Tears formed in her eyes, glistening. She wore her gently waved hair chin length, and with her straight nose and small face, she often reminded Rebecca of what Greta Garbo might have looked like at sixty. Except that, as far as Rebecca knew, Greta Garbo didn’t need psychotherapy to see her through the week.
“She only one I have left.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Man on bus — he upset me. When I get off, he follow. I run and run...”
Rebecca scribbled notes. She’d heard this before. “There’ve been other times when men followed you. Was there something different about this man compared to the others?”
“They all different. They send different man each time. So I won’t know. But I always know. And now they got more opportunity, because I go two buses for here. Before, I walk five minutes to old office. I wish you don’t move. This not safe neighbourhood.”
“I understand how you feel,” said Rebecca. “I know it’s hard to go out of your area, but it will get easier. It’ll just take time.”
Mrs. Kochinsky studied her for a moment. “If you say, I believe. Look — I’ll bring you knishes for Passover. Home-made. Just next week. See? I believe you.”
Rebecca smiled uneasily. The emotional wall she usually kept between herself and her patients had been impossible to summon in Mrs. Kochinsky’s case. The pain she had gone through, the horror, put her in a different category.
Before leaving, Mrs. Kochinsky turned to Rebecca and said, “Oh, I forget something tell you. A visitor coming for me. Cousin from California. So long when I saw him — I didn’t even know he still lives. When he call, like voice from past.”
Then she suddenly smiled goodbye, her mouth partly open in mute apology as if there was something she preferred not to say. It was the same smile each time she left. Apology for what, Rebecca wondered: for living, for being a casualty of war, for surviving with complications?
Iris was deep into files at her workstation when Rebecca passed by at five forty-five. “I’ve got my pager,” Rebecca said. “I’11 just be around the neighbourhood if you need me.”
Iris looked down at Rebecca’s feet. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’m going to do what I tell all my patients: go for a brisk walk around the block.”
Iris examined her from the feet up. “Well, the shoes are good. But you need a swanky track suit, Doc. Something with polyester to show off the slimmer you. That skirt with those running shoes...,” she shook her blonde head. “You want to exercise, you gotta have the right outfit. Come shopping with me this weekend and I’ll find you something spiffy.”
Rebecca put one hand on her hip in protest but realized there was no use arguing. She stepped downstairs past the office of the other doctor. Lila Arons, M.D. They’d met briefly when Rebecca leased the space. A brisk handshake, the usual greetings, and they had both gone on their way.
She stepped outside the medical building, heartened by the way her feet felt in the new leather running shoes. Solid. She was ready to take on Beverley Street. The street looked as empty as the first time she’d seen it, leafy quiet in the shade of another century.
Once on the sidewalk, she dipped her hand inside her jacket pocket to deposit the beeper. What she felt there made her stop.
“Rebecca, Rebecca!” David chided out of an undefinable corner of her past. His trimmed reddish beard pointed at her with irony.
She held the wrapped sugar cube up in her palm, impressed with its survival. She hadn’t seen the gabardine rain jacket since last September when she had pushed it to the back of her closet together with the white cane. She had always carried something for David’s carbohydrate hunger, which came on suddenly when his medication reached its peak. It was a reaction to the insulin. Common enough. Not dramatic enough for a haunting, too physical to ignore. She had gotten rid of his aftershave, his jeans, his tweed sports jackets. She had tried to sweep her life’s surface clear of reminders of him but every now and then there was this self-sabotage she couldn’t explain. She dropped the cube back into her pocket, but uneasily.
She moved up Beverley Street at a pace she knew was unsatisfactory, but it was all she could muster. Speed was a problem for her lately; she could do nothing quickly. Often she felt submerged in water, her body struggling just to move normally. Aunt Sally had insisted at the Shiva that what she remembered most when Uncle died was the fatigue, the dense weariness that grief deposited in the bones. Don’t overdo it, Rebecca directed her solid leather-bound feet. We just want to get in shape, we don’t want to win any races.
She paced herself along Baldwin Street where narrow brick houses watched behind lawns of yellow inchoate grass that would turn green inside of a month. She approached the spectacle of Spadina Avenue. Three lanes of traffic rushed on either side of the streetcar tracks that ran along the centre of the grand avenue, ready to trip the unwary pedestrian. A deathtrap for anyone dependent on a white cane. Apparently a physician named Baldwin who practiced architecture on the side had designed the street in the early 1800s with the Champs Elysées in mind. By the time Jewish merchants opened their produce stalls along the street near the end of that century, Spadina was no longer glamorous. Now modern wholesalers with their overcrowded dry goods, hardware, and poultry shops made the street garish. But because of its elaborate width, it was difficult, from one side of Spadina, to see what was on the other. A lot, thought Rebecca, like looking across to the opposite bank of a respectable river. Across the expanse she picked out the store where David had bought his art supplies. Chinese restaurants had opened on either side.
When David was alive, she had struggled with her weight — a lifetime ago when she was ten or fifteen pounds more than she liked. But her atrophied appetite satisfied her in a morbid way though she denied she was punishing herself. She hadn’t given David diabetes. She just hadn’t been paying enough attention to realize he was hiding his symptoms. As a physician she knew it was common to deny one’s illness in the hope it will disappear. He had concealed the constant peeing, the thirst, from her. He constantly sucked on breath mints to mask the sweet ketonic breath. He didn’t want to worry her. For awhile he’d fooled his mother, poor Sarah, who had survived the Holocaust but lost her only child.
Near the end, when he was in hospital, Rebecca left him alone with his mother and took the elevator down to the main floor. Sarah had no other relatives — all were lost in the camps. Though she never talked about it, and though her auburn hair and quick smile belied it, her loss defined her to Rebecca, who now found it hard to be with the two of them — one dying and the other a reminder of death. It was August and the evening air wafted so softly against her skin refreshing her, filling her with guilt. She was alive! She stood in the shadows too numb to move while traffic floated by. Voices murmured off to one side. She absently noted two interns in white coats sitting on the cement stairs leading up to the hospital. “Fellow at rounds this morning, only thirty-five. First thing he knew anything was wrong was when he went to check his eyes for blurred vision. Diabetic retinopathy. Blind now. Pyelonephritis. That’s not the way I want to go! Crazy thing is, his wife’s a doctor....”
She had never forgotten that conversation; never come to terms with the guilt. She knew she’d failed in her primary role. Not only had she missed the symptoms that would’ve been obvious if a patient had presented with them. That was bad enough. But the changes in his painting. How could she have ignored the reaching for the light? In a year, the subdued and muted palette that had always defined his work became transformed. His canvases deepened into cadmium reds and phthalo blues that should’ve set off alarm bells in her head. The dimmer his world became, the more radiant his colours. Finally they became brilliant streaks of pigment without shape. Was there anything more ironic than an artist going blind?
Near the end he would try to engage her in discussions about God. Try to get her position, as a woman of science. She mouthed the platitudes for his sake, but in reality reserved judgment. This was her deal with the Almighty: if he let David live, she would embrace Him wholeheartedly. In her