The Widower's Tale (27 page)

"Percy, you need to stop worrying. Really. You sound like an ad campaign." She told me to look after my health and she'd look after hers. She said this sweetly, but the sweetness took effort, I could tell. She pulled herself to the edge of the bed and began to dress. I watched with regret as her back, flushed in patches shaped vaguely like my hands, vanished under a T-shirt.

"Are you leaving?" I asked morosely.

"After you make me some lunch." She stood beside the bed, hands on her hips. "Or tell you what. I'm a big girl. I'll make it." Downstairs she went, just like that, subject changed. Over the continuing sounds of playground fervor, soon I heard the radio, then Sarah singing along, opening cupboards, placing a pan on the stove. She'd learned her way around: around my kitchen, around my orneriness; and now, around my intrusive concern.

Forty-five minutes had elapsed since my arrival when Chantal stood up behind her desk and signaled me. I followed her down three corridors, until she knocked on an unmarked door. In the interim, a buxom woman in a garishly flowered smock had come to the waiting area, introduced herself as Angel, and given me a take-out menu from which to order my lunch ("Our treat").

"Oh, Dad, I'm sorry."

Trudy came around from behind her desk and hugged me more warmly than she had in years. She wore the requisite doctor coat, her plastic identification card pinned to a pocket.

"It's bad enough that you have to chase me down at work. I'm sorry I got hung up."

Chantal, as she set our lunch-in-a-bag on Trudy's desk, snorted. "Like that is something she just never, ever does, our Dr. Barnes. Gets herself
hung up."
She and Trudy exchanged wry smiles before she left the office.

I sat in one of two chairs facing the desk. While waiting for my precious turn with this popular woman, my daughter, I'd conjured a range of smart-aleck greetings ("Pray what do you have against balloons?" "Beam me up, Trudy!" "Since when did pain become a little army of moons?"). But now I found myself wanting only to absorb the details of her inner sanctum: a place far more modest than I had imagined all these years. The one window was miserly, offering a sullen glimpse of windows no more generous or revealing than hers in another building across the street. Behind Trudy's back, medical journals and reference volumes filled several rows of cheap, laminated shelving. I saw only two photographs of family, one of a thinner, shaggier Robert accepting his high school diploma, the other of herself and Douglas, in formal attire, faces pressed together, blanched by the flashbulb.

On a bulletin board dominating another wall, dozens of other photographs--the Christmas cards and bar mitzvah announcements of people I'd never met--curled away from thumbtacks. And everywhere I looked--on notepads and pamphlets; on a T-shirted teddy bear slumped in a corner; even on Trudy's lapel, rendered in rhinestones--lurked that pink loop of ribbon, that mealy-minded equivalent of blurting out to a total stranger,
Gosh it's so awful you have cancer, but we can fight it together, yay!

Yet amid such tacky surroundings, I was smacked by a wave of nostalgia when I saw all the framed certificates: my daughter's college and medical degrees, for which I had remortgaged the house, along with a series of honors I did not know about. Had there been a presentation of the Geraldine and James Quigley Chair in Medical Oncology? If so, had she simply not bothered to invite me? Had she assumed I wouldn't want to go?

"Dad? Did you hear me?"

I looked at Trudy. "I'm sorry, daughter. I'm just ... taking it all in."

"Such as it is." She laughed. "I can tell you're appalled at the squalor. Now you know why doctors will sell their souls to attend pharmaceutical conferences in Maui and Scottsdale. Fresh air!" She opened the bag and handed me two paper napkins. She pulled out our sandwiches, peeling back the paper.

"Roast beef, Dad?" She shook her head in mock disapproval.

"Special occasion."

"Listen. I hate to do this to you, but we have about twenty minutes and then I really have to get back to seeing patients. I see patients only two and a half days a week now. It's absurd. Chantal stacks them up like planes at Logan."

She was wedging me in, no special treatment, yet I could not recall when I had last seen Trudy--the adult Trudy--so relaxed or bouyant. Was this airless labyrinth her oyster, the place she felt most at home?

Her intent regard was now entirely mine.
When you get her, honey, you have
got
her!
She sat still, her forearms pinning to her desk a scatter of manila folders. She'd unwrapped her sandwich, but it rested on the deli paper, untouched.

