The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  Arm in arm with my mother, I trudged to the Cotillion Terrace, the gaudy catering hall where the ceremony was being held. Mom had been so rattled by the sight of my ankle, I didn’t want to worry her any more by admitting that almost every step I took hurt.

  The Cotillion Terrace was located on Eighteenth Avenue. To get there, we first had to walk down Sixty-fifth Street, which meant passing the considerably more modest catering hall known as La Perville. Small yet oddly radiant, La Perville catered to Christians and Jews, Italian-Americans from the surrounding blocks as well as Hasids from nearby Borough Park. Some nights, I would glimpse men in dark coats and fur-rimmed hats or skullcaps, while other times, I saw priests circulating among crowds of women in high heels and bouffant hair.

  My mother loved to linger on the sidelines, gazing at the brides as they entered La Perville in all their white finery. How she strained to peek inside as guests gathered in the ornate lobby, sipping champagne from tall fluted glasses or helping themselves to hors d’oeuvres served by handsome waiters who seemed to glide along the carpeted interior. There was always a small string ensemble positioned close to the door, greeting guests as they entered with the melodies of old Capri or prewar Vilna.

  The band played in front of a gushing indoor fountain, and Edith would stare and stare at them, a diminutive woman in a long blue woolen coat much too large for her, longing for the day when Suzette or I would be married, and we would choose La Perville, and she for once would find herself on the inside On that cold night, I was the one who wanted to loiter, grateful for any excuse to rest. I wished that vanity hadn’t compelled me to wear my new high-heeled shoes. A thin layer of snow blanketed Eighteenth Avenue, which made it even harder for me to walk. It cheered us to walk inside the Cotillion, a large, garish establishment that had once been a movie theater. It was decorated with plush red carpets, tall stairways, crystal chandeliers, and mirrors.

  The wedding was in full swing. We were instructed to head toward the women’s side of the grand ballroom. My heart sank at the realization it was going to be a segregated wedding, with women and men sitting apart—and dancing apart. There would be none of the romantic slow-dancing with boys I had hoped for on this night of my first evening gown.

  Friends waved to me to join them in a hora. I felt winded after only a few steps and returned to my table.

  The evening had hardly begun, and I was already spent.

  Mom spotted me sitting alone. “Loulou, tu ne danses pas?” she asked; Why aren’t you dancing? I pointed to my overflowing plate of food and pretended I was merely taking a break to sample the delicious food. I needed to get through only another hour or two of Celia’s wedding.

  A few days later, my mother and I ventured to Maimonides Hospital. There was no hope of a miracle inside this chaotic jumble of clinics and emergency rooms that catered to the indigent poor who couldn’t afford a private doctor. There were only endless waits and, at the end of the wait, a session with a physician or resident who was often foreign, poorly educated, and barely able to speak English.

  The young Indian resident who saw me seemed puzzled by my swollen ankle, though not overly concerned. He ordered a series of blood tests. When we returned for the result some days later, he merely shrugged, saying nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  I was feeling worse and worse. I was now having trouble merely getting up and going to school. Another trip to Maimonides was in order. This time, my mom and I opted for the emergency room instead of the unwieldy clinics. The wait was shorter, and I was seen not by a foreign doctor but by an American nurse in a spotless uniform and with a confident manner.

  First, she ordered me to take off my sock and show her my ankle. Then, she asked me to remove my trousers so she could examine the area more closely. She summoned a colleague, another nurse, for counsel. Both seemed amazed to see it wasn’t simply my ankle but my entire leg that was bloated.

  I heard her gasp when she spotted it—the odd swelling above my thigh I’d neglected to mention to anyone, even Mom.

  How long had it been there? she wanted to know. I shrugged, too tired to tell her my history with Cat Scratch Fever. Why hadn’t I seen a doctor? I tried to explain about that too, how it was impossible to find a good doctor in New York, far harder than in Cairo, but she’d stopped listening.

  Summoning my mother from the waiting area, she informed her that she was arranging for me to be seen at once by a specialist.

  At once, she repeated.

