Authors: Kim van Alkemade
Finally, the gears whirred to life. The arrow above the elevator swept past numbers until its tip pointed to five. I pulled open the metal gate as the orderly lifted the door. It was Ken, the young
veteran with the mechanical arm, a shiny hook where his hand had once been. I stepped into the elevator to help him maneuver the gurney.
“It’s okay, Nurse Rabinowitz, I’ve got it.” He grasped the rail of the gurney, his hook a pivot, and swung it around and into the hallway. “There you go.”
“Thank you, Ken. And who do we have here?” The woman on the gurney looked ancient: gray hair lank and oily, face sinking away from her beak of a nose, the skin of her thin arms crinkled like wax paper. I leaned over to read the name on her chart. Mildred Solomon. I straightened up too fast and jostled the IV line going from her withered arm to the glass bottle hanging above the gurney. She moaned.
“I’m sorry about that, Mildred,” I said.
“Doctor.” Her voice was scratchy, insistent.
“The doctor will be making rounds again later this afternoon. I’ll make sure he sees you, Mildred.”
“Doctor!” Her eyelids pulled apart for a moment, watery slits.
“She doesn’t want to see a doctor,” Ken said. “She wants you to call her doctor. She used to be one. At least, that’s what I heard.”
“Oh.” My stomach turned over. I should have eaten by now. “Is there anything else?”
He shrugged. “I guess not. She’s due for her medication, I think. They couldn’t decide if they wanted me to wait until after meds to bring her up, but then they said to go ahead, so here she is.”
“I’ll take her from here, then. Thanks again.”
“Sure thing.” He retreated to the elevator, using his good hand to pull the gate shut, then reaching up with his hook for the door. I looked away, down at my new patient.
“Come along then.” What was the harm in humoring her, I thought? “Let’s get you settled in, Doctor Solomon.”
A tight smile stretched her thin lips. “That’s a good girl.”
It must have been the heat, because suddenly I became dizzy. My eyes played a trick on me, stretching the hallway like a fun-house mirror. I grabbed the gurney to steady myself, took deep breaths until the corridor regained its normal shape. Even so, as I pushed Mildred Solomon into Mr. Mendelsohn’s old room, I had the strange sensation of going the wrong way on a moving escalator.
“Is everything all right?” Gloria peeked her head in. “You don’t look so good.”
“It’s this heat. I’m a little light-headed, I’m afraid.”
“Help me move her, then you go take your break. I’ll settle her in.” Gloria positioned the gurney beside the bed. I went around to the other side and leaned across. On the count of three, Gloria lifted and I pulled, shifting the old woman onto the mattress.
“You can go now, Rachel. Here, might as well take the gurney down with you.” Gloria transferred the IV bottle to the stand by the bed, took the chart and examined it. “And who do we have here? Mildred, is it? Welcome to Fifth, Mildred.”
I retreated, rolling the gurney out of the room and over to the elevator. Gloria’s sharp voice carried into the hallway. “Doctor? The doctor will see you when he comes on his rounds.”
I wasn’t one to stretch out my breaks, but that day I lingered in the staff cafeteria, drinking glass after glass of iced tea until I gave myself a headache. Doctor Mildred Solomon. I rolled the name around in my mind, trying to find where it fit, like those pinball games you get in a box of Cracker Jacks. A memory sparked deep within my brain: a woman’s face, tilting over me; me, standing in a
crib, my eyes lifted to hers; my hands reaching up for the little tie around her neck; a voice, her voice, asking if I’d been a good girl. The face was nothing but a blur, but the name, Doctor Solomon, dropped into place.
If anyone had asked me that morning if I remembered the name of my doctor at the Infant Home—if I remembered much of anything before Mrs. Berger and Reception at the orphanage—I would have said no. Now, I was sure of it. But if the desiccated patient in Mr. Mendelsohn’s bed was that same woman, or just had her name, I didn’t know.
“Better?” Gloria asked when I returned.
“Yes, thank you,” I lied, my eyes pinched from the headache I couldn’t shake. “How’s our new patient?”
“She’s all settled in, but it looks like she missed lunch. I called down for a liquid meal, and it took this long for them to bring it up.” Gloria handed me a tray with a bowl of broth. Beside it, a full syringe rolled across the folded napkin. “I noticed she was behind on her medication. I measured out the prescribed dose, but she must be in a tremendous amount of pain to need that much. See if you can get her to take some broth first; that morphine will knock her out. Oh, and listen to this. She told me I should call her Doctor Solomon. That’s one I haven’t heard before.”
