Doctors

  ‘And meanwhile you can call your grandma or your classmates here whenever you feel lonely,’ offered Hannah.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am, I can’t,’ the little boy replied. ‘Nobody ’round here’s got a phone.’

  ‘But you can write,’ said Elva pointedly. ‘Your father never phoned us up from Europe and still we always kept in touch.’

  ‘Is there anything else that’s troubling you, Linc?’ Hannah asked.

  He nodded shyly.

  ‘Suppose I … disappoint you?’

  ‘There’s only one way you could disappoint us,’ Herschel said emphatically. ‘That is if you don’t come.’

  There was a silence as the young boy looked at his grandma. Now Elva spoke for both of them.

  ‘We both agree his father would have wanted him to go with you.’

  Though Herschel wanted to leap with joy, he said simply, ‘That’s wonderful. My wife and I will stay here till we organize the practical arrangements.’ Then to the boy he added warmly, ‘I promise that you won’t regret this.’

  The Landsmanns felt intoxicated with hope while Linc was struck dumb by the awesomeness of his decision.

  ‘Herschel, are you mishugah? You mean to tell me there aren’t enough shvartzes in Cleveland that you have to import another one from the South?’

  ‘Stefan – I mean Steve, I forbid you to talk like that.’

  Having found a nearby hotel that would accept them for the night, Herschel had phoned his brother in Cleveland to ask if Steve’s lawyer could find out what they were legally obliged to do.

  His brother had been less than enthusiastic about the whole idea. ‘Listen, Herschel, be reasonable,’ Steve continued to argue, ‘I know you and Hannah want a child. We’ll find you one up here. What am I saying – we’ll find you two. You want three? We’ll find you three.’

  ‘I want this boy,’ said Herschel Landsmann, in a determined tone of voice.

  ‘All right, all right, Hersh. I’ll have my lawyer check out the details and call you in the morning.’ And then a final admonition: ‘Only, don’t blame me when you get turned down for the Country Club.’

  The attorney, a young man not long out of Northwestern Law, looked more favorably on the Landsmanns’ proposition. There was, of course, the matter of the mother still de jure entitled to the child’s custody. But judging from all he’d heard about Lorraine, he didn’t foresee any problem on that front. It would be easy to prove that the elder Mrs Bennett had been the actual parent de facto and was therefore entitled to transfer guardianship of young Linc to the Landsmanns as foster parents.

  There remained but a few minor details for which he would have to consult a law firm in the state of Georgia.

  ‘You folks are doing a wonderful thing,’ the attorney said sincerely, at the close of their first telephone consultation.

  Oh yes, Herschel confessed to himself, at least I know it’s wonderful for us.

  One evening a week later, he found Hannah sobbing.

  ‘What’s wrong, my love?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she murmured, ‘we’re going to have a child in our house.’

  At the beginning the young boy attended the local public school. When they discovered how far behind he was in reading and in math, the Landsmann hired tutors for him – three hours every afternoon.

  Linc did not seem to mind. For he had an unquenchable thirst to learn. And yet, as he confessed to Herschel in one of their heart-to-heart talks, he desperately missed his grandma – and playing basketball. Herschel could do nothing to rectify the first problem, but he could certainly solve the second. Twenty-four hours later a backboard with hoop and net had been set up on the Landsmanns’ garage.

  Yet the Landsmanns continued to fret, worrying that perhaps they were driving Linc too hard.

  ‘Do you think we’re overpressuring him?’ Herschel asked late one afternoon. He had come home early from the office and Linc was still closeted upstairs with Miss Alsop, his English tutor. ‘He may hate us someday for all the time we keep him prisoner with the extra lessons.’

  ‘No, honestly,’ his wife assured him, ‘I think he enjoys it. There’s excitement in his eyes. He wants to learn.’

  ‘That’s right, I do.’

  They turned. Linc had just entered. ‘I love it, really. I wouldn’t even mind it I had tutoring on Sundays – ’cause then it wouldn’t be long before I catch up to the pack.’

  ‘And then –?’ asked Herschel with delight.

