I.O.U

  “Miss Grant—”

  “Try to eat a few bites of your salad, Jennifer.”

  I picked up my fork. “Miss Grant, what do you think she might have been if she hadn’t spent all of that energy trying to be a nice little girl and a nice little woman?”

  “And a good wife and a good mother, too? I don’t know, dear. I can’t honestly tell you that I ever saw any particular latent talent in your mother. She was a good reader, an adequate little artist, she had a typical child’s singing voice, but no Shirley Temple. I don’t really believe she was a case of a frustrated writer or business executive, or what have you. She wasn’t you, dear. There was only one thing that I think she sometimes wanted to do that she couldn’t—”

  “What?”

  “Now and then,” Miss Grant said, slowly, as if she were thinking as she spoke, “I think she really wanted, maybe even desperately wanted, to break a rule. Jump in another puddle. Jump in a lot of puddles! Do something mischievous. Get into trouble. Get away with something she wasn’t supposed to do. But except for jumping in that pitiful little puddle, I don’t suppose she ever did. I do believe I know why, too.”

  “Tell me, please.”

  “The penalty for doing wrong was too high for her to bear.”

  Perhaps from fatigue, my heart was beating abnormally fast and hard. “What penalty?”

  The old woman—who had taught my mother, my father, my sister, my husband, and me—thought again before she spoke. “The one she paid in her good little girl’s heart. Somewhere along the line, she got the idea that she was loved for being good. Unfortunately, the corollary of that idea is that a child will be hated and rejected for being ‘bad.’ Your mother had fine, decent parents, Jennifer, and I’m sure they didn’t mean to give her that message. But give it to her they did. ’Be a good girl, Meg, and we’ll always love you. But do something—anything bad, and you’ll lose our love.’ It was a common message to girl children in those days.” She eyed me for a moment. “Perhaps it still is.”

  “I’ve broken rules, Miss Grant.”

  “What?” Her tone was gently scoffing. “Living with a man before marriage, is that the one you mean? You married him, didn’t you? You came back to your hometown, like a good girl, didn’t you? You hold a respectable, low-paying, womanly, other-serving job. You are honest and ethical to a fault, and I would very much like you to try to tell me exactly which other rules you think that you break.”

  “But Miss Grant, don’t you live by them, too?”

  “Yes.” The old woman sighed. “And most of the time I don’t regret it, but now and then the idea of Paris and Baghdad seem very attractive to me. Don’t they to you, dear?”

  I laughed. “We’ll go!”

  But she only straightened her back a millimeter more and shook her head. “I seriously doubt it, my child, for either one of us. And before you have time to take that as some sort of challenge, let me inquire as to a bit of more mundane business. Is everything all right down at that gallery where we’re funding that outrageous display of art?”

  “I thought you liked it,” I said.

  “Oh, I do!” She chuckled. “I’m especially fond of that parody of Degas’s painting of the woman bathing, where it is a rather plump and surprised-looking man who is caught in the act of bathing, instead. But it does outrage some of the good people of our city, doesn’t it? Faye has told me about those anonymous letters that we have received from MOAC. I’ll admit that I’m worried about protecting the artists and their work from that kind of sublimated rage, and I do believe that we assumed that responsibility when we agreed to sponsor them, don’t you?”

  “Yes, m’am.” I smiled at her. “I’ll talk to Faye.”

  “Soon,” she directed me. “I am truly concerned.”

  “Today,” I agreed, but I resented it a little.

  “Eat more of your salad, Jennifer. You’re too thin.”

  I suddenly wanted to tell my beloved mentor to go jump in a puddle. But I ate the damned salad anyway. I asked her if she remembered who had stood behind her in line to sign the guest book at my mother’s funeral, but she didn’t. When she asked me why, and I told her, she only said, in the Delphic way she sometimes had of saying things she thought you ought to be able to figure out for yourself, “Guilt is such a confusing emotion, isn’t it?”

