Other Men's Daughters (2 page)

“You think I don't know,” she said. Cambridge neighbors were as hungry for gossip as their notion of Iowans. (Hungrier: fluent passivity was an appetizer.) Sarah herself gossiped little. But for years now she had kept an inner catalogue of his weaknesses; each year added to them, every book she read gave her new material.
Double Helix
, Jim Watson's charming boy's book of genetics and tourism, was a treasure trove for her. “You never had Jim's free spirit. You're a grub, you go to the lab like a bookkeeper to his accounts. Without verve, without creative spark.” And he lacked Jim's tenacity. “I can't see you rushing off a train to a bookstore and swotting up a subject the way he swotted up Pauling's
Chemical Bonds
in Heffer's.”

“Blackwell's.”

“Yes, a pedantic grub. You'd remember you had to play tennis, or have lunch or take one of your girls to the movies.” He didn't have any girls then. And was this what a grub did? She described him the way Jim described himself. Yet it worked, as did anything in his dark moods, to sap his self-confidence. Her latest find was Lévi-Strauss. “You're a
bricoleur
,” she said over the Corn Flakes she “insisted” on buying against his lectures about protein breakfasts. “A mental garbage collector. Your life is made of left-overs. You don't plan, you don't have long views of your own. You've got the mind of a primitive.” He vaguely thought Lévi-Strauss had wiped out the notion of the human primitive, but he knew the joys of lecturing, he waited her out. “It's clear why you're not an important scientist.”

Women, thought Dr. Merriwether, did have difficult times, particularly women who grew up between the Twenties and Sixties; they smelled new freedom in the air, they saw young women who enjoyed it, yet felt they themselves hadn't been prepared for it. Even scholarly, New England girls such as Sarah had been raised as charmers, dreamers. If they were almost content, they sensed they shouldn't be. Like the new blacks of the Sixties—Merriwether's experience was mostly second-hand—they assigned every pain to one conspicuous wound, they were this way or that because they were women, being a woman was a misery, an inflicted misery, and who were the inflictors but men, and what man in particular but the husband, or, at least, the husband one no longer loved, that is, the man who no longer loved them. So the progression went, and women of intelligence and education were the prime sufferers or complainers, activists, gossips, haters and corrupter/liberators of others. Merriwether feared for his children. Sarah did not hear hatred in her voice, but the vitriol leaked into the children's heads. Poor Sarah, yes, but also, yes, curse her, curse her blind egoism, her self-righteousness and curse her hatred.

A strange, released summer for Dr. Merriwether. Most of the day he was alone. Sarah had taken the children to her parents' summer place on Duck Isle, Maine. He stayed behind in Cambridge and moped about the laboratory. Most of his friends were away. Three afternoons a week, he dusted off his M.D. and did the doctoring chore for the Summer School at Holyoke Center.

For a month, he ate most meals by himself, breakfast on a stool at Zum-Zum's—toasted bacon rolls with strawberry jam, fresh orange juice, a terrific tonic after the winter of frozen cylinders out of the Minute Maid cans, two cups of coffee and the New York
Times
—lunch at the Faculty Club, sometimes with a colleague, and dinner at the Wirthaus where he had the same table every evening, just behind a little Korean gourmand who ate nine-course dinners. (“Where do they go?” he wondered.) The first week, he hit on an excellent golden
Graves
; he drank most of the bottle every night. The waitress pointed him to the evening's delicacies. It wasn't unpleasant. Bolstered by thousands of meals with family and friends, he did not have the bachelor shame of solitary eating, and he could do without talk.

After dinner, he walked the jammed, astonishing summer streets, then home, and in the silent house, watched television movies or read books of a sort he hadn't read since his literary youth, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare.

Longtime skeptic living in a sea of skepticism, Merriwether needed something more that summer. The Cambridge heat, swampy, intimate, almost visible, drained that energy which, most summers here, drove him down to the boathouse for a shell, or to running in sweatpants along the river. Now and then he did play tennis with his colleague Davison, but that energy which for years he'd at least partly dispensed in a thousand competitive games (even solitary rowing was competitive for him: he rowed against clogged arteries, against the clock), turned inward. “About time,” he thought. “But where to take it?”

