Chagrin Falls is about the prettiest little town you’ll ever visit. There’s a village green where children fly kites and a bandstand where a brass band plays John Phillip Souza every Fourth of July. Surrounding it are stately homes and cozy little shops, the kind with little bells that jingle when you open the door. And at the heart of it all is the falls, the sound of which has a tranquilizing effect on the people walking their dogs and sitting on benches and even on the happy mailman who gives you a little wave when he passes you on the sidewalk. (These are the same falls into which my father, then an eight-year old tormented by guilt, tossed a long overdue library book. But that’s another story.) Behind all that charm though lurks evil in its purest form. Dr. Lambert, family dentist.
No one likes a trip to the dentist, least of all a child, but the annual check up with Dr. Lambert, which took place in October, would begin to weigh upon me in earlyAugust. It would start with a mild queasiness subtly insinuating itself into my summer idyll. (“What’s bothering you?” I might ask myself as I prepared to do a cannonball off the diving rock at Lake George. “Oh yeah, Dr. Lambert.”) At one month out the escape attempts were under way—“My teeth are fine, Mom, I’ve been brushing four times a day!” When that didn’t work I began to consider running away from home. I would hop a train, sleep under bridges, live the life of a hobo. A hobo with cavities, but then life is full of trade-offs. By late September desperation had turned to despair. I can never remember the final week, it’s just a blur of nausea and terror.
It’s a lovely ride out to Chagrin Falls, forty-five minutes that starts with modest homes with tidy yards and ends with horse farms and large colonials surrounded by white picket fences. For me though it was an endless walk down the hall to the electric chair. Death was coming, and not a quick, merciful death, but one involving untold hours of writhing pain. Okay, maybe it was more like forty minutes of writhing pain, but it sure felt like hours.
First came the climbing of the stairs (Dr. Lambert’s office was just above one of those cozy little shops), then came the walk down the dark corridor, past doors with pebbled glass windows on which were written the names of lawyers and accountants in neat gold leaf. The last of these said “Dr. Richard A. Lambert, D.D.S.” It might as well have said Dr. Mengele. Mom would press the button and I would hear the sound of a buzzer somewhere deep within. Then came the answering buzz of the door unlocking, loud and startlingly harsh. There were no quaint little bells on this floor. We were in the reception room. It wouldn’t be long now. The only bright spot in this gloomy cell was the stack of “Highlights” on the side table. Under different circumstances I might have enjoyed leafing through its pages, playing games and solving puzzles, like the ones where you look at two seemingly identical pictures and try to figure out how the one on the right differs from the one on the left (the dog collar is black in this one and white in the other; the guy has five fingers here and only four there). But in this context I could barely focus on the magazines (to this day, when I see an issue of “Highlights” I am overcome by a feeling of dread).
At the appointed hour (Dr. Lambert was nothing if not punctual) the little window would slide open and the receptionist would say they were ready for me. If I was going to lose it this would be the time to do it: screaming, crying, clinging to my mother, all dignity out the window, like the condemned man who walks to the gallows with his head held high only to drop a load in his pants when the hood is pulled over his head. (I know what you’re thinking: nobody likes going to the dentist, suck it up kid. But wait, you’ll see.) I was pretty much catatonic by the time they dropped me into the chair, two hard black slabs embraced by octopus arms with belts and pulleys leading to various instruments of torture. And then there was the spotlight, which brought to mind a police interrogation room. In the next room was the faint, high-pitched buzz of someone being drilled.
But for one exception, the hygenists were always young and perky. They did their best to make me feel relaxed as they stuffed the gag-inducing X-ray film into my mouth and tried to line it up with the point of that white cone. Trouble was I felt like I was choking and usually spat it out somewhere between “Okay, bite down,” and the click of the button. So the process took twice as long as it was supposed to, which was, perhaps, my not-so-unconscious way of forestalling the horrors ahead.
The cleaning itself wasn’t so bad. I actually liked the taste of the red, cinnamon-flavored Lavoris they sprayed into your mouth and enjoyed watching it disappear into the whirlpool of water when I spat it into the sink. Once they applied the polish, which didn’t taste so bad either, my ordeal was almost over. The bad news was that meant the appearance of Dr. Lambert was imminent.
Dr. Lambert didn’t so much arrive as materialize. One minute it’s just you and the hygenist, the next, there he is beside you, metal probe in hand, staring down at you through steel-rimmed glasses. When I say staring at you, I don’t mean at your eyes; Dr. Lambert had eyes only for your teeth, cold, pitiless eyes that were as colorless as his sallow skin. In fact, the only color in Dr. Lambert’s pallet of whites and grays came from his neatly coiffed chestnut hair. He had to be at least sixty yet there wasn’t a gray hair on his head. Every lock was neatly in place though there was no evidence of product there; I think the guy just woke up looking that way. That is, if he slept at all. (He didn’t seem the type to me. I picture him sitting upright in a hard-backed chair, eyes shut tight, until exactly 4:00am, when they would snap open, suddenly alert.) But it wasn’t the hair on his head I found most disturbing, it was the abundant hair in his nostrils. You couldn’t miss those nostrils, whose sinister stare seemed to follow you while the rest of him went about its probing.
There was no small talk during the examination, no “How’s school, Paul?”—Dr. Lambert was incapable of doing anything that might put you at ease. He was even harder on his employees. When he did speak, in that nasely, barely audible whisper of his, it was to give a running critique of the hygenist’s work. “Plaque still apparent on L-9…Also, below the gum line on L-4…Apparently you skipped seven and eight altogether.” There was never any response from the poor woman—she knew better than that—just an audible quickening of her breath, the first signs of hyperventilation. When the examination was over the final verdict was never good. One time I heard him say, “Did you actually attend dental school, Miss Flynn?” Her response was to run out of the room in tears.
