Open Doors Read online

  She washed her face, applied fresh powder and then washed it off. Neil hated her in makeup, hated the scent of cosmetics.

  “Oh, Neil.” She said his name aloud, looked at her watch. Still too early for Jack to return. She returned to the office and closed her eyes, willing herself to calm.

  At last Jack Newnham entered, walking so softly in the rubber-soled shoes that were requisite footwear for peripatetic doctors that she did not hear him approach. She remembered suddenly that Neil often joked that he had chosen psychiatry because it was a sedentary calling and he could wear the elegantly crafted Italian loafers that were his one extravagance. She fought against an inexplicable wave of hysterical laughter. Still, she looked up at Jack, suddenly hopeful. His relatively swift return could only mean good news. There had been no laborious analysis, no repeat imaging. She smiled to indicate her readiness, her gratitude.

  He pulled up a chair and sat opposite her, cupping his chin in his very large hands.

  “There’s no easy way to tell you this, Elaine,” he said slowly. “But the news is not good. Neil has an aneurysm, very near the base of his brain. It’s what we call a berry aneurysm, a clustered swelling just where the artery branches out.”

  She gripped the arms of the chair but kept her voice as measured as his own.

  “An aneurysm,” she repeated, the word heavy upon her tongue.

  It belonged to a lexicon to which she laid no claim. But of course she knew vaguely what an aneurysm was, had absently listened to discussions of surgeries that vanquished the threat. Casual dinner conversations among surgeons, trading OR triumphs and new techniques, exchanging professional war stories over glasses of white wine. Isolated phrases fluttered through mind and memory. Zapped that damn aneurysm. It was in a tricky spot but we got it…They’re using lasers on aneurysms now—interesting stuff.

  “But you can operate. Surely you can operate. Laser surgery.” She retrieved the word from the detritus of half-remembered discussions.

  She leaned forward, willing him to agree but instead he shook his head and absently scratched at a scarab of blood that had adhered to his white coat.

  “No. It’s inoperable,” he said at last. “The radiologist, Stan Price, agrees. I asked Harv Bernstein from neurology to do a consult but I’m fairly certain Stan and I are right.”

  Harv. Stan. The old boys’ club of nicknames and complacency, the specialists who were summoned from dinner parties and commencement ceremonies for their opinions, bravely and honestly and often irritably offered. They were the dispensers of truth, the oracles of hope or despair. Harv Bernstein had bad breath and his daughter was into drugs. Such knowledge, Elaine thought, would invalidate his judgment. She would not rely on a man whom she did not like. She would insist on another opinion, a neurologist from the city, someone from Columbia or NYU. Someone with sweet breath and well-adjusted kids.

  “You’ll want to call your children,” Jack said miserably. “There’s enough time, I think, for all of them to get here.”

  “Enough time?” she asked witheringly. Did he think that he had the final say, that she would surrender Neil to his death sentence so easily, so unquestioningly? She would fight, of course she would fight. There would be world enough and time. It was Neil they were talking about. Her Neil. Heart of her heart. Her love. Her husband lover. Her zieskeit, the endearment inherited from his mother. “He’s mein zieskeit, my sweetness,” the tiny hunched woman had told her. “And mine, too,” Elaine had replied and taken his mother’s work-worn hand into her own, a tactile promise never broken. She would treasure him and care for him. She would not allow him to go gentle into that evil night. Damn Jack. Damn Stan. Damn their stupid MRI machines rushing his life away. She would turn time into their ally, not their enemy.

  “Elaine, an aneurysm can leak at any time. Call your children. Please. That’s what Neil would want. That’s what they would want.” Jack’s tone was firm, reasonable. The hardest part of his job was over, the terrible news had been delivered and now damage control could begin.

  She sat very still although color rushed to her face and her hands closed into fists. At last she reached into her bag and took out her cell phone.

  “I’ll call Lisa,” she said, not vanquished but compromised. “In Philadelphia.”

  “Please,” he said and pushed his own phone toward her.

