Private Practices by Linda Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page A

Sara, Ben mused, and sat with his head buried in his arms. Whenever he thought of his mother, he felt sorry for her. Drowsy, he remembered how she had told him that when she was young, she had always dreamed of marrying a prince. An immigrant, she had learned English late in childhood, read fairy tales well into her teens, and fantasized overlong about princes charming, bewitched and benighted.
    The man she had married, Samuel Zauber, Ben and Sidney’s father, had clearly been no prince. An accountant for the Mid-Hudson Dairy, he spoke with an accent, smoked cigars whose odor Sara detested and left his socks strewn about the living room floor. After his death, Sara complained about him incessantly. But while he was alive, Ben imagined, she must have kept her complaints to herself, for she had made an alteration in her fantasies and Samuel was necessary to that alteration. She had decided that although she had not married royally, she might, instead, produce a prince for herself.
    Sara tried, from the first month of her married life. In bed with Samuel she smelled his feet, was aware of the odor even when he had bathed them in the porcelain tub. She herself felt hot, sweaty, sunstruck. He would ride her, straddling her and galloping, a courier who did not know the errand he was on, the reason why she lay so willingly beneath him though he rode and rode her to exhaustion. And she never told Samuel how she felt. Feelings as a matter of display between husbands and wives were invented later, when Sara was already an older woman. In their midnight rides across the bed, physical presence was all.
    Then at last Sara became pregnant and rejoiced, never once doubting that the weight within her was a son, a prince. But after six bloodless months she awoke screaming and bleeding in the night and Samuel called their doctor, the only Jewish physician in Poughkeepsie, and he came and took Sara in his black Ford to the hospital and she was assured, when she was sent home several days later, that there was no cause for the miscarriage, that there was nothing wrong with her, that it had just been an idiopathic event. She was urged to try again.
    And she did try, and did try, and for the next eight years she was pregnant seven times and seven times Samuel telephoned in the night for the doctor and Sara was taken to the hospital and then returned home to try again. She began to believe that God had forsaken her, and grew depressed and stayed at home, friendless. And then, on her ninth effort God decided in her favor and let her have Sidney. Or so it seemed to her. That he was God-given she never questioned, and, even more than most Jewish women of her age and background, treated her first son as a being at whose feet both she and her husband should worship.
    She knitted and embroidered and sewed and fed him, first with her breasts and then with an ornate spoon, a large never a small one. She kissed and bathed and caressed him and put him to sleep, once he reached the age of nightmares, in her own fluffy bed, urging Samuel to settle down on the couch. She taught him to read and recited her fairy tales to him and told him he must be a doctor when he grew up, and help God help poor women like herself, and she sat him on her knees for piano lessons before he was three years old. He was everything she had ever wanted in life.
    In a way the second baby, Ben, was superfluous. She had had all her prayers answered by Sidney. Ben was an afterthought, God’s postscript.
    Still, she had done her best to love them equally. She was indefatigable and exquisitely fair. It was not her fault that Ben was a much more lethargic baby than Sidney, undemanding, absorbed in his own fingers and toes and unimpressed by rattles and colored wooden beads. Not her fault that Sidney, at two, had memorized his picture books, whereas Ben, stubby-fingered, could barely manage to turn pages one at a time. Not her fault that Sidney, at three, could print his name in great