iI.

Prayer for acceptance of absence (repetitive).

May Grace be ever present and fill the void created by that which has been expected but is absent. Please render in its place acceptance and a heart that overflows. Amen.

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II.

“Anomalies of limited amelia in pseudo-Thalidomide teratogenesis,”

14 Journal of Embryo Pathology and Non-Traditional Therapies pp. 263-66.

Abstract. Much scientific, public health policy, and political attention has been paid to profound congenital anomalies, including secondary and tertiary effects, caused by the use of the German-manufactured, non-barbiturate sedative widely advertised, sold and used to treat morning sickness in pregnant women starting in the late 1950s. Some study populations have centered on cohorts of expectant mothers who were exposed directly to other teratogenic agents (that can disturb the development of a fetus). Less examination has focused on daughters and granddaughters genetically susceptible to amelia (loss of limb due to birth defect).

 

Nevertheless, sufficient epidemiological data has been gathered to enable investigators to evaluate long-term health and vocational effects of such primary and genetic exposure to pseudo-Thalidomide teratogenesis, with effects consisting of an absence since birth of a single hand or foot. The data notably has sought to correlate the self-confidence and morale of study subjects with exposure to non-traditional therapies, such as constant prayer directed to three generations of exposed and susceptible women by cloistered Roman Catholic nuns in the City of Port De Lys (Midwestern United States) starting in 1962.

 

III.

Attention, please.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. Your attention, please. This is your motorman speaking. Please stand clear of the doors. Please be careful stepping off the car and crossing the platform. Please make seats available to those who need them. Please release the doors so the car can proceed. Please note: the next car will arrive in 12 minutes. Thank you for riding the Port De Lys RTA….”

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​The young man was on a brief visit to Port De Lys from out of town. He was staying with family in nearby Dartmouth Woods, and he waited at a crowded streetcar stop at the spruce suburb’s Lockwood Street station. He was a college senior on fall break, heading downtown in the “old smokestack city” to meet his mother’s cousin who was a principal in a local stock brokerage house. Upon the mother’s inquiry, the cousin invited the young man to lunch and to interview for a position after graduation.​

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The young man boarded the car and surveyed the scene. Someone on the car had a boom box playing classical music. The young man knew little about classical and nothing about the selection being played. But he was impressed by the clarity and quality of the amplified sound. The rush and lull of the orchestration both propelled the young man forward and settled him down.​

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Gem Street station was the car’s first stop. The young man watched as the doors opened and a polite scrum of commuters moved on and off the car. A seemingly self-possessed young woman stepped from the platform into the car. She looked, to the young man, to be about his age, early 20s. She wore an oddly old-fashioned blue and white striped print dress with buttons down the front and a blue cape over her shoulders. The dress had a pleated front and was hemmed just above her ankles. She had fine but plain facial features and a fair complexion. She wore no makeup. Her hair was shoulder length with large loose curls that seemed more befitting of a younger girl. She wore a flat fabric hat with a wide floppy brim.

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​The young man stepped back to make way for new passengers. He reached for a grab bar above one of the car’s bench seats. He steadied himself by bending his knees as the car lurched, getting underway. The young woman shifted in the car and disappeared from the young man’s view. The car rocked and briefly shuddered, and its lights flickered off and on as it picked up speed and soon was hurtling down the track. The symphony piped through with a swell of bum-bum! bum-bum! bum-bum! The young man scanned the car for the girl. Over his shoulder, he could see she was situated next to and steadied by a stainless-steel stanchion anchored to the car’s floor and ceiling. She and he were nearly back-to-back.

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​The train eased into the Southtown stop. The young man again shuffled across the car to accommodate boarding passengers. He tucked himself next to and then leaned against a utility closet door in the corner of the car. Here he could see the girl without craning or obstruction. He hoped she would notice him, but also hoped she would not notice him noticing her. He pretended to be oblivious to her presence, a forced nonchalance, glancing-away from the object of his interest, as shy people do out of fear of embarrassment.

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​Still, the young man peeked and saw the girl tilt her head forward, as though looking at the feet of other commuters, the brim of her large hat covering her face. He could see for a moment her tucked-in chin, which seemed small, even fragile.

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​The crowd thinned at the College Station stop, and the young man could see the young woman hooking the upright post with the crook of her left elbow. She seemed to occupy an odd posture in which she held her flattened, freed left hand, fingers splayed as a screen to protect her right forearm and hand, which she held across her body close to her waist.

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​The passengers then were jostled by a sudden shake of the car, and the young man glimpsed the reason for the young woman’s protective stance. Her right hand was not a real hand. It was a false hand, a prosthetic hand. This shocked the young man. The hand had been super-realistically rendered, so realistic in its detail it seemed, from the young man’s vantage, to be supremely unnatural in its attempt to imitate nature.

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​It was though the hand been made for a doll, and as such it might have been a part of one of the finest dolls ever made. But it would have been a doll with a too-perfect sculpted hand.

