by Jan Cherubin
It was easy enough to find ways of being with Evie that would not arouse Shirley’s suspicion. I had only to suggest a number of activities in earshot of both girls to have the right girl volunteer, since Shirley was a killjoy and Evie was up for almost anything—walking for hours in the cold, running races, friendly wagers, silly songs. She told jokes in Yiddish and that colorful language coming out of her angelic mouth had me in stitches.
“You boost my spirits,” I said.
“They need boosting?” said Evie.
“Of course. I’m a stranger in your house. An outsider.”
“Der zaytiker. I hadn’t thought of it that way,” she said.
“Of course not. You’re not a snob.”
“Well, gee. Who am I to act superior? We take in boarders to make ends meet.”
“Who are you? You, my dear, are the daughter of a property owner.”
“Clyde, you should join the Party. You’re one of us and you know it.”
“I am. But I don’t want to be told what to do or what to think,” I said. Although, I thought, at that particular moment standing on the corner of North Avenue and Monroe Street in the frosty night watching the red bloom on her cheeks and the tip of her nose, she could have persuaded me to cut off my right arm.
The next night when I came back into my room after brushing my teeth and taking a piss, she was sitting on my bed. She put a finger to her lips, got up and closed the door, then leaned against it and pulled me to her. I kissed her but she had her lips pursed, teeth clenched. I laughed. “You kiss like a little girl.”
Her eyes flashed. “Then teach me to kiss like a woman,” she said.
Reader, I did. And then skillfully unbuttoned her blouse and kissed her innocent breasts.
She was too young, and Shirley’s feelings had to be considered, of course. But it was the brother, Nat, savior of the family, who was starting to get suspicious, so I tried to make friends. I lent him a book of short stories by Chekhov that I thought he’d appreciate as a fellow physician, and I invited him to the opening of Casablanca at the Hippodrome along with Shirley, Evie, Evie’s friend Shana, and my friend Chick Scheiner. The movie was so romantic and couldn’t have been more current. Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting in Casablanca the very same moment we were taking our seats in the theater. I had Evie on my left and Shirley on my right. Near the end of the picture when Laszlo says to Rick, “Welcome back to the fight, this time I know our side will win,” and the camera lingers on Ingrid Bergman’s face, I looked down at Evie and saw tears glittering on her cheeks. I wanted to pull her close and kiss the tears away, but I couldn’t, and I thought how being forced to hide our feelings from the others created a powerful kinship between us and the tortured lovers on the screen. I was moved by their sacrifice, and as I furtively held Evie’s hand in the darkened theater, it became clear that we were doomed. Evie was a child. I had to go away.
The radio course ended, I got my certificate, and I enlisted. After all my trouble, I wasn’t chosen for the Signal Corps. They put me with the Engineers.
Somewhere In England
3 April 1943
Dear Evie,
After several anxious weeks waiting to ship out to an unknown destination—in the army it’s always SNAFU, that is, Situation Normal All Fucked Up—and then two really trying weeks on a troop ship zigzagging across the Atlantic, we arrived safely. It’s really hitting me hard. I won’t see you again until the war is over. I believe in love now, because now I know for certain that I love you, and you love me, and to hell with the age difference, or whatever it is your small-minded family objects to about me.
I can’t tell you where we are—practically everything we do is a military secret. The other night I walked into the nearby town, and you can plainly see how low the standard of living is here. It’s an Army rule never to accept food when invited to a home, you may use up their entire week’s allowance.
A very rickety portable Victrola in the “Y” hut grinds out “As Time Goes By” on a well-worn record for me several times a day. I think of you constantly. Well, so long, darling. Regards to the family, and tell Shana to write.
