Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (22 page)

As the new Yonge Street subway pulled into Bloor Street station, Sarah fainted.

“Counting the days?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Daniel grinned in agreement as he fell in beside a classmate and walked up towards the hospital. It was housed in a looming red-brick Victorian mansion perched on the far bank of the Don River, next door to the city jail. Its aging facade was covered by the desiccated brown vines of an ivy that never seemed to bud nor bloom, but did succeed in obscuring the old stone nameplate carved over the door so one could no longer read the words, The Toronto Hospital for the Isolation and Treatment of Contagious Diseases. The hospital had been established to house cholera patients in the 1830s, purposely located at some remove from the original city; then it had treated diphtheria, scarlet fever, smallpox, chicken pox, and eventually polio. Now it mostly specialized in chronic care and had been renamed the Don Hospital some years ago, but the medical students still insisted on its old nickname, the Contagion.

Daniel studied medicine well west of here, at the University of Toronto, as his father had before him, attending lectures in the same Gothic pile, laughing with his classmates on the same green campus. Medicine was the choice dictated by respect for family, by acknowledgement of what
had been sacrificed and achieved since 1891 when Daniel’s grandfather had arrived in Montreal from Poland by way of Hamburg, with no English, no French, and no money. Barely more than a teenager, he had walked the streets with a pushcart collecting rags and bones, eventually building up a garment business that he soon moved to Toronto along with his new wife, two young sons, and baby daughter. There, Grandfather Segal grew so rich that his third son could choose whatever career pleased him and so had enrolled at the university. In just two generations, the Segals had gained such peace of mind and prosperity that they now could afford altruism: medicine was the hallmark of their social achievement and their family was to produce factory owners and doctors in equal measures for years to come.

But for Daniel, medicine was also a vocation. Since his boyhood in a doctor’s home, he had felt a gentle thrill as he watched his father splint the injured paw of a stray dog and as he himself took charge of his younger brothers when they sledged down a snowy hill or sought summertime frogs in the muddy bottom of a ravine. Now, he knew the joy of benevolent power when nature obeyed his commands and a wound healed or a fever dropped, the swelling pride when a patient rallied and a mother smiled her gratitude. Daniel was both a realist and an optimist, a man who saw the world as a place that could be fixed.

Perhaps that was why he so hated, from the moment he boarded the streetcar and rode out across the Bloor Street viaduct, each day that he had clerked in infectious diseases at the Contagion, a place where little healing seemed to be going on. The halls were long and narrow, their floors covered with a cold and echoing tile, their high ceilings dimly lit. The wards were only worse. Open one of the solid oak
doors, beautiful pieces of Victorian carpentry into which windows had been hastily and badly carved at some later date so that doctors could look in on their patients, and you found stark quarters where the cracked plaster was painted an unappealing shade of green while the windows were so grimy you could not see the grounds outside. At least the first and second floors were full of bustling nurses tending to a full house, but up on the third floor in the remnants of the isolations wards, the patients looked abandoned in their bleak accommodations, a few frail figures propped up in iron beds, only three or four to a room, as though anyone so obstinately unfashionable as to catch an infectious disease in the age of vaccines and antibiotics could hardly warrant a great deal of medical attention. Indeed, the worst cases were on the remaining polio ward, where a weeping Mediterranean mother, withered with worry despite her youth, would watch and pray as a child fought the fever. Daniel felt angered by these women. The vaccine had been available for a full year now, but they had been frightened of these new medicines, or slow to take the child to the doctor for immunization, or had not understood enough English to read the letter that came in the mail, or had immigrated here only a few months ago. The sad reason would be noted somewhere on the chart. The doctors would reassure her—“He’ll live, he’ll live”—but could not say whether the infection had spread to the spinal column where it might cripple and maim for life. The answer would be revealed only in the weeks to come as a slow recovery, exhaustion that never seemed to clear, and muscles that would not obey commands would mean the worst.

So, this day in May towards the end of the academic year, it was with relief that Daniel and his classmate heard
Dr. Sanderson call over his shoulder, “I’ve got a measles case for you this morning,” as he hurried through the hallway at the head of a group that included residents, interns, nurses, and the two lowly student clerks. The pair were undertaking clinical rounds with lassitude that morning, knowing the term would soon be over and they would leave the Contagion for good. They were glad of the diversion that a measles patient might offer. Today, perhaps, they would be spared the polio ward.

