by Larry Karp
But away from his instrument, the fiddler went grim. A step outside Mrs. Aronowitz’s room, Samuel’s face was a storm cloud, ready to blow. Routine after visiting a terminal patient. I learned early—get him thinking about the next case. “Going to send Mr. Wilson home today?” I asked, and as usual, it worked. Samuel smiled, bright sunshine, storm passed. “I think so. Looks like we’ve got that ulcer licked. Just have to make sure he sticks to his diet this time.”
After office visits, Samuel went home. I made for the Steinberg Hospital Library, looked up arteriosclerotic heart disease and strychnine poisoning in book after book after book. Nothing to change my opinion about Jonas Fleischmann’s cause of death. I did read that symptoms of tetanus are similar to those of strychnine poisoning, but a good dose of strychnine can be fatal within twenty minutes, while tetanus comes on much more slowly. If Jonas had scratched his finger on a contaminated piece of metal he’d’ve had plenty of time to call Samuel for help.
Halfway through dinner that evening, the phone rang. Samuel jumped up, snatched the receiver, nodded as he listened. “Yes…yes… Sounds for real. Be right over.” He dropped the receiver back into the cradle. “Lily Fleischmann. Her niece is in labor.”
Just hearing the name Fleischmann was flint to my tinder. I nearly went over backward, pushing away from the table. Samuel chuckled. Ramona clicked her tongue. “Today, of all days. Jonas’ funeral.”
“Take it up with You-Know-Who,” Samuel said lightly. “Old He-Who-Taketh-and-Giveth-on-the-Same-Day.” He squeezed Ramona’s shoulder, danced past us into the living room.
I kissed Ramona. She looked up at me, sad smile. “That man—I don’t know where he gets his energy.”
I ran down the porch stairs to the car. To Samuel, no call was ever routine. He took off down Roosevelt like a bat out of hell. We zipped past Steinberg Hospital, odd. I pointed. “Samuel…?”
“Home delivery.” Eyes straight ahead, watching the road.
“Why?”
“Hospital beds’ve gotten tight, war injuries. And with so many nurses gone overseas, the ones still here are on roller skates twenty-four hours a day. Besides, hospitals cost money that some people don’t have.”
Muggy night air swirled through the car. Samuel rested an elbow on the window edge. “After the war, maybe I’ll get a little money together, buy a convertible.” He switched on the radio. Benny Goodman, “A Smoo-o-o-th One.” Samuel started whistling along, note-perfect, right on with every nuance of those clarinet whinnies. All the way to the Fleischmanns’, Samuel whistled. “Oh Look At Me Now,” “Throwin’ Stones at the Sun,” “More Than You Know,” not a dropped note. Then he whistled solo from the car up to the front door.
Murray let us in, dark blue shirt open halfway down the front, sleeves rolled. Sweat streamed down his cheeks. My shirt was plastered to my back, but Samuel, as always, looked cool and comfortable. Murray bounced a glance from Samuel to me, then back. “Hey, it’s Dr. Firestone and Doc F, Junior again. Givin’ twofers this week, Samuel?”
No malice in his voice, nothing offensive. Just his way. A junkman’s heavy-handed humor. But I heard my mother’s voice. “A coarse man.”
“For you, special,” Samuel said, then his tone softened. “Doing all right, Murray?”
Murray looked blank, then recognition lit his eyes. “Oh yeah, sure. Thanks, Samuel. Funeral’s done, Jonas is under ground. Finished.”
As Murray talked, a heavy man in a three-piece woolen suit walked into the hall from the living room. Full beard, thinning black hair, impressive bay window. On his head he wore a black yarmulke. He shook an angry finger at Murray. “I heard that. ‘Finished’! You put your brother in the earth, turn around, go right back to work. That’s not—”
Murray cut him off with an upraised hand and a sharp “Sha! Hey, Ez, let the doctors go upstairs, okay? Maybe I gotta listen to this stuff but they don’t.”
The fat man nodded at Samuel, mumbled, “G’d evening, Dr. Firestone,” then ran eyes over me as if I were a worm. “This pisher’s a doctor? He don’t look old enough to tie his shoes.”
Samuel laughed out loud, said, “Top o’ the evening to you, Ez,” then turned around. I followed him to the foot of the stairs. He stopped long enough to whisper back at me, “Lesson for today—don’t get into pissing contests with skunks.” Then he tore upstairs, three at a time. With the heavy bag, I could do only two.
