“I didn’t know that.”
My father was.lying. Even I had known that, Doc Apple-ton said it so often. Zimmerman was a chafe to him, a lifelong sore point. I was furious with my father for being so obsequious, for laying us both open this way to a long and often-chewed story.
“Why, yes,” Doc Appleton said, blinking in surprise that my father should be ignorant of such a famous fact. “We went all through the Olinger schools together.” He leaned back in the chair that fitted him so exquisitely. “Now when we were born here it wasn’t called Olinger, it was called Til den, in honor of the man who got cheated out of the election. Old Pappy Olinger was still farming all that land to the north of the pike and east of where the cardboard box factory is now. I remember seeing him take his team into Alton, a little old fella not five feet tall with a black hat and a mustache you could have wiped your table silver on. He had three sons: Cot, who went crazy one night and killed two steer with a hand hoe, Brian, who had a child by the Negro woman they had to work in the kitchen, and Guy, the youngest, who sold the land to the real estate developers and died of trying to eat the money up. Cot, Brian, and Guy: they’re all beneath the ground now. Now what did I start to say?”
“About you and Mr. Zimmerman,” I said.
My impudent impatience was not lost on him; he looked over my father’s shoulder at me and his lower lip slid thought fully to one side and then to the other. “Ah, yes,” he pronounced, and spoke to my father. “Well, Louis and I went through the grades together when they were scattered all over the borough. First and second grade was over by Pebble Creek where they put the parking lot for the new diner; third and fourth grades were in Mrs. Eberhardt’s barn that she rented the town for a dollar a year; fifth and sixth were in a stone building on what they used to call the Black Acres, because the loam was so deep, over beyond where the race track used to be. Whenever they’d hold a weekday race, on Tuesdays usually, they used to let us out of class because they needed boys to hold and comb the horses. Then for those that kept on past sixth grade, by the time I was the age they had built the high school at the Elm Street corner. Now didn’t that look grand to’ us then! That’s the building, Peter, where you went to elementary school.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, trying to atone for my rudeness before.
Doc Appleton seemed pleased. He relaxed into his creaking chair so deeply his creased high-top shoes dangled, just touching their toes to the threadbare carpet. “Now Louis M. Zimmerman,” he went on, “was a month older than myself, and a great hand with the girls and the old women. Mrs. Mettzler, that was our teacher in the first and second grade, a woman not an inch under six feet tall and with legs like the siding slats of a tobacco shed, took a shine to Louis, and for that matter so did Miss Leet and Mrs. Mabry that followed her; all his way through school Louis had the best of attention, while of course nobody thought a second thought about an ugly duckling like Harry Appleton. Louis always had that edge. You see: he was quick.”
“You said a mouthful,” my father said. “He’s always a jump ahead of me, I’ll tell you that.”
“He never had, you see,” Doc Appleton continued, making curious ambiguous motions with his plump scrubbed hands, pressing the palms together, lightly chopping the knuckles of one hand with the edge of the other, “the adversity. He always knew success and never developed the character. So he spreads, you see,” and his white fingers crabbed through the air, “like a cancer. He’s not a man to trust, though he gives the Bible lesson every Sunday up at the Reformed. Tcha. If he was a tumor, George, I’d take a knife”-he shifted his hand and held up his thumb and it did seem very stiff and sharp-”and cut him out.” And his thumb, sickle-shaped backwards with pressure, scooped a curt divot out of the air.
“I appreciate your being frank with me, Doc,” my father said, “but me and those other poor devils up at the high school are stuck with him forever as far as I can see. Three out of four people in this town swear by him-they worship that man.”
“People are foolish,” Doc Appleton said, and lurched forward in his chair so that his feet softly plopped on the carpet. “That’s one thing you learn in the practice of medicine. People are by and large very foolish.” He tapped my father’s knee once, twice, three times before continuing. His voice assumed a confidential wheeze. “Now when I went to medical school down at Penn,” he said, “they thought, you know, a country boy, dumb. After that first year they weren’t saying so dumb any more. It might be I was a little slower than some but I had the character. I took my time and learned the books. When the class graduated, who do you think was at the head? Heh, Peter-you’re a bright boy. Who do you think?”
“You,” I said. I didn’t want to say it but the word was forced from me. That’s how those Olinger bigwigs were.
Doc Appleton looked at me without nodding or smiling or in any way showing that he had heard. Then he looked into my father’s face, nodded, and said, “I wasn’t at the head, but I was up there pretty well. I did all right for a country boy supposed to be dumb. George, have you been listening to what I’ve been saying?” And without warning, in that strange way monologuists have of ending a conversation as if their time has been wasted, he got up and went into his inner sanctum and made tinkling noises out of sight. He returned with a small bottle of cherry-colored fluid that from the way it danced and gleamed seemed more mercurial than liquid. He pressed the bottle into my father’s wart-freckled hand and said, “A tablespoon every three hours. Until we have the X-rays we won’t know any more than we know now. Get rest and don’t think. Without death, now, there couldn’t be life. Health,” he said with a little smiling roll of his lower lip, “is an animal condition. Now most of our ill-health comes from two places-the brain and the back. We made two mistakes; one was to stand up and the other was to start thinking. It strains the spine and the nerves. It makes tension and the brain makes the body.” He angrily strode toward me and roughly pressed my hair back from my forehead and stared intensely at my brow. “You’re not as bad on your scalp as your mother,” he said, and released me. I flattened my hair forward again, humiliated and dazed.
“Do you hear from Skippy?” my father asked. All fierceness and shimmer left the doctor; he became a heavy old man in a vest and fastened shirtsleeves. “He’s on a staff in St. Louis,” he said.
“You’re too modest to say it,” my father told him, “but I bet you’re prouder than hell of him. I know I am; next to my own son he was the best student I ever had and not too much of my thickheadedness seemed to rub off on him, thank God.”
“He has his mother’s graces,” Doc Appleton said after a pause, and a pall had fallen. The waiting-room seemed long deserted and the black leather furniture depressed and dented by the shadows of mourners. Our voices and footsteps felt lost in dust and I felt viewed from thousands of years in the future. My father offered to pay. The doctor waved his dollars aside, saying, “We’ll wait till the end of the story.”
“You’re a straight-shooter and I’m grateful,” my father said.
Outside, in the gnashing, black, brilliantly alive cold, my father said to me, “See, Peter? He didn’t tell me what I want to know. They never do.”
“What happened before I came?”
“He put me through the mill and made an X-ray appointment at Homeopathic in Alton for six o’clock tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“You never know with Doc Appleton what he means.
That’s how he keeps his reputation.”
“He doesn’t seem to like Zimmerman but I couldn’t make out exactly why.”
“The story there, Peter, is that Zimmerman-I guess you’re old enough to say this to-Zimmerman’s supposed to have made love to Doc Appleton’s wife. It happened if it happened at all before you were born. There was even supposed to be some doubt as to who Skippy’s father was.”