Dr. Deerwood’s office was on the first floor of an apartment house on Park Avenue. His waiting room was “Victorian,” according to Anna’s mother, layered with Oriental carpets and brocade-upholstered sofas. There were gold tassels on the curtains, and the walls were a patchwork of small paintings overwhelmed by heavy frames. Other patients sometimes waited here, crunched or folded into chairs, walking with canes, their resemblance to Lydia familial, as if they were cousins in affliction. Today being Sunday, the room was empty. Anna and her mother sat side by side on a settee, Lydia in her chair. Waiting for Dr. Deerwood, knowing he would come, was the high point for Anna of these biannual visits. Anticipation effervesced under her ribs. The doctor will come! The doctor will come!
The whisper of a door, then his voice: “Good day, good day. Welcome, all of you.” He was a round man whose waxed white mustache looked better suited to a top hat than a gray medical coat. He greeted Lydia first, gently pushing aside her peekaboo hair. “Hello, Miss Kerrigan,” he said. “Lovely to see you again. And the elder Miss Kerrigan,” he added, shaking Anna’s hand. “And, of course, Mrs. Kerrigan.” The whereabouts of Mr. Kerrigan in recent years had never been addressed.
The examination took place in an adjacent room, plainer in decor but comfortably warm. A cascade of pulleys and leather straps occupied one corner, but these were never invoked for Lydia. The doctor lifted her from the wheeled chair and stepped with her onto a scale. Anna, who had been excited by this job as a younger girl, adjusted the weights until the bar was suspended. Then the doctor set Lydia down on a soft examining couch, took her head in his hands, and moved it gently from side to side. She lay still, almost sleepy, while he looked inside her mouth and smelled her breath and listened to her heart and lungs with a stethoscope. He examined her hair and fingernails. He manipulated her body: arms, legs, torso, feet, and hands, which he carefully uncurled to their full size and measured. Lydia would have been taller than Anna by some two inches.
“Is she more restless in the evenings?” he asked. “I’ll give you camphor drops that should calm her. Is it harder for her to swallow? Eating can become a trial, I know. I’m impressed that she hasn’t lost weight; many of my patients begin to at about this point. Don’t be alarmed if she starts to look thinner; that’s perfectly natural.”
Lydia used to laugh. She used to look out the window. She used to repeat what was said around her in a babbling, nonsensical form. She used to be alert for long periods. One by one, these pleasures and habits had fallen away. Each time another one disappeared, Anna and her mother would adjust to a new state in which they no longer expected that thing—hardly remembered it.
Now, in her awakened state, Anna found herself thinking differently about her sister. Wouldn’t listening to love serials all day send anyone into a stupor? What did Lydia have to stay alert for?
The examination complete, Dr. Deerwood pulled a chair close to Lydia, making her a part of their colloquy. “I must commend you both,” he said to Anna and her mother. “Your efforts continue to bear wondrous fruit.”
Tears streaked from their mother’s eyes, as they often did at this juncture, although she never cried. “Do you think she’s happy?” she asked.
“My goodness, yes. Lydia has been surrounded by love and care the whole of her life. Few people in her position enjoy that luxury, I’m afraid.”
Anna had sometimes thought she might be in love with Dr. Deerwood, this magician who could transform their long struggle into something luminous. But today, perhaps because she’d noticed he wore riding boots under his medical coat and she wondered if he kept a horse in Central Park, she found herself thinking, We’re paying him an awful lot of money to tell us we’re wonderful. And then, as if another voice had interposed itself, Nice work if you can get it.
“Why is she getting worse?” Anna asked, and felt her mother flinch.
“There is no cure for Lydia’s condition,” Dr. Deerwood said. “You know that.”
“Yes,” Anna admitted.
“She is following a course that is natural to her. What we might consider ‘better’ or ‘worse’ does not apply to your sister in quite the same way.”
“Can we do more with her?” Anna asked. “Take her outdoors more often? She’s never even seen the ocean—not once in her whole life.”
“Novelty and stimulation are good for everyone, Lydia included,” the doctor said. “And sea air is full of minerals.”
“Suppose she catches cold,” Anna’s mother said tightly.
“Well, I wouldn’t take her in winter. But a day like today would be fine, if she’s properly dressed.”
“I’d rather wait until spring.”
“Why?” Anna asked her mother. “Why wait?”
“Why rush?”
They stared at each other.
“I would tend to agree with Miss Kerrigan,” Dr. Deerwood said gently. “Tempus fugit, after all. Before we know it, we’ll be meeting again next May. Why wait?”
Normally, visits to Dr. Deerwood left Anna and her mother swathed in a gauze of well-being that lasted hours—some of the loveliest they spent together. Now they avoided each other’s eyes as they pushed Lydia back to Park Avenue. Outside, Anna adjusted her sister’s hair while their mother retied the kerchief at her neck.
“Well. The park?” her mother asked.
“Why not the beach?”
“What beach, Anna?”
Anna was incredulous—had her mother not heard a word the doctor had just said? “Coney Island or Brighton Beach! We can hail a taxi.”
“It will take forever and cost a fortune,” her mother said. “We haven’t enough diapers or food. And why this sudden fixation on Lydia seeing the ocean? She can hardly see at all.”
“Maybe she hasn’t enough to look at.”
In the rich autumn light, her mother’s face appeared terribly faded—the more so for the bright green feathers she’d sewn onto her hat the night before. “What’s gotten into you, Anna?” she asked sadly. “Can’t we enjoy our day like we usually do?”
Anna relented. Her mother was right about the food and diapers; it was too much to attempt without more planning. They walked to Central Park, full of mothers with their children and soldiers eating frankfurters carefully, so as not to soil their uniforms with mustard. Anna tried to snatch the pleasures of the day as if she were biting into candies. The huff and snort of horses. The smell of popcorn. Leaves floating from the trees. Lydia fell asleep, her head forward. With her shining hair covering her face, she looked like a girl with trouble in her legs, no more. This vision elicited a more benign pity than what her true condition provoked. Anna could almost hear soldiers murmuring to each other, What a shame, such a pretty girl.
But Anna’s thoughts strayed stubbornly to the beach and then to Dexter Styles. As they looked down the steps to the Bethesda Fountain, she said, “Do you think Papa will come back?”
It had been a year, easily, since they had mentioned him, but her mother showed no surprise. Perhaps she, too, had been thinking of him. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve a feeling he will.”
“Did you look for him? On the piers? Or at the union hall?”
“Of course. You knew it at the time. But the Irish never tell. ‘So sorry, Aggie dear, shame of a thing . . .’ Those twinkly blue eyes. You’ve no idea what they’re thinking.”
“Suppose there was an accident. On the piers.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t hide that! Widows and orphans are their specialty. It’s wives they’ve trouble with.”
“What if—someone hurt him?” Anna’s heart accelerated as she said these words. She saw amazement in her mother’s face.
“Anna,” she said. “He hadn’t an enemy ever, in all the years I knew him.”