Day after day that summer, the
Times
obituary pages contained news of deaths which gripped his heart. The deaths were seldom of people he knew personally, yet they touched him deeply. People who were fixed stars in his cosmos of expectation were suddenly no more. Day after day another: Walter Gropius (whom he had passed for years in the Yard); Red Rolfe, his boyhood baseball hero; Senator Dirksen; Ho Chi Minh; the other Bauhaus great, Mies van der Rohe. There were many Harvard deaths: Woody Woodworth (from whom he'd taken a course in The Sonata), Lem Cleveland, Bob McCloskey. Almost every obituary section contained such loss for him. It was as if he were receiving piecemeal a devastating message.

Against this drear subtraction surged the foam of the street, the—what could he call them?—kids, the young, girls, boys, the hippies, freaks, heads, the beauties and transfigured uglies from all over the world in every state of dress and undress. There were tonsured Buddhists in saffron saris, tinkling bells and chanting “Hare Krishna” on quarter-hour strolls through crowds; blonde Cherokees, fringed, feathered, dyed, pounding drums and playing flutes in Forbes Plaza; there were pubescent Mennonites, Shakers in flat hats and long dresses, Bowery bums, angelic longshoremen, Georgia belles in Leghorn hats, Hells Angels in leather vests. Thicker than bugs in a cornfield, the International Young, bare-chested, bare-legged, barefoot, walking, dragging, dancing, jogging, lying against the Coop pillars, sitting on the benches of the Mass Transit island while curly-headed Lenins hawked “underground” newspapers. A living museum of the self-possessed dispossessed.

“What is it all about?” puzzled Dr. Merriwether, walking, absorbed, toward class, lab, home, or Holyoke Center. What is this terrific need to look special? Is it so hard to be anyone now? Why so much noise? Why were the demands on others so huge? Was it that there was so much expression in the world that one had to go further and further out to even think of oneself as a person? How he wished, how he wished.

Poor Merriwether could not even get so simple a need to his lips—such simple physiology—he just drew them tight and peered in the bookstores at the bare-legged girls, stared at the flopping breasts, the bare bellies, and went home to puzzle the meaning of it all.

“Truth comes as lightning strikes.” He read this gnomic splinter in the middle of the Charles, his smooth arms supported on the oar shafts, holding a paperback anthology of Greek poems. It was his only morning on the river that summer. He had stopped for breath and to rummage among the ancients. But though he was ready, Capital T “Truth” did not strike.

Four, sometimes five mornings a week, he worked in the lab. Mostly out of the old discipline he'd begun thinking of as another propping habit. (“Habits get you through life, not into it.”) It had been two years since he'd published a paper, four or five since he'd done work that absorbed him. Yet research had been near the center of his life.

He'd begun as a student of thirst, a dipsologist. “Funny name for a serious pursuit,” he told his graduate students. Like all drives which were called instinctive, thirst was a dense complex of chemistry and mentality. Dr. Merriwether had investigated its relationship to lactation, hemmorhaging, drugs (atropine, epinephrine, metallic oxides, opium), x-ray irradiations, inferior vena cava congestion, snake bites, salinity, fear, various exertions (including copulation), suggestibility and dreams. In twenty-one post-doctoral years, he'd published almost a hundred papers. He had believed that what Wolf called “the dipsologic triad,” thirst, drinking, satiety, was a primeval life pattern, that life, a sum of tropisms organized by the basic “drive” of self-preserving, could itself be regarded as a gigantic thirst. He'd even speculated that what he referred to in class as “cytologic
coups d'état
, the cancers,” could profitably be studied with dipsologic models.

Yet he did not really buckle down to his research. His mice withered around the electrodes, he noted the salinity of carcinomic cells, he glimpsed certain interesting recurrences, but, in essence, he drifted.

Of course, he was doing other things. The “doctoring”—his protective term for the moonlighting—took up nine hours a week.

Even as a part-time doctor, he'd seen almost everything in the way of flesh and its common disorders, but he enjoyed the work as a form of theater, the encounters with students, the skill or clumsiness with which they described their ills, the emotional guises assumed in examination, and, occasionally, the surprise of a body.