  She dialed Lisa’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times. Lisa, like Elaine, hated the cell phone, resisted its intrusion and yet, like her mother, she would not let it ring unheeded.

  “Dr. Gordon.”

  How Neil smiled when he heard his daughter say Dr. Gordon. “At least have the courtesy to call yourself Dr. Gordon the Second,” he had playfully admonished her.

  Elaine breathed deeply, spoke quietly.

  “Lisa, Dad’s not feeling well. I’m here with Jack Newnham. He’ll speak to you.”

  Jack Newnham nodded and took the phone. Calmly, with professional economy, he discussed the technical findings. Elaine heard the words centimeter, cerebellum, cerebral, an alliterative confluence. Hemorrhage, he said and colors flooded Elaine’s mind. Scarlet, crimson, burgundy. All the varied and terrible shades of blood. She was an artist and she thought in color. She shook her head, banishing the invading images. Jack was listening now.

  “Sure,” he said. “Absolutely. Wait. I’ll put her on. And Lisa. I’m sorry. So sorry, but you know that.”

  He handed the receiver back to Elaine. Again, her daughter’s voice, brisk and confident. She was leaving in a few minutes. There wouldn’t be much traffic. She would be at the hospital in two, two-and-a-half hours. Jack had arranged for her to review the MRI. She, too, thought it would be a good idea for Elaine to call Denis and Peter. She would call Sarah in Jerusalem herself.

  “But maybe we should wait to call Sarah,” Elaine protested although she was secretly glad that Lisa sounded so decisive. “There are other specialists we could call. Other opinions.”

  “Of course,” Lisa said. “We’ll do everything. But we have to let the others know. Peter, Denis, Sarah.” She repeated her siblings’ names as though they formed a mantra.

  “Get something to eat, Mom. Take it easy. I’ll be there soon, very soon.”

  She clicked off and Elaine sat holding the receiver as though it were an alien object whose purpose she could not comprehend. Jack Newnham took it from her and gently replaced it.

  “I want to see him. I want to see Neil,” she said, her voice broken at last.

  “He’s heavily sedated but I’ll take you to him. Of course I will.”

  He took her hand and led her from the room and down the corridor past the young woman who still cradled her bloodied hand, although now her eyes were closed.

  Neil was in a private room on the third floor, the blinds on the large windows so tightly drawn that not even a splinter of light penetrated. He lay beneath a heavy white coverlet, motionless; his long arms, poking through the wings of the blue-and-white hospital gown, were almost rigid. It seemed to Elaine that his face, always narrow, had grown suddenly gaunt as though the pressure of the pain, even in so brief a period, had already diminished him. But his eyes were open and he smiled thinly as she took his hand in her own and bent her head to pass her lips across his upturned palm.

  “My wedding ring,” he said weakly. “They took it off. I want my wedding ring.”

  Elaine turned to Jack and wordlessly he took the ring and Neil’s watch from his pocket.

  “Everything had to be removed for the imaging,” he said.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Elaine held the watch to her ear and then dropped it into her bag. Neil lived by his watch, his days measured out in fifty-minute hours, always punctual, always glancing at the Roman numerals on the face of the time-piece for assurance and reassurance. He had been well trained. His mother, that tiny Yiddish-speaking woman, had always kept her eyes on the clock as she rushed from job to job, sewing seams during the day, cutting patterns at night, every
hour another dollar toward her son’s tuition, his diploma. His father worked double shifts in a stocking factory, arriving early, leaving late, scavenging minutes to riffle through the Yiddish paper. The watch was his gift to Neil at his medical school graduation, his last gift as it turned out, because two weeks later he died of a massive heart attack and a month later, Neil’s mother, too, was dead of a mysterious blood disease. It had occurred to Elaine, who had loved them both, that they had managed, with great effort, to stay alive until their son’s future was assured.

