Excerpt of The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
(Page 3 of 10)
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He tried again. "I'm sorry. I don't seem to know what I'm doing.
And I'm in a hurry. I'm a doctor. I'm late to the hospital."
Her smiled changed then, grew serious.
"I see," she said, turning back to the clerk. "Really, Jean, do
take
him first."
She agreed to see him again, writing her name and phone number
in the perfect script she'd been taught in third grade, her
teacher
an ex-nun who had engraved the rules of penmanship in her small
charges. Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in
the
world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it
perfect.
Eight years old, pale and skinny, the woman in the green coat
who
would become his wife had clenched her small fingers around the
pen and practiced cursive writing alone in her room, hour after
hour, until she wrote with the exquisite fluidity of running
water.
Later, listening to that story, he would imagine her head bent
beneath
the lamplight, her fingers in a painful cluster around the pen,
and he would wonder at her tenacity, her belief in beauty and in
the
authoritative voice of the ex-nun. But on that day he did not
know
any of this. On that day he carried the slip of paper in the
pocket of
his white coat through one sickroom after another, remembering
her letters flowing one into another to form the perfect shape
of her
name. He phoned her that same evening and took her to dinner the
next night, and three months later they were married.
Now, in these last months of her pregnancy, the soft coral robe
fit
her perfectly. She had found it packed away and had held it up
to
show him. But your sister
died so long ago, she exclaimed, suddenly
puzzled, and for an instant he had frozen, smiling, the lie from
a
year before darting like a dark bird through the room. Then he
shrugged, sheepish. I had
to say something, he told her.
I had to find a
way to get your name. She smiled
then, and crossed the room and
embraced him.
The snow fell. For the next few hours, they read and talked.
Sometimes she caught his hand and put it on her belly to feel
the
baby move. From time to time he got up to feed the fire,
glancing
out the window to see three inches on the ground, then five or
six.
The streets were softened and quiet, and there were few cars.
At eleven she rose and went to bed. He stayed downstairs,
reading
the latest issue of The
Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. He was
known to be a very good doctor, with a talent for diagnosis and
a
reputation for skillful work. He had graduated first in his
class.
Still, he was young enough and—though he hid it very carefully—
unsure enough about his skills that he studied in every spare
moment,
collecting each success he accomplished as one more piece of
evidence in his own favor. He felt himself to be an aberration,
born
with a love for learning in a family absorbed in simply
scrambling
to get by, day to day. They had seen education as an unnecessary
luxury, a means to no certain end. Poor, when they went to the
doctor
at all it was to the clinic in Morgantown, fifty miles away. His
memories of those rare trips were vivid, bouncing in the back of
the
borrowed pickup truck, dust flying in their wake. The dancing
road, his sister had called it, from her place in the cab with
their
parents. In Morgantown the rooms were dim, the murky green or
turquoise of pond water, and the doctors had been hurried, brisk
with them, distracted.
All these years later, he still had moments when he sensed the gaze of
those doctors and felt himself to be an imposter, about to be unmasked by a
single mistake. He knew his choice of specialties reflected this. Not for him the random excitement of general
medicine
or the delicate risky plumbing of the heart. He dealt mostly
with broken limbs, sculpting casts and viewing X-rays, watching
breaks slowly yet miraculously knit themselves back together. He
liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white
heat of
cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his
faith in
something so solid and predictable.
(c) 2005, Kim Edwards. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Penguin Group.
