twelve

Dr. Z.’s daughter was not one of those little girls who played dress-up in princess dresses, letting silver beads and purple feathers drift across the carpet. She was a chess player and very fond of puzzles. Her mother and father were careful with their children: reality was presented unadorned, no tooth fairy, no elves, and no higher power beyond Con Edison. There were piano lessons and a brief bout with Mandarin which was abandoned for shell-collecting by the beach, bird-watching and the West Side Soccer League.

Ronit was named after a grandmother who as a little girl escaped in a sixteen-foot fishing boat captained by a Dane. Dr. Z. had never been sure if this Dane who had saved his mother was a righteous man or one who demanded certain favors or funds in return. The story, like most of the stories from the other shore, was uncertain in detail, accurate in emotion, but fogged over by the mist of time and the confusions of memory.

Dr. Z. was proud of his daughter who was not overly anxious, phobic, timid, or aggressive. She was not joyless or friendless and could navigate setbacks, like not being invited to someone’s birthday party, with grace. The muscles in her legs tensed as she ran and climbed and swung from high bars. She had long shiny black hair that she wore in braids until her body changed and her breasts appeared, expected but still surprising, a gift, one that came with a dark side.

And from her excellent college she went to an excellent medical school, the same one that had granted a degree to her mother some thirty years earlier. She had no interest in neurology, her mother’s field, or psychiatry, her father’s. She was drawn to oncology. This was where the battle against the enemy was at its fiercest, the stakes were high, the losses many. It wasn’t a field for the faint of heart. Ronit wanted to go to war and she did.

Perhaps it wore on her. She seemed to reject boyfriends after a few months of promising sleepovers. One lasted a year and a half. To soft-spoken inquiries from her mother she always smiled and said she wasn’t ready. Why not? asked Dr. Z., who was not only eager for a grandchild but convinced that union, sexual and otherwise, was necessary for a good life. Was this old-fashioned of him? Would he have felt the same way about his son who had in fact married before he was thirty to a woman who taught the learning-disabled and seemed in perfect harmony with her fate. Also, she baked and broiled and sautéed blissful dinners for all occasions. Not to mention birthday cakes for the children decorated with tiny plastic horses, clowns, trains riding on their chocolate tracks. Ronit ate cafeteria food in the hospital and kept a box of energy bars in her pantry for emergencies.

The family celebrated her thirty-first birthday with a picnic in the park followed by a performance of Hamlet under the stars. Dr. Z. wanted to ask about the men she had met, any interesting ones, any long-term possibilities. He had no ethnic or religious requirements, no specific occupations, no visions of a beloved son-in-law keeping him company in his old age.

That is not quite true, a better way to say it would be that he was ready to give up all his personal wishes for the happiness of his daughter, anyone she loved he would embrace.

Ronit had a cat she was quite fond of. Several of the young men she had dated began to sneeze and cough when settled on her couch with a glass of wine and expectations of a move into the bedroom. Ronit bid them good night, walking them politely down the long hall to the elevator. Her loyalty lay with the cat, who slept in her bed, his body giving warmth to the cold winter nights, his tongue licking her face before the alarm rang in the mornings.

A healthy life, said Freud, requires work and love. So I have half a healthy life, said Ronit to her friends when they met for drinks at the end of a very long day. Dr. Z. did not laugh when she said this to him. Perhaps you should consider therapy, he said. When, just when, asked Ronit, would I have time for that? Dr. Z. did not press her. She became chief resident, received an appointment at the hospital and published several papers on the success or lack of it of this new protocol or that. When Dr. Z. looked carefully at his daughter he saw the way her jaw tightened when she watched her nephew play with his toy doctor kit, a present from her on one family occasion. He saw that the soft shine of youth was disappearing from her skin, her hair held back by a clip was not free to bounce and flow as it once had been. He saw a few gray hairs at her crown. It was unthinkable that age should reach her, drain her, and he was helpless in the face of time, the facts of life and death could not be altered by his love. Ronit was sliding through time and she was still without a partner. Did she want a woman? Dr. Z. dared to ask. Ronit laughed at him. Oh Dad, she said, leave me alone.

Maybe if the cat would die, he thought. How old was that cat?

