Herb Rudman comes in. In his upper seventies now, but still a lot of spring in his step. Retired professor at Michigan State., Professor Emeritus, as they call us. His wife, Florence, taught my kids in kindergarten over at the Glenn Cairn grammar school, what, twenty five years earlier.
A lovely, soft, simpatica woman.
One day I was talking to her after class when I’d gone to pick up Alexandra, my youngest from my second marriage, and we discovered that we were both originally from Chicago.
“That’s funny, I went to Wendell Philips High School in Chicago, and my Spanish teacher was this tiny little powerhouse of a woman named Elsie Fox. She couldn’t have anything to do with you?”
“Couldn’t she? She was my Aunt Elsie, my father’s sister. But her Spanish was terrible. She actually had an M.A. in French from the University of Chicago, never went to Latin America or Spain.”
“But she was good,” Florence (Flo) defended her.
“Good, but after being married to a Peruvian for ten years, I began to hear things differently.”
Flo laughing.
“I guess so.”
Flo dead now for maybe five years. Cancer.
I remember Herb coming up to me after services one night and giving me a hug, “I can’t live without Florence.”
But he’s managed. Had a girlfriend for a while. Alone again now, but he somehow pushes on.
I think of my grandmother and her indomitable spirit.
I never heard of a Jew committing suicide. They hang on to life, hang on, hang on, like my old Irish terrier, Toto, would hang on to a sock when I would play with him as if the sock were life itself.
“How are you doing anyhow?” asks Herb.
“Still a little blood.”
Prostate surgery. A little prelude to bigger surgery or seed implants. I’ve just been diagnosed for prostate cancer.
“I’ve heard there’s a high, high survival rate for seed implants. And it’s a million times less invasive.”
“When I had my surgery,” said Jack Rackman, two pews up, “Seed implants were just in their experimental phase, but I think I’d have them now.”
“I give you another fifteen years, minimum!” says Herb and gives me a little hug, goes down to the first row.
“Me too,” says Jack, his wife smiling in accord. Thin, beautiful. Aging, but still thin and beautiful, always looking Alice in Wonderlandish.
I don’t know. Eighty-five.
I’m two months away from seventy and it seems like the seventy years passed like a long, lazy afternoon. I don’t want to leave planet Earth and Reuben sandwiches and drives in the country.
Bernadete and I are in the last pew. Always the last pew. Why? Is there something in the back of my mind that is afraid of some sort of terrorist attack and I want to be able to run away as quickly and easily as possible?
But I’m home here in the middle of my tribe.
Not that I’m not at home in the middle of other tribes. Literally tribes. In the Andes, on the Peruvian coast, in the Amazon, among Arabs, the Irish, the English, walking around in Prague or Paris. There’s this internationalist virus that’s been injected in me all my life, but somehow the Jews have done a better job of socializing religion than anyone else as if the whole service were some sort of prelude to the retribalization of the oneg/coffee house afterwards.
Ah . . . here come the Sapers, Martin and Thelma.
I don’t know, for some reason they took me in as family years ago when I first joined the tribe.
Both in their mid-80’s, at the YMCA every morning for exercise classes.
He invented the carwash or something like that. All kinds of money. Live in this expensive, expansive house just on the edge of East Lansing. We usually spend Passover at their house, Passover, Chanukah, whatever. We never have anyone over to our house. My Brazilian M.D. wife couldn’t put together a kosher corned beef sandwich, much less any ritualistic feast. So we always invite the Sapers over to the University Club for Sunday brunch in order to pay them back.
He’s this tiny little rodentish-looking guy, all smiles and joviality, she’s white haired and gorgeous, trouble with her legs and back and hearing. He used to be in the army during the Vietnam War. I don’t know what he was, a colonel or something. Spent time going all over Southeast Asia. One huge tragedy in their lives. One of their sons was killed in a plane crash. His own plane.
