Caroline's Daughters Read Online Free PDF Page A

one of my patients told me this story, it’d be very hard not to laugh.”
    â€œWhy don’t you try laughing, then?”
    He frowns. “Laughing? That nonsense? But I’m not sick.”
    â€œNo, I mean pretending you’re a patient. Your own patient.”
    â€œOh. Well.” The frown deepens as he tries to puzzle it out. “I sort of see what you mean.” He brightens a little. “Matter of fact, a patient was telling me her story yesterday, very sad, mixed up with an alcoholic, and heaven knows I didn’t laugh.”
    â€œOf course not,” Sage reassures him.
    Jim grins. “She wouldn’t believe me when I told her how old I am. But I’m always very open about that. I just tell them right out.”
    Sage has been hearing this particular little vignette from Jim, the telling of his age, on most of the occasions that they have recently seen each other, she now reflects: the patient who cannot believe Jim’s so readily admitted age. And for a crucial moment she now wonders: could he have misinterpreted all around—are they in fact surprised that he is not older than he says?
    On the way over to Jim’s, Sage now realizes, she had wanted to talk about Noel. She wanted from Jim the magic, impossible words: No, of course Noel isn’t seeing anyone else, you’re just very insecure, you’re too used to trouble, when it isn’t there you make it up (true enough). Or, she had wanted some large and quite “inappropriate” dosage of love from Jim.
    â€œHow about a drink?” he now asks her. “What a lousy host I am, I go on and on about myself and leave you high and dry.”
    There is so much truth to this—and a drink is so much
not
what she wants—that Sage begins to laugh. She laughs and laughs, bending over as she sits there, then cuts off as she feels her laughter out of control, she could as easily cry.
    â€œActually I have to get home now,” she tells Jim, when she can. “I want to get a little work done before dinner.”
    â€œWork? But it’s Sunday. Don’t you know there’s a name for people like you?” Somewhat heavily he chides her.
    â€œI like to work, it’s when I know who I am,” Sage tells him.
    â€œWell, I guess I’m rather like that too. I should stick to medicine, I do best at being a doctor. In fact Caroline said that to me rather often. Only very tactfully of course.”
    â€œOf course,” Sage echoes.
    By now they both have risen and are walking toward the entranceway.Where they repeat their small non-embrace routine. Affectionately.
    â€œWell, I’m really glad you came by. You always do me good,” Jim tells her.
    â€œOh, me too,” Sage lies.
    Driving home, passing Presbyterian Hospital, Sage thinks briefly of the years of her grandmother’s dying there. Molly Blair, all shrunken and dying forever, and Caroline going to see her every day. Caroline brushing Molly’s thin yellowed hair, and taking home Molly’s handmade silk nightclothes to wash by hand and to iron. (Sage, who hates to iron, was especially touched by this detail.) And Sage, visiting, would silently, secretly exhort her grandmother to die. She used to wonder if Caroline ever felt the same. She must have, mustn’t she? Must have longed for her mother to die? But if so no one ever knew.
    The house now occupied by Sage and Noel, bought by Sage with her inheritance from Molly Blair, is at the end of a small cul-de-sac on the eastern, “wrong” side of Russian Hill, a neighborhood once cheaply inhabited by working-class Italians, now very expensive, mostly occupied by Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian families who double or triple up, in the tiny rooms of those houses.
    Sage and Noel’s is a large two-story stucco box with an entirely undistinguished exterior, a sort of disguise, Sage sometimes feels the outside of their house to be. While inside Noel has