An Uncommon Education (3 page)

The hand went up, the men were down the stairs and guided out the door before they had a chance to look my way. I managed to tuck the papers into the waistband of my tights, smoothing them down just before my father turned around. I shut my eyes, trying to look sick enough to be near sleep.

I heard the front door close softly a few minutes later. Mrs. Kennedy’s voice started again; my father must have pressed the button. “I shall try to point out to you some of the things as we go through the house that were important in our lives,” Rose intoned. “Since the music room in the days before radio and television was the place for the family to be together, we shall start here.” She paused. “We spent a lot of time in this room in the evening. Mr. Kennedy would sit in that red chair by the gateleg table. Usually I would sit in the wing chair there by the table opposite him.” Words like “chair” betrayed her upper-class Boston accent, the vowels too long and set high in the mouth. She mentioned the piano but not the hours she had spent at it, the dreams she once had of becoming a concert pianist. “Life was so much simpler then,” Rose’s recording concluded.

The papers were growing warm against my skin. I wondered how to get them back where they belonged without my father seeing what I was up to. I wondered if what my mother had said about Rosemary Kennedy had been true, that her mother had all but killed her.

“Do you know”—I opened my eyes to see my father standing on the other side of the rope—“that Mrs. Kennedy also liked to take her children to historical sites in the Boston area”—he eyed me to see if I was listening—“as part of their schooling. She spent so much time teaching those children, it’s no wonder she regretted the limits of her own education.” I closed my eyes again.

“She always sounds happy to me,” I remarked, affecting more nonchalance than I felt. I didn’t fully believe what I’d just said. But at the very least she sounded content, and I was sure that was what she wanted us to hear. I opened one eye and forced myself to sit, and then stand. He opened his arms and I made my way across the room and under the rope and into them. He could still lift me then. My dress was a little too big, bunching between us and concealing, I hoped, what I’d hidden.

“I threw up in the bushes,” I whispered, my head on his shoulder.

“Not so happy,” my father continued, holding me close but staring off at something in the piano room, the aroma of whatever Mrs. Olsen had used to clean the wood floors lingering in the air. I could hear the house begin to settle; I was beginning to fall asleep on his shoulder. “Can you imagine the kind of political career she might have had if she’d been born just fifty years later?” He shook his head and said nothing else for a moment, and I started to drift off again. “Might have run for president herself, the old broad.” I opened one eye again. “I’m not running for president,” I muttered into his shoulder. “I’m going to be a doctor,” I added, emphasizing the personal pronoun in case he needed to be reminded of what we both already knew. He patted me on the back, nodding to the empty music room.

I wonder now if he chose Mrs. Kennedy as a role model because she did share some commonalities with my mother: disappointment, an Irish Catholic upbringing, a natural grace, and the allure of an intelligent face. If he had chosen someone more confident, less likely to have hidden insecurities, I might never have made the transfer. Because, ultimately, although my mother had no interest in having me emulate her, I believed that she hadn’t discarded me so much as left me to drift as close to her shores as I chose, watching constantly for an opportunity to come in. I think a child who watches like that has more than the usual tendency to latch on to her quarry with single-minded determination.

I decided to ask my father about Rosemary and her mother, so I looked up at him, trying to formulate a question to which I’d get the kind of answer I was looking for. There was a weak smile on his face as he stared into the room at Rose’s picture on the piano. He was becoming more sentimental in his middle age, given to frequent reminiscing of what might have been or what could be. When I think of him in those moments, it makes the gap between our ages seem even broader: I, just discovering; he, summarizing already. I held him tighter, wanting his attention back on me.

And then suddenly we weren’t standing. We were tilting forward, bending down, and my father was not just holding but gripping me. The tilt was very, very slow, and I remember waiting for him to say something, to explain as we listed toward the floor. Then his arms disagreed: the left clenched me to his chest and the right let me go entirely. I was able to brace my own fall as I sprung free, but my father fell heavily, on his back. I looked at him, at his eyes open in surprise, and then I was screaming as loud as I could; and I continued screaming; long, wordless cries for help, even after Mrs. Olsen was there and then people from the street outside and an ambulance had been called.

