Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain

by Kirsten Menger-Anderson

  “Yes! A wonderful contraption. I have one at home.” The clerk gestured to the shelf of crocks. “The company makes a whole line of products — not a complaint they can’t address. Just yesterday we received a radium suppository!” He shrugged and laughed, as if embarrassed, though his words fell smooth and practiced from his lips. “I tried one myself, and I’ve never felt better. Good for a man’s drives. Is your husband …”

  “No,” Dora said.

  “Yes, of course. I did not mean to imply … Many young women are too shy to mention … We have other cures. Perhaps you feel depressed?”

  The clerk’s eyes probed hers. He was a salesman, the type her mother, who spent hours selecting fruits and vegetables, always complained about. What she couldn’t afford, she claimed was rotten — the food itself or, more often, the salesman. Dora laughed. No, she was not depressed. She had a good husband, a fine home. When she looked in the mirror, she smiled.

  “Just the Revigator,” she said.

  “The cures are all half-price when you buy two. We have creams for the complexion, tablets for stomach ailment, shampoo for thicker, shinier hair, soap for the bath, cream to soften a man’s beard, machines to radiate the air —”

  “For pregnancy?” Dora asked, the decision quick on her lips.

  “I’ll wrap it for you.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-nine fifty.”

  Her mother would have bargained, threatened to leave the shop before paying even a reasonable price. Yet Dora had money from her sewing. And her husband was building a skyscraper, the tallest in the world. She did not need to haggle, could not imagine that Pauline or Elizabeth or Rose would bother.

  “Thank you,” she said, and the clerk extended his hand.

  • • •

  DORA PLACED THE Revigator on the dining room table, a centerpiece in the otherwise sparsely furnished room. The instructions, folded inside the clay pot, promised that the water would instantly take on charge, providing immediate relief to all lame muscles, rheumatism, neuritis, sciatica, lumbago — conditions she had never heard mentioned before. She waited to drink it, deciding not to try the Revigator water by herself. Instead she prepared a shepherd’s pie: chopped beef, potatoes, carrots. Vegetables crunched beneath her knife. She’d made the dish before, already it felt routine, hers, a lesson she had learned and mastered.

  The knock on the door surprised her, and she wiped her hands and checked her reflection in the metal mixing bowl. She looked more tired than usual, though the curvature distorted her features enough that she was not sure. The knock came again. She untied her apron, folded it quickly.

  At the door stood her sister, Rivka, wearing the same dress she’d worn the last time she visited, a cream-colored sack with short, puffy sleeves and a wide collar. She cradled a cloth sack in her arms.

  Dora opened the door wider so her sister could come inside, but Rivka waited on the front stoop. Her sister was six years older than Dora, old enough that when the family arrived in New York, she had gone to work instead of school. Now she could sew beautifully, but she could not write.

  “Come in,” Dora urged, and this time Rivka stepped inside. “Sit down.”

  From the dining room came the sound of the Will Rogers broadcast. A female, a perfect southern belle, said, “My mother said I had to go,” and a man laughed. Dora turned off the radio, took two glasses from the cupboard, and joined her sister in the dining room.

  “I brought these.” Rivka handed Dora the sack, filled with homemade challah, jars of whitefish, and the pickles Dora had loved as a child. The bread, light as beaten egg, scented the air with its sweetness. Dora breathed deeply, smiled.

  “We heard you are getting thin,” Rivka said.

  Even though Dora had moved uptown, she could not escape the reach of her mother’s gossip circle: old women, whose heads bobbed sadly, sharing tales of past and present, united only by troubles. Ivan’s lost job, the Cossacks who plundered his garment shop in Ostrog, the rising price of fish, the synagogue destroyed in Gusyatin the night before the boat left, the daughter, Dvoirah, who married a shaygetz. The others felt pity for Dora’s mother, for her loss. What daughter would treat her family so?

  “You tell them I’m well.” Dora poured water for Rivka, cut the bread, which she offered, though her sister did not accept.

  “Are you well?” Rivka’s large brown eyes had faint lines on either side. Already she looked more like their mother. Her cheeks had the same tightness, high cheekbones protruding as if seeking escape. Her hair had lines of gray; her lips turned downward. She looked old.

