The Poison Tree

by Henry I. Schvey

  My grandparents vacationed at precisely the same time each year. In winter, they went to The Breakers in Palm Beach; in summer, they went to the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire. As with everything else, including eating and sleeping, they operated on separate schedules: Grandpa flew; Grandma took the train.

  It was late summer and I had just turned sixteen. I couldn’t go back to work. I had no intention of living at home with my mother, and I couldn’t confront Adar about my changed feelings. So, in the middle of the night, I grabbed a few things and, without a word, decided to head to New Hampshire. I didn’t even flush the toilet for fear it might wake Bobby. If he knew I was leaving, he would wake Mom and ruin everything. And if she woke up and found out what I was doing, she would call the police to stop me. I managed to lock the front door as I made my getaway. Feverishly, I walked all the way down to the Port Authority terminal from 72nd Street. I thought the walk would refresh me. It didn’t.

  The Port Authority Bus Terminal was filled with flying hotdog wrappers and unshaven men. The waiting room stank of sweat. An old woman cooed, pushing a small baby carriage across the floor with a smiling doll tucked inside. I had a Pan Am Airways bag with me, a jar of Skippy Peanut Butter, saltines, underwear, socks, and a flannel shirt.

  The Greyhound for New Hampshire left at four in the morning, and as we pulled away, I slumped down, imagining the police were after me. I was also terrified I would see Adar. I found a copy of The Daily News on the floor, wadded it up, and wedged it between my head and the windowpane for a pillow. I ate nearly the whole jar of Skippy, scooping it up with my forefinger without crackers, and fell asleep. I woke up suddenly with terrible diarrhea, and barely made it to the little toilet at the back of the bus. The toilet was more comfortable than my seat, and I stayed in there a long time. When I staggered back to my seat, I noticed that the bus was empty. I walked up to the front and terrified the driver, who had no idea anyone was still left on board. He told me we had passed Mount Washington, and dropped me off at the next rest stop.

  The mountain air was freezing cold. I pulled on my heavy shirt, and ate the saltines with a half bottle of fizzless Coke someone had left behind. That settled my stomach. I had no idea where I was, or how far from Mount Washington I was, and didn’t really care anymore.

  Outside the truck stop in the middle of the New Hampshire mountains, I watched cars flash by like monsters with yellow eyes. For the first time in my life, no one knew where I was. Not my parents, not Adar. If I died, no one would care. I might be missing for days, weeks … my body would turn up somewhere.

  “Sixteen Year Old Discovered! Face Mutilated by Animals,” would be my epitaph, along with my limbless picture on the front page of the National Enquirer. I thought about Adar, and how just over a month ago we walked sixty miles back to New York together. How long ago that was! How shallow and superficial I was to have thrown that away! My father was right—I would never amount to anything. I sat by the side of the road, holding my knees, rocking back and forth. Then I began to scream, the helpless rage of an abandoned child.

  After a while, I felt like I was watching one of those old horror movies with Margaret. She had thrust her tiny fists into her eyes, and I told her, “It’s only a movie.” I knew everything would turn out all right in the end, even if it seemed impossible at the moment. And it did.

  “This is me speaking, Grandma. Henry. I’m calling from a truck stop here … somewhere in New Hampshire. Please don’t cry—”

  She stopped crying and began to scream. I took the phone and tucked it under my ear, shoving my hands inside my pants to keep warm. I knew I had to wait for her shrieking to subside, so I remained patient while her wailing shook the glass phone booth.

  “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, IT’S HIM! WAKE UP, HARRY! HAAAAARRY!—HE’S ON THE PHONE! WHO? HENRY, THAT’S WHO! Where are you calling from? New Hampshire? HE’S CALLING FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE! I’m gonna have a stroke! What’s he doing to me? How did you get here? By BUS? YOU TOOK THE GREYHOUND BUS ALL BY YOURSELF? Don’t you know Stanley, my nephew, he took the bus at night and was mugged and ended up in the hospital; they said he had BRAIN DAMAGE!”

