I shuddered at the thought of touching the glass, let alone drinking from it and told Max I would order kvass when we ate if he wanted to taste it. He didn’t seem interested.
The rest of us saw as much as we could each day. Max left after breakfast with his one day stipend and was back in time for supper. He didn’t say where he had been but was clearly having a good time. This was the first country I had been in where the language was based on a completely different system and used the Cyrillic alphabet. Max was able to transpose the correct Russian sounds to letters with different pronunciations in English. I was slow at it and had to do the mental exercise letter by letter.
Leningrad was virtually unchanged since the war ended. Unlike American cities, there was no transition from worn but still elegant stone buildings built long ago to mimic buildings in Paris and open farm land. It was a chilly place made colder by canals snaking through the city and a cold wind blowing off the Baltic Sea. It was rumored to be warmer than inland Russia, which was a scary thought.
We asked to ride the train from Leningrad to Moscow but were informed we would go by air. A different Intourist guide met us in Moscow. This one told us flat out that no one bought the stupid myth that we were the parents of these children. We were too young and nobody had four children any more.
Max ran into this belief schism when talking with a group of English-speaking Russian students. They asked him where he lived. He described the house in Wilmette. They were so irritated at what they were certain were lies they cut him off. No one had a six-bedroom house. They could believe a two-bedroom flat — even that was probably a lying boast — but they were insulted that Max couldn’t even stay within likely probabilities if he were going to lie.
At the Moscow airport, we each gave Pete our rubles. Max had far more than he should have had. Pete and I were both furious. And frightened. We knew he must have sold something, maybe some of his blue jeans. They seemed to be a ridiculously hot item in Russia. Young men had been sidling up to the boys since we arrived with offers of what seemed to me to be far too many rubles for a tired pair of jeans.
Max started out with three pairs of jeans. He did all his own packing once we started traveling. I didn’t know how many were left. Our Intourist minder had made it clear that selling anything to a Russian was an immediately jail-able offense. Trying to keep his voice low, Pete asked Max what he had sold.
Max tried to look offended but he was a lousy actor. Pete flatly refused to turn in Max’s rubles for American currency. My stomach knotted. I couldn’t argue with Pete. He was right but we were surrounded by uniformed soldiers and I was chickenhearted enough to wish he hadn’t chosen Moscow airport to take a moral stand. The soldiers were probably nice guys but they were not just standing around with pistols in holsters in case we needed protection from bad guys. They were holding machine guns in front of their chests and looking bored as though they wished there were something fun to do like shoot ugly Americans with badly behaved children.
Max knew rubles were worthless outside Russia. No other country would exchange them in 1970. He finally realized he was going to end up with a lot of worthless paper. He set his jaw, held up the bunch of rubles so the Russian soldiers couldn’t miss what he was doing, ripped the stack of bills into small pieces and dropped them in the basket meant for items we weren’t allowed to take out of Russia. The hair on the back of my neck lifted. I was breathing in shallow gasps. We were the only foreigners leaving on this flight. I was certain Pete and I would be arrested. I was waiting to feel a gun barrel stuck in my back. I knew the soldiers saw the whole thing. The bulky soldier closest to us flinched. We had wandered in and out of food markets and been amazed at how much rubles bought. I imagined this was the first time the soldier saw someone tear up enough rubles to feed his family for a week. These seemed to be foot soldiers. Maybe they hadn’t been instructed to respond without an officer to tell them what to do. I fervently hoped no officer strolled by and decided to make an issue of Max’s destruction of government issued currency.
Panic makes time crawl at a slug’s pace. I pictured scenarios where I sent Linda home with Seth and Andrea. Maybe the police would still act on their assumption the man in the family was in charge and arrest only Pete and Max. But I doubted it. Mothers were blamed for the dumb things their children did everywhere else. Why should the Russians be any different?