  “How’s Father?” Dora asked.

  “The same.”

  “Mother?”

  “She misses you. You should visit.”

  Dora nodded, though she knew that she would not return to the old flat or endure the neighbor’s stares, or her father’s sworn silence. Hester Street was a memory, fading.

  “Try the water,” Dora said. “It has radium in it.”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “It cures everything.”

  “I’ve heard. We hear the same news downtown.” Rivka held her cup of water up, observing it. “What do you have that needs curing?”

  The flat felt oddly silent, the space too large for the sisters who, growing up, had shared a single dim room. A thick curtain had shielded them from the boarders: Bais, who snored louder than a whistling kettle; Akiva, who liked to scold the girls for no reason; Ivan, who always ate more than his share. Now even the dining table seemed immense, pushing the sisters far apart. Dora did not need this space, could not fill it. She chewed the challah. Seeing Rivka made her feel selfish. How could she have left home for an empty, unknown place? Guilt stole the flavor from her mother’s bread. Her family could not afford this gift, should not send food when they struggled to provide for themselves.

  What do you have that needs curing? With the question came dusk, and night would soon follow. Dora would take her new tonic, await her new husband, serve dinner, clean dishes, and retire. What did she have that needs curing?

  “I’m pregnant,” she lied, looking away.

  “Mazaltov,” Rivka said, raising her glass and tipping it to her lips. She smiled, though Dora felt that her sister knew the lie for what it was, nothing, a wish, a dream, a hasty answer to a question she could not otherwise answer. “Congratulations.”

  “It’s a secret,” Dora said. She already saw the girl, dark hair pulled back in a braid, in the kitchen with a bowl, a book, a necklace — counting the gold links of the chain.

  When Rivka left, she hugged Dora and promised to come again soon, just as she had a month before.

  “Zayt gezunt,” she said. Be well.

  STEW SAID HE ached when Dora asked about his day over dinner. He’d lifted more than ten men did, he said, and his muscles were tighter than fastened bolts. Dora felt the tissue rising knotted and hard beneath his white shirt.

  “Have some water,” she said.

  Together she and Stew drank water, he reading the instructions, she explaining that Rose and Elizabeth used the Revigator daily. He admitted to feeling better, said being with her alone would have been enough.

  “Am I enough?” She rubbed his shoulders, the remains of the shepherd’s pie still cooling on the table.

  He watched her for a moment, blue eyes reading her face. The tonic had brought a flush to her cheeks, and she felt warmth in her stomach, near her womb. The little girl would sit at the table soon, swinging her legs, anxious for word that she could be excused. That girl was only a few years away, waiting for Dora to hold her, teach her, allow her the childhood denied young Dvoirah.

  “Peter fell today,” Stew said, “from the scaffolding.”

  Her grasp tightened on her husband’s shoulders. Her fingers pressed hard, forcing him down. The child would have looked up from the floor, where she sat, legs crossed, counting lentils, sorting the lighter from the dark, forming small piles. This news would have upset her.
How easily it could have been Stew. How easily he could have slipped away.

  “He’s in the hospital,” Stew said.

  “Alive?” the word fell as if in a foreign tongue from her lips. Had she spoken in Yiddish? She watched his face, trying to read the answer between his drawn brows and tired eyes.

  “Wouldn’t be there otherwise. Likely won’t work again, least not for awhile.”

  She thought of Pauline, a child in either hand, blonde hair undone, a cloud of platinum around her shoulders. Pauline would have to sell her past now, her collection of tables, the couches, the stacked chairs. She’d have to decide which pieces to sell and which to keep and cherish for as long as she could.

  Dora nodded, laid her head on her husband’s shoulder. Behind her, but not far away, the radium cure sat in the cabinet. A spoonful to make her more fertile. A spoonful to destroy her pain.

  “Can we go to bed?” she asked, and Stew rose with her and undressed. Under the covers, her fingers found his chest, his thighs, and his abdomen. He was sleeping already. But she heard his heart. He would love the child, like her family had once loved her. She would tell him when the time came. But tonight, this night, only lies grew inside her, filling the emptiness with the life she would never admit to missing.

