Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (23 page)

“He's in the hospital,” Stew said.

“Alive?” the word fell as if in a foreign tongue from her lips. Had she spoken in Yiddish? She watched his face, trying
to read the answer between his drawn brows and tired eyes.

“Wouldn't be there otherwise. Likely won't work again, least not for awhile.”

She thought of Pauline, a child in either hand, blonde hair undone, a cloud of platinum around her shoulders. Pauline would have to sell her past now, her collection of tables, the couches, the stacked chairs. She'd have to decide which pieces to sell and which to keep and cherish for as long as she could.

Dora nodded, laid her head on her husband's shoulder. Behind her, but not far away, the radium cure sat in the cabinet. A spoonful to make her more fertile. A spoonful to destroy her pain.

“Can we go to bed?” she asked, and Stew rose with her and undressed. Under the covers, her fingers found his chest, his thighs, and his abdomen. He was sleeping already. But she heard his heart. He would love the child, like her family had once loved her. She would tell him when the time came. But tonight, this night, only lies grew inside her, filling the emptiness with the life she would never admit to missing.

S
ALK AND
S
ABIN

A year after my father was called before the McCarthy subcommittee, the acne began to appear, and nothing I did prevented the blotches from rising and spreading like a small red army over my cheeks and chin. I tried calamine, witch hazel, all seven lotions from the pharmacy on Sixth Avenue, and finally a paste my mother mixed from powdered roots and soil — something she knew from her childhood. Perhaps my skin wasn't ruined enough for her medicines and already too rough for the soft, white creams the other girls used.

We'd just moved to Bleecker Street from the Upper West Side, mostly at my mother's insistence, though it was Father who decided. My mother hated the way the people stared at her uptown. Whatever she wore — solid, print, cotton or silk — was always too loose or too short or too
bright. She didn't roll her hair or iron her skirt; she didn't hold my little brother's hand when they crossed the street. “They can see that I'm foreign,” she complained, though she'd been a foreigner her entire life: a child of French diplomats in Cuba who grew up to dance for the German ballet. She'd met my father at a performance on Broadway, given up the stage for another foreign world of streetlights, sirens, the scream of New York.

Now my mother offers private dance lessons in our living room, which is why we have no furniture, just mirrors, dozens of mirrors, hanging on nails at different heights. I use a gold-framed rectangular one to study my skin, where I count seventy-eight distinct pimples and forty-two red blotches that will certainly develop new dimensions. My mother asks me if I was smoking reefer. “You can tell me,” she says, eyes appraising my skin. “I see the signs.” She wears pink and orange with a cloth flower in her hair. Dark eyes, dark lips. I almost feel she wants me to admit to it. “No,” I say, and she says, “Do I have to talk to your father?”

My father has the last word on everything, though since we've moved, he's become more accommodating — allowing a small black-and-white TV, the orange and blue molding Mother painted despite the no-alterations clause in the lease, and several late dinners at nearby restaurants. I like to think he is trying to make things better for us, but his
allowances feel so fragile, I don't want to consider them for fear they will disappear.

For a while, right after the hearings, Father wouldn't allow us out at all. But that was before we moved, and long before Jack. My mother sees Jack only when Father's working. It's her secret, and ours, me and my brother. My father has his work; we have Jack Steenwycks, or someone like Jack. First we had Uncle Stew, later Uncle Nathan, and then — my mother stopped using prefixes — Walter, Scott, and Jack. Each one came with presents: ice cream sundaes, trips to Coney Island, a card trick where twos turned to aces and aces became queens, a box of hard candies, a carved wooden train we still keep hidden beneath my brother's bed, a cloth doll I left out in the street. Jack has the debates, which he moderates himself, pitting my brother against me on topics like syphilis and malaria: which is the worse disease? Or medical care during wartime: should the soldier or general receive care first? He asks questions, and Mother asks questions, too. Simple things like “Is blood blue,” or “What if we had no bandages” — things that could never be true, and thus make us feel smarter.

When Jack comes over today, he wears a soft leather jacket and wide-brimmed hat that make him look like a cowboy. He still smells of shaving cream even now, in the late afternoon. He brings flowers, purple irises, which my mother likes, though they have no scent, and he carries the
ragged journal he sometimes pretends to read from, though it's filled with nothing more than geometric scribbles. My brother and I looked through the book once while Jack and Mother were in the bedroom.

My mother takes Jack's hand. “We're going walking,” she says.

I'm scraping the pink chewing gum from the cover of my algebra book. In English class, I found a second wad under my desk, where it was sure to stick in my hair during the next air-raid drill. The note didn't surface until history class, when I found it wedged between my almanac and the wooden back of the desk. “Communist” was all it said.

I've never told anyone about my father or his party meetings, though I know he is right, that the government needs to change, that food and shelter and a share of the wealth is every man's right. I've seen my father say it hundreds of times: at rallies, union meetings, strikes — even at the university, where he teaches, despite the fact that communism's forbidden there. He's given me his articles to read, pages that compare whole economies to ailing human bodies: gangrenous hands, legs crippled from polio. “How does such a creature live?” he writes. How, when the limbs that support it have no health, can the body function? Yet people fear his cure. They reject it, as if health itself were a disease, something to avoid at any cost.

