“Just do the best you can. Try to relax over it,” Martin counseled sympathetically.
“I’ve got to do better on the next test.”
“There’s no ‘got to.’ No one person is expected to excel at everything, Peter.”
“Claire always does. I wish I was smart like her, Dad.”
“You are smart in your own way.”
“Not like her,” Peter said stubbornly.
“We’re all different.”
A fine boy, Peter was, a serious, responsible child. But it was true, he’d never have the intellectual fire of Claire. Too bad! And he thought: A boy needs it so much more. Then he thought: Claire would be furious if she could hear me say that.
He put his hand on the child’s shoulder. And something of the tenderness that was in him must have been conducted like a current through his touch, because Peter looked up anixously.
“Are you unhappy, Dad?”
“No, no, of course not Why should I be?”
“Well, I thought—Enoch says you’ll miss Claire so much. Will you?”
How many more times would he be required to answer that question?
“Yes, we all will, won’t we?”
“But you will especially.”
The boy’s eyes, trusting and shy, rested on his father’s face. And for the first time, Martin did not turn away from that reminder of Hazel, that quiet gaze.
He cleared his throat. “Gosh, you’re growing. Is that the only sweater you’ve got to wear?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“The cuffs are halfway to your elbow.”
“I grew three inches since last year. Haven’t you noticed?”
No, he hadn’t noticed, he’d been so absorbed with other things.
“We’ll go shopping next Saturday morning. I guess you’ll need practically everything, won’t you?”
“Marjorie’s been wanting things ever so long. Her dresses are too short, and last year’s spring coat doesn’t fit at all.”
“ ‘Ever so long’? Why didn’t she ask me?”
“I guess she thought you were too busy.”
“She could have gone shopping with Claire again.”
“But Claire’s been getting ready to go away.”
“Gosh,” Martin said doubtfully, “I don’t know anything about what little girls should wear.”
“You could just get what the other girls in her class have, couldn’t you?”
“You’re right,” Martin said.
The boy’s kindness struck to his heart. Ever since their mother’s death, it seemed these children had been gradually drawing together. And he thought of the adult fears they must have, these good children of his. They had still so much to go through: teeth to be straightened, homesickness at camp, sex education with its wonders and dangers. (How to convey to them some rudimentary knowledge, when you knew so very little yourself?) Then college boards, and after that, the earning of a livelihood. How to do that without being trampled in the crush, and still refrain from doing any trampling, still keep some of that first, clean Sunday-school decency?
Claire sees the world die way my father saw it, Martin thought suddenly. She thinks she’s sophisticated, and in some ways, superficially, she is. But fundamentally, she is like my father.
He looked at the clock. They would have taken off by now, headed eastward toward an old, poor, dangerous land. No, he couldn’t allow himself to grow old even if he wanted to. He still had too many people to think about.
He smiled at Peter. “Well, we’ll take care of everything. Now I suggest you go to sleep. It’s late and tomorrow’s Monday.”
He went into his den. All the little objects in the room, the lamps and bookends, the ashtrays and the clock, glowed like jewels in the light of the naked white walls. Suddenly and for the first time, he understood why he had surrounded himself with whiteness. That first room of hers—And he opened the closet, where on the top shelf, still in its English wrapping paper, gone dusty and brittle with years, stood the Three Red Birds, summertime version. Taking it down, he propped it against a shelf, then stood a moment, studying the rhythm of the birds and the background of that living green which she so loved.
“Among trees,” she used to say, “one hears the world breathe.”
So tomorrow he would hang it up at last and face reality. Had it, though, been all real? Sometimes it seemed unreal, an enchantment that couldn’t possibly have been as he remembered it. And if they had lived together, sharing a roof, childhood diseases, plumbing bills and fatigue, how would it have been then? How endured?
That, my friend, you will never know.
It was time for sleep, if he was to do his best in the morning. Tomorrow’s surgery was going to be tough. The patient was a student, a young physicist, already possessed of awesome knowledge beyond Martin’s comprehension. And something was growing in his head, something which Martin would reach in to find, probing deeper and deeper, not knowing until the very last whether his most educated conjecture had been correct. How could a man ever get used to such a venture? Each time was like the first time. And on the slipper chair in his bedroom he sat down to go over the steps and possibilities for tomorrow.
