Page 21 - WhyAsInY

Chapter One
Doctor’s Hospital
NOVEMBER 1 – NOVEMBER 3, 1944
Wherein, six days prior to FDR’s election to a fourth term, our author confronts various tribulations, domestic and foreign, and manages somehow to emerge victorious.
No, it wasn’t exactly supposed to happen as it did, but everything worked out well in the end. Moreover, I suppose that it was com- forting to be able to affix the blame.
On Wednesday, November 1, 1944, ready to get this story started, my mother, née Justine Louise Caplan (“Caplan with a C ”), arrived at what she later told me was the very finest maternity hospital in Manhat- tan, Doctor’s Hospital. (Place names are important in this book, not just for their meaning, which is obvious here, but because, given the limited amount of movement in my life, they tend to recur, and often in the oddest and most unrelated contexts. Doctor’s Hospital is only the first such example of this not particularly fascinating phenomenon; it will reappear in 2001 and 2005, assuming that you’re somehow still reading this when the time comes.)
My mother also told me that at that time, Doctor’s (Doctors? Doctors’?) patients were routinely served their meals on china—the finest china—and that the utensils were sterling silver, not silver plate. I’m given to understand that on that very day, one of the Astors also
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