T
hen, much later it seemed, I saw things for a while and then no longer saw them. It was quiet. I heard voices but could not distinguish words. My mouth was dry. When I called for water, a wet piece of cotton was brushed across my cracked lips. I was angry and came into consciousness kicking. That they would tie me to a table and force me to breathe what I couldn’t breathe! I was held down, Donald was holding my hand, he was saying, “Take it easy, take it easy!” I went to sleep and awoke, quite clear in the head now. I was in some sort of room with curtains. Others were outside the curtains. They had their own concerns. Children were crying. The curtain was pulled back and a nurse showed me how I could have water. She took a tongue depressor with cotton wrapped around one end and dipped it into a glass of water and then let me suck the water from the cotton. It was not enough, but she would only give me it that way.
I felt very bad, as if things were sticking in me so that I could feel the insides of me, what my insides felt like. I was told to lie still, which I was glad to do because of this wet sticking feeling in my stomach. Then my mother stayed with me awhile. She was angry at the nurse about something. She told me I had my feelings under the covers like that because I had drains in me, the operation was over, I didn’t have to worry that that would ever happen again, but meanwhile where they had made the incision there were rubber drain tubes to see to it that all the poison left my body. The idea was to keep those drains in me for a while and not to close things up to make sure all the poison
came out. That was all. I didn’t want to know about it. I didn’t want to see.
Whenever the doctors changed the dressing I kept my eyes closed because I didn’t want to see. I was not well. I was not happy. I was very tired and injured, I felt I had been badly treated, I had been cut, I had stitches in me and drains, and at night when no one was there and I woke, I heard another child crying and I couldn’t help it, I wept too.
Then my grandma came to visit me. She walked through the curtain. So she hadn’t died after all. I was glad the curtains were pulled around my bed because none of the others could see her, she embarrassed me speaking in Yiddish and looking very old and shabby in her black dress, and with her grey hair pinned up in her braids but scraggly around the edges, she was not as neat as she usually was and she smelled of her sour grass. But I was thirsty and explained to her how to do the water, and she did this properly. Then she felt my head with her dry ancient hand and she thought I was too hot, she found a washcloth at the foot of my bed and went outside the curtains to the sink along the wall and rinsed the cloth in cold water and came back and put the folded cloth over my forehead. “You are a dear precious boy,” she said to me and I understood this clearly even though it was in Yiddish. She took a penny from her old change purse of cracked leather. In her forefinger and thumb she held this penny and with her other hand opened my hand and pressed the penny into my palm, just the way she always did. “I bless you, my beloved child, I pray for good health for you. You are a good boy and I love you,” she said. “God will protect you.”
W
hen my mother and father arrived, I told them Grandma had come to see me. They exchanged looks. My mother excused herself and left the room holding a handkerchief to her eyes. My father sat down at the side of the bed.
“I brought you some books,” he said. “It’s something new. They have these pocket-sized books now, wonderful books for twenty-five cents. I know you like Frank Buck, don’t you?”
I nodded. He was very serious. Dark circles were under his eyes.
“Here is his own book about going after big game,” my father said.
“Bring ’Em Back Alive
. It’s not just a comic book. It’s his autobiography. And here is a story about a young deer called
Bambi
, by Felix Salten,” he said. “Just to get the animal’s point of view.”
That didn’t interest me as much, but I didn’t say that to my poor father. I realized how worried he was, how I had worried them all with my burst appendix.
“And here is a famous book, a classic that you might not find interesting just now but you may in the future. It’s a wonderful book,
Wuthering Heights
, by an English writer, Emily Brontë.”
“Thank you,” I said, although I was too tired to do more than look at the covers.
“I’ll put them here on the table next to you. You see them? You can just reach over when you want to look at them.”
Much later I found out what happened at the end of the hospital corridor outside my room. After visiting me, my parents met with Dr. London, who had performed the surgery. He told them I had a fifty-fifty chance of pulling through. Then he left to go about his rounds and at that point my mother attempted to throw herself out of the hospital window. The odds the doctor had quoted did not seem to her favorable. My father held her, wrestled with her at the open window. He held her until she went limp in her despair and broke down crying.
If they had only asked me, I could have told them I wasn’t going to die. I knew I would not because of my theory. My theory held that if I thought of something before it happened, it wouldn’t happen. I had experienced a ruptured appendix before I had thought about it and that was unfortunate, but I had thought about dying from it before it had had the chance to kill me, so now it couldn’t. It was very simple.
