When the dizziness started, three months before her due date, and the headaches got so bad she was sick to her stomach, they all remembered, for her sake, the cousin of a cousin or a sister-in-law’s sister who had had the most frightening symptoms, and everything had been fine in the end. As she began to look less blooming, as her vision became blurred and her walk unsteady, they told each other she needed to rest more, to eat more meat; she had been a child during the famine; no wonder she wasn’t very strong. One or the other of them, organized by Sophie, brought food to the apartment at lunchtime, schnitzel or sauerbraten, with a slice of plum cake from the bakery on Dyckman Street. Afterward they tucked her up on the living room sofa with a crocheted comforter.
But sometimes she could not keep down the food they brought; sometimes she dropped her knife or bumped into a chair on her way to the table. Then she might press her clenched fists against her temples, rocking back and forth, and ask them to leave the veal dumplings or the liver and onions in the kitchen; she would heat them up later. Whichever of the women had come that day would flutter around her, anxious and frightened, telling her with diminishing conviction about a friend or a neighbor back in Nuremberg who’d been nauseated and dizzy for nine months before miraculously giving birth to a healthy child. When they arrived home they would phone Sophie to report.
Jeannette too had taken to phoning Sophie, always at the most inconvenient times, when Sophie was breading veal cutlets or expecting a call from her son Kurt, now enrolled in Ohio State on the GI Bill. Everyone was lying, Jeannette said, all the women, and Louisa’s fool doctor too. Anybody with half a brain could see that something was wrong. She, Jeannette, had tried to speak to Rolf, but Louisa was pretending for him, as everybody else was pretending for Louisa. She should have taken to her bed and stayed there throughout her pregnancy; Jeannette had told her as much, but of course she had not listened to her. The stupid American doctor saw no reason why she shouldn’t be climbing mountains. Now look what was happening. Already it might be too late.
“You mustn’t worry her,” Sophie said. “The last thing she needs now is more worry.”
But she herself, Jeannette said, was out of her mind with worry; she could not digest her food properly; the constant acid in her stomach was ruining her health.
“Then you are the one who must see a doctor,” Sophie told her sharply. “I’ve been going to a very pleasant young man, right here in Inwood. I’ll give you his number.”
“It’s all very well for you,” Jeannette said, sniffing. “You’re not her mother.”
“We cannot be telling our children what to do any longer. If she needs another doctor, Rolf will see to it.”
But in the end it was Louisa who saw to it. On a gusty fall morning, after Rolf had left for work, she put on the brown felt hat that she had worn for her wedding, walked unsteadily to the corner of Broadway, and hailed a cab. At the hospital on 168th Street, she tottered down the strip of carpet in her high heels, like a drunken model on a runway, and leaned, trembling, against the reception counter. A plump blond nurse carrying a roll of rubber tubing stopped on her way past and asked if she was all right. She was fine, Louisa said: now that the time had come to say out loud what she had been thinking for five weeks and three days, that something was wrong with her baby, she had changed her mind. But when the nurse touched her arm she started to cry.
“Hey,” the woman said, shifting the tubing to her left hand. “Hey hey hey. I’m Bonnie. Why don’t we take you into the back there and talk for a sec.” She steered Louisa, blinded now by tears, through some swinging doors and into a cubicle with a white metal table, where she set the tubing down and gently removed the brown hat. After that Louisa became wholly submissive, allowing Bonnie to take her coat and help her up onto the table. When she was down to her underwear, Bonnie tied a gray hospital gown around her and went to fetch a doctor, who spoke hardly a word, but worked his fingers over her scalp the way the girl at the hairdresser did when she was giving her a shampoo and then shone a light into first one eye and then the other. Bonnie tucked Louisa’s hair behind her ear for her before leaving the room. The doctor pinched the skin on her temples and pressed his thumbs, hard, into the back of her neck.
