The Leap Year Boy (9 page)

“He did?”

“Yes.” Abe said that he didn’t know what it was, but that there was something magical about him, and that he was going to do something truly amazing, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to miss it.

*

On her second cup of tea and whiskey, Irene said, “There’s something else, Ma. It’s about Alex. He’s growing.”

“Of course he is. All babies grow.”

“You don’t understand, Ma. About how he’s growing.”

Ida watched him play on the floor with a wooden spoon and a potholder. “What about it?”

Chapter 7

Although promising research on immunization had begun in the early 1900s, an effective vaccine to combat diphtheria would not be widely available for many years. In the meantime, the disease worked its way through hundreds of thousands of Americans, killing up to 15,000 people in some years, and was particularly lethal to children and the elderly well into the 1920s.

Pittsburgh in 1911 was a particularly fertile nesting ground for “The Dip,” as it was commonly referred to with a mixture of dread and gallows humor. The Dip entered the Smokey City on the broad backs of newly arrived workingmen and their families, since at the time there was an unprecedented industrial boom and Pittsburgh needed all the muscle it could get. The word had gone forth to immigrant neighborhoods up and down the East Coast, and to those just off the boat: Come to Pittsburgh, there’s work a-plenty. And come they did, with their skills, their strengths and their infectious diseases.

Arthur and Benjamin Miller, who’d been suffering with hacking coughs, were among 35 children at Fulton Elementary School sent home on March 10, 1911, by Rose Thompson, school nurse. The unhappy diagnosis: The Dip. The instructions were to keep them isolated for a minimum of two weeks and hope for the best.

Irene quarantined her sons in their room on the left side of the second floor. She’d never seen them look so miserable. Even Arthur, who insisted he was too big to be hugged and kissed by his mother, begged her to hold his hand.

She settled Arthur on the bottom bunk and Benjamin on the top. It was such a small room for the two of them, with two dressers, a toy chest and a secondhand desk with uneven legs that caused it wobble even though she’d been on Abe to fix it. She was on Abe for any number of things, but nothing ever seemed to get done unless she did it.

Alex’s little bed sat in the far corner. She cracked open the single window a few inches. She wanted to leave the door open, too, to let out the mustiness, but she was afraid that somehow The Dip might float down the stairs, seeking out the rest of the family like a hungry, ghostly beast, so she kept it shut tight, even when she was inside, changing their sweaty bedclothes, mopping their fevered brows and trying to cheer them as best she could through their delirium. It was strange, she thought, it was now that she realized how much she loved them. She wished she’d told them more often. She vowed to tell them that she loved them every day if they pulled through.

As worried as she was for the boys, she believed their toughness and shoe leather constitutions could withstand anything The Dip could throw at them. It was Alex for whom she feared the worst. She was certain The Dip could clog and silence his little lungs at its pleasure. Even at three years old—or three quarters, as he and his brothers would say—Alex now weighed just a touch over sixteen pounds, so how could his puny body fight it off? She resolved to have him sleep in her room and move his playthings downstairs to the kitchen, where he’d be away from his brothers, and where she could keep an eye on him.

Even under normal conditions, Alex hated to be separated from Arthur and Benjamin. He pouted at the kitchen window when they marched off to school with their rarely opened books bound in straps slung over their shoulders, while he was left behind in the kitchen with his mother and Tippy the tuxedo cat, who hid from him as much as possible, as if in her walnut-sized brain she sensed there was something odd and vaguely dangerous about the little boy that weighed just two pounds more than she did and threw forks, bits of food and his socks at her head.

Alex listened patiently as Irene explained the dangers of The Dip. When she told him about the new sleeping arrangements, he tossed his breakfast on the floor and refused to get dressed. It wasn’t until Irene let him help her load plates of food into his red wagon, which she hauled in to feed his brothers, that he settled down. He added Arthur’s ball and jacks and Benjamin’s rabbit’s foot to the pile of food.

