Ed King (12 page)

Alice and Dan liked the Chosen People concept so much that they put Eddie in Beth David’s half-day kindergarten. On his first afternoon, he didn’t want to go, and cried, and clung to the car-door handle. Alice bribed him by saying that after school he’d get a toy and ice cream, and he calmed down and went to Beth David.

As it turned out, kindergarten wasn’t bad. Finger painting, building blocks, story time, and kickball were good; playing house, nap time, and singing weren’t. Clay was so-so, the matching game was good because he knew the answers, and what happened on a kibbutz was okay because they saw a movie about it. Eddie felt impatient saying his
bracha
before he could guzzle grape juice and wolf down his challah, but he liked to give
tzedakah
, because the sound of a coin clanking against the wall of the can was satisfying. The money was going to plant trees in the Promised Land, as shown on a poster labeled “Miracle in the Desert” taped to the classroom door. Eddie liked the idea of those trees, but he didn’t like it when Miss Cohen got out her guitar and, sitting on the floor, made them sing, in Hebrew, “Hatikvah,” the national anthem of Israel. Even worse, they had to make hats out of construction paper and wear them, along with sheets, for little plays about Abraham and Moses. Worst of all was Israeli dancing with Rabbi Weisfeld, who turned pink doing the
hora
.

“Not enough academics,” said Dan, after an open house in Miss Cohen’s room. “Whatever happened to the ABCs? Since when does Ed need Joan Baez Junior if he’s already reading like a fourth-grader? They’re charging us tuition like he’s going to Harvard and this is what we get?”

“I agree,” said Alice. “She’s too young.”

They moved him, briefly, to a Montessori school, and when that turned out not to be a good fit, they found a school for the academically gifted whose motto was “Great oaks from little acorns grow.” Acorn Academy’s teachers were specially trained to help exceptional children become more exceptional. Eddie was finally where he was supposed to be—with twelve other kids like him.

Acorn Academy encouraged extracurricular activity, so Alice and Dan added Tuesday piano lessons, Wednesday modern Hebrew, and Sunday mornings—for both Simey and Eddie—at the Jewish Community Center, which offered tumbling and basketball. Within three months, Eddie was playing “The Pirate’s Hornpipe” at a recital and mopping up the other boys—including Simey—when it came to layups on a six-foot hoop (“Havlicek Junior,” his coach called him). Simey showed little interest in sports, but it was apparent early that he was extremely intelligent. Simey, in fact, was a veritable whiz kid, prodigious in his ability to multiply long numbers without pencil and paper. Given his unusual brilliance, Dan and Alice paid for testing to determine if he should start school early. A specialist at the University of Washington thought Simey had “exceptional blood flow in his cerebellum” as well as a trait often found in prodigies known as “the rage to master.” In other words, the answer to the early schooling question was, as Dan put it, “an unqualified definitely”—Simey should join Ed at Acorn Academy, despite being seventeen months younger. So he did.

The next year, Ed and Simey went to Gladys Glen, with its special program for gifted children and its ten-acre wooded campus. Monday through Friday, Alice drove them to Bellevue at eight and picked them up at four-thirty. This meant no more Wednesday modern Hebrew, so Dan and Alice shelled out for Saturday school at Beth David. A tradition developed for after Saturday school: the Kings ate corned beef on rye with potato salad for lunch, followed by macaroons and halvah from Israel.

Simey and Eddie each got a weekly allowance of twenty-five cents, which Dan parceled out on Saturday mornings in the form of two dimes and a nickel. The nickels were meant for
tzedakah
at temple, but the dimes were theirs to spend as they wanted, and what Eddie wanted, each week, was a package of Sugar Babies and a comic book. Always on Saturday he was impatient for these purchases, and begged Dan, on the way
home from Beth David, to stop at a mom-and-pop store where, before long, he and Simey were expected. Simey took forever choosing candy, but that was perfectly fine with Eddie, because it gave him time to read parts of comic books while standing in front of a display rack. Back in the car, the boys tore into their candy and stuffed it down greedily. Eddie usually had his comic book read, or partially read, before Dan pulled into the driveway. If he hadn’t finished his intense examination of the latest
Adventure, Action
, or
Green Lantern
, he sat there deaf to Dan’s entreaties—“I want you inside
right now
, little man”—and read and finished his candy. Simey went in to watch cartoons, and Dan and Alice prepared the Saturday delicatessen lunch, so that a sandwich and potato salad, on a paper plate, would be waiting for Eddie when he came inside to reread his comic book while eating.

