Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (18 page)

Then, behind my grinning likeness, in the recesses of what should have been just the reflection of wood veneer and brushed steel, I saw a shadow pass, and in its wake—it was as if an unseen hand drew back a diaphanous veil—I seemed to see a darker yet paradoxically more vibrant version of the same confined elevator, as if the fluorescent half-light within the mirror fell on a more luxuriant interior, richly appointed in more extravagant color and detail than the institutional browns and beiges around me.

Behind my hoary image, I heard the child sobbing again in the middle distance. I searched the depths of the mirror first, only because the cries seemed to be located there in space.

The depths of this mirror were darker and far more palpable than the elevator car itself, and shadows seemed to stir in the peripheries, where I saw tongues of fire, a torch? A hallway with a hooded figure carrying a candle? When I turned around to confirm my impression, I was suddenly unable to locate the child’s cry in space, because it seemed to be coming from every direction at once.

Then I saw a little girl coming toward me, emerging from the lush shadows in the depths ofthat mirror. She wore an old cotton johnny, just like the ones we wore in the old hospital. She was pale and thin. She looked sleepless and wasted, like a wraith from
Carnival of Souls,
but I recognized her at once. It was Maddy Kruger right there in the mirror, eight years old, three years younger than me. Her johnny hung on her like a white gunnysack on a scarecrow.

Then I looked down at my own bony, pale little hands and felt my knobby legs sliding inside my own johnny. I was just a skinny little thing, too. We were both living on broth and red clover tea because we couldn’t eat. The coughing fits made us vomit.

“Maddy!”

I had forgotten how sick we were. The fevers and the coughing. Why had I forgotten it? Why did I forget all about the hospital? Why was it so easy to remember now? I could see the old hospital right there on the other side of the glass where Maddy was standing. We had the whooping cough, or as we used to call it, the
whopping
cough.

We both heard the little girl crying above us. We looked up and tried to see her. We were in an old wood-paneled, hand-operated elevator, the kind with an inside safety cage and a brass rail and a little man in a uniform who sat on a stool upholstered in red leather and asked you where you wanted to go and said what floor the elevator was stopping on.

The little girl was lost, stuck up there somewhere above us in the elevator shaft. She needed her mommy or somebody to help her.

“Listen, Sally,” said Maddy. “It’s the little girl again. She’s still crying.”

“What’s her name?” I asked. “Did you find out her name? I don’t think she’ll answer us until we find out her name.”

Somebody must have hurt her. She was so afraid she couldn’t use words, she just moaned and cried. Maddy and I tried calling out to her, but she wouldn’t answer us with words or tell us where or how to find her. She was too afraid to do anything but hide and cry. Maddy said we would just have to wait until she knew us better and trusted us. Then maybe she would tell us how to help her. But not now. Now she was too hurt and afraid to do anything but cry.

A bell chimed. A tinkling far off in the darkness above the shaft.

“Come on, Sally,” said Maddy. “We have to go see Dr. Gottreich.”

“No,” I cried. “I don’t want to go.”

Maddy was crying, too. The dark circles around her sunken eyes were wet with tears.

“I don’t want to go, either,” said Maddy. “But we have to. He’s the doctor. You have to see him now. You have to remember him now so you can forget him again. Do you remember what he did to you?”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t want to remember.”

Maddy took my hand; her fingers felt like bones clutching me.

“It’s too late, Sally. You have to see him. You have to remember him so you can forget him again.”

I coughed and wrung my gown into a big knot. Maddy started coughing, too.

We held on to each other while a nurse led us through the basement of the old Gottreich Hospital. It was the old hospital, all right, but it looked as if it had been sealed like a tomb and preserved, and we were the first ones to enter it after all of these years. Damp cobwebs and a century’s worth of filth clung to the weeping stone walls, which were festooned with lichens, verdigris, and mold. Beards of moss hung from unhinged doors.

Finally we came to a heavy wooden door with a decrepit sign on it that said:
PAIN ROOM
. That was the nickname for the room. The doctors called it the Pain Room, because inside Dr. Gottreich conducted important experiments on ways to make pain stop hurting.