*

During the quarantine, as Irene cooked and emptied chamber pots, Alex sat on the linoleum floor or in his little wooden chair in a corner of the kitchen, with two thin books his grandmother had given him:
A Child’s Life of Christ
by WB Conkey, and
The Coloured Picture Bible for Children.
Furiously pressing with Arthur’s crayons, he colored the black and white illustrations: orange and purple for Crowning With Thorns, blue and green for The Last Supper, red and yellow and black for The Resurrection. He showed his fledging artwork to Irene.

“Oh my goodness, Jesus has a green and purple face.”

“Do you like it, Momma?”

“Wait until I show your grandmother. She’ll hit the ceiling.”

Alex dropped the crayons on the floor. He plopped the book on his knees and traced his fingers along the letters. To Irene, it looked as if he were reading.

He was. The letters formed words in his mind, and on his lips. He voiced them quietly, matching them to the pictures. He wondered who these men really were; if they lived on Mellon Street, why hadn’t he seen them? Some of them seemed nice. He pointed to the figures on the page and asked Irene why, when everyone else was so big, the baby Jesus so little, like he was. Irene told him it was only a story.

“But Momma, does baby Jesus ever get big?”

“Well, yes. He grows up to be a man.”

“Will I grow up like baby Jesus?”

She thought about how he’d made the sign of the cross. “I think you just might.”

*

After eight days of wheeling in meals and wheeling out chamber pots, applying cold rags and removing sweaty underwear, reading to them from
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
and listening to them bang on the door when they wanted more food, Irene was pretty sure her boys had emerged from the depths of The Dip none the worse for wear. Their fevers were long gone, and to counteract the boredom of mandatory confinement, they’d actually begun to read their schoolbooks and write out their arithmetic homework problems. Irene couldn’t be sure if Benjamin was doing both his and Arthur’s. She wouldn’t put it past Arthur to coerce Benjamin into it.

Dr. Malkin stopped in on the ninth day of their illness. The Dip had been very good to him, for healthy physicians were much in demand. Even educated people who normally knew better had requested his services, and for once he could name his price for a house call.

He went into the boys’ room, made his way through a jumble of clothes and toys and littered plates and had them strip to the waist. His listened to their hearts and lungs and made them say “ah.” He jammed his otoscope into Benjamin’s ear, not knowing precisely what he was looking for, but as long as he owned the tool he felt he might as well use it.

Malkin insisted that he examine Alex, too. “Let us be it on the safer side. I must tell it to you, I wonder how is it, Mrs. Irene, that your bigger boys caught it The Dip, but this little one, with his teensy system and the infection running its way around in your house, a mystery to me it is why he wasn’t struck down like a sledgehammer to the head. But he has got no sickness, it seems, not even a tiny bit, he looks to be it in the perfect health, which is of course to his good fortune.”

“Maybe God looks out for him, Doctor.”

“This could be, Mrs., the powers of God the Almighty, that is something which I respect it, but it is beyond my training as medical doctor. Still, it is a curiosity to me, in the medical sense, of course, of how he avoided it this plague.” He repeated his request. “May I have it then a moment, if you please, with your Alex, for to give it to him a precautionary examination?”

“I’m not paying extra.”

“No, but of course not.” He turned to Alex. “Hello there, my little fellow.”

Alex stuck out his tongue. His brothers had told him Malkin was a greenhorn, and although he didn’t know what it meant, he understood by the way they said it that the doctor was some sort of undesirable.

Malkin pressed his index fingers on either side of Alex’s throat, where he believed he would find the thyroid gland, or perhaps it was the pituitary, he sometimes confused the two, but he was virtually certain one or the other or perhaps both were essential for growth. If only he had more time with this little thing, he could do experiments and make a study that could put his name out there in the journals, put him in demand for speaking engagements, medical conferences, fat royalties. If only his family would cooperate and let him have his way, the medical community might come to know and respect the name Sergei Malkin.

He told Alex to say ah, and as he tried to insert a tongue depressor Alex bit down on his finger. His brothers cheered him on.

Malkin stuck his finger in his mouth. “Ouch, he broke it the skin, the little…let us hope it mine hand to God he is not a carrier of The Dip, even though he is not infected as far as I can tell.” He wiped his finger with a blotted handkerchief. “Perhaps it is a good idea the little fellow should wear it a muzzle next time I examine him.”

