Orphan #8

by Kim van Alkemade

  I was surprised how long she spoke; she must not have had an attentive audience for quite a while. I was confused, though, by her story. Was she angling for my sympathy? I knew what it was like to be excluded, kept at the margins, denied recognition everyone else enjoyed, no matter how undeserving. But I wasn’t like her, I reminded myself. She’d exploited me when she should have cared for me. What difference did it make that she had to struggle? Over us, she’d had all the power, and I knew now how she’d used it.

  A twinge of pain tugged at Mildred Solomon’s mouth. “Why do you want to know about my tonsil study?”

  “Because,” I said, watching for her reaction, “I was your material.”

  Dr. Solomon blinked, confused. She stared at me, as if trying to focus on print too small to read. “You were one of my subjects?”

  I nodded, imagining for a moment that Dr. Solomon recognized me: her brave, good girl. She lifted her hand to my face. I tilted my head toward her curved palm. I hadn’t realized how much I craved this tender gesture until it was happening. It hadn’t been her fault after all. She’d wanted to be kind to us, treat us like her own children, but she had to prove herself. The world was so unfair, she wasn’t allowed to show affection. Not then. Not until now. I rested my cheek in her hand.

  But no, it wasn’t a caress. Dr. Solomon bent my head back to expose the underside of my chin. Her thumbnail circled the scars there, tracing the dimes of shiny skin. Then she placed her fingers against my drawn eyebrows and wiped away the pencil. Finally, she reached up to my hairline and pushed along the brow. My wig shifted. She pulled her hand back in surprise. It wasn’t tenderness I saw in her face, not even regret. Fear, maybe? No, not even that.

  “So the alopecia was never resolved? I was curious about that, always meant to follow up. What number were you?”

  I adjusted my wig. “Eight,” I said. I expected it to happen any second now—Dr. Solomon would ask to be forgiven. For everything she had done to me, for the repercussions of a lifetime, Mildred Solomon was about to atone. My eyes were on the old woman’s face, greedy for the words I wanted to hear.

  Dr. Solomon squinted, as if seeing into the past. “Number Eight. I do remember you.” She closed her eyes, the lids stretched tight. “You were such a clingy little thing.”

  The words stung like a slap. She collapsed back against the pillows, her breath fast and shallow. The pain was getting worse, I could see. Good, I thought. The bitch deserved it.

  I thought she’d lost her train of thought until she said, “How is it my fault, exactly, your tumor?”

  “Because of the X-rays you gave me. All those X-rays, for no good reason.” I wanted to spit the words out, sharp as nails, but I sounded like a bleating lamb.

  “I had my reasons. Good ones, too. Didn’t you read my article?”

  “Yes, I did. I read how you thought you were saving us from surgery. But you used us, you used me. We didn’t even have tonsillitis. We were perfectly healthy. Maybe you did have your reasons, but aren’t you at least sorry for how it turned out, those X-ray experiments? For what they did to us, to me? First my hair, and now this.” I clutched my breast. “What’s going to be left of me after this?”

  “It’s too bad for you, Number Eight, sure, but if researchers gave up their experiments because they were worried about the consequences, we’d still be dying of smallpox.”

  “Why are you calling me Number Eight? My name is Rachel, Rachel Rabinowitz. You never even knew that, did you?”

  Over a grimace of pain, Dr. Solomon’s face flushed with anger. “Dr. Hess told me never to use your names. Just numbers, he said, they’re just numbers. How else can a researcher maintain objectivity, especially working with children? You don’t think it was hard to keep my composure, with those damn nurses bursting into tears every time I turned around? It was all I could do to get them to respect me. They were always questioning my methods, as if we were equals.” She snorted derisively. “Nurses. I’d like to see them dissect a corpse.”

  She was panting, almost hyperventilating—soon she’d begin to tremor from withdrawal. I picked up the syringe, eager now to shut her up. I eased the needle into the IV, depressing the plunger until her breath, still shallow, steadied. I didn’t want to speak to her again, not today. Still, I withdrew the syringe at just half the prescribed dose, squirted the remainder into the vial in my pocket. She’d be in pain again soon, but so what? It would be gratifying, at four o’clock rounds, to see Mildred Solomon suffering. I’d give her a full dose then, leave her quiet for the night nurse.

