An Uncommon Education (41 page)

She looked like she had nothing left to say. I sat back and folded my hands across my eyes.

“It frightened me,” she said quietly. “It was not only because you were who you were. It was because of my son. I never made him laugh. He made so many drawings of you. And birds. None of his parents! None even of his home.” I fought the urge to reach out to her, to be comforting. But she was still stern, still forbidding, despite her weakened manner. I still felt she saw me as emblematic of what she didn’t trust: a questionably Jewish, female intellectual who had stolen her son’s affections. I was clearly not someone she would have chosen in any way. But, at that point I’m not sure that I was striving to be chosen any longer.

“Why did you write to her?” I asked.

She looked momentarily confused. “And not to you?”

“Yes.”

“You were a child. Even with your old-woman ways. I’m sure your mother felt the same way. It was probably right that we went away.”

“Did you never wonder what I’d think? That I wouldn’t forget?”

“No,” she said. “I never thought you would forget.”

“So you thought it was better that I wondered.” I clenched my hands beneath my legs, trying to grip the couch, hunching my shoulders. She was upset, too, her hands white at the edges of her chair.

“I have had to bury both a husband and a son,” she said. “A father and a mother. You’re not the only one who has suffering.”

“He’s not dead!” I nearly shouted.

“He is as good as dead,” she said, slowly and clearly. The old Chava came out to protect her son as viciously as she once had. I suspect it was better, in her mind, to think of him as gone than to think of him as beyond salvation.

I stood up. “I’m going to see him,” I told her. She didn’t react. I gathered my things and made for the door.

“Is it true?” she asked me. She was still sitting in her chair. “That you are going to be a doctor?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“Vat kind of doctor vill you be?” Her accent returned with her emotions. “A cardiologist? Someone who makes the new hearts?”

“You’ve spoken with my mother?”

“A little.”

I sighed. “I’m not so sure anymore,” I admitted. My hand was growing warm on the doorknob. “It will be a while before the technologies are good, if they ever are.”

She sat back in a satisfied way, nodding to herself, dismissing me. “Yes. The technologies. They aren’t so good, are they? Not good enough to make a heart, at least. Maybe that’s how it should be. Why should men be able to make a heart? This work is not what we are meant to be doing.” She nodded again, confirming something. I said goodbye and showed myself out.

I
learned from my mother that although Teddy was living at Shattuck permanently, he was frequently transferred to McLean Hospital for evaluation by a neurologist who had taken him on as a sort of pet project. Whereas Shattuck is in Jamaica Plain and has the institutionalized look of most places that care for the chronically ill and poor, McLean is in Belmont, a quiet, well-kept suburb west of Boston. It’s made up of a few dozen grand buildings, so that it has the feel of a wealthy community. It was established in 1811, and its grounds were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect who also designed Wellesley. But whereas Wellesley’s gothic buildings and orderly greens are stately, McLean’s are rambling, taking their time.

When I arrived on the grounds, I was directed to Proctor House, one of the largest and most beautiful buildings on the premises. I was greeted at the front door by a pleasant nurse who looked at my visitor’s pass approvingly, as though it were a merit badge.

“Teddy!” she exclaimed when I told her who I was there to see. She winked at me. “What a lovely boy. Let’s see”—she checked her watch—“two o’clock. He should be in the great room. He does stick to his schedule, that one.”

She led me to a set of double doors. They opened just as we approached them and a tall doctor in a white coat stepped out, closing the doors behind him.

“So you’re . . . Ms. Feinstein?” he said, holding out his hand after taking the visitors’ sheet from the nurse and checking it.

His name tag read Dr. Wilkinson. “Yes,” I said.

“I’m Mr. Rosenthal’s doctor,” he said, grinning broadly. “You’re the first friend to visit him here! He will be delighted. Tell me”—he indicated a pair of armchairs by the window, gesturing for me to take one—“how long have you known Teddy?”

I told him we had grown up together. That we had been neighbors.

“Oh no,” he said, as he took the other seat. “You must be Naomi.”

I nodded.