From the top of the stairs I heard soft cries. Four closed doors and one open, that obviously a bathroom. Samuel clearly knew where to go. We trotted single-file through the atrium, into the farthest room.
A girl lay writhing and moaning in a double bed facing the door. Lily Fleischmann sat on her left, holding her hand. On the girl’s right sat a well-dressed woman, stiff, almost prim in a white silk blouse and plaid skirt. Lily smiled at Samuel but the other woman took one look at me, threw her hand to her chest and half-rose from her chair.
Samuel returned Lily’s smile, then said, “Okay, Shannon,” to the girl in the bed. “This’s what we’ve been waiting for.” He half-turned toward me. “Shannon Herlihy, my son, Leo. He’s learning to be a doctor. Leo, that’s Shannon’s Aunt Nancy.” As if we were at a cocktail party.
Aunt Nancy didn’t seem overly reassured. Shannon quieted, tried to smile, couldn’t quite make it. She wasn’t much older than I. Would’ve been pretty, except her face was swollen, lips thick, eyelids bloated. Long blonde hair, matted in sweat. The man downstairs, Ez? Couldn’t be her father, could he? Her husband?
Samuel rested a hand on Shannon’s round abdomen, raised an eyebrow as she began to squirm. The girl cried out, threw her head back and forth on the pillow. “Good contraction,” Samuel said, then, “Face, fingers’re a little puffy, aren’t they, Leo? Toxemia, a high blood pressure condition, happens only in pregnancy. Soon’s the baby’s out, she’ll be fine.” Talking to both Shannon and me.
Lily gave him a rubber glove. As he slipped it on, he said to the girl, “Going to see how far along you are. Anything bothers you, tell me.” Never for an instant letting go of her eyes. He reached under the sheet covering her, and as he bent forward, Shannon’s face scrunched up. “Hurt?” Samuel asked.
“No, just feels funny. I’m scared.”
Samuel pulled off the glove, said quickly to Lily, “Fully effaced, four centimeters dilated, water bag intact, head’s right down there.” Then he looked back to Shannon. “Sure you’re scared. Everybody’s scared when they’re doing something new and big and important. But it’s going great. Nancy, Lily, Leo and I’ll be with you the whole way.”
“But Doctor Firestone, I’m afraid it’s gonna hurt, like with those contraptions.”
I struggled to keep my face straight, but Samuel smiled openly. “Yes, it will hurt some. When it gets worse than the cramps you’re having now, we’ll give you medicine, twilight sleep. Afterward, you won’t remember anything bad at all. Promise.”
Twilight sleep, gold-standard labor painkiller then, a combination of morphine and scopolamine. Shannon started another contraction, screamed, thrashed. Lily said, softly, “Breathe, honey, deep, like I told you. In….out….in….out. Breathe with me, that’s right. Good.” When the pain let up, Lily took a washcloth, dipped it into a bowl of water on a nightstand, washed the girl’s face. Shannon managed a wan smile. I glanced at Aunt Nancy, sitting there holding Shannon’s right hand loosely, now and then smiling at the girl and nodding her head, yes-yes, like a mechanical doll. I wondered why she didn’t just wait downstairs.
A couple of hours later, Shannon started thrashing with every contraction, pulled her hands away from Lily and Aunt Nancy, beat fists on the pillow. Samuel examined her, looked pleased. “Six centimeters, baby’s head oriented just right. You’re doing great, Shannon—now for that twilight sleep. Then I can break your water and we’ll be off to the races. Next thing you know, you’ll have had your baby.”
He took vials of morphine and scopolamine from his bag, drew the contents into
a syringe, then plunged the needle into Shannon’s hip. A few minutes later, the girl’s eyes closed and her body relaxed. Samuel gently worked a long needle inside her vagina. Light-green fluid burst onto the sheet. My father looked at Lily, eyes twinkling with mischief. “Passaic Falls.”
Lily rolled her eyes and walked toward the door. “I’ll get fresh linen.”
Clean bedsheets or not, that odd labor-room odor of sweat and raw flesh got stronger and stronger as hours dragged. I wondered what races we were off to. Twilight sleep, I learned, was not exactly sleep. Shannon screamed, flung her limbs wildly, shouted the vilest words. Lily, Aunt Nancy and I took turns standing guard at the bedside so Shannon couldn’t throw herself to the floor.
About one in the morning, Samuel said she was fully dilated and the head just needed to come down, probably another hour. Lily looked at me. “I could use a Pepsi. We got that and ginger ale down in the fridge. How about you go have a bottle, then bring us one. What d’ you want, Nancy? Samuel?”
