by W. E. Gutman
*
As these events unfolded, I was trying to survive, skipping from one dull job to another, moving from one rooming house to another in a futile and self-deceiving bid to find some permanency in my life. It was around that time that I met Suzy Levine, the daughter of a fish monger in the old Fulton Fish Market in downtown Manhattan. Suzy had short kinky hair and almond-shaped eyes. She reminded me of Leslie Caron. A dance student and a pupil of choreographer Martha Graham, Suzy liked to fuck almost as much as she enjoyed going into demented twirling-Dervish trances during which she pirouetted across the room in an exhausting quest for perpetual motion and Dionysian rapture. I would jump out of my skin as she suddenly snapped into bizarre and convulsive poses in the middle of an otherwise quiet tête-à-tête. She called them “contractions,” modern ballet exercises developed by the eccentric and surly Miss Graham herself.
Suzy’s parents had taken a liking to me, inviting me to spend weekends at their home in Yonkers. It would not be long before they ceased looking at me as their daughter’s boyfriend and began treating me as a prospective son-in-law. I had no intention of marrying Suzy but I was having a good time and eating several square meals a week. One day, yet again out of work, Suzy’s father, Harold, a kind and generous man, offered me a job “in the family business.” He called it a “career move.” After four months of twelve-hour days spent ferrying frozen halibuts from the Hudson River piers to the store, gutting, rinsing, trimming, weighing and wrapping fish, peeling and de-veining shrimp, loading the trucks, taking orders on the phone, canvassing prospective customers and following up new leads in the afternoon wearing a suit and tie, I bid Suzy farewell. I owe an aversion to fish and a leeriness of dancers to this life-altering experience.
*
And then, one day, I saw my mother die. I was 34. No, she didn’t die suddenly. She’d always done everything with prudence and reflection. It took months of pain -- constant, searching, tenacious. She turned yellow, lost her hair, shed half her weight and slowly lost her mind. I witnessed this irreversible transformation with disbelief, helplessness and anger. Lies had kept her hoping, fighting at first. Then she learned the awful truth and she gave up. One day, when the others left the room to stretch their legs after an all-night vigil, I touched her face and called her name.
“Mama, mama, don’t go.”
She winced and her eyelids parted ever so briefly. I knew she’d seen me, felt my presence, heard the words. She expired that evening. June was young and the air was filled with all of spring’s fragrances. And every vestige of childhood in me died with her. Only the dreams she’d dreamed for me survived, some unfulfilled, some beyond reach except in the limitless regions of a mother’s love. I remember cursing her, hating her. No one understood the rage that surged within me when she died. I felt betrayed, lost. Taken for granted, often unnoticed in life, longed for in death, my mother would have been the first to grasp this paradox. No one else did, except my father who, familiar with the contradictions of the human soul, discerned in my calumnies the brittle fragments of a broken heart. Heeding her last wishes, she was cremated and we buried her ashes in a family plot outside Paris, where my grandmother and uncle would later be laid to rest. It rained that day. It would rain without fail every time I visited the cemetery. And I would grumble every time because my shoes got wet and caked with mud.
It is in the nature of coincidence to contain hints of irony.
*
I would be greeted by rain upon my return to New York. A monotonous downpour drenched Manhattan with chilling persistence. Broadway stretched before me, a dank canyon in which a million lights flickered through the sulfurous mist. They were all there: drunks, vagrants, hawkers, doomsday prophets and reformers, the homeless and the transient, visitors and commuters, and beautiful girls so well disguised that they looked as though they’d spent the day typing. It was the West Side and men with upturned collars and vacant expressions walked right into me, as if I wasn’t there. Creatures of all genders trapped me in their staring game and I didn’t know if their eyes conveyed hate, lust or defiance. I didn’t want to miss a single nuance so I stretched my gaze to the limits of peripheral vision until I found a new pair of eyes up ahead. And the contest resumed. I reached Forty Second Street, the outer rim of a funnel through which stirs a backwash of humanity. The light turned red. I stopped. At my feet lay the puddles, like bottomless black lagoons in which shimmer all sorts of eerie reflections. Everything around me seemed to reinforce life’s constrictions. STOP. ONE WAY. YIELD. NO PARKING. NO STANDING. NO RIGHT TURN. NO LEFT TURN. WALK. DON’T WALK. Uncle Sol, the only blood relative who drove a cab for a living, and who’d read everything from Anaxagoras to Zola, once described life as “nothing but a fucking traffic jam.” His erudition notwithstanding.
