The Dutch House(80)
“Teddy,” his mother said in warning.
“Autopsies,” Teddy said, bored out of his mind. “They have to do them, you know.”
“We do,” I said, “but they make us take an oath never to discuss it at dinner.”
For that withholding, the room sent up a grateful round of laughter. From a distance, I heard someone ask Maeve if she was a doctor as well. “No,” she said, holding up her fork speared with green beans. “I’m in vegetables.”
When the dinner was over and we’d been piled up with leftovers for the weekend, Celeste kissed me goodbye. Maeve promised that we would pick her up Sunday morning on our way to the train. They trailed us out to the car, all those happy Norcrosses, telling us we should stay. There would be movies later on, popcorn, games of Hearts. Lumpy ran out of the house and into the yard, barking and barking at the piles of leaves until they shooed him back inside.
“This is our chance,” Maeve whispered, and jumped into the driver’s side. I went around and got in the car beside her while they stood there, the whole host of them waving and laughing as we pulled away.
The Norcrosses had their dinner early so it was barely dusk. We had just enough time to make it back to the Dutch House before the lights went on. We’d promised Jocelyn we’d come to her house later for pie, so this was just a brief interlude between dipping into other people’s splendid meals. We were still young enough then to conjure up the exact feeling of how Thanksgivings had been when we were children, but it was a memory with no longing attached. Either it had been me and Maeve and our father eating in the dining room, and Sandy and Jocelyn trying their best not to look like they were rushing to get home to their own families, or it was the years with Andrea and the girls, in which Sandy and Jocelyn rushed openly. After that disastrous Thanksgiving when Maeve was banished to the third floor, she had stayed away from Elkins Park, and every year I looked at her empty place at the table and felt miserable, even though I never could understand how her being gone on Thanksgiving was any worse than it was on all the other nights of the year. Having spent this particular Thanksgiving with the Norcross family had made up for a lot, and we both left the dinner feeling restored, even if our exit had smacked of escape. Maybe it was possible, we thought, to rise above the pathetic holidays of our youth.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Maeve said, rolling down her window to meet the frigid air, “but if I don’t have a cigarette right this minute I’m going to die.” She pulled one out then handed me the pack so I could decide for myself, then she handed me the lighter. Soon we were each blowing smoke out of our respective windows.
“As good as that dinner was, this cigarette might be better,” I said.
“If you did an autopsy on me right now you would find I am nothing but dark meat and gravy, with maybe a tiny vein of mashed potatoes inside my right arm.” Maeve was careful about her carbohydrates. She had forgone the Norcross pie in order to have a slice at Jocelyn’s.
“I could present you at grand rounds,” I said, and thought of Bill Norcross sawing into the carcass of the turkey.
Maeve shuddered slightly. “I can’t believe they make you cut people up.”
“I can’t believe you make me go to medical school.”
She laughed, and then pressed her fingers to her lips as if to quell her dinner’s revolt. “Oh, stop complaining. Seriously, apart from dissecting other human beings, tell me one thing that’s so terrible.”
I tipped my head back, exhaling. Maeve always said I smoked every cigarette like I was on my way to my execution, and I was thinking this really should be my last one. I knew better, even though those were still the days when doctors kept a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of their lab coats. Especially orthopedists. You couldn’t be an orthopedist without smoking. “The worst part is understanding you’re going to die.”
She looked at me, her black eyebrows raised. “You didn’t understand that?”
I shook my head. “You think you understand it. You think that when you’re ninety-six you’ll lie down on the couch after a big Thanksgiving dinner and not wake up, but even then you’re not really sure. Maybe there’ll be some special dispensation for you. Everybody thinks that.”
“I never for a minute thought I was going to die on the couch at ninety-six, or be ninety-six for that matter.”
But I wasn’t listening, I was talking. “You just don’t realize how many ways there are to die, excluding gunshots and knife fights and falling out windows and all the other things that probably aren’t going to happen.”
“Tell me, Doc, what is going to happen?” She was trying not to laugh at me, but it was true: death was all I thought about in those days.
“Too many white blood cells, too few red blood cells, too much iron, a respiratory infection, sepsis. You can get a blockage in your bile duct. Your esophagus can rupture. And the cancers.” I looked at her. “We could sit here all night talking about cancer. I’m just telling you, it’s unsettling. There are thousands of ways your body can go off the rails for no reason whatsoever and chances are you won’t know about any of it until it’s too late.”
“Which makes a person wonder why we need doctors in the first place.”
“Exactly.”
“Well,” Maeve said, taking a long pull on her cigarette, “I already know how I’m going to die so I don’t have to worry about that.”