See How They Run (3 page)
The girl was sobbing, calling out a boy’s name. The small breasts under her hospital tunic were hard fists with sharp tiny points.
A pair of forceps appeared in Dr. David Strauss’s hand.
Glinting in the overhead kettledrum lights, the forceps descended between Katherine O’Neill’s trembling legs.
Then David was hoisting a baby girl up into the lime-light, letting its blood rush back for nourishment.
The umbilical cord was carefully snipped. David whacked the baby’s bottom extra hard.
“Prolapsed cord.” The young doctor tried to sound calm and usual. A “prolapsed cord” meant that the umbilical cord had been compressed between the baby’s head and the mother’s pelvic bone. Oxygen had totally been cut off.
The baby girl still wasn’t breathing.
Strauss’s six-foot one-inch frame was bent in half over the blue, suffering infant. He gently blew into a tracheal catheter, trying to force oxygen into the baby’s lungs.
“More heat!” He wanted the Infant Table Warmer.
“Adrenalin,” the resident tersely instructed at Strauss’s side.
In the terrible machine-quiet of the Mount Sinai delivery room, David Strauss underwent nearly fifteen minutes of the tensest, most draining exercise and strain he could imagine.
Finally, his dark thick head of curls flew back. David Strauss moaned. He looked down on the O’Neill baby. She looked like a sleeping little doll.
“Oh screw me,” David said. “Just screw everything.”
He walked over to the delivery table and leaned down toward the seventeen-year-old. David Strauss then hugged Katherine O’Neill—something that was so absolutely forbidden by hospital rules, it wasn’t even covered in the regulations.
“Oh Doctor, Doctor, Doctor,” the little girl sobbed into his hair. “I just want to die, too.”
It was 3:09
A.M
. on April 25.
For David Strauss, the death of the O’Neill baby wasn’t the worst thing that would happen to him that day.
It wasn’t even in the top ten.
Scarsdale, April 25.
Winding along the pretty duck pond and tree-infested Bronx River Parkway that night, feeling familiar, pleasant vibrations rising up from their ’64 Mercedes 190 (their New York City shitkicker—“the Gray Ghost”), David Strauss couldn’t help thinking that he and his wife, Heather, basically had most of the things they wanted in life.
Sometimes—after the death of young Katherine O’Neill’s baby, for example, David wondered if he and Heather didn’t have too much of a good thing.
Less than two months earlier, David was thinking as he maneuvered the too-skinny Parkway lanes, he and Heather had bluffed their way past the stuffed-shirt, bluestocking Coop board of the Beresford Building on Central Park West. They were now the comparatively young landlords of a high-ceilinged, eight-room park-and-river-view penthouse in one of New York’s landmark, snobbier apartment buildings.
Right in the lobby of the forty-seven-year-old building, David also owned a neat, oak-paneled office, where he wore a white shirt and Brooks Brothers striped tie every day; where he practiced efficient, sometimes inspired medicine for women ranging from a world-renowned fifty-one-year-old playwright quietly having an illegitimate (“I like to think of her as ‘fatherless,’ David.”) baby on the twenty-second floor, to the more conventional problems of Pap smears, pelvic examinations, yeast infections, menopause, and Premarin dispensation.
Heather, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, preferred working out of Mount Sinai on 100th and Madison, but she, too, loved their apartment in the Beresford.
That night, Heather had worn a formal Yves St. Laurent dress from Saks. She’d also had her long blond hair tipped and sensor-permed at Suga. Heather was looking very spiffy, David was thinking, as the two of them sped along.
“Tell me something, David,” Heather kept saying as the Gray Ghost got closer and closer to Scarsdale. “Are the rest of the Strausses ever going to like me? At least to put up with me? Seriously, David?”
Which was a funny question in a way, because Heather was one of the most
likable
people David had ever met.
Everyone liked Heather Strauss
.
Patients, even the most irascible bastards; New York City cabdrivers; the monsignori-venerable doormen and elevator operators at the Beresford.
But.
Were the Strausses ever going to like Heather? Well, David thought, even he was puzzled over the answer to that one.