Dr. Lambert went through hygenists the way other dentists go through paper bibs. You never had the same one twice. Except for The White Witch. I think he hung on to her till the day she died, maybe even longer.
The White Witch was ancient, old enough to be Dr. Lambert’s mother (could it be?). Her hair was pure white and, except for the shadowy crevices of her wrinkles, her skin had the same pale, waxy quality that Dr. Lambert’s had. Apparently he liked her work because I never heard a critical word from him during those follow up examinations. Obviously he didn’t grade on bedside manner though because to say she had none was a gross understatement. She wasn’t the “there, there” type; if you were crying or squirming she’d say “Be quiet!” or “Keep still!” One day she responded to my wailing with a loud slap across my face, a slap so hard everyone in the office heard it. My mother certainly did because she was on her feet and through that door in five seconds. She was about to do to The White Witch what The White Witch had done to me when Dr. Lambert stepped in to calm things down. Of course, as far as doctor and hygenist were concerned it was my mother who needed calming down. The White Witch was as composed as ever, in fact she seemed genuinely puzzled by my mother’s reaction. She had whacked me the way one might whack a television set with bad reception: I was making noise, she stopped the noise, end of story. She looked like she might give my mother a whack too if Dr. Lambert hadn’t given her a slight flare of his hairy nostrils (the two obviously had their own special language). If Dr. Lambert thought The White Witch had crossed a line he certainly didn’t show it. I guess the old bird was a woman after his own black heart because the next time I visited she was still there (Dr. Lambert wisely assigned one of his less competent, though more kid-friendly, assistants to me).
My most memorable visit with Dr. Lambert was my last, when I was twelve and needed to have a cavity filled. He had discovered it the week before when, pausing over an X-ray (while I held my breath), I heard him—almost inaudibly—say “What have we here?” My heart rate rose immediately. If there was one thing worse than The White Witch it was Dr. Lambert’s drill. They had a special room for that. No windows, no view of the village green, nothing to distract you from the pain. The torture began the moment they led you to the room and sat you in the chair. There you were left for a good long time, long enough to inspect every piece of ghoulish equipment and speculate on its sinister purpose. The drills were obvious; they hung there like a nest of boa constrictors waiting to squeeze the life out of you. But what were the ominous looking instruments laid out so neatly on a tray? In good time, Paul, in good time.
As always, Dr. Lambert arrived silently, his presence announced by the light pressure of a hand upon my shoulder. “Good morning, Paul.” He always used his kindly voice just before the big needle came out. Only this time, to my great relief, there was no big needle. “You’re a big boy now,” he said, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. “Big boys don’t need novocane.”
No more visits to Dr. Lambert after that. I refused to go anywhere near Chagrin Falls. Unless my parents wanted my teeth to fall out they were going to have to find me a new dentist.
Dr. “Don’t-call–me-doctor-call-me-Don” Vernar was the anti-Lambert. Not surprising considering my parents found him at the Unitarian Church. Where Dr. Lambert was lean and had that disturbingly high-pitched voice, Don Vernar was plump with a rich baritone, sort of a bald, goateed teddy bear who wore black turtlenecks and a peace medallion. Dr. Lambert’s office had been institutional pea green but Don’s was all day-glo reds, yellows and oranges, its walls lousy with Kahil Gibran quotes and the obligatory “War is not healthy for children and other living things” poster. There were crocheted pillows and bean bag chairs everywhere and the Beatles and Peter, Paul and Mary were piped through unseen speakers. If Dr. Lambert was all about pain and sacrifice, Don Vernar was all “Why suffer, man? You want novocane, you got it. You want hypnosis? Got that too.” That you were there to get your teeth done seemed almost an afterthought. Don’s office was a place you could hang out and be mellow and if having someone probe your teeth made you uptight, don’t sweat it man, we’ll put it off till next time.
And it worked, I was mellow. Well, as mellow as one can be at a dentist’s office. My parents were mellow too, at least until the bills arrived. Don Vernar was expensive, about twice as much per a visit as Dr. Lambert. More than that, because Don spent all that time getting me to relax—“How’s it going, man? You diggin school? ‘How did I get into hypnosis?’ Long story…”—it took four times as many appointments to accomplish what the ruthlessly efficient Dr. Lambert did in one.
So after six months they tried to switch me back to Dr. Lambert. (It was disappointing to discover that my parents could so easily put a price on my peace of mind—and lowball it at that—but then what is youth but a long series of disappointments in one’s parents?) They backed off after I started hyperventilating.
It was not until years after Dr. Lambert died that I could bring myself to set foot in Chagrin Falls. When I heard the news it was all I could do to keep from dancing like the munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz.” I pictured his grave in some cemetary on the edge of town, the White Witch lying there in the plot beside his, their gothic headstones festooned with fanged gargoyles sporting retainers and night guards. The town itself hadn’t changed much, if anything it was even more charming. Still, I sensed Dr. Lambert’s evil presence there, a presence that grew stronger when I passed the little card shop that occupied the space below his old office. It was clear to me that Dr. Lambert’s evil spirit was too strong to be contained within his little plot, indeed too strong to be contained within the boundaries that seperated the here from the hereafter. He was here, no doubt about it, floating through the little florist shop and the antique store, staking out the butcher’s and the toy store (especially the toy store), gliding in and out of doorways, past the little bells that chimed when people (at least the living ones) entered and exited. Dr. Lambert floated up and down the aisles, enveloping unsuspecting shoppers in his ethereal evil, watching their faces darken and their smiles disappear.
I’m sure he sensed me too—especially me, one of his favorite victims. After all, Dr. Lambert and I had a special relationship. I got back to the car as quickly as my feet would carry me.