I sat and watched him, my throat quickly becoming raw and voiceless. All at once I could not understand what I saw, could not understand how this man on the floor was my father—a man who could not hold me, who could not stand. He was as still as a waxen doll, his chest all at once empty of air. As I stared at him I could hear the thumping of my pulse in my ears, the breath began to leave my own chest in a small, steady leak.

Two

I
scrambled back to him from where I’d fallen and lifted his head into my lap. The heavy weight of it frightened me almost as much as his collapse. Someone put a hand on my shoulder and tried to pull me away, but I couldn’t hear what was being said to me. “Please,” I begged him. “Please, please, please,” I muttered out loud, while silently, fuming, like a train building speed,
not you, not you, not you
.

In the next instant I began to promise him everything I had to promise. I didn’t believe in a God, but my pleas to a nameless
something
felt like the only way to shut out the total panic that wanted to take over. My mother’s right wrist with its dark, thick scar floated in my vision, and I squeezed my eyes shut, holding my father’s head and pressing my forehead to his.

I tried to think of what I could do to lure him back, of how badly he wanted to see me become something he had never been, of how I needed him to do that. I thought of Rose Kennedy, of the model he’d made for me of her, and wondered if I could promise to have no regrets, if such a promise was something someone could make. But I could think of nothing else, so I did just that, whispering it into his ear, letting myself believe that the words themselves might carry within them the power of resurrection.

I realized, belatedly, that the paramedics had been on their way for some time, but they arrived out of nowhere at that very moment; a thousand capable hands descending in response to my critical oath, lifting him, pulling his clothes away, tying their lines, pressing the electric white blocks to his chest. I caught a glimpse of his pale, still face from between their shoulders and groped for his hand. They pushed me aside, working as one, and my father’s body jumped and he took a breath. I heard myself cry out involuntarily, a useless protest escaping if only to be heard. A moment later I was told I would be checked for shock.

But as they shone a light into my pupils and walked me through my senses, a sort of clarity began to dawn, my mind careening toward the first thing it could latch on to as a counterpoint to panic. I took as deep a breath as I could, filling my lungs until they hurt, and then filling them some more, gathering myself back from some unknown place, inflating my body and straightening, taking in the instruments and techniques and formal curiosities, slowly forcing myself to drop anchor in the chaos, to understand rather than just watch, to make sense instead of wonder.

My father had known it all along—perhaps both my parents did—that an inescapable vulnerability wove through all our experiences and that it was better to focus elsewhere, preferably even further than the eye could see. But it took my own deep gulp of catastrophe for me to understand the power of such protection. And as I did, I felt a wondrous calm settle in as I watched the machines and the men and their instruments encourage my father’s heart to start again. And as his pulse began its slow, mountainous march back on the machine at my feet, it seemed Rose and Jack and all their children were surrounding us, their hands on our shoulders as the paramedics began to lift and carry my father through the front door, all of the Kennedys gone and all still there, seeing what I saw and nodding their heads in understanding. And drifting on the outskirts of the crowd was Rosemary, her stare direct and intentional:
She could fly
.

Later in the hospital with my mother, I followed the doctors like a mute hound, transfixed as they achieved the miraculous shuffle of my father from death to life. My mother was beside herself, and in no state to look after me, so an intern was informally assigned to me, a kind young woman who handed me a paper cup of water by way of comfort. I drank the cold liquid down, staring at her and wondering what it took to earn a coat as clean as hers. “Do you want to ask me anything?” she offered quietly. I nodded, silent. She knelt down and put a hand on my shoulder. “Your father’s doing great,” she said. “You don’t need to worry.” I found my voice, blurting out my only question. “Did you have to cut open his chest to fix his heart?”

