Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  Talking with Grandma, Ruth sounded tough. She said, “Those bastards.” A long pause. “It’s all a pack of lies. I’m sure they aren’t Cuban. There is no Cuban air force—they only have six planes. They must be ours.” Another pause. “No. We’re fine,” she said. And again, “Fine. No. We’re okay.” She sounded angrier and angrier.

  I wandered into the kitchen. I wished I were anywhere but home. Our kitchen had one large window which was half open. Its view was of the narrow courtyard, a tunnel of windows that revealed identical structural interiors but surprisingly different interior decorations on every floor. I leaned out and glanced down two levels to what I knew was Joseph’s room.

  He was there! Looking right up at me. He smiled and waved. I called down, “Thanks for the book! Now I can beat you.”

  He said something.

  “What?” I yelled.

  Joseph raised his window higher and stuck his head out. “I know a way we can play like this.” He produced a flashlight, turning it on and off. “Morse code and chess notation.” He abruptly attempted to pull his head in, whacking it against the window. He shouted, “I’m coming,” back into his apartment. “I’ll show you in school,” he called. “Gotta go.” He withdrew into his shell.

  I was smiling when I turned around and discovered my mother confronting me, smelling sweet, but staring with rage. “They can put me in jail.” My throat went dry. I don’t think I could have talked if I knew what to say. “They killed Ethel. They electrocuted her. They didn’t care that she had two beautiful little boys. Do you understand? You’re killing me.” She said this in a calm sane voice: the steadiness was unnatural and all the more terrifying. “You talk to people and you’re killing me.” I expected her to hit me. She had never done so; but I heard it in her tone, like a hard slap across my cheeks. Instead, she turned on her heels—her dress billowed as if she were dancing—and walked out.

  I cried. I cried hard, hysterically.

  Ruth appeared when I was winding down, or when I had run out of tears might be a more accurate description. She had tissues in her hand. She wiped my nose. She had changed into slacks and had her raincoat on. Her head was covered by a scarf. She certainly looked surreptitious, if not subversive. “I’m going out, honey,” she said in a gentle whisper. “This is Aunt Sadie’s number. Call her if there’s an emergency. But there won’t be. I’ll be home by the morning. There’s milk and cookies and peanut butter and bread if you get hungry. You can watch TV past your bedtime.” She had finished wiping my nose. She kissed my eyes one at a time, then my forehead and said softly, without irony, “Happy Birthday.” She left. I listened to her retreating footsteps all the way to the firestairs. I could make out the sound of her going down and then she was gone.

  I was excited to be able to watch television at late as I wanted. But when it grew dark the big apartment sounded empty and vulnerable as I listened to New York’s night music: sirens, the raucous shout of a drunk, the taunts of a gang of teenagers. They were noises I had heard all my life, but they used to be a harmless background, the churning surf of a tempest whose waves couldn’t reach me. I tried to fall asleep in my parents’ king-sized bed with no success. I was too little and the sounds crept closer and closer: ambulances coming to pick up dead bodies; killers shouting they were looking for little boys to stab.

  Don’t be weak, I told myself. If you get scared and call for help, you’ll have failed her. Use your peasant brain, my father reminded me. I hunched my shoulders, stuck my tongue over my upper teeth, and grunted like an ape. I did feel stronger as a brute; as a thoughtless animal, I wasn’t frightened.

  I lay sideways in a fetal posture on the huge bed, with all the lights on, held my penis and made savage noises. They would have seemed silly and pathetic to an observer, but for me it was salvation. I escaped into a fantasy of power and fell asleep.

  Ruth wasn’t there in the morning. I felt confident at first. The sun was out, there were Cheerios for nourishment, the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon hour for entertainment, and later, when I heard the noise of the weekly adult fast-pitch softball game across the street in my schoolyard, I got up my courage, dressed and went outside. I remember the day was clear, sunny and cool; and the game was thrilling, especially because I was able to get close, perched on the ledge behind the fence. I had been limited to watching from the more distant view of my bedroom window since I had been forbidden to go out on weekends for a year. Some of the men, flattered by my attention and applause, talked to me. I felt heartbroken when the game ended.