Sometimes Eddie tossed out snippets about the Legion of Super-Heroes. From the back seat he would let Dan know that he didn’t like Triplicate Girl, or that Colossal Boy was in love with Shrinking Violet. At school, Eddie wrote illustrated stories about Cosmic Boy, who creates magnetic fields, and Lightning Lad, who’s killed but resurrected. In her end-of-the-year report, his teacher wrote, “Eddie has a terrific imagination and a real talent for drawing with crayons. I would venture to guess that for him the Legion of Super-Heroes is something like the panoply of Greek or Norse gods, and I have not discouraged his interest in this direction. His absorption in these figures has been a gateway for him to art, narrative, and much creativity. The resurrection of ‘Lightning Lad’ in particular, I thought, was truly wonderful, and indicative of a mind that is stretching itself. For Eddie to be playing so powerfully with myth and story at such a young age is, I think, an excellent sign. I’ve enjoyed listening to him as he explains the meanings behind his pictures.”

That summer, the Kings spent three days in Pasadena and a fourth, much anticipated, at Disneyland. As soon as they entered, here came the Dapper Dans, strolling along Main Street in their candy-stripe vests singing “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” Eddie, though, kept looking for Legion of Super-Heroes figures, even after Alice had explained, twice, that there were none of those at Disneyland. “A different company,” Dan added, exasperated. “The Super-Heroes aren’t Disney, they’re DC Comics, which is owned by Warner Brothers, which is a Disney competitor. Now, look at those animatronic bears there, boys—they’re wearing what look to be actual bear hides.”

“Where can we see the Super-Heroes?” answered Eddie.

In the first grade, Eddie decided that, though comic books remained glorious, baseball cards reigned supreme. Baseball players, like superheroes, wore colorful uniforms, but they also wore five o’clock shadows. Eddie filed his cards in shoe boxes. Dan encouraged him to create a special category for Jewish ballplayers, but what Eddie really liked were MVP cards. There was a “Classic” series of MVP cards that a collector could compile with luck, cash, and determination, and Eddie, by Hanukkah, was dead-set on filling his few remaining gaps—’34’s Mickey Cochrane, ’43’s Spud Chandler, ’58’s Jackie Jensen, and a frustrating three in a row, ’63–’65, Elston Howard, Brooks Robinson, and Zoilo Versalles. On the first night of Hanukkah, after fidgeting through Dan’s recitation of the three blessings in Hebrew and English and Alice’s candle lighting, Eddie tore into the fifty packs of Topps his mother had wrapped in festive paper. Cochrane, Robinson, and Versalles, yes; Chandler, Jensen, and Howard, no. “Don’t give up,” advised Dan. “You hit five hundred on opening night of an eight-game home stand.”

Next it was movies. Somehow, Eddie knew his movies. On Friday nights it was mandatory for Dan and Alice to take their sons to see, for example,
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
. All four Kings went to a matinee of
Fiddler on the Roof
and to the opening night of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. By early February, Eddie was putting his Oscar predictions in writing, hitting on
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
for visual effects and
Fiddler
for cinematography, but striking out on all the big awards, which left him irate. “It wasn’t me,” he said, before going to bed. “The Academy made idiotic choices.”

Then Eddie wanted to play football. After his first game, in the car, on the way home, he said to Dan, “I hate playing guard, I want to be quarterback, how come I can’t be quarterback?”

“Are you good at quarterback?”

“
Way
better than Timmy.”

“I don’t know why, then,” Dan said. “If you’re better than Timmy, and I’m sure you are, how come your coach plays you at guard?”

“It’s
unfair
,” said Eddie. “I should be quarterback.”

There were also problems, that spring, in baseball, because Eddie couldn’t seem to get a hit. An optometrist said he needed glasses for nearsightedness. “No, you look very handsome,” countered Alice, when Eddie tried some on for the first time and declared, “I look like a retard.” The
optometrist’s assistant explained that, for sports, glasses could be secured with an adjustable band. “I don’t want an adjustable band,” said Eddie. “I don’t want glasses. I’m not wearing glasses.” Alice had him fitted for contact lenses.

