The Light of Luna Park

by Addison Armstrong

  Dr. Morrison laughs as he passes her over to me. “She just knows there’s no point in crying to the strange man in the house. No milk.” He holds his hands up to show Stella. “All I’ve got on me is whiskey.”

  “They gave her a drop every day at the island.” I quickly look down at Stella and away from Dr. Morrison. That’s the second time I’ve offered information about Stella unbidden. I must be even more desperate to share the miracle of Stella than I realize. Or perhaps the doctor is just that type of listener, the type to make you forget you’re talking at all.

  Dr. Morrison raises his eyebrows. “I suppose it worked for her.”

  “Everything did. The incubators, the nurses, the feeding spoons . . . it’s an amazing facility.”

  Dr. Morrison wrinkles his brow. “I would have thought . . . well . . .”

  I laugh. “You would have thought it an unsavory place, you mean.”

  The doctor shrugs in a way that turns his shoulders inward, and I see him suddenly as he must have been as a boy. “I’m sorry.”

  “No.” I realize too late that contradicting him so is rude. “I would have thought the same, had I not been there myself. It’s sandwiched beside a roller coaster and the Lilliputian Village, after all! And it’s a dime to get in and ogle at the infants as if they’re mere sideshow freaks.”

  He blinks with wonder. “How incredible. I’ll have to visit”—he smiles—“and perhaps I can convince you to give me a guided tour?”

  My nurse’s training is all that keeps my face from dropping into abject terror. This is why I never should have mentioned the incubators to this man. What is it about him that made me do it? I settle on a neutral answer. “Unfortunately, the facility does not reopen for another eight months.” Noncommittal.

  “Hmm.” Dr. Morrison’s voice is low, as if he is actually disappointed. “I really would like to see it. Do you know, by any chance, whether Stella’s success is typical?”

  “Oh, yes!” I hug Stella to my chest. I can talk about this: general statistics and procedures that have nothing to do with Stella herself. “Eighty-five percent of the babies survive, ones that wouldn’t make it a day at the hospital.”

  “How?”

  I am so eager to share the wonder of the place that saved Stella that it all spills out despite my slight sense of misgiving. I describe their filtered oxygen and temperature regulation, the nurses and their love and cleanliness, the way that babies too young to suckle drink through the nose using pipettes and folded spoons. “He’s been there succeeding with these babies for over twenty years”—my characteristically smooth tone rises into something sharp—“yet the hospitals still refuse to do the same!”

  The doctor, leaning against the wall outside Mrs. Wallace’s bedroom in a way that makes him look less like a doctor and more like a man, shakes his head. “I’ve had little experience in hospitals,” he admits, “always having served privately. But it seems to me that the benefit of the institution is to house the equipment that a physician such as myself cannot cart around, equipment such as those incubators.”

  “I completely agree!” Why do I, normally so calm, blink as if about to burst into tears? “Bellevue does have the newest equipment in all the other wards, you know. But the babies get neglected, even though we had the first obstetrics ward in the nation. But it’s primarily for the mothers, and certainly not for the early babies. I gather they’re viewed as too much of a risk to spend the money on.”

  Dr. Morrison opens his mouth and then closes it again.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he assures me, “nothing, really.”

  Again, it is not my place to question a doctor. But I keep my gaze fixed on his face for just a moment. Long enough to tell him that I still want to know.

  He relents. “I’ve also heard tell that others, other medical professionals even, don’t want to save the babies who come early. Some of them are of the opinion that they won’t turn out . . . right. Or that they’ll pass their”—he coughs uncomfortably—“weakness onto their children. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have even begun.”

  I brace myself as if on the deck of a boat, my legs tense and rooted. “They’re ‘undesirable.’ ” I’ve heard the word at Bellevue whispered under the breaths of doctors reluctant to serve the drunkards, the mentally handicapped, the cripples, the patients in the new psychiatry ward that is the first of its kind.

