City of God

by Swerling, Beverly

  “It’s all in the bow,” Danny said. They were alone in the uptown shipyard, the plans of the Ann McKim that Sam Devrey had produced some two years back spread once more on the table between them. Cod’s head and mackerel’s tail had been the conventional wisdom in the making of merchant craft for two hundred years, but according to the plans the Ann McKim had a bow that was not broadly rounded in the manner of the head of a cod. Hers was considerably narrowed, almost tapered. Danny tapped the drawing at that point. “Bow like this has to make her handle easier sailing into the wind.”

  Sam nodded agreement. “True enough, but it’s precisely that curve of the hull that forces everything else.” The ship was only twenty-seven feet in the beam, the prime reason she was less than five hundred tons burthen. Other ships of her length could carry twice as much cargo. “Danny, what if the slope of the keel were different?”

  “Different how?”

  “I’m not entirely sure yet.”

  There was a tiny room on the ground floor of number thirty-seven Cherry Street, the building next to the one that housed Mei-hua and Mei Lin and Ah Chee, which Sam had claimed for himself. A place where he was absolutely certain John Jacob Astor had no spies. It was not really a room so much as an oversized and windowless cupboard, but he forbade any of his lodgers entry. The room contained a tank full of water and an assortment of bits of paper and slivers of wood. Sam spent a good portion of his time in the yellow light of an overhead lantern, testing the shapes of many a hull. One thing he’d definitely established was that longer objects offered less resistance to water than shorter ones. And if the base of an object was triangular its whole distance, there was less resistance still.

  The keel of the Ann McKim sloped downward from eleven feet at the bow to seventeen feet at the stern. “How could you make it a sharp V-shape the entire length?” Sam asked.

  “You couldn’t.” Danny had been leaning over the plans. Now he straightened and reached for his pipe. “Not as long as you’re building your ship out of God’s own wood and not some miracle material the Devil might provide.”

  “So, Benjy, a real doctor now, ja? At the University of the City of New York they said so?”

  “Yes, Papa. That’s what it means that they gave me my degree from the department of medicine. I can write M.D. after my name and I’m a real doctor.”

  “Excellent, excellent.” Jacob Klein helped himself to another piece of his wife’s savory potato pudding. At this October Friday night meal celebrating the start of the Sabbath, even an ordinary potato was made special. “You will need a consulting room then. I have been looking at premises right next to the shop. Of course these days everything is very dear, but if—”

  “It’s all right, Papa. You don’t have to take on any additional expense. I won’t need a consulting room just yet.”

  “No consulting room?” Frieda Klein had just returned from the kitchen with a replenished platter of chicken, roasted in the brand-new coal-fired cookstove her husband had bought her. With an oven yet. So there was no need to turn a bird on a spit in front of the fire. She put the dish down between her son and her husband, meanwhile hushing her two daughters, who were ignoring the men and giggling between themselves. “But you must have a consulting room. Where will you see patients, Benjy?”

  “I’m not going to see private patients, Mama. Not right away.” His parents stared at him. His younger sisters, sensing something important afoot, did the same. “I’m going to stay at Bellevue for the time being. Dr. Turner has persuaded Dr. Grant to add a second resident to the permanent staff and he’s offered the privilege to me. Isn’t that wonderful?” Even to himself the confidence in his voice sounded forced and insincere.

  “I see.” Jacob reached for another piece of chicken. “And am I to go on paying seven dollars a week to the almshouse so you can have this great privilege?”

  “Jacob! It’s the Sabbath. No quarreling. And no money talk.”

  “It’s all right, Mama,” Ben said. And to his father, “No, Papa, Bellevue will now pay me. I get a hundred dollars a month.” It was not an inconsiderable sum.

  “But the future, Benjy. You need to earn more than a hundred—”

  “What is the matter with both of you? On the Sabbath money we don’t talk. And are you going to keep that piece of my delicious chicken on your fork in the air, Jacob? Like a flag? Eat. Later, when it’s not the Sabbath, then you can talk to Benjy about earning a living.”