Irene said, “Perhaps next time you’ll keep your fingers where they belong.” She coughed dryly.

Arthur whispered to Benjamin, “Up his ass.”

Benjamin laughed and coughed until he was out of breath.

Malkin stowed his stethoscope in his bag. No sense offending the woman, not if he hoped to get Alex into his surgery at some point. “Well, I can see it by their laughter the boys are feeling fine, for laughter it is always a good sign. In fact, some will say it that laughter is the best medicine. Which would put it a doctor like me out of business. Ha ha ha, it is my joke, no?”

Irene and the boys stared silently at him.

“Well, that will be all for today. The fee is one dollar. Please.”

No sooner had the boys recovered from The Dip than it hit Irene like a
force majeure
. Her fever reached 103

on the second night of her illness, and in her delirium she wailed for Alex, but Abe had enough sense not let him go near her, despite his son’s attempts to crash through the door to her bedroom.

After he got Alex to calm down, Abe went into their bedroom with a bowl of chicken soup from a pot her mother had delivered earlier that afternoon. He assured her that she would be all right, not too worry, that’s she’d come out of this fine and dandy, that she was a strong woman, and he meant it, but yet, as he looked at her pale, sweating face, he wondered with a mixture of guilt and excitement what his life might be like if she were to die right then and there. He’d be free and clear from her constant nagging, yes, but on the other hand, how would things really change? He’d be saddled with raising three boys alone, and not easy boys at that, the older one a troublemaker already, the younger one a good student, but that stuttering of his. And then,there was Alex., How the hell would he manage all that, would he have to take another wife, and what kind of woman would sign on for this, and what if the new wife was worse than the old one? It made his head hurt, and he hoped he wasn’t getting The Dip, too. As for Delia, well, even with Irene gone, he couldn’t imagine her becoming mother to his three sons. She simply wasn’t the motherly type. She’d cut him off, anyway, complaining she was too tired from waitressing and too tired of him making excuses why he couldn’t get out to see her. They were, as she put it, on ice for now.

Irene coughed and cried for her mother, but momentarily forgetting his fear of The Dip, he took her hot hand for a second. He felt if he held it any longer The Dip would seep through her skin and into his, so he let it fall by her side. As much as he felt sorry for her, he was terrified like everyone else of falling to the plague. Before he went downstairs, he washed his hands three times.

At the dinner table, Arthur said, “Dad, Mom is going to die, isn’t she?”

Benjamin said, “Sha…shut up, Arthur. You don’t na-know anything.”

Abe glanced from one boy to the other, his rapidly growing Irish-Jewish hybrids, with Irene’s light coloring and reddish hair, their round faces interrupted by his hooked nose. He spooned more mashed potatoes on their plates. “Now, boys, you know your mother is one tough cookie. She’s tough on you, ain’t she? She’ll be fine, you mark my words, once The Dip runs out of steam, all right? You boys beat it, didn’t you? Anyway, mothers don’t die from The Dip. You stop your worrying now and eat your dinner. More green beans?”

“But Mrs. Cleary on Haw…haw…Hawthorne Street. She’s a mother and she died.”

“Mrs. Cleary? I don’t know no Mrs. Cleary.”

“Agnes Cleary is in my class,” Arthur continued. “Her mother died last week on account of The Dip and they kept Agnes out of school for the funeral. And her grandmother died, too. She said so.”

Abe pointed his fork at Arthur. “Well, that don’t mean that’s going to happen to your mother, you hear me?”

Benjamin fidgeted in his chair. “Dad, what happens when you duh…die?”

Abe stared blankly at his son. Irene, he thought, she’d be the one to answer a question like this. “What kind of question is that?”

“But what happens?”

“Benjamin, a boy your age don’t need to think about such things as dying. You should be thinking about baseball, see? How about those Pirates, huh? 1909 world champs. Last year wasn’t so hot, but think can do it again this year? That Chief Wilson, he sure can pitch, can’t he, huh?”

“Dad…”

“Look, son, you didn’t die from The Dip, did you?”

“But what happens?”