church cooled her sweat and set her to shivering. Once, she had to get up to go to the sacristy bathroom. When she fell asleep, her father elbowed her awake. When communion came, she had to choke down the host. For a terrible moment up by the altar, she feared she’d have a retching spell. She took deliberate steps and deep breaths all the way back to the pew, and she ended up missing a day of school.
That Friday night, after dinner was over and the kitchen was clean and her mother had retired to her room, her father sat her down on the couch.
“If you’re going to be fool enough to do this,” he said, “you can’t go about it half-cocked.”
He went to the liquor cabinet and brought over a couple of tumblers and set them down on the coffee table. Then he went back and returned with a number of small bottles of different types of whiskey.
“What’s this?”
“You’ll be getting a lesson.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“You will,” he said.
“I’ve learned my lesson already.”
“This is a different lesson,” he said. “We’ll start with the good stuff.”
He told her he would take her methodically through everything there was to drink and everything there was to avoid. Then he poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into her glass. What struck her more even than her revulsion at the idea of taking a drink was that her father had come up with a plan, that he’d thought ahead about all this. He seemed to have bought the bottles for the occasion, as if he’d plotted the lesson out like an actual teacher.
She took a small sip; it burned her throat. He told her to take a bigger one. It smelled like charred wood and tasted like ashes. He poured a drink from each bottle and made her drink it in turn. She could tell there was a difference in quality, but only barely. When he got to the fourth, he poured some for himself and told her to drink with him slowly. It went down easily and left no trace except a warmth in her belly that spread out and seemed to heat her body a part at a time.
He put the whiskey bottles away and brought out several small bottles of vodka. She hated every one. He didn’t drink any. He was wearing his reading glasses. There was something scholarly in it. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a master class or a form of house arrest. Then he brought out several varieties of gin. He took the wrapping off each and poured a small amount in her tumbler for her. He had stopped drinking after the whiskey. She wondered if by boring her with a scientific approach he was trying to take away whatever fascination attached itself to alcohol in her mind.
He went to the refrigerator and brought back a bottle of Schaefer.
“Drink this,” he said.
“I don’t like the taste of beer.”
“Drink it down and get it over with.”
He took the cap off and handed it to her. She took a few small sips and tried to push it back toward him.
“Finish it,” he said.
When she’d finished, he told her she wasn’t to be seen drinking any other beer. Then he brought out bottles containing drinks that were fruitier and more colorful than anything she’d imagined him permitting in his house. Cointreau. Crème de menthe. Crème de cassis. Grand Marnier. He made her taste each in turn. She liked the taste of the crème de menthe and he shook his head and poured a full glass.
“Enjoy it, then,” he said.
“I don’t want to drink that much.”
“If you want to stay under this roof, you’ll finish that glass.” He took out another tumbler and filled it. “And this one when you’re finished with that.”
He came in when she was done and poured out another glass.
“What’s going on?” she asked, feeling woozy.
“Drink this.”
She woke in the morning with a headache, grateful it was Saturday.
“You will never again drink anything you can’t see through,” her father said when he saw her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter after taking an aspirin. “You will never pick up a drink again after putting it down and taking your eye off it.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Drink whiskey,” he said. “Good whiskey. Not too much. That’s the long and short of it.”
“I don’t think I’m ever drinking again.”
She thought she saw a trace of a smile cross his lips.
When New Year’s Eve came around, he raised a glass to her, and everyone else gathered did too.
“Here’s to my Eileen for making the honor roll again,” he said to a loud cheer. “God bless her, we’ll all be working for her one day.” He paused. “And let me tell you, there must be something right with her if she can stand after half a dozen zombies. She’s definitely my daughter.”
She’s definitely my daughter. She heard a lifetime of unexpressed affection in the words. She imagined she could go for years on it, like a cactus kept alive by a sprinkling of rain. Still, she was so embarrassed that she decided never to drink anything but whatever the most boring girl in any group she was in was drinking.
From the moment students entered the doors of St. Catherine’s Nursing School, on Bushwick Street in Brooklyn, until the day they graduated, the one bit of knowledge instructors seemed most concerned to impart was that they’d be thrown out for poor performance, but Eileen was used to those tactics after thirteen years of Catholic education, and she knew that even if nursing wasn’t the field she’d have chosen, she’d been training for it without meaning to from an early age. There was nothing these veterans could throw at her that life hadn’t thrown already, and they somehow knew this themselves. There were times she could feel them treating her with something like professional courtesy. She couldn’t help thinking this was what it felt like to be her father, to be praised for something you’d never had any choice about, to wonder if there was a way out of the trap of other people’s regard.
Martyrdom was never her aim, the way it was for some of the halo polishers she went to school with. They might as well have joined the nunnery for all the secret satisfaction she heard in their voices when they complained about the exhaustion and thanklessness of it all. But they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at a nunnery. They lacked the mental fortitude.
She’d never dreamed of being a nurse. It was just what girls from her neighborhood did when they were bright enough to avoid the secretarial pool. She would’ve preferred to be a lawyer or doctor, but she saw these professions as the purview of the privileged. She didn’t know how she’d ever have gotten the money to pursue them. She thought she might have had the brains for them, but she was afraid she lacked the imagination.
After St. Catherine’s she went on scholarship to St. John’s for her bachelor’s, enrolling in