All my love,
Clyde
CHAPTER 13
Susan and my mother didn’t want me encroaching on Brenda’s territory, so I asked my stepmother deferentially, did she mind if I called their doctor to discuss my father’s condition? “Knock yourself out,” Brenda said. Cromwell answered the phone himself, as if he expected my call. “Your dad asked me to put him in the hospital,” he said. “I told him that was ridiculous. I said I’d come over and hold his hand if he wanted.” Cromwell laughed and my body went cold with dread. He was the first of many doctors who would make me feel like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby: completely alone, everyone you ever trusted conspiring against you. Cromwell used to get a kick out of my father’s shtick over the years. But the headache was not an act. The doctor should have known the difference. I said my father had been called a lot of names before but never a hypochondriac. The doctor chuckled. “Look, honey, we’ve done every test. Ask Brenda. I sent him to a neurologist. An ENT specialist. He even had that little surgery for the deviated septum.”
I was naïve. I thought sickness didn’t have anything to do with me. Now all of a sudden, there was nothing else. “Listen, Cromwell,” I said, stepping up my game. “My father is no faker. We’re getting a second opinion.” Maybe I didn’t call him Cromwell. But I did say we’d get a second opinion, the only threat I could think of. I was screwed. I hadn’t expected to get involved, not like this. I was there to do dishes, nothing more. It was Wednesday. My return flight was booked for the following Tuesday. I’d try to make it. First I’d call my mother’s friend Shana Bloom—her son Mike was a doctor. My mother’s brother, Uncle Nat, was a respected physician, but I wasn’t about to call him. The pompous ass hated my father. They hadn’t spoken in years. So I’d call Mike Bloom, and take his referral, and the new neurologist would find out what was wrong, and very quickly my father would have surgery to correct the problem, or drugs to cure it. I’d make sure Brenda was on board with the treatment, and I’d go back to my life.
“Do what you want,” said Cromwell. “But the fact is, Clyde just needs to be a big boy.”
I hung up the wall phone in the kitchen next to the tacked-up shopping list. The sun was winking through the trees on the backyard hill. Shadows fell across the sink and striped the metal cabinets. I wanted to sit at the table, the old one with the red Formica surface and black-iron legs, and have my mother serve me a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk. I wanted to be from a family where the parents were still married to each other and the mother took care of dire situations like this one.
“He wants to wear that dreadful hat,” Brenda said, on the morning of the second opinion. “Don’t let him.” She had her coat on. She was off to work. My father liked wearing his green beanie all the time now, he even slept in it. The knit hat made him feel better. “It’s hideous,” Brenda said. She reached over and plucked it off his head. He whimpered like a dog. I watched her put the hat on the shelf in the closet. “I gave him his pain pills but he won’t swallow them,” she said. “You deal with it. Have fun with your new doctor.”
We listened to her car warming up in the driveway and then the Mazda’s engine getting fainter as she rounded the corner. “Do you want your hat back?” I said. My father nodded and I brought it to him. “What was that about?”
“She thinks I look like a dirty hippie.” He shrugged. “What’s the name of this guy again?”
“Dr. Heidenheimer. Hard name to forget.”
“Don’t be a wise guy,” he said. “I have to wear the sweater I got at Bloomie’s.”
I knew why he wanted that one. I went through his dresser drawers, scraping them open and clapping them shut until I found the sweater he’d bought shopping with Darleen. He was always telling me what a great sense of style Darleen had. My mother and Susan couldn’t stand Darleen
because my father praised her so much. She was his own Eliza Doolittle; she used to say “don’t” for “doesn’t” when she first took his class, so now he went wild about her accomplishments—her “gourmet” pot roast, the great birthday presents she gave him. I liked Darleen, though. She got me.
“What time are we supposed to be there?” he said.
“Ten.” I left the room while he put on his clothes. Out the picture window slanted needles of rain hit the driveway and the dead lawn. What was wrong with Brenda? His hat made him feel better. Didn’t she care that he was in pain? Did she honestly believe he was faking at this point? I went to the stereo cabinet and picked up the photo album she kept on top and sat in the recliner leafing through the pages. Who was Brenda McLean really? She once told me with pride that a professional photographer had taken these pictures when she was seventeen, about to graduate from high school. In most of the photos, she’s posed against a broad tree trunk, her strawberry blonde hair in a side ponytail curling down the front of an orange shift. She was slender as a teenager, thin-armed, and her eyes told the camera there had been boys. Boys who no doubt felt the cold center where there should have been heat.
