Die Once Live Twice (19 page)

“Bill, I can’t believe the resistance you had from Congress and how the medical establishment has treated your efforts. Vile. Reed’s 1901 commission confirmed that it was the mosquitoes. It seemed no one believed him. It’s a shame Walter didn’t live to see your work.”

“Yes. Walter was furious, of course, about the verbal abuse. It was while he was in Washington being abused that Jessie allowed himself to be bitten to prove the point. Walter felt we’d had proof since December 1900, so he blamed United States skeptics for Jesse’s death. He named the research compound Camp Lazear.”

“Doctor Gorgas, what did you do when someone contracted yellow fever despite your efforts?” Maude Adams interposed.

“If we couldn’t have the sick quarantined in screened verandas, we had what we called ‘portable fever cages.’ Fairly primitive in the jungle, you know.”

“You put them in a cage? Do you have a spare? I have a few administrators I’d like to lock up.” Phil leaned back with a hearty laugh at his own joke, then turned serious. “Let’s raise our glasses to the real heroes of medical research—those with the courage to take the greatest risk.”

“Shame Walter couldn’t be here,” Gorgas said as he clinked glasses with the others. “Beat yellow fever, beaten by appendicitis.”

“A damn shame. He could have had that appendix operated on,” Jonathan agreed. “He was in Washington, wasn’t he?”

Gorgas nodded. “Peritonitis came on him too fast.”

Jonathan slammed his palm on the table. “Bill, you and Walter and the others would be the biggest heroes my mother ever had. She dreamed of knights in shining armor solving medical problems. Medicine for her was a crusade for dominance over disease. She sent me on this crusade.”

“How thrilling,” Maude said excitedly. “I’ll play your mother when you write a stage play about her.”

“I’d like that. Like to be a knight, too. Let me assure you, I’ve worked with horses. So, here’s a riddle. Richard the Lionheart came to the siege of Acre against Saladin with 100,000 knights and soldiers. Richard lost 50,000 soldiers—none from battle. How did they die?”

Maude Adams raised an eyebrow. “Disease?”

“Exactly. And guess which disease? Infection. Typhoid, cholera, malaria, yellow fever—all from infection. The same ones that kill soldiers in today’s wars.”

“I’m glad we’re not at war.” Maude shivered.

“But we are—every day. We fight infection every day.” Jonathan realized the conversation was becoming too serious and turned to Spanezzi. “But enough about death from infection. Phil, how about you? How do your patients die?” Jonathan asked.

“Jonathan!” Marion pretended to be scandalized. “Maude, they have a professional term for that. They call it gallows humor.”

“Death is too much with us,” Spanezzi sighed. “Jonathan, I’ve got a harebrained idea I’m going to try. I am tired of watching my patients with hip fractures just lie in bed, get pneumonia, and die. I’m going to operate them.”

“It’s been tried before, Phil. And not with success, as you know.”

“I’m going to try boring a hole through the fracture and drive an ivory dowel across it to stabilize it. Then I can get people out of bed. When I do that I can beat off the Captain.”

Maude looked puzzled. “The Captain?”

“Miss Adams, he is referring to pneumonia, the Captain of Men’s Death. Not to the good captain seated next to you.” Jonathan smiled at the beautiful actress with big eyes, a tapered face, and well-formed lips.

“I’m a colonel anyway,” Gorgas bragged to Maude.

“Your turn, Jonathan. What’s your main interest these days?” Phil asked.

As the doctors proceeded to talk medicine, Marion and Maude stood up. “We’re going to the powder room while you all go on about these things,” Marion said. “If you marry Deezi here, Maude, you’ll need to learn to abide talk of vaccination, bacteria, immunity, and a host of other strange words.”

As they walked away, the men heard Maude say to Marion, “Now tell me what Deezi means.” Marion whispered in her ear and they both left the bar laughing.

Gorgas turned to Phil. “What does Deezi mean?”

“It means
dipshit
. An Iowa term of endearment, she tells me. I fear I always get the worse of the exchange.”

“I warned you, Phil. Don’t mess with Marion. She’s from out West.” Jonathan poked Spannezi in the side.

