Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (13 page)

“Daddy’s not coming home?” The rim of the tub was a precarious and uncomfortable seat. I braced myself with my hands. The porcelain was cool and massive. “Is that what it means?” I asked. I seemed to feel nothing. I know my mother expected me to be upset. Obviously, I didn’t really understand what was going on. “Use your peasant brain,” to choose just one example of my confusion, seemed like an insult to me. I understood peasants to be primitive people, only a cut above Cro-Magnon Man; indeed, peasants were less impressive since they were alive today, demonstrably inferior to other human beings, whereas Cro-Magnon was the peak of intelligence for his time. And what trouble was going to find me? More men who wanted to pee on my mother? Those terrifying Cuban anti-Communists (they were called by my father
Gusanos,
which means worms) and the CIA, deadly agents of the most powerful government on earth, were going to be defeated by an eight-year-old’s peasant brain? Or by my hard-headedness? And why was my father proud of our primitive ancestors? I didn’t want to emulate them: I wanted to be like him, a handsome intellectual.

But I knew even then, had known since that night in Tampa, that there was a part of Francisco I didn’t want in me, and I also believed, although I immediately shoved it out of sight, down below into the damp and unlit basement, that his reason for staying in Cuba was more cowardice than self-sacrifice. I knew what I felt and believed and then in an instant, I never knew that I had ever thought such a thought. O, miracle of miracles from the creature that thinks: we move inexorably toward truth, and on arrival, shut our eyes.

“That’s what it means, honey,” my mother said. She had no warmth in her tone, hardly any coloration. She could have been a recorded phone company voice, explaining that the number was disconnected. “Daddy won’t be coming home for a while. But he’s fine and he loves us.” The letter went back into my father’s chinos. “Don’t be frightened,” she said and stood up. She extended her hand. “It’s bedtime.”

Oh no, I was certainly not going to be frightened. Of what? What was there to be frightened of?

Poor woman. She was lost. I took my mother’s hand. To me she was beauty, sustenance, comfort. Even in the torn shirt, with the target on her back, swimming in my father’s pants, I put my hand in hers with confidence.

My room had only the nude ceiling fixture, a triangle of three bulbs that spread a yellow light, a sickly glare, as if the sun were dying. Ruth had taken down my shelves of books, comics, baseball cards, and games in order to paint the walls blue. She had done one wall and then decided the color was wrong, that it ought to remain white as before. But it was still undone, since painting a room white bored her. I had one wall of blue, three of peeling yellowed white, and my possessions were in a disorganized heap, sometimes covered by a sheet and sometimes not, depending on whether Ruth had vowed that morning to do the job. I looked at this wreck while I undressed and Ruth turned down my bed. No wonder Mrs. Stein wouldn’t allow Joseph to play at my house. Maybe it had nothing to do with her nuttiness. Maybe it was us.

I had never seriously considered that we were the weirdos. Despite our political unorthodoxy, my father’s lack of a typical job, I had a heroic image of my parents and I trusted their assertion that I was strong, fast, smart and good. It was gracious on my part to be friendly to boys like Joseph, wasn’t it? But now, as I put on my faded Superman pajama bottoms (I didn’t wear a top), I saw that we were the oddballs. Everyone else was a happy American, not enemies of the government like us. Everyone else’s mother wore dresses and cooked dinners. Everyone else’s father went to work in the morning and came home at night to talk about the Yankees, not Dostoevsky or the Third International. I wasn’t the envy of my friends, the delight of my teachers, the wonderful exception. I was the unfortunate kid, the geek, surrounded not by genuine regard, but the kindness of pity.

I don’t remember when my tears started, whether I was already into bed and had been tucked in, or whether it was just before. My mother said, in that flat voice, “You’re crying,” and got into bed with me, gathering me into the warm hollow of her curved body, her head arching over me, her legs covering and entwining with mine. She no longer had the chinos on. Perhaps she had gone out for a while and resumed painting, perhaps this took place in the middle of the night, and I had woken weeping. I don’t remember exactly. The Brooks Brothers shirt I can recall. Its fabric, smelling faintly of my father and faintly of my mother and strongly of paint, was somehow both soft and coarse. My tears wetted a large circle on the upper ridge of her left breast. Her nipple emerged, a truncated pillar, rising in the soaked material.

