Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (16 page)

Patrick’s house was immense, but it was only partly visible through the elaborate tree and shrub garden surrounding it. I imagined women in crinoline dresses and men in white suits sipping tea under the willow trees; Lily Briscoe at her easel. A shoulder-high garden wall made way for double-swing black iron gates with ornamental gratings. One of the gates was ajar.

Rosie gasped. “Wow, it’s a mansion. I feel like Julie Andrews in
The Sound of Music
.”

“Or
Mary Poppins
,” I said.

“What should we do?”

I shrugged. “Go up to the door and ring the bell?”

“I bet a butler will answer. I didn’t think he was this rich.”

“How did he find your father?” I asked.

“Oh, you know, one person tells someone else … or maybe Patrick’s mother knew about my father in Europe, before the war…”

We proceeded through the gate and up the path. The house appeared to be quite old, though it may have been the twined ivy clinging to the rough-hewn grey blocks and the architectural style—arch-happy neo-Romanesque—that gave it an antique look. There was something lonely and expectant about the long rows of window-eyes and copper-green shingles; like the self-sacrificing statue in
The Happy Prince
, I thought.

“I’m nervous,” Rosie said. “Maybe we should have called before we came.”

I rang the bell. “Think of it as an adventure.”

There was no response at first, and we were trying to decide whether to ring again when a woman’s voice called out: “Just a second!” The door opened and there stood Patrick’s mother—and my one-time psychiatrist.

I need to backtrack for a moment.

When I was small, my mother was chronically frantic about my health. I’d been rushed to the hospital several times: I was prone to chest colds, and since from her gallery seat, life was a tragic opera, my mother’s diagnosis was always drastic. The phantom ailment was asthma, and when the doctors insisted that there was nothing wrong with me, she got all huffy—
like the rest of the so-called doctors who who can die first—
She repeated her macabre accusations on the bus, pulling me closer to her as if I were her accomplice. It was an intimate ritual, and gave me as much pleasure as the cool, gentle touch of the stethoscope against my skin.

Eventually the asthma fell out of favour. Instead, when I was eleven, my mother decided that I had a bone deformity. I was soaking in the bath when she first noticed my affliction. She asked me to stand up, looked me up and down, and tears streamed from her eyes: my arms, my legs, my shoulders—none of it was quite right. Over the next few weeks we trekked from waiting room to waiting room; no one could persuade my mother that my bones were properly aligned. This was a year or two before our national health plan came into effect, but I don’t think anyone charged my mother—the last thing they wanted was another phone call from her. I didn’t mind these outings. I enjoyed the predictable cycle of hope and dismissal that shaped my mother’s pursuit of physicians, and since her various phobias kept us mostly at home, any excursion was a treat.

We were rescued, finally, by Dr. Frankel. It was early autumn, and wet leaves lay scattered on the sidewalk like discarded party decorations. I bent down to collect two or three of the prettiest ones—all crimson or all gold, without spots or perforations.

Dr. Frankel’s office was located not in a medical building or a side extension of his home but behind a restaurant in the East End. To reach it, we had to turn onto a narrow lane that ran along the windowless back walls of stores. Facing these brick walls, on the other side of the lane, were struggling backyards separated by simple wooden fences. I was intrigued by the little fenced yards, with their sprinkling of dandelions, neat rows of garbage pails, a tricycle or two; I felt certain they were portals to a warm, orderly but eventful world to which I had no access, could barely even imagine.

Dr. Frankel’s door was embedded in one of the brick walls. A hand-written note instructed visitors to walk in and have a seat: the doctor would be back shortly.

We entered and found ourselves in a room with a coat stand, five folding chairs, a pile of neglected magazines on a stool, and a mystifying tangle of wire coat hangers on the floor. I could see at
once that there was something wrong with this setup—anyone could see. Doctors’ offices were supposed to have carpets and smell of disinfectant; a receptionist handed you forms to fill in; there were other patients ahead of you.