When the women returned from the powder room the conversation waned. Jonathan pulled out his watch. “Oops, the time. Tomorrow I have my weekly clinic in the tenements with William Park. Try to help some of those poor souls—whether they want it or not! So, actually, we must go.” He nodded to the others at the table. “I enjoyed your company thoroughly. Call on me the next time you’re in the city, Bill. Miss Adams, my pleasure.” Jonathan bowed slightly as he took Marion’s arm and they left. Then he stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “Colonel Gorgas, my next project will be yellow fever. I’m going to develop a vaccine for it—wait and see!”

Chapter Nineteen

J
onathan’s destination the next day was a decided contrast to the opulence of the Plaza. As he dipped below Second Avenue on New York’s East Side, toward his clinic in Ward 19, he sensed the tenements seemed restless. They were always uneasy because of the racial and cultural mix of immigrants living in distrustful proximity. Whenever a fragile truce between the Italians, Irish, and the Russian-Jews was forged, an onslaught of arrivals from Ellis Island could stir trouble anew. They couldn’t speak to each other, competed for the same jobs, had diverse religions, and their poverty caused fear and antagonism. The strife in the tenements created prejudice throughout the city toward immigrants.

In the ward, sheets of tin lay loosely atop worn-out roofs hardly sheltering the residents from cruel weather. Jonathan shook his head as he peered above at the worn and patched rags and linens hanging on clotheslines. Scrubbed clean in the morning, the clothes would be grey and gritty after a few hours drying in the soot-rich air. Though it was doubtful anyone cared. Stained and muck-filled clothes appeared standard for the dour inhabitants.

The grimy faces of the bearded men lining the street fronts followed Jonathan’s every step, as if they were silently alerting the others that a stranger was in their midst. The tenement dwellers knew what the city folk outside their ward thought of them. At forty-one, Jonathan fancied himself still capable of fending off a threat, but he realized that the desperation and rage of a mob would not be conquered, and he picked up his pace. Dodging the pushcart vendors cramming East 44th, he headed for the northeast corner of First Avenue, where he would find Doctor Park. He would be hard to miss among the Italians of the volatile blocks from 40th to 50th.

“Doctor Sullivan!” Little Angelo caught up with him and seized his arm. “I think you no do vaccinations today. I been in neighborhood. It’s bad.”

“Angelo, what did you see?” Jonathan asked. Twelve-year-old Angelo had made himself Jonathan’s guardian angel because he knew the diphtheria antitoxin had saved his life. Jonathan thought sometimes the boy liked to overdramatize situations. Angelo had seen an automobile once and ran to tell Jonathan the city was being invaded.

“This is special bad day. One building, you know the one no one would have the vaccine? Many died las’ night. This day, you not go.”

Suddenly, Jonathan stopped short at a sound that filled him with dread. A dozen women were wailing. They screamed garbled appeals for mercy at the rosaries wound tightly around their wrists. The husbands of the grieving women were in the streets, carrying their dead children high above their heads as if offering their limp bodies to the Lord. Jonathan counted six as the grim procession attracted mourners ever more fervent in their grief. As he watched this gruesome scene, Doctor Park strode up to them.

“Jonathan. I think we have to keep out of sight.”

“I say same,” said Angelo.

“Angelo has a valid point today. Angelo, you might want to return to your family. I don’t want you caught up in this.”

“These my people. They no hurt me.”

“Perhaps you can keep watch. How would that be? From a safe distance.”

“Okay. I go, but I stay close.” He saluted and sauntered down the street, slipping into the crowd watching the mourners.

Jonathan turned to Doctor Park, who frowned and said, “That crowd is angry. Recent immigrants, and they’re afraid Teddy Roosevelt is going to throw them in the ocean. On top of that, Miss Little was speaking this morning.”

Miss Laura Little had built an organization named the National Health Defense League after she lost her child. She blamed the death on the smallpox vaccine and campaigned incessantly against all forms of vaccination. Miss Little’s raging tirades about the evil of inoculations and government involvement could whip crowds, already fearful of the doctors, into a rage. Jonathan was convinced she had gone mad with the loss of her child, but his normal sympathy at such misfortune had quickly eroded in the wake of the lies she spewed about the dangers of the one inoculation that could relieve the suffering diphtheria caused.

“This morning she was supported by the local doctors who don’t want us interfering with their business,” Park snorted. “Their business is a sham. All they do is sell elixirs, and if it works they take credit. If it doesn’t—well, it’s God’s will,” Park seethed.