  Undesirable is the word used to describe the ones doctors view as burdens on society. The ones they are reluctant to save. Yet matters are worse in nearly every other corner of the medical world. Bellevue alone is revolutionary in its willingness to serve anyone and everyone who comes through its doors. They didn’t turn a soul away even during the Spanish flu, though I’ve heard beds lined the hallway like toy soldiers.

  “They aren’t.” Dr. Morrison’s response is instantaneous. “They aren’t undesirable. Just look at your daughter.”

  “No. No. Of course not. I know that. But to know there are so many people who could think such a thing . . .”

  “I’m sorry I ever mentioned it.”

  I shake my head. “I’m a nurse, Dr. Morrison. It’s my job to see the nasty side of things. And then it’s my job to make them better.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Stella Wright, January 1951

  I need an action plan. Something to do, somewhere to go. I can’t sort out this mess sitting still in this stuffy office, but it’s hard to think of answers when I hardly know what questions to ask. I need more information about my mom, need to explore the world she inhabited before I came along. I think again of my parents’ marriage certificate and march outside to find a pay phone.

  “Operator?”

  “Number, please.”

  I recite the number of Ann Leslie, my mother’s closest friend. Well, her closest friend as far as I know. I’m beginning to wonder how well I truly knew my mom. Maybe she had a secret stash of friends hidden away somewhere.

  “Mrs. Leslie.” I nearly cry at the sound of her voice. Her Midwest drawl is a relic from my childhood, a near extension of my mother herself. “It’s Stella. Stella Wright.”

  “Stella!” Mrs. Leslie sounds as overcome as I. “Oh, Stella. How are you, darling?”

  “I’m managing. And yourself?”

  “The same, dear. The same.”

  I pause a beat. “I’m calling because I actually have a question for you. About my mom.”

  The woman laughs gently. “Let’s see if I can answer it.”

  “Do you know if she was ever a nurse? It would have been before I was born.”

  “A nurse? Althea? Oh, no, dear. Absolutely not. She hated blood, don’t you know? Couldn’t volunteer at the hospitals with us because of it. Remember when the rest of us went in and helped at Bellevue in the early forties during the war?”

  “Of course,” I murmur, though I don’t. Presumably because Mom didn’t go along.

  “We invited her every week, but she always went pale and told some story about needles and blood. She couldn’t stand the sight of it. Surely you knew that?”

  “Yes, yes. How could I have forgotten? Thank you for reminding me.”

  Though Mrs. Leslie cycles through all the required niceties, she must be able to tell I’m distracted. When the telephone interrupts us to say we are running out of time and to put in more coins, she lets me go. “Take care, dear. You go ahead and call if you need anything.” After her merciful farewell, I set down the receiver with a hard click. All these new discoveries have been strange and hard to decipher, but this single conversation threatens to be my unraveling. My mother, afraid of blood? Far from it! My mom always took charge in the case of an injury. She was the one to deftly wrap my arm when I fell from the curb into the road as a child, unfazed by the angle of the bone in my shoulder. She was the one to pull out my splinters, quiet and dogged in her determin
ation.

  And when I cut myself making vegetable lasagna at age fifteen, my mother slept in my room so she could change the bandages soaked through with deep red blood. She sang to me so I wouldn’t cry looking at the gash, but she didn’t need to sing to keep herself calm.

  My mother lied to Ann Leslie. That, more than the letter or the legal documents or the thumbprint, convinces me she had secrets.

  But what were they? And why?

  Overwhelmed, I put my head back and breathe deeply, summoning all my energy to keep from crying. I want so desperately to be able to call my mom. Without her, who do I have to talk to?

  Jack, she would tell me. She was so happy when I married him. I suppose she’d feared that I wouldn’t meet a man who’d accept me and my headstrong ways.

  “You’ll never find a husband,” I recall a well-respected professor telling me my freshman year at Vassar. She’d pulled me aside after a class in which I’d snapped back at a male student who’d claimed the Brontës weren’t worth studying, and I didn’t know whether to be offended by her remark or honored by it. Herself unmarried in middle age, the woman had ended up a professor of female literature. Didn’t seem so bad to me.

