Lawrence F. Bassett
The Doctor and His Wife
The arrival of the doctor’s float plane on the lake each August was a
considerable highlight of our summers, right up there with the big
fireworks on the Fourth and the beauty pageant to crown—what else
could we have called her?—"The Lady of the Lake."
“You hear?” they’d say at the village store. “The doctor’s here.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Came in yesterday. Cal Johnson saw him. Said he landed that plane
of his soft as a mother’s hand on a baby’s bottom.”
“Cal said that?”
“Well, not about the baby’s bottom—no.”
Cal about as poetic as a door.
The doctor, though, was poetry—or romance, at least. The way he
flew his own float plane to the lake from God-knows-where. The cut of
the sportcoats you always saw him wearing, even steering his big
inboard across the lake. His lean frame. Matinee-idol good looks.
It wasn’t long after the war when the doctor first flew to the lake.
Talk was he’d been a Navy flyer in the Pacific somewhere. Had taken a
leave of absence from medical school to fly off carriers, shoot down
the Japanese.
No one really knew.
He kept to himself, and while he was amiable enough when you met him,
he could be taciturn, too. Uncommunicative. He’d tell you the time of
day if you asked him, but wouldn’t volunteer the kind of day it was,
the weather we were having. Didn’t ask after your family, express an
opinion on how the walleyes were biting at his end of the lake, where
the fishing was always thought to be superior.
“Quiet fella,” they’d say at the store.
“Oh, yeah,” they’d say. “But still waters, though—they run deep.”
“That so?”
“Heard it was.”
And the doctor’s wife was beautiful.
When the doctor first brought her to the lake, it was already
Eisenhower's second term. Even up here at the lake we had seen
pictures of Senator Kennedy’s wife in the magazines. Comparisons were
made, in the doctor’s wife’s favor, mostly.
“This is Lydia, my co-pilot,” is how the doctor introduced her at the
store.
He smoked a pipe, she cigarettes.
They kept an old jeep at their place at the lake, and when they came
into the village for supplies he’d stay sometimes behind the wheel of
the jeep while she went inside the store to shop. Prince Albert
tobacco for him, in the can; Lucky Strikes her brand.
We had known her name was Lydia, of course, before she was introduced—information gleaned, like the doctor’s title, from envelopes
addressed to them, carefully scrutinized by Alton Ward, our rural
carrier.
Before they had children, the doctor’s wife would go out on the
doctor’s boat with him and sunbathe while he fished. She wore a chaste
tank suit, those who saw her said, and would wave back if you waved —
something the doctor never did, being too occupied with testing the
walleyes’ hunger. Or their gullibility.
The picture of them on that boat on the lake. He in sportcoat and
polo shirt over khaki wash pants, canvas shoes, casting his fearsome
trebled-hooked plugs at the walleye; she in her tank suit on a towel
laid across the fantail of the boat, lazily returning the waves of
passersby.
Then their children arrived. There were two—a boy and a girl, not
too many years apart.
Mrs. Foster, at the village store, had anticipated each of them.
“Doctor's wife’s pregnant,” she had said each time, sagely informing
her confidants, who included almost everyone who stopped by the store.
No one was quite sure if they approved of the doctor landing his plane
on the lake with a pregnant woman at his side in the cockpit, but all
were sure it was our place to consider the question. We had, after
all, a proprietary interest in the doctor and his wife and, after they
arrived, their children, too.
But our interest was always at some remove.
There were two societies at the lake, Memorial through Labor Day — the
summer people whose cottages lined the lakes south shore or who stayed
at the old lake lodge and the locals who inhabited the village on the
north shore or the farms with their fields beyond — but the doctor and
his wife belonged to neither. They kept as aloof from the club dances
at the lodge as they did from the round and square dancing at the
Grange, and when their children reached their teens and became of
considerable interest to the lovelorn boys and girls their ages on both
shores of the lake, that interest was rebuffed. Or not rebuffed,
exactly. Ignored.
After their children were grown, the doctor and his wife came alone
again to the lake each August. They aged, and there came a time when
the doctor’s plane didn’t land. The doctor’s wife came by herself, by
car, and commented, buying cigarettes at the village store, how high
prices had become.
And a few years after that, the doctor’s place at the lake was sold.
The new owners, who were gregarious, told everyone who would listen
how they despaired of ever fixing up the doctor’s place, and they tore
the old place down eventually, replacing it with what everyone said was
a wonder—a place so big and marvelous it quite took your breath away.
And everyone had seen it, too, this wonder, because the new people
were sociable, inviting summer people and locals, too, to picnics and
parties and barbecues.
“Nice people,” people said at the village store.
“Oh, absolutely,” people said, eager for their invitations to the new
peoples’ latest soiree.
“Not like the doctor and his wife.”
“No—not like them at all,” people said. And it took a keen ear to
hear the loss in that—the lost poetry or, at least, the lost romance.
©2008 by Lawrence F. Bassett
