The Glatstein Chronicles (16 page)

He was one of the loneliest persons on deck. Even his daughter had made some friends, girls her own age, but he connected with no one. When he was sure that his daughter wasn’t looking, he sneaked into the bar and quickly downed one whiskey after another. And when his daughter next saw him, she smelled right away that her father had let himself go too far and gave him a few good smacks in his red face, as he swore on his life to this plump little girl with the sharp tongue that this was positively his last drink: If she ever saw him take another, she would throw him to the sharks.

On deck there was so much sun that everyone seemed to be encased in a thin layer of sunlight, like cellophane wrapping. There was sun between every exchange of smiles, between exchanged Good Mornings. Sun everywhere, on hands and necks, bare backs, and faces. Everything looked brighter and more transparent—suits, dresses, stockings. The slight hairs on women’s bare legs, stretched out on deck chairs as if on display, quivered in the sunlight like tiny blades of grass. Downy motes flew by, like precious diamonds of sun-dust that sometimes streak on the tail of a comet of sunlight into a sun-drenched room.

The prizefighter who had spent his first days slathered in oil, sunning himself, was now up and about, beaming at everyone. He had become more acclimated to shipboard life and had abandoned his former habits. With a woman on his arm, he now promenaded the deck, just like everybody else, neglecting to swagger or thrust out his chest. He still wore the same sweater knotted around his neck, and a cap at a jaunty angle, but his muscle was no longer intimidating. On the contrary, the companion he had picked up looked more the prizefighter. She stepped down heavily on her sandals, weighed down by her considerable bulk. Her red-painted toenails, rouged cheeks, painted lips, several gold teeth, and her ample bosom sagging under clanking chains were all so well suited to the fighter’s bashed-in nose that no one could have found him a better match. Trailing him, like Sherlock Holmes, was his manager and Man Friday, looking as if his head were in the clouds, but all the while, not once taking his eye off his bread-and-butter. He walked alone, too much the concerned businessman to bother with the ladies—his head filled with plans, calculations, and strategies.

The doctor who had been stalking me for days finally caught up with me. Unceremoniously, he motioned to his wife to go off and leave us alone, and immediately launched into an account, sparing no detail, of how he had discovered a cure for that incurable affliction, Addison’s disease. With his fat little hands and round face, he had the look of a clever pug. His cheeks here and there sported bluish-red blotches. He was a short man, and when he spoke, he bounced up and down, thrusting himself into the listener’s face. His medical practice was divided between America and Europe, half a year on each continent. “Europe used to mean Germany,” he sighed, “but that’s now off limits.” He was therefore on his way to Austria, where he would be attending a medical conference, at which he would disclose his cure for Addison’s disease.

He explained to me, in his grotesque Yiddish-German English, interspersed with some well-worn Hebrew phrases, that, in general, doctors were actually—he finished the sentence with a vulgar word, spoken with the utmost relish. He then struck a questioning pose, to ascertain what impression his shocking word had made on me and whether I had caught his opinion of his colleagues, who, to his mind, were no great exemplars of wisdom. He repeated the offensive word several more times, smacking his lips and shouting it aloud so that all might hear.

“Dat’s vot doctors are. You tink,” he said in his Germanized English, lapsing into a Yiddish intonation, “that a doctor is a clever man, but the truth is”—this he confided to the non-Jewish woman who was walking beside me—“a physician is a —.” Again he concluded with the same Yiddish vulgarity and the same display of Hasidic rapture. It was a word which for him was the ne plus ultra for conveying the unmitigated stupidity of doctors. The woman looked to me for protection from the incomprehensible remark, which the doctor urged me to translate for her. “Tell her what it means. It’s no shame! It’s human.”

Sensing that some indelicacy was being bruited, the woman took fright lest I actually translate, as requested, and very elegantly slipped away from us and disappeared.

“You see,” he said, rubbing his fat, little hands with satisfaction, “I chased her away. I hate it when women mix in when men are talking about serious things.” He then digressed and proceeded to lecture me, now speaking entirely in Yiddish, on how one should behave toward women. One must practice thrift.

