facing the river, and when Michael started to put a proprietary arm across my shoulders, I moved away and said, irritably, “What
has
he done, anyway?”

“Who?” Michael asked.

“Joe, of course,” I said. “He’s been yakking about Caitlin’s disappearance for almost two hundred pages, and he seems to take total responsibility for it. But we have no idea why. Obviously he knows something crucial—when are you going to let the rest of us in on it?”

“Why do you sound like that?” Michael said.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re angry with me about something. It can’t be about Joe.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a fictional character, Alice.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. And I could swear that thought hadn’t crossed my conscious mind until I heard myself say it.

Michael grew pale and his upper lip glistened with perspiration. Everyone around us had receded into the background. Even the homeless man, who had indeed begun to scream, seemed remote and innocuous. “I don’t get this,” Michael said.

“Yes, you do,” I said.

“So now you’re editing my life?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Could we just go up to your place?” He had a doggy look about him again, but it was more beseeching now than playful.

“What for?” I said. “It’s over.” I’d known that with certainty before I’d even left the apartment. That’s why I hadn’t worn any makeup or perfume, and why my hair, which he’d once tangled around his wrist until my scalp prickled, was pulled back so severely now with a rubber band.

“Shit,” he said, and reached for his cigarettes. When he absently offered me one, I took it. It seemed the least I could do.

But I inhaled too deeply and singed my throat. When I could speak again, I said, “Michael, I’m really sorry. I should never have let this happen between us.”

“Why not?” he asked miserably.

Because I’m the grown-up here,
I almost said.
And because it would be
even more painful in the end if we continue, at least for me.
Instead I stamped out the cigarette—I’d probably just given up smoking, as well— and I clasped my hands in my lap, so I wouldn’t try to take his hand or touch him in any other way. “Because it isn’t appropriate. And it interferes with our professional relationship.”

“And you’re married,” he said.

“Yeah, that, too,” I admitted, thinking that he wouldn’t have been such a good writer if he didn’t have so much insight.

“Wasn’t it okay?”

Okay.
The understatement of the century, I thought. The term
raw
sex
came easily to mind, for the obvious reasons, and as opposed to something gently simmered in the juices of a shared life. But I only said, “It was lovely,” a deliberately prim, past-tense description of something that still reverberated in all my nerve endings.

“Shit,” Michael repeated, which I took as kind of a halfhearted acceptance of things.

I waited awhile and then I said, “So, do you want to tell me about the manuscript?”

“I thought I’m not supposed to do that, that I might ‘talk it out.’ ” He made exaggerated quote marks in the air as he spoke.

“You might,” I said, trying to ignore both the sarcastic gesture and the bitterness of his tone. “But I think we’ll have to take that risk. Come on, let’s walk.”

Once we were in motion, it became much easier to talk. Maybe that was because we could only look obliquely at each other, and because some of the nervousness we’d both been feeling was expended by our striding legs. I was also more direct with him, less afraid or superstitious about invading that sacrosanct creative field. I asked him when he’d started writing the book, and he said that it was begun—inside his stoned head, anyway—when he was still in high school. He thought about it obsessively, but he didn’t write anything down for years.

“At first it was going to be a memoir,” he said. “Do you want to hear the opening line? ‘My sister Donna was named for a girl in a series of books my mother loved when she was young.’ ”

“Donna Parker,” I said right away, “I loved them, too.” I knew that I’d just recklessly crossed over the border into his parents’ generation. That, and the corroborating fact of my naked face in sunlight, must have helped to ease the sting of my rejection. It didn’t matter that those books had stayed in print for years and then been reissued; that Suzy had read them all, too, although not without considerable disdain. I was too old for him; he could surely see that now.

But Michael wasn’t even looking at me; his mind was elsewhere. “I called her Donna Duck,” he said, “because she waddled when she first learned to walk. We actually
were
sixteen months apart. I used to quack into her neck, and it broke her up.”

“ ‘Cake’ was an imaginative leap, then,” I said.

“Well, you triggered that. I was really happy when you wanted those kinds of backstory details about Joe and Caitlin. It reminded me of the truth, and it empowered me to be inventive at the same time.”

“Is she dead, Michael?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

“And did she live with one abusive man after another, like Caitlin?”

Michael wobbled a little and stopped walking. We faced each other. “No,” he said. “She never lived with anybody but me and our mother and father.”

“What do you mean?” I thought of devastating disease, of retardation.

Michael was crying. I had to grab his hand and lead him to a bench. There was no one else there; we were at the last curve of the promenade before you come to Gracie Mansion. We sat down and this time I put my arm around him. “Wait,” I said. “It’s all right.” And, “Take your time.”

A tugboat pushed a long garbage barge slowly past us before Michael spoke again. “She died when she was four years old,” he said. “It was my fault.”

“How can that be?” I asked. “You were, how old—five? Six?”

“I was supposed to be watching her.”

“Michael, that’s crazy, you were just a baby yourself.”

“But I was good at it,” he insisted. “My mother had a migraine; ‘the hammer,’ as she called it, had conked her in the head, and she had to lie down in a dark room with a wet compress over her eyes. I made it for her. And I was used to watching Donna—it was like my job.”

I needed a villain, someone besides this grieving man sitting next to me, still sheltering a grieving boy, and I felt a swell of rage at his mother, coddling her complaint in a darkened bedroom, relegating her own job to little children. But then she lost one of those children. “What happened?” I asked.

