The Doctor's Wife (40 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Brundage

BOOK: The Doctor's Wife
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One afternoon Lydia discovered the small room where they kept the medicines. She soon realized that it was not difficult to slip a bottle of aspirin into her pocket, or even the tiny yellow pills they gave to the more disagreeable patients. When she got home, she crushed a few of the pills into her father’s food, in an effort to ease his pain, and he never suspected. The pills gave him an easy, glassy-eyed look, and he didn’t bother her so much, didn’t scold her. He’d gaze out the window at the fields, or stare blankly at the television. Weeks passed, and little by little the hard lines of her father diminished, and he became someone else, a befuddled stranger. Without him bugging her all the time, she felt a new sense of freedom and now it was she who snapped at him, tugging at his sheets, shutting off the TV. Sometimes she even got lazy and would forget to feed him, or change his clothes, which had the foul odor of his excrement, but he never complained, not once.
 
 
The cook singled her out to do certain tasks. He made her clean the ovens, and he would supervise her and inspect her work and if it was not done to his satisfaction he would make her do it again. One day after work he called her into the kitchen. He took her hand and brought her into the pantry. She did not like the look in his eye, sweat forming quickly on his brow. He grabbed her knapsack, rifled through it, and pulled out the stolen pills. Almost instantly she began to cry. “Do you know it is a crime to steal?” he asked her. “These are narcotics, Miss Crofut. Do you know you’ve committed a federal offense? I could turn you in. I could have you arrested.” She cried, dropping to her knees. “You’ve caused me nothing but trouble,” he told her. “You’re a foolish, insipid girl and you’ll never amount to anything. You don’t do anything right. Even the simplest tasks.” He took down a can of lard and opened it. He shook his head as though he were sorry for her. He grabbed her and lifted her skirt and bent her over the piled sacks of flour, roughly tugging down her underwear. He used the lard, smearing it liberally the same way he greased the pans for corn bread, then took her with a brooding force. When he finished, he withdrew from her, wheezing and stumbling, and fired her. “One word about this and I’ll call the police,” he said. “I’d hate to see a young girl like you spend the rest of your life in prison.”
 
 
Riding home on her bike, she found it too painful to sit down on the seat. She could hardly see through the blur of her tears. The gray houses tumbled behind her. She did not understand why the man had done such a thing, but she knew it had been a sin, a terrible sin. The next day she concentrated on chores, ignoring the pain the man had caused. Trying to forget it. To stuff it deep in her heart where she’d never look again. First she mowed the lawn. It was hard work, the sweat pouring out of her. Then she washed her father’s sheets, soiled with sweat and piss. She filled the washtub with water from the hose and let it warm in the sunlight. Then she gathered the sheets and brought them outside and pushed them deep underwater, holding them there, holding her breath. She could not go on like this much longer. Taking care of him. She could not. She pinned the sheets on the line. Wet, they reminded her of the cool damp skin of her dying mama, and she wrapped herself up like a mummy, waiting for her mama to whisper.
If only she would,
Lydia thought.
If only.
 
 
Shortly after the rape, Lydia went to confession and told the priest of the awful event. Afterward, the priest sighed and spoke in a doleful voice. “You will spend your entire life trying to rectify this act.”
 
 
Lydia went home and looked the word up in the dictionary.
To set right; to correct. To correct by calculation or adjustment. To refine or purify.
Lydia did not have any idea how she could possibly do any of those things and lay awake every night going over the incident in her head. Had it been her fault? Why hadn’t she done something—why hadn’t she fought back?
 
 
Oh, yes, Lydia knew about sin. Jesus had never forgiven her.
 
 
A week later Simon Haas knocked on their door. The minute she saw him she knew that he would be the one to save her.
 
 
 
They’d buried her father in the cemetery, next to her mother. After the burial Simon moved in with her. He’d brought his things from the city. He didn’t have much, just his paints and a small suitcase, two pairs of trousers, three shirts, four pairs of socks. He set his few belongings out on her father’s dresser: a leather pouch that contained his money and a small, ornate box that had been his mother’s. He had in his possession a small green bottle of aftershave, a razor, a tortoiseshell comb with several teeth missing, and a tin that contained a special tobacco that, he said, he used to calm his nerves. People thought they were related, that’s how he got them to stay away. And they lived like that. He said he was willing to keep her, to take care of her like a relative, in exchange for almost nothing.
 