“He remembers very little, my dear,” he told me, leaning forward confidentially. “He came into my care nearly catatonic. We suspect there had been several strokes before his mother realized he needed medical care. He has a genetic blood-clotting disorder; it can manifest itself in this way.” He squinted at me, wondering how freely he could speak. “I know, it’s hard to hear,” he said, reading my face and trying to comfort me. I shook my head. It hadn’t been the drugs or alcohol, after all; it was just something endemic to the blood he had inherited. A sudden relief flooded through me. Maybe it hadn’t mattered at all, what I remembered for so long.

“I know he was adopted,” I said.

He nodded, looking relieved. “He has settled in to Shattuck well. I bring him here because I believe that a change of pace is excellent for the synapses. Also, it’s closer to my office.” He smiled sheepishly at his own admission.

“I must warn you, young lady,” he added, his voice suddenly low, “he will probably not remember you.”

“I know,” I said, stiffening.

“But I should mention it.” He looked over at the reception desk, where the nurse was busying herself with papers. She got the hint and gathered a pile of them before leaving through a door at the back of the room. “He came with the usual clothes and suitcases. But also with drawings. Many drawings. I suspect he was particularly prolific in the months leading up to the strokes. I suspect the increased pressure on the brain led to somewhat of a manic state of creativity. The drawings are beautiful, really. He was quite the junior ornithologist; had a real predilection for yellow birds. Still does, actually! And there are many of you, as well, my dear. His mother explained who you were. You were much younger. His visual memory of you stopped when you were both”—he squinted at me—“I suspect, around twelve or thirteen. We haven’t yet made sense of that particular curiosity.”

“April 26, 1988,” I said. “It was the day they moved away,” I explained.

“Right. Right!” He took out a pen from his breast pocket and made a note. “See, you’re already helpful! So, are you sure you are prepared to see him, Ms. Feinstein?”

I nodded.

“I am sorry to have to explain still one more thing,” he went on, his body not yet releasing me to the double doors, “but you must know that he should not be upset.”

I got his meaning. “Of course,” I said. “No histrionics. Promise.” I crossed my heart.

He grinned, taken by surprise. “Well, good, then.” He stood up and went to the doors, opening them like a man introducing an act.

The ceiling inside was nearly thirty feet high, and the length of the room stretched impressively from one end of the long building to the next. In some ways it reminded me of Camp Milnah, with its polished wood floors and board games scattered on various tables beside oversized windows. There was a Ping-Pong table, too, and a television hummed away in one corner. There were fewer than ten residents there, and the majority of them were fixed on an episode of
Wheel of Fortune
. A tall young man, well over six feet, sat like a planted reed at one of the tables near the window. I couldn’t see his face from where I stood.

The doctor nodded. “That’s him,” he said. He looked down at his watch. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

No one paid any attention as I walked across the room, though I felt my footsteps were so loud they were echoing off the walls. Teddy was toying with a checkers set, placing the reds on the white squares and the blacks on the black squares. When he looked up I sucked all my breath in at once, like a reverse collapse.

I quickly took the seat across from him. He had changed very little, his illness keeping him in a permanent expression of immaturity. His skin was pale and smooth and he needed to shave the little bit of hair that sprouted over his upper lip. His lips were fuller and better-shaped than they had been when he was a boy. His eyes had not changed. Looking at me, they were the foggy, dense color they used to be whenever I had upset him. His hair had been cut quite short, and his fingers were incredibly long and thin. He looked like a junior Abraham Lincoln with a buzz cut, pensive and freakishly tall and thin, his sensual features almost grotesquely pronounced.

“Hello,” he said. He looked at me with concern. I reached across the table for his hand, and he took mine. I tried to wipe away the tears with the back of my other wrist.

“Are you hurt?” he asked me, anxious.

I shook my head no.

He relaxed a little at this. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Naomi.”

“That’s a pretty name. I’m Theodore. Or Teddy. Some people call me Teddy.”

I dropped my head into my arms, trying to catch my breath.

After a while he leaned forward. “Are you sure you’re okay? You’re new here, aren’t you?” he whispered conspiratorially. “Sometimes some of us don’t always know if we’re okay.”

