Page 1 of The Doctor's Wife




  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE - Bones

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART TWO - Flesh

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  PART THREE - Need

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  PART FOUR - Heart

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  PART FIVE - Prayers

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  PART SIX - Extremities

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Acknowledgements

  Teaser chapter

  A PLUME BOOK THE DOCTOR’S WIFE

  ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and winner of a James Michener Award. Her short fiction has been published in The Greensboro Review, The Witness, and New Letters. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.

  Praise for The Doctor’s Wife

  “What Elizabeth Brundage has done with The Doctor’s Wife kept me up two nights—the first was the one in which I read it, and the second was the night when I kept trying to argue with her. ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ I wanted to say—but yes, he would. He would almost surely do all that. And so would she.”

  —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller

  “The Doctor’s Wife is certainly a tense and compelling psychological thriller, but it’s more than just a page-turner. In her dark depiction of small-town intolerance, Brundage invites us to question . . . our engagement with the world. My favorite (and truly the darkest and saddest) line of the book is the very last.”

  —Ruth Ozeki, author of My Year of Meats and All Over Creation

  “Elizabeth Brundage has exquisitely captured the tension that resides at the crossroads of self and society. The Doctor’s Wife encapsulates not only our uncertain, conflicted times but the maddening, endearing, fascinating contradictions of the American moral construct. This novel is as politically pertinent as it is a page-turner.”

  —Meghan Daum, author of The Quality of Life Report

  “The Doctor’s Wife is a full meal of sex, danger, and small-town paranoia which I greedily devoured.”

  —Laurie Fox, author of The Lost Girls

  “Elizabeth Brundage’s prose reveals an honesty, clarity and grace uncommon for any novel, let alone a debut, and her insights consistently surprise and astonish . . . The Doctor’s Wife is a novel to savor, praise and share.”

  —David Corbett, author of The Devil’s Redhead and Done for a Dime

  “Steeped in psychological suspense, compelling and compulsively readable.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  PLUME

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Books Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a

  Viking edition.

  First Plume Printing, December 2005

  Copyright © Elizabeth Brundage, 2004

  All rights reserved

  Title-page photograph © Brian Cencula/CORBIS

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Viking edition as follows:

  Brundage, Elizabeth.

  The doctor’s wife : a novel / by Elizabeth Brundage.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-436-25926-2

  1. Physicians’ spouses—Fiction. 2. New York (State)—Fiction.

  3. Physicians—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.R84D63 2004

  813’.6—dc22 2003065773

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHERS NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCT
S OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Scott, Hannah, Sophie, and Sam

  Goosey Goosey gander,

  Whither shall I wander?

  Upstairs and downstairs,

  And in my lady’s chamber;

  There I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers;

  I took him by the left leg

  And threw him down the stairs.

  —MOTHER GOOSE

  Prologue

  The memory starts here, in my apron pocket, with the gun. I remember holding it. It felt good, cold. And inside my body it was hot, blistering hot, and I took the gun out of my apron and started walking across the kitchen floor and it came to me that I had memorized every squeal in those old wood planks and I went to the cellar door, which was laughing blatantly in my face, and I got my hammer and I started whaling on that door thinking, Fuck you, you assholes, fuck you a thousand times and fuck all your mothers! And I hacked away at that door like it was some kind of live animal, and then it was open, it was broken, it was striated, and there was wood all over the place, and chipped paint like all the pieces of my heart, and I helped myself to the darkness beyond it, and I rumbled down the stairs in my work boots, into the cold stink of the cellar, and I grabbed him. I said, Get up, you’ve caused me enough fucking trouble, and he shook in my grasp, like a child, he shook, and I could see in his face the reckoning, I could see he was sorry, he had come around, he had come full circle, and I knew somehow that I was responsible for that, I had done that and it made me proud. I yanked on him and he in his weakened state cowered and I could feel the temptation to do it right then, I could feel it, I had to work at suppressing it. I wanted it to be over, I wanted him to be somewhere else, buried deep in the ground where no one would ever look and in the spring it would be covered with flowers and those lovely fluffy dandelions that you can blow into a thousand pieces. I used to do that when I was little and I used to wish for things but I never got what I asked for and now, in retrospect, when I consider my unrelenting devotion to Jesus, I have to say that I am sorely disappointed.

  They find me on the ground, drooling in the dirt, the river howling in my ears, my mother’s red wool coat twisted up my hips. I can taste blood in my mouth, and can see a little bit of my yellow hair on the ground and my hand is like a dead bird, and I can see now that the gun is there and it is dead, too. The gun is a dead skunk. And my hand is just a white bird. And the skunk has made a bad smell. I wish my husband had tried harder, because then we would have had a chance. I wouldn’t have done any of this. I just wanted to lead a good Christian life. But I was the Devil’s wife, that’s the truth of it. And even Jesus can’t save you from that. For years I have tried to overcome my weaknesses. For years I have told myself that it didn’t matter, what he did to me, all those years ago. That hot summer day when he knocked on my father’s door. I was just this little girl, a black taste like tar in my mouth when I picture the real truth to that. And he was already a man, he had hair on his face, a well-defined Adam’s apple, a deep voice. I was just a small skinny girl with cuts on my knees and burrs stuck to my dress. He took that from me. He stole it. And I want it back now, pathetic as it may sound to you. I want it back.

