Consenting Adult (27 page)

“Why would you?”

“But working there—it’s been half a year by now—going in at midnight, staying through those first operations in the morning, you sure get inside of things you never gave a thought to in your whole life.”

“You must,” Ken said.

“Talk about the last mile. That trip to surgery, down this long corridor, up in the elevator, down that corridor—for some scared kid or some old man or woman who thinks it’s probably cancer—” He shook his head and set his beer down. He was looking at the carpet, as if he were embarrassed at his speech.

“It must be harrowing,” Ken said. “I must compliment you on strong nerves. I know I never could work in that kind of tension.”

“Tension, yes, but there’s something else, I can’t put my finger on it. There’s a resident there I’ve been talking to, and he got the drift, all right. Dr. Rugov, that’s his name, Fred Rugov, and he said, “This place is a great narcotic for your own
oy veys.”

Tessa joined in the general laugh, but she knew there was nothing jocular for Jeff in what he had said. Even about comparatively “talkable” things, he still needed to pave over with the concrete of silence the malleable earth where emotion took root and from which it drew sustenance. This night job of his had reached him at an unexpected level, and was leading him toward whatever revelation this was to be.

“And the hospital work,” she prompted after a moment “In some way it gave you an idea about the graduation gift we still owe you. Is that it?”

“Just so. This has been building up for quite a while, really. I haven’t even talked it over with Margie or Nate. I wanted to be sure on my own.”

“Let’s hear it,” Ken said.

“It’s nothing like a new car or a trip abroad.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Well, after all the sizing up and mulling around, it started to hit me, what I want to be. Or what I want to do. I want to study medicine. And then practice medicine.”

“Why, that’s fine, Jeff,” his father said. A leap of feeling within him was pride, he knew its contours, and along with it, fractionally lagging behind like a hurdler taking the jump half a second behind the runner ahead, there was another leap, his old disbelief that this splendid young man could be in any way tarnished.

“You want to go back to college,” Tessa said slowly. ‘To be a doctor. How wonderful, Jeff.”

“I thought if you would stake me to the first year,” Jeff said, rising from his chair in one smooth arc of motion, facing them both, looking down into their upturned faces. “It’s a big thing, expensive, I’ve been looking into what it costs, and it’s no go for me to try to swing it on my own, in between driving a hack.”

“But it is marvelous,” Tessa said. She glanced at Ken, caught his nod, saw the meaning of his rising color, so different accompanied by the pleasure in his eyes, so unrelated to the rising color that went with anger. “Why do you say ‘the first year’? There would be four years.”

“But the first year would be the graduation present That would give me all the leeway I’d need to find out how to swing the rest of it—student loans, government loans, guaranteed bank loans for college, all that jazz.”

“Hang up your shingle draped in promissory notes!” Ken said.

“Just my style. No kidding, these low-interest loans—you don’t start to pay them back until you get your degree, and there are a billion angles I’d be investigating while I was out there, packing in my first year. But that one year alone comes to about two thousand.”

Ken looked not at Jeff but at Tessa. “I think we could make that first year our gift, Jeff. It’s good news, this.”

“And now that you say it,” Tessa said, “it seems inevitable, as if it were there all the time, hidden away.”

“That’s what’s so weird,” Jeff agreed. “When you think back to all my chem courses at college, and biochem and biology and math and all the science credits, you’d think I had a premed course going the whole time. I’ll have some credits to make up, comparative anatomy and stuff, but even so.”

“Is there any particular field of medicine you have in mind?” Ken asked. His tone had turned neutral, his eyes were guarded. “Or is that off in the future?”

“No psychiatry, no analysis,” Jeff said vehemently. “What I want is something you can see in a microscope, test in a lab, something you can make a culture of and know the antibiotic to kill it, or the injection or drugs to cure it. Something you can X-ray on a big glass plate and study in front of a frosted pane of light and say, ‘See, there it is.’ ”

He was half shouting the words, his voice strident, the syllables pounding; he stopped abruptly. In a moment he added quietly, “I’m not running down all psychiatry or analysis.” He looked at his mother. “It sure has its place in medicine, but as a profession for me, never. Not that I’ve even thought of a specialty. I guess that chooses itself later. Sort of gradual selection.”