“Here, you go, Sally,” said the nurse. “Maddy and I will be back soon to collect you.”

The Pain Room.

Maddy or I said that every time we came here. We read the sign, saw the word
pain,
and said, “Don’t worry, it’s just a nickname for the room where they study why things hurt and how to make them feel better.”

I remembered that one time, we were almost to the Pain Room, walking along the hallway, just like this, and the lights went out. It was pitch black because we were underground, walking in the old hospital corridor. We had to feel our way along the black wall, looking for an opening, until we found the door to the Pain Room.

Then we pushed it open and could see, because Dr. Gottreich was waiting for us, and he had lit a taper.

DR. GOTTREICH HAD A
smile made of gray teeth. He wore a head mirror and green pajamas, sometimes with a cloth cap as well. He was old. Older than our grandpas. The hospital, Gottreich Hospital, was named after his dad, who also did important pain research. Dr. Gottreich was almost all the way bald, but was young at heart—sparkling eyes, easy to talk to, and kind, especially to our parents. The moment they were gone, he behaved unlike any other adult we’d ever known.

He talked to us kids the way grown-ups talked to each other. He made fun of other adults, including sometimes our parents, and said things we thought but would never dare say or admit to grown-ups, especially not to a doctor or a minister.

“It’s my little Sally Druse,” he said. “How are we feeling?”

The Pain Room always smelled of iodophor and camphor and a sweet oily smell—like spoiled fruit mixed with paint thinner—that seemed to cling to the doctor’s clothes, the sheets and cloths. It was cold and dank, because it was underground, and the walls were stone.

On the far wall, there were beakers with flames under them, glass flasks, coils of tubing, burners, and glass containers of specimens.

Right next to the door where I came in was a big glass case with a fat canvas hose coiled inside, and mounted next to it was a red axe with a big shiny steel head.

In red and black letters on the glass case it read:
IN CASE OF FIRE, BREAK GLASS.

Dr. Gottreich patted the cushion on the examination table.

“Come on. Hop up.”

He helped me onto the table and unfastened my johnny in the back so he could listen to my lungs with his stethoscope. It was as cold as a dog’s nose. The nurses warmed theirs in their hands first, but not Dr. Gottreich.

“Deep breath,” he said. “That’s it.”

His voice was a friendly purr.

While he listened to my breathing, I looked at posters on the wall just behind him: medical diagrams, drawings of open skulls with parts of the brain labeled, skeletons with the bones all named, exposed eyeballs with all the parts labeled, empty eye sockets with lines and arrows going into the skull at different angles.

“How’s the coughing, Sally?” he asked with a kind voice.

“Bad,” I said, “sometimes.”

“Have you been drinking your red clover tea?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Excellent. It’s what we call an expectorant. It helps get the bad stuff that makes you cough out of your lungs. Have you been a good girl up on the children’s ward?”

“Yes,” I said, but I hesitated for just a moment and heard my own voice waver, because one night Maddy and I stayed up late, past lights out, and we got caught playing outside the high wooden partitions around our beds, which were supposed to keep us isolated from the other kids so they wouldn’t catch our whooping coughs. The night nurse was angry, so angry that she may have told Dr. Gottreich or written something about it in our charts.

He reached up and turned on a big drum light overhead. It was steel and had large glass bulbs with big hairy glowing wires inside them. Then he opened a black bag with metal clasps on it and rummaged inside.

“Your mommy told me that sometimes you are a bad little girl.”

His tone mocked my mother in a backhanded way, as if Dr. Gottreich wouldn’t hold it against me if I were a bad little girl because he still had vivid, fond memories of being a bad little boy.

“She seems a little strict, if you ask me,” he said. “I told her that a little more fun and some extra candy now and then would be good for your health.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

His tools clanked inside the black bag as he rummaged through them looking for the one he wanted. He found a tongue depressor and brought it out.

“Your mommy said that sometimes there are tantrums,” he added, with a chuckle. “Sometimes you can’t control yourself?”

“She did?” I asked.

“We don’t always behave, do we,” he said, but then he smiled.