*
Grand Central Station. I remember a nun begging for alms at the bottom of a steep, interminable subway escalator. She sat on a folding chair, night after night, gazing at the hordes that spilled at her feet. She nodded, slowly, rhythmically. Her lips moved but the roar of the trains engulfed her incantations. She may have been reciting the rosary, the paternoster, an endless mantra of benedictions, or she may have simply said “Welcome to hell, welcome to hell….”
Redemption, she knew, can be bargained for with a little kindness. The generous ones, few as they were, only gave on Fridays. The others pretended not to see her. Underground, where commuters surrender to a numbing daily cadence -- hurry to work, hurry back home -- life seems thin and fitful, snatched in haste, endured with wariness in guilt-ridden anonymity by a transient mob that barely tolerates itself. And there seems to exude from this pulsating, throbbing, scurrying mass of people a smell of hostility and fear and boredom, all of it skillfully concealed behind a million expressionless eyes.
Sooner or later, I noted, everyone made a special effort to diminish the guilt. So the nun waited. And hell got more crowded every day.
*
There are two kinds of solitude: the one we eagerly seek and the one that trespasses when there’s no one left around to disturb it.
My mother’s death put an abrupt end to my father’s career. He said, “fuck medicine,” and retired. He was 69. Heartbroken, embittered by the shortcomings of his craft, he withdrew into a world of self-imposed solitude in the company of an irascible cat, Minou, a stray he’d rescued as a kitten on a bitter winter night. This once vibrant man survived my mother by 14 years, now a recluse given to neurasthenia, sudden fits of anger and weeping. On September 9, 1987, after suffering a series of fainting spells, he was admitted for the last time to St. Luke’s Hospital. On the 16th, his doctor summoned me. My father was dying, he said. It was a matter of hours. I remember taking his hand into mine and squeezing it gently. He squeezed mine. I had no words. I knew this was the end but I could not bring myself to say anything. My father abhorred the immodesty, the banality of empty words, especially in moments when silence speaks with greatest eloquence.
My mind raced back in time and I remembered the war and tales of a man in a white frock over a silver-braided black uniform, a Reich’s officer paid to experiment on thousands of unwitting human guinea pigs. They called him Herr Doktor but his stethoscope was cold and he sneered as you shivered before him. He used to shove the tongue depressor so far down your throat that you retched and your nostrils filled with vomit. His injections were painful. The glass syringe was enormous, it seemed, and he held it up to the light like a sacred object, transfixed by the amber droplets of serum gushing from the gleaming needle. You heard yourself pleading, begging. “Herr Doktor, will it hurt?” Embarrassed but in desperate need of reassurance, you shed your pride and dropped your pants before the sharp, tugging stab made an answer quite superfluous. You winced and he laughed like a drunken burgher at an Oktoberfest village fair. Nazi wit has a way of reducing obscenity to bestiality. Nothing mattered anymore, the nausea, the sores, the blinding headaches, the chills, the fevers, the dizzying descent into madness. There was plenty of
stale bread and thin leek broth on the stove in the infirmary, and he granted seconds to repeat volunteers. In the end, if his injections or his scalpel or the foul salves he applied on your festering wounds didn’t kill you right away, he invited you in for more until they did or until insanity finally yanked you out of his clutches.
I looked at my dying father, born poor, of humble origins, a simple man filled with compassion, an honest country doctor, a healer who had shed bitter tears when his first patient died. He seemed to be at peace. At about six that evening, he opened his eyes and looked at me with the same tenderness that had lit his gaze when I was a little boy and he’d pick me up in his arms.
“It’s such a short journey from the source to the open sea, son,” he said softly. My father had never been big on symbolism. He considered it a subterfuge, an evasion from truth, a descent into mawkishness. He closed his eyes and whispered, this time in French.
