Trusting Calvin

by Sharon Peters

  He also never mentioned his Holocaust experiences.

  Max and Barbara entered a period, a long, several-month period, of serious marital unhappiness, the arrival of which, after twenty years together, brought as much mystification as pain. No shouting matches erupted, no sharp exchanges or slamming doors. They were both too restrained for that. Also, there really wasn’t a single issue or problem to fight through and get beyond, they both knew. More, it seemed, there had been a gradual awareness of disappointments and discomforts, of diverging thoughts about how things should be, an accumulation of little things grown too big to ignore.

  But although the apartment grew silent and tense, there was no talk of divorce. Their sons were not yet through school, and they agreed that since having a family had been a mutual decision, they would honor that and raise their sons together, in a two-parent home.

  Eventually time, events, and the obligation to family lessened the misery. Things were never again precisely as they had been, but there was never again talk of unhappiness.

  Their routines continued, and the years flowed on with typical bumps and joys. Serious-minded Steve graduated in the top 10 percent of his high school class and chose to attend Washington University in St. Louis on a full scholarship. Rich, still in high school, now the only son at home, became the one to begin to unlock the family secret.

  Both boys knew their father had been “blinded in the war,” knowledge they had gained more from osmosis than through direct conversation. But as they reached their teens they noticed that many of the Braille library books Max always had stacked up were about the war and the Holocaust. There was also that tattoo, which they never asked about because they sensed they weren’t supposed to. They were smart boys, though, and they had drawn conclusions.

  Rich finally broached it directly. He was studying the Holocaust in school, he said to his father. He had to write a paper, and he wondered if Max would be willing to help.

  It was impossible for Max, of all people, with his dedication to education, to deny a request like that, Rich knew. And in this way, the younger son began to learn a little about how the Holocaust had impacted his father.

  “I had no choice,” Max told Sig later. “I wanted him to get a good grade. I gave him a broad stroke of the brush, not a lot of details.”

  The crack was narrow, but his son hauled out information a little at a time.

  “I owe it to him,” he said to Barbara one night. “His classmates, kids whose parents are not survivors, should not know more about that time than my son does.”

  Rich finished high school and set off to college, eventually studying law enforcement, though it took him some time and a transfer before he settled on his major. Steve got a job as an accountant and lost his young wife to lymphoma. Each of Max’s sons were trying to find their footing in difficult times, and Max kept his distance, not trusting himself to handle the conversations well, or appropriately.

  “I never enjoyed the confidence of either one of my sons. We didn’t develop the openness, closeness, and trust required. That is no doubt my fault,” he said in a letter to his grandchildren years later. He regretted it—but couldn’t explain why or fix it.

  Remarkably healthy physically, given what his body had been through, Max suddenly began having sharp stomach cramps resistant to every effort he made to quell them. He made an appointment with his doctor.

  It was colon cancer.

  The day before his surgery, Max gave Sig money to buy two cemetery plots.

  “My will is in order, and when you take care of this I will be at ease. Whatever will be, will be.”

  The surgery, performed the day after Thanksgiving, 1983, was successful, if not minor. Max bounced back with surprising speed for a man of sixty. In the new year, he went back to work.

  During his weeks of recuperation, he had given serious thought to suggestions made regularly by a few people who knew something about his background, suggestions he had always rejected. Maybe it was time, he now thought, to do as they had recommended—to share some of his experiences. He wasn’t ready to talk yet about his years in the camps, but maybe he could put some of it on paper as his old friend, Jacob Freid, editor of the Jewish Braille Review, had urged. Silence and the isolation Max had constructed for himself could no longer be an option, Freid had insisted. The few survivors still alive had an obligation to tell their stories.

  “If I ever intend to do it,” Max told Sig, the first person with whom he shared this idea, “now is the time. If the surgery told me anything, it’s that it is much later than I thought.”

  “It will be hard on you. Hard on Barbara and the boys.”

  “Yes. It will.”

  Max told Barbara that he intended to write a piece, that he thought it would be easier to write than speak it. “In this way, maybe I will be able to pull the cork. I don’t know.”

  He wasn’t sure the cork should be pulled, but he was no longer certain it shouldn’t be.

  He typed and Barbara read, correcting his spelling from time to time. He described incidents she had never been aware of, and she stopped sometimes to ask him about them, and often, to do research on her own.

  What emerged, much later, was a ten-page manuscript he called “Liberation Day of a Blind Survivor.” It wasn’t everything he had endured—far from it. He wasn’t ready for that. It was a few details in a competent if remote style. He sent it to Freid with a note saying: “Do with it whatever you please.”

  Fried called to say he would publish it and suggested Max submit a copy to other publications. In time it appeared in the Cleveland Jewish News, the Plain Dealer, and the News Herald.