The false hand was veiled by a sheer black glove of dotted tulle lace. The glove extended from beneath the cuff of the girl’s long sleeve past the second sculpted knuckle. With this, the young man’s mouth went dry and breath went shallow. A cold bead of sweat ran down his ribs from under his arm. He felt a dizziness that summoned a long-suppressed memory.

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​When the young man was a small boy, his mother had brought him to the circus. Their seats had been high in the grandstands. Before the lights were dimmed and the attention of the “Ladies and Gentlemen” had been directed to the center ring, he had scanned the arena and could see a mezzanine where children in wheelchairs had been placed. One of the boys in a wheelchair attracted his attention because of his fitful movement. He twisted and jerked his head and neck and arms, rounded his shoulders, and undulated his back. He contorted his mouth and rolled his eyes. 

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​The young man, then a tender child, did not know what he was seeing or what apparent distress possessed the boy in the wheelchair. He heard ringing in his ears. His legs grew wobbly and he instinctively lowered himself and lay down on the concrete steps. The last thing he recalled before he revived was a chemical smell of industrial cleaner on a floor that remained sticky with spilled soda and unfinished cotton candy from previous shows. 

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​As with that earlier episode, the young man’s mind raced considering what the young woman on the street car’s loss of a hand might mean to her life, and while that did not result in the young man’s fainting, it did cause his feelings to melt into calm sympathy and a dull ache in his heart.

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​The young woman stepped off the car at Eliot station. Nothing in the way she carried herself indicated that she would welcome sympathy.  

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​The boy disembarked, too. He met his cousin. They had lunch. He was not offered a job. He never had ocassion to return to Port De Lys. 

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IV.

Uphold a leaf.

Last night the man, now old, dreamed of the young woman he had seen on a streetcar on that one occasion long ago. He had not thought of her for many years. In his dream he was a boy, again. He was standing at a distance to what appeared before him. It was as though he was present but invisible, an observer. The young woman appeared, at first, as a child. With her was her kindly father. She and her father were walking together in shifting settings, first on the street, then in a park, then on the beach, and now smartly dressed walking down an aisle to their seats at a theater or at a sporting event. As father and daughter proceeded in their dream walk, the father held the end of the girl’s right forearm at the place where her right wrist ended, as though he were holding the girl’s hand if the girl had had a right hand.

 

The father and daughter moved casually and gracefully. The father called the daughter’s right forearm her “stem.” This evoked a picture in the boy’s mind  of a stem as it appears in nature, as that which upholds a flower or a leaf, or bears a piece of fruit – in each case with flexibility and strength.​

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The girl, to the boy’s reckoning, seemed intent on mischief toward her mother who, unlike the girl’s father, did not seem at ease with the girl’s loss of a hand. In her mother’s presence the girl would go out of her way to call attention to the abbreviated end of her right arm and not in her father’s gentle and poetic terms. Rather, to her mother’s chagrin, she referred to the end of her arm not as her “stem” but as her “stump,” pointing out that “stump” is what her doctors called it.

As the dream progressed, the girl once again appeared as she had appeared in real life, all those years ago, riding in the streetcar in Port De Lys. She wore, as she had worn that day, a prosthetic hand. It appeared to be made of porcelain and was an artisans’ masterwork from another age, a marvel of detail, the fingers, their nails and cuticles, the knuckles and joints, the dimpled flesh on the back of the hand, the shadow of veins deep below the surface subtly painted blue, the cupped shape of the palm and fingers, the fine half veil of the lace glove, all were rendered with care and precision. The boy in his dream imagined that the girl’s beloved great aunt and uncle had brought back the hand as a gift from a trip to Vienna.​

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The boy imagined, still within his dream, that the girl preferred not to wear any prosthesis, least of all one that was merely decorative. If given a choice she would cover her right wrist with a neatly folded, safety pinned right sleeve of a long-sleeved man-tailored button-down shirt. The boy in the dream imagined that the girl had hanging on the back of the door of her bedroom closet an old-school harness-secured, body-powered, spring-controlled, metal hand prosthesis, the kind whose binding is strapped across one’s shoulders and back, with shoulder and arm movement used to control the opening and closing of the “hook” which is used quite deftly to perform many functions of a missing hand. In his dream, the boy imagined the young woman feeling a sense of honor when she wore this pragmatic prothesis, as though in proud solidarity with soldiers who had lost arms or hands in war, and for whom the hook was a badge signifying the drive to confront and overcome loss. 

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V.​

Turned and disappeared.

The boy started to awaken to his elderly self. The girl in the dream at the end of the dream stood in the streetcar as the car slowed for its final stop. She held still for a brief moment to study the boy, as the boy had studied her, and as though to say goodbye as she turned and disappeared into the crowd.

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("The Girl with the Veiled Hand" by Eddie Roth first was published in August 2024 here in The Eddie Roth Reader.)