Mary Percy Stone’s father was a prominent obstetrician at the end of the century, when, as is well supported by the Mt. Sinai hospital records, babies were increasingly in vogue on the Upper East Side. After years of the well-to-do eschewing children for more exotic hobbies, pregnancy—the simplest and perhaps most obvious display of bounty—became the fashion statement. Dr. Archibald Stone’s business had been steady in the years leading up to the craze, and, although he admired the fox-trimmed hats and mufflers his neighbors on East Seventy-Second Street wore, their neat pile of La Perla lingerie in plums and aquamarines, their slender figures punctuated by apostrophic bellies, his true interest was in the newborn infants themselves. He took immense personal satisfaction shepherding mother and child through labor and had thousands of delivery room photographs (he always provided his own Nikon), which he kept in thirty-nine pink and blue damask-covered albums in his home office in Murray Hill.
Mary Percy charged ten dollars an hour—for that was a decent wage at the time—to organize and maintain the albums. First, she had to be absolutely sure that the Nikon was charged at all times, as an obstetrician can never be certain when duty will call. To allow for human error, Dr. Stone insisted that the nurses take no fewer than two photographs of physician and babe per delivery, requiring plenty of available memory. Mary Percy made mock-ups of all digital images, one sheet of photographic paper per infant, and placed the prints in a manila folder, which she slipped into her father’s well-worn leather satchel. The sheets were then returned to her, usually that evening or the following, in a red folder, the desired print circled in red wax pencil. In all but the slightest percentage of these photographs, her father, who wore his dark beard and hair clipped very short, smiled maniacally, gray eyes wild, tongue pressed to the gap in his front teeth.
Once Father selected the image, Mary Percy printed an eight-by-ten and affixed it to the scrapbook page using a compound paste Dr. Stone stumbled upon while surfing his favorite Internet sites for amateur historians. The paste, which he insisted on mixing himself, was guaranteed to preserve documents of all kinds from the aging process. Dr. Stone adamantly insisted the children be organized by sex—the boys went into blue albums, the girls went into pink ones—and time and date of birth. Getting the correct birth order proved the most anxiety-provoking part of Mary Percy’s job (although, it must be said, she was quite often vexed by the fashionably androgynous names), for children, like unhappy occurrences, come in groups of threes and are often separated by hours and, at times, mere minutes. Mary Percy often called the records department at Mt. Sinai for the exact times as her father, reliable though he was, could not be accountable for such minute details while participating in the miracle of bringing human life into the world.
The second aspect of Mary Percy’s job, the aspect she much preferred, was not closely monitored. Mary Percy, in the interest of scientific accuracy, created her own database wherein she could look up “Father’s children” as she called them. It was from this database that she kept up with the babies, noted changes of address, preschools, allergies, growth spurts, predilections (if noted in correspondence), and overall well-being. Up to the age of one year, she sent cards every three months, and to the age of five, she sent annual birthday wishes bearing her father’s signature as well as her own. He allowed her to choose the cards herself because she was not a frivolous girl. Instead of shopping for a dozen or more birthday cards a day, she kept five different happy, bright cards featuring cartoon animals in stock at all times. On a given day, she would simply look to see which card she’d sent out for that particular day the year before (penguins or hippopotamus) and choose a different card in stock. On seven occasions, Father’s children died and she sent condolence cards carefully selected on a case-by-case basis.
Over the course of these correspondences, Mary Percy developed a rapport with a few mothers, and they exchanged pleasant, informative letters. Imagine Mrs. Bascomb’s or Mrs. Rosen’s surprise upon bumping into Dr. Stone outside EJ’s Luncheonette or Sarabeth’s and discovering that Mary Percy was in fact his daughter—his wife had died when Mary Percy was but two months old. “But her letters are so…” they’d begin, searching for the right word. Dr. Stone was proud of Mary Percy, and spoke of her as having a scientist’s mind. For financial reasons—he gave his daughter a significant raise the year she graduated from Fordham University with a degree in biology with an emphasis on zoology—Mary Percy continued her work. She even began, on her own, an informal collection of photographs, letters, and mementos and enjoyed comparing the school yearbook photos and snapshots from cotillion with the infant photographs she’d so carefully recorded. Mary Percy most enjoyed the holiday cards she received—she could no longer manage to send all the cards herself, and provided a sketch of what she wanted and a list of eighteen hundred addresses to a reputable agency—in particular, she loved the photographs of good-looking families in red or black turtlenecks (the women usually wore cream silk blouses and pearls) in front of a roaring fire, Father’s children (sometimes there were two or three of them) holding golden retrievers whose fur shimmered in the lights, or Russian blues who’d been caught posing contemptuously for the camera. She asked her father for a pet when she was twelve years old and again when she was twenty-two, but was turned down in accordance with his distaste for the sound of their footfall on the hardwood floor in their apartment.
