The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

by Dawn Raffel

  The crowd tore into the gunman. They likely would have pummeled him to death had the wounded president not called out, “Be easy with him, boys.” He asked that somebody break the news gently to Ida, who wasn’t with him, before he was lifted onto a stretcher and carried off.

  * * *

  —

  Everyone was in the streets. To reach the emergency medical center, the ambulance had to pass directly in front of the incubator station, which was in the same square.

  News flew on breath, and it stank. Dr. Roswell Park, the exposition’s medical director, was out of town, performing surgery in Niagara Falls. In his stead, the center was staffed with junior doctors and medical students. Telephones were ringing all throughout the town. Answer, answer. Martin, so close yet so bereft of credentials, was helpless. If only.

  Inside the medical center, as Buffalo’s physicians began to arrive, morphine was administered to cloud McKinley’s pain. Dr. Roswell Park was already en route. But as the minutes passed, the team on-site realized they had no time left to wait.

  Matthew D. Mann, the obstetrician, was the senior-most surgeon present. He was a resoundingly confident man, but the pressure on him was immense. The doors to the operating theater snapped shut. Burly Secret Service agents stood outside, guns at the ready. They soft-stepped and whispered as “the blood of the Republic” spilled under the surgeon’s knife.

  Dr. Mann had five other doctors, two medical students, and six nurses attending. But his expertise was extracting babies, not bullets, and he couldn’t find the second one. Just the day before, McKinley had lauded the world’s advancements on display. Among these was the X-ray machine that thousands of visitors had viewed. By year’s end, the first Nobel Prize in Physics would go to Wilhelm Röntgen for the science that made it possible to see through skin and into the body’s hidden places. If only, if only. Nobody felt competent to use this new invention on the president. Dr. Park arrived just as the operation was ending; the wound was carefully stitched, the bullet still inside. Then the doors parted, first from the operating room, then to the street, where a silent crowd witnessed McKinley being carried out, conscious, on a stretcher.

  Terrible things can happen anywhere: Everybody knows it. But here it was in front of them, a lovely day turned bloody. To the immigrant, to the baby nurse, to every man and woman standing sickened in the street, the day would mark the start of an “after.”

  At first, McKinley seemed to rally. Optimistic updates went out daily from the private residence where the president convalesced. Then gangrene set in. On September 14, his last reported words were, “It’s God’s way. His will be done. Good-bye, all good-bye.”

  With that, Theodore Roosevelt became the twenty-sixth president of the United States.

  * * *

  —

  On October 29, the president’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was executed.

  On November 2, the Buffalo fair officially ended.

  On November 11, Samuel Schenkein was arrested and the incubators, some still occupied, were seized. “BABIES MAY DIE,” screamed one headline. Another reported that city hall circles were agitated by a question about whether Deputy Sheriff Michael Burke was babysitting: He was in charge of “inventory.” Included in the seizure were 20 bottles of lotion, 10 dozen infants’ linen, 12 dozen toilet powder, 20 dozen toilet soap, 12 dozen jars of toilet cream, 20 dozen tubes of toilet cream, “kindred articles of an estimated value of $1000,” and $55 in cash.

  The infant incubator exhibit had impressed the public, the press, and much of the medical establishment. Financially, it flopped. Now that the fair was over, the Qbata company’s investor, Emmett W. McConnell, was incensed. He sued Schenkein and Coney as involuntary bankrupts, claiming that he was owed $17,250 in receipts, and that his duplicitous partners were hiding assets, which they planned to ferret out of town to the next world’s fair, in St. Louis. This last part especially infuriated him: He demanded another $75,000 in damages because they had dealt him out of their plans.

  Samuel Schenkein coughed up $1,000 bail; in time, a judge would vacate the order of arrest. Sheriff Mike also caught a break: The confiscated inventory didn’t include live infants. They were sent home, with no further word as to their well-being.