By the time the SAS 727 to Copenhagen was airborne, I was light-headed with relief and profoundly grateful we hadn’t been able to book space on Aeroflot. After their experience on the Russian airline with its dingy broken interior and rude, doughy and shabbily dressed stewardesses, the kids were open mouthed at the slender young Scandinavian women with their rosy, finegrained skin and shining blonde hair who greeted us with smiles. Even I fingered the bright, spotless upholstery and reveled in one more layer of safety between us and the Russian government.
Max brooded. He thought Pete was being unfair. He clearly had no idea we had narrowly escaped an extended vacation in a Russian jail.
Except for the tall glasses of sour, unflavored kefir that were a standard part of the breakfasts, the kids liked the Russian food. But they fell in love with the long, thin Danish sausages pronounced pullsa. They were similar to American hot dogs without the ensuing stomach ache or cramps. After Russia, Copenhagen seemed as sparkly fresh and clean as Disney World. We didn’t hesitate to eat food from vendors’ carts.
Max roamed on his own, sneering at Seth because his brother openly enjoyed the Tivoli Gardens. Max almost got us booted out of our hotel. There was only one elevator in the five-story building. It had a habit of stopping just shy of the floor. Sometimes this was enough to keep the doors from opening until someone on the first floor pushed the up button. The third day we were in Copenhagen, Max decided to fix it. We never knew what he did but it froze the elevator in place. There was only one porter, a red-faced man who looked like a stroke waiting to happen even when the elevator worked. We offered to pay for the elevator repair man. They were gracious, didn’t ask us to leave but suggested we should try to control our son. Pete and I were both furious. Max tried to justify what he had done. He always did, no matter how clear it was to everyone else that he had been in the wrong. This made the rest of our stay uncomfortable. We tried to be invisible as we skulked in and out but there was always someone at the desk.
Max opted to stay at a hostel when the rest of us took four days to drive around the Danish countryside with a swing through Germany. He had developed a bad case of diarrhea. He denied trying the kvass but added if he had tried the kvass, the alcohol in it would have overcome the threat of contamination.
Liz, a girl he met at the school and hoped to see again, had been hospitalized for more than a week with what was first thought to be cholera but was finally determined to be just an unusually severe gastro-intestinal illness, so we may have been maligning him.
The desk clerk at the hotel in Copenhagen told me where the hospital was and said they had universal health care and would treat Max in an emergency. We dropped him off at the hostel, paid for a four-day stay and told him to eat rice, crackers and noodles and to skip fatty food and beer. Pete gave him enough money to eat. I would have liked to feel sympathy for him but he had exhausted all I had.
Chapter 47
Nova High School was in Broward County, Florida, a few miles inland from Ft. Lauderdale. The ranch house we bought was in Hollywood, the part of the county closest to Miami, where Pete and I both found work in a small advertising agency. I felt it was important to find a four bedroom house so Max and Seth didn’t have to share a room but none seemed to exist in our price range. The realtor said people didn’t spend enough time indoors to waste space on extra bedrooms. I could see the logic of this but I didn’t like the idea of putting the boys together again.
Our house sprawled but there was still a lot of yard. A large heated pool and patio were accessed from the master bedroom. Night was my favorite time. Spicy night-blooming jasmin
e scented the air. A constant breeze rustled the fronds on the tall coconut palms in the side yard with a sound like something a New Age composer would play using wind instruments made by rain forest natives.
True to his promise, Pete bought a boat and trailer, enrolled us in Coast Guard safety classes for boat owners, and had a trailer hitch put on my car. He had a five speed Mustang and didn’t want it near salt water. My car was an automatic drive Nash Rambler. Not my first choice but all we could afford after the Mustang and the boat. We needed two cars because I came home an hour and a half before Pete did and had to collect Andrea from the babysitter’s and make dinner. I missed the public transportation we had in Wilmette.
Linda was away at college on the other side of Florida and loving it. She had chosen it because it was so far away from Wilmette. She was freaked out when we moved to Florida but relaxed when she realized we were still a long way away. She said there were a few kids at college who were almost as weird as Max, but since she wasn’t related to them she didn’t have to bother with them or be embarrassed by their antics.
