The Doctor's Daughter (6 page)

Dr. Augustus Strange, my father’s medical school mentor, had worshiped two deities: the preservation of life and the genius of research. The idea was to keep the patient alive until something was developed in the laboratories that could save her. My father was torn between love and love, his love for my mother and his love for the ethical precepts that guided him. He let her suffer longer than he should have, I was positive of it, and just as certain that the choices he’d made, and his flash memories of their consequences, incited his current bouts of anger and depression. Imagining her still alive was only a mitigating aspect of his dementia, a respite from all that oppressive guilt.

I was due for my yearly mammogram in June, only a few weeks away. I could probably move up the appointment if I called and said that I’d found something in my breast. Something that was most likely nothing at all. But my mother’s oncologist, Jeannette Joie—oh, the paradox of that name!— had once told her that one should listen to one’s body, that intimations of illness and disease are sometimes available to the patient long before any real symptoms. Was this what I’d been trying to tell myself since that disturbing April morning?

I flipped through my notebook, looking for something to support that theory, when I remembered that Dr. Joie was from Montreal—a Canada goose! I made a note of that, too. The appointment at East Side Radiology was at 10 AM on June 13, Friday the thirteenth, as it turned out, but I’m not superstitious. I’d made it months ago, and I knew the receptionist would become cross and difficult if I tried to change it. A couple of weeks probably wouldn’t make a difference, anyway, and my own schedule was pretty busy.

Soon I was sitting in the park reading Michael’s newest installment. Most of it was very good, although there was still an occasional sense of something vital withheld, or skirted. But the characters were consistently, divinely rendered, especially Joe Packer, and I did something I frowned upon when one of my authors did it—I started to cast the movie.

Joe would be played by Matthew McConaughey, who’d have to grow a mustache for the part, and that beautiful red-haired actress, Julianne Moore, would play his girlfriend, the older woman he meets in the bus station after she runs away from her unhappy marriage. I didn’t write to Michael about any of this, for fear of sounding like some starstruck idiot, and because I didn’t want to distract him from his own vision of his characters and their story.

He’d called unexpectedly one afternoon the week before, saying that he just wanted to hear my voice, to make sure he hadn’t dreamed me up. He sounded as appealing on the phone as he was on the page. “I figured I’d probably reach some suicide hotline,” he said, “but that would just be pretty convenient.” His voice was both rough and honeyed, the way I’d imagined Joe’s would be. There was a lot of noise in the background, some kind of grinding machinery.

“You sound like you’re in Michigan,” I said.

“Everyone tells me that,” he said, and we both laughed.

The relative intimacy of a telephone conversation after all that e-mailing made me loosen my reserve, and I told him more candidly how much I admired his writing. The revisions were strong, I said—and he’d addressed all of my smaller concerns, about oft-repeated words or similes that seemed forced—but it was important not to hold back emotionally, as he still sometimes tended to do. He kept saying, “Yes, I know. You’re right about that. I’ll fix it.”

Then I explained how a novel had to be pitched these days, maybe in one compelling sentence, and how crucial the sales department was to the fate of any book. It wasn’t my usual style to bring up commerce in the middle of a discussion about craft, but I felt a little reckless and giddy that day. “When the time comes,” I said, “I might be able to help you place it.”

Michael said that at the rate he was going, he’d probably have a draft done by the end of the summer. He proposed delivering it to me then by hand, and I warned him not to rush things, to let the writing follow its natural flow.

The evening of Jeremy’s concert, Ev was already waiting in the church when I got there. To my surprise, Scott and Suzy were there, too. Jeremy had invited them, and I was elated by this evidence of our children’s autonomy, and that they had outgrown the ferocious hostilities of childhood. They were still so different from one another—Suzy avidly read the program notes, while Scott went through some cards in his own wallet and then checked out a prayer book and the donation envelopes in a pocket in our pew—but now they were civilized beings temporarily bonded by music and family occasion.

A truce must have been called between Ev and Scott, as well, because I saw Ev lean over to whisper something in Scott’s ear, making him laugh. Poulenc and Debussy were on the short program. My clone, Jeremy, blushing under the spotlight at the altar, gave us a shy little salute before the group started tuning up, just as he used to do at school concerts and plays. His girlfriend lifted her bow and waved, too. Scotty and Suzy sat between Ev and me, separating and uniting us, as they did on Sunday mornings in our bed when they were children, and we smiled at each other over their heads as the music began.

