Orphan #8

by Kim van Alkemade

  “Oh, I hear Dr. Feldman coming now,” Betty said. The door from the adjoining office opened abruptly.

  “And who do we have here?” I opened my mouth to introduce myself when I realized Dr. Feldman hadn’t asked me, wasn’t even looking at me, but instead was reaching for the chart Betty held out to him. He settled thick glasses on a nose so biblical I couldn’t help but think of him as a rabbi.

  “Call if you need me,” Betty said to him, turning to leave. The look they exchanged was so intimate, as if they knew everything about each other, it reminded me why I preferred the more impersonal environment of a hospital or the Old Hebrews Home.

  “So, what brings you here today, Miss Rabinowitz?”

  Facing him, I found myself tongue-tied. I’d had no trouble telling it all to Betty: the Infant Home, the X-ray experiment, Dr. Feldman’s article in the library. Wasn’t it all in my chart already, or had he only pretended to read it? Mute, I touched my breast.

  “Yes, well, my nurse tells me you’ve found a lump. Let’s start there, shall we?” Dr. Feldman positioned himself beside the table, facing my back, and tugged open the gown. I moved to lie down, but he stopped me. “Just place your hand on top of your head.” I did, feeling like a child playing Simon Says, while his fat fingers, yellowed by nicotine, searched my breast. I was embarrassed to see my nipple harden—from the air-conditioned cold as much as his prods and pinches—but he seemed to take no notice. After bruising his way up and down one side of my chest and armpit, he had me switch hands, forgetting to pull the gown back up over my shoulder, leaving me naked to the waist. He accompanied his examination with rumbling sounds in the back of his throat.

  “Very good. You can get dressed now.” He called for Betty on his way out, lighting a cigarette before the door was even closed. When I was presentable, she ushered me into his office. It reeked of smoke. Next to the overflowing glass ashtray on his desk was a pretentious blue pack of French cigarettes. The air conditioner rumbling in the closed window seemed only to recirculate the sickly smell.

  “Miss Rabinowitz,” he said from behind the fortress of his desk. “I’ll need to see the results of your blood work, but my examination of your breast, coupled with the X-ray treatments my nurse tells me you received as a child—”

  “They weren’t treatments,” I interrupted, surprising both of us with my vehemence. “It was an experiment. I was experimented on, not treated.”

  “Be that as it may, I have been noticing a statistically significant correlation between excessive childhood exposure to radiation and cancers later in life. Now, forgive me for asking, but have you ever given birth to a child or nursed a baby?”

  “No, of course not.” I sounded so prudish, I said again, simply, “No, I haven’t.”

  “Have you experienced normal menses? Are you postmenopausal?”

  “I didn’t start until I was sixteen, and I’ve never been exactly regular.”

  “I see. Is there any chance of pregnancy?”

  “None.”

  “Well, we’ll see what the urine test tells us. As I was saying, based on my examination, I’d say you’re quite lucky. The tumor is distinct with discernible edges. Though it may be fast growing, we have caught it in time to qualify you for surgery. If it was too advanced, you see, it wouldn’t be advisable to cut across the cancer field.”

  He walked across the room and flicked a switch. A spotlight turned on, illuminating a laminated poster of a woman on his wall. He took a crayon from his pocket and began drawing on it. I could see smudges from past demonstrations. “I begin with an excision of the tumor, which is examined for cancer cells. If the results are negative, I finish the procedure and do what I can to repair the remaining breast tissue. If the results are positive, as I expect they will be, I proceed directly to a mastectomy of the entire breast and related lymph nodes. Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t find it advisable to remove the pectoral muscle, but as a prophylactic measure, I’d recommend taking the other breast as well. For a woman with your history who’s never had a pregnancy or nursed an infant, it would be the wise choice.”

  His dashed lines crisscrossed the woman’s chest as if he were planning a military maneuver on undulating terrain. I wanted to cover my breasts with my hands, to reassure and comfort them. Instead I gripped the arms of my chair. I hated how he kept mentioning babies, as if this wouldn’t have happened if I’d been a normal woman.