  In 1988 the American Council for the Blind named it the year’s best submission and sent a plaque, which Max hung over the desk where he typed, and a check for $200. Two months later, at the ACB convention in Columbus, Max presented that check, plus $200 he and Barbara had donated and a $100 contribution from a friend to serve as seed money for a scholarship fund for blind students. Once presented with the idea and the money, the state group launched its first-ever scholarship fund solicitation effort, an endeavor so successful that they awarded a scholarship to a blind student every year after. The board of directors voted to call it the Max Edelman Scholarship Fund.

  Seven

  Soon after New Year’s Day in 1990—after thirty-seven years, three months, and one week of sliding films from one tray to another—Max retired from the Cleveland Clinic. Technology was advancing and encroaching so rapidly, he knew he would be called sometime soon into an office to hear that his job was being eliminated.

  “I want to be the one who decides when I won’t be working anymore,” he told Barbara, “not have someone else decide that for me.”

  He arrived at the hospital that final day, pressed and polished, creases sharp in his trousers, as always, knowing there would be a cake-and-punch send-off. What he hadn’t expected was the throng of doctors and nurses and aides and other personnel who made their way through the long corridors to pay homage to his decades of unfailing precision and reliability. For hours he stood, straight and formal, shaking hands and receiving good wishes.

  Days later, he took the first step toward constructing the kind of active retirement he knew he needed. He applied for a guide dog.

  Over the years, many people had suggested he get a guide dog to expand his freedoms. His boss wouldn’t permit a dog in the darkroom, so pursuing it was pointless, he told the advice-givers, one after another. Max did not mention the much greater issue: that all dogs, no matter the size, no matter if on leashes or not, terrified him. A dog didn’t have to bark or growl; it didn’t even have to approach. Just the jingle of a collar and tag a few feet away or the sound of a dog snorfling in the dust along a fence line brought fear sweat instantly to the surface, made his stomach drop and his heart race. He couldn’t breathe well or t
hink clearly until he had moved a safe distance away.

  Max had tried to convince himself that although it might be understandable that this fear had bored into him like an awl, in his present circumstances it was not only ridiculous, it was excessive, life-limiting, and pathological. He had read enough to know all the terminology. He had not, however, located any meaningful advice for overcoming it.

  Still, he was determined to have a guide dog. He would no longer be spending ten hours every weekday working in the hospital or traveling to or from it, so he would have a great deal of free time, and he didn’t want to spend it cloistered.

  “They don’t let blind guys drive,” he said to Sig, “or I would get where I need to be on my own.”

  Barbara’s arthritis—in her ankles, feet, and hands—had become so severe in recent years that getting around was difficult for her, especially when it was cold or damp. When her mobility was limited, so was Max’s. It would be excruciating, he knew, if the hours of his retirement were dictated by the schedules, availability, or interests of others.

  “That is not a life for me.”

  A guide dog, then. That was the answer.

  He and Barbara discussed Max’s fear before submitting the application, the changes to their lives that would come from having a dog. Not just an ordinary dog like other people had, but one that would always be with them, sleeping in their bedroom, going to restaurants and their sons’ homes, one that would require daily walks and attention. It would change everything.

  Barbara understood better than anyone Max’s consuming need to go where and when he wanted, not to feel trapped. “I think we have to do this,” she told her husband. “I don’t know how to live with a dog, but I suppose they will tell us how to do that. I believe I can do this. Can you?”

  “It’s not a matter of whether I can,” he said. “This is something I must do.”

  He needed this “tool for independence,” as he called this animal he had decided he must bring into his life. Whatever rotting leftovers of the past he would have to discard or destroy to make this work, he would. It was that important.

  A few weeks after submitting his application, he received word he’d been accepted for the next class.

  Spring breezes were carrying the fresh scent of new growth over the fields north of New York City, when, in early May 1990, Max arrived on the sprawling, tree-studded campus of Guiding Eyes for the Blind, long respected for the quality of its guide dogs and for carefully sorting through every detail of a person’s life in order to pair up each client with precisely the right animal.

  Max was one of twelve blind or visually impaired people who had traveled from Ohio, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and several other states for the twenty-six-day training session, all of them knowing this step they were taking would fundamentally change their lives.

  At sixty-eight, Max was the oldest student the school had ever accepted—though in subsequent years, increasing numbers of older people sought dogs as the result of losing their eyesight to injuries, diabetes, or other later-year diseases.

  Max was also the first student who had ever arrived with a gut-­gripping fear of dogs.

  The age thing, school officials had assured him on the phone before he arrived, was one they would contemplate, and then they would simply deal with whatever issues might arise when he was with them on campus. They had been matching people with dogs for many years, they said reassuringly, and there was absolutely no reason to think that a man of nearly seventy would not grasp, process, and put to use all the information and instruction they would provide as completely as a man of twenty.

  The dog-fear thing they didn’t prepare for. Max hadn’t mentioned it.

  The official welcoming that first day, efficient and well-paced, fanned the interest and excitement already burbling in the people who had arrived there to be joined up with dogs—people from diverse backgrounds, positions, and pursuits, including a radio station employee, a snack-bar operator, and a college student poised on the brink of a career. When the overviews, stage-setting, introductions, and welcoming had ended, the chatter of expectation ricocheted about the room.

