Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil Read online

  “A test of what?” my mother asked. She snapped the final t, whipping the sound scornfully. I cringed because of a fight my mother had had earlier in the day with her oldest sister, Sadie. Aunt Sadie had picked us up at the Great Neck train station to drive us to Uncle’s estate. Conversation had been pleasant until we pulled into the driveway, and then she said to my mother, “Don’t make trouble today with your brother.”

  My mother laughed. “Its a non-aggression pact. If he doesn’t fire I won’t shoot back.”

  Aunt Sadie warned her again, repeating in different words that Ruth shouldn’t fight with Uncle Bernie. “Even if he does shoot first,” Sadie added.

  My mother lost her temper. I was startled. I had seen her angry with my father, but that was only once or twice, and never with anyone else. Her thin face and smooth white skin were quite different in color and shape from her dark brother’s oval head. Enraged, her high cheekbones lifted, pulling back her lips to expose her small bright teeth, and her green eyes narrowed. She might have been a big cat in a furious fight for her life. She bobbed her chin at Sadie and said, “Don’t tell me how to behave! I’m not a child! I’m not on this planet at Bernie’s sufferance! I’m not living off him like the rest of you! You’re terrified I’m going to blow up the Bernard Rabinowitz gravy train—well, don’t worry, it won’t be me who cuts his throat. It’ll be the working class. It’ll be people like those workers down South. Those poor people he brags he brought to their knees.”

  “Shut up already,” Sadie said, both scared of the cat’s angry motions and also conscious of my presence. She indicated me with a nod to my mother.

  “I’ll never forget him gloating about how his paid thugs drove a truck over one of the strikers!”

  “All right, I’m sorry I said anything!” Sadie opened her door and fled. My mother panted, angled at Sadie’s vacated seat as if her prey were still there. From my back-seat view, I saw a single green eye in profile. That eye seemed to find me, with the spooky myopic stare of a bird. “Come on, let’s go in,” she said to me. She added, without irony, “We’ll have fun.”

  What I got from all that was that my uncle was a powerful man, a dangerous man, an important man. If he had devised a test for me, then I wanted to pass it: to avenge my earlier defeats at tennis and football, to win my cousin’s love, to please my mother, to represent my alien father well, and also, finally, to hold the gaze of my terrible and handsome uncle.

  “A test of their character,” Uncle Bernie said to my mother. He continued quickly to us children, “I’ve hidden the Afikomen somewhere in this house.” His fingers continued to play a silent tune on the white cloth.

  “You haven’t left the table,” Cousin Daniel said. “You still have the Afikomen.”

  As Leader, at the beginning of the service, Uncle Bernie had broken off the Afikomen from a plate of matzos on display at the table. He wrapped it in a thick napkin with a shiny white satin border and put it in his lap. As he did, I overheard my cousin Daniel whisper to his older brother, “I’m gonna watch him this time.” I didn’t know what Daniel meant. At eight I didn’t remember the previous year’s Seder. He meant that he would keep an eye on Uncle, waiting to see where he slipped away to hide the Afikomen. Bernie hadn’t left the table during the Seder and therefore, Daniel had reasoned, he must still have it in his lap.

  Bernie’s mouth widened into his beneficent smile. “You mean this.” He lifted the napkin from his lap. “Very clever, Daniel.”

  “Yes!” Daniel got to his feet. “I win!”

  “Not so fast,” Bernie said and raised his hand like a traffic cop. There was something comic, not mean, about Uncle’s expression and tone. Most of the adults chuckled and commented on Bernie’s wisdom and Daniel’s greed. Uncle ignored his grown-up audience and continued to address us children. “This year we’ll do it differently. This is only the symbolic Afikomen. I hid the real one—”

  “Call it what it is,” my mother interrupted. “A door prize.”

  She was shushed by the grown-ups. The children, including me, ignored her. But my uncle didn’t. He flicked a glance in her direction and the emotion in his eyes amazed me. It was contempt and hatred. But only a flash. Immediately, his eyes were friendly again and he continued in his smooth deep voice, a resonant cello, “I hid the real one while you were playing outside. The child who finds that Afikomen will find it not only because of his intelligence and his perseverance but because of the strength of his character.”

