The Doctor's Wife by Elizabeth Brundage
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE - Bones
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
PART TWO - Flesh
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
PART THREE - Need
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
PART FOUR - Heart
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
PART FIVE - Prayers
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
PART SIX - Extremities
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Acknowledgements
Teaser chapter
A PLUME BOOK THE DOCTOR’S WIFE
ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and winner of a James Michener Award. Her short fiction has been published in The Greensboro Review, The Witness, and New Letters. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.
Praise for The Doctor’s Wife
“What Elizabeth Brundage has done with The Doctor’s Wife kept me up two nights—the first was the one in which I read it, and the second was the night when I kept trying to argue with her. ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ I wanted to say—but yes, he would. He would almost surely do all that. And so would she.”
—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller
“The Doctor’s Wife is certainly a tense and compelling psychological thriller, but it’s more than just a page-turner. In her dark depiction of small-town intolerance, Brundage invites us to question . . . our engagement with the world. My favorite (and truly the darkest and saddest) line of the book is the very last.”
—Ruth Ozeki, author of My Year of Meats and All Over Creation
“Elizabeth Brundage has exquisitely captured the tension that resides at the crossroads of self and society. The Doctor’s Wife encapsulates not only our uncertain, conflicted times but the maddening, endearing, fascinating contradictions of the American moral construct. This novel is as politically pertinent as it is a page-turner.”
—Meghan Daum, author of The Quality of Life Report
“The Doctor’s Wife is a full meal of sex, danger, and small-town paranoia which I greedily devoured.”
—Laurie Fox, author of The Lost Girls
“Elizabeth Brundage’s prose reveals an honesty, clarity and grace uncommon for any novel, let alone a debut, and her insights consistently surprise and astonish . . . The Doctor’s Wife is a novel to savor, praise and share.”
—David Corbett, author of The Devil’s Redhead and Done for a Dime
“Steeped in psychological suspense, compelling and compulsively readable.”
—Bookreporter.com
PLUME
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Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a
Viking edition.
First Plume Printing, December 2005
Copyright © Elizabeth Brundage, 2004
All rights reserved
Title-page photograph © Brian Cencula/CORBIS
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Viking edition as follows:
Brundage, Elizabeth.
The doctor’s wife : a novel / by Elizabeth Brundage.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-436-25926-2
1. Physicians’ spouses—Fiction. 2. New York (State)—Fiction.
3. Physicians—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.R84D63 2004
813’.6—dc22 2003065773
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHERS NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Scott, Hannah, Sophie, and Sam
Goosey Goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs,
And in my lady’s chamber;
There I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers;
I took him by the left leg
And threw him down the stairs.
—MOTHER GOOSE
Prologue
The memory starts here, in my apron pocket, with the gun. I remember holding it. It felt good, cold. And inside my body it was hot, blistering hot, and I took the gun out of my apron and started walking across the kitchen floor and it came to me that I had memorized every squeal in those old wood planks and I went to the cellar door, which was laughing blatantly in my face, and I got my hammer and I started whaling on that door thinking, Fuck you, you assholes, fuck you a thousand times and fuck all your mothers! And I hacked away at that door like it was some kind of live animal, and then it was open, it was broken, it was striated, and there was wood all over the place, and chipped paint like all the pieces of my heart, and I helped myself to the darkness beyond it, and I rumbled down the stairs in my work boots, into the cold stink of the cellar, and I grabbed him. I said, Get up, you’ve caused me enough fucking trouble, and he shook in my grasp, like a child, he shook, and I could see in his face the reckoning, I could see he was sorry, he had come around, he had come full circle, and I knew somehow that I was responsible for that, I had done that and it made me proud. I yanked on him and he in his weakened state cowered and I could feel the temptation to do it right then, I could feel it, I had to work at suppressing it. I wanted it to be over, I wanted him to be somewhere else, buried deep in the ground where no one would ever look and in the spring it would be covered with flowers and those lovely fluffy dandelions that you can blow into a thousand pieces. I used to do that when I was little and I used to wish for things but I never got what I asked for and now, in retrospect, when I consider my unrelenting devotion to Jesus, I have to say that I am sorely disappointed.
They find me on the ground, drooling in the dirt, the river howling in my ears, my mother’s red wool coat twisted up my hips. I can taste blood in my mouth, and can see a little bit of my yellow hair on the ground and my hand is like a dead bird, and I can see now that the gun is there and it is dead, too. The gun is a dead skunk. And my hand is just a white bird. And the skunk has made a bad smell. I wish my husband had tried harder, because then we would have had a chance. I wouldn’t have done any of this. I just wanted to lead a good Christian life. But I was the Devil’s wife, that’s the truth of it. And even Jesus can’t save you from that. For years I have tried to overcome my weaknesses. For years I have told myself that it didn’t matter, what he did to me, all those years ago. That hot summer day when he knocked on my father’s door. I was just this little girl, a black taste like tar in my mouth when I picture the real truth to that. And he was already a man, he had hair on his face, a well-defined Adam’s apple, a deep voice. I was just a small skinny girl with cuts on my knees and burrs stuck to my dress. He took that from me. He stole it. And I want it back now, pathetic as it may sound to you. I want it back.
