CHAPTER 14

He stayed in Sinai for ten days. No matter how early I got there, he was watching the clock.

“Where were you?”

“What are you talking about? It’s nine in the morning,” I said.

“They came and took me down, and you weren’t here.”

“Who came?”

“They came and took me downstairs for a bone scan and a CAT scan,” he said. “It was awful.”

“A scan doesn’t hurt—does it?”

“It was fucking unbelievable! They had me down there for two hours and no one was there to give me my shot when I needed it and I had to lie on this table, and you know, Joanna, how much it hurts me to lie down completely flat. They gave me a bone scan. That wasn’t a problem. But then they wheel me into another room for the CAT scan, and you’re not gonna believe this, but I’m lying on a table and they’re running this gigantic million-dollar machine and this guy, some kid with pimples, he says, ‘We ran out of paper.’ Fucking unbelievable! Million-dollar machine and it breaks down like the Xerox at the library. Some kind of printout comes out and they ran out of paper so I have to lie there for hours. They’re talking like I’m not there. I say, ‘You ran out of paper? What do you need paper for?’ And they’re ignoring me. I’m the one on the table. I’m the one this is about.” He shook his head in frustration. I put the milkshake I brought on the windowsill along with my bag and coat and pulled the blue chair up to the bed. He watched as I moved around the room and I noticed his right eye had gotten even more sluggish, lagging considerably behind his left eye. I handed over the milkshake, a real one, not the thick McDonald’s kind, but the kind that was easy to drink, made with real ice cream and milk. He sucked on the straw for a second and passed it back with a frown. He couldn’t even swallow a milkshake. I lit a cigarette and he took a drag. Implausibly, he got away with smoking in the hospital. In those days, it was easier. Everyone smelled of smoke, if not firsthand, then secondhand. The food service lady rolled in her cart with Salisbury steak. I grabbed the cigarette and hid it behind my back. “He can’t eat that,” I said. “Doesn’t he get a liquid lunch?”

“I don’t see anything on his chart,” she said. “Why can’t he eat?”

“Nobody knows.”

Eventually someone went out and bought paper for the Xerox and he had the CAT scan and we waited for the radiologists to give us results. If this wasn’t a case of cluster headaches—if this was a tumor growing in his head—why didn’t I witness the slightest sense of urgency from the medical staff? Meanwhile, no matter how many times I told the nurses, the food service people, or any doctor who momentarily stuck his head in the door, that my father couldn’t eat, they kept bringing him roast chicken and hamburgers.

Brenda came to the hospital almost every night after work, but never stayed long—she had to go home to feed the dog. Shep came, and Susan, of course, and Uncle Harry flew in twice during those ten days at Sinai. Darleen showed up a few times, and Liz Stone came mainly to see me. I complained my mother didn’t visit often enough. “I’m here now,” she said. “What do you want from me?” He sat up, squared his shoulders. “Evie!” he called out happily, Demerol fresh in his veins.

“How’s the patient?” my mother said, laughing. His illness was funny. It was ridiculous. It wasn’t Clyde. Everyone had reasons for not taking the illness seriously. I pulled my mother aside and told her she better keep after the doctors because clearly, Brenda wasn’t going to. “Not me,” my mother said. “I’m not his wife anymore, and I won’t be holding a vigil at his bedside.”

20 April 1944

Somewhere in England

Dearest darling sweetheart,

I knew the army would solve our dilemma one way or another. It is a strange thing, but by going away I really found you. Keep writing your soulful letters, darling Evie. Some day soon we’ll be together again if what’s in the works (that I can’t talk about) goes well. Wait for me just a little longer, while the whole world waits out this nightmare until the dawn. We soldiers wait as well, not knowing where we’ll be sent or when, but wherever it is, it’ll make little difference. One adapts a “don’t give a goddamn” attitude because it does you little good to worry about anything. Practically everything that happens to a soldier is dependent on forces outside of oneself. Meanwhile, one just “sweats it out,” as the army saying goes.

They say man’s only way to achieve immortality is through his children. I should have liked to have a child with you. Some day, I hope. And it will be a son. Then I shall hold you in my arms and close my eyes, and think back to this time when I sat in my tent on the cold English moor and spoke to you across the ocean, sharing with you all the things I have in my heart.

Forever,

Clyde

The pace at Sinai was slow, Dr. Heidenheimer said, because it was almost Christmas and the hospital was short on staff. He had stopped by to tell us the bone scan was negative, which was good news, but not a surprise. He ordered the test because back in 1983 my father had prostate cancer (successfully treated, or even cured, with radiation). The negative bone scan confirmed the pain in his head wasn’t prostate cancer recurring and spreading, because prostate cancer would show up in his bones first, before traveling anywhere else. That was what prostate cancer did. Besides, no one had heard of prostate cancer ever spreading to the sinus, which was where, as it turned out, the radiologists found a shadow on the CAT scan. Heidenheimer mentioned this casually, as an aside. He seemed fearful of upsetting my father. “It’s just a shadow, Mr. Aronson. We don’t know what it is yet.”

