The Dutch House(36)

“Does it even matter to you that I don’t want to be a doctor?” I asked. “Does what I want to do with my life factor into this?”

“Well, what do you want to do?”

I wanted to work with my father, to buy and sell buildings. I wanted to build them from scratch, but that was gone. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll play basketball.” I sounded petulant even to myself. Maeve would have loved to have had my problems, to explore the limits of how extensively and expensively she could be educated.

“Play all you want when you get off work at the hospital,” she said, and followed the signs to Connecticut.





Part Two





Chapter 8




The snow was coming down heavy and wet in New York on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Penn Station looked like a feedlot and we, the anxious travelers, were the cows standing in pools of melting slush, bundled up and pressed together in the overheated terminal. We couldn’t take off our coats and hats and scarves because our arms were full of suitcases and bags and books we didn’t want to put on the disgusting floor. We stared at the departures board, awaiting instruction. The sooner we could get to the train, the better our chances of claiming a seat that was forward facing and not too close to the toilet. A kid with a backpack full of bricks kept turning to say something to his girlfriend, and every time he did he clocked me with the full weight of his possessions.

I wanted to be back in my dorm room at Columbia.

I wanted to be on the train.

I wanted to be out of my coat.

I wanted to learn the layout of the periodic table.

Maeve could have saved me from all of this had she troubled herself to come to New York. Now that she had overseen the delivery of who knew how many tons of frozen vegetables to grocery stores for the holiday, Otterson’s was closed until Monday. My roommate was having Thanksgiving with his parents in Greenwich, so Maeve could have slept in his bed and we could have eaten Chinese and maybe seen a play. But Maeve would come to New York City only if circumstances demanded it—say, when my appendix ruptured the first semester of my freshman year of college. I rode to Columbia-Presbyterian with the hall proctor in an ambulance. When I woke up from surgery, Maeve was there asleep, her chair pulled next to the bed, her head on the mattress beside my arm. The dark mess of her hair spread out across me like a second blanket. I had no memory of calling her, but maybe someone else had. She was my emergency contact after all, my next of kin. I was still floating in and out of the anesthesia, watching her dream, thinking, Maeve came to New York. Maeve hates coming to New York. It had something to do with how much she had loved Barnard and all the potential she had seen in herself then. New York represented her shame about things that were in no way her fault, or at least that’s what I was thinking. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again she was sitting up in that same chair, holding my hand.

“There you are,” she said, and smiled at me. “How are you feeling?”

It would be years before I understood the very real danger of what had happened to me. At the time I saw the surgery as something between a nuisance and an embarrassment. I started to make a joke but she was looking at me with such tenderness I stopped myself. “I’m okay,” I said. My mouth was sticky and dry.

“Listen,” she said, her voice quiet. “It’s me first, then you. Do you understand?”

I gave her a loopy smile but she shook her head.

“Me first.”

The spinners started clicking a jumble of letters and numbers and when they stopped, the sign read harrisburg: 4:05, track 15, on time. Basketball had taught me how to move through a crowd. Most of the poor cows came to Penn Station just once a year and were easily confused. In the collective shuffling, very few turned in the right direction. By the time they’d puzzled out which way they were supposed to go, I was already on the train.

On the plus side, the trip would give me more than an hour to study, time that was necessary to my continuing redemption in Organic Chemistry. My professor, the aptly named Dr. Able, had called me to his office in early October to tell me I was on track to fail. It was 1968 and Columbia was burning. The students rioted, marched, occupied. We were a microcosm of a country at war, and every day we held up the mirror to show the country what we saw. The idea that anyone took note of a junior failing chemistry was preposterous, but there I was. I had already missed several classes and he had a stack of my quizzes in front of him so I don’t suppose it took an act of clairvoyance to figure out I was in trouble. Dr. Able’s third-floor office was crammed with books and a smallish blackboard that featured an incomprehensible synthesis I was afraid he would ask me to explain.

“You’re listed as pre-med,” he began, looking at his notes. “Is that right?”

I told him that was right. “It’s still early in the semester. I’ll get things back on track.”

He tapped his pencil on the pile of my disappointing work. “They take chemistry seriously in medical school. If you don’t pass, they don’t let you in. That’s why it’s best we talk now. If we wait any longer you won’t catch up.”

I nodded, feeling an aching twist in my lower intestines. One of the reasons I’d always worked hard in school and gotten good grades was an effort to preclude this exact conversation.

Dr. Able said he’d been teaching chemistry long enough to have seen plenty of boys like me, and that my problem wasn’t a lack of ability, but the apparent failure to put in the necessary time. He was right, of course, I’d been distracted since the beginning of the semester, but he was also wrong, because I didn’t think he’d seen plenty of boys like me. He was a thin man with a badly cut thatch of thick brown hair. I couldn’t have guessed how old he was, only that in his tie and jacket he resided in what I thought of as the other side.