"You said you had something urgent to discuss."

"Yes!" I said. "Well."

She waited. Of course, she would be used to this: facing people who couldn't utter the most important questions of their lives.
How bad is it? Has it spread? Can you cure me? How long do I have, doc?
Though no one, I was certain, addressed this woman as "doc."

I'd never heard her discuss this part of her work--the people, rather than the science--and why would she have offered? I had no more insight into such drama than the average viewer of daytime TV.

"Is this about Clover, Dad?"

"No. It's ..." A light blinked on her phone, but she ignored it. "Trudy, what are cystic breasts?"

I had assumed she might laugh, but she didn't--though her surprise registered in a passing grimace. "Fibrocystic breast condition, that's what I assume you're referring to."

"So people who have them--this condition--they should be seeing a doctor about it, regularly, for, in order to ..."

Trudy interrupted my muddle. "This
is
about Clover, isn't it."

"No," I said. "It's about the woman I ... this friend of mine. Her name is Sarah." I exhaled forcefully; when had I taken in so much air?

Trudy's reaction was startling. She blushed and smiled. She raised her hands in surrender. "Confession, Dad. I've heard about Sarah. Clover told me, in an e-mail last week. Dad, it's great. We've wanted this for ages. For you." She expected me to speak again, but I couldn't. She leaned across the desk. "Clover says you've been acting sort of sneaky, as if there's something wrong. Did you think we'd be angry? We couldn't be
less
angry."

Had I been engaged in a normal conversation with my daughter that happened to concern my so-called love life--if such a conversation could ever be regarded as normal--would I have succumbed with relief to her joy on my behalf, happily disclosing details about Sarah that emphasized her maturity rather than her youth, painting her as "suitable" despite the two decades between us in age, despite her having a child barely out of diapers? Would I have been reassuring Trudy that I never planned to marry again? Until a week before,
that
was the conversation I'd tried to imagine. And to think it had seemed so difficult, that one!

"Trudy," I said, "I'm here because you're a doctor. Or the doctor that you are. I'm--I can't stop worrying about her. About Sarah."

"Dad, I assume she has a doctor of her own. The condition you're talking about is normal. Though if her doctor wants her to see a specialist--"

"She won't talk about it. But I have the distinct impression she's ... not paying proper attention to certain ... well, specific issues that ..." As I spluttered into silence, I saw Trudy look furtively at her computer screen, which was turned away from me. She frowned. When she looked at me again, her features remained tense. She did not, thank heaven, ask me what the hell I was talking about. She asked, "Are you telling me that she's ignoring a symptom her doctor thinks she should worry about?"

"I don't know."

"Dad, there's a reason
you're
the one sitting in that chair." Trudy drank from a cup of coffee that looked hours old, its surface murky. She put it down and pushed it away. "Okay, Dad. It feels bizarre to be telling
you
this, but in a nutshell, most lumps turn out to be nothing of concern. Most biopsies, by far, yield a benign result. But all the same." She opened a drawer and pulled out a business card. She wrote on the back of the card. "I'm guessing she needs to see a surgeon. Have her call Chantal's direct line--here it is--and say that she's your friend. She has to use your name. Chantal can get her to the head of the list with one of the surgeons whose names I've written there. They're both excellent. Her doctor can take care of the referral."

"Surgeons?"

"That's the place to start," said Trudy. "They look at the films. She has mammograms, right? Don't look so alarmed, Dad. It doesn't mean anyone's going to pull out a scalpel."

I took the card. "I've invited Sarah and her boy for Thanksgiving. I was wondering, if the occasion ... hoping you could ... maybe ..." Once again I plowed into a syntactical snowbank.

"Take her upstairs and ask her to disrobe?" Trudy took a large bite of her sandwich, chewed, and swallowed. "Dad, I'm really excited to meet her, I'm glad you're including her, but there's nothing I can do for her as a physician if she's in denial. Do you know any of her female friends?"

Someone knocked on the door. Trudy walked around me to answer it. She stepped out and closed the door behind her. I examined the card I held, the freight train of initials following my daughter's name. What were all these credentials? Did the average patient understand what they meant?

