But then we were at the table, eating, and he never paused for grace or removed his cap, though I told myself not to be judgmental. He praised my cooking in the usual way — I’m known from one end of this island to the other for my lobster bisque, not to mention my pork roast with onion and peanut sauce — and then, as I’ve said, we wound up by the fire. I was trying to pinpoint the odor he gave off, something between perspiration, naphtha and a heap of old sweat socks left out in the rain, and I was just about to offer to do a load of wash for him as a way of getting him to open up, but he wasn’t the sort of man to open up, even when he was digesting. In fact, right then, with the crumbs on his lips and the platter of cranberry tarts still balanced on his stomach, he began, ever so softly, to snore.
—
It was a while before I saw him again, other than to wave at him when he passed by in his Volvo going God knows where, and in that time just about everybody we knew invited him to dinner (the better class, that is, the ones who gave two hoots whether a township functioned smoothly or even at all). I know the Caldwells had him over, Betsy Fike, John and Junie Jordan, all sorts of people. And if he wasn’t dining out, he could be found down at the Kettle at seven o’clock on the stroke, forking up a plate of fish and chips or deep-fried scallops, which are delicious, I admit it, but maybe not so beneficial for your heart health, as any doctor ought to know. At any rate, I doubted if he cooked for himself at all, not even to the extent of heating up a can of soup over the range or popping a frozen dinner in the microwave.
Then there was the question of his office hours. Our agreement — the township was paying him $75,000 a year, plus the use of the Trumbull House, gratis — stipulated that he hold office hours, morning and afternoon, five days a week, and be available for house calls as needed. But Betsy Fike, whose wrist never really healed properly after her boating accident, went in to see him at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning — in pain, real pain — and the door was locked and he never answered her knock. Even worse, when you could get in — and I had this from Fredericka Granger — he just sat there behind his desk, which even back then, right in the beginning, was a mess, heaped high with forms and papers and grease-stained sandwich wrappers, empty potato chip bags and the like, and you practically had to move heaven and earth to convince him to take you into the back room for an examination. And that was a mess too.
I guess he’d been here six weeks or so by the time I decided to go in and see for myself. There was nothing wrong with me — Wyatt says I’m as healthy as a horse — but I invented something (female troubles, and though I’d turned forty-six and long since given in to the inevitable, I still wanted to see what he had to say about it, if that makes any sense). At any rate, I went in after lunch on one of those crusted-over March days when you think winter will never end, and took a seat in the deserted waiting room. The doctor didn’t have a nurse, so you just rang a bell and waited. I rang, took a seat and began leafing through the finger-worn magazines Dr. Braun had left behind when he lost his license in a prescription pill sting on the mainland and had to leave us.
Dr. Murdbritter (yes, that’s right, it does sound Jewish and we batted that around like a shuttlecock before we made him the offer) wasn’t prompt at all, not this time. I sat there a good ten or fifteen minutes, listening for sounds from within, until I got up and rang again, twice, before resuming my seat. When he finally appeared, in a faintly grayish-looking white shirt with an open collar, no jacket, he looked as if he’d been asleep. His hair — have I mentioned his hair? — was as kinky as a poodle’s and it tended to jut up on one side and lie flat on the other, and so it was now, as if he’d just raised his head from the pillow. He looked old, or older than his documentation claimed (which was my age exactly — we were even born in the same month, six days apart) and I had to wonder about that. Had he fudged a bit there? And if so, what of his qualifications, not to mention previous experience?
“Hello, Doctor,” I said, trying not to chirp, which I unfortunately find myself doing in such circumstances — running into people, that is, at the market or the gas station or the library or wherever. You’re chirping, Wyatt’ll say, and I’m forever trying to rein myself in.
The doctor’s face was unreadable. He was squinting at me. He gave a little tug at his beard. “Mrs. McKenzie,” he said, his voice as flat as if he were reading from a phone book.
“Call me Margaret,” I said, appending a little laugh. “After all, we have broken bread together—”
He didn’t appear to have heard this — or if he did he chose to ignore it. This wouldn’t be a sociable visit, I could see that. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked, stepping back to hold the door open so that I could see through to his heaped-up desk, and beyond it, the examining room, which looked little better.
“Oh, nothing, really,” I said, settling into the chair stationed in front of the desk while he eased himself into the swivel chair behind it with an audible sigh, “and I don’t want to trouble you—” Was that really a boot, a mud-encrusted boot, peeping out from beneath the examining table in the back room? And where were the oil paintings of dories and seabirds and the sun setting over Penobscot Bay Alva Trumbull had left behind when she bequeathed the place to the township?
“Yes?” He was waiting, his fingers knitted, his eyes roving over me.
“I’m having pains.”
“What sort of pains?”
I glanced away, then turned back to him, indicating, as best I could, the region of my lap. “Women’s pains. A kind of, I don’t know, just pain.”
“Bloating?”
I shook my head.
“Blood? Any discharge at all?”
I shook my head again, even more emphatically. There had been something, a faint discoloration I sometimes found in the crotch of my panties when I did the wash, but it was ordinary, the sort of thing women my age can be prone to once menopause comes, and I’d thought nothing of it till he put a name to it: discharge. I felt strange all of a sudden, as if I’d gone too far, too deep, and my little fib had come back to bite me.
He asked the usual questions then, looked at the charts Dr. Braun had left, probing gently about my previous history, and when we got to a point where we could go no further, he rose and said, “If you’ll step inside,” indicating the examining room.
“But I, I don’t really—” I began, pushing myself up from the chair in confusion, all the while silently cursing Fredericka Granger. Here he was leading me into the examining room without a hint of hesitation, but as far as I was concerned there was nothing to be examined, or no point to it, at any rate, because I was here to check up on him, not vice versa.
“It’s all right,” he said, and for a moment I saw beyond the beard and the dingy shirt and the tumult of the place, and saw him for what he was — a good doctor, a friend, a man who’d come to fulfill our collective need. I bowed my head and complied.
Still, as soon as I was inside, in his inner sanctum, I have to tell you I was shocked all over again. Everything I’d heard was true. The paper on the examining table looked as if it hadn’t been changed since Dr. Braun’s time. The linoleum was in serious need of wax, let alone a good mopping, the wastebaskets were overflowing — I saw fluffs of cotton stained with blood, syringes, throwaway thermometers, yet more fast-food wrappers and paper cups — and there must have been half an inch of dust scattered over everything. Worse, there was that muddy boot peeping out at me from beneath the table, and his jacket, his white coat, thrown across the back of a chair like an afterthought.