I turned my head onto my arm and laughed. I laughed until he did, too.

“We have a buddy program here,” he said. “I could be your buddy,” he added tentatively.

“Okay,” I said, wiping my eyes. “That sounds good.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a crumpled piece of paper, smoothing it out on the table in front of us. “I was trying to get this one all morning,” he said. “But it kept moving.” He shook his head. “It’s not very good,” he announced, staring down at it.

I reached out and turned it toward me. It was a sparrow, the details so small and fine that even the jagged lines of the individual feathers stood out. “It’s lovely,” I said. “Just like the bird.”

“I need some colored pencils. Or a camera. A camera would be great.” He sighed. “There are a lot of bird pictures in my room. I don’t know if I drew them all. I think if I did I would’ve written my name on them and then I’d know. I live at Shattuck, mostly. Dr. W lets me visit here. How about you?”

“I’m between places right now,” I said. “I’m not a resident here, though. I’ve just come to visit you.”

His smile was crooked and broad. “Wow,” he said. “Neat.” Then, suddenly, he raised his finger and pointed at me, “Wait, do I know you?”

I nodded my head just slightly, trying to act casual. I busied myself with wiping my eyes again. “We used to be friends,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember.” He looked crestfallen.

“That’s all right,” I said quickly, taking his hand again. “We’re still friends.”

“Cool. You seem nice. And you’re really pretty.” His grin bordered on lecherous. “Most of the people here are not my friends. That lady in the pink thinks she’s my mother. I hate that. And that fat guy says he’s Richard the Third. There aren’t three Richards!” He laughed out loud, enjoying the joke. “Dr. W is cool. Maybe he could help you.”

I looked a little confused.

“You were crying,” he pointed out. “He helps people who cry.”

I stayed with him until Dr. Wilkinson ushered me out. I came every day for the next month of his stay, then began regular weekly visits at Shattuck. Teddy was limited in his conversations, sticking mostly to birds and drawings and Dr. W, and occasionally, much to our mutual amusement, imitations of other residents. He never asked where his mother or father or anyone else was. He was not able to recall anything beyond a few days before or after the present, and his life held a similarly simple pattern: games, drawings, visits from me or his doctor. Some days he had to ask my name several times, but he was always profusely apologetic. Curiously, his degeneration had done little to affect his charm, and I coasted on his warmth, my concerns shelved when I was with him. Before long our junior year had ended and it was summertime. A strange ease began to work its way into my life, and I began to stretch beneath it, realizing that the space it created made new room to breathe.

Thirty

J
un was back home and enrolled at Tokyo University by the time Ruth, Julie, Calbe, and the rest of the class of 1995 graduated that June. Their graduation day was breezy and bucolic—it couldn’t have been more pleasant if it had been ordered by some all-seeing, even-tempered administrator. Ruth and Julie had stayed close until they left, though I rarely saw them speak, just saw that the tension they held between them had been kept taut. It’s sometimes hard to believe that it was Ruth’s stunt on the lake that led me to Shakes and all that came after. I would always be in some debt to her, though I haven’t seen her since her graduation day.

That summer I put in a request for a single room in Pomeroy, a dorm off the main quad, one of four set on a hill a good distance off from the lake. The room I was eventually assigned was on the back of Pom, facing the rear entrance to the college, so that I could hear traffic on the outside street rushing by, particularly at night and in the rain. It was a private, hopeful sound.

My visits to Teddy continued between a lighter class load and more frequent visits to my parents. Sometimes my father even joined me at Shattuck, though it made him uncomfortable to be there. “So much suffering,” he would mutter. “Like Mom?” I asked him once. He nodded, his eyes brimming. I took his hand, wondering if either one of us would ever have the courage to look suffering in the face and not think we might break from it. I told him how I had begun to study neurology and psychology, too, that I wasn’t as interested in cardiology as I had once been. He nodded again, still collecting himself. “I know, I know,” he said, as if conceding something he’d known for a while. “It’s good work you’ll do. Too much pain for me, but you are different. I used to wonder if anything made you afraid. You were always charging ahead! A funny girl you were,
ketzi
.”