I took the tray, making an effort to hold my hands steady. “The orderly said she really was a doctor. At least, he thought she might have been.”
Gloria lifted her eyebrows. “That hadn’t occurred to me. I assumed she was confused. You know how they get.”
I did. It wasn’t unusual for patients to mistake us for their mothers or their maids, even their children. Maybe I was mistaken, too.
M
ISS
F
ERSTER LOOKED UP FROM HER DESK AT THE
Jewish Children’s Agency to see Miss Jones, a social worker from the court, enter the office with two young children, a boy and a girl. They were better kempt than the disheveled urchins she was used to seeing, their faces washed, clothes neatly mended, apparently well fed—at least their legs weren’t bowed with rickets. Obviously not swept up off the streets or removed from some immigrant’s hovel. Miss Ferster wondered what tragedy had brought them to her.
“The Rabinowitz children,” Miss Jones announced, tugging off her gloves. Tucked under her arm was their file, still thin: a remand signed in night court, a carbon of the police report, an order naming the agency as temporary guardian. Miss Jones had added a few notes about their neighbor, Mrs. Giovanni, who’d dragged the children away from their mother’s body, given them baths, dressed them, and kept them overnight. By the time Miss Jones arrived at the address on the court documents, the boarders had cleared out and the custodian was on her knees scrubbing the floor in the Rabinowitz apartment, pink bubbles frothing around the brush. Mrs. Giovanni had assembled the children’s things:
some clothes, a hairbrush, an alphabet book, the photograph from their parents’ wedding, a shoe box of official-looking papers. Miss Jones had picked a few documents out of the box but politely refused to take anything else, saying the agency would provide whatever they needed.
For Sam and Rachel, their first ride in a private car had passed in a blur of worry. Now, at the agency, they clutched hands and looked anxiously around the cramped office at desks stacked with paper, a couple of clattering typewriters, a big chalkboard on the wall.
Miss Ferster, her round face and even rounder glasses surrounded by curls, reached out a hand for the file. She read over the papers and clucked her tongue. “Poor lambs,” she said, squinting at the children. “You’ll be doing the initial follow-up, Miss Jones?”
“I’m on my way to interview the grandparents, but if the situation is unsuitable or the relatives refuse them, I’ll take the case back to court for adjudication. The children will certainly be assigned to your agency—the census lists the parents as Yiddish—so there should be no disruption in care. At that point, the state’s payment will start coming to you. Whether or not the father is apprehended will make no difference. Absconded or imprisoned, the children are as good as orphaned.”
“Such a shame,” Miss Ferster clucked. “Well, thank you, Miss Jones.”
“Good luck to you, Samuel.” Miss Jones offered to shake the boy’s hand, but he turned away, upset over the words she’d used to talk about his father.
“And good luck to you, Rachel.” She slid her fingers along the
little girl’s cheek. “You are very brave. It was my pleasure to meet you.”
Watching Miss Jones leave the office, Rachel didn’t feel brave, even if she looked it. Her parents’ fight, her mother’s death, the invasion of police—it all so shocked her, she forgot to have a screaming fit. Later, when she saw how Sam was so upset, she kept herself quiet for his sake. But below the stillness that was mistaken for bravery, her insides were as jumbled as a jar of buttons.
Miss Ferster came out from behind the desk to greet the children. “Have you eaten today?”
Rachel looked at Sam, who said, “Mrs. Giovanni gave us rolls and honey and coffee for breakfast. And butter.”
“Mrs. Giovanni is your neighbor?” Miss Ferster glanced back at the file. “She sounds like a very nice lady. Now, Sam, you’re six years old, in first grade, correct? And Rachel, you’re four?”
Sam answered for her. “She’ll be five in August.”
“All right, why don’t you two sit down over there and I’ll see what I can do.” Miss Ferster indicated a bench against the wall. On it, some other child had left a tied piece of string.
To distract herself, Rachel pulled the string taught between her fingers and held it up to her brother. “Cat’s cradle with me, Sammy.” Even though boys his age had long ago given up cat’s cradle for marbles and stickball, Sam dipped his fingers into the string and pulled it from his sister’s hands.
