Doc Dennis must have convinced himself that such talk also helped the girl to grieve. Fearnot was his goddaughter after all. But most often it was she comforting him: “Could have happened to anybody.” “No one but you really blames you.” “Everybody knows you loved my dad past you-all’s even being brothers.” “You’d give your soul to get him back.” —Such phrases the child repeated as if by rote to a middle-age doctor who needed to hear each and daily. Doc Dennis himself had often used these very lines first on patients then their survivors.
Three ready-made sentences contain so much of human consolation: “I love you,” “I’m real proud of you,” “I am so sorry for your pain.” It seemed odd that a dead man’s daughter should be offering such sentiments to her father’s executioner, but she did. Meanwhile, she sometimes sat in his car imagining the doctor’s own wife and grammar-grade kids waiting for him at their dining-room table back in town.
Fearnot herself felt comforted by Dennis, his being so like her dad in face and gestures. Men’s chin-dents seemed carved by a single surgeon bent on giving both a similar Viking-edge. The physician had long ago, in the way of lifelong friendships, taken to sounding like the man he would later kill. Some people swore such imitation came from simple hero-worship. They said such boyhood admiration had lately helped make Dennis a better person, less a brat.
Both born Scotch-Irish, both grew tall and athletic. The future-doctor proved more nervous and fast-moving, tending to blink. By the time these two turned thirty-five even their blond hair started silvering alike, from the outer edges inward. They’d lately been mistaken not just as brothers but twins.
To sell newspapers post-accident, the Falls Herald-Traveler emphasized such similarities. Boys’ near-identical high-school-annual portraits became a front-page staple. The boating mishap, a gory story, had everything. “If it bleeds, it leads,” journalists say, and this one hemorrhaged for months. Both gents were highly-placed, good-looking, family guys. Their joint fate was more widely reported thanks to a certain tasty Cain-Abel angle. “Inseparable friends” led to thoughts of one’s head. Quiet rumors about their high school showering reemerged.
After a funeral attended by six hundred, the doctor fell silent around others, including his own confused wife and kids. Doc Dennis finally started seeing patients again. But, by now, he felt most safe with Fearnot.
Her dad, during high school, had been elected student body president. The future-banker worked after school in his well-liked father’s seed-and-feed store. They lived in a narrow if tidy house on Villa Street. Young Dennis, far richer, never nominated for office, mainly built pep-rally bonfires and played a witty harmonica in school talent shows. Since his father owned and managed the mill, Dennis needed no weekend- or summer-jobs. He was considered fun and pretty, notable for owning the best red luxury-roadster to ever gather dust in our school lot. As citizen and student, Dennis never quite caught up with the easy loping dignity of his quiet pal. Seeing his poorer buddy wear a mended tweed jacket, Dennis had his father’s seamstress patch a brand-new blazer of his own. The rich boy saw and accepted his friend’s superior standing in Falls, but others guessed it had always peeved him.
After the decapitation, our local paper kept publishing Doc Dennis’s own high school yearbook portrait. At eighteen he looked almost disabled by handsomeness. Beneath the grinning image ran cryptic lines written by one “Anony-mouse”:
Dimpled, adored, everywhere visible.
If facile and slight and just slightly risible.
What some would call Promise, others term Moisture.
And yet the whole world will still be your oyster,
Dennis the Menace.
Some said he chose med school to offset lingering doubts about his basic smarts, his gravity. He’d had to work hard to even get through basic course-work, he always admitted that. Finally, as Falls’ youngest family physician, he’d made himself welcome then indispensable. Like his competitor, Doc Roper, he was good in the office, weak at getting out patient bills. Dennis was elected to the vestry at All Saints Episcopal. He’d be present at eleven o’clock service, sometimes wearing tinted glasses, however bad Saturday-night’s hangover. Till the boating mistake, he seemed to have finally outrun and outranked his old rival and best friend.
