They played on the beach, and for Rob the sense of hopelessness and failure that went with these games went also with blue skies, full sunlight and waves breaking on sand. These things, that for other people meant carefree vacations, meant for him an almost intolerable bondage. To refuse to play would have been unthinkable. If he’d been a better player, he would have been able to say he didn’t feel like a game, but, as it was, the cries of spoilsport and poor loser would have been too truthful. No one held it against him that he was so wretched a player, that he could barely hit the ball, because of his bad eyesight perhaps, the sunlight glinting into his eyes from the frames of his glasses, that he would not see the ball when it came hurtling towards him out of the sizzling blue sky like an assassin’s bomb, numbing his fingers when he raised his hands to fend it off, knocking him on the head or neck, or, even more humiliating, ignoring him so completely so that he had to run after it, chase it down the beach or into the lake. His family treated him as a joke, even, and especially, his mother. “What did you hurt today?” she would ask him, as she doled out the snacks afterwards on the patio deck above the boathouse, sandwiches and Cokes for the boys, beers for the men. In the city his father drank Scotch, but at the cottage, which he called his “summer place,” he drank beer. The others would tell funny stories about Rob’s blunderings, his losing duels with the demonic white ball, while he would grin. The grin was obligatory, to show he was a good sport and didn’t mind. “You have to be able to take it,” his father was fond of saying, without being too specific about what it was. He also said, after almost every game, that competitive sports were good for you because they taught you how to handle failure. Rob knew his father was only trying to make him feel better; nevertheless, he felt like answering that he’d had enough practice at that and he wouldn’t mind being taught how to handle success.
But he had to be careful about saying things like that. “He’s the sensitive one,” his mother was in the habit of telling her friends, half proud, half rueful. Her favourite picture of him was the one in his choirboy surplice, taken the year before his voice cracked. His oldest brother was supposed to be the handsome one, his middle brother was the smart one, Rob was the sensitive one. For this reason it was necessary, he knew, to appear as insensitive as possible. Lately he had begun to succeed, and his mother was now complaining that he never talked to her any more. He found even her moments of solicitous interest painful.
She trusted the others to make their own way, but she didn’t trust him, and secretly Rob agreed with her estimate. He knew he could never be a doctor, although he felt he wanted to. He wanted to be good at baseball too, but he wasn’t, and all he could see ahead for himself at Medical School was catastrophe. How to confess that even the drawings in his father’s medical books, those interiors of bodies abstract as plaster models, made him queasy, that he’d actually fainted—though no one knew, because he’d been lying down anyway—when he’d given blood this year at the clinic and had seen for the first time the hot purple worm of his own blood inching through the clear tube across his bare arm? His father thought it was a great treat for his boys to be allowed into the observation bubble at the hospital while he was doing open heart surgery, but Rob was unable to turn down the offer or admit his nausea. (Red rubber, it’s only red rubber, he would repeat to himself over and over, closing his eyes when his brothers weren’t watching.) He would come away from these ordeals with his knees jellied and his palms scored with the marks of his jagged, bitten nails. He couldn’t do it, he could never do it.
James, the handsome one, was already interning, and the family made jokes at the Sunday dinner table about pretty nurses. Adrian was cleaning up the top marks in third year. Both of them fit so easily into the definitions that had been provided for them. And who was he supposed to be, what had been left over for him when they were dishing out the roles? The bumbling third son in a fairy tale, with no princess and no good luck. But friendly and generous, kind to old women and dwarves in the forest. He despised his own generosity, which he felt was mostly cowardice.
Rob was supposed to go into Pre-Meds in the fall, and dutifully he would do it. But sooner or later he would be forced to drop out, and what then? He saw himself on top of a boxcar like some waif from the thirties, penniless, fleeing his family’s disappointment, heading for some form of oblivion so foreign to him he could not even picture it. But there was no one he could talk to about his knowledge of his own doom. A year ago his father had taken him aside for the pep talk Rob was sure he’d had with both of the others. Medicine wasn’t just a job, he told Rob. It was a calling, a vocation. One of the noblest things a man could do was to dedicate his life selflessly to the saving of others. His father’s eyes gleamed piously: was Rob worthy? (Speedboat, Rob thought, summer place on the bay, two cars, Forest Hill house.) “Your grandfather was a doctor,” his father said, as if this was the clincher. His grandfather had been a doctor, but he’d been a country doctor, driving a sleigh and team through blizzards to deliver babies. They had often heard these heroic stories. “He wasn’t very good at collecting his bills,” Rob’s father would say, shaking his head with a mixture of admiration and indulgent contempt. This was not one of his own weaknesses. “During the Depression we lived on chickens; the farmers gave them to us instead of money. I had only one pair of shoes.” Rob thought of the shoe rack that ran the length of his father’s triple-doored closet, the twinkling shoes arranged on it like testimonials.
He would not be able to take the scene when they found out, he would just disappear. He thought of the final catastrophe as happening in a classroom. They would all be dissecting a cadaver, and he would suddenly begin to scream. He would run out of the room and down the corridor, reeking of formaldehyde, he would forget his coat and the galoshes that were a fetish of his mother’s, it would be snowing. He would wake up the next morning in a greenish-grey hotel room, with no recollection of what he had done.
It was his family who had chosen this job, this camp. They felt it would be good practice for him to spend the summer with crippled children; it would be part of the it he had to learn to take. His father knew the Director, and it was all arranged before Rob was told about it. His father and mother had been so enthusiastic, so full of their sense of the wonderful opportunity they’d arranged for him, how could he refuse? “Use your powers of observation,” his father had said to him at the train station. “I wish I’d had this chance when I was your age.”
For the first week Rob had had nightmares. The dreams were of bodies, pieces of bodies, arms and legs and torsos, detached and floating in mid-air; or he would feel he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and he would wake up with his skin wet from effort. He found the sight of the children, especially the younger ones, unbearably painful, and he didn’t understand how the other staff members could go around all day with expressions of such bluff professional cheer. Except that he did it himself. Though apparently with less success than he’d thought, since Pam the physiotherapist had come over to sit beside him in the staff lounge after the second-day orientation meeting. She had dull blonde hair held back by a velvet band that matched the blue of her plaid Bermuda shorts. She was pretty, but Rob felt she had too many teeth. Too many and too solid. “It’s rough working with kids like this,” she said, “but it’s so rewarding.” Rob nodded dutifully: what did she mean, rewarding? He still felt sick to his stomach. He’d been on shift for dinner that evening, and he could barely stand the milk dribbling from the bent plastic feeding tubes, the chair trays splattered with food (“Let them do as much for themselves as they can”), the slurps and suction noises. Pam lit a cigarette and Rob watched the red fingernails on her strong, competent hands. “It doesn’t do them any good for you to be depressed,” she said. “They’ll use it against you. A lot of them don’t know the difference. They’ve never been any other way.” She was going to do this for a living, she was going to do this for the rest of her life! “You’ll get used to it,” she said, and patted his arm in a way that Rob found insulting. She’s trying to be nice, he corrected himself quickly.