The Oriental Wife (13 page)

I
t was Rolf they consulted, not the patient. Rolf was summoned to a room with tall windows, on the top floor, the dizzying heights of the neurology department. Two bony doctors, professorial types in hairy jackets, met him at the elevator and escorted him there. They had already arranged for him to go, the very next day, to a doctor on Park Avenue, a Dr. Channing, who was a leading expert in the field.

After he left them he came and sat by Louisa’s bedside, drawing up the pink visitor’s chair and speaking in a measured voice, very low, to keep the women in the other two beds from overhearing. Louisa listened in silence, her mouth trembling slightly, as though with the effort of concentrating on his words, which weren’t his at all: meningioma, basal ganglia, occipital lobe.

“It’s all right,” she said then, sounding cross, “you can talk in a normal voice. Really.” She looked around at the other beds. “It won’t matter if they hear, they won’t understand what you’re saying either.”

When he had finished, she asked if they could save the baby.

“What do you mean?”

“If I die.”

“You’re not going to die,” he told her, too quickly.

“What did they say about the baby?”

“They said it would be fine. Absolutely fine.”

“No they didn’t,” she said, in a voice so tender he could hardly bear it. “You’re making it up.”

“They said the heartbeat was normal.”

“And what else?”

“They said it seemed perfectly healthy.”

“You’re lying to me. I can tell because you lie so badly.”

“I’m not. They don’t think the tumor will affect it.”

“But they’re not sure.”

“I suppose not.”

She asked him to feel the baby. He got up from the chair and sat on the edge of her bed, while she guided his hand onto her stomach. Immediately, the baby kicked. “It feels fine,” he said. “It feels exactly the same.”

In fact he could not remember how it had felt before.

“Are you a lucky man, Mr. Furchgott?” Dr. Channing asked him the next morning. “Because I’m afraid it’s ultimately a matter of luck.” He was a tall, plump, beautiful man with snow-white hair and the radiant pink skin of an infant. There were hunting prints and maps of the ancient world on his office walls, and a large brass letter opener lying on his handsome desk, which he tapped on the blotter as he answered Rolf’s questions.

Only when Rolf asked about the baby did Dr. Channing look slightly annoyed. If the tumor had been discovered earlier, he said, he would have recommended a termination. As things stood, it was hard to say, really, what damage might have been caused. The oxygen supply to the fetus could have been interfered with.

And what would that mean? Rolf asked.

“I can’t say with any certainty. We don’t encounter this situation very often, as you can imagine. But brain damage can’t entirely be ruled out.”

What did he mean, it couldn’t be ruled out? Was he saying the baby was brain-damaged?

“Good heavens.” Dr. Channing tapped the letter opener against his gleaming white cuff. “Nothing of the sort. The child might be perfectly normal. I only meant the possibility can’t be ruled out.” It was then that he asked whether Rolf was a lucky man.

Louisa, it seemed, had her own luck, in that the tumor was benign. They could leave the whole matter alone, if Rolf chose; the mass in the brain might remain the same size indefinitely. “On the other hand,” Dr. Channing said, shifting the letter opener into his own other hand, as though to illustrate this formulation, “it might not.” He produced a multicolored diagram of the brain, a surprisingly humble object, like an illustration for a school textbook, with what looked like sweat marks on it, from the drawer of his elegant desk. Taking up the letter opener again, he used it as a pointer. If the tumor spread to the right—a coil of grayish blue—there was a risk of blindness, whereas here on the left—a bilious yellow-green—was the center that affected speech. Then there was the purple area directly in front of where the mass was now. He tapped twice.

What happens if the tumor goes there? Rolf asked.

Dr. Channing set down the letter opener and cracked his rosy knuckles. “It all depends. Sometimes there are personality changes. Only sometimes. But we don’t want it to reach the basal ganglia, that would be a very bad business. Pressure on the basal ganglia is always a very bad business. A terminal situation.”

Again: what were the chances?

“I’m afraid there aren’t any reliable statistics.” He looked a little less cheerful now. “I will say, though, that it’s improbable—it’s not, let’s say, extremely likely—that the tumor will remain at its present size indefinitely.”