  I met Jack three days later. Against all odds, he had ended up at Vassar as one of just thirty-six male students admitted that April: three percent of the student body. Roosevelt’s Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 had sent so many G.I.s into universities free of charge that there was no room left for them in traditional schools. Driven by patriotism, women’s colleges such as ours, all-female since its founding in 1861, began opening their doors to the men. Our thirty-six were local Dutchess County men recently discharged with honor, and though I was curious about these boys, I was not impressed by them. The whole lot seemed to be shameless flirts—and while I could not blame a veteran for craving a woman’s companionship, I feared that their pleasure-seeking would disrupt the haven that Vassar had become for us girls.

  And the bragging! Everywhere the men gathered were choruses of bravado and self-proclaimed heroics. Yes, we supported the G.I. Bill. Yes, we welcomed these men into our fold. But there was only so much swaggering hubris I could handle. Jack has told me since that the majority of the soldiers were not truly as self-important as they seemed; rather, the men lacked confidence after the war and feared ostracism in a world of women. At the time, however, I considered the lot of them pompous fools.

  Except for Jack. He was different. When I first stumbled upon him, he was tucking into a signature Vassar Devil: ice cream, chocolate cake, and fudge.

  Sitting alone on a bench outdoors, he looked up as I passed. “This,” he mumbled with dark crumbs pasted on his chin and caked in the corners of his lips, “is the best part of being discharged.”

  A laugh escaped me. “I can tell.”

  His face reddened, incongruously childish for a man who had been through war. “Sorry.” He searched in vain for a napkin. “Battle wasn’t great for our table manners.”

  My laugh came out like a bark. “I can tell that, too.”

  He’d merely groaned in response, offering his half-eaten dessert as a token of peace. “Here. Help me make up for it.”

  Now, I can nearly taste the chocolate we shared. Rich and decadent, warm fudge and cold ice cream.

  Maybe I should call Jack. My fingers brush the smooth curve of the telephone as I start to lift it. Perhaps my husband would see these mysteries—the letter, Margaret’s death and thumbprint, my mother’s late marriage and her apparent lies—more clearly than I can.

  Or perhaps he’ll tell me to forget it all. To come home and focus on our future instead of the past. And part of me . . . part of me is tempted.

  I crash the phone back into its receiver. I won’t call him. Something in me thinks I owe it to my mother to find out who she was before I came along. And I owe it to me, too. I can’t return home as listless as I was when I left. Here, I have a goal. A goal that matters.

  I finger the letter in my pocket. Hattie Perkins to Nurse Anderson. My Althea Anderson. I don’t know where this road is taking me, but I have to follow it. I miss my mother too much not to claim everything that’s left of her.

  I reread Hattie’s letter and then close it back up. No more clues. I look again at the envelope addressed to Michael Perkins and flip to the return address. 1208 Surf Ave., Brooklyn.

  Brooklyn. What on earth would a tiny, premature baby be doing away from both the hospital and her parents—not even in Manhattan but across the river?

  I pick up the phone again and ask the operator for 1208 Surf Avenue. After a brief pause, she informs me that Coney Island’s Luna Park is closed for the winter. I thank her and hang up, bouncing on my toes. Coney Island seemed strange enough, but Luna Park? What were infants doing at the amusement park?

  Just because the park is closed in January doesn’t mean I can’t find out. The public library in Bryant Park has a local room; surely, I’ll find something there.

  I hail a taxicab to take me back toward Midtown. When I’m half a mile away from 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, I ask the driver to stop, and I get out. I’ve missed the city, and I want to walk its streets again. I crane my neck as I walk beneath the massive steel bars that crisscross the sky, wondering at the construction men perched with their sandwiches atop them.

