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| March 12, 2010 |
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by Richard Rapport 1943 Sex and love, and war and departure, and birth and memory, but not yet my memory, not what I have to tell. Those things were the preface. 1946 The house in Minneapolis where my mother and I lived while he was gone had a closed landing at the bottom of the stairs that went to the second floor. An ordinary wooden door, like a closet door, opened into the living room, sealing off the stairs. I had to hide there, in the dark at the bottom of the landing, on the day that he returned because of the difference that he made. He came back still wearing the uniform of the Ninth Army Air Corps, before there was an Air Force. He was big, and smelled like a man who knew things, and he held my mother. All of my grandparents were there. Crying, I was coaxed out to him, and fear made the code in my memory. That was the beginning. 1948 Dewey was winning, the radio told us, as my dad made a splint for the broken leg of a neighbor who had hobbled to our house to be mended. He was still a resident then, but he had been a flight surgeon during the war and could set bones straight and prevent them from moving. He did it with a soft wrap and tape, and a couple of pieces of wood. We lived beside a lake in a house that was really a cottage. It was a country house with transoms over the bedroom doors, and the neighbor was a country boy. We sat on the long screened-in front porch, listening to the incorrectly predicted election results on a Philco radio and watching the fire-flies burn around the edge of the lake while he wrapped up the leg. "Your Uncle Sam is having an election," he said. I didn't know I had an Uncle Sam, but I thought it was better than having an uncle or even a chemistry set to watch the elaborate bandaging and taping of the leg. The boy hopped away with his father for a crutch. 1950 Some Sunday mornings, he took me with him to make rounds. We drove past the huge automobile manufacturing plants and stopped first at the city hospital, then the private one--always in that order. Years later he told me that all of the doctors in the city charged their private patients a few dollars more so that they could treat those at the public hospital who couldn't pay. At the first meeting of the year, the secretary of the county medical society determined how much it would cost to provide drugs, x-rays and hospital care for the poor, and each member contributed to a fund that paid for them; there was no dissent. He never recognized this practice as re-distribution of wealth, but accepted his responsibility to care for patients who couldn't pay. Even after Medicare made him richer, he wanted that responsibility for each patient. When he made rounds, we started in the x-ray department where films were developed by hand in large vats of chemicals, and the entire department smelled like the chemicals. He showed me the shadows, and showed me what they meant. Everyone knew him there, and in the elevators and the halls and stairwells. On the wards, he left me in the nurses station while he visited his patients. "Do you know my son?", he asked and introduced me to other doctors, nurses and orderlies. The nurses, I thought, liked him, and some of them flirted with him. Midsummer, and the others were somewhere else. Our flat square of a backyard required attention, and I was required to help. When we had finished, he said "Ricky, do you want to learn how to tie a knot you make with one hand, a surgeon's knot?" He took a piece of string from his pocket and looped it around a slat of the fence and showed me, with movements as liquid as the hand movements of a Hindu dancer. His fingers twined around each other in a way that cannot be said, but can only be shown. "Daddy, how did you do that?" He showed me again and again and again. I practiced for twenty-one years, and then I could do it too. 1956 The year I could have had a Bar Mitzvah, he showed me manliness instead by taking me to watch an autopsy. I could not understand the body being examined as a thing, and the smell and the idea made me sit down. I watched two that year. In the fall, during a paper drive, I was bitten by a spider on the fourth finger of my left hand. When it swelled up and turned blue, he took me to the city hospital emergency room which smelled like alcohol, sprayed my finger with ethyl chloride, and opened it himself to drain. I still have the scar under my wedding ring. 1957 On my birthday, he took me and five of my friends to watch the Harlem Globe Trotters play a team they always beat. He took me with him to the operating room. When I began to play football in high school and college, I found similarity between the locker rooms of operating rooms and athletic teams. The undressing and dressing again in special uniforms, the secrets and smells and fellowship--the wish for success--are the same. The shoe covers, hats and masks were all made of cloth then, not paper, and so were the drapes used to cover the patients on the operating table. I stood behind him on a squat stool that could