Like Father, like Son
As I sat reading one evening last winter, my young son Rahul approached my chair in friendly silence. He stood just outside the half-moon of my light ade by an old brass lamp I cherish, the one that lit my doctor father’s desk.
These days Rahul likes coming to me with his most serious problems when I’m reading. It wasn’t long that he did that whenever I was working in the garden. Perhaps he feels at ease with difficulties when I’m doing what he’s getting ready to do. In the season past he learnt to plant seeds and leave them, instead of digging them up the next morning to see if they had grown. This year he’s beginning to read to himself—although he won’t admit to me that he can.
I looked up and he grinned. Then his expression turned abruptly serious—a not too flattering imitation of me when I look serious.
“I’ve broken my car,” he said, withdrawing the toy from behind his back. “Look.”
He didn’t ask if I could mend it. His trust that I could was a compliment from a small boy to the miracle fixer of tricycles, pedal cars and assorted toys.
The car’s blue plastic door had snapped. My father, who treasured the tools of all profession, would not have approved of a plastic car.
“There are some pieces missing. Have you got them?’
Rahul opened a clenched fist to reveal the remaining fragments. I did not see how it could be properly mended.
He watched me intently, his expression revealing absolute confidence that I could do anything. That look stirred memories. I examined the car with great care, turning over the broken pieces in my hands as I turned over the past in my mind.
When I was seven, I’d gone to my father’s surgery one November day after school. My father was clearly the best doctor within a thousand kms. Of our small town. I was perpetually astonished by him, by the things he could do—as were his patients. He could not only heal whatever was the matter with anyone, but he could also break and train a horse, carve a top and slide down Long Hill on my sledge, standing up. I liked to hang around his waiting-room and notice the way his patients always looked better after they had seen him.
But on this day, my purpose for going was to see my best friend, Jimmy Hadsety. Jimmy hadn’t been at school for three days, and his mother had sent word to my father’s nurse that she just might bring him from the farm today.
When the last of the afternoon’s patients had left, Jimmy was still nowhere to be seen. My father and I went off on his round. He liked me with him because he enjoyed telling stories when he drove—and I suppose I was the best listener in the world when it came to my father’s stories.
It was nearly seven when we finished. As we started home, my father said suddenly, “Let’s go up and check old Jimmy.” I felt squirmy with gratitude, certain that my father was doing it to please me.
But when we came in sight of the old house, there was a light in an upstairs window and another over the back door—the ancient signs of trouble.
As we drove up, Alice, Jimmy’s older sister, came running out and threw her arms round my father, crying and shaking and trying to talk. “Oh, Doctor, Jimmy’s dying! Dad’s chasing all over the place looking for you. Thank God you’ve come. It was only a cold. Then he started to sweat like a river and just closed his eyes.” She kept talking like that and hanging on to him.
My father never ran. He usually said there wasn’t any good reason to hurry. If you had to hurry it was too late. But he told Alice to let go of him, and he ran then.
I followed him through the kitchen and up the narrow, dark stairs. Jimmy was breathing very fast and made a high, airy sound. He had mounds of quilts piled over him so that I could barely see his face in the flickering light of the oil lamps. He looked d all worn out and his skin glistened.
His mother said nothing. She was a large woman whom I had never seen before in her own house without an apron on. She stood behind me, both her hands on my shoulders, as my father listened to Jimmy’s chest. He fixed a hypodermic and held the needle up to the light. Mrs Hardesty, Alice and I watched a clear drop roll off the tip of the needle. I was certain that in it was the miracle we certainly must have.
My father gave Jimmy the injection. He then got a gauge pad from his black case and put it over Jimmy’s mouth. He bent over him and began to breathe with him. No one moved in that room, and there was no other sound.
Then, as suddenly as lightning, there was the awful sound of my father’s breathing alone. I felt Mrs. Hardesty’s hands tighten on my shoulders and knew, as she knew, that something had snapped. But my father kept on breathing into his lungs. After a long time, Mrs. Hardesty went to the bed, put her hand on my father’s shoulder and said very quietly, “He’s gone, Doctor. It’s no use. Come away. My boy’s not with us any longer.” But my father would not move.
She took me by the hand then, and we went to the kitchen. Mrs. Hardesty sat down in a rocking-chair and Alice, looking as forlorn as I’d ever seen anyone look, threw herself into her mother’s lap. I went out and sat down on the top step in the cold darkness. I wanted no one to see or hear me.
When Mr. Hardesty came back and saw our car, he went running into the house. In a while I could hear voices. Then silence, then voices again. At last there was a noise of men’s heavy steps on the stairs. My father came outside, and I followed him into the car. All the lonely way into the town he said nothing to me. And I could not risk saying anything to him. The world I thought I knew lay broken in my heart.
We didn’t go home; we went to his surgery instead. He stood alone at the door for a long time. Then he called out my name loudly, fiercely, handed me the key and said; “Open it. I can’t get it open.”
I was very frightened. I wasn’t used to doing things for him. It was always the other way round. We went to his darkened office. He told me to turn on his lamp, and began going through textbook after textbook, looking desperately for something he might have done.
I wanted to stop him, but I did not know how. I couldn’t imagine how the night would ever end. From time to time, all unwilling, I would begin to cry again.
Finally, I heard someone at the door and went out through the reception room, grateful to whoever it might be. News of the beginnings and endings of life traveled far and fast in a community like ours. My mother had come for us. She knelt down, hugged me, rubbed the back of my head, and I clung to her as I had not done since I was a baby.
“Oh, Mother, why couldn’t he, why couldn’t he?” I wept.
She rubbed my back until I was quiet. Then she said, “Your father is bigger than you are, but he’s smaller than life. We love him for what he can do; we don’t love him less for what he can’t do. Love always accepts—no matter what.”
Even though I’m not sure I understood what she meant, I know I felt the importance of what she said. Then she went to get my father.
THAT winter seemed to have gone on for ever when I lived through it long ago, but the memory played itself out in my mind in seconds as I sat turning over the pieces of Rahul’s toy. I said to him, “I’m afraid it’s broken.”
“I know that. Will you mend it please?” There was a tiny disguise of impatience in his voice.
“I can’t”
“But you can.”
“No, I can’t. I’m sorry”
He looked at me—and the expression of awesome confidence faded. His lower lip trembled, and he fought his tears even as they came.
I pulled him up on to my lap and comforted him as best as I could over his sorrow over his broken toy and his fallen idol. Gradually his crying subsided. I was certain he sensed my melancholy at seeing myself only as an ordinary mortal in his eyes because he stayed nestled against me for quite some time.
As he left the room, giving me direct and friendly look, I could hear my mother’s voice, telling me in her certain way that love was not conditional. Once the son, now the father, I knew that out of the anguish of that discovery comes the beginning of understanding.
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