 
Simply the opportunity to paint her.
 
 
Routinely, he woke early, before dawn, and went walking in the long grass behind the house. He liked to witness the rising sun and the wailing geese crossing the red sky. Lydia would watch him through the kitchen window, a large man in a leather coat, confronting the new sun like a dare. During those moments, when they were separate, she tried to understand him, to get inside his mind. But he had told her nothing of his life or his past. He’d come in and shake off the cold, hang his coat on the hook, and wait for her to serve his breakfast. He liked strong black coffee with sugar, and took his bread dry, without butter or jam. He moved slowly through the day, observing the various details of their life in the house. The way the cream fell from the pitcher. Her hands as they poured his coffee. He said her hands reminded him of birds. He’d take them in his own and warm them at his mouth. Or the sun crawling across the table. The light attracted him as much as the darkness. Each was important, he told her, and one could not survive without the other.
 
 
He followed her around like a lost dog with his paper and his pencils. His charcoal. Her only escape from him was the bathroom, the narrow room that dripped and hummed. The little birds in the tree by the window. The smell of peppermint soap. Sometimes she would stay a long time just to torture him, to make him wait for her, and when she’d finally emerge he’d study her as though she had changed somehow, as though she’d transformed in some powerful way.
 
 
Afternoons, he sketched her all around the house. At the window, looking out at the trees. At the table buttering bread. The time dragged, and she longed to be back in school, but Simon wouldn’t let her leave the house. He told her he couldn’t bear her being out of his sight. At first, she felt special and important, almost like a princess. But then she saw his obsession, she saw that he was using her, and she began to hate him for it.
 
 
To occupy her, he gave her chores. He taught her things: how to stretch the canvas, how to prepare the colors. Dissatisfied with the paint he brought back from the city, he took to concocting his own pigments and taught Lydia how to mix them, too. She didn’t mind mixing colors. She liked the way a color could make her smile. He was particular when it came to his supplies and she’d dutifully stand at the sink, scrubbing his brushes until they shone, the turpentine ripping up her hands, the colors running off her fingers like blood. After what she’d done to her father, she knew her life had become the consequence of that awful sin, and she believed this with all her heart. Jesus was letting her off easy.
 
 
Simon ripped down the velvet drapes that her mama had sewn and burned them in the yard with all her father’s things. Now the sun filled the old house. His easel and his paints all over the living room. He was not a good housekeeper; she found herself picking up after him endlessly, his plates left on the couch, a banana peel in the bathroom, a bottle of milk spoiling on the back porch. He painted constantly. He painted whatever he saw that interested him. If she ate an apple he painted the core and the pits and the bruised petals. He painted her father’s house from every angle, the windows and their changing light. He painted the old wrinkled woman who walked the road in her black coat, pulling her three-legged dog. The men in flannel shirts, painting the barns. The smirking redheaded boy who mowed the big field across the road, high up on the big green tractor.
 
 
Two months later she took ill. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. She knew there was something wrong with her, and she suspected it had something to do with the cook at the nursing home, but she didn’t dare tell him. One afternoon Sister Louise came to the house for a visit. Simon answered the door in his undershorts, his naked chest covered with paint. He had a look in his eye all the time, a madman. “There’s something wrong with her,” Lydia heard him tell the nun. “Maybe she’ll tell you.”
 
 
Sister Louise came into the room and shut the door. She had a long face; she rarely smiled. Like Lydia, she had grown up without her mother. At school, Lydia had been her pet and Sister Louise used to bring her presents. Once she gave her a tin of shortbread. She sat on the edge of the bed and took Lydia’s hand. “Lydia, tell me what’s wrong?”
 
 
Lydia broke down and told Sister Louise about the cook and what he’d done to her.
 
