When Dr. Tauber imagined the woman with the unpronounceable name, as he did more and more frequently, it was always without her son. In his daydreams, the boy was as absent as the husband. Only the woman was there, at his office, in his bedroom, on the stairs, clothed or unclothed, and although even in his fantasies he couldn’t imagine her speaking his language, whatever he said to her she understood perfectly.
He didn’t know what to call the distraction she’d become. What he felt for her, if it was love, what he felt for her was love, if it was. He trudged through a morning, labored across a dark afternoon. If it was love. He leaned into a face, conscious of tainted breath and the periapical swell of an acute abscess. He ate dinner from a plastic tray that nearly burned his fingers when he pulled it, unthinking, from the microwave.
Why the need to give the feeling a name? In the morning he waited for five minutes on the stairs, but she and her son didn’t appear. Then the hated ascent to his office. Wasn’t the feeling more genuine if it remained nameless? He traced gold inlay over the craze line of a maxillary premolar. But possibly that was the point: by naming it he might bracket it. Build a fence around it. The bright memory: her handing him a pair of onions.
He paused, sickle probe in hand, to look at them, oversized and lopsided on a silver tray, shadowed in an alcove like a shrine.
***
“Are you okay?” the voice—a child’s voice—had asked.
He was hunched over a handrail, taking his customary break in the morning climb up the hill. They had stopped four steps above. He noticed the woman first, face dark and steeply angled and creased diagonally along the forehead. Then the boy beside her, nine maybe or ten. Her jacket was too small for her and the boy’s too large. That was one common characteristic of the Visitors: mismatched clothes, or improperly sized, or belonging to yesterday’s fashion, a piecemeal assemblage of parts that gave them a scarecrowlike, patched-together look.
Was he okay: what a question. Did he look okay? He didn’t say this but thought it. He didn’t say this because he was in no condition to speak, occupied as he was with breathing and coughing and handrail-gripping to prevent a backward tumble down the hill. On the other hand, this was a fairly ordinary morning. This moment occurred every morning; it simply occurred at a progressively lower point on the stairs as the months and years and decades passed.
When he first set up his practice on the hill he’d told himself that the stairs would keep him young; when it was no longer possible to make that argument, he’d maintained that the stairs were, at least, preserving him; when what the stairs were doing, it had eventually become clear, was killing him. Slowly wearing down bone and joint and ligament and muscle. His ex-wife, who as his dental assistant had needed to brave the same stairs, had wanted to relocate. But their apartment, he’d reminded her—the apartment he now lived in alone—was a seven-minute walk away; they would never find a more convenient location. As much as he hated to admit it, she’d probably been right all along. Now, though, it was too late: if there had ever been a time when he might have summoned the resources to find a new office, to move equipment, to establish and groom new patients, that time was over. He would never know how many patients he had lost to the stairs; how many, especially the older ones who made up most of the neighborhood, had given up and gone somewhere less demanding. But there was one small advantage: the patients who did come arrived breathless and exhausted, and he’d always suspected that this made them more willing to sink gratefully into the dental chair and open their mouths to the needle and drill . . .
Of course Dr. Tauber also arrived breathless and exhausted. These days a minimum of thirty minutes was required before he felt capable of wielding needle or drill or any tool for that matter, which was why he arrived at the foot of the hill every morning at eight twenty. Occasionally people passed as he made his gradual way up the stairs, neighbors usually on their way to work, but he had never encountered Visitors here before.
They stood silently above him, watching him gasp and hack. The woman prodded the boy and he said it again—“Are you okay?”—in a tone that made the question sound like an accusation.
Dr. Tauber held up a hand: Wait.
So it was her question. Her concern.
“Thirty-two years here,” he replied when he was eventually capable of speech. “You’d think I’d be used to it.” Smiling at the woman he realized she hadn’t understood a word. She looked down at the boy.
“I’ve been here for thirty-two years now,” he repeated slowly to the child, “and I’m still not used to these stairs. Do you understand?” The boy nodded. “Well tell her then.” He drew an impatient line with his finger from the boy to the woman. “Tell her what I said.”