When he had reviewed his mental diagrams to his satisfaction, he allowed his mind to wander and ate an apple. Hazel had always provided a piece of fruit for him at bedtime. Now Marjorie continued the custom. He sat back to enjoy the comfort of it: a fine tart apple, a Northern Spy, he’d guess. There had been a tree outside his room. Oh, the life in that tree! Midsummer rustlings and rapping all night at the house wall when polar winds drove. The apples of boyhood: Russets, Greenings, Gravensteins. Wasps in sweet, rotting piles of apples on the grass. Basket on the porch when Pa sickened and died.
When I die, my patients will bring neither apples nor tears to my house. Some of them will not even remember my name. “Some big doctor did the operation,” they will say. But my father—how they loved him! And he loved them! They never knew—how could they?—how little he knew. And he, even he didn’t know how little he knew. Not his fault, of course. He wouldn’t believe it if he could come back and see what I am going to do to that young man tomorrow morning.
So one pays for everything. We know more, we can do more; but we are not the fathers to the sick that my father was, and they do not love us.
He walked to the window to pull the curtains shut. Under a white sky glow, the city throbbed. Even from this height, Martin could hear its murmur. Only yesterday he’d stood at a window looking down at the crowd pouring in for his medical school commencement. The cap and gown, so regal and austere, had hung ready in the closet. Alice had sat between his parents in the second row. The parents had looked small and gray. He could remember thinking that some of the parents had been young. He could remember Tom being solemn and Perry, lost now, choking on laughter. Dr. Perrault gave a long speech about medical advances, great changes coming. Names were called. He’d had an awful feeling he’d stumble up or down the step getting the diploma. Then majestic music, marching out. Pa shook his hand. Had those been tears or only blinking into the light, into the sun? “Dr. Farrell,” Pa had said, the first to call him that.
Thirty-five years, he thought now. There’s still so much I haven’t done. And as always came that sense of rushing time, like the wind in a boy’s ears as he runs downhill.
He pulled the curtains and picked up the telephone. “Who is this? Miss Kerrigan? My patient Bateman in Room 1002, is he still restless?” (Restless, yes, why not, poor boy, on this long, long night, this speeding night, not long enough for him?) “Have Dr. Cotter come in to look at him, will you? Yes, thank you.”
He was worried about young Bateman, so bright, so eager, so terrified. When a man didn’t expect to recover, Martin had found out, he often didn’t. There really was such a thing as the will to live. Once he had thought it an old wives’ tale and had said so with some scorn when his father had told of it.
“There are some things we’ll n
ever know,” Pa had said, and it was true. Body and mind are interwoven. Or call it soul, if that is the name which satisfies you.
Sighing, Martin drew off his shoes. You could relax a little when you had a resident like Fred Cotter watching over things. It didn’t happen often. Once in a blue moon, among the waves of perfectly competent, willing young people, came one who had that special feel, a sort of inner birthlight, so bright, so flaming, that nothing would ever put it out, not age, nor wealth, nor prestige, nor even love. A man like that is a partner in the universe, you might say. Albeniz would have approved of Cotter.
He had got his old diary out to show to Claire before she went away. It lay now on the table, opened at the frontispiece where he had written that quotation from Aesculapius which, forgetting that he had known it long before, he had chosen again for the pediment of the institute. And he saw himself on the bed under the sloping roof of his room in Cyprus—sweet scent of warm wood shingles in July—writing with the book propped on his knees.
That Greek physician, alive in a time and place so different from this as scarcely to be imagined anymore, had perceived the truth. The lustrous sky of Attica, Martin thought; he had always fancied it as having been particularly blue. Oh, he would go there yet, take his children someday and see it. “Yes, yes,” he murmured, turning out the light. Then clearly, loving the sound of the old words, he spoke them aloud into the darkness.
“For where there is love of man, there is love of the art.”
BELVA PLAIN is the internationally acclaimed author of nineteen bestselling novels. She lives in northern New Jersey.
Belva Plain, Random Winds
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