Authors: Kim van Alkemade
“Of course I do, I’m not senile. It’s just that damn morphine, I can’t think straight, he prescribes so much.” Dr. Solomon closed her eyes. She seemed to be looking for something. Was she finally remembering me?
“Put me on the map, that study. No one had used X-rays on tonsils before.” She looked at me eagerly. “I met Marie Curie because of it, when she toured New York. Did you know that? Shook her hand, that very hand whose burns gave her the idea radium could be used in medicine. She congratulated me. Me! Thanked me, too, for my small donation to her radium fund. It was infuriating that the woman who discovered radium couldn’t afford any for her own research.” She stared at the ceiling, her suffering pushed back by the pleasure of remembering.
“I almost didn’t get that residency at the Infant Home. Sure,
they were starting to let women into medical schools, just enough of us to close down places like the Female Physicians College, but we weren’t exactly wanted, I can tell you that. Made me live in the dean’s house, where his wife could keep an eye on me. It was that, or room with the nursing students.” She spoke fast now, as if the words were outrunning the pain. “The Hebrew Infant Home had one of the best X-ray rooms in the city, all the radiologists wanted that residency. Dr. Hess only ranked me second because the dean’s wife made her husband put pressure on him. She championed me in her own stupid way, thought second place would satisfy my vanity, but why would I want second place when I deserved first? Then the idiot who’d been ranked ahead of me dropped a vial of radium. Can you believe the incompetence? We were in the laboratory at the medical college, passing it around—tiny thing, a tenth of a gram, but still worth thousands—until he bobbled it and let it fall into the sink. I remember his stupid face as he watched it disappear down the drain. Had to get a plumber in to melt the lead joints in the pipes to recover it. Once Dr. Hess heard about that, he nixed the idiot’s application. Well, everyone else had already accepted their residencies. My only prospect was a position in an outdated X-ray clinic in the middle of nowhere—Nebraska, I think it was, or maybe Wyoming—which I was putting off as long as I could. I was the best in my class, I should have had my choice of residencies. That’s what it was like for me, killing myself to be first just so I’d be in a position to capitalize on the stupidity of others.”
I was surprised how long she spoke; she must not have had an attentive audience for quite a while. I was confused, though, by her story. Was she angling for my sympathy? I knew what it was like
to be excluded, kept at the margins, denied recognition everyone else enjoyed, no matter how undeserving. But I wasn’t like her, I reminded myself. She’d exploited me when she should have cared for me. What difference did it make that she had to struggle? Over us, she’d had all the power, and I knew now how she’d used it.
A twinge of pain tugged at Mildred Solomon’s mouth. “Why do you want to know about my tonsil study?”
“Because,” I said, watching for her reaction, “I was your material.”
Dr. Solomon blinked, confused. She stared at me, as if trying to focus on print too small to read. “You were one of my subjects?”
I nodded, imagining for a moment that Dr. Solomon recognized me: her brave, good girl. She lifted her hand to my face. I tilted my head toward her curved palm. I hadn’t realized how much I craved this tender gesture until it was happening. It hadn’t been her fault after all. She’d wanted to be kind to us, treat us like her own children, but she had to prove herself. The world was so unfair, she wasn’t allowed to show affection. Not then. Not until now. I rested my cheek in her hand.
But no, it wasn’t a caress. Dr. Solomon bent my head back to expose the underside of my chin. Her thumbnail circled the scars there, tracing the dimes of shiny skin. Then she placed her fingers against my drawn eyebrows and wiped away the pencil. Finally, she reached up to my hairline and pushed along the brow. My wig shifted. She pulled her hand back in surprise. It wasn’t tenderness I saw in her face, not even regret. Fear, maybe? No, not even that.
“So the alopecia was never resolved? I was curious about that, always meant to follow up. What number were you?”
I adjusted my wig. “Eight,” I said. I expected it to happen any second now—Dr. Solomon would ask to be forgiven. For everything
she had done to me, for the repercussions of a lifetime, Mildred Solomon was about to atone. My eyes were on the old woman’s face, greedy for the words I wanted to hear.
Dr. Solomon squinted, as if seeing into the past. “Number Eight. I do remember you.” She closed her eyes, the lids stretched tight. “You were such a clingy little thing.”
The words stung like a slap. She collapsed back against the pillows, her breath fast and shallow. The pain was getting worse, I could see. Good, I thought. The bitch deserved it.