“Ne cherches pas midi à quatorze heures.” This was an advice he’d often repeated. Loosely translated, the injunction cautions against seeking things were they are not. He expired moments later and I knew that, at last, he’d found his “place,” an abode not made by human hands, a realm not found on maps that had eluded him all of his life. Would I find mine, I wondered, as I buried him at the New Montefiore Cemetery in Long Island in a simple pine casket, naked and swathed in a shroud, as he’d stipulated in his will.
Like me, he never ceased to long for Paris.
Several years later, after much soul-searching, I wrote a tribute to my father. Careful not to dwell on our personal relationship, the belated eulogy focused instead on the physician. The essay was published by The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 1996. Entitled A Magnificent Misfit, it reads:
My father did everything himself without benefit of nurses, clerical staff or drafty assembly-line consultation cubicles. He took your temperature as you sat face-to-face on white enameled swivel chairs -- rectally too, if necessary, in which case you weren’t sitting. He even drew blood from your finger and let it run up a thin graded tube as you marveled at the strange powers of capillary action.
This wonderful man had his own centrifuge, a gleaming autoclave and an old Roentgen that hummed with imperturbable omnipotence in a bright, cheerful room that always smelled of iodine and clove. When he administered injections, he would deaden the point of impact with a dry little slap, and he would talk about this and that with neighborly solicitude long after the needle was out.
You were never surprised to learn that he’d pedaled several kilometers at night in the rain to deliver a baby on an old kitchen table or in a big brass bed, or to hold the hand of a dying village patriarch as family and friends looked on. Sometimes it lasted until morning. He’d go straight back to his office looking tired but he’d smile, put on a fresh smock and patch up scraped elbows and knees and he’d even ask how Aunt Lucy or Uncle Charlie was feeling these days. And he never forgot to stuff your pockets with eucalyptus candy and lemon drops.
“How much do I owe you, doctor,” I would often hear his patients ask.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he’d answer, staring at his feet, clearly embarrassed by the question. “Whatever you can.” Then he’d quickly add, “don’t worry if you’re short. You can pay me next time.” He always assumed his patients were impecunious -- most of them were -- and he could never bring himself to demand prompt payment of his very modest fees. Money made him feel uncomfortable. He had an almost prudish disdain toward it.
“There is something incongruous about charging money to heal, relieve pain, save lives,” he once told me. “I shall never get used to it.” This was a remarkable ethos for a man who, by his own admission, had embraced medicine to escape the abject poverty of his childhood and was forced to wash dishes, wait on tables, tutor dunces and donate blood to pay tuition.
“It all happened in dissection class,” he recalled in a rare moment of wistful introspection. “I wept at the sight of my first cadaver. He was so very young. Who is this wretched mass no one will claim, I asked myself. Has he no family? Is there no one to mourn him? Surely he was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother. He was alive, he felt pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. He had dreams. Did he love? Was he loved in return? Did he suffer? Could he have been saved? Did poverty deprive him of good health or rob him of a decent funeral?”
A pre-med student once asked my father what he considered to be the three cardinal medical taboos. My father replied without hesitation: “Do not operate unless such procedure is clearly in the patient’s interest. Do not overmedicate. Never charge patients more than they can afford. Ignore the first two taboos and you are merely unprincipled. Break the third and I shall call you a vampire.”
The student now boasts a Fifth Avenue practice, a New Canaan estate and a yacht at anchor in a secluded cove on some Pacific coral archipelago. It takes three months to secure an appointment. He does not handle emergencies. He makes no house calls.
I miss my father. He was incorruptible. He had no time for sophistry, no patience for equivocation, no room for the shaded areas separating right from wrong. Compassion was his only guide, his patients’ health and welfare his sole mission and reward. He lived frugally -- “how much does one really need to live with dignity,” he once asked a wealthy colleague who found the question contentious. My father died poor but debtless.
I wish I had a dollar for every patient this 1935 graduate of the Paris Faculty of Medicine treated for nothing, for every paté de foie gras or leg of lamb or kilo of butter or basket of eggs he accepted in lieu of honorarium, for every debt he forgave, for every prescription he paid out of his own pocket. I would have had a neat little sum, more than enough to pay for the thorough checkup doctors denied me when I lost my job, when unemployment benefits ran out and I could no longer afford medical insurance.