I was no longer frightened. I may not have liked the drains in me, the profoundly uncomfortable foreignness of tubes lolling
about in my guts, but I did not fear for my life. The time of terror for me was before I was put under as I wrestled the deadly sweet ether that filled my throat and my lungs with its terrible chemical chill. But it is apparent to me now that my parents interpreted the visit from my dead grandma as a sign of my own impending death. That particular day I was very close to death. Nobody could have persuaded me that it was not a palpable visit Grandma had made, a real event, and that was the point. My dear hollow-eyed family, these great framers of my existence and gods of my thought, had a way of coming into my room so hesitantly, with grim and fearful glances from the door, and lips pressed tight in pale faces as if awestruck by what they saw; I had to turn my head and smile at them before they would come in, before they were satisfied that I was still alive. They would suppose, in the delirium that produced my occult meeting with my Grandma, my own terrible passion, with my eyes turned into the past as if rolled up in my head, and I seeing what was dead and gone in the disconnection from my own forwardness through time, as if, becalmed and drifting to stillness, to inanimation, the mind sees death as life.
These horrors of meaning were for my family to understand. I was only ill with peritonitis. My conviction was not shaken even when I was moved into another room, a bigger room, with no curtains around my bed, but with a kind of railing, like a crib’s. I was very insulted. It was a children’s ward, and there were many such crib beds, each with a child either younger than I or older, and there were many of us now regardless of age in these humiliating beds and all of the others were looking at me. Some of the little ones stood up to look at me. I still had to lie down. I could see out a big window to a windowless building across the street. It was the north side of Madison Square Garden, which pleased me. At night I imagined I could hear a sports crowd cheering at a basketball game.
When Donald came to visit he was angry because nobody had told him that I had been moved to this special ward.
“I went to your old room and the bed was empty and the mattress was rolled up,” he said. “Nobody I spoke to knew
anything. I ran all over the place trying to find out what had happened.”
He sat down beside my bed and rubbed hs eyes with the back of his hand. “Can you imagine a hospital full of doctors and nurses and not one of them knew where you were?” He began to laugh with tears in his eyes. “Finally, I saw one of your nurses, and she told me you were here.” He shook his head. “Jesus, what if I had called Mom when I couldn’t find you!”
I introduced Donald to the other children nearby. There were four or five of them. I wanted them to know I had an older brother. He waved and some of them said hello but most just stared. They were all dying. I knew that, it was clear to me. One girl, Miriam, who was several years older than I, had had her leg sawn off. She was on the bed next to mine. A couple of kids were in wheelchairs during the day and had to be helped into their beds at night. One of them was very yellow and skinny. They were all dying. I knew that because I had heard the doctors and nurses talking. Also the toys here were very elaborate, the toys and games these children had were the most glorious I had ever seen, but they didn’t seem to care; each day their parents or grandparents came and brought more toys and games but they were not thankful. Some of the children had been here for months. They did not enjoy visits, they only enjoyed talking to one another, and teasing one another. I was not one of them, I could see that. Though I had been put in among them, I didn’t think that I was dying. They didn’t think I was either, because none of them wanted to be my friend. Except Miriam, the big girl in the bed next to mine. She liked me. “Your brother’s very handsome,” she told me after Donald had left at the end of the visiting hour.
W
hat pulled me through was a new drug, sulfanilamide. My impression then was that it was a kind of yellow powder that had
been sprinkled all around inside me before I had been sewn up. I think now it was administered after the operation as well. In a few weeks I was released from the hospital and brought home wrapped in blankets. It was winter. In the early spring I was allowed to get out of bed for a while each day, and after that I was taken to the country for my convalescence, the country being Pelham Manor, on Montcalm Terrace, the home of Aunt Frances and Uncle Ephraim, hosts of the yearly Passover dinner.
