The Road Taken by Rona Jaffe Page B

of the most popular names of the year. There were four other Joans in the hospital when Rose was there. She liked giving her child a modern name; Joan would be a modern woman.
    But in the hospital when Rose looked at the new baby she was disturbed by a small red blister on the child’s forehead. “What is this?”
    “It’s a hemangioma,” the doctor said. “A blood blister. When she grows older and combs her hair it will bleed. Better to get rid of it right away, while she’s a baby and doesn’t feel much pain. We have a new medical miracle these days, thanks to Madame Curie. You’ve heard of radium?”
    “Yes,” Rose said. “Of course.”
    “I will put a small piece of lead on the baby’s forehead with a hole in it where the blood blister is,” the doctor said, “and then I’ll put a piece of radium over the hole and it will simply burn the hemangioma away.”
    “Radium must be so strong,” Rose murmured, alarmed.
    “Isn’t it wonderful? The same thing that watchmakers use to paint luminous numbers on dials can also cure disease. I’ll do it when she’s a month old.”
    After the procedure, Joan cried and screamed for days and nights. It was obvious that the doctor’s idea of not feeling much pain was totally subjective. Then the site ulcerated, and whenever Rose had to clean it Joan screamed more hysterically, and Rose was near tears herself. Finally it healed, leaving a round, shallow, indented scar, which made Joan’s forehead look as if the soft baby head bones had not closed—but of course they had not closed yet because she was so young. Rose wondered if they would.
    “What have I done to her?” she said to Hugh. “The doctor worried about her combing her hair, and now he just says, ‘She’ll wear her hair in bangs, she’ll be fine.’”
    “Is he a doctor or a hairdresser?” Hugh asked. He was furious. His love for his two nieces was as fierce as if he had been their father.
    As for Ben, he seemed not to want to deal with it at all.
    But then, eventually, the indented scar stopped looking so raw, and finally turned a mottled white, although it never went away. Madame Curie died of radium poisoning after all her years of touching it and working with it. The watchmakers, who had licked the tips of their brushes to make them pointed before they dipped them into the luminous radium paint, were dying of leukemia. Radium, although it turned out to have other uses and to be very valuable, had been, like so many other cures and panaceas, elevated into a firestorm of overenthusiasm for just a moment, a mistake. At school, Joan charged her friends a nickel each to look at her “horrible scar.” Whether or not she was living with a bomb inside her body no one knew, and after a while, because she seemed normal in every way, they more or less forgot about it.
    During the Depression the thing that seemed to save everyone was going to the movies. The plots were fanciful, the movie theaters even more so, their interiors resembling exotic palaces. In summer the movie theaters were the only places that were air-conditioned—a large sign outside promised:
Cooool.
On dish night you would get a free plate, if you wanted it, along with your entertainment—a further incentive for struggling families to part with their money. Talking pictures had been around for a while, but the technology was still primitive enough so that everyone on the screen had a high-pitched voice. After a while you believed they really did. Many of the actors had been trained on the New York stage, so they had accents that were almost English. You could also believe that all upper-class people spoke that way, and maybe they did.
    America’s darling was blond, curly-haired little Shirley Temple, with her fat cheeks and tiny mouth, tap-dancing up and down staircases, pouting and singing her way into everyone’s heart. Peggy and Joan begged for tap-dancing lessons, and finally Rose found a woman who was willing to teach them for