Dr. Knox by Peter Spiegelman

clouded mirror with a chipped black frame—all bought at neighborhood secondhand stores that were gone now, or rebranded as
vintage.
    Here three-plus years, and it looks like you’re expecting evac anytime. On the off chance no helo’s coming, why don’t you hang a picture, or put a rug down?
Sutter had said that the last time he stopped by, but I didn’t agree. I had dug in here—you just had to read closely to see it.
    There were books on my shelves, and not just the rippled paperbacks that I’d picked up used at the bookstore on Spring Street. There were volumes older than I was, which had survived through med school, residency, marriage, a storage locker in New Haven while I was abroad, and then the trip west when I washed up in Los Angeles, with no plan of what to do and no idea of where else to go.
    There was a copy of Guyton’s
Textbook of Medical Physiology,
its cloth cover frayed and faded, that had been my father’s when he was in med school, and a Mitchell-Nelson
Textbook of Pediatrics,
in even worse shape, that had been my grandfather’s. By its side was my great-grandfather’s Gray’s
Anatomy.
It was much abused by time and humidity, stained with coffee, Scotch, and who knew what else, but his father’s inscription was still legible in purple ink in front:
To the next Dr. Knox.
    I was, on my father’s side, the latest in a long line of Drs. Knox, who had tended to the ill and injured of Litchfield County, Connecticut, since before the Revolution. Until I came along, anyway. I was the first Dr. Knox not to settle in Litchfield County, or in Connecticut, or maybe not anywhere at all. I was also the first to go west to medical school, the first to divorce, the first to work in Africa, the first to be relieved of that work. So many milestones…In fact, the aberrant behavior had started a generation earlier.
    My father, Wilton Knox, was the first Dr. Knox to marry another physician—to marry any woman who worked outside the home—and the first Knox to marry a Jew. Which had no doubt set his Anglo-Saxon ancestors spinning in their Litchfield graves. His living relatives weren’t thrilled either, nor were my mother’s—though I imagine her parents were by then long past being surprised by anything she did.
    Marilyn Berg was their youngest child. Their other children had joined the family’s scrap metal business in Buffalo, married within the tribe, and dutifully produced the next generation, and Marilyn was expected to do her part—was all but promised, the story went, to a local dry-goods prince—but she’d had another future in mind, and it didn’t involve being anyone’s hausfrau. It did include a full ride to Vassar, though, and afterward to the Yale School of Medicine, and she’d dared her parents to stop her. They didn’t try. She was the first in her family to go beyond high school, and she was never other than first in any of her classes.
    I took a long pull of Stella and took the Guyton off the shelf. There used to be a picture in here. It was tucked in back, a black-and-white snapshot taken when she was in college, and I held it up to catch the streetlight. She was on a bench, and a Gothic spire loomed behind her. She wore a skirt like a pleated horse blanket, a white blouse, and the impatient scowl she donned for every photo. There was a pile of books beside her. Behind the sour look, she was eastern European lovely—small, dark-haired, pale, awkward, and insubordinate, her eyes full of intelligence and banked anger.
    She’d met my father in New Haven. He was two years older, but a year behind her in med school. She made extra money tutoring; he was having trouble with biochem. They took their residencies—his in internal medicine, hers in emergency medicine—in Boston. They married when he passed his board exams and she finished a post-residency fellowship in critical care. She was three months pregnant at the time.
    It was back to Litchfield County then, to a white house