But for the three weeks and six days between visits, George deeply loved and admired his father. He was proud that Allan worked in a free dental clinic twice a month, and that he braced up (as George thought the verb should be) poor adults and kids in his office for free. There were scrapbooks in the waiting room filled with pictures of before (buckteeth) and after (the ultimate dental ideal), as well as letters of appreciation from patients, praising Allan for his concern, skill, and pleasing manner. Dopey Annette Silverberg, who went to dancing class with George, once told him during a waltz that his father was “jovial.” Jovial! How could you be considered jovial when you were inflicting pain on someone?
The biggest lesson he learned from his childhood was this: that he wanted to grow up to be exactly like Allan, except that he knew that he would never, under any circumstances, become an orthodontist. In his junior year of college George had had a passing thought that maybe he’d become a gerontologist, but the thought of Allan and Elaine being old enough to possibly need his services made him sick to his stomach.
It had perhaps been a mistake to later share these thoughts with Lizzie, who was given to an abiding interest about George’s childhood, so different from her own. Although she was also devoted to Allan (she couldn’t imagine a better father-in-law, or father, if it came to that), she wanted George to think deeply about his relationship to his dad. She pointed out that his older brother, Todd, having presumably suffered similarly at his father’s hands, was a surfer bum, with no connection to teeth at all.
“But of course,” Lizzie told George, “you never ever see a surfer with bad teeth. Maybe we should move to Sydney, too, and you could become the dentist who specializes in kids who want to be surfers.”
George was not particularly introspective and only occasionally wondered why, given what he’d felt about his father and pain, he had decided to go into anything relating to teeth at all and had not studied engineering or agronomy or really anything else. What he thought about a lot, though, during the long years of his greatest successes, was whether those months and months of getting his braces tightened had been the source of his slowly developing belief that perhaps pain could be rendered mute and weaponless.
“But, George, don’t you think it’s a bit weird that you, someone who denies the existence of pain, became a dentist? I bet you inflict as much pain or more on your patients than your dad did. I bet Freud would say that what you were really doing, what you needed to do to grow up, was to deny pain and Allan’s power over you.”
“First of all,” George answered patiently, “I don’t deny the existence of pain. What I think I’m denying is that pain, or at least suffering, is ever really necessary. And I’m certainly not causing the pain. People come to me when they’re in pain. Great pain, sometimes. My job is to make the pain go away by fixing what’s wrong. Which I do. And thirdly, I’m not denying my dad’s influence on me. He’s—he was—a terrific father. You know that. If I could be even half as good a father to my own kids, I’d be thrilled. I just didn’t want to be responsible for that fucking monthly tightening-of-braces routine for any other kid in the world.”
“Well, why’d you go to your dad for braces? I know I read somewhere that doctors shouldn’t treat their own families.”
“He was the best in Tulsa,” George said simply, and not without pride. “Everyone knew that. All my friends went to him, whether they were Jewish or not. For those who were, it was like a rite of passage. Hebrew school. Learning your haftorah portion. Braces from Dr. Goldrosen.”
Lizzie was far from convinced that George’s career had been a purely free choice and not some working out of an ancient father–son curse, but that particular day she let the matter drop, though she continued to ponder it all.
The second downside was Todd. He was only twenty-one months older than George, but because Todd skipped the sixth grade, they were three grades apart. In some ways this was a relief to George, because each year there was then the chance that Todd’s teachers would have transferred to a different school, moved out of state, or retired, and the people hired in their place would be unaware of Todd’s unnerving combination of superior intelligence and scorn for the human race and its ridiculous conventions. But more often than not, what happened on the first day of classes in September was that the teacher, taking attendance, would say, “George Goldrosen.” Pause. Sigh. “Any relation to Todd Goldrosen?” And when George acknowledged that, yes, indeed, he was Todd’s younger brother, the teacher would look at him for a long time, assessing what he saw, before finally going on to the next name. George guessed that the teacher was hoping that he was as smart as his older brother but that he lacked Todd’s interest in defying authority. Actually, both of these were true.
There wasn’t a physical resemblance between the brothers. Todd inherited a mixture of all of Allan’s and Elaine’s most attractive physical qualities and out of that olio of genes he became himself. He had dark eyes, skin that tanned easily and evenly, thick black hair, and eyelashes to die for (this was according to their Stillwater grandmother; their Montreal grandmother wasn’t interested in such trivialities). His eyes were dark brown, he had no need of glasses, and he possessed a killer smile both before and after orthodontia. In short, he looked like Adonis. George knew this last fact about Todd because one of Todd’s many girlfriends had told him so, and he knew which girlfriend it was because George happened to regularly read Todd’s journal, which included intimate details about his girlfriends and who said what and what was done, and Todd had no trouble with including all the graphic details. George would often feel that he needed to wash his hands after putting the journal back in the top drawer of Todd’s desk, but he never felt so dirty that he stopped sneaking into Todd’s room whenever Todd was out on a date, and reading it.
George, on the other hand, resembled nobody else in the family. He was much fairer skinned, with red hair that curled up into short, tight ringlets on his head and that, sadly, began receding when George was in his early twenties, just when he and Lizzie became a couple. The sun was his enemy; during those impossibly hot Oklahoma summers of his childhood he couldn’t stay outside nearly as long as Todd did. He’d have to huddle under a towel when he came out of the pool at the Jewish Center.