not wobble or tip over; the scrub nurse called it a lift. I was not afraid. I watched the residents cut open the skin and accurately stop each tiny bleeding place with a hemostat and then tie them all off, dozens of them lined up together. There was no cautery. After they removed a rib and opened the chest, he took over and he joked with them and the anesthesiologist who he told me liked to pass gas. I was surprised that people said funny things in the operating room. Now, I am surprised when they do not. He showed me the lungs and the heart on the inside of a living person and told me how they worked. My father was a storyteller. He told things that happened and things that did not--but could have or should have happened--all in the same voice. No one knew the difference; he did not know the difference either and it didn't matter because it was all true. He told stories in the operating room until he began to cut out the lung tumor, a wedge resection he called it, and then he said things I could not understand. He helped the residents close the chest with big, curved and straight needles, and they tied the sutures in the way that he had showed me in the backyard. I did not faint. He never told me to do it, to open people, repair them and sew them closed. He said "Do what you love to do, and you will be happy." 1958 The summer after my first mediocre year at prep-school, he taught me how to write. In a damp white shirt and loosened tie, he sat next to me at the desk in my room, a child's desk although I was fifteen, and he told me "Tell it without saying it," as he crossed out most of my words. He could write and he could edit, but he could not imagine. He taught me to order properly at a restaurant in Detroit where children were not taken. He made sure we cleansed our palates between courses, and tipped well. 1961 I think it surprised him that I finished first at graduation. 1964 The year I was as good as I will ever be, he came to watch me play. He came to my little university for Parents Weekend, and stood on the sidelines with the other players' fathers, the ones for whom athletics was the reason for college. He wore his hat and overcoat and the cheerleaders hung my number thirty-six around his neck. I carefully put on my uniform, smeared the black stuff under my eyes, got ready. We ran down from the locker room, through the Midwestern leaf piles and the smell of the fall, and past our fathers. He held a little transistor radio in his hand and when I ran by he shouted "Michigan is ahead of Ohio State!" Even after I didn't answer, I don't think he could imagine his mistake. He did that sometimes, thought only about what he was thinking. It isn't easy to be the father of another man. We lost late in the game after our coach ran a play that worked and then insisted on the same play six consecutive times. A simple play: I led the left halfback off right tackle and hit their outside linebacker six straight collisions, each time for less yardage. He thought it was foolish to do that; we all thought it was foolish. Michigan lost too, but I didn't care. 1965 It surprised him again, the honors at graduation, and when I was admitted to a first rate medical school. His had not been first rate. 1967 By the time of his first heart attack, I had already learned to call it an MI and thought I understood what that meant. I didn't understand what it meant to him, though. I drove up the snowy freeway, past the lake where we had lived in 1948, and went to see him in the hospital. He was in a bed in his own hospital, which made him a patient and he didn't like it. My mother stood beside the bed as I listened to his chest with the stethoscope I had brought with me so that I could. They both pretended nothing had happened. "You won't hear anything" he told me with a little smirk, but he was wrong. I heard the sound of his life coming and going, coming and going, lub-dub, lub-dub. Some of the professors at my medical school knew who he was, and asked about him, especially the surgeons. The famous thoracic surgeon who had developed an operation for the repair of a fistula between the trachea and esophagus of newborns knew him and he asked if I was Dick's son. Then he asked me if I thought I was a movie star, and if my father knew I had hair to my shoulders. Even though he had developed the operation to fix the fistula, rules prevented the professor from doing it any more because he was too old. He could be in the operating room, and instruct, and help, but he was not to be the attending surgeon. I watched one day while he showed a resident how to do his own operation. He did not cut and he did not sew, but he could not stop himself from tying the knots. My father did not understand the Vietnam War. It was a long time before he forgave me for his failure to understand. He preferred to believe in the war he did understand, and in the myth of Communism. That war he knew because of things that had happened, or should have happened. 