She blinked, then began to try to answer that question and the ones that followed. And so I entered a classroom of my own design, the hospital and our reasons for being there giving way to my curiosities. Before long, she managed to scrounge up a plastic model of the heart and use it as a shield between herself and my questions. She named everything on it and I was quiet, lingering on the most foreign words,
vena cava
,
atrium
,
aorta
,
ventricle
,
septum
, looking at the ugly red-and-purple thing and hoping it had no real business within my father. She noticed my frown and laughed a little. “It’s not the most appealing thing in the world,” she said, then leaned in close, “but the real thing is much worse. Nothing pretty about it.” Almost instantly she pulled away, stealing a quick glance at me to see if I had registered the inappropriateness of what she’d just said. I loved when adults blurted things out to me. It was like getting away with something free and clear. I nodded, imagining a red, swelling, glistening thing.

My intern wore white, as they all did, with subtle drapings of metal over their shoulders and pockets. We talked of blood all night, but I never saw a drop of it on any of them.

I imagined a transitional room between where we stood and where the doctors worked, lined with countless replacement jackets and metals, all dutifully waiting for the next costume change. I wanted them to appear otherworldly, with powers to easily bring back the dead, and by the end of the night they did. It wasn’t difficult to begin convincing myself that I, too, might be more than just an
I
, I might be a
someone
, a force in the world rather than a subject of it, vulnerable to the whims of my parents and other terrifying imbalances. These doctors, too, I reasoned, must have been children, once.

Reunited with my mother to receive my father’s progress report, I fingered the surgeon’s coat while he talked with her, imagining it on my shoulders. When he looked down at me, I smiled at him knowingly, producing my plastic heart from behind my back like a freak show magician. He recoiled, checked himself, then stared at me suspiciously. I sat back with satisfaction, my mother gazing at me, bleary-eyed and mystified, too tired even to ask.

The doctor gave a casually forced laugh, determined not to show any surprise or discomfort I might have brought him. “That’s not what you should look at,” he said, standing authoritatively. “Come with me.” He raised an eyebrow at my mother to get her approval, but didn’t wait for her reaction. I followed him down the white corridor to a massive door with a silver handle, something I would never have dared to touch. It was open with a flick of his wrist. “Over here,” he said, striding toward his desk.

Above it hung a framed print. He pushed his chair out of the way and pointed to it. “That drawing was made five hundred years ago. Go,” he nudged me forward, “look at it closely.” I had to crane my neck back to see it well. “It’s as accurate as any sketch you’d see today,” he announced.

The paper was covered in scribblings, a sketch of a heart like an apparition emerging just left of center from the densely packed writing.

“It’s da Vinci’s.” The surgeon interrupted my thoughts. “He studied pigs first, but their hearts are very similar to ours.”

“So that’s a pig’s heart?” I asked.

He frowned, again squelching something less than polished. “No,” he laughed, “not this one.” He pulled his brows together, leaning into the drawing. “It doesn’t really matter, anyway.” He squatted down beside me, his voice suddenly reverent. “The first anatomically correct image of the heart known to Western man.” He pointed up to it, over both our heads, “That,” he said, “is what all of medicine is really about. Find a way to replicate that, you find a way to live forever.” Who would want to live forever, I thought, thinking of my mother. But I didn’t say anything.

“If it weren’t for scientists like da Vinci,” he was saying, “geniuses really, we might never have saved your father tonight.”

“Wasn’t da Vinci an artist?” I asked. “Why was he drawing pig hearts?” The surgeon stood up. “He was much more than an artist,” he said, placing a hand on my head.

“What else do you have in here,” I asked, looking around. He smiled and put his hand back on the door handle. “I think you’ve seen enough for now. Let’s get you back to your mother.”

I wasn’t quite done. “But wouldn’t someone else have drawn it eventually?” I asked, studying the print again.

Behind me the surgeon was silent for a beat. “Again, that’s not what matters,” he said more sternly. “It’s the impulse to know, to draw, to demystify.” He paused, unsure for a second. “He made the heart less mysterious. It was a courageous thing to do.”