  The surgeon, a dapper and elegant middle-aged man named Dr. Reich, met me in an examining room upstairs. In his expensive suit and shiny silk tie, he projected the image of the bon docteur. He looked me over carefully, intently—the first time that a doctor had in years—all the while keeping up a light banter and wearing a steady smile on his face. He stopped smiling when he reached the area above my thigh. He asked my mom into the examining room and began speaking as if I weren’t there.

  “Your daughter is very sick,” he said bluntly. “We need to admit her immediately and run some tests.”

  It was already Thursday. The prospect of a weekend in the hospital, away from my parents, seemed unbearable. I pleaded for time.

  He reluctantly agreed, but only after my mother vowed we would be back on Sunday.

  My father abandoned his armchair Sunday afternoon and put aside his prayer books. He shuffled up and down our small apartment as my mother helped me pack my suitcase. It was small and colorful and compact, not at all like the bulky brown bags piled up in our basement.

  The suitcase was my prized possession—the first I had ever owned, since among the original twenty-six, no one saw fit to let me have my own bag. Suzette had given it to me as a gift several years back, with a twinkle in her eye, after making me promise I would use it to make grand voyages to glamorous destinations. Inside, she tucked in a small pink and white pamphlet entitled “You Are a Woman Now,” with an illustration of a pretty, smiling young girl on the cover. It was a basic primer about the facts of life, but even with my mother’s squeamish attitude toward sex, it contained nothing I didn’t already know. As I packed, I thought of that long-ago book with its image of the young girl, looking all flushed and hopeful, “You Are a Woman Now,” and wondered what had become of her.

  Brooklyn didn’t have taxis we could flag in the street, so we called a private car company to take us to the hospital. I rode with my father in the back of the car—he couldn’t bend his leg anymore and needed the room to stretch. My mom sat in front with the driver. None of us spoke much. At Maimonides, we were directed to the children’s ward, in a rotunda painted in cheery yellow and decorated with stuffed animals, toys, and flowers.

  What was I doing in a children’s ward? I asked. Wasn’t I a woman now?

  “Dearie, you don’t want to be with the adults, believe me,” a nurse said as she escorted me to my room and pointed out my bed by the window. After helping me unpack, she coldly told my parents it was time to leave.

  My father was seated in the armchair by my bed. He had whipped out the worn little red prayer book he carried in his pocket at all times, and was deep in prayer. He wouldn’t even have thought of arguing with the nurse. “Merci, mademoiselle,” he said politely, and tipped his hat. He stood up painfully from the chair and shuffled a few steps behind my mom. As they waited for the elevator, he was leaning heavily on his cane.

  The view from the hospital window was desolate and bare. I could see the silhouette of trees against the sky, and the faint outline of the El in the distance. I wished that my mother could have stayed by my side, as on that night we’d spent together at Maimonides’ true home, the Temple of the Great Miracles, not this cold impostor that bore his name. Tonight, before leaving, she had assured me that my father would be up all night praying. Under my hospital pillow, I could feel the gift he left behind, the threadbare red prayer book from Cairo.

  IT WASN’T CAT SCRATCH Fever.

  After a week of subjecting me to every test imaginable, the docto
rs at Maimonides, like their colleagues in Egypt a decade earlier, were puzzled. They decided that a small operation was in order to examine and analyze the actual site of the swelling. They called the procedure a biopsy.

  The morning of the surgery, my father performed an operation of his own. He ordered a car to take him to Ocean Parkway and the new home of the Congregation of Love and Friendship, and held a special prayer vigil to coincide with the exact time the surgery was taking place. To his relief, at least twenty men were on hand at that hour of the morning, more than enough for the requisite quorum.

  Even so, the test results were dire. I had contracted another mysterious ailment known as Hodgkin’s disease.

  “Hopkins disease?” I asked, thoroughly confused. I’d never heard of it, and no one breathed the word cancer, though of course that is what it was.

  At home, my mother seemed to unravel before my eyes. She sat at the kitchen table, penning letter after distraught letter to Suzette in California, pleading with her desperately to come home, to come home at once and help her to cope with the crisis. My father did nothing but pray, all day long and late into the night. Our apartment became his very own house of worship. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, staring at my leg, unable to figure out what to do.

