Doctors, Page 2

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ she asked.

  ‘No. No vale la pena. I am due in the lab at seven. I will just stay here and try to take a nap in an on-call room.’

  ‘How did I get in my own bed, Mom?’

  ‘Well, darling, when we got home it was very late and you were asleep on the Castellanos’ couch, so Inez and I carried you and Warren back.’

  ‘Is Warren okay?’ Barney had not yet seen his brother.

  Estelle nodded. ‘Thank God for Dr Castellano. We’re very lucky to have him as our neighbor.’

  For a split second Barney felt a pang of envy. Laura’s father was home. Sometimes he missed his own dad so much it really hurt.

  He vividly remembered the day his father had left. Harold had picked him up and hugged him so closely he could smell the cigarette smoke on his breath. Often now just watching someone light up a cigarette made Barney feel lonely.

  And yet there was one small source of consolation: A small rectangular flag bearing a blue star in a white field trimmed with red hung proudly in the Livingstons’ front window. This told every passerby that their family had a member out there fighting for his country (some households had banners with two, and even three stars).

  Late one December afternoon, as the brothers were returning from the candy store with a nickel’s worth of Tootsie Rolls, Warren noticed something surprising in Mr and Mrs Cahn’s front window – a flag that bore a star of gold.

  ‘Mom, how come theirs is so fancy?’ Warren complained as they were having dinner.

  Estelle hesitated for a moment, and then answered quietly, ‘Because their son was … especially courageous.’

  ‘Do you think Dad will win a star like that one day?’

  Though she could feel her face turn pale, Estelle endeavored to answer matter-of-factly, ‘You never know about these things, darling. Now come on, eat your broccoli.’

  After she had put the boys to bed, it suddenly struck her that Barney had been silent through that entire conversation. Had he perhaps understood that Arthur, the Cahn’s only son, had been killed in action?

  Later, sitting alone at the kitchen table, doing her best to pretend her cup of Postum was real Brazilian coffee, Estelle kept reminding herself of Harold’s frequent protestations that he would be in no danger. (‘Translators don’t get shot at, hon.’) But then didn’t security rules forbid him from disclosing exactly where he was – and what he was doing? A day never passed without some family in Brooklyn receiving one of those dreaded telegrams.

  Then she heard her older son’s voice. It was affectionate and reassuring.

  ‘Please don’t worry, Mom. He’s gonna come back.’

  There he stood in his Mickey Mouse pajamas, all of six and a half years old, yet taking the initiative and trying to console his mother. She looked up with a smile.

  ‘How could you tell what I was thinking?’ she inquired.

  ‘Everybody in school knows about Artie Cahn. I even saw one of the teachers crying. I didn’t say anything because I thought it would’ve scared Warren. But Dad’ll be all right, I promise.’

  ‘What makes you so certain?’ she asked.

  He shrugged and confessed, ‘I don’t know. But worrying would make you sadder.’

  ‘You’re right, Barney,’ she said, hugging him tightly.

  At which point, her comforter suddenly changed the subject.

  ‘Would it be okay if I had a cookie, Mom?’

  1944 was a banner year. Rome and Paris were liberated, and FDR was elected to an unprecedented fourth term. Some time after the Americans retook Guam. Harold Livingston telephoned his family all the way from California to announce that he was being sent overseas. He couldn’t specify where, only that it would be to help interrogate Japanese prisoners of war. His next communication would be by V-mail – those barely legible miniature letters, photographed on microfilm and printed on slimy gray paper.

  The year was also a milestone for Luis Castellano. The State Medical Board reversed its decision and declared the Spanish refugee fit to practice medicine in the United States of America.

  Though feeling pleased and vindicated, Luis knew they were moved not merely by the merits of his case, but by the fact that nearly every able-bodied doctor had been conscripted by the military. He and Inez quickly transformed their front ground-floor bedroom into an examination room. He received a loan from The Dime Savings Bank to buy a fluoroscope machine.

