Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain

by Kirsten Menger-Anderson

  She considered calling him. She imagined his voice, her apology, the moments of awkward silence. She had discarded her family photographs, but when she closed her eyes she could picture a boy of ten with hair cropped close: Abraham brewing remedies from sugar and soap, a mixture to cleanse his system. He’d torn a pocket, and fine white grains of sweetener spilled out in a trail behind him. This boy had grown into a man, but she could not remember him, or his glasses, or his fashionable suits.

  A SPOONFUL MAKES YOU FERTILE

  When Dvoirah Chernikovsky married, she changed her name to Dora Steenwycks, and for three months she aged into the appellation, pronouncing it daily before a mirror. Dora Steenwycks, her dark hair combed away from her forehead, pin curls framing high cheekbones, dark brows, and wide-spaced eyes. Dora Steenwycks. She felt lovely in the name, defined by it, fully grown and self-determined. Of course, her father had not uttered a word to her since the day she announced her wedding plans, and her mother, who spoke nothing but Yiddish despite the ten years she’d lived in New York, never ventured to the West Side. But these were easy sacrifices, distances Dora had longed for throughout childhood, a separation between the Old World, which her parents desperately clung to, and the New.

  The new Dora never wore home-sewn clothing or missized shoes stuffed with newspaper, never admitted that English was not her first language, though discerning listeners could tell, never ate herring or shopped at a pushcart, never discussed which young men and women should meet and marry and how she’d facilitate the union. For seventeen years, Dvoirah had only wanted what she was now: Dora, married to a man who wore faded dungarees and white cotton shirts and smelled of steel and dug soil. Hair thin and brown, eyes blue, chest as wide and strong as the buildings he woke at dawn each day to build, Stew was America. Every breath smelled of red meat and potatoes — baked, not boiled — roasts, pies, chicken — whole and basted — green beans. Dora was learning to cook for him. She savored her new rituals, and he savored her meals, or at least he had when they first married. Now as she watched him eat, she could see his distaste, his eyes lowered, avoiding hers.

  “Bit raw in the middle,” he said, bent over a plate of meat loaf and gravy. Dusk light colored the table a warm brown, almost red, and the bars of the chairs cast long shadows on the hardwood floor. She no longer covered the table with cloth and rarely lit candles. Meals had become little more than a time to replenish, to soothe hunger before sleeping or leaving for work.

  “You’re used to it overdone.” She’d mixed the bread crumbs and meat early that morning, waited until six o’clock to bake it along with an apple pie. Stew hadn’t returned before seven since he’d taken the job with Starrett Brothers. He was building the Empire State Building — the tallest structure in the world, and as foreman his responsibilities kept him away often. But the work was good, particularly now. Dora would never complain when so many others could not afford clothes for their children, or proper meals, or rent, leaving her guiltily concealing the roast in her shopping basket. Stew worked hard, which was why her kitchen was twice the size of her mother’s and why her windows looked out to the street instead of a ventilation shaft.

  “Food made with love always tastes good,” Stew said, the expression grown stale. Yet Dora expected affirmation, required it almost, just as she needed to hear Stew’s heartbeat at night or his cough in the morning before he went out to smoke a cigarette. These were the things that defined him, that made him real, solid, a part of her life.

  She reached to take the plate from her husband. “There’s more in the oven,” she said. “It will only take a minute.”

  “You do too much.” He rested an open palm on her arm. “You needn’t work. We’re getting by.”

  “It’s not that.” The crate of cut fabric sat in the living room awaiting her embroidered flowers. She’d left the stitchwork unfinished, laid out on the floor. Most of the day she’d spent in the coffee shop on the corner of Sixty-seventh Street. She carried a book, but usually she just listened: a mother and daughter exchanged marital advice (conceive the child first — if he knows in advance, he’ll say no); two army veterans discussed gout (a pinch of ground-up autumn crocus will ease the pain); a pair of lovers shared a cup of coffee and made plans for the night (a walk past the sheep in Central Park, something inexpensive). How the conversations fascinated Dora! Her lips moved around overheard words as she silently repeated them, imagining that her life required such expressions.

