Free The Doctor's Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer Page A

attuned to that kind of blind discovery. I wondered if there had been a rift between my parents, like the one between Ev and me, that was finally resolved in bed. I hadn’t noticed any lapses in their paradise, but I was away at school most of the time then and, as I’ve said, fairly preoccupied. “Let me count the ways,” he’d written to her, while she had underlined Larkin’s “Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.” My poor mother, my poor father.
    No one can ever convince me that the term
a good death
is anything but an oxymoron. The last-ditch chemotherapies, a few years later, after the cancer had reached my mother’s bones, offered their own, additional torments—neuropathies that numbed her hands and feet and left a perpetual taste of metal in her mouth, as if she’d been sucking pennies. She had no appetite, anyway. Faye or my father or I spoon-fed her broth and Jell-O, which she vomited into a basin soon after, while one of us held and stroked her clammy, bristly head.
    “Sweetheart, you shouldn’t be seeing this,” she once said to me in her hoarse new whisper, but I couldn’t take my greedy eyes off her. She had always tried to shield me from things that might be offensive or frightening. At scary movies she would cover my eyes with her own hand, that cool, fragrant blindfold, and I got into the habit of protecting myself, of turning away from things I didn’t choose to see. Bad training for a writer, I suppose. Was the compulsive blinking I did at ten simply another manifestation of that?
    Dr. Augustus Strange, my father’s medical school mentor, had worshiped two deities: the preservation of life and the genius of research. The idea was to keep the patient alive until something was developed in the laboratories that could save her. My father was torn between love and love, his love for my mother and his love for the ethical precepts that guided him. He let her suffer longer than he should have, I was positive of it, and just as certain that the choices he’d made, and his flash memories of their consequences, incited his current bouts of anger and depression. Imagining her still alive was only a mitigating aspect of his dementia, a respite from all that oppressive guilt.
    I was due for my yearly mammogram in June, only a few weeks away. I could probably move up the appointment if I called and said that I’d found something in my breast. Something that was most likely nothing at all. But my mother’s oncologist, Jeannette Joie—oh, the paradox of that name!— had once told her that one should listen to one’s body, that intimations of illness and disease are sometimes available to the patient long before any real symptoms. Was this what I’d been trying to tell myself since that disturbing April morning?
    I flipped through my notebook, looking for something to support that theory, when I remembered that Dr. Joie was from Montreal—a Canada goose! I made a note of that, too. The appointment at East Side Radiology was at 10 AM on June 13, Friday the thirteenth, as it turned out, but I’m not superstitious. I’d made it months ago, and I knew the receptionist would become cross and difficult if I tried to change it. A couple of weeks probably wouldn’t make a difference, anyway, and my own schedule was pretty busy.
    Soon I was sitting in the park reading Michael’s newest installment. Most of it was very good, although there was still an occasional sense of something vital withheld, or skirted. But the characters were consistently, divinely rendered, especially Joe Packer, and I did something I frowned upon when one of my authors did it—I started to cast the movie.
    Joe would be played by Matthew McConaughey, who’d have to grow a mustache for the part, and that beautiful red-haired actress, Julianne Moore, would play his girlfriend, the older woman he meets in the bus station after she runs away from her unhappy marriage. I didn’t write to Michael about any of this, for fear of