When he too went away, Louisa sat there for a long time, waiting anxiously for Bonnie to return. Instead, two men in rumpled green uniforms arrived, rolling a gurney between them and telling her to hop on and lie down; they had orders to bring her downstairs. In the elevator they had a disagreement about someone named Lena: one of them thought she was just being friendly to Josie’s husband, the other that she was after him. “Come off it,” the taller one said. He looked as though he needed a shave. “The guy’s sixty if he’s a day.”
“Yeah, well, when Lena’s hitting the sauce she don’t care how old they are.”
Down in the basement, they wheeled her down the corridor and inside a musty beige room almost filled by a huge machine with steel arms swiveling out in all directions. Each arm had a different-shaped attachment at its end. A man who’d been sitting at a desk in the corner got up and swiveled a stubby, cone-shaped one toward Louisa until it was pointing at the right side of her head. A light flashed. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Just relax. This won’t take a minute.” He pointed the cone at the other side of her head, then at her forehead; again, there was the flash of light. Then he went and opened the door, and the same two men came and wheeled her out into the hall. Without a word, they aligned the gurney carefully with the wall before stepping into the elevator, leaving her there. She began to cry, weak helpless tears, her bare legs cold against the table.
Several times, she heard the elevator descend and then stop; finally the doors opened and a nurse stepped out—older than Bonnie, skinny, with a starched cap. “Now now,” she said, in a neutral voice, handing Louisa a pink pill and a tiny cup of water, and propping up her head so she could swallow. “You mustn’t cry, you know. It’s bad for the baby.” Louisa lay back, both hands on her stomach, and whispered to her child that it was all right, they would be all right, everything would be fine. Then she remembered Phillip, back in London, saying those words to her one wet afternoon: she had not heard from her father for two weeks, the Manchester Guardian had run an article that day about the proscription of Jews from the streetcars and parks in Germany. “I promise,” he had said, kissing her eyelids, “I promise you’ll be fine,” and as he unzipped her dress, “It’ll all be all right. You’ll see. We’ll get them out. We’ll be very happy. Everything will be just fine.” But it had not been all right in Chicago, and she knew, even before the doctor came back, that it was not all right now.
CHAPTER TWO
It was Rolf they consulted, not the patient. Rolf was summoned to a room with tall windows, on the top floor, the dizzying heights of the neurology department. Two bony doctors, professorial types in hairy jackets, met him at the elevator and escorted him there. They had already arranged for him to go, the very next day, to a doctor on Park Avenue, a Dr. Channing, who was a leading expert in the field.
After he left them he came and sat by Louisa’s bedside, drawing up the pink visitor’s chair and speaking in a measured voice, very low, to keep the women in the other two beds from overhearing. Louisa listened in silence, her mouth trembling slightly, as though with the effort of concentrating on his words, which weren’t his at all: meningioma, basal ganglia, occipital lobe.
“It’s all right,” she said then, sounding cross, “you can talk in a normal voice. Really.” She looked around at the other beds. “It won’t matter if they hear, they won’t understand what you’re saying either.”
When he had finished, she asked if they could save the baby.
“What do you mean?”
“If I die.”
“You’re not going to die,” he told her, too quickly.
“What did they say about the baby?”
“They said it would be fine. Absolutely fine.”
“No they di
dn’t,” she said, in a voice so tender he could hardly bear it. “You’re making it up.”
“They said the heartbeat was normal.”
“And what else?”
“They said it seemed perfectly healthy.”
“You’re lying to me. I can tell because you lie so badly.”
“I’m not. They don’t think the tumor will affect it.”
“But they’re not sure.”
“I suppose not.”
She asked him to feel the baby. He got up from the chair and sat on the edge of her bed, while she guided his hand onto her stomach. Immediately, the baby kicked. “It feels fine,” he said. “It feels exactly the same.”
In fact he could not remember how it had felt before.
