The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [57]
She tore up the steep wooden stairs and hurled open the door. Sofia lay by the stove; her eyes were closed but Missie could see a pulse beating slowly at the base of her throat, and she thanked God that at least she was still alive.
After arranging the pillow carefully under Sofia’s head, she fanned her desperately. “Sofia, Sofia,” she called, “you are all right now, everything’s all right.” But she knew she was lying, because Sofia Ivanoff looked very ill.
“It was just the heat,” Sofia said weakly when she recovered her senses a few minutes later. “It was nothing.”
But two weeks later it happened again, and this time she complained of the pain in her head. It was a pain that refused to go away no matter how much of the patent medicine in the deep-blue bottle Missie bought from the pharmacy and poured anxiously down her throat. She refused to see a doctor, saying she didn’t need it, but Missie knew it was because they couldn’t afford it. Then one morning Sofia could not get out of bed. Her left side was paralyzed.
Missie ran to Orchard Street to fetch the doctor, vowing she would earn the money to pay him somehow.
He was an old Jewish man, gray-bearded and kind. “I’m afraid the lady has suffered a series of small strokes,” he told Missie gravely, “and this has led to bleeding in the cranial cavity. It is the pressure that is causing the pain, and this can only be relieved by operating.” He glanced hesitantly at the young girl and the child standing side by side, their anxious eyes fixed on him as the life-giver, the bringer of hope. As he always did in these circumstances, he wished he had a different job. “I must be frank with you,” he said. “She is an old woman. The operation is as likely to kill her as the stroke. All I can do is give her something to relieve the pain.”
Missie gulped back the panic-taste of bile in her throat. “You can’t mean … not that she might …”
“We all must die sometime, my dear,” he said gently. “Believe me, it is far worse when my patient is young.” He opened his worn black Gladstone bag. “I’m giving her an injection of morphine to ease the pain. I’ll call in to see her tomorrow morning. Meanwhile you must take care of yourself and your child.”
Missie glanced down at Azaylee, so blond, so pretty, and so helpless. Her child, the doctor had said. If Sofia died, then what everyone believed would come true. Azaylee would be her child.
Each morning she waited anxiously for the doctor to come, searching for him among the pushcarts and the crowds out on the street.
“She is no better,” she told him worriedly a few days later. “The pain is back again. She tries not to show it, but I see it in her eyes.”
“I will give her more pain-killers,” he said patiently. “They will allow her to rest peacefully.” He glanced sharply at Missie: she looked pale and worn out from lack of sleep and worry. “You should get some rest yourself, young lady. And make sure you eat properly.”
Missie did not laugh because it wasn’t funny. She hadn’t been to work for a week and they were down to their last few cents. O’Hara had been kind; he had sent a woman around with a bowl of food every lunchtime, but she could not accept his charity much longer. And she knew if she did not return to the saloon tonight he would have to find someone to replace her.
At five o’clock she fed Azaylee a plate of their usual meager stew and gave her a hunk of the day-old black Russian bread, bought at Gertel’s bakeshop on Hester Street, whose heady aromas almost drove her wild with longing. A whole fresh sesame bread spread thickly with sweet French butter was the peak of her desires, but she was forced to content herself with a small slab cut from a day-old sour rye loaf.
She washed Sofia, patting her fine-boned face with a fresh linen towel laundered by her own hands and dried in the sun out on the fire escape along with everyone else’s laundry. There were days when she couldn’t see the tenement buildings for the washing, and there were no secrets as to the worn state of their neighbors’ undergarments. She lifted Sofia’s