6

My uneasiness around household help was probably a throwback to my childhood, when it began as a kind of love affair. Faye Harriet White was born in Beaufort, North Carolina, and came to New York City in search of work when she was thirty years old. My mother had just been confined to bed with the threatened pregnancy that was to result in my safe delivery, and so it was my father who hired Faye, through the auspices of the Maid-Rite Employment Agency (renamed Domestic Arrangements in a more politically correct era), to replace their part-time cleaning woman, to live with them and run their household.

When the story of Faye’s hiring was first related to me, I pictured something like an adoption agency in a Shirley Temple movie, with various orphaned maids lined up, each one yearning to be picked, and my father, with his infallible eye and knowing heart, choosing the one shining person in their midst.

Faye was securely in place when I was born, so I can’t recall a time before her presence in my life. Our three-story, gray gabled house in Riverdale required a great deal of maintenance. There were gardeners and yardmen, and men who came in on a regular basis to do the heavy work, the window washing and floor polishing. Some of the laundry—like my father’s white lab coats, our bed linens, and the curtains—was sent out to a professional service, but Faye attended to everything else inside the house.

I remember doing my homework at one kitchen counter while she chopped onions or punched down bread dough at another, and I can still hear the sputtering hiss of her steam iron in the basement, where she smoothed out the tangles of our personal laundry. But my sharpest memories of Faye involved her care and feeding of me, and served to strengthen the conviction I held then that she was, somehow, exclusively mine.

I was almost ten years old and in the fourth grade at the Chapin School in Manhattan, to which I commuted every day, along with Violet, in a yellow school bus. My study group was doing a unit that term on the Civil War, and our progressive textbooks were filled with hard facts about slavery in easy-to-read language. I examined the illustrations of a slave ship, with its shackles and chains; of an auction at a slave block in South Carolina, where a half-naked woman stood, bound and disconsolate, on a platform, while a man in buckled shoes raised one finger in chastisement or to place a bid; and of the separate, minimal slave quarters on plantations.

Faye, of course, lived right in our house with us. She had her own room and bathroom, off the kitchen. I wasn’t permitted to enter her room— another fallout from my mother’s commitment to privacy. But sometimes Faye left the door ajar and I could see her single bed with its pebbly chenille cover, the small white television set on her dresser, and one arm of the pink linen lady’s chair my mother had had moved in there when she redecorated her own sitting room.

It was a Friday afternoon, and Halloween. Our jack-o’-lanterns had been carved and set on the porch steps, awaiting darkness and their candles. I was going to be a fairy princess again for trick or treat, and Violet, who lived a few streets away, was going to be the Headless Horseman. She had designed the costume herself, and executed it with the help of the Steinhorns’ maid, Mattie. It was composed of a folded oak-tag frame that sat across the top of her head, and would serve as a pair of broad shoulders when one of her father’s jackets was hung on it. Mattie had sketched in a black hole with Magic Marker, where the head should have been, and Violet drew a shirt collar and tie on the front of the oak tag, punching out airholes and eyeholes with a pair of Mattie’s sewing scissors. She intended to tip her father’s gray fedora to her invisible head when we went door-to-door that evening.

My mother had gently urged me to try something different and more creative this year, like Violet, but I stuck to the role I loved best, although I knew it was babyish and unoriginal. And I’d requested, and received, a particular store-bought costume that was so puffy and stiff and sparkly, it seemed to transform me. When I came home from school that afternoon and tried it on, complete with tiara and star-tipped wand, I shed glitter everywhere, like fairy dust.

Faye was doing the laundry in the basement and my mother was out shopping for trick-or-treat candy. My father had just returned from performing several hours of surgery at the hospital. He was relaxing in his study the way he loved best, reclining in his brown leather chair in a dressing gown, and listening to a Beethoven symphony on the stereo system. I had taken my social studies book home with me, and I went upstairs and sat at my desk, with some discomfort, in my princess outfit, reading about the destruction of slave families, about children being sold off separately from their parents, and husbands and wives torn from each others’ arms.