  “Stanley has brain damage, Grandma? I didn’t know—”

  “No, they think he’s okay now, but is that what you want for yourself? It serves you right! You think our kind of people take the Greyhound bus at night? Only Goyim! You think the Jews survived Dachau and godknows-where so you could ride the Greyhound to New Hampshire in the middle of the night? Do you? There are all kinds of sick, deranged people on buses. Tilly Goodman, she plays canasta with me, had her purse stolen on a bus. What’s that? No, the 86th Street Crosstown, but it’s the same thing. Thank God nothing happened. It’s—what time is it? Omygod, you’re in some sort of trouble, aren’t you? HAARRRY, get out of bed and get in here right away, something’s wrong! I knew it, I told him I didn’t want to go this year. Get in here! No, I’m not joking! It’s him!”

  “Grandma, listen. Please, calm down. I’m fine. Really. Fine. I just wanted to talk to you and Grandpa.”

  “He just wanted to talk … so he rode all the way up to New Hampshire by Greyhound in the middle of the night—to talk! They don’t have phones, anymore, at your mother’s?”

  “I wanted to talk in person. Visit you here.”

  “Do they know you’re here, your father and mother?”

  “No.”

  “OHMYGOD HAARRRY, Norman don’t even know he’s here!”

  I heard the familiar “Bitch … bitch … bitch” as Grandpa snatched the receiver away.

  “Now be calm,” he said softly, but firmly.

  “I am calm, Grandpa,” I said. I really did feel strangely calm.

  “Not you. I was talking to your grandmother. Hold on a sec. She’s lying over here on the floor with a washcloth soaked in vinegar, crying. Calm down now, Birdie, I say! Look, tell me where you are and we’ll pick you up.”

  “I don’t know where I am, Grandpa.” As I said this, I felt an indescribable sense of shame. How could I call them without knowing where I was?

  “You don’t know where you are?” There was an infinitely long silence on the other end. “Okay, that’s okay. Now check with somebody who does know, and I’ll hold. But for god’s sake don’t hang up.”

  “All right, I won’t. It may take a minute.” I went inside the truck stop and got the address.

  “Okey-dokey, you wait right by that phone booth and don’t go off anywhere else. You understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “I know the place; it’s about half an hour. As soon as we can. In a taxi. If dey have such tings in New Hampshire.”

  “Okay, Grandpa.”

  I started to hang up, and heard him do something completely out of character: he began to sing!

  “I’ll be down to getcha in a taxi, honey … better be ready ’bout half-past eight. Don’t be late … Gonna be there when the band starts playing …”

  “Grandpa? Are you all right?”

  I heard the phone crackle as he came back on. “Just trying to cheer her up a little, your grandmother … I think she might have passed out.”

  I had never heard anyone in my family sing besides Mom, and the only thing I could remember her singing in years was Tony Bennett’s “I Wanna Be Around.” Now, here, in the middle of a freezing New Hampshire night, my grandfather was actually singing.

  I stood by the side of the road stamping my feet for a half hour or so, until I saw the approaching taxi. Grandpa and Grandma were inside, and it looked like a silent movie: two people yelling, gesticulating, mouths moving, but no sound. Grandpa got out and pinched me on both cheeks, and everything became less surreal. I climbed inside where Grandma was waiting to kiss me. She was apparently under strict orders not to say anything. She saw my Pan Am bag, and turned to ask Grandpa where the boy’s luggage was. Grandpa shrugged. “Birdie. Remember what we agreed. Tomorrow is time enough.”

  We drove back to the Mount Washington Hotel in sil
ence.

  The Greeks had different rivers in Hades: Mnemosyne and Lethe. If you drank from Mnemosyne, you remembered everything; if you drank from Lethe, you remembered nothing. The week I stayed with my grandparents in New Hampshire was just what I needed. After we got back to the hotel, it was still dark outside and I wasn’t sleepy. Grandma told me to take a bath. I never took baths anymore, and was going to tell her no. But for some reason I listened. I felt as though someone had dipped me gently into Lethe. I remembered baths Grandma used to give me when I was a little boy. I always hated it when she wrapped me up so tight I couldn’t move my arms or legs in the white terrycloth towel—her towels felt so soft, and smelled so different than the ones we had at home—but by the time she lifted me out and rubbed me with Johnson and Johnson’s talcum powder, I loved the feeling.

