Empire Falls

junior prom, in need of no more support than the strong arm of some handsome boy. This was the carrot the doctors dangled before her, and Cindy Whiting had followed it bravely, yet again, into the operating room .
    The procedure, the chief surgeon later concluded, was neither a success nor a failure. If that most important of medical injunctions was recollected—first, do no harm—then clearly Cindy Whiting was no worse off. In fact, over time, some slight improvement would surely be noted. That it was not more successful, the surgeon admitted, had less to do with the operation than with the patient, whom he hadn’t expected to be so easily discouraged, nor so stubbornly averse to physical therapy. The staff reported from the start that neither cajoling nor prodding nor badgering had much effect, that nothing could shake her conviction that the procedure had been a complete failure, that her own efforts would therefore prove futile. Cindy preferred lying in bed and watching television and taking painkillers to being tortured in the physical therapy room. When the distressed surgeon tried to encourage the girl by reminding her of how excited she’d been by the prospect of attending her junior prom, she replied that cripples didn’t get invited to dances .
    Cindy Whiting’s adamant refusal to work at her therapy so frustrated the surgeon that he called her mother in for a consultation. Before the operation, he recalled, one of the things the young woman had most looked forward to was her father’s return from Mexico to be at her side, and he was interested to learn why that hadn’t happened. Fathers, he hinted, were sometimes able to motivate daughters in ways that neither mothers nor doctors could imagine. Cindy, he added, seemed particularly devoted to her father, and this just might work in their favor .
    Mrs. Whiting’s response was not at all what he expected. She began by admitting that she herself was partly to blame for not preparing the surgeon for the operation’s inevitable failure, and then assured him that her husband’s presence would only have made a bad situation worse. Her daughter, she explained, had unfortunately inherited her father’s fundamental weakness of character. Alas, he himself was a man too easily encouraged, too completely seduced by hope, only to be devastated by disappointment. He’d been born to privilege, conditioned to expect that things would go well, and pathetically unable to cope once they started to go wrong. Mrs. Whiting had done everything in her power to curb these tendencies in their daughter, but nature, it seemed, had overruled nurture. Like her father, Cindy was subject to vivid dreams, which she invariably surrendered without a fight. She assured the surgeon that, no, there was nothing further to be done, and that he was not to blame himself .
    The surgeon was not a man who required any such warning. Blaming himself would not, in the normal course of events, have occurred to him. Nor, given his clinical training, was he used to regarding physical failure in moral terms, but as he listened to Mrs. Whiting’s dispassionate profiles of her husband and daughter, he found it difficult not to arrive at a moral judgment, though not one he was inclined to share with her, at least not until his services had been paid in full .
    I F COLD AND DISPASSIONATE , Mrs. Whiting’s analysis of her daughter’s character was not, Grace Roby had to admit, far off the mark. Had Cindy Whiting even a small measure of her mother’s willpower, she might, at least physically, have benefited from her most recent operation. As was often the case with children and their parents, this child possessed a trait immediately recognizable in the parent, except that in the child it had become so twisted as to appear completely new. Both women, Grace soon recognized, were equally stubborn, though their stubbornness manifested itself in radically different ways. In Mrs. Whiting willfulness had become a driving force whose relentless purpose was the removal of all obstacles, large and small, whereas in her daughter it took the form of the intractable, doomed obstinacy with which she approached each and every obstacle. To Grace, who’d always been drawn to the heartbreaking plight of the Whiting girl, it was terrible to witness the workings of human nature in the Whiting household and to acknowledge the all-too-certain outcome of the struggle between mother and daughter .
    Grace had never before