  SALK AND SABIN

  A year after my father was called before the McCarthy subcommittee, the acne began to appear, and nothing I did prevented the blotches from rising and spreading like a small red army over my cheeks and chin. I tried calamine, witch hazel, all seven lotions from the pharmacy on Sixth Avenue, and finally a paste my mother mixed from powdered roots and soil — something she knew from her childhood. Perhaps my skin wasn’t ruined enough for her medicines and already too rough for the soft, white creams the other girls used.

  We’d just moved to Bleecker Street from the Upper West Side, mostly at my mother’s insistence, though it was Father who decided. My mother hated the way the people stared at her uptown. Whatever she wore — solid, print, cotton or silk — was always too loose or too short or too bright. She didn’t roll her hair or iron her skirt; she didn’t hold my little brother’s hand when they crossed the street. “They can see that I’m foreign,” she complained, though she’d been a foreigner her entire life: a child of French diplomats in Cuba who grew up to dance for the German ballet. She’d met my father at a performance on Broadway, given up the stage for another foreign world of streetlights, sirens, the scream of New York.

  Now my mother offers private dance lessons in our living room, which is why we have no furniture, just mirrors, dozens of mirrors, hanging on nails at different heights. I use a gold-framed rectangular one to study my skin, where I count seventy-eight distinct pimples and forty-two red blotches that will certainly develop new dimensions. My mother asks me if I was smoking reefer. “You can tell me,” she says, eyes appraising my skin. “I see the signs.” She wears pink and orange with a cloth flower in her hair. Dark eyes, dark lips. I almost feel she wants me to admit to it. “No,” I say, and she says, “Do I have to talk to your father?”

  My father has the last word on everything, though since we’ve moved, he’s become more accommodating — allowing a small black-and-white TV, the orange and blue molding Mother painted despite the no-alterations clause in the lease, and several late dinners at nearby restaurants. I like to think he is trying to make things better for us, but his allowances feel so fragile, I don’t want to consider them for fear they will disappear.

  For a while, right after the hearings, Father wouldn’t allow us out at all. But that was before we moved, and long before Jack. My mother sees Jack only when Father’s working. It’s her secret, and ours, me and my brother. My father has his work; we have Jack Steenwycks, or someone like Jack. First we had Uncle Stew, later Uncle Nathan, and then — my mother stopped using prefixes — Walter, Scott, and Jack. Each one came with presents: ice cream sundaes, trips to Coney Island, a card trick where twos turned to aces and aces became queens, a box of hard candies, a carved wooden train we still keep hidden beneath my brother’s bed, a cloth doll I left out in the street. Jack has the debates, which he moderates himself, pitting my brother against me on topics like syphilis and malaria: which is the worse disease? Or medical care during wartime: should the soldier or general receive care first? He asks questions, and Mother asks questions, too. Simple things like “Is blood blue,” or “What if we had no bandages” — things that could never be true, and thus make us feel smarter.

  When Jack comes over today, he wears a soft leather jacket and wide-brimmed hat that make him look like a cowboy. He still smells of shaving cream even now, in the late afternoon. He brings flowers, purple irises, which my mother likes, though they have no scent, and he carries the ragged journal he sometimes pretends to read from, though it’s filled with nothing more than geometric scribbles. My brother and I looked through the book once while Jack and Mother were in the bedroom.

  My mother takes Jack’s hand. “We’re going walking,” she says.

  I’m scraping the pink chewing gum from the cover of my algebra book. In English class, I found a second wad under my desk, where it was sure to stick in my hair during the next air-raid drill. The note didn’t surface until history class, when I found it wedged between my almanac and the wooden back of the desk. “Communist” was all it said.

  I’ve never told anyone about my father or his party meetings, though I know he is right, that the government needs to change, that food and shelter and a share of the wealth is every man’s right. I’ve seen my father say it hundreds of times: at rallies, union meetings, strikes — even at the university, where he teaches, despite the fact that communism’s forbidden there. He’s given me his articles to read, pages that compare whole economies to ailing human bodies: gangrenous hands, legs crippled from polio. “How does such a creature live?” he writes. How, when the limbs that support it have no health, can the body function? Yet people fear his cure. They reject it, as if health itself were a disease, something to avoid at any cost.