  Jacob could not wait that long. Only until the women were in the kitchen, putting the dishes in the soapy water they had prepared before sundown, laughing and talking so he knew they would stay there for a while. Only until he and his son were sitting with small glasses of schnapps and the little dry sweet cakes called kichelach. For Jacob, talking to Benjy about his future could wait only until then. “Benjy, a hundred dollars a month is good for just starting out, I agree. But if—”

  “Papa, if I opened a private practice with a consulting room, I would average a dollar a patient. There is literature on the subject. And being new, how long would it take for me to have a hundred patients a month?”

  “You’ve thought about this, I see,” Jacob said.

  “Of course, Papa. Carefully. The way you have always told me.”

  “Ja, but I think you thought about it for me. So you would have points to make in the argument. I think for yourself you are thinking something entirely different.”

  Ben was holding a kichel, but he hadn’t taken a bite. “No, Papa, I really—”

  “Benjy, you are the first American Jewish doctor here in New York. No, don’t interrupt. I know about Mordecai Singer and Chaim Gold, but they are old men trained in the old ways of the Rhineland and Bavaria. How long do you really think it will take for you to have a hundred patients?”

  Ben put the cake down. It was no longer so enticing. “Not long, Papa.”

  “And considering that Samson Simson is ready to be your patron, it is—”

  “What do you mean, my patron? I haven’t seen Mr. Simson for almost a year. Not since that day after shachris.”

  “I know. Mr. Simson came to my shop again last week. He has another nephew getting married so he needs another kiddush cup. And after he congratulated me on having a son who is now a real doctor, he said also that he and the elders at Shearith Israel were all proud that one of us was among the first group of doctors to be graduated from the University of the City of New York Medical College. He mentioned that he was sure many of the members of the congregation would be looking forward to the opportunity to consult you. That you should come and talk with him about it. Considering.”

  “He means considering that what he wants to talk to me about is Mrs. Manon Turner. I have nothing to tell him, Papa. I told you both that. She’s a nice lady and she comes to nurse the poor. What is there to tell?”

  “All right. To Mr. Simson maybe nothing. But to me? Maybe what to tell me is why you want to doctor poor goyim rather than make a living looking after our own kind. I don’t mean to be heartless, Benjy. Sick is sick and caring for the sick is a mitzvah whether it’s one of us or one of them. A bigger mitzvah when you do it for charity. But for charity you are a volunteer, a few hours every week maybe, like your Mrs. Turner. To make a living so some day you can support a wife and children of your own, Hashem should grant you such blessings, for that you need a consulting room and a private practice.”

  One of the Sabbath candles—lit by his mother before the Sabbath began, so there would be light for the meal without it requiring any of the family to do the work of making light—guttered out. Ben couldn’t see his father’s face when he said, “It’s because of Dr. Turner, Papa.”

  “Yes. I thought so. Only what exactly about Dr. Turner? That’s the part I don’t understand, Benjy.”

  “It’s the research, Papa. I want to go on working with Dr. Turner in his laboratory and doing research. Only at Bellevue is that possible. At least for now. Later I can have my own laboratory maybe.”
r />   “Research.” Jacob had already had the conversation with his son in which he heard about the possibility of curing all disease for all time. A miracle to be achieved by cutting open poor Irish people who were already dead. It was only because he knew there were unlikely to be any Jews at the almshouse that he had not vigorously objected to the practice. Since it had been a condition of the original Jewish settlers being permitted to come to New Amsterdam that they never be burdens on public charity and always look after their own, Jacob could hold himself apart from such thorny moral dilemmas. “Research,” he said again. “In a laboratory of your own. Tell me, please, Benjy, who is going to pay you to do this research?”

  “Right now, Bellevue, Papa.”

  “A hundred dollars a month. I know. But in the future, Benjy?”

  “I don’t know. But I have to do this, Papa.” The last candle flickered out, and the room was in total darkness. The kitchen was quiet as well. Mama and the girls had apparently retired. “I have to, Papa. It’s what I was born to do.”

