by Jan Cherubin
“She’ll tell you.”
“I want to hear it from you,” said Heidenheimer.
“I have a headache,” said my father. “Bad, doctor. Get out the list, Joanna.”
“How long has your voice been hoarse?” the doctor asked.
“It’s always been this way,” I said. “His brothers, too.” I told Heidenheimer about the leaf theory and how my father had difficulty swallowing anything except very slippery food.
“A sack of potatoes, is that right?” Heidenheimer said.
He led my father to the examining table and left him with his legs dangling. I started for the door. I didn’t want to see him undressed, if that was going to happen. I had done enough, the socks, the teeth. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back. “Stay here.” Like a magician, Heidenheimer produced a feather from his pocket. He brushed it against my father’s cheeks and chin. “Can you feel that? That? That?”
“Yes, no, yes.”
“Why aren’t your dentures in place?” the doctor said.
“Hurts.”
“There’s some numbness on the right side,” said Heidenheimer. He put the feather in his pocket, held his forefinger up and moved it back and forth slowly. He asked my father to follow with his eyes. I watched with alarm. My father’s left eye moved in the direction of Heidenheimer’s finger, but the right eye lagged behind. His right eye barely moved at all. The doctor seemed unconcerned.
“Take off your socks,” Heidenheimer ordered.
My father summoned me, and I peeled away the nylon. Flakes of dry skin fluttered around his ankles like confetti.
“What’s wrong with your feet?” Finally, the doctor was alarmed.
“I’m not here about my feet,” my father said.
“You need those nails taken care of. Have your daughter take you to a podiatrist.”
“Doctor, I’m in pain! Help me!” my father said.
Dr. Heidenheimer tickled his feet with the feather. My father kicked. He felt that. I put on his socks and shoes.
Back in our chairs, Heideheimer paged through a book. “I don’t want you to think I’m belittling your pain, Mr. Aronson. But I believe you may have cluster headaches. See this picture?” He held the book open to a drawing of a man with sweat pouring from his brow and tears streaming down his face. “This man has cluster headaches and he is obviously suffering. I just want you to know, I appreciate how much pain you’re in.”
I wasn’t sure how my father’s slow eye fit into the cluster headaches theory, but I liked cluster headaches too much to question it. Cluster headaches was even better than the leaf theory. My father was not faking. He had a very bad headache. But that was all. He’d get well. Earlier, though, making the list, sitting at the table listening to the rain, I had decided no matter what Heidenheimer said, we weren’t leaving his office with a prescription on a lousy square of paper. We weren’t leaving until my father was put in the hospital.
“I think he has cluster headaches,” Heidenheimer said. “But I agree. Let’s get him over to Admissions.”
By the time Brenda got to Sinai Hospital with his overnight bag, he was sitting up in bed in Room 605 with a loopy grin on his face. The shot of Demerol he’d gotten seconds ago was already working! I wanted to shout with joy. This was the first time since I’d arrived four days ago, except for the moments when my mother reminisced about the war and the FBI, that I’d seen him happy. I felt like I’d been shot in the ass with Demerol myself. I laughed at nothing. I wanted to hug everyone. He clutched the TV remote and flipped past Wheel of Fortune, and then President Reagan denying he knew about the Iran-Contra deal, and settled on the music channel.
“In case you’re interested, Dr. Cromwell doesn’t have privileges at Sinai,” Brenda said, smiling thinly. At the time, I didn’t understand how important this was, or how troubling for her.
“If we listened to Cromwell,” I said, “my father wouldn’t be in any hospital.”
“What’s so great about being in the hospital?” Brenda said.
“Look at him,” I said. He was merrily conducting the Muzak version of “Penny Lane.”
“He’s drugged up like a junkie,” said Brenda. “Big deal.”
My father dropped his arms into his lap. “I told you she said terrible things.”
Apparently, my plan wasn’t working. Brenda wasn’t getting on board. She was neither curious about what was wrong with him, nor happy to see him feeling better. I had actually thought I would be on a plane on Tuesday, heading west. Who was I kidding? I’d have to cancel my flight. I’d have to stay and see this thing through. I’d have to quit my job.
“Pfft. Here. I brought your pajamas,” Brenda said, “I’m going home.” She kissed my father and left.
CHAPTER 14
He stayed in Sinai for ten days. No matter how early I got there, he was watching the clock.
“Where were you?”