Hoffman jumped up, put his paws on my thighs, and sent the album sliding off my lap onto the carpet. I put my arms around his neck and buried my face in his fur. I was feeling sorry for myself. The rain had turned to sleet. My father would criticize my driving on the icy roads, where I parked, how I held his arm.
“Joanna! Come back. Put on my socks,” he called. “Please.” I got up reluctantly and Hoffman hopped down. I scooped up Brenda’s album and put it back on top of the stereo. In my father’s room, I kneeled at his feet and shimmied a nylon sock over his thick, crumbly toenails.
“Why won’t you swallow your pills?” I said.
“Can’t.”
I helped him walk to the dining room and I sat across the table from him with a pen and note pad to make a list of questions. He handed over a bundled washcloth. “Put this in your pocketbook,” he said. I uncurled a terrycloth corner and took a peek—false teeth, uppers and lowers. Choppers. “Hurts,” he said, so he’d taken them out. He was lucky—the bushy mustache covered the sunken part of his mouth. You couldn’t even tell. I watched him while he gathered his thoughts and I drew his picture on the note pad, a wide cartoon head, squinty eyes, a broad thin line for a smile, short verticals for the mustache, a lion’s mane of curly-cues for hair.
“Don’t forget the leaf theory,” he said. “Tell this Heidenheimer what I told you. I woke up with the headache back in October when I was raking leaves. You know how I grind them up with the lawn mower for my compost heap? Maybe I inhaled something.”
“Can’t you tell him yourself?”
“Write it down, goddamnit. If they hadn’t banned leaf burning this never would have happened.”
“Remember those bonfires we made?” I said.
“Write it down,” he said. “Maybe I inhaled a small particle of leaf up my nose into my sinus and that’s what this whole nightmare’s about.”
“Leaves! Leaves!” he used to yell to us, his call to action in the autumn. The stately pin oaks that saved our neighborhood from suburban blandness left a deep blanket of colorful leaves. “Who’s gonna help me rake these leaves?” Susan never wanted to. “Mom’s doing my hair in a pageboy,” she’d say. She always had a reason.
“Where’s the other one? Get out here, Joanna! Help me rake these leaves. C’mon. What’s the matter with you? Step lively.” It was a raw day near the end of October. Halloween was always cold, always a coat over my costume. My hands were chapped and the tip of my nose and my cheeks were red. I remembered he asked if I wanted to start a vegetable garden in the spring. “You and me,” he said. “Lotsa work, though. Digging, sowing, weeding. You up for it, kid?”
“A time to reap, a time to sow,” I said.
“You’re quoting the Bible.” He handed me a rake.
“I’m quoting the Byrds.” I was twelve.
“Oh yeah, smartie. Where do you think the Byrds got it?”
His sarcasm stung, although it turned out we were both wrong. The Byrds got it from Pete Seeger (who got it from the Bible). My father was so afraid of being left behind, he could never let me get ahead of him in any way. He had to be up on whatever was young and new and next. We gathered the leaves we raked into our arms and heaped them onto a fallow flowerbed and set fire to the heap and threw in potatoes wrapped in foil. He called them mickeys, unbothered by the slur. We went up the hill and raked more leaves while the potatoes roasted. The fire snapped and crackled and the burning smell was intoxicating, but its heat didn’t reach us. It was the physical exertion that eventually warmed me. The harder I worked, the better I felt. I stopped thinking about how I wished I were smarter, quicker, more like him. I let my body fill with a quieter feeling, a feeling of strength and peace. We paused, each resting on a rake. It seemed as if we could see the whole world from our backyard. From the top of the gentle slope behind the house and over the rooftops to the houses rising on the hill across the creek. The pin oaks ringed the horizon, their bare branches like etchings against the autumn sky. “Do you really not believe in God?” I said. The potatoes were ready, and we left our rakes on the ground and went down to the fire. I grabbed the weeder pole leaning against the fence and stabbed a mickey with the weeder’s forked metal tip lifting the potato out of the fire. I broke open the charred jacket with a stick and steam billowed out. It was too hot to eat.