  “And I, Hashem help me, am apparently born to support you and your wife and children forever.”

  “But I don’t have a wife and children, Papa.”

  “I know. That is a big part of the problem. Come, Benjy. Time for bed.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE WIDOW TURNBULL ran nothing grand enough to be called a restaurant. She prepared one meal a day for a few local gentlemen whose business required them to be in this part of the island so far above the proper city when the four o’clock dinner hour arrived. Her plain and decent cooking was served to no more than the six who could fit around the table in the front room of her farmhouse on what was now grandly called Twenty-ninth Street and Second Avenue, though it looked little different from when it had been simply the Turnbull farm. The land had been in her dead husband’s family since his people arrived from England before the Revolution. Most of the original acreage had been sold off to speculators convinced it would someday be part of a bustling city. Maybe so, but Mr. Turnbull preferred a dollar today to the promise of five dollars tomorrow. So now that she was a widow, thanks to her husband and the speculators, Mrs. Turnbull wasn’t poor, but what was left of the farm could support only a few chickens, a couple of cows, and a plot of vegetables alongside the farmhouse. Cooking for strangers was a sensible way to make use of those remaining assets.

  It was first come first served at the Widow Turnbull’s, except for her regulars like Nick Turner and Mr. Harvey, whose job it was to ride through the woods, checking on the street and avenue markers indicating the future grid and report monthly to the council. Then there was Mr. Cranston, a widower who lived nearby and operated the ferry that brought farmers and cattle across from Long Island to the stockyards and abattoir on Twenty-fourth Street and Third Avenue, the section known as Bull’s Head Village. Lately those three regular diners were joined at least once a week by Danny Parker the shipwright, come to check on his secondary yard located where so-called Thirty-fourth Street spilled into the river.

  That yard, as Nick recalled the first time he was introduced to Parker, was where he had met Sam Devrey when Devrey felt the need to explain about his exotic second household on Cherry Street. Did Danny Parker know about that arrangement? Maybe he did and it didn’t matter since Devrey Shipping was probably one of Parker’s biggest clients. Not his worry, Nick reminded himself, though it did grieve him to think how awful it would be for Carolina if the story ever got out. On this particular February day he was glad to have the conversation at Mrs. Turnbull’s table entirely occupied by talk of the stevedores who en masse had put down their tools and refused to work unless their wages were raised. Shut down the entire port. Mayor Lawrence had to call in the Twenty-seventh Regiment of the militia to get things back to normal.

  “Seems to me,” Harvey said, “since they call it a strike, that’s what they should get. Bring back flogging. That’ll put a stop to all this nonsense.”

  “Not unless Lawrence is prepared to whip pretty much every workingman in the city.” Parker reached for one of Mrs. Turnbull’s hot and flaky biscuits. “A few years ago there wasn’t one of these labor unions anywhere in New York that I’m aware of. Now they’re everywhere.”

  “A man has to protect his livelihood,” Cranston said quietly. “If businessmen are going to buy marble quarried by Sing Sing prisoners who work for no wage at all, what are law abiding marble-cutters to do about it? They can’t possibly match the Sing Sing price.”

  “But if Sing Sing marble isn’t sold to defray the cost of operating the penitentiary,” said a Mr. Graves, who had ridden down from Westchester and was stopping the night at Mrs. Turnbull’s, “what will? And what are the alternatives? Hang them all instead? Or decent citizens having to pay higher taxes to keep them?”

  “The marble-cutters are decent citizens as well, with families to support just like the rest of us,” Cranston said. Nick was mildly surprised to discover this radical side to the ferry operator’s character.

  “Nothing to do with marble-cutters,” Parker mumbled, his mouth full of stewed beef and onions. “It’s the stevedores what went on strike.”

  “But they’re all in it together, aren’t they? This General Trades Union organization claims to speak for ’em all. Flogging’s too easy. Hang a few of the ringleaders, that will make the point.” Harvey was excited enough to stand up and wave his glass of ale at the rest of them.

