The Oriental Wife (14 page)

It was seven weeks since the birth. Everyone had been mindful of the danger; the obstetrician had sent Rolf a letter enumerating the risks—herniation, excessive intracranial pressure, pituitary malfunction—although he hadn’t specified what the
results of these might be. In the event, although Louisa’s contractions had come in irregular, violent patterns over a period of forty-three hours, and she lost far too much blood, both mother and baby came through all right. Franz had been with Rolf in the waiting room—the obstetrician had long since turned the case over to a resident and gone home to rest—when a plump, boyish-looking man in sweat-stained surgical whites had come through the swinging doors, a broad grin on his face, and told Rolf in a Southern accent, “You got yourself a baby daughter. All her fingers and toes, and she can scream like anything. So don’t worry, okay?” Reporting back to Sophie the following day, Franz said that this was the moment when he began to believe in America.

The hospital kept them there for a week, while Louisa was recovering. Everyone had been optimistic then, everyone had predicted that things would be right as rain, as one of the nurses put it: Louisa even tried the expression on Jeannette, who came and sat by her bed, twisting her hands in her lap, as Louisa waited for them to bring her the baby. Dr. Seidelbaum was monitoring things from his own hospital, farther downtown; he phoned Rolf to congratulate him on the birth and tell him about an article on his new procedure in the
Journal of Neurosurgery
. His father had emigrated from Stuttgart in 1909, he told Rolf; Rolf should call him Leo.

Louisa herself was hectic with gaiety, laughing at everything. In the month that she was back in the apartment, before heading downtown to Dr. Seidelbaum’s hospital, Rolf would wake in the night and lie there listening, half expecting to hear her sobbing in the dark, but it was only Emma who cried—Louisa said the moment she looked at her she knew she was an Emma—and then Rolf would get up and warm
her bottle. Louisa slept more heavily in those weeks than Rolf had ever known her to, he had to shake her sometimes to bring her back to consciousness. There was always a moment when he was afraid he could not rouse her, but then there she was, radiant with happiness.

On the morning of the day she had to check into Mount Sinai, Louisa lifted Emma high into the air and lowered her to her face, kissing her with loud smacks, while Emma squealed with delight. The babysitter, an Irish girl from the neighborhood whose chief training had been as the eldest of twelve children, wished her luck. “I really really hope it’ll all go okay today. I’m going to say a prayer for you.” Louisa smiled a vague secret smile, as though amused at this burst of fervor. It was hard for Rolf to know any more what she was thinking.

Rolf carried her suitcase, packed with three nightgowns and several paperback books as well as her toothbrush and makeup. Franz was waiting in a taxi downstairs. Complex negotiations, mostly out of Louisa’s earshot, had been conducted about who should accompany them to the hospital; Sophie had persuaded Jeannette that the two of them would be needed to keep an eye on the babysitter, who had never been alone with Emma for more than a few hours before. Otto had written to Rolf and offered to come. He had been discharged from the navy at last and was living in California, about to get married to an émigré teacher he had met shortly before shipping out for the Pacific, who had been writing to him throughout the war. He mustn’t come, Rolf had told him, not yet, anyway; he mustn’t leave his fiancée so soon after they’d been reunited. But the night before, Louisa had phoned him—to congratulate him, she said—and talked to
him for what seemed like a long time. Rolf didn’t know what they’d said to each other.

The cab driver, who had just returned from visiting his daughter in Minnesota, told them New York was no fit place for human beings to live. When Louisa said she loved New York, he turned around to look at her and said it was funny, she didn’t look like a crazy person. Then he swung onto Broadway and speeded up. There was a large dray horse pulling a flatbed cart on the other side of the road, something they all agreed they had never seen there before. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could get Emma a pony, Louisa said dreamily. Franz took her hand and squeezed it.

