Lacking animation, I said, “Anytime you want.” I sat up.
“Please don’t pay any attention to my jabbering,” he said. “It’s just my teeth chattering from the cold—reminds me of the good old days in Buffalo, when we froze our asses off.” He immediately tried to withdraw those words, recognizing that “the good old days,” even in the depths of Buffalo’s coldest winters, had been filled with light for me. He removed his coat and threw it on my bed so that it covered my feet.
“I brought you something,” he said proudly. My mother seemed genuinely excited by this rare piece of good news. “That’s really thoughtful of you, Sandy,” she said, and asked him to unwrap the gift. He quickly obliged. It was a record.
She read aloud the title on the record jacket—Victory at Sea—adding, “What a nice record.”
“It’s more meaningful than you can ever imagine, Hoffman,” I said. “The idea of victory has been in my mind these past days—but not victory just for me. I made a deal with God. If he gets me out of this hole, I’ll do everything I can to prevent others from going through grief like this in the future.”
“You know, Greenberg,” he said, with an intensity meant to buck me up, “I think you’ll triumph over any obstacles put in your way. Do you remember when you were on the track team and you told me that you didn’t mind throwing the shot put, running the mile or 440, but you could never do the hurdles? I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.”
I never did find out what my mother made of my “deal with God.” Maybe it just passed by her. I was in extremis, and the young are prone to sweeping announcements. Besides, Sandy seemed to have closed the subject out with his encouraging words. But a half century later, that hospital-bed promise would blossom into the abiding passion of my life, almost my raison d’être.
As we sat there, my mother mentioned that another rabbi had walked in. Obviously sent to inspire me, he began lecturing. It developed that he himself was blind and had come with his guide dog. His comments were clearly expected to exert a special force on me. I put it to the rabbi—not at all in a hostile way—about how the whole thing was unfair and nobody really understood. Then I started to talk about how nothing really seemed worth it any longer. I’d had such big plans—graduate school and government and all that. Now everything was ruined. Seeing that I was not being suitably responsive, the rabbi grabbed my blanket, tore it off my bed, took my arm, and, with his guide dog in tow, dragged me up and into the corridor. He repeatedly screamed, “I will teach you how a blind man lives!”
Finally, a nurse rushed over to us, pulled him away from me, and led me back into my room. I sat on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, perspiring profusely. Oblivious to everything around me—Sandy seemed to have made his exit—I finally lay down and after a while closed my eyelids and fell asleep.
I seemed to wake every few moments and turned from side to side. Repetitive dreams: the placard appeared again, those black letters monopolizing my mind. The door to my room was shut, and I could hear nothing. I could see nothing. It can’t happen here.
Those four days and nights in the hospital were interminably long. They gave me plenty of time for reflection—too much. One afternoon I heard my mother’s whispered response to a question from a hospital staff member: “We cannot pay Dr. Sugar in full at this time.” My head reeled from the implications of that little exchange. Despite Dr. Sugar’s blunt way of speaking, he was a compassionate man, but his horror at my previous treatment and his prompt efforts to control the damage to my eyes had left little time for conversations like this.
I would lie in bed, and my mother would be seated in the room’s only chair. Every so often one of several nurses would come in to check on me, removing the bandages and gauze that covered my eyes like small pillows. She would wipe off the ointment that had been smeared over my eyes and apply a fresh coat. She would ask me how I was doing, and I would say fine, even though that reply was as perfunctory as her question, and a huge lie to boot. They would chat with my mother, sometimes talking about what was in the newspapers.
Britain was boosting its arms budget. Castro hoped to reestablish friendly relations with the United States, provided we stop arming his enemies. A mob had attacked the Soviet Embassy in Belgium. I would hear them discussing what was going on in the world, trying to make conversation, and I would think, “The world is still out there?” Then I would chastise myself for thinking such a self-centered thing—for thinking that because I could not see something, it was not happening at all.
