“I’d appreciate it if you’d make up a bed for me on the living room floor. Pillow and blanket will do.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer the couch?”
“I would but I won’t be able to wake up if I’m too comfortable.” As a peace offering, he rewarded her with a wan smile. “Clayton, where’s my celery tonic, please? And take a Seconal. You’ve been up the whole night and the entire day.”
“Where will he sleep?” Nurse Grady inquired, alarmed.
“Next to me or on the floor of Manya’s room. Wherever he prefers.”
Clayton placed an inch-high corned beef sandwich on a tray along with the soda.
“Open your mouth,” Dr. Koronovsky commanded him and threw a sleeping pill inside it. “You’ve done enough work for today. Dr. Wolfson and the second-shift nurse will handle things for a few hours.”
Through the encounter with the nurse and with Clayton, Dr. Wolfson had remained silent. He burst forth now.
“Why do you exert yourself with such ferocity? You don’t overlook a single detail. I’ve been here the whole day and didn’t think to have their hair washed. Of course their hair is contaminated. It’s filthy with sweat. It would never cross my mind. And the expense. Who’s paying for Willy’s surgery, for these nurses, for the medication? You,
you.
Are these people your family, your special project, some secret obsession? I’m the one writing the paper, but I’m an observer. You’re the one who rescued them. Why?”
The sleeping pill he had swallowed on an empty stomach affected Dr. Koronovsky. He laughed and laughed. He gulped his sandwich and guzzled his drink before replying.
“Manya, she’s my oldest friend in a neighborhood that God may have forgotten or at least overlooked. She’s my model for survival. I set myself on this course of action—doctoring for the poor—and she encouraged me. Also she kept after me to marry Phyllis. Guilt about my sisters consumed me. I was immobilized. Each and every hour I visited her, Manya repeated her refrain. ‘Get married. You deserve a better life.’ No one else ever told me I deserved a better life or that I had to seize it for myself. This is the least I can do for her now.”
“Are you some kind of bloody socialist?”
“Is Manya? She’s been giving her food away every night since I was a boy. Consider what she did for Lil, a wretched ghetto child, neglected, overworked by an uncaring mother, riddled with heart disease. The scourge of the ghetto isn’t poverty, it’s illness. Manya never hesitated to help Lil. She does it without effort.”
“I haven’t ever heard you say this much in one breath.”
“I’m babbling, it’s the Seconal talking. Before I pass out I’ll tell you this. I’m a terrible writer. Can’t cobble two sentences together. That’s why I recommended you for this project and helped you with the grant. The answer is not to keep charts the way you do, but to figure out what it takes for these people to do without and cherish existence. It’s touch and go, touch and go, a medical disaster in this family at every turn. From a scientific point of view Lil and Jack should never have had children. Too many genetic strikes against them. But science in one sense is bullshit. Forget their illnesses and see what they have going for them. High intelligence. Talent. An incomprehensible drive. It would help if I could pry them away from Orchard Street. I’ll offer them this apartment for a year. Rent-free. I’m not sure Manya will accept.”
“How could she say no to a luxury apartment rent-free?”
“Because it means giving up too much.”
“You’re talking in your sleep.”
“Insight, Scott, is as important as diagnostics.”
Dr. Koronovsky took a quick shower, wrapped himself in a hospital bathrobe, snuggled into a hospital blanket on the floor and passed out. The night nurse, Mrs. Ferguson, an older woman, proved gentler than Miss Grady. Everyone slept through the night.
In the morning Bubby left her bed.
“Where are your sisters?” she asked Koronovsky as he was setting out for the day.
“With Uncle Zelig, in Trenton, New Jersey. He’s very lonely. He’d like them to live with him. The neighborhood there, it’s just like here, a Jewish community.” He eyed her judiciously. “Manya, try to like this place.”
“It’s like a fancy hotel. Only it’s too finster.”
“Too dark? Pull the drapes open. There’s plenty of light.”
“The dining room and living room have no windows. In the kitchen you see another building. Besides, what would I do with myself so far from everyone?”
“We’ll talk about it later. I’ll call you in a few hours about Willy.”
“You shouldn’t come back today. Dr. Wolfson will stay for an hour, that’s enough. Go home to your wife. Make night early.”
“Would it destroy you to move in here?”
“I couldn’t. For a visit, you saved us. To live, no.”
