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

hands shook sometimes; he was, after all, the same man who’d written a landmark monograph, in 1968, on surgical intervention in bile duct blockage.
    Then we noticed that he’d begun to grope for words—“senior-itis,” he called it with a mirthless chuckle—or simply wound down in the middle of a sentence, to silence. After a while the phone calls started. My father had never cared much for the telephone; I think he considered it a “feminine ” instrument, like the hair dryer and the vacuum cleaner. He’d almost never answered the phone at home; either Faye or my mother did that, and at work it was the job of switchboard operators and medical secretaries, like his own Miss Snow, the pretty post-deb blonde who wore demure pastel twin sets and pearls, but aggressively guarded his door and his telephone extension.
    When I began to call him regularly, after his retirement, our conversations usually resembled a celebrity interview—I’d ask probing questions, and he’d give abbreviated, evasive answers. “Daddy, tell me what you did today.” “The usual.” The sense I got was that he was busy, which was good, and that he wasn’t too lonely, which was even better.
    My father did write letters over the years, though, and I’ve saved the ones he sent to me when I was away at summer camp and college. They were all handwritten on his professional stationery, and they were chatty and affectionate, and invariably signed “Your Daddy.” On my nineteenth birthday he sent greetings on a page from his prescription pad. “Rx for Alice Marion Brill, age nineteen: Take one heaping dose of happiness every day.”
    So when the telephone calls began, about three years ago, I was startled at first, and then I grew concerned. The first one came while I was at work. He’d called, it seemed, to ask me the time. He had a wonderful restored Breitling watch that my mother had given him, and a silver desk clock, with imposing Roman numerals, in his consultation room at the hospital. A cherry-wood grandfather clock reliably chimed out the hours in the vestibule of his home. Why was he asking me the time? I was busy when he called and decided that, oddly enough, he was just checking his watch’s performance.
    There was no discernible reason for the other calls, though, especially in the middle of the night, when he didn’t say anything for long seconds while I shouted “Hello! Hello!” against the possible onslaught of bad news. Once, he said, rather formally, “Forgive me, I must have the wrong number,” and hung up.
    Twenty-seven years before, not long after my mother died, people tried to fix my father up with various widows and divorcées. A couple of infatuated patients pursued him themselves. But he didn’t want to date at all; the term itself seemed distasteful to him. Marjorie Steinhorn said he’d told her that he still felt married. He continued to play bridge and have dinner with old friends, and he kept renewing his subscription to Alice Tully Hall, taking me with him, or one of the children when they were old enough. I believe that Jeremy’s interest in music began with those Sunday-afternoon concerts. He would reread the programs in bed the way Scotty reread his favorite comic books.
    It was my father’s own idea to sell the Riverdale house and move into the town house in Scarsdale. Faye had retired and gone back to North Carolina, and no one else he hired seemed to please him. He was between housekeepers when someone broke into the house while he was at the hospital. They were sophisticated thieves who’d managed to disarm the security system, and they stole many of the things he cherished, including a portrait of my mother by Alice Neel and the Egyptian prayer rugs they had bought on their honeymoon. It was as if my mother had died again—he suffered a similar impotent wrath, the same crushing grief.
    Ev and I agreed that a new, smaller place was appropriate and we helped him to settle in, with enough of his