I do not recall my mother leaving my side once during that entire week in Detroit, but there must have been times when she called home to report on my condition. One of these times she learned that her other son’s stomach had started to bleed, so consumed with worry was he. A wonderfully symmetrical disaster. It was something for a philosopher to smile at, only my mother did not display humor about any of it. And yet I cannot say that she saw horror in it, either. She had lived her life with a sort of resigned sadness, as if things would always be grim. She was a woman not taken to laughing a lot, so when we did hear her laugh, it was especially nice. She was reserved, quiet, thoughtful, deliberate: as the Israelis say, sabra—like the prickly-pear fruit from which the term derives, tough on the outside, sweet on the inside. She had the skin to deal with grimness.
Dr. Sugar came in only once, I think. He had little to say. I suppose he just wanted to make sure my eyes had not become infected. He, too, probably asked me how I was doing, and I would have said fine. My mother would have said fine as well. God forbid we tell him the truth. He was possibly the only person in the world who knew what to do with my eyes, but he was responsible for the eyes of thousands, which probably inured him to all the pain he witnessed.
And so what did the rest of that week look like? If you eliminate everything—the bed like a skeleton, the chair my mother sat in, the pale curtains on the windows, the nozzles and intravenous tree and monitors, the little table on which they placed my food (bland and soft), the bed sheets, the safe toiletries, the towels in the bathroom, the telephone—if you take all that away, what have you got? Or what is there to be remembered? Nothing except the misery.
As terrible as that week was, though, it gave me some time to begin to figure things out—what we would now call a workout, something one does for a distressed company. Instead of being a distressed company, I was a distressed person, and I was in the earliest stirrings of setting out to turn myself around.
Much of that necessarily occurs in one’s head, and by an ironically beneficial twist, a blind person is left largely with only that: the conscious life within his or her head. One then realizes how much of one’s mental life had been anchored in the world one saw. This is something that you, the reader, must contemplate, if you are sighted, in order to understand much of what my account is about.
Nothing was ever said straight-on between my mother and me about my being blind, so nothing can be said of her thoughts on it now. We had hardly ever spoken about the Holocaust when I was growing up. Why would we speak about my blindness now?
Only once did it come up even tangentially before her passing, as hard as that may be to believe. Many years later, in Maryland, on my sister Ruth’s porch, I made some kind of joke, common for me, about how I had misplaced something or knocked something over, and unbeknownst to me at the time my mother started to cry. She did not make any noise, just started shaking, I was told later, and then crying. Afterward, my sister told me that I ought not to act that way—it was too painful for Mother.
Still, nothing I write or say now can come even close to the deep emotional reality of that week in February 1961, when my mother sat with me in my hospital room. In a way, my mother and I were living in separate worlds that week; we were not, despite our physical proximity, beside each other. I do not remember what we said to each other, but it was definitely not about my blindness. Beyond any doubt, she was submerged in her own anguish th
at week. Anguish from seeing me in pain but also, surely, anguish because of all that I might have done with my life.
She was probably also thinking of the practical burden that had been placed on her. How was she going to take care of me? She had been living a difficult life. She had kept her family together after her first husband died, when it would have been easier to let them go to foster homes. On top of that, she had been taking care of her own mother, who at the time of the ordeal in Detroit had only recently passed away. She was now mother to four, or even five, if we count all she did for her second husband—cleaning, making dinner, doing the laundry, and all the things a woman of that era was expected to do.
Perhaps she saw my blindness as just the next in a long line of hardships. Maybe she was even comfortable with it in some way. Not comfortable that it had happened to me, but maybe it confirmed that her life was always to be an unrelenting burden. She was a pessimistic optimist, finding stability in her pessimism. Maybe, as well, there were other versions of the unsaid that hunkered down somewhere in other corners of her life, ones of which I would never know. I am certain that the horror of what had happened to friends and relatives in Europe was festering in one or another of those corners.