  I was hungry. I returned to the apartment intending to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That was when I discovered my error. I had no key to get back in. I guess I expected my mother to be home by late morning. She wasn’t. I rang and rang until a neighbor appeared. She asked if anything was wrong. No, no, I insisted, horrified at the thought that I might have revealed Ruth was away, information which could lead to her imprisonment and electrocution.

  I ran off to the stairs, down a flight or two, sat on a step and wept. I had made a bad mistake. I couldn’t figure out how to correct it. A different neighbor appeared to see who was crying. I fled to another landing. That scare got me thinking long enough to make a decision.

  I would ignore my hunger and wait outside until Ruth returned. I stood near the building entrance, trying to appear casual and not let on that I was expecting someone.

  An eternity seemed to pass. Probably no more than a few hours, but while enduring them I felt more and more abandoned and helpless. I had vivid fantasies. I imagined my father dead in the rubble of Havana. I pictured a malicious laughing Cuban pilot as he landed at an airport in New York to celebrate his destruction of Fidel’s revolution. I saw Ruth step forward in her James Bond outfit, pull out a Walther PPK and shoot him.

  One of my friends appeared with his father. They carried baseball gloves and a softball. My friend asked if I wanted to play catch in Fort Tryon Park. I answered that I didn’t, although I desperately wanted to. I couldn’t risk not being there when Ruth returned. I would be in enough trouble for having left the apartment. I had been trying without success to think up a noble reason for having gone out. I think my friend’s father was suspicious. He asked several times if I was okay.

  I remember those three or four hours on the sidewalk vividly. I could write hundreds of pages on the compensating fantasies, the despair I saw in New York’s mottled sidewalks, the breathless anxiety when people I knew happened by and interrogated me, the heart-stopping fear when I noticed a police cruiser on the corner and I hid between parked cars. I lived a lifetime in a few hours. I felt as if my entire character had been changed. And yet nothing happened. In the real world, outside the terror and longing in my head, the afternoon was dull. But inside me World Communism struggled for its life and lost—and I was orphaned.

  Joseph rescued me. He spied me from his window and called down to ask what I was doing. I didn’t tell him the truth but I made it clear that I was on my own. I was cold; my stomach hurt. He sensed my desperation and told me to come up. I hesitated for all the obvious reasons, namely his parents and my mother. “I’ll answer the door,” he said. Somehow that reassured me. Maybe he meant to sneak me in.

  But no, Joseph had too much respect for his mother to do that. He greeted me at the door and asked in a whisper, “Where’s your Mom? What’s wrong?”

  “I was supposed to stay inside. I got locked out. I don’t know where she is.”

  Joseph nodded in his old man’s grave manner and said, “Follow me. Keep quiet and say you’re sorry when I tell you to.”

  We walked, much to Mrs. Stein’s surprise, right into her kitchen.

  “Mom, Rafe is here. He’s come to tell you that he’s sorry he lied. His mother has punished him by not letting him go out or see his friends for six months. He doesn’t tell any more lies and now she lets him go out. We’d like to play chess, just one game and then he’ll go.” Mrs. Stein stared open-mouthed throughout his speech and stayed in th
at pose when he was done. Joseph nodded to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I almost burst into tears. I had to fight to keep them to a trickle. “I’m really sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  “That’s all right,” she said, trying to be stern-faced, but melting to me. “You did a bad thing, but if you’re sorry and you don’t do it no more, then it’s all right. Go ahead. Play.” We turned, ready to move fast. “You want something to eat?” she asked.

  I was never so glad for bland food. I told Joseph a truth, namely that my mother had left me alone all night, but not why, and I explained that if he told anyone, he was putting me at risk of being grounded forever. Joseph said I shouldn’t worry about my mother finding out I was at his place—he had a plan. We moved the chess set so we could look up to see the windows of my apartment. If Ruth turned on a light we would notice. Since it was daytime, I had my doubts she would, but I might spot her moving around. Anyway, I didn’t care if this precaution was fallible. Out on the street my fear and hunger had overwhelmed me. I was too relieved by my rescue to care if I was punished for it.