  After the bath, I slept until evening of the following day. I knew that they must have called my parents to tell them I was okay. But they never mentioned it, and neither did I. There was an unspoken understanding that no one would mention how I ended up in New Hampshire.

  Each new day at the hotel had the same routine. At 7:00 we went down to breakfast, just the three of us. We each were given a little card with a golf pencil to mark down what we wanted, and every morning I ordered exactly the same thing as Grandpa: first, oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins and heavy cream, which you poured from a miniature sterling silver pitcher. Then a poached egg in a special cup. I’d never eaten a poached egg before, and didn’t want to even try it because of my experience with the malteds in camp I was forced to drink with a raw egg to fatten me up. But now I found I could eat a poached egg and like it. While I waited for my egg, the waiter always brought fresh orange juice in a tiny glass, a basket of fresh salted rolls, and a tray with individual pats of butter. He put two gleaming pats of butter on my plate with a tiny pair of tongs. I buttered a roll and dipped it in the egg yolk. I even finished breakfast with pitted prunes and a cup of instant Postum like Grandpa. I tried to melt into their ordered lives, and it worked. After breakfast, Grandpa went back to his room and put on a pork-pie hat, and we were on the putting greens by 7:45. After lunch, from 1:15 to 2:15, Grandpa took his nap, and I played Gin Rummy with Grandma. Then, we did crossword puzzles or read the two-day-old New York Times when it finally made its way up to the hotel. Not once did Grandma tell me how I needed to bring my parents back together. Not once did either of them ask me how I ended up there in the middle of the frozen night.

  After a week, Grandpa asked how I felt about returning to New York. I told him I was fine with that. My final weekend there, I felt good enough to try tennis again. Grandpa was napping and Grandma was playing canasta, so I went out and looked for the courts. I had not played even once since my father had left, but it seemed like it might be fun to try again. I felt so healthy and rested, and everything seemed so different now. I borrowed a racket and balls from the pro shop and walked bravely over the perfectly manicured fields to the courts to begin practicing my serve. And it did feel good to be on a tennis court again. I opened the can of balls, listened to the hissing sound of gas escaping from the vacuumed tin, and inhaled the delicious aroma of brand new Slazenger tennis balls.

  But as I tossed the fuzzy white ball up in the air and followed its arc up into that flawless blue sky, my mind flooded with so many images that I couldn’t even swing the racket. All those times I had gone with such enthusiasm to play tennis with my father at the Rosen’s in Scarsdale and come home filled with shame, came rushing back in the seconds between tossing the ball aloft and its return. The ball plopped at my feet, and I followed it until it stopped bouncing. Then I walked away. I left the racket and can of balls lying there, too.

  When I returned to the city, New York felt like a tomb. Of course, the streets were full of people—the last gasp of the summer tourist season, businessmen in seersucker suits and straw hats, women clicking around Fifth Avenue in high heels—but it felt completely deserted. I looked over my shoulder constantly. For Adar. Sometimes I felt he was there, spying on me and watching me from across the street. Other times I knew it was my imagination. Even so, I wondered, was Adar deliberately toying with me, sadistically waiting to take revenge, intruding himself into my thoughts? Uncle Lee told me he had worked two more days after I left. Then he quit without saying a word—not even a goodbye to Uncle Lee. His final paycheck was still waiting for him; did I want to deliver it to Adar myself? I told him to forward it to Canarsie.

  There were only a few weeks of summer left, but something remarkable happened nevertheless. My father came over and my parents actually spoke to one another civilly a few days after my return. In the living room. My mother hired a handy man to move all the boxes into her locked bedroom. I don’t know what they said, but the outcome was that if I expected to go to college (assuming Horace Mann let me graduate), I would need to see a psychiatrist. They were afraid I would commit suicide. I saw Dr. Irving five times per week. He said almost nothing. My recollection of these sessions was that we simply stared at one another for forty-five minutes—then I left. I called him Dr. Steelcase because he looked just like one of those filing cabinets: gray hair, gray suit, gray tie. Even his notebook was gray. In my imagination, his wife and children were gray, too. Even though I hated seeing him, after the allotted time, he told my parents that he felt it was safe for me to attend college in the fall.