“What are you talking about? It’s nine in the morning,” I said.
“They came and took me down, and you weren’t here.”
“Who came?”
“They came and took me downstairs for a bone scan and a CAT scan,” he said. “It was awful.”
“A scan doesn’t hurt—does it?”
“It was fucking unbelievable! They had me down there for two hours and no one was there to give me my shot when I needed it and I had to lie on this table, and you know, Joanna, how much it hurts me to lie down completely flat. They gave me a bone scan. That wasn’t a problem. But then they wheel me into another room for the CAT scan, and you’re not gonna believe this, but I’m lying on a table and they’re running this gigantic million-dollar machine and this guy, some kid with pimples, he says, ‘We ran out of paper.’ Fucking unbelievable! Million-dollar machine and it breaks down like the Xerox at the library. Some kind of printout comes out and they ran out of paper so I have to lie there for hours. They’re talking like I’m not there. I say, ‘You ran out of paper? What do you need paper for?’ And they’re ignoring me. I’m the one on the table. I’m the one this is about.” He shook his head in frustration. I put the milkshake I brought on the windowsill along with my bag and coat and pulled the blue chair up to the bed. He watched as I moved around the room and I noticed his right eye had gotten even more sluggish, lagging considerably behind his left eye. I handed over the milkshake, a real one, not the thick McDonald’s kind, but the kind that was easy to drink, made with real ice cream and milk. He sucked on the straw for a second and passed it back with a frown. He couldn’t even swallow a milkshake. I lit a cigarette and he took a drag. Implausibly, he got away with smoking in the hospital. In those days, it was easier. Everyone smelled of smoke, if not firsthand, then secondhand. The food service lady rolled in her cart with Salisbury steak. I grabbed the cigarette and hid it behind my back. “He can’t eat that,” I said. “Doesn’t he get a liquid lunch?”
“I don’t see anything on his chart,” she said. “Why can’t he eat?”
“Nobody knows.”
Eventually someone went out and bought paper for the Xerox and he had the CAT scan and we waited for the radiologists to give us results. If this wasn’t a case of cluster headaches—if this was a tumor growing in his head—why didn’t I witness the slightest sense of urgency from the medical staff? Meanwhile, no matter how many times I told the nurses, the food service people, or any doctor who momentarily stuck his head in the door, that my father couldn’t eat, they kept bringing him roast chicken and hamburgers.
Brenda came to the hospital almost every night after work, but never stayed long—she had to go home to feed the dog. Shep came, and Susan, of course, and Uncle Harry flew in twice during those ten days at Sinai. Darleen showed up a few times, and Liz Stone came mainly to see me. I complained my mother didn’t visit often enough. “I’m here now,” she said. “What do you want from me?” He sat up, squared his shoulders. “Evie!” he called out happily, Demerol fresh in his veins.
“How’s the patient?” my mother said, laughing. His illnes
s was funny. It was ridiculous. It wasn’t Clyde. Everyone had reasons for not taking the illness seriously. I pulled my mother aside and told her she better keep after the doctors because clearly, Brenda wasn’t going to. “Not me,” my mother said. “I’m not his wife anymore, and I won’t be holding a vigil at his bedside.”
20 April 1944
Somewhere in England
Dearest darling sweetheart,
I knew the army would solve our dilemma one way or another. It is a strange thing, but by going away I really found you. Keep writing your soulful letters, darling Evie. Some day soon we’ll be together again if what’s in the works (that I can’t talk about) goes well. Wait for me just a little longer, while the whole world waits out this nightmare until the dawn. We soldiers wait as well, not knowing where we’ll be sent or when, but wherever it is, it’ll make little difference. One adapts a “don’t give a goddamn” attitude because it does you little good to worry about anything. Practically everything that happens to a soldier is dependent on forces outside of oneself. Meanwhile, one just “sweats it out,” as the army saying goes.
They say man’s only way to achieve immortality is through his children. I should have liked to have a child with you. Some day, I hope. And it will be a son. Then I shall hold you in my arms and close my eyes, and think back to this time when I sat in my tent on the cold English moor and spoke to you across the ocean, sharing with you all the things I have in my heart.