  The next obstacle loomed with nightfall. Joseph’s father and mother appeared and looked at me as if I should be leaving. I had tried to beat Joseph using the Sicilian Defense, gleaned from the little learning I had gotten out of his birthday present the previous day. But I was quickly trounced twice—Joseph didn’t tell me he owned a new book with more variations. I tried a different opening for the third game and seemed to be winning. I was about to attack him King’s side when I saw the mouse’s one-eyebrow face, squinting at me unhappily. “It’s late,” he said sourly.

  I had an inspiration: “I’m sorry, Mr. Stein. I lied to you. I’m very sorry. I’ll never do it again.” This humbling of myself, this lie of an apology, an unthinkable abandonment of my pride only six months before, was a relief to me. I wanted to give myself up, to crush myself if I could, to be remade from top to bottom. I stood. “Thank you for inviting me,” I said to Joseph, who looked so astonished by my formal manner I thought the lenses in his glasses were going to pop out. I walked toward his parents, resigned that I had to go.

  “Ma,” Joseph asked, a pleading note in his tone, “can Rafe sleep over?”

  Mrs. Stein glanced at her husband. He blinked at her. The fierce man with steel fingers who dragged me to my mother’s had disappeared down a hole and come out a mouse again. “It’s a school night,” she said uncertainly.

  “We’ll go to bed early,” Joseph said. “No talking after lights out.”

  “Sure,” the mouse said in a faint squeak. “If it’s all right with his mother.”

  Joseph opened his eyes wide and stared at me. He spoke these words with slow significance: “Why don’t you go upstairs and ask her?”

  Bless him, he concealed his new chess books and pummeled me all night—I lost that third game and then two more—but he made sure I was cared for. I rang my bell a few times, without much hope. Mostly, I tried to think of a reason why I wouldn’t be returning to the Steins with pajamas or school clothes or schoolbooks.

  I told Mrs. Stein all my pajamas were dirty—that shocked her and gave her a pleasant feeling of superiority. I said my mother wanted me to go home early in the morning to change for school.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, worried and scared. I cried. I thought I was doing it silently. Joseph turned on the tensor lamp. He squinted at me myopically. “Are you crying?” he whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” I blubbered and let out a sob.

  He put a finger to his lips and then whispered, “Don’t cry. You can always stay here. My parents think you’re very smart. And, you know, by Jewish law you’re Jewish.”

  “I know,” I said and stopped crying. I remembered Papa Sam. I saw Uncle Bernie’s round face smiling as he presented me with a twenty-dollar bill.

  In the morning I left. There was still no answer at home. I decided to go to school in my dirty clothes. It was April 17th. That morning roughly fourteen hundred Cuban exiles, trained and backed by the CIA, invaded at the Bay of Pigs. They were easily and quickly defeated. But in the interval between the first report and the final result there was, at least among supporters of the Cuban revolution in the United States, a conviction that American troops would follow up, that this was the forerunner of a U.S. overthrow of Fidel. To this day it isn’t known where my mother spent Saturday night and Sunday. By mid-morning on Monday she was arrested. She spat on Adlai Stevenson as he entered the United Nations (at the time he was the U.S. ambassador) and then fought violently with the guards who dragged her away. She was carrying a gun and a can of gasoline.

  I didn’t know those details for many years. Aunt Sadie found me in gym on Monday afternoon. She walked across its varnished floor with a look of horror in her eyes, a look that belied the account she gave of my mother. She said Ruth was going to be okay but that she was sick and had to stay in a hospital for a few days. (In fact, she was undergoing psychiatric observation at Bellevue.) Huge tears rolled down Aunt Sadie’s cheeks while I explained that I had been on my own for two days and nights. Aunt Sadie used her key to my parents’ apartment, packed a bag for me, and we went to her house in Riverdale.

  Cousin Daniel looked through my things while Aunt Sadie left us to phone first her husband and then Uncle Bernie with the report about me. Daniel made fun of my schoolbooks. He said he had learned all that in first grade—I was in fourth.

  “Well, it’s because I go to a private school,” Daniel said. “It’s much better. We’re years ahead of you.”

