Dr Jew

your clothes for nothing. Now let's go."
    The boy silently consented. When they were in the man's rental car the boy said, "Uncle Dave? Can we stop and see ma before –"
    "Now, boy, your ma is sick. We can't go barging in any time we please howdy-do. They got rules and stuff in hospitals."
    "I just want –"
    "Boy, you got to be less selfish sometimes. You let her be for now and we'll see her when you get back."
    The boy said nothing and held back his tears. See her when you get back.
    The car carried them away.
    The boy never saw his mother again.

VI.

    A babbling flatulence of conversation around her as she rode a bus deep into the Richmond District. She found the old building she'd been referred to and went up the stairs. And here is where things became fuzzy. She waited and waited and waited, but she couldn't tell you where. And was it a nurse or something else that came and called her name? She followed someone down a corridor of blue and the smell of rubbing alcohol, clown pictures in frames psychologically manufactured to put children at ease and doing the exact opposite. Serpentine corridors that wound impossibly upon themselves and which promised no exit without a trustworthy guide. Down stairs unlevel, unevenly spaced, irregular, crumbling and covered with moths and rat feces, dust. Behind walls of glass where they kept babies and ancient mariners destroyed by forgotten diseases, through an aviary where they kept her for weeks if not hours.
    The office door smelled of licorice and was gigantic, at least five feet tall. Huge letters covered the door and screamed in Technicolor Willy Wonka stripes as if to announce some new obscenity or Las Vegas act: DR. JEW.
    The nurse vanished and the woman began to knock but before her knuckle touched the door it opened and something like a man stood there waiting, a doctor-like man and more like one portrayed on TV and if a face it was difficult to remember so the details will be spared.
    "Come in," said the man.
    Without moving her feet (or so it seemed) she found herself in his office seated in a lush upholstered chair (was it a recliner?) and they discussed her problem.
    "I want a child," she said. "I've tried for years, Dr. Jew."
    "I see, I see," he said. "A most natural, serious, and unfortunate circumstance. So let us hear more about this condition for in its regular recurrence and normality there lies within it the seed of unusuality and conundrum. And what kind of man would the would-be father be? Has, in the years of your turmoil, this husband of yours been tested?"
    "Husband?"
    "Husbandry, ahem, ma'am," said Dr. Jew, "a condition being normal handing its way down to us from on high since the days of – ahem – Adam and Eve – and it being a condition nothing to be afraid of or curtsied about however I do naturally in medical sensitivity understand any squeamishness you have in discussing both spermatozoa or ovum in this matter either separately or united but united is where we obviously have the puzzle the twist if you will, aye there's the rub, so that you find yourself upon the doorstep of my cauldron that I may enlist you and assist by means alchemical or otherwise your transference from barren lonely flesh mistress to milkspraying breastmother with filthy hands of infants under your blouse – which is most becoming, I might add – all in professional context and manner I might add, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha – but returning to the matter at hand I must again reinstate my query upon your non-present husband in this case. Has he been tested?"
    "My husband?" she said.
    "The one and same," said Dr. Jew.
    "I don 't have a husband," she said. "I'm not married."
    The doctor hesitated, then said, "Ahaha, of course not, of course not, and it doesn 't matter in the least not the least THE LEAST for I said husband only from the history of me and my era from whence I came a prudish place if ever there has been and I have carried from thence the cluttered misgivings and Victorian whippings that misguidedly taught that a woman aiming to conceive or not conceive but merely engaging in the conceiving motion – ah – without securing a husband was deemed a whore but those bygone days are gone thank God rest in peace good riddance as I say to bad rubbish and understandably so, so forgive me again for using that word husband when that blithe lucky soul – I almost said rogue, ha ha ha – has yet to bend down on knee and implore you for your hand and the rest of