  The legal and financial mess, however, was only beginning. Buffalo Children’s Hospital bought a few machines, bringing in some cash, but plans for St. Louis were falling apart. Forget about Topeka. Their lotion-licensing business was over before it began. Messrs. Schenkein and Coney, and with them, Miss Maye Segner, were very close to being permanently out of business.

  WELCOME TO THE CITY OF THE DEAD

  The directions are easy. On a sweltering day, take the J train outbound through Brooklyn. Go underground and up again, past Cleveland and Norwood and Crescent streets, with the life of the city unfolding below. Get off at Cypress Hills.

  Proceed along a long and curving road, past rows and rows of graves on rolling land. Some are adorned with flowers slowly wilting in the heat, some with ripening oranges, there to sweeten the passage to the afterlife, some with portraits of the dead etched into stone.

  Underneath an underpass, then down a dirt stretch, you will come upon an abbey. Around the back, the door is unlocked. Enter. In a minute or two, your eyes will adjust. Thin light filters in through stained-glass sheaves and holly. A nondenominational chapel waits, vacant. There is birdsong in the distance, if you listen, and a lawn mower’s drone. Persian rugs, slightly rucked, will threaten to trip you.

  The dead line the walls in rows of drawers, an archive of bones. Up a flight, the light is weaker. Arrows point to famous remains: showgirl Mae West, boxer James John Corbett, steakhouse master Peter Luger. Each notable crypt is marked by a placard on the floor. A former Polish prime minister is memorialized by a bust in a glass case inscribed, “His heart rested here.”

  Up another flight the darkness is almost impenetrable. Slowly, shapes emerge. A round banquette, like something out of a Hollywood musical dream hotel. Wooden tables for two with aging silk bouquets, and ornate chairs with fabric slightly threadbare to the touch, as if the dead might slip out for a spot of tea, or something stronger.

  At the mouth of row LLL, in the bottom-most drawer, alongside his wife, lies Dr. Martin A. Couney.

  * * *

  —

  What did I think I would find here? For months, I’d felt like I was after one of those particles physicists confirm only by the disturbance of their wake. I could have told William Silverman that Martin Couney came from a town called Krotoschin, not Alsace or Breslau. But his census records, starting in 1910, were full of inconsistencies: He was German, he was French, he arrived here in 1884 (at the age of fourteen) or in 1888 (still not possible, I thought), his name was spelled “Coursey,” his daughter, Hildegarde, was listed as his wife. Some of these mistakes were clerical errors, others were probably fibs. Hildegarde had disappeared completely. Martin Couney’s immigration record was missing and so was the record of his naturalization. The New York State medical licensing archive had no information on him. Between “Coney” and “Couney” and the fact that his funeral had been held at Kirschenbaum’s Westminster Chapel, one of the city’s oldest Jewish funeral homes, I figured he’d been born Cohen, or maybe Cohn, or Coen, or possibly Kohn, which certainly narrowed it down.

  * * *

  —

  Then there were the babies. In the American Academy of Pediatrics Archives, outside Chicago, among the Couney buffs’ papers, I found two letters written by a man named Harold S. Musselwhite, Jr. The first was addressed to “Research Librarian” at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Dated Thursday, June 27, 1996, it began, “Re: Martin Couney, M.D. I was one of his charges in 1921. . . . I shall appreciate a copy of any obituary record you may have printed and additional information you may be able to provide.” What answer he got is unknown, but a second letter, addressed to L. Joseph Butterf
ield, M.D., was also on file. This one was dated Saturday, June 6, 1998, and it contained a more detailed account of his life. He stated that he was born at home in Brooklyn on April 24, 1921. “My parents and several others were preparing to go to the Statue of Liberty when my mother paused to go to the bathroom. She suddenly called out, ‘The baby’s here’ and I was saved from going down the toilet. . . . It was my maternal grandmother who conceived the idea of keeping me in a cotton-filled shoebox placed in a warm oven as a makeshift ‘incubator’ until they made contact with Dr. Couney. No hospital had the means to care for me,” he wrote. “The ‘how’ and ‘when’ is unknown to me as was my means of transportation to Coney Island. Unfortunately, all persons concerned are now deceased and most of the records destroyed.” He recalled being told that at his baptism he had “a head so small that it fitted into a small teacup.” Mostly he was seeking information, but he wanted to leave a record, too. He wrote about meeting his wife, about his service in the navy, his jobs in insurance and real estate, and the miniature and dollhouse shows he and his wife ran in Mystic, Connecticut. The couple had three children and seven grandchildren. Yet there was something missing: He had never met another of Martin Couney’s patients, and yearned to know: Who else is out there? The last record of Harold Musselwhite in the pediatric archive noted his website, circa 2001, through which he hoped to find incubator-mates.