These days, there are support groups for every diagnosable ailment and condition, as well as for some that are not. Even if we wanted to maintain silence, it would be difficult. In all likelihood, a social worker at the Detroit hospital today would drop by to offer some kind of pamphlet, and we would have had a consultation with him or her, closely followed by our enrollment in an outpatient support group. A jumping-off point would have been provided for us. But my blindness arrived then, not now—in 1961, not in the twenty-first century—and in Detroit, in that hospital room, my mother and I spoke not a single word about it.
After four dismal days and nights, I was discharged from the Detroit hospital. It was a Saturday morning. I walked out and felt fresh air on my face; I took deep breaths. That moment remains the most glorious memory of my life—the first little push toward regaining my life—and my brain gave me a further break by not allowing itself to imagine the struggles ahead.
It was a bitterly cold day when we arrived in Buffalo. Sue was waiting for us at the station. I took hold of her and said, “Your hand is freezing.” We kissed and hugged, and I could tell she had lost a lot of weight since December. I had been so focused on my mother’s anguish that I had almost forgotten there was another woman who loved me.
The homecoming was awkward. My siblings stumbled through the next few hours, talking from time to time, but without their usual ease. That evening I returned to the bedroom I shared with Joel, took a sleeping pill, and started to cry. From his bed, Joel reached out and touched my shoulder. Sleep came shortly.
The following days were filled with visits from relatives, neighbors, and friends. Day after day they came, and day after day we talked about everything but the obvious. They took their cues from me. My post-hospital euphoria was gone.
Sue would arrive each morning. Her joie de vivre was infectious; she lifted all spirits—except mine. Nevertheless, whenever I slipped into solitude, her buoyancy drew me out of myself. She even persuaded me to attend a friend’s engagement party. Horror filled me at the idea of exposing myself in my newly deformed state. It was the prelude to the rest of my new life.
As it turned out, the party was every bit as unpleasant as I had imagined. Sue stayed by my side, guiding me around the room. Her laughter filled the air, but I could feel, or imagine, that our friends were staring at me. The evening could not end soon enough.
But home and home-cooking were sources of great comfort during this time. My mother, Sue, my siblings, and my father did everything they could to make life easier for me.
Mostly I moved around the house and neighborhood by myself, slowly, tentatively, and awkwardly. Chains—black, heavy chains—seemed to rattle around my body, my every movement limited, cautious, and above all fearful. Sue, seeing me grimace, would try to alleviate the weight of the chains by holding my hand and guiding me. But I could hardly wait till evening so I could take my sleeping pill and drift away from the present. Each day seemed the same, filled with the same visits and the same chatter—all calculated to avoid recognition of the all too obvious.
Then again, actually recognizing my blindness was just as disturbing. Witness the social worker who stopped by our house to discuss my options for the future. A thin older woman with once-blonde hair turning gray, according to Sue, her face was unremarkable except that she had thin lips. She had a quiet, unaccented voice, and she used no colloquialisms. It was as if she simply appeared on our porch in Buffalo, out of nowhere.
Sue and I sat side by side in chairs like an old married couple. I did feel old—old, tired, and more than a little helpless. The social worker arranged papers and handed some to Sue. (I could hear this.) She said that Sue and I should take a drive out to the country. Some of the blind people she had helped—mainly men, for some reason—had become justices of the peace. There were other options, too, she told Sue (as if I were not there). She was matter-of-fact about my possibilities. As she saw it, I had very few of them. Aside from being a justice of the peace, she said in her flat tone, I could make screwdrivers or cane chairs. I was stupefied.
At the woman’s direction, Sue drove me out to places that made Buffalo look like Midtown Manhattan—towns and villages hardly anybody knew of, mostly surrounded by farms and forest. Sue told me that the blind local justices of the peace sat in rocking chairs on their porches, looking as if they had had the life sucked out of them.
