HE’S A HANDSOME man, lanky, with black sleepy eyes and soft skillful hands: Gerald Wilcox, a doctor in Sperry, Montana, specializing in the ear, nose, and throat. He no longer drinks much now — champagne at a wedding, wine at the table if guests are present. A glass, maybe two. He’s not graced with a huge reservoir of will power. You do what you can, and what he’s been able to do is rein in the drinking. Not give in dominion.
“It makes you morose, don’t you see that?” Not to mention the driving around, not to mention people’s trust in you. It’s too small a town. Why do I have to say these things?”
This is Charlotte talking, his wife of twenty-two years. Born Charlotte Timmons — calls to mind “timid,” that’s the joke of it — she is a tall forthright woman, brassy-haired. “Gerald,” she tells him, “I am forty-four years old. I never intended to be a woman who wears a girdle, a women with chins.” She pinches the excess flesh, creates a wattle, and exhales with showy contempt. Of their marriage she has lately said, “This is not a business arrangement, Gerald. This is something else. Do I make myself clear?”
He pretends bafflement. “Darling,” he says, “my feelings have not changed one iota — in fact they’ve grown deeper, more complex.”
But, yes, he knows what she’s talking about. Blessedly, these complaints are intermittent. Life proceeds, slips from one state to the next; at odd moments passions reawaken.
Their only child, Jeanette, is plain-faced, secretive, bookish, as lanky as Gerald. She has recently asked that he knock off calling her his Little Bean.
“And what might you prefer,” he inquired, “Jeanette, Queen of the Euphrates?”
“Don’t be mean,” Charlotte told him. He said he wasn’t. “You don’t think I’m being mean, do you, honey?” he asked his daughter.
She cut her eyes at him, made them slits. “No, Daddy.”
Last year she was reading Little Women, this year — it’s 1959 — John O’Hara. Wilcox came upon the book among her things while foraging for the stapler. “Well, we don’t censor what a person chooses to read in this house,” Charlotte said when showed one passage to her.
Wilcox read aloud: “He kissed her and put his hand on her breast. Without taking her mouth away from his she unbuttoned the jacket of her suit and he discovered that she was wearing a dickey, not a blouse, and then put his hand down into her brassiere until he was able to cup her breast in the curving palm of his hand.”
A great arching of Charlotte’s brows. She brought her face near his. “Oh, my,” she said. “Would you put your hand down into my brassiere, Gerald? Would you cup my breast?”
He decided that each of them has a talent for secretiveness. Three secret hearts under one roof.
Nearly every night, he inscribes a few lines in his journal. He notes the ebb and flow of infectious disease. If he and Charlotte have been to a movie, a synopsis appears, a terse critique. He makes reference to the weather, if noteworthy: Cheated of summer this year. Such gloom. Or: Woke last evening to a lightning storm. Jeanette came into our bed, fearing wildfires . . . explained how remote the possibility. Or: Walked uptown over the noon hour. Green fuzz on the trees along First.
Now and then, something like: Saw Mrs. D — this forenoon, had the very disagreeable task of telling her that the tumor has begun to encroach on the esophagus. Where some people get their stoicism is more than I can fathom.
Flipping back a few years — 1952, 1949 — he finds the occasional entry he can make no sense of: That business with the Bagnolds continues to nettle me.
Not a clue.
Strangely, he seldom rereads what he’s written. He’s not addicted to it. If pressed, he couldn’t say why he goes to the trouble, except it pleases him to keep this accounting. Giving up the journal falls outside the realm of what he can do.
In any case, the daily drinking is history, done with two years now and not much missed. But one night perhaps every six weeks, he takes to his office — it occupies the spacious front parlor of the house at 118 Plympton Street, a house of high ceilings spidered with hairline cracks, endowed with several rooms the Wilcoxes barely use — and injects himself with an ampule of morphine. Then he composes longer entries in his journal.
For instance: I do not feel invincible. Indeed, I feel so near the great powers that it is no trouble to imagine being crushed by them, ground into powder, yet I do feel very much alive, there is no doubt of that. A pity one cannot feel this way more of the God-damned time. Having written this, he pauses. No, disastrous, he writes, lets the fountain pen dawdle in his hand.
