On the way to his desk he met Millikan, nervous, narrow-faced, sallow, with his scrap of mustache. He carried a towel, too, and approached, signaling with it. How he aped his father-in-law!
“Telephone, Leventhal. Miss Ashmun’s been looking for you. Some party on your line.”
“Who?” Leventhal was filled with anxiety, suddenly. He went rapidly to his desk.
“Asa?” It was Elena.
“Yes, what’s the matter? Anything wrong?”
“The baby is worse. Mickey…” he heard her say. Her voice shot up and she became incoherent.
“Slower, slower Elena, please. I can’t follow you. What’s happening over there?” He guessed, his heart sinking, that she, too, was growing worse. “Now tell me slowly what’s the matter.”
“I want to get a specialist.”
“Why don’t you send the boy to the hospital?”
“I want a specialist to come to the house.”
“What does your doctor say?”
“He didn’t come today. Let him stay away. What good does he do him anyway? He doesn’t do any good. He doesn’t come even when he knows Mickey is so sick. Asa, do you hear me? I want a big man.”
“All right. But if you took my advice about the hospital…”
Again she cried out incoherently, piercingly. He made out phrases of exclamation and question but scarcely any words except the persistent “No! No, no, no!” He attempted to interrupt. It was the operator, depositing the coin with a mechanical whirr, who put a stop to it. Elena, in fear, shrieked, “Asa!”
“Here. We haven’t been cut off yet. I’m still on the wire. Listen, I’ll get another doctor and be out myself after work.”
“A specialist… I don’t want anybody else.”
Twice the operator demanded another coin. “Shut up!” Leventhal at last said, exasperated. “Can’t you wait another second.” But he was already talking on a dead line. He banged the instrument and jolted it aside with his elbow. Miss Ashmun seemed astonished. He gazed at her gloomily and presently picked up the phone again. He called the Harkavys. Harkavy’s sister Julia had a child and should be able to recommend a good doctor. Harkavy’s mother answered the phone. She was extremely fond of Leventhal and spoke to him cordially, asking about his wife. “But I guess it’s Dan”l you want to talk to. ‘Dan”l!’“ she called. “He’s home today.”
Leventhal at once explained it was Julia he wanted. Afterward he regretted that he had not taken the opportunity to ask Harkavy about Kirby Allbee. But what a time it was to have thought of him!
5
AFTER a hurried supper of a sandwich and a bottle of soda at a stand near the ferry, Leventhal crossed to Staten Island. He walked onto the deck with his hands in the pockets of his fully buttoned, wrinkled jacket. His white shoes were soiled. Posted beside a life ring, his dark forehead shining faintly under his ill-combed, thick hair, he gazed out on the water with an appearance of composure; he did not look as burdened as he felt. The formless, working, yellowish-green water was dull, the gulls steered back and forth, the boat crept forward into the glare. A barge was spraying orange paint over the hull of a freighter, which pointed high, lifting its bow out of the slow, thick cloud. Surely the sun was no hotter in any Singapore or Surabaya, on the chains, plates, and rails of ships anchored there. A tanker, seabound, went across the ferry’s course, and Leventhal stared after it, picturing the engine room; it was terrible, he imagined, on a day like this, the men nearly naked in the shaft alley as the huge thing rolled in a sweat of oil, the engines laboring. Each turn must be like a repeated strain on the hearts and ribs of the wipers, there near the keel, beneath the water. The towers on the shore rose up in huge blocks, scorched, smoky, gray, and bare white where the sun was direct upon them. The notion brushed Leventhal’s mind that the light over them and over the water was akin to the yellow revealed in the slit of the eye of a wild animal, say a lion, something inhuman that didn’t care about anything human and yet was implanted in every human being too, one speck of it, and formed a part of him that responded to the heat and the glare, exhausting as these were, or even to freezing, salty things, harsh things, all things difficult to stand. The Jersey shore, yellow, tawny, and flat, appeared on the right. The Statue of Liberty rose and traveled backwards again; in the trembling air, it was black, a twist of black that stood up like smoke. Stray planks and waterlogged, foundering crates washed back in the boat’s swell.
The specialist was coming. But what he could do depended on Elena. Contagious cases were hospitalized; the health authorities were called in. But the first doctor seemed to have given up the struggle with Elena, and presumably he knew the law. With unconscious grimness, Leventhal prepared himself to struggle with her. As long as she held out, all the specialists in the world were futile. The prospect of interfering, rushing in to rescue the boy, was repugnant to him; it made him feel, more than ever, that he was an outsider. But what could you do with Elena? To begin with, ordinary good care might have kept the child from falling sick, and judging from what he had seen… well, her fear of the hospital was an indication of her fitness to bring up children. Some people would say that she loved them and that her love made up for her shortcomings — not to look too closely at those shortcomings. Love, by all means. But because the mother and the child were tied together in that way, if the child died through her ignorance, was she still a good mother? Should someone else — he thought of it seriously — have the right to take the child away? Or should the fate of the two of them be considered one and the same, and the child’s death said to be the mother’s affair only because she would suffer most by its death? In that case the child was not regarded as a person, and was that fair? Well, that was the meaning of helplessness; that was what they meant when they said it. Now with that in mind you could understand why little children sometimes cried the way they did. It was as if it were in them to know. Unfair, thought Leventhal, not to say tragic.
He began to consider his own unfortunate mother whose large features and black hair he could summon up very faintly. Invariably he saw her wearing an abstracted look, but he was not in fact sure that her look was abstracted. Perhaps he attributed it to her. And when he examined his idea of her more closely he realized that what he really meant by abstracted was mad-looking; a familiar face and yet without anything in it directed toward him. He dreaded it; he dreaded the manifestation of anything resembling it in himself. A period of coolness toward Harkavy had followed the latter’s remark about persecution. Knowing his history, how could Harkavy say that to him? But eventually he satisfied himself that Harkavy was merely thoughtless and didn’t sufficiently understand what he was saying. Until he spoke, he himself didn’t know what was coming. So he had forgiven Harkavy, but he was left more conscious of his susceptibility to remarks of that kind. He was afraid the truth about him was so apparent that even Harkavy might see it.
He had spoken of his fears to Mary late one night in bed. She laughed at him. Why did he accept his father’s explanation of his mother’s illness? And he had never really learned the facts about it, it was true. He had only his father’s word for it that she died insane. Many of the things that terrified people lost their horror when a doctor explained them. Years ago everyone spoke of brain fever; now it was known that there was no such sickness. “For my own peace of mind,” Mary said. “I would try to find out what she had.” But, although Leventhal then promised that he would go into the matter soon, make a real inquiry, so far he had done nothing about it. As for his fears, he was too ready, Mary told him, to believe anything and everything about himself. “That’s because you’re not sure of yourself. If you were a little more sure you wouldn’t let yourself be bothered,” she said with all the firmness of her own confident strength. And she was probably right. But, my God, how could anyone say that he was sure? How could he know all that he needed to know in order to say it? It wasn’t right. Leventhal felt the presumption of it without, however, blaming Mary; he knew she expressed truthfully what she felt.