Dr. Stone died suddenly and somewhat prematurely in the summer of 2000. Mary Percy was nearly thirty years old. She wrote letters announcing her father’s death and the closing of his practice. Thankfully, she was able to print the address labels from a program on her computer. After she finished her final letter, addressed to Roger Zwaska on East Seventy-Seventh Street, she padded around the house for a month in the fur-lined slippers her father had bought for her, drinking Irish coffee and reading National Geographic. She then decided to visit every single museum in New York, after which, she found work as the manager of the Mt. Sinai record room.
Because of her increased salary and the money her father left her, Mary Percy lived comfortably for four years without finding her true calling, but she was neither lonely nor self-consciously discontent. Mary Percy was tall with large shoulders and breasts, and she was perfectly comfortable filling up space the way many tall people aren’t. Men and women alike admired her straightforward self-confidence, her thick brown hair—which she’d worn long her whole life—luminous ivory skin, and strong arms. She bit her nails to the quick, but was otherwise well maintained. She took two lovers during those four years; the first was a sportswriter she met on the subway. He mistook her for a golfer he knew named Simone—at least he said he did—and she fell in love with his cat, Chester, and stayed with him (the sportswriter) for two weeks until baseball season began and he was forced to travel. The second was a male nurse named Tom who remembered her father; he took her up to the nursery to hold the newborns. At first, Mary Percy was frightened of them. She was more accustomed to the business of children, could match ages with average heights and weights, describe the expected course of development for teeth and words, but caring for them was another matter. Each day of their office romance (fifty-six days in all, with intercourse occurring on twelve occasions), Tom would goad her into holding one of the infants. Ten minutes was all Mary Percy could take before she, and, in turn, the child, became agitated.
“Figures,” Tom said very grimly one day on their way down the escalator to the cafeteria.
“How’s that?” she asked. Her cheeks were red. She bit the nail of her ring finger.
“You didn’t have a mother.” He said this as though it were her fault, if not her preference. Mary Percy couldn’t forgive him for the remark, and she cut the romance off shortly thereafter. Not soon enough, however: she was pregnant.
The cruel irony of her situation was not lost on her. The daughter of an obstetrician afraid of raising her own child. Three months went by. Mary Percy was in agony. More than anything, she did not want the baby. But, as one who’d been raised to view birth as nothing less than proof of God’s existence, she couldn’t abort it. She began walking the fifty-odd blocks to and from work. She demanded her employees abolish all paper records; she wanted everything digitized. When this project was done (long overdue), she wrote Tom a short note explaining her condition and her intention to give the child up for adoption. She cannot say, for certain, whether or not she wished to be talked out of her decision, but she received a response in her email in-box the following day: He already had another girlfriend, a florist, and couldn’t raise the child on his own (implicitly suggesting Mary Percy couldn’t raise the child on her own either). He was sure she was doing “the best thing.” That was their final communication.
Mary Percy took a leave of absence from work and had the child at the New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. She thanked the Lord her obstetrician did not take a photograph, that the baby girl came quickly and was carried out of the room in the hands of an older black woman with smooth, filed nails wearing what seemed to be a pink bonnet. She promptly fell asleep due to the heavy drugs she’d been given.
Three days later, Mary Percy was back at work and, for the life of her, couldn’t remember why she’d given the child up. What had she been thinking? What possessed her to give away such an opportunity? To record the growth of her own and to experience, firsthand, the love she’d seen emblazoned on the holiday cards? She bumbled through the next two years, making glaring errors in her record-keeping, forgetting to back up the system properly, losing whole days intended for data entry and upkeep, wondering where her baby went after it was ejected from her womb, until she decided, to put it quite crudely, that she would seek out another chance. For whatever her failings, Mary Percy was a believer in humanity’s ability to reproduce efficiently. She was not without hope.
