In the Walled City: Stories by O'Nan Stewart

Author:O'Nan, Stewart [O'Nan, Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802196699
Goodreads: 39858561
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1993-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

The Doctor’s Sickness

Doctor Markham loved Monday morning and the start of another workweek. One eye closed by his pillow, he remembered business he had left hanging Friday and arranged his coming day. Downstairs, his housekeeper Mrs. Railsbeck was sautéing margarine for his one over-easy, the radio on higher than it need be to wake him. Even her Muzak couldn’t discourage him. Monday! He pitched out of bed, tossing the covers behind him, and glanced off the bathroom door frame. He made a practice of not lingering on the pot, though the Geographic piece on the endangered African elephant attracted him. Monday, the weekend’s lethargy lifting like a wet fog, invigorating as the cold shower he drew, flooding him with names of patients, forms half-filled and waiting, yellow tabs by the missing information. The people he would see today!

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, he would see her —blonde girl, make-up, terminal, a shame. Was it today or next Monday? Never mind, today he was bound to have a full slate. Flu season. Plus, plus —what? Lord, what was happening to his memory? He groped for the washrag hanging on the showerhead, swabbed his face, whipped the curtain aside, and climbed out. Through the crack in the door, he could see Mrs. Railsbeck making his bed.

She watched him eat, trying to force a second piece of toast on him, another glass of the white grape juice he didn’t like in the first place. She seemed disappointed, and he made up for it by promising to have something at coffee break. He never did; she’d given up asking when he got home. It was a ritual, and out of courtesy he deferred to her. If Helen were alive, he imagined he would be doing the same for her. He left her to do the dishes and went upstairs for the tie and handkerchief she had laid out for him. He was two minutes ahead of schedule when he went downstairs to get his hat and coat and gloves before starting out for Utica, forty miles away.

Doctor Markham drove a Chrysler Imperial, forest green, with a white landau roof. The odometer, which in the course of the doctor’s ministering to parts of three towns had rolled over twice, now read a constant 70,153 miles. The commute was one of the job’s few drawbacks. In private practice, the doctor had covered upwards of three hundred miles a week, but driving the same route over and over at the same time every day, half of it creeping along the Thruway in rush hour traffic, he could not get used to. He was afraid the city driving was hurting the Imperial. It was idling higher, he could hear it at lights. Now that Junie was gone, his place on Main boarded up, the doctor often took the Rabbit he’d bought for Mrs. Railsbeck, and left her the big car for around town, knowing she would never use it. This on nice days; when it was raining or

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