Doctors (3 page)

Estelle and Inez grew to be good friends. They did air-raid warden duty together every Tuesday night, patrolling the silent, shadowy streets making sure every household had its lights out. And periodically glancing skyward for a trace of enemy bombers.

The soft darkness seemed to make Inez more comfortable—and freer with her thoughts.

Once when Estelle casually inquired whether Inez minded the lack of sleep, she was surprised to hear her respond, “No, it reminds me of the good old days. The only difference is that now I do not have my rifle.”

“You actually fought?”

“Yes,
amiga
, and I wasn’t the only woman. Because Franco had not only all his Spanish troops, but also
regulares
—mercenaries from Morocco that he paid to do his dirty work.

“Our only hope was to attack and run. There were so many of those butchers. And I am proud to say I hit a few of them.”

She then realized that her friend was taken aback.

“Try to understand,” Inez continued, “those bastards slaughtered children.”

“Well, yes, I see your point.…” Estelle responded haltingly, while struggling to accept the reality that the gentle-voiced woman by her side had actually killed another human being.

Ironically, Inez’s parents both had been staunch right-wing supporters not merely of Franco, but of Opus Dei—the church within a church—which sided with the dictator. When their only daughter, fired with socialist idealism, left to join a Republican militia unit, they had cursed and disowned her.

“I had no one in the world—except my rifle and The Cause. So, in a way, that bullet brought me luck.”

What bullet? Estelle wondered to herself. But it soon became clear.

During the siege of Malaga, Inez and half a dozen other Loyalists were ambushed on their way to Puerta Real. When she regained consciousness, she was staring into the unshaven face of a heavyset young doctor who introduced himself as “Comrade Luis.”

“Even then he was a character. Of course we had no uniforms, but Luis seemed to go out of his way to look like a peasant.” She laughed. “But I don’t think he ever stopped working. There were so many wounded. As soon as I could stand, I started helping him. Through all the long hours, he never lost his sense of humor. In fact, that was about all we could take with us when we fled. We barely got across before they closed the French border.”

When school started, Barney and Laura were in the same third grade class at P.S. 148. Paradoxically, being thrown into a group of thirty other children brought the two closer than ever. Laura discovered what a valuable friend she had in Barney. For he could already read.

In fact, what had originally drawn Estelle and Harold Livingston together was their mutual love of books. And ever since his third birthday, each parent had taken turns giving Barney reading lessons. As a reward they would read aloud to him stories from
Bullfinch’s Mythology
or poems from the
Child’s Garden of Verses.
Their psychology worked. Barney’s appetite for books was almost as voracious as his craving for Nabisco Vanilla Wafers.

As a result, he was now able to sit on their front stoop and
conduct Laura through the complexities of immortal classics like
See Spot Run.

But in due course, Barney exacted reciprocity.

On his seventh birthday his mother gave him a basketball kit, complete with backboard, rim, and a real net that went
swish
when you sank a good one. The night before the gala day, Luis Castellano had risked life and limb to nail it—at the official ten feet—to the Livingstons’ oak tree.

Barney let out a whoop of delight and proclaimed, “Laura, you gotta help me practice—you owe me.”

Her assistance entailed acting as enemy defenseman and trying to block Barney’s shots at the hoop. To his amazement, Laura was almost too good at it. She scored nearly as many baskets as Barney. And though he continued to grow tall, she continued to grow taller.

Germany capitulated on May seventh, 1945, and by the end of the summer Japan had surrendered as well. The joy was nowhere more intense than in the Livingston household on Lincoln Place where Barney, Warren, and Estelle paraded around the kitchen table singing, “When Daddy comes marching home again.” It had been more than three years since they had seen him.

Harold Livingston came home. But not at a march. In fact, his gait was slow and at times uncertain.

Constantly pushed and jostled by noisy, excited crowds of other wives and children, Estelle and the two boys waited breathlessly as the train pulled in. Before it even stopped, some of the GIs leaped onto the platform and began to run full tilt toward their loved ones.

Barney stood on tiptoe. But he could not see a soldier who looked familiar enough to be the dad he had been seeing in his dreams.