And then, shortly before her thirty-seventh birthday, Ronit met her father for dinner at an Italian restaurant near the hospital and before they opened the menus she said to him, I’m seeing someone. Oh, he said, using his neutral voice, his doctor voice, when a patient told him of wanting to put a knife in the heart of her sister, or of planning to hide his fortune offshore. Oh, he repeated. Ronit waited. She made him ask, Who? He asked. The man was a poet. She had met him at his mother’s bedside. A poet, said Dr. Z. who admired poets in principle but considered them like rare flora, better kept at a distance, far down some Amazon river and not in one’s own living room, or for that matter in one’s daughter’s bedroom. Is he healthy? he asked Ronit, visions of Keats and consumption passing through his mind. Nobody—not even poets—has consumption anymore, he reminded himself.

Dr. Z. said, Tell me about him. And she did, leaving out a few things, the second wife for instance, as well as the long ago stay at a rehab hospital in Minnesota. As she talked Dr. Z. saw the color rise in her face and he saw that his daughter had something else in her life besides her patients and he was relieved and would have been joyous but he had one important question to ask, before he would really allow joy to romp in his heart.

And what about children? he asked so casually he might have been asking if this prospective son-in-law liked pumpkin pie or did he prefer apple?

Yes, said Ronit, he wants children right away and so do I. And, she added, he is not allergic to cats.

There was a wedding, not too expensive, but with dancing and Ronit’s brother lifted his own child into the air and tossed him into his new brother-in-law’s arms and everyone clapped and circled around. Then Dr. Z. found himself high up above the small crowd sitting on a small chair supported by six friends of the groom consisting of the entire staff of a small literary magazine. The musicians played on and on. Dr. Z. glanced over at his wife who was visibly alarmed by her suspension up in the air but nevertheless took the time to blow him a kiss, an expression of love he welcomed even in the din, even as he worried that his large and somewhat overweight body might crash to the floor, causing mayhem.

Because of that vivid thought he recognized in himself the blood red thread of regret: Ronit was no longer his alone, although it was precisely what he had hoped for, and had worried might never happen.

For the millionth time he saw in himself what he taught his patients to see in themselves, the raw other side, the dark selfish maw of his soul. Up in the air above the dancing wedding crowd he shut the door against the less pleasant part of himself which accompanied him everywhere, even to his daughter’s wedding, the wedding he had waited for so long and so eagerly.

Shortly afterwards the cat developed an aneurysm in his spine and, wailing in pain, was put to sleep in an early dawn visit to the only animal hospital open in the city at 4 a.m. Ronit did not seem overly grieved. She was trying to get pregnant.

Dr. Z. did not want to ask any questions that would cross the important boundaries between a married child and her attentive father. He did not want to be the one who accompanied her to the fertility clinic when it came to that and it did come to that after twenty-one months of failure. He wanted to appease the right gods, the ones he did not believe in, so that Ronit could have a child. The poet seemed steady in his affection. He published a book that he dedicated to Ronit, giving a galley to Dr. Z. and his wife with a thank-you note for their faith in him. Faith was not Dr. Z.’s habit. But he had grown fond of the poet and when he imagined his grandchildren he thought of them like Wallace Stevens, doctor poets, poet doctors. He knew that was absurd—they might very well become football players or die in some war he himself wouldn’t live to see. Nevertheless, in his daydreams as he waited for a late patient or walked home from his office, he conjured them up, reading Dante in Italian and Freud in German and giving papers at international conferences and poetry readings at the local Y.

I’m becoming a fool, he said to his wife. You always were a fool, she said, my fool.

It turned out the poet had a low sperm count. It turned out that while she was now only thirty-nine, Ronit had pushed the flexibility of her female parts to their limit. She now could hear the drip of time as month changed into month, season moved into season. Time was no longer the unnoticed river that ran through her life, it was the nightmare that woke her in the dark. The first in vitro failed. The second in vitro failed too. She had begun to stare at every pregnant woman she passed in the street. A bitter taste of envy and rue would come over her and she would look away, ashamed of herself, unable to be glad for the woman who was not her. She had trouble sleeping and in the early hours before dawn she would look over at her husband and despise him for no reason at all. The hormones she was taking in preparation for the in vitro made her emotions careen about as if they were in a perpetual car derby, smash, crash, crunch. She burst into tears when a scan of a young girl with bone cancer came back with the wrong shades. She had never done that before. She promised herself never to do that again.

