The Doctor's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

funny smell even her Lucien Lelong couldn’t disguise. How pleased he always looked, how uncharacteristically rumpled. One time, I paused in the doorway, a timid actor waiting offstage for a cue. “Come here, goosey girl,” my mother said, opening her white arms like wings to take me in.
    I got up and opened my dresser drawer again and took Scott’s money out. Ev’s specter seemed to have vanished from the room, but just before I closed the drawer I put three hundred dollars back. I went inside and explained to Scott that I was having a little cash-flow problem myself, and he didn’t look very happy about it, but he pocketed the two hundred and prepared to leave.
    I felt a pang of remorse for holding out on him and I didn’t want to let him go yet. “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Why don’t we go see Poppy in the Big House? I know he’d love to see you. We can take a cab,” I added, as further inducement. My father did love to see Scott, who’d always amused him, even now when he confused him with one or another of his nursing aides, covering himself by calling them all “young man.”
    Scott looked at the watch I’d bought him in February for his birthday, one of those oversized, complicated mechanisms that tell you the time in Tokyo and Paris and is guaranteed to function sixty fathoms under water. “Sorry, no can do,” he said. “I have to be downtown.” Like a man with urgent business elsewhere.
    A few days later Ev asked me if I had seen his blue-and-white swirl paperweight. It was a mid-nineteenth-century miniature Clichy that he’d picked up in Paris five years ago, and one of his favorites. I had often seen him gazing into its layered depths as if it held the answer to some cosmic question.
    Ev had always treated his collection of paperweights in a casual and generous way, sort of like public art. He let the children and guests handle them, and he didn’t keep them in one place or organize them in any formal way, by color or artist or period. Instead, he set them almost randomly on shelves and tables around the apartment, where they didn’t have to vie for glory, and each one became an individual beacon of light and beauty.
    My first, unbidden thought when Ev asked about the missing Clichy was of Scott standing in the living room the other day, looking around as if he were seeing everything there for the first time. “Oh, I don’t think . . . ,” I began, and then stopped myself, flustered and perturbed. I could feel the color rise in my neck, like mercury in a thermometer.
    “You don’t think what?” Ev said, and when I didn’t answer, “Hello? Alice?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve lost my train of thought.”
    “What’s wrong with you? You never finish a sentence anymore.”
    “Something’s been . . . never mind,” I said.
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Al,
what
? Talk to me.”
    “I told you.
Nothing.
I’ll ask Esmeralda about the Clichy on Thursday. Maybe she moved it when she dusted.”

3
    “Have you noticed anything different about me lately?” I asked Violet. We were sitting across from each other in a small, crowded diner a few blocks from the Met. All around us, silverware rang against china, and other women, surrounded by shopping bags and oversized purses, leaned forward into their own intimate and animated conversations. Shrieks of laughter erupted periodically, like jungle birdcalls, around the room.
    “Somebody ought to write a book called
The Bitches of Madison
Avenue,
” Violet remarked.
    “Well, have you noticed anything different or not?” I said.
    She peered suspiciously at me over her menu. “Like what? You haven’t had anything done, have you?” My friend Violet is what the French call a
jolie-laide,
and what Americans mean when they say that a woman looks interesting—a measured compliment in any language. Her mother had tried to talk her into a nose job when she was a teenager, but Violet refused, insisting that her nose was an important part of