  Gloria noted the empty bowl of broth, the empty syringe of morphine. “Good job, Rachel. You see why I wanted you on shift with me. Go ahead and take your lunch break.”

  On my way to the staff cafeteria, I realized what luck it was I’d switched with Flo. There was only one other nurse on the night shift, and no supervisor. Tomorrow night, I’d have Dr. Solomon to myself. She would be the one at my mercy.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE DAY AFTER SAM RAN AWAY, RACHEL COULDN’T GET herself out of bed at Rising Bell. Naomi came to jostle her just as Breakfast Bell rang. “You better get up now, and hurry. The other monitor will give the whole dorm standing lessons if you make us late.”

  Rachel sat up, her knees, neck, and back aching. Tears spilled over as she whispered, “I just can’t do it.”

  “All right then.” Naomi hustled off, then quickly returned. “I sent the rest of them down, I’m taking you to the Infirmary.”

  Gladys Dreyer didn’t seem surprised to see Rachel back so soon. “Delayed reaction most likely. You had a very upsetting experience. I’ll keep you here for a couple of days so you can rest up. We’ll say its mononucleosis if anyone asks.” Grateful, Rachel fell into the bed Nurse Dreyer offered. Naomi dashed out and soon ran back in with a book from the library. “I thought this was one you’d like,” she panted, holding out a volume about Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. Rachel had read it before but accepted gratefully, knowing Naomi had made herself late for school on her account. She expected it would be Naomi’s last kindness, now that Sam and his bribes were gone.

  It was a luxury unheard of in the Orphaned Hebrews Home: an entire day spent reading in bed. Nurse Dreyer even brought lunch on a tray. It occurred to Rachel this was how children with families lived. Children with quiet bedrooms in apartments where time was told by the soft ticking of a clock instead of the screech of bells. Children with fathers who came home from work to ask what they had learned in school that day. Children whose mothers kept them home when they were feeling too fragile to face the world.

  After school, Naomi was back, this time with Rachel’s homework. “Your teacher says to get better quick, and so do I.” Naomi squeezed Rachel’s hand before hurrying off. Rachel looked at the notebook and math text on her lap, pleased but puzzled by Naomi’s continuing attentions.

  The doctor from Mount Sinai who attended the orphanage noted Rachel’s fatigue but doubted it was mononucleosis because she had no sore throat or fever. Gladys Dreyer persuaded him. “She could be infectious, even without those symptoms,” she argued. “She’ll only be allowed to stay with your diagnosis. I wanted to give her a few days, after what she’s been through. . . . ” She took the doctor aside and spoke with him in a voice too quiet for Rachel to hear. He listened, nodded, cleared his throat.

  “Better to keep her away from the other children, just in case,” he concurred.

  So Rachel spent the week lazing in bed, reading the books and doing the homework Naomi brought her and getting used to the idea that Sam was gone for good. With Marc Grossman sent upstate, it was mostly Sam’s abandonment that weighed her down. She wondered if the idea of his running away depressed her more than the fact of his absence. Other than Sunday afternoons in Reception, she’d spent so little time with her brother over the past nine years. They were in separate dorms and different grades, never in the same clubs after school or the same table for meals, on opposite sides of the lake during
summer camp. Her life in the Home would hardly be changed without Sam there. She’d no longer look for him across the dining hall or in the yard, was all; no longer search him out when the baseball team was playing; no longer try to catch his eye as they passed each other, silently, in the wide corridors of the Castle.

  “When are you coming back to the dorm, Rachel?” Naomi asked on Friday when she dropped off Rachel’s homework. “It’s no fun there without you.”

  Rachel smiled, daring to believe Naomi might have been a true friend this whole time. “Nurse Dreyer thinks I’ve rested up long enough, she says I should go back on Sunday.”

  “Good! Then you won’t miss the brisket.” Naomi settled herself on the edge of Rachel’s narrow bed. “You ever wondered why Sunday dinner is the best meal of the week? I mean, it really ought to be Friday night if you think about it, right? But it’s Sunday because that’s when the board of trustees has their meeting. You know, those men in suits who look in on us while we eat? They like to see where their money’s going.” Naomi left with a wink that made Rachel smile for the first time since the Purim Dance.

