Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (15 page)

Joseph rescued me. He spied me from his window and called down to ask what I was doing. I didn’t tell him the truth but I made it clear that I was on my own. I was cold; my stomach hurt. He sensed my desperation and told me to come up. I hesitated for all the obvious reasons, namely his parents and my mother. “I’ll answer the door,” he said. Somehow that reassured me. Maybe he meant to sneak me in.

But no, Joseph had too much respect for his mother to do that. He greeted me at the door and asked in a whisper, “Where’s your Mom? What’s wrong?”

“I was supposed to stay inside. I got locked out. I don’t know where she is.”

Joseph nodded in his old man’s grave manner and said, “Follow me. Keep quiet and say you’re sorry when I tell you to.”

We walked, much to Mrs. Stein’s surprise, right into her kitchen.

“Mom, Rafe is here. He’s come to tell you that he’s sorry he lied. His mother has punished him by not letting him go out or see his friends for six months. He doesn’t tell any more lies and now she lets him go out. We’d like to play chess, just one game and then he’ll go.” Mrs. Stein stared open-mouthed throughout his speech and stayed in that pose when he was done. Joseph nodded to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I almost burst into tears. I had to fight to keep them to a trickle. “I’m really sorry. I won’t do it again.”

“That’s all right,” she said, trying to be stern-faced, but melting to me. “You did a bad thing, but if you’re sorry and you don’t do it no more, then it’s all right. Go ahead. Play.” We turned, ready to move fast. “You want something to eat?” she asked.

I was never so glad for bland food. I told Joseph a truth, namely that my mother had left me alone all night, but not why, and I explained that if he told anyone, he was putting me at risk of being grounded forever. Joseph said I shouldn’t worry about my mother finding out I was at his place—he had a plan. We moved the chess set so we could look up to see the windows of my apartment. If Ruth turned on a light we would notice. Since it was daytime, I had my doubts she would, but I might spot her moving around. Anyway, I didn’t care if this precaution was fallible. Out on the street my fear and hunger had overwhelmed me. I was too relieved by my rescue to care if I was punished for it.

The next obstacle loomed with nightfall. Joseph’s father and mother appeared and looked at me as if I should be leaving. I had tried to beat Joseph using the Sicilian Defense, gleaned from the little learning I had gotten out of his birthday present the previous day. But I was quickly trounced twice—Joseph didn’t tell me he owned a new book with more variations. I tried a different opening for the third game and seemed to be winning. I was about to attack him King’s side when I saw the mouse’s one-eyebrow face, squinting at me unhappily. “It’s late,” he said sourly.

I had an inspiration: “I’m sorry, Mr. Stein. I lied to you. I’m very sorry. I’ll never do it again.” This humbling of myself, this lie of an apology, an unthinkable abandonment of my pride only six months before, was a relief to me. I wanted to give myself up, to crush myself if I could, to be remade from top to bottom. I stood. “Thank you for inviting me,” I said to Joseph, who looked so astonished by my formal manner I thought the lenses in his glasses were going to pop out. I walked toward his parents, resigned that I had to go.

“Ma,” Joseph asked, a pleading note in his tone, “can Rafe sleep over?”

Mrs. Stein glanced at her husband. He blinked at her. The fierce man with steel fingers who dragged me to my mother’s had disappeared down a hole and come out a mouse again. “It’s a school night,” she said uncertainly.

“We’ll go to bed early,” Joseph said. “No talking after lights out.”

“Sure,” the mouse said in a faint squeak. “If it’s all right with his mother.”

Joseph opened his eyes wide and stared at me. He spoke these words with slow significance: “Why don’t you go upstairs and ask her?”

Bless him, he concealed his new chess books and pummeled me all night—I lost that third game and then two more—but he made sure I was cared for. I rang my bell a few times, without much hope. Mostly, I tried to think of a reason why I wouldn’t be returning to the Steins with pajamas or school clothes or schoolbooks.

I told Mrs. Stein all my pajamas were dirty—that shocked her and gave her a pleasant feeling of superiority. I said my mother wanted me to go home early in the morning to change for school.

I woke up in the middle of the night, worried and scared. I cried. I thought I was doing it silently. Joseph turned on the tensor lamp. He squinted at me myopically. “Are you crying?” he whispered.

“I’m sorry,” I blubbered and let out a sob.

