The Doctor's Daughter (22 page)

A couple of days later I took Scott to dinner at one of the Indian restaurants in his neighborhood. Over the appetizers, he told me that he was thinking of going back to school, that he and Ev had discussed it during their lunch date. He was going to look into a film program at the New School for the spring semester.

“What will you do with
that
?” I asked, although it was in keeping with the sort of schemes I used to dream up for him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, video editing maybe, or animation. Dad says they’re, like, pretty hot fields.”

“Uh-huh. And will you give up your job at Tower?” I asked, as if I were scandalized about his sacrificing such a plum.

“Yeah, probably,” Scott said. “Dad says he’d bankroll me at first, and then maybe I could get a student loan or something.”

Dad says, Dad says—
that
was a brand-new mantra. I bit into a samosa and burned my tongue. As I downed some ice water, it occurred to me that Ev must have been giving Scotty some recent handouts or loans. That was why he hadn’t asked me for any money for a while. When the two of them had been at such inflexible odds with each other, I’d hoped and argued for just this kind of sympathetic connection between them. But now I felt usurped by it. Ev had called forth his soft, impractical alter ego, Al, to mother our prodigal son. And the residual Ev in me bristled with resentment. “Do you know anything about film?” I demanded. “Do you even go to the movies?” I wouldn’t have been all that surprised if my voice deepened into a baritone, if dark hair sprang up on the backs of my hands. Scott leaned away from me, clutching his fork. “Oh, Scotty,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”

“It’s okay, Ma,” he croaked, still eyeing me warily. Mercifully, our main courses arrived then, in a theatrical production of sizzle and smoke, breaking the awful tension.

The next time I saw Dr. Stern, I found myself paraphrasing Celia. “All relationships are such stupid power struggles,” I said. “Why does one of us always have to be on top, in bed and in the world? Why can’t we ever just lie there peacefully, side by side? I mean, before we’re dead.”

22

Ruth Casey had submitted her manuscript,
Perfection,
to a few publishers before she’d sent it on to me, and she’d gotten it back quickly from all of them, and without comment. I suspected it had only been read by some very young editorial assistants who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, imagine the grim realities of autism she’d depicted. Or maybe it had just been buried in the slush pile and not read at all. I was going to refer her to an agent I knew who would probably put her in touch with a mature and sympathetic editor, but on a second read, I saw ways of making the manuscript better first, and more competitive in a crowded market.

The writing was very good, but she’d only done occasional short magazine pieces before, and she needed help with organizing her material and the general structure of the book. And I wondered if the narrative would be more appealing if the voice were a little warmer and less detached. But its main content, about the daily struggles of a couple with a wild yet unresponsive child, and the gradual loss of hope, was both arresting and appalling. Even the latest scientific findings, Ruth wrote, which took the onus off the parents of autistic children, with new suspects like epilepsy and a fragile X syndrome, couldn’t relieve her and her husband of their sense of liability. “I didn’t need Bettelheim to nail me,” she wrote. “I gladly did it to myself. David took an even bigger hit.” Despite the cool, tough tone of her prose, I expected Ruth herself to appear war-torn, starved for sensible company and a compassionate ear.

In person, though, she was merely an impassive and pallid dishwater blonde in her early forties. When I held out my hand, she took it, but hers was icy and limp and I quickly let go. In describing her to Violet later, I used the word
reserved,
but I actually thought she was a pretty cold fish. Maybe her disaffection enabled her to deal with her sad and strenuously difficult life; it also made her the ideal antidote to Michael for me. This was going to be a professional arrangement, pure and simple. No one would have to take off her clothes to get any work done.

I took on
Perfection,
and also an informed, but overwrought, novel of the Renaissance, glad to be kept busy and sidetracked from my personal problems. When I checked my e-mail one morning for new responses to my ad, there was a message from Thomas Roman. I realized that I hadn’t thought about him much in the turmoil of the past few weeks. He wrote that he was coming to New York City soon for a few days, and wondered if we could meet for a drink or tea somewhere; he had something to give me. If that turned out to be a collection of my mother’s love letters, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see them.

