Orphan #8 (16 page)

“Hey, lady, you can’t be hanging around here, we’re gonna start up the ball again soon as we clear some salvage outta the way.” He pointed up at a wrecking ball hanging silent from a crane. I didn’t move.

He exhaled a deep drag, apparently in no particular hurry to get back to his crew. The man cast a curious eye over me. “Everything all right, ma’am?”

“When did this happen?”

“This job? We been at this about a year now. It’s built like a fortress, this thing. Tearing it down to make a park, but who knows how much longer it’s gonna take. They’re hauling most of the rubble down to the Battery for fill, but there’s some valuable salvage in there, you know? Copper’s not what it was during the war, but it’s still worth pulling the gutters and plumbing for scrap. And me, well, I can’t resist some of the flourishes. There’s these balustrades in white marble, beautiful stone. They’re a bitch—excuse me, ma’am—to haul, and I can only keep what I can get out before they start up the ball again. So.” He took a last drag and stepped on the smoldering butt. “I gotta get back to it, and you better step back.”

“Can’t I watch?” My eyes were on the sky where the clock face used to be. “I lived here, back in the twenties. This used to be my home.”

“You don’t say. When I started on the job the place was empty, just some old guy rattling around there all alone. Tried to chase us out when we first scouted the building to place our bid. And I knew the army’d used it as a barracks for a while. But yeah, once
we got in there, saw all those toilets, I mean, I never seen so many toilets in my life, and the rows of sinks, and those kitchens? The old guy, he told us all about it, said he’d been caretaker since it was an orphanage.” The man stared at me. “So, you an orphan, then?”

The question sounded strange in the present tense. I used to think that
orphaned
was something I’d been as a child and since outgrown. It occurred to me, though, that was exactly how I’d been feeling all summer.

“I guess anyone alone in the world’s an orphan,” I said.

A whistle blew. “They’re starting up the ball. Better cross the street if you want to watch it.” He hurried away.

I crossed Amsterdam to the Avenue. The sun was beating down; I hid from it under a ginkgo tree that shaded a bench facing the Castle. There was a low rumble and a belch of smoke as the crane came to life. The smell of diesel fuel wafted across the street. The ball began to swing like a hypnotist’s watch, knocking at the building as if asking to be let in. Each knock brought a cascade of brick and dust, exposing steel and splintering wood. The ball swung away, but the Castle hardly seemed to get smaller. I sat in the shade as the wind brought specks of the orphanage into my lungs. I felt as if I were living in two time periods simultaneously, images from the past projected onto my view of the present. There was the Castle, coming down brick by brick. And there I was, my first day in Reception, clinging to Mrs. Berger’s skirt. Or there, in the dorm, counting down the rows to find my bed. Or there, in the yard, having a catch.

As I watched the Castle give up its bricks to the wrecking ball, it occurred to me where I’d seen those hinges before. At least, what they reminded me of. It was at some small gallery in the Village,
an exhibit of photographs taken in Europe before the war. I couldn’t recall the photographer’s name, but I remembered standing, fascinated, in front of that one picture. Black and white, large format, close-up. Huge hinges in stone walls, the print shining silver where sunlight touched metal. The card beside the frame read:
JEWISH GHETTO, VENICE, ITALY.
The iron gates that once creaked shut each night had been gone since Napoleon, but the hinges were embedded too deep to extract. The hinges were all the photographer needed to evoke the plight of the Venetian Jews, locked in from sunset to sunrise. Just like we were in the Home.

Wasn’t it Pieter Stuyvesant who said that first boatload of Jews could stay in New Amsterdam only as long as they took care of their own and asked for nothing? So take care of ourselves we did. They always told us how lucky we were to grow up in the Orphaned Hebrews Home, schooling us in its illustrious history. Didn’t we weather the blizzard of 1888, kept warm by our own stockpile of coal, fed from the ovens of our own bakery? And while children all over the city succumbed to cholera at the turn of the century, didn’t we emerge unscathed, the city’s water filtered before it reached our lips? After the Great War, people fell to influenza by the tens of thousands, but in the Home not a single child died. No matter how impressive, though, our Home was a kind of ghetto, the scrape of metal as the gates swung shut the same sound in Manhattan as in Venice.