  Horace Mann took pity on me, and allowed me to graduate. However, only one college accepted me: the University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin had two features that appealed to me: it was a long way from New York, and they had lost the 1963 Rose Bowl game. I watched the Rose Bowl on television, and never forgot how Wisconsin, led by star player Pat Richter, stormed back from a huge deficit to make the game heart-stoppingly close. They lost by a final score of 42–37, and I wept at the game’s final seconds when the outcome was decided. Had Wisconsin won, I wouldn’t have applied. Losing gallantly made it seem a school where I belonged.

  As my mother read the acceptance letter from the Director of Admissions, her hands trembled and she began to sob uncontrollably. “Those are tears of joy, aren’t they, Mom?”

  “Joy? Of course, they’re joy,” she said. Tears still shone on her cheeks. “What mother wouldn’t be overjoyed to see her son ruin his life?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Where you attend college determines your future, and ‘it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to—’”

  “Mom, stop quoting Polonius—he deserved to die, stabbed behind that arras in Hamlet.” Her days of studying Shakespeare with Joseph Wood Krutch and Lionel Trilling were never far from her, especially if they contained a lesson she could cram down my throat.

  “How can you say such a thing? That’s cruel. Polonius was a good, kind man,” she said sadly, “like my Papa, or your Uncle Lee.”

  “He was nothing like Gramps; he was a snoop. What was he doing snooping there in the first place?”

  I began walking feverishly around the dining room table. This was something I had wanted to say for years, and now I had a perfect excuse. The characters from Hamlet had sprung to life in my mother’s mind, and had become metamorphosed into people from her family: my father was of course, Claudius; she herself was Gertrude; I was Hamlet; Polonius could be either her father or Uncle Lee depending on the situation. My view was that if Uncle Lee happened to get stabbed listening in on my conversations (as happened more than once at Gramsie’s house where telephone conversations were never private), he deserved what he got.

  “Polonius was there to help protect Hamlet’s mother,” she said, defensively. “A woman alone, attacked by her son … it was unfair. What was her name again?”

  “Gertrude, Mom. How could you forget her name? I thought you were such a brilliant student? Unlike me.” My sarcasm was modulating into anger.

  “Of course, Gertrude. I remember attending Mark Van Doren’s lectures on Shakespeare at Columbia … such brilliant men. I have m
y essays from those courses somewhere … did I ever show them to you? I got straight A’s from both Professor Van Doren and Professor Trilling. And they never, and I mean never, gave A’s.” She gazed towards her bedroom where the essays were buried in one of her countless boxes.

  “You’ve shown me the essays.” I said.

  “Oh. Where were we?”

  “Wisconsin,” I said. “I was admitted there, remember.” My anger was growing in direct proportion to her obliviousness.

  “Yes, I remember, and I won’t sit back and see you ruining yourself by going to a state school.”

  “It’s a terrific school, Mom. My college counselor says it’s one of the top schools in the Midwest academically. Besides, with my grades and SAT scores, I’m lucky to get in anywhere.”

  “How dare you say that?”

  “Because it’s true!” I was desperate now. “It’s not like I’ve been admitted anywhere else. I even got rejected by a school you said must have been named after a candy bar!” I was referring to Clark University. She was sensitive about this topic; she even went crazy when she once heard me humming The Beatles’ “I’m a Loser” in the shower. She even refused to let me see the Follow Me Boys movie since Walt Disney had died just prior to its release. Mom knew those boys must be following him to the grave.

  “You know how I feel about you low-rating yourself,” she said. “Besides, I have custody of you until you’re twenty-one. I have it all worked out. Professor Mosley says you’ll be enrolled at Columbia by Christmas.”

  “What! What are you talking about?”

  “My Hen-yie at Columbia! Won’t that be wonderful? You are still my Hen-yie, aren’t you?” She started calling me this childish nickname when she was wildly enthusiastic.

  “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Mom, okay? I don’t want to go to college in New York.”

  “That’s ridiculous! Why not?”

  “Hasn’t Horace Mann proved anything to you?”