  Saturday night, though, one of the boys in the Infirmary who’d been running a fever had a crisis. Rachel woke from an unnerving dream to find Gladys Dreyer examining the boy with a panicked expression. “Can you lift your leg for me, Benny? Just lift it up. No? Then how about your foot, can you move your foot? Are you really trying?” The boy’s fevered face scrunched with effort, but the leg remained inanimate.

  Gladys went to her desk and dialed the in-house extension for the superintendent’s apartment. “Mr. Grossman, we’ll need the doctor from Mount Sinai here first thing in the morning.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, as if the louder she spoke the word the more likely it was to be true. “I think it’s polio. Yes, of course, isolation procedures immediately.”

  On her way back to attend to the boy, Gladys saw Rachel sitting up in bed, taking advantage of the uncharacteristic light to read her book. “I’m afraid you might be with us for a while longer, Rachel. I’ll confide in you because I know I can count on you not to frighten the younger ones. We may be dealing with a case of polio. We’re going into isolation—no one in or out of the Infirmary until we can be sure none of us is contagious.”

  When the doctor examined Benny the next day, he wasn’t as convinced as Nurse Dreyer had been. There was too much hysteria over polio, he thought, and most of the cases he saw were in infants. Still, he ordered that the boy be moved to the Infirmary’s private room while he sent a sample to the Rockefeller Institute for analysis. He agreed that isolation procedures should be followed until the results came back. At their meeting that afternoon, the trustees were informed of the situation by Mr. Grossman, who assured them isolation would be complete: doors at either end of the Infirmary hallway were locked to prevent errant contact, and a dumb waiter would be used to deliver food and supplies. The abundance of caution let the trustees go home to their own families, congratulating themselves once again that the Orphaned Hebrews Home was the best child care institution in the country—if not the world.

  Benny’s fever broke, though his leg remained terribly weak. Results came back positive for poliomyelitis, which meant the Infirmary stayed in isolation for the full six weeks—the rest of March, all of April, and into May. And so Rachel was trapped, along with a despondent Gladys Dreyer and the dozen children who happened to be in the Infirmary at the time.

  A few of them were in serious condition: a girl in danger of developing pneumonia, a boy with bronchitis, a stitched knee that risked infection, a broken arm requiring elevation. Most, however, soon recovered from the sprains, cuts, scrapes, coughs, aches, and bumps that had sent them to the Infirmary in the first place. Rachel was the oldest and she wasn’t even sick, so Nurse Dreyer enlisted her as a nurse’s aide. She taught Rachel how to clean the pus from infected stitches, how to prepare a mustard plaster for bronchitis, how to check for fever and take a pulse.

  Only Nurse Dreyer attended to Benny, assiduously following the disinfection protocols set out by the attending doctor. Between visits to the boy, however, Gladys leafed through the pages of Look magazine and sipped tea in her apartment while Rachel circulated among the children. During the night, if one of them called out, Gladys stayed in bed, listening for Rachel to get up in her place.

  “I don’t know how I’d survive isolation without you, Rachel,” she said one day over lunch in her cozy kitchenette. “You’ve taken a real interest in the Infirmary. Have you thought about becoming a nurse? You could start a course in the fall. I’d be glad to put in a word for you with the Scholarship Committee.” Rachel hadn’t thought about what came after the Home, but she liked the idea. Nurse Dreyer lent her an old copy of Emerson’s Essentials of Medicine, which she read eagerly. Even if she didn’t completely understand it, she enjoyed the pages dense with anatomical terms and diagnostic descriptions, illustrated by simple drawings of various systems and organs. She worked through the glossary letter by letter, abscess to xanthin. In bed at night, she’d run her finger down a column in the index and choose a disease to read about: bilious fever, creeping pneumonia, hookworm, mumps, palsy, typhoid. Bacillus tuberculosis, at twenty-six pages, put her to sleep for a week.

  In addition to daily supplies and meals and piles of library books to keep the children occupied, the dumb waiter delivered a substantial package of schoolwork for Rachel, including all her texts and lessons. Tucked into the pages of Tennyson’s poems, Rachel found a note from Naomi.