  ‘What’s that for, Papacito?’ three-year-old Isobel asked her father as the quartet of young spectators watched the apparatus being installed.

  ‘I know,’ Barney volunteered, ‘it’s for looking inside of people, isn’t it Dr Castellano?’

  ‘You are right, my boy,’ he nodded, patting Barney on the head, ‘but good physicians have already a machine for looking at their patients’ insides.’

  He then pointed to his temple. ‘The brain is still the greatest diagnostic tool a man can use.’

  Luis’s reputation – and his practice – quickly grew. King’s County offered him hospital privileges. Now he could send specimens to the laboratory where formerly he washed test tubes.

  Sometimes, as a special treat, the children were allowed to visit his medical sanctum. Barney and Laura could touch some of the instruments and peer into their younger siblings’ ears with the otoscope, provided they would then allow Warren and Isobel to listen to their chests with a stethoscope.

  They had almost become a single family. Estelle Livingston was especially grateful. The only other relative she had was her mother, who – when other babysitters were not available – would take the subway from Queens to stay with Warren while Estelle worked in the library.

  But she knew that boys needed a masculine figure in their lives and understood why Barney and Warren had grown to worship the rugged bearlike physician. For his part, Luis seemed to revel in the acquisition of two ‘sons.’

  Estelle and Inez grew to be good friends. They did airraid warden duty together every Tuesday night, patrolling the silent, shadowy streets making sure every household had its lights out. And periodically glancing skyward for a trace of enemy bombers.

  The soft darkness seemed to make Inez more comfortable – and freer with her thoughts.

  Once when Estelle casually inquired whether Inez minded the lack of sleep, she was surprised to hear her respond, ‘No, it reminds me of the good old days. The only difference is that now I do not have my rifle.’

  ‘You actually fought?’

  ‘Yes, amiga, and I wasn’t the only woman. Because Franco had not only all his Spanish troops, but also regulares – mercenaries from Morocco that he paid to do his dirty work.

  ‘Our only hope was to attack and run. There were so many of those butchers. And I am proud to say I hit a few of them.’

  She then realized that her friend was taken aback.

  ‘Try to understand,’ Inez continued, ‘those bastards slaughtered children.’

  ‘Well, yes, I see your point …’ Estelle responded haltingly, while struggling to accept the reality that the gentle-voiced woman by her side had actually killed another human being.

  Ironically, Inez’s parents both had been staunch right-wing supporters not merely of Franco, but of Opus Dei – the church within a church – which sided with the dictator. When their only daughter, fired with socialist idealism, left to join a Republican militia unit, they had cursed and disowned her.

  ‘I had no one in the world – except my rifle and The Cause. So, in a way, that bullet brought me luck.’

  What bullet? Estelle wondered to herself. But it soon became clear.

  During the siege of Málaga, Inez and half a dozen other loyalists were ambushed on their way to Puerta Real. When she regained consciousness, she was staring into the unshaven face of a heavyset young doctor who introduced himself as ‘Comrade Luis.’

  ‘Even then he was a character. Of course we had no uniforms, but Luis seemed to go out of his way to look like a peasant.’ She laughed.
‘But I don’t think he ever stopped working. There were so many wounded. As soon as I could stand, I started helping him. Through all the long hours, he never lost his sense of humour. In fact, that was about all we could take with us when we fled. We barely got across before they closed the French border.’

  When school started, Barney and Laura were in the same third grade class at P.S. 148. Paradoxically, being thrown into a group of thirty other children brought the two closer than ever. Laura discovered what a valuable friend she had in Barney. For he could already read.

  In fact, what had originally drawn Estelle and Harold Livingston together was their mutual love of books. And ever since his third birthday, each parent had taken turns giving Barney reading lessons. As a reward they would read aloud to him stories from Bullfinch’s Mythology or poems from the Child’s Garden of Verses. Their psychology worked. Barney’s appetite for books was almost as voracious as his craving for Nabisco Vanilla Wafers.

  As a result, he was now able to sit on their front stoop and conduct Laura through the complexities of immortal classics like See Spot Run.