  “I thought you’d be later,” she said, hoping Stew would understand the raw dinner.

  “I’m going out with the boys tonight.” He wiped his lips with a cloth napkin and folded an arm across the empty tabletop. “Just tonight.”

  Dora tried to smile. She hated that he drank, hidden away in a basement club behind curtains and locked doors and secret knocks and passwords. But more than that, she hated the time he spent away. She’d spoken to no one that day.

  “What do the other wives do?” she said. The American wives, the wives who grew up with American parents, who knew how to add Worcestershire sauce to a dish without measuring. What did they do?

  “Temperance society,” he said, stretching to kiss her. “Though the law’s on your side now.”

  “I’m not on a side.”

  “No? I wouldn’t have guessed it from your face. Why don’t you join them? You just need to bring sweets, that’s what I hear. And gossip.”

  Gossip was something Dora’s mother engaged in, knitting a loose blanket of rumor and tossing it around like a thick quilt, something warm and substantial. Gossip was for old women, women who lived within four city blocks and pretended the world was flat and square and ended at the kosher diner on East Broadway. Gossip terrified Dora, reminded her of the isolation, the immigrant enclave she had escaped. Yet after dinner she donned a good dress, green cotton, narrow at the waist, with a matching hat and jacket and took a tin of toffee, reserved for guests and thus never opened, from the pantry shelf. She would meet these temperance women, less because she wanted to than because she wanted to show her husband that she could enjoy his evening out.

  WHEN DORA AND Stew married, they had no guests. Stew’s father had moved his practice to Florida. The elder Steenwycks claimed he was an only child, though Stew sometimes mentioned a mad Aunt Lillian, who died a few years before he was born, and another woman, whose name he did not even know; Dora’s family refused to come. Even Rivka, her sister, stayed home, obeying her father’s bidding. Dora joined her life to her husband’s in a Presbyterian church, where Stew kissed her and declared her the most beautiful girl in all New York. “You belong to me now,” he’d said. She felt love then; it overwhelmed her.

  The first night of their marriage, Dora asked if she could remain by the window. She wanted to watch the street and changing sky. She’d never spent a night alone. Stew shook his head. “What do I tell them at work tomorrow? A married man sleeping alone on his wedding night.”

  “Tell them to come over,” Dora said. “Tell them you want them to meet me.”

  Till then she’d met only one of Stew’s friends, a woman he’d once dated. She had since married, had two children. Stew and Dora saw her on the street, by chance, and Dora compared the woman’s hazel eyes, plump cheeks, and almond brown hair to her own. The mother had softer lines, a wider smile, and a more expensive dress.

  He hadn’t introduced her to anyone else, not since the day they first met at a dance, when she’d slipped from her family’s two-room tenement with her best cotton jumper and her hair curled to resemble a fashionable bob. Classes had ended, she had her high school diploma, and she would not miss the celebration, despite her father’s no. Only Ivan, the boarder, had seen her leave, and he reported the event the next morning, referring to Dora as a kurva and a nafke, anything to indicate whore. Rumor whirled. Dvoirah Chernikovsky, pretty Dvoirah, had too much free spirit. She would break her poor mother’s heart. Imagine! After all the years the family sacrificed to send the girl to school. But the rumo
r only made Stew more handsome, more perfect. He loved her, he said. Dora married him within two months and moved into his white-walled flat.

  The night after their wedding night, Stew brought home two men, both ruddy and sore from hours of hard work in the sun. Dora made coffee in the kitchen, and Stew excused himself from the guests to help. He slipped an arm around her waist and kissed her neck. She heard only the whispered conversation in the next room.

  “She’s a Jew,” one guest said. And she was certain that in an even lower voice he added, “You can tell by her smell.”

  PETER AND PAULINE’S home on West Sixty-ninth Street was cluttered. Three full windows looked out to the street. Ivy grew up the side of the brownstone. The door to the hallway was as wide as the grand fireplace, before which Peter squatted, vainly fanning a waning fire. Dora had met him before, when he’d stopped by with rolled architectural drawings, and she remembered his warm Irish accent and smile. She had no way to recognize Pauline among the three well-dressed ladies bent over as many unmatched coffee tables. But the hostess rose graciously and walked, to Dora’s amazement, between two nearly overlapping couches, three end tables, and an oak recliner to greet Stew and Dora.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “I’ve just come to bring Dora,” Stew laughed, “and take Peter away.”

