Free Up From Orchard Street by Eleanor Widmer

and walked around with a thermometer in his mouth; my brother suffered from asthma and wheezed his way through the nights; and later I contracted rheumatic fever and stayed in bed for weeks.
    Nor were we the isolated few. A diphtheria or measles epidemic would spread catastrophe through the Lower East Side. When polio raged, children seemed to be carried away overnight. In fact, we were among the privileged because of our private doctor.
    Dr. Koronovsky—again no first name—lived with his two sisters in a luxurious elevator apartment on Grand Street furnished with, among other possessions, a piano covered with a shawl more intricate than ours, and wall-to-wall carpeting. The doctor had his own room with a bedroom set that he had bought at Jones Furniture, which sold “the best” to uptown people; a plum-colored couch and upholstered chairs in the living room; and two radios, one in the living room and one in his private quarters. In the second bedroom his maiden sisters, Etta and Yetta, slept in twin beds—everything of the finest quality, Bubby reported. She had been in the apartment several times to cater small dinner parties.
    Still, Dr. Koronovsky carried an air of sadness with him. He sported a small goatee, a vest that displayed a gold chain with his Phi Beta Kappa key as well as his gold watch, and Hickey Freeman suits in various states of disrepair. What accounted for his misery? His two sisters had made every sacrifice to send him to medical school, serving as janitors for the building in which they lived in exchange for free rent. They scrubbed the steps, pulled garbage cans to the sidewalk, mopped animal urine and feces; no job too cruel for them because their brother had to be a doctor. Their parents expected it; they had martyred themselves to send their children to America.
    After Koronovsky finished his residency at Beth Israel Hospital he was offered the chance to buy into a private practice close by on West Sixteenth Street. But his sisters, tiny black-haired women with worn-out eyes and bony hands, refused to move uptown. Koronovsky, easily the best doctor on the Lower East Side, kept his office on East Broadway, charged more than anyone and did consultations uptown. To ensure his sisters’ happiness he didn’t marry. But he did have “a friend,” a woman refined and educated whom he loved and visited once a week.
    In our apartment after he diagnosed my father’s bronchitis—he scoffed at the barber and his burning cups—or Lil’s sore throat, Dr. Koronovsky would sit in the kitchen with Bubby to speak of his dilemma. “After what my sisters did for me, how can I bring a strange woman into the house? My wife would run my house! What would happen to my sisters?”
    “Emmes,” Bubby replied, “absolutely true.” She paused to formulate what she said next. “But your life: you deserve a life. It’s coming to you. When will you begin living, when your sisters are gone? Then it will be too late.”
    Dr. Koronovsky dipped rugulach into his raspberry tea served in a filigreed holder and refused to answer Bubby’s question. “What about you, Manya? You didn’t remarry. You had chances. Quite a few.”
    Bubby nodded in agreement. “More than a few, but not one meant anything to me. One man was not too smart, another couldn’t hold a job, a third . . . Can you imagine . . . this man, he asked me to marry him after knowing me two weeks. He said we should take Jack, about three years old, and while he played in the park, we should sneak away and leave him there. I should forget about my one and only child, leave some stranger to find him, for that grub yung? What was he, crazy? I told him, ‘Don’t find your way back here, or I’ll soap up the stairs and slide you down.’
    “Another meshugana, almost the same story. I should bring Jack to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and say I’m too poor to take care of him. ‘Manya,’ he told me, ‘without your child we will always be on a honeymoon.’