I thought she’d lost her train of thought until she said, “How is it my fault, exactly, your tumor?”
“Because of the X-rays you gave me. All those X-rays, for no good reason.” I wanted to spit the words out, sharp as nails, but I sounded like a bleating lamb.
“I had my reasons. Good ones, too. Didn’t you read my article?”
“Yes, I did. I read how you thought you were saving us from surgery. But you used us, you used me. We didn’t even have tonsillitis. We were perfectly healthy. Maybe you did have your reasons, but aren’t you at least sorry for how it turned out, those X-ray experiments? For what they did to us, to me? First my hair, and now this.” I clutched my breast. “What’s going to be left of me after this?”
“It’s too bad for you, Number Eight, sure, but if researchers gave up their experiments because they were worried about the consequences, we’d still be dying of smallpox.”
“Why are you calling me Number Eight? My name is Rachel, Rachel Rabinowitz. You never even knew that, did you?”
Over a grimace of pain, Dr. Solomon’s face flushed with anger. “Dr. Hess told me never to use your names. Just numbers, he said,
they’re just numbers. How else can a researcher maintain objectivity, especially working with children? You don’t think it was hard to keep my composure, with those damn nurses bursting into tears every time I turned around? It was all I could do to get them to respect me. They were always questioning my methods, as if we were equals.” She snorted derisively. “Nurses. I’d like to see them dissect a corpse.”
She was panting, almost hyperventilating—soon she’d begin to tremor from withdrawal. I picked up the syringe, eager now to shut her up. I eased the needle into the IV, depressing the plunger until her breath, still shallow, steadied. I didn’t want to speak to her again, not today. Still, I withdrew the syringe at just half the prescribed dose, squirted the remainder into the vial in my pocket. She’d be in pain again soon, but so what? It would be gratifying, at four o’clock rounds, to see Mildred Solomon suffering. I’d give her a full dose then, leave her quiet for the night nurse.
Gloria noted the empty bowl of broth, the empty syringe of morphine. “Good job, Rachel. You see why I wanted you on shift with me. Go ahead and take your lunch break.”
On my way to the staff cafeteria, I realized what luck it was I’d switched with Flo. There was only one other nurse on the night shift, and no supervisor. Tomorrow night, I’d have Dr. Solomon to myself. She would be the one at my mercy.
T
HE DAY AFTER
S
AM RAN AWAY
, R
ACHEL COULDN’T GET
herself out of bed at Rising Bell. Naomi came to jostle her just as Breakfast Bell rang. “You better get up now, and hurry. The other monitor will give the whole dorm standing lessons if you make us late.”
Rachel sat up, her knees, neck, and back aching. Tears spilled over as she whispered, “I just can’t do it.”
“All right then.” Naomi hustled off, then quickly returned. “I sent the rest of them down, I’m taking you to the Infirmary.”
Gladys Dreyer didn’t seem surprised to see Rachel back so soon. “Delayed reaction most likely. You had a very upsetting experience. I’ll keep you here for a couple of days so you can rest up. We’ll say its mononucleosis if anyone asks.” Grateful, Rachel fell into the bed Nurse Dreyer offered. Naomi dashed out and soon ran back in with a book from the library. “I thought this was one you’d like,” she panted, holding out a volume about Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. Rachel had read it before but accepted gratefully, knowing Naomi had made herself late for school on her account. She expected it would be Naomi’s last kindness, now that Sam and his bribes were gone.
It was a luxury unheard of in the Orphaned Hebrews Home: an entire day spent reading in bed. Nurse Dreyer even brought lunch on a tray. It occurred to Rachel this was how children with families lived. Children with quiet bedrooms in apartments where time was told by the soft ticking of a clock instead of the screech of bells. Children with fathers who came home from work to ask what they had learned in school that day. Children whose mothers kept them home when they were feeling too fragile to face the world.
After school, Naomi was back, this time with Rachel’s homework. “Your teacher says to get better quick, and so do I.” Naomi squeezed Rachel’s hand before hurrying off. Rachel looked at the notebook and math text on her lap, pleased but puzzled by Naomi’s continuing attentions.
The doctor from Mount Sinai who attended the orphanage noted Rachel’s fatigue but doubted it was mononucleosis because she had no sore throat or fever. Gladys Dreyer persuaded him. “She could be infectious, even without those symptoms,” she argued. “She’ll only be allowed to stay with your diagnosis. I wanted to give her a few days, after what she’s been through. . . . ” She took the doctor aside and spoke with him in a voice too quiet for Rachel to hear. He listened, nodded, cleared his throat.