  “We’ve been driving him mad with our talk,” Pauline said and, turning to her husband, added, “Haven’t we, Peter?”

  Peter reached to take a couple sandwiches from an overflowing platter. He, like Stew, kept his hair cropped short, sideburns trimmed, chin clean-shaven. Both men wore the uniform of their profession: dungarees, cotton shirt, hat askew. Dora could confuse them in the dark. She smiled at Peter, feeling close to him.

  As Peter made his way around the furniture, Stew kissed Dora’s cheek and promised to return in a few hours.

  “Peter’s told me so much about you,” Pauline said, grasping Dora’s hand and leading her into the crowded sitting room. If she disliked Dora, or noticed the smell Stew’s other friends had spoken of, her face did not show it. Her hair was platinum, styled in crisp waves before collecting in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a lace-collared dress that fit so well Dora could almost imagine her hostess unclothed. But this was her mother’s thought, not hers. A married woman could dress as she liked, and if Dora had the fair skin and complexion, she too would choose the Hollywood vogue.

  She reached into her bag for the tin of toffee, which Pauline accepted with a smile. The other women, Rose and Elizabeth, stood to greet her, but did not venture around the amassed furniture to take her hand. Both looked pregnant, Elizabeth perhaps eight months, and Rose showing only enough that Dora noticed but would not mention it for fear that the woman still thought it a secret.

  “I can’t part with any of it,” Pauline explained as Dora made her way between a stack of chairs and a settee. “Heirlooms, you know.”

  Dora nodded, though the only items her parents had brought from Russia were a necklace, a pair of earrings her mother promised to split so that each of her daughters could have one gold-set stone and a framed sketch by a distant cousin who was “quite famous,” though none of Dora’s schoolmates recognized the name when she had boasted of it. Back then, the teachers called her un-American when she forgot an English word and substituted Yiddish. But she’d learned to watch and copy, to fit in. Nights at home with her family became less important: her father bent over his borrowed texts, her mother complaining that scholars never put bread on the table, her sister darning the boarder’s socks. Dora sewed buttonholes, “finishing work,” they called it, her paychecks passed unopened to her parents. Dora and Rivka had shared a bed, and nights they shared stories. Rivka told tales of their neighbor, Fish Eye, who traveled the world in a tall pair of boots and peeked at young girls through open windows. Dora made up adventures of an American boy who lived in the subway station and ate bugs, though he was really a president.

  “It is good to have something to fall back on these days,” Pauline said, guiding Dora deeper into the parlor. “I’d sell it all — even my mother’s wedding dress — to feed the children.”

  “You have children?” Dora blushed, regretting the question immediately. She should have known this about her hostess or had the good sense to keep quiet.

  Pauline nodded. “Two.”

  Dora sat, crossed one knee over the other, and rested her hands on her legs. She tried to piece together the conversation her arrival had interrupted.

  The larger of the two pregnant women, Elizabeth, her dress a thick, dusty curtain around her abdomen, had been holding forth on some sort of illness. Fatigue? Morning sickness? She did not summarize the symptoms for Dora, but she did turn to her as she continued her story. As she spoke, she rubbed her belly, almost as if the rounded form belonged to a lap cat, a surprisingly soft, warm thing.

  “I’ve felt much better since I began taking it. One glass a day. And it’s not so expensive when you compare the cost to Carlsbad or Wiesbaden, which,” she added hastily, “we could never afford.”

  Pauline turned to Dora. “The Revigator,” she explained kindly, offering the plate of sandwiches — canned ham, sliced thin. “Elizabeth purchased a Radium Ore Revigator.”

  “Have you seen them?” Elizabeth asked, addressing Dora now as well. “They’re quite pretty, really, a pottery crock, lovely glaze, small enough to fit in a cabinet, though I prefer to keep it out on the tabletop.”