  My sister, on the other hand, was a maelstrom of activity. In L.A., she was both in close touch with us and yet mysterious about what she was doing. I only knew that she would phone at any hour of the day or night, saying I should trust no one and listen to no one. I didn’t have Hodgkin’s, my older sister insisted, confident as ever; all I had was a virus. The doctors were wrong, the hospitals were wrong, the tests were wrong, the biopsy results were wrong, my parents were wrong, everyone around me was wrong and not to be trusted.

  She urged me to leave at once for California, where she vowed to take me to proper doctors. New York was like Cairo, she said contemptuously. Stanford in Palo Alto, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota—those were the places I needed to go for care, she said, warning me not to be ministered by some hacks at a Brooklyn hospital named after a dead mystic.

  I had trouble walking to the corner bakery—I wondered how I would get to Stanford. The exchanges drove my mother to distraction.

  New York, May 10, 1973

  Dear Suzette,

  Please stop these chimeras about going to Stanford for treatment. We don’t have the money for Stanford. Loulou’s only form of insurance, if you recall, is the Medicaid card your father helped her to obtain. If we can’t decide on a course of treatment, we will surely lose her. Maman.

  Occasionally, my sister offered advice that seemed to make sense. When she advised us to get rid of the cat, Pouspous Jaune was immediately banned from the house. For days, even weeks, thereafter he would try to return, meowing at the window of our ground-floor apartment, clamoring to be allowed back in. I would see him wandering around the neighborhood and wonder how he was faring, this spoiled house cat used to being hand-fed bits of cheese by my father, and now forced to scrounge around for his supper. He seemed so lost—as lost as I felt.

  My mother was resolute, and never let him in the house again. He was the last Pouspous I ever owned.

  My family located a specialist, a Hodgkin’s expert named Dr. Lee. He worked in Manhattan, a place so foreign and remote my friends and I called it “the City,” at a hospital called Memorial. It was a major cancer center even then, but that was before it reinvented itself and wanted to be known only by the crisper, clinical-sounding name of Sloan-Kettering, when it touted the supremacy of its laboratories and research scientists over the more human mission of its doctors and clinicians.

  One morning, my parents and I clambered into a private car for the drive to Manhattan’s East Side. We had almost stopped taking subways: my parents weren’t letting me walk anywhere. I worried that their entire savings were now being spent on taxis to and from my doctors’ appointments.

  I was used to doctors with ethnic names, mostly Jewish. I couldn’t get my mind around Dr. Lee’s identity, which only fueled my anxiety. Dr. Lee had to be Chinese, I decided. As we crossed the bridge into Manhattan, I began chatting amiably with the driver.

  “Loulou, ne parles pas avec le chauffeur,” my father said in a chiding tone. I wondered how even in these desperate circumstances, he could still manage to be so class-conscious that he felt it necessary to tell his daughter to stop talking with a cabdriver.

  What class did we belong to, anyway?

  By my father’s template, we were still members of an elite, a ruling aristocracy. He was the Captain, and I was his Egyptian princess, even though all trappings of our former life were gone, and the closest we came to royalty these days was Kings Highway, the shopping strip near Ocean Parkway where Mansoura’s and other Oriental grocers were located.

  The driver dropped us off at the wrong address. Bedpan Alley, as this sliver of Manhattan’s Upper East Side is called, is a beehive of medical institutions, research laboratories, clinics, and medical schools. We wandered, lost and hopelessly confused. After going from one building to another, we finally found our way to Memorial’s lobby.

  We were still early, and my parents were anxious for me to have lunch. Ever since they’d realized I was losing weight, they had become obsessed, my mother in particular, with my diet. She’d push large plates of food on me.

  Memorial’s cafeteria was minuscule, more like a take-out counter. Among the few offerings on the sparse menu was vegetable soup, and I agreed to my father’s offer to purchase a small bowl for me. Once I began stirring the hot broth with my spoon, I noticed small chunks of meat swimming alongside the celery, carrots, peas, and onions.