Summer had already arrived in the city, making the hospital hot and airless. An electric fan had been placed in the lobby, its vibrations painfully shaking the elongated pole on which it was mounted but producing cool currents nonetheless. But on the wards themselves, no such provisions had been made for the sick. Lecturing on the virulence of what are known as childhood diseases when contracted in adulthood, Dr. Sanderson opened an oak door and led his group from the close air of the hallway into an atmosphere that seemed to be made more stifling still by the body temperature of a fevered patient.

At first, Daniel did not recognize Sarah. Her hair had disappeared, the long strands pulled back from her face by an efficient nurse and the soft curls plastered against her head with sweat. Her eyes were shut, her face was gaunt, and her small, crisp nose now protruded so sharply from it that her gracious profile had turned to a blank mask sliced down the middle by a hawk-like beak. It was only when he saw the name on the chart he was passed that he suddenly realized who this patient was.

He started forward, about to speak, but bit the words back.

“Segal?” Dr. Sanderson turned to him.

“Nothing, sir.” Daniel handed the chart to the other clerk.

“Most cases can be treated at home, in children and adults, unless the fever becomes dangerously high in the later stage of the illness. That’s what happened here. A week with sore throat, and spots, then the rising fever. Brought in last night with 105. Semi-delirious. Not surprising at that temperature.” As if to illustrate these remarks, the patient shifted on her bed and, without opening her eyes, started to mumble anxiously for a moment before subsiding back into stillness.

“Unclear how the patient caught it. She has no contact with children, and there are no current reports of measles in the schools. She’s European originally. Did not move here until age twelve, or thereabouts. That may explain why she was not exposed to measles in childhood. Infection patterns vary.”

He turned to a particularly eager intern.

“Dr. Smythe, for the benefit of our clerks here, describe Koplik’s spots and tell us how the fever should now be treated.”

Daniel, who had been concentrating fiercely on the doctor’s words both to steady himself and in hopes of discovering Sarah’s actual condition, now drifted into his own thoughts.

“It’s measles, only measles, just measles. She’ll be okay, fine, okay.”

The doctors agreed that the temperature in the room was no aid to recovery and moved on, instructing one of the nurses to find a fan for the patient, but Daniel lingered a moment, wanting to do something immediately, uncertain how to leave. It was then that Rachel Plot entered the room, carrying some flowers and a small suitcase.

“Daniel!” She looked at him in delight. “How did you…?”

“I was just… They are doing rounds, the students… it’s a teaching hospital. Maybe they didn’t tell you that at the desk. The students… um, we follow along.”

“Oh, I see,” Rachel replied. She was wearing a little suit of beige cotton, the material was thin, but the jacket tight, and she shifted uncomfortably in the heat, putting down the suitcase to wipe her brow with her one free hand, then walking towards the bedside to set the flowers on a small table.

As Rachel moved, Sarah, perhaps sensing a presence even if she had not wakened to the doctors, stirred again and began mumbling. A single white sheet covered the bed, its folds clinging to her fevered body like drapery on classical statuary, and as she grew more agitated, her hands grasped the edge of this shroud, wringing it to and fro. Rachel hovered at her side, worried but unsure what to do. Sarah’s anxious but unintelligible chatter grew louder now, firmer, until its sounds finally coalesced into a single, discernible word, and as she suddenly ripped back the sheet from her body with her right hand, she cried out,
“Maman!”
and then stilled.

Alarmed, Daniel moved rapidly towards the bed, but stopped as Rachel rushed to pull the sheet back into place. She covered Sarah and her short, blue hospital gown with a firmness that tainted him with a hint of voyeurism, so emphatic were her smoothing hands over the thin fabric. He took a breath and continued forward, taking up a place near Sarah, on the opposite side of the bed. He looked across at Rachel. She averted her eyes, looking down at the sheet. They did not speak, both wanting to act as though they had not heard the cry but not quite able to manage the pretence. If Daniel now felt a trespasser in the room, as though he had been caught spying on
a family’s pain, Rachel was no less embarrassed, sensing Sarah’s cry as both a humiliating condemnation of her years as the girl’s caregiver and all-too-naked revelation of how much they now needed Daniel to take over the job.