  Neil would not need the watch until he had recovered and he did not ask for it. She would keep it with her, the sound of its ticking reminiscent of the faint beat of his heart in the stillness of their long-shared nights during their long-shared years. The ring, the wide gold band inscribed in Hebrew with the words from The Song of Songs, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” she slipped onto his finger just as she had slipped it on all those years ago as they stood beneath the marriage canopy. The rabbi, the bearded orthodox officiant chosen by Neil’s parents, had disapproved of a double-ring ceremony but she had not cared. The ring had slipped on easily and she had whispered the words as she whispered them now in this hospital room. “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”

  “How do you feel, darling?” she asked, as she gently brushed that silver shock of hair from his forehead.

  “Better,” he said. “But sleepy. Very sleepy.”

  “Then go to sleep. I’ll be right here.”

  He closed his eyes, held her hand tightly for a moment, the ring cutting into her flesh, and then released it. His breath was measured, his face relaxed.

  “I can stay here, Jack?” she asked, recognizing her new role. She was a supplicant who had to submit to the rules of this small monarchy of healers.

  He nodded.

  “Of course. Can I send someone up with some coffee, a sandwich, for you?”

  She shook her head.

  “All right then. I’ll be back when Lisa comes.”

  “Yes. And Jack…”

  He paused at the door.

  “Elaine?”

  “Thank you. You’ve been very kind.”

  The initial shock over, she had recovered her persona. She was, as always, a courteous woman, conscious of the kindness of others. Neil slept, she herself dozed off, waking to accept a cup of coffee and a sandwich from a chubby Candy Striper, flushed with the opportunity to do good.

  “I hope your husband will be all right,” the girl said.

  “Oh, he will be, he will be,” Elaine assured her.

  Her own words comforted her. And Neil, still asleep, did look better. The color had returned to his face and pain no longer contorted his features. She adjusted the coverlet and made a mental note to bring a blanket from home. And pajamas. And his shaving gear. A radio or perhaps his small CD player. Neil needed his music as other men needed food and drink. She rummaged in her bag for a piece of paper, a pen, and made a list. The normalcy of the task calmed her. She was an organized woman, a maker of lists, a completer of projects.

  She was still writing, the list having expanded to include books and bedside delicacies, when Lisa entered the room, grave-eyed and unsmiling, tall beautiful Lisa, her shining dark hair helmeting her head, a silk scarf in the russet-and-golden hues of autumn caping the chocolate-brown cashmere sweater that exactly matched the long skirt that fell to the tops of her tan suede boots.

  “Mom.” Lisa kissed her cheek.

  Her daughter’s lips were moist against Elaine’s dry cheek. Her eyes, the startling blue inherited from her father, were red-rimmed and Elaine knew at once that she had been crying. She drew Lisa toward her in a fierce embrace and held her close.

  “Everything will be all right,” she murmured, reassuring her daughter, reassuring herself.

  Lisa would know what to do, whom to call. Her medical school classmates were in the vanguard of New York’s most respected young practitioners, their names appearing regularly in the magazine features Neil had always derided—“The City’s Hundred Best Doctors,” “Doctors’ Doctors,” “Physicians in the Know.” She needed the best doctor available, a doctor’s doctor, a physician in the know and she could rely on her daughter to snare an immediate appointment, an immediate bedside visit. Doctors did that for each other, she knew.

  “You look tired, Lisa,” she said. “There must have been terrible traffic. It never takes you this long to drive from Philly.”

  “Actually, I’ve been at the hospital for a while. I went over the imaging—you know, the MRI—and I met with Stan Price and Dr. Bernstein.”

  She walked over to her father’s bed, lightly touched his hair, passed her finger across his brow.

  He stirred but did not waken.

  “They’re only local doctors,” Elaine said. “I want you to call in specialists from New York, maybe one of your colleagues at Penn.”

  “They’re very good doctors,” Lisa replied. “Both of them. And I agree with their diagnosis. I wish I didn’t but, Mom, the MRI doesn’t lie. Dad’s condition is serious, very serious.”

  “No. We’ll get another opinion. We’ll move him to another medical center. Hopkins. Presbyterian. The Mayo Clinic.” Elaine plucked names from memory, a random assortment of medical meccas, and shot them at her daughter, verbal bullets of hope.