He put a finger to his lips and then whispered, “Don’t cry. You can always stay here. My parents think you’re very smart. And, you know, by Jewish law you’re Jewish.”

“I know,” I said and stopped crying. I remembered Papa Sam. I saw Uncle Bernie’s round face smiling as he presented me with a twenty-dollar bill.

In the morning I left. There was still no answer at home. I decided to go to school in my dirty clothes. It was April 17th. That morning roughly fourteen hundred Cuban exiles, trained and backed by the CIA, invaded at the Bay of Pigs. They were easily and quickly defeated. But in the interval between the first report and the final result there was, at least among supporters of the Cuban revolution in the United States, a conviction that American troops would follow up, that this was the forerunner of a U.S. overthrow of Fidel. To this day it isn’t known where my mother spent Saturday night and Sunday. By mid-morning on Monday she was arrested. She spat on Adlai Stevenson as he entered the United Nations (at the time he was the U.S. ambassador) and then fought violently with the guards who dragged her away. She was carrying a gun and a can of gasoline.

I didn’t know those details for many years. Aunt Sadie found me in gym on Monday afternoon. She walked across its varnished floor with a look of horror in her eyes, a look that belied the account she gave of my mother. She said Ruth was going to be okay but that she was sick and had to stay in a hospital for a few days. (In fact, she was undergoing psychiatric observation at Bellevue.) Huge tears rolled down Aunt Sadie’s cheeks while I explained that I had been on my own for two days and nights. Aunt Sadie used her key to my parents’ apartment, packed a bag for me, and we went to her house in Riverdale.

Cousin Daniel looked through my things while Aunt Sadie left us to phone first her husband and then Uncle Bernie with the report about me. Daniel made fun of my schoolbooks. He said he had learned all that in first grade—I was in fourth.

“Well, it’s because I go to a private school,” Daniel said. “It’s much better. We’re years ahead of you.”

This remark didn’t wound as deeply as it would have a year earlier. I knew that I was a geek compared to Daniel, a monstrosity to his normalcy, but I also knew much more about life. I had faced killers and saved my parents’ lives. I had stayed alone in my apartment and lied to grown-ups. I knew how to please my mother better than he could ever please his. I knew the secret that real men knew, the secret that women become loose and groan if touched in the right way. And in my Indian wallet, I had a special letter (that spies from the CIA were looking for) from a revolutionary, a man who had unselfishly given up being my father to make a just world. Besides, when I challenged Daniel to a chess game, thanks to Joseph’s tutelage, I mated him in fifteen moves. Danny got so mad he picked up the board and scattered the pieces all over his beautiful carpet. He was a sore loser, but I wasn’t. I worked hard until I learned how to win. I was a geek and I was an outlaw, but I was a man and he was a boy.

Aunt Sadie came in as Daniel threw the pieces. She casually rebuked him and told me that Uncle Bernie wanted to talk to me on the phone.

“Hey fella,” his cello voice greeted me. “What a brave boy you are. Your Mom told you to keep what she was doing secret, is that right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, it’s good to obey your Mom. But you don’t have to keep secrets from me. I’m family. We don’t have secrets in a family.”

“Is Mom in jail?” I knew from Sadie’s nervousness that her account wasn’t accurate.

“Uh … Didn’t Aunt Sadie tell you she was sick?”

“Yes,” I said.
Use your peasant brain.
“But I don’t think she told me the truth. If Mom’s in jail, can I come live with you, Uncle?” I couldn’t be a burden and a worry to my parents anymore. My uncle was rich. He was the great capitalist, the overwhelming force that had defeated my parents. Maybe I could get his help, get his power, and avenge my father and mother.

“With me? You’re gonna stay with Aunt Sadie and Max and Danny. That’ll be more fun. My kids are in college, you’d—”

“Mommy says you’re a genius, Uncle.” That was true. She said he had a genius for using power. “Daniel hates me. He says I’m a spic. I don’t want to live here. I want to live with you. I want you to be my father.”

There was a long silence. Then, in a choked voice, Bernie’s cello sang low: “I’ll come get you, boy.”

He told me to put Aunt Sadie back on. I rushed to find her and grinned at Daniel as she went. He challenged me to another game. I mated him in ten. He threw the board against the wall so hard it split in two. I was triumphant. Aunt Sadie returned from her second conversation with Bernie. One side of her hairdo was stuck up in the air and her eyes were red. She kissed me and then wheeled angrily at Daniel. “You and I have to have a talk, young man.”