Like an obedient child, I stayed in my assigned seat, snooping with my eyes alone. Flattened against the back of the desk chair lay a girlish cardigan: fine wool in a yellow as timid as Trudy was not, to be fastened with a row of buttons resembling pearls. On a shelf behind the chair stood a photograph I hadn't seen while Trudy was seated: Poppy and me, in our late twenties, parents already but out on our own, dressed up for some festive occasion. I wore a white shirt and a large, almost clownish orange bow tie--an early present from Poppy. (Where was that tie?) She wore a scanty summer dress of which the picture showed only the shoulder straps, white with blue daisies.

I couldn't help myself: I stood up and walked around the desk to hold the picture in my hands. Did I have a copy of this image, in an album somewhere?

Norval and Helena's wedding. That was the occasion. Helena's parents' lawn in Ipswich, its view of tawny, luxuriant marshes receding toward the ocean. The mosquitoes had been frightful that evening. One had to stay in motion, on the dance floor, to escape them. Luckily, the band had been good and lively. Poppy had removed her shoes and misplaced them. At the end of the party, I carried her down the road to our car. Before we'd fallen into bed that night, tipsy, footsore, I'd rubbed calamine lotion across her back. The sheets were pink as bubble gum when we awoke.

The events of that day and night opened before me as if I were flipping through a favorite childhood book. Helena's wedding dress had been red, its color verging on scandal among guests from our parents' generation. Norval told me later that she'd believed she was pregnant that day, had hoped it. They never did have children, and I realized, as I looked at the picture of Poppy and me in Trudy's office, that I did not know precisely why. And should I have known? Should I have, at some point, asked them? Poppy would have known, and told me quite plainly, long ago.

"Dad?"

I faced Trudy. "Red-handed."

"No. I'm the culprit here. I've always loved that picture of you and Mom. I stole it from your study years ago. I decided that if you mentioned its absence, I'd put it back. Please take it home."

I handed the picture to Trudy. "It's yours, daughter. You keep it."

"I have to kick you out now. I'm sorry. I didn't get a chance to ask you about Robert. Do you hear from him? I feel as if he's disappeared this year."

"The lad is buried under books, as well he should be. Or so I gather from his latest e-mail."

"He tells you more than he tells me." Trudy paused. "Did you know he's broken up with Clara?"

"The girlfriend?"

"She called me last week. She's very upset. With him and about him." Trudy sighed. "It gets so complicated, when you like them."

"Whom?"

"Your child's ... special friends. That's
whom."

"I never faced such a dilemma with you or Clover," I said. "With Clover, the 'whom' changed a bit too often, and you--you snatched up the highly eligible Douglas on your first go-round."

"Dad, 'snatch' is not the most flattering word; and a college grad with a psych degree isn't exactly what I'd call 'highly eligible.' You might say I just followed in your footsteps, yours and Mom's." She still held the photograph from Norval's wedding. She looked at it, pointedly, and polished the glass on the inside of her white coat, then set it back on the shelf.

"One might say so, yes," I conceded. I did not see Trudy and Douglas as possessing the passion I'd shared with Poppy--but then, how could I? What did I know about their life when they were alone? Perhaps they stripped naked in their tasteful dove-gray living room, late at night with the curtains closed, and tangoed for hours, roses clenched between their teeth.

"Good-bye, Dad. I'll see you next week. I can't wait to meet Sarah." Trudy hugged me again, but she had changed back to the Trudy I knew: each gesture a preface to the next, her life a perpetual progress, a sailboat before a steady wind.

Ten minutes later, after retracing my journey through the hospital maze and stepping back onto the street (Trudy's voice, in my head, exclaiming "Fresh air!"), I realized that I had left my umbrella back in her waiting room--and, as I thrust my hands into my raincoat pockets, that I had neglected to give her the birthday present I'd picked out at Sarah's loft: a pendant made from a nugget of ruby-colored glass.

It was raining the next day, too--another day on which I'd chosen to venture into town. I parked my car in the Charles Hotel garage and walked across the Square toward the Yard. Mercifully, the rain let up just then, so I took the longer route through the phalanx of brick buildings, stopping briefly to regard and contemplate the only place of employment I had ever really known.