Up From Orchard Street (10 page)

Years before, Dr. Koronovsky taught her to read a thermometer, and she became expert at washing it with alcohol, placing it under the tongue, then scanning the silver line of mercury. There was no thermometer in the Goodman household and the stores on Broadway, then the Yonkers main thoroughfare, closed up shop at eight o’clock. So Uncle Goodman rushed out and returned with a thermometer. I was too bleary-eyed to see Bubby’s face when she scrutinized the results, but I heard her announce soberly, “One hundred and three.”

Aunt Bertha, foreign to illness, offered a solution to the problem. “We’ll give her an enema. We’ll clean out her system. She’ll be fine in the morning.”

I despised enemas, considered them the worst of indignities, and in spite of my fever screamed out, “No, no enemas!” Then I sat up, repeated, “I will not have an enema,” and collapsed back on my pillow.

When I said no to something, ridicule did not follow. In Yonkers, with Aunt Bertha standing in the doorway with an enema bag in her hand, Bubby gently turned her away. “I’ll sleep with her a little,” she explained. She snapped off the light, touched my forehead, moved my legs. Meningitis carried children off in hours. Gently, she massaged my arms and legs without attempting to remove my navy blue dress.

Abruptly, she snapped on the lamp and let out a low cry. I still couldn’t see clearly, but my arms seemed pink, maybe red. She tried the thermometer again. “How much is it?” I asked, the true daughter of my father. “The same,” she said doing her best to cover up her lie with excessive cheerfulness.

She sponged me with a cold cloth, looked out the window and waited for the sky to lighten. Finally she knocked on Goodman’s bedroom door. He came to my side and nodded, “I’ll bring the car.”

My grandmother dressed quickly, and stripped the bed of the sheets and the pillowcases. Her sister, Bertha, would find the task odious. She wrapped me in the blanket and Goodman carried me down to the backseat of the Lincoln. “Manya, is it measles?” he asked. “No.” Her voice broke. “She has 104 temperature.”

I recall nothing of the ride home nor of the two flights of dark stairs. Bubby pushed open the door and my father, a light sleeper, heard us at once.

“What is it?” He glanced at me, cried, “Oh, my God!” and called, “Clayton, go to the doctor. Go to his house on Grand Street.”

Settled in my parents’ bed, I lost sense of time. Soon enough Dr. Koronovsky bent over me, and Bubby asked, “Will I need a paper on my door?”

“I have to report that she has scarlet fever, maybe something else. I’ll be back in a few hours to see what develops.”

“Polio?” my father asked.

“Too soon, too soon to tell. I’ll be here by noon. Manya, you can’t serve food today or tomorrow. It’s the weekend. It won’t be too bad for you. Keep her as cool as possible, and Lil and Willy stay away from her.” The doctor addressed my mother, “Lil, you must be careful for the next few days. Because of your heart. These infectious diseases are hard on the heart.”

Uncle Goodman, close to tears, managed to say, “Doctor, send me the bill. Don’t worry about the money. Give her the best. Manya, you won’t lose her. Manya, I tell you, you won’t lose her.”

My grandmother looked down at me, willing me to live.

Through the slits of my eyes I realized that Dr. Koronovsky was unshaven, a dark cardigan sweater covering his rumpled shirt.

“Manya,” the doctor said, “I haven’t been to bed yet. We have an epidemic. I lost two last night, one boy, one girl. Manya, she has 105 right now. Your apartment is less than adequate. The bedroom is freezing. She needs to be sponged every hour, kept sanitary, kept warm, kept isolated. Manya, would you consider sending her to the hospital, not the ones down here, but to Beth Israel, uptown? I could have her admitted because of my affiliation.” He tried his best to persuade her.

More than thirty-five years had passed since Bubby buried her husband. Throughout those years her hatred and contempt for hospitals never waned—she could not even bring herself to visit my mother when she delivered both her babies in J. P. Morgan’s Lying-In Hospital uptown. She didn’t hesitate now. “No,” she cried, louder than I had the night before when I refused to submit to an enema. “No, I will do whatever you tell me, but no hospital.”

It seemed odd to me that Goodman pushed forward into my parents’ bedroom and asked, as he inspected the overhead light, “Are there any other electrical outlets?”

We had one electrical outlet in the dining room that had been installed at my grandmother’s expense. There Clayton would set up the ironing board and the electric iron to do my mother’s personal clothing.