“It was August and hot as hell, normal for Pontiac, though. One of our neighbors had a round aboveground pool. It wasn’t that deep, but there was a little ladder of three or four stairs leading to it. I went up them and Donna followed, the way she always did.” Stepping on his heels. “The water was scummy, I remember that. Like cold soup with wrinkled fat on top. There was a white rubber ring—it said ‘USS something’—floating around the edge of the pool. I could read.”

I didn’t need to hear the rest. I didn’t want to hear it, either, but I had asked, so I was obliged to listen. “I leaned in and pushed the ring around with a stick for a while,” Michael said, “and then I went down the stairs, past Donna, who was in my way. There were other kids in the yard, things going on. Wash hanging that we ran through like curtains, a tied-up dog that kept barking.”

“It wasn’t your fault. They told you that, right?” And I remembered “The Stone Boy,” a story by Gina Berriault, in which a mother won’t forgive her younger boy after he accidentally shoots and kills his brother. The boy stands naked outside her closed bedroom door, waiting vainly for the absolution of her love. “What about the tattoos?” I asked, because I needed to get away from the pictures in my head.

“The blue circle for the pool, the white bracelet for the life preserver, the yellow crescent for the moon reflected on her back,” he recited quickly, in a monotone. “Although it was daytime and the moon was only a little sliver of white. I remembered being surprised that I could see it and the sun at the same time. Pretty corny symbolism, right?”

“I like the moon stuff, not the rest,” I said, and we sat silently for a few beats, as if we were both merely contemplating editorial changes in the manuscript. And then I said, “In the book, you let Caitlin live to grow up. I think I understand that. But why did you give her such a terrible life?”

Michael shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe to show that she’d have been better off dying young?”

“Do you believe that?”

“No.”

“Are you going to tell us that in the end? And that Joe invented her whole adulthood?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you think I should?”

“I don’t know, either,” I confessed. “But it’s something to think about, a possible way around what you’re unable to write.” Maybe it was the only way around it, but I had reverted to my old, careful nondirective self. It was his book, his life.

We stood up at the same time and started walking again, and after a while Michael escorted me back to my building. I thought about asking him to come upstairs with me once more, to try to make up for art’s failure to console or even properly explain anything. But I was weary, and I imagined that I looked something like his mother when she was being pounded by one of her “hammers.” In fact, I wanted to lie down in a darkened room, myself, with a soothing compress across my brow. So we hugged and parted.

There was a message on my machine from a woman named Ruth Casey. I’d contacted her, suggesting she call me about a manuscript she’d submitted, her account of raising a severely autistic child. The market was overrun with books on the subject, but this one was different. Ruth was a single mother, for one thing, and she was a professional writer. There was no self-pity in her writing voice, or false cheer. Her book, which she called
Perfection,
began, “It took seven years, three surgeries, and one in-vitro fertilization before David and I conceived Rose, so of course we expected the reward of perfection. But nothing is ever promised or owed.” By the end of the manuscript, David is long gone and Rose is thirteen, her body relentlessly maturing while she remains emotionally undeveloped and unreachable. Ruth Casey lived with Rose in the city, on the Upper West Side. I scribbled a note to myself to call her back to discuss the project. Maybe I’d just offer some free publishing advice.

Then I went into Suzy’s old room and scanned the shelves until I found my original dog-eared copies of the Donna Parker books.
Donna
Parker in Cherrydale. Donna Parker in Hollywood. Donna Parker, the Mystery at Arawak.
That girl really got around. I closed the window blinds and got into Suzy’s maidenly bed, along with a couple of the books, the ones that, miraculously, still had dust jackets, as frayed and faded as they were. Donna herself looked archaic, with her brunette version of the Doris Day flip and that dorky hair band.

I opened
Donna Parker in Hollywood
to the first page. Even with the blinds shut, there was enough afternoon light in the room to read by. “Donna Parker closed the lid of the suitcase triumphantly and looked around her bedroom.” As soon as I began reading, I remembered how Violet and I used to act out the books, and that she had always insisted on being Donna, consigning the supporting role of Donna’s best friend, Ricky West, to me.

I put up a protest each time—I didn’t want to be a mere sidekick to the girl who won hearts and solved mysteries wherever she went, who could even feel triumphant after closing a suitcase—but Violet prevailed, as she usually did in our arguments, by firing a steady stream of logic at me, like an automatic pistol. Wasn’t I a redhead, like Ricky, and didn’t Donna have dark hair, just like herself? Besides, Violet had actually been to Hollywood once.

Never mind that she was only an infant on that trip, or that Violet’s electrified frizz was nothing like Donna’s smooth coif. My own counterlogic— my father and Donna’s were both named Sam (her mother was mostly known as Mrs. Parker), and it was only fair to take turns—seemed weak, even to me. What bothered me more than anything was that Ricky’s mother was dead. I couldn’t bear to identify with that definitive fact of her life, even if it all was only make-believe, and not the most persuasive writing in the first place.

Later that night, I called Violet and asked her why we had loved those books so much, and she couldn’t explain it, either. She wanted to know what made me bring them up, and I told her that this guy I was editing mentioned that his mother had loved them, too. I spoke carefully, like a drunk afraid of slurring her words, but for one panicky instant I wondered if I’d actually said, “this guy I was fucking.”