  “Now, now gentlemen.” Mrs. Turnbull arrived to calm the troubled waters, carrying a steaming dish of something that smelled marvelous. “You mustn’t get yourselves all excited. Lose your appetites you will. And I’ve made you baked apples with maple syrup.”

  There was a good bit of silent eating after that, though the strain of the argument flowed like an underground river among them. Nick took a last spoonful of baked apple and stood up. It was a short walk back to the almshouse, but it was easier while there was some light left, particularly in the cold of winter.

  “Going so soon, Dr. Turner?” The stranger from Westchester patted his mouth with a napkin and stood up as well. “I had hoped to show you something of interest. At least I expect it would be, since you’re a medical man.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Graves?”

  Graves went over to the satchel he’d left beside the door when he arrived. “I call it Somnus. For the god of sleep.” He produced a tightly corked metal canister about ten inches high. “A few whiffs and your patients will slumber peacefully, and whatever you do, they will feel no pain.”

  “If you’re speaking of nitrous oxide or laughing gas, I heard of it years ago in Providence. It provoked uncontrollable silliness, even euphoria. But as a medical analgesic it wasn’t much use.”

  “My Somnus is not nitrous oxide, Dr. Turner. I can promise you that. It is quite different, as I’m prepared to demonstrate.”

  Nick spied Mrs. Turnbull watching them intently from her place beside the door to the kitchen. Whatever it was Mr. Graves wanted with him, the man had known to find him here because the Widow Turnbull had disclosed that Dr. Nicholas Turner regularly came to her farmhouse for his dinner. “Demonstrate how, Mr. Graves?”

  “I will prove to you that Somnus produces a deep slumber that prevents the feeling of pain.”

  “And what exactly is this Somnus?”

  “I’m not prepared to say at this moment, Dr. Turner. A man has to protect his right to earn from his labor, doesn’t he?”

  “Fair enough.” Nick reached for his greatcoat and muffler, which were hanging on a hook beside the door. “But I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong man. We can’t afford such luxuries at Bellevue. You should talk to the doctors down the town at New York Hospital. Private charity for the deserving poor may stretch a bit further than the budget the council allots to the almshouse.”

  “I do indeed intend to visit New York Hospital, Dr. Turner, and a number of private physicians, but I wanted to speak with you first because I’m told you’re a true man of science. Forward t
hinking. Not everyone is, as I’m sure you know. There’s some that object to any kind of research as being against the laws of God and man.”

  That long, hard look, Nick realized, was intended to be conspiratorial. Damn. Impossible to keep anything quiet, not in a place like New York. “Forward thinking,” Nick said. “I shall take that as a compliment.”

  “What I propose, Dr. Turner, is that what I have in here”—Graves indicated the metal canister—“would allow a man to come under the surgeon’s knife while still alive and feel nothing.”

  There was a gasp or two from the others. “And afterwards?” Nick asked.

  Graves shrugged. “Afterwards the patient would wake up, and things would go on as they would have in any case.”

  “It’s a remarkable claim, Mr. Graves, but difficult to prove in these circumstances. If you care to come to the hospital sometime and—”

  “I can prove the truth of my words here and now, Dr. Turner. I will be your patient. I believe Mrs. Turnbull can supply us with a sharp knife. I’m prepared to allow you to make as deep a cut as you like on any part of my person.”

  Mrs. Turnbull meanwhile had produced a large carving knife and was holding it in full view. “With that,” Graves said, nodding towards the knife. “And with these other gentlemen as witnesses.”

  “He sat down,” Nick told Manon the next day. “Then Mrs. Turnbull pulled the cork on the container of this Somnus and dampened a cloth with whatever was inside and waved it under his nose. Next thing you know, Graves has taken a couple of deep breaths and gone out as quickly as you’d snuff out a candle. Couple of the others slapped his face and called his name, but didn’t get any response.”