The boy emitted an arrhythmic blurt of sound. When he’d finished, the woman turned to smile at Dr. Tauber, diagonal crease gone.
“So you live here on the hill?” Dr. Tauber asked, although he was fairly certain he already knew where they were living, where they must be living.
The boy nodded.
Looking at the mother so the boy would understand that Dr. Tauber was addressing her and that the boy was only required to translate, he said: “I guess that makes us neighbors. I have my office here, on the top of the hill. I’m Dr. Tauber, by the way. Edward. Call me Edward.”
The boy blurted sounds; somewhere in the middle of it Dr. Tauber recognized his name. The woman put a hand to her chest and said something unidentifiable that he knew must be her own name. Indicating her son, she spoke again; this time he thought he detected a strangled “gaa” between clicked and throated consonants.
“Right!” he said. “Well, nice meeting you. Better get back to it. These stairs, you know!” And, nodding abruptly, he stepped past them, resuming his climb. He’d had a feeling, as she pronounced the unpronounceable names: a neighbor might be watching. From a window or doorway, from the top or possibly from the foot of the stairs, somewhere a gossipy neighbor, watching him chat with the Visitors.
They were called “the Visitors” in the neighborhood even though it had become clear that they were not visiting. That they were staying. Once the state revealed its plan to put on the hill, in the abandoned dormitory of the old polytechnic institute, these people fleeing from—was it conflict? drought? redrawn borders?—anyway some calamity or other, a petition had been circulated, led by an old woman named Marie. Dr. Tauber knew her as well as he knew anyone there, having for three decades attended the gradual disintegration of her teeth. Sweet and soft-spoken, with a lisp now due to her recently installed dental plate, she was not the obvious candidate to rally the residents against what she was calling “the Vithitorth.” He hadn’t wanted to sign the petition. Not due to any particular sympathy for “displaced persons,” who—with the exception of the man that limped up the stairs every Monday to deliver dental supplies—seemed less like “persons” than statistical abstractions from a news report. His reluctance was due, rather, to a fundamental distrust of joining causes. Of joining anything, really: his ex-wife’s most frequent complaint had been his supposed remoteness; the only time he ever let himself get close to people, she used to say, was when he was leaning over them in mask and gloves. His fear was that signing the petition might rope him into unforeseen responsibilities. But Marie’s argument was sound: if these Visitors were allowed to come it might scare current residents away and discourage others from moving in, resulting in a loss of business for him. What she didn’t say, what was not even hinted at by her but remained nevertheless firmly in his mind, was that refusing to participate might be seen as less than neighborly by his patients on the hill. So he had signed, his name added to a long list of mostly elderly residents, and there followed a festive adorning of the neighborhood in brightly colored posters, yard signs, and banners, and Dr. Tauber was surprised to see Marie’s name in a newspaper article about the issue. A decision had been made, not an official announcement but a rumor interpreted as one: the dormitory would not be used after all. They had won. And although there was nothing that could be described as a celebration, there was a general sense of relief.
Then one evening, on his way home, he’d seen the gate to the dormitory open for the first time in years. He could hear hammering, pipes clanging. A few weeks later, other sounds could be heard beyond the gate. The sounds of children: shouts and cries and laughter reaching him on the stairs together with the smell of unfamiliar food cooking. And nearly overnight the hill had become noisier, wilder, infused with a volatile new life . . .
There were no further petitions. Now that the Visitors were there, the residents didn’t have the heart, it seemed, or at any rate the bad manners, to demand their removal. There were children after all, mothers and children . . .
The particular mother and child that Dr. Tauber had met on the stairs became a common sight as he made his morning climb. The boy, he learned, had just started attending the local grade school. Dr. Tauber got the impression that it might have been his first time attending school in America, but he didn’t dare ask where the boy had learned English, just as he didn’t ask where they’d been living or what they’d been doing before coming to the hill. When he spoke with them—or rather with the mother by means of the boy’s sullen translation—he made a point of avoiding tactless questions about their previous lives. He told her once about a nearby park with a playground. Another time he recommended one supermarket over another. There were mornings when they didn’t appear, and mornings when he found himself disappointed to see her going down the stairs with other mothers and children; and on those mornings it was astonishing to see her speaking in her language, voluble and animated, with a boisterous laugh he wouldn’t have expected from her. She was like a different person, and he realized how much the constraints of translation must be stifling her when they talked. Embarrassed, he tried to ignore her then, but she always smiled and waved, even when the other mothers glared at him stone-faced.