  The detective’s name is Bascombe, a windswept man in an old hunting coat, with a face unaccustomed to smiling. He takes off the coat and throws it onto the couch across the room. Now I see his shirt, a simple white button-down, and the worn blue jeans held up by suspenders. He is nearly fifty, a patient man, a hunter. I can tell by his face that he is alone, unmarried, and carries a deep sense of regret. It is his talisman, regret. It keeps him safe. He is a man, I realize, with little faith, and I tug on my cross to remind him of my own. Because even a jaded detective knows that a man without faith is lost.

  A cop comes in with some coffee, places the paper cup in front of me, then leaves the room. The detective sits in his chair behind his cluttered desk. The rain batters the window behind him and it is almost dawn and I can tell they’ve gotten him out of bed and that the coffee is a necessary stimulant. Scattered across his desk with alarming clarity are the photographs of my father’s house, large black-and-white prints that portray an aspect of the awful things I’ve done, but only an aspect. There is the body of the man I’ve shot. The bullet wound on the upper flesh of his thigh. The hole that has burst and ripped through the legs of his pants and the blood splattered like paint around it.

  I don’t realize that I’m shaking until I take the cigarette. The detective reaches across the desk and lights it and I meet his eyes and he smiles a little. It is an appealing gesture, and as we smoke together it is as though we are friends sharing the quiet emergence of morning, and not bitter enemies. His eyes, gray as wet slate, tinted with the history of all he has seen, watch me relentlessly, without even a glimmer of mercy. He seems immune to my beauty, which normally spreads like a viral rash across the skin of a man. “Are you comfortable?” he asks, pushing the ashtray across the desk. “Is the coffee all right?”

  I haven’t even tasted it. “Yes, it’s fine, thank you.”

  “Do you understand why you’re here?”

  I drink to avoid answering. The coffee tastes like turpentine; I wonder if they’ve put something in it.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your relationship with Dr. Knowles,” the detective says.

  I try to think. I don’t understand the word relationship. “He’s my friend.”

  “And his wife?”

  I look at the detective directly. “What do you want, Detective? What do you really want?”

  “What do I want?” He looks surprised. “I’m interested in your side of things.”

  This makes me laugh, but then the tears run down my face. He takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and hands it to me and I wipe my eyes and smell the square of white cloth. It smells clean and fresh, like laundry detergent, and I am reminded for a moment of my mother. It makes me cry, it makes me cry and cry while the detective sits there and watches. He isn’t in any hurry. He doesn’t make me feel bad. “Take your time,” he tells me and I stutter to catch my breath, spitting and gasping and stuttering, and I imagine it is a good performance for the detective, who is the type who cries secretly at movies, who is easily betrayed by women, and I think perhaps it will make him feel sorry for me, it will make him care. He gives me another cigarette and I smoke it gratefully and I remember my husband the day we met that hot afternoon on my father’s porch. Simon Haas was a nothing then. A bumbling artist. He wanted to do my portrait. He’d been watching me all afternoon, hiding behind the brambles. But I saw him; I knew. I was playing with the cats, one was orange, the other calico. He knocked on the door. Portraits for sale, he said with his lips trembling. I stood there. I could feel him wanting me. My father, who was on the couch, moldy with disease, hired him. Money’s no object was what he said, a plan already festering inside his twisted mind. When Simon went out to get his paints, my father told me to fix my hair. I raced up to Mama’s room, used her tortoiseshell comb, dabbed on her lipstick, which was ruby red and crumbled like an old crayon when I pressed it to my lips.

  That was the day I smoked my first cigarette.

  “Have you ever been in love, Detective?”

  He doesn’t answer me.

  “I was just a stupid kid. I didn’t know anything.” The words tumble out slowly, as if I am reciting a poem, a child’s nursery rhyme. “He saved my life, you know.”

  The detective shifts, a confused expression on his face. “Who did, Mrs. Haas? Who saved your life?”

  But I am crying too hard to answer.

  The detective reaches across the table and takes my hand and for a moment I enjoy the warmth of his flesh, the rough care he shows me. But then I pull away, I have to. I don’t want his pity. “No,” I say, shaking my head, the tears rolling out. “I can’t tell you, I won’t.??
?

  But this isn’t true. I’m bursting to tell. Bursting.

  PART ONE

  Bones

  1

  SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT Michael Knowles wakes to the sound of his beeper and picks up the phone. “You want Finney,” he tells the page operator. “I’m not on call tonight.”

  “You are now, Dr. Knowles,” the operator says officiously, and puts him through to the ER. A nurse comes on and brings him up to speed in a voice shrill with hysteria. The patient, she explains, a thirteen-year-old girl from Arbor Hill, is in labor, four months premature. “Boyfriend dropped her off about an hour ago and split. No prenatal care, no insurance. Now she’s bleeding all over the place and I can’t get anyone to give me a consult. Your partner’s puking his guts out in the men’s room. I’m told it’s food poisoning.”