Die Once Live Twice (21 page)

A half-block later, at the clinic, a crowd of women was gathered around three wooden tables lined up together to form one long table, filled end-to-end with food. “An old-fashioned Iowa church-basement potluck,” Marion gushed. She began to mingle with the women, thanking them with kisses on both cheeks. Angelo kept hold of her hand and translated for the Italians. Rabbi Radulovic—Rabbi Rad, as Marion quickly nicknamed him—translated for the Russian-Jewish ladies.

Each of the women offered her special dish to Jonathan and Marion as they walked past the table, and soon their plates were heaped with food. A card table covered with a white sheet and surrounded by four chairs stood at the entrance to the clinic, and Park was already there, attended by more women from the neighborhood. He was already eating when Jonathan and Marion were led up to him. Jonathan helped Marion to her seat and then took his own, sweeping his hand toward his burgeoning plate. “You’ve got to eat it all, too,” Park said. “The women are watching to be sure you like their food the best!”

“I’m not sure what’s worse, serum sickness or the stomachache this will give me,” Jonathan quipped.

“Trust me—choose the stomach,” Marion said.

An Italian man with a bushy mustache and a clean shirt approached the table. With a flourish he set down four chipped cups and removed the cork from a bottle of red wine. He pointed to himself and then to the wine. Angelo chirped, “This is Gino. He say this his own wine. He offer to you.”

“Grazie,” all three said and clapped for Gino. The wine was poured into the cups, then Gino tilted his cup at the three guests, saying “Salut,” and motioned for them to drink. All four drank together and Jonathan thought he had swallowed fire. He glanced at Marion, who was swallowing hard and fast to avoid gagging. Park’s face was ashen and his eyes almost glazed. Jonathan raised his cup and smiled at Gino. “Bene, bene,” he said with gusto. Gino poured himself and Jonathan one more cup each, touched his cup to Jonathan’s and chugged. Jonathan knew he must do the same.
My God, I hope it doesn’t burn coming out the bottom end like it does going in the top end.
Thankfully, Gino left the bottle on the table and departed.

“They haven’t given up killing you two,” Marion said, raising an eyebrow. “They’re just using a different poison!” The women watching them cheered at their laughter.

Jonathan turned serious and spoke to Park. “Bill, while I was at home I spent hours pondering why we can’t get support for vaccination. I know there’s nothing we can do about the religions like that Sweden-something...”

“Swedenborgianism,” Park interjected.

“Yes. Which believes injections contaminate the soul. I just want all these Catholics and Jews in this ward to accept the inoculations.”

“Jonathan, medicine has never had any cultural authority in this country. It is the same in the homelands of these immigrants. I don’t think we will reach the status of European countries like Germany, France, and England until we have a disciplined educational system that produces scientifically trained doctors.”

“There are two solutions to this lack of authority, Doctor Park,” Marion said. “Your solution is the foundation for permanent respect. But mine is the solution for now. We need to be trusted by all the people we serve. I think Jonathan’s teacher, William Osler, calls it the art of medicine.”

“If we don’t have it now, after the lives we have saved, how do we get it?” Park asked.

Jonathan leaped in. “By being here every day for them. By showing we care, that we are concerned for their health. Once a week is never going to earn their trust.”

“Jonathan, I have a Department of Health that I have to run for Biggs. You have laboratory work at Rockefeller Institute. We don’t have time to do that.”

“I can do it,” Marion said.

Park raised an eyebrow at her, but asked gently, “What do you know about running a medical clinic, Marion? This isn’t a musical where you have a score and the script. This is something new every day, with more boos than cheers.”

“Face it, Doctor Park, your scientific treatments haven’t earned you much trust from these people, and there aren’t that many treatments I have to learn! The caring and concern, the individual attention that create the art of medicine is simply a woman’s touch,” Marion answered. “I’m unemployed now, so I’m going to come and show them someone from scientific medicine cares enough to be here every day.”

Park blushed. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Jonathan said, “Just wait until the reviews get published. Marion will be a star!”

“I can’t imagine the reviews. But if I succeed it will be my quint-essential achievement.”

“Wow. I didn’t know a girl from Des Moines knew such a big word!” Jonathan smiled.

“I’m a librarian, remember?” Marion answered.

“When does this begin?” Park asked.

“Today,” Marion said as she stood. “And I have people to talk to, so I’ll bid you good day, Doctor Park.”

Chapter Twenty-one

M
arion had come to New York expecting to perform on a stage in an ornate theatre, looking at boxes and balconies filled with adoring fans standing and cheering for an encore. Her day would end with a sweeping bow and glamorous company. But now her stage was a small, dark, three-room house converted into a clinic, and her audience was pale, feverish, and rarely cheerful. The front room held the registration desk, waiting chairs and the triage area. The small bedroom had three cots separated by sheets hung from wire strung on the ceiling. Marion’s new office was a small desk in the kitchen, where water boiled on the stove to sterilize scissors and forceps. Jonathan had added a room with a flush toilet and a shower, but the outhouse still stood in the back.

Marion carried a pistol in her purse, but each day as she walked through the tenements Gino would leave his porch with a “G’morn’, Mrs. Dottore” and serve as her bodyguard. She brought her Midwest work ethic to the tenements and within a month she had forged some order. She hired two nurses, one Italian and one Jewish, who taught her basic nursing, showed her how to give inoculations, and translated for her. Marion purchased lights for every room. “At least we should see who we are treating, even if I don’t know why or how we are to treat them!” She hired Rabbi Radulovic to provide transportation to a hospital for the really sick. All day long he had a horse and a buckboard with a driver available at the temple a block away.