  Miss Grant had taken a taxi to the restaurant, which made me feel guilty because I knew what a budget-breaker that was for her. Because of that, I insisted on paying for lunch (“But I invited you, Miss Grant!”) and I drove her home. After helping her to her door, and kissing her good-bye, I returned to my car and sat for a few moments with my open notebook in my hand. There wasn’t really anything to write down from my talk with Miss Grant, except maybe “puddle,” and that didn’t exactly seem pertinent. But I thought about that little girl with the overactive conscience that Miss Grant had described to me at lunch.

  “What if…” I mused aloud. “What if Mom believed that our family had committed a ’sin,’ by putting so many people out of work? Wouldn’t that be something she would confess to her priest? And it could certainly account for the fact that she was upset the last time she went to see him.”

  Could that guilt and shame have literally driven her nuts?

  Well, hell, it was as good an explanation as any the doctors had ever given me, but I wasn’t satisfied with it. Not yet. Maybe Pd never find an answer to satisfy me.

  “And that will drive me crazy,” I said, as I started the car.

  7

  MY FRIEND MARSHA HAD ARRANGED A TWO O’CLOCK APPOINTMENT for me with Dr. Calvin Farrell, the gynecologist/obstetrician I had managed to insult at my sister’s house after the funeral. As a result, I was looking forward to this physical exam even less than usual.

  Partly as a delaying action, I stopped in the lobby of the medical building to use a pay phone, before taking the elevator to Dr. Farrell’s office.

  My assistant answered the phone, sounding enormously happy as she said, “Good afternoon! Port Frederick Civic Foundation. Faye Basil speaking.”

  “Hi, Faye, it’s—”

  “Jenny! Oh, it’s wonderful to hear your voice. How are you?”

  I was tempted to kid her about her obvious enthusiasm for taking over my job, but I thought that might cause her to feel guilty and self-conscious, so I just replied, “I’m great, Faye, but I’m a little worried about the New East Gallery. I just had lunch with Miss Grant, and she thinks we ought to hire a—”

  “Security guard. You bet. I’ve hired one, and she’ll be there tomorrow.”

  I paused, slightly taken aback by her efficiency, which shouldn’t have come as even the least surprise to me. I loved the fact that she had hired a woman to do it. It was wonderfully appropriate, and the artists would appreciate her sensitivity. “Good. It sounds as if you’re taking care of business just fine, Faye.”

  “Well, thanks, but I really do miss you.”

  And I felt fortunate in my knowledge that she meant that. We discussed a few items of other business, I answered a couple of questions, but it was clear that there wasn’t much I could have been doing there that she couldn’t do just as well. Again, I wanted to tease her about trying to usurp my job, but I thought better of that, too, and just said good-bye, “for a little while longer.”

  I then rode the elevator up to the third floor.

  Like Father Francis Gower, Doc Farrell was also attended by doting, bustling women. They were his lab techs, his accountants and secretaries, and his majordomo of a nurse/receptionist, Marjorie Earnshaw. A big-boned, imposing woman, she was his Mrs. K, but with a forcefully bitter edge, a woman who never missed an opportunity to tell you how she could have been a doctor if her parents hadn’t forced her into nurse’s school back in 1930 because that was considered more acceptable for girls.

  “What’s the problem, dear?” Marj inquired, pen poised over her appointment book, eyebrows cocked over her reading glasses. She’d worn the same hairstyle for al
l the years I’d known her—hair slicked up and held in place all the way around her skull by an elasticized band, with fat, stiff curls pouring down over her head. On this day, the band was white with a bold pattern of fiery orange and black poppies to match the fabric of her shirtwaist dress. She was a sturdy-looking, buxom woman of middle height, so she could carry it off all right without looking altogether like a fire engine. The orange also matched her lipstick and her stubby fingernails. I couldn’t imagine how she tolerated wearing those bands around her skull all the time; in her place, I would have had to process those poppies into heroin to treat my headache. She said, reprovingly, “I squeezed you in on Dr. Marsha Sandy’s special request. Are you sick? Something urgent that can’t wait for a regular appointment?”