Andrea and I went on a few boat trips but then I opted to mow the grass and stay home unless we were water-skiing or actually going somewhere. The boat was parked in our driveway and launched from a ramp on an inlet a few miles from the house. Every time it was launched there were arguments. The boring job of vacuuming the pool beat dealing with three males fighting to be the one in charge.
Without Max, Pete and Seth were always peaceful together but if they even tried to drive up to Fort Lauderdale to buy the Sunday Times without Max, he flew out of the house so fearful he would miss something, he literally looked as though his flailing arms and legs were operating without the benefit of the rest of his body. This made me feel sad. But there was nothing I could do to change the underlying chemistry. Pete and Seth meshed without effort. Pete and Max were like oil and water, where someone forgot the emulsifier to make them bind together. Their relationship was simply bad chemistry.
On an earlier vacation Pete had suggested we all get certified as scuba divers. We bought scuba gear, signed up for a course and all of us but Andrea, became certified divers. Andrea swam with the agility and confidence of an eager minnow but was too small to wear a regulation tank.
When we moved to Florida she complained about being left out. Max seemed to identify with this. He put on his tank and mask, found a mask small enough for her to wear and showed her how to buddy dive in our pool. I was surprised to see how patient he was with her. Fortunately, she was a quick learner. They continued until the tank was empty.
By January, we had done all the fun things we could think of so many times they had become routine.
Seth was the only one who had found friends. The agency Pete had worked for in Philadelphia and for the first five years we were in Wilmette asked him to go to Seattle to supervise the shooting of a commercial for an account he had worked on and knew well. He jumped at the chance. I envied him. He would be surrounded by witty, creative people whose minds sparked each other’s thoughts.
Pete decided Florida was a great place to own a motorcycle and bought a Honda 70 because it met the below five horsepower limit for under-16-year-old drivers. He planned to give it to Seth when he turned 15 in April and got his learner’s permit. In the meantime, it was going to be another family fun toy. He was irritated when I said I had no desire to ride a motorcycle. He nagged at me for being a spoilsport so one Sunday I rode on the back of the motorcycle to an empty school parking lot. Riding on any vehicle with my knees sticking out where one of the old people who drove around Florida in the dead center of the road going either too fast or too slow could take off one of my kneecaps made me a lousy back seat passenger. I kept flinching.
The bike wasn’t powerful but it was large and heavy. I could carry the other side of two sheets of dry wall and hoist 50-pound sacks of cement but at five-foot-three and 110 pounds, I had my limits. The first was obvious. My legs were too short for this bike. When I tried to keep the bike upright when it wasn’t moving, it canted at such an acute angle I was holding up most of its considerable weight. Pete insisted I could ride it if I tried. So I tried. I got it started. I even rode it around the lot a few times more than I wanted to because I knew if I stopped I had to get my left leg on the ground and hold the bike up. I finally stopped, was able to get the kick stand open and climbed off. That was it. I explained I would rather be a spoilsport than crippled.
Florida was every motorcycle-obsessed kid’s dream state. With a learner’s permit, they could legally ride a motorcycle on city streets. Seth considered the motorcycle his but Max got to it before Seth reached his fifteenth birthday. Pete said Max could ride it to school and signed the permission form. I cringed every time he rode off on it. He couldn’t get to the first corner without gunning it a few times and executing a wheelie.
I had just arrived at work at the advertising agency one morning when the nurse from Nova High School called. Max had been in a motorcycle accident and was on the way to Fort Lauderdale hospital. She said he had been injured but she didn’t know how seriously. She gave me the name of the hospital and told me how to get there. Pete was in Seattle so I was on my own.
Thank God I spent so much of my life behind the wheel of a car and was able to call on muscle memory to automatically respond to the traffic. My heart pounded and it was hard to breathe. I was in total panic mode for the next hour. I know I drove from Miami to Fort Lauderdale then located the hospital and retained the school nurse’s directions because I ended up in the correct emergency room, but I don’t remember any of the trip.
