THE HOUSE ON BRATTLE STREET
Even before they were married, Tom had tried to convince R.J. that she should exploit the combination of law and medicine to produce optimum annual income. When, despite his advice, she had effectively turned her back on the law and concentrated on medicine, he had urged her to develop a private practice in one of the affluent suburbs. While they were buying their house he had grumbled about her hospital salary, almost 25 percent lower than the income would have been from a private practice.
They had gone to the Virgin Islands for their honeymoon, a week on a small island near St. Thomas. Two days after they returned they had started looking for property, and on the fifth day of their search a real estate woman had taken them to see the distinguished but run-down house on Brattle Street in Cambridge.
R.J. had viewed it with disinterest. It was too large, too expensive, too badly in need of repair, and there was too much traffic going by the front door. “It would be crazy.”
“No, no, no,” he had murmured. She remembered he had been so attractive that day, his straw-colored hair in a designer trim, and wearing a beautifully cut new suit. “It wouldn’t be crazy at all.” Tom Kendricks saw a handsome Georgian house on a graceful heirloom street with red-brick sidewalks that had been trod by poets and philosophers, men you read about in textbooks. Half a mile up the street was the stately house in which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had lived. Just beyond that was the Divinity School. Tom already was more Boston than Boston, getting the accent just right, having his clothes tailored by Brooks Brothers. But in fact he was a midwestern farm boy who had gone to Bowling Green University and Ohio State, and the thought of being Harvard’s neighbor—almost part of Harvard—fascinated him.
And he was seduced by the house—the exterior of red brick with Vermont marble ornamentation, the handsome thin columns alongside the doors, the small antique panes on each side and above the doorway, the matching brick wall around the property.
She thought he was joking. When it became apparent he was serious, she was dismayed and tried to talk him out of it. “It would be expensive. Both the house and the wall need repointing, the roof and the foundation need repair. The real estate company’s description says right up front that it needs a new furnace. It doesn’t make sense, Tom.”
“Sense is what it does make. This is a house to be owned by a couple of successful doctors. A statement of confidence.”
Neither of them had saved much. Because R.J. had received a law degree before entering medical school she had managed to earn some money, enough to finish her medical education and training with only a reasonable debt. But Tom owed a frightening amount. Nevertheless, he argued stubbornly and at length that they should buy the house. He reminded her that already he had begun to make very good money as a general surgeon and insisted that when her smaller income was added to his, they could easily afford the house. He said it again and again.
It was early enough in the marriage so that she was still besotted. He was a better lover than he was a person, but she didn’t know that then, and she listened to him with gravity and respect. At last, bemused, she had given in.
They spent a good deal of money on furnishings, including antiques and near-antiques. At Tom’s insistence, they bought a baby grand piano, more because it looked “just right” in the music room than because R.J. was a pianist. About once a month her father took a taxi to Brattle Street and tipped the cabbie to carry in his cumbersome viola da gamba. Her father was happy to see her settled, and they played long and fulsome duets. The music covered a lot of scars that were there from the start and made the large house seem less empty.
She and Tom ate most of their meals out and didn’t have live-in help. A taciturn black woman named Beatrix Johnson came every Monday and Thursday and kept the house clean, only now and again breaking something. The yardwork was done by a landscaping service. They rarely had guests. No hung shingle encouraged patients to enter the front gate of their home; the only clue as to the identity of the inhabitants came from a pair of small copper plates Tom had fastened to the wood on the right-hand side of the front door frame.
THOMAS ALLEN KENDRICKS, M.D.
and
ROBERTA J. COLE, M.D.
In those days, she called him Tommy.
When she left Dr. Ringgold she did morning rounds.
Unfortunately, she never had more than one or two patients in the wards. She was a general physician interested in family practice, working in a hospital that didn’t have a department of family practice. That made her a kind of jack-of-all-trades, a utility player without classification. Her work for the hospital and the medical school fell between departmental boundaries; she saw pregnant patients, but someone in Obstetrics delivered the babies; in the same way, almost always she referred her patients to a surgeon, a gastroenterologist, any one of more than a dozen specialists. Most of the time she never saw the patient again, because follow-up care was done by the specialist physician or the hometown family doctor; usually patients came to the hospital with only those problems that might require advanced technology.
At one time, political opposition and the sense that she was breaking new ground had lent spice to her activities at Lemuel Grace, but for a long time now she had lost her sense of joy in medical practice. She spent too much of her time reviewing and signing insurance papers—a special form if someone needed oxygen, a special long form for this, a special short form for that, in duplicate, in triplicate, every insurance company with different forms.
Her office visits were apt to be impersonal and brief. Faceless efficiency experts at insurance companies had determined how much time and how many visits she could allow for each patient, who was quickly sent off for lab work, for X rays, for ultrasound, for MRI—the procedures that did most of the real diagnostic work and protected her from malpractice suits.
Often she pondered, who were these patients who came to her for help? What elements in their lives, hidden from her almost cursory glance, contributed to their illness? What would become of them? There was neither time nor opportunity for her to relate to them as people, to really be a physician.
That evening she met Gwen Gabler at Alex’s Gymnasium, an upscale health club in Kenmore Square. Gwen was R.J.’s medical school classmate and best friend, a gynecologist at Family Planning whose breeziness and salty tongue disguised the fact that she was hanging on by her fingernails. She had two children, a real estate broker husband who had run into hard times, an overcrowded schedule, bruised ideals, and depression. She and R.J. came to Alex’s twice a week to punish themselves in a long aerobics class, sweat out foolish desires in the sauna, soak away fruitless regrets in the hot tub, have a glass of wine in the lounge, and gossip and talk medicine throughout the evening.
Their favorite wickedness was to study the men in the club and judge their attraction solely by their appearance. R.J. found she required a hint of the cerebral in the face, a suggestion of introspection. Gwen liked more animal qualities. She was an admirer of the owner of the club, a golden Greek named Alexander Manakos. Easy for Gwen to dream of muscular but soulful romance and then go home to her Phil, myopic and stocky but deeply appreciated. R.J. went home and read herself to sleep with medical journals.
On the surface, she and Tom had the American dream—busy professional lives, the handsome house on Brattle Street, a farmhouse in the Berkshires that they used for extremely rare weekends and vacations. But the marriage was ashes. She told herself it might have been different if they had had a child. Ironically, the physician who frequently dealt with infertility in others had been infertile for years. Tom had had semen analysis and she had had a battery of tests. But no cause of the infertility was uncovered, and she and Tom had been quickly caught up in the responsibilities of their medical personas. Those demands were so heavy for each of them that gradually they had drifted apart. If their marriage had been more substantial, doubtless in recent years she would have considered insemination or in vitro fertilization, or perhaps adoption. By now, neither she nor her husband was interested.
Long ago R.J. had become aware of two things: that she had married an insubstantial man and that he was seeing other women.