The Strange Case of Dr. Couney Read online

  ALSO BY DAWN RAFFEL

  In the Year of Long Division

  Carrying the Body

  Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

  The Secret Life of Objects

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 Dawn Raffel

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  Ebook ISBN 9780698404816

  Version_1

  For the babies

  CONTENTS

  Also by Dawn Raffel

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Breath

  Part One

  MASTERS OF INVENTION

  “All the World Loves a Baby”

  The Obit That Wouldn’t Die

  A Showman Is Born

  Et Voilà! The Artificial Hen

  William Silverman and the Couney Buffs Convene

  Michael Cohn Sees an Elephant, and the Light of a New World

  The Couney Buffs Encounter the Mysterious M. Lion

  “The Greatest Novelty of the Age!”

  Part Two

  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  The March of Science and Industry

  The Arrival of the Eminent Dr. Martin Arthur Counéy

  Nailing Jelly to the Wall: The Couney Buffs Gain a Follower

  “The President Has Been Shot!”

  Welcome to the City of the Dead

  Two Elephants, a Wedding, and a Bunch of Crying Babies

  Kiss the Baby

  “The Crime of the Decade”

  Little Miss Couney Arrives

  “What Took You So Long?”

  All the Pretty Preemies

  Magnetic Tape

  A Dream in Flames

  The Forgotten Woman

  Building Better Babies

  The Day of Couney Finally Arrives

  Let’s Pretend I Wasn’t There

  Keep the Incubators, Please

  One Very Short Lady

  Part Three

  THE BLACK STORK

  No-Man’s-Land

  A Charmed Life

  The Rise and Rise of Julius Hess

  A Legend Is Born

  Alone in a Crowd

  Send the Ambulance

  The Century of Progress

  Not for Public Viewing

  All Aboard the Twentieth Century

  “My Little Brother”

  Sorrow in Sea Gate

  “Leave As Soon As You Get This”

  The Ones Who Got Away

  Playing with Matches

  Vision and Hindsight

  Who Will Save You Now?

  Winter

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography/Suggested Reading

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE: BREATH

  The pains came too early. The cramping of the womb. The ragged breaths. The life demanding release. The woman, Marion Conlin, was carrying twins, and on an otherwise gentle Thursday in May, her labor had commenced. Too soon. Not now. Not yet. Each contraction a blow.

  Only the year before, she and her husband, Woolsey, had celebrated their wedding. Summer of 1919. Atlantic City honeymoon, where, in that golden pocket—the Great War over, Prohibition not begun—a newlywed couple might sip champagne and hear their beautiful fortunes told and stroll in their swim suits into the sea, laughing.

  Now they were in a hospital in Brooklyn. Marion’s labor could not be stopped. One daughter entered the world, drew breath for twenty minutes, and lay still. The second was so tiny, it was painful to look, her skin near translucent.

  The obstetrician had no words of comfort. He gestured toward the child who had died. “Don’t rush to bury that one,” he said bluntly, “because you will need to bury the other one too.”

  “But she’s alive,” Woolsey said.

  “She is not going to live the day.”

  This was too much to bear. “Well, she’s alive now,” her father said. In Atlantic City, he had seen a sideshow on the boardwalk with premature infants in incubators, being saved. “Aren’t there machines for little babies that will help them?”

  “Yes, but we don’t have those here,” the doctor said. “And anyway, it wouldn’t make a difference in this case because she is not going to live.”

  Atlantic City was hours, lifetimes, away, but something Woolsey Conlin had heard came back to him: That boardwalk doctor ran another sideshow, closer to home. While the obstetrician continued to insist on the hopelessness of the situation, Woolsey Conlin picked up his two-pound daughter, wrapped her in a towel, walked outside, and hailed a taxi. “Coney Island,” he told the driver. “Can you step on it, please?”

  Part One

  MASTERS OF INVENTION

  “ALL THE WORLD LOVES A BABY”

  Chicago, 1934

  Chicago had already sweated through one hell of a week, and today was only Wednesday. The trouble began with a bang, literally, on Sunday when the cops shot down John Dillinger outside the Biograph. Gangster was seeing a movie. If you didn’t know better, you might have believed the deceased was seeking revenge: As the final larcenous breath rattled out of his lungs, the city was being strangled.

  By Tuesday, the mercury in the snazzy Havoline Thermometer Tower, soaring over the Century of Progress fairgrounds on the lakefront, had shot up to 105—with 109 degrees reported inland at the airport. Either way, it was the hottest day ever on record for Chicago.

  Heat deformed the air, which seemed to wobble. Clothes stuck to flesh. Flesh stank. With ice in short supply and the stench of the slaughterhouses ripening—where pigs strode doomed over the bridge of sighs and cattle hung bloody from hooks—people fled to the beaches of Lake Michigan to sleep.