Where Eddie truly excelled was in the swimming pool. His swollen foot was no longer swollen, just a little thicker than the other foot. Each summer he became more dominant in the water; each summer he smashed club records. He began to call himself Ed, not Eddie, and recoiled now when his parents called him
Edeleh
. Still, it was fun for Dan and Alice to sit on bleachers—while Simey ran around with other kids—and watch Ed, in his racing suit, outdistance the field in the butterfly and freestyle, and anchor the swim club’s medley relay team to a Seattle private-club historical best. With his rangy shoulders and narrow waist, wringing out his hands and curling his toes around the edge of the starter’s block before the firing of the pistol, Eddie gave Dan a new take on his birth parents, who were present—for Dan—at a moment like this, as the true font of Ed’s success. Alice was less prone to give them the credit and believed that her efforts in getting Ed to 6 a.m. turnouts—not missing one—was essential to his glory. She glowed with each of Ed’s swimming triumphs, enjoying them, sometimes, with tears in her eyes. Now when she called Pop he liked to say, “Put Mr. Mark Spitz on the telephone with his
zaydie
, I want to ask him how are his seven gold medals and if the girls already are crazy for him.”

The girls were; Ed King was popular. There were two bathing beauties on his swim team, both older, who liked to sit with Ed on adjacent towels during meets, play Crazy Eights with him in the clubhouse, double up against him during splash fights, and alternately challenge him to games of tetherball (high-speed and giddy bouts, Alice saw, from her post in a chaise longue under an umbrella). There was a well-developed girl at Saturday school who turned crimson in Ed’s presence and who showed up to watch him play basketball at the Jewish Community Center, where Ed commonly scored twenty or more points while leading his team to summer victories. There was a girl down the block, a year older than Ed, who was fanatical about music and had a record collection, a stereo, and posters of David Bowie and Patti Smith in her bedroom. And there was a girl from school who called to ask him if he wanted to join a group of friends for a trip to the Northgate Mall. Ed went, and they wandered—Ed
and two blondes. After lingering on a bench, where they ate bags of French fries, they saw
Jaws
. Ed sat between his tandem dates, holding in his lap a box of popcorn into which they dug their fingers, giving him a hard-on.

Ed and Simon now attended Gladys Glen’s new middle school, where, in the back of a math classroom sat four bulky computers—a first in the area for students their age. There they discovered video games, and because they talked about video games so much, and pointed their parents in the right direction, Dan and Alice bought them a
Pong
console for Hanukkah. The boys wore out the paddles within three months, damaged the television, and made so much noise playing
Pong
—hooting, hollering, arguing, even screaming—that Dan and Alice had to institute a
Pong
curfew that began, on school nights, at ten. Ed and Simon started going to an arcade on weekend afternoons to play
Jet Fighter
,
Shark Jaws
,
Stunt Cycle
, and
Gun Fight
, competing to see their initials digitally emblazoned next to the term “Hi Score.”

Suddenly Ed’s Bar Mitzvah loomed. He had to meet with Rabbi Weisfeld to go over his Torah and Haftorah portions and to discuss their interpretations. Weisfeld, keeping a straight face, grilled Ed mercilessly. Knowing that the boy wasn’t born a King, he was impressed all the more when Ed memorized with such rapidity that, as he put it while lauding this stellar student to his parents, “not even
a yeshiva bucher
could do better.” “It’s easy for me,” Ed explained, when they passed on such rabbinic compliments.

Five hundred fifty people filled the sanctuary on the day of Ed’s Bar Mitzvah. There he stood at the head of the congregation, in a new suit and gleaming shoes—the birth son of Walter Cousins and Diane Burroughs and the adopted son of agnostic Jews—reading, in Hebrew, about the ritual for cleansing lepers, which included pigeons, hyssop, shaved hair, and dead lambs. When that was done he read the speech Alice had slaved over for three nights: “My Torah portion from Leviticus 14 and 15 tells us that God, in his infinite wisdom, makes way for the return of the healed soul into the community of Israel. Why one
ephah
of flour mixed with water as a grain offering? Why does God allow for either two turtledoves
or
two young pigeons, according to what the sick man can afford?” He paused to let those questions sink in. Almost everybody was smiling at Ed, and his view from the pulpit was of widely
approving faces. “Today, in our world, questions like these don’t make any sense, not if we ask them literally,” he read. “It is their meaning and symbolism that we are meant to explore. God always has a deeper purpose, and when He says that a priest should put the blood of a lamb on the tip of the right ear of a leper, and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot, we need to ask ourselves what God is really saying.”