After a few minutes I became hungry and I went downstairs again, carrying my wand, to look for a snack. The door to Faye’s room was wide open. There was a book on her bed—the Bible, I saw with disappointment, as I got closer. From that angle in the doorway I could see her night table, too, with its blue china lamp and a small picture frame. I wondered if it held a photograph of me, like the ones on my mother’s dressing table and on my father’s desk in his consultation room at Mount Sinai. I crossed the threshold of Faye’s room; it took only two or three baby steps before I was inside. The framed photo on her night table was of a skinny black boy about my own age, squinting into the sun in front of a bright green, shingled house. I had never seen the boy or that house before.

I looked down and there was telltale glitter at my feet on the braided bedside rug. I tried to pick some of it up between my close-bitten fingernails but only managed to disseminate more of the stuff onto the rug and the bed. I knew I’d be in trouble with my mother if she saw it, and I was about to go and ask Faye for help when she came to the doorway with a stack of folded towels in her arms. “What are you doing in there, Alice?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Hey, I’m your fairy godmother,” I added, waving my wand at her.

“You’re my fairy messmaker, you mean. Set that thing down now.”

I lay the wand on her night table and picked up the boy’s photograph. “Who’s this?”

“That’s Roger,” Faye said. “That’s my baby.” She took the photograph from me and gazed at it with the melted expression I had always associated with myself, with a time when she still bathed me, and I’d enter a kind of trance as the warm washrag sloshed across my shivery shoulders and down my spine.

“What do you mean?” I asked in alarm.

“He’s a lot bigger than that now,” Faye said, “but that’s my son.” She replaced the photo on the night table and swiped at the glass with the corner of one of the towels she still held. “Now I’ve got to clean up in here, and you’ve got to get that dress off.”

“It scratches,” I whined, in a pathetic bid for sympathy, and then I said, “But where does he live?”

“Roger? In Beaufort, with my mother.”

“But . . . but . . . ,” I stammered. I had so many questions I couldn’t formulate any of them. I knew that Faye had a family in North Carolina. Letters and phone calls came periodically for her from them, and every summer, during the two weeks my father joined my mother and me at the rented house in Chilmark, she went down south for her vacation, and to “see everyone.” I had envisioned those reunions as a kind of pastoral mob scene, with cousin-friends and aunts and uncles, everyone hugging and smiling, but no one especially close or important to Faye.

This was the most stunning news I’d ever heard. It slid into place in my chest so decisively, I knew it could never be removed. Even more extraordinary was the sight of Faye herself right then, casually arranging towels on the rack in her adjoining, pink-tiled bathroom.

I grabbed my wand and ran out of the room, through the kitchen, and down the hallway into my father’s study. The symphony had just reached a crescendo and I had to really shout over it to be heard. “How could you! How
could
you!” I cried. And I stamped my feet as hard as I could on the Oriental rug beneath them.

His eyes were closed and he didn’t respond for a few moments, but I knew he wasn’t sleeping by the way his pale, beautifully tapered fingers kept time with the music on the armrests of his leather chair. Then his eyes opened and he said, irritably, “What is it, Alice?”

“It’s you, Daddy!” I yelled. “You’re a mean, terrible slaveholder!”

“What!” The music continued relentlessly over our heads.

“You sit here listening to your precious stupid music while your poor slave works her fingers to the bone,” I said, shaking my wand at him until fairy dust was scattered across his paisley dressing gown like dandruff. But my father refused to disappear.

He hoisted himself up with effort from the depths of his chair, and brushed his hands ineffectually at the clinging silvery glitter. “What in hell are you talking about?”

“You know perfectly well. Faye!
Faye!
Who you brought here in chains and she can’t see her own child! You slaveholder, you! Oh!” And I burst into furious tears.

“Alice,” my father said through his teeth. “Go to your room. Right this minute!” I watched the changing patterns of rose and white bloom on his angry face. “Do you hear me?” All of Riverdale could hear him. I stood my ground for a second or two and then I flung the wand at him and fled.