And one of their other sons came to the funeral in his own plane . . . and crashed, too. So they both died within days of each other, and every year during the week of the deaths you can see the huge, heavy sadness all over their faces. It’s not something you get over, is it?
Two other sons though, one in the Boston area who I’ve never met, and another one who runs the fanciest, ritzy-snitzy art gallery in East Lansing and lives in the fanciest-wanciest house I’ve ever been in in the Glen Cairn area in East Lansing, Michigan, a few stone-throws away from Michigan State University.
“Hey, Martin! How ya doin’?” I say as they get in the pew in front of me.
“Just back from Connecticut. War veterans. Great time.”
“Too bad I’m not a war veteran, too,” smiles Thelma, “I always get left behind.”
I always want to give her a hug, kiss her on the head, but that’s not her style. Everyone else in the synagogue, yes, her no. Don’t ask me why.
Martin talks a little about Connecticut, about terrorism.
“It’s funny,” he says, “all the Moslems I’ve known were A-l. I’ve always thought of the Moslems as our first cousins, which they are, which they are . . .”
Suzanne and David Lowe come in.
There was a time when Suzanne and I were very close. I mean nothing happened, but there was all this radioactivity in the air whenever we’d see each other. Very sexy woman, sleek and long-haired. Some kind of job in the government, a lawyer who does the final revisions of all the laws passed by the legislatures in the state of Michigan. David, her second husband, from Rockford, Illinois, is assistant principal or something like that over at the most racially diverse high school that ever was, Eastern High School; is a fantastic artist who does these immense, bright, very Israeli-looking paintings, like something out of 3,000 B.C.E.
He’s getting a master’s degree from Michigan State in administration.
Bright guy, nice guy.
“We’re buying a house on Wildwood in East Lansing, an Alden Dow house. He was a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. Great place, the whole back of the house all windows, so it’s living, living in the garden . . .” I tell him.
“Great. So I can bicycle over. And I’ll expect at least a cup of coffee.”
“Of course.”
One of the reasons I want to get a place in East Lansing is to go back close to the university where I’ve spent most of my life.
“Can I come along?” asks Suzanne with a smile.
“Of course.”
Joan Gochberg comes in.
The pianist. No organ here, just a piano. At first I thought it was kind of strange with sacred music, but now I’ve gotten used to it.
She comes over, gives me a hug, I kiss her on the head.
Then Don, her husband, a professor in the English department, specialist in Shakespeare. A nice handshake from him. He looks good, but has aged a lot in the last year or so, just on the edge of retirement.
I see their daughter, Lisa, maybe once a week. She works in the library at MSU. Part-time. New baby, a one year old boy. I usually go over to her place and sit and talk and play with her new son.
We’re very close. In fact there was a time, before she got pregnant, and her husband didn’t want to have another baby, that....well, he looks exactly like me, a convert to Judaism, lots of Anglo-Irish blood in his background, just like in mine. Who would have known whose baby it was? And, in fact, her new son does look very, very much like me.
Don sits up front, David and Suzanne sit across the main aisle from us, Joan gets up on the altar (Bima in
Hebrew), sits down at the piano, and our new (temporary) student Rabbi comes out with a guitar in his hands, strapped over his shoulder.
“Shabbat Shalom . . .”
And services begin.
I’m home. I want to hear all about God in the heavens, the order of the universe, sanity, goodness, charity toward our neighbor, peace in the world, everything on track. I want to be surrounded by my fellow villagers, be part and parcel of a group that returns my warmth, that worries about me.
Ah, a latecomer, Pierre. He’s a circuit court judge. His wife has all sorts of ailments so she never comes with him. He comes to our pew, sits next to us, shakes hands. Always a little late.
Sometimes we have lunch with him down at the central market in Lansing, this old market that goes back half a century.
Handshakes, embraces, he sits down, we all stand up and the Cantor, a woman from Detroit, begins to lead us in the opening hymn that turns the Sabbath (Shabbat) into a bride: the center of Jewish Friday night services, Time itself turned into something sacred.
