Free I Live With You by Carol Emshwiller Page B

me?”
    “You were always kind. I’ll not be any less to you.”
    What am I good for? What use am I but to stay here as the father of females? All those small, ugly, black-haired girls…. I suppose all of them biting their lower lips until they bleed.

THE DOCTOR
    H E DATES HIS THIRD WIFE often but she’ll not come back to live with him. Even before it got this bad she said he’d have to clean out this place first. Have to get new couches not so clawed and peed on. Use a lot of spray for the smell. But there’s no way to clean it up now without burning it down.
    She left him five years ago. She had good reasons, lots more than just this mess. One was, he was a partying person and she wasn’t. (Of course if she came back now there couldn’t be any parties anyway, at least not for a long while of cleaning up.) And of course you never can know people’s reasons for leaving—nor for coming back.
    The doctor has rugged sexy good looks. He’s still attractive even though in his seventies and even though he broke his back which left him with a crunched-down look. He used to be six feet three but now he’s only six feet. As a young man he had dislocated and broken his fingers so often they look terrible now, crooked and with swollen joints. One wonders how he can be a surgeon, thread his needles, and tie the fancy little knots anymore.
    The house is a huge Victorian with a front stairway and a back stairway, five bedrooms not counting the maid’s room, two upstairs bathrooms and one downstairs (only one toilet still works, but the doctor is alone, he doesn’t need more than one). The front parlor is all bay windows and the back parlor is all wood paneling.
    There’s empty fields behind the house and little patches of forest on each side. Sometimes deer come in to the doctor’s back yard.
    The third wife said if he’d clean the place up even a little bit she’d think about coming back, but he’s like those old men who’ve never thrown away a
Life
magazine or a piece of string. With him it’s mostly medical journals. He’s not thrown one away since he’d been in medical school, nor any books either. Lots of other junk around, too, parts of old motors, rusty tools…. Two dead cars are in the garage. He has to park his diesel sedan in the driveway.
    When the doctor and his third wife bought this house, the wife kept things more or less cleaned up. If she was still with him things wouldn’t have gotten quite so out of hand. She never did like having all this stuff, but it was in some control and mostly out of sight. Actually the house was full of junk from the moment they moved in.
    The doctor loves a big house like this. When his wife was still with him they could invite guests to stay over. He likes to play the paterfamilias. Of course he can’t do that anymore. Now he does it in a smaller way. Whenever he goes to a party he always brings big chunks of cheeses and special black bread. Sometimes a ham. Sometimes a five pound bag of pistachios. Always more food than anybody can use in a week.
    His dog died shortly after his wife left him. He buried it in the back yard. That dog…. Twelve years before he had taken home a sick, mangy puppy, slept with it on his chest and got mange himself. It was a type of mange that human beings are not supposed to get. The puppy grew up to be the dog that died.
    But on the other hand, the doctor taught heart surgery by having the students operate on dogs.
    The house badly needs painting, but the doctor doesn’t notice. If he did, and though it’s a huge job, he’d probably plan to paint it himself. He’d buy the paint and keep it in the garage or the basement and now and then think about doing it.
    The cats started more recently when the doctor discovered a family of feral cats in his garage and began feeding them. One was pregnant. It was getting colder so the doctor made a little cat door into his basement. It gave them the run of the house.
    He’s not sure how many cats