Will I find a doctor like my father when I retire and my meager writings barely cover the cost of a pine casket? They say it’s cheaper to die than to live. My father devoted his career to deconstructing aphorisms. He was the magnificent misfit lesser men do not have the courage to be.
A week or so later, I received a phone call from David Asman, then an opinion page editor at The Wall Street Journal (now an anchor on the Fox business network).
“Willy,” Asman said, “The White House called. President Clinton read your piece. He wants to respond. May I give your mailing address?”
“Yes,” I answered, dumbfounded. “Yes, of course.”
A couple of weeks later, the postman delivered an envelope bearing the White House seal. Inside was a note, personally handwritten and signed by the president:
Dear Mr. Gutman --
Several weeks ago I read your very moving tribute to your father in The Wall Street Journal. It impressed me so much that I cut it out and carried it around, re-reading it from time to time. My grandfather, who had barely a grade school education, was much the same kind of man. He ran a grocery store in a poor Southern town before food stamps. He sold food on credit to poor and working people he knew could never repay him when he knew too, that they were doing their best. I have been trying to start a discussion in the country on what we owe each other on the edge of a new century. Your wonderful piece certainly will help. Sincerely, Bill Clinton.
Clinton’s letter, unexpected and heartwarming, restored my faith in the vigor and amplitude of idealism. Surely, I thought, such accolade from the president of the United States would translate into reshaping and redirecting political institutions heretofore created by the elite, for the elite.
But that was not to be. Good intentions are often subverted by opportunism, self-interest or, in his case, political expediency. Time and again, Clinton was forced to set aside his campaign pledges, capitulating to the guardians of the status quo, signing bills favoring Republican agendas that bolstered the already colossal might of America’s corporate elite.
In his second inaugural speech -- as he had in his letter to me -- Clinton used such rousing buzzword
s as “a new century” and “a new millennium.” But deeds failed to echo the rhetoric. His stated antipathy for the “evils of capitalism,” and his commitment to a “radical redistribution of economic and political power” were soon forgotten in favor of “bipartisan” symmetry. Hard as he tried, his presidency offered no stalwart program to provide Americans a health care system unfettered by extortionist insurance schemes. Instead, like his predecessors (and successors, including Obama), he continued to serve the rich, the mighty and the well connected to the bitter end. His feeble and irresolute commitment to social causes was further sapped by his administration’s dependence on militarism and war.
Words sabotaged and distorted by political misinformation can have a disquieting effect on our timorous psyche. Take “socialized medicine.” Americans take Social Studies in school. Their parents teach them social graces. Hostile to any form of social contract (except social engineering) many, influenced by social Darwinism, claw their way up the social ladder. Having reached the top, they hire social secretaries to handle social calendars brimming with social obligations. Overly sociable, some come down with social diseases. All eventually become eligible for social security.
Somehow, no one takes umbrage at the word “social” except when twinned with the word “medicine,” which, Great Zeus, suddenly transmutes it into some ungodly, un-American obscenity. Never mind that other civilized nations provide their citizens with cradle-to-grave affordable, quality healthcare and low-cost, effective over-the-counter medicines. But Americans must not be roused from their naiveté. In a society that willingly sacrifices the individual at the altar of corporate profit, the predatory agendas of the medical lobby and the colossal greed of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries shall not be imperiled.
So, my essay had moved the president of the United States but it failed to touch the sympathetic nerve of the medical establishment. I received scores of choleric letters from physicians around the country. I was branded a gadfly, a meddler, a whiner, and a communist. I was also accused of “opportunism,” “romanticism” and “mischief making.” How sad when homage to a man who selflessly and valiantly upheld the Hippocratic ethic elicits such a tide of indignation, especially from fellow physicians. This ugly barrage was tempered by half a dozen letters, many from sons and daughters of “country doctors,” all echoing the same deep and stirring longing for a more intimate doctor-patient relationship. Yes, doctors are now subject to enormous constraints and proscriptions virtually unknown at the height of my father’s career. The craft has been over-bureaucratized. Having said that, I can’t help but hearken to a kinder, gentler era when a doctor was also nurse, midwife, pharmacist and confidant, and the honorarium for such versatility and skill was dictated by what the patient could afford, not what the “market” commanded.