The detective’s name is Bascombe, a windswept man in an old hunting coat, with a face unaccustomed to smiling. He takes off the coat and throws it onto the couch across the room. Now I see his shirt, a simple white button-down, and the worn blue jeans held up by suspenders. He is nearly fifty, a patient man, a hunter. I can tell by his face that he is alone, unmarried, and carries a deep sense of regret. It is his talisman, regret. It keeps him safe. He is a man, I realize, with little faith, and I tug on my cross to remind him of my own. Because even a jaded detective knows that a man without faith is lost.
A cop comes in with some coffee, places the paper cup in front of me, then leaves the room. The detective sits in his chair behind his cluttered desk. The rain batters the window behind him and it is almost dawn and I can tell they’ve gotten him out of bed and that the coffee is a necessary stimulant. Scattered across his desk with alarming clarity are the photographs of my father’s house, large black-and-white prints that portray an aspect of the awful things I’ve done, but only an aspect. There is the body of the man I’ve shot. The bullet wound on the upper flesh of his thigh. The hole that has burst and ripped through the legs of his pants and the blood splattered like paint around it.
I don’t realize that I’m shaking until I take the cigarette. The detective reaches across the desk and lights it and I meet his eyes and he smiles a little. It is an appealing gesture, and as we smoke together it is as though we are friends sharing the quiet emergence of morning, and not bitter enemies. His eyes, gray as wet slate, tinted with the history of all he has seen, watch me relentlessly, without even a glimmer of mercy. He seems immune to my beauty, which normally spreads like a viral rash across the skin of a man. “Are you comfortable?” he asks, pushing the ashtray across the desk. “Is the coffee all right?”
I haven’t even tasted it. “Yes, it’s fine, thank you.”
“Do you understand why you’re here?”
I drink to avoid answering. The coffee tastes like turpentine; I wonder if they’ve put something in it.
“Why don’t you tell me about your relationship with Dr. Knowles,” the detective says.
I try to think. I don’t understand the word relationship. “He’s my friend.”
“And his wife?”
I look at the detective directly. “What do you want, Detective? What do you really want?”
“What do I want?” He looks surprised. “I’m interested in your side of things.”
This makes me laugh, but then the tears run down my face. He takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and hands it to me and I wipe my eyes and smell the square of white cloth. It smells clean and fresh, like laundry detergent, and I am reminded for a moment of my mother. It makes me cry, it makes me cry and cry while the detective sits there and watches. He isn’t in any hurry. He doesn’t make me feel bad. “Take your time,” he tells me and I stutter to catch my breath, spitting and gasping and stuttering, and I imagine it is a good performance for the detective, who is the type who cries secretly at movies, who is easily betrayed by women, and I think perhaps it will make him feel sorry for me, it will make him care. He gives me another cigarette and I smoke it gratefully and I remember my husband the day we met that hot afternoon on my father’s porch. Simon Haas was a nothing then. A bumbling artist. He wanted to do my portrait. He’d been watching me all afternoon, hiding behind the brambles. But I saw him; I knew. I was playing with the cats, one was orange, the other calico. He knocked on the door. Portraits for sale, he said with his lips trembling. I stood there. I could feel him wanting me. My father, who was on the couch, moldy with disease, hired him. Money’s no object was what he said, a plan already festering inside his twisted mind. When Simon went out to get his paints, my father told me to fix my hair. I raced up to Mama’s room, used her tortoiseshell comb, dabbed on her lipstick, which was ruby red and crumbled like an old crayon when I pressed it to my lips.
That was the day I smoked my first cigarette.
“Have you ever been in love, Detective?”
He doesn’t answer me.
“I was just a stupid kid. I didn’t know anything.” The words tumble out slowly, as if I am reciting a poem, a child’s nursery rhyme. “He saved my life, you know.”
The detective shifts, a confused expression on his face. “Who did, Mrs. Haas? Who saved your life?”
But I am crying too hard to answer.
The detective reaches across the table and takes my hand and for a moment I enjoy the warmth of his flesh, the rough care he shows me. But then I pull away, I have to. I don’t want his pity. “No,” I say, shaking my head, the tears rolling out. “I can’t tell you, I won’t.??
But this isn’t true. I’m bursting to tell. Bursting.
PART ONE
Bones
1
SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT Michael Knowles wakes to the sound of his beeper and picks up the phone. “You want Finney,” he tells the page operator. “I’m not on call tonight.”
“You are now, Dr. Knowles,” the operator says officiously, and puts him through to the ER. A nurse comes on and brings him up to speed in a voice shrill with hysteria. The patient, she explains, a thirteen-year-old girl from Arbor Hill, is in labor, four months premature. “Boyfriend dropped her off about an hour ago and split. No prenatal care, no insurance. Now she’s bleeding all over the place and I can’t get anyone to give me a consult. Your partner’s puking his guts out in the men’s room. I’m told it’s food poisoning.”