Suddenly his mother gave a little shout, “Oh, there he is!” She waved at someone far down the platform. Barney looked where she had pointed but saw no one. That is, no one who corresponded to his memory of Harold Livingston.

He saw an ordinary man of ordinary size with hair receding from his forehead. Someone pallid, thin, and tired-looking.

She’s wrong, he thought, this can’t be Dad. It can’t be.

Estelle no longer could contain herself. She cried out, “Harold!” and rushed forward to embrace him.

Barney stood there holding Warren’s hand and watched, realizing that never before had Momma left them on their own like this.

“Is that our daddy?” little Warren asked.

“It must be,” Barney answered, still a bit confused.

“I thought you said that he was bigger than Dr. Castellano.”

Barney almost said,
I
thought so too.

And now they were together, all four of them, Estelle still arm in arm with her husband.

“Barney, Warren, how you two have grown!” Harold Livingston said with pride and put his arms around his older son. Barney recognized the once-familiar scent of cigarette smoke.

Somehow, despite the mob outside, they found a taxi—with a very patriotic driver.

“Welcome home, GI Joe,” he proclaimed. “Hey—we really showed them Krauts, didn’t we?” the cabbie crowed.

“My husband served in the Pacific,” Estelle proudly corrected him.

“Oh, Nazis, Japs—what’s the difference? They’re all a bunch of lousy bums. Tell your husband he did good.”

“Did you get to kill anybody?” Warren asked hopefully.

Harold answered slowly. “No, son. I just helped translate when we were interrogating prisoners.…” His voice trailed off.

“Don’t be so modest, let your kids be proud. You obviously saw enough action to win that Purple Heart. Ya get hurt bad, buddy?”

Barney and Warren looked at each other saucer-eyed as Harold brushed off any hint of heroism.

“It wasn’t much. Just an artillery shell that landed pretty near our tent. For a while there I was a little shaky, but I’m a hundred percent now. I should have taken these darn things off before I got here. The important thing is that we’re all together again.”

But his protestation only confirmed what Estelle had sensed the moment she had seen him on the railroad platform. He was a sick man.

Luis Castellano was waiting at his front window when the taxi pulled up outside the Livingston house. In an instant, he and his family were on the street, Luis enveloping Harold in his big bearlike embrace. “I’ve been talking to your picture on the
mantelpiece for years,” he explained. “I feel like you are my long-lost brother!”

It was a night that burned in Barney’s memory forever. Though he was down the corridor from the closed door of his parents’ bedroom, he still could hear their voices.

His mother seemed to be crying a great deal, and in tones oscillating between anger and despair kept asking, “Can’t you
explain
, Harold? What exactly is a ‘thirty percent disability’?”

His father seemed to be trying to reassure her. “It’s nothing, hon. I swear there’s nothing to worry about.”

Then all was quiet. There was no noise at
all
from his parents’ bedroom. Barney simply gazed down the hall at their door, wondering.

At breakfast Barney scanned his parents’ faces, but could decipher no clue as to what had occurred the previous evening. And watching his mother fuss over someone who was almost a stranger gave him funny feelings that he could not understand. He left early for Laura’s house so they could have plenty of time to talk on the way to school.

But as soon as they were alone, he confided to her, “I’m scared. Something’s—I don’t know—different about my father. I think maybe he’s sick.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You
know
?”

“As soon as we got home last night, Papa took my mother into his office and started explaining to her about something called ‘
neurosis de guerra.
’ ”

“What’s that in English?” Barney asked anxiously.

“I don’t even know what it is in Spanish, Barn,” she confessed.

At four that afternoon, Estelle Livingston was seated at the circulation desk in the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library when she looked up and saw Barney and Laura scanning the shelves of medical books. She invited them to her office in the back where they could talk privately.

“Please don’t be worried,” she said, trying to sound reassuring. “He wasn’t hit by anything. It’s just a mild case of shell shock. He was very near a big explosion and that sort of thing takes a while to get over. But he’ll be back teaching again next term.”

She took a deep breath and then asked, “Do you feel a little better now?”