  I realized at once that I couldn’t eat it.

  “Ce n’est pas kasher,” I cried. I pointed out the pieces of forbidden beef to my dad. I was sure he would be as upset as I was. Hadn’t he railed against my siblings for having abandoned the Jewish dietary laws shortly after we arrived in New York? In all the years I had known him, the opulent years, the struggling years, the desperate years, the years of exile and flight, the years of personal and financial ruin, the years selling ties in the street and the years seated in an armchair at home, I’d never once known him to cut corners, to sidestep the faith that was the centerpiece of his life.

  “Loulou, manges,” he said very simply; Please eat.

  He had reverted to that eerily mild-mannered tone he used to convey only what was most important. As I pushed the cup of soup away, he pushed it back to me and nodded his approval.

  I took a sip of the broth. I felt unbearably sad; only at that moment did it finally dawn on me how sick I must be.

  At last, it was time to go upstairs for my doctor’s appointment. When the receptionist called out my name, I was taken to a small examining room and asked to sit on a table. I wasn’t even expected to change into a dressing gown but could remain in my own clothes.

  After a few minutes, the door opened and a tall man walked in, wearing dark gray trousers and a blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looked nothing like a doctor. He wasn’t wearing a white coat. He didn’t carry a stethoscope. And he wasn’t Chinese. When he reached out to shake my hand, he introduced himself as Burt Lee.

  Dr. Lee didn’t say much, which added to my confusion. He seemed cold and somewhat forbidding. There were none of the pleasantries doctors engage in, not even the obligatory smile, but that was fine, since I didn’t feel much like smiling either. I noticed that he was eyeing me very carefully, taking in my hair and face, even studying my clothes. I looked a sorry sight in the baggy brown pants and pale blue T-shirt that had become my daily uniform. Who needed to dress up for a doctor, anyway?

  Dr. Burton J. Lee III, M.D., of Park Avenue, Yale, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

  If he held back on some of the niceties, he also spared me the endless questions I had been asked in recent weeks. As doctors struggled to make a diagnosis, they would confront me with a litany of tedious inquiries. With Dr. Lee, I didn’t have to say whe
ther I had lost weight, or had trouble sleeping, if I felt weak or tired, or had noted other troubling changes in my body.

  He seemed able to tell at a glance that the answer to all of these questions was yes.

  Instead, as he examined me—rapidly, with a sure, firm, confident hand—he asked questions no other doctors had. He wanted to know what I liked most about school and if I had any hobbies. Was I planning to attend college? What were my favorite books and authors? He almost had me chuckling as he spoke about attending Yale in the 1950s, and going to Vassar, where I had been accepted, to meet women.

  I had only one question for him: “Do I have Hodgkin’s?”

  “You might,” he replied, as lightly and noncommittally as if I’d asked him whether I had a cold. “You might.”

  We returned a few days later. As I waited for him in the examining room, he met with my parents in an adjoining office. After a few minutes, I heard what sounded like a scuffle. I opened the door a crack.

  There was my father, tears streaming down his face, pleading with Dr. Lee. “S’il vous plaît, Docteur,” he kept saying, “s’il vous plaît, monsieur.” It was the first time I had ever seen my father cry. He sounded desperate and submissive, and I had never known him to be either.

  But pleading for what? I had no idea what was going on, only that the formidable man in rolled-up shirtsleeves looked angry. Burton James Lee III of Yale, Park Avenue, and Greenwich seemed troubled by the display of this old man in a shabby raincoat and straw hat.

  “This will not do, sir,” he said in his most patrician tone, and ushered my father and mother to the reception area.

  Dr. Lee came to see me in the examining room. Without fanfare, he began to describe some of the tests he was ordering. I noticed that he used the same mild tone of voice that my dad used when he talked about grave subjects. He only sounded urgent when he leaned over to deliver one piece of advice. “Don’t listen to your father,” Dr. Lee told me. He repeated the warning in his clipped upper-class English, enunciating every single word: “Don’t listen to your father.”