Deficiency (3 page)

But despite all the activity, she couldn't get Paige Thorndyke out of her mind. The diagnosis she had instinctively arrived at seemed ridiculous, but the symptoms supported it. When her tour ended, she walked out to the parking lot still reviewing the possibilities. She ambled slowly through the pools of cool white illumination dropped over the macadam lot by the globular pole lights and walked right past her black BMW convertible, a graduation gift from her parents. She shook her head and doubled back.

Talk about your absent-minded professors, she thought, and sifted through her pocketbook to find her car keys. As usual, she fished out her house keys first and panicked, thinking she had misplaced her car keys; but they were there, lost in the makeup case, the lipsticks, the piles of change, the hand mirror, Life Savers, and gums. How could she be so meticulous in her work and so messy and disorganized in her personal life? she wondered. Probably because I don't concentrate on myself as much as I should, she replied to her own question.

Curt had advised her to concentrate on putting her work behind her once she had left either the office or the hospital, but sometimes, that just wasn't possible, at least, not for her. Curt was wonderful about closing the door behind him. He could shut himself off so completely, it was as though he were indeed two different people.

In the beginning she thought that indicated he wasn't fully involved in what he was doing, but now she had come to believe his power of forgetting was an asset. Many a night and many a morning after a night, she tossed and turned for hours reliving what she had done the previous eight hours. She had little hope for anything different this morning, despite her physical fatigue. She imagined she looked terrible — pale, drawn, strands of hair flying this way and that. She certainly felt drained.

At five feet ten with olive green eyes, prominent cheek bones, raven black hair that was shoulder length when she wore it down, and a firm, full figure, she looked more like a
Cosmopolitan
magazine cover girl than a physician. Her sensuous mouth and alluring smile drew endless compliments, but at this point in her life and her career, she found that to be more of a burden than a blessing.

Despite the many inroads women had made, medicine was still a man's domain. Patients who could choose usually chose male doctors over female. Even women discriminated against female physicians. It was maddening, but if a woman was to be accepted as a physician, she had to look brilliant and be coldly analytical, whereas a man could look goofy, have a personality, and even flirt.

She did the best she could to deal with the problem. Whenever she was on duty or practicing, she wore her hair tied in a tight, "granny bun" behind her head and wore no makeup, not even a light shade of lipstick. She had a pair of thick-rimmed, very plain glasses, her doctor glasses, she called them, and she always wore these dull-colored heavy cotton or tweed cardigan suits with a flat white blouse. Usually, she couldn't wait to get home after work and take off her physician clothes.

She would brush down her hair, apply some lipstick and some eye makeup, put on one of her pants outfits or nice blouses and sweaters with her tight-knit skirts or leather skirts and feel like… Wonder Woman. Curt kidded her about it, and said, "You accuse me of being like two different people. What about you?"

But when she chased him down, forced him to be honest, he confessed he felt more comfortable with a male doctor than a female himself and if he went in to see a doctor who was female, he would be nervous if she was what he called "a looker."

They almost got into a heated argument about it, but in the end she concluded it wasn't his fault. There were years and years of social changes yet to evolve.

Wise old Hyman Templeman had lowered his bifocals, even though all he had to do was raise his eyes, and warned her about all this when she first came to see him about the position he had advertised.

"It's like coming to bat with two strikes against you, Terri," he advised. "You want to work in your hometown where people remember you as the girl next door, a cheerleader, homecoming queen, and ask them to accept you as their family physician. I got as far away from my hometown as I could," he muttered, shaking his head, a head still crowned with a full crop of angel white hair. "I was born and bred in South Africa, you know."

She didn't know that. Funny, she thought, Hyman had been a doctor in this community for nearly forty years, and not once had she heard anyone talk about his coming from South Africa.

"And the second strike?" she asked, suspecting the answer.

"That you're a woman, what else?"

"So you wouldn't think of giving me the position then, I suppose."

"Never suppose anything," he chided gently, his bushy, gray eyebrows rising and then shifting forward as his forehead creased. "Conclude after you review all the facts. Supposing gets you onto side roads that are often dead ends. Whenever my patients ask me what I think, I say, I think I'll think about it.

"So," he concluded. "I'll think about it."

She left, never expecting he would call, but he did.

"Things are a bit boring for me these days," he said a bit impishly. "I could use some excitement around here."

"You won't regret it, Dr. Templeman. I promise I'll work hard and…"

"Now one thing right off, Terri. If we're going to work together and you want people to accept you same as they accept me eventually, you start calling me Hyman. Understand?"

"Yes, Doc… Hyman."

She had it! Her parents were overjoyed. How proud they could be, but she lowered their balloon a bit when she announced that she wasn't going to live at home. She wanted to move into Grandma Gussie's house. It had been on the market for four months without a bite, much like most of the real estate around there lately.

"But why?" her mother questioned, her face grimacing as though she were suffering real physical pain.

"I've always felt comfortable there, Mom. I just would like it for a while."

"Let her do what she wants," her father said. "She's earned the right."

"But what about Curt?" her mother pursued. Terri knew her mother had been quietly investigating all sorts of wedding preparations, anticipating that she would get the position and would practice medicine here. Terri was not surprised. After all, as soon as Terri had decided to return to the area to practice medicine, whether she worked with Hyman Templeman or not, she and Curt had become formally engaged.

"It will be a while yet, Mom."

"But…"

"Doris!" her father cried holding up his arms like someone pleading with the Almighty.

"Okay, okay. I'm just asking. A mother can ask her daughter questions, can't she?" she said and turned to her again, this time like a prosecutor who had overcome a defense attorney's objection. "Why wait now?" Her mother held her breath in anticipation of some dreadful news.

"I have to have my own space for a while," she told her. "It's important I feel independent."