Their three children were grown and away at college, two boys at Harvard and the youngest, a girl, Lila, at Smith. Here, in the stillness of this elegant home, with its low ceilings, carpeted stairs, casement windows and wine and velvet smells, I stayed for a week and took my ease. There was a backyard with a large rock and a profusion of forsythia in bloom. Aunt Frances had undoubtedly saved my life by finding for my parents a doctor who understood what had happened to me. She really liked me and I liked her, she was gracious and kind, a very pretty woman with prematurely white hair and a quiet aristocratic bearing, like a good queen in a fairy tale who still bears some of the loveliness of the princess. She did not raise her voice, which endeared her to me. I was given the bedroom of her daughter, Lila, a single room, with Lila’s awards and honors all over the walls. She had raised dogs in her early youth, and various ribbons, many of them blue, testified to her skill. Her champion dog, Vicky, a Kerry blue terrier, was still in residence. I was invited to browse through her books, a largely disappointing collection of science texts and dog-training manuals and, from her childhood, Nancy Drew mysteries. But she did have all the Oz books, by L. Frank Baum, and I read these and found them to my taste.
I was still slightly afraid of my uncle Ephraim. He was the kind of intimidating adult who thinks of children as naturally imperfect beings that have to be constantly instructed against their own worst natures. He had a deep voice and he asked questions that awaited answers. An oil painting of himself stood over the mantel in the large living room. I studied that painting in the day, when he wasn’t home. It portrayed him as thinner and
handsomer than he was, it showed him without his glasses. He was a portly man, with frameless eyeglasses and large teeth, a big nose and a double chin, and he wore dark suits and went off to take the New Haven line to his lawyer’s office with the somber mien of a cabinet minister proceeding to affairs of state. At dinner once I put a green pea on my knife and received a ten-minute lecture on why this was not right. I was asked if I understood the points he had made and was then asked to repeat them. I thought he liked me but that I had a long way to go before he could respect me or admire me. He looked on our family, all of us, I thought, as woefully flawed and probably tempered his judgment with the reflection that not many people could be expected to achieve life’s heights as he had. He was a right-wing Republican and liked to argue with my father in a Socratically baiting manner that was condescending.
Yet, of course, he was kind. He had assumed the role of overseer of the entire family’s legal welfare, even though we were connected to him by marriage only. He was everyone’s lawyer, without fee, charging neither my uncle Phil the cabdriver, when Phil needed to be incorporated for his protection as a medallion owner, nor presumably my father, who probably had needed some legal work in starting up his record business. Uncle Ephraim had more money than anyone else in the family and so probably contributed greatly to the support of my grandma and grandpa. I couldn’t have known that a man as proper and august as this had his own deferences: he had not been allowed to marry Aunt Frances until he had given up his job running a magazine subscription business and gone to law school and gotten his degree. That ruling had come from my grandma and put him in her debt for the rest of her life. His three or four years studying law at night while he supported himself in the day taught him a discipline for which he was grateful; the frustration of going unmarried until he proved himself able to support the woman he loved brought him out of the Jewish lower-middle class into a life of wealth and self-determination. Money, propriety and responsibility were his and he wore them all like a judge’s robes.
I knew my father detested Ephraim’s politics, and his conservative values and pomposity. I assumed my uncle Ephraim disapproved of my father’s leftist politics, his impulsiveness, his impracticality, his romanticism. They were like the Aesop tale, the ant and the grasshopper, and I could not for long decide for either existence because I would find it by itself insufficient, though I was all for my father. I always wanted him to win. I did not want that carefree singing grasshopper to come begging when snow covered the ground and he had nothing to eat. This feeling governed me in the week or so I stayed at Pelham. It was like Heaven for a good child, muffled and beautiful. I sat wrapped in a blanket, the sun coming through the parlor windows behind the kitchen; outside was a composition of grass and flowers and trees. Everything was in its place, even the Japanese beetles, which dutifully flew into the lamplike trap to quietly crawl over one another and die. Aunt Frances made her will known quietly, and courteously; even her live-in housekeeper, Clara, the tall black woman with a stony face and a sweet, low mellifluous voice, had a stately grace. Everyone in this house seemed to move in a kind of self-assured regal calm. I contrasted this with the chaos of my home, the intensity of our lives, the extremity of our emotions. In the mornings I drove with Aunt Frances and Uncle Ephraim in their enormous black Buick Roadmaster to the Pelham Manor railroad station. There at exactly the same time each morning the train came along its gravel bed—not a subway but a real train pulled by a locomotive—and chuffed to a stop, and Uncle Ephraim climbed aboard and waved to us. There seemed to be no errors in this life, it moved with a picture-book perfection, at least as it was presented to me in my convalescence.