“Bring your parents by,” he said to me a few days before parents’ visiting weekend. “I’ll tell them how well you’re doing, relieve their troubled minds.”
I was standing at the door of Dr. Able’s office and took an extra beat to decide whether to tell him the truth or just say thank you and leave it at that. I liked my persecutor, but my story was complicated and tended to engender a kind of sympathy in other people I’d never been able to tolerate.
“What?” he said, waiting for my answer. “No parents?”
He meant it as I joke and so I laughed. “No parents,” I said.
“Well, I’ll be in the office on Saturday as part of the festivities if you and your legal guardian want to come by.”
“We might do that,” I said, and thanked him as I left.
I put it together easily enough, and years later, Maurice Able, whom everyone called Morey, confirmed my suspicion: he went to the registrar’s office to look at my file. He never asked about my parents again, but he started to suggest we hold our weekly meetings over lunch at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. He invited me to the dinners he and his wife hosted for the graduate students in chemistry. He checked to see how I was doing in my other classes and alerted those teachers to my situation. Morey Able took pity on me and became my advisor, thinking it had been my parentless state that had put me in academic peril, when in fact it was my father. Halfway through college, I had come to see I was a great deal like my father.
Archimedes’ Principle states that any body completely or partially submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force, the magnitude of which is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body. Or to put it another way, you can hold a beach ball under water but the second you stop it’s going to shoot straight back up. And so throughout my interminable academic career I suppressed my nature. I did everything that was required of me while keeping a furtive list of the buildings I passed that were for sale: asking price, selling price, weeks on the market. I lurked at the periphery of foreclosure auctions, a habit I found hard to break. Like Celeste, I got an A in Organic Chemistry. I then went on to biochemistry second semester and followed that with a year of physics with a lab my senior year. Dr. Able, who had met me when I was drowning, never took his eye off me again. With the exception of that one half-semester, I was a good student, but even after I had recovered my standing, he always had it in his mind I could do better. He taught me how to learn and then relearn, to study until the answer to every question was coded in my fingerprints. I had told him I wanted to be a doctor and he believed me. When the time came to apply, he not only wrote me a letter of recommendation, he walked my application twenty blocks uptown and handed it to the director of admissions at the medical school at Columbia himself.
The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation. I would guess at least half the students in my class would rather have been anywhere else. We were fulfilling the expectations that had been set for us: the sons of doctors were expected to become doctors so as to honor the tradition; the sons of immigrants were expected to become doctors in order to make a better life for their families; the sons who had been driven to work the hardest and be the smartest were expected to become doctors because back in the day medicine was still where the smart kids went. Women had yet to be allowed to enroll at Columbia as undergraduates but there were a handful of them in my medical school class. Who knows, maybe they were the ones who actually wanted to be there. No one expected their daughters to become doctors in 1970, the daughters still had to fight for it. P&S, as the College of Physicians & Surgeons was known, had a thriving theater troupe made up of medical student actors, and to watch the shows the P&S Club put on—the dreary soon-to-be radiologists and urologists in half an inch of eyeliner bursting into gleeful song—was to see what they might have done with their lives had their lives belonged only to them.
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.”