He turned on a bright light next to my head, swiveled his head mirror down, and pressed his eye to the eyepiece. I could see my own distorted reflection in the polished metal as he manipulated the light source. The reflector made a bowl with his eye at its center, as if he were a Cyclops with a metal head. The harsh bright light reflected back from the shimmering concavity. I had to squint because it hurt my eyes.

“Say
ahh,”
he said, and stared hard at me with his one beady eye in the metal dish.

I opened my mouth and said “Ahh,” but it made me cough and then I couldn’t stop.

“Cover your mouth,” he said, and handed me a cloth.

I took the cloth, but I didn’t use it to cover my mouth, because I saw streaks of blood on it.

“Cover!” he said.

And I did.

When I could get my breath again, I said, “There’s blood on the cloth.”

“So there is,” he said.

He aimed the head reflector and the light again into the back of my throat. I stopped breathing because I was so afraid I was going to cough again. I just stared at his eye and waited.

His voice changed from a warm purr to a probing thing, like one of his instruments.

“I see something I don’t like,” he said.

He swiveled the head mirror up out of the way and gave me a hard look with his black eyes in his old bald head. I noticed that behind him on the wall was a color drawing of a skull, just about the same size as his skull, with a rubber-gloved hand holding an instrument that looked like a big knitting needle going in the bone above the eye. I couldn’t read all of the labels and names on the poster, but there were words across the top in big black letters. The lights shone off the shiny poster right there and made the letters hard to read:
TRAIN SOURBALL LABORATORY
?

Pretty strange words to see on a poster in a doctor’s office. Where were the trains? And was the sourball an acid drop candy or the old sourball doctor in charge of the Pain Laboratory? I tried to get another angle and make the shiny spots go away from the letters so I could read them better.

Then Dr. Gottreich got in the way. I tried not to think about how his whole head looked like a skull, because I was afraid that he might swivel down his mirror again and be able to see right into my thoughts with that beady Cyclops eye.

“What do you see that you don’t like?” I asked. “What is it? Am I sick?”

He swiveled the head mirror back down over his eyeball and peered hard at me.

“Not sick,” he said. “Just very bad sometimes, right? Like your mommy said?”

I was afraid because with the dish up close to my face and his eye peering through a hole in it, sometimes it seemed like his voice was coming out of a talking eyeball.

I tried to remember when I had been bad. I must have been so bad that my mother didn’t have the nerve to discuss it with me. Instead I must have done something that was so bad and shameful that she’d gone straight to the doctor and asked him what could be done about it.

Of course I believed Dr. Gottreich. I could conceive of a wicked man not telling the truth, and of such a man lying to a child for some awful reason. But a doctor? In my child’s-eye view of the universe, doctors occupied ranks in a hierarchy somewhere between my parents, Elsa and Pa Bear, and the angels and saints. Doctors were up there with priests and ministers, they belonged to vocations with special powers, and like priests, they were always good and kind to children.

My mother had warned me that there were evil men in the world who might ask me to touch them, or they might try to touch me. She was so stern and cold and dreadful when she talked about it that I felt I had already done something wrong. She told me that if anybody ever tried something wicked like that, I must say no. I should get away from them as soon as possible, because the Devil was in them. “The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man,” she had said. Only my parents and my doctor could touch my private areas.

I imagined that there were many other strict rules about behavior that also didn’t apply to doctors. Only doctors could do and say certain things, because they knew all of the secrets about the human mind and body. They took an oath to heal. Only priests and doctors could talk to me the way Gottreich was talking to me, about being good. Or bad.

What did I do? What did my mom say I did that was bad?

I was afraid to ask. What if he named some terrible deed in the harsh light of the examination room that I had forgotten? Something I’d done when I thought I was alone, but my mom had seen it? Or worse, what if he whispered some repulsive secret from one of my nightmares or daydreams, something so vile I had blotted it from my memory? What if Dr. Gottreich knew about some half-formed wicked fancy, a make-believe exploit that I’d contemplated and vividly imagined and enjoyed imagining, even though it never became an actual vile deed? If he named it, I would recognize it. Oh, yes. I’d have to confess that the bad thought was mine, if it had my filthy mental fingerprints all over it, if it was something my bad little girl’s imagination had cooked up when I should have been doing chores or my lessons.