And so the night before the third try she would have prayed but she had no one to pray to. Instead she called her father. He said, I have a good feeling about this. This time it will work. He didn’t have a good feeling about anything but he wanted to comfort her. He wanted to spare her. You know, he said, you could adopt. I don’t want to talk about that tonight, she said, and he said, I’m sorry. Good night Daddy, she said, and he felt a sharp pain in his heart. It wasn’t angina. It wasn’t a crucial vein closing. It was just the fact: his child in danger.

You had to wait a few days, almost a week, to see if hormone levels changed, if anything had happened in the mysterious cave of the womb. Dr. Z. rehearsed his lines. He had prepared exactly the words he would say to her if the eggs remained lifeless. He prepared his voice, he prepared his words, no man about to go into battle concentrated as fiercely on his purpose, to blunt the pain, to encourage, to simply be there, but not be intrusive. How not to be intrusive when he was, most surely, intruding. Above all he was determined not to let his daughter see or suspect his own disappointment. Also he knew that was impossible. She would know. It would add to her pain.

And so he was sitting in his chair, his doctor chair, in his office, his feet up on the stool in front of him, waiting for the bell that would announce his next patient, when the phone rang and he picked it up. What now, what now? ran through his mind as it always did. It was Ronit. He knew instantly almost before the first word was sent soaring through the air. It was the lightness of her tone, the way she said, Dad. Yes, she was pregnant. The following weeks brought her word of twins. It also brought new fears. What if they die in utero? What if they are damaged? When was the amnio? When would they know if the babies had avoided the diseases of older mothers, the dread diseases that he could recite in his mind and did each morning as he rose from his bed?

Dr. Z. had not asked the poet if his family history contained schizophrenia, manic depression, suicides, thieves, sociopaths. It would have been rude. His daughter would have been furious with him. He knew better than to ask those questions. A simple tell me about your family had produced a story of a potter mother and a father who baked bread and taught Asian history at a progressive New England college. Also he had spoken of an aunt who had died of leukemia in her thirties. Dr. Z. wasn’t worried about leukemia or at least no more so than all the other threats that now gathered around his daughter. He banished them from his mind. He was too well analyzed himself, too sane to allow the normal dangers of life to spoil his pleasure, to darken his brain with appalling grief. He banished such thoughts, almost, sometimes.

He was aware of the potential problems in utero with two fetuses. He was aware of the psychological pressures that twins would occasion. On the other hand all children had to survive in landscapes that were less than perfect, families that failed them again and again. These twins would have good parents and all would be well. He began to read the vast literature of twin studies. He had no interest in the ones that spoke of twins separated at birth liking the same brand of breakfast cereal twenty years later. He was interested in the more complex issues of how they vied for parental attention, how they developed different personalities one from the other. It turned out the experts did not agree on cause and effect. They were not able to explain why one twin flourished and the other curled into him- or herself. They were not sure which in- and out-of-womb experiences were causal and which were merely riders hitched to the preordained soul.

Ronit was beautiful as her stomach rose slightly beneath her white coat. All her patients approaching death could see the life growing within her. Were they jealous or sorrowful at the sight? Probably both, also pleased for their doctor. Perhaps it was a sign of good fortune that might spill over to them. She had lunch in the doctors’ lounge with a friend whose husband was a younger colleague of her father’s.

Her friend said, I’m happy for you, and seemed to mean it. I’ll get the name of a good nanny for you from my nanny.

Ronit asked her friend, No more trouble? No, said her friend, the bad time passed. We survived.

I thought you would, said Ronit.

And then, because of the nature of her work, the chemicals that might be floating through the vents, she took a leave. She took long walks in the park. She went to movies in the afternoon. She took pregnancy gym classes and made two new friends, one also carrying twins.

Dr. Z. did not think the few poems the poet produced on the subject of his wife’s pregnancy were among his best. He found them coy.

There was an emergency one night. Ronit called, she had a terrible pain under her navel. The obstetrician, someone she had trained with, told her to go to the emergency room. Dr. Z. and his wife dressed quickly and met her there. The poet was trembling. Don’t tremble, Dr. Z. wanted to say but didn’t. Ronit was swept away from them. The poet was with her. It was too soon. Dr. Z.’s wife held his hand. I’m sure it’s nothing, she said with her usual disposition to ignore the beast with long teeth running right at her. I hate God, said Dr. Z. You don’t believe in God, said his wife. Nevertheless, said Dr. Z., I hate Him. But no more than a half hour had passed when Ronit and the poet emerged and they were smiling. A small hernia had caused the pain. It would go away or they might operate after she delivered. It was nothing. It did not threaten the babies who were doing whatever they did in the dark of the womb, float, touch, dream. Do fetuses dream and if so do they have nightmares?

