Trusting Calvin

by Sharon Peters

  Max had expected and had tried to gird himself for the fact that some people would dismiss him—some would even pity him because they knew he couldn’t see. What he hadn’t expected was the level of animosity he was encountering because of his blindness. For his Jewishness, yes, he had dealt with that since childhood, but not for his blindness.

  He began to regret his decision to come to America. At least in Germany he’d had a career he enjoyed, one that brought satisfaction and respect, and whatever struggles he’d had with being blind were internal, not the result of nastiness from others.

  He sank into a crater of gloom—dangerous, he knew, because experience had taught him that once the negative feelings gained entry, the memories and the hostility he felt about the war surged forth with special ferocity. It happened that day; it happened many times in subsequent years.

  The nightmares, too, had journeyed across the Atlantic with him like a dark, determined shadow, and they worked him over with the same intensity they had in Germany. He lived something close to a double life: working husband during the day, and at night, when he slept, a dead-legged captive, unable to escape the horrors of the camps. It seemed especially unjust that although blackness was all he saw during the day, when he dreamed, everything appeared in full, awful color: crimson blood gushing from a skull blasted open by a single rifle shot; the blazing blue eyes of the guards who had beaten him until he could no longer see their eyes; the sharp, blood-stained muzzle of a big German shepherd diving deeper into the mangled neck of a screaming man.

  When he was able to thrash himself awake—heart slamming against this ribs like a frantic animal—it was a very long time before he could breathe normally again. After especially bad, battering nights, when Barbara couldn’t soothe him, he would arrive at work, tattered and drained. Forget it, he lectured himself as he moved film from tray to tray. Move on. His tactic for achieving this was to cram the past into a vault he never accessed, at least during the day, when he could force his mind to follow the precise routines necessary to earn his pay. In the mean hours of the moon, though, when he was loose and vulnerable, the ugliness oozed out, leaving him chafed and angry. He despised his inability after all this time to be stronger than the memories and images, the anger and the emptiness.

  “It was not enough that they almost killed me, that they left me blind,” he said to Barbara one morning. “Their genius is that they make those of us who lived through it nearly die again every day.”

  No one at work knew anything about his background, nor did most of his friends. His watch and shirtsleeve usually covered the KL tattoo riding just above his left wrist. He did not purposefully hide his past, but he had no interest in sharing it, never inviting questions or dropping hints. Admitting to that kind of pain only makes others uncomfortable, he believed, and acknowledging misery begets greater misery. That was how his parents had lived, never wallowing in unpleasantness or distress. Sig and Jack, who had suffered many of the same miseries, took much the same approach, rarely speaking of the war years, trying, Max assumed, to tamp out the anguish and pain just as he was.

  Others, too, had nourished his disinclination to speak of the past. When Max had started at the clinic, his job coach, Feldman, always quick with advice, had offered some on this score as well. “No one is interested in your experiences, and no one cares how and where you were blinded,” he said. “If you are asked, say as little as you possibly can.”

  Max’s standard answer, when someone asked how he had lost his sight, was: “During the war.”

  The couple carved out their place as hardworking immigrants with boundless drive to learn and achieve, and, as their life became less threadbare, allowed themselves some diversions. They went to movie matinees; they joined Sig and Marianne on a road trip to New York to visit Jack and Violett, strolling Fifth Avenue and Times Square and eating in old Jewish delis; they spent every Sunday afternoon with a small circle of friends. They celebrated Hanukkah and Yom Kippur, usually with Sig and his wife, and they also celebrated Christmas—in the way Barbara had in her youth. She decorated the apartment, made holiday cookies and the special Christmas bread known as stollen, and knitted gifts for everyone she knew.

  Four years after they arrived in Cleveland, they discovered, to their amazement, that a baby was on the way. Barbara had been told in Germany that she was unlikely to ever be able to bear a child, and they could hardly believe their good fortune. Their little apartment wouldn’t do, so they found a third-floor, two-bedroom apartment in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, intending to raise the child Jewish and engage him or her in religious study. Barbara set about preparing a bedroom for the infant, making curtains and buying furniture. They didn’t know if they would have a son or daughter, and they didn’t care.

  The crib had been set up and the diapers stacked on a changing table when, after supper on February 24, 1955, Barbara cleared the table, washed the dishes, and told Max it was time to go to the hospital. Sig arrived to drive them and stayed in the waiting room with Max until 3:30 the next morning, when a door opened at the end of the corridor.

  “Mazel tov! You have a son!” announced Dr. Abrams, placing the six-pound, eight-ounce infant into Max’s arms.

  Sig grabbed his Kodak and snapped pictures.

  Max, having learned the custom of such things, stopped at the drugstore on his way to work to buy It’s a Boy cigars for the men and candies for the women.

  Barbara left the assembly line to raise the baby they named Stephen. Although this put a significant crimp in their finances, it was important, they agreed, for a child to be raised by his mother, in the early years at least. Cutting back on movies and weekend lunches out and mending clothes instead of buying new ones were not unacceptable sacrifices.