The journal books, black and soft-sided, are kept in the top-right drawer of his desk. It’s a locking desk, but the key has long ago vanished, so it’s conceivable that Charlotte has inspected them at length. Perhaps even his daughter as well. Once, he went to the trouble of plucking a long hair from his head, licking it, and pasting it unobtrusively across the opening of the drawer, a trick he’d acquired from a mystery story. Then he thought better of it, and had a laugh at himself.
And, too, some incidents fail to appear in the journals. The night, for instance, when he drove his car onto the ice of McCafferty’s Slough. A luscious, ludicrous evening. This slough had the shape of an oxbow, nearly a full circle segregated from the river’s main channel by a narrow, birch-lined dike. A thin crust of snow lay atop the ice, but in places the wind had blown it clear. He drove from one end to the other, spinning gloriously, dodging the occasional squat black icehouse. It was late winter, the air mild and seductive. How had he come to be there, out on the ice? Drinking, yes, he’d been to a roadhouse called Sammy’s, but he wasn’t very drunk, only softened, estranged from care.
Driving, he had been telling one of his oldest, lamest jokes — Hey, you in the field there, I been going up this hill for close to two hours, don’t it ever end? Oh hell, stranger, there ain’t no hill here, you just lost your two hind wheels — when the hind wheels of his own car cracked through the ice. McCafferty’s Slough wasn’t deep, seven or eight feet at most. It harbored perch and whitefish. Muskrats burrowed in the mud along its bank. Walking the ice, you’d see them squiggle out and follow along beneath your boots, elongated, trailing bubbles. But there were — he did know this — springs feeding the slough, which left the ice untrustworthy in spots. And so as he finessed a lovely skidding spin, telling his lame joke, the back end of the Buick dropped through, stopping them short. It was quickly apparent that no amount of clever rocking back and forth would help.
“For shit’s sake, Gerry,” his companion said.
She was Glenny Parker, a slender girl with a ferocious hook nose, and a belly that was literally concave. A shallow white basin. At work, sometimes, he thought of his hand idling there, making quarter-size circles, which seemed to please her. She hadn’t believed him at first, that he was a doctor, thought he was teasing her.
They set out across the ice, she gripping his arm, with his topcoat around her shoulders, her shoes red kidskin with straps like fine red wire. The night’s hilarity had leached away. They hiked back up the gravel ramp they’d barrelled down a half hour before. The air seemed less mild now. Wind poured the foothills, jangling the snowberries and the brittle remains of the cottonwood leaves. Up the way, not far, was a farmhouse with a light burning. As they drew closer, the light went out.
Wilcox squinted at the mailbox, saw the name, “Maki.” Old Finn, he thought, starting up the drive. A dog emerged from the blackest patch of shadow and ratcheted off a few congested barks, but made no serious effort to charge him.
A cowled light came on above the door. Glenny Parker didn’t know whether to follow or stand back out of sight. She elected to do a little of both.
After a moment, a man in pants and nightshirt came onto the canted slab of concrete that served as a back stoop. Unshaven at this hour, he had a big, fair boy’s face gone to thickness.
“Who’s there?” he said. “Is someone there?” Then, shielding his eyes, “Dr. Wilcox? Is that you?”
All along, the doctor knew, there’d been the chance he’d be recognized, though, naturally, he’d hoped otherwise. But who was this man? A patient? Husband or son of a patient?
Maki looked beyond him. “Someone out there with you?”
The doctor hesitated, then, hearing Glenny’s feet on the gravel, found himself in the position of saying yes, actually, he did have a friend along.
Maki nodded. “That wouldn’ta been you out on the ice?” he asked.
Wilcox wiped his face, chuckled uneasily. “To be honest with you,” he said, “I’m in kind of a jam here.”
Maki acknowledged that he was. The girl’s hands were plunged up to her elbows in the deep pockets of his coat; she looked tiny, brutally out of place. Maki eyed her without comment.
