Other Men's Daughters Read Free Page A

breasts, the bare bellies, and went home to puzzle the meaning of it all.
    â€œTruth comes as lightning strikes.” He read this gnomic splinter in the middle of the Charles, his smooth arms supported on the oar shafts, holding a paperback anthology of Greek poems. It was his only morning on the river that summer. He had stopped for breath and to rummage among the ancients. But though he was ready, Capital T “Truth” did not strike.
    Four, sometimes five mornings a week, he worked in the lab. Mostly out of the old discipline he’d begun thinking of as another propping habit. (“Habits get you through life, not into it.”) It had been two years since he’d published a paper, four or five since he’d done work that absorbed him. Yet research had been near the center of his life.
    He’d begun as a student of thirst, a dipsologist. “Funny name for a serious pursuit,” he told his graduate students. Like all drives which were called instinctive, thirst was a dense complex of chemistry and mentality. Dr. Merriwether had investigated its relationship to lactation, hemmorhaging, drugs (atropine, epinephrine, metallic oxides, opium), x-ray irradiations, inferior vena cava congestion, snake bites, salinity, fear, various exertions (including copulation), suggestibility and dreams. In twenty-one post-doctoral years, he’d published almost a hundred papers. He had believed that what Wolf called “the dipsologic triad,” thirst, drinking, satiety, was a primeval life pattern, that life, a sum of tropisms organized by the basic “drive” of self-preserving, could itself be regarded as a gigantic thirst. He’d even speculated that what he referred to in class as “cytologic coups d’état , the cancers,” could profitably be studied with dipsologic models.
    Yet he did not really buckle down to his research. His mice withered around the electrodes, he noted the salinity of carcinomic cells, he glimpsed certain interesting recurrences, but, in essence, he drifted.
    Of course, he was doing other things. The “doctoring”—his protective term for the moonlighting—took up nine hours a week.
    Even as a part-time doctor, he’d seen almost everything in the way of flesh and its common disorders, but he enjoyed the work as a form of theater, the encounters with students, the skill or clumsiness with which they described their ills, the emotional guises assumed in examination, and, occasionally, the surprise of a body.
    Even when he’d been most absorbed in research, Dr. Merriwether had liked at least the idea of being a physician. There was of course the real pleasure of relieving pain, but more, he’d long ago sensed an important relationship between the practice of medicine and that of the poets and sages whom even the most commercially minded Merriwethers respected. Many poets had been physicians or the children of physicians. Dr. Merriwether supposed the connection had to do with the importance of human crisis in both occupations. Doctors and poets had to do with essentials; they knew the confusion and mystery of suffering, the disproportion between the human being as complex chemistry and the human being unmade by death.
    The week before the astronauts took off for the first human touchdown on the moon, a stirring girl came up to Merriwether’s office for examination. In the magic suggestiveness of certain times, she had a lunar name, Cynthia. Her surname was Ryder.
    Dr. Merriwether rose for every entrant, an old courtesy learned early, but impressive to many patients, even those who, like him, had been raised amidst rituals and formalities. Miss Ryder was golden-haired but almost Indian dark, slimly full, tall, slightly prognathous, brown-eyed. Her hair waterfalled to the top thoracic vertebra, her tanned flesh issued from a laundered yellow corolla. A human sunflower. Dr. Merriwether said, “How do you do? Miss Ryder,