Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (21 page)

I was mesmerized by the prospect of living in daily proximity to Julie, within hearing of her gentle voice, within range of her warm brown eyes, within reach of her angora sweaters and what gave them shape.

“You know Bill can’t be bothered by me, but he’d love to have a kid brother.” Bill, her sixteen-year-old brother, was present for only the must-attend family functions: Passover, Thanksgiving, Uncle’s birthday. He was a moody adolescent, in rebellion against his coarse businessman father. He grew his hair long, he played bass guitar in a rock band; I was told he asked to join the Freedom Rides. I don’t think I’d ever heard him speak more than a mumbled monosyllable. He didn’t seem companionable.

Not certain whether to refuse or accept, I looked toward the window. A taxi entered our driveway, heading for the front door. There was a single passenger, a woman who appeared, in the flash I got as it went by, somewhat like my mother.

“Think about it,” Julie said. “I’ll go with you to talk to Uncle Bernie about it. He won’t mind. I mean, he’ll miss you, but he’d understand that it’s better for you to be with other kids.”

The doorbell rang. The mansion was so large there were two extensions for its bell. One was at the head of my hallway, near the kitchen so that the gong sounded loud to us.

“There’s somebody here!” I said, thrilled, and ran off, to get to the door first. I saw a woman’s figure through the side panel of glass. My heart raced as I pulled on the handle.

I got it open and there was my mother, an unexpected and, for a moment, unmitigated joy. Her head was covered by a scarf (she had been shaved near the temples for the electroshock therapy), there were black half-moons under her eyes that turned them stark and vacant, and she clutched a small overnight bag to her stomach, as though protecting it from a thief. I was so happy I couldn’t speak. I ran to hug her. I pressed into the bag rather than Ruth.

“Hello, Rafe,” she said in a high singsong. She held on to the suitcase with one hand and hugged me into the luggage with the other.

I didn’t answer or question why she had given up her pretense. I pressed my chest into the overnighter and buried my face into her neck. I was blind to the crowd that gathered to confront her; I listened while she greeted her family over my head.

“Hello, Julie. You look so pretty. Is everybody here? What’s the occasion?” Ruth’s words implied she felt at ease, but she spoke haltingly and at least an octave above her usual range. She sounded weak.

Julie didn’t respond.

“Ruth,” Aunt Sadie said. “Does Dr. Halston know you’re here?”

“Hello, Sadie. Hello Bernie. Charlotte, you look gorgeous. As usual. All of you look so handsome and beautiful. I came to see Rafe. He’s gotten tall, hasn’t he? He’s almost up to my chin. Come on, let me see you, Rafe.”

She pulled me off her. I looked into her big haunted eyes. There was no glint of green, no mischief, no sexiness. Only hunted desperation. “There … Don’t cry.” She smeared tears off my cheek with a cold hand. I didn’t realize I was crying. “I came to visit for a little while. That’s all right, isn’t it Bernie? You won’t object to that.” Her voice squeaked with false lightheartedness. It was grating and worried me. Where was she? Where was my mother? Each time I saw her she was refashioned into a grotesque version of one of her extreme moods. (Indeed, I was witnessing, and had been witnessing for a year, the steady disintegration of her personality, accelerated by stress and her improper treatment.) “You have to let me see my boy once in a while, don’t you? That’s just common decency. Even under capitalism they have rules about that.” Now there was a hard, furious undertone. “Even sharecroppers are allowed to see their sons.”

Bernie mumbled that of course she was welcome. Sadie led us into my bedroom. Sadie was the only one who came along and she appeared to be nervous, wary of my mother. I guess, because of the spitting incident at the U.N., they thought of her as violent. Or perhaps it was that Ruth used to throw things when she fought with them as a child. She was the youngest of a large family and no doubt she felt frustrated at her relative smallness and consequent inability to impress them. I had heard stories of her rages: once, she hit Harry with an ashtray; another time she had poured syrup over Bernie’s head. Since she had done violent things when they thought of her as normal, it was natural to be fearful of her in this unbalanced condition.