  A sigh escapes me as I reach the library and gaze upon its stone pillars. My mother loved this place like a second home, and we would spend hours curled up in its polished corners. She used to read to me in her steady voice: nursery rhymes, children’s books, and sometimes the poetry she loved so much.

  Climbing the steps now, I remember the days I spent hopping up them, the year I christened the lion statues my special friends. “Hi, Joe. Bill.” I whisper their old names as I pass them and step inside.

  I give my coat to the attendant and stand in the grand Astor Hall lobby for a moment, gazing up at the detail on the walls. Just being here makes me feel as if I’m closer to my mother. She had a full-time job keeping me safe as I skipped around the lobby, grazing the other visitors and, several times, nearly knocking over the candelabras underneath the arched doorways.

  I make my way to the local room, my heels clacking against the tile floor, and approach the librarian.

  “This might be an odd request,” I begin, “but do you know anything about Luna Park and the treatment of premature babies?”

  I keep my head high, though I can’t help but feel ridiculous, and am surprised when the librarian smiles. “Oh, yes. The man who ran the place, Dr. Couney, died just last year. There was a big buzz about it.”

  “The man who ran what place, exactly?”

  “The incubator ward! He ran them on Coney Island and out in Atlantic City, too. Saved thousands of lives.”

  I shook my head. “I knew there was a hospital on Coney Island, but I didn’t realize it was part of Luna Park. How unusual.”

  “Oh, no, dear. It wasn’t a hospital. They were part of a show.”

  I shake my head, struggling to understand.

  “Listen. The doctor died in March of last year, so I’d recommend his obituary if you want the overview. You can find it in the periodicals room.”

  Thanking the librarian, I fade quietly into the periodical stacks. I pass over the microfiche in favor of the more recent paper newspapers. As the woman predicted, I find Couney’s obituary on the first page of the March 2, 1950, New York Times.

  Dr. Martin A. Couney, 80, a specialist in the care of prematurely born infants, who for a number of years conducted a baby incubator station at Coney Island and who also exhibited such babies to the public at fairs, died last night at his home, 3728 Surf Ave., Sea Gate.

  Surf Avenue again. The man lived close to his babies.

  A pioneer in incubator methods of treating premature babies, Dr. Couney is credited with having saved the lives of more than 6,500 infants placed under his
care.

  Six thousand, five hundred infants? I nearly drop the paper, I’m so taken aback.

  He was born in Alsace shortly before the Franco-Prussian War and studied medicine in Breslau, Berlin and Leipzig. He did post-graduate work in Paris under the late Pierre Constant Budin, noted French pediatrician, and then came to the United States.

  Dr. Couney started exhibiting the “incubator babies” more than fifty years ago. After conducting exhibits in London, Berlin and at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo he had shows at both Dreamland and Luna Park, Coney Island. The night Dreamland was destroyed by fire, the babies were saved by a speedy transfer to the Luna Park incubators.

  The “Incubator Doctor” was a physician first and a showman after. It was his boast that he did not receive fees for the infants he cared for, but used the exhibition method to pay the excessive costs of treatment in the days before hospitals started to give specialized care to premature babies.

  Babies were sent to him from hospitals and clinics from various parts of the country.

  I shiver. Bellevue was one of those hospitals, and Margaret was one of those babies. But Hattie never saw her daughter again; was she one baby Dr. Couney wasn’t able to save?

  His wife, Mrs. Anabelle Maye Couney, died in 1936. A daughter, Hildegarde Couney, who was Dr. Couney’s principal aide, survives in his home.

  Funeral services will be held at 1 pm tomorrow at Kirschenbaum’s Westminster Chapel, 1153 Coney Island Ave. Interment will be in Cypress Hills Abbey.

  I read the obituary again. A daughter, Hildegarde Couney, who was Dr. Couney’s principal aide, survives in his home. I copy down the address and tuck it beside the letter and the thumbprint in my purse.

  “Find what you needed?” the librarian asks politely as I leave.

  “Oh, yes.” I thank her with a smile. “I know where I’m going next.”