Doctors (10 page)

“You mean the cookbook lady?”

Judith nodded. “Believe it or not, cooking was once a required course in the Med School.”

“What on earth for?”

“I’m not quite sure,” Judith replied. “But since interns were forbidden to get married, the professors probably thought they’d better learn to feed themselves.”

“Sounds monastic,” Laura remarked, “but anyway, I still want to give it my best shot, Professor Baldwin. Can you help me?”

“Only if you feel genuinely strong enough to survive rejection, Laura. Take it from me, it’s maddening to see the boy who sat next to you in Chem or Bio—whom you practically tutored so he could scrape by with a
B
—get accepted by the Med School, while you and your
A
still aren’t deemed good enough to go there at all. If I sound a little bitter, that’s because I am.”

“Are you trying to discourage me?” Laura asked.

“Have I succeeded?” Judith inquired.

“No,” Laura answered firmly.

“Good.” The older woman smiled broadly. “Now let’s prepare the order of battle.”

Laura returned to Briggs Hall to find a sheaf of telephone messages from suitors she did not know—and a letter from Barney.

At Christmas they had so much to catch up on that they talked until 4
A.M.
From Barney’s enthusiasm about the intellectual giants he had been exposed to, Laura concluded that the
average undergraduate at Columbia was getting a better education than the one at Harvard.

But one thing seemed to be exactly the same at both institutions. The pre-Meds were, almost to a man (and they were mostly men), ruthless, competitive grinds—who would think nothing of messing up your Chem lab experiment if you so much as left to heed the call of nature.

“That’s real dedication,” Barney commented wryly, “but you know those are the characters who’re going to get into Med School for sure.”

“Yeah,” Laura agreed, “I wish I knew what the hell made them tick. I mean, it can’t just be the money.…”

“No,” Barney replied, attempting to sound like a professional analyst, “I detect a high degree of social insecurity. These guys seem to view the white coat as some kind of security blanket. Or look at it another way—most of these dorks could only get a date if they went to a fruit store. Imagine the power of being able to say to a woman, Take off your clothes and show me your tits!’ ”

Laura began to laugh.

“I’m not joking, Castellano,” he insisted.

“I know—if I didn’t laugh I’d cry.”

The next day they had another lengthy nocturnal session. This time on a very sensitive topic for them both—their parents.

Harold Livingston had found a way to cope with his guilt at not being a breadwinner. He hit upon the idea of using the skills he had acquired in the Army to translate some of the classics of oriental literature—beginning with the eleventh-century
Tale of Genjii
, the first and most famous Japanese novel.

Barney took pride in his father’s courage, reassuring Warren that their dad was not merely performing a therapeutic exercise. He had checked the college bookstore and pragmatically determined that Harold’s work could fill an important gap on the Lit shelves.

“It could give him a whole new lease on life.”

Laura, on the other hand, was anything but reassured. From the moment she entered the house she sensed that the fabric of her family was unraveling. Each in turn, her parents tried to win her confidence, as if Laura’s allegiance would validate the opposing paths they had taken.

Inez, who was now so often in church confessing her sins
that she could not possibly have time to commit new ones between visits, tried to persuade Laura to come with her.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she replied. “I don’t have anything to confess.”

“We are all born sinners, my child.”

For a moment Laura forgot that Man’s first disobedience was the sin of Adam. Instead she thought of another stigma after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden that hit closer to home: the mark of Cain. Am I my sister’s keeper? She knew that—at least in her mother’s eyes—she was.

Nor did she find solace in her father’s company. Indeed, it was quite the contrary. As she returned home late one evening, she heard her father’s drunken voice calling from the study, “
Venga, Laurita, venga charlar con tu papa
”—come and chat with your father.

She reluctantly obeyed.

Luis was in his shirtsleeves, both elbows leaning on the desk within reach of a half-empty bottle.

“Have a drink with me, Laurita,” he offered, his voice blurred and hazy.

“No, thank you, Papa,” she answered, trying to keep her composure. “And don’t you think
you’ve
had enough?”

“No, my daughter,” he replied. “I can still feel the pain.”

“The what? I don’t understand.”

“I have to drink until I can no longer feel the pain of existence.”

“Come on, Papa, don’t camouflage it with philosophy—you’re just a plain old drunk.”

“I’m not that old, Laurita,” her father answered, seizing on but one of her adjectives, “that’s the pity of it all. Your mother has abjured the world, the devil, and the flesh. She refuses to—”

“Do I have to hear this?” Laura interrupted, feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

“No, of course not. I just thought perhaps you’d understand better why I drink, if you could understand how difficult my life is.…”

She did not know how to reply.

In any case, her father rambled on. “At least the bottle does not turn its back on me. It warms me when I’m cold. It soothes me when I’m frightened—”

Laura was finding the conversation intolerable.

She stood up. “I’m going to sleep. I’ve got some studying to do tomorrow.”