“Sure, flirt with them,” he expounded, “make them happy, don’t make a fool of yourself, but above all—preserve your manly energy, your vital fluids. Never dissipate your powers. Learn how to get pleasure out of life, but always practice thrift. Life isn’t that proverbial ‘inexhaustible fountain.’ A great doctor is telling you this, not some little pipsqueak who thinks he’s a doctor, but who’s really … well, you already know what.”

But he couldn’t take the risk that I might have forgotten and told me again. Just then his wife happened by and he decided that she should also have the pleasure of knowing. She smiled tightly and continued on her way.

The Latvian lady passed by and greeted me. I introduced her to the doctor and he immediately took advantage of the opportunity. Asserting medical privilege, his hands made a quick tour of her figure, as he noted her lovely throat, healthy skin, well-developed bust, and truly proportioned back. His fat, little hands moved up and down, until she realized that this was more than a medical occasion and she excused herself. “Well,” said the doctor, “I’ve just given you an illustrated lecture. I can’t say that I don’t enjoy a pat here and a pat there, but the main thing is to conduct yourself like a man and preserve your source of energy.” He then explained to me that the most fatal mistake doctors make is to speak of specific diseases.

“The truth,” he declared, “is that there are no separate diseases. People are divided into two categories—healthy and sick. This is elementary, but doctors have messed it all up with their complicated theories. A healthy person contains within him all diseases, but he is master over them, he keeps all his body parts in harmony, he sets a rhythm to his life. In a sick person, all the so-called diseases erupt simultaneously and they become the masters. There’s no such thing as cancer alone. When a person falls ill, he becomes susceptible to cancer, to tuberculosis, he can die from pneumonia—in short, he can get any and all the diseases in the book. A doctor—and you know what kind I mean—pokes around, looking for a specific ailment, and lucky him! A diagnosis! Right away he begins to bombard the ailment with all manner of junk medication, overlooking the larger picture, the entire human body. This is how an amateur operates, not how life operates, and it is, in fact, downright inhumane. He pokes around in the dark to cure the ‘illness’ while everything in the patient is going wrong. He doesn’t understand that it’s all a matter of harmony and disharmony. He puts a stethoscope on the chest and listens to the heart—do you know what a heart is? Neither does that doctor. You might as well be whistling into his ear. When you listen carefully to a heart, you hear—what can I tell you?—you hear a Wagnerian opera. Now it’s pumping away as triumphantly as the ride of the Valkyries across the heavens. Then comes the
kol demama daka,
the ‘still, small voice’ of the High Holiday prayer—Liebestod. Blessed be the true judge!”

He dragged me over to a corner and took out a brochure from his breast pocket. “Let me read you a lecture I delivered in 1900,” he said. “It was later published, and created a furor in the whole medical world. It immediately put me in the front ranks of the great doctors of our generation. Why am I suddenly reading you a medical lecture? Because I want to show you that medicine is the highest form of poetry. First, listen to the beat and cadence of words that are recognized as classics of poetry, that no one doubts are rhythmic song:

Every schoolboy knows that this is poetry—‘She walks in beauty like the night.’”

He almost chanted the lines, tapping out the rhythm with his feet, stressing the accented syllables and muting the unaccented. In his recitation he strove to demonstrate how beautifully chiseled each line was. “Keep in mind that same rhythm, that same music, and you’ll see that it’s exactly the foundation for my paper,” he said. “Remember, ‘And all that’s best of dark and bright.’ Now concentrate, it’s not that easy to understand. Free your soul, take your paws off your soul and let it sing to you andante cantabile.”

He was transformed. His eyes turned moist, like rain-streaked windowpanes. His coarse features lightened, his foot beat time to the verse. His face flushed in a mix of shyness and pride. He looked like some provincial author, reading from a work into which he had poured his heart and soul—which was reason enough to set him ahead the table of the immortals, where they are served slabs of praise and leviathan-sized hunks of recognition and, as Hasidic Jews do from their rebbe, grab leftovers from the fingers of Shakespeare and Homer.

Long after the Byronic enchantment of his lyrical model had faded from my mind, he continued to intone his medical masterpiece. He sang out the multisyllabic medical terms denoting all sorts of ugly, loathsome diseases of the blood, skin, digestive tract, and liver, to the tapping of his little, Terpsichorean feet, as though they were words in a dream, music for a dance.