Miss Ferster sifted through the papers on her desk, then went over to the wall and picked up the receiver from the telephone that hung there. She talked into the mouthpiece for a long time. After replacing the receiver, she went to another woman’s desk.
“No foster care available, Miriam, can you believe it? I’ll have to assign him to one of the Homes.”
Miriam looked up at the chalkboard. There was a column for each of New York City’s Jewish orphanages. Below each heading, a list of children’s names descended, kept carefully even across the bottom. “The last boy went to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn,” she said. “We’ll have to send this one to the Orphaned Hebrews Home in Manhattan. For the girl, at her age the Infant Home’s the only option.”
“I wanted to put these two in foster care with the Sheltering Society.” Miss Ferster took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “They’ve been through enough without separating them as well.”
“You want them all to go into foster homes, that’s your problem.”
“These orphanages,” she muttered. “They’ve become so packed this past year, what with the influenza, not to mention the Great War. How many are in the Orphaned Hebrews Home now? Over a thousand, isn’t it? That’s no kind of life for a child.”
“It’s better than the streets, or the State Home, you know that,” Miriam reminded her. She was older than Miss Ferster, still remembered when the large institutional orphanages were being touted as the most efficient solution to the child care crisis. “Once the Cottage Houses are built, we can start sending children out to Westchester.”
“I am looking forward to that. The group houses will be so much better for the children than those orphanage dormitories.” Miss Ferster glanced at the children on the bench and sighed. “I suppose there’s nothing else to be done for them, though. Can you
cover the office, Miriam? I want to take the little girl myself. If you call Mr. Grossman he’ll send a counselor for the boy.”
Little rope burns were starting on their fingers by the time Miss Ferster came over to Sam and Rachel. She sat on the bench to explain their situation. “I haven’t been able to find a foster home that can take both of you, not yet, but I am going to keep trying. So, just for now, Sam, you’re going to stay at the Orphaned Hebrews Home, but that’s only for children who are already six years old. That means you, Rachel, are going to the Hebrew Infant Home.”
“Why can’t we stay with Mrs. Giovanni until Papa comes back for us?” Sam said.
“That’s not the way it works, I’m afraid.”
Rachel’s lip threatened to tremble. “I want to be with Sam.”
“I know, dear, and I’m so sorry, but it’s only going to be for a little while. I’ll keep trying to find a foster family, someone nice like your Mrs. Giovanni. If you can be brave and good for a few more days, and do your best to get along without each other, I’ll do my best to bring you back together. Can we do that for each other?”
Rachel’s fingers were tangled with Sam’s in the cat’s cradle. She looked up to her brother with frightened eyes.
“But I’m supposed to take care of her. Papa said so.”
“And you will. Just give me a few days to find a placement for you together. I’ll take Rachel to the Infant Home, and when I come back I’ll tell you all about it.”
Miss Ferster pulled at the string to separate the children’s hands. Rachel grabbed Sam’s fingers and wouldn’t let go. Miss Ferster
picked her up and tried to pull her away from her brother. Rachel could no longer keep down the panic that rose from the bottom of her belly. It burst out of her throat in a wail that vibrated the air throughout the office.
“Now, now, Rachel, now, now.” The distress in Miss Ferster’s eyes made Sam want to help her.
“Rachel, listen. Soon we’ll be together again, but only if you’re good for the lady.” Sam pried loose his sister’s fingers. “By the time you can count to one hundred and one, that’s when I’ll see you again. Can you count for me, Rachel?”
Rachel tried. “One. Two.” Every numbered utterance was swallowed by a sob. “Three.” Miss Ferster lifted her up. “Four.” Miss Ferster crossed the office, the struggling girl in her arms. “Five.” The office door opened, and Rachel was carried out. “Six.” The door shut behind them.
Inside, on the bench, waiting for the counselor who would take him to the orphanage, Sam counted under his breath, matching his numbers to his sister’s. When he got to one hundred and one, he kept on going.
R
ACHEL LOST TRACK
before she got to ten. She kept trying to start over, but it was too hard to concentrate. There was the taxi pulling up to the curb, then the drive through Central Park, Miss Ferster urging her to look at the horse-drawn carriages. After the park, the taxi crossed a bridge with stone towers, and through the window Rachel saw water and ships and white birds rising and diving in the air. They drove on until the houses were thinned by lawns and trees. Finally, the taxi pulled over.