“She’ll be fine,” Daniel eventually assured Rachel, finding some words to fill the silence. “Some delirium is to be expected with the fever, and her temperature is falling. I know it doesn’t feel like it.”

He gestured around the room, as if to indicate the heat, but it annoyed him that he felt a need to defend the hospital.

“One of the nurses is going to bring a fan, so it will get a bit cooler in here.”

He moved awkwardly away from the bed, and turned to leave the room, indicating with a half-hearted extension of a limp hand that he needed to catch up with rounds.

“I’ll call,” he said, and hurried away.

He did call. If he had not done so earlier, if he had never lifted the phone in the ten months since their expensive dinner, it was not because he had made a mistake, not that he found himself, on further acquaintance, unawakened and unmoved by Sarah. Rather, he had encountered a dead end, a wall he did not fully understand and so did not know how to begin to climb. And, of course, his pride had been hurt. Sarah had said good night and thank you very prettily that evening, but the moment when she had withdrawn her hand rankled. He heard himself justifying his behaviour—“I was only trying to help”—in a tone that sounded cringingly petulant even inside his head. But he was a man who lived in the present. The months had dulled his shame, and now confronted with her transfigured form on the hospital
bed, he felt again the kind of desire he could simply act on, whatever the embarrassments of his encounter with Rachel. He did not tell Sarah of the scene in the hospital and did not ask if Rachel had ever told her, but simply called a month later to see if she might care for a movie next Saturday night.

Catching up with each other’s news as they sat waiting for the lights in the cinema to dim, he said only that he had been very busy with school, preparing for graduation from medical school that spring, trying to find a hospital that would take him as an intern. She had been busy too, she lied, still working part-time at the library even though she had finished her degree. She and Lisa had talked about getting an apartment together, and looking for proper jobs, but Lisa was to be married. She and Michael, next month. So, Sarah was still lodging with the Plots. And she had been ill recently, she confessed, the measles, funny she had thought only children got it, anyway, it took a while to recover, longer than you’d think.

At the end of a summer of picnics, movies, and walks, on a sunny day towards the end of October, Daniel proposed an outing. He had borrowed his father’s car and arrived in great style at the Plots’ that Sunday afternoon, his own sense of occasion somehow making him nervous. She opened the door herself, wearing a light dress and cardigan that would prove too flimsy the minute the sun began to set, and sling-back shoes that would make walking in the woods difficult, but she wanted to ignore the approach of winter and had dressed as though summer were still with them. She too felt this was an occasion, and seemed to move more slowly, even
more tidily than usual, as she walked down the front steps, stood quietly as Daniel carefully opened the car door for her, and slid into the passenger seat. On their drive out into the countryside, their conversation seemed happy yet newly brittle as though they were moving backwards through their acquaintance rather than forward.

“What a beautiful day…”

“The colours should be perfect…”

It was a Canadian ritual this, the October drive out to the woods to admire the sharp reds, mellow oranges, and brilliant yellows of the autumn leaves, colours whose intensity was unknown in Europe’s gentler climate, produced here by the sudden change of hot to cold when summer days gave way to frosty mornings in the space of a few weeks. As they drove westwards, great swathes of red and yellow appeared in the green of the landscape, and they fell into a comfortable silence. At a park about an hour from the city, Daniel brought the car to a stop in a gravel lot, turned off the engine, and sat staring at his knees. Now that he had stopped concentrating on his driving, he somehow could not find the motivation to move. It was as though some extreme energy would be required for the next stage of their outing, and instead he was filled only with a warm, lazy heaviness. Sarah shifted slightly in her seat and the rustle of her skirt roused him from his odd lassitude: he looked up, smiled at her, and then got out of the car and went around to open her door. He had brought a picnic—some salmon sandwiches his mother had made, soda pop, and the crisp new apples that had still been hanging on a tree two weeks before—and he spread it out before them on a plaid blanket they had first laid on the grass, grasping a corner each as they wafted it to the ground.