“Don’t be hasty about saying no.”
“Listen, Koronovsky, you know my brother-in-law Goodman, Bertha’s husband? God alone sent such a man to us. He’s begged us to come and live in Yonkers, in some nice apartment, with a little restaurant on the main street. Ich ken nisht.”
He didn’t argue with her. “Get some rest,” he said quietly.
Against one wall in the living room stood a fake fireplace. When we pressed a button a fan went on that cast red flames against artificial logs. Bubby and I played casino on an end table between chairs angled in front of the fireplace. Dr. Scott Wolfson found us there and expressed delight that we were able to sit up for a while.
“Better, you’re much better. Why do you look sad?”
“I don’t have anything to read.”
“There’s a whole bookcase full of books, mostly medical, but some are novels. They’re in the master bedroom, where your parents are sleeping.”
“My father found
The Great Gatsby
. When he’s finished I’ll read it.”
“Does he allow you to read a book like that?”
“He lets me read anything. My Uncle Geoff, he has a bookcase with a lock and key. He calls those books
erotica
. My father says it’s a lot of hooey to keep books locked up.”
Dr. Wolfson slapped his forehead. “This family confuses and confounds me. In other words, you drive me crazy. You should be reading children’s books. You’re nine going on twenty. In some ways you’re older than your mother.”
Dr. Scott Wolfson was my first love, the man I would marry and be with forever if I could. But I shocked him, made him uncomfortable. Even as he admired me he drew away. My whole family, perhaps with the exception of Willy, had that effect on him. I couldn’t confide in him as I did with Hal Pankin. Scott Wolfson drove me to silence.
“Help me,” he finally said. “I want to buy Willy a present. I still feel terrible because I didn’t pick up the messages that night he got sick. What shall I buy him? A game? A puzzle? What does he love the most?”
“A radio. A small radio, the kind you don’t plug in.”
“A portable radio. What a great idea! As soon as I examine your parents I’m off to buy the radio.”
“Is it expensive?”
He gently pounded his knuckles on top of my head. “Hey you, quit it. Be a child for five minutes and I’ll buy you a doll.”
When he showed up several hours later, he was exuberant. “Willy is crazy about the radio,” he told us. “It’s ivory color and I bought a whole box of batteries so he can play it for hours. He began to cry, he was so happy, and he misses all of you. He’s still on IVs, his scar hurts and he wants Bubby. I told him tomorrow or the next day.”
“Morgen. Ahf morgen,” said Bubby.
“If you have no temperature we’ll aim for tomorrow.” He poked me with his elbow. “This is for you. It’s not another log for the fire and should keep you busy for a few days.”
It was
Gone With the Wind
. “Just what I wanted.”
“Crazy family!” He grinned, encouraged that his two gifts enchanted us.
We stayed at Dr. Koronovsky’s apartment a full week. Lil hadn’t quite recovered when Uncle Goodman came to drive us back to Orchard Street. Bubby suffered terribly the last two days of our stay, restless, disoriented by the electric lights that illuminated every corner from rising to bedtime. The apartment felt like a cage to her. But an attempted early return to our own dwelling proved fruitless—Dr. Koronovsky had insisted on having the Orchard Street quarters fumigated.
“We come in and spray the floors, the walls, the furniture. It takes two days for the fumes to evaporate,” the fumigator told him. “We’ll open the windows on the second day. Don’t rush inside before we give you the okay. The fumes can leave you sick.”
On Saturday, weak in the knees though able to manage, Jack returned to his store. Uncle Goodman wanted to persuade Bubby to stay in the comfort of the Koronovsky flat. He and the doctor discussed the details by telephone.
That their cause was hopeless became evident with Bubby’s first evaluation, “Dus is ein cayver.”
“A grave?” Uncle Goodman could not conceal his shock at the choice of words and the emotion behind them. “Manya, people sacrifice, they scrimp and save for months and years, they deny themselves everything to buy one of these apartments. This one falls into your lap, free of charge and you call it a grave.”
“If not a grave—maybe that’s too strong—then a prison. I can’t breathe in here. I need a place open to the world.”
That ended the discussion. Nothing more could be said.
We awaited the word from the fumigator, who called to apologize for a slight mishap. The wallpaper above the telephone table had come apart at the edges. Finding swarms of roaches under the paper, he had no recourse than to tear it from the wall.