I couldn't answer when Mr. Wharton called on me; I
didn't even hear his question. I was folding the communist note in my palm, imagining how I would reinvent myself, how my skin would clear, and how one day I'd return to this school, and whoever had done this would seek me out and beg me to teach about the unions and strikes. The reason communists weren't more popular, I believed, was entirely aesthetic. Even I acknowledged that my father, with his long chin, thick brows, and hairy nose was particularly unattractive.

Mr. Wharton tapped his pointer on a wooden chair, staring at me, his jacket missing a button, his trousers so short that his socks showed. The chalkboard was covered with notes I noticed only then: battle diagrams and years, without any indication of significance.

“I don't know,” I said.

Katherine, who sat behind me, laughed.

“Joanie's wet her underpants,” she said softly so that only I and a handful of others heard. I realized then that she'd scrawled the note and placed the gum in my textbook. Her tone revealed it, and the fact that she knew I was upset. I can picture her placing the gum between her lips, cheeks wide and fat as a pregnant belly. People think she is beautiful, but she laughs like hard change in a beggar's cup, her pale hand sporting Walter Thompson's class ring. I know she lets him touch her. Secret places, dark places. After school, after she lingers at the back of the room to apply the
red lipstick my father forbids me to wear, I follow them to Central Park and watch as Walter slips his hands under her skirt. She's never seen me, but he did once. He was kissing her, but looking at me. He was watching me and I him and for the first time I was equal. I, too, had a chance at winning his heart. I'd felt such a thrill then, I'd turned and run.

A
T DUSK, BEFORE
Jack and Mother return from their stroll, the light in our flat becomes forgiving. My skin looks softer, almost a single, coherent red hue. I write my compositions in my ledger book and help my brother with arithmetic. He doesn't need assistance, but he always asks for it. I think he gets lonely. When we talk, lying side by side on the living room floor, he rubs his bare feet together. “How was school?” I say, or “Were they mean to you?”

We are accustomed to talking across empty spaces. When I was his age and he only ten, we'd promised never to marry and live together in a house in the middle of Central Park where no one would call us names or whisper behind our backs. He still believes we will do this, though I have committed myself to a newer, secret love: Walter Thompson.

Through the open window, I hear the sizzle of laughter. Crowds have begun to form on the streets — the night crowds, who dress in black or clashing colors, orange and purple, yellow and blue, and drink coffee until breath reeks
and hands tremble. I know the Bohemians. They define themselves as outsiders, but outsiders who belong. I've been an outsider since the day I was born. I have no interest in proving that.

When footsteps sound on the landing, my brother runs to the door. He stands on his toes to kiss Jack on the cheek. Later, perhaps after Father comes home and we all lie in separate rooms (or sit — Father types till late into the night), I will tiptoe into my brother's room and tell him that he is too old to be kissing men. But my brother loves Jack. He has decided to become a doctor, like Jack. I like Jack, too, but he is only twenty-two, and not really old enough to be any of the things he professes: a world-famous surgeon, a poet, a politician, a father of a little girl. He says that his grandfather was a famous surgeon, and his father before him — all the way back to the
Mayflower.
I don't think Jack is even a doctor, or that he belongs with my mother, with his fair skin and hair, straight shoulders, torn leather coat. He speaks loudly, just as my father does, but he never seems angry, and he never speaks of politics or revolution, though I know he's a communist. I've seen him reading Father's newspapers, and when he realized I noticed, he didn't try to hide it.

The first time I met Jack, he pulled up his trouser cuff so I could see his pale left calf. I was surprised when he later told me he displayed his crooked leg to feel closer to children.
Like sharing a secret. He'd nearly died, he said. And he'd been so jealous of his twin brother, who was healthy and strong and smart. “He's a doctor,” Jack confided, and then added quickly, “a doctor, too.” He looked sad, but only for a moment, and then he smiled. Had it not been for the long months in bed, he would never have read so widely or learned the poems he'd used to “infect my mother's heart.”

“Infect?” my mother asked him.

My brother fell in love with Jack that first day, and Jack still listens to him and nods as if he agrees with everything my brother says: that the trash can in the corner is not big enough, that one day he'll have a car like the blue Ford that drives past our apartment each morning, that he prefers milk to ice cream, as ice cream is too cold, that his favorite color is red, his next favorite, green. He won't stop talking, and Jack won't stop nodding, and my mother always seems delighted by the whole thing. She really likes Jack, though she's not herself when he's around. She laughs too easily, her smile foreign. When Jack's around, Mother forgets that she's an outsider and that people stare or that life is hard and she's isolated — all things she complains about to my father, who explains again and again that she feels so precisely because it's her nature. “If you insist on being miserable, you will most certainly remain so.”

If my mother were with Jack, only Jack, he would have
to become more like my father before she could really be herself again. Jack would have to eat with his mouth open, refuse to bless food, forget my mother's birthday, and mine, too, for that matter. He would have to have admirable passions, selfless ones, like ridding the world of misery. He would have to forgo walking so as to have more time to read, or read as he walked and thus arrive late to most engagements. My mother can only be with a man like that, which is why all the others have come and gone.