Page 30 - WTP VOl. VIII #6

Doctor's Daughter (continued from preceding page)
table than a place for washing up before dinner or straightening a wayward hair. A suburban landscape gone berserk, the counter had become clinical terrain, daisy-shaped soaps thrown over for alcohol bottles and needles.
That afternoon, the blood looked dark.
It was my mom’s fifty-eighth birthday. Dad told her that he wasn’t feeling very well. He never said this
in the three and a half years that he had been ill. Worse, he wanted to go to the hospital. A surgeon himself, he assessed his own condition as if it were a patient’s, another patient’s. From a hospital wheel- chair, once, he held up his x-ray to a ceiling light, straightening the film with a single shake. He never said the word, cancer, in the three and a half years. He looked annoyed when he handed the x-ray back to the technician.
My father waited for me on the foyer settee, his hol- lowed cheekbones catching a flicker of summer sun. I flew through the front door, carrying the peach cobbler I had baked for that evening’s birth- day celebration. It was still warm in the pan. Mom wheeled the oxygen tank to the garage, winding the tubing into countless circles to get it out the door. Then, she sat on the floor and put on her husband’s shoes. He wanted the cordovan pair with the laces.
I slid the pie onto the shelf and grabbed hold of one of Dad’s arms. Mom braced the other and we inched him through the hall and down the two steps into the garage. The steel door shut behind us, making the singular thud that had signaled his return home each evening. The walls shook. We eased him into the back seat. Mom swiveled his legs in after him, paused, then kissed his cheek.
“It was almost black,” she whispered. “The blood. It was black. Hurry now, get in, and sit with your father.”
~
Scott was a doctor, too, and had come from Philadel- phia that morning. We didn’t want to leave, but Dad insisted, one labored word at a time. An academic, he relied on rationale, fact and reason. Never, emotion. I knew that we needed to go.
I kissed my father’s forehead and said that I’d see him the next day. At the house, I told my mom that
I was going to go back home. I had a story to finish writing, a magazine piece about holiday decorating. Garlands on the mantle. Bows and pine cones. She let me go, even though I was returning to an empty house. My husband left for Los Angeles a few days before; Dad said that he should stay out west. I drove the fourteen miles north on the Hutchinson River Parkway, west on the Taconic to Briarcliff. The house was as I left it, all the lights on, mixing bowls in the sink, lined with peach puree.
I showered and put on pajamas. At nine o’clock, I called the hospital.
“He’s doing well,” Scott said. “Here, let me put him on.”
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby girl.”
“Keep up the good work,” I told him. “I will,” he said. “You, too.”
~
At midnight, the phone rang. Twice, I let it ring twice. I did not want to know; she did not want to say.
“Scotty was with him,” my mother said. “I will come get you.”
Just sixty-four, he was, and I, not finished, either. Not nearly finished. Cut off mid-stream.
3
When you make an incision into a calf’s heart, the trick is to point down with the tip of the scalpel so that you pierce the epicardium. The blade alone won’t penetrate the outer skin, so you have to angle the knife and apply just a hint of pressure with your index finger before leveling out and completing the cut. I learned this after dinner, when the dishes were cleared off the table, leaving just one plastic placemat with the dried flowers laminated inside. On it, Dad lined up the catgut, curved needle, needle holder,
We took turns laying on the hospital cot that night. I kept myself from falling asleep, timing the blinks on the monitors, differentiating the cabs on York Av- enue—sedan or Checker. My father had a barrel chest and proud posture. Shoulders back, chin up, he’d
tell us, out for a walk. In the hospital bed, his body hardly raised the blankets on top of him, slipped in like a note in an envelope. He slept without stirring as morphine steamed through the mask, sending swirly apparitions over the pillow. I got close at intervals throughout the night and checked for breathing sounds. Nothing changed the next day and by dinner- time, Dad told us to go home. My brother would stay.
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