I went once, during nursing school, to help vaccinate children in a state orphanage. The conditions were so bleak they made me ill. I hadn’t realized, before, what advantages our wealthy donors had bought us: our teeth straightened, our health tended, our clothes washed, our educations secured, our stomachs filled. But did that
mean they had the right to experiment on us, as Dr. Solomon had on me? I supposed it seemed fair—the use of our bodies in exchange for the keeping of them. All my life, I thought the poison of those X-rays was the price I’d paid to be cured of some disease. Now that I knew the truth, it seemed the cost of my childhood had been borrowed from usurers, interest compounding over the decades, the final tally perhaps too dear to pay.

The shade was retreating with the shifting sun. I couldn’t sit on that bench forever. With a heavy sigh, I resigned myself to going home. I crossed Amsterdam, returned the foreman’s salute, turned the corner. As I followed the sloping street down to the Broadway line, I made a last survey of the Castle. Missing doors, broken glass, dangling gutters. Sky where there should have been a clock. The empty yard. The gateless hinges.

I
MANAGED, ON
the long train ride home, to talk myself out of the inevitability of dropping dead from radiation cancer. Dr. Feldman’s article had sent my imagination leaping to conclusions. I was a nurse, for heaven’s sake. What I needed was a medical opinion, not the fevered suppositions of an addled brain. I’d seen in the author’s note that Dr. Feldman practiced in Manhattan, so the first thing I did, after grabbing the mail and letting myself into the apartment, was look up Dr. Feldman’s number in the city directory.

“Let me see what I have for you.” The woman’s tone over the telephone—reminiscent of Gloria’s terse superiority—led me to assume she was Dr. Feldman’s nurse and not just his receptionist. I heard the rustle of turning pages. “His first openings are in September.”

My casual attitude crumbled. “I couldn’t possibly wait until next month.”

“I can give you the names of some other oncologists who might be able to see you sooner.”

“It has to be Doctor Feldman. I was just reading his article, about the long-term effects of childhood X-rays?” I needed this nurse to realize I wasn’t an ordinary patient.

“Yes, I’m familiar with his work.” She wasn’t prepared to give; I had to offer something more personal.

“In the article, he cited an experimental study that was done at the Hebrew Infant Home by Dr. Solomon.” I paused for dramatic effect—if this didn’t sway her, I was afraid I’d never get the appointment. “I was one of the orphans in that study. I thought Dr. Feldman would be interested in evaluating me as soon as possible. For his work.”

The silence on the line lasted long enough for the imperious nurse to decide her employer’s interest would, indeed, be piqued by my case. “He’s in surgery tomorrow morning and booked for the rest of the day, but there’s been a cancellation day after tomorrow. Can you be here at ten o’clock?”

“I’m off that day, so that’s fine. I’ll be there.”

“We’ll see you then.” The receiver clicked as Dr. Feldman’s nurse hung up. I kept the phone in my hand, ready to place a call to Florida. I was desperate to hear her voice, never mind the charges, but I needed to compose myself first. I wanted to tell her about Mildred Solomon, but that would lead to the Infant Home and the experiments, the medical library and Dr. Feldman’s article. I hesitated, adding up all the minutes it would take to tell her the whole story. Maybe I could cut it short, stop at Dr. Solomon arriving on Fifth?

I hadn’t realized the line was still open until the operator spoke up, asking if I wanted to make another call. I wouldn’t say anything about anything, I decided, just be comforted by her voice in my ear. I asked for long-distance, gave the number in Miami, and listened to it ring. No one answered. Out by the pool again, or maybe at the beach? I pictured her gathering seashells on the sand, oblivious to my needing her. I’m not sure how long I stood there before I gave up and put down the receiver.

It was just as well. I didn’t want to worry her with my wild speculations—better to wait until after my appointment, when I’d have something definitive to say. I grabbed some leftover tuna salad, reminding myself to stop at the grocer’s. Sitting at the kitchen table, I sorted through the mail: a bill from New York Telephone, a statement from her bank, a flyer from the furniture store down the block, and an invitation addressed to me from Mr. and Mrs. Berger of Teaneck, New Jersey. Tearing open the envelope, I saw Vic’s son, Larry, was having his bar mitzvah. After three girls, no wonder they were making it a big occasion. They must be inviting everyone they’d ever known to have gotten to my name in their address book—since Vic’s mother died, we’d exchanged cards at Rosh Hashanah, but nothing more.

