Spring Break

by Gerald Elias

  ‘Moshe Schneidermann. He was my professor for a medical ethics course I had to take last semester.’

  ‘Medical ethics? What is it, a five-minute class?’

  ‘No, it was really interesting. Professor Schneidermann is old, but he’s really smart.’

  ‘That’s comforting. And how exactly do you suppose this Professor Schneidermann is going to help “our investigation”?’

  ‘I think he might be able to help us get the coroner’s report. He, like, knows everybody.’

  Jacobus shrugged. Like the Jewish widow who spooned chicken soup into her deceased husband’s mouth said, ‘It vouldn’t hoit.’

  Anderson helped Jacobus wash up and dress and wheeled him into the lobby only slightly behind schedule.

  ‘He’s over there,’ Anderson whispered.

  ‘Thanks for pointing him out,’ Jacobus replied. ‘What would I do without you?’

  Anderson brought the wheelchair to a stop.

  ‘Mr Jacobus, I presume?’ The voice was a little older and a lot more Jewish than his own.

  ‘Schneidermann?’ Jacobus asked.

  ‘The same.’

  ‘My young lackey here tells me you might be able to help us.’

  ‘Maybe it would be possible. Maybe it would not.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Just what it sounds like. The ethical considerations are complex.’

  Anderson interrupted.

  ‘I’ll just call Mr Lilburn at Chops and tell him we’ll be a little late.’

  ‘You do that.’

  After he left, Schneidermann said, ‘A bright young man. I think we got along because we understood each other’s persecution.’

  ‘I’m not that hard on him,’ Jacobus said.

  Schneidermann laughed.

  ‘Not that. Slavery. He understands what we, as Jews, have gone through for the past millennia, and I understand what his race has had to endure in this country.’

  ‘What do you mean, “his race”?’ Jacobus asked.

  ‘He’s Negro. Didn’t you realize?’

  He hadn’t, having assumed from the name Chase Anderson that he was as lily white as Pat Boone. And unlike Alonzo Sumter’s voice, Chase’s sounded absolutely typical of rural New York. Jacobus brushed aside his oversight, but it provided a caution that jumping to conclusions based upon partial information could lead him down the wrong path.

  ‘No matter. You said medical ethics are complex,’ Jacobus said. ‘From my experience, the only ethical complexity is who the doctor is going to overcharge: the patient or Blue Cross.’

  Schneidermann wheezed out a laugh.

  ‘Yes, it seems to have come down to that, hasn’t it? But let me give you a couple of examples of how it might not be so easy.

  ‘Let us say an old man, like you or me, needs a liver transplant and has been waiting a year for it. He’s made his way to the top of the list and has only four or five months more to live if he doesn’t get one. Miraculously, a liver becomes available. But let us say at the same time a young lady, full of life and potential, has been brought into the emergency room with a stab wound and will die within twenty-four hours without a transplant. Who gets the liver? Being Solomon in this case is not an option, by the way.’

  Jacobus almost immediately said the woman but then thought, where is the dividing line? Age, sex, married or single? Who decides? Suddenly he wasn’t so sure.

  ‘And that’s an easy one,’ Schneidermann continued. ‘What if a doctor offered you, Mr Jacobus, a pair of eyes that would enable you to see again? All the trees, all the beautiful paintings, all the smiling faces. All those things that have been cloaked in darkness for all these years. Would you take those eyes? Would you see all those things again? Think carefully.’

  Jacobus considered his life since he had lost his sight. It had been a struggle. There had been endless challenges. Yet the world as he conceived it now didn’t require the visual. His connection to sound, smell, and touch had deepened to such an extent that being able to see could, paradoxically, detract from the richness of his life.

  ‘I detect some hesitation,’ Schneidermann said, ‘which means you are a thoughtful human being. Because you’re also wondering what is the ethical dilemma here. Not necessarily yours, which is simply a question of balancing the pluses and minuses, but of the doctor, whose goal is to heal. Would a new pair of eyes heal you, Mr Jacobus, or would it tear your life apart?