DOC DENNIS AND Fearnot were soon observed sitting by the side of one-lane rural roads. They would be seen talking there while using hand-gestures, shaking their heads, plainly acting out some event still emotional for both. His car was parked out beyond Moonlight Lake in a farming community where doctors still made house-calls; any physician’s vehicle was therefore widely-known from being often-awaited. Locals guessed why Dennis would venture so far from town and with whom. Folks needed their attractive doctor to be sane and back at work. So, in an act of unusual mercy (or self-interest) Falls’ town gossips held back their usual worst. “Haven’t those two been through enough already? Who else can get them past this? Not her mother. They say she’s off the deep-end forever. Catching that in her bass-net, who can blame her?”
Parking unchaperoned with a dead friend’s teenage daughter would only be allowed a doctor so beloved, only one lovely girl half-orphaned in this interesting a public way. Maybe such ditch-bank heart-to-hearts would help both mourners. Each had lost weight. Each looked shaken. And when you offered either one condolences downtown, they acted like people just admitting to themselves that they are going deaf while not quite ready to consult a professional. Meaning: They stared at your lips not your eyes. Tilting too far forward, they nodded a lot.
FEARNOT’S MOTHER RARELY left her bed. She now smoked as if enlisted by some government-project that required her, as a patriot, not to eat, only to inhale her nourishment, unfiltered. After the boating accident, a new fear found her: flood. Everyone pointed out how our Lithium River, though it varied in depth, was lately just a goodly little brook. But she felt secure only on her home’s second floor. The banker’s wife could not admit to having witnessed his sudden death, its sounds and sight. She could not bring herself to even look upon the boat-owning culprit. She pointed out how he had drunk the boat’s every drop of gin while she, busy smoking, had tasted none.
People swore Doc Dennis, so apologetic he appeared bent, had aged a decade in six months.
THE NEXT STEP is mysterious yet understandable if you think about it long. The doctor, despising himself, endlessly admitting that his power-craft navigation had varied from the standard practices of anybody safety-minded, this same doctor once nicknamed Dennis the Menace now sought forgiveness before a very pretty (if raw-eyed) girl of fourteen called Fearnot. Her mother rarely knew where the poor child was. The mother had given up school carpooling, saying that the steering wheels of cars and boats looked too weirdly alike.
Doc Dennis, being Fearnot’s godfather, was the person her family had handpicked to provide her moral education. For hours on end, this guardian and his charge talked alone in his big brown Chrysler sedan. It had become the autumn after the summer’s outboard beheading. It proved the wettest fall on record. You know how two people in a stopped car—during some comically-hard country-downpour—fog up their windows and soon feel even more a quiet unit? Now we must move to rank speculation.
Say her housebound mother is of no use to Fearnot. Say the poor fellow keeps crying in that coughing choppy way grown men finally do. Say this particular day she has been especially missing her dad. Say that, from her passenger-seat, she shifts left to console her stricken godfather. Say she kisses his tears. Say he, newly 41, is the exact age her able missing poppa would also be now. Say she sees a man still slender, hair starting to go valuably silver. Say the fellow present, like the one gone, acts as earnest-harmless yet guarding as any family’s good collie. Say the doctor would do anything to comfort his godchild.
He returns her gentle kiss. From their crying, both their shirtfronts are dampened to a patchy translucency as he hugs her. In adjusting his grip upon her, imagine he accidentally touches her left breast. Its swee
t votive-candle warmth feels steadying, buoyant, a new source of latency, of contact, consolation. Surely the feel of her beginning yielding life there stirs him. Only a dead man would not be stirred.
Say she herself longs to escape into comforting him fully. Say she has noted all his gestures that’re like her father’s, certain exact phrases, even a solemn twinkling way of refusing pity that most guarantees a nice fellow’s getting it. Somehow, by distracting him, Fearnot seeks to finally calm herself. Say these two have often remarked how—during such long drives nowhere—they sense their dead favorite’s spirit-residue alert here in the car with them, in the backseat, even closer. Say that, as any two dry sticks—pressed testing-shifting one against the other—can create a friction sufficient to heat toward flame, some new element springs alive between them. It’s their own first try at providing warmth for a man who lost his head in the tepid green waters. Today it forces them beyond usual caution, past church-worthy control. There is no decision, simply action suddenly. If a blouse has six buttons, you start with the one at the top and open the lowest last.
