“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Schwartz said.
“I’m Sandy,” she said, and smiled over the top of her book.
“David.”
“Peter.”
“Manny,” he said, and shook hands with me, and then reached over to shake hands with David, and then tried to get to Sandy’s extended hand, but his leg wouldn’t permit it, so he just waggled the fingers in compromise, and she waggled her fingers back at him.
“Have you three been skiing long?” Schwartz asked.
“Sandy’s been skiing since she was six,” David said.
“Really? Yes, of course,” Schwartz said. “You’re a very good skier. I saw you on the mountain even before the accident You’re very good.”
“Thank you,” Sandy said, and put down her book.
“Me, I’m totally uncoordinated,” Schwartz said. “I don’t know why I ever got involved in this cockamamy sport. I’ve been skiing for five years now, and all I do is get worse. Maybe I’m lucky I broke my leg. The way I feel now, if I never see snow again for the rest of my life, it couldn’t be soon enough.”
“Lots of skiers feel that way after an accident,” David said.
“Is that a fact?”
“Sure, but as soon as they heal, they’re right out there on the slopes again.”
“It has to do with machismo,” Sandy said.
“Well, I don’t feel I have anything to prove,” Schwartz said. “The way I started skiing was my brother Morris rented a house up in Manchester, Vermont, because there was a girl he was interested in, and she was an avid ski nut. So he went up there, and the house had about two dozen rooms in it, and also seven million flies, and he asked if I wanted to come up some weekend. To keep the flies company, I guess. Once you get up there, I don’t have to tell you, you feel stupid as hell being so near a mountain and not at least trying to ski. So I tried to ski. So here I am five years later with my leg in a cast, and me an obstetrician.”
“Oh, are you a doctor?” Sandy said.
“Yes,” Schwartz said, and smiled modestly. “The irony is my brother Morris married that ski nut, and she’s had two babies since and neither of them go skiing any more.”
“The babies?” Sandy said.
“No, no, Morris and Judy,” Schwartz said, and laughed. “There’s a basic injustice there, don’t you think? That my brother Morris should introduce me to the sport and then go home to have babies, while I’m still single and breaking my leg in a profession where I have to deliver babies standing up.” Schwartz smiled quickly at Sandy and said, “I’m the one standing up, not the babies.”
“What’ll you do now?” Sandy said.
“Who knows?” Schwartz said, and shrugged. “Sit in the park, catch up on my reading, maybe give a guest lecture or two in a wheelchair. Some of the interns they got today could use a few lectures on how to deliver babies, believe me.”
“I’ll bet it’s not as simple as it looks,” David said.
“Who said it’s simple?”
“I said it looks simple. Reach in, grab the head, bite the cord, slap the kid, that’s it.”
“Sure, sure, as simple as that,” Schwartz said, and laughed. “Did you ever have to deliver a breech baby?”
“I never had to deliver any babies at all.”
“It’s a lot harder than delivering groceries, I can assure you,” Schwartz said, and laughed again, and suddenly I began liking him.
The day I decided to become a psychiatrist, I vowed that I would never consider myself anything more than a mechanic of the mind. It was refreshing to discover that Emmanuel Schwartz, M.D., considered himself nothing more than a mechanic of the womb, so to speak. His laughter expressed genuine modesty about his profession, and yet I was willing to bet he could deliver babies sideways, upside down, or backwards with equal ease.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” Sandy said, and Schwartz laughed even more heartily, and managed to knock over his crutches at the same time. David picked them up for him while Schwartz fumbled for a handkerchief in the zippered pocket of his pants, thanking David between gusts of laughter, murmuring, “Oh, dear, oh that was funny,” and finally tilting his head back and spreading his handkerchief tentlike over his face to dry his eyes.
I hadn’t thought Sandy’s quip so outrageously comic, but then I suppose I’m accustomed to expecting nothing less than perfection from her. Smiling now, pleased by Schwartz’s reaction, she said, “Are you here alone, Dr. Schwartz?”
“Manny,” he said from under the handkerchief, the cloth puffing out as he spoke. “No, I’m here with a friend. Seymour Foderman. He’s a lousy skier, too,” Schwartz said, and burst out laughing again.
“Who’s a lousy skier?” a voice behind us asked, and Schwartz yanked the handkerchief from his face, and all four of us turned, and there stood Schwartz’s twin, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
“Speak of the devil,” Schwartz said. “Seymour, meet David, Sandy, and Peter. My friend the gynecologist — Dr. Seymour Foderman.”
They were, Foderman and Schwartz, most certainly the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the medical profession. Like Schwartz, Foderman was round and dumpy, pear-shaped, with the same apple-cheeked moon face and pale-blue eyes, sloping shoulders, fat behind and meaty thighs. Wearing a green jersey turtleneck and baggy-kneed ski pants, he put his hand on Schwartz’s shoulder, and said, “Has he been maligning me again?” and even his voice was remarkably similar to his friend’s, high and somewhat nasal, with the unmistakable cadences of the native New Yorker, Bronx variety. “I happen to be a very good skier,” he said, and Schwartz said, “Oh, an expert, without doubt,” and they grinned at each other, and I realized they were about to launch into a form of dialogue developed over the years until it was second nature, as symbiotic as the relationship between gynecologist and obstetrician, two old buddies working their shtik like a pair of standup comics — except that one of them was sitting with his leg in a cast.
“Manny, on the other hand, is exceedingly clumsy,” Foderman said.
“Seymour skis with all the agility of an arthritic,” Schwartz said.
“Oh, certainly, but look who fractured his leg.”
“At least I fractured it with precision.”
“Yes, precisely in three places.”
“If you’re going to break your leg, do a good job, I always say.”
“You did an excellent job,” Foderman said. “I understand you’ll be on crutches till the Fourth of July.”
“Even longer.”
“I’m sure your patients’ll be happy to postpone parturition.”
“Indefinitely,” Schwartz said and grinned at Foderman, who grinned back. Unobserved by either of them, Sandy watched the exchange, and a thin fast smile broke on her mouth. I knew at once that her imagination had been captured by these medical twins, and that something rare and exciting would happen before we left Semanee.
I didn’t know what.
Dr. Krakauer doesn’t really talk with a German accent. I only do him that way when I’m relating analytic atrocity stories to Sandy and David. Nor is he monosyllabic, like some psychoanalysts; we usually engage in rather lively dialogues up there in his secret laboratory on East Ninety-sixth Street. Some of these have to do with the embarrasing fact that I was still wetting the bed when I was twelve years old. Dr. Krakauer attributes this to my father’s affinity for booze, his theory being that my nocturnal irrigation was a form of revenge expressed in liquid terms, the punishment fitting the crime, so to speak. But most of our conversations have to do with Rhoda.