Max’s first words were garbled because his front teeth were obviously missing and blood was dribbling out of his mouth. He turned to Steve, the friend who had driven him to the hospital and said, “See, I told you she wouldn’t cry.”
He sounded triumphant. He told me later he knew how upset I was but he counted on my staying calm no matter what happened when he needed help. Max said he had always assumed that was what all mothers did until Steve regaled him with his own mother’s hysterical melt-down reactions to some of his escapades.
Max held out his hand knowing I would hold it. There was no one else there to comfort me or Max so I concentrated on helping him get through what was clearly going to be a tough ordeal.
A doctor came into the room with x-rays, stuck them in a viewing frame and turned on the light. When I identified myself he said, “Max has a broken collarbone but most of the force of the impact was absorbed by his face. The bone holding his front teeth in place was shattered and five teeth were knocked out.” He handed me a plastic bag with four bloodied teeth in it. He indicated Steve. “Max’s friend found these and brought them up to the ER. A fifth tooth is gone but he said these were all he could find. We have a dental surgeon waiting. He’ll tell you if these teeth can be implanted. Max has had a shot that should keep him moderately comfortable until you can get this filled.” He handed me a prescription and a paper with directions to the surgeon’s office then took the x-rays off the screen, put them back in the envelope and gave them to me.
The dental surgeon looked distressed when he looked at the xrays. Max’s mouth was beginning to swell and was obviously quite painful. The surgeon explained it would be impossible to numb his mouth adequately. “I can’t afford to wait until he can be properly anesthetized. I have to get the loose bone fragments out while they’re still movable. I’m sorry, Max.”
It took two hours of agony to get the last bone shard out. The missing tooth had been pushed up into the bone. I was glad Steve had gone back to school so Max didn’t have to maintain his bravado in front of his friend. Max had the bad luck to have unusually sensitive teeth. Pain and the remaining effects of severe shock triggered recurring nausea. He held my hands and I did what I could to comfort him but the surgeon had to give him brief time-outs to vomit blood and regroup his resources. When I showed the surgeon the pathetic little bag of bloodied but otherwise perfect front teeth and asked if
he could implant them, he gestured me around so I could look into the wreck of Max’s mouth and shook his head. “Too much bone gone. There’s nothing left to attach them to.”
That was when I almost lost it. A gaping red hole with jagged, splayed out shards of broken bone was all that was left of Max’s beautiful front teeth. I couldn’t even see any remaining gum. There was just shattered bone. Max had his eyes closed so he didn’t see my stricken expression. I couldn’t trust myself to speak. I just nodded and went back behind him.
The surgeon said, “The bottom teeth are loose but the braces should keep them in place and they’ll tighten. I assume he had braces on the top teeth at one time. When did they come off?”
“Ten days ago.”
The surgeon shook his head. “Probably a good thing they were off. The bone above his upper teeth took most of the force. If anything, the braces would have transmitted that to his back teeth and loosened them too.”
Seth was devastated. The freedom the motorcycle would have meant for him was lost for good. He knew Pete wouldn’t buy another one.
Chapter 48
Max discovered he wouldn’t get credit for two of the courses he had taken at New Trier because the grades he got were too low to transfer. He had to finish both the spring semester and the one next fall to get his high school degree. Already depressed by the change in his face because of the missing front teeth and the loss of the junked motorcycle, this was more than he could handle. This was his fourth year in high school. He was seventeen and weary of dealing with a world where he had to get a permission slip to go to the bathroom. He showed up at school each day but he no longer cared whether he passed or failed.
Without front teeth he sounded like a lisping caricature of an old man so he didn’t speak. When he was called on by teachers, he just shrugged and looked away without answering. No one seemed to grasp how traumatic it was for a seventeen-year-old boy to suddenly lose all of his front teeth. At a time in his life when image was vital to him and his peers, he had gone from very good looking to what he was sure was glaringly ugly. He couldn’t eat normal food because it was too painful to chew anything with more substance than scrambled eggs. He perfected the bored teenager expression so his teachers assumed he was just being willful.
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