“Let me get the tractor,” he said to the doctor. Wilcox began to protest. All he really wanted was the use of the telephone, though just who he’d had in mind to call at one in the morning wasn’t at all clear.
Maki turned back to the girl. “You better wait inside,” he said. Head down, she slipped away from Wilcox, went up the stoop, and passed through the mudroom into the bright-lit kitchen.
Maki secured the door, then the two men made their way back to the slough, Maki a stolid unhurried presence at the wheel of the tractor, and the doctor standing on the back, grasping the back rim of the seat, authentically chilled now. Yet thinking, This could still turn out all right.
Maki insisted on doing all the work himself, crouching on the ice with his tow chain, grunting out a few words that were lost to the Buick’s undercarriage. He hoisted himself back up to the seat of the tractor. A short blast of diesel smoke, a slippage of the tire cleats before they grabbed, and the car bumped from its hole.
Wilcox stood by, rubbing his hands.
Maki got down again to uncouple the chain, dropped it with a clank into the box on the side of the tractor, and climbed back to the seat.
A week later, undressing in their bedroom, Charlotte asked, “You remember Arlette Bledsoe? She said her brother gave you a hand the other day.”
Arlette Bledsoe’s brother?
“Helped with the car, fixed a flat or some such thing?”
“Oh, that,” he said. “Yes.”
“You didn’t mention it.”
“I guess I didn’t, no.”
“They’ve had a rotten time of it,” Charlotte said. She reminded him that Walter Maki had lost his wife, and that she, Charlotte, had attended the service. At Immanuel Lutheran? In the pouring rain? She was deploying the voice she used for reminding him of things an ordinary person would remember.
He dropped his cufflinks into the wooden tray on his dresser, studying his wife a moment. Nothing accusatory there, he decided.
Briefly, he let himself recall the trip back into town with Glenny Parker. Reaching a pint bottle from the glove box, asking if she wanted a little warmup. “Sure, why not?” she said. She took a small mouthful, swished it between her teeth, then bounced the bottle down on the seat between them. She rode with her head against the far window, eyes shut. He drove her into town, back to her apartment on Lancaster Street, but did not go in.
AND SO tonight, three winters later, Gerald Wilcox is sequestered in his front room, stocking feet on desk, savoring the distant murmur of the furnace, the first swirls of wind brushing the waters of his thoughts.
Morphine, alkaloid derivative of opium . . . from the Greek “morph,” the curious shapes seen in dreams. He can’t hear the word in his mind’s ear without hearing as well his orotund, long-deceased Grandfather Vail. Each evening, one hand on the newel post, the old man would announce he was headed up into the arms of Morpheus, if the seedy bastard would have him. It’s an association Wilcox can’t shake to this day: morphia and sleep, forgetting. Yet unless he overdoes it, unless the day has drained him, he can bypass the sludgy soporific effect, and achieve a state he thinks of as attentiveness.
Or that’s his aim.
His wife is upstairs in bed. She’s been soldiering through a life of Michelangelo, so bloated a tome she has to brace it with a pillow. She reads bits aloud, saying, “What that man endured, up on that scaffolding?” She says, “Oh, that Pope, that Julius, what a monster.”
He hears her neck crack as she turns to see if he’s listening, before she chides him. He says he hasn’t missed a word. Secretly, it pleases him that Charlotte still gives a good God damn about matters beyond the Sperry Golf Club, the hospital auxiliary, the preparation of sauces, and that she cares that the life they’d set out to lead together is not entirely extinguished. And, beyond that, isn’t there a deep, atavistic pleasure in being read to? She has a whiskey voice, as a mystery writer would put it, though in fact the scratchy timbre results from tiny polyps on her vocal cords. Sometimes she lets the book fall, and asks about his patients: the McVicar sisters, Valen and Isabel, six-footers, retired nurses; the Lomasny girl whose larynx was crushed by a strand of barbed wire; and so on, the human parade, morning and afternoon. He should keep their infirmities to himself, but instead he tells Charlotte these true stories, and none of it goes beyond her. If she knows of his wandering, there’s no sign of it. If she’s knows it’s in the past now, there’s no sign of that, either.