"You've got your career; you're going to be married. Why do you have to feel any more independent?" her mother persisted.

Curt had wanted to know the same thing.

"Why can't we get married immediately? Why do we have to wait for you to feel secure in your profession? What does that have to do with our marriage?"

She explained as best she could that without a strong self-image, she wouldn't be able to give him all he deserved.

"Let me clean up my act first," she begged. "I'd like to be standing on my own two feet."

She knew it was difficult for him to understand. It wasn't something his mother would have ever said to his father, and despite his protest that he was just as much a modern thinking man as anyone else, he carried a great deal of old-fashioned baggage, even some he wasn't aware himself he was carrying, as his attitude about doctors had revealed.

But it wasn't all bad. She admitted to herself that she liked, even craved some of those old-fashioned values, especially Curt's reverence for the sanctity of marriage and the home. In this way Curt was more like his grandparents. Of all the grandchildren, he had been the closest to them. As a child he had worked on his grandfather's farm and absorbed his rural-flavored wisdom. He had been with both his paternal grandfather and grandmother when they died, and to this day, he missed them dearly. She liked that about him. It was one of the qualities that endeared her to him and overcame what she saw as some faults.

Terri knew that Curt sincerely believed that a man and a woman became one when they took the vows, each and every word of which he accepted and held sacred. He cherished the image of family, wanted children and a solid home life. And so, he was caught in a conflict she recognized and handled as delicately as she could. He told her he was proud of her, proud of what she had accomplished, and proud of the idea that he would be married to a doctor, but at the same time, she sensed he was afraid she would be one of these professional women willing to sacrifice the children and their needs when it came to being her own person.

"Not that I want to be like my father," he quickly emphasized. "And expect you to do everything and make all the career sacrifices like he expected of my mother. I want to be there for my kids all the time. I'm not paying any chauffeur to cart them around to their school activities and Little League. We're all going to grow up together," he promised. "Can you make the same promise?" he taunted.

"I don't know, Curt," she confessed. "I'm going to try. I want the same things you want. I'm going to try, but at the moment, I don't know."

It was a more honest answer than Curt had wanted, and a little sour note resonated in the hall of their otherwise happy symphony.

Terri tried to be understanding. She believed that in many ways the modern world tested the bonds of love more than they had been tested in times when people had to struggle every day merely to survive. She had an undying faith that the love between her and Curt would overcome any and all obstacles. Was she being naive or perhaps as Hyman Templeman might say, "a little too doctor arrogant"?

Occasionally, she muttered a tiny prayer: "Oh please, please, don't let that be so."

Impulsively, she made a sharp right turn onto State Highway 17 and sped up, instead of taking County Road One down toward Centerville and to what had been her grandmother's home. She was going to Bridgeville because that was where Curt lived, in a home once owned by his grandfather. It was another wonderful thing they shared, she thought, both currently residing in their grandparents' old homes.

She glanced at the clock in the car. It was ridiculously early to pay a visit, but she relished the idea of getting him up to answer the door and then going back to his bedroom and crawling under the covers with him.

She wanted to make love very badly; she wanted to be vibrant and sensuous and feel sexual ecstasy. She wanted to feel alive. That was it. There was no other way to get Paige's degenerating body out of her mind and to forget the glassy eyes of the dead.

Curt could barely open his eyes, and when he did, he had to squint because the old farm house faced the east and the rising sun peered over the horizon unobstructed. The house had been built on a knoll facing the long, flat fields that had once hosted acres of corn, a sea of it he used to think. Now it was all overgrown, the pale brown weeds swaying in the autumn breeze. But there were a number of beautiful large maple and hickory trees around the house, and the house had a wide and deep back yard that looked upon the mountains and woods. On the rear patio, one could feel isolated, peaceful, relaxed. Curt wanted to put in a pool, but he didn't want to go forward with any of the changes or restorations in the old house until he and Terri were married so she could be party to each and every decision. Actually, he hated the thought of changing anything in the old house, the house his grandfather had built himself.

Curt's grandfather had been a small farmer, raising dairy cows and chickens and the corn crop that once had glittered like gold out there. He and his hard-working wife, Nanny Lillian, had raised four boys and a girl. Two of the boys, Uncle Frank and Uncle Abe, now worked on Wall Street. Uncle Louie had become a merchant marine and was presently still a captain on an oil tanker. Aunt Charlotte married a banker and moved to Pennsylvania.

There was never enough money when Curt's father, uncles, and aunt were growing up. His father had to take on odd jobs and when he was old enough, work in the Catskill resorts as a busboy and finally as a waiter to earn his college tuition. But he never gave up and when he did get into law school, he graduated at the top of his class. Only after he had landed a good job with a New York City law firm did he marry Curt's mother, Marion Steele. Shortly afterward, when the opportunity presented itself, he went into his own practice, developed real estate deals in the Catskills and became one of the most respected and successful attorneys here.

There wasn't time in those days to worry about whether or not he was stepping on his wife Marion's own career goals, he once told Curt whenever they discussed Curt and Terri's long engagement. "Your mother knew that from the start. She once had some ambition to become a magazine editor and work in New York City, but she never really pursued it. Oh, she tried some freelance writing, but that didn't lead anywhere, and soon she was happy just being Mrs. William Levitt. I never heard her complain about the decisions she made. Of course, that was before all this women's liberation business, before women began to wonder why they couldn't have flies on their pants, too," he joked, half joked, actually. Curt knew his father was too much of a male chauvinist.

However, Curt's father loved and respected Terri, even though he teased her whenever he had an opportunity to do so. Curt was also aware that his father was a flirt and suspected that he might have had an extramarital affair here and there, but Curt would rather not think about it. He was like that when it came to his father — deliberately blind to any of his faults or willing to easily excuse and rationalize them away.