The Dutch House(44)



The first day of orientation took place in a lecture hall with stadium seating. Various faculty laid out impossible cases and told us that by the end of the year we would be able, if not to solve these cases, then to at least discuss them knowledgeably. The head of cardiac surgery took the stage to extol the wonders of the cardiac surgery program, and the boys who had told their mothers they were going to be heart surgeons whistled and hollered and clapped, each one thinking that this was going to be him one day: the lord of it all. Then a neurologist came out and other members of the audience cheered. One by one every organ had its moment in the sun: Kidneys! Lungs! Oh, how they beamed! We were the smartest bunch of idiots around.

When I was in medical school I had a telephone in my apartment. We all did. Even in our first year they wanted us to know we could be called to the hospital at any hour. My phone was ringing when I came in the door during my second week of school.

“I have the most fantastic news,” Maeve said. Long-distance rates went down at six o’clock and then again at ten. The clock read five past ten.

“All ears.”

“I had lunch with Lawyer Gooch today, strictly social, he thinks he’s supposed to be my father now. Halfway through the meal he mentions that Andrea had contacted him.”

There was a time when this news might have perked me up but I was too tired to care. If I started my homework immediately I might be asleep by two in the morning. “And?”

“She called him to say she thought that sending you to medical school was excessive. She said she’d been given to believe that the trust was for college only.”

“Who gave her to believe that?”

“No one. She’s making it up. She said she hadn’t complained about Choate because you’d just lost your father, but at this point she feels we’re bilking the trust.”

“We are bilking the trust.” I sat down in the single kitchen chair and leaned against the little table. The phone was in the kitchen, what I called the kitchen closet. I tracked the path of a cockroach as it wandered down the front of the yellow metal cabinet and slipped beneath the door.

“He told me she’d looked up the cost of Columbia and that it was the single most expensive medical school in the country. Did you even know that? Number one. She said it’s her proof that this is all a plot against her, and that you could go to U-Penn for half of what Columbia costs and leave some money for the girls. She told him she simply wasn’t going to pay for Columbia anymore.”

“But she doesn’t pay for it. The trust pays for it.”

“She perceives herself to be the trust.”

I rubbed my eyes and nodded to no one. “Well, what does Lawyer Gooch say? Does she have any case?”

“None!” Maeve’s gleeful voice was loud in my ear. “He said you can stay in school for the rest of your life.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You never know. There are lots of fascinating things to pursue. You could live the life of the mind.”

I thought of the endless maze that was the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, our professors in their white coats sailing down the hallways like gods in their heaven. “I don’t want to be a doctor. You know that, right?”

Maeve didn’t miss a beat. “You don’t have to be a doctor, you only have to study to be one. Once you’re finished you can play a doctor on television for all I care. You can be anything you want, as long as it requires a great deal of schooling.”

“Go help the poor,” I said. Maeve taught an evening class on how to make a budget through Catholic Charities and on Tuesday nights she stayed up late to grade their notebooks and correct their math. “I need to study.”

“I wish you could be happy about this,” she said. “But the truth is it doesn’t matter. I’m happy enough for both of us.”

Happiness had been suspended for the foreseeable future. I was taking Human Histology, Embryology, and Gross Anatomy. The lessons of chemistry that Dr. Able had drilled into me held fast: I answered every question at the end of every chapter and in the morning I woke up and answered them again. We were put in groups of four, given a cadaver, a saw, and a scalpel, and told to go to work. The only other dead person I’d seen until that point was my father, and I found it far too easy to picture a group of white coats perched like vultures around his bed, waiting to open him up. Disassemble, reassemble. Our cadaver was older than my father, a smaller, brown-skinned man. His mouth was open in the same horrible way, as if it were the universal last act to try and fail to gasp a final breath. I would have thought that in order to cut a man apart and label him I would have needed at the very least some degree of curiosity, but that wasn’t the case. I did it because it was the assignment. Some of my classmates vomited in the lab that first day, others made it to the hall or even the bathroom, but the carnage of our work didn’t hit me until I was outside again, the sweet-sick smell of formaldehyde still painted in my nose. I threw up on the sidewalk in Washington Heights along with the junkies and the drunks.

I had seen Celeste from time to time during my junior and senior years of college. I had seen other women, too. Dating was an activity that required thoughtfulness and planning and time, and in medical school I had none of those luxuries. Going out with Celeste felt the least like dating. She asked almost nothing of me and she gave the most in return. She was agreeable and cheerful, pretty without being distracting. When I went to Philadelphia on the train she came with me. Maeve and I would drive her to Rydal but Celeste never insisted that I spend time with her family. Maeve and Celeste were still affectionate with each other in those days. Maeve was happy because Columbia Medical was expensive, had top rankings and offered me no financial aid. Celeste was happy because it was farther north than Columbia’s main campus and therefore easier for her to get to from Thomas More, where she was still an undergraduate English major. My tiny apartment was two blocks from the medical school, and Celeste would come down from the Bronx after her last class on Friday afternoon and stay with me until it was time for her to work her shift at the front desk in the dean’s office Monday morning. When I was an undergraduate, we worked around my roommate’s schedule, but in medical school we fell into a kind of three-day-a-week marriage, which, in retrospect, was probably as much marriage as we were capable of. We lived under the rules that had been established when we met on the train: I had to study and she had to let me. But we also lived in the America of 1969: the war was grinding on, protestors filled the streets, students still commandeered administrative offices, and we had as much guilt-free, diaphragm-protected sex as time allowed. I will forever associate the study of human anatomy not with my cadaver but with Celeste’s young body lying naked on my bed. She let me run my hands across every muscle and bone, naming them as I went along. The parts of her I couldn’t see I felt for, and, in doing so, learned how best to bind her to me. The little fun I had in those days I had with Celeste—the splurge of Szechuan noodles in white paper cartons eaten on the roof of the hospital late at night, the time she got free passes to see Midnight Cowboy from her French professor who had meant for her to go with him. Everything went so well for us until she turned her attention to her impending graduation. She wanted to start making plans for the future. That was when she told me we’d have to get married.

Ann Patchett's Books