All the same, we sat down as instructed. Looking through the dust-coated magazines I came upon one with the promising title,
True Confessions
, and soon I was deeply absorbed in the pornographic tale of a girl with a psychotic father. The father, a religious fanatic of some sort, catches his daughter swimming naked in a pond with a boy, and not only that, but on a Sunday morning, when she should have been in church. Enraged, he forces her to walk naked through the town, while he goads her with a switch made of prickly branches. Before long, the girl runs away and marries Rialto, a man with a thin moustache and perverse tastes who wants to show her off to his friends … This bizarre narrative was interrupted by Dr. Frankel’s entrance.

Although it was a warm day, Dr. Frankel wore an ancient capelike coat, and since I was well trained by then, I knew that he, too, had been
there
, and that his coat had come with him from Europe. He removed the coat, draped it gently over the coat stand, and held out his hand. “Good day, Mrs. Levitsky. Good day, Mrs. Levitsky’s daughter.”

We followed him to his office. “Please to sit down, Mrs. Levitsky and Mrs. Levitsky’s daughter,” he said. His hair was spotted with dandruff, his knuckles were hairy, his ears were hairy. His white doctor’s jacket lay crumpled in a heap on his desk. With his large hairy hands he clutched the white fabric and shook it into shape.

He slid his arms into the sleeves of the jacket.

“Please to step out, Mrs. Levitsky, and I will examine your daughter.”

When the door was shut he nodded and asked me to touch my toes. “Very good,” he said. “Would you like a candy?”

He handed me a lemon lollipop and called my mother back inside.

—well doctor well well—

“Bad news, Mrs. Levitsky.
Very
bad news. Your daughter has a definite bone deformity, as you so well observed. Incurable, I am regretting to say.”

—Yossi Yossi—

Dr. Frankel handed her a tissue, leaned forward, and said confidentially, “Listen, if we don’t tell to anyone, no one will know. It will be our little secret.”

Instantly my mother cheered up.

—yes thank you yes yes—

As we walked back to the street, my mother congratulated herself on finding, after so many wrong turns and dead ends, a true doctor, and not only a doctor, but a fine human being as well.

—here is what you what you call a gentleman—

To celebrate, we bought chocolate ice cream at the three-booth greasy spoon on the other side of Dr. Frankel’s office. Our waitress spoke only French, and my mother licked an imaginary cone and repeated
chocolate, chocolate
, which she assumed was a universal term. My mother was resourceful, if nothing else.

At home, my mother gave Bubby, who listened or did not listen, heard or did not hear, understood or did not understand, her version of our deliverance.

—such a gentleman such a gentleman—

My mother decided, after this happy result, that my body didn’t require further medical attention. Instead, under the influence of her card-playing friends, she became preoccupied with my mental health.

Fanya was devoted to cards, and every Wednesday night several of her friends invaded our flat, eager to gamble and dispense advice. Sitting in the kitchen, I had a clear view of the living room, where the card table was set up. Since my mother and her friends were too poor to risk the loss of a few dollars, they gambled with sunflower seeds. The seeds, along with Mrs. Blustein’s bare feet (she suffered from “heat attacks”) and
Mrs. Kaplan’s kerchief, tied peasant-style under her chin (in case of lice), gave the scene a rural charm. With a box of soda crackers by my side and my legs resting on two chairs, I watched these social gatherings and wrote down slivers of conversation, which I transcribed into imperfect haikus.
Ai these varicose / the lettuce wrap in a cloth / on Tuesdays is best.

Other entertainments included my mother’s transformation into Greta Garbo. Eyelashes sticky, breasts heaving up and down under a dress that drew its inspiration from a wedding cake, my mother was not usually demure. When confronted with a hand of cards, however, she fell silent: not a word, not a syllable. Instead, her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth expressed the intensity of her insights, the wry amusement aroused by her opponents’ benighted moves. When it came to gin rummy, Fanya Levitsky was nobody’s fool.

It was during one of these visits that my mother’s defeated friends suddenly latched on to me. Whoever heard of a child locking herself in the bathroom in order to sing Harry Belafonte songs at the top of her lungs? And what about my troubles at school—my poor grades, my detentions? Why not schedule a consultation with Dr. Vera Moore? She completely cured the Rothman boy. Of course, she had a waiting list, but in some cases (the women looked at one another knowingly), she took patients right away.

My mother nodded thoughtfully. Yes, they certainly had a point, these friends of hers.