  They did indulge in one modest luxury. Barbara took driving lessons, passed the test, and they bought their first car, a used blue Chevrolet, so she would no longer have to balance grocery bags against her chest while pushing Steve’s stroller home from the market.

  Max continued his relentless pursuit of English language mastery; he and Barbara studied for and passed the citizenship test to become naturalized citizens of this new country; and they reveled in being parents, rarely going anywhere or doing anything if toddler Steve couldn’t join them.

  A second robust son, Richard, arrived four years later. To accommodate the larger family and growing boys, during the following years they moved to slightly bigger, slightly better apartments, Barbara continuing to be a stay-at-home mother, baking, reading to her sons, and taking them to museums. When Steve was in third grade and Rich was nearly four, they enrolled their youngest in a preschool program so that Barbara could return to GE to ensure there would be enough money for college.

  Barbara left for work each morning at seven, and Max got the boys fed and out the door in time for school and preschool, then dashed off to his own job, still sliding film through trays five days a week. When Max arrived at the bus stop after work each evening, Steve was always waiting—rain, snow, or broiling summer heat—to walk his dad home.

  As with his parents before him, Max was strict. It was his job to make sure his sons appreciated the value of perseverance and self-respect, that they understood integrity is essential for living an honorable life, and that no one should do less than capability and circumstance allow. The boys learned at a very young age that their father appreciated punctuality and predictability, demanded politeness and reliability, had no patience for laziness or underperformance, and would not tolerate excuse-making. As and Bs on report cards were acceptable; Cs were not.

  “If you’re capable of doing better, you should,” Max said with regularity, and “If you don’t learn something new this day, it’s a wasted day.”

  These were the things a father does to help turn a boy into a man, and Max was without equal in attending to that. Barbara, quick with a hug and a pan of German plum cake when
an achievement or a disappointment warranted it, could supply the gentleness and understanding that Max’s mother had given her children.

  They had their comforts and their routines. Game nights with Scrabble tiles in Braille and dominoes, everyone a fierce competitor. The special seven-layer cake for every birthday. Dinner at 6:30 every evening, always from scratch—brisket, roasted chicken, gingerbread—which Barbara put together from memory or instinct, never from a recipe.

  Barbara and Max built every piece of their life around nurturing their sons into full bloom. The couple finally joined a congregation so the boys could go to Jewish summer camp every year and could, when the time came, begin religious training so they would have a foundation of faith that they could choose to embrace or reject in adulthood.

  Every summer, all four packed up the family car, a bag stuffed with sandwiches nestled in the backseat between the boys, and they hit the highway, rolled-down windows admitting a blast of wind that swept papers and wrappings around like crazed birds. They went to New York sometimes, where they visited the Statue of Liberty and the United Nations building, and rode the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. Both boys developed keen observation skills, describing for their dad the big and tiny pieces of what they were seeing so perfectly that he could picture in his mind things he had never actually witnessed—buildings that soared so high that their tops were lost in the wispy fog of a rainy day, sidewalk grates bigger than tabletops that belched forth the mysterious sounds of the netherworld of tunnels, pigeons so street-savvy that they fluttered within inches of fast-moving feet to pluck up crumbs and crusts.

  Washington, D.C., was the destination one summer, so the boys could experience their country’s seat of power. And to give their city-boy sons a taste of something different, they spent a week at a farm in Pennsylvania, where they swam in a pond, went on hayrides, and watched cows being milked.

  “It’s a good life we’ve made, Max,” Barbara said after one of those trips, and Max agreed.

  As the boys grew older—Steve, driven and goal-oriented, Rich, playful and easygoing—each with his own talents and interests, each with his own approach to school and the religious training their parents insisted upon, Max felt increasingly inadequate. They needed things now that he couldn’t provide.

  Steve had become quite a baseball player and dreamed of playing third base for the Cleveland Indians. Max wished he could practice with him, chuck balls at him in the park, watch games with him on TV. That he couldn’t made Max feel he wasn’t fully doing his job as a father. He attended his son’s Little League games, he and Barbara off to the side, she telling Max when Steve was up at bat, describing his swings and his progress around the bases. They went to Cleveland Indians games sometimes, and Max and the boys spent long summer afternoons by the radio, listening to major league games, cheering and groaning.

  Rich loved fishing. How wonderful it would have been, Max thought gloomily, if on a weekend he could have loaded his son into the car and driven to a lake, instructed him in the mysteries of flies and ripples in the water. In 1970, when Rich was eleven, they rented a summer cottage near a pond stocked with bluegill. Father sat next to son on the bank, Max weaving the worms onto the hooks, Rich doing the fishing, having taught himself the finer points of casting and reeling.

  Max’s bouts of depression never diminished, arriving and staying by their own clock and course. He never missed work, even when he was utterly disconsolate and disoriented, muscling his way through the hours by disconnecting himself from any thought but the task at hand.

  This same distancing from emotion was also asserting itself more often at home. It might be difficult for his family to witness, he supposed, but it kept him from being completely swamped and unable to function.