“Are you a lucky man, Mr. Furchgott?” Dr. Channing asked him the next morning. “Because I’m afraid it’s ultimately a matter of luck.” He was a tall, plump, beautiful man with snow-white hair and the radiant pink skin of an infant. There were hunting prints and maps of the ancient world on his office walls, and a large brass letter opener lying on his handsome desk, which he tapped on the blotter as he answered Rolf’s questions.
Only when Rolf asked about the baby did Dr. Channing look slightly annoyed. If the tumor had been discovered earlier, he said, he would have recommended a termination. As things stood, it was hard to say, really, what damage might have been caused. The oxygen supply to the fetus could have been interfered with.
And what would that mean? Rolf asked.
“I can’t say with any certainty. We don’t encounter this situation very often, as you can imagine. But brain damage can’t entirely be ruled out.”
What did he mean, it couldn’t be ruled out? Was he saying the baby was brain-damaged?
“Good heavens.” Dr. Channing tapped the letter opener against his gleaming white cuff. “Nothing of the sort. The child might be perfectly normal. I only meant the possibility can’t be ruled out.” It was then that he asked whether Rolf was a lucky man.
Louisa, it seemed, had her own luck, in that the tumor was benign. They could leave the whole matter alone, if Rolf chose; the mass in the brain might remain the same size indefinitely. “On the other hand,” Dr. Channing said, shifting the letter opener into his own other hand, as though to illustrate this formulation, “it might not.” He produced a multicolored diagram of the brain, a surprisingly humble object, like an illustration for a school textbook, with what looked like sweat marks on it, from the drawer of his elegant desk. Taking up the letter opener again, he used it as a pointer. If the tumor spread to the right—a coil of grayish blue—there was a risk of blindness, whereas here on the left—a bilious yellow-green—was the center that affected speech. Then there was the purple area directly in front of where the mass was now. He tapped twice.
What happens if the tumor goes there? Rolf asked.
Dr. Channing set down the letter opener and cracked his rosy knuckles. “It all depends. Sometimes there are personality changes. Only sometimes. But we don’t want it to reach the basal ganglia, that would be a very bad business. Pressure on the basal ganglia is always a very bad business. A terminal situation.”
Again: what were the chances?
“I’m afraid there aren’t any reliable statistics.” He looked a little less cheerful now. “I will say, though, that it’s improbable—it’s not, let’s say, extremely likely—that the tumor will remain at its present size indefinitely.”
“I see.”
“Well, then,” Dr. Channing said, brightening. “Perhaps we’d better start thinking about treatment.” There was a team at Dana Farber, up in Boston, that had been using radioactive substances to shrink such tumors. “Unfortunately, they haven’t had the results they hoped for. It may be some time before we can pinpoint the cancerous cells.”
“So you wouldn’t recommend it for my wife.”
“I wouldn’t personally, no.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Dr. Channing resorted to the letter opener again, passing it deftly along his knuckles. “There’s a Dr. Seidelbaum who’s been doing some interesting work,” he said, as though he had just remembered. Dr. Seidelbaum, it seemed, had been performing a procedure of his own devising on cranial tumors. “I’m not personally acquainted with his methods, but he’s extremely well regarded.” He could make a referral if Rolf wanted; he could even phone right then and there. Though he believed, he said, raising an eyebrow, that Dr. Seidelbaum charged rather hefty fees.
Out on Seventy-ninth Street, cars seemed to be veering toward the curb; the wind had been high for days, and candy wrappers and paper cups blew merrily in the gutter; Rolf had to cram his hat down onto his head. Dr. Channing would send the X-rays to Dr. Seidelbaum, who’d agreed to see Rolf in his office the following day. Nobody, it seemed, thought it necessary to see Louisa in person. “Oh, no, sir, I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Dr. Seidelbaum’s secretary said, a little shocked, when Rolf asked if he should bring her along.