“I know you say you don’t believe in God, but then what do you believe in?”
“What are you talking about, kid?”
“What’s the meaning of life, I guess that’s what I’m talking about.” I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my pea coat.
“There is no meaning,” my father said. He grabbed the weeder pole.
“OK, then what do people live for?” I had broken the spell of peace and strength. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“I’m an existentialist,” he said, without looking at me. He kept poking at the fire with the pole. “We pretend there’s meaning. You know you’re gonna die someday, right?” He turned and glanced at me for a second. “But you don’t dwell on it.” My potato had cooled off so I bit into it. “Gimme some of yours,” he said. He came closer, and we touched shoulders. “You pretend it isn’t all going to shit, so while you’re alive, you do the right thing.”
I wondered why I had heard people say that existentialism was cynical and hopeless. It seemed almost childishly optimistic the way he explained it. I didn’t know how to ask about the discrepancy though.
“OK. You’re an existentialist,” I said. “So how come you send us to Baltimore Hebrew for Sunday school?”
“Because I can do it for free. That’s the only reason I teach Jewish literature there. The free tuition for you kids.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Look kid, you’re Jewish. I’m not finishing the job for Hitler.”
We discarded the tinfoil remains, then went up the hill again and heaped more leaves into a trashcan. He paused for a second on one knee and caught his breath. Then he lit a cigarette and smoke came out of his nose like tusks. “You know, we used to roast mickeys all the time at the Home,” he said. The feeling of peace returned. We worked silently. He held the cigarette tightly between his lips and we stuffed armloads of leaves into the trashcan, then carried the can down to the fire, each holding a handle, and set it down.
“You really don’t believe in God,” I said. “Not at all?”
“Stop bothering me,” he said. He grabbed the weeder pole and stirred the ashes. “Go help your mother. Leave me alone.”
Sleet turned back to rain pounding the backyard, the somber sky graying the morning light. I turned on the lamp in the dining room. “Did you mention the leaf theory to Dr. Cromwell?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah I told him.” The leaf theory roused my father so much he put on his glasses. “Tell this He
idenheimer I’m always hungry but I can’t eat. I eat two bites and it’s like I ate a sack of potatoes.”
I wrote sack of potatoes under leaf theory, imagining a dozen whole potatoes sitting in my own stomach.
“It hurts, Joanna,” he said. “I want to shoot myself.”
“Let’s go, let’s get out of here. Let’s get you some help.” I jumped up, slung my bag over my shoulder, and tucked the list inside next to the vial of Tylenol with codeine, a bottle of ginger ale, and his choppers in a washcloth.
“Wait! Write down relentless,“ he said. “Tell him the pain is more intense when I lie on my back. Joanna. . .”
“What?”
“Tell this doctor . . . how I used to be.”
Rain pattered on the gravel roof. How he used to be. What popped into my head was his picture in the Baltimore Sun. He’d gotten into a shoving match with the mayor, on behalf of the teacher’s union. I glanced over his shoulder now at the Jackson Pollock imitation behind him on the wall. I remembered when he laid the big piece of masonite on the picnic table, and poured the red and yellow and black straight from the can, making his own splatter painting. Aronson ‘64. How was I to describe him to a stranger? Maybe bare-chested, as I saw him in the orphanage Picture Booke, astride his horse Playboy.
He was disappointed when he got a look at Heidenheimer in the doctor’s office. The man was bald and pasty-faced. “What did you expect?” I said. “Albert Einstein? Someone like you?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Tell me about your headache, Mr. Aronson.” The small man sat behind an enormous mahogany desk and we sat in chairs facing him. His office was spacious with an examining table at the far end.