My mother didn’t enjoy seeing my room or my schoolwork or spending time with Sadie and me. She looked at everything I showed her as if it were a potentially infectious object. She handled my story, for example, the same one Julie read, with the tips of her fingers and dropped it almost immediately back onto the desk.

“Sadie, could you get me something to drink?”

Sadie hesitated. “I don’t know what they’ve got. Let’s go in the kitchen and—”

“They have everything here,” my mother interrupted. She didn’t sound sarcastic, she said it gloomily. “Right, Rafe?”

“They don’t have Coke,” I said. “They have Pepsi.”

“I’ll have a Pepsi. Could you
get
it for me, Sadielah? Please, big sister?” She pretended to be little. She put her hands up in front of her chest, cocked her head, and pursed her lips. It wasn’t good mimicry. There was too much mockery in it; whether of her own helplessness or of Sadie’s attitude, wasn’t clear.

It irritated Sadie. She stood up straight and said sternly, “Ruth, don’t do anything foolish. You’re out. That’s the important thing. If things continue to improve you’ll …” Sadie looked at me and stopped talking.

“Get visiting privileges?” Ruth spoke very softly, without threat, and yet she was ominous.

Sadie frowned. “I’ll
get
the Pepsi. I’ll be right back,” she said and that did sound like a threat.

My mother watched her go and then turned to me, speaking hurriedly. “I can’t fight his lawyers. I’ll lose everything. And they’ll keep on trying to
get
in. You know? They’ll keep trying to get inside.” She pointed to her right ear in a violent stabbing motion.

Of course, I didn’t know what she was talking about. I knew it had something to do with me. “You’re not staying?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

“He won’t let me. I’m not well enough,” she said and suddenly demolished her humorless whisper and grim expression with loud laughter and a display of teeth. But it wasn’t a musical sound and her smile wasn’t cheerful. Rage and fear were what they suggested, not good humor. She made a sudden grab for my arm and pulled me close.

I was scared by her grabbing me that way. In the joy of seeing her, I had forgotten about her nighttime embraces. The aggressive move reminded me of what else the active Ruth was liable to do.

[This splitting off of my incestuous mother from the mother I needed is a necessary creation of an incest victim’s survival mechanism. The incestuous parent becomes a separate person with a separate set of memories for which there are a separate set of responses. Hence, in reaction to severe abuse at an early age, there is also the creation of multiple identities for the victim, with different memories and different feelings.]

“Mom!” I begged. I was horrified, not only by the idea of her being sexual, but of doing it in Uncle’s house with everyone nearby. I assumed, with the classic victim’s psychology, that I would be blamed and punished if we were found out.

But Ruth was merely pulling me close to whisper. To whisper in the hunted voice of her paranoia: “Give me the message your father gave you for me. Quick, she’s coming.”

Rattled, I shook my head no, unable to articulate.

“Don’t you have a message?”

I shook my head no. I was confused and scared. Did she mean the letter? No, she meant a new message.

Ruth squeezed my arm. It hurt. “Tell me the truth.” I shook my head again and tears formed. She seemed angry at me. I felt I had failed: that I was supposed to have gotten a message from my father or done something that would have made me available to receive one.

I tried to pull away.

“Don’t lie, Rafe! Tell me!” She shouted. The words swirled at me out of her blackened eyes, eyes that had seen something horrible. And they accused me. “You don’t expect me to believe he hasn’t sent you anything!”

“Ruth!” Bernie was there. He yanked me out of her clutches and sent me spinning. I must have gone into shock because I have no recollection of the next half hour. I know the arm my mother had taken hold of was bleeding because later on I remember sitting in the kitchen while Eileen stained the scratches from Ruth’s jagged fingernails with iodine. I do recall seeing my mother fall over backwards a moment after Bernie pulled me away from her. It may be that she recoiled on her own. It may be that he hit her. Also, I remember, or think I remember, what he said after she fell. It sounds implausible unless one has thoughtfully analyzed the conflict in my uncle between his need to be victorious in all situations and his equally strong need to be beloved in all situations. He pulled me off, and, as she lay on the carpet, he said, “I love you, Ruthie.”