Sue pulled into a gravel driveway in front of a wooden building where we were told there was going to be a wedding. One of the blind men we had heard about would be presiding. Sue led me in, and we sat at the back. The couple being married were certainly farmers. The man, perhaps my age, was trying to stand up straight, but something in his back seemed to prevent him from doing so. He was arched at the shoulders. The bride was a heavyset woman, almost pretty. The justice of the peace, I was told, was wearing a gray suit and had on dark glasses to hide eyes that would presumably alarm people if they were to be seen. He sounded practiced but detached—possessing not a bit of joy in his voice. Members of the couple’s families were present, but they were few. The building was not a church; there were no pews, just rows of chairs. Unaccountably, drawings done by schoolchildren lined the walls.
The ceremony was unremarkable. Up until a point, those two kids had been unmarried, and then, suddenly, they were married. That was it.
“They’re done,” Sue said.
I could hear the wedding party walking out of the building and into the dusty air. I could also hear the tapping of the justice’s cane against the floor. He moved deliberately but quickly. Sue went up to him to say that she had been told we should speak with him, if he had time. Her boyfriend had just gone blind, or was blind, or, well—if he could find the time to speak to me, we would really appreciate it. He said he would, but he did not say that he would be happy to or that he was sorry to hear about my condition. He was not going to give me solace. He was going to tell—no more, no less.
We three sat on a bench outside. The justice of the peace asked us what we wanted to know, and I said I just wanted to get a sense of how he got around. He said, “I use a cane.” I asked him how he got from one place to another. He said he lived in the village, but if he needed to go farther, there was a bus. I asked, foolishly, “What if you need to go into Buffalo?” He looked at me—I could feel his dark eyeglasses on me—but said nothing. I thought that was strange. Clearly, he felt the question was strange. Outrageous, even, as if he were on the verge of saying, “Why in the world would I go to Buffalo, young man?”
After that, I did not speak. Sue did the talking, as she always has, gracious as ever. She asked him what living in this place was like, whether he liked presiding over weddings. She talked about her schooling and mine. I could tell he liked her; I could almost see him smilin
g. If only he could have seen her.
Later, the social worker returned to our house to check on me. Over tea, she asked me how the visit to the justice of the peace went. I did not tell her that it was not particularly helpful. I did not explain to her that a life like that would actually be a death for me. She told me that she just wanted me to get a sense of what possibilities were available. It was odd to sit with this woman. I could hear her rise up a bit to set her teacup in the saucer. I could hear the floorboards squeak when she shifted. I could even hear her breathe—but I could not get a sense that she was actually there. It was as if there was a shell of a body pretending to be a human being in her place, like the justice of the peace.
When I asked her what else she might have for me, she told me again that I could cane chairs. I did not know what that entailed. She also told me of other blind people she knew who made screwdrivers. I did not know how a screwdriver was made. It seemed dangerous.
My mother came out to ask us whether we needed anything. I said no. The social worker said she was fine, thank you. I faced my mother when this woman spoke, as if my mother would somehow confirm what I thought: perhaps this woman was not there to begin with. Of course, my peevish attitude was an effort to deny what my life had become. I could deny it by denying the social worker’s existence. She had to be a wisp of air, a swirl of snow left in the wake of a car. I wanted to annihilate her.
“What do you think, Sandy?” the social worker asked. I did not know what to say to her. I wanted to tell her that her rules did not apply to me—that this was not the kind of life I was going to lead. I would not be presiding over marriages in small towns. She was kind, nice, decent, and I appreciated her help. But it was not for me. I wanted to promise her that my life would not be a peaceful drive in the country or a quiet porch from which to stare at the world.
There would be no serenity. My life would be good, but it would not involve rocking chairs or slow walks down a country lane, stick tapping away. She helped me, that social worker, in ways she probably had no knowledge of. I could feel rebellion stirring in my heart.
Hello Darkness, My Old Friend Page 8