“There’s no rush anyway,” Tessa said. To be able to just sit here, she thought, with no need for wisdom, for control. How remarkable that for the first time in years the world of sex is diminished to auxiliary status in the hierarchy of life, his life and ours.

“You said ‘while I was out there,’ ”she said then. “Out where, Jeff? Have you decided where you want to go?”

“You bet I have.” For the first time constraint tinged his words. He took up his neglected beer and drank thirstily. “This is going to surprise you too, but I’ve been looking into it, and it really is the one answer for me. It’s U.C.L.A.”

“California?”

“That is a surprise,” Ken said.

“Their medical school rates as one of the best in the whole country,” Jeff said flatly. He began to fist his reasons for choosing U.C.L.A.

But California, Tessa was thinking. Again separation. Only this time more so. He wants distance, he wants to give up even the snatches of attachment we still have as a family. He wants to go to the other edge of the continent, three thousand miles the other edge, to assert his separate life, to live where none of us can know what he is doing, not even the little we know now. It’s the next step for him, of course. He still feels driven; he drives himself but he still feels driven.

“California doesn’t seem as far as it used to,” she said aloud. “I remember my first flight there—it took seventeen hours. Right after the war that was.”

“And now with the big jets, it’s nothing,” Ken said, too cheerily. He glanced at Tessa, as if to check her reception of this phase of Jeff’s plan. “A doctor has a good busy life,” he went on hastily, “a satisfying one. ‘My son the doctor.’ It sounds good.” He laughed. “I sound like the proverbial Jewish mother, don’t I?”

They laughed with him, but in a swift aside he thought, My son the homosexual doctor, the gay doctor. Well, it was safer than My son the gay senator, living under the endless threat of political ruin, safer than My son the gay spy, blackmailed into spying, safer than My son the thousand other careers where discovery could mean the crash of a lifetime’s work and reputation.

“We’ll stake you to that first year at U.C.L.A.,” he said to Jeff. “And to some airplane fares home for holidays, won’t we, Tessa?”

“Of course we will.”

It would be a long time, she thought, before he asks for airplane fare. Certainly not this year; at Christmas he would be just three months into his new world, and too swamped with his schedule for time off. Of that she was already certain. Think of it as if he were drafted, but without the danger of Vietnam. During the years of his student deferment, she had ignored the draft, but since he had finished at C.C.N.Y. she had often felt the absence of that automatic exemption, and each lurching escalation of the war had made her aware of it at a higher pitch. A note from Dr. Isaacs to the draft board would create exemption of another kind, but Jeff would be the last person on earth to ask for such a note or use it if it were thrust upon him. That news story recently about a “Gay Motorcade” in Los Angeles to protest the Army and Navy’s outright exclusion or dismissal of homosexuals—she remembered again the primary fear it had aroused in her, and the revulsion. In the old days the armed services assigned men to separate quarters if they were black, even to separate regiments; this was the same official behavior, the same stigma by those in power, without regard to an individual’s general worth, his character, his bravery under fire, an assault on his dignity forever. But in the world of medicine, a man earned his dignity and showed his worth and they were his for the rest of his days.

“It’s a great commencement gift,” she said at last to Jeff, who had been watching her without impatience. “You’re going to be first-rate as a doctor, I could bet on it. You’re going to have a wonderful life, Jeff.”

He looked at her, then at his father. “Thanks,” he said. “I—well, thanks.”

Y
OU’RE GOING TO HAVE
a wonderful life, Jeff. As time passed, Tessa began to flinch every time she remembered what she had said. It had been a fatuous optimism, blind to the truth. No hospital in the country would ever admit him as an intern if they knew he was a homosexual—she had asked Mark Waldo, and he had hesitated. She had pressed him and he had told her. Not one. No internship, no residency, no official hospital connection later on. Not if they knew. Jeff would have to keep his secret forever.