  After I left Chicago, I found the website—still live, with no evidence of other Couney babies found—and an obituary for Harold Musselwhite, Jr., dated 2005. He’d died at the age of eighty-three, about six weeks after William Silverman. I also found an address for his daughter Joy. I thought she might want to have copies of her father’s letters, so I put them in the mail. When she called, she was slightly stunned; her father had never told her some of those things. She didn’t know anything more than I did about Dr. Couney, and as far as she could tell, her father had never met anyone else who’d been the incubator doctor’s patient.

  * * *

  —

  Some of Martin Couney’s patients have to be alive. Almost as soon as I had the thought, an article popped up about sisters named Jane Umbarger and Jean Harrison. The “incubator twins” from the Century of Progress had toasted their eightieth birthday with margaritas at a family picnic in Illinois. A photograph showed the two women wearing flowing summer tops, one pink and white and the other blue and green.

  What felt like a minute later, I was on the phone. Jane had the flat midwestern accent of my childhood. For all that I craved information, Jane craved it more. She had wondered for most of her life about Martin Couney. “Was Coney Island named for him?” she asked. “Can you believe they didn’t allow him in hospitals?” She and her sister had never met anyone else who’d been in the sideshow, despite living all of their lives in or near Chicago. Her sister Jean had tried writing to media outlets, with no success, although someone unsavory wrote to her once from a prison. More than anything else, Jane wanted to know, “Is there anyone else like us?”

  * * *

  —

  Jane and Jean were born on August 17, 1934, three weeks after the homecoming at the Century of Progress. Together, they weighed seven pounds, ten ounces, which would have been perfect if they had been one person. Their aunt, a nurse, got them into the show.

  Every day, Jane said, their father stopped at the fair on the way to his job at First National Bank. He would pass the naughty Streets of Paris and deliver his wife’s breast milk to the nursery next door. Among the visitors was a four-year-old boy who would become Jean’s husband.

  Nineteen years later, strangers crowded the church for the sisters’ double wedding. The public had seen them struggle to live, and now—the Depression over, the war won—they wanted to watch the girls walk down the aisle to their happily-ever-after ending.

  * * *

  —

  The second time I called, I had both women on the line. Jean’s voice was deeper (she was fifteen minutes older), but the sisters sounded remarkably alike—mid-twentieth-century chipper. Often they said “Oh!” in unison.

  “We’d always assumed we were in the Science Hall,” Jean said. “We were in our forties or so when we went to an exposition that showed all of the world’s fair. And we were on the midway! Like a freak show! We were so shocked to find out.” But that shock was amused: a funny midlife treat, like a surprise in a Christmas stocking.

  Once again, Jane peppered me with questions: Was Martin Couney married? “Oh!” How long did he live? “Oh!” Had I found any other twins? And how did I get involved with this story, anyway? “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

  Jean was still married to the boy whose parents had paid a quarter for him to see her in the incubator.

  “Was it love at first sight?” I asked.

  “With my husband, it was,” Jane said. “When he met me, he told his friend, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’ But I’m not married to my first husband. I’ve been married to this one for fifty-three years.”