In their encounters she never used English, although she must have learned enough to offer a simple greeting at least, a “hello” or “how are you.” At times it seemed she understood more than she let on; at other times he was convinced she understood nothing at all . . . The boy’s English, on the other hand, continued to improve as the months passed, until he sounded like any American child. His interpreting skills, however, remained as poor as ever. It wasn’t just his sparse vocabulary; it was, more than anything else, his attitude: he regarded Dr. Tauber with unconcealed suspicion, and provided only the barest translation in either direction. Dr. Tauber would see layers of feeling cross the woman’s features as she spoke, only to hear the boy deliver in his terse monotone a phrase about seasonal fruit or the unreliability of the local buses. It was as if he were trying to flatten the contents he was transmitting to a single dimension, extracting any depth or substance. Sometimes Dr. Tauber felt that the boy was more of a barrier than a bridge. It might be better, he thought, if the son weren’t there at all; then he and the woman could communicate unimpeded, learning to read each other in a pure, wordless language of gestures and facial expressions . . .
The boy seemed to wish he didn’t need to be there either. He perked up only once, when Dr. Tauber complained about the snowfall that had made the stairs even more treacherous than usual.
“I like it,” the boy said, suddenly defiant. “I like snow.” Placing on the word a grave emphasis that was apparently the closest he came to ordinary childlike enthusiasm.
“He likes snow?” Dr. Tauber grinned at the woman. “With these stairs?”
The boy grunted affirmation.
“No, no. It’s for her. That was for your mother.” With his finger Dr. Tauber made the invisible-line gesture from boy to woman that meant a translation was required.
After the boy finished the woman spoke. “We don’t have snow,” the boy explained. “At home.”
“At home? . . . Ah, right. Well of course: no snow.” He tried to imagine it: all heat and light and crumbling surfaces the color of dust. “That must be . . .” He stopped; he’d nearly ventured into a region he had no wish to explore.
“I have one of my own,” he said to the woman instead. “A son. Much older now of course. When he was your son’s age he loved the snow too. Couldn’t get enough of it.” Dr. Tauber waited for the translation, then continued: “We used to build snowmen.” He turned to the boy. “Have you made one yet?” He wanted her to see that he was good with children. That he could be kind to her son.
The boy looked at Dr. Tauber as if he didn’t understand English any better than his mother.
“. . . A snowman,” Dr. Tauber said. “A man made out of snow. Sticks, a carrot. Maybe a hat, like Frosty. Frosty? You don’t . . . You must have seen one.” Squatting, he formed a small mound of dirty snow on the step above, squeezed together a slushball and set it on top.
Mother and son looked down at what he’d made.
He stood up. “Well this isn’t much of an example.” His shoe toppled it, crushed the shape flat. “Sometime we’ll have to . . .” He was about to say “build one together.” But something about the boy prevented him from behaving, even for a moment, in a fatherly way . . .
And the boy’s actual father? Gone, Dr. Tauber was sure. Left behind in their sunbright, snowless country. Lost. Killed, possibly, in a war. Anyway permanently absent from the woman’s story . . .
He arrived at the stairs at eight fifteen now so he wouldn’t miss her if she left early. He would wait in the cold on his usual step even after he’d finished catching his breath. And it began to seem to him that the moment when she appeared at the dormitory gate and descended to him, that this moment and not the office one hundred and thirty-three steps above was the reason he was on the stairs at all. Or that in any case it was this moment that allowed him to survive the superficial variety and underlying sameness of his days. Often they only exchanged pleasantries or smiled at each other as they passed, but he felt nevertheless as if he were receiving a day’s worth of some essential sustenance, enough—if only barely—to carry him through the long hours above spent presiding over ruin and decay . . .