In the meantime, she busied herself with parenting courses of all varieties to prepare herself for a future baby, and took one of limited popularity that changed her life: How To Balance Your Pitta Dosha Child And Cure Tummy Trouble. Included in the YMCA course description was this brief paragraph:
Children and adults with a pitta dosha are sharp and determined in thought, and work with an element of purpose. They are often enterprising and ambitious. Physically, they tend toward ruddy complexions, minor skin rash and thin and/or prematurely graying hair and much prefer cooler climates. When out of balance, those with too much pitta become irritable and critical, have difficulty sleeping, experience heartburn, digestive discomfort and constantly feel hot and thirsty, even in mild temperatures.
•
As a child, Mary Percy had suffered from all manner of digestive difficulties from heartburn and acid reflux to gas, which none of her father’s medicines had been able to cure. She examined a long silver strand of hair in the bathroom mirror. The radio alarm clock on the sink read four thirty-one in the morning; she’d been hot and restless since three fifteen. She decided she’d sign up for the course and begin, immediately, to dye her hair.
The students in How To Balance Your Pitta Dosha Child And Cure Tummy Trouble were mostly parents at the end of their ropes: exhausted mothers in the throes of breastfeeding, couples with colicky infants, babies prone to upset tummies. The teacher was a frazzled Indian named Dr. Gopal Narayan, a slender man with a fine moustache and wispy black hair he combed across his coffee-colored pate. He was an obstetrician who’d had a practice in Madras and—due to circumstances of fate he wouldn’t go into during his brief introduction—ended up teaching at this particular YMCA. He wore thin brown leather loafers and a papery, laundered white Oxford that shined from the scalding of many pressings. He was nearly always late for class and spoke with a heavy accent that was, at times, difficult to understand. However, he handled the children with confidence. His special gift was burping. With a few firm, well-placed pats (his palms were very long and fine), he was able to relieve the babies of digestive discomfort.
Mary Percy waited for Dr. Narayan one starless, frigid February night. She stomped on the icy pavement outside the YMCA to keep her knees from going stiff. The round of her face— mouth, nose, and eyes—was appled; she had perspired in the heated basement playroom where Dr. Narayan held his class, and the microscopic beads of moisture were freezing on her face, creating bright blotches of color. While sitting on a red toddler-sized building block in the rear of the room behind the mothers holding fine-haired chublets, she had, for a moment, reconsidered her plan. She examined the film of condensation that had formed on the rectangular windows above her at street level and thought it might be too cold. There was no telling how long she would have to wait for him to finish up with the parents of some bowel-afflicted child.
But wait she did. The air suddenly softened. Fine flakes of snow landed on her eyelashes and hat. One snowflake landed on her black down jacket. She concentrated on memorizing its crystalline structure, its perfectly symmetrical fragile legs of ice; she vowed to copy it in her notes as soon as she returned home. It was just at that moment, when a sudden wind knocked it from its precarious perch on her shoulder, that Dr. Narayan, his black gloved hands holding the flapping edges of his shabby peacoat and faded burgundy scarf, burst through the door of the YMCA, which slammed shut, and sneezed into the snow.
She walked with him for several blocks. She remembered the air had no scent but that of cold.
“This weather is terrible for me. You see, I’m inclined towards the sun,” he explained. “It’s a very different dosha than your pitta dosha. My prakruti is vata, which means I live nearly entirely in my mind; my energies go into thought, nervous action, the heat of movement, and I am very prone to illnesses, head colds in particular, when my energy is low. There is nothing I can do to avoid catching a virus.” He sounded increasingly defeated, and yet in Mary Percy, warmth and pity stirred. Her rising emotion went unnoticed in the swelling snowstorm, between his increasingly quick steps and short, frantic pants. “I suppose you’re here to see me about getting pregnant.”
She grabbed his arm at the light on Broadway to stop him from stepping into a wayward cab, driver lulled by gray muffled sky, the drifting snow.
“Pitta doshas frequently have a difficult time with pregnancy, and I venture to say,” he said in his thick accent, “this is medically unsubstantiated in the West, but it has to do with agni. Agni is the flame of consciousness. It allows a person to hear and digest information, and to get rid of the toxins that poison the mind and body—it’s all connected, you see?”
“It is all connected,” she said, finally getting a word in over their noisy, labored breaths.
Now he stopped and looked at her. They were at the subway station at Union Square, at the entrance to the downtown trains.