“I see.”

“Well, then,” Dr. Channing said, brightening. “Perhaps we’d better start thinking about treatment.” There was a team at Dana Farber, up in Boston, that had been using radioactive substances to shrink such tumors. “Unfortunately, they haven’t had the results they hoped for. It may be some time before we can pinpoint the cancerous cells.”

“So you wouldn’t recommend it for my wife.”

“I wouldn’t personally, no.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Dr. Channing resorted to the letter opener again, passing it deftly along his knuckles. “There’s a Dr. Seidelbaum who’s been doing some interesting work,” he said, as though he had just remembered. Dr. Seidelbaum, it seemed, had been performing a procedure of his own devising on cranial tumors. “I’m not personally acquainted with his methods, but he’s extremely well regarded.” He could make a referral if Rolf wanted; he could even phone right then and there. Though he believed, he said, raising an eyebrow, that Dr. Seidelbaum charged rather hefty fees.

Out on Seventy-ninth Street, cars seemed to be veering toward the curb; the wind had been high for days, and candy wrappers and paper cups blew merrily in the gutter; Rolf had to cram his hat down onto his head. Dr. Channing would send the X-rays to Dr. Seidelbaum, who’d agreed to see Rolf in his office the following day. Nobody, it seemed,
thought it necessary to see Louisa in person. “Oh, no, sir, I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Dr. Seidelbaum’s secretary said, a little shocked, when Rolf asked if he should bring her along.

On a bench outside the park, a red-haired boy was angling a sugar cone piled with strawberry ice cream toward the mouth of a girl who kept giggling and ducking away. The yellow cabs heading downtown obscured them from Rolf’s sight for a moment and then revealed them again, the girl holding up her hands in protest, the boy trying to zigzag the cone past them. Rolf stood staring from the other side of Fifth Avenue, his vision blurring and clearing, blurring and clearing, light coming at him in waves. Just as the girl surrendered, as she was licking the pink ice cream from her chin, she looked up and caught his eye. Immediately he swerved away, hurrying to Eightieth Street and crossing against the light. As he entered the park, a patch of red and yellow flowers, fiercely bright in the sun, made him dizzy for a moment; the vivid green of the grass brought on a nausea he could only just contain.

Louisa was being discharged; she lay on the bed in her street clothes, her shoes neatly aligned on the floor, her hat on the bedside table. The nurse had to come and take her pulse before they could leave, she said. He told her about Dr. Seidelbaum’s promising procedure, stressing his high success rate. (He made no mention of blindness, impaired speech, personality changes.) But she only nodded tiredly in response; her eyes were fixed on the painting on the wall opposite—a cheerful beach scene with striped umbrellas and blond children—and her expression was one of strained politeness; he could not even tell if she was listening.

Then she turned and looked at him. “Poor Rolf,” she said. “Poor Rolf.” She held out her hand, and he took it. “Let’s talk about something else. About other people’s problems. What was in the paper today?”

He had carried the
Times
with him onto a half-empty subway that morning, having left for the office at six to get his work done before he went to see Dr. Channing. For once he could have opened the paper out fully in front of him, instead of reading it column by folded column. But he could not summon up the interest. Seated across from him had been a squat bronze-skinned woman with a face like an Inca carving, stony with exhaustion; a crumpled shopping bag full of rags and worn-out brushes swayed at her feet. For just an instant he seemed to see into her—he felt the weight she carried inside her, he saw the dark room where she lived alone—and it made him afraid.

He might have told Louisa about her, or the couple outside the park, but he could not explain the blinding vividness of them. Instead he tried to remember the previous day’s news. The UN was under attack for failing to resolve the Iranian crisis; the Russians had vetoed the U.S. plan of action. Many members of Congress felt that America should resign. There were speeches about it in the House every day.

“Go on,” she said. She was looking at the painting again, her lips were slightly parted.

A truck strike was threatened at the city’s sugar refineries. Retail prices had gone up by 13 percent in the past year. Meat-price controls had been removed. Thousands of Jewish war veterans had marched on Washington to demand the resettlement of homeless European Jews in Palestine. President Truman had agreed to meet with them.