  During the day, perspiring throngs pressed their way into the Great Halls and pavilions at the world’s fair, less interested in the scientific and cultural marvels on display than in inhaling refrigerated air. They poured out onto the midway, dripping into their summer cottons and brimmed hats, fanning their faces with folded maps, mopping up ice cream that melted faster than they could eat. Freaks, savages, steamy strippers, and miniature humans were there for their viewing pleasure. If people couldn’t stanch the sweat, they could at least secure a couple of hours’ respite from the cruel Depression and the news coming out of Germany.

  Today, the high—finally!—was supposed to be south of 100. That in itself was cause for celebration. As for the news, for the fifteen minutes between 12:45 and 1:00 p.m., the airwaves would belong to Dr. Martin Arthur Couney and the adorable babies whose lives he had saved in his incubator sideshow.

  * * *

  —

  The radio script had a written instruction not to conduct today’s program as a farce. Yes, the announcer could make a few cra
cks about all the crying and yelping, but he needed to mind himself, on account of the “ethical standing” of the city’s physicians who had a manicured hand in this thing. This baby “homecoming” would not be half as fun as the midget wedding two weeks earlier. Why, even a former vice president of the United States had been out in the Lilliputian village when that tiny torch singer married her groom, and the cops had to stop the mob from going nuts.

  Every day, you had a new extravaganza at the Century of Progress. It wasn’t just the grand Hall of Science, the Halls of Religion, and Travel and Transport, the Homes of Tomorrow, with everything prefabricated, some kind of dream. It was Ripley’s and strippers and marching bands and neon Deco blazing through the sweltering night. So what if it wasn’t as grand as the famous White City back in 1893? Who cared if the old folks didn’t find the sky ride quite as stirring as the Ferris wheel they liked to carry on about? You really had to hand it to the planners and the backers—they’d managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat of the Depression.

  The world’s smallest man and women, at the Century of Progress.

  Given a choice, you might rather escape than eat. People jam-packed the midway, reeking of Tabu perfume, of Burma-Shave, and summer BO, ready to part with whatever they had, dollars thick in silver clips or crumpled in a pocket, a scavenged coin or two, nickels pilfered from a pay phone.

  Train after train steamed into Union Station, belching out tourists. Folks at home depended on the radio, the ticket to the world. Today’s show would reconvene the tots who’d been the littlest humans breathing, premature babies so small you could scarcely imagine a heart, a lung, a soul. They’d spent the summer of ’33 sleeping and cooing in Martin Couney’s sideshow on the midway. “Infant Incubators with Living Babies”—the sign so big you’d have to be dead to miss it. Just next door, inside the Streets of Paris, Sally Rand was doing her scandalous fan dance that made her look naked, but Martin Couney had something most of these people had never seen before.

  Saving a two-pound person was a neater trick than swallowing a dagger or eating a flame. Most hospitals were not equipped to do it. And even if they were, you couldn’t barge in off the street. So every day, the crowds paid a quarter to see the preemie sideshow. Housewives, dressed up in their prettiest slim-waist prints, salesmen who’d blown into town from Topeka and Canton and Scranton on a junket, schoolmarms in their sensible shoes, the farmhands and the factory men, swoony schoolgirls dragging the boys from the block, society gals in their slouchy hats, stenographers and operators, grannies and aunties and sticky brats. With luck, they got to watch the nurses feed or bathe the patients. The French nurse, Madame Recht, would flash a diamond ring and slip it over an infant’s wrist, all the way up its skinny arm, to demonstrate scale.

  Today, the “graduates” included forty-two “lusty-lunged boys and girls of all nationalities and assorted colors,” according to the press release. Singles, twins, a sole surviving triplet. Plus, a VIP: Miss May Winter, class of ’01, from Dr. Couney’s show at the Buffalo World’s Fair. Thirty-three-year-old spinster worked in the travel department at Carson Pirie Scott & Co.—point being, she was normal. Productive. These babies could grow up to be like anybody else. They didn’t have to die.

  Martin continued issuing diplomas through 1940.

  Martin Couney had been selling this idea forever. Anyone who’d ever bought a pickle in Atlantic City or spent a salty day at Coney Island had heard of this guy. Babies came straight from the bloody birthing beds and overburdened hospitals—infants who doctors swore would die, or swore would die without him. No other hope. Back in the aughts, before half of these people remembered, he used to exhibit in Chicago’s fun-parks. Jolly kind of fellow. European. Pretty much everyone thought he was swell. Excepting some of the members of the medical establishment. Many had simply ignored him. Others were made uneasy—the way he practiced next to the din of the chute-the-chutes and freak shows, making a spectacle of the weaklings, even if he saved them.

  Today’s show could change his reputation. At a quarter of one—live from the Century of Progress!—two unimpeachable doctors would join him on the midway and publicly agree about the way to save these babies. No, not with sideshows, but yes, with incubators—as Martin had been saying all along—and yes, with dedicated care, and yes, indeed, with public money. The script included Dr. Julius Hess, the director of Sarah Morris Children’s Hospital at Michael Reese and head of Chicago’s Medical Society. Formidable. And Dr. Herman Bundesen, the health commissioner, a man who was known to be mighty fond of the microphone himself.