“I’m sorry, I forgot myself.” He squinted in the wind. “Where are you going?”
In her apartment, Dr. Narayan put his wilted black socks on the floor heater and drank a foamy glass of Irish coffee served in one of her shamrock glasses. Mary Percy showed Dr. Narayan the first of the 139 photo albums she’d made (it happened to be a pink album of girls), and he flipped the pages, guessing aloud the doshas of the babies. Mary Percy filled in details about their development as she remembered them, corroborating his analysis more often than not. He was pleased. She then laid out her plan, which she’d worked on the last eight mornings starting at five thirty before turning to hospital business. The first page in the four-color packet was a photo of Father’s old office on East Seventy-Second Street.
“The current tenant was a protégé of my father’s and has agreed to let us use the office on Fridays, Saturdays, and evenings after seven o’clock,” she said.
“But for what?” Dr. Narayan wiped his mustache.
“Our clinic.”
After two more Irish coffees, they had settled on a name: Ayurvedic Clinic For Gastrointestinal Maladies. Dr. Narayan would treat and diagnose all the patients, and Mary Percy would act as his assistant and office manager. At the end of the evening, Mary Percy suggested that they not limit the practice to infants and children, and thus began, somewhat inadvertently, her career as a medical practitioner: She had a gift for—please forgive the crudeness of expression, but the correct medical terminology would be meaningless to the lay reader—burping adults. However, this gift was not evident at the time, and her intention was to remain in a strictly supporting position.
That night, feeling drunk and much warmed, Dr. Narayan took home the rest of the plan to look over, but was asleep, burgundy scarf still around his neck, moments after he climbed up the stairs of his Park Slope apartment.
Against all reasonable speculation, their medical practice was a success at its inception, due, in large part, to Mary Percy’s single act of lawlessness: The week before she gave notice at Mt. Sinai, she printed a list of all hospital clients who had received treatment for digestive cancers, illnesses, and complaints over the course of the previous four years. As for Dr. Narayan, after wandering from hospital to hospital as a “consultant,” picking up hours at nonprofit clinics and teaching courses in his peculiar specialties, he was most pleased to hang his name on the door—to have his very own office in which to practice. He took the business of medicine very seriously indeed, never failing to proceed cautiously with all treatments and remedies at his grasp, whether they be Eastern or Western in nature, to ease the suffering of his patients. For young children, he carefully and tenderly prescribed feeding schedules, herbs to be mixed with warmed water at bedtime, and, in his European script, listed foods to be avoided at all cost. Infants he closely monitored for signs of grave illness beyond mild allergies typical of the doshas and burped them to their great satisfaction.
Many of his patients posed more challenging problems. It seemed that in spite of strong, reliable evidence in support of healthy, fresh foods and exercise, the population as a whole had turned a deaf ear to the sound nutritional advice available and was in constant need of relief from, what Dr. Narayan called in his singsong accent, “pockets of pressure.” He adeptly adjusted diets and suggested exercises to counteract the excess of pitta and spark the agni-flame, but, in the case of the elderly in particular, there was little recourse; scant were the long-term solutions yet available to those whose who’d ravaged their systems over the years. Mary Percy found herself in the position to care for a steady and always growing pool of regular clients who depended upon her for their weeklies. She purchased a stately black leather rocking chair, a modern piece without armrests, and, in the little room her father had sectioned off with yellow checked curtains and intended for nursing, sat the elderly client upon her lap, dish towel over her shoulder, and confidently patted him or her in upward strokes between pelvis and rib cage (though varying her motion slightly from man to woman, person to person).
On weekday evenings, particularly Wednesdays after the theater and Fridays after a rich meal, the waiting room would be filled with the gray-haired and liver-spotted in pearl chokers and orthopedic shoes, clinging to walkers and the more dapper canes. They’d flip through the photo albums Mary Percy had made of her father and his children, searching, perhaps, for familiar names, or for a favorite gummy-mouthed expression of pleasure or surprise, and wait their turns to see Mary Percy. In short, business thrived.
It goes without saying that Mary Percy and Dr. Narayan eventually married. They had long since become lovers and taken solace in the comfort of the other, and it seemed, though they were not able to have their own child, that theirs was an example of two seemingly disparate lives merging into one.
It was by pure chance that I learned what became of Mary Percy Stone.