  “And, of course, I’ll perform the castration.” His crayon dipped below her waist, dabbing the lower abdomen where her ovaries were hidden. His back to me, he didn’t see the blood drain from my face.

  “Oophorectomy is standard procedure for all breast cancers, though I usually prefer to accomplish castration with radiation. Obviously, that wouldn’t be recommended in your case. Neither would X-ray treatments following surgery, another reason to be aggressive while I have you on the table. Take them both and be done with it.” He paused and considered his two-dimensional patient. Speaking more to her than to me, he said, “The operation is disfiguring, but at least in your case there’s no husband to consider.”

  He switched off the light and took his seat behind the desk. He reached for the pack of cigarettes, lit one for himself, then tilted them in my direction. I was tempted but declined; I didn’t want him to see how badly my hands were shaking.

  “This isn’t a cure, you understand. In my experience with this disease, even the most complete mastectomy merely delays a recurrence. But that delay can be significant. Two years, five. I have one patient who has survived eight years since her operation. The sudden onset of menopause due to the castration may be unpleasant, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?”

  I couldn’t muster a response. My reticence annoyed Dr. Feldman.

  “Is there anyone you want me to speak to?” he asked when I hesitated to agree with his surgical plans. I lifted the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth to pronounce her name, but it stuck there, unsaid. “No one, then?”

  It galled me for him to think I was an old maid. “I don’t live alone,” I said, defensively. Dr. Feldman looked confused. “I have a friend, my roommate.”

  “I was talking about relatives,” he said. “I usually discuss these matters with the husband.”

  If only I could have told him how I sometimes called her husband—but only when she got that teacherly tone and instructed me on how something ought to be done. She was usually too emotional to be the husband, and though I never claimed that role, I wasn’t much of a wife, either. She did the shopping and cooked dinner, but only because I was hopeless in the kitchen and had no patience for the grocer’s. I balanced our checkbooks, but she was the one who could use a wrench to fix a leaking faucet. In the bedroom, it’s true, she took the lead, but it was what we did in there that disqualified us from these categories in the first place. For some of our friends it was obvious who was butch and who was femme, but if we could have married, I wondered, which one of us would have been which? Right now, I know what I would have chosen—me dissolved in wifely tears, her the strong and reassuring husband.

  It seemed my interview with Dr. Feldman was coming to a close. “Let me call my nurse,” he said, pressing a buzzer on his desk. “Betty will get you on my surgical calendar and schedule a preoperative appointment. I’d like to move quickly.” With that, he stood and extended his hand.

  I got to my feet and mirrored his gesture. His yellowed fingers closed loosely over mine. From his examination, I’d expected a firmer grip. In a daze, I followed Betty out of the room.

  “You’re a nurse yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “That’ll make things so much easier. Some of these women, they really don’t understand what’s happening, and of course it falls on me to hold their hands. They say doctors make the worst patients, but they should say nurses make the best.” She sat at her desk, flipping through the pages of Dr. Feldman’s appointment book, then wrote some dates and times on a c
ard she handed to me. “I’ll have you come back into the office the day before the surgery to review our procedures, and I’ll get your vitals again.”

  I looked at the card in my hand. “Next week?”

  “Dr. Feldman had an opening on his surgical calendar, and he did say it was important to move quickly. Where cancer is concerned, the sooner the better.” Betty must have seen the anxiety rising in me. “Is there anyone you can bring with you?”

  “My roommate. She’s away, but I can call her to come back.” She would come back, wouldn’t she? All I had to do was tell her what was happening, if I could ever get her on the phone. I imagined the timetable in my mind: the overnight train left Miami every morning, getting her into New York the next day. If I called tonight, she could be here the day after tomorrow.

  “I meant a relative, dear. They only allow immediate family in the hospital.”

  “I don’t have any family.” I panicked at the idea that they might confine her to a waiting room, prevent her from being by my side. I blurted out, “I’m an orphan, remember? It’s not my fault I don’t have anyone else.”