He’d never needed this sustenance before. Or: he’d needed it and hadn’t known it. He’d gotten something once from dentistry, not sustenance perhaps, but a craftsman’s pleasure at least, professional curiosity when a mouth opened and accomplishment when it closed and the Dixie cup filled with water . . . In the beginning of his career, when he was just out of dental school, a mouth had been a landscape. Mountains, cliffs, caverns: and the mouth itself a cavern. Caves within dank caves. What a mystery a mouth was! The secrets people held behind their lips. His first year in private practice: that elegant lady with the fanglike cuspid snaggletoothed in her upper left quadrant. Nothing could have been more charming. When she opened her mouth to him, he wanted to profess his adoration then and there. It wasn’t even sexual, or yes, possibly it was, but not in the obvious sense; it was the shy and reluctant revelation of a flaw. An opened mouth was a confession. He never looked into their eyes. It felt invasive. Too much. They were already vulnerable; he was already the master even as he was a supplicant before them. They lay frozen in the ergonomic chair, helpless, beyond humiliation. In surgery at least the patient was anesthetized; the conquest was hidden from the conquered. Here they opened themselves voluntarily, they chose to surrender to him . . .
When had this surrender stopped feeling like a privilege? It wasn’t that the woman had replaced the pleasure of dentistry; her presence simply reminded him that he must have lost it at some point long before, and that he’d been existing since with nothing to put in its place. Still, his work, and his devotion to it, had continued to provide something. Balance and order, for example. His life hadn’t been unbearable; if there was loneliness and an absence of joy, he’d barely noticed. And meeting her had brought . . . what? Imbalance; disorder. An incursion of the unknown into what had until then seemed a perfectly satisfactory existence. It was clear what he’d lost; but what had he gained? Momentary and meaningless encounters on the stairs with a woman who didn’t even speak his language.
He’d decided to stop waiting for her there, and was even considering going to work earlier or later to avoid seeing her, when, one morning, the woman reached into her shoulder bag and produced a pair of giant onions.
She held them up, one in each hand.
“Onions,” Dr. Tauber said. “Un-yunz.” Enunciating carefully, thinking she might be asking for the English name.
She took a step closer, stretched her arms toward him.
“For me?” Dr. Tauber glanced at the boy. His face, as usual, was giving up nothing. And the woman’s face? He’d hoped he could learn to decipher it; but he couldn’t have named what he saw there as she set the onions on his palms.
“Ah. Really? You shouldn’t . . . That’s, well, thank you.” She shook her head and, smiling, said something, but the boy provided no translation. Then they left, Dr. Tauber still holding up the onions as if on display, feeling somehow it was wrong to lower his hands.
He didn’t eat the onions; instead he placed them on a stainless dental tool tray and set the tray in an alcove beside his desk. He didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a custom in her country to give onions to neighbors? Or her own odd but endearing idiosyncrasy? Or was it, conceivably, something else—some kind of sign? He was afraid to read too much into it. Nevertheless, it wasn’t completely implausible that the gift contained a meaning he was meant to understand. He might not have been as young as her, but he was distinguished and he was a doctor and in her country the idea of a younger woman and a man not yet old but somewhat older might be perfectly acceptable or even preferable since the mature man, if a professional like himself, would be in a position to take care of— But he was getting ahead of himself . . .
What he felt for her: it wasn’t as though it represented a return to the lost feelings of his youth. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this for his wife, or for either of the women he’d dated in dental school. But maybe all of this—the sad and persistent yearning, the daydreams, the unmoored helplessness he experienced when he looked at a pair of onions on a tool tray—maybe it was all a symptom of something other than love, whatever that word might want to mean. An unusually concentrated form of gratitude, for instance. How often was he given vegetables? How often was he given anything? And if not precisely gratitude, an emotion perhaps without a proper name in his language, and impossible therefore to convey to her. But actions, he reminded himself, speak louder than words: what, after all, was her gift if not a wordless action? He could repay her, and show his feelings (whatever they were), with the action he performed best . . . Then again, no: offering to examine her mouth at no charge might be taken the wrong way . . .
“Thank you again for the onions,” he said the next time they met. “They were delicious. And I wanted to show my appreciation.”