After a while I stopped crying. The room was dark. Harsh light from the street’s amber lamps spread through my Venetian blinds. They undulated with the breeze; shadows of their thick latticework moved over the wall, the partly open closet door, and the naked unlit bulbs.

Lying on the damp of my tears became uncomfortable. I tried to turn away from Ruth and the shirt, but her arms locked and wouldn’t let me.

“Stay!” she implored in a whisper. She pushed at me with one foot, digging under my legs, and, claw-like, used her other foot to gather me, pressing my legs, pelvis and hips against her. She undulated like the shadows, and her big lips, dry and hot, manufactured soft kisses on my forehead. Moans—I mistook them at first for sobs—escaped between her caresses. I felt the looseness in her sex. At least I remember I did. She rocked and kissed and shuddered until her body went rigid. Her muscles clenched and she jerked a few times. The bedsprings squealed violently; yet her embrace felt gentle, only a breeze that moved the shadows across my unpainted room. After that, she lapsed into sleep. I slid out from her relaxed embrace, found the chinos in a lump by the bathroom, and stole my father’s letter.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR
Transference

D
URING THE REST OF MY EIGHTH YEAR
R
UTH’S STATE OF MIND WORSENED
. Most of the time she communicated with me by writing messages on a yellow legal pad. I had to answer in kind with the red pencil she offered or simply nod my agreement. (I never disagreed: you don’t talk back to a mute.) When our written conversation was over, she tore off the sheet from the pad and methodically folded the paper into a square. She stared intently, pressed her lips tight, and ripped the square into smaller squares. Her face had a look of fury and concentration. She gathered the litter of yellow pieces into a cup made by her palms, carried them before her as if they were holy into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. While the water rushed out, she checked under and around the bowl to make sure none had fluttered onto the black and white web of tiles.

The messages weren’t worthy of secrecy. They were: “Put your dirty clothes in the hamper in my closet.” Or: “Don’t forget to close the refrigerator door.” Or, every woman’s favorite injunction to men: “Don’t leave the seat up after using the john.” It was absurd, heartbreaking and scary.

One winter night, at bedtime, she wrote, “Painting your room. Sleep in mine.” While I got into pajamas, she pushed my bed away from the wall and covered it with an old sheet, streaked by colors she had tried out elsewhere. She moved brushes, cans of paint, a ladder, and other paraphernalia into my room. But no painting was ever done there; and she had finished the rest of the apartment.

My parents had a king-sized bed, so huge that our sharing it for a few nights might not appear odd. Besides, we had no visitors. Ruth deliberately quarreled with her Communist Party friends, presumably as part of the need to separate publicly from my father. She had a non-political friend, the mother of one of my buddies, but she fought with her as well, on some pretext—I never heard that detail. I was allowed to play outside with my friends for an hour after school and some weekend mornings but I was forbidden to visit at their apartments or invite them home, because her paranoia was galloping. She explained on her yellow pad: “Adults are dangerous. Keep everything secret. Go to school and come home. Keep quiet around grown-ups. They could put me in jail.” She didn’t bother me every night; not often, in fact. And was it bothering? How I long to use the jargon that would clothe my nakedness for those of you lucky enough to be shocked by it: I was glad of the security of my mother’s bed and I enjoyed the warmth of her body. And I did my best—believe me, it was my best—to ignore it when that body, swishing the sheets and creaking the springs, became too animated for comfort alone. I nestled deeper into the pillow, reaching for unconsciousness. In fact, sometimes I did nod off while she moved against me with that insistent, furtive rubbing.

And what did I feel? Or rather, what was I aware of feeling?

I was the two-sided boy: the marred downcast face of a geek I saw in the mirror and the outward beam of a happy boy shown to teachers and friends. Sometimes my performance of normality and happiness even fooled me. I would forget for hours at a time, while with the children at school, that I was not a child. I was the revolutionary-traitor, the fatherless-father, the boy-lover, the terrified-strongman.

