Page 59 of The Dutch House

The first time I made it back to Jenkintown after starting medical school must have been the Thanksgiving of 1970. The work had come down on me in an avalanche that first semester, just as Dr. Able predicted, and I scrambled to keep up. Add to that the fact that Celeste and I were putting the apartment to good use and I had neither the time nor the inclination to go home on the weekends. This was before there had been any talk of marriage, so Maeve and Celeste were still pals. Celeste and I had come to Philadelphia together on the train the night before Thanksgiving. Maeve picked us up and we dropped Celeste off at home, then the next day Maeve and I went back to have our dinner with the Norcrosses. The men and the boys played touch football in the yard—in honor of the Kennedys, we said—while the women and the girls peeled potatoes and made the gravy and did whatever last-minute things needed to be done. They sent Maeve out to set the table once they understood she really wasn’t kidding about not being able to cook.

The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in theden to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room. There were aunts and uncles and cousins, plus a large assortment of strays who had nowhere else to go, the category in which Maeve and I were included. Celeste’s mother always did a spectacular job with the holidays, and after months in which dinner had meant grabbing something in the hospital cafeteria or picking rolls off of patient trays, I was especially grateful. At every table, hands were held and heads were bowed while Bill Norcross recited his tidy benediction, “For these and all His mercies may the Lord make us truly thankful.” No sooner had we lifted our eyes than the bowls of green beans with pearl onions and the mountains of stuffing and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and platters of sliced turkey followed by boats of gravy began to make their clockwise march around the table.

“And what do you do?” the woman on my left asked me. She was one of Celeste’s many aunts. I couldn’t remember her name, though I knew we’d been introduced at the door.

“Danny’s in medical school at Columbia,” Mrs. Norcross said from across the table, on the off chance this was information I’d be unwilling to share myself.

“Medical school?” the aunt said, and then, remarkably, she looked at Celeste. “You didn’t tell me he was in medical school.”

The middle section of the long table fell silent and Celeste shrugged her pretty shoulders. “You didn’t ask.”

“What kind of medicine do you plan to practice?” one of the uncles asked. I had just that minute become interesting. I didn’t know if he was the uncle who was matched to this particular aunt.

I envisioned all the empty buildings I’d seen up in Washington Heights, and for a minute I thought it would really be somethingto tell them the truth: I was planning on practicing real estate. From the end of the table I saw Maeve flash me a wild smile, confirming that she alone understood how insane this was. “I have no idea,” I said.

“Do you have to cut people up?” Celeste’s younger brother asked me. I had been told this was his first year in the dining room. He was the youngest person at the table.

“Teddy,” his mother said in warning.

“Autopsies,” Teddy said, bored out of his mind. “They have to do them, you know.”

“We do,” I said, “but they make us take an oath never to discuss it at dinner.”

For that withholding, the room sent up a grateful round of laughter. From a distance, I heard someone ask Maeve if she was a doctor as well. “No,” she said, holding up her fork speared with green beans. “I’m in vegetables.”

When the dinner was over and we’d been piled up with leftovers for the weekend, Celeste kissed me goodbye. Maeve promised that we would pick her up Sunday morning on our way to the train. They trailed us out to the car, all those happy Norcrosses, telling us we should stay. There would be movies later on, popcorn, games of Hearts. Lumpy ran out of the house and into the yard, barking and barking at the piles of leaves until they shooed him back inside.

“This is our chance,” Maeve whispered, and jumped into the driver’s side. I went around and got in the car beside her while they stood there, the whole host of them waving and laughing as we pulled away.

The Norcrosses had their dinner early so it was barely dusk. We had just enough time to make it back to the Dutch House before the lights went on. We’d promised Jocelyn we’d come toher house later for pie, so this was just a brief interlude between dipping into other people’s splendid meals. We were still young enough then to conjure up the exact feeling of how Thanksgivings had been when we were children, but it was a memory with no longing attached. Either it had been me and Maeve and our father eating in the dining room, and Sandy and Jocelyn trying their best not to look like they were rushing to get home to their own families, or it was the years with Andrea and the girls, in which Sandy and Jocelyn rushed openly. After that disastrous Thanksgiving when Maeve was banished to the third floor, she had stayed away from Elkins Park, and every year I looked at her empty place at the table and felt miserable, even though I never could understand how her being gone on Thanksgiving was any worse than it was on all the other nights of the year. Having spent this particular Thanksgiving with the Norcross family had made up for a lot, and we both left the dinner feeling restored, even if our exit had smacked of escape. Maybe it was possible, we thought, to rise above the pathetic holidays of our youth.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Maeve said, rolling down her window to meet the frigid air, “but if I don’t have a cigarette right this minute I’m going to die.” She pulled one out then handed me the pack so I could decide for myself, then she handed me the lighter. Soon we were each blowing smoke out of our respective windows.

“As good as that dinner was, this cigarette might be better,” I said.

“If you did anautopsy on me right now you would find I am nothing but dark meat and gravy, with maybe a tiny vein of mashed potatoes inside my right arm.” Maeve was careful about her carbohydrates. She had forgone the Norcross pie in order to have a slice at Jocelyn’s.

“I could present you at grand rounds,” I said, and thought of Bill Norcross sawing into the carcass of the turkey.

Maeve shuddered slightly. “I can’t believe they make you cut people up.”

“I can’t believe you make me go to medical school.”

She laughed, and then pressed her fingers to her lips as if to quell her dinner’s revolt. “Oh, stop complaining. Seriously, apart from dissecting other human beings, tell me one thing that’s so terrible.”

I tipped my head back, exhaling. Maeve always said I smoked every cigarette like I was on my way to my execution, and I was thinking this really should be my last one. I knew better, even though those were still the days when doctors kept a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of their lab coats. Especially orthopedists. You couldn’t be an orthopedist without smoking. “The worst part is understanding you’re going to die.”

She looked at me, her black eyebrows raised. “You didn’t understand that?”

I shook my head. “Youthinkyou understand it. You think that when you’re ninety-six you’ll lie down on the couch after a big Thanksgiving dinner and not wake up, but even then you’re not really sure. Maybe there’ll be some special dispensation for you. Everybody thinks that.”

“I never for a minute thought I was going to die on the couch at ninety-six, or be ninety-six for that matter.”

But I wasn’t listening, I was talking. “You just don’t realize how many ways there are to die, excluding gunshots and knife fights and falling out windows and all the other things that probably aren’t going to happen.”

“Tell me, Doc, whatisgoing to happen?” She was trying not to laugh at me, but it was true: death was all I thought about in those days.

“Too many white blood cells, too few red blood cells, too much iron, a respiratory infection, sepsis. You can get a blockage in your bile duct. Your esophagus can rupture. And the cancers.” I looked at her. “We could sit here all night talking about cancer. I’m just telling you, it’s unsettling. There are thousands of ways your body can go off the rails for no reason whatsoever and chances are you won’t know about any of it until it’s too late.”