  ‘And then I’ll pass them,’ said the boy with blithe self-confidence.

  The next summer, they presented him as a candidate for Shaker Heights Academy. It was not the usual time for admissions. But the headmaster was persuaded by the tenacity of the foster parents, the letters from his teachers and tutors, not to mention a telephone call from their local Congressman (Steve had reluctantly arranged that ploy).

  But most of all he was impressed by the young man’s intellectual potential. Linc did astonishingly well on the exams they set specially for him. No one would have credited the fact that only months ago he had been scarcely literate.

  Moreover, the director of admissions suggested that it might be something of an interesting experiment. That is, to have a colored youngster in the otherwise snow-white student body.

  ‘Sort of like a foreign student, you might say.’

  ‘Quite,’ the headmaster agreed. ‘And one might also say we’re killing two birds with a single stone.’

  ‘How so?’ his colleague asked.

  ‘Well, not only is the lad colored, but his foster parents are, you know – of Hebrew stock. That would put an end to some of the complaints we’ve had of late.’

  They little knew how significant their admission of Lincoln Bennett, Jr, would turn out to be. For – as he had predicted – having caught up with the pack, Linc proceeded to outdistance them. In fact, after a single term they had to promote him to a higher class in English, Math, and Science.

  And that was not all.

  To no one’s surprise, he was the greatest athlete the school had ever seen. But that seemed only natural. For as the coach told the headmaster, his race excelled at any sport involving running fast or jumping high.

  At first the other students treated him like a visitor from some strange planet, but one by one he captivated all of them.

  Still there were moments of embarrassment. The dances with the ‘better’ girls’ schools, for example. After some awkward incidents, the headmaster tactfully agreed that it would be best if he did not participate in such activities.

  Linc tried to conceal his hurt from the other kids at school, especially the jocks, who welcomed him on their team, but not in their homes. He would stand in front of a mirror, trying to rehearse a detached attitude with which to confront – and endure – the frequent humiliations.

  He confided his true feelings only to Herschel and Hannah. From Hannah he got comfort; from Herschel, strength: ‘Some day, Linc, you’ll be tall and proud and they’ll be very ashamed. I know it’s hard. But you’re being very brave.’

  Thus, when he had no commitments on the playing fields, he spent the weekends with Hannah and Herschel. Hannah, who in her Berlin Gymnasium had been a whiz in science, was someone he could talk to about matters like Newtonian dynamics, for Linc was now way ahead in Physics.

  Herschel read his essays and offered detailed comments. Naturally, they sometimes disagreed with one another. But is not an argument the truest index of emotional involvement?

  And they did not overlook their promise to his grandmother. They enrolled Linc for religious school and every Sunday they took him to the local Baptist church.

  Herschel would have long heart-to-heart talks with Linc. He spoke of Berlin, Hitler’s rise to power, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 depriving Jews of civil rights, and how he wished that, like his brother, he had seen the writing on the wall and left. But he and Hannah had been so comfortable, so seemingly assimilated, that they had never dreamed the Nazi
s wanted to get rid of them.

  They both talked compulsively of the camps, of the cruel ‘Selections’ that determined who would live or die. The Nazis only spared the lives of those who looked robust enough to work. After they described how they had lost their little daughter, Linc had nightmares for a week. He could not come to grips with hatred on so vast a scale.

  Linc tried to understand their calamity in terms of the faith his grandma had instilled in him.

  ‘Couldn’t it maybe have been God’s Will?’ he asked them.

  ‘His Will?’ Herschel replied. ‘To slaughter all the members of our family?’

  ‘No,’ the boy said with feeling, ‘that he spared you two – so we could meet.’

  Herschel looked at him with deep emotion. ‘Yes, even I could believe in such a God.’

  Linc, in turn, would talk to them about his childhood. He had vivid memories of ‘the Colonel’ (as they proudly called him) reading to him from the Scriptures every night. Even before his dad went to war, his mother rarely was around.

