What Couldn’t Be
He was a small-town Iowa dentist, son of a preacher, a World War II vet, a good man, well-respected, a tail twister in the Lions Club, active in his church. He was tall and thin, with oversized hands, the slight hunch that tall people develop in their perpetual effort to fit in. His sharp features, made sharper as he aged by deep wrinkles, jutted out from under and around his bifocals. How did those massive hands, those long fingers, those large well-groomed fingernails handle such precise instruments? How did they fit into the little mouths of modest, soft-spoken townspeople, people whose mouths never spoke above their inside voices and never utter an offensive word?
Those hands worked just as he needed them to, for nearly 40 years, since just days after he returned from the war. Every Monday through Friday he walked less than a mile from his modest post-war bungalow at the end of a road to his small office just off Main Street. Rents on Main Street were a little higher for no good reason and a professional office doesn’t belong on Main Street, he always thought. It would say too much, be too prideful. He’d greet his secretary and his patients, friends he’d known for years, as he walked through the waiting room. He’d put on his white coat and then hunch over his first patient to begin grinding, whirring, chipping and flaking away, that blinding light shining into pink crevasses lined with white pearls, gray nubs, yellow river stones or rotting cavities. And at the end of a day, he would walk home, always opening the door at precisely 5:30 when his wife, a nurse during the war effort but now a full-time mother, would be waiting with the children and supper ready.
This was the life of a smalltown dentist and he wore it well. Every week, he and his family attended the United Methodist Church, where he sang in the choir. In the winter he and his wife organized Christmas caroling around the neighborhood, serving up hot chocolate and homemade sugar cookies at their home afterwards. In the summer, when work was slow, he’d teach his sons about service by running missions to Mexico. He’d find a donated school bus and load it with donated dental equipment he had collected from around the state. Then the family would drive thousands of miles south, up into the dry, strange mountains with air so hot that the little squiggles over Spanish n’s looked like they hovered and spun over the blacktop. When the blacktop ran out they rattled over gravel, hoping the tires would hold up. When the gravel ran out and the roads weren’t roads anymore, they hoped the springs would last. Then they knew they were there, at the remotest of villages, the ones that needed dental care the most.
Everyone in the village would help unload the dental equipment, set it up in a worn building with broken concrete at every corner and a roof that looked like broken terra cotta flower pots barely overlapping one another. The Iowans would adjust to the altitude, the thin, dry, hot air, and then the dentist would get to work, hunching over his patients, speaking just a few words of Spanish, making due with miming an “open wide” or a “grind your teeth” or a “spit out now.” Meanwhile, his wife and children, combining their own simple Spanish, mime and the broken English of the locals, made friends in the village, until word spread and the family scheduled visits and new clinics in many villages over many years. And by the time someone drove them to an airport and they boarded a plane back to Iowa, people who had groaned when a simple breeze whispered through their damaged mouths were no longer in agony. Old men with no teeth could now chew their food. Little girls who wouldn’t dare smile without covering their faces with their hands now laughed and ran and giggled freely. Another village would have a school bus and the family would fly home.
This was the life of a preacher’s son. A veteran. A husband. A father. This was that life. So there was no room for anything else. So you see, there was never a time in all those years when he found himself alone in his office with his secretary, the woman who had helped him build his practice into what it was, the most respectable practice in three counties. There was never a time when he took her in his arms and she responded willingly, never a time when he used his couch for something other than a place for visitors to sit while he talked with them about the affairs of the town or the church. There was never a time when he walked home with the smell of her all over him and his wife pretended not to notice so long as he walked in that door at 5:30 when the children and supper were ready.
Or a time when after he injured his shoulder so badly from that fall from the roof that he needed medication for the pain. There was never a time after that when he took too much medication, and when the medication ran out and his doctor told him no more, he switched to scotch. He never did that, because the town dentist isn’t a drunk and besides, a drunk is someone who is drunk at work, and he certainly never was that. He was a doctor after all. He could control it. No, there was never a time when he stashed bottles in the garage, behind the big tool box or the canoe, or in his office at the back of his closet, on their sides high over the coats at the back of the shelf where shorter people would never see them.