Angelo hung around the clinic for hours on end and finally Marion gave him jobs to do so that he was not always underfoot. Marion had him scrub the clinic walls with alcohol. “I don’t know what a patient came here with, but no one is leaving with something new.” She quickly fell in love with his enthusiasm, intelligence, and charm. After the hectic pace of the first month slowed, she wondered why he wasn’t in school. “Angelo, what grade are you in?”

“Grade? No school, Dottore. Help mama.”

“School, Angelo!” Marion commanded, pointing her index finger straight at his face. “You are to start Father Padraig’s school tomorrow. I will help Lucia.” Marion hired Lucia as a nurse’s aide to insure that there was money for Lucia’s family. Angelo could continue to work at the clinic after school.

The clinic forced Marion to evolve. In Des Moines, her father was a lawyer and she never lacked for food or clothes, though neither was ever fancy. But the whole state had fewer citizens than New York City. Her world was her neighborhood, where she and her friends played after school, and she walked everywhere, though never very far. Her girlfriends married local men who worked in the family business, usually linked to farming. But her soprano voice thrilled people, and it took her to Drake for college and then bought her a ticket to New York City. The city opened her eyes to wealth. The clothes were pretty, the hats flamboyant. The people she met in the theater taught her the ways of the city so that by the time she married Jonathan her conversion to socialite was complete.

She had expected Ward 19 to resemble a poor section of Iowa. “Slum” was a word from her literature courses at Drake. These people had no jobs, no certainty of food each day, committed petty crimes for money, and lived with thirty families in a single dwelling. For them, suffering was an everyday experience.

But after a month in this tenement clinic, Marion understood why Jonathan would not give it up. In the theater she had given people pleasure for an evening, and perhaps they would remember her music for a week, but then she faded from their minds. Her music did not change their lives. But in the clinic, a baby’s life was saved with an inoculation or a child’s with a vaccine. She could save a whole family from typhus by teaching them hygiene. It was a performance that made a difference for a lifetime, not a week.

Though she knew little medicine, she realized that no one knew enough. In the summer of 1908, children were sick with unfamiliar symptoms. Lucia’s friend Maria brought her boy Vincent on a hot August morning that happened to be Jonathan’s weekly clinic day. He was suturing a cut on a teenage boy’s arm in the kitchen when Marion had five-year-old Vincent laid on one of the three cots in their treatment room. “She says he has a bad headache and backache, Marion,” Lucia translated. “He won’t eat and he has an upset stomach. He cried all night.”

Marion said sympathetically, “We have two or three children a day with these symptoms, muscle aches and bad stomach. Have you seen anything like this before?”

“No, Dottore Marion. This is new this summer. Seems like it is mostly boys.”

“Are the boys playing somewhere different than the girls? Could they be exposed to some germ the girls aren’t?”

“No. They play in streets. Same streets.”

Vincent said he needed to go the toilet and when his mother Maria stood him up he crumpled to the floor. He tried to push himself up but his legs were jelly. Maria covered her mouth and wailed as Marion and Lucia lifted Vincent back to bed. Marion went to Jonathan while Lucia helped Vincent pee in a bottle.

Jonathan listened to Vincent’s history and examined his legs. “It is infantile paralysis. Is this the first boy you had with paralysis?” he asked Marion.

“The first one for me.”

“There were a lot of cases in New York last summer,” Jonathan said. “Maybe as many as two thousand cases. Before that, there were only scattered reports of it. It seems to occur only in the summer, and usually with boys five years old and younger. Simon Flexner has made it a priority, so there’s a special project at the Rockefeller Institute for it.”

“What causes it?” Marion asked.

“A viral infection. I think. The germ can’t be seen with the microscope so that’s why I think it’s a virus.”

Flexner was interested in the disease because it caused paralysis, which struck fear into the heart of New Yorkers. Although tuberculosis and smallpox caused many more deaths in children, caring for a crippled child was a particular hardship for these families. The social need compelled the Institute to study the disease, and everyone hoped Flexner could repeat the success he’d had in curing meningitis. Flexner was confident that the virus causing infantile paralysis entered the body through the nose and infected the olfactory nerves leading to the brain.

Marion’s need, however, was immediate. “But what do I do with Vincent?” she demanded. “What do I tell Maria?”

Jonathan shook his head. “I don’t know, Marion. I just don’t know. There is nothing we can do. Either it reverses spontaneously or the boy is permanently paralyzed. We need to send him to Willard Hospital. They have a special ward for these kids. We’ll have to quarantine Maria’s building.”

“We had a Jewish boy last week who couldn’t swallow. We sent him to Willard Hospital. Audrey says Rabbi told her the boy died. Is it the same disease?”

“Yes. Less common, but more lethal. That’s called bulbar paralysis. The chest muscles get paralyzed, so the child can’t breathe.”

“This disease is dreadful. If I get paralyzed, shoot me. Right now, I’m glad that you and I don’t have children or they might get it. Do all children have these same symptoms?”

“I’m not sure of the range of symptoms, honey. We will have to learn by keeping track of the patients and their symptoms. Hire someone to keep records of all the patients. We’ll sort it out when we have numbers.”

“Angelo could do that. It will make him feel important and he can use the skills he’s learning in school. But oh, I sure would like to talk to that Doctor Flexner. I could light a fire under him.”

Jonathan laughed. “He’s not the most approachable of individuals. He likes to give orders, not take them. And whatever he says, goes.”

Marion raised her finger. “We’ll see about that.”

“I was born on Christmas,” Marion told William Welch, the guest of honor at the Sullivans’ Christmas party.

“I’ve never known anyone born on that day. How did your parents synthesize your birthday party and Christmas celebration?”

“Oh, they just always made me feel special. I always got to be Mary in the church nativity play. That’s where I first knew I liked acting. Christmas has always been a special week.”