Up in my room, the room that had once been featured in
House &
Garden,
I flounced around in helpless rage for a while before I went next door to my playroom and with great deliberation took a couple of Erlenmeyer flasks from the science corner and threw them against the wall. I didn’t know what to do with myself after that, so I tossed a couple of Bulgarian dolls after the flasks, which had satisfactorily shattered. Then I marched back to my bedroom, plopped down at the desk, and scrolled a sheet of paper into my Olivetti. “Far from my native state,” I rapidly typed, as if I were plunking out an exercise on the piano, “I’ve come across this land / to find my poor slave fate, at a cruel, cruel master’s hand.”
There.

As soon as I finished typing, my mother opened my door, without knocking—didn’t
my
privacy count?—and strode into the room. “Alice,” she said. “What can you have been thinking?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, evasively.

My mother sank onto my bed. “Sweetheart,” she said. “You have deeply hurt your father’s feelings.”

“Well, he deserves it,” I said, although everything that had happened was a little muddled in my head now.

“Oh, you don’t mean that. Daddy is a wonderful man. And Faye is certainly
not
a slave. Where did you ever get such an idea?”

I shrugged.

“Your father pays her a handsome salary,” my mother said. “And we both care about her very, very much.”

“But she doesn’t live with her little boy!” I cried.

“That’s true,” my mother agreed. “But that isn’t Daddy’s fault.” She paused. “There are many difficult things in this world,” she said, “and nobody to blame for them.”

“I broke my flasks,” I said, needing to claim responsibility for something.

“You did? Let me see.”

We went into the playroom together, and all my mother said when she saw the costumed dolls lying among the shards of glass, like the victims of a Balkan war, was “Please don’t walk barefoot in here, Alice.” Then she crouched to pick up the larger pieces of glass. “Oh!” she cried out a moment later. She had cut her finger, and I marveled at the crimson brilliance of the blood that welled up, like the blood on the cambric the queen gives her daughter in “The Goose Girl.”

It’s established in the first paragraph of the story that the king is dead, and that the widowed queen has sent her beautiful daughter out on horse-back, accompanied by a waiting-woman, to meet the prince to whom she’s betrothed. But soon after they start out on their journey, the waiting-woman forces the princess to exchange places with her. This was one of my favorite parts, because it meant that we aren’t bound forever by what we appear to be. But it was terribly sad, too. I could almost hear the blood drops on the cambric intone, “Alas queen’s daughter, if thy mother knew thy fate . . .” and the blood inside my head thudded in response. What if, in some unrecoverable instant, I had managed to coerce Faye, an African queen’s daughter, a true princess, to switch places with me, and become my indentured servant?

After my mother put a Band-Aid on her finger, she told me that my father had petitioned her for leniency toward me, which I doubted; it was probably the other way around. She said that I had to go downstairs and apologize to him for my rudeness, after which I would be allowed to have supper at Violet’s, as planned, and then go out trick-or-treating, with Mattie as our escort.

We went downstairs to my father’s study. The music was off now and he was back in his chair, sipping a Gibson. Sometimes he would offer me the little pickled onion. I approached him slowly, propelled by soft nudges from my mother, right behind me. Then I stood there, not saying anything.

“Alice wants to say she’s sorry,” my mother said.

“Oh? And are you her ventriloquist, Helen?” my father asked. But he sounded amused, and his face was all one neutral shade again.

I stepped a little closer to him, on my own now. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I murmured.

“For what?” he prompted.

“You know. For saying mean things, for being rude.”

“I see,” he said. “Not exactly royal behavior, was it?” He reached out and straightened my tiara, which must have slipped during all the excitement. I could smell the soap on his hands and the gin on his breath. When he finally proffered the onion, I snapped it up, the way a dog takes a treat.

I was lying on my bed later when Faye stuck her head in. “You sleeping?” she asked. I shook my head, and she came all the way in, dragging the Hoover behind her. She went past me into the playroom and vacuumed up the remaining splinters of glass. They made satisfying little popping sounds, like firecrackers. Faye came back through my room on her way out. “Do you want some tomato juice, girl?” she asked, and I shook my head again. I didn’t look directly at her, but I could still see her neatly plaited hair, her bosom rising and falling under the flowered field of her housedress.