  My mother made a rude sound with her lips. Daniel got out of his chair to leave the table. His father restrained him; Uncle Bernie hadn’t signaled us to begin our search.

  Bernie ignored my mother’s contemptuous noise. Instead, he smiled generously at Daniel. “You stand like greyhounds in the slips,” his cello vibrated. “Straining upon the start.” Bernie raised his right hand, decorated with tufts above the knuckles. “The game’s afoot,” he said and waved his arm like a racing flag.

  Daniel and the others bolted. I made my move as well, running behind Uncle’s chair and passing four or five other adult relatives, until I was caught up short. A hand had taken hold of my left arm. The sudden yank caused me to stumble. I fell against the chair of the person who had stopped me. It was my mother.

  “You stay here,” she said and she sounded angry. I assumed she was angry at me. “You’re not playing this stupid game.”

  “Mom,” I complained and tried to wriggle out of her grasp. My struggle for freedom proved how much I wanted to win that contest. I was not a bold child. In fact I suffered from acute shyness, especially in front of adults, and although these grown-ups were my people, some were totally unknown to me, thanks to my mother’s role as the family black sheep. I was shy and I was not defiant of my parents. Normally, if my mother grabbed me in public and forbade me from something in an angry tone I would obey her injunction silently, if unhappily. Indeed, my attempt to get away so surprised her that I easily freed my wrist from her loose grip. For a moment we exchanged a look of mutual shock at my action—and then I ran.

  Uncle’s formal dining room had a wall of glass, allowing a panoramic view of his unblemished lawn sloping to the water—the pool and tennis court were placed discreetly on the ground’s perimeter. I ran from there into a huge living room, itself the length of most people’s homes. It too had a view of Long Island Sound; only here it was provided by four windows with small panes of leaded glass, a kind of latticework that distorted the manicured lawn and tranquil water into a moody Impressionist painting. Two cousins were in there, one on his knees checking the wall cabinets, another on his belly peering under the sofas and love seats.

  My mother pursued me. She caught me as I reached the large central hall, painted a light yellow color, and dominated by a sweeping dark mahogany staircase. My cousins’ feet thudded and trampled on the second floor; occasionally they raced across the landing in their movement from one bedroom to another. They were having their chance at glory while I was under arrest. This time Ruth’s grip on my arm was tight and painful. She was incensed. Today, I suspect she was more humiliated that I had defied her in front of her siblings than infuriated by my contrariness. At the time I was baffled by her. “Don’t ever run from me like that again!” she shouted. Her words hurt, too. The violence of her tone hurt. “You’re not going to play this ridiculous game! You’re not a performing monkey!”

  “I wanna!” I protested and pulled at her grip. This confrontation changed my understanding of myself and her. I was shy, I was obedient, yet I was willing to fight her. And, although I was not to understand why for many years to come, I discovered that day that this inner self, the adult growing so far undisturbed in an unilluminated corner of my child’s soul, was a person my mother didn’t want to meet. She only wanted to know the sweet, bashful, compliant boy. (And why not? Such a child was a great compensation for the abrasive and selfish personalities who had been her lot in life. One of the first practical lessons of psychology is that neurotics aren
’t fools. Typically, they are clever people whom the world has thwarted.)

  “No, you don’t!” She shook my arm so hard my entire body trembled. She was shaking all the intransigent men in her life; she was trying to dislodge the stubborn materialism of her family and her nation. So she had to shake hard. She had to shake as hard as she could; and yet she could never shake hard enough.

  Daniel, of all people, came down the staircase like Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood, dancing, leaping, using the banister to propel himself three, four steps at a jump. His wide face, the characteristic Rabinowitz oval, was flushed. He’s found it, I thought, heartbroken.

  Daniel raced around us. “I figured it out!” he bragged as he disappeared down the narrow side hall that led toward the kitchen. But he was empty-handed, not carrying the heavy white napkin which would be wrapped around the Afikomen.