  I swallowed my annoyance. As if there were a chance in hell that I was going to blurt out to her: “I’m run-down because I’ve been in a state of acute depression since my mother died. So what do you prescribe, Marj?” She’d have done it, too; Marj was a great one for passing out samples of pills that the pharmaceutical salespeople left behind.

  “What is it that can’t wait?” she repeated, narrowing her eyes, which were an unattractive hazel, and already a little squinty to begin with.

  I was sufficiently on edge to let her goad me into doing a very thoughtless thing. I leaned forward and whispered: “AIDS test.”

  “Oh?” The hazel eyes opened to their full, if limited, width. She didn’t bother to hide her disapproving surprise. “Then you’ll want a blood workup first thing. Go on down the hall to the lab, Jennifer. I thought you were married.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You haven’t had a blood transfusion?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, then why—”

  I was already regretting my poor choice of a joke, but I jumped in the next puddle anyway. Blame it on Miss Grant. “I haven’t always been married, Marj.”

  “And neither has your husband,” she said sharply, pursing her orange lips. “Have you thought of that?”

  I put my hand to my heart and feigned dismay. “Oh, my. Oh, no!”

  She nodded portentously, full of wisdom and doom, the heavy mass of steel gray curls dipping down, then rising again.

  I turned and escaped down the hall to the lab, feeling less guilty than I should have that I’d managed to put one over on the nosy old bitch. God’ll get you for this, Cain, I chided myself.

  Nurses took my blood and urine samples and told me to wait on a bench until I was called. It gave me time to contemplate my own sins, none of which I cared to confess either to Father Gower or to Miss Grant.

  An hour later, I had disrobed and rerobed in a cotton examination gown—pink with little yellow flowers—and was lying on my back on a metal table with a sheet of white paper under me. My feet were propped up in padded metal stirrups, no longer the cold bare metal ones of yore. (The world was making progress, or at least women were.) It was nearly time for my “yearly” anyway, so we’d gone ahead with the full shebang —breast exam, pap smear, and all. Doc Farrell, once he was finished, pushed his little stool on wheels back away from the end of the table where I lay with my legs splayed and my eyes resignedly focused on the ceiling like the virgin sacrifice in a pagan fertility rite.

  “We’ve always misinterpreted the Victorians, Doc.”

  “Hmm?” he said, as he peeled off his gloves and tossed them in the trash.

  “This is when we should lie back and think of England, not during sex.”

  “Very funny.”

  The physician beyond my knees was seventy-six years old and now delivering the babies of the “baby boomers” that he had delivered. Though he looked the part of the archetypal kindly grandfather, white hair and all, Doc Farrell was infamous for his lousy bedside manner. “You’re sick?” he had once said to me when I had called with a croaky throat. “Why? You need attention? Get a boyfriend.” His idea of a prescription was to tell you to “take two aspirins and if you’re still sick in the morning, I don’t want to hear about it. Call Marj. If she thinks you’re sick enough, she’ll let me know, but frankly, I’ve got a hell of a busy day tomorrow with people who are really sick, and I couldn’t squeeze you in if you were dying, which you aren’t by a long shot.”

  His metal speculum clattered into a metal pan as he threw it down and said, “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “Well, it wasn’t so good, either.”

  He frowned at me over his shoulder as he wheeled himself over to the sink. That was something else you could always count on with Doc Farrell: He was nearly always wrong about what hurt and what didn’t. If he said, “This won’t hurt at all,” you knew to breathe deep and grit your teeth, but if he said, “This may hurt,” you knew it was safe to relax. Once you understood that, you knew when to brace yourself. One of these days, I swore for the umpteenth time, I’m switching to a woman gynecologist.

  I had never understood why he had continued to be the most popular “female” doctor in Port Frederick, or even why I had carried on my mother’s habit of seeing him. I guess that was the answer: habit. As he finished and I sat up on the table while he washed his hands, I promised myself that if he was rude to me this time, I’d find myself another gynecologist next time.

