The Doctor's Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer Read Free Book Online

aunt, Ev’s brother Steve’s wife, Karen, in San Diego, was very sweet to them. She never forgot birthdays, and she sent them greeting cards on every imaginable holiday, from Purim to Presidents’ Day. But I knew that at one time or another each of them had told Violet things they weren’t able to tell Ev or me. She always treated them seriously, even when they were small, when she’d let them do huge, messy paintings in her studio.
    The show at One Art was an eclectic jumble of showy collages; almost invisible pen-and-ink drawings; whimsical wire sculptures; and Violet’s big, somber canvases—like a family of foster children thrown together by cruel fate.
    Soon after we arrived a man and woman came in, asked directions to another gallery, and left. I walked around the room, looking at the work, while Violet leafed through the guest book, reading some of the inscriptions aloud to me. Someone had scrawled, “Keep your day jobs!” across a whole page, which made Violet laugh. A few other people, from places like Georgetown, Texas, and DeKalb, Illinois, had written polite and positive remarks, or simply signed their names and addresses.
    But the comments were mostly from relatives and friends of the artists. “Beautiful work! We’re so proud of you! Love from Aunt Lil and Uncle Bernie.” Art critics don’t review co-op shows any more than literary critics review self-published books. It was a good thing that Violet
had
kept her day job, at a high-end art shop called Framework, on Lexington Avenue. And I suppose it was good that I was still working, even freelance, in my field. The major difference between us was Violet’s steadfast commitment to her painting, to her art—as essential to her true self as her prominent nose.
    Maybe not having children was the trade-off; look at Austen and Dickinson and Georgia O’Keeffe. Louise Nevelson had a son, but she handed him over to someone else to raise. I’m not convinced of the connection, though. My own kids were grown now, or nearly so, and the only writing I’d done in the past few years was in the journal I still kept in a spiral notebook, a grown-up version of my childhood diary. And even those entries were sporadic and sparse, and strewn with domestic effluvia: blue pants to cleaners, Total, milk, asparagus, Crest. I’d added a couple of hasty notes recently in my weird shorthand: “? Esm. & Scott re: Clichy.” “Visit D.!”
    Back when I still thought of myself as a writer, before I started tampering with other people’s work, I carried a notebook all the time and wrote down almost every impression I received, as if I were a recording angel assigned to keep track of the mortal world. Aunt Lil and Uncle Bernie and the Hildebrands from DeKalb were surely not the audience Violet had envisioned for her work, but it didn’t matter all that much; she painted for herself now.
    “Write the story you’d like to read,” Phil Santo used to tell us in the workshop, but we could hardly hear him over the roaring of our ambition. What happens to all that lost desire, all the language we never use? Why did the floor of my life suddenly seem to be made of glass that I might just crash through? And where was my mother when I still needed her? The room began to turn, like the dancers confined to her perfume bottle.
    “Violet,” I said. “Feel my head. I think I’m burning up.”

4
    My father didn’t just lose his keys one day and forget what they were the next. His decline was gradual and followed an unremarkable pattern. At first he suffered from the usual complaints of the aging, like hearing loss, lethargic bowels, and hesitant urination, while his heart stampeded, although nothing much really excited him anymore. A hearing aid and a beta-blocker were prescribed, as well as medication for his prostate and blood pressure. He had retired from his surgical practice several years before, but he still did a few consultations. His reputation was intact even if his