  I couldn’t answer when Mr. Wharton called on me; I didn’t even hear his question. I was folding the communist note in my palm, imagining how I would reinvent myself, how my skin would clear, and how one day I’d return to this school, and whoever had done this would seek me out and beg me to teach about the unions and strikes. The reason communists weren’t more popular, I believed, was entirely aesthetic. Even I acknowledged that my father, with his long chin, thick brows, and hairy nose was particularly unattractive.

  Mr. Wharton tapped his pointer on a wooden chair, staring at me, his jacket missing a button, his trousers so short that his socks showed. The chalkboard was covered with notes I noticed only then: battle diagrams and years, without any indication of significance.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Katherine, who sat behind me, laughed.

  “Joanie’s wet her underpants,” she said softly so that only I and a handful of others heard. I realized then that she’d scrawled the note and placed the gum in my textbook. Her tone revealed it, and the fact that she knew I was upset. I can picture her placing the gum between her lips, cheeks wide and fat as a pregnant belly. People think she is beautiful, but she laughs like hard change in a beggar’s cup, her pale hand sporting Walter Thompson’s class ring. I know she lets him touch her. Secret places, dark places. After school, after she lingers at the back of the room to apply the red lipstick my father forbids me to wear, I follow them to Central Park and watch as Walter slips his hands under her skirt. She’s never seen me, but he did once. He was kissing her, but looking at me. He was watching me and I him and for the first time I was equal. I, too, had a chance at winning his heart. I’d felt such a thrill then, I’d turned and run.

  AT DUSK, BEFORE Jack and Mother return from their stroll, the light in our flat becomes forgiving. My skin looks softer, almost a single, coherent red hue. I write my compositions in my ledger book and help my brother with arithmetic. He doesn’t need assistance, but he always
asks for it. I think he gets lonely. When we talk, lying side by side on the living room floor, he rubs his bare feet together. “How was school?” I say, or “Were they mean to you?”

  We are accustomed to talking across empty spaces. When I was his age and he only ten, we’d promised never to marry and live together in a house in the middle of Central Park where no one would call us names or whisper behind our backs. He still believes we will do this, though I have committed myself to a newer, secret love: Walter Thompson.

  Through the open window, I hear the sizzle of laughter. Crowds have begun to form on the streets — the night crowds, who dress in black or clashing colors, orange and purple, yellow and blue, and drink coffee until breath reeks and hands tremble. I know the Bohemians. They define themselves as outsiders, but outsiders who belong. I’ve been an outsider since the day I was born. I have no interest in proving that.

  When footsteps sound on the landing, my brother runs to the door. He stands on his toes to kiss Jack on the cheek. Later, perhaps after Father comes home and we all lie in separate rooms (or sit — Father types till late into the night), I will tiptoe into my brother’s room and tell him that he is too old to be kissing men. But my brother loves Jack. He has decided to become a doctor, like Jack. I like Jack, too, but he is only twenty-two, and not really old enough to be any of the things he professes: a world-famous surgeon, a poet, a politician, a father of a little girl. He says that his grandfather was a famous surgeon, and his father before him — all the way back to the Mayflower. I don’t think Jack is even a doctor, or that he belongs with my mother, with his fair skin and hair, straight shoulders, torn leather coat. He speaks loudly, just as my father does, but he never seems angry, and he never speaks of politics or revolution, though I know he’s a communist. I’ve seen him reading Father’s newspapers, and when he realized I noticed, he didn’t try to hide it.

  The first time I met Jack, he pulled up his trouser cuff so I could see his pale left calf. I was surprised when he later told me he displayed his crooked leg to feel closer to children. Like sharing a secret. He’d nearly died, he said. And he’d been so jealous of his twin brother, who was healthy and strong and smart. “He’s a doctor,” Jack confided, and then added quickly, “a doctor, too.” He looked sad, but only for a moment, and then he smiled. Had it not been for the long months in bed, he would never have read so widely or learned the poems he’d used to “infect my mother’s heart.”