‘I just feel sort of choky-like. Like I’m drinkin’ ginger ale I can’t taste.’
‘You want a real drink?’
‘No. It’s somethin’. Frankie’ – she paused as if it were too foolish to say – ‘I can’t get up.’
She tried to smile but the lips froze with a rising fright. He touched her knee. ‘A little charley horse is all you got.’ And massaged her legs gently while she braced herself by her elbows against the pillow.
‘I – I can’t feel you rubbin’ so good.’
‘Lay back ’n take it easy,’ he ordered her professionally, ‘your nerves is exhausted. I think that croaker missed a joint lookin’ you over.’
‘Don’t say “croaker,” honey. Say “Doctor.”’ She lay wide-eyed, looking up at the shadowed ceiling for some friendlier shadow there. ‘Frankie, if it was just somethin’ bust, wouldn’t it hurt like everythin’?’
‘Somethin’s bust awright,’ he decided. Not knowing quite what he meant by that himself.
The analyst at the people’s clinic was young, pure in heart, and dressed in theories as spotless as his own chaste white jacket.
‘The name is Pasterzy,’ he introduced himself, gripping Frankie’s hand in a med-school grip. ‘A good name for a doctor,’ Frankie told him, ‘this is my wife.’
He had brought her in a borrowed wheelchair and she’d raised one hand listlessly to take the doctor’s hand. Then had simply sat regarding them both with a sort of puffed-up hostility.
Young Dr P. had immediately taken her by surprise with a needle jabbed into the tender back of her calf. Her eyelids had fluttered but she had not cried out.
‘You felt that,’ he’d accused her gently.
‘Of course I felt it, goldarn t’ing.’ She had turned to Frankie indignantly. ‘This dummy pinched me, Frankie – what’s the big idea?’ But all Frankie had done was to stand there like a goof watching another man stroking his wife’s leg clear to the knee.
‘You’re lying to yourself, Mrs Majcinek,’ Dr P. had told her tactlessly and she’d turned in a flood of tears to Frankie. ‘Don’t just stand there when he’s talkin’ like that – gawpin’ while he calls your wife aliar ’ncopsfree feels – get me to a doc who respects people.’ She turned with condescension upon the doctor kneeling at her feet. ‘Do you mind?’
Dr P. stood up and the two men had exchanged understanding glances. ‘Bring her back after she’s better rested,’ he’d told Frankie.
Halfway through the door Sophie had grabbed the chair’s wheels to keep from being pushed all the way through before taking one over-the-shoulder parting shot: ‘If you’re so damned smart why ain’t you a millionaire?’
That night she had dreamed that she was about to be jabbed by a flaming needle in Frankie’s hand: she’d gotten out of bed, turned on the light and wakened screaming. Frankie had carried her back to the bed and she hadn’t gotten out of bed unaided since. Living between the bed and the wheelchair, her arms had grown flabby while her legs had lost flesh from disuse. The skin had crowded pendulously upon itself beneath her chin to make her eyes mere pale gray slits reflecting her sick despair.
That Pasterzy had taken as much as any doctor could. Frankie would have to wait outside and when Sophie was returned to him she would look so careworn that Frankie would hardly have the heart to question her. Yet couldn’t help wondering humbly.
‘What he do, Zosh?’
‘He took a sample of blood. He says I got real good blood. Wait till he takes a smear, see what he says then.’
‘He don’t hurt you, does he?’
‘It ain’t hurtin’ like that, Frankie, it’s just he’s such a squirrel. His roof is leakin’ – he don’t even look at the pins no more. He don’t even touch me, he don’t even taken my pullis, maybe I got a fever. He just asts them person’l questions. He’s a stinkin’ t’ing hisself, I think,’ cause I don’t like how he talks. You should of heard what I told him when he started pikin’ around to find out what you do for a livin’, how much dough you make. I told him you’re out of work ’n that stopped him cold.’
‘You done just right there,’ Frankie had conceded. They had to be pretty sharp to get around his Zosh, he knew. ‘Didn’t he give you no perscription for medicine though?’
‘He don’t give me nuttin’ but talk, talk, talk, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell, he’s one big stinkin’ t’ing.’
‘Don’t say “stinkin’ t’ing,”’ Frankie had suggested, ‘say “reekin’.”’
‘He’s a reekin’ t’ing all right. He wears me down till I’m reeker’n he is. Tells me to go home ’n rest, get fresh air. Where the hell does he think I live – by the Humboldt Park lagoon? “Get built up,” he says. “Built up fer what?” I ast him. “So’s you can tear me down again?” He wants to know too much, why I said that.’
‘What he say then?’
‘He says he’s a sort of siko-patic doctor, he got to find out everythin’ – “Did I like to play wit’ little girls ’r little boys when I was a little girl?” Is that his business, Frankie? I told him sure I liked the little boys, the nice ones anyhow, I liked the little girls too, if they just wasn’t sheenies. Then I ast him a thing or two myself.’
‘What you ask him, Zosh?’ Frankie sounded worried.
‘I ast him why don’t he wear boxin’ gloves when he goes to bed.’ N you know what? He took off his glasses, blew on ’em, put ’em down ’n then starts walkin’ around lookin’ for ’em. I had to tell him where he just put ’em. Why do I have to have some popeye kike like that quackin’ at me anyhow, Frankie? Ain’t there no real doctors no more?’
‘Don’t say “kike,”’ Frankie protested mildly. ‘He’s a Polak.’
‘Some Polak. He’s a reekin’ t’ing is all.’
Frankie was relieved when she and Doc Pasterzy had at last washed their hands of each other. Those trips down Division, wheeling her in the chair, had left him feeling half crippled himself.
But she wouldn’t go to County. ‘We give them my mother’s heart there,’ she claimed, ‘they put a auto-topsy on her.’
Eventually she had run through a whole series of quacks, faith healers and, for as long as Frankie’s terminal-leave pay had lasted, an ‘electric blood reverser’ manipulated by Old Doc Dominowski.
It didn’t do any good to tell her what all the neighborhood hustlers knew: that old Doc Dominoes, as they called him, wasn’t Doc Dominowski at all. The original Doc Dominowski had had a license. But after his passing his daughter had rented his office to this blood-reversing impostor who’d left the deceased doc’s shingle up. A ruse as simple as that. Though in print he had never claimed to be anything but a wandering masseur.
The present Dr D. had had a slogan stamped over his Damen Avenue door: Ad Electrica Necessitas Vitae. An inner legend announced Big Boy Is In.
A diploma in the waiting room revealed Big Boy to be a member of The American Association of Medical Hydrology, whatever that might be. Furthermore he was a deacon of the Royal Aryan Society for Positive Christianity and as such was privileged to throw in divine healing without extra charge. That went right along with the three-dollar treatment for a touch of the astral power and a short lecture on the latent powers possessed by all of us. ‘Pow-wers what vassly transent our normaller ones,’ was just how Big Boy put it. The whole trouble with Sophie, he saw as soon as he set eye on her, was that she hadn’t been awakened; and had the brass to tell her husband so.
‘God help me when she comes to then,’ Frankie sulked to himself. He knew a rogue when he saw one and this mild-looking, white-haired, stoop-shouldered coneroo with the flat pink snout, a toothpick stuck in one corner of his mouth and his initials embroidered in red upon the pocket of an army-surplus surgeon’s smock, looked like an old hand to Frankie. He boasted that he was the most popular spine manipulator and ray caster on the Northwest Side. He still looked like the business end of a fugitive warrant to Frankie.