Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (16 page)

A math tutor appeared after my first two weeks at Baker Hill Elementary School because a teacher commented to Bernie that, although I was very bright, I wasn’t as well prepared as the other students in that subject. My father, being a writer, had encouraged me to read books above my age level; as a result, Bernie received glowing reports from the English, history and science teachers. Especially the latter. My mother had pushed science on me. In addition to her belief in communism, she felt the future of humanity would also depend on our ability to conquer space. She encouraged me to read lots of young adult books on earth science and often took me to the Hayden Planetarium where she plied me with pamphlets and later quizzed me, pretending I was a contestant on
The $64,000 Question
—only I wasn’t being slipped the answers. I got Hershey kisses instead of money.

How do I know what the teachers said about me? Bernie was direct. He called me into his study after my first two weeks at school, pointed to the deep red leather armchair opposite his oak desk, and beamed. “Your English teacher says you’re reading at a twelfth-grade level. Your history teacher says you know more about the Civil War than she does. And your science teacher thinks you’ll make an excellent candidate to try for a Westinghouse. He’s a little concerned that the local public high school won’t be strong enough in the sciences for you. He says that what he’s struggling to get the rest of your class interested in is like kindergarten material for you. Oh,” here Bernie looked up from his notes, “and he says you beat everyone in the chess club. Not the school tournament. You arrived too late for that. But he said you beat their best player.” Uncle grinned and added, “Easily.”

I nodded casually, preoccupied by my survey of Bernie’s study, a room that was usually kept closed off.

“You didn’t tell me.” Uncle sounded accusatory.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The study was all deep colors. Recessed shelves were filled with sets of leather-bound editions of the Great Books (they were never read, of course); the carpet was maroon; the curtains were another shade of dark red. The furniture was heavy and square. The theme was blood and history. It was my uncle’s throne room. His dark round face had the serenity of a king’s. He wore bifocals to read from his notes, but he looked strong and his cello voice sounded omniscient. “You’re apologizing for not bragging?” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

He removed his bifocals and leaned away from his notes. “No, boy, you don’t understand. You didn’t tell me anything about school when I asked you. That’s why I made a special trip to talk to your teachers. I assumed you were having trouble adjusting. You know your aunts predicted that you’d have difficulties coming from a public city school and competing,” he grinned, “with our brilliant Great Neck students.”

I nodded; I thought I would too. I was, in fact, not doing well in math, mostly because all year they had been studying other base number systems than the decimal and at P.S. 173 we were still working on simple multiplication. “They’re pretty smart,” I said. They were certainly articulate. And sophisticated: they talked almost like grown-ups about sports, television, music, movies and theater. But, oddly, almost none of them seemed to know how anything was made or why it worked the way it did. And politically they were babies: they believed President John Kennedy would never lie and that racism only existed in the deep South. “I can catch up,” I said, worried that Uncle thought it was too hard for me because I was behind in math.

“Catch up?” Uncle rubbed his forehead, exasperated. “I was being sarcastic. I keep forgetting you don’t know me very well. I was kidding you, boy. The children around here aren’t smarter than you. You’re smarter than them. You need a little tutoring in math, but even your math teacher thinks you’re very bright. She said you’ve almost caught up on the whole year in these two weeks. The other teachers think you’re the brightest kid they’ve got. I sent for your records—I know you’re tracked into the special progress classes at P.S. 173—but I wanted to get a look at your IQ. Can you believe it, I had to call—?” Uncle waved his hand, saying goodbye to this detail. “That’s not important. I got it today. You’re at the genius level.”

That startled me. The word genius had a special significance. My mother used it as the ultimate compliment. She told me there were merely a handful of geniuses in all of world history. In conversation her list of geniuses was brief: they were Marx, Einstein, Mozart, Tolstoy, and Ernie Kovacs—the only one I knew of who appeared on television.

“I don’t understand why your mother didn’t tell me. Or your father. He was always proud of you, I have to give him that. But what were they thinking of? Letting your brain pickle in that …” Bernie shut his eyes and gently rubbed them. “Solidarity with the working class,” he mumbled.