The morning we returned to Orchard Street, a light mist was falling. We sat on each other’s laps in Goodman’s car. Bubby applauded as we pulled up to the familiar sidewalk. We staggered up the stairs on sailor’s legs. Clayton threw open the door. An arctic blast hit us with force. “Man,” Clayton exclaimed, “this place is colder than a witch’s you-know-what.” He raced inside to light the gas stove and open the range door.
In seven days the apartment had shrunk again, or so it appeared after our recent spacious lodgings. Despite the assurances that the insecticide had disappeared from the air, the smell of poison clung to every surface. Uncle Goodman switched on the lights and plugged in the electric heater in the bedroom. He carried a new heater for the dining room in his arms. The moment the prongs of the heater hit the dining room outlet we were plunged into darkness.
“It’s an overload,” Clayton cried. He searched for the fuse box in the hallway and at the bottom of the stairs. Darkness. Pitch black darkness everywhere. Mrs. Ginsberg and Mrs. Feldman bolted out of their rooms screaming, “Finster, finster.” Uncle Goodman remained calm and by the glow of his cigarette lighter called the electric company. We couldn’t expect service for twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Two days of darkness. Two days of frigid cold, torn wallpaper, mountains of dead roaches on the floor, exterminator fumes, dripping walls.
My desperation, everyone’s desperation, was as palpable as a silent collective scream. I clutched
Gone With the Wind
. Clayton wailed. Bubby cried silently.
“We’ll go back to Koronovsky’s. We have the keys. We’ll go back,” counseled Uncle Goodman, “until everything here is in order.”
My father, who lived by omens and superstitions, who spit three times when he saw a nun approaching, who regarded a black thread on his clothes as a harbinger of disaster, raised his voice. “No. It’s out of the question to turn back. That would bring us bad luck.”
Uncle Goodman didn’t argue with Jack. “Clayton,” he said with authority, “take the flashlight and be careful where you step. Women first. Everyone back into my car.” He drove all of us, including Clayton, straight to Yonkers.
We were held together with spit. Miraculously, Uncle Goodman brought his own electrician to Orchard Street who replaced the old fuses and installed a four-foot-high electric wall heater in the dining room. He selected the least damp wall, hammered a thick slab of wood into the perilously crumbling plaster, attached the heater to it and ran the extension cord into the kitchen. The twin coils of the heater glowed like a theatrical stage set. Uncle Goodman also treated us to a small heater for the hallway toilet. As the burly electrician packed his tools, we heard him ask Uncle Goodman, “How do people live like this?” Goodman didn’t answer. The toilet heater proved a master stroke. We would have suffered from constipation for the rest of the winter without it.
Weinstock brought us a roll of wallpaper to replace what had been torn by the exterminators. “It’s the latest, with sticky stuff on the back. Cut it to whatever length you want.” The color and texture did not match the existing paper. No matter. Clean and fresh counted for more than decorating perfection. He also looked at the new heaters and shrugged. “Thrown-out money.”
We didn’t ask Weinstock to explain. On the day the fuses blew, each of us resigned ourselves to a different future. We simply plodded on because we couldn’t visualize the direction it would take.
On Saturday, Dr. Wolfson drove Bubby and me to Beth Israel Hospital to pick up Willy. He wasn’t coming home. Rather, we drove him to a convalescent hospital in Lakewood, New Jersey. Bubby wore her sealine fur coat and Mr. Jacob had lent me a boy’s tweed jacket lined with shearling that fit over my rose-colored suit.
Pale and noticeably thinner, Willy hugged his portable radio. The warm hat with felt flaps waggled on his head like a Halloween fright wig. None of us cared. Our joy at being together erased any possible discomfort, especially since Dr. Scott was delighted with himself and the universe. He had just become engaged to Susan Laurel Newman, a chemist.
The drive seemed too short, though we stopped at a café on the way and had coffee and French crullers. If the doctor disapproved of children drinking coffee he didn’t say.
The convalescent hospital resembled the posh hotels we saw along the road, with a wide veranda where recovering adults and children lounged in chairs, covered up to their chins with plaid blankets.
Heavy snow had fallen the night before and the lake, the lanes around the hospital and the boughs of the trees lay under a white blanket. Outdoors, we couldn’t hear a sound. The stillness, the whiteness, the serenity were a world apart from the city.