Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (22 page)

“It is good to have something to fall back on these days,” Pauline said, guiding Dora deeper into the parlor. “I'd sell it all — even my mother's wedding dress — to feed the children.”

“You have children?” Dora blushed, regretting the question immediately. She should have known this about her hostess or had the good sense to keep quiet.

Pauline nodded. “Two.”

Dora sat, crossed one knee over the other, and rested her hands on her legs. She tried to piece together the conversation her arrival had interrupted.

The larger of the two pregnant women, Elizabeth, her dress a thick, dusty curtain around her abdomen, had been holding forth on some sort of illness. Fatigue? Morning sickness? She did not summarize the symptoms for Dora, but she did turn to her as she continued her story. As she spoke, she rubbed her belly, almost as if the rounded form belonged to a lap cat, a surprisingly soft, warm thing.

“I've felt much better since I began taking it. One glass a day. And it's not so expensive when you compare the cost to Carlsbad or Wiesbaden, which,” she added hastily, “we could never afford.”

Pauline turned to Dora. “The Revigator,” she explained kindly, offering the plate of sandwiches — canned ham, sliced thin. “Elizabeth purchased a Radium Ore Revigator.”

“Have you seen them?” Elizabeth asked, addressing Dora now as well. “They're quite pretty, really, a pottery crock, lovely glaze, small enough to fit in a cabinet, though I prefer to keep it out on the tabletop.”

“No,” Dora took a sandwich, though she could not imagine eating it, even now that she no longer adhered to the laws of
kashruth.
She didn't want to draw attention to herself. Stew had assured her that no friend of his would say the things she'd overheard that second night of their marriage, but the words still hung in her thoughts.

“Inside they're lined with radium,” Elizabeth continued, “and the water absorbs it. You can taste the radiation, almost like anise. Do you like licorice? I adore it. And it has the most wondrous curative properties.”

“It travels throughout the body,” Rose added. She had a foreign accent, one Dora noticed but could not place. A narrow stretch of white cloth-covered buttons ran from her neck to her hips. “And cures all impurities. It's a wonder for rheumatism and gout, though we're all far too young to know!”

“Of course!” Pauline said. “But we have other complaints. Does it help for cramps? Headache?”

Elizabeth nodded, and Rose confirmed in her oddly inflected voice. “Everything.”

Pauline turned to Dora, “Rose's husband is a doctor.”

“It's how I got pregnant,” Rose said. “We were having no luck till we started.”

“Pregnant,” Dora echoed, feeling obliged to participate in the conversation. “Stew doesn't want children till the economy's better.” At once, she felt rude, insulting. She should merely have listened, as she did in the café.

“You
are
brave to have children now,” Pauline said graciously. “It's been very hard on us, and we have only two.”

Dora nibbled the crust of her sandwich. Her father had scarcely made a living teaching Hebrew before the market crashed, and her parents had three boarders as of the last time she saw Rivka nearly a month earlier. Rivka would not take money, forcing angry Yiddish words from Dora's lips — words she'd sworn never again to utter. She was an American now. Look! She sat among American women! She no longer had to sneak out of the house or wash her hair with kerosene to fight the lice that flourished in the close tenement buildings. She did not wear a
sheitel,
the wig her mother would never abandon. But Dora knew that her mother was a prisoner beneath the woven hair, a permanent outsider. Rivka would be too, if she didn't work harder to assimilate.

“Even cancer,” Rose added. “Inject radium into the organ — the liver or kidneys — and it kills the diseased cells. The cancerous cells first, that is, faster than any other cure.”

“Rose!” Pauline exclaimed.

“Pauline's squeamish,” Elizabeth said. A morsel of fat hung from her lip.

“I am not, it's just —” Pauline laughed. “We should all get a Revigator, don't you think? Promote
healthy
drinking.”

“That is what we're here to talk about.” Elizabeth took another bite of her sandwich. “Always seem to forget, don't we?”

