Everyone knew Mother as Mrs. Duke, Doctor Duke’s wife. On meeting her, people half-bowed, nodding their heads and shaking her hand for too long. “Doctor Duke’s wife, well, well.”
I was Doctor Duke’s son, with his shock of dark curly hair and too small face, the boy that was going to go to high places. When I was real small I imagined that meant I’d climb to the top of the purple mountain range I could see in the far distance from our kitchen window.
Mother, fair and slight, always wore a house apron, the one covered with large golden daffodils and long dark stems. The flowers looked like they were growing up that apron, going to smother her one day.
Doctor Duke liked “supper at six sharp.” That’s how he talked, sounding like a hand-saw cutting through wood. When I laughed at his giving more silly orders, asking Mother to please wear make-up at the supper table, he said he’d knock me into the dark with ether if I didn’t watch myself. For hours after, I stared into our bathroom mirror, watching.
Saturday mornings, when Doctor Duke had left for his practice and I didn’t have any place to go so early, I’d climb into his and Mother’s bed, lying in his too big dip in the mattress, feeling like I was sinking. Mother smelled of that oatmeal face cream she wore at night. I wondered what Doctor Duke smelled like first thing in the mornings. Mother would pretend to be asleep, mock-snoring and puffing out her pale pink lips with her breath, always giving up the game because we’d get to giggling so hard.
Once, her eyes still closed, she asked me to check her pulse. I didn’t want to play. I wasn’t ever going to be a doctor. Please, she urged. I lifted her hand into mine, surprised that it felt smaller, rougher than just the day previous and held my first two fingers to her wrist, too squeamish to look at her dark blue veins there.
“Well?” she asked.
“I’m counting.”
“I’m here, though? Tell me I’m here.”
Ethel Rohan feels most here when she writes and holds her daughters. She blogs at www.straightfromtheheartinmyhip.blogspot.com.
Absolutely love how you tell the story of Mrs. Duke, Dr. Dukes wife, through the boy. And the ending is gorgeous in a sad yet hopeful way.
I love how you can tell a whole story in so few words. It’s magical !
I am cooking dinner an hour after reading your piece and still thinking about The Duke’s especially the boy. It reminds me of a piece of art that I should have bought because I can’t stop thinking about it after.
Wonderful work, Ethel. Love, love the ending.