  He hadn’t found it! I was thrilled.

  “Look at me!” My mother wanted to shout; shame suppressed her demand into a maddened whisper. My head had turned to follow Daniel. Why the kitchen? What did he think: it was still in the matzo box?

  I was convinced of this suddenly. My uncle was a businessman and he had probably thought of matzo’s production: returned the Afikomen to its box, stashed the box in a kitchen cabinet, in the working section of the house, tended by the black cook and maid. The lesson would be clear: a reminder of work and service. Obviously, at eight, I couldn’t have articulated this reasoning, but that, more or less, was the logic I theorized. Had Daniel? Was that what he meant when he cried “I figured it out” and ran toward the kitchen? Or was he headed to some other room? There were many others in that direction: the family den; the back stairs to the finished basement; the pantry; an office for my uncle. The house was huge, more than twenty rooms; I hadn’t seen most of them.

  First, I had to get free. I sagged against my mother’s hold on my wrists, a premature sit-in protester, becoming a dead weight.

  “Stand up!” she ordered, trying to hoist me to my feet. But she wasn’t especially strong—this was more than two decades before women of her age pumped iron. I felt a malicious pleasure at her impotence. She frowned and complained, “Stop it! Stand up!”

  My legs bumped her shins. “Ow,” she said and kicked the heels of my Buster Browns, first one foot, then the other. Not hard. Now we were both behaving like frustrated eight-year-olds.

  I drooped, ass hanging low, arms stretched to the limit. I thought they might pop out of my shoulder sockets, but I didn’t care. “I know where it is!” I shouted at Ruth. “Let me go! I can win! Let me go!”

  She quit trying to lift me. Instead she pulled me toward her face, a face distorted by rage and frustration. “Stop it right now or we’ll leave this minute! I swear to God I’ll drag you by the neck all the way to New York.”

  I pictured the humiliation of such an exit. As yet there were no sixties images of noble passive resistance to inspire me. To be dragged out by my angry mother in front of all my cousins, the pretty aloof girls in their dresses, the self-confident and athletically skilled boys with their rougish shirttails hanging out, seemed to me to preclude any chance that they might one day respect and like me.

  When Ruth began to carry out her threat, twisting toward the door and yanking me at it, I straightened. “Okay,” I said, head down to avoid her eyes. I was angry and I was ashamed of my anger. She was my mother: I loved her; she was the god of my universe; to hate her that much was painful and confusing.

  I began to cry: choked sobs of thwarted anger and disappointed love. A beautiful cousin—Uncle Harry and Aunt Ceil’s daughter, eleven-year-old Julie—stopped in her progress down the mahogany staircase. Her long straight black hair draped her narrow face, the ends curling inward, nearly touching under her chin. I was ashamed and quickly looked away, but not before a glimpse of her told me she was sympathetic. The quizzical tilt of her head—perhaps it was merely her beauty—convinced me she understood I was the victim of an injustice.

  “What’s wrong?” she called down to my mother. Julie had a sweet and yet confident voice. Later, it served her well in business. When she challenged you, there was no challenge in her tone.

  “Nothing,” my mother said impatiently. She pulled me to her, covering my face and muffling my tears. “Calm down!” she whispered. But it was an order.

  Of course, it was my attempt to quell the anger that brought on hysterical tears. But I accepted her injunction and fought them.

  “He can search with me,” Julie said. She finished her descent and walked over. Her alert brown eyes scanned us with curiosity and maybe (perhaps this is a later imposed memory) a hint of condescension.

  In any event, at her offer I cried louder. Ruth pressed me tight into the smooth fabric of her skirt. “This is a family discussion. Could we have some privacy, please?” Ruth’s tone was unpleasant.

  Julie was brave. She answered in her unchallenging and bold voice: “Well, if you want privacy you’re in the wrong place. This is the foyer,” she added and let go of a short volley of laughter.

  “I know this is the foyer,” my mother said, and added sourly, “We’ll get out of everybody’s way.” Being at her brother’s mansion drained Ruth of her sense of humor. She walked me—still hiding in the slippery fabric of her dress—toward the narrow hall where Daniel had disappeared. We moved awkwardly, like a mother-and-son team in a three-legged race. I was coughing at this point, coughing from the tears I had swallowed.