I was stuffing the invitation back into its envelope when I saw Vic had scribbled something on the RSVP.
Hope you can come, too bad Sam couldn’t be there
. Nothing about her. If I’d been married, of course my husband would have been included. Vic knew who I lived with, even if he had no idea what it really meant. It was the same at work. The other nurses pitied me for being alone, a spinster, an old maid. It rankled that I couldn’t correct them. The lounge echoed with their ceaseless talk about husbands or boyfriends
while I swallowed my words, unable to say
I know how you feel, we had a fight last night, too
, or
I’m so excited to get home, it’s our anniversary
. They yammered and complained while I feigned interest and shared nothing. When I saw them meet their men on the street, lips turned up for a kiss in front of all the world, I hated them all a little. I might have come to hate myself, too, if I didn’t have someone of my own to come home to.

Or maybe Vic did know, or at least suspect, his exclusion an intentional rebuke. The thought made me bitter. I’d send a check with my regrets—that’s all they were really after. I’d spare myself suffering through that celebration, the single friend seated with married couples and their boisterous children, odd one out at the round table.

I set up a fan facing the couch and turned on the television, hoping a soap opera would help me pass the time. The program was irritating, all scheming wives and cheating husbands. I began nodding off. I was so tired—tired from remembering, from feeling betrayed, from being afraid. From the heat. From loneliness. No wonder I acted like a character in a paperback and kissed that librarian. I was a drowning woman flailing for anything to keep my head above water. For as long as Deborah’s mouth was on mine, I could forget about Dr. Solomon and what she’d done to me. Now it invaded every thought. I imagined myself in the X-ray room, my little body strapped to that table, the radiation penetrating my cells.

It was ridiculously early for bed, but I just wanted this day to be over. I went in to take a shower before putting on my pajamas. Standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror, there was no more avoiding it. I raised my arm above my head and felt that twinge. I’d
been skirting it all summer, favoring my other arm or keeping the elbow low when I sprayed on my deodorant. With shaking fingers, I followed the line of muscle down from my armpit and across my chest.

Only a willful act of ignorance could have prevented a nurse from diagnosing a condition so evident. How could I have been so blind? It must have been growing secretly for months, even years. But never having felt it before—the tumor, pinched between my fingers, was big as an acorn—it seemed to me it had manifested overnight, conjured into existence by Dr. Solomon’s arrival on Fifth.

I took a sleeping pill to kill the hours until morning. Getting into bed, I tried not to obsess over it, tucked my hands beneath my hips to keep from groping myself. Women had lumps all the time—benign tumors, fluid-filled cysts. I had my appointment; best to put it out of my mind until Dr. Feldman could render his verdict.

There was too much light in the room. I pulled a sleeping mask from my nightstand and settled it over my eyes. Better. Hopefully, the next thing I knew it would be morning and I could set my course for the Old Hebrews Home. I pictured my patients, how helpless they were, how they counted on me to keep them clean and safe, to take away their pain. How would one of them feel—how would Mildred Solomon feel—if I treated her like a laboratory animal instead of a person? She had a lot to answer for. What would she say, I wondered, when I confronted her with what her experiments had done to me? She’d have to be apologetic; sorry, at least, for not knowing then the harm X-rays could do. They thought radium would be a cure for cancer, not the cause of it. But
once she saw how she had damaged me, what choice would she have but contrition?

I was imagining our conversation until I remembered that, at her prescribed dose of morphine, she’d be too incoherent to understand, let alone speak. I still had that vial in my pocketbook from the morphine I’d held back. I would have to hold back more if I wanted to prod her into consciousness. I’d never gone against a prescription before yesterday—even when I knew a doctor was wrong, I always followed orders. The idea of toying with Mildred Solomon’s dose gave me a secret sense of power. Instead of counting sheep, I fell asleep figuring out how to adjust her dose to get what I wanted from her. It would be my own little experiment.

Chapter Nine