Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

“It’s okay, Mama’s here, Mama’s here. It’s okay.” Joanne circles through the living room, kitchen, and dining room, patting the sobbing boy while Lou follows.

“You told me he was used to it. Haven’t you been giving him crackers?”

“Yes, mother,” she lies again. “Did you break it up?”

“For Christ’s sake, he’s eight months old!”

Lou prepares to leave. Joanne tries to remember the last time she saw Tina and Megan. Someone took them away. A grandmother maybe. She is ashamed not to know, but that block of years is hazy, after her father moved to Florida and Lou failed her first two tries at the CPA exam.

Before her mother leaves, she puts a hand on the baby’s head. “I’m sorry, little guy. You all right?”

Joanne sees it again — Lou coming down the block that day, her anvil step and cold eyes testifying that she’d already been in the house, where the frosting bowl, cereal boxes, a mac and cheese pan and several dirty plates lay on the table next to Pacific Avenue. Then her eyes shifted to the boys’ dirty T-shirts and angry faces, and for a moment Joanne actually expected her to turn around, to deny them. Instead, Lou’s anvil pace quickened, a hard, relentless click, and she shouted, “Joanne, you okay?”

As Joanne jogged up the sidewalk, turning her back on those other, motherless children, pain spiked again, this time in her right ear, and the world fell away. All except her mother’s face, where she is sure she saw relief, which today, even more than then, saves her life.

Dr. Spencer looked up from his misery to the long, winding lines — dark eyes, brown clothes, the occasional red and yellow native costume — and each day before this and after seemed a wretched sameness to him, as if Ellis Island were a prison rather than a reception point, and he was the one locked inside. It made him wonder for the first time if these people were worth all the trouble.

Dr. Hauss, down the line, was new, so his inspection — just clubfeet and goiters — still took twice as long as it should. Waiting for him to finish, Spencer slumped against the metal railing and pressed his palms over his ears, gently rubbing his temples with his extended pinkie fingers, aware that he looked haggard, but not caring. These people’s murmurings — a dozen disparate languages ricocheting like a symphony of ignorance off the tile walls — made his head throb more than last night’s bottle of brandy. Who were they to judge him? Human flotsam. Desperate castoffs. They had no right. They did not know him.

The next person was a woman in her forties, then a man in his twenties, followed by a family of four who all had conjunctivitis. He passed them on, then stopped and glanced at their backs. Really? Had he run his finger under every eyelid? Of course. It was so automatic he did it without thinking.

Spencer reached for his face, then jerked his hand back. Damn her! He’d almost touched his eye without disinfecting. Spencer dunked his hands up to the wrists, splashing solution onto his instrument stand. It took only a moment to risk his sight, his whole life.

Just like it took Laura only a moment to excise him from hers. Six words— I don’t want to marry you —had reduced thirty years of confidence, work, friends, and good looks to the simple, ridiculous fear of not being good enough to love. It felt as though she’d stamped his forehead “undesirable” and he would walk around trying to hide under his hat the rest of his life, tripping over obstacles with his brim pulled down too far. Spencer wasn’t sure whether or not to believe what she had said — that there was no one else — but what did it matter? Was it better or worse than what his sister had said — that Laura came from a different class of people. “I’m surprised she ever went out with you.”

While Hauss muddled through the next large family, Spencer absently arranged the things on his stand — a row of blue chalk, a flat piece of metal like a buttonhook for inverting eyelids, a notebook for interesting observations and a gold-plated, new ballpoint-style pen Laura had given him. Spencer opened his notebook and looked at his name, written with the pen in the top left-hand corner of the inside cover. The crisp lines of his signature, the perfectly round dots between his M and his D, suddenly seemed a mockery. He decided to throw the pen out as soon as he could get a different one.

Spencer had gotten a job on Ellis Island right after he finished his training and last year he’d been promoted to the eye and brain man, responsible for diagnosing trachoma, a highly contagious infection that caused blindness, and mental deficiencies. Like all the physicians, he used blue chalk to mark his diagnosis on the person’s shoulder, in his case CT for trachoma and a circled X for the deranged and retarded. Inspectors further down the line separated people based on their marks. People marked with CT were sent to the infirmary for a second check. If confirmed for trachoma, they joined those with a circled X back on the boat, bound for wherever they started. Which is why Spencer’s position was left to the most experienced.

Finally Hauss sent up a group of eight and Spencer worked through, starting youngest to oldest — the best way since younger kids got scared off if they saw him use the buttonhook.

Done, he leaned on his podium, head in his hands. God, Hauss was so damn slow! Perhaps he could go to the administrator’s office and tell them he was ill. Who would question a doctor’s diagnosis of himself? But with Hauss’s speed, if he went home sick, they might have to shut the whole line down for the day. People whose relatives were waiting for them to disembark would get stuck on the boats. Maybe he could at least get a damn chair to sit on. Wasn’t he entitled to that much? A chair? He was a doctor after all.

Spencer pushed his glasses up on his tall nose and rubbed his eyes, then glanced quickly at his hands. What the hell was wrong with him? He never touched his eyes at work. Had he remembered to disinfect? Of course, he hadn’t seen a case of trachoma all day. Still.

He dipped his hands in the bowl of disinfectant on the stand’s lower shelf. Some of the doctors on the Island didn’t bother with this precaution — as if they had no common sense at all. Sometimes, seeing this, Spencer wondered if he should feel proud of his job. Was it true what Laura had implied, that only the desperate take a job on the Island? Spencer’s father owned a grocery. He had no medical connections. So what of it?

A man approached with red, watery eyes. Spencer swirled his instrument in the disinfectant, flipped up the man’s eyelid and ran his finger along the underside. It took only a second to feel the white granules. The man forced his eye shut, face wrinkled in outrage, and muttered something in Yiddish. Trachoma and the Jews. They had it the worst, especially of late.

Spencer marked him on the shoulder with a CT, then smiled kindly, eager not to alarm him — he looked as though he could be trouble — and motioned for him to go on ahead.

Waiting for the next group, he scanned the lines, focusing on the women, wondering what they thought of him. Were they ashamed to have a strange man touch them? Or did they admire him, a doctor, an American? Did they resent him for judging them or seek his approval gladly, like a child seeks a parent’s?

Spencer washed his hands again, straightened his tie, then glanced up. Laura stood in front of Hauss. Laura? The same crackly red hair, like fall leaves. The same white neck. The mole? Was it there? Hauss had his hand on the woman’s neck, checking for goiters. She looked afraid and angry. Spencer’s stomach felt bound like a tourniquet on a wound. He knew now: that’s what Laura went to last night. Someone else’s touch.