  “Calm down,” she said again, this time tenderly. She stopped and rubbed my back.

  “I’m trying,” I said in a pathetic way, coughing and choking. At least we were alone in the narrow hall. It was dark. The only light came from two doors leading to adjoining rooms.

  “Try a little harder,” she said, but again tenderly. She bent over and kissed my wet cheek.

  It occurred to me Daniel might come by any minute. The thought of him witnessing my babyish behavior stopped my tears.

  “I want you to understand,” my mother said. To be on my level, she knelt on one knee. Her tone was anguished. She had made me the victim of her dissatisfaction with the world; I could hear, although not comprehend, her regret. “Your uncle has made a lot of money and he thinks that getting money is good. That it shows how smart and great a person is. Well, most geniuses, most of history’s great men, never made any money at all. And they certainly didn’t care about making money. Looking for the Afikomen is just supposed to be a fun game—it’s not supposed to be a test. When my father—when Papa used to lead the Seder—” she stopped. I couldn’t see her face that clearly. Besides, I was distracted, furiously wiping away my tears, to remove the evidence should Daniel happen by. Meanwhile, Ruth had reminded herself of a neglected duty. “Come,” she said and took my hand. “We’re going to visit Papa Sam.”

  I was leery of seeing Grandfather. I remembered from my visit to Great Neck in December that he was confined to a wheelchair. There wasn’t much substance left to his body, a body that was once, especially for an immigrant from Europe, tall and muscular. Indeed, his athletic figure had been the cause of his initial success in life. At seventeen, Papa Sam was chosen for the Tsar’s personal guard. The men selected for that honor were picked because they would look strong and handsome on state occasions. Papa Sam was the only Jew to wear the bright red uniform with gold buttons and a fur collar. His fellow guardsmen regularly abused him for being a Jew. They would form a circle, put him in the middle, and take turns kicking his legs with their hard-tipped boots while they called him kike. He couldn’t fight back. To resist meant a court martial, and a sentence of at least twenty years’ hard labor, if not death. That was the story he liked to tell about his life. Papa Sam would bring out a photograph of himself in the honor guard uniform, standing at attention in front of a palace, and then show us his scarred shins.

  One day Papa Sam informed his colonel that his mother was ill; he asked permission to visit her in the small town of his birth. In fact, the news he had gotten was
of her death. He was granted a leave. He walked all the way to Paris and eventually made his way to London, where he met my grandmother. The emigrated through Ellis Island to the United States seven years before my mother was born.

  Unfortunately, by the time I met Papa Sam, heart disease had shrunk and warped his tall frame. In December, his big head looked precarious atop a skinny torso that scarcely filled his wheelchair. His bony shoulders were hunched forward; they carved a bowl in his chest. His skin was loose and bloodless; his eyes dull and hopeless; the mouth slack and stupid. He probably smelled as well, but I don’t remember that. In any event, the prospect of going to see Papa Sam didn’t thrill me or compensate me for missing out on the Afikomen hunt.

  However, this time I was obedient. Ruth led me toward the kitchen. I could see into it. The black women were cleaning and readying the real dessert. The cabinets were closed and there was no sign of Daniel. I heard the hilarity of the grown-up relatives through the service door to the dining room. They were raucous. Some sang, “Chad Gad Ya! Chad Gad Ya!” Others teased the singers about their lack of musicality. My young cousins, of course, raced above, behind, and below—full of their own energy and happiness. Only my mother and I were glum non-participants. Just before we reached the kitchen, Ruth turned into another hallway that was new to me. It led to a short addition to the mansion, built to accommodate Papa Sam and his nurse after my grandmother died. It consisted of two small bedrooms and a bathroom, a kind of motel for the sick old man. During the December visit I had seen him in the living room and I had assumed he lived elsewhere, probably in a hospital, since his nurse looked and behaved like a nurse, with a white uniform and a crabby manner.