  ‘Which leads to the most difficult issue that confronts us: When to let a patient die. With the technology now available to us in medical science, we can keep many sick people alive indefinitely. That is a good thing, is it not? But what if someone’s quality of life is vegetative – worse, intensely painful – as part of the bargain of staying alive? What if the patient begs the doctor to let him die? And what of the family’s endless emotional and financial suffering? What then, Mr Jacobus? How does one decide? Ultimately, there is a time for us all, but when is the right time?’

  Jacobus didn’t care to discuss philosophy before breakfast. Or after breakfast, for that matter.

  ‘That’s what I want to find out,’ Jacobus said. ‘Chase said you might be able to get Aaron Schlossberg’s coroner’s report.’

  ‘That is not possible.’

  ‘You’re a great help. Why the hell not?’

  ‘Because there are no coroners in New York anymore. We have medical examiners.’

  ‘Well, then the medical examiner’s report.’

  ‘That is not possible, either.’

  ‘I don’t want to sound like a broken record like you, professor, but why the hell not?’

  ‘Because my recollection is that the newspapers said Aaron Schlossberg died of natural causes, which I presume they gathered from the death certificate. I understand from Chase Anderson that you’ve become acquainted with the certificate. Is that indeed what it said as to the manner of death?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what it said.’

  ‘Then there would be no medical examiner’s report. There would only be one if the death were ruled to be homicide, suicide, or otherwise suspicious.’

  ‘But it is suspicious. It’s damn suspicious!’

  Jacobus explained the questionable circumstances surrounding Aaron Schlossberg’s death. How all those people had gotten sick from mushroom poisoning. The mystery couple in the woods. Audrey Rollins’s inexplicable behavior and disappearance. Schlossberg’s body discovered in the practice room with no music on the piano, the keyboard closed, and the light and fan turned off.

  ‘No one would use one of those rooms without turning those switches on,’ Jacobus said.

  ‘The only other possibility,’ Schneidermann proffered, ‘would have been if someone else had come after he died and turned them off.’

  ‘And then left, leaving Schlossberg’s body there to rot? Hardly worth considering.’

  ‘I tend to agree.’

  A new thought occurred to Jacobus.

  ‘And if he was so damn sick,’ Jacobus pursued, ‘if he was so damn sick how did he get to the conservatory when his house was five miles away?’

  What had been Jacobus’s vague, uneasy conjectures were suddenly crystalizing. There was something terribly wrong with the picture.

  ‘And even if he could have driven – which is highly unlikely – where was his damn car?’

  The death certificate now seemed wholly unsatisfactory, too tidy an answer to the questions that gnawed at him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Schneidermann. ‘The death certificate is such an impersonal and simplistic end to a human being’s existence, as if a life were no more than the completion of a form. It is cruel, is it not?’ Schneidermann seemed to be thinking out loud. ‘It is possible. But then again …’

  ‘Chase said you have connections. Cut through the red tape.’

  ‘Even if it were so, what are you suggesting be done?’

  ‘Get Schlossberg’s body exhumed.’

  Schneidermann chuckled.
>
  ‘I have read quite a bit about you, Mr Jacobus. You and I have much in common. More than you know. I, too, came to America because of the war. My parents, too, died in the Nazi camps. My interest in medical ethics came from living through that experience myself, though when I came here it was not in that capacity but as a musician. Like you. I played the clarinet. I was a teenager. Every week at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Bohemia, where the Nazis showed the world how well they treated the Jews, I played the Mozart quintet and the Brahms quintet. While I played this music, phrase by beautiful phrase, my friends and family died. The more I played, the more they died. But at least they died having heard these most sublime compositions. And the Brahms especially, as you know, with its portents of sweet mortality. Some of the older people in the camp – the ones from Hamburg – had actually seen Brahms perform. Did the music not provide them at least a modicum of comfort in their distress? Wasn’t that a good thing? I wondered. Or was it? That is the question that drove me.

  ‘I was among the first generation of musicians at the Kinderhoek Settlement. Theodesia Lievenstock was a kind woman who only meant well. I continued to play music, but the idea of being paid for it after Theresienstadt made me feel unclean. Like a vulgar whore. I could no longer tolerate the sight of my clarinet, and for many years could not listen to a note of music. Thankfully, that has changed.