The waiting room in the maternity ward uptown had not yet been rescued from wartime austerity; its mismatched chairs, in various grimy checks and tweeds, had looked like discards from various basements. The one in Dr. Seidelbaum’s hospital was airy and opulent, flooded with light. There were Persian carpets in deep reds and blues, curved chintz sofas, matching drapes held back with woven red ropes. It was like wandering into a model living room at B. Altman’s, lacking only certain personal touches—knickknacks, photographs, domestic clutter—to bring it to life. Rolf and Franz sat opposite each other on the two sofas, each of them composing his features for the other’s sake. The operation was scheduled for eleven; it had been explained to them in advance that they would not be permitted to see Louisa until afterward. At 10:45 Dr. Seidelbaum bounded in, dressed in his street clothes, and greeted Rolf exuberantly. Rolf introduced him to Franz, and instead of shaking Franz’s hand he held both of his own up to him. “See? Completely steady. No shakes.” He explained to Franz, as he had to Rolf, that his father had
emigrated from Stuttgart in 1909; Franz did his best to seem enthusiastic. He had never been to Stuttgart. He had been to Heidelberg, to Frankfurt, to Hamburg, to Berlin, but never to Stuttgart. Dr. Seidelbaum asked him if he knew they used a saw, an actual saw, to cut through the skullbones. Franz said he didn’t. The doctor squeezed Rolf’s shoulder before turning to go. “Relax,” he said. “It’ll all be over soon.”

Rolf had brought a book with him, a heavy, navy blue volume that he opened on his lap as soon as the doctor had left. Every few minutes he turned a page. Franz took a copy of
Life
from the coffee table and spent the next hour looking at photographs, unable to comprehend the captions. He would never know in what country someone had photographed an emaciated dog lying on whitewashed steps, or where the men were fighting in the streets, or whom the monks were praying for. He paused at an advertisement for Alka-Seltzer, and a smaller one for false teeth, two smiling fair-haired people with their arms entwined. Meanwhile the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner, with its handsome gold face, seemed to be growing louder.

When Dr. Seidelbaum returned the sun was streaming in through the picture window; Franz could not see his face properly. The man sat down next to Rolf, putting his head in his very clean hands. Immediately, in some part of his mind, Franz thought, he’s an actor, this one. “Is she dead?” Rolf asked.

The surgeon looked up. No, no, he said, it was nothing like that. “We’ve succeeded in removing the tumor. She’s absolutely out of danger.” Then he returned his head to his hands. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“What is it?” Rolf asked sharply. “Tell me.”

Dr. Seidelbaum let out a long breath. He did not excuse himself, he said, he alone was responsible. But the tumor had extended farther into the ganglia than he’d thought. He had had to cut into the gray matter. In ridding her of it certain nerves had been severed in her brain.

“Which nerves?”

He wasn’t sure yet. An optic nerve, certainly, but apart from that, he wouldn’t care to speculate. They would have to wait until she woke. The morbidity might be considerable.

Then he said, “You don’t have to pay me,” but Rolf said he had sent the check the day before. After that nobody spoke for a long minute. Franz listened to the clock. When it seemed that Rolf was not going to break the silence, he asked if he could go to her. As a child she’d been prey to nightmares; if he heard her cry out he had always tried to get to her first, before Jeannette or the grumpy nursemaid could scold her for waking them; he would turn on the light and sit on her bed, holding her tight. It was mice she used to dream of then, or Russian soldiers. He did not want her waking now to an empty room, to blindness or deafness or whatever this bouncy young man had inflicted on her.

Dr. Seidelbaum said he would take them to her; she might be coming to already. It was Franz, again, who asked the questions. What was
morbidity
? “Damage,” said Dr. Seidelbaum. What had the doctor meant by
considerable
? “We can only speculate until we know what to expect.” At the very least, Dr. Seidelbaum said, her ambulatory functions would be impaired. It was a question of degree. “And at the very most?” Franz asked. But the doctor did not answer that one. Instead he led them down the corridor, ushered them into an elevator, steered them down another hall, and pushed open a
door. Louisa was lying on a gurney in a brightly lit, salmon pink room, a sheet pulled up to her neck, her head swathed in a neat little cap of bandages—like the green turban she sometimes wore, with a small gold pin on it, only this was white. There were dark hollows under her eyes, her face looked much thinner than the day before, as though the operation had drained the flesh from her bones. Dr. Seidelbaum felt her wrist and pulled up her right eyelid. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.