Imagine how, in her grief, she feels she’s some way consoling her fun-loving father regarding his own death (just as he resurfaced holding aloft the red towrope, gasping while laughing, as he gulps that first fresh air).
Imagine the doctor, her godfather who, at her christening, publicly vowed to help direct her lifelong spiritual-ethical instruction. He is today counting on her to say, “No.” Just as Fearnot depends upon his maturity and worldliness, his Episcopal office-holding, his medical degree, his understanding of village decency.
Say both of them are quite literally crazed with grief. Say only lust can overtake grief’s cold force with its counterclaim nearly as heavy. Say lust can fill a void with no more qualm than water fills a blasted mine. It is difficult to tell then where one force ceases and a new surge has commenced. Say that these two mourners love each other like father and daughter, but are grief-blasted free of any old taboos blocking their way.
Imagine late this afternoon that he forgets his wife has dinner waiting, forgets his kids at table staring at the sunburst wall clock. He never imagines their little stomachs might be making funny hunger sounds. Just say, by evening, Dr. Dennis S— has a whole new thing for which to blame himself. Say Fearnot pretends it never happened, this her only time. It did not occur except as some final emphasis to what began with her father’s cleverly untangling his towrope under clouded lake water. Till, triumphant, lifting red line overhead into clarity, he found air then Doc’s whirring blade atop him.
KNOW THAT SOME several months past that rainy afternoon in a car, this same lean girl is trying to climb a nylon rope in gym class. Fearnot is usually the first one up. Her lady-teacher, always appreciative of every lovely lass in motion, notices something. She summons the girl into her office. Coach Stimson, closing her door, says she just wonders. The girl freely admits to confusion, a lack of having any sort of real period for a group of months. Even while using her own fingers, she cannot quite count right. Nor does the child, still fourteen, seem to understand all that such idle tallying might imply. The lady-coach goes, “Were you absent from one of my Health Class lectures, young lady? A fairly important one?”
The girl’s mother, who’s been too fearful to even venture downstairs below what she now terms “the waterline,” is called to school immediately for a discussion with both gym teacher and school nurse. Their tone scares Fearnot’s mother into venturing down toward her home’s first floor, then driving her own boat-sized white Cadillac. The nurse and one female guidance counselor stand by. The girl has, in simplest terms of innocence, just told them who the father is. She says it was no one’s fault. Just as any random water-skiing accident might be blamed on, well, weather conditions, sight lines, geometry, and no one person.
Fearnot’s mother, arrived for the conference and at once informed, screams to such an extent the nurse must lurch to motion. A tranquilizer-hypo has been readied for the girl but the mom gets stuck first. Drugged, the mother in her flowered hat, an appropriate purse over one arm, swings out of the coach’s office and yells Dr. Dennis S—’s name and deed to a whole gym full of girls’ intramural basketball, and to fifty-odd parents gathered to watch. Fearnot, following, sees only open mouths in rows. Any hope of courtly secrecy is ended.
Then the girl’s mom becomes very vengeful. She feels understandably upset about what a doctorly best friend has done, first to her husband, then to their one child. There is a sad incident where the mother, turned vigilante in her grief, sets the doctor’s brown family sedan ablaze. That car is the admitted site of insemination and it’s suddenly visibly on fire during eleven o’clock service at All Saints. The mother uses this smoky disturbance outside church to run right down the aisle toward him. Pointing, she openly accuses him (witnessed by his wife and three young children) of impregnating his own trusting goddaughter, not quite fifteen. “Justify yourself, dog. Before God, your family and me. Justify yourself, you complete and total red-dicked hound.”
Then, thanks to volunteers from the choir, Fearnot’s mother is physically restrained, dragged for immediate counseling into the rector’s office. It is quite a mess.