  ‘But the question of medical right and wrong consumed me. Because I had seen so much wrong I could hardly imagine there was any right. But there is, you see. Getting you a medical examiner’s report after the fact would present some practical challenges – an exhumation and an autopsy – and some ethical questions – privacy rights, family rights, following the law, to name a few – but I think there is a greater good in what you are trying to accomplish. Am I morally right in saying that? I don’t know. But let me make a few calls, innocently enough. Dr Pine and I have had over the years, let us say, a working relationship. He likes to pull strings. Perhaps I can pull his and make him think it is I who is the marionette. And I’m familiar, though less so, with Dr Dahl, the county medical examiner. Will that suit your purposes, Mr Jacobus?’

  Jacobus had almost stopped listening after Schneidermann had mentioned the deaths of their parents. He was taken back to the time when he had been sent by his mother and father to the Juilliard School in New York, partly for his musical training, but more, he later realized, for his protection from the black tidal wave of Nazism. Music and two thousand miles of ocean had helped him block out the horror. For Schneidermann, the horror and the music were inextricably entwined.

  ‘I asked, will that suit your purposes?’ Schneidermann repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ Jacobus said, jolted back into the present. ‘Yes. Of course. That will do very well. And when we’re finished with this business, maybe then two old musicians might get together with three others over a bottle of wine and play some lovely chamber music.’

  ‘Thank you for the invitation, Mr Jacobus,’ Schneidermann replied. ‘But no thank you.’

  He also declined Jacobus’s invitation to join them at Chops, declaring he was kosher. In any event, he wanted to stroll around the campus to relive the bittersweet memories of what was once the Kinderhoek Settlement. He wanted to hear young people playing music, joyfully.

  Jacobus left Schneidermann at the inn and, with Anderson driving, arrived at Chops five minutes later and a half hour behind schedule for Lilburn. With school in session, the restaurant was much busier than on their previous visit. The frenetic Presto from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik that played over the restaurant’s PA made Jacobus feel even more rushed. Anderson spotted Lilburn in a corner booth.

  Jacobus began to apologize for keeping him waiting.

  ‘No need,’ Lilburn said. ‘I’ve devoted the extra time to attempting to untangle a veritable Gordian knot of conflicting interests I’ve heard since yesterday. I don’t know if any of it has anything to do with your particular concerns, and I’m not sure how much of it has to do with my retrospective on the life of Aaron Schlossberg. But it reads like a Danielle Steel romance, so perhaps it will end up on an airport bookstore bestseller shelf.’

  ‘Mind if I order breakfast first?’ Jacobus asked. ‘If I’m going to throw up it might as well be on a full stomach.’

  Anderson asked if he could stay and listen.

  ‘You mean you want a free breakfast,’ Jacobus said.

  Anderson sputtered an unintelligible response.

  ‘I can see why Schneidermann likes you,’ Jacobus said. ‘Such a quick wit. Order whatever you like.’

  Once the waitress departed, Jacobus asked Lilburn to bring him up to date.

  ‘Under the guise of writing my Times piece,’ Lilburn said, ‘and per your instructions, I spoke to Elwood Dunster and some of the others who don’t seem to like you very much. For the life of me, I can’t understand why.’

  Chase Anderson snorted beside him. Jacobus ignored it.

  ‘As I haven’t yet established a coherent narrative,’ Lilburn continued, ‘I will just read from my notes and let you glean what you may.

  ‘You know Harold Handy, the music historian: Short, compactly built. Late fifties, graying beard, elfin smile. An ebullient soul with monotone delivery. Acts as if everything he says is fascinating to him and should be to everyone else. Formed an alliance with Bronislaw Tawroszewicz. Unlike him in every imaginable way. Common hatred of Dame Sybil, who he views as pedant with no imagination.’

  Jacobus had no difficulty recalling that Handy found Sybil narrow-minded and that Sybil found Tawroszewicz incompetent. Still, Handy and Tawroszewicz seemed strange bedfellows.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Dante Millefiori: Tall. Magisterial. Big forehead. He and Schlossberg, something of an alliance if not warm friendship. Because (I think) they fed off each other’s successes. Millefiori: kudos and engagements for premiering Schlossberg’s latest; Schlossberg able to spread his musical seed with Millefiori as chief pollinator. Ergo, Millefiori agreed to supporting Tawroszewicz’s tenure track efforts, but only as long as the latter remained subordinate in orchestral hierarchy. Are you following all this? It’s quite Byzantine.’