When Dr. Z. had his own children he had been very engaged in learning his trade. He went four times a week to his own analyst. He watched his son and then his daughter, checking the milestones, muscle flexibility, and eye contact. He was assured and assured his wife, they were normal children. Actually he thought they were better than normal but he knew that was vanity and pride and ego and not necessarily objective truth. He nevertheless found them extraordinary. He forgave himself that delusion: it was so common.

He was supervised twice a week by another analyst who watched his work like the tax man auditing the local mobster. He was fascinated by himself at that time. He was fascinated by his patients, but his children as they arrived in his life seemed natural, like his degrees, expected, appreciated, but hardly astonishing. He knew the medicine, had done the obstetrics rotation, had delivered four babies on his own. It was heady. He remembered a nurse wiping away tears from his eyes that were staining his mask. But after all it was only one of the amazing moments of his life.

Now, this with Ronit, this was everything. Was this about his own genes? Was his attention on these not yet breathing babies just an expression of ego, of the human desire to live on and on? Dr. Z. conceded that possibility. But maybe not. Ronit wanted these babies. She wanted to be their mother, not knowing yet how they might hurt her, how she would grow fearful for their very lives, and how her own life would never again be hers to lose or to live. His ignorant daughter wanted these babies and he wanted her, no, more than wanted, needed her, to have what she wanted. He would not be able to bear her grief if anything should happen. He had no bargaining chips to offer fate. He had no recourse if he were denied. He could only wait, a father who loved his daughter, too much maybe, but maybe when it came to love there was no such thing as too much or at least there shouldn’t be.

Emotions cannot be measured like chemicals in vials. That was one thing that attracted him to psychiatry in the first place. The proper amounts were always in flux and attempts to measure the mind always failed. He liked that: that he considered real poetry.

Then as the due date approached and the heartbeats remained steady and the sonograms showed two little boys, floating about in the shadows, he found himself afraid of death: not his own, but theirs. He tried to analyze his fear, he considered his father’s sudden heart attack, his mother’s slow fade as arteries narrowed. He thought of Yorick and Hamlet and the alas of it all. He thought of graves and wars and outer space with its vast emptiness and none of it relieved his anxiety about Ronit and the twins who would come in their own good time, just after Ronit’s fortieth birthday. The poet was composing a poem to welcome his sons. The grandfather-to-be was having stomach troubles, was it anxiety or ulcers? He would have it checked later.

And then, as he and his wife were walking down the aisle at the Metropolitan Opera House, moving slowly toward their season seats, their favorite opera, La Traviata, only ten minutes from curtain time, his cell phone rang. He answered it furtively. It was the poet, they were on their way to the hospital. There had been some loss of amniotic fluid. There had been some intermittent contractions. Their doctor wanted them in the hospital, a cesarean might be needed.

Dr. Z. and his wife missed that performance at the Met. It was unfortunate that they had decided to purchase the better seats for that year’s subscription, seats that were now conspicuously empty in the center of the sixth row.

Dr. Z. wanted to go to the hospital. The poet had suggested they go home and he would call with word and then they could come. Dr. Z. felt he should be by his daughter’s side but then remembered that he shouldn’t.

He stood by the window in his living room looking at the Hudson River, black and still. He saw the lights of the looming apartment buildings on the Jersey shore, the steep cliffs beneath them, the George Washington Bridge delicately uniting the shores. He saw a small tugboat anchored halfway across, its dark shape reminding him of the Egyptian canoes that carried the dead into the underworld, stacked with the necessities of life, the memories of their breathing days. Why was he thinking about death now? The answer was obvious. The birth of the twins was the signal for his own death to approach. It marked the moment when the torch of life was passed on. It was sweet but bittersweet.

And then a freighter went slowly by. There was a light on its prow and several in the cabin. What was the long black boat, shaped like a coffin, carrying? He couldn’t see. It was an omen. He didn’t believe in omens. The freighter had a small red taillight that reflected in the water, ripples of neon curves in the darkness. He spent a half hour trying to decide: an omen of what?