  Plus, this show was going coast to coast, riding on the airwaves out above the dusty plains, the sharecropped farms, the railroad beds, the tenements, the crystal-and-teacup avenues, the shantytowns, the ranches with their cattle stock, the tidy homes and offices, the luncheonettes and smoky joints in all the little cities all across the USA.

  For today, the radio host would keep his cool and wipe his brow and hold the laughs in check.

  * * *

  —

  Martin Couney, in his custom quarters—air-conditioned—on the midway, had every conceivable reason to be in a splendid mood. Here came his moment, and could you believe it? Everything he’d ever done was leading up to this. All those years of eminences looking down their noses, as if it were in questionable taste to save a life. Tawdry, they called him. Unscientific. Up to something fishy, just because he’d gotten rich. Not once had he billed the parents of his patients a nickel. No matter what color, religion, or class—penthouse or alley—he’d saved them the same. The audience paid, and if he’d made money, what business was it of anyone else?

  They’d tried to shut him down and shut him up. They’d painted him a rogue and a risible figure. Yet several doctors had spent a summer learning from him, a fact they conveniently liked to forget. Only Julius Hess had been his faithful ally, all the way back to those long-ago days in Chicago, both men young and hopeful.

  How many babies had gone to their graves? Chicago was one thing, New York was even worse. The rest of the country, forget it. First, they said the incubators didn’t make a difference and then they stopped to question if these babies were worth it. It wasn’t as if there was any shortage of hungry mouths to feed. Why sweat these small ones, who might be a burden?

  Over in the Great Hall within the Hall of Science, the public could view a display explaining eugenics. Propagation of the fittest. Selective human breeding would eliminate the “feeble,” the “degenerate,” the possibly defective. Also in the hall, the fine men of science were showing pickled fetuses for public edification. And yet, the infant incubators counted as amusement.

  Martin was growing old in this endeavor. At sixty-four, he was losing his hair, while his girth had grown thick. For thirty-odd years, he and his wife, Maye, along with Louise—“Madame” to the public—had executed every clever stunt they could concoct to get the press to show up. Every day that no one paid attention was a day that children died.

  To hell with the heat. He dressed with Old World elegance, no matter the weather. What he lacked in height, he made up for in comportment. Some might say he should reduce, but where was the need? His work was his life, but a man had to eat. The steam that arose from a redolent plate; the bouquet of a fine, aged wine; and a table filled with guests—there was possibly nothing better than that. Except for a baby.

  A baby!

  All the world loves a baby—this was his slogan, written at the door to every show. To gauge by the crowds, it was true, at least when Maye made the babies delicious to look at, with ribbons and bows. But no one—not Maye or Louise, not even, perhaps, the parents themselves—appeared to adore a baby more than he did. The light in the eyes, the fragile breath, the cheeks. The initial sparks of cognition. And then the chubby toddlers who were brought back to visit. More recently, the creamy invitations: a high school graduation, the wedding of someone no one but he and Louise an
d Maye believed would see a single birthday.

  Every blistering, footsore day, he would station himself at the door to his show—All the world loves a baby! Once seen, never forgotten! He never got tired of talking to the public, not even the Dummkopfs who deduced he’d made the little critters. (Hiya, Doc, where’dja get the eggs?) Sometimes they wanted to order one fresh for themselves.

  To terrified parents, he offered reassurance. Maybe their child was the weight of a little undercooked brisket, maybe the obstetrician shook his head. Martin promised life. And sure enough, most of the patients went home in a couple of months, daintily dressed by his wife. Maye, a highly trained R.N., would give instructions (feed every two hours, love all the time). He would proffer a glossy autographed photo of himself, signed “Uncle Martin” or “Your foster father.” Louise would sign her likeness “Aunt Louise.”

  Maye avoided cameras. She tended the babies and kept the books and managed all the rest of it—the nurses, wet nurses, supplies, the business end. She didn’t have a word in the radio script, but she would be plenty busy today.

  * * *

  —

  Maye knew this reunion was costing a fortune. Her husband was extravagant—give him a dollar and he would spend three. Today, they were serving an elegant luncheon to more than forty people. Forty-two silver cups had been engraved, to be presented to the babies.

  Every day, Martin saw the money coming in at the gate, which was tremendous, but she saw the bills. No expense was spared, no possible corner cut or tucked inside the nursery. And every night, while the Deco lights blazed on the midway, they hosted multiple seatings at dinner, for staff and wet nurses, and always the guests. Medical men who might think twice, and then again, before endorsing her husband in public wouldn’t say no to filling their bellies at his table. He’d courted them relentlessly, for all the years she’d known him. Back home in New York, he favored high-end restaurants, but here in Chicago, they rarely left the fairgrounds.