All for three, simpleminded, medieval, and pretty stupid reasons: (a) on Sunday mornings, maybe twelve times a year, Heather attended services at St. John the Evangelist Church; (b) she ate Oscar Mayer and Nathan’s Famous hot dogs; (c) she identified with characters out of
Captains and the Kings
and John Updike, instead of
Seventh Avenue
and Chaim Potok.
In other words, Heather Duff Strauss was a blond-haired, sparkly blue-eyed, wonderfully human and lovable
shiksa
.
David’s wife, his best friend, “the top,” as the old Cole Porter song had so nicely put it.
The Housewife was just finishing her fourth surveillance walk past the mesmerizing lights of the Strauss mansion in Scarsdale.
She strolled past the rolling front lawns of the moon-flooded estate and down alongside a long stone wall trailing geranium vines. She approached a copse of maple trees loitering at the end of the block, like a shadowy street gang.
In front of her on a taut chain leash, a perky young Irish setter—bought earlier that evening in White Plains—excitedly sniffed its first bed of pachysandra and relieved itself on the leafy plants.
With her pretty dog, her navy riding jacket, her gypsy kerchief, the Housewife blended neatly into the suburban night scene.
The chic-looking woman estimated that there were now sixty to seventy people attending the large Strauss affair.
Quiet Upper North Avenue was an impressive parking lot for Lincolns, Cadillac Sevilles, Mercedes 280 Es, Jaguar XJs, and other expensive automobiles.
“We almost have a full house,” the Housewife whispered into a transmitter clipped onto her riding jacket.
As she passed a side view of the house, the woman fingered round, bumpy objects in a special pouch pocket sewn into her sports jacket.
The bumpy objects were white phosphorus grenades, the kind that had been used to raze entire villages in Vietnam and Cambodia.
At the corner of Post Road, the Housewife bent and patted the young setter’s soft smooth head.
She whispered into the pup’s perked right ear. “Yes, yes, yes. That’s a good girl.” Then the woman clipped off the chain leash and released the small dog. Someone would care for it, she knew.
I have killed before
, the Housewife said to herself,
but never quite like this
. She looked at the pretty house—cozy North Avenue. It made her shiver to think of the rest.
It looked like something out of an illustrated children’s book. High above the Strauss mansion’s steep, four-gabled roof a moon raced through a high ceiling of poplar and oak leaves.
The estate grounds were a beautiful, smoky-gray painting that night. Close up, every object was finely etched in black.
The skeleton of an old hickory tree.
A horned owl perched on a garage.
The strange, strange man in his dark pilot’s Windcheater looked like a highly skilled housebreaker.
Which was one way to describe the Soldier.
Pressed down close to the loamy, steaming ground, he ran as quickly and silently as his heavy backpack would allow.
He trampled through formal gardens on the East Park side of the Strauss property. Past a red-barn-siding garage with its own private gas pump. Across a mushy bog that rose up to his shoetops. Over an unexpected brook and into what looked like an old world fruit and vegetable garden.
The Soldier stopped and crouched low at a vine-covered gazebo that had seemed to be a small cottage from the brook.
“There’s a single man out here,” he spoke into his transmitter.
Watching the man—who had come out of the party for a smoke—the Soldier unstrapped his heavy pack and waited until the man from the party finally wandered back inside.
Now the Soldier could begin.
Inside the bag was a curious assortment of supplies. Knotted rags. Different lengths of copper pipe. An American-made Colt Python with four clips. Fuse. A full two-and-a-half-gallon Exxon gasoline can.
Right in the heart of Westchester County, New York, the Soldier couldn’t help thinking as he set to work.
In America.
David and Heather climbed out of the dusty, rusted Gray Ghost. Arm in arm, they walked toward the imposing forty-one-room manor house where David had grown up.
“Where’s the Sousa band and welcoming committee you promised?” Heather whispered in David’s ear.
“Inside.” David tapped his knuckle against the house shingles. “The other side of these great, half-timbered walls. With bells on their toes, I’ll bet.”
Inside the grand Tudor house, the two of them were semiprepared to meet the mainstays of David’s immediate family: Strausses, Cohens, Hales, Loebs, Lehmans, Kleins.
