When the youngest started to run a fever, the mother gave him some liquid medicine, not aspirin. “We don’t give aspirin to babies, Willa.”
“We don’t either, ma’am.”
“Ma’am again — oh, oh, oh.”
“…Sylvie,” Willa managed.
When the fever continued — down in the morning, up again in the afternoon, higher still at night — the parents brought him to the pediatrician’s office. Willa and the boys did a jigsaw puzzle at home. Virus, not bacteria, the pediatrician said; it will run its course.
“But how long is its course?” the father moaned on the fourth day. “You never had such a high fever,” he accused the eight-year-old, who burst into tears. “I am sorry, I am sorry,” the father said, and he hugged his son.
At night the adults took turns tending the infant, sitting in the living-room rocking chair. While the mother was rocking him, Willa slid into the kitchen. She carried a packet of the reddish powder Aunt Leona had pounded from various nuts. She boiled water and let the powder steep. By the time it was her turn to rock the baby, the tea had cooled. She poured it into a bottle and slipped the bottle into the pocket of her apron. She took the baby and sat down on the rocker. Exhausted from fretting, he fell asleep on her shoulder. She heard the mother stumble into the bedroom. The father came out; she heard him in the kitchen opening some contraption, a folding chair maybe…There was a full moon. Through the living-room window Willa saw Dr. Gurevich and the janitor walking down the street, arm in arm.
Willa took the bottle from her apron. She shifted the baby to her lap and cradled him and stroked first his left cheek and then his right, and at last he opened his eyes and then his mouth and she inserted the nipple. Looking at her, he drank about two-thirds of the bottle. She could feel the heat draining from his body, feel his breathing become slower, feel the rasp in his chest grow still. He slept again. He smiled in his comfortable sleep. She got up and carried him into the kitchen. The contraption she had heard was an easel. The father was working at a drawing, intently using the side of his pencil to create shadows…
“Jack.”
He turned. “What! What!”
“The fever has broken.”
He took the baby from her. He was not ashamed to cry. But when she stared at the drawing — only a head this time, pointed ears and one eye missing and an open mouth, lipless — he gave an embarrassed snort. “It’s like an amulet; it’s to prevent catast—”
She touched his shoulder to show she understood. Then she moved to the sink and took the bottle from her pocket and unscrewed the nipple and tipped the thing, and the rest of the amber-colored potion poured out in front of his eyes and hers.
Castle 4
The hospital — red-brick High Victorian Gothic — had been built atop a low hill just after the Civil War. It was named Memorial Hospital but was soon referred to as the Castle. The structure had been modernized inside, many times, but the balustrades and turrets and long thin windows from which you could shoot arrows at your enemies — all these remained.
And, like a true medieval fortress, it cast its formidable shadow on the surrounding area. Everyone who worked in it or lived near it or occupied its rooms felt its spirit: benign maybe, malign maybe, maybe neither, at least for now. The place harbored secrets — electronic information, sneaky bacteria — and it was peopled by creatures who had wandered in or maybe had lived there since birth, like the AIDS babies, the short-gut babies, the babies lacking brain stems: all abandoned to the Castle by horrified parents who sometimes even fled the state. There were beautiful ladies-in-waiting — waiting to die; and crones whose futures were no happier; and tremulous knights; and bakers with envelopes of magical spices. There was an ugly guard with a kind heart.
Zeph Finn had lived for the past year and a half in the Castle’s domain, first in the residents’ quarters and now in the top flat of one of the nearby three-deckers. He rarely went anywhere: he shuffled from Castle to flat, flat to Castle. He had ventured forth tonight, however, to a potluck party. And now a pretty girl had asked him something, but for God’s sake what, he hadn’t heard — oh, what do they always ask. “I do regional anesthesia,” he guessed.
“Oooh, do you. What region — the Boston area? Do you move from one hospital to another hospital?”
Silent, Zeph moved from this guest to another guest. Most of the potluck people here were doctors and knew that a regional anesthesiologist specialized in nerve blocks. Many knew Zeph. Because of this familiarity he’d agreed to drop in, a box of cheese straws under his arm. The host, chief of the emergency room, was one of his few friends — his dogwalkers, he called them; they dragged him outside whenever he’d been noticeably unresponsive for a while.
He had no girlfriend at present. He never had a girlfriend for long. But there were some women who saw in his numbed silence, his reluctance to meet the eye, something to work with. They hoped to rescue him. Rescuing the rescuer, ha! A doomed enterprise.
“He’s married to his specialty,” somebody once said to somebody.
“Oh, no,” said the other somebody. “He’s engaged to his cart.”
Zeph had heard this joke and was not offended. Who wouldn’t feel an abiding affection for that cart of scrupulously ordered drawers with a disposal container attached to one side. Needles, syringes, label tapes, and IV catheters in the top drawer. More needles and ampoules in the second. Continuous-nerve-block sets in the third. Emergency stuff in the fourth, along with drugs whose names scanned like poetry, according to a would-be girlfriend who had memorized them as an aid to seduction. “Lidocaine, ephedrine, phenylephrine, epinephrine,” she began, and then got stuck on atropine, poor puppet.
When he left the party he walked home along half of the perimeter of the hospital grounds, looking up at the edifice every so often. A huge parking lot floated from the rear. Some old-timers — that is, docs who had been young in World War II — remembered the year-by-year expansion of the lot.
But long before that brutal felling of trees, neighborhoods were forming just beyond the fringe. At the beginning of the last century a subway station had been constructed near the Castle and the three-deckers were built. They became — they were expected to become — dwelling places for the poor. Birthed together like litters, block after block, the houses were clapboard, and each floor had a porch. There was a plot of land in the back of each to be shared by all three tenant families; Irish then, now folks from more faraway places: there were the Filipino blocks, the Venezuelan area, Little Brazil…Many adults worked in the Castle; others took the subway to jobs in town. Each neighborhood had a few restaurants, a bar, a grocery, a couple of day-care centers.
The area had one unexpected feature, discovered when the three-deckers were erected. This was a stream, mostly underground, but running for a while through a little wood. The earth was more swamp than soil; strange bushes and spindly, widely spaced trees thrived in it; nothing could be built on its softness, you couldn’t even hide there. The city, acknowledging the piece of land unprofitable, might have embellished it a bit, put up markers to identify the vegetation, made a sanctuary of it for people and birds. But the city left it alone. The two public schools among the neighborhoods of the Castle each had a playground and a basketball court, and one had a baseball field. And so kids ignored the little forest. The only people to visit it during the day were peculiar children, perhaps shunned by their boisterous fellows, perhaps preferring isolation. Zeph went there occasionally to smoke and very occasionally to snort.
This summer the woods were being explored by two sixth-graders from the Filipino community, Joe and Acelle, Joe because he liked plants and insects, Acelle because she liked Joe. Every afternoon Joe tolerated Acelle’s almost wordless presence. Her chief occupation when school was out was helping her only sister — their mother was dead. When not busy with that task she followed Joe, obeyed him, adopted his ideas. Sometimes, though, she just lay down and listened to the birds.