He read on and on, growing more and more flushed. After an hourlong performance, he returned the brochure to his breast pocket, remarking that he only wanted to show me what medicine is, its mystique, its music, its poetry, its intimation, provided that it’s being practiced by “a real doctor not a —.” He opened his fleshy lips wide and cackled as he once again pronounced his beloved word. His face regained its bluish-red blotches, everything returned to type. He shouted out the word again and again to make sure no one failed to hear it, and with the same exuberance that he had just spoken of Byron’s poetry—adding a dollop of national pride—he exclaimed, “A plague on the goyim, they should only have such a fabulous word!”

Sitting on a nearby bench, with two girls in tow, was a man with a square, gray beard, wearing a French yarmulke, a beret, that is. He had just finished a phlegmatic set of exercises and was now relaxing, flirting with the young women, who flirted right back. They looked the old man straight in the mouth, which issued a stream of youthful, seductive sounds, as if he were playing the flute. His voice was morning fresh and clear and held us all in thrall, particularly when he remarked that he had made sixty-seven Atlantic crossings but couldn’t remember a more delightful one than the present. “The air is like champagne,” he said, breathing in and out several times, with studied regularity.

The doctor wasted no time in practicing his wiles on the young women, but they both fled, like frightened hens. After their hasty retreat, the graybeard, finding himself in exclusively male company, let pass a gross word at the expense of the girls, still in the same flutelike tones. He talked on and on about himself, but the more he talked, the less one knew him. His name was Lawson, and at one time, he said, “I came this close to being a millionaire. Today I’m a—who knows what I am?”

But if he didn’t know what he was, he certainly knew everything else, and made no bones about it. “I know everything,” he declared, in his self-assured way and in the same flute-tone. He spoke four or five languages fluently. He was Gentile but was well informed on Jewish affairs. He knew everything there was to know about Zionism, he even knew the names of Yiddish newspapers …

“I like Jews,” he said, “but they have to be real Jews. I don’t like bluffers. I can bluff with the best of them. I once told Otto—we were on a first-name basis—that he was a louse, neither Jew nor Turk.” I presumed he meant Otto Kahn, the famous investment banker. “‘Otto,’ I said, ‘you’re a louse.’ And he answered me, ‘Vincent, you’re right, but we live in this world and have to make a few dollars.’ That’s why that rabbi of yours is such a prince. ‘Stephen,’ I said to him”—surely this was Rabbi Stephen Wise—“‘it must be very hard on you to be the leader of such a stubborn people,’ and he laughed in his deep, bass voice. Now, Felix”—this I took to be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter—“was an altogether different sort of Jew than Otto. And ah, yes! I knew old man Jacob, that little Jew with the German accent, who raked in all that gold in America, the philanthropist who left a pittance to Jewish charities.” Was he talking about the revered Jacob Schiff? “But one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,
de mortuis nil nisi bonum,
and all that. Of course, Otto’s dead too, and I’d like to know what saints he sat himself down with in heaven. I bet he snubbed your holy men and went right for the Christian martyrs. I love Jews. I must have a Jewish soul. Ninety percent of my lovers were Jewish, as were my first two wives, neither of whom asked for a cent in alimony. I once said to Roosevelt, ‘Who are you kidding? You talk Socialism to the capitalists and capitalism to Socialists!’ The president doesn’t mind being teased. He’s a politician through and through, also a great statesman, a real American. What’s a real American? First and foremost, a family man. Had I been a good family man, I’d be on top of the world now. Unfortunately, I’ve got wild blood in me.”

The doctor, who was forced into silence by this verbal deluge, at last saw his chance in the notion of “wild blood.” He began to lecture on how one must learn to curb impetuous behavior. Mr. Lawson interrupted with an authoritative medical lecture of his own. This was too much for the good doctor, and when I saw that he was ready to explode, I took pains to inform Lawson that we were in the presence of one of New York’s most eminent surgeons. But Lawson wasn’t impressed and was ready with a tale about his own close friendship with Doctor Alexis—Before he even had a chance to say the surname, the doctor jumped up, his bluish-red blotches filling with blood, turning his face as purple as eggplant. “Tell your Alexis that he’s a —,” he sputtered, pronouncing his beloved word with such force that even a non-Jew might grasp its meaning. “Do you know what that is?”