So there could not have been a time when his grown sons could say, “Our father used to drink heavily, for a little time after he hurt his shoulder, but not anymore,” because he never had. And therefore there could not have been a time when this small-town dentist drove his family in a school bus to some Mexican village at the top of a mountain, brought fresh supplies, repaired a dental clinic and the villagers’ teeth, and stayed in the home of a man who, like a son, he had sponsored for dental school so he could staff the clinics. They must not have broken bread together with his young family and drank and celebrated and told stories into the night. He could not have then reached out to their pre-teen daughter as she walked by and grabbed her in a way that made her shriek and then cry and others jerk their heads to look, now confused, now shocked, now furious. It was a joke. It was only a joke.
Of course, there was a time when the trips to the mountains of Mexico stopped, but that was because now there was a fishing cabin in Canada. How wholesome that would be for the boys, swimming, driving a motor boat, filleting fish and avoiding bears, playing in the tall pines. It was a different kind of light in Canada, traveling low across the horizon, over the lake and the loons. The air was cool and crisp from the miles of pine trees exhaling so deeply into it all night long. And when those wholesome boys grew up and got married, there was a time when they brought their wives and daughters to enjoy it in the summer.
But there was never a time, especially after their babies were born, when the wives began to wonder, was something a little off with Grandpa? There was never a year in Iowa when Grandma and Grandpa babysat their first granddaughter daily while the younger couple built their new home, when fights erupted almost every night as the son poured stinking spirits down the sinks and broke the bottles as he threw them in the trash. That would not be right. It could not be so. They were not that kind of family.
So on the first birthday of the second granddaughter of the other son, when a fresh bottle of gin was discovered nearly empty, it could not have been by him, the grandfather. He had been home with his granddaughter less than an hour, that bottle was new, and no one could consume that much gin in that little time, but especially not this man because he was a good man and this baby’s grandfather and she had been left alone in his care. And if he had, well, he could handle it after all. And later that night, when that massive hand of his, those vice-like fingers that had worked hard for nearly 40 years, wrapped around his daughter-in-law’s buttock as she walked by while serving birthday cake, why was she upset? It was just a joke. She must’ve known that because she grabbed his hand and pulled it forward, but before he could break her fingers joke about their little wrestling match, she spit “uncle” through her teeth and he let go, smiling, triumphant.
So there never could have been a conversation between that son and his young wife, an outsider to this small-town Iowa family, its upstanding father and its tradition of never saying anything if you can’t say something nice. How could they have spoken of how Grandpa was a drunk, and that if he could do that to a full-grown woman in front of her husband, his son, what was he capable of with his granddaughter someday? But he wasn’t capable of anything because he hadn’t done anything and never had. He was a good man who might have drunk a bit much in the old days but that was long ago, if at all. The gin? Didn’t she drink it? The hand. That was just a joke. The baby? Never. It could never happen. It had never happened. It wasn’t possible. He was a decent man, a Lion, the son of a preacher, a small town dentist, a husband, a father, a grandfather, a member of his choir who had run missions to Mexico.
Still, the son called his mother, though he resented his wife for speaking what is never spoken, for bringing her unseemly accusations into his family, and asked his mother what he never would and didn’t want to. It was because of his wife, he explained, and that he would even utter such a thing, but do you think, Mom, I’m sure it isn’t, but do you think that any of this could possibly be true?
Mom? Are you there?
Yes, it is true, his mother said, the secret tumbling out of her body like an accident. I’m sorry, she whispered, her husband craning from his lounger to hear. In the silence that followed, the innocent memories, the intricate family legends and old jokes, the stories that take a lifetime to build, embellish and polish to a fine sheen for the grandchildren to hear and carry forward, began cascading around them both, collapsing over them, bending their shoulders, breaking their backs, letting so much air and sun in all at once it blinded her son, there on the other end of the telephone line. He winced, his eyes hurting from the bright light. He sat down, breathing hard, his heart aching from the rush of sharp, unfamiliar, painful air. No, he said, but even as he said it, he knew from this moment on there would be no more no, no more never or not or couldn’t be or hadn’t done.
There was only this. There was only truth.