Rise with your class, not out of it
—my Daddy’s phrase. He had beaten those
Gusanos,
beaten them quick. Uncle Bernie himself said that someone he knew—a very powerful man in the Democratic Party, I overheard Uncle Harry explain to his wife—believed Kennedy was going to lose in ’64 unless he did something to overshadow the humiliation Castro had handed him. Bernie had said, “Jack has to prove he can stand up to the Communists.” (Bernie usually called the President by his first name; I naively assumed they were friends.) By the time I had this audience with Uncle I felt more encouraged about my future. My parents weren’t defeated. Hang on, I thought. Wait for me. I’m coming to help.

“My school was okay, Uncle,” I said. I was pleased Uncle realized I was smart, but I didn’t take the IQ test seriously. I knew my mother had worked in the PTA to stop that testing because it wasn’t fair to the poor. Made sense to me. After all, I knew more than other kids because my parents read books. They weren’t rich, exactly, but they had the education of rich people and they didn’t have to work in what my father called mind-numbing jobs. (With apologies to the current rage in psychology for testing, although modern culturally neutral IQ tests are based on different criteria, they still have a conventional standard of what intelligence is, and I take their results no more seriously than the older clearly biased versions. So do, I believe, the more thoughtful educators and child experts of today, who know that such tests measure only one piece of the puzzle of human capacity and achievement. However, in Great Neck in 1961, a high IQ was regarded as a sacred fact, almost an obligation.)

“But you prefer your new school, don’t you?”

I nodded without much conviction. I didn’t. What I had liked about school in New York City was the company of other children. The learning and studying was uncomfortable. My parents had showed me on many occasions that what my teachers told me, or what was in the books (especially history books), were simplified (and in some ways incorrect) versions of grown-up knowledge. I wanted to get right to the grown-up learning.

“Aren’t you happier with children who are as bright as you?” Uncle laughed at himself. “I mean, at least closer to being as bright as you.”

I thought of them as brighter, I really did. They knew what clothes were cool. They knew sophisticated expressions. One girl said ciao instead of goodbye and I remember how impressed I was that she knew Chinese. And, most of all, they were brimming with what I interpreted as self-confidence. They believed they were right even when they were dead wrong. Sometimes they convinced me I might be wrong when I knew I couldn’t be. And when finally proven wrong, they showed no embarrassment at their previously mistaken confidence. But I didn’t like them, because what they respected were all the wrong things: they were interested in me because of whose nephew I was; they were nicer if you got As than if you got B’s; they were mercilessly derisive if you messed up in athletic games and slavish if you were expert. These were bourgeois values. I knew that much from my father and mother, I knew these children were overwhelmed by bourgeois qualities—competitive, acquisitive, and snobbish. I didn’t blame them for their faults. Ruth had often told me people were inevitably going to be hard-hearted and materialistic in a society whose mechanism depended on inequitable rewards. (Stalinists have a behaviorist view of humanity.) Despite my disapproval I was attracted to my schoolmates’ smarts, beauty and wealth; I wanted their respect and I wanted to best them at everything. But I didn’t like them. After I wiped out the top chess player in the school I accepted warm congratulations from kids who had been disdainful of me only an hour before, walked down the hall to the boys’ room, found the stall farthest from the swinging door, flushed the toilet, cried, banged the door and cried some more. “I hate them,” I whispered into the rushing water. But I dared not complain to Uncle. I couldn’t risk being sent to live with one of my aunts. After all, I had been raised by Marxists and I knew about the power of Capital—Uncle Bernie was the Tsar of the Rabinowitz family and I meant to stand beside his throne.

My uncle’s domestic routine changed. He arranged to be home more often. The weekend after the IQ revelation he took me to his country club to show me off. He provoked a chess game between me and the grandson of the owner of a chain of New York retail stores. (Bernie and this Retail King were soon to be competitors.) Bernie stood behind me throughout the game and watched, although he didn’t know anything about chess. His presence dried up my throat and knotted my stomach. Pieces blurred, diagonals wavered, and I felt doomed. But I couldn’t surrender to the pressure. I reminded myself how much was at stake, that I had to win to keep Bernie’s favor.

