On his way out, I offered him a glass of whiskey. Rose stocked the finest whiskey. As I poured his drink, I was thinking that even in an apocalypse, for the privileged few, whiskey and pretty parlors and top-drawer service never cease.
“Tell me, miss,” he asked, “are you religious? Seems all the folks in this godforsaken town are suddenly, fervently religious.”
“I don’t put stock in anything I haven’t seen,” I declared.
“And even then?” He was laughing with me now. He poured himself another glass and held it up to the lit lamp. “I’ve been an Episcopalian my whole life, but I feel these days we are very much on our own.”
There was such a haunted look about him. I hoped I wouldn’t have to hear his confession.
“Odd, this house,” he mused. “It’s a far cry from her other place.” When he saw that line of talk made me uncomfortable, he hesitated. “Ah, you’ll forgive me if I’m crude. You don’t need to worry so much. The tough nuts like your lady upstairs tend to rebound. They built this city, you know: the miners and the Roses.”
He drained his glass and set it on the mantel. “I have seen things these last weeks that would make Dickens weep. I fear our city has lost its soul.” He shrugged. “Perhaps it never had one.”
He sighed and something rattled in his throat. He was too tired to cough. “I wouldn’t bet on much these days, but I think I’d bet on you, miss. Tomorrow, then,” he said, and he put on his hat and coat and reached for the door. “Boil water. As much as you can spare. We’ll need clean sheets and towels.”
That evening in the square, we traded pots and china plates for extra water, which we set to boil in the morning, awaiting the doctor’s arrival.
He didn’t come, not that day or the next. Or the next.
Pie offered to walk downtown and check for him at the hospital, but no one had seen Dr. Howell in days, and there wasn’t another doctor who could be spared.
I accused Pie of not pushing hard enough.
“I did push. I was rude like you,” she said.
Rose burned with fever. Her arms became mottled. Still, her heart beat. While my heart boomed with every twitch. I feared that now that I was with her—now that she was mine—she was going to die.
In the kitchen, they caucused—Pie, Tan, LowNaa, even Lifang. They decided that we had to return Rose to the hospital. They were haggling over who should be the one to convince me.
I wouldn’t hear of it. Instead I grabbed my coat.
Dr. Sugarman was at supper; he answered the door with crumbs in his beard. When I told him what I needed, he went to a closet and rummaged for his leather doctor bag. It was dusty from lack of use.
On the way back to Rose’s house, I asked him if a psychiatrist ever did this sort of thing. “No, my dear,” he said, “not since school.” In medical school in Vienna, he had been a colleague of Freud’s, his practice being the psyche, the soul, he explained; he hadn’t tended to the bodies of patients in many years.
Sugarman was winded climbing Rose’s stairs. He washed his hands in the basin beside the bed. As he tugged at the bandage covering her eye, his hands shook. He stepped back and bowed his head.
“Dr. Sugarman?”
He didn’t answer me.
Finally, he said, “Vera, I think some whiskey.”
He drank a glass and said, “You too, dear.”
We covered the bedclothes with sheets, then sterilized the instruments in Sugarman’s bag with whiskey. Again Sugarman bowed his head and mumbled in Hungarian and Yiddish a mix of hexes and blessings and sighs. He gave Rose a shot of morphine. With no further ceremony, he used a clamp to hold the lid in place, though it took him several tries. There was nothing to clamp onto, the bones in the socket were shattered.
He stepped back, rejiggered, tried again, admonishing himself and God.
“Vera, here,” he said. “Hold like so.”
There was a stink to the infection, and it made me sick in my stomach, but what could I do? I did. Sugarman held the lower lid with his finger. Grunting, he seized the scalpel, lifted the eye from the muscles surrounding it, and cut the ball at its root. The eye dropped, missed the bowl, and rolled onto the sheet, settling in the crook of Rose’s arm. Sugarman pinched the ball with his fingers and put it in the bowl and set that on the bedside table.
I couldn’t look but I looked anyway. The eye resembled a hard-boiled egg with a raw red knot attached to one end. At the other end, a fixed stare.
Sugarman peered through his wire spectacles, bending close to inspect Rose’s face. Next, he scraped the pus in the socket with a tiny spoon. His fingers shook on approach; his fingers had white hairs on the knuckles. He bathed the cavity with yet more whiskey.
When I saw the thread and needle, I asked, “Really? That’s how you do it?”
“That’s how you do it,” he said.
He stitched the seam and wrapped her head with a roll of cotton that Howell had left behind.
Where Sugarman stitched, the seam would eventually look like a crudely knit purse, but even so, I was grateful to him. When he finished, once again he bowed his head. I waited with him.
He glanced at me, and I asked, “Are you praying for her?”
“No, my friend,” he said, “not her. You.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
The Ramble
Sugarman came by the next morning to check on Rose.
“How can I help you, dear?” he asked.
I didn’t understand the question. He’d done more than anyone. I told him so, and said that I was grateful. I added, “Dr. Sugarman, I’m fine.”
He said, “Vera, you are not fine.” And he
