Read Things Unsaid: A Novel for Free Online Page B

“picture of Dorian Gray.” The white wimples the nuns wore—like chin straps, bandaging the entire border of their faces—were so tight they left deep creases that cut into their skin, red and raw. And when they uncinched the wimple, my God … their faces collapsed! Frightening. Instead of forty-five, they looked seventy-five. The wimple was like a religious form of facelift. Still, he never passed the obligation on to another doctor. Bob knew his obligations. He supposed he did care about the discount on his daughters’ tuition, too. December, though—flu season—that was the worst month.
    In those days he only had Sunday afternoons off, after his hospital and convent rounds, all in pursuit of greater wealth. How he had liked to take his Cadillac out for a spin. The car was his consolation prize.Even when enjoying boomtown status as the “rubber capital” of the world, Akron was no joy ride.
    Bob wasn’t sure his wife and kids really liked going to Lake Tamsin, a gigantic mud hole that smelled a little bit like their toilet. The summer before, one of the Kofer boys had drowned there after diving off the platform and hitting his head. The lifeguards couldn’t find him in all the sludge and muck. He must still be down there somewhere. The ghost of Kris Kofer—the son of one of those colored families who wanted to be there, too. They should swim elsewhere. No one gets what he wants.
    So many southerners and West Virginians had migrated to the tire companies for employment. He knew how they thought: the majority of his patients, just normal people like everyone else he knew. Just because Akron had the largest chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Summit County and had the Wooster Avenue Riots of 1968 didn’t mean there was no place for the coloreds. Colored people were making too many demands in those days, and his daughter Jules was so upset with his opinions.
    “Daddy”—he couldn’t figure out why that word coming from his daughter seemed hollow, without any affection, sort of tinny to his ear—“have you been reading what’s happening in the South?”
    His wife smoothed out the bedspread to lay out their picnic.
    He thought he sounded like a Sunday school preacher. “There’s nothing but that goddamn Martin Luther King in the headlines.” The beer bottle sloshed and dribbled near his knee. “Who does he think he is? Nothing’s going to change! He’s going to be killed. Mark my word.” He could count on holding Jules’s interest. She was the only one of his three kids to read the newspaper,
Time
magazine, anything with print on it about college students who were marching and protesting in the streets. Jules was intellectual, something of a bluestocking. Too bad it wasn’t his son who had the intellectual smarts. Wasted on a girl.
    “I just read that police are using tear gas and dogs. Fire hoses powerful enough to knock the protesters down. But they just stand there and take it until they get hurt. That can’t be fair, can it?” Jules asked.
    “Nah … Billy clubs and guns, now
that
would hurt.”
    Jules looked worried as he leaned back in his chair, pleased withhimself. “You’re kidding … aren’t you? There are photos of people knocked off their feet by the force of those hoses.”
    “What do you expect, huh? It’s water, for God’s sake.” His voice rose. “How can water hurt?”
    No one said anything. His wife moved just a bit closer to him to respond. What could she possibly have to say about important matters?
    “But the colored are God’s children, too. And don’t say anything but ‘colored’ or ‘Negro.’ It’s too low class,” Aida said, turning towards their kids. He thought that was an affectation. He knew she was more concerned about class than mean-spiritedness.
    Confused, stumbling into a response, his older daughter seemed as if it took all her effort to talk back to him. The confidence of a high school freshman—stammering, blushing, fidgeting—was ridiculous.