  ‘All I remember is her dressing up and driving off to some “social engagement” in Atlanta. All of us had been living in my grandma’s house, and she just called up the General Store and told them to tell us she wasn’t coming back.’

  ‘Linc, maybe it was for the best,’ Hannah said understandingly. ‘Your grandma gave you everything a mother’s love could give.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not saying I missed her,’ he replied a little too quickly, bravely suppressing the feeling that had always gnawed at him – that he had somehow been the cause of his mom’s departure. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, giving Hannah a loving smile, ‘I’ve got you both now.’

  Herschel and his brother Steve simply did not get along. Rochelle, Steve’s upwardly mobile wife, was embarrassed by their accents and did her best to invite them as seldom as possible. Steve had no respect for Herschel’s opinions or suggestions. At best, he was a tolerated employee. Still, what else could Herschel do? Long ago in Germany he’d built a thriving business. But Hitler’s jackboots crushed it all.

  Then, in 1951, all that the Third Reich had brutally snatched away, the German Federal Republic suddenly returned. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer announced that his government would pay reparations to its predecessor’s victims.

  A specially appointed Court of Restitution ordered that the erstwhile proprietor of the Königliche Ledergesellschaft could repossess his factories in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Cologne – or else be offered adequate compensation.

  Not surprisingly, Herschel chose not to return to Germany and accepted monetary ‘reparation.’

  As soon as he received the check, Herschel hurried over to his brother’s office and placed a banker’s check for twenty thousand dollars on his desk.

  ‘Thank you, Steve, now you don’t have to treat me like a poor relative anymore.’

  With his new working capital, Herschel financed a reborn Royal Leathercraft, first in Cleveland, then Columbus, then Chicago. Within two years he had become the sole supplier of children’s shoes to the eight-hundred-store ‘Rob McMahon’ chain.

  Young Linc was a loving grandson. He called Elva every weekend (Herschel had arranged to have a phone installed) and visited at Christmas, Easter, and two weeks in the summer.

  Yet although his relationship with his grandma stayed reciprocally strong, his friends – his erstwhile friends – seemed to avoid him. He no longer dressed like them, or talked like them.

  ‘You ain’t a nigger no more,’ one shouted scornfully. And, after his second visit, Linc realized that his only remaining tie with Millersburg was Grandma.

  The following spring, that final bond was broken, too – Linc was called to the headmaster’s office and found Herschel waiting sorrowfully to break the news.

  At first he did not cry at all – but later the Landsmanns heard him in his bedroom sobbing most of the night. His one request was that Herschel journey with him to Millersburg to see his grandma laid to rest. He stood in the first pew, his head bowed, as he listened to the pastor’s eulogy which hailed Elva Bennett as a saint – but which also had some covert criticism of her grandson.

  ‘She was a woman of valor. She gave her only son to die for our beloved country and be buried on a foreign shore. She raised his only son until the young man left the fold. We bow our heads and join in prayer for Elva, the last Bennett to be buried here in Millersburg.’

  Linc was devastated. On the long ride home Herschel attempted to console him.

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it the way you took it, Linc. He’s just a country preacher—’

  ‘He knew exactly what he said. He wanted to expel me – and he did.’

  Herschel sighed. He could feel the boy’s sadness. But what could he say to assuage it?

  It was Linc who at last broke the silence. He looked at Herschel as he drove and suddenly asked, ‘Will you adopt me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The pastor’s right, the Bennetts are all gone. And to tell the truth, I never really knew my father. The Colonel’s just a picture on the wall to me. I still sort of worship him, but he’s so far away. It’s not his fault but, honestly, I’ve thought about him more times than I ever touched him. You’ve been a family to me in flesh and blood. I want to have your name.’ He paused and then began, barely audibly, ‘’Cause otherwise there won’t be any Landsmanns, either.’

  Herschel managed to keep his emotions in check till he could bring the car to a halt on the shoulder of the road. Then, weeping unabashedly, he embraced his son.

  Barney spent more than two hours in Bennett’s hospital room as they discussed the play of the Celtics, the skating of the Bruins, and the prospects of the Red Sox.

