The Doctor's Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer

want to be changed.” Then we both laughed so hard, coffee went up our noses, and we kept bursting into nervous laughter that whole afternoon for no reason at all.
    Most of the time I went to see my father by myself, dragging my feet all the way there. He had a few other visitors. Leo and Marjorie showed up about twice a month, close to their old schedule with my parents for bridge and dinner, and so did Parksie, who had to take the tram from Roosevelt Island, and then an express bus to Riverdale. Three of my father’s former surgical fellows used to travel together to see him, in a sort of pilgrimage, but they stopped going after their personal god failed to recognize them. His ability to remember who people were ebbed and flowed, just like his orientation in time and to place, and his fits of agitation.
    I felt guilty about staying away for three whole weeks, but I kept excusing myself from duty. I had so much work to do, I didn’t feel too great— that ominous feeling in my chest had taken root there like a strangler weed—and I called the nursing desk on his floor nearly every day to check on him, in lieu of visiting. Mostly, I just wanted the uninterrupted routine of my own life, or to live in the more compelling world of
Walking to Europe.
Michael had taken my most urgent editorial suggestions seriously, and he’d sent some solidly revised pages that put me back under the spell of the manuscript.
    Caitlin, his hero Joe Packer’s sister, had been unemployed and living with a darkly moody boyfriend, one in a series of difficult men she was drawn to, when she disappeared. I could see the generic furnished room they’d shared, his transient’s eyes already ogling the door, while Joe looked around for some evidence of where she might have gone, or that she’d even ever been there.
    As I suspected, Michael loved Scott’s title and wanted to know all about him. In my e-mail I only said that Scott was a terrific kid with an imaginative bent. I avoided mentioning his age, and knew it was because it might reflect on my own. I was so easily distracted from my father’s needs; what would he think of me if he were able to think straight? He was very strongly principled about obligation. You did things because you were supposed to, not because they were pleasant, whether it was performing surgery on a malodorous, abscessed liver or sending a thank-you note to your great-aunt for that ugly hand-knit sweater. Attending to the father who had so faithfully attended to you was surely the embodiment of that law.
    The Sunday after my lunch with Violet, I was sitting opposite Ev in the living room, doing the
Times
crossword puzzle, when he put down his section of the paper and said, “You can’t keep putting it off like this.”
    Oh, yes I could. It was raining out, I wanted to go back to bed. I had been sneaking glimpses, over my puzzle, of Ev’s broad hands on the newspaper, and the swell of his thighs in his pajamas, and thinking that I might invite him back to bed with me.
    “Come on, Al,” he said, pulling me up from the sofa. “I’ll go with you.” The strength of his grip and the sweetness of his offer aroused me further, but Ev went right to the phone to call Suzy and arrange for her to meet us in the main lobby of the nursing home.
    Suzy’s hours at Stubbs, White were erratic and long, and I knew that weekends were especially precious to her. She had a habit of being late for most occasions, but she was waiting there when we drove up, and I felt that familiar shock of happiness on seeing her, the way I used to when I’d spot her in a crowd of children swarming out of All Souls or Brearley. Could there ever possibly be a time when I wouldn’t know my own, beautiful daughter? Like Scott, she has Ev’s strongly defined coloring—Jeremy is the only other redhead in the family—and an original, heart-shaped face. “Mom! Dad!” she called, sounding equally pleased to see us, and we hurried across the lobby