A Sharp Intake of Breath. Джон Миллер

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СКАЧАТЬ remember that; you were just little.”

      “I remember her. She was nice to me.”

      Ma got up from her chair and came around behind me. “My God, Saul, he might be right. She must have a very progressively minded husband.”

      “She said her husband gave her permission because she loved being a nurse. And she also told me about the diamond.”

      My parents’ faces showed their skepticism.

      “I remember!”

      And I did.

      When Ma brought me to Dr. Grover, I was almost five years old. It was early 1921, a bright, cold day in January, and we walked for an hour through the unplowed Toronto streets to make our appointment. Occasionally, we’d find one narrow track in the middle of a wide boulevard and follow it, the snow on either side of me reaching to above my knees. Ma carried me as much as she could, but I had to walk most of the way, complaining that she was tugging too much on my arm. She told me we would be late, that my legs were sinking too deep and that if she didn’t pull me along, I might get stuck. She brought a bag full of money to the hospital. Dr. Grover gently pushed it back across the desk and told her she should keep it until afterwards, and then send a bank draft.

      When I was a newborn, my parents had decided to wait even to have my palate fixed. The operations were expensive and Pop had heard from friends about the humiliating process they’d have to go through before the hospital determined it would pay. Pop was a proud man and decided they’d save for the operations themselves. They spent five years at it, putting aside a portion of the meagre proceeds of their silk and cotton retail store on St. Patrick Street. Without telling Pop, Ma went with her hand out to the Toronto Hebrew Benevolent Society, and since she kept the books, she was able to conceal the donation as business profits.

      My mother, if I may say so, was a dogged and intelligent woman. She was impressed with modern medicine but she was also skeptical and inquisitive. She sought to educate herself rather than rely solely on what the doctors told her. She read voraciously whatever she came across—critically, laughing at advice she found preposterous and mocking it to anyone who would listen. One day, years later, I found a booklet in her house called “Your Baby Has a Cleft Palate?” Ma had underlined the following passages: “His condition may have been a shock to you. Stop blaming yourself ... and stop regarding your husband with questioning eyes. No one knows as yet why this developmental failure occurs and until science discovers the reason, you should stop worrying about it.”

      She had scribbled “What nonsense!!!” in the margin. I wondered which part she felt was three-exclamation-mark nonsense: that parents actually blamed themselves for the condition, that somehow a husband’s indiscretion might be responsible for a birth defect, or that saying she shouldn’t worry would be enough to allay her fears.

      With Dr. Grover, however, Ma’s criticism drained away, as though it were light rainfall, and his smile, the porous earth into which it seeped. Even though Dr. Grover had embarrassed her by refusing her bag of money, she spoke of him with reverence. A young, single man helping sick babies, she said. He knew all of the latest methods. Maybe it was better, she rationalized, that they had to wait five years. When I was born, Dr. Grover was away treating wounded soldiers in France, just shipped off to help in the field hospitals of Verdun. The doctor who would have operated in his absence might have been older and perhaps not well versed in modern medical techniques, Ma speculated. Dr. Grover, on the other hand, had studied at Yale University. He was handsome and kind. If only he’d been Jewish, she would’ve surely introduced him to a single friend.

      I mostly remember a big man with round glasses, a wide forehead, and a wild tousle of auburn hair who had halitosis and who made me tilt my head back too far while he breathed into my open mouth. I remember his nurse much better, and more fondly: a stout Englishwoman who said to me, “Here at the hospital they call me Nurse Fister, but you can call me Nurse Grace.”

      She had limpid blue eyes, sat with me when my parents couldn’t be there, and said “there, there,” a lot. She made me feel safe by stroking my cheek.

      Before giving me a needle she said, “Grip your mother’s index finger, as tight as you can.” I squeezed hard, until my hand hurt so much I didn’t notice the needle at all.

      One afternoon, about a month after we first met Dr. Grover and Nurse Grace, the doctor stitched together the roof of my mouth, applying an aluminium splint to keep it together and to prevent me from sucking at the horsehair stitches. Nowadays, children born like me have better treatment, and it’s free. Back then there were specialists just as there are today, and the surgeons did the best they could, but the methods were less refined. The instruments appeared medieval, with hooks and barbs in places that couldn’t possibly have been for anything but show. To fix a lip, for instance, they’d jab needles from one side of the cleft to the other and draw the sides together with sutures wrapped around the needles in figure eights, like tying a boat to butterfly moorings. Crude methods that did the trick but aesthetically weren’t very satisfying. Even fifteen years later, when I had that operation, the techniques hadn’t significantly improved.

      Nurse Grace fussed over me during my recovery. When Ma and Pop weren’t there, she told me stories of England, of her husband’s exploits in South Africa, and of a beautiful amber diamond called the Orange Sunset, which he brought back for her as a wedding present.

      Nurse Grace stroked my hair when I complained about the pain. Her voice was a soothing balm. I listened to her lilting tones while I stared at ceiling tiles or at a tiny spider spinning her web in the corner of the room, or considered the gurgling radiator in the background, a counterpoint to the gurgling in my throat.

      Eight days later, they removed the splint, and I was home. I remember a marked increase in toys, and being doted on by Ma and my sisters and various relatives and neighbours. Even by Pop.

      MY PARENTS HAD NEVER SAID IT ALOUD, but they believed I was slow. It didn’t help that the doctors told them I might be, that Mrs. Debardeleben had confirmed it. It didn’t help that I barely spoke, so afraid was I of what would come out. It was in this context that at breakfast that morning, my memory of Nurse Grace had made an impression.

      It made a bigger one, a few months later, when the neighbours had a small fire in their shop. It was quickly extinguished, but all of our merchandise had to be removed from the shelves and triaged: aired out, washed, or thrown away. When it was time to put the salvaged stock back, I told Pop he’d gotten the order of the silk bolts wrong when he’d rehung them.

      “They go blue-red-pink-beige-white, not red-blue-pink-white-beige,” I said.

      “You can’t possibly remember that.” “You should listen to him,” said Bessie. “He remembers things he sees.”

      Years later, I’d be told that scientists didn’t believe in photographic memory. All I knew was that I had an ability others didn’t have to remember things I saw—the location and sequence of objects and the placement of words on a page. When I spoke, my words sometimes came out unformed and escaped here and there, but every word I read, every image I saw got ensnared, as if in a sticky web, waiting to be retrieved.

      Pop stood back and took direction from me as I reassembled the merchandise, placing rainbows of fabric in exactly the right order on the display tables. When I saw how pleased he was, I became excited and told him I knew our whole inventory off by heart. Then, my parents were impressed. They were relying on me for something.

      My excitement was short-lived.

      Rather than deciding I was smart, they pigeon-holed me. I was still СКАЧАТЬ