And what of the babies? He had heard no names suggested. He wasn’t concerned about their names.

He thought, because he couldn’t help it, of the terrible things that might be. The diseases that the amnio couldn’t identify. Of the fine wiring of the brain in which the smallest error could result in the most serious of deficits. If a neuron of a synapse drifted perhaps a hundredth of a millimeter off course, then a brain and its body could end up in an alleyway wrapped in a torn blanket on a freezing cold night or it could do harm to its mate or it could be walled into itself and suffer exile from the heat of other bodies. If a neuron strayed, if a synapse clogged and paused at the wrong second, a brain could become evil. Dr. Z. did believe in evil. Santa Claus, Elijah, werewolves, vampires, they were myths, but evil and guilt, they were as real as the bones of his body.

He named the deficits, all the ones he could think of, as if naming them would scare them away, as if naming them, staring them in the face, would spare the children, would guarantee their ordinariness. He repeated the word autistic four times, because he knew what that curse would mean, for child and parent. He tried to stop himself. Morbid and ridiculous, he called himself names but he couldn’t stop. And then, exhausted, he went on to the less disastrous but still calamitous conditions, situations, problems that shape experience, determine happiness, competency, education, income. He thought of all the attention deficit disorders, he thought of excessive shyness, of paranoia, of uncontrolled aggressions. He thought of polars, bi, and depressions, singular. Standing there at the window he felt as if he could not breathe, as if his lungs had stalled—too much was being asked of them.

He wanted a cigarette. There were none in the house.

And then he thought of sex. He wanted sexual happiness for these little boys, not yet of course, but one day, and he knew that the genes carried those impulses forward. Genetic plans could be altered by the oddest of small matters, a connection between a serious earache and an enema could excite something best left unexcited. A desire to be the other sex could come in the genes, in the biology, or it could come in a parent’s preference for a girl or a boy or in a teasing playground incident or in the air when the windows were open, like Peter Pan flying into Wendy’s nursery. Sex could be thwarted, misdirected, colored with fantasies of pain inflicted or experienced. The wires in the child’s brain were like radio receptors receiving commands from worlds unknown, malevolent or benevolent by whim. Whose whim? No one’s whim, at any moment a man could become a cockroach.

Pollutants in the air, pollutants in the black heart of schoolteachers, nannies documented or undocumented, could shift the destiny of a child one way or another. Squalls of misery could come from a broken friendship, a failure to accomplish a task some other child could do easily. What if these children succumbed to the long litany of troubles he heard from his patients, fears, phobias, desires to harm, a sense of failure, realistic or not.

Dr. Z. stopped himself. He had become a psychoanalytic hypochondriac. He seemed to himself less like a grandparent than an analyst in desperate need of an analyst. He thought of calling Dr. H., but then the hour was late and what would he say after all? I’m worried about my grandchildren not yet born and whether or not the vicissitudes of living will destroy them.

He knew what Dr. H. would say. Those vicissitudes of yours, that’s just living. Dangerous of course, but perhaps you should focus on starting a college fund for the children or imagine giving them each a microscope, or perhaps a kite with a long red tail on their tenth birthday. Have a pleasant daydream, good night. That is what Dr. H. would say. He didn’t need to call him.

Dr. Z. was worrying about whether one twin would dominate the other and the possibility of a fixed unequal relationship developing between the stronger and the weaker one. He thought of Jacob and Esau and how he had always held a particular sympathy for Esau who seemed unloved by his mother. What was wrong with being a hairy man who liked to hunt? He thought too of how he had wished his own brother ill on more than one occasion. He was getting very tired, standing there at the window. The lights in the apartment buildings on the Jersey side had mostly disappeared. Large dark shadows of buildings stood like concrete and iron vultures above the water.

Come to bed, said his wife. No, he said. I don’t want to undress and then dress again. And then, as he looked out the window and returned to his melancholy musings, a sharp sound caught his attention: the phone.

Everything is fine, said the poet in a tone that aimed for calm but didn’t achieve it. We named them Virgil and Isaac. Virgil is five pounds and Isaac is four and a half. They are lying under a warming lamp right now. And you can come and see them. Floor 5, room 306. Ronit is resting. She said to tell you to hurry and to please bring a hairbrush, she forgot hers.