Forever,
Clyde
The pace at Sinai was slow, Dr. Heidenheimer said, because it was almost Christmas and the hospital was short on staff. He had stopped by to tell us the bone scan was negative, which was good news, but not a surprise. He ordered the test because back in 1983 my father had prostate cancer (successfully treated, or even cured, with radiation). The negative bone scan confirmed the pain in his head wasn’t prostate cancer recurring and spreading, because prostate cancer would show up in his bones first, before traveling anywhere else. That was what prostate cancer did. Besides, no one had heard of prostate cancer ever spreading to the sinus, which was where, as it turned out, the radiologists found a shadow on the CAT scan. Heidenheimer mentioned this casually, as an aside. He seemed fearful of upsetting my father. “It’s just a shadow, Mr. Aronson. We don’t know what it is yet.”
I walked the doctor out into the wide white hallway. “It could be cancer,” Heidenheimer said. “There’s a possibility it’s cancer. We don’t know. It could be tuberculosis. A liquid cyst of some kind.”
“Tuberculosis. Really? That’d be good,” I said. “You can survive TB, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not cluster headaches, though.”
“No.”
Still, there was hope. TB.
He’d need Magnetic Resonance Imaging next to get a three-dimensional picture. “You should call for the MRI appointment right away,” Heidenheimer said. “Try Copeland on Reisterstown Road.”
“You want me to call? Isn’t that something the hospital does?”
“No. You better do it today. They’re usually booked up, especially this time of year.” Sinai didn’t own an MRI machine. Patients were sent to an outside facility. I figured they must take in-patients to the outside facility in an ambulance.
“No,” said Heidenheimer. “Somebody has to drive him there . . . in a car.” He glanced down the empty hallway. “You, I would imagine,” he said.
The appointment was set for the following week. Meanwhile, my aunt and uncles were coming to visit. Just before they were due to arrive, Brenda hid my father’s hat again. His head felt cold on the inside, he said. There was metal jangling in his skull. The green beanie was the only remedy. He pulled it down over his ears. Brenda could not stand the dirty homeless hippie look. That his head was cold on the inside and metal clanged in his ears she could stand. I went down the hall and recruited his favorite nurse Debbie to intervene. Debbie came and held out a hand. Brenda opened her purse grudgingly and gave the hat back. He put it on just in time. His brothers and sister busted onto the sixth floor ignoring the level of quiet in the hall. We could hear Uncle Harry and Uncle Alvin roaring out room numbers as they searched for 605, while Aunt Vivian explained hospital etiquette in her New York squawk to her ignorant brothers. And then Uncle Alvin’s wife Aunt Gladys was yelling, “Where you running? Wait for me!” in a Queens accent so thick it sounded like a parody. They swarmed around my father’s bed. He winced. I thought it was less about the headache than the humiliation. He was their big brother, “the professor,” they called him. But the professor was weak, and not how he used to be.
“Clyde,” said Uncle Harry. “Brudder.”
My father smiled. “Brudder,” he said.
“Guess who I talked to on the phone today?” Uncle Harry said. He was wearing a driving cap and a gray tweed overcoat that smelled of wind and cold. “Manny Bergman.”
“No shit,” my father said.
“You remember Bergman, don’t you Brudder?”
“His feet, I remember, more than the rest of him,” my father said. “Sticking out from under a car.”
Uncle Harry laughed. “Manny taught me how to rebuild an engine.” Harry turned to the rest of us. “We had all kinds of mentors at the H. Older guys, teachers. There was always an older brother around to teach you something.”
“Day and night,” my father said.
Debbie came in and asked us to go out for a few minutes while she changed the sheets, which she knew how to do without my father even getting up, so we left him and walked to the end of the corridor where a window overlooked Pimlico Racetrack. We could see everything from the sixth floor—the infield, the muddy track, the grandstand, and the clubhouse. Tears were rolling down Uncle Harry’s cheeks.
“You know what Clyde said to me?” he asked.
“What?” I said.
“Be a man.”
Uncle Alvin was staring out at the track. He looked up. “What’s that, Harry?”
“Not now. Clyde didn’t say it in the room,” said Uncle Harry. “Back then he said it. The day Mama left us at the Home. ‘Be a man,’ Clyde says. I was five years old.” Uncle Harry took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose.
“We just need to get him something to eat,” said Uncle Alvin. “You see how thin he is?”
Uncle Harry looked at me accusingly. “Did you give him those Pecan Sandies I sent?”