  But in due course, Barney exacted reciprocity.

  On his seventh birthday his mother gave him a basketball kit, complete with backboard, rim, and a real net that went swish when you sank a good one. The night before the gala day, Luis Castellano had risked life and limb to nail it – at the official ten feet – to the Livingstons’ oak tree.

  Barney let out a whoop of delight and proclaimed, ‘Laura, you gotta help me practice – you owe me.’

  Her assistance entailed acting as enemy defenseman and trying to block Barney’s shots at the hoop. To his amazement, Laura was almost too good at it. She scored nearly as many baskets as Barney. And though he continued to grow tall, she continued to grow taller.

  Germany capitulated on May seventh, 1945, and by the end of the summer Japan had surrendered as well. The joy was nowhere more intense than in the Livingston household on Lincoln Place where Barney, Warren, and Estelle paraded around the kitchen table singing, ‘When Daddy comes marching home again.’ It had been more than three years since they had seen him.

  Harold Livingston came home. But not at a march. In fact, his gait was slow and at times uncertain.

  Constantly pushed and jostled by noisy, excited crowds of other wives and children, Estelle and the two boys waited breathlessly as the train pulled in. Before it even stopped, some of the GIs leaped onto the platform and began to run full tilt toward their loved ones.

  Barney stood on tiptoe. But he could not see a soldier who looked familiar enough to be the dad he had been seeing in his dreams.

  Suddenly his mother gave a little shout, ‘Oh, there he is!’ She waved at someone far down the platform. Barney looked where she had pointed but saw no one. That is, no one who corresponded to his memory of Harold Livingston.

  He saw an ordinary man of ordinary size with hair receding from his forehead. Someone pallid, thin, and tired-looking.

  She’s wrong, he thought, this can’t be Dad. It can’t be.

  Estelle no longer could contain herself. She cried out, ‘Harold!’ and rushed forward to embrace him.

  Barney stood there holding Warren’s hand and watched, realizing that never before had Momma left them on their own like this.

  ‘Is that our Daddy?’ little Warren asked.

  ‘It must be,’ Barney answered, still a bit confused.

  ‘I thought you said that he was bigger than Dr Castellano.’

  Barney almost said, I thought so too.

  And now they were together, all four of them, Estelle still arm in arm with her husband.

  ‘Barney, Warren, how you two have grown!’ Harold Livingston said with pride and put his arms around his older son. Barney recognized the once-familiar scent of cigarette smoke.

  Somehow, despite the mob outside, they found a taxi – with a very patriotic driver.

  ‘Welcome home, GI Joe,’ he proclaimed. ‘Hey – we really showed them Krauts, didn’t we?’ the cabbie crowed.

  ‘My husband served in the Pacific,’ Estelle proudly corrected him.

  ‘Oh, Nazis, Japs – what’s the difference? They’re all a bunch of lousy bums. Tell your husband he did good.’

  ‘Did you get to kill anybody?’ Warren asked hopefully.

  Harold answered slowly. ‘No, son. I just helped translate when we were interrogating prisoners …’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Don’t be so modest, let your kids be proud. You obviously saw enough action to win that Purple Heart. Ya get hurt bad, buddy?’

  Barney and Warren looked at each other saucer-eyed as Harold brushed off any hint of heroism.

  ‘It wasn’t much. Just an artillery shell that landed pretty near our tent. For a while there I was a little shaky, but I’m a hundred percent now. I should have taken these darn things off before I got here. The important thing is that we’re all together again.’

  But his protestation only confirmed what Estelle had sensed the moment she had seen him on the railroad platform. He was a sick man.

  Luis Castellano was waiting at his front window when the taxi pulled up outside the Livingston house. In an instant, he and his family were on the street, Luis enveloping Harold in his big bearlike embrace. ‘I’ve been talking to your picture on the mantelpiece for years,’ he explained. ‘I feel like you are my long-lost brother!’

  It was a night that burned in Barney’s memory forever. Though he was down the corridor from the closed door of his parents’ bedroom, he still could hear their voices.

