Now he stooped toward me in the dimness of his waiting-room, his pale round face straining to focus on my brow. He said, “Your skin looks fair.”
“It’s not too bad yet,” I said. “It’s worst in March and April.”
“Very little on your face,” he said. I had thought there was none. He seized my hands-I felt that fierce sureness of touch my mother had felt-and studied my fingernails in the light filtering from the brighter room. “Yes,” he said, “Stippled. Your chest?”
“Pretty bad,” I said, frightened I would have to show him.
He blinked massively and dropped my hands. He was wearing a vest but not a coat and his shirtsleeves above the elbow were clipped by black elastics like narrow bands of mourning. A gold watch-chain formed a shifting pendulous arc across the brown vest of his belly. He wore a stethoscope around his neck. He switched on a light, and an overhead chandelier of brown and orange glass held together by black leading plunged pools of shine onto the wash of magazines on the central table. “You read, Peter, while I finish with your Dad.”
From the consulting-room my father’s voice earnestly called, “Let the kid come in, Doc. I want him to hear what you have to tell me. Whatever happens to me, happens to him.”
I was shy of entering, for fear of finding my father un dressed. But he was fully clothed and sitting on the edge of a small hard chair with stenciled Dutch designs. In this bright room his face looked blanched by shock. His skin looked loose; his little smile had spittle in the corners. “No matter what happens to you in life, kid,” he said to me, “I hope you never come up against the sigmoidoscope. Brrough!”
“Tcha,” Doc Appleton grunted, and lowered his weight into his desk chair, a revolving and pivoting one that seemed to have been contoured for him. His short plump arms with their efficient white hands perched familiarly on the accustomed curve of the carved wooden arms, which culminated in an inner scroll. “Your trouble, George,” he said, “is you have never come to terms with your own body.” To be out of their way, I sat on a high white metal stool beside a table of surgical tools.
“You’re right,” my father said. “I hate the damn ugly thing. I don’t know how the hell it got me through fifty years.”
Doc Appleton removed the stethoscope from around his neck and laid it on his desk, where it writhed and then subsided like a slain rubber serpent. His desk was a wide old rolltop full of bills, pill envelopes, prescription pads, cartoons clipped from magazines, empty phials, a brass letter opener, a blue box of loose cotton, and an omega-shaped silver clamp. His sanctum had two parts: this, the one where his desk, his chairs, his table of surgical tools, his scales, his eye-chart, and his potted plants were situated, and, be yond his desk and a partition of frosted glass, the other, the innermost sanctum, where his medicines were stored on shelves like bottles of wine and jugs of jewels. To here he would retire at the end of a consultation, emerging in time with a little labeled bottle or two, and from here at all times issued a complex medicinal fragrance compounded of candy, menthol, ammonia, and dried herbs. This cloud of healing odor could be sniffed even in the vestibule that contained the mat, the print, and the stucco umbrella stand. The doctor pivoted in his swivel chair and faced us; his bald head was not like Minor Kretz’s, which declared in its glittering knobs the plates and furrows of his skull. Doc Appleton’s was a smooth luminous rise of skin lightly flecked with a few pinker spots that only I, probably, would have noticed and recognized as psoriasis.
He pointed his thumb at my father. “You see, George,” he said, “you believe in the soul. You believe your body is like a horse you get up on and ride for a while and then get off. You ride your body too hard, You show it no love. This is not natural. This builds up nervous tension.”
My stool was uncomfortable and Doc Appleton’s philosophizing always afflicted me with embarrassment. I deduced that the verdict had already been handed down and from the fact that the doctor felt leisure to be boring I deduced that the verdict had been favorable. Still I remained in some suspense and studied the table of wiggly probes and angled scissors as if they were an alphabet in which I could read the word. AI AI, they said. Among these silver exclamations -needles and arrows and polished clamps-there was that strange hammer for tapping your knee to make your leg jerk. It was a heavy triangle of red rubber fixed in a silver handle made concave to improve the doctor’s grip. My very first trips to this office that I could remember centered about that hammer, and the table of instruments took its center from this arrowhead of sullen orange as if from something very ancient. It was the shape of an arrowhead but also of a fulcrum and as I watched it it seemed to sink, sink with its infinitesimal cracks and roundnesses of use and age, sink down through time and to be at the bottom sufficiently simple and ponderous to make there a pivot for everything.
“…know thyself, George,” Doc Appleton was saying. His pink firm palm, round as a child’s, lifted in admonition. “Now how long have you been teaching?”
“Fourteen years,” my father said. “I was laid off late in ‘31 and was out of work the whole year the kid was born. In the summer of ‘33, AI Hummel, who as you know is Pop Kramer’s nephew, came up to the house and suggested-”
“Does your father enjoy teaching? Peter.”
It took me a second to realize I had been addressed. “I don’t know,” I said, “at times I suppose.” Then I thought and added, “No, I guess he doesn’t.”
“It’d be O. K.,” my father said, “if I thought I was any good at it. But I don’t have the gift of discipline. My father, the poor devil, didn’t have it either.”
“You’re not a teacher,” Doc Appleton told him. “You’re a learner. This creates tension. Tension creates excess gastric juice. Now George, the symptoms you describe might be merely mucinous colitis. Constant irritation of the digestive track can produce pain and the sensation of anal fullness you describe. Until the X-ray, we’ll assume that’s what it is.”
“I wouldn’t mind plugging ahead at something I wasn’t any good at,” my father said, “if I knew what the hell the point of it all was. I ask, and nobody’ll tell me.”
“What does Zimmerman say?”
“He doesn’t say a thing. He thrives on confusion. Zimmerman has the gift of discipline and us poor devils under him who don’t have it, he just laughs at us. I can hear him laughing every time the clock ticks.”
“Zimmerman and myself,” Doc Appleton said, and sighed, “have never seen eye to eye. I went to school with him, you know.”