But tonight he’s downstairs, with the latest journal book in his lap. Charlotte will have doused the light and gone to sleep.
The telephone sounds.
The upstairs phone rests on the bedside table. By the third ring, Charlotte will have reached for it; her free hand will be sweeping through the empty sheets in search of him. He fetches the thing quickly into his lap, and says, “Yes?”
“Walter Maki,” the caller says.
“What’s the trouble, Mr. Maki?”
“I was counting on having you,” Maki says. Already there’s a note of intransigence.
It’s Maki’s boy, Leonard. Ear problem.
“He’s in a certain amount of pain then?”
“I told him to go back to sleep, there wasn‘t anything we could do till morning, but he was past that.”
Infected mastoid, Wilcox imagines. He asks how old the boy is. He wonders, hearing his words go out, if he sounds drugged. No, certainly not.
Maki says the boy is thirteen.
“All right,” the doctor says. “Bring him in to the office.”
That pushiness in Maki’s voice: “I was thinking of you coming out here.”
So Wilcox agrees to a house call. Driving out Lower Valley Road, he thinks, isn’t it a wonder he’s never before been summoned out on a night he’s injected himself. He feels robust — in the pocket, as the horn players used to say. He lifts his hands from the wheel and the car careers along, hugging the blacktop’s soft-edged runnels, bending neither left nor right. Taking hold again, he drives past the old community hall at Aaberg’s Landing, past the low spot choked with cattails that floods each spring. A burst of aspen leaves blows through the splay of headlights, the words “gold leaf” appear in his head, and he thinks then about angels. Imagine the ceiling of the world ruptured, spewing forth angels. He’s not a believer — not remotely — but this is how his mind works on these nights. Another few miles and he draws alongside the slough. The water is black, still.
Maki admits him, leads him through the mudroom into the kitchen. The boy is on the sofa in the front room. Maki has the stove cranked. There’s a smell, a scent added to the water kettle atop it. Mentholatum. The boy’s cheeks are fiery, and the skin of his neck clammy. He lacks Maki’s square features. His eyes are tipped and melancholy, his face long and weak-chinned.
The swelling is greater than Wilcox had supposed. He palpates the space behind the ear with a light touch. It’s too late in the game for medication alone.
“This has been hurting for a few days, hasn’t it, Leonard?” he asks.
The boy offers a constricted nod.
“You can lie back down.”
To his son, Maki says, fiercely, “Whyn’t you say anything before now?”
“You thought it would take care of itself,” the doctor says. “Isn’t that right?”
Leonard stares back at the two men, blinking, his mouth open in a shallow pant.
“Just human nature,” Wilcox says. He goes back to the brightness of the kitchen and Maki follows.
“We should get him into town,” Wilcox says.
Again, Maki balks. He looks intractable, almost menacing.
“We’re not going to tussle over this, are we?” Wilcox asks, but immediately he undergoes a change of heart, rises to the challenge. “Never mind,” he says. “We can do it here.”
Leonard is brought into the kitchen and seated at the enamel-topped table, with his head on a folded towel covered by a sheet. The doctor numbs the skin behind the ear, though this will work only minimally.
“I have a girl,” he says to the boy. “She’s a little older than you. Jeanette, Queen of the Tigris and Euphrates, I call her.”
With one hand he holds the head still, and with the other makes a cut. The boy flinches, but his reaction is remarkably controlled. The incision produces perhaps three tablespoons of pus, viscous green, vile-smelling. “That’s it,” Wilcox says. “Good.” He irrigates the area with antiseptic, bandages it, administers a hefty dose of sulfa, and Leonard is put to bed again in the front room.
“You’ll sleep now,” Wilcox tells him. The boy stares back, disbelieving, but his eyes already have a glassy, listing look.
“Give you a drink?” Maki says.
“Thanks, no.”
“No drink for you?”
“No.”
“Can I give you some tea?”
“That’s all right,” Wilcox says. He has entered the stage where his thoughts wither, when if he were home he might consider a second dose, a touch-up. It’s never the right idea. He need only recall the night he lost track and went to his knees, retching in the downstairs lavatory, his heart thready and arrhythmic, his rubbery blue-phantomed skin the skin of a corpse. He was mortified that Charlotte might discover him, horrified that she wouldn’t. Nearly three months elapsed before he picked up the needle again. He thought maybe he’d cured himself, but no.