I never saw my mother again. She wasn’t permitted to visit me when she was released full-time from Hillside. Dr. Halston believed that the shock therapy had cured her depression and that long-term analysis would eventually bring her to normality. She was told that if she worked with him productively she would be able to see me and finally live with me again. Uncle set her up in an apartment near Hillside with a paid companion and she had five sessions a week with Dr. Halston. He believed she was doing well at the time the Cuban Missile Crisis began. Even that, although it distressed everyone, didn’t seem to agitate Ruth.

She sneaked off on the day of Kennedy’s apparent triumph, when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the nuclear devices from Cuba. She set up a sign in the windy U.N. Plaza. It read:
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD WILL END.
She poured gasoline over her head while a confused knot of people watched and then she lit a match.

She died without regaining consciousness three days later. I was told she had been killed in a car accident. I didn’t go to the funeral because I became violently ill, vomiting uncontrollably for hours. A doctor injected me with what I presume was a sedative. I was kept in bed for two days. Uncle Bernie slept on a cot in my room the night of my mother’s funeral. Years later Aunt Charlotte told me he had never done that for his son Aaron or his daughter Helen. She thought it proved his love. I think it proved he felt responsible.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN
Hamlet’s Ghost

T
HE WEEK BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS A BOX SENT BY
J
ACINTA AND
P
EPÍN ARRIVED
on a UPS truck. It was their yearly Christmas package, jammed with a dozen gifts for me. Each was wrapped in red paper decorated by many Santas and sleighs, and each was tied with festive red bows and each was identified by a green card on which my grandmother had written in a large oval cursive:
Feliz Navidad,
followed by the person to whom she had apportioned the gift-giving. Five were ascribed to her and to Pepín. One apiece were credited to Uncle Pancho and a cousin my age. Those gifts were traditional, the usual amount that Francisco would hide in the back of his bedroom closet until the night before Christmas. They would be put under our tree after I fell asleep alongside his and my mother’s gift. What was new were the five additional presents allocated to my father.

Uncle Bernie handled the problem of these gifts clumsily. The day they arrived he left instructions for them to be put in my room without ceremony. I found them when I came home from school and opened them with Eileen, my caretaker. She was offended by Uncle’s treatment of the Christmas presents. She expressed that disapproval loudly to me and not at all to her employer.

“You’re half-Christian. He can’t hide from that. He should put a tree out for you and you should go to Sunday school. Don’t tell him I said so. It’s not my place, but you’ve got people who believe in Jesus, whatever may be wrong with your father. And they mean you to know about Christmas.”

Judging from the gifts, Grandma Jacinta’s true intention was to keep me warm—she had sent three sets of pajamas. Living in Florida she must have had an exaggerated notion of New York’s winter. There were also two sweaters, a package of underpants and another of socks. The remaining five presents were small toys: two Matchbox trucks, a set of dominos, a yo-yo, and a book about dinosaurs.

I thought they were pathetic. Cheap and too babyish for me—heart-breakingly inadequate when compared to even a casual purchase Uncle Bernie might make on his way home from the office. They made me angry. After Eileen and I opened them she left the room to put the discarded wrapping paper in the garbage. I threw the Matchbox cars at my Lego storage chest so hard that I dented one of their doors. I crushed the yo-yo with the heel of my brown loafer and I scattered the dominos all over the room by flinging the box. The top came off in mid-flight and the white ivory rectangles spun out. I spent the rest of my rage trying to rip the dinosaur book in half. I was only a little ways through the tyrannosaur’s head when Eileen reappeared.

“My God!” she gasped at the wreckage I had made of the Catholic presents. She grabbed the book away and let out a torrent of words about poor children who needed things if I didn’t want them and my not forgetting that it was the thought that counted and many other clichés. I didn’t listen. I sagged onto the bed and tried to hear in my head my father talking on the Miami radio station. I could. Francisco still reverberated in the old radio console’s speaker, the music of his voice lightened by a sexy melody that was quite different from Uncle’s somber cello. I was discouraged by both male examples: how could I match their vigor, confidence and commitment to principle? And why were the women so weak and foolish, stuck in the literal world, believing it mattered whether I was grateful for toys, believing it mattered whether my father had sent a message while he was so busy fighting for the revolution?