“Better to keep her away from the other children, just in case,” he concurred.
So Rachel spent the week lazing in bed, reading the books and doing the homework Naomi brought her and getting used to the idea that Sam was gone for good. With Marc Grossman sent upstate, it was mostly Sam’s abandonment that weighed her down. She wondered if the idea of his running away depressed her more
than the fact of his absence. Other than Sunday afternoons in Reception, she’d spent so little time with her brother over the past nine years. They were in separate dorms and different grades, never in the same clubs after school or the same table for meals, on opposite sides of the lake during summer camp. Her life in the Home would hardly be changed without Sam there. She’d no longer look for him across the dining hall or in the yard, was all; no longer search him out when the baseball team was playing; no longer try to catch his eye as they passed each other, silently, in the wide corridors of the Castle.
“When are you coming back to the dorm, Rachel?” Naomi asked on Friday when she dropped off Rachel’s homework. “It’s no fun there without you.”
Rachel smiled, daring to believe Naomi might have been a true friend this whole time. “Nurse Dreyer thinks I’ve rested up long enough, she says I should go back on Sunday.”
“Good! Then you won’t miss the brisket.” Naomi settled herself on the edge of Rachel’s narrow bed. “You ever wondered why Sunday dinner is the best meal of the week? I mean, it really ought to be Friday night if you think about it, right? But it’s Sunday because that’s when the board of trustees has their meeting. You know, those men in suits who look in on us while we eat? They like to see where their money’s going.” Naomi left with a wink that made Rachel smile for the first time since the Purim Dance.
Saturday night, though, one of the boys in the Infirmary who’d been running a fever had a crisis. Rachel woke from an unnerving dream to find Gladys Dreyer examining the boy with a panicked expression. “Can you lift your leg for me, Benny? Just lift it up.
No? Then how about your foot, can you move your foot? Are you really trying?” The boy’s fevered face scrunched with effort, but the leg remained inanimate.
Gladys went to her desk and dialed the in-house extension for the superintendent’s apartment. “Mr. Grossman, we’ll need the doctor from Mount Sinai here first thing in the morning.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, as if the louder she spoke the word the more likely it was to be true. “I think it’s polio. Yes, of course, isolation procedures immediately.”
On her way back to attend to the boy, Gladys saw Rachel sitting up in bed, taking advantage of the uncharacteristic light to read her book. “I’m afraid you might be with us for a while longer, Rachel. I’ll confide in you because I know I can count on you not to frighten the younger ones. We may be dealing with a case of polio. We’re going into isolation—no one in or out of the Infirmary until we can be sure none of us is contagious.”
When the doctor examined Benny the next day, he wasn’t as convinced as Nurse Dreyer had been. There was too much hysteria over polio, he thought, and most of the cases he saw were in infants. Still, he ordered that the boy be moved to the Infirmary’s private room while he sent a sample to the Rockefeller Institute for analysis. He agreed that isolation procedures should be followed until the results came back. At their meeting that afternoon, the trustees were informed of the situation by Mr. Grossman, who assured them isolation would be complete: doors at either end of the Infirmary hallway were locked to prevent errant contact, and a dumb waiter would be used to deliver food and supplies. The abundance of caution let the trustees go home to their own families, congratulating themselves once again that the Orphaned Hebrews
Home was the best child care institution in the country—if not the world.
Benny’s fever broke, though his leg remained terribly weak. Results came back positive for poliomyelitis, which meant the Infirmary stayed in isolation for the full six weeks—the rest of March, all of April, and into May. And so Rachel was trapped, along with a despondent Gladys Dreyer and the dozen children who happened to be in the Infirmary at the time.
A few of them were in serious condition: a girl in danger of developing pneumonia, a boy with bronchitis, a stitched knee that risked infection, a broken arm requiring elevation. Most, however, soon recovered from the sprains, cuts, scrapes, coughs, aches, and bumps that had sent them to the Infirmary in the first place. Rachel was the oldest and she wasn’t even sick, so Nurse Dreyer enlisted her as a nurse’s aide. She taught Rachel how to clean the pus from infected stitches, how to prepare a mustard plaster for bronchitis, how to check for fever and take a pulse.