  One of his most treasured friends was a Polish immigrant with whom he and Sig spent nearly every Sunday afternoon, drinking coffee and arguing about current events. Michael Lewinow had been a psychologist in Poland, and though he never practiced in the United States (because he couldn’t, despite enormous effort, master English sufficiently well), his knowledge was broad. An amusing sort with a great gift for gab, Lewinow sometimes shared his observations about the probable or suspected emotional and mental health of people in the news. He always seemed to be right on the mark, his friends agreed.

  One afternoon, after Sig had left the room, Lewinow leaned forward in his chair and began speaking to Max in Polish, his voice soft but serious. “Max, you’re my friend, and I must tell you this: I’m concerned. I’ve known you long enough to know that you’re sabotaging your own life. You’re denying an important reality, Max. You are blind, and you’re angry about it. People see a distant, angry man closed into himself, and they think you’re angry at them. The way you present yourself keeps you even more removed than you purposefully make yourself. You need to snap out of it.”

  Max was furious. He hadn’t invited this kind of intimacy, and he felt attacked. It was the truth as Lewinow saw it, and Max believed in truth-telling, but the man had no right to break the unwritten rules of friendship. Max said none of this that afternoon, or ever. He fumed silently, and their friendship cooled. Although they still got together nearly every Sunday, Max pulled back, a fortress against further uninvited incursions.

  He was middle-aged now, and there was, Max thought, little likelihood of changing much about himself. He wasn’t sure how to go about making any changes; in any event, he wasn’t sure he wanted to—wasn’t even sure that every unpleasantness he encountered could or should be laid directly at his own feet. Years later, when he began to experience something of a lightening of spirit, he wished he had given his friend’s analysis serious consideration at the time it was presented—a priceless gift, even though it felt like a harsh rebuke.

  “I allowed myself to be too preoccupied with the things I couldn’t do because of my blindness rather than to focus on the things I could do, and do well,” he confided in a letter years later.

  But at that moment, he could only move forward in the ways he always had, which had brought him this far. He wouldn’t risk a misstep that might jeopardize everything he had built. He had to keep working at his job so there would be money for his sons’ college educations, and he had to continue to reject the hope of someday resuming a full career in physical therapy, rather than just dabbling on the side. He had to invest most of his energy into staying in control so that the nightmares and the depression wouldn’t completely absorb him, so that emotion wouldn’t carry him to a place from which he might not be able to return. A man can only do so much at once.

  He did, however, pursue new learning. He took a correspondence course, offered by the Hadley School for the Blind in Chicago, in Hebrew Braille. That class didn’t really lie outside his ken, but another did. He signed up for an adult education class in upholstering.

  The instructor, Mr. Chenissi, was stunned when Max tapped his cane into the classroom and took a seat. The teacher went about his introductions and detailed his plans for the weeks ahead: a chair seat first, then a full chair or sofa, eyeing the blind man, composed and still.

  “I don’t know about this,” the teacher said to Max after class. “I don’t believe it’s possible for a blind person to do this correctly.”

  “Give me a chance, please,” Max responded. “I don’t know if this will work either. Maybe I will fail, but I will try very hard. And neither of us will have lost much if I do not succeed.”

  Max proved to be the best of students, requiring help from a sighted person, it turned out, only for cutting the fabric and stitching the piping, assistance Barbara provided. In all other ways, his hypersensitive fingers—so capable after years of doing the work his eyes did not—felt out and followed the tiniest channels, locating angles and drop-offs like a sculptor pressing the formless into something of beauty.

  One evening, Rich joined his father in the basement work area,
where Max was re-covering the cheap sofa and chairs they’d purchased years earlier, battered from the activities of two lively boys. After a while Rich grew quiet.

  “Unc couldn’t make a couch like that, could he?” the boy said at last, referring to his uncle Chris, Barbara’s brother, who had immigrated to America. He was a competent fixer-upper who always had a home-improvement project going on in his own home.

  Max couldn’t, for a few seconds, force words past the clot of sadness in his throat.

  “No one can do everything, of course. But, no, Unc couldn’t make a couch like we do.”

  This simple question from a ten-year-old proved, he figured, that a boy needed to find something, just one thing, that would allow him to be proud of his dad.

  Max was sure his sons had suffered more than they said from having him as their father, in ways sighted people would never imagine.

  When Steve was in eighth grade, his school held a father-son evening where retired Cleveland Browns offensive tackle and placekicker Lou Groza was the guest speaker. People mingled and chatted with one another and the teachers as Max sat alone, marooned in his chair, trapped by his inability to make his way through the crowd. Only one person approached: the father of Steve’s best friend. Max regarded the behavior of all the rest as simple avoidance of a blind person, which he had experienced many times before.

  “I felt ashamed and sorry for Steve,” he told Barbara that night in bed. “He couldn’t have helped but notice it, even though he might be too young to understand it completely.”

  Barbara suggested this might be the time for the two of them to talk with the boys about the blindness. Max didn’t respond. He had folded into himself again, brooding. She recognized this posture. It might be a day or more before he would emerge and reconnect in his somewhat remote but normal-for-him way.

  Max didn’t speak then with Steve or Rich about the social difficulties related to his blindness, believing that burdening them with a father’s troubles would be selfish.