The View From Penthouse B Read Free

bank, deposit all of it, and keep forty dollars for spending money! For everything! For lunches and subway fare and maybe one movie a week. I never felt deprived because all my friends lived that way, too. Those were the days!”
    Those were also the days when daughters married right out of college, especially when young doctors were doing the asking. Margot explained her ambivalence at Thanksgiving, with just the immediate family present, planned that way so she could explain why she’d turned down Charles’s proposal.
    He didn’t understand who she was, Margot insisted. Or who she’d become. Margot Considine was something of a household name; well, at least she felt that way when Mitch or Mike teased and complimented her, and the station’s phone lines lit up. Our father paused in his carving mathematically precise slices of breast away from the bone and turned to our mother. “Did a daughter of ours just say that she didn’t want to marry a perfectly nice man from a good family, a physician no less, because he didn’t listen to her being teased by two buffoons?”
    “I’m afraid so,” said our mother, still in her apron, a gift from me that was festooned with horns of plenty in honor of her November birthday. And then, borrowing his wry tone: “Let’s use psychology. Let’s agree that she is too important and famous to marry anyone, let alone a mere doctor in training. We’ll pretend we don’t want her to give Charles the time of day. That should help.”
    Margot said, “What about the fact that he’s going to be a gynecologist?”
    Dad said, “I owe most of what is great in my life to that honorable profession.”
    “But would you want your favorite eldest daughter to be married to one?” Margot asked. “Aren’t you wondering if a man whose patient population will be 100 percent female is the best candidate for marriage? Or monogamy?”
    We waited. Our mom said, “Jim?”
    Margot continued. “Because it seems to me that one of two things would follow: either temptation or burnout.”
    “Ask him,” our dad said. “He must already know if temptation goes along with the job.”
    Charles insisted that the answer was no. He’d learned in his first week of residency, performing dozens of pelvic exams a day, to disassociate. How could she confuse the emotional with the clinical? He had eyes only for her.
    Margot said she needed a week to think things over, then said yes. As befitting the beautiful eldest daughter, the wedding was large and formal, black tie and prime rib. I’d been fitted for contact lenses and wore an orchid behind one ear. Charles’s eight groomsmen danced with Betsy and me so obligingly that I now suspect it was a condition set down by the bride or her parents. But that night, it felt like popularity.
     
    Although Margot appears strong and cynical, and is quick to joke about her divorce, I think she needs me here. I have assumed the task of accepting Charles’s collect calls, two a month, a frequency we negotiated despite her reluctance to accept even one. I argued for that small act of charity. “At least he didn’t die,” I remind her.
    At first, his calls were heartbreaking. He told me how much he missed Edwin, his favorite brother-in-law, which I really shouldn’t have believed, but I’d so rather have heard that than the frequent questions about poor me, my state of mind, health, welfare, and rotten luck.
    Whether it’s the group therapy in prison or just the hours and hours of boredom that have made him reflect on his life and marriage, he speaks in a new pop psychology idiom and in a new revelatory fashion. “I wasn’t emotionally available to Margot,” he announced, his greeting. “Which is so typical of a surgeon.”
    I said, “But you’re not a surgeon,” which he corrects. What did I call hysterectomies and Caesarians if not surgery? He’d spent thousands of hours in the OR during his training. And his point was not his board certification but his