Aunt Nancy shook her head. My father thought for a moment. “Ginger ale.”
As I went down the stairs I heard loud voices from the living room. “Listen, Ezra, I hate being rude to a guest. But I been telling you for almost an hour now, I had a big day, and I’m tired. I want to go to bed, I got to go to work today.”
“And that is why I am not leaving.” Ezra sounded like a puffed-up schoolmaster. “You’re afraid maybe those gangsters you sell your scrap to’ll go someplace else if you ain’t at work today? A week, you should stay home, say morning kaddish, then sit shiva all the day. It’s the law.”
“For Christ sake, I’m talking to a wall. Yeah, fine, it’s the law. So is sellin’ scrap to Uncle. Which by the way is none of your damn business if I do or I don’t.”
I tiptoed from the bottom step to the edge of the living room doorway. “I make it my business,” Ezra roared. “Suppose I go drop a word to the right person. What do you think would happen then?”
I knew what would happen. In 1943, a junkyard selling scrap to the enemy? Especially a junkyard run by Jews? Let word get out, and that yard would go up in smoke one night. People would be beaten, maybe killed.
Strangely, Murray didn’t sound concerned. “Sure, Ez,” he said. “You just go and drop that word. Go ahead. Then one day you can explain to God why you turned the goyim loose on me.”
Ez’s comeback was so savage I flinched against the wall. “A Jew who disobeys the laws of his people and the laws of his country is not just a bad Jew,” the big man bellowed. “He’s a bad man.”
Silence, just for a moment, like the premonition of a whirlwind. Then as if he were talking to a dog he was whipping, Ezra shouted, “In Poland alone, Hitler kills six thousand Jews every day. Which is no secret to nobody no more, except maybe Mr. Roosevelt. The Nazis pack Jews with their yellow stars into trains like cattle, off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, and they ain’t going to stop ’til every Jew in Europe is dead. You’re a Jew, Murray. You think maybe those Nazi momsers would tell you you’re not?”
I stretched my neck to peer around the corner of the doorway and peek with my right eye. Ezra was choleric, crimson-faced, arms up and out like a round buzzard ready to swoop down onto Murray and tear him to bits. But Murray just looked at that furious fat man and laughed. Then he said, “Tell me I’m whatever you want, Ez. There’s people tell me I’m a schmuck, but I don’t think on accounta that I gotta be a schmuck.”
Ezra looked like a tire that had just caught a nail. He staggered back a step, lowered his arms, dropped his chin to his chest. Murray took him by the elbow, guided him toward the hall. I turned, trotted across the hall into the kitchen. “I appreciate you want to help me, Ez,” I heard Murray say. “But when you offer a man help and he says no, you gotta leave him be. All them mumbo-jumbo prayers, they don’t make the least bit a sense to me. Jonas is dead, gone. He’s in the ground, that’s that, and I got a business to run. Person’s gotta eat. G’night.”
The screen door slammed. I ran to the refrigerator, grabbed two Pepsis and a ginger ale, flipped all three caps on an opener, then started back through the hallway. Murray stood in the living room doorway. A smile of crafty amusement ran up the left side of his face. “Well, if it ain’t Young Doc Firestone. How’s it going up there, Dockie?”
“Dockie.” I liked that. All of a sudden, I felt energized. “Samuel says she’s doing well, fully dilated, just has to push a while.” I held up the bottles. “Hot up there. We got thirsty.” Murray didn’t say anything, so I went on. “That girl, Shannon? She’s your niece?”
Murray wasn’t quite quick enough to keep an instant of surprise from flashing over his face. “Yeah, my niece,” he said. “And what you’re really asking is, where’s her husband, right? And why she comes to her auntie’s house to have her baby.”
The junkman’s voice was like ice creaking under my feet. I took a step backward, glanced over my shoulder at the stairs. “Lemme give you a little bit of advice, Dockie, okay?”
I looked Murray in the eye, good move. He smiled. “You’re all right, Dockie. Ain’t many guys your age’d go along with their old man and sit for a whole night watching something come out of a girl ’steada going off someplace with a girl they could put something in. It’s important a doc should ask the right questions, but it’s also important he shouldn’t ask the wrong ones. Kapeesh?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Nah.” With a wave, Murray sent my apology flying past him into the living room. “You were born smart, but ain’t nobody was ever born knowing anything. You gotta learn.” Crafty smile back over his face. “Like you gotta learn how to listen to people from behind a wall without having them see you. Or know you’re there. Like when I hear stairs creaking, but afterwards I don’t hear no creaking floorboards going into the kitchen.”