D
ORA FOUND A
whole shelf of Radium Ore Revigators at the shop Rose recommended. In fact, the store sold nothing but radium cures: a Vigoradium, a Standard Radium Emanator, a Health Fountain, the Radium Apparatus, and the Lifetime Radium Water Jug. Glass cabinets filled with bottles of radium tonics, tablets, and creams lined every wall of the shop. The Ra-Tor Plac, encased in cherrywood, promised to perfectly radiate water with its rays, while the Linarium, which came with a special offer coupon, would instantly sooth sore muscles. The shop was new and clean, the walls and floor so white that the daylight seemed brighter inside than out.

“May I help you?” The clerk, a short man with a pleasant smile and dark hair on his knuckles, handed Dora a glass of water. “On the house,” he said. “You're looking a little peaked.”

“I'm not ill,” Dora said. She'd walked to the shop, two
miles, perhaps. The early-spring wind blew through the avenues, gaining speed and strength and striking her skin like a castigatory slap. The night before, she dreamed that Stew's mother had called him, and he packed a day bag and slipped out the front window. Waking alone, Dora carried the nightmare into the day, and it took many minutes before she dispelled it. Stew's mother had died in the Spanish flu epidemic when Stew was only seven. He never spoke of it. The past is the past, he said. It is behind us.

Dora considered the clerk.

“One can always be better,” he said, extending a hand in greeting. She took a sip of the water, which tasted like licorice, only it sizzled on her tongue.

“I would like a Revigator,” she said.

“Yes! A wonderful contraption. I have one at home.” The clerk gestured to the shelf of crocks. “The company makes a whole line of products — not a complaint they can't address. Just yesterday we received a radium suppository!” He shrugged and laughed, as if embarrassed, though his words fell smooth and practiced from his lips. “I tried one myself, and I've never felt better. Good for a man's drives. Is your husband …”

“No,” Dora said.

“Yes, of course. I did not mean to imply … Many young women are too shy to mention … We have other cures. Perhaps you feel depressed?”

The clerk's eyes probed hers. He was a salesman, the type her mother, who spent hours selecting fruits and vegetables, always complained about. What she couldn't afford, she claimed was rotten — the food itself or, more often, the salesman. Dora laughed. No, she was not depressed. She had a good husband, a fine home. When she looked in the mirror, she smiled.

“Just the Revigator,” she said.

“The cures are all half-price when you buy two. We have creams for the complexion, tablets for stomach ailment, shampoo for thicker, shinier hair, soap for the bath, cream to soften a man's beard, machines to radiate the air —”

“For pregnancy?” Dora asked, the decision quick on her lips.

“I'll wrap it for you.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-nine fifty.”

Her mother would have bargained, threatened to leave the shop before paying even a reasonable price. Yet Dora had money from her sewing. And her husband was building a skyscraper, the tallest in the world. She did not need to haggle, could not imagine that Pauline or Elizabeth or Rose would bother.

“Thank you,” she said, and the clerk extended his hand.

• • •

D
ORA PLACED THE
Revigator on the dining room table, a centerpiece in the otherwise sparsely furnished room. The instructions, folded inside the clay pot, promised that the water would instantly take on charge, providing immediate relief to all lame muscles, rheumatism, neuritis, sciatica, lumbago — conditions she had never heard mentioned before. She waited to drink it, deciding not to try the Revigator water by herself. Instead she prepared a shepherd's pie: chopped beef, potatoes, carrots. Vegetables crunched beneath her knife. She'd made the dish before, already it felt routine, hers, a lesson she had learned and mastered.

The knock on the door surprised her, and she wiped her hands and checked her reflection in the metal mixing bowl. She looked more tired than usual, though the curvature distorted her features enough that she was not sure. The knock came again. She untied her apron, folded it quickly.

At the door stood her sister, Rivka, wearing the same dress she'd worn the last time she visited, a cream-colored sack with short, puffy sleeves and a wide collar. She cradled a cloth sack in her arms.

Dora opened the door wider so her sister could come inside, but Rivka waited on the front stoop. Her sister was six years older than Dora, old enough that when the family arrived in New York, she had gone to work instead of school. Now she could sew beautifully, but she could not write.

“Come in,” Dora urged, and this time Rivka stepped inside. “Sit down.”

From the dining room came the sound of the
Will Rogers
broadcast. A female, a perfect southern belle, said, “My mother said I had to go,” and a man laughed. Dora turned off the radio, took two glasses from the cupboard, and joined her sister in the dining room.