So much had transpired since I’d started looking into her past. I remembered the tortured scrawl of my father’s letter to “Darling,” and I thought of his confusion when he accused me of bringing my “paramour” to the nursing home, and of my actual betrayal of Ev. It wasn’t easy to trust love or any of its artifacts. And my desire to know everything was tempered by a need to protect certain aspects of memory and history. But maybe Thomas Roman had a poem of hers I’d never seen before, or only an innocent letter containing some of those early anecdotal details unavailable anywhere else. I wrote back, setting a time and place for us to meet.

That afternoon Michael and I met at a coffee shop to go over my notes on his recent revisions. We’d exchanged a few wary e-mails, but hadn’t seen each other since the end of our affair. He was sitting in a booth when I got there, scribbling in a notebook.

“Hey,” he said, jumping up and dropping his pen, but the kiss that landed near my chin was chaste and friendly. Dr. Stern was right; it was already a little better. As soon as we were settled in the booth, with the table between us, we ordered coffee and got right down to business.

He’d taken up the idea of Joe as the inventor of Caitlin’s adult life, and had written a couple of long, new revelatory chapters in a kind of creative frenzy. It was wonderful work but somewhat sloppy, in the way of first, rapturous drafts. I was torn between slowing him down so that he would write more carefully, and urging him to simply go on and edit later.

Michael solved the dilemma himself by saying that he was bushed— he’d been working overtime at the factory—and needed to pause for a while and just polish his sentences. He also wanted to look at the new stuff in the context of the rest of the manuscript.

His decision pleased me, and so did the ease between us, the lack of sexual tension. I told him about the Gina Berriault story and said that he might want to read it, as much for its keen understanding as for its literary example.

I was getting ready to leave when a woman approached our booth and said hello to me. She was a tall, Nordic-looking blonde. For a discomfiting moment or two I had no idea who she was. Then I realized it was Imogene Donnell’s girlfriend—who’d aroused such domestic yearning in me that day in Brooklyn—and her first name, Patty, fell into place, too.

After I introduced her to Michael, she began to talk about the upcoming art show, and how excited she and Imogene were about it. “Maybe you can make the opening, too,” she said to Michael. “We’ll need all the warm bodies we can get.”

Michael wrote the information down on a paper napkin he’d pulled from the table dispenser. I felt only the smallest pang when I saw how he perked up at her invitation to be a warm body, and the way he looked her over. Well, he was in for a surprise.

There was a surprise for me, too, when I got home. The official invitation to the art show was in my mailbox. But it’s too early, was my first thought. The return address on the envelope was the gallery’s, but my name and address were in Ev’s handwriting; this was a special, preview mailing. I didn’t open the envelope until I was upstairs, in the kitchen, where I used the fish-boning knife to slit the top with surgical precision.

The invitation was stark and striking—bold black letters on a single page of heavy white stock. The heading was the word ANYWAY, which I’d finally come up with as a title for the show, with the artists’ names listed alphabetically underneath, followed by the date, the time, and the place. I shook the envelope, hoping for a personal note, but nothing fell out. Then I propped the invitation against the coffeemaker, so I could see it from every angle in the room.

The title had occurred to me after I’d interviewed all of the artists, examined their slides, and considered and rejected several other possibilities. Then I remembered Imogene shrugging and saying that creating art didn’t make much sense, given the way the world was, but that she did it anyway. I thought of Greta Gordon’s valiant little “night lights,” and about India, whose studio was once in the shadow of the World Trade Center and whose grandparents had been in Bergen-Belsen. The persistence of these artists, like Violet’s, in the face of such dispiriting times and so few rewards, seemed to be at the core of their work.

The members of the collective met and voted unanimously to approve the title. They hadn’t read the essay yet, because I was still refining it, incorporating my motivation for naming the show “Anyway” into the text. It felt good to write it, but less thrilling than when I used to write fiction. Maybe you’re not supposed to be thrilled with your own writing; maybe that precludes the reader’s delight. It was one more thing I might have discussed with my mother, if she had lived, or with Ev, if we hadn’t been so locked in competition.

I’d made a reservation at the Palm Court at the Plaza for my tea with Thomas Roman, because it was a place my mother had liked so much. If Rumpelmayer’s still existed, we might have gone there instead. I was the first to arrive and was shown to a table in that elegant, open room, facing the entrance, where I could watch out for him. “I’ll be the oldest guy there,” he’d written. “You’ll know me by my decrepitude.”