My sanity became the new topic of conversation. Was I suffering from a Freudian complex, a trauma, maybe even a split personality?

—what can I do with my education stopped in the middle—

After a few days of deliberation, my mother phoned Dr. Moore, and three days later, at seven in the evening, we set out for the medical building on Decelles Street. Dr. Moore had extended her office hours for us, just as my mother’s friends had predicted.

The building on Decelles was by now a familiar destination; we were well acquainted with the large round elevator buttons, the silent hallways, the oracular names on the frosted-glass door panels: Goldstein, Greenberg, de Vries. But we’d never seen anything like Vera Moore’s waiting room, in this building or anywhere else. You wanted to be early, if you were going to wait in a room like this one: chairs upholstered in velvet, framed paintings, a Persian carpet, a rolltop desk equipped with paper and pastels. I settled into one of the chairs and gazed at a watercolour of imaginary creatures resting in a cool, blue forest. Half-eagle, half-lion. Half-lizard, half-butterfly.

Following our success with Dr. Frankel, I associated medical brilliance with starker settings, but maybe it was the peculiarity of the room that boded well. I began to feel drowsy; I wanted to curl up on the carpet and shut my eyes.

Dr. Moore opened her office door and said, “Maya?”

I hurried towards her, leaving my mother alone in the velvet armchair, her stiff black alligator purse balanced precariously on her lap. I felt important as I entered the secret office. I imagined that I belonged to an indeterminate species, here to be observed and properly classified—maybe I, too, was a hybrid: part girl, part something else. I think I almost believed that Vera Moore had supernatural powers. Not spectacular powers, maybe, but minor ones, like being able to guess the contents of your fridge, or what page you were at in the book you were reading.

It may have been Dr. Moore’s presence rather than her profession that made her seem clairvoyant. She was majestic, and her voice was soft and certain, as if she harboured many unspoken thoughts, clever and amusing thoughts that would require intricate elucidation. Yet at the same time there seemed to be a towering shadow by her side, casting its gloom on her alone. You couldn’t see the shadow, but you could see its effect on Dr. Moore: it slowed her down, gave an odd pliancy to her face.

“Would you like to sit here?” she asked me. She placed her fragile, veined hand on a rotating globe chair upholstered in orange corduroy—like a little house, if you were Thumbelina and lived in a walnut shell. They used to be common, those chairs, though I never see them any more.

“Okay,” I said, arranging myself inside the corduroy cocoon. Dr. Moore sat facing me. Between us, on a low table, she’d arranged several polished stones and mineral samples, as well as a wooden egg made of intersecting geometrical pieces. You were supposed to figure out how to take the egg apart and then put it back together. I couldn’t be bothered with that sort of puzzle, but I liked the smooth polished wood, and I reached out for it.

“So, why are you here?” Dr. Moore asked, gazing straight at me. Her clear blue eyes made me think of Heidi—snowy Alps under blue skies, wheelchairs, miracles. Dr. Moore had naturally frizzy hair which she’d gathered into a bun; the loose strands were held in place by marbled combs, the kind you saw in drugstores. Her hair resisted both the bun and the combs, and lone filaments escaped in all directions. Try conditioner, I thought.

“My mother brought me.”

“Do you know why?”

I swivelled my chair gently from side to side. “She likes doctors.”

“Oh?”

“She likes them, but she also doesn’t like them.”

“She has mixed feelings?”

“Yes. She wants them to help us, but when they don’t find anything, she hates them. She says they’re just waiting to see who will die first.”

“Really!”

“Everything’s multiplied for my mother,” I explained. “You might see one rock here, on the table.” I pointed to the mineral samples. “My mother will see a million rocks. And believe me, she’ll have something to say about each one.”

Dr. Moore smiled, and I noticed that she had dimples, though they were partly lost inside the soft, unhappy brackets of her smile.

“And you, Maya? Do you listen when she goes on and on?”

I shook my head and said triumphantly, “That’s the whole point.”

“It’s tiring for you?”

“Not really tiring. It’s just … more like boring. The same thing, over and over. Over and over. ‘Yossi, Yossi—Yossi—’” I mimicked my mother. “That’s my father. She likes to say his name.”