“I brought these.” Rivka handed Dora the sack, filled with homemade challah, jars of whitefish, and the pickles Dora had loved as a child. The bread, light as beaten egg, scented the air with its sweetness. Dora breathed deeply, smiled.

“We heard you are getting thin,” Rivka said.

Even though Dora had moved uptown, she could not escape the reach of her mother's gossip circle: old women, whose heads bobbed sadly, sharing tales of past and present, united only by troubles. Ivan's lost job, the Cossacks who plundered his garment shop in Ostrog, the rising price of fish, the synagogue destroyed in Gusyatin the night before the boat left, the daughter, Dvoirah, who married a
shaygetz.
The others felt pity for Dora's mother, for her loss. What daughter would treat her family so?

“You tell them I'm well.” Dora poured water for Rivka, cut the bread, which she offered, though her sister did not accept.

“Are you well?” Rivka's large brown eyes had faint lines
on either side. Already she looked more like their mother. Her cheeks had the same tightness, high cheekbones protruding as if seeking escape. Her hair had lines of gray; her lips turned downward. She looked old.

“How's Father?” Dora asked.

“The same.”

“Mother?”

“She misses you. You should visit.”

Dora nodded, though she knew that she would not return to the old flat or endure the neighbor's stares, or her father's sworn silence. Hester Street was a memory, fading.

“Try the water,” Dora said. “It has radium in it.”

“I'm not thirsty.”

“It cures everything.”

“I've heard. We hear the same news downtown.” Rivka held her cup of water up, observing it. “What do you have that needs curing?”

The flat felt oddly silent, the space too large for the sisters who, growing up, had shared a single dim room. A thick curtain had shielded them from the boarders: Bais, who snored louder than a whistling kettle; Akiva, who liked to scold the girls for no reason; Ivan, who always ate more than his share. Now even the dining table seemed immense, pushing the sisters far apart. Dora did not need this space, could not fill it. She chewed the challah. Seeing Rivka made her feel selfish. How could she have left home
for an empty, unknown place? Guilt stole the flavor from her mother's bread. Her family could not afford this gift, should not send food when they struggled to provide for themselves.

What do you have that needs curing?
With the question came dusk, and night would soon follow. Dora would take her new tonic, await her new husband, serve dinner, clean dishes, and retire. What did she have that needs curing?

“I'm pregnant,” she lied, looking away.

“
Mazaltov
,” Rivka said, raising her glass and tipping it to her lips. She smiled, though Dora felt that her sister knew the lie for what it was, nothing, a wish, a dream, a hasty answer to a question she could not otherwise answer. “Congratulations.”

“It's a secret,” Dora said. She already saw the girl, dark hair pulled back in a braid, in the kitchen with a bowl, a book, a necklace — counting the gold links of the chain.

When Rivka left, she hugged Dora and promised to come again soon, just as she had a month before.

“
Zayt gezunt,
” she said. Be well.

S
TEW SAID HE
ached when Dora asked about his day over dinner. He'd lifted more than ten men did, he said, and his muscles were tighter than fastened bolts. Dora felt the tissue rising knotted and hard beneath his white shirt.

“Have some water,” she said.

Together she and Stew drank water, he reading the instructions, she explaining that Rose and Elizabeth used the Revigator daily. He admitted to feeling better, said being with her alone would have been enough.

“Am I enough?” She rubbed his shoulders, the remains of the shepherd's pie still cooling on the table.

He watched her for a moment, blue eyes reading her face. The tonic had brought a flush to her cheeks, and she felt warmth in her stomach, near her womb. The little girl would sit at the table soon, swinging her legs, anxious for word that she could be excused. That girl was only a few years away, waiting for Dora to hold her, teach her, allow her the childhood denied young Dvoirah.

“Peter fell today,” Stew said, “from the scaffolding.”

Her grasp tightened on her husband's shoulders. Her fingers pressed hard, forcing him down. The child would have looked up from the floor, where she sat, legs crossed, counting lentils, sorting the lighter from the dark, forming small piles. This news would have upset her. How easily it could have been Stew. How easily he could have slipped away.