  Betty placed her hand on my forearm, a steady pressure. Steadfast, that’s the word she brought to mind. “How about I put down that she’s your sister. That way she’ll be able to visit you, all right? Bring her with you next week, why don’t you.”

  Next week. I still didn’t understand why it all had to happen so soon. It was only three days since Mildred Solomon had arrived on Fifth. How had she managed to ruin my life so completely in such a short time?

  Betty walked me out. “Dr. Feldman’s the best, Miss Rabinowitz. You’re lucky he could fit you in.”

  The last thing in the world I felt was lucky, and I knew who was to blame. I could picture her, withered and twitching, unrepentant. I had planned to go home, get some rest before facing the night shift, but the notion of a nap was ridiculous when all I could think about was confronting Mildred Solomon. She’d have to be sorry when I told her what Dr. Feldman had in store for me, and all because of her. And if she wasn’t? Well then, I had the rest of the day and all night to make her sorry.

  BACK OUT ON the heat-shimmered sidewalk, the cold of Dr. Feldman’s air-conditioned office clung to my skin. The subway was so awkward from there, I decided to walk through Central Park. A meandering diagonal along its shaded paths would bring me, eventually, to the Old Hebrews Home. Gloria would be glad to see me, and Flo, I was sure, wouldn’t mind going home in the middle of the day. I passed a phone booth and resisted the urge to dial long-distance right there on the street. I’d call tomorrow morning, I decided, when I got home from the night shift. She’d still have time to get here before Dr. Feldman took his knife to everything she loved about me.

  As I walked, the August sun burned off my chill, replacing it with a caul of sweat. The park was cooler, but not by much. People were tucked up in shaded places, avoiding the lawns and walks. I listened for squirrels chattering in trees or pigeons cooing for bread crumbs, but all I could hear was the metronome of my heels on the asphalt path. There was a stretch, around the Harlem Meer, where I seemed to be the only person moving under that indifferent sky.

  If it wasn’t for the appointment card in my pocketbook, I’d think I dreamed the whole thing. Three days ago I was fine—lonely, sure, but that would have been over by the end of August. I’d insisted we wait to celebrate my birthday until she was back, dinner at our favorite restaurant in the Village with a few of our old friends. How I wished now we’d never moved. Who would visit me, the long days I’d be recuperating? Molly Lippman? The idea made me shudder, as if someone had walked on my grave.

  Where would we put my grave? What cemetery would sell us side-by-side plots, and what could we carve on my headstone? Everything I was—everything we were—would be forgotten, no chiseled beloved or loving to bear witness that I’d been more than a spinster. I wasn’t named on her pension; she wasn’t in my will. She’d have to masquerade as my sibling just to visit me in the hospital. Built on the insubstantial foundation of our feelings, the life we had created together seemed a figment of our imaginations that dissolved into fairy dust in the face of something real, and deadly, like cancer.

  By the time I got to the Old Hebrews Home, I was racked with anxiety and dread. I took the stairs to steady myself, anticipating the sanctuary of the nurses’ lounge.

  Flo was there. “What are you doing here already? I was just on my way down to the cafeteria for lunch.”

  “I got done sooner than I expected.”

  She peered at me. “I don’t see the difference.” For a second I feared she could read the cancer in my face until I remembered I’d told her I had a hair appointment.

  “Oh, well, I don’t like much of a change. Listen, Flo, thanks again for switching with me, but as long as I’m here, why don’t you sign out early and head home, let me cover the rest of the day? I’m here until morning either way.”

  “Sure, if that’s what you want. Day shift’s got me tired already. You’ll see, nights you can sit quiet, think your own thoughts.” She sat on the windowsill and lit a cigarette. “Have one with me. Might as well get paid for my lunch break. I’ll eat when I get home. My mother-in-law’s baking a noodle kugel, if you can you believe it, in this heat?”