Maki has taken a seat at the table. His palms are turned down upon it , as if to keep it from levitating.
“The boy will be fine,” Wilcox says. He’s still on his feet, bag in hand.
“Sit down,” Maki says.
Wilcox smiles and sits down. “I could stay a minute,” he says.
“This evens us out,” Maki says.
“Well, now, I wouldn’t look at it that way.”
“That night on the ice,” Maki says. “You were a sorry-looking thing.”
Wilcox looks at him, waiting.
“You and that girl.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So let me ask you,” Maki says. “Do you think I ever stepped out on my wife?”
“Mr. Maki, I wouldn’t hazard the first thought on that subject,” Wilcox says.
So this is a chastising. There are worse things.
“You’re sure he’s OK,” Maki says. “He won’t lose his hearing?”
“His hearing will be fine. Trust me.”
“He plays the trumpet.”
“Is that so?”
“His mother was musical,” Maki says. “She wanted him to have the lessons.”
“This shouldn’t hurt a thing.”
Maki shakes his head. He says, “You’re hopped up on something, aren’t you?”
“I’m going to have to be going now,” Wilcox says, standing again. “I’ll leave you this prescription. Be sure he takes all of it.” He pulls out the blank and writes, watching the extravagant looping that is his signature. “Let me see him in a few days.”
Maki leaves the paper where it lies. “You and that silly girl,” he says.
WILCOX’S headlights judder on the washboard, the Buick’s hindquarters drift as he corners at the section lines. Then, abruptly, he’s on blacktop again. He pictures Leonard off in a back room with his trumpet, hopes to Christ the boy possesses a little natural aptitude. The idea of him bleating away in his mother’s memory is more than Wilcox can take on just now.
He lets himself in the rear door of the house on Plympton Street, hangs his coat on the ivory knob in the hall, listens for symptoms of unrest. He pours himself a short inch of bourbon and carries it to his office. Ten past three. No, that’s unfair, he thinks. She was not a silly girl, Glenny — just in the wrong company. She had her talents. For a moment, he recalls her lips creeping into the hollow beneath his ear as he drove, keeping to the back roads, her voice tiny but remorseless, I know what you’d like, Gerry. Stop the car, can’t you? Yet he saw her only once after that night on the frozen slough, and things had not gone well.
He sits for a time. Eventually, he takes up the journal, and writes: Why do you never get used to the stink of pus? If you could smell that exact hue of green, that‘s how it would be . . . and yet it’s just a broth of white cells, the body’s defenses. What purpose is served? Why not the rusty smell of blood, the sweetness of breast milk instead? Was I ever taught this?
Again he finds himself picturing the ceiling of the world, with white cells clustering like a mob of angels.
He writes: Why this clamoring for purpose? There’s a footfall outside his door. He slaps the journal shut and braces himself.
But it proves to be his daughter. “What are you writing?” she asks.
“Oh, you know, these notebooks of mine,” he says. You don’t mean you‘ve never poked around in them?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Jeanette says, aggrieved.
Getting to be quite a capable liar, Wilcox thinks, not unhappily.
“What are you doing up?”
Jeanette shrugs, approaches the desk.
“Not sleeping again?” he asks. “Would you like me to give you something?”
“No.”
“I could.”
“I know,” Jeanette says. “Anyway, it’s too late.”
Wilcox checks the filigreed clock hands again and somehow it’s gotten to be five past five. “So it is,” he says.
Jeanette is barefoot, wearing a long flannel gown with a tiny satin bow at the neckline. Her hair is profuse, like Charlotte’s, but not nearly so radiant a yellow, and at the moment it looks sea-wracked. She has a long neck and still no bust to speak of, though she’s been menstruating for a good two years. Were it not for her gaze — watchful, not in the least dreamy — she might have been painted by Mayfield Parrish.
“Aren’t your feet cold?” he says.
“I suppose.”