Thanks, Grandma, for getting me here, although this is the last place you would have ever expected me to be on a Friday night, or ever.
What a deceptive liar she was, what an actress.
Her and my whole family. Fakes, hypocrites. No wonder I’m so confessional; just in reaction to having lived inside lies all my life.
My grandmother was the central influence on my whole life, but a lot of other things made me what/who I am, not the least of them my childhood polio.
Age four.
Summer.
I’m out in Cicero with my grandmother as usual. A couple of weeks, a month. My parents glad to get rid of me. They can have all the sex they want without having to worry about me.
Just a one bedroom apartment. I used to sleep over in one corner next to the window that looked out on Cottage Grove Avenue and the streetcar tracks. I guess they used to do it (at least sometimes) with me sound asleep over in the corner. Or maybe while I was next door at my grandmother’s, after she had left Cicero.
But while she was still there, brother, they turned her into a summertime babysitter in a big way.
We’d go to the public swimming pool and I’d spend hours swimming, fooling around with the other kids. Only then one day, walking home, I felt “goofy.”
“I feel ‘goofy.’”
“What do you mean? You are goofy, fulltime,” my grandmother laughed.
“I mean sick-goofy,” touching my forehead. Hot. Sweatier than usual.
“Well,” reaching over and touching where I had touched, “you’re right. You’ve got a fever. I hate to tell you what I think . . . we probably never should have gone swimming.”
Not that she ever swam, just sat there like a great big birthday cake glorying in pool, sun, just being, being alive.
When we got home she called my father and he and my mother were out to Cicero within an hour.
He felt my forehead, stuck a thermometer under my tongue, then, graver than I had ever seen him before:
“Put your chin on your chest.”
“My chin on my chest?”
“Bend your head down, touch your chest with your chin.”
I tried. It should have been a snap, right? But I couldn’t.
“I can’t do it. And it hurts when I try.”
“OK . . .”
“It’s not polio?” my mother asked.
“I’m afraid it is.”
“Oh, God,” my mother going hysterical, her in her white sandals and white, red-rose printed dress, her hair all pulled back sleek and summerish, sunglasses on so she wouldn’t have to ever, ever, ever squint, creating the worst of all possible curses: wrinkles. Turning on her mother, “All that stuff in the paper about polio. I told you to not take him to the pool. I told you, I told you, I told you . . .”
“You never told me. I don’t remember you ever telling me—”
“Don’t remember, don’t remember, don’t remember. You’re getting senile.”
My father stepping in between them.
“OK, you two, all this bickering isn’t going to solve anything, let’s get in the car and take him down to Michael Reese.”
Michael Reese? Who was Michael Reese?
“Who’s Michael Reese?” I asked.
“It’s not a who, it’s a hospital,” my father answered sneeringly. I was supposed to know all the names of all the hospitals in the Chicago area, right?
“Thanks a lot, Ma,” my mother said sneeringly to her mother as left walked out the door of my grandmother’s great old arts-and-crafts bungalow, the house I loved most in the world.
“So long, Grandma,” I said as I went out the door, “thanks for everything.”
Her coming over and kissing me goodbye, a strong, heavy hug.
“It’s contagious,” my father warned her, but she didn’t care, I was her favorite, the center of the center of her very alone old age.
“I hope you’re wrong,” she said to my father, standing on the stone steps of the house as we got into our black Chevy.
Still Chevys. Just a few years before we graduated into Buicks.
I kissed my hand and then blew her the kiss, and she did the same back. We pulled out and started back east toward Chicago.
I felt horrible. Not just the heat, but pain in my neck now, as if there some sort of amorphous monster, some king of octopusish sea monster inside me, reaching its tentacles down into my whole system. My mother started to cry, me in the back seat trying to figure out what it was all about.
“You don’t think it’s . . .”
My father answering like some ancient Greek statue of Zeus suddenly come to life.
“It is.”
“Oh, my God.”