1969 I did not go to fight in Vietnam, whether out of fear or bravery I cannot know. Instead, I went to Chicago to be an intern and to learn surgery from a man he knew and who turned out to be like him. I learned the fundamentals of operations and of toil, sometimes working thirty-six hours straight. His friend was an old-fashioned surgeon who made demands of the house staff on his service, in his service. Morning rounds were to be done at 6:30, the skin cut by 8:00, professor's rounds at 5:00 and sometimes lasting until 7:30, then finish the work, the "scut" it was called. But the professor was there too, not in an office or a lab, certainly not at home in bed. We operated all night once to save a woman with a lacerated liver, spleen and bowel--a girl really, who now is a woman I know well and who now lives in my new city--and when he was sure she would not die he took us all to the Loop in his own car and bought us steak and eggs. He was a man who could make a surgeon. I went to do research, which my father thought was a waste of time. He was right, though it took me ten years to believe him. 1972 Some city people moved to the country that year, the year the war was almost over, and doctors did too. The Public Health Service sent me to Appalachia to serve the people, most of whom had been served too much and didn't want us. I learned to know which patients were sick, which ones were worried, and how to make house calls. I called on a man I knew would soon die; he knew it too, of course, though he really wasn't old enough to die. One spring day my father who was visiting called with me. The scent of hepatic failure came not so much from the patient himself, who was as yellow as paint, as from the toilet filling with brown urine that he refused to flush through several uses. The patient, like my father, had lived during the depression. The bedroom where he would die was upstairs, facing Main Street, but he kept the shades drawn all the time. He looked at a wall decorated with wallpaper that had always been there. My father knew how to talk to a man like this, and how to comfort him, because of what both of them knew. 1978 It was my fate to become a neurosurgeon, and so eventually I did. "Any operation that takes more than three hours isn't worth doing," my father said when I described craniotomies lasting half a day. I went to teach in an exotic foreign medical school on the equator. He had a coronary by-pass while I was gone to Southeast Asia, but he didn't tell until I came back. 1980 "He was offered the best academic job around, but he said no and went to work at Group Health," I heard him say to another doctor at a party. That would have been his choice, too. I watched him operate one last time on that trip, although he saw patients until the day before he died. The Chief Resident opened the chest, but could not find the tumor. My father put his left hand into the wound, turned to the side so that he could extend his fingers a little deeper and, without looking, reached down to feel. "There it is," he said, never turning his head. 1987 He came to my hospital to drink coffee with the nurses and to watch me operate. He liked to do that, and to introduce himself to people as "the real Dr. Rapport." 1990 His town, the place he lived his life, began to die at the same time he did. Michael Moore made a movie about the economics of the place where he too had lived--Flint, Michigan--about the greed and pain when factories left the town. My father did not imagine the cause and effect, and blamed the town's failure on the movie. He never would see the film. Forty years a known surgeon in a town famous for making cars, now he was old, and he ate too much because all of his other pleasures were used. He was not recognized. He was not recognizable. 1993 He sat on a stool behind me the last time I saw him, containing himself as he directed my repair of a brick walkway beside the house. I felt his eyes on the job and remembered them watching me with the same slightly uneasy concern as I washed the wheels of his car when I was five. Four and a half decades later he still wasn't sure my work was to his standard, and although he squirmed a bit, he said little. He assumed that his sitting there, in the heat and sunlight of a June afternoon with his oldest son doing the work he could no longer do, insured the repair done properly. We loved each other in that moment without saying so, and enjoyed the work together, although he wasn't enjoying his life much. "I've had seventy-five good years," he said, "and three mediocre ones." Later that summer, he and my mother went out, and when they came home he finished a bowl of ice cream and fell off his chair in the dining room. He would have wished for that suddenness. I flew from my fashionable west coast city where I am known, now, for a little while, to the Midwestern town I no longer know. I opened his desk and, in the slot in front made for holding pens I found his wings, the Ninth Army Air Corps wings that had meant for him so much possibility. I keep them in my desk now, and in the staircase landing of memory, closed by a door, like a closet door. He showed me most of what I know, both how to be and how not to be. He showed me how to tie surgeon's knots. |
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