  “There’s no point.” Lisa’s tone was dead. She did not argue. She stated facts. “There’s nothing we can do. I spoke to Sandy—I mean Sarah.” The Hebrew name her twin now used still eluded Lisa, even after so many years. “She and Moshe are making arrangements. They should be here sometime late tomorrow. Did you call Peter, Denis?”

  “No.” Elaine felt guilty, angered by the sudden reversal of their roles. She had been negligent, her daughter conscientious. “I thought I would wait till you got here, until we arranged to get another opinion, until we saw a top specialist.”

  She would not so easily give up hope. She would be in this, as she was in all things, tenacious. There were things she could do. There were always things that could be done. Passivity was the enemy. She looked at Lisa, willing her to agree but her daughter’s face remained frozen into a mask of grief.

  “We can get one if it would make you feel better. But there’s no point. Honestly, there’s no point.” Lisa’s voice broke and she leaned over to kiss her father’s cheek. Her lipstick left a tiny coral crescent on his pallid skin.

  “I’ll call Peter and Denis,” she said and, too swiftly, left the room.

  Elaine knew that her daughter did not want her to see that she was weeping. Lisa was the child who had closed the door of her bedroom, shutting them out of her childhood sorrows, her adolescent pain. Always, she had been intensely private and Elaine and Neil, ever tolerant, ever understanding, ever protective of their own privacy, had not invaded those emotional perimeters. Their children had their own way of coping and she and Neil had allowed them that independence. They themselves had lived always in the shadows of their parents’ whispered worries, swift to abate fears that could not be articulated. Their own sons and daughters would be free of such burdens.

  “Elaine.”

  Neil was awake and she rushed to his side, lifted his hand, kissed it, smiled at him, grateful that her own eyes were dry.

  “Feeling better now?” she asked.

  “Sort of. What did they say? What do they think?”

  “What do you think?”

  He shrugged.

  “A brain tumor maybe. Possibly an aneurysm. It will be all right.” He winced with pain even as he reassured her. “What did Jack tell you?”

  “He spoke to Lisa. She’s here now.”

  “Good. Good. I’m hungry. At least I think I’m hungry. Send Lisa in and see about getting the patient some nourishment.” He forced a grin and waved her out of the room.

  Lisa stood in the hallway carefully applying powder to mask her swollen eyes, the tear tracks on her cheeks.

  “Denis and Peter will be here first thing
in the morning,” she told her mother and, planting a smile on her face, went in to see her father.

  Lisa would not lie to him, Elaine knew. Her daughter never lied. Wearily, she directed her steps to the hospital cafeteria. Neil was partial to their grilled cheese, she knew.

  two

  Peter, having caught the red-eye from L.A, was at the door with his family at daybreak the next morning. It startled Elaine, bleary-eyed after the long night at the hospital and the few hours of restless sleep at home, that Peter’s wife Lauren and his small son and daughter, Renée and Eric, accompanied him. Their presence alarmed and disconcerted her. But, of course, Lisa had described Neil’s prognosis with no holds barred. She kissed her blond daughter-in-law’s cool cheek and embraced her exhausted grandchildren. She noted that Eric closely resembled Neil; her husband’s bright blue eyes stared up at her from the child’s face.

  An hour later Denis and his partner Andrew arrived. Tall Denis, lean as always, newly returned from a visit to Andrew’s family in Jamaica where the island sun had burnished his very smooth skin and lightened the tangled curls of his chestnut-brown hair, held Elaine in brief embrace. Andrew held out his hand, fumbled for the appropriate words.

  “I am so sorry,” he said. “This must be so hard for you.”

  His words, delivered in the lilting accent of his island, were, after all, ill chosen. Elaine withdrew her hand.

  “Actually, it’s Neil we worry about,” she replied and immediately regretted her tone. Andrew, she knew, was uneasy enough with their family, conscious of being a “person of color,” as he was described in the short bios offered in the high-end glossy journals that carried his photographs, conscious of being a non-Jew in the heart of a Jewish family, even a family as casual about their Jewishness as the Gordons.