  Hi Rachel, Sorry you’re stuck in isolation! I got worried they’d nab me, too, for visiting you in the Infirmary. It could have been fun, though, if we were both there together! I hear you’re practically running the place. Did you know Nurse Dreyer had a boyfriend? He actually showed up asking about her, but when he heard the word polio you better believe he hightailed it out of here. Doubt she’ll ever see that one again. Amelia even says to say hi, but I think she’s just rubbing it in that you’re stuck up there. Everyone hopes you don’t catch it, though, that’s for sure. I’m still waiting to hear if I’ll get a counselor position, then I can live here while I go to Teachers College at Columbia. That’s what Bernstein’s doing. Not Teachers College, of course, he’s going to City to be a lawyer. I wish the Scholarship Committee would back girls for that. I’d be good at arguing cases, don’t you think? But teaching’s better than secretarial school, that’s for sure, and anyway, only boys can go to City. All the F6 girls are trying to catch Bernstein’s eye, I can tell you. Amelia practically trips over herself every time he walks by, but she’s not his type. He’d make a good catch, though, don’t you think? I’ll write more later, take care of yourself! Your friend, Naomi

  Rachel had never had a confidante before, and the connection warmed her. Naomi addressed her as an equal in a way she never could have in the F5 dorm. That night, she read the note again. Naomi wrote about Bernstein with such admiration, Rachel wondered if she was among those girls trying to catch his eye. The idea of Bernstein and Naomi seemed so natural, she wondered why it made her jealous.

  THE ISOLATION PERIOD ended in May. Benny was left with a slight limp—enough to keep him off the baseball team but not so severe as to attract attention. Thanks to Nurse Dreyer’s precautions, tests confirmed that none of the other children had contracted polio. But Gladys had come to depend on Rachel so much, she asked Mr. Grossman to let her stay on as an assistant until the end of the summer. They’d count it as an apprenticeship, she argued, to strengthen her case for the Scholarship Committee. Mr. Grossman agreed, provided Rachel completed her schoolwork and passed her exams. Rachel had gotten used to the autonomy of the Infirmary and welcomed the idea of staying through the summer instead of going to camp. The habit of visiting Mrs. Berger and Vic had fallen away with Sam’s leaving, replaced, now that isolation was over, by Sunday afternoons with Naomi in Nurse Dreyer’s apartment. Rachel had come to believe their friendship had nothing to do with Sam’s bribes.

  On Rachel’s fift
eenth birthday in August, Gladys had slices of pound cake and stewed peaches brought up to the Infirmary for the occasion, and Naomi presented Rachel with a card made from folded construction paper decorated with pictures cut out of a magazine. Naomi could hardly wait to finish singing happy birthday before she burst out with the good news. “You’re looking at the new counselor for F1. Ma Stember’s finally leaving, to get married, can you believe it? I’m even moving into the counselor’s room.”

  “Congratulations, Naomi.”

  “Listen, I’m going to Coney Island to visit my aunt and uncle next Sunday, to tell them all about getting the counselor job. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “What a nice idea,” Gladys said. “Get some color back in your cheeks.” Rachel raised a hesitant hand to her scalp. “I’ll lend you my cloche hat, it’ll cover you right up.” Gladys got up and lifted the hat, a new and prized possession, out of its round box and placed it on Rachel’s head. The bell-shaped felt covered her scalp, curving prettily from her brow to the nape of her neck. Stylish women were wearing their hair so short, such hats revealed little more than a fringe above a bare neck. On Rachel, the look was perfect.

  “You’re like from a magazine,” Naomi said. “Come see.” They gathered around a mirror. Rachel hardly recognized herself. Her transformation was so stunning, Naomi and Gladys were both at a loss for words.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?” Rachel asked, meeting Nurse Dreyer’s eyes in the mirror.

  “Of course not, dear. I know you’ll take care of it.”

  “And everyone wears bathing caps on the beach,” Naomi said.

  “All right, then, I’ll go with you.” Rachel’s smile made her even prettier. The image startled her, and she turned away from the mirror.