 
Sister Louise’s face went pale and her blue lips trembled. She called Simon into the room and told him what had happened. “She’ll have to go to a home for unwed mothers,” she said. “Take her to a doctor at once. If you don’t, I’ll call the police and they’ll think it’s yours. You’ll go to jail. It’s still against the law to have relations with a minor.” With that she left.
 
 
The next morning they closed up the house and left for New York. “I don’t want to go to a home,” she kept saying.
 
 
“You’re not going to any home,” he told her. “I’m not putting you in a goddamn home.”
 
 
He took her to his friend Grace’s apartment. It was a tiny room that smelled of sweat and lilacs. Grace looked at her and shook her head. “Naughty boy,” she said to Simon.
 
 
“It’s not what you think,” Simon told her. “Somebody else did this.”
 
 
“Sure they did, honey, sure they did.”
 
 
That afternoon Grace took Lydia to a clinic that was located on the third floor of a building with no elevator, over a veterinary hospital. Lydia could smell the dogs and cats as she climbed the stairs. They had to wait two hours. Lydia had to answer questions. She had to lie about her age. Then Grace paid them in cash. They took Lydia into a small room and put her feet up and spread her legs and took the thing that was making her sick out of her body. They sucked it out and she could hear it getting sucked, like a vacuum, and it made her sick, too, the idea of it. She could still remember the Oreos they gave her afterward, and berry punch. She was crying. She didn’t know why she was crying but she couldn’t stop. It wasn’t that she wanted it, really—she didn’t know what she wanted. But still, she felt sad. Deep, deep sad.
 
 
“You’ll get over it,” Simon had told her in the car. But she knew she wouldn’t. They were living out of his car. It was just three days later when Simon sold his first painting to a woman named Norma Fisk. With the money they rented a furnished room with a hot plate and a small refrigerator. She’d stare out the window all day long at the city streets. He’d give her pills that he bought on the street. Sometimes they made her feel better. Sometimes they made her sick. He’d paint constantly, as if it was the only thing that could keep him from touching her. She knew he wanted her in a sinful way and it tortured him. He would sink into a dark mood and drink and avoid her. She told him she wanted to go back to school, and he yelled and screamed. Perhaps her father had been right, he said, perhaps she was lazy and ungrateful.
Get me the phone, I’m calling that orphanage. Let them deal with you.
Once, he became so enraged that he packed her things in a suitcase and put her in the car. “I’m not cut out for this,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore.” She cried the whole way up the Northway, until he pulled up in front of a dreary house with a sign out front, Bard’s Children’s Home. “Out of the car, get out of the fucking car!” And she cried and screamed and twisted on the seat and then he kissed her. A surprise of moisture on her mouth. And he looked into her eyes. “Don’t you know I love you,” he said. “Can’t you see that you’re everything to me? I’d fucking die without you.”
 
 
And it was then, with his face inches from hers, that she made her first fatal mistake; she believed him.
 
 
40
 
 
THERE WAS SOMETHING heartbreaking in discovery. You had to let go of the past and that wasn’t easy, no matter how much you wanted to. Earlier in the evening, when Simon had followed Lydia to St. Vincent’s, he’d discovered that she had a whole other life outside of the tight formality of their marriage. Much to his bewilderment, they’d enlisted his nut job of a wife to man the Crisis Hotline, advising strangers on what he imagined were a variety of domestic travails; it baffled him to think that she could handle the task. Yet he’d spied her through the glass window in her little pink coat, handling the calls with apparent ease, a flush of importance on her cheeks. He had loitered for two hours in the corridor near the candy machines, drinking sour coffee and sketching people on paper towels from the men’s room. Finally, she’d emerged from the small office, accompanied by a man with a limp, and he’d known at once that it was Tim Hart, the minister from her church. Around his very own kitchen table, Simon had heard many a dewy-eyed devotee speak, in somber tones, about the man’s unfortunate disability. Unimpressed, Simon had refused to get swept up in the evangelical gusto of the New Birth Church, but had, in his guilt, donated hundreds of dollars to its discretionary fund with the blessed hope that this man of enlightened sensitivity could keep his wife on an even keel.

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