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“Walter Lewis Studio.”
“Is Mitchell there? I’ve got to talk to Mitchell!”
Recognizing the voice and tone of urgency, “Marsha, what’s wrong? The baby… Is the baby…”
“No, Mikey’s fine! It’s me! Something’s wrong with me and they’re getting me ready for an operation, and I’ve got to talk to Mitchell, now!”
“He’s out and I don’t know where.” Glancing at her watch: 9:52. “But he usually checks in at about eleven.”
A nurse carrying a tray with a syringe and an orderly pushing a gurney entered the room.
“They’re here! Please find my husband!”
Looking helplessly at the phone as it went dead in her hand. “Walt!” Myra yelled. “Where’s Mitchell?”
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Chicago, Illinois
March 24 through April 6, 1957
Walking alongside the gurney, Rhea entered the elevator with her daughter as it left Maternity on the third floor bound for Surgery on the seventh.
“Mother,” drowsy and slightly incoherent from the shot, taking hold of her mother’s hand, “when Mitchell gets here, tell him I love him and every thing’ll be okay.”
Her rings having been taped to her fingers with adhesive tape, the only other piece of jewelry Marsha wore was a gold baby locket with a small diamond given to her by her grandmother when she was an infant.
Looking at her, noticing the locket, “Marsha, lift your head.”
“My head?” Her eyes half closed, “Why, Mother?”
“I want to take your locket off.”
Marsha wearily lifted her head.
Removing the chain and locket, dropping them into her purse, “If anything should happen to you up there,” Rhea nodded her head upward, “I’m sure you’d want your cousin to have this.”
Frowning, the nurse and orderly glanced at each other.
The elevator door gliding open, “What do you mean, if anything happens to me, Mother?” the gurney was pushed through. “I’m coming back! I am coming back, aren’t I?” As she was wheeled into the brightly lit operating room, Marsha’s last coherent thought was: Who’ll take care of my baby?
****
“Exploratory Laporatory!” Doctor Ezra Silverman, the masked and gowned surgeon told the hastily assembled scrub team.
“Holy cow!” Razor in hand in preparation of shaving Marsha’s lower abdomen and pubis, “What’s with this?” the nurse looked at Marsha’s already shaved pubis and lower abdomen.
In attendance, masked and gowned, Doctor Manny Greenblatt said, “She gave birth yesterday.”
Glancing at Greenblatt, the nurse swabbed Marsha’s abdomen with antiseptic.
“This soon after delivering it could be gallbladder,” Doctor Silverman said. “But…” considering a moment, making an incision on the right quadrant. “…let’s shoot for the appendix.”
“Jesus Christ!”
Just as Marsha’s appendix ruptured.
****
“Thank, God! Where are you?”
“On the south side.” Catching the urgency in his mother’s voice, “What’s wrong?”
****
“It was her appendix,” Doctor Schaffer said, “and luckily we caught it just in time.”
“My daughter’s okay?”
“Yes, everything went fine. You’ll be able to see her in Recovery in about two hours… Couldn’t reach Mitchell, eh?”
“No! The bastard never showed up!”
Knowing Rhea most of her life, Schaffer was no longer shocked or surprised by her sometimes irrational attitude. “Don’t be so hard on him, Rhe. Marsha said he’d be out working and that maybe there’d be no way to reach him. If you know where, why don’t you call to see if he even knows about this yet.”
“Yeah, Doc, I was just getting ready to call again.”
“Okay, someone will let you know when you can see your daughter.” Turning away, “Oh, by the way,” Schaffer turned back, “we’ve a little problem: Marsha’s got to stay here, on the surgery floor and won’t be allowed back on Maternity so we’ll have an aide move her belongings up here. And because she’s off maternity, technically she’s considered to be contaminated and if she comes into contact with her baby, he’ll be considered contaminated, too, so the only way she’ll be able to be with, uh, Michael, is if we have him moved to Pediatrics. But Marsha isn’t going to be in any shape to handle him—especially to nurse him—for a couple of days anyway, so I’d recommend you leave the baby where he is for now. And, to be honest, I’d rather Michael stay in maternity where he’s in a more sterile atmosphere.”
“She’s not going to like that, at all, but I’ll let Marsha make that decision when she’s up to it. And, oh yes, Doc, I still want my daughter in a private room.”
“She’s going to be in Recovery for a couple of hours, so you’ve plenty of time to head over to Admitting and authorize it.”
****
At 1:47 pm, hospital aide Blanch Reed was instructed to move the belongings of the previous occupant of room 323 on Maternity, to 714 on Surgery.
Coming into the unoccupied room, Blanch wrinkled her nose as she smelled an unfamiliar scent and, at the same time the start of the familiar odor of decay. Standing in the center of the room, sniffing the air, she shrugged her shoulders, then humming “Bloody Mary,” a song from the play South Pacific, going to the closet, the aide removed the previous occupant’s clothing—the clothing Marsha had worn to the hospital when she’d been admitted six days earlier. Leaving the maternity blouse and slacks on the wire hanger, Blanch hung it on the cart’s handle. She put the three floral arrangements that Marsha had received on the lower shelf of the cart. Blanch then put the green, imitation lizard overnight case—that Mitchell had brought to the hospital on his second visit—onto the bed and opened it. Inside were Marsha’s underpants, bra and socks. As she put the former occupant’s other belongings into the case—a paperback book, hairbrush, comb, toothbrush and toothpaste—stopping humming, she sniffed the air.