  This remark didn’t wound as deeply as it would have a year earlier. I knew that I was a geek compared to Daniel, a monstrosity to his normalcy, but I also knew much more about life. I had faced killers and saved my parents’ lives. I had stayed alone in my apartment and lied to grown-ups. I knew how to please my mother better than he could ever please his. I knew the secret that real men knew, the secret that women become loose and groan if touched in the right way. And in my Indian wallet, I had a special letter (that spies from the CIA were looking for) from a revolutionary, a man who had unselfishly given up being my father to make a just world. Besides, when I challenged Daniel to a chess game, thanks to Joseph’s tutelage, I mated him in fifteen moves. Danny got so mad he picked up the board and scattered the pieces all over his beautiful carpet. He was a sore loser, but I wasn’t. I worked hard until I learned how to win. I was a geek and I was an outlaw, but I was a man and he was a boy.

  Aunt Sadie came in as Daniel threw the pieces. She casually rebuked him and told me that Uncle Bernie wanted to talk to me on the phone.

  “Hey fella,” his cello voice greeted me. “What a brave boy you are. Your Mom told you to keep what she was doing secret, is that right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, it’s good to obey your Mom. But you don’t have to keep secrets from me. I’m family. We don’t have secrets in a family.”

  “Is Mom in jail?” I knew from Sadie’s nervousness that her account wasn’t accurate.

  “Uh … Didn’t Aunt Sadie tell you she was sick?”

  “Yes,” I said. Use your peasant brain. “But I don’t think she told me the truth. If Mom’s in jail, can I come live with you, Uncle?” I couldn’t be a burden and a worry to my parents anymore. My uncle was rich. He was the great capitalist, the overwhelming force that had defeated my parents. Maybe I could get his help, get his power, and avenge my father and mother.

  “With me? You’re gonna stay with Aunt Sadie and Max and Danny. That’ll be more fun. My kids are in college, you’d—”

  “Mommy says you’re a genius, Uncle.” That was true. She said he had a genius for using power. “Daniel hates me. He says I’m a spic. I don’t want to live here. I want to live with you. I want you to be my father.”

  There was a long silence. Then, in a choked voice, Bernie’s cello sang low: “I’ll come get you, boy.”

  He told me to put Aunt Sadie back on. I rushed to find her and grinned at Daniel a
s she went. He challenged me to another game. I mated him in ten. He threw the board against the wall so hard it split in two. I was triumphant. Aunt Sadie returned from her second conversation with Bernie. One side of her hairdo was stuck up in the air and her eyes were red. She kissed me and then wheeled angrily at Daniel. “You and I have to have a talk, young man.”

  Uncle Bernie took me away in a black limousine. I leaned against him and fell asleep on the ride to Long Island. I was nine years old and I was in charge of my life. I thought I was doing a better job than my parents had. After all, I was on my way to live in a mansion, on my way to help them win their lost cause.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Overcompensation

  I WAS MOVED INTO PAPA SAM’S OLD QUARTERS. EILEEN MCELHONE, A young woman (she seemed quite grown-up to me; but she was only twenty-eight) was hired through an agency to supervise me. Aunt Charlotte had no interest in playing mother now that she had sent her children off to college. She spent most of her time fund-raising for various museums, hospitals and Jewish organizations. Three or four nights a week she stayed in Manhattan. My uncle expected to be busy as well, supervising his real estate interests and preparing for an expansion into retailing through the purchase of Home World, then a foundering Northeast chain of appliance stores. He was frequently on trips or working late in Manhattan, not to mention the events he attended because of his charities and art collecting. It fell to Eileen to keep me company, ferry me to and from school and various athletic activities.

  She was very beautiful, an Irish stereotype. She had light blue eyes, thick red hair, and high cheeks that alternated between bloodlessness and bright embarrassed flushes. Her speech was a melody. She had the natural literacy of a nation that puts Yeats and Joyce on their paper money. Her white and red colors, her gay moods and teasing speech, were so different from the dark, brooding Jews and Latins of my family that I was sometimes slow to answer her conversation, mesmerized by the spectacle of her exotic appearance.