He saw my embarrassment, started to laugh again. “Hey, don’t worry, Dockie.” Disparaging headshake. “That Ezra Shnayerson, he’s the rabbi in the orthodox synagogue over on Ellison. Whatever stick he’s got up his ass, he ain’t gonna drop no word, at least not to anybody but me. See, Orthodox Jews don’t bother Christian people, but they think God told them it’s their job to straighten out a Jew who knows crap when he smells it. So on accounta me, Ez is scared his soul’s gonna be S.O.L. on Judgment Day. There’s another lesson, Dockie, and I bet your old man’d tell you the same. Don’t ever depend on nobody else, not in this world. All that ever gets you is scared or in trouble. Or both.”
I liked Murray. He was rough, but his eyes and voice were kind. I asked would he really be at work later that day. He looked at his watch. “Christ, after one o’clock—that’s two nights outa three. Yeah, I’ll be there. Why?”
“I went to see you yesterday,” I said. “Forgot about the funeral. I’ve got a music box missing its governor. George couldn’t find one that’d fit. He said to come back today and see you.”
Murray smiled. “Music box, huh? Governor? Sure, Dockie, can do. But you gotta excuse me for now. If I don’t get my beauty sleep I ain’t gonna be worth a fly’s fart at that yard to you or anybody else.” He motioned me to the stairs; I went up, heard him clopping behind me.
Chapter 5
The waiter picked up my empty sandwich plate, pointed at my iced-tea glass. “Another?” I shook my head. As he walked off, I said to Dad, “Bet you didn’t look back down those stairs.”
Dad chuckled, lifted his glass, took a quick swallow.
I got up to that labor room as fast as I could move with those three open soda bottles. About an hour later, the baby was ready to come. Samuel put on forceps, pulled. The crown of the head, all dark curly hair, stretched that poor girl to what looked like the breaking point. I held my breath as she let loose a sound like an engine revving out of control. Samuel slid off the forceps, took hold of the baby’s head, guided it out. The face was like a plum. Samuel pulled downward. Shannon screamed, and out came shoulders, then the b
ody, in a gush of dark greenish fluid full of clumps that looked like olive-colored blood clots. “God damn,” Samuel muttered. “Meconium.” He threw two clamps across the cord, cut between them, laid the baby on the mother’s belly, head downward. Then he picked up a red rubber bulb and sucked at the baby’s nose and throat. No response.
Shannon, free of pain, lay still in her twilight sleep, but Aunt Nancy leaped off her chair, clutched at her temples, and screamed, “My baby!”
Her baby? I thought. Samuel didn’t seem to notice. He pinched the baby’s nose, put his lips to the baby’s mouth. Samuel’s chest expanded, once, twice, a third time. Then he straightened, lifted the baby’s legs, gave it a couple of light taps on the bottom. The baby’s face contorted. It flexed its arms and legs, let out a howl, turned pink. Samuel smiled at Aunt Nancy. “Baby’s fine, don’t worry. Had a little something stuck in its throat but that’s gone now.” Aunt Nancy clutched him with both hands, yelled, “You saved his life,” then turned toward Lily and screeched, “He breathed life into my baby.”
After we cleaned Shannon up, Samuel and I went down to the kitchen, took bottles of Pepsi from the refrigerator, sat at the table. Sweat and body oil gave Samuel’s face a golden glow. “That green stuff,” he said. “Meconium. If a baby doesn’t get enough oxygen, its anal sphincter relaxes and releases meconium into the fluid. Baby inhales it on the way out, clumps get stuck in the trachea, baby can’t breathe. I sucked out the plug.”
I thought of Aunt Nancy, grabbing at him, screaming he’d breathed life into her baby. Why didn’t he tell her he’d only released an obstruction? “Where did it go?” I asked. “The meconium plug.”
Samuel laughed. “Where do you think?” He laughed harder, must’ve been the look on my face. “Won’t do me any harm—there’re no bacteria inside the uterus.” Then a sudden change in the weather. Samuel cocked his head, gave me a hard look. “All right, no, it wasn’t pleasant. But by the time I went and dug a suction tube out of my bag, that baby might’ve been damaged or dead. A mouthful of baby shit might not taste good, but it beats sending a kid out brain-damaged.” He wiped his hands on a towel. “Come on. Let’s say good-bye.”