That didn’t turn out to be hyperbole. He came toward me in slow motion, leaning on a wheeled walker, with a tiny, equally aged, but more nimble woman at his side. She seemed to be deliberately decelerating to keep in step with him. Tom Roman was stooped, but still tall; he reminded me of those white-crested wading birds we used to see at sunset at the beach in Chilmark. The woman was his wife, Emily, a “behind-the-scenes person,” as she put it, at
Leaves.

“My first reader,” he amended. “She used to read
everything
that came in, even when there was postage due. She was always afraid she’d miss something.” He looked amused and adoring. Why shouldn’t he be? Emily obviously adored him, too, and she was abidingly radiant. It was hard to imagine her ever lampooning some awful submission to
Leaves,
just for kicks, the way the other summer interns and I often did at G&F.

“So you’re little Alice,” she said, beaming at me over her menu. “We were so fond of your mother.”

“All those letters, back and forth,” Tom said. “We felt like childhood friends. But we met only once, on the Vineyard,” he added. “You were there, too, but I doubt you’ll remember.”

I didn’t remember, although I scrambled through a mental montage of those distant summers, trying to dredge up a youthful version of this ancient pair. But I knew then, if you can ever know that sort of thing for certain, that my mother’s friendship with Thomas Roman had never been more than that.

“How is the memoir coming along?” he asked.

I’d forgotten about that. All of my “harmless” lies were coming back to haunt me, one by one. My face flared, and I had to take a long sip of iced tea before I could answer. “I’m not actually writing a memoir,” I said. “I’m just trying to find out some things for myself; you know, to sort out the past.” I felt like one of those scam artists who prey on the elderly, as if I’d attempted to wangle their life’s savings from them rather than simple information about my own family.

But neither of them seemed that surprised or perturbed by my confession. Then I took my mother’s Central Park poem from my purse and handed it to Tom, asking if he’d ever seen it before. He read it carefully, at least a couple of times, before shaking his head and passing it on to Emily. She’d never seen it before, either. “This seems like a rough draft,” she said. “Your mother did so many revisions before she sent anything out. Maybe she just didn’t have time to work on this one.”

“That last line is interesting, though,” Tom said, “with its nod to Dickinson.”

“And kind of mysterious,” I said. “I was hoping you’d seen the poem before, or that my mother had spoken to you about it. I keep thinking that it’s a clue to her history, and even my own.”

Tom shook his head again, as if to clear his thoughts, and said, “I’m sorry, Alice.” Then he reached into one of the flap pockets of his jacket and withdrew a small envelope that he handed to me. “But maybe this will help in recapturing the past.”

There was a snapshot inside the envelope, one of those faded, scalloped-edged prints from my childhood. It was taken at the beach—a seagull swooped down above striped umbrellas toward some quarry in the water. I was in the center of the picture’s foreground, squinting as I always did in the sun, and about waist-high to the four adults leaning together to fit in the frame of someone’s Brownie lens. We were all wearing swimsuits.

I would never have recognized Tom and Emily; did they recognize themselves in those dark-haired, nervy-looking strangers? My father had one arm around my mother’s waist and the other clamped to the top of my head, as if he were saying, through the clench of his smile, “Hold
still,
Alice.” And he would have been right to restrain me. My left arm and leg were only a blur; I was already headed elsewhere, maybe into the future that was now. “God,” I said.

“Yes,” Tom Roman agreed.

“Your father was so much fun,” Emily said. “We laughed and laughed that day.”

Fun! It wasn’t a word I would have associated with my father, but as if the snapshot were only the freeze-frame of a movie, I envisioned our pose broken by the click of the shutter, and then all of them in motion behind me along the shoreline, their eruptions of laughter generated by something witty my father had just said.

“That’s for you,” Tom said, when I tried to hand the snapshot back to him, and I thanked him and tucked it into my purse, alongside my mother’s poem.

We argued briefly over who would pay the check, but my relative youth and alacrity helped me to prevail. They were staying at a hotel downtown, someplace cheaper and more modest than the Plaza, and I put them into a taxi before I started walking home. Floating, almost.