With the previous occupant’s belongings on the cart, starting to the door, remembering she hadn’t checked the drawer of the nightstand, leaving the cart in the doorway, going back, Blanch opened the drawer.
Blanch Reed had lived on Chicago’s south side all of her thirty-eight years, and her taste in food had always run to the unimaginative food popular with people of the Negroe race: ham hocks, yams, cornbread, turnip greens—the foodstuffs that in later years would be termed as “soul food.” Now, however…
“Whew!” Assailed by the odor, lifting the plastic bag by a corner, holding it at arm’s length, “Lord a mercy, if that don’t beat all!” Her eyes widening, staring at the lobster claws, moving her arm stiffly to the right, Blanch let it drop into the wastepaper can.
Passing the nurses’ station, “You all better be callin’ a janitor an’ get the trash out’a three-twenty-three real soon!” Blanch said to a nurse while motioning over her shoulder with her thumb. “Lady what used’ta be in there like to eat real big, stinky bugs!”
March 26, 1957
“I’ve got to go, Mother.” Tiredly moving her legs over the edge of the bed, holding her side with one hand and the edge of the bed with the other, Marsha attempted to lift her body off the upward angled hospital bed.
Rising from her chair, Marsha’s aunt Sadie motioned to help but, “Here, I’ll do it.” Rhea a bit quicker, taking her daughter’s hand, “You want me to help you onto the toilet?”
She’d had mixed feeling regarding “no more bedpan” and having to get off the bed to use the toilet and, yes, she would love the help and when Mitchell was here earlier today he did help her onto and off the toilet with, oddly, not too much embarrassment, but her mother? “No, Mother, thank you.”
Actually relieved that she had been relieved of that duty too, glancing at her sister, Rhea sat again.
In the washroom, trying to lower her backside onto the seat, Marsha couldn’t tell which hurt worse: the appendectomy or the episiotomy. Whereas she could hold her side supporting the longer than usual “exploratory” appendix incision, she could not very well hold the area between her vagina and rectum, at least not in company while walking to and from the washroom.
Finished, shuffling back to bed, sitting on the edge she tried to lay back, but the appendix incision hurt, so, putting a hand under her knee, she lifted her left leg onto the mattress, but now both incisions hurt.
“Do you need help?”
“No, Mother, I’d have to do it myself if you weren’t here, so I might as well get used to doing it.”
Putting her arms behind her back, feeling as though her body weighed a ton, Marsha laboriously shifted onto the mattress, and in so doing looked at the sheet between her thighs… and fainted.
****
“Marsha!”
Attempting to move the hand aside…
“Marsha!”
Moving her head from side to side, attempting to move the hand to escape the burning odor of ammonia.
“Marsha, open your eyes!”
Opening her eyes taking a moment to focus, then, “Oh, God!” remembering, “so much blood!”
“It’s okay, Marsha. We gave you a shot and the bleeding’s stopped.”
“All that blood… Doctor Greenblatt, I thought I was dying.”
“It’s okay now, Marsha. You had a uterine hemorrhage brought on by having an appendectomy so soon after delivering.”
“Hi, honey.”
Looking to the other side of the bed, “Hi, Mitchie.”
From elsewhere in the room, “Hi, sweetie.”
Hearing her father’s voice, lifting her head, Marsha looked about the room that was crowded with her mother, father, cousin, both aunts and Rosalie, and by the look on all their faces, Marsha knew they were deeply concerned about her.
“There are no visitation restrictions for a private room,” Greenblatt said. “Would you like me to send them away?”
“Oh, God!” Still groggy, she began to cry because now Marsha knew she was going to die.
March 31, 1957
The Brith Milah: The Bris: The Circumcision
On the eighth day in the life of Michael Lipensky, Rabbi Murray Kay, the “Mohel”—a physician who is trained and authorized to perform the ritual circumcision—intoned, “Brukheem habaeem b’sheym Adonai.”
Standing alongside his grandson, whispering, Morris Barrish translated, “Blessed are you who come in the name of God.”
Enthralled by the fluorescent light on the ceiling above his head, Michael Lipensky lay naked atop a blanket on the table in the nurses’ lounge adjoining the Weiss Memorial Hospital nursery.
Besides the Mohel, there were the ten men that formed the minyan: Walter, Morris, Mitchell and his uncle Al Marcus. From Marsha’s side there was Eli, Roger, Eli’s brother William Goldman and Marsha’s other uncles, Harry and Stanley. Also in attendance was Marsha’s and Mitchell’s friend Marty Fishman.
“The rite of circumcision has been enjoined upon us as a sign of our covenant with God,” Rabbi Kay said in English as, dipping a strip of sterile gauze into a goblet of kosher sacramental wine, he placed it between Michael’s lips.
Tasting the sweet wine, Michael greedily gummed and drew on the saturated gauze and, the few drops of alcohol immediately numbing him…
Kay placed a small, stainless steel clamp onto the baby’s penis between the foreskin and glans, shut it tight, then…
Mitchell, along with most of the men, closed their eyes, as…
…With one precise cut, the Mohel removed the foreskin.
“Mazel tov!”
Only then did Mitchell open his eyes.
“Mazel tov!”