My opponent was tough, as tough as Joseph. He was familiar with the opening I tried; I couldn’t remember the right moves because of my nerves, and I got in trouble.

The Retail King gloated. He said something to indicate he was sure of his grandson’s victory. From behind I heard my uncle’s cello rasp: an angry and guttural scrape of his bow. “It ain’t over yet,” he said. His hand spread over my head, fingers massaging my skull so that the skin shifted like the loose fur of a dog. “Never give up,” he whispered. I remembered Joseph telling me while we lay in bed my last night in Washington Heights that he thought when I fell behind I was too quick to counterattack. He said I was so good at defense he might not be able to beat me if I simply dug in and forced him to prove his advantage was a winning one. I tried that this time, adopting passive tactics, working to relieve my positional congestion, and overdefending the obvious point of attack. My opponent hesitated to go for an all-out King’s side assault and gradually his advantage began to stall.

The Retail King became impatient with his grandson. “This is going on forever and nothing’s happening,” he complained in a mumble. “I thought you said you were winning.”

“He
was,”
I answered. Uncle and his friends laughed heartily. (There were two or three other club members who took an interest in our match.)

“I still am,” my opponent said. “I’m up a pawn.”

“So what?” I said, contemptuously. “You don’t know what to do with it.” I had seen a winning attack for him half a dozen moves ago, a line I would have been glad to try if our positions were reversed. I learned a lesson about defense that day, namely search with an enemy’s eyes for your defeat and then decide your strategy.

He attacked at last, only now it was rash. My overdefended position recoiled at him. In a few moves he was destroyed. There was something magical and tragic about the turnaround. Yet I felt unaccountably sad at the devastation, the rageful vengeance of my cramped pieces once they were liberated. I had never enjoyed a win so little.

Uncle, however, was gleeful. I was surprised at the childish way he goaded the Retail King. “Told you it wasn’t over. That’s always been your problem, Murray. You take things for granted.”

“Come on,” the Retail King said to his grandson. “We’re late.” He yanked his heir out of the chair. I was disturbed by so harsh a reaction to failure. After all, they were in a direct blood line, not the more distant relationship I had with Bernie.

Uncle rubbed my hair, put an arm around my shoulder as we walked to the valet parking, and said loud enough for the Retail King and
my
foe to hear, “You’re a born winner, boy.” Once in the car he asked if there was a special toy, some treat he could buy me on the way home. I said no. I didn’t feel deserving. There was something ugly to me in my victory. I couldn’t identify what and that also bothered me. Uncle said, “Virtue is its own reward, eh? I’ll say this for Ruthie. She didn’t spoil you. She didn’t make the mistake I made.”

He asked me to explain what had happened in the game. I told him about Joseph and his chess books and the principle of overdefense. The next day, when I got home from school two boxes were waiting for me. They contained almost every chess book in print as well as a handsome wooden set and a wallet-sized travel set that could be folded flat. The latter was made of black leather with my initials in gold. Inside the wallet were bright red and white plastic pieces fitted with magnets so they couldn’t slip.

As soon as Bernie showed his pride and interest in my intellectual abilities, my aunts, uncles and cousins (including grouchy Daniel) were more than friendly—they became attentive to and somewhat worried by my opinions. Wearing the robes of Uncle’s favor and approval I was treated with a miniaturized version of the deference and awe accorded him.

The exception was my cousin Julie, beautiful twelve-year-old Julie, Uncle Harry’s youngest. She had reached an early maturity, with breasts and hips, and a gleam of subtle mockery in her eyes for her older male cousins. She had treated me as an equal when I was the family alien. She continued to treat me as an equal in my new role as Uncle Bernie’s Special Project.

My first full experience of the new family attitude to me was a gathering on May 19th to celebrate my uncle’s fifty-fifth birthday. I used to move among them without being noticed much, except for the occasional remark that I had my father’s Latin looks, a comment made in a dubious tone and that, then and now, I associate with racism. In fact, my black hair, brown eyes, thick eyebrows, and tanned skin could have been inherited from Papa Sam and Uncle Bernie as easily as from Francisco and Grandpa Pepín.