  Max sat stone-faced.

  Now is the time, he figured. He grasped his cane to approach training supervisor Charlie Mondello.

  Straightforwardly and unapologetically, Max made his confession. Scared of dogs. Terrible nightmares of dogs, the result of unspeakable violence in concentration camps years ago, decades ago. Even when they were not maiming or killing, they paced, those dogs, tense and alert, straining at their leashes, always ready at a single word to leap on a man, pull him to the ground. Even pet dogs set him on edge now, triggered visceral reactions.

  Charlie needed to know all this, Max told him, because it would explain why Max’s behavior might be tentative or reluctant sometimes, once the dogs were around. But he would press himself to move beyond those images of the past, beyond the way his mind and body reacted to dogs, he vowed. His motivation and need were that strong.

  “I am capable of overcoming this fear,” he insisted.

  Charlie said nothing for what seemed a long time. This is it, Max thought. They will send me home. Nothing can be done for you, they will say. It is impossible.

  “No human being is born evil,” Charlie said at last. “Some become evil. No dog is born vicious. Some are trained to be vicious. Give us a chance to prove to you that the dog you will get here will guide you safely, love you, and protect you.”

  Max softened in relief. “I will work very hard. If I fail at this, it will not be for lack of trying.”

  In 1990, this school was one of only four in the country that was training and placing guide dogs with blind people, and the twelve-hour-a-day schedule and curriculum had been honed over thirty-six years to make the most of every minute each crop of students spent there. There is nothing simple or casual about uniting a person and a guide dog, and it takes a significant amount of time to instruct the human side of the team in everything he or she must know to make the relationship with the dog, already trained and nearly ready to set out into the world, successful and safe.

  For the first two days of preparing to be a team, as it’s called when a dog and a person unite, the students had no contact with the animals. This delay was partly so the students could begin to open their minds to accepting that the two of them, person and dog, would have a relationship like no other. They would rely upon each other, support each other. They would accomplish much together, but that does not happen simply by handing the leash of an impeccably trained dog to a willing blind person.

  The students would grow comfortable, during this preamble, with some of the realities of life with a guide dog, with the feel and scent of the harness they would use to work together. They would begin to come to terms with the reality that the journey to get them to the point where they could leave this place with a dog—and, just as important, with the confidence, emotional wherewithal, and skills to venture forth in an entirely new way—would require a depth of faith and commitment demanded in few other endeavors.

  There was also another reason for the delay in presenting the dogs to the students.

  Each animal had been scrupulously bred—Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, and German shepherds—for the calmness, intelligence, even temper, resilience, and scores of other qualities required for a dog expected to take on enormous responsibility. Each had been plucked from its litter for demonstrating, even at just a few weeks old, the qualities critical to becoming a sound and reliable guide dog. Each had been raised for more than a year by carefully selected volunteer puppy raisers all along the East Coast, people who took the young animals into their homes and lives and hearts, teaching them good manners and some obedience skills, taking them to work and to school and to social events to acclimate them to crowds, children, traffic noise, chattering squirrels, elevators, howling sirens, nois
y restaurants, and hundreds of other situations and circumstances.

  Each young dog had been monitored, assessed, and tested again and again along the way—some failing to progress to the next step for any number of issues, like ball obsession or fear of escalators. (Those that didn’t make the cut moved to more appropriate jobs, or to life as a pet.)

  Turned over to the Guiding Eyes trainers at fourteen to eighteen months old, they were again nurtured and challenged for several months, pressed into serious training, learning the skills critical to guiding the blind, spending hours a week for six months or more, mastering obedience and also focus, and listening for commands like “forward” and “right” and “left.” Again, some failed to make the cut.

  Each of the dogs ready now for assignment had $20,000 worth of careful breeding and purposeful training in its background, each among the small percentage—one-third or fewer of any given litter—who had sailed through every month and every test and had not demonstrated even a small flaw along the way. Each was well-mannered, friendly, fit, and eager to work.

  And yet, for all the precision and prescribed routines in their breeding, selection, raising, and training, for all the similarities in their temperament, skills, and intelligence, the dogs were far from identical. Each had distinct personality traits and characteristics that separated one from another, and it was these traits that usually made one a better match for one particular person rather than another.

  The instructors already knew, from an exhaustive application process, a great deal about each student’s lifestyle, family situation, living arrangements, and work and travel needs by the time he or she arrived on campus. This helped them to develop early notions about what dog would fit with which person.

  Some dogs, more athletic and action-oriented, were ideal for a high-octane blind person; some, extremely cuddly, very laid-back—“plodders,” as they are known—would be perfect for a low-energy person who wanted a languorous companion guide. Much of that part of the equation had already been calculated. But now, as they spent hours with the students, the instructors were learning more about the nuances of these humans’ behaviors, such as their normal walking pace, and some of their idiosyncrasies. This knowledge would help to ensure that each person got a dog that would mesh naturally into a life that both parties found satisfying.