White Masculinity in the Recent South

Doctor’s Son

Doctor’s Son edwin t. arnold When I was very small, I sometimes confused my father with Mark Twain. This is not as improbable as it sounds. My father was born in 1910, the year Twain died, and I easily conflated these two events, imagining a transmigration of spirit, I suppose , engendered by Halley’s Comet. I didn’t know that Twain died in April, while my father was born in October, but it wouldn’t have mattered. My father loved Twain, especially the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Connecticut Yankee came next), and he sometimes told us these tales mixed in with his own stories of boyhood in rural East Georgia, “God’s Country,” he called it. He had a book, The Favorite Works of Mark Twain, that he sometimes read, a big cloth volume that I would take down and admire, especially the illustration that graced the spine. It was Huck with a rifle in one hand and a lanky rabbit in the other, smiling at the reader from under his big hat. I have this book on my own shelf today, ripped and worn but still there, a presence and remembrance. Also, my father, like Twain, wore white linen suits, to help ward off the stifling Georgia heat that took such a toll on him. He was a small-town doctor, a general practitioner, and this was his garb for most of the year. In his clinic he would sometimes work in a knee-length lab coat, stethoscope hanging from his neck, but it is the suit I best recall: baggy pants, wrinkled coat, topped off, before the first heart attack, by the habitual cigar. He looked nothing like Twain physically, no bushy white hair or electric eyebrows or luxuriant mustache. My father was always clean-shaven, neat, except during the short time he took up chewing tobacco after he had to quit smoking. My mother quickly put a stop to that, and I imagine he was uncomfortable with it, too, since it involved spitting, “expectorating,” as he called it, which he considered a thoroughly nasty thing to do. He was also something of a prankster, even a clown at times, who loved the outrageous. He told jokes to his patients, made them laugh, and, in turn, created funny stories out of his experiences with them which became a repertoire of amusing anecdotes he repeated time and again. When he wasn’t dressed in white, he favored brightly colored plaid sports coats, the more extravagant the better. He liked to dress up and pose for the camera. He had a favorite pair of pince-nez glasses that he would sometimes wear, peering through them in an attitude of pretend seriousness, and his favorite photograph had him, dressed in white, with these pompously positioned on the end of his nose, a ribbon circling from them around his neck. He stares, unsmiling, his thinning hair standing up from his head in a plumage of static explosion. This picture accompanied a story in the local paper shortly after he was elected to the school board. He was mocking his own reputation in the photo and in the article, which I suspect he wrote himself. “Egad,” the “reporter” observes at one point in the interview, “the old gentleman [he was in his forties at the time] goes on and on and on.” Several years later, when he was sick, word got around town that he had died, and he gave another interview to the paper. This time he explained that he was recovering from his heart attack but that he was indeed back in practice. “The rumors of my death,” he told the paper, channeling Mr. Twain again, “are only half-true.” Truth to tell, I don’t remember this funny father very well. He suffered his first coronary in 1957, when I was ten; the second killed him fourteen years later; and the image I mostly recall is of the man in between. “I wish you could have known him before he got sick,” my mother often said to me when we would talk about him, but from what I gathered he had always had a dark side, an emotional fragility and depressive nature that were exacerbated by the coronary and its aftermath. He had a temper that could eclipse his good humor in quick order. “Confound it!” was his common oath, for he rarely cursed in our presence beyond...