  I took the cigarette she offered and sat beside her. “What do you think of our new patient?”

  “No trouble at all, not with all the morphine she’s on. I barely managed to get a bowl of broth into her.”

  “Did she say anything?” I asked, worried what Dr. Solomon might have revealed about me.

  “Just that I should tell them she wanted to eat some chocolate pudding. It was funny how she said it: tell ate I want chocolate pudding. Made me wonder if she’d had a stroke.”

  Dr. Solomon hadn’t had a stroke, I knew. She was referring to me by number. By morning, I swore, she’d know my name.

  “Anyway,” Flo said, “I doubt she’ll last much longer. Probably be someone else in Mr. Mendelsohn’s bed next time I’m on.” She exhaled contemplatively. “I used to sit up with him. He never seemed to sleep. We’d talk all night sometimes. A couple of weeks ago, he was telling me about his grandson visiting, showed me the card he’d gotten, thanking him for helping the boy study for his bar mitzvah. I said something along the lines of that being the reason God spared him from the camp. Mr. Mendelsohn got so quiet, all you could hear was the wheezing from his lungs. I was wondering—I hardly knew I said it out loud, but I finally asked—how did he survive? It was the middle of the night. Lucia was out at the nurses’ station, sound asleep probably, the whole floor so dark and quiet. He said, ‘Are you sure you want to hear about that, Fegelah?’ He always called me by my Jewish name. Anyway, I said yes, and then he told me the strangest story.”

  “What was it?” I was curious, too; I’d always taken an interest in survival. “Tell me.”

  “He said all his life, he had a condition where colors and emotions were connected. Like the first time he saw his wife, she was wearing a dress the color of daffodils, so golden and bright, he said he fell in love with her before he even knew her name. So, he explained, yellow was love, green was a peaceful, calm feeling, and brown was sad, like when his little dog died. He said gray was anxious, so before an exam at school everything seemed blanketed in a dreary fog. Black and white meant nothing special to him, but blue—he said blue was full of hope, so if he looked up into a blue sky on his way to school, he’d become optimistic that he’d pass his exams. His whole life he suffered from this, he said, as if parts of him that should have been separate were linked.”

  “I read about that once,” I said. “Or something like it. The Greeks had a name for it, didn’t they, when people mix up sounds and colors?”

  “Synesthesia. I looked it up.” Flo stared at the sky, seeming far away. “I guess it was something like that, or maybe it was all in his mind. Mr. Mendelsohn thought it was real, though, but I didn’t know why he was telling me about it when I’d aske
d how he survived the camp. I was afraid he was going to tell me they pulled him aside to study him, but instead he said, ‘My wife died in 1936, that’s why I sent the children away. I should have gone with them, but I had a business to run, profits to protect. When they herded us into the ghettos, I had plenty of money for bribes and the black market, so I fared better than others. Later, on the train, we were packed in so tight a person could hardly breath, but my face was against the side of the car and there was a gap in the boards, so I had fresh air the whole way. Some of us fainted just from the stench and the standing. Only when we unloaded at the camp did I realize the man standing next to me for the last two days had been dead the whole time.’ Can you imagine, Rachel?”

  I shook my head. It was too awful to contemplate.

  “He said by the time they were unloaded, they were all exhausted, starved, and filthy. He said, ‘Without thinking, we went where they pointed, left or right, like rats in a maze. They must have thought they could wring some work out of me because I was sent to the labor barracks. Everything was gray or brown, and that was as it should be. Grief, anxiety, despair—if the mud wasn’t already brown it would have turned that color in my eyes. Weeks went by, then months, and every day I managed not to die. I pushed others aside to put in my mouth whatever food there was. I kept my head to the ground and did my work. I expected every hour to keel over, but somehow I stayed on my feet. They called us out every morning to line up and be counted. Even the dead had to be counted. On days the mortuary wagon didn’t come, we had to drag the body back and forth to take its place in line.’” Flo’s cigarette had burned down to her fingertips. She shook the ashes from her hand.