Instead of answering Goodman’s question, Bubby wiped her flushed face on her apron. “Tell us what to do.”

“A sponge bath every hour, medium warm water with alcohol. The alcohol stings, but it will also dry up the rash and keep it from getting infected. Fresh nightshirt after every bath—old soft shirts. If you have a way of heating this room, place her in that tin tub—but the room is too cold now. She’s also dehydrated, needs lots of liquids. Get some paper straws, and make her sip water every half hour. Buy some Jell-O, any flavor, and dissolve it in water. Don’t refrigerate it; use it as a drink, to get some sugar into her. And keep that head and hair clean. Sanitation is very important, because I don’t know what else, what other disease is in her body.”

My grandmother nodded to everything, and my father, whose memory always startled the family—he remembered the words to hundreds of songs, could summarize the plots of every book he read, absorbed the racing form at a glance—repeated, “Sanitation, sponge baths, Jell-O in water, head and hair clean. Doctor, what about meningitis, what about polio?”

“No signs, yet. Any stiffness in neck, shoulders, arms, legs, call me at once. And remember, Willy and Lil can’t enter the bedroom.” Koronovsky paused. “Manya, no meals to anyone but the immediate family. Jack, put up a handwritten sign.” Willy provided one of his school tests and my father wrote on the clean side, Closed for Vacation. He pried a rusty thumbtack from the kitchen cupboard to fix the notice to the front door.

No one would accuse us of lying. The neighbors knew Bubby, my parents, my brother, me. They accepted the excuse of a vacation as they accepted any strategy that helped them to live. Dozens of witnesses had watched me carried up the stairs; countless others could testify to Dr. Koronovsky’s car, to Uncle Goodman’s car. Before Clayton left to buy Jell-O and straws, everyone had heard of my illness, knew my exact temperature, knew about the children less fortunate than I who had died in the night.

Sipping water from a straw caused intense pain; my throat seemed composed of shards of glass. Bubby promised, “I’ll make you the telle fun himmel, the plate from heaven,” and I smiled and slept for many hours after that. I didn’t open my eyes until Goodman was standing at my bed, holding up a large box. “I bought you a present,” he said, bubbling with enthusiasm. “I bought you an electric heater.”

“Also,” he added, “from my factory, I got the electrician. On a Saturday.” He was elated.

My father had many talents. He was a natural writer, could compose words to popular songs that sounded as if they had been done by a published songwriter. But he literally could not change a lightbulb nor wanted to, either because he wouldn’t soil his hands or because he regarded himself as above such mundane tasks.

When Goodman trooped in with the electric heater the neighbors buzzed with news. Who had heard of such an object on Orchard Street? The electrician, a man in a railroad cap and a mackinaw, came prepared with yards of extension cord, which he attached to our one outlet in the dining room and carefully tacked along the baseboards leading into my parents’ room. The plug fit neatly into the electric heater.

I was too weak to applaud but everyone else did, as if he had turned on the switch to the stage at Radio City Music Hall for the holiday extravaganza. Moreover, the electrician also brought with him an entire roll of felt, and holding a dozen nails in his mouth, he discarded the sopping wet towel on the bedroom windowsill and installed felt along the entire window frame. “Airtight” was the single word he said.

Dr. Koronovsky was appropriately impressed when he returned to a warm room with an electric heater and a window sealed from drafts.

Short little kind Goodman rocked on his skinny legs and asked Bubby, “Goot gedavend? Did I pray good?”

“Very good,” Manya answered, as if she had been praying in shul and her prayers were answered.

Everyone remarked on the swift skills of the electrician. His job completed, my grandmother asked him if he would like a bite to eat. He mentioned a ham sandwich. Without a moment’s hesitation, she cut some brisket of beef very thin, added lots of kosher salt, lathered it with mustard and served it on rye bread with a kosher pickle. The handyman declared it the best ham sandwich he had ever tasted. She gave him another to take home.

In spite of the sign on the door all the neighbors, even the Polish woman on the fifth floor, Mrs. Rosinski, gathered to appraise the electric heater, the beautiful wiring and the felt along the windowsill. Bone-tired from the hectic, worrying day, Jack, Lil and Willy “made night” early, sleeping in the folding beds in the dining room. Everyone except Bubby. For the second night in a row, she kept vigil over me, sponging me, forcing me to swallow a few spoonfuls of liquid every few hours, but mostly moving my arms and legs and examining me for stiffness in my neck. “You’ll be better,” she assured me. “Besser, mine kind.”