As much as Jonathan admired Park, his compassion was deeply ingrained. “But those doctors are the ones who get respect in this society,” Jonathan said. “They are there every day for these people and provide some measure of comfort. We come during epidemics and once a week to our clinic.”

“Exactly. We are putting those doctors out of a job. They wouldn’t mind at all if we disappeared. They are mad about the new Board of Food and Drug Inspection the government just established. They’re afraid the government will prevent them from selling these potions,” Park said. “I hope they do.”

“The immigrants have a daily life as fragile as cracked glass. The Italians hate the Russian Jews. They both trust no one who does anything different. Public health doctors only want to change their water and stick them with needles,” Jonathan said.

At that moment a local doctor was at the center of the group of men at the corner, riling them up to run off the public doctors. He inflamed them with stories of children dying by the needle. Finally, he pointed his arm and index finger to the line of mothers with sick children waiting at the Health Department’s clinic, speaking in Italian much too rapidly for Jonathan and Park to understand. He waved his hat toward Jonathan and Park and led a rush of men on the attack.

The two medical men had been around long enough to understand the language of vengeance and they both scrambled up the alley, ducking through the back door of a small room as the crowd began shouting, “Morte, morte.” There was no exit, so Jonathan pulled Park back to Second Avenue, searching for yet another opening, but they were quickly surrounded. Jonathan was pounced on by the group of sour-smelling men, who wildly flung their fists at him, knocking him hard to the ground. In spite of his fitness and strength, his attempts at fending them off failed. He finally gave up, wrapping his arms around his battered face.

The local doctor who had incited the death chant yelled to five or six of the men to pin Jonathan to the ground and rip off his shirt. The others restrained Park as he struggled to help his friend. Grabbing Jonathan’s black bag, the doctor knelt beside him. Still squirming with all his might to break free, Jonathan shouted at the Italian to have him released. He just laughed, switching to passable English. “No use, grande signore dottore. These people”—he gestured to the circle around them—“gave up everything to come to this country. Now they have lost the only precious thing left to them. There is a debt.” Jonathan’s eyes widened in horror as he understood where this was leading. “It must be repaid. Time to get what you want to give, yes?” hissed the doctor as he filled three syringes while the crowd surrounding them suddenly fell deathly quiet.

“Doctor,” Park pleaded, hanging from the grip of several burly captors, “don’t. You have no idea what that could do.”

“No,” the Italian sneered. “The problem is that you have no idea what it can do.” He turned back to Jonathan.

“No, please. Doctor, por favore. Listen, por favore! Ascoltare! Ascoltare! Listen, please!” Jonathan shouted until finally a large greasy hand clamped his mouth shut. Jonathan’s eyes flew toward the needles heading toward his arm. He struggled to break free as the crowd roared back to life with every jab of the syringe. Finally, tired of Jonathan’s struggles, the hand lifted just long enough to land a final punch to the side of Jonathan’s face, knocking him unconscious.

Park knew he was next. In a few moments he was face down on the ground, his arms pulled tight behind his back. Again the death chant of “Morte, morte” rang out around them.

“You next. Plenty for you, yes? You come here to take my living away from me,” the doctor snarled, clawing at Park’s shirt. “You take my life away from me! How you like it, eh?” Park’s arms fell to the ground as the grasping hands suddenly released him. He rolled over just in time to see the Italian doctor clutch his bloody chest. The Italian doctor stared down at his left hand and the blood dripping from it, collapsed to the ground and lay motionless. The men who had been holding Park slowly rose in fear. Three of them raised their arms in surrender.

Park looked up to see Rabbi Yassel Radulavic, who stood still in his black suit, black hat, and long grey beard, holding a smoking pistol pointed at the Italian men. “We will leave these public doctors to their business,” he said. “They have saved the children of my people and many of yours, too. Go home to your wives and ask them yourselves. Now leave, all of you. Go!” He fired his gun in the air and the crowd dispersed as quickly as they could run.

While his savior was clearing the crowd, Park, still woozy from the thrashing, crawled over to check Jonathan’s pulse. It was thready and weak. His face looked like a rotten apple, and Park counted six puncture wounds from the injections. A single dose could cause serum sickness. Such a large dose of horse serum could throw Jonathan into shock if he reacted against it. There was no telling what the outcome of that could be.