Uncle Bernie took me away in a black limousine. I leaned against him and fell asleep on the ride to Long Island. I was nine years old and I was in charge of my life. I thought I was doing a better job than my parents had. After all, I was on my way to live in a mansion, on my way to help them win their lost cause.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE
Overcompensation

I
WAS MOVED INTO
P
APA
S
AM’S OLD QUARTERS
. E
ILEEN
M
C
E
LHONE, A
young woman (she seemed quite grown-up to me; but she was only twenty-eight) was hired through an agency to supervise me. Aunt Charlotte had no interest in playing mother now that she had sent her children off to college. She spent most of her time fund-raising for various museums, hospitals and Jewish organizations. Three or four nights a week she stayed in Manhattan. My uncle expected to be busy as well, supervising his real estate interests and preparing for an expansion into retailing through the purchase of Home World, then a foundering Northeast chain of appliance stores. He was frequently on trips or working late in Manhattan, not to mention the events he attended because of his charities and art collecting. It fell to Eileen to keep me company, ferry me to and from school and various athletic activities.

She was very beautiful, an Irish stereotype. She had light blue eyes, thick red hair, and high cheeks that alternated between bloodlessness and bright embarrassed flushes. Her speech was a melody. She had the natural literacy of a nation that puts Yeats and Joyce on their paper money. Her white and red colors, her gay moods and teasing speech, were so different from the dark, brooding Jews and Latins of my family that I was sometimes slow to answer her conversation, mesmerized by the spectacle of her exotic appearance.

Eileen lived in what used to be the nurse’s room, only a step across the hall from mine. We shared a bathroom. She was kind, but too convinced (as Freudians and Catholics tend to be) of the inherently bad nature of humanity, especially as evidenced in children. She could not distinguish between the natural egotism of a four-year-old and the pathological narcissism of a forty-year-old. She believed sex was unspeakable, savage and dirty. We got along well; at nine, I held similar opinions. I believed all my desires to be evil. But I had a comforting rationalization: I wanted money and power as weapons in the good fight, to save the miserable and the poor.

Eileen was critical of American children. She thought my fellow Great Neck schoolmates were spoiled, whiny, rude, and arrogant. So did I. She praised me lyrically. “Oh, what a good boy you are. What a joy you are to take care of. Why you hardly need any attention at all. You’re practically taking care of me. Not like these others, the little monsters they call children. Ordering their mothers about like servants and treating the servants like they were still slaves from Africa.” She had no respect for my parents and wasn’t shy about speaking ill of my mother. “What kind of a woman leaves a child alone for two days and nights? And in New York City, which is no better than a jungle, or even worse than a jungle, if you ask me. As a mother she was a good Communist. I have no use for her kind. I don’t care that they want to make things better for us poor and us workers. I know what happens to their hearts once they get the power. Then they don’t care about the poor anymore. They’re not so sentimental about workers when they’re the bosses. I know about Communists, yes I do. I don’t have much use for greedy capitalists but the Communists are even worse. Under capitalism you can have nothing to eat. But under Communism there’s nothing to cook your nothing with.”

Other adults avoided the subject of my parents. I mean my uncle, his wife, Charlotte, Uncle Harry and Aunt Ceil, and Aunt Sadie. Since Bernie employed his brother, and all his brothers-in-law, I saw more of them, especially on weekends. My status had changed, of course. My cousins, except for Daniel, were more friendly. They played with me; they praised me if I did something well; they encouraged me to try again if I failed. Daniel continued to be sullen. He tried to beat my brains out at anything we played, from Monopoly to tennis.

The latter was to become harder and harder for Daniel, although he was an excellent player (he had entered and done well in several junior tournaments) because after my first two weeks living with him, Uncle Bernie took an active interest in improving me. He arranged for a group tennis lesson at the nearby racquet club and had the same pro come over to teach me privately on Friday afternoon. He also hired a swimming instructor, “to work out the kinks in my strokes.” I merely knew how to stay afloat, not cut through the chlorine with the grace and speed of an Olympian. “I want you to be a strong athlete for camp,” Bernie said with his characteristic frankness. “The popular kids at camp are the good athletes. If you’re just smart, they’ll pick on you.” I wholeheartedly shared his worry. I was a geek and a half-breed: with so many tender spots I needed all the armor I could lay my hands on.