Both children nodded mutely. And then quickly left.

That fall, as Estelle had promised, Harold Livingston returned to his pedagogical duties at Erasmus Hall. And as before, his students found him charming and witty. He could make even Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
enjoyable. And he seemed to know all of Classical literature by heart.

And yet now and then he would forget to bring back groceries on his way home from school—even when Estelle stuck a list in the breast pocket of his jacket.

Ever since he had gotten his basketball hoop, Barney had dreamed of the day when he and his dad would play together.

During Harold’s long absence, Barney had constantly badgered his mother for details about what his father was like “in the old days.” Once he had heard Estelle reminisce about the summer before he was born. By sheer chance there had been a guest tennis tournament at the lakeside resort they had gone to in the White Mountains.

“Harold decided to give it a try—just as a lark. He’d been a wonderful player in his college days—though, of course, CCNY had no tennis team. Anyway, he borrowed a racket, waltzed onto the court, and the next thing I knew he was in the finals! The man who beat him was a PT instructor at the local college—and he said he was lucky that Harold had an off day. He even said that if Harold ever took it seriously he’d be another Bill Tilden. Can you imagine that?”

Barney didn’t know who Bill Tilden was, but he could certainly imagine the man whose picture was on the mantelpiece, dressed in tennis whites, smashing a ball to smithereens. He dreamt so often of the day he could show Dad
his
sporting skills. And now at last the time was at hand.

“Have you seen the backboard Dr. Castellano put up on the tree?” he asked his father casually one Saturday, as a kind of overture.

“Yes,” Harold answered, “looks very professional.”

“Want to shoot some baskets with me and Warren?”

Harold sighed and answered gently, “I don’t think I’ve got the pep to keep up with two dynamos like you. But I’ll come out and watch.”

Barney and Warren raced to put on their sneakers and then dribbled out toward the “court.”

Anxious to display his prowess before his father, Barney stopped fifteen feet from the basket, jumped, and shot the ball. To his chagrin, it missed the backboard completely. He quickly whirled and explained, “That was just warming up, Dad.”

Leaning on the back door, Harold Livingston nodded, took a long puff of his cigarette, and smiled.

Barney and Warren barely had the chance to sink a few lay-ups (“Good fast break, huh, Dad?”) when an irate voice called from across the fence.

“Hey, what the heck’s going on, you guys? How come you’re playing without me?”

Darn, it was Laura. Why’d she have to butt in?

“Sorry,” Barney apologized. “It’s a kinda rough game today.”

“Who are you kidding?” she retorted. (By now she had bounded over the fence.) “I can elbow hard as you any day.”

At this point Harold called out, “Be polite, Barney. If Laura wants to, let her try.”

But his admonition was a split second too late, for Laura had already stolen the ball from Barney’s grip and was dribbling past Warren to sink a basket off the backboard. Then, after the three players took turns shooting, Laura called out, “Why don’t you play with us, Mr. Livingston, then we could have an actual half-court game.”

“That’s very kind of you, Laura. But I’m a bit tuckered out. I’d better take a little nap.”

A look of disappointment crossed Barney’s face.

Laura glanced at him and understood what he was feeling.

He turned slowly toward her and their eyes met. And from that moment on they knew they could read each other’s thoughts.

But whenever the entire Livingston clan went over for dinner, Barney would marvel at Luis’s gift for making Harold animated—even talkative. The doctor was a man of Falstaffian appetites—for food, for wine, and most of all for knowledge.

And his never-ending fount of questions appealed to the teacher in Harold, who delighted Luis with anecdotes from the history of Roman
Hispania
—especially with the revelations that some of the Empire’s greatest writers were of Spanish origin—like Seneca, the tragedian, born in Córdoba.

“Inez, you hear that? The great Seneca was one of ours!” And then he turned to his instructor and melodramatically demanded,
“Now, Harold, if you could only tell me that
Shakespeare
was also Spanish!”

Laura was delighted to hear Mr. Livingston explain why she, quite unlike the stereotyped Latin
chiquitas
, had light blond hair: their family doubtless had Celtic ancestors who migrated to the Iberian Peninsula.