The two men approached the bed together. It seemed to Franz that Louisa was struggling to wake; she gave a little moan, her eyelids fluttered; then she went to sleep again. Meanwhile Rolf hung back, looking over Franz’s shoulder. Franz could feel his fear, he wanted to say something to him, but he could not take his eyes off Louisa. A minute later she opened her eyes and gave him a lopsided smile, seeming to recognize him. It appeared that the doctor had been wrong after all. But when Franz reached down to take her hand, which was lying on the sheet, it was stiff and lifeless in his own. He squeezed it harder, and then harder, waiting to feel some pressure in return, but she only went on looking at him, smiling that same half-smile. He tried to lift her hand to his face, in order to kiss it, and discovered that it would not bend.

A
fterward, of course, when the doctor had returned and the necessary experts had been summoned, the real assessment could begin. Within twenty-four hours, they had ascertained the precise extent of motor function impairment: weakness in the left leg, paralysis of the left arm (it was unfortunate that Louisa had been left-handed, a propensity Jeannette had tried to rid her of throughout her childhood). The damage to her sight was quickly identified: blindness in the left eye, the right only minimally affected. It was the left side of her mouth that drooped too, causing a certain slurring in her speech. The balance problems were trickier to quantify—a whole battery of tests was required. And it would never be fully determined how much the other changes, the unmistakable decrease in charm, the vagueness and timidity, were due to cortical deficits, and which might have been avoided had other circumstances been different.

Dr. Seidelbaum, on the grounds that none of this was his area of expertise, turned the case over to the neurologists and the physiotherapists, who, in consultation with each other, decided that the patient should be sent home as soon as possible, rather in the spirit, as one of them explained to Rolf, of throwing a child into water to teach her how to swim. Meanwhile more permanent arrangements had to be made for the care of the real child, the infant Emma, whom Katy from the
neighborhood had no intention of looking after permanently. Babysitting was strictly her part-time vocation; she was taking classes in cosmetology, she explained to Rolf, who had to ask her what that meant. Two of her sisters were roped in. But Deirdre was surly, Maureen washed Emma’s face with a dirty flannel, and she got an eye infection. It was this situation that Sophie, in consultation with Franz, had determined to amend.

The last time Sophie had gone to Bogardus Place, Maureen was squatting on the living room floor, changing Emma’s diaper. The baby was smeared with what looked like milk and carelessly applied powder, which was also distributed at random on the living room carpet, some in the shape of footprints where it had been trodden on. The air smelled bad; Emma was grizzling and writhing, flailing her arms about. Louisa, her useless arm folded crookedly against her chest, kept trying to rise from her armchair across the room and falling back again. Bristles of red hair were poking through on her shaven scalp, standing straight up.

Sophie waited until Maureen had finished and took the child from her, wrapping her more snugly in her none-too-clean blanket, so that she could not wriggle too much. Then she laid her carefully in Louisa’s lap, propping her against Louisa’s good arm and hovering nearby in case she started to fall. For a minute, mother and baby gazed at each other, both perfectly still, Louisa’s face alight with joy. So she feels it, what we have all felt, Sophie thought. That at least isn’t dead in her. Then the baby lifted up her arms to be held, and started to cry. Sophie took her away. The girl knocked over the tin of powder, which she’d left on the floor, and headed for the bathroom, trailing the dirty diaper behind her.

Rolf would get ill, Franz said; Rolf could not go on getting up with the baby all night and going off to work in the morning. Somehow the money must be found to pay a proper housekeeper. But even when this decision had been made, when Rolf himself had agreed, no likely candidate presented herself. Rolf had put an ad in the Sunday
Times
, without result. Gustav had tried the
Aufbau
. Jeannette, clearly unable to take on the job herself, wrung her hands and cried that there were too many situations vacant since the war, everyone was crying out for workers. Nobody wanted to look after a baby in a crowded little apartment uptown. Nursemaids were for those who lived downtown, on Sutton Place.

Sophie brought the problem to Mrs. Timpson in 5B. For several years they had been exchanging news of their soldier sons in the elevator, and Mrs. Timpson once told Sophie that her husband was the only gentleman left in the building: Gustav, it seemed, always took off his hat when he saw her. She had to put the ad in the
Daily News
, Mrs. Timpson said, the kind of person she was looking for would never read the
Times
. “You’re looking for a widow, and women only read the
Times
if their husbands get it.” Sophie took the subway to Herald Square and filled out a form; the harried-looking young woman in the classified department crossed out all the articles and charged her $3.20.