So many relatives. Also David’s older brother, Nick, who would be appearing on NBC-TV.
On the fifty-second Academy Awards—which was the ostensible reason for the party.
Just thinking about “Nick the Quick” brought a smile to David’s lips. Nick was what their grandmother Elena called a
tummler
, a big, lovable clown—who maybe was going to turn into a successful “alrightnik” out in Hollywood.
The closer he got to the big house, though, the more serious second thoughts David had about the tricky evening ahead.
For one thing, some of the people inside had actually boycotted his and Heather’s wedding two years before.
Some of them still hadn’t met Heather Duff Strauss.
“Hello. Oh, hi there, Mrs. S.”
Heather was looking as pale as the Gray Ghost as she and David stood on the stone front porch.
“Just practicing my act,” she assured David, both of them looking up at the great glazed bay windows.
“Okay, let’s do it.” Heather took a deep breath. “Twang your magic plunker, Froggie. Bang the brass knocker, Davo. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
David couldn’t help smiling at his wife. Just then, though, the big wooden front door seemed to open by itself.
“Aahh-ha,” said a flaming red mouth and fluttery blue eyes—David’s great-aunt Frieda. “Everybody! Everybody! David and his girlfriend are here … Oops!”
“Oops is right, Aunt Frieda.” David held Heather’s arm tightly. “Frieda, this is my wife of two years, Heather. Heather, welcome to the North Pole.”
Not unexpectedly, the exact tone of voice of the large catered party was difficult to pin down and isolate.
“It’s part very sophisticated cocktail party.” Heather looked around at chiffon Empire gowns and tuxes; at Queen Anne side chairs; Cromwellian tables and cabinets; expensive art on every available wall space.
“And it’s part New York delicatessen service-crew reunion,” David smiled. “Knishes. Sour pickles. The herring in cream sauce.”
“Also, it’s part Irish wake, I think.”
“And part Indian suttee … and part United Jewish Appeal breakfast. Remind me to take you to one of
those
some time.”
Technically, it was Nick’s day. Only in the Strauss view of the world, that made it the whole family’s day, which meant that everyone attending the gala party was up for an Academy Award that night. The entire Strauss family.
After peeling off from yenta Aunt Frieda, from Uncle Milt (colonel in the Army Reserves; ten-million-a-year salesman for Prudential), David and Heather were roadblocked by Aunt Shirley Lehman, who was a trustee of the Brooklyn Museum even though she lived in Tarrytown now, and who was writing a chichi novel about East Side housewives called
Pure Vanilla Extract
. She sat Heather and David in front of Degas and Chagall, and kibbitzed and kibbitzed until they both felt amazingly at ease and almost welcome at the party.
In fact, after being there for half an hour or so, David began to feel a vaguely familiar glow inside.
He saw that Heather was being accepted into the family—and that Heather herself knew it.
David Strauss found himself smiling.
This was family, damnit! This was okay. It was better than okay
.
They blew everything out of proportion all the time. They badgered you. They made you dance the horah. They cut you up, down, and sideways in incisive ways that went right to the bone marrow. But
somehow
—and David started to laugh out loud as he thought this—
some way
, they cared for you more than anybody else ever would. They loved Heather—because
he
loved her.
At one point, loud clapping started up around the huge, warm, familiar living room. People were clapping for David and Heather. Grandmother Elena’s wolfhound rolled around the carpet yowling and farting. David kissed Heather and he felt a little warm tear on her cheek.
“I’m really happy,” Heather whispered. “I’m never been happier, David.”
“This reminds me of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in
To Catch a Thief
,” David whispered to Heather as they crossed the upstairs hallway.
“Or two of the little Japanese people in
Godzilla Meets King Kong
,” Heather said, suggesting another cinema image.
The two of them sneaked past the ancient ruins of David’s old bedroom. Past his father’s ten-thousand-book study. Then David was slowly twisting the glass knob on one of the closed bedroom doors.
The polished walnut door sprang open a thin crack. A blade of light sliced out into the hallway.
They could both smell lavender water and sachet, and a boyhood epiphany closed around David: expensive family cars that purred like cats: old family cats that made noises like broken-down cars.