He waited for the translation. With an open hand the woman made a sign of erasure. He ignored it and forged on: “I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I’m a dentist actually.” When the boy hesitated, he clarified: “I’m a . . . tooth doctor. I fix teeth.” Baring his own, he tapped his incisors with a forefinger.
He had to use the finger to make the invisible-line gesture before the boy reluctantly translated.
“And your son,” he said, “I was thinking I’d be happy, you know, to give him an oral diagnosis. A dental checkup. Pro bono publico, as they say. Free of charge. Just my way of . . . Just. Well.” He smiled down at the boy. “Go ahead, tell her. Tell her I can check your teeth for you.”
For a moment the boy stared silently back at him. Then, without taking his eyes off Dr. Tauber, he said something to his mother.
She reacted not with words or a change in expression but bodily, lurching backward like she’d been pushed and nearly tripping on the step behind her. She recovered her balance and took the boy’s arm. And then they were passing him, two dwindling figures descending the stairs and vanishing around a corner.
He stood holding the handrail, waiting as if—although he knew better—they might reappear at any moment.
He spent the weekend reenacting the scene in his mind. What had he done? Did the offer of dental care in her culture constitute some unforgivable faux pas? Maybe it was rude to have used the words pro bono, as if they were indigents unable to pay. Or did she simply dislike dentists? By Monday he’d half convinced himself that her reaction had nothing to do with him or what he’d said. There were any number of possibilities, he thought, arriving even earlier than usual to wait for them. But the way she gripped her son’s hand as they came down the stairs—and on the other side of the handrail!—without once looking in his direction had already confirmed the worst even before she ignored the “Good morning!” he called out in the most ordinary tone he could muster.
That afternoon, after the limping man had completed his delivery of dental supplies, Dr. Tauber stopped him outside his office.
“Excuse me.”
He closed the door so Angela, his receptionist and dental assistant, wouldn’t hear.
“A question. If you don’t mind. In your country people receive dental care, yes? I mean, of course you do. And it’s not common to . . . You are from the same country, am I right? As the Vis—as the people in the old dormitory down the hill?”
Was country the proper word? It might be a region. Or something else: a borderless wasteland; a land with new and arbitrary borders . . .
Yes,” the man said. Then added (proudly? contemptuously?), “But I don’t know those people.”
“Well of course not. It’s not like I think you all . . . Of course not. It’s just that I need to . . . clear something up.”
There had been a slight misunderstanding, Dr. Tauber explained, during a discussion about an appointment. He left out the onions and the offer of free dental care. Nothing in the man’s manner indicated a willingness to help or even any interest in the matter—he seemed, if anything, impatient to return to his deliveries—but Dr. Tauber was nevertheless able to recruit him to act, however reluctantly, as translator.
At the dormitory gate Dr. Tauber hesitated for an instant, feeling suddenly like a trespasser. The building, salmon-colored stucco, looked more like a motel than a dormitory: three stories of doors behind rusted walkways faced a treeless courtyard of weeds and shattered concrete. He realized he had no real information to give the man: he didn’t know their apartment number; the woman’s name he couldn’t possibly repeat; the only thing he remembered about the boy’s name was that strangled “gaa” . . . The most he could provide was a brief physical description of the two.
The man hobbled over to a little girl kicking a ball against the building. She pointed at a door on the second floor. They climbed iron stairs. As the man knocked, Dr. Tauber halted behind him and then took three steps back. He was no longer convinced of the husband’s permanent absence. He might be there, on the other side of the door: hairy and brutish and nearly bursting out of mismatched clothes . . .
When the door opened, though, it was a woman. Another woman. He’d assumed finding her would be straightforward: how many families could there be with a single mother (if she was a single mother) and a boy of his age? Five, as it turned out. When they left, the woman kept her door open in spite of the chill, peering out at them as they went down the hall. The same thing happened at the next door they tried: a knock; the wrong woman; a face peering out as they left. All around him, he could sense them—a woman with a laundry basket; a pair of teenage boys—stopping in their tracks to watch him. Even the little girl: ball abandoned, she stood on the cracked concrete observing Dr. Tauber and the limping man as they went back and forth, from floor to floor, conducting their search. Maybe they thought he was there in some official capacity, to inspect or investigate or deport. But he didn’t feel empowered by the attention. He felt, instead, furtive and self-conscious, as though he were the Visitor, wandering an unknown land without a proper visa . . .