“What is it?” I asked from the backseat.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get all the latest medical technology, all that the latest medical technology has to offer,” stopping, then deciding to confess it all, put it on the table, which was his way of dealing with reality, wasn’t it, “It’s polio. We’re going down to Michael Reese Hospital. I have a friend down there—an acquaintance let’s say—let’s see what he has to say.”
Polio.
So I’d be crippled for the rest of my life? Or in one of those iron lungs?
I knew about things, didn’t I? That’s all I ever heard around the house over dinner.
Dinnertime, in fact, was kind of summing-up-the-day time, all the operations, the hospital and home visits, who had come into the office, diagnoses, results, prognoses. All part of this vast educational overview they had for me. I was to become the next Dr. Fox. Sometimes my father would even talk about us going into partnership, imagining our names up there on the office door:
Hugh B. Fox Sr. M.D.
Hugh B. Fox Jr. M.D.
“So I’ll be crippled for the rest of my life? Or in an iron lung? Or . . . dead?”
My mother screaming like an attacking eagle.
“Oh, my God!”
“Helen!”My father hardly ever stern, but he had his moments. Then bending back over the seat, talking softly to me, “Just rest, my boy, rest . . . that’s all you can do right now.”
It wasn’t very hard to rest. I closed my eyes and was out, out, out. Always restless, the lightest of sleepers. Only now suddenly I turned into a stone. They had a hard time waking me up when we got to the hospital, my mother sniffling into one of her fancy lace-bordered handkerchiefs, my father giving her dirty looks, “Helen, please,” but she wouldn’t/couldn’t stop, after all I was it for her, a miscarriage before me, a tubal pregnancy after me, my father going in and tying off her other tube, another favorite dinnertime topic.
I couldn’t get out of the car. Tried. Almost fell down.
My father could have carried me, I suppose, but instead went and got a wheelchair and the next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital bed, my father and some other doctor hovering over me, the other doctor flexing my legs, thinking, thinking, thinking, then turning
to my father.
“Of course you have to realize that the whole thing is in an experimental phase, Hugh; it may cure him or it may kill him. So far we’ve only used it on monkeys . . .”
My father, broad-faced, beefy-looking, grey hair thinning in front, slicked back looking like he was trying to emphasize his balding, solemn black eyebrows, deep-voiced.
“I’d rather have him dead than crippled.”
“No!” I objected, “I’d rather be crippled than dead—” then thinking of the catacombs in Rome, Rest in the Lord, At Home with Jesus . . . the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit . . . Saint Joseph, the Blessed Virgin, thinking, Dead isn’t so bad, the Beatific Vision, all Eternity Face to Face with the Living Trinity, beatitude, perfect happiness, a lot better than slummy old, crumby old Chicago where you could smell the slaughtered cattle on the west side when you were riding the “L” train in the summer, no blood-smells in heaven, per omnia saecula, saeculorum, Amen, forever and ever Amen, “although dead’s OK too . . .”
The other doctor smiling at me, turning to my father.
“That’s a funny thing to say, huh?”
“He’s a funny kid.”
The other doctor took my father aside. I wasn’t supposed to hear. Lowered his voice to almost a whisper. But I had/have ears like a raccoon, heard everything. He wasn’t going to give me the shot right away, had to do some lab tests on my blood to be sure it really was polio, although it certainly seemed to be, had to get the shot ready for tomorrow, tomorrow morning. I’d probably end up in the hospital for some weeks at least, at least. My chances for total recovery, “You never know; the recovery rate on the monkeys has been pretty good.”
My parents stayed around for a while, I was shown how to use urinals and bedpans, told not to even try to get out of bed, my mother coming over to give me a kiss, my father pulling her back.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Very contagious. Unless you want to end up in the bed next to him.”
A little laugh as she dropped a few tears.
Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.
And they were gone.
The next morning, after breakfast, my parents reappeared again, with my father’s researcher friend carrying a huge hypodermic needle in his hand. Almost like a gun.
Who, Me? Page 5