At Mark’s words, an insensate fury had choked her, at all hospitals everywhere. No hospital could risk a homosexual doctor on the staff. He was not to be trusted with young male patients. He was not fit to practice medicine. He was not of the high moral character the hospital required.

Did any hospital waste one minute worrying whether a heterosexual intern could be trusted with a young female patient? There the high moral character was taken for granted, the fitness for the practice of medicine. But if you were gay you were automatically stripped of worthiness, denied your right to follow the practice you had spent years preparing for.

How sexist, how blindly unjust. That any young man or woman who had spent four years in college and then another four in medical school, that he or she had already demonstrated character, responsibility, high standards—this seemed still to elude the authorities of the hospital world.

It was monstrous, an injustice so obvious that its true name should be persecution, oppression. Sexist oppression. There was a good deal of discussion these days, particularly in the strengthening feminist movement, about sexism and sexist oppression, but all too few people saw that the world’s treatment of gay people was also a sexist oppression.

Then how could there be a wonderful life for Jeff in medicine? You will have a wonderful profession, Jeff—that much she might have said, without this ensuing feeling that she had been asinine. You have chosen a fascinating field to work in. That much would have been true, clearly was true for him already. Every letter showed it, from his first day out there. He wrote infrequently, but when he did his letters were all about his courses, about lab projects, about the load he was carrying and how he wished he could speed it along and go even faster.

They longed for his letters, Ken as well as she, and for a good long time his letters and theirs had been bright and sustaining contacts with him. It was a long time before she first began to feel some vague sense that something was missing in their letters, and she fumbled about with it by herself, unable to pin it down. Then one day, perhaps in Jeff’s second year in California, she was reading one of his letters and at its close she handed it across the table to Ken, saying, “It’s like a college thesis.”

“What is?” Ken asked.

“I was just thinking …”

Ken had already begun reading it, and she dropped into silence. But she had realized why she had been plagued by the feeling that something was missing. Something was. Each of Jeff’s letters, now that he had finished his first news of where he lived, what his schedule was to be, each letter now was nearly as impersonal as a term paper. Each was a discourse on some aspect of his work, and a good discourse, clever, sometimes witty and amusing, sometimes perceptive and even touching. This one, in great part, was about the astonishing contrasts he was finding between this second year’s lab work and last year’s.

“Gone are the comfortable days,” he wrote, “of doing a tracheotomy on a carefully anesthetized cat, where you smell only healthy animal tissue and ether. This week, for instance, we’re working with fresh human organs, just out of autopsy, and our path. prof, has been holding forth on a cancerous liver, sections of which are right there in a sort of flat well atop the lab table. Mighty different, nasally as well as in other ways. You get this intensely personal sense of warm human tissue, newly dead, there are human smells and it’s nothing like the remoteness you got last year from dissecting tissue out of some embalmed cadaver.”

She watched Ken reading the letter and saw that it absorbed him too. It did reveal some of Jeff’s feelings about his work, but not one line of it told anything of friends, of acquaintances, of his life in general outside the classroom or lab.

Don’s college letters, and Margie’s, had been filled with young chatter and gossip; they had both known that there was lots you could put into a letter home without yielding what you wanted to keep to yourself. Neither one had ever gone in for intimate revelations—they would have hated it, and they knew that their parents would have hated it too. But they had each found some happy medium, and so far Jeff had not.

As for visits home, her prophecy had proved all too accurate, and it was indeed a long time before they had to send airplane fare for a trip East. She had discovered an equanimity about his absence at Christmas, his first winter at U.C.L.A., that she had never guessed she would have. Maybe, she had thought, that analogy of his being off in the Army but not in Vietnam had more comfort in it than I suspected. She had telephoned him in the middle of Christmas Day, remembering to allow for the three-hours-earlier of California, and she and Ken had taken turns talking to him. He had seemed in good spirits, glad to have their call, had thanked them for their gifts and asked them to deliver his thanks to Margie and Nate, to Don and Jenny, promising follow-up thank-yous of his own as soon as he “wasn’t working like a yak.”