Although there had been a witty Talk of the Town written about Dr. and Mrs. Narayan a few years back, I was too busy raising my two boys and running my yoga studio to take notice. However, it was in the very early stage of my wildly unexpected third pregnancy (I didn’t even know I could still get pregnant) that I first saw the advertisement for the Ayurvedic Clinic For Gastrointestinal Maladies. I had been feeling queasy for two straight days; even the thought of peanut butter, my staple, made my stomach churn. There, on one of the overhead displays in my subway car, was a photo of a genial-looking elderly couple against a vivid red and gold display. I programmed their number and address into my calendar and made an appointment for the following Monday in allowance for my mysterious affliction to disappear on its own.
Two days later, my biological mother’s obituary appeared in the Times: Mary Percy Stone-Narayan, 80, Co-Founder of the Ayurvedic Clinic For Gastrointestinal Maladies. There was a photograph of her from twenty-odd years before. She was nearly completely white-haired, even then, but with steady, calm eyes. My husband said he could see me in the shape of her face, her straight Puritan nose and bow mouth, but I was uncertain. I put my index finger over her face to try to pick up a connection.
Early Monday, I dressed slowly. I felt funny about not showing to my appointment since no one had called to cancel, equally strange about arriving in the wake of death. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to feel sad for this woman who’d birthed me but hadn’t loved me. I should have sought her out before. No, she should have found me. No, I was the one who should have been curious enough to reach out. I felt both relieved I’d never face her and guilty-sad for that relief. I also felt nauseous. I went to the clinic, half expecting, half hoping it would be shuttered.
Dr. Narayan, looking frail and rumpled, answered the buzzer himself. His face was very pale and, upon seeing me, said, quite simply, “Your dosha is pitta, like your mother’s.” He had been expecting me—they had been expecting me—for some years, he said, and it was Mary Percy’s deepest regret she never knew what became of me.
As with Mary Percy’s first encounter with Dr. Narayan, he spoke rapidly, allowing me little opportunity to speak. He showed me the photo albums of Father’s children, then, quite insistently, led me to his examining room, told me I was pregnant, and announced in his Madras accent that I would have a difficult pregnancy. Dr. Narayan recommended some herbs and I left, unsure what to make of him, and decided on the spot to visit my regular obstetrician two blocks north. She immediately confirmed my pregnancy, though insisted that the term would be no more difficult than it was with my two boys, even with my advanced age.
A week later, Dr. Narayan arrived on my doorstep with my mother’s lab book—her personal computer filled with a precise account of her life.
As Dr. Narayan predicted, my pregnancy kept me bedridden, and I had ample time to sort through my mother’s meticulous records. Mary Percy must have relied upon the details, the weight and measure and data of life to make the emotional chaos of her childhood comprehensible. I, on the other hand, cannot stand tedium. I teach yoga in order to escape the concrete world and its incessant demands, to find solace from appointments, responsibilities, facts, in controlled movement and mental silence.
But we are not without connection, my birth mother and I. We both, in our own way, found benefit from a knowledge of East Indian philosophy and tradition. We have both used our hands and bodies to help give physical comfort to others. Upon Mary Percy’s death, Dr. Narayan received over a thousand cards, many from her patients and from “Father’s children”—now parents and grandparents scattered around New York and the globe. I’d like to think that, although Mary Percy couldn’t be a mother to me in my infancy, she might have been a mother in my infirmity, as she was tender and gentle to the aging men and women who came to her in need of help. Yes, I have made my peace with Mary Percy Stone, for daughters without mothers must constantly explain and justify our existence—we are life’s paradox, life’s mistake even, for we are truly something out of nothing.
On the day my daughter was born, Dr. Narayan came to visit me at Mt. Sinai. He promptly announced that Shelly Percy, unlike her grandmother and mother, had a vata prakruti, and would have a quick and creative mind—she would be far more prone to wandering than her female ancestors. I didn’t have a chance to discuss which specific tendencies and idiosyncrasies I should be on the lookout for, as two weeks later, Dr. Narayan himself passed away of an arrested heart, leaving me the volumes of my grandfather’s children, thousands of infants, their lives recorded the instant following their first shocking, wonderful, miraculous encounter with the world.
– East Seventy-Second Street, May 2047
Valerie Kinsey lives in the Bay Area with her husband and children. She teaches writing at Stanford University.