  He looked up from the sink and smiled like a real grandfather.

  “You look just like your mother, Jenny.”

  Well, damn. So I was stuck with him for a while longer.

  “Except that she took better care of herself.”

  “Thank you for going to the funeral. I’m sorry that I—”

  He waved me off. “There’s nothing wrong with you that time and a few good vitamins won’t cure. What else can I do for you?”

  “Well.” If he’d been his usual curmudgeonly self, I might have coped, but this observant, brusquely gentle old man had me on the verge of tears already. My voice shook as I said, “I don’t know if you remember, Doctor Cal, but I was away at college when my mother was committed to Hampshire. My father never really explained anything to me—either he wouldn’t or he couldn’t—and my sister was too young to understand anything, and nobody else seemed to know, and I was too young to quiz the doctors, and then later when I did feel confident enough to ask them questions, I never got the same answer twice. And so I still want to know. I’d really like to know exactly what happened back then while I was away. Do you remember? Will you tell me?”

  He frowned and shook his head as if he were going to discourage me like Father Gower. But instead he said, “I remember better than I want to, Jenny. Do you know I was the doctor who committed her to Hampshire?”

  “No,” I said, feeling unaccountably shocked, “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, I was.” He glanced at the large watch on his left wrist, but seemed to decide to take the time to talk to me. “Jenny, what do you know?”

  I tried to think back almost two decades ago, and to remember. “I was a freshman at college. I’d just come back to my room from lunch in the dorm cafeteria and I found a note from my roommate telling me to call home. I did, and I think I talked to my father, who told me something vague, like they’d put Mother into a hospital for tests. He didn’t sound upset or anything, but then you know Dad, if it wasn’t his tonsils they were taking out, he wouldn’t pay much attention. Anyway, I don’t remember any sense of urgency, no Jenny Come Home Immediately Your Mother Is Dying sort of thing. I don’t even recall having the sense that she was even very sick.”

  “He didn’t want to frighten you.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Did they tell you which hospital?”

  “No, and of course it didn’t occur to me that it might be anything but an ordinary one. I suppose I did ask what was wrong with her, at least I hope I did, but all I kept hearing was that she was going in for tests. I don’t suppose he ever said what kind, and I must have assumed he meant, I don’t know, blood tests, or whatever. I don’t think I was even particularly worried about it.”

>   “You didn’t go home?”

  “No. As I said, he didn’t give me any sense of urgency.”

  Doc Farrell was quiet for a moment, playing with the stethoscope that dangled from his neck. “It was pretty urgent, Jenny.”

  “I’ll bet it was. What was really going on?”

  “I’ll tell you that, but first, finish your story. When did you finally come home? When did you find out the truth?”

  “I didn’t come home until school was out. By then it was essentially all over but the shouting.” (My shouting? Memories, awful ones, flooded me, including one of me weeping and yelling horrible things at my father, only my father wasn’t there. I was yelling in an empty room. My room. When nobody else was home. How could I have forgotten all of that fury?) “Until this moment, I had forgotten how angry I was at my father for not telling me everything. I was heartsick. I would have come home earlier, immediately, right then. I would have helped. I could have seen her.” My hand went to my heart involuntarily. “Oh God, it still hurts to think that she might have wondered where I was, maybe she even thought I didn’t care enough—”

  “I doubt it.”

  His astringent tone helped me.

  I managed to smile at him. “All right. Then when did I learn the truth? I guess when I got home and I told Dad I wanted to visit Mom at the hospital and he told me it was Hampshire Psychiatric.”

  “What did he tell you was wrong with her?”

  I shrugged. “You know Dad. A nervous breakdown, I think he said. I had to ask her psychiatrist, and he wasn’t able to tell me much more than that, either.” I felt a ball of self-pity—and pity for my mother— rising up my esophagus. “When you come right down to it, nobody’s ever given me any better explanation than that.”