ON THE FIRST anniversary of the boating mishap, having driven his own family to a coastal resort in Maine where they’d go unrecognized, this same young doctor waits till midnight. Then, diving off a moonlit beach, he Australian-crawls on out toward New Brunswick, Canada. Back at the rented cottage, Doc Dennis’s wife, aware of the ominous anniversary, insomniac and restless, finds his note on the kitchen table. She phones 911. A Coast Guard cutter intercepts the doctor against his will; he has swum four miles straight out. He appears to be naked. He plainly intends to swim till he cannot. Dr. Dennis is institutionalized for three months, then released. The news of this attempt on his own life, joined with the boating mishap prior to fathering a child on his own innocent goddaughter, requires his family’s moving to a new town.
They choose one in Maine. And, as of last year (Google tells us) this semi-retired medico was still practicing part-time. He is much revered locally, and it is easy to find online a “Dr. Dennis S— medical school scholarship, established by the countless Cobscook Bay residents that ‘Doc’ first befriended then cured. This man, as quiet as he is self-disciplined, has proved capable and essential here. May his tradition of healing be passed along to . . .” Etc.
DURING THOSE TIMES a girl in Fearnot’s condition got sent away to Newport News, Virginia, to “visit Auntie,” actually an institution. The place, once a tobacco-magnate’s mansion, has been retrofitted for young women with brief if unhappy sexual histories. Not one framed picture of a mother or a baby is seen in any of its thirty walnut-paneled rooms.
Fearnot lives there during her pregnancy’s remaining months. All is normal. The baby will be put up for adoption. Its papers guarantee the biologic parents’ names will never prove traceable. Just as Doc Dennis tried to disappear into the North Atlantic, he must have intended that the history of his outside child never be found on public record. He knows a childless God-fearing couple in rural Maryland. The man was a college suite-mate study-partner. Doc does not tell them the name of the coming child’s father. Just, “A quite bright patient of mine, a teen girl from one of our leading families.” Doctors can get around the usual waiting period and Fearnot’s mother readily agrees. The so-called relinquishment papers will be signed right after Fearnot gives birth. The expected bastard’s parentage is described as follows in a file found through a retired archivist (only after this home closed in 1979, perhaps due to improved contraception, or to more girls’ simply keeping their children):
Brilliant forty-one-year-old medical doctor and newly fifteen-year-old girl placed in (his) charge and that he made her get into trouble and family way. Girl (the preg. mother) had been a popular school leader and horseback champion. Family believed to have been mod. wealthy, Father, banker, Wake Forest grad. Girl consid. very pretty and well-liked till lapse. Doctor
was girl’s own godfather, family friend. Used personal influence on young female for own selfish end, apparently. Neither could keep the child. Girl’s mother said doctor later tried taking own life at sea but attempt was foiled (boat, Coast Guard). Every indication—pregnancy proceeds well and that child likely to be bright & presentable, judging from its fortunate if careless parentage.
IN THE SAVAGE kindness of such institutions, she brought her baby to term at the Burwell Home for Unwed Mothers. When found dilated to a correct number of centimeters, she was whisked to a nearby hospital, where the girl got anesthetized so that, by the time she regained full awareness, her infant was already sleeping in its new home. It had just been driven across state-lines into Maryland by qualified adoptive Caucasian parents. They’d literally been seated in a chamber marked WAITING on the far side of a room called DELIVERY. They held two folded blankets just in case: one pink, one blue. To spare her the troubling specifics that so often vex an unaccompanied mother’s drugged imagination, the girl herself was never informed of her own child’s sex. “Can tell you it was a real healthy one,” is all the kindest nurse would say.
Fearnot endured usual lectures, usual crying jags. What most upset this recent mother was her uncontrollable lactation. Nurses had given her a shot to reduce her natural milk. But at night, once she rolled onto her side, Fearnot felt hot lines escape her. She had once completed a book report regarding Madame Curie. Now the heat of her own milk seemed two white lines of radium with a power to glow in darkness. Nourishment was trying to get out and go somewhere and earn its keep. The front of her blouse grew damp, recalling two transparent shirtfronts pressed together in a parked brown sedan. Other nights, as she wept, crying’s hiccups released further milk till it seemed her breasts themselves were spilling blue-white tears, 98.6.