Even when he'd been most absorbed in research, Dr. Merriwether had liked at least the idea of being a physician. There was of course the real pleasure of relieving pain, but more, he'd long ago sensed an important relationship between the practice of medicine and that of the poets and sages whom even the most commercially minded Merriwethers respected. Many poets had been physicians or the children of physicians. Dr. Merriwether supposed the connection had to do with the importance of human crisis in both occupations. Doctors and poets had to do with essentials; they knew the confusion and mystery of suffering, the disproportion between the human being as complex chemistry and the human being unmade by death.

The week before the astronauts took off for the first human touchdown on the moon, a stirring girl came up to Merriwether's office for examination. In the magic suggestiveness of certain times, she had a lunar name, Cynthia. Her surname was Ryder.

Dr. Merriwether rose for every entrant, an old courtesy learned early, but impressive to many patients, even those who, like him, had been raised amidst rituals and formalities. Miss Ryder was golden-haired but almost Indian dark, slimly full, tall, slightly prognathous, brown-eyed. Her hair waterfalled to the top thoracic vertebra, her tanned flesh issued from a laundered yellow corolla. A human sunflower. Dr. Merriwether said, “How do you do? Miss Ryder, isn't it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you feeling ill?”

“No, sir.”

Drawer Three, he thought. The Pill.

“But you want to talk with a doctor.”

“I want a prescription, sir.” A distant speech of soft vowels, southern, a speech restrained by shyness and courtesy, a pleasure for Merriwether whose own speech had almost Bostonian “a's” and other piquancies of New England, derived perhaps from the tight mouth of skeptic reserve, the residue of generations of legal and theological hair-splitting. Or, perhaps, from the endemic New England constipation, the holding back as long as possible before going out to the icy latrine.

“Please sit down.” The yellow skirt drew up, just concealing that for which she sought prescription. “As you know, a doctor can't prescribe before he examines.”

“Yes, sir. I want a prescription for the contraceptive pill.”

“Have you had a prescription before?”

“At school, but I didn't get it renewed last time. I thought I could get it here in Student Health.”

“Have you had a Pap test recently?”

“In April.”

“We make a point of talking a bit about these chemical contraceptives.”

“Yes, sir. I've had some talks about them.”

“That's fine. Have you noticed anything unusual since you've taken them?”

“I think my breasts got bigger.” A wonderful smile, slow, the face finely engraved with parentheses outside the lips, a smile of intelligence and humor.

“‘Expel Nature through the door, she'll come back through the window,'” said Dr. Merriwether. Miss Ryder's smile flowed into laughter, her face creased beautifully. An intelligent face. “For many girls it's like simultaneously dieting and feasting. There's an awful lot of nonsense about The Pill's side effects. Some are serious, but researchers tend to stuff a mouse with a dose that's a tenth its body weight, record the ensuing miseries, and then wave red flags. For the
Reader's Digest
. You could kill someone with water on such an experimental base. My own view is that the chief side effects have to do with the new orderliness it introduces. As the white pills leave the blue dial, people chart their monthly psychophysical changes.”

The lecture was directed to the sheared stone pipes of Memorial Hall. He looked back to Miss Ryder. Or, at least, to her yellow dress rising over a fine mesomorphic body, the bra-less breasts, full, finely nippled, whitely isolated by bikinied sun-tan sessions. He had seen many girls' bodies and was habituated even to their surprises. Beauty would stream from what had appeared sheer adiposity; a slim virgin would simmer in dermal poison; another would unclothe a venereal monument, so munificent and warm that he had to force constraint into his palms on her chest and back.

“I see you don't have time to waste, Miss Ryder. But I think I won't bother examining you today. I won't even ask you the state of your feelings. Don't report me.” And he turned from the perhaps-offering, perhaps-display and wrote the prescription.

The dress was on one arm. Now it resumed its place, the golden hair disappeared and, reappearing, was tossed aside. The long, Indian-hued head hoisted, arched, tossed, an athlete's movement. “Thank you, Doctor. It's very nice of you.”

“I hope everything works out well, Miss Ryder.”