  ‘You say Millefiori and Schlossberg weren’t exactly bosom buddies?’

  ‘My impression is that each of them had such a high opinion of themselves that neither could accommodate a second soul as an equal in such rarified atmosphere. Millefiori has a highly affected accent. Snooty, faux English.’

  ‘Kind of like yours,’ Jacobus commented.

  ‘I have no accent,’ Lilburn said, having learned over the years how to fend off Jacobus’s gibes. ‘I just happen to speak properly. Where Millefiori acquired his I couldn’t guess for the life of me. He’s of Italian ancestry, clearly, but was born and raised in Indiana. Perhaps he wished to compete with Schlossberg, who had a great deal of that New York patrician dialect but without the sarcastic edge. But in case you were wondering, Jacobus, I should add that I perceived no overt ill will on Millefiori’s part, just the ego thing so typical of you classical musicians. Touché.’

  Jacobus had indeed been wondering. Conflict between two men with lofty self-images was not unheard of. Nathaniel had reminded him of that on numerous occasions.

  ‘Here’s where it gets distinctly Machiavellian,’ Lilburn continued. ‘I understand you’ve already spoken to Tallulah Dominguez and Alonzo Sumter. It seems the two of them approached Schlossberg, Handy, and Millefiori to make a deal. They would agree to support Tawroszewicz’s tenure if Schlossberg, Handy, and Millefiori would go with them to Hedge and request Dunster be retired.’

  Jacobus threw up his hands.

  ‘I’m just the messenger!’ Lilburn exclaimed. ‘I gave you advance warning.’

  Their breakfasts arrived. With his fingers, Jacobus found a piece of bacon on his plate. Unfortunately, he found his sunny-side-up egg first.

  ‘What about Sybil?’ Jacobus asked, wiping his fingers on the tablecloth. He didn’t h
ave much of an appetite, anyway. ‘She made it clear she detests Tawroszewicz.’

  ‘Fit to be tied. Irate. Irate that Tawroszewicz might get tenure and she couldn’t do anything to prevent it. Mainly, I think it was that she can’t brook being marginalized. All this wheeling and dealing and no one invited her to the table. And if you were wondering, she has no particular love for Dunster, either, as she has deemed his scholarly efforts lacking.’

  ‘I sensed she feels that way about any musician who has actually held an instrument in his hands.’

  ‘That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I think essentially that’s accurate. In fact, as an aside, that’s how most of the academic faculty feel about the performance division. So much so it has officially been enshrined in conservatory policy.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that if an academic gives a performance it comes under the heading of “research,” but if someone on the performance faculty were to perform the same music, no matter how seriously the program has been researched, it comes under the heading of “service.”’

  ‘Why should anyone give a shit about that?’ Jacobus asked. ‘Why waste time on semantics?’

  ‘Because, as they say, time is money. “Research” is eligible for grants and “service” is not.’

  ‘So you’re saying that the performers are getting screwed?’

  ‘That’s what they seem to be claiming. But that’s just a general gripe. Specifically, Dame Sybil felt it was a terrible disservice to the conservatory to give a quote-unquote “Paleolithic Neanderthal” like Tawroszewicz tenure. On the kinder, gentler side, she was all for Dunster retiring with dignity at a time of his own choosing.’

  ‘But sooner rather than later?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘So was the deal consummated?’

  ‘You mean between the Jets and the Sharks? No. For one, it probably wouldn’t have gotten very far anyway because Charles Hedge would certainly have countermanded any deal that reduced his ability to raise money. Dunster is on friendly terms with some of the conservatory’s longtime major benefactors, and they would be disinclined to keep giving if Dunster were to be dismissed. And I must say, Jacobus, Dunster really is a nice man, your run-ins with him notwithstanding. Plus, he’s got a wife, kids, grandkids. He’s soft-spoken, knows his music.’