Unexpectedly, Dr. Koronovsky burst into the apartment before sunrise to speak to my father. “Jack, there’s a new drug on the market called sulfanilamide. We don’t have it down here, but one of my associates at Beth Israel can get me some. Your daughter’s heartbeat is accelerated, either from scarlet fever or maybe it’s the onset of a touch of rheumatic fever. I want your permission to try the drug. It may not help her, but I assure you there aren’t side effects. A written consent is necessary. The signature must be yours.”

My father paced up and down, smoking one cigarette after another. Nurtured by cups heated by a barber, homemade mustard plasters, and those powders of aspirin and codeine that Dr. Koronovsky dispensed by the boxful, he had a problem with this strange new drug, not even available on the market. Confronted with a decision, he hesitated. “Does it help polio?”

“No, as far as I know, it doesn’t touch polio.”

“Then what is it good for?”

“Infection. It wards off further infection. It prevents the outbreak of more bacteria. It allows the body to heal. Whether it will cure this one I don’t know. But there’s nothing to lose.”

For once, my mother who regarded all such decisions as the province of men, spoke up, “I think we should try it. You should sign the paper. If it can’t hurt her, what’s to lose?” My mother hesitated. “Does it cost a lot? The medicine? Is it expensive?”

“Don’t give it a thought,” Dr. Koronovsky replied, stroking his goatee. “It will be taken care of without costing you a cent.” My parents readily accepted this half-truth, not pursuing the question of whether Goodman or Koronovsky paid for the sulfa drug. My father gave permission, signing “Jack A. Roth” in his elegant cursive handwriting. Obviously relieved, Dr. Koronovsky announced that he would return at noon with science’s latest miracle.

Bubby sponged me, took my temperature, fed me water, and at 6:00 A.M. donned her brown cardigan sweater and crept out of the house. She walked slowly to Little Italy and paused at the first open butcher shop, disregarding the pigs’ heads in the window, pigs’ feet on display at the counter and the salamis and sausage links that hung from the ceiling.

On the Lower East Side, everyone was a polyglot. Italians knew the Yiddish words
goniff, schmuck, putz, shiksa
and
momser
. Jews knew the words
puta, bambino, madre
. When my grandmother entered the butcher shop, she said, “Mia bambina e malo.” She pointed to her face, neck and hands. “Fetz,” she added. The butcher, eyes half-lidded and not quite awake, called, “Nonna!” and the Italian equivalent of my grandmother came out of the back room. The eyes of the two women locked in understanding.

The Italian grandmother showed my grandmother two types of pork fat, one a cube and the other, a loose gray mass, straight from the pig’s stomach. She suggested a little of each. My grandmother nodded, said, “Thank you” in English, paid for the package and walked from Cherry Street to Orchard Street without a backward glance. She experienced not a moment’s fear. White-haired women in baggy cardigans had no cause for anxiety on these streets. She stopped off to buy an Italian olive and sucked the pit all the way to our door.

My parents hadn’t even stirred by the time my grandmother entered my bedroom and said, “The Polish lady, Mrs. Rosinski, from upstairs, she told me yesterday that fetz fun a choser is sayer goot.”

“Bubby,” I cried out in protest, “where did you get pig fat?”

“Cherry Street,” she said and began rubbing me first with the stuff pressed into a square, then with the loose fat from the pig’s belly. The loose fat smelled awful, a greasy mess on my hot skin. So my grandmother abandoned it and stayed with the square, rubbing it over my legs, my vagina, my stomach, chest, neck and face. Then she covered me up to my chin with a blanket and raced into the kitchen to prepare coffee for my parents and to get Willy off to school.

A few hours after my pig-fat massage, Dr. Koronovsky arrived with the new miracle drug. As soon as he walked into the bedroom, he sniffed the air. “What’s that terrible odor?” He pulled back the blanket. “Ah,” he said wearily, “that old idea about pig fat curing rashes. Manya, I don’t want to embarrass you, but that’s a superstition, and you are the least superstitious woman on the Lower East Side.”

My grandmother blushed. “I was worried. I wanted to do something, try anything.”

“Try these.” He shook the box with the sulfa pills. “Two at once, and one every four hours after that.” The doctor sighed deeply. “Manya, bring in the tub and bathe her. Be sure to disconnect the electric heater while she’s bathing. Wash her very carefully because the fat may contain bacteria.” He glanced up at Bubby. “No damage done. We’ll get her through this.”