As she turned and headed for the door, Luis called after her, “Laurita, I beseech you, I’m your father.…”

She did not stop. She did not turn. She merely felt confused and hurt. And lost.

Completely lost.

Estelle could not help noticing that none of the Castellanos touched more than crumbs of the food she had so lovingly prepared for Christmas dinner. Inez sat like a statue. Luis drank wine and Laura kept glancing at her watch, counting not merely the days but the hours and minutes she had yet to endure before she could escape to Boston.

The burden of sustaining conversation had now fallen on the frail shoulders of Harold Livingston.

He turned to Laura, smiling. “Barney tells me that you both got A’s in your Organic Chemistry midterms. Keep it up and it’s open sesame to Med School.”

“For Barney, maybe,” Laura remarked, “but my advisor says the medical establishment doesn’t look kindly on aspiring lady doctors. Even to get an interview, you have to be something like first in your class, with a letter from God—or at least Saint Luke.”

From the corner of her eye, she could see Inez frowning at her irreverence.

“Surely, Laura, you’re exaggerating,” Harold Livingston commented.

“Okay, then,” Laura responded, “I defy anyone to name three famous female doctors in all of history.”

“Florence Nightingale,” Warren chimed in immediately.

“She was a nurse, schmuck,” Barney snapped.

“Well,” Harold began slowly, taking up her challenge, “there was Trotula, a professor of medicine at the University of Salerno in the eleventh century. She even wrote a famous textbook on obstetrics.”

“Wow, that’s a really good one, Mr. Livingston.” Laura smiled. “Two to go.”

“Well, there’s always Madame Curie,” Harold offered.

“Sorry, Mr. Livingston, she was only a chemist—and had a hard enough time doing that. Does everybody give up?”

“Yes, Laura,” Harold conceded, “but as a History of Science major, you should be able to answer your own question.”

“Well, straight from the pages of
The New York Times
I’ll give you Dorothy Hodgkin, M.D., who’s just discovered vitamin B-12 for treating pernicious anemia. Then I give you Helen Taussig—a Radcliffe girl, coincidentally, though not allowed to get a Harvard M.D.—who did the first successful blue baby operation. I could probably give you a few more but I doubt if there’d be enough for a touch football game against the AMA.”

At this point, Luis broke his silence and added, “You will change all that, Laurita. You will be a great doctor.”

Under ordinary circumstances, Laura would have been gratified by this unexpected display of parental optimism.

But then Luis was dead drunk.

Later that day when the two of them were alone, Laura told Barney matter-of-factly, “I won’t be coming home for Easter.”

“Hey—that’s lousy news. Why not?”

“Frankly, I think I’ve already experienced the Last Supper.”

Summer came and Barney was still working the night shift on Park Avenue. He sweltered in his doorman’s uniform and forced himself to study during every free moment.

Having finished his freshman year with an A-minus average, he did not wish to clip the wings of his ascent to Med School heaven by risking a lousy grade in Physics. He therefore decided to take both halves of this required course during the summer session at Long Island University, where the competition among pre-Meds was slightly easier.

This ploy was hardly a top secret in the community of aspiring physicians. Laura, too, had opted to take Physics that summer—though at Harvard. As she explained in a letter to her parents, she could not bear the prospect of yet another airless, punishing summer in the melting asphalt of New York. She had no illusions about their sensing the real reason.

But, as she quickly discovered, the only similarity between Harvard University and its Summer School was the coincidence of names. For in July and August the Yard became a sort of country club with the cream of East Coast nubility flocking to Cambridge in the fond hope of snagging a real Harvard husband. Laura was amused by their disarming lack of subtlety. They wore the shortest of shorts and the tightest of T-shirts.

“You’d really go berserk here, Barney,” she wrote to him. “There’s more cheesecake here than at Lindy’s.”

As he walked the LIU campus the next day, Barney looked at some of the passing co-eds and suddenly realized that in the matter of sex he was beginning to be retarded. Indeed, Warren had recently claimed to have gone “nearly almost all the way” with a girl from Eastern Parkway. It was unthinkable that his little brother should actually score before he did!

And thus, with horny Machiavellianism, he decided to audit what he regarded as the most promising hunting ground—Modern Drama.

His instinct proved correct—the place was packed with would-be actresses, at a ratio of at least three girls to every boy. Moreover, he quickly discovered that “Columbia” was a magic word to them. Three cheers for the Ivy League.

His first successful seduction could arguably be credited to the rather unromantic initiative of Miss Rochelle Persky who, as they were necking passionately in her parents’ living room, whispered tenderly, “Well, are you gonna do it or not?”

He was.

They did.

Naturally, he could not conceal his pride. In his next letter to Laura he gave a few heavy hints, though of course omitting all gross detail. Not really out of chivalry, but for the purpose of aggrandizing his own skills in the enterprise. (He just signed it “Unvirginally yours.”)