  His mother seemed to be crying a great deal, and in tones oscillating between anger and despair kept asking ‘Can’t you explain, Harold? What exactly is a “thirty percent disability”?’

  His father seemed to be trying to reassure her. ‘It’s nothing, hon. I swear there’s nothing to worry about.’

  Then all was quiet. There was no noise at all from his parents’ bedroom. Barney simply gazed down the hall at their door, wondering.

  At breakfast Barney scanned his parents’ faces, but could decipher no clue as to what had occurred the previous evening. And watching his mother fuss over someone who was almost a stranger gave him funny feelings that he could not understand. He left early for Laura’s house so they could have plenty of time to talk on the way to school.

  But as soon as they were alone, he confided to her, ‘I’m scared. Something’s – I don’t know – different about my father. I think maybe he’s sick.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘As soon as we got home last night, Papa took my mother into his office and started explaining to her about something called “neurosis de guerra.”’

  ‘What’s that in English?’ Barney asked anxiously.

  ‘I don’t even know what it is in Spanish, Barn,’ she confessed.

  At four that afternoon, Estelle Livingston was seated at the circulation desk in the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library when she looked up and saw Barney and Laura scanning the shelves of medical books. She invited them to her office in the back where they could talk privately.

  ‘Please don’t be worried,’ she said, trying to sound reassuring. ‘He wasn’t hit by anything. It’s just a mild case of shell shock. He was very near a big explosion and that sort of thing takes a while to get over. But he’ll be back teaching again next term.’

  She took a deep breath and then asked, ‘Do you feel a little better now?’

  Both children nodded mutely. And then quickly left.

  That fall, as Estelle had promised, Harold Livingston returned to his pedagogical duties at Erasmus Hall. And as before, his students found him charming and witty. He could make even Caesar’s Gallic Wars enjoyable. And he seemed to know all of Classical literature by heart.

  And yet now and then he would forget to bring back groceries on his way home from school – even when Estelle stuck a list in the breast pocket of his jacket.

  Ever since he had gotten
his basketball hoop, Barney had dreamed of the day when he and his dad would play together.

  During Harold’s long absence, Barney had constantly badgered his mother for details about what his father was like ‘in the old days.’ Once he had heard Estelle reminisce about the summer before he was born. By sheer chance there had been a guest tennis tournament at the lakeside resort they had gone to in the White Mountains.

  ‘Harold decided to give it a try – just as a lark. He’d been a wonderful player in his college days – though, of course, CCNY had no tennis team. Anyway, he borrowed a racket, waltzed onto the court, and the next thing I knew he was in the finals! The man who beat him was a PT instructor at the local college – and he said he was lucky that Harold had an off day. He even said that if Harold ever took it seriously he’d be another Bill Tilden. Can you imagine that?’

  Barney didn’t know who Bill Tilden was, but he could certainly imagine the man whose picture was on the mantelpiece, dressed in tennis whites, smashing a ball to smithereens. He dreamt so often of the day he could show Dad his sporting skills. And now at last the time was at hand.

  ‘Have you seen the backboard Dr Castellano put up on the tree?’ he asked his father casually one Saturday, as a kind of overture.

  ‘Yes,’ Harold answered, ‘looks very professional.’

  ‘Want to shoot some baskets with me and Warren?’

  Harold sighed and answered gently, ‘I don’t think I’ve got the pep to keep up with two dynamos like you. But I’ll come out and watch.’

  Barney and Warren raced to put on their sneakers and then dribbled out toward the ‘court.’

  Anxious to display his prowess before his father, Barney stopped fifteen feet from the basket, jumped, and shot the ball. To his chagrin, it missed the backboard completely. He quickly whirled and explained, ‘That was just warming up, Dad.’

  Leaning on the back door, Harold Livingston nodded, took a long puff of his cigarette, and smiled.

  Barney and Warren barely had the chance to sink a few lay-ups (‘Good fast break, huh, Dad?’) when an irate voice called from across the fence.