  As he was holding up his end of the trivial sporting conversation, Barney was asking himself, How come this guy who’s probably my closest friend in Med School will never talk about his family? The most he’s ever told me is that his father was a shoemaker in Cleveland. What the hell is Bennett hiding?

  Finally, at a quarter after eleven – and it did not escape Barney that the nurses had permitted him to stay long after visiting hours – he rose to leave.

  ‘I know you aristocrats have private tutors, Landsmann,’ he remarked, ‘but we plebeians actually have to go to class and I’ve got an eight o’clock lab. Is there anything you want me to bring you tomorrow night?’

  ‘Only if you could manage Marilyn Monroe,’ Bennett smiled.

  ‘Sorry, Ben, but we’re going steady. Do you have a second choice?’

  ‘Well, actually, it would be great if you got me some civilian clothes. I’m hoping to get sprung from this place by the day after tomorrow.’

  He reached to his night table, picked up a ring of keys, and tossed them to Barney.

  ‘You’ve got it, Landsmann,’ Barney replied, and headed for the door.

  ‘Give my love to Castellano and the other guys,’ Bennett called after him.

  As Barney climbed into the white Corvette that Lance had kindly lent him for the evening, he suddenly felt battle-weary. He badly needed sleep. After all, tomorrow he would once again confront the harsh reality of Med School.

  Or was it unreality?

  17

  Many of them finished their freshman year alive.

  But Med School provides perhaps the best substantiation for Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. For here we see in its cruelest form the survival of the fittest. Not the smartest, as one should expect. But the fittest to cope with the inhuman pressures, the demands made not only on the brain but on the psyche.

  This was made abundantly clear by the first suicide among the would-be doctors.

  And it was significant, and not unnoticed, that Dean Holmes referred to the tragedy with that qualifying adjective ‘first,’ suggesting that he fully expected there would be more.

  Professor Francis James had led them upward through the nervous system like Virgil leading Dante on his journey toward Paradise. First, the spinal cord –
which sends out the commands for our most basic movements, leading upward to the brain stem, which receives most of our senses. Then the cerebellum – the inner gyroscope that keeps the tight-rope walker on his wire, the ballerina on her toe, in fact the orchestra of the entire body playing in exquisite symphony.

  Finally, the crowning glory of cerebral hemispheres – containing all the treasure chests of our experiences. The wealth of lessons we have learned from pain and pleasure, food and drink, from fight or flight, from copulation, urinating – and The New York Times.

  The time for finals was now as close as neurons in the nervous system. In the blinking of an eye, which – sleepless – none of them had time to do, they would be tested on it all. The human body in totality: macroscopic, microscopic, and invisible. (One must recall there are many viruses as yet unseen by any apparatus.)

  Barney’s gift for friendship made him luckier than most. Lance had lent him a microscope as well as all the slides, so he could contemplate with bloodshot eyes the beauties of a cancer. The slides of carcinoma, viewed bifocally, could radiate like a fuchsia-colored tapestry designed by God.

  And for Bacteriology, he had the help of Seth Lazarus – who not only knew the stuff, but had a flair for teaching it to others.

  The only problem was he spoke so goddamn softly that unless you sat right next to him, even in these tiny dorm rooms where his acolytes would gather, you could miss a pearl or two. Seth would take notes on the lecture and everybody would take notes on Seth. At times it seemed as if they would canonize him, despite his single eccentricity: He would go to bed at nine o’clock – unyielding as Horatius on the bridge, he wouldn’t even compromise for nine-fifteen.

  ‘For chrissake, Lazarus,’ a desperate fellow student once complained, ‘you’re not a baby anymore. Your mom won’t dock you from dessert if you don’t make it to your beddie by the dot of nine. Can’t you be daring just this once and go at ten?’

  Pleas were futile, though he was genuinely apologetic.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said in his characteristic high-pitched whisper, ‘I think it very important that we all recognize our circadian rhythms. And I know I function best real early in the morning – so I start at five. But a tired brain is like a worn-out battery. So, sorry guys, I’ve gotta go and recharge. Goodnight.’