  “No,” Dora took a sandwich, though she could not imagine eating it, even now that she no longer adhered to the laws of kashruth. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Stew had assured her that no friend of his would say the things she’d overheard that second night of their marriage, but the words still hung in her thoughts.

  “Inside they’re lined with radium,” Elizabeth continued, “and the water absorbs it. You can taste the radiation, almost like anise. Do you like licorice? I adore it. And it has the most wondrous curative properties.”

  “It travels throughout the body,” Rose added. She had a foreign accent, one Dora noticed but could not place. A narrow stretch of white cloth-covered buttons ran from her neck to her hips. “And cures all impurities. It’s a wonder for rheumatism and gout, though we’re all far too young to know!”

  “Of course!” Pauline said. “But we have other complaints. Does it help for cramps? Headache?”

  Elizabeth nodded, and Rose confirmed in her oddly inflected voice. “Everything.”

  Pauline turned to Dora, “Rose’s husband is a doctor.”

  “It’s how I got pregnant,” Rose said. “We were having no luck till we started.”

  “Pregnant,” Dora echoed, feeling obliged to participate in the conversation. “Stew doesn’t want children till the economy’s better.” At once, she felt rude, insulting. She should merely have listened, as she did in the café.

  “You are brave to have children now,” Pauline said graciously. “It’s been very hard on us, and we have only two.”

  Dora nibbled the crust of her sandwich. Her father had scarcely made a living teaching Hebrew before the market crashed, and her parents had three boarders as of the last time she saw Rivka nearly a month earlier. Rivka would not take money, forcing angry Yiddish words from Dora’s lips — words she’d sworn never again to utter. She was an American now. Look! She sat among American women! She no longer had to sneak out of the house or wash her hair with kerosene to fight the lice that flourished in the close tenement buildings. She did not wear a sheitel, the wig her mother would never abandon. But Dora knew that her mother was a prisoner beneath the woven hair, a permanent outsider. Rivka would be too, if she didn’t work harder to assimilate.

  “Even cancer,” Rose added. “Inject radium into the organ — the liver or kidneys — and it kills the diseased cells. The cancerous cells first, that is, faster than any other cure.”

  “Rose!” Pauline exclaimed.

  “Pauline’s squeamish,” Elizabeth said. A morsel of
fat hung from her lip.

  “I am not, it’s just —” Pauline laughed. “We should all get a Revigator, don’t you think? Promote healthy drinking.”

  “That is what we’re here to talk about.” Elizabeth took another bite of her sandwich. “Always seem to forget, don’t we?”

  DORA FOUND A whole shelf of Radium Ore Revigators at the shop Rose recommended. In fact, the store sold nothing but radium cures: a Vigoradium, a Standard Radium Emanator, a Health Fountain, the Radium Apparatus, and the Lifetime Radium Water Jug. Glass cabinets filled with bottles of radium tonics, tablets, and creams lined every wall of the shop. The Ra-Tor Plac, encased in cherrywood, promised to perfectly radiate water with its rays, while the Linarium, which came with a special offer coupon, would instantly sooth sore muscles. The shop was new and clean, the walls and floor so white that the daylight seemed brighter inside than out.

  “May I help you?” The clerk, a short man with a pleasant smile and dark hair on his knuckles, handed Dora a glass of water. “On the house,” he said. “You’re looking a little peaked.”

  “I’m not ill,” Dora said. She’d walked to the shop, two miles, perhaps. The early-spring wind blew through the avenues, gaining speed and strength and striking her skin like a castigatory slap. The night before, she dreamed that Stew’s mother had called him, and he packed a day bag and slipped out the front window. Waking alone, Dora carried the nightmare into the day, and it took many minutes before she dispelled it. Stew’s mother had died in the Spanish flu epidemic when Stew was only seven. He never spoke of it. The past is the past, he said. It is behind us.

  Dora considered the clerk.

  “One can always be better,” he said, extending a hand in greeting. She took a sip of the water, which tasted like licorice, only it sizzled on her tongue.

  “I would like a Revigator,” she said.