Read Online The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel by Susan Jane Gilman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Susan Jane Gilman
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Lower East Side. Mount Sinai, the nicer Jewish hospital uptown, had been founded by German Jews, you see. Oh, what a bunch of machers . Such aristocrats. They looked down on those of us from Eastern Europe. At one time they’d even formed a society to keep us “cruder” Jews from immigrating. They believed we’d make them look bad. Ha, I always say. Peel back any “superior” culture, and all you see is brutality.
Nowadays it’s standard procedure to rush an accident victim to a hospital. Back then, however, hospitals were regarded the way public bathhouses and toilets are today—they spoke of charity, humiliation—to be avoided at all costs. For immigrants, hospitals were where people simply went to die.
If there was a medical problem on the Lower East Side, families usually sent for one of the roving nurses from the Henry Street Settlement House. She’d climb the treacherous stairs to the apartment (or even step nimbly from rooftop to rooftop) to minister to you there. You could have cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis. Health officials might be called in to quarantine your entire family—a mark or a decree would be placed on your front door—and a dozen of you could be confined there for months—until all of you were either healthy or dead. But you cared for one another at home.
Poultices, ointments, boiled onions wrapped in cheesecloth, camphor, vinegar mixtures, brandy, tonics, chicken soup of course—these were the standard medicines of the day.
Yet even back then, when a tiny girl was knocked unconscious in the street, her right leg twisted out from her body like a paper clip with her broken fibula poking through her skin, people knew enough to know that she needed a type of medical attention that went beyond anything that Henry Street or a nurse could carry up the steps in a worn leather satchel. And so someone—Mr. Dinello himself, it turns out—put me in his wagon and rushed me to the Beth Israel Dispensary.
I have no memory of my arrival, nor of being X-rayed by a brand-new mechanical contraption that was the pride of the hospital. What I will see and remember later, groggily, is my mother. She materializes with her back to me, standing beneath the high, frosted window across from my bed. I am now propped up with pillows but slack-jawed and atrophied with pain. A doctor beside her holds dark panes up to the light. The eerie, translucent rectangles are mapped with bands, wisps, and knobs. One, he explains to my mother, is my leg.
Though she has no working knowledge of science or anatomy, the visual makes it obvious: My tibia has a compound fracture, and my fibula has cleanly snapped in two like a branch. My right foot is broken. My pelvis is also fractured. Another film shows the graduated tines of my rib cage. Three of my ribs are cracked.
“She is young, so her bones are soft. They will heal, Mrs. Bialystoker,” the doctor says. “Now?” He raises his eyebrows and shrugs exaggeratedly. “Whether she will walk again or walk with a limp? Or a cane? That we will have to see.”
“ Oy. Vey iz mir! ” my mother cries.
The doctor looks at her, not unsympathetically. “She’s very lucky, Mrs. Bialystoker,” he says softly. “She easily could’ve died.”
My mother stares at me, immobilized and swollen, then at the doctor. After a moment she wails, “Oh, that she should have!”
With a look of distress, she points accusingly toward my bed. “Bad enough she is one of four girls. Bad enough she is ugly. But now you’re telling me she is also a cripple? Tell me, please, Doctor. What am I supposed to do with a daughter like this?”
Picking up her basket, she sobs, “Keep her, for all I care. She is useless.” Turning, she hurries out.
Once, a few years ago, I mentioned this to Sunny, my domestic. She set down the silver polish and stared at me. “Oh, Missus Dunkle,” she said, shaking her head sadly.
“Please,” I said. “Spare me the tears.”
Parents just
Nowadays it’s standard procedure to rush an accident victim to a hospital. Back then, however, hospitals were regarded the way public bathhouses and toilets are today—they spoke of charity, humiliation—to be avoided at all costs. For immigrants, hospitals were where people simply went to die.
If there was a medical problem on the Lower East Side, families usually sent for one of the roving nurses from the Henry Street Settlement House. She’d climb the treacherous stairs to the apartment (or even step nimbly from rooftop to rooftop) to minister to you there. You could have cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis. Health officials might be called in to quarantine your entire family—a mark or a decree would be placed on your front door—and a dozen of you could be confined there for months—until all of you were either healthy or dead. But you cared for one another at home.
Poultices, ointments, boiled onions wrapped in cheesecloth, camphor, vinegar mixtures, brandy, tonics, chicken soup of course—these were the standard medicines of the day.
Yet even back then, when a tiny girl was knocked unconscious in the street, her right leg twisted out from her body like a paper clip with her broken fibula poking through her skin, people knew enough to know that she needed a type of medical attention that went beyond anything that Henry Street or a nurse could carry up the steps in a worn leather satchel. And so someone—Mr. Dinello himself, it turns out—put me in his wagon and rushed me to the Beth Israel Dispensary.
I have no memory of my arrival, nor of being X-rayed by a brand-new mechanical contraption that was the pride of the hospital. What I will see and remember later, groggily, is my mother. She materializes with her back to me, standing beneath the high, frosted window across from my bed. I am now propped up with pillows but slack-jawed and atrophied with pain. A doctor beside her holds dark panes up to the light. The eerie, translucent rectangles are mapped with bands, wisps, and knobs. One, he explains to my mother, is my leg.
Though she has no working knowledge of science or anatomy, the visual makes it obvious: My tibia has a compound fracture, and my fibula has cleanly snapped in two like a branch. My right foot is broken. My pelvis is also fractured. Another film shows the graduated tines of my rib cage. Three of my ribs are cracked.
“She is young, so her bones are soft. They will heal, Mrs. Bialystoker,” the doctor says. “Now?” He raises his eyebrows and shrugs exaggeratedly. “Whether she will walk again or walk with a limp? Or a cane? That we will have to see.”
“ Oy. Vey iz mir! ” my mother cries.
The doctor looks at her, not unsympathetically. “She’s very lucky, Mrs. Bialystoker,” he says softly. “She easily could’ve died.”
My mother stares at me, immobilized and swollen, then at the doctor. After a moment she wails, “Oh, that she should have!”
With a look of distress, she points accusingly toward my bed. “Bad enough she is one of four girls. Bad enough she is ugly. But now you’re telling me she is also a cripple? Tell me, please, Doctor. What am I supposed to do with a daughter like this?”
Picking up her basket, she sobs, “Keep her, for all I care. She is useless.” Turning, she hurries out.
Once, a few years ago, I mentioned this to Sunny, my domestic. She set down the silver polish and stared at me. “Oh, Missus Dunkle,” she said, shaking her head sadly.
“Please,” I said. “Spare me the tears.”
Parents just
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