“Go on.”

The Civilian Production Administration was considering canceling the regulations regarding women’s clothing. Skirts might be longer again by early 1947, and sleeves wider. He’d thought she might smile at that, but her expression did not alter.

The clocks had just gone back—already, at four, it was dusk outside. On the street below, a young woman in a plaid skirt was wheeling a baby stroller; a skinny boy hardly old enough to be a father slouched protectively by her side, hands in his pockets. As they waited for the light to change, a grizzled man in a peacoat came barreling around the corner and almost slammed into them. The boy seized him by the arm, but the other shrugged him off and hurried on his way.

Again, nausea rose in him. The growth in Louisa’s brain made a certain kind of sense: it had definite meaning, required definite action; there were causes and effects to think of—even, despite Dr. Channing, the laws of probability to consider. When he listened to the doctors, his heartbeat, like the baby’s, was normal. But looking at a velvet coat on a child, an ice cream cone, a middle-aged cleaning lady, had become unsafe.

“We have forgotten there are sorrows in the world that have nothing to do with the Nazis,” Sophie had said the night before. Jeannette had told her the news. The child would need to be looked after, Sophie said briskly, while Louisa was in the hospital. If she could help in any way, he had of course only to ask.

Thank you, he said stiffly. Always before he had been the one to offer help. How was Gustav? he asked her.

“You are wondering why he doesn’t talk to you himself. As a medical man.”

No, no, he said, though the thought had crossed his mind.

“He wanted to, but I advised against it. I was afraid he might become quite emotional, it would only upset you. But he asks you to send Louisa his love.”

Of course, he told her. And how were her children?

“I am trying to explain why I will not invite you for dinner while Louisa is in the hospital. I am not sure it would be relaxation for you.”

“I understand.”

“Then we won’t speak of it again.”

He’d been relieved that he did not have to go there. He did not want to sit in that small room, with the sound of Gustav’s breathing, the smell of veal and cauliflower and damp wool, and the fog of sadness that even Sophie, so brisk and sensible, could not dispel. It was the silence, the thin air, of his office he wanted, with the door shut into the corridor. It was being alone with a yellow legal pad and a sharpened pencil and the figures Mr. Starin had asked him, once again, to review: the question had been reopened of buying the lumberyard in Oregon from which they purchased their supplies of wood. In 1938 they had missed their chance; someone else had moved more quickly, but now that buyer was himself putting it on the market—for health reasons, he said; he was recovering slowly from a heart attack. Mr. Starin wondered if that was the true and only reason.

Rolf had sat with the numbers, breaking them down every way he could think of, for half a day before Louisa took herself to the hospital. Now, as the church bell wobbled across the way and they waited for the nurse to come, his thoughts returned to them. It was clear that the business was not flourishing, but there were opportunities to be seized.
New efficiencies would be needed, they would have to achieve economies of scale, but the potential was there. The crucial figures—production for the last three quarters, margin percentages for the different lumber types—made a clearing in his mind, glowing faintly, with a pleasing luminosity. The image of a misshapen, oxygen-deprived creature growing in Louisa’s belly sank back again, into the swamp from which it had come.

M
y good Sophie. My good Sophie. You cannot take this on yourself. You will wear yourself out.”

“You talk as if I were planning to look after the child myself. I am only going to make a few arrangements.”

“Even so. It is terrible, what happened.
Schrecklich
. But this is not your responsibility.”

“Whose responsibility should it be then? Jeannette’s?”

He gave her a wounded look. “She is no better?”

“Who, Jeannette?”

“You know who I mean.”

“No.”

“
Schrecklich
,” he said again, under his breath. Sophie stood up and began clearing the table. “Think of how fast it happens,” Gustav said. “A person’s destiny decided just like that, in an instant. A life destroyed so fast. And why? For what reason?” He shook his head. “If we knew when we were born what lay in store for us, none of us would have the courage to see it through.” But Sophie, scraping the gristle from his plate into the bin under the sink, could not be thinking about destiny just then, or the courage required for existence.