My prison was not without parole. I did captain the softball team; I was allowed to play in the schoolyard after class in the various pickup games of stickball, touch football and so on. Contrary to what you might expect I did well at school. My grades were excellent. I was elected to the student council. I was considered to be an exceptionally mature and responsible boy. The explanation is widely understood by child psychologists today, although that does not necessarily make a sufferer easier to spot. Back then only a few specialists (and not all, by any means) would have suspected my imitation of harmony. A truly unhappy child, the child whose parents do not play their roles, knows best how to mimic the behavior of responsible grown-ups and has the greatest motivation to do so. The particular abuse I endured was that my mother cast me as father and lover. She didn’t attack my ego: her abuse wasn’t that active. She ignored me, refused to nurture the real me into manhood, forced me to be an adult-manqué and take care of her, in every sense of that word. For long periods of time children are capable of this fakery. (Usually they become incapable as adolescents or adults, when something more difficult than precocity is asked, when real maturity is demanded by friends and lovers.) Eventually, of course, the facade cannot be supported; cracks and stresses on the flimsy supports multiply, and sooner or later it collapses. But that doesn’t happen right away and, I’m convinced, it is this phase—the cover-up—which does the most harm.

My mother would pull herself together from time to time. We visited Aunt Sadie and Cousin Daniel occasionally. I was especially enjoined to tell them nothing. I obeyed gladly: the last person I would have admitted my situation to was Daniel.

And, by the way, when I speak of my situation, I mean the facts as explicated to me by my mother, namely that my father was a revolutionary in exile, a defender of Cuba, preparing for the day when the corrupt government of the United States would be overthrown. I was unaware that my mother’s nighttime embraces were wrong, in the sense that they were the hurtful actions of a traumatized adult for which I bore no responsibility. Nevertheless, I also knew I wasn’t supposed to talk about them; I knew they made me uncomfortable … sometimes. Even if Ruth had released me from my vows of secrecy, I wouldn’t have spoken. In my mind I was a full participant. I didn’t pull away; I made no fuss about sleeping in her bed. I wanted to stay. I kept the secret for my own reasons. The thought of losing her, including what I didn’t like about her, filled my head with panic and resolve.

We did not attend Seder in 1961 at my uncle’s, although by April Ruth seemed to be improving. She was grooming herself again, circling ads in the newspaper, going on a few job interviews. We were broke. The money my father had left behind in the bank was used up. I believe—I’m uncertain about this detail—that Ruth had been offered part-time administrative work at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and planned to say yes.

On April 15th, 1961, my ninth birthday, Ruth didn’t throw a party. She wrote on the legal pad: “We’ll go to the movies and have a cake. But no friends. Children are good but can’t trust parents.”

It was a Saturday. She took me to the Museum of Modern Art where, in a narrow, stark white screening room they showed Charles Chaplin movies to serious-minded film lovers. My mother enjoyed herself. For the first time since Tampa, I heard her laugh long and loud. And she cried, of course. That was almost as unusual as her laughter. She whispered to me again and again, “He’s a genius. Isn’t this great?”

I hated Chaplin. I thought the pathetic tramp grotesque, the absence of dialogue a dreary reminder of my home’s inarticulate misery. I wanted to see a James Bond movie—I think
Dr. No
was playing then. Friends of mine had been given the 007 attaché kit for their birthdays. It included a plastic copy of Bond’s Walther PPK that fired red bullets. My friends let me play in their hide-and-seek spy games, but I had to hide all the time, since I had nothing with which to defend myself. Worse, I had nothing to shoot at them.

I told Ruth I thought Chaplin was great. I watched her out of the corner of my eye and echoed her laughs, smiling when she turned her head to confirm that I was enjoying it.

“You have such good taste,” she told me over my birthday dessert at Rumpelmayer’s. “Is it good?” she asked about the piece of dark chocolate cake she had ordered for me. She had vetoed my request for Black Forest saying it was vulgar. (I liked cherries—still do.)

“Yes,” I lied. The dark chocolate was too rich and too bitter for my unsophisticated child’s palate. (Still is.)

We crossed the street to Central Park. Ruth found an empty bench, in an odd spot, near a stone bridge. (I can’t find it today.) Occasionally a bicyclist went by; once, a couple walked past. She fell silent each time until they were gone. She took my hand, looked toward the trees, not at me, and made a speech.