  I congratulated her, and she said, “When Jean and I got married, I think we were too young. I think because Jean was going to get married, I thought I needed to get married, too, that we needed to have a double wedding.” When she met her second husband, they both had two kids already. They adopted each other’s children and together they had two more. All those years, both of them worked in her husband’s boat-building business. “I’m retired now,” she said. “At eighty-one, I think I should be. But I put a lot of years in. You know, it was very busy. Besides raising the six kids.”

  “That’s a lot,” I said.

  “It wasn’t easy,” Jane said. “But it’s our life.” She said it with affection, and yet, almost as if afraid of sounding ungrateful, she quickly added, “I’m happy that I found my second husband, believe me.” Jane had lost a daughter eleven years earlier but had fourteen grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.

  Jean and her husband of sixty-two years—the man who’d glimpsed his future at the Century of Progress—had raised three sons while she worked first at her family’s pottery business, then at a newspaper. The couple had nine grandchildren and were expecting their twelfth great-grandchild.

  “We hope we’re still here when your book comes out,” Jane said before we hung up.

  * * *

  —

  I sent letter after letter, hoping I’d found the right address for people whose names had been in a newspaper half a century earlier. I looked up obituaries and sought out the children. By any chance was your mother in an incubator . . . ? or I think this might have been your relative. People whose parents had been in Martin Couney’s machines knew little about the circumstances but told me things like My mother had a wonderful life. My mother had ten children. My father lived into his eighties.

  Whenever I found a “baby” still alive, she (and it was always she) was itching to talk. Each woman, now in her seventies, eighties, or nineties, was tickled that people had paid admission to see her. Each, like Jane and Jean, had more questions for me than I for her. And each was yearning to know, Who was that man who saved me?

  * * *

  —

  In Cypress Hills, I had come to what, in a cruel pun, was another dead end in my quest. I stood there and stood there, staring at the name carved into marble. Come on, Martin A. Couney, I willed him. Talk to me.

  The cemetery prohibits photographing graves, but the man I was visiting wasn’t exactly a stickler for rules. And I hadn’t seen a living human being since before I’d walked under the underpass. I pulled out my iPhone and took a snap. Later, I saw how dark that photo is, revealing nothing.

  TWO ELEPHANTS, A WEDDING, AND A BUNCH OF CRYING BABIES

  Coney Island, 1903

  On Sunday, January 4, 1903, a crowd of invited guests gathered to witness a public execution. Although plans to charge admission had been scuttled, a nervy carnival atmosphere prevailed, with curio
sity seekers watching from nearby rooftops, squinting in the winter light. Condemned to die was a healthy circus elephant named Topsy. The men who had ordered her death were Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy. The masterminds of A Trip to the Moon were building their own amusement park, visibly under construction. On their orders, Topsy was to be fed arsenic-laced carrots, wired up, and electrocuted with more than 6,000 volts.

  Branded a “bad” elephant, Topsy had spent her life being prodded with hooks between her eyes, struck with a pitchfork, and hit with hot pokers, all in the interest of entertaining a circus audience. A few years earlier, a drunkard stuck a lit cigar on the tip of her trunk. She threw him off, killing him. After that, she’d been sold to Sea Lion Park in Coney Island, which Thompson and Dundy had recently acquired.

  Topsy’s luck—such as it was—ran out when her trainer, Whitney Ault, went on a bender and rode her down Surf Avenue. The stunt resulted in Ault’s getting canned, but no one else could handle the three-ton animal. Thompson insisted he tried to give her away but couldn’t find a taker. No zoo or circus wanted her, he said. And once he decided Topsy would die, the showman figured he might as well make a buck.

  Thompson’s initial plan was to have Topsy publicly hanged and charge a quarter admission. Horrified, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals thwarted both the hanging and the profit. But the organization permitted the combination of poisoning/strangling/electrocution, which would be quicker and, they believed, less cruel. For educational purposes, the Edison Manufacturing movie company was on hand to film the event so that Americans nationwide could view it, while Thompson took the opportunity to advertise his soon-to-open theme park.