Sidney Sheldon - A Stranger in the Mirror

Outside the door of the operating room stood Karl Czinski, nervously kneading his hat in his large, calloused hands. This was the happiest day of his life. He was a carpenter, a simple man who believed in early marriage and large families. This child would be their first, and it was all he could do to contain his excitement. He loved his wife very much, and he knew that without her he would be lost. He was thinking about his wife as the student nurse came rushing out of the delivery room, and he called to her, “How is she?”

The distraught young nurse, her mind preoccupied with the baby, cried, “She’s dead, she’s dead!” and hurried away to be sick.

Mr. Czinski’s face went white. He clutched his chest and began gasping for air. By the time they got him to the emergency ward, he was beyond help.

Inside the delivery room, Dr. Wilson was working frantically, racing the clock. He could reach inside and touch the umbilical cord and feel the pressure against it, but there was no way to release it. Every impulse in him screamed for him to pull the half-delivered baby out by force, but he had seen what happened to babies that had been delivered that way. Mrs. Czinski was moaning now, half delirious.

“Bear down, Mrs. Czinski. Harder! Come on!”

It was no use, Dr. Wilson glanced up at the clock. Two precious minutes were gone, without any blood circulating through the baby’s brain. Dr. Wilson faced another problem: what was he going to do if the baby were saved after the four minutes had elapsed? Let it live and become a vegetable? Or let it have a merciful, quick death? He put the thought out of his mind and began to move faster. Closing his eyes, working by touch, all his concentration focused on what was happening inside the woman’s body. He tried the Mauriceau-Smellie-Veit maneuver, a complicated series of moves designed to loosen and free the baby’s body. And suddenly there was a shift. He felt it begin to move. “Piper forceps!”

The maternity nurse swifty handed him the special forceps and Dr. Wilson reached in and placed them around the baby’s head. A moment later the head emerged.

The baby was delivered.

This was always the instant of glory, the miracle of a newly created life, red-faced and bawling, complaining of the indignity of being forced out of that quiet, dark womb into the light and the cold.

But not this baby. This baby was blue-white and still. It was a female.

The clock. A minute and a half left. Every move was swiftly mechanical now, the result of long years of practice. Gauzed fingers cleared the back of the infant’s pharynx so air could get into the laryngeal opening. Dr. Wilson placed the baby flat on its back. The maternity nurse handed him a small-size laryngoscope connecting with an electric suction apparatus. He set it in place and nodded, and the nurse clicked a switch. The rhythmic sucking sound of the machine began.

Dr. Wilson looked up at the clock.

Twenty seconds left to go. Heartbeat negative.

Fifteen…fourteen…Heartbeat negative.

The moment of decision was at hand. It might already be too late to prevent brain damage. No one could ever be really sure about these things. He had seen hospital wards filled with pathetic creatures with the bodies of adults and the minds of children, or worse.

Ten seconds. And no pulse, not even a thread to give him hope.

Five seconds. He made his decision then, and hoped that God would understand and forgive him. He was going to pull the plug, say that the baby could not be saved. No one would question his action. He felt the baby’s skin once more. It was cold and clammy.

Three seconds.

He looked down at the infant and he wanted to weep. It was such a pity. She was a pretty baby. She would have grown up to be a beautiful woman. He wondered what her life would have been like. Would she have gotten married and had children? Or perhaps become an artist or a teacher or a business executive? Would she have been rich or poor? Happy or unhappy?

One second. Negative heartbeat.

Zero.

He reached his hand toward the switch, and at that instant the baby’s heart began to beat. It was a tentative, irregular spasm, and then another and then it steadied down to a strong, regular beat. There was a spontaneous cheer in the room and cries of congratulation. Dr. Wilson was not listening.

He was staring up at the clock on the wall.

Her mother named her Josephine, after her grandmother in Krakow. A middle name would have been pretentious for the daughter of a Polish seamstress in Odessa, Texas.

For reasons that Mrs. Czinski did not understand, Dr. Wilson insisted that Josephine be brought back to the hospital for an examination every six weeks. The conclusions each time were the same: she seemed normal.

Only time would tell.

3

On Labor Day, the summer season in the Catskills was over and the Great Merlin was out of a job, and along with him, Toby. Toby was free to go. But where? He was homeless, jobless and penniless. Toby’s decision was made for him when a guest offered him twenty-five dollars to drive her and her three children from the Catskills to Chicago.

Toby left without saying good-bye to the Great Merlin or his smelly props.

Chicago, in 1939, was a prosperous, wide-open city. It was a city with a price, and those who knew their way around could buy anything from women to dope to politicians. There were hundreds of nightclubs that catered to every taste. Toby made the rounds of all of them, from the big, brassy Chez Paree to the little bars on Rush Street. The answer was always the same. No one wanted to hire a young punk as a comic. The sands were running out for Toby. It was time he started to fulfill his mother’s dream.

He was almost nineteen years old.

One of the clubs Toby hung around was the Knee High, where the entertainment consisted of a tired three-piece combo, a broken-down, middle-aged drunken comic and two strippers, Meri and Jeri, who were billed as the Perry Sisters and were, improbably enough, really sisters. They were in their twenties, and attractive in a cheap, blowsy way. Jeri came up to the bar one evening and sat next to Toby. He smiled and said politely, “I like your act.”

Jeri turned to look at him and saw a naive, baby-faced kid, too young and too poorly dressed to be a mark. She nodded indifferently and started to turn away, when Toby stood up, Jeri stared at the telltale bulge in his pants, then turned to look up at the innocent young face again. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Is that all you?”

He smiled. “There’s only one way to find out.”

At three o’clock that morning, Toby was in bed with both of the Perry Sisters.

Everything had been meticulously planned. One hour before showtime, Jeri had taken the club comic, a compulsive gambler, to an apartment on Diversey Avenue where a crap game was in progress. When he saw the action, he licked his lips and said, “We can only stay a minute.”

Thirty minutes later, when Jeri slipped away, the comic was rolling the dice, screaming like a maniac. “An eighter from Decatur, you son of a bitch!” lost in some fantasy world where success and stardom and riches all hung on each roll of the dice.

At the Knee High, Toby sat at the bar, neat and tidy, waiting.

When showtime came and the comic had not appeared, the owner of the club began to rage and curse. “That bastard’s through this time, you hear? I won’t have him near my club again.”

“I don’t blame you,” Meri said. “But you’re in luck. There’s a new comic sitting at the bar. He just got in from New York.”

“What? Where?” The owner took one look at Toby. “For chrissakes, where’s his nanny? He’s a baby!”

“He’s great!” Jeri said. And she meant it.