Finally a door opened—number 7, first floor—and this time it was her. Dr. Tauber stayed back, in the courtyard, wishing there was a tree he could hide behind. But then she spotted him, and he regretted standing so far away: it made him look like some suspect character lurking in the distance. The limping man spoke. And then they were exchanging those sounds of theirs, at first tentatively, then with increasing urgency from her and lengthening stretches of silence from him, until she said one last thing and closed the door.
The man swung around, and for a second Dr. Tauber thought he was about to get hit.
“You are a shame,” the man hissed.
“I’m a what?”
The man lurched past Dr. Tauber, then stopped.
“Here, you people. You think about you only. What you want, you say. But what you said to her? In my country, you can’t say such things.”
“Can’t say . . . what? Dentists can’t offer free dental care?”
“Can’t . . . I don’t know the word. A shame. To want to be . . . not her husband. To be like her husband. To want to . . .”
“What? But that’s ridiculous. I never . . . I never said anything of the kind!”
The man looked skeptical. More than skeptical.
“No: listen to me. I’m telling you, I never said anything like— There was a mistake. A mistake in the translation. Must have been. I used the words pro bono. It’s Latin. It means ‘for the common good.’ In other words no charge. I offered to examine her son’s teeth at no charge. Nothing else. Maybe the boy misheard me. Or didn’t understand.”
Although the man didn’t appear completely convinced, he was eventually persuaded to return to her door, where he knocked, repeating something in his language, until it opened. Dr. Tauber wasn’t sure if it was safe to move closer but he did, until he was almost at the door himself. The woman’s face was set and hard; the diagonal crease he’d seen that first time had returned. The man gestured toward Dr. Tauber as he spoke.
“I’m not a bad man!” Dr. Tauber interrupted, afraid that before the man could finish the door might close forever. “Tell her! No: don’t tell her that. Tell her my intentions are not . . . My intentions are to help her. To help her son. To check his teeth. She gave me onions.”
The man translated.
As she listened, the woman’s face lost its hard focus, then went slack and inward with some kind of understanding. And Dr. Tauber, succeeding finally in reading her face, understood as well: he knew what had happened.
Leaving the door half open, she disappeared inside. When she returned, her son was beside her. They stood formally in the doorway until she touched the back of the boy’s head.
“Sorry,” he murmured, wet eyes glistening with hatred.
She touched his head again (but tenderly; why so tenderly?).
“I’m sorry,” he said, louder this time. “For lying.”
The woman spoke.
“She says her son has afraid of dentists,” the man told him.
“Right. Well.” Dr. Tauber cast an amiable expression in the boy’s general direction, avoiding his eyes. “It wouldn’t be the first time. Children and dentists. Anyway, no harm done. Water under the bridge. It’s an expression. All is forgiven, basically.”
He waited for the man to translate and then continued: “The main thing is that I’m here to help. I want your son to learn he has nothing to be afraid of.”
***
Ordinarily Dr. Tauber didn’t work on weekends, but he made an exception, arranging the appointment for three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon—there was no need, after all, to involve Angela in this informal pro bono case, with its unclear issues regarding the necessity of legal forms and insurance, among other things. He’d put on lab coat and gloves and set a mask under his chin, and was anxious to see the woman’s reaction to the sight of him in uniform, but when they arrived at the reception area she gazed past him, at the scene framed in the window: rooftops and miniature trees and a skyline of distant buildings glittering in the sun.
She put her fingertips to the glass and exhaled a sound or a word.
“Quite a view, isn’t it?” he said, making a grand gesture that encompassed the entire city, as if in the sweep of his arm he was offering it all to her.
The boy wasn’t looking out the window. He was staring through the doorway at the still-darkened operatory.
“Ready to get started?” Dr. Tauber walked over to him. “Follow me.”