“Yeah, I gave him the Pecan Sandies.” My father could just as soon eat a box of nails, but I didn’t say so. I was careful with my aunt and uncles. Any one of them could go off at any time. Harry was so easily slighted, and while Alvin was fun and upbeat, that lasted only until you needed something from him. I liked Aunt Vivian—I liked all three of them some of the time—but Aunt Vivian made up stuff for no apparent reason and couldn’t be trusted. And yet, she was often brutally honest, telling the truth when no one else would. She was a nurse in the army during World War II, and then a civilian nurse until she began writing prescriptions for herself and lost her license. The four of us were silent for a few moments watching a woman carrying a balloon bouquet into another patient’s room, the balloons going bap, bap hitting against each other.
“My big brother, Clyde,” said Harry. “He was always looking out for me at the Home. But guess what? Clyde was scared to death, too. He was so scared he shat his pants.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “My father told us you were the one who shat your pants.”
“No,” said Uncle Harry. “Not me. Him.”
“They probably both shat their pants,” said Aunt Vivian.
CHAPTER 15
Tuckahoe
“Company E! Up! Upstairs! Bedtime! Upstairs! Companies E, D & C!” Hordes stampeded the grand central staircase, the kitchen stairs, the back library stairs. They poured through all doors into the dormitories in the east and west wings on the third floor. Line up in your underwear, wait your turn behind thirty strange kids, pee, wash hands and face, brush teeth, s
tand at attention by your footboard, watch for the Colonel’s signal, slice of the cane, put on pajamas, everyone all at once. Slice of the cane, climb into bed.
One night as we all stood at attention, this kid Irving Weiss came sauntering in humming to himself, lost in thought. Shorty blew his whistle, then yelled at the top of his lungs: “Wrecking crew! Wrecking crew!”
The kid looked up and the guys swarmed. “Get him! Get Irving!” They came from all sides, tall and short, bruisers and weaklings, piling on, a tangle of legs and windmilling arms. Isn’t somebody going to help him? I thought. Whoever’s in charge? I stood by my bed and scanned the room for Beiderman, Miss Beaufort, somebody, anybody. Then I saw Colonel Anderson by the door observing. After a while the Colonel gave the nod to Shorty. “OK, all off,” Shorty said. Irving’s pants were missing. He sat dazed on the floor in his skivvies. Lights out until morning.
Up! Up! March! March!
I kept moving toward every other Sunday, holding the pure inviolable image of my mother in my heart. I would pass through each day of the week and then pass through them again, and she would come to me, and this time she would take me home.
After school I waited and waited on the baseball field, but no one picked me for his team. No one even knew me, what position I was good at, or that I was clever, and yet I felt like everyone was looking at me. Shame spread up my neck like a rash. I had to get away, so I ran off the field and kept going, my long legs taking me far. I ran up the road past the auto shed. I ran past the chicken coops and the potato fields. I ran until my chest hurt and my lungs were about to explode and I had to stop. When I caught my breath, I entered the cool dark of the barn.
Inside the quiet cathedral, I calmed down. I liked the smell of horseshit and hay, the animal sweat. I touched one of the worn leather harnesses and tried to figure out the purpose for each of the iron tools hanging on the rough wall. I felt better in the barn. A dray horse nickered and tossed his mane. It was Playboy. I went to his stall halfway down the muddy alley. His nostrils were huge up close. I reached up and stroked his silky hide. He was warm. I dragged my fingers through his mane. Playboy looked at me with one eye and I looked back. I felt like he knew me. I could have curled up on the straw next to the gentle animal and drifted off to sleep. I stroked his neck instead and held onto the peaceful feeling until a twig snapped down the alley and Playboy stomped his hoof. A high-pitched laugh ricocheted off the rafters and I froze. Shorty Lapidus. I knew it. Then a smaller boy’s squeaky voice: “A dime! You promised!” I ducked into the empty stall next to Playboy’s and hid behind a bale of hay. “A nickel. That’s it,” said Shorty. “I’m not doin’ it,” said the small voice. “You’re doin’ it, alright.” A thud. The clank of a belt buckle. “Ow!” Grunting and crying. I covered my ears but the sound came through my fingers. “Shut up.” A strange feeling in my dick. “Almost,” said Shorty in a strangled voice. Thrashing, clanking, a slapping sound. A flash of bare ass. Drawn-out groans, and then silence. “Pull your pants up, homo. Pansy! Fairy. Faggot,” Shorty said.