Wilcox asks if she knows a boy named Leonard Maki.
Jeanette shakes her head.
“He plays trumpet.”
“Don’t know him,” she says.
“I thought you might. From school.”
She stands, arms crossed, shifting her weight, her lungs filling and emptying.
After a moment, he asks, “Anything troubling you soul, dear heart?”
“No.”
“You can tell me.”
But of course she can’t.
“Something’s always troubling the soul,” Wilcox says. “It’s an irritable organ.”
He offers a smile, which is not returned.
“I’m all right,” she says. “I’m not disconsolate.”
Wilcox smiles inwardly at this word she’s plucked from the ether. “Well, it is the way it is,” he says. Then it’s her turn to nod, and he supposes they understand each other.
“You hungry?” he asks, standing, putting the journal aside. He touches her on the head, works his fingers into the tumbling snarls, which, briefly, she allows.
She follows him down the dim hallway into the kitchen. He opens the refrigerator and stares in at the lighted shelves and closes the door again.
“Do you know how to make that coffee cake?” he asks his daughter. “With the crumbles?”
“In the brown book,” Jeanette says, pointing with her chin. “Fannie Farmer.”
Wilcox reaches it down, locates the page, which is grease-spattered to transparency in places, with notations in his wife’s dishevelled, back-slanting hand: “Gerald likes.”
“No yeast in this one?” he asks.
“No, Daddy.”
He gets out what he needs, also the coffee tin. An easy recipe. In a matter of minutes, he slides the baking pan onto the oven rack.
“Better set the timer,” Jeanette says, and so he sets the timer.
He collects the bowl and the utensils and runs water on them in the sink. Over his shoulder, he says, “Why don’t you go wake your mother?”
“She won’t want to get up this early.”
“Oh, I know,” he says. “But go anyway. Tell her she won’t want to miss this.” He shakes his hands, dries them under his armpits, looks his daughter in the eye. “Use those exact words. Say, ‘He says you won’t want to miss this.’”
No further objection from Jeanette. In fact, he detects a twitch of conspiracy about the lips as she turns to leave. Moments later, he notes her tread along the squeaky boards of the upstairs hall.
He goes and stands at the back door, looking out where a thin silver light is falling through the empty chestnut branches. He doesn’t feel too damn awful, considering. Has the makings of a headache, where the neck cords meet the skull, but it will pass. Food will help, and caffeine. Later, in the afternoon, the fatigue will hit, that fuzziness he detests. If there’s no one in the office, maybe he can sneak upstairs and lie down. If not, the tiredness, too, will pass. He pictures himself beginning a new page: 18 November. Made Charlotte a coffee cake. Maybe he’ll record what she has to say about this unusual occurrence. Maybe she’ll notice him climbing the stairs, and follow, launching salacious suggestions at him in a stage whisper. Maybe he’ll get to write: C. and I napped before supper. He watches a black dog cut through the yard, tail switching. After a while, the timer dings; his whole upper body startles, as if he’s been seized from behind. Then he remembers to breathe again.
He slides the baking pan from the oven, sniffs the sugary cinnamon, pokes a toothpick into the center the way Charlotte would. It comes out clean and dry. He sets the pan on a wire rack, runs water into the percolator, taps in coffee, sets the flame. He listens for his wife. He pictures her getting to her feet and pulling on her robe, the slippery blue nylon, yanking the sash, then tousling some life into her night-heavy hair. Waiting, alone here in the kitchen, he suddenly wonders what will become of the journals after his death. He’s barely given this a thought before. He’s not fifty yet — how many more will have accumulated in the drawer by then, the pebbled-leather volumes swollen with his daily commentary, his nagging queries of himself? And how soon will it be before he relaxes his guard and lets the rest come forth — that chill along his inner arm before the needle slips in. The warming flood of ruminations. He pictures the heap of journals pulled into a lap, flopped open and read, one after another. How can it feel like comfort to him that they will be? And then what? Strange to admit, it’s not a thought that troubles him.
[First appeared in The New Yorker, July 20, 1998; reprinted in The Best of Montana's Short Fiction, 2004]
