Page 157 - A Little Life: A Novel

just me and my father. He was a doctor, a general practitioner who liked to
hope he might grow old with his patients.
We lived on West End, at Eighty-second Street, and his practice was in

our building, on the ground floor, and I used to come by to visit after
school. All his patients knew me, and I was proud to be the doctor’s son, to
say hello to everyone, to watch the babies he had delivered grow into kids
who looked up to me because their parents told them I was Dr. Stein’s son,
that I went to a good high school, one of the best in the city, and that if they
studied hard enough, they might be able to as well. “Darling,” my father
called me, and when he saw me after school on those visits, he would place

his palm on the back of my neck, even when I grew taller than he, and kiss
me on the side of my head. “My darling,” he’d say, “how was school?”
When I was eight, he married his office manager, Adele. There was never
a moment in my childhood in which I was not aware of Adele’s presence: it
was she who took me shopping for new clothes when I needed them, she
who joined us for Thanksgiving, she who wrapped my birthday presents. It

was not so much that Adele was a mother to me; it’s that to me, a mother
was Adele.
She was older, older than my father, and one of those women whom men
like and feel comfortable around but never think of marrying, which is a
kind way of saying she wasn’t pretty. But who needs prettiness in a mother?
I asked her once if she wanted children of her own, and she said I was her
child, and she couldn’t imagine having a better one, and it says everything

you need to know about my father and Adele and how I felt about them and
how they treated me that I never even questioned that claim of hers until I
was in my thirties and my then-wife and I were fighting about whether we
should have another child, a child to replace Jacob.
She was an only child, as I was an only child, and my father was an only
child, too: a family of onlys. But Adele’s parents were living—my father’s

were not—and we used to travel out to Brooklyn, to what has now been
swallowed by Park Slope, to see them on weekends. They had lived in
America for almost five decades and still spoke very little English: the
father, timidly, the mother, expressively. They were blocky, like she was,
and kind, like she was—Adele would speak to them in Russian, and her
father, whom I called Grandpa by default, would unclench one of his fat
fists and show me what was secreted within: a wooden birdcall, or a wodge

of bright-pink gum. Even when I was an adult, in law school, he would