Free The Doctor's Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer

feeding the ducks and geese. That was something she and I often did together when we went into Manhattan. Faye would save the crusts for us from the stale loaves she used in her banana bread pudding. The poem was untitled. I read it again and found myself trembling. I knew it wasn’t poetic quality that had gotten to me, though—my mother had written much better stuff than this. It was the poem’s particular content or its language that made me feel the way I did: troubled, anxious, as if I were about to receive unwelcome news.
    The reference to Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers” was easy enough to decipher; at some point my mother had experienced a loss of hope. I doubted that it involved a literary disappointment. When the goose ate it and flew away—that must have been when she’d first learned about her cancer. My hand went back to the opening in my robe, but didn’t venture inside this time. Or was it when she realized that the treatments could no longer stem the disease?
    The poem wasn’t dated, so there was no way to really know. The hungry, honking geese at the lake, I remembered, had originally migrated from Canada. Their droppings were as big as a small dog’s, and we had to scrape our shoes on the curb after we left the park.
    I sipped my cooled coffee, and scanned the pages of the ledger, to see if there was any indication that my mother had sent this poem anywhere. Maybe she’d titled it later, after it had been taken. There were no probable matches among the recorded acceptances or rejections, though, and I didn’t have copies of any of the journals in which her poems had appeared. I’d asked my father if I might have them after he’d moved to Scarsdale and downsized his possessions, but they seemed to have vanished during the packing or the move itself.
    Suddenly, I lost interest in playing detective. It seemed futile now, and a little boring, but I took my notebook from my purse and jotted down a few things, anyway. “C. W.
New Yorker,
Nov. 18, ’63,” “Thom. Roman,” “Central Pk.” “Thing with feathers?”
    Then I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bagel and some Swiss cheese. I realized that I was famished and there were things I had to do: get a haircut; send Parksie some flowers for her birthday, the way my father always did; and then go to the park and work on the bioethics manuscript and on the latest installment of
Walking to Europe.
In the evening Ev and I were going to meet at a church in Chelsea, where Jeremy and Celia’s chamber group would perform. I tucked everything neatly back into the accordion folder—making sure I put the note from
The New Yorker
just where I had found it—and carefully retied the ribbon.
    I lingered in the shower, turning the hot water up a notch every couple of minutes, until the enclosure felt like a sauna. Without really thinking about it, I closed my eyes and lavishly soaped my breasts. Then I began to examine the left one in the usual circular pattern.
Bingo.
It definitely felt more like a thickening than a discrete lump. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? Jesus. I started trembling again in the overheated stall, and all that steam was affecting my breathing.
    I got out of the shower, wrapped myself in a bath sheet, and sat down on the closed toilet seat. My mother’s mother, the grandmother I’d never known, had died of cancer, too, when my mother was eighteen. It was so widespread by the time it was discovered that no one was exactly sure where the primary lesion had been. The thought of the word
lesion
chilled me even further. Was my father confusing me with my mother when he’d used it the day before?
    He had found her tumor himself, and I could only imagine the circumstances of that discovery—sexual delight turned to abject terror. She was a doctor’s wife with a family history of malignancy; didn’t she do regular self-exams? And why hadn’t he found it earlier, before the metastasis? His fingertips were