A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [192]
“But I’d think you’d want a doctor of your own faith around at a time of…” (Katie was going to say, “death” but checked herself in time)…“birth.”
“Oh, sugar!” said Sissy contemptuously.
“Like should stick to like. You don’t see Jews calling in Christian doctors,” said Evy, thinking she had made a telling point.
“Why should they,” countered Sissy, “when they and everybody else knows that the Jewish doctors are smarter.”
The birth was the same as all the others. Sissy had her usual easy time made easier by the skill of the doctor. When the baby was delivered, she closed her eyes tightly. She was afraid to look at it. She had been so sure that this one would live. But now that the time had come, she felt in her heart that it wouldn’t be so. She opened her eyes finally. The baby was lying on a nearby table. It was still and blue. She turned her head away.
“Again,” she thought. “Again and again and again. Eleven times. Oh, God, why couldn’t You let me have one? Just one out of eleven? In a few years, my time of childbearing will be over. For a woman to die at last…knowing that she has never given life. Oh, God, why have You put Your curse on me?”
Then she heard a word. She heard a word that she had never known. She heard the word “oxygen.”
“Quick! Oxygen!” she heard the doctor say.
She watched him work over her baby. She saw a miracle that transcended the miracles of the saints her mother had told her about. She saw the dead blue change to living white. She saw an apparently lifeless child draw a breath. For the first time she heard the cry of a child she had borne.
“Is…is…it alive?” she asked, afraid to believe.
“What else?” The doctor shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “You’ve got as fine a boy as I’ve ever seen.”
“You’re sure he’ll live?”
“Why not?” Again the shrug. “Unless you let him fall out of a three-story window.”
Sissy took his hands and covered them with kisses. And Dr. Aaron Aaronstein was not embarrassed about her emotionalism the way a Gentile doctor would have been.
She named the baby Stephen Aaron.
“I’ve never seen it to fail,” said Katie. “Let a childless woman adopt a baby and bang! A year or two later she’s sure to have one of her own. It’s as if God recognized her good intentions at last. It’s nice that Sissy has two to bring up because it’s no good to bring up one child alone.”
“Little Sissy and Stevie are just two years apart,” said Francie. “Almost like Neeley and me.”
“Yes. They’ll be company for each other.”
Sissy’s living son was the great wonder of the family until Uncle Willie Flittman gave them something else to talk about. Willie tried to enlist in the army and was turned down; whereupon he threw up his job with the milk company, came home, announced that he was a failure, and went to bed. He wouldn’t get up next morning or the morning after. He said he was going to stay in bed and never get up as long as he lived. All his life he had lived as a failure and now he was going to die as a failure and the sooner the better, he stated.
Evy sent for her sisters.
Evy, Sissy, Katie, and Francie stood around the big brass bed in which the failure had ensconced himself. Willie took one look at the circle of strong-willed Rommely women and wailed, “I’m a failure.” He pulled the blanket up over his head.
Evy turned her husband over to Sissy and Francie watched Sissy go to work on him. She put her arms around him and held the futile little fellow to her breast. Sissy convinced him that not all the brave men were in trenches—that many a hero was risking his life daily for his country in a munitions factory. She talked and talked until Willie got so excited about helping to win the war that he jumped out of bed and made Aunt Evy scurry around getting him his pants and shoes.
Steve was foreman now, at a munitions factory on Morgan Avenue. He got Willie a good paying job there with time and a half for overtime.
It was a tradition in the Rommely family that the men keep for themselves any tips or overtime money that they