The woman was about to go with them, but he barred her way with a smile and pointed toward the reception area’s sofa and magazine rack. As much as he wanted her near him, he needed the boy alone so he would understand the hopelessness of his situation; the fact that there would be no rescue.
He turned on the lights and guided the boy inside. The boy made it to the middle of the room before coming to a stop. He seemed a genuine child for the first time, frozen in place beside Dr. Tauber and giving off something as vital and primitive as an odor . . .
He saw through the boy’s eyes all of the room’s familiar objects: the aseptic gleam of the arrayed instruments; the curved chair waiting to contain; and looming above it the operatory light that a girl had once told him looked like an insect’s head. And in a moment, once he’d adjusted the mask over his face and the dental loupes over his eyes, Dr. Tauber would loom over the boy as well like something other than himself . . .
Once a child had seen all of that: there was usually no way to bribe or persuade or trick a mouth into opening then. And he never tried. He may not have been a pediatric dentist—as the neighborhood aged, he had, if anything, by default come to specialize in geriodontics—but he had, over the years, dealt with more than his share of uncooperative children. And he ordinarily favored a no-nonsense approach. He decided, however, that in this case he would not, under any circumstances, use a bite block: he would rather risk a bitten finger than lock the boy’s mouth in place. He wanted the boy’s consent; he wanted the boy to submit willingly.
He was curt and a bit stern without being too forbidding. Sit here. Head back. Relax. I’m going to adjust the chair now. No, hold still, it’s just a bib. The boy’s reactions were slow, disturbingly delayed. He didn’t cringe or scream or struggle the way some children did, but Dr. Tauber sensed the clamped jaw. The coiled resistance. Panic had clouded over all of the intelligence in the boy’s eyes. Relax, Dr. Tauber commanded. Which meant: Give up. Yield. He put a thumb to the boy’s chin and said, Open. And when the boy did finally yield and the lips parted, it was like a magical transformation from animal into compliant human, and Dr. Tauber felt triumphant and heartbroken. After that it was praise that worked, simple praise and he was no longer stern but cheerful and avuncular.
The teeth were perfect. There were no fractures; no biofilm deposits; no malocclusions. Permanent dentition was developing normally, with no over-retention among the primary teeth. No sign of gingival inflammation. Not a single carious lesion. A complete absence of expected hypodontia or microdontia: each neat row was uniform and complete. Who could say when the boy had last received care? Who could say if he’d ever received care? And here it was, a miracle: a pristine mouth, immaculate, uncorrupted.
When the boy had rinsed and the bib had been removed, Dr. Tauber took off his mask and loupes, helped the child down off the dental chair, and led him back to the reception area.
“It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” he said to the woman. “There’s a lot of work to be done.” He waited for her son to speak, knowing the boy could be trusted now to translate correctly, then continued: “More visits will be required. Quite a few. At no charge, of course. Don’t worry though: it’s not a hopeless case. I’ve seen worse. With the right care, his teeth can be saved. I’m going to help your son.”
He was already devising a course of action. The miracle of the perfect mouth would be maintained. For the next appointment: radiographic examination followed by routine cleaning, fluoride treatment, and instruction in oral hygiene. Then regular preventive visits to monitor incipient decay and the exfoliation of the remaining primary teeth. And in several years, with the onset of adolescence, the potential for new and interesting problems: ankylosis; ectopic eruption; the need for orthodontic care. Yes: there was a lot of work to be done. Many visits that, over the course of time, might prove necessary for the patient; many explanatory consultations with the parent . . .
The dark oval of her face swam suddenly near. She was moving toward him. Reaching out to take his still-gloved hand with both of hers. She spoke. He didn’t need a translation to know that she was thanking him. He let her grip his hand. His own grip, he felt sure, was professionally firm and neutral. Whatever was trembling inside him didn’t reach his fingers. He’d always been proud of this ability to separate heart from hands. With age some men lost the steady touch. And Dr. Tauber had himself been younger, there was no denying it, he’d been younger and would never be as young again as at this moment, with her close, gripping him through his glove, speaking words to him he seemed almost to understand. But the hands were as solid as ever: none of the shaking that spelled the end of a career in dentistry.