I walked the doctor out into the wide white hallway. “It could be cancer,” Heidenheimer said. “There’s a possibility it’s cancer. We don’t know. It could be tuberculosis. A liquid cyst of some kind.”

“Tuberculosis. Really? That’d be good,” I said. “You can survive TB, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not cluster headaches, though.”

“No.”

Still, there was hope. TB.

He’d need Magnetic Resonance Imaging next to get a three-dimensional picture. “You should call for the MRI appointment right away,” Heidenheimer said. “Try Copeland on Reisterstown Road.”

“You want me to call? Isn’t that something the hospital does?”

“No. You better do it today. They’re usually booked up, especially this time of year.” Sinai didn’t own an MRI machine. Patients were sent to an outside facility. I figured they must take in-patients to the outside facility in an ambulance.

“No,” said Heidenheimer. “Somebody has to drive him there . . . in a car.” He glanced down the empty hallway. “You, I would imagine,” he said.

The appointment was set for the following week. Meanwhile, my aunt and uncles were coming to visit. Just before they were due to arrive, Brenda hid my father’s hat again. His head felt cold on the inside, he said. There was metal jangling in his skull. The green beanie was the only remedy. He pulled it down over his ears. Brenda could not stand the dirty homeless hippie look. That his head was cold on the inside and metal clanged in his ears she could stand. I went down the hall and recruited his favorite nurse Debbie to intervene. Debbie came and held out a hand. Brenda opened her purse grudgingly and gave the hat back. He put it on just in time. His brothers and sister busted onto the sixth floor ignoring the level of quiet in the hall. We could hear Uncle Harry and Uncle Alvin roaring out room numbers as they searched for 605, while Aunt Vivian explained hospital etiquette in her New York squawk to her ignorant brothers. And then Uncle Alvin’s wife Aunt Gladys was yelling, “Where you running? Wait for me!” in a Queens accent so thick it sounded like a parody. They swarmed around my father’s bed. He winced. I thought it was less about the headache than the humiliation. He was their big brother, “the professor,” they called him. But the professor was weak, and not how he used to be.

“Clyde,” said Uncle Harry. “Brudder.”

My father smiled. “Brudder,” he said.

“Guess who I talked to on the phone today?” Uncle Harry said. He was wearing a driving cap and a gray tweed overcoat that smelled of wind and cold. “Manny Bergman.”

“No shit,” my father said.

“You remember Bergman, don’t you Brudder?”

“His feet, I remember, more than the rest of him,” my father said. “Sticking out from under a car.”

Uncle Harry laughed. “Manny taught me how to rebuild an engine.” Harry turned to the rest of us. “We had all kinds of mentors at the H. Older guys, teachers. There was always an older brother around to teach you something.”

“Day and night,” my father said.

Debbie came in and asked us to go out for a few minutes while she changed the sheets, which she knew how to do without my father even getting up, so we left him and walked to the end of the corridor where a window overlooked Pimlico Racetrack. We could see everything from the sixth floor—the infield, the muddy track, the grandstand, and the clubhouse. Tears were rolling down Uncle Harry’s cheeks.

“You know what Clyde said to me?” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“Be a man.”

Uncle Alvin was staring out at the track. He looked up. “What’s that, Harry?”

“Not now. Clyde didn’t say it in the room,” said Uncle Harry. “Back then he said it. The day Mama left us at the Home. ‘Be a man,’ Clyde says. I was five years old.” Uncle Harry took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose.

“We just need to get him something to eat,” said Uncle Alvin. “You see how thin he is?”

Uncle Harry looked at me accusingly. “Did you give him those Pecan Sandies I sent?”

“Yeah, I gave him the Pecan Sandies.” My father could just as soon eat a box of nails, but I didn’t say so. I was careful with my aunt and uncles. Any one of them could go off at any time. Harry was so easily slighted, and while Alvin was fun and upbeat, that lasted only until you needed something from him. I liked Aunt Vivian—I liked all three of them some of the time—but Aunt Vivian made up stuff for no apparent reason and couldn’t be trusted. And yet, she was often brutally honest, telling the truth when no one else would. She was a nurse in the army during World War II, and then a civilian nurse until she began writing prescriptions for herself and lost her license. The four of us were silent for a few moments watching a woman carrying a balloon bouquet into another patient’s room, the balloons going bap, bap hitting against each other.

“My big brother, Clyde,” said Harry. “He was always looking out for me at the Home. But guess what? Clyde was scared to death, too. He was so scared he shat his pants.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “My father told us you were the one who shat your pants.”

“No,” said Uncle Harry. “Not me. Him.”

“They probably both shat their pants,” said Aunt Vivian.