The Dutch House(43)
I’d called her at home on a Saturday, a sack of quarters I should have been saving on the metal shelf in front of the dorm pay phone. “I know it was real estate, but what was the deal? What did he buy? Who would have given him a loan if he was really as poor as he always said he was?”
The line was quiet for a minute. “What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to understand what happened in our life. I’m trying to do the thing you’re always doing, I’m decoding the past.”
“On a Saturday morning,” she asked. “Long distance?”
Maeve was exactly the person I should have talked to, because she was my sister and because she had a knack for money. If anyone could have helped me solve the problem it was her, but Maeve wasn’t going to listen to anything that might sidetrack me from her dream of medical school. And even if I could have told her, what would I have said? I’d found another building in Harlem up for auction? A rooming house with a single bathroom on every floor? “I’m just trying to figure out what happened,” I said, and that much was true. I had spent countless hours in my father’s company and never asked him a thing. The operator came on and said I needed to put in another seventy-five cents for the next three minutes, and when I declined to do so the line went dead.
Dr. Able alone had seen me slip away, and it was Dr. Able who called me into his office to bring me back to the righteous path of chemistry. He sent me to the department secretary to schedule appointments so that I could meet with him once a week during office hours. He said I had no absences left, and from then on would be expected to be present in class regardless of my health. While the rest of the students would be assigned four or five questions from the end of every chapter, I was to answer all of the questions and come in to have my answers checked. I was never sure if I’d been singled out for punishment or benevolence, but either way I didn’t think I deserved it.
“Bring your parents by,” he said to me a few days before parents’ visiting weekend. “I’ll tell them how well you’re doing, relieve their troubled minds.”
I was standing at the door of Dr. Able’s office and took an extra beat to decide whether to tell him the truth or just say thank you and leave it at that. I liked my persecutor, but my story was complicated and tended to engender a kind of sympathy in other people I’d never been able to tolerate.
“What?” he said, waiting for my answer. “No parents?”
He meant it as I joke and so I laughed. “No parents,” I said.
“Well, I’ll be in the office on Saturday as part of the festivities if you and your legal guardian want to come by.”
“We might do that,” I said, and thanked him as I left.
I put it together easily enough, and years later, Maurice Able, whom everyone called Morey, confirmed my suspicion: he went to the registrar’s office to look at my file. He never asked about my parents again, but he started to suggest we hold our weekly meetings over lunch at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. He invited me to the dinners he and his wife hosted for the graduate students in chemistry. He checked to see how I was doing in my other classes and alerted those teachers to my situation. Morey Able took pity on me and became my advisor, thinking it had been my parentless state that had put me in academic peril, when in fact it was my father. Halfway through college, I had come to see I was a great deal like my father.
Archimedes’ Principle states that any body completely or partially submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force, the magnitude of which is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body. Or to put it another way, you can hold a beach ball under water but the second you stop it’s going to shoot straight back up. And so throughout my interminable academic career I suppressed my nature. I did everything that was required of me while keeping a furtive list of the buildings I passed that were for sale: asking price, selling price, weeks on the market. I lurked at the periphery of foreclosure auctions, a habit I found hard to break. Like Celeste, I got an A in Organic Chemistry. I then went on to biochemistry second semester and followed that with a year of physics with a lab my senior year. Dr. Able, who had met me when I was drowning, never took his eye off me again. With the exception of that one half-semester, I was a good student, but even after I had recovered my standing, he always had it in his mind I could do better. He taught me how to learn and then relearn, to study until the answer to every question was coded in my fingerprints. I had told him I wanted to be a doctor and he believed me. When the time came to apply, he not only wrote me a letter of recommendation, he walked my application twenty blocks uptown and handed it to the director of admissions at the medical school at Columbia himself.
The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation. I would guess at least half the students in my class would rather have been anywhere else. We were fulfilling the expectations that had been set for us: the sons of doctors were expected to become doctors so as to honor the tradition; the sons of immigrants were expected to become doctors in order to make a better life for their families; the sons who had been driven to work the hardest and be the smartest were expected to become doctors because back in the day medicine was still where the smart kids went. Women had yet to be allowed to enroll at Columbia as undergraduates but there were a handful of them in my medical school class. Who knows, maybe they were the ones who actually wanted to be there. No one expected their daughters to become doctors in 1970, the daughters still had to fight for it. P&S, as the College of Physicians & Surgeons was known, had a thriving theater troupe made up of medical student actors, and to watch the shows the P&S Club put on—the dreary soon-to-be radiologists and urologists in half an inch of eyeliner bursting into gleeful song—was to see what they might have done with their lives had their lives belonged only to them.