On a bench outside the park, a red-haired boy was angling a sugar cone piled with strawberry ice cream toward the mouth of a girl who kept giggling and ducking away. The yellow cabs heading downtown obscured them from Rolf’s sight for a moment and then revealed them again, the girl holding up her hands in protest, the boy trying to zigzag the cone past them. Rolf stood staring from the other side of Fifth Avenue, his vision blurring and clearing, blurring and clearing, light coming at him in waves. Just as the girl surrendered, as she was licking the pink ice cream from her chin, she looked up and caught his eye. Immediately he swerved away, hurrying to Eightieth Street and crossing against the light. As he entered the park, a patch of red and yellow flowers, fiercely bright in the sun, made him dizzy for a moment; the vivid green of the grass brought on a nausea he could only just contain.
Louisa was being discharged; she lay on the bed in her street clothes, her shoes neatly aligned on the floor, her hat on the bedside table. The nurse had to come and take her pulse before they could leave, she said. He told her about Dr. Seidelbaum’s promising procedure, stressing his high success rate. (He made no mention of blindness, impaired speech, personality changes.) But she only nodded tiredly in response; her eyes were fixed on the painting on the wall opposite—a cheerful beach scene with striped umbrellas and blond children—and her expression was one of strained politeness; he could not even tell if she was listening.
Then she turned and looked at him. “Poor Rolf,” she said. “Poor Rolf.” She held out her hand, and he took it. “Let’s talk about something else. About other people’s problems. What was in the paper today?”
He had carried the Times with him onto a half-empty subway that morning, having left for the office at six to get his work done before he went to see Dr. Channing. For once he could have opened the paper out fully in front of him, instead of reading it column by folded column. But he could not summon up the interest. Seated across from him had been a squat bronze-skinned woman with a face like an Inca carving, stony with exhaustion; a crumpled shopping bag full of rags and worn-out brushes swayed at her feet. For just an instant he seemed to see into her—he felt the weight she carried inside her, he saw the dark room where she lived alone—and it made him afraid.
He might have told Louisa about her, or the couple outside the park, but he could not explain the blinding vividness of them. Instead he tried to remember the previous day’s news. The UN was under attack for failing to resolve the Iranian crisis; the Russians had vetoed the U.S. plan of action. Many members of Congress felt that America should resign. There were speeches about it in the House every day.
“Go on,” she said. She was looking at the painting again, her lips were slightly parted.
A truck strike was threatened at the city’s sugar refineries. Retail prices had gone up by 13 percent in the past year. Meat-price controls had been removed. Thousands of Jewish war veterans had marched on Washington to demand the resettlement of homeless European Jews in Palestine. President Truman had agreed to
meet with them.
“Go on.”
The Civilian Production Administration was considering canceling the regulations regarding women’s clothing. Skirts might be longer again by early 1947, and sleeves wider. He’d thought she might smile at that, but her expression did not alter.
The clocks had just gone back—already, at four, it was dusk outside. On the street below, a young woman in a plaid skirt was wheeling a baby stroller; a skinny boy hardly old enough to be a father slouched protectively by her side, hands in his pockets. As they waited for the light to change, a grizzled man in a peacoat came barreling around the corner and almost slammed into them. The boy seized him by the arm, but the other shrugged him off and hurried on his way.
Again, nausea rose in him. The growth in Louisa’s brain made a certain kind of sense: it had definite meaning, required definite action; there were causes and effects to think of—even, despite Dr. Channing, the laws of probability to consider. When he listened to the doctors, his heartbeat, like the baby’s, was normal. But looking at a velvet coat on a child, an ice cream cone, a middle-aged cleaning lady, had become unsafe.
“We have forgotten there are sorrows in the world that have nothing to do with the Nazis,” Sophie had said the night before. Jeannette had told her the news. The child would need to be looked after, Sophie said briskly, while Louisa was in the hospital. If she could help in any way, he had of course only to ask.
Thank you, he said stiffly. Always before he had been the one to offer help. How was Gustav? he asked her.
“You are wondering why he doesn’t talk to you himself. As a medical man.”
The Oriental Wife Page 10
