by Jan Cherubin
My father became irritable and moody. He grew cynical. He was easily enraged. He didn’t like it when I had supper at a friend’s house. He wanted me home. What’s wrong with our house? My cooking isn’t good enough? This was before Johnny, before Nola. I stayed home and he got angry when I wouldn’t eat the mashed potatoes my mother had plopped onto my plate. I was turned off by the lumps. He slammed his open hand on the table. “Eat those potatoes, goddamnit!” I took a forkful. “Don’t look at me like that, you snotty kid.” I gagged, then opened my mouth and let the lumpy blob fall onto the plate. He jumped up knocking his chair over. I jumped up and made a run for it, but he chased me down the hall whacking my back and shoulders hard before I got to my room and was able to close the door against him. My mother told me later she threw a shoe at him and hit him on the leg. After a few minutes, there was a knock at my door. My shoulder was throbbing. He stuck his head in. “I’m sorry,” he said.
CHAPTER 34
“Susan! Joanna!” We shot up from the sofa like soldiers at reveille. “It hurts. Get in here.” He was sitting on the edge of the bed smoking. “I can’t sleep,” he said. The light blazed in his room. “I’ve been looking at these magazines.” He pointed to a stack at his feet. “So I was reading this magazine and I had a revelation.”
“It’s good you were able to read,” Susan said.
“Sometimes I can do a page. So I’m reading New York and John Simon writes these nasty things about Barbra Streisand and I have this revelation. You wanna hear it?”
“Sure,” we said.
“Everything is both true and not true.”
Susan and I exchanged a look. He woke us up for this?
“Listen, I have to ask you girls a question, a favor. This is important.” He patted the bed and we sat down, the three of us in a row facing his dresser against the wall, above it the only photo of him as a small child, fists balled, in his sailor suit. Aunt Adele had sent the photograph years ago, in a fancy frame wrapped as a gift. “I want to know if both of you will give your inheritance to your mother,” he said. “You know, if I leave you money in my will, you’ll give it over to her.”
I glanced across the hall at Brenda’s closed door. Was she listening? Would she be angry knowing the concern he had for our mother? I desperately wanted to go back to sleep. “What are you talking about?” I said. “You’re going to get better.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But I want to know if you’ll give up your inheritance.”
The whole thing was strange, waking us in the middle of the night to tell us what? That we were being disinherited. Why did he have to put it that way, “give up our inheritance,” as if he were cutting us off and casting us out, rejecting us for some trespass or disloyalty? “Yes, of course,” I said. I should have said no, I should have realized his request was anguished, that he really wanted to leave money directly to my mother so that he did not have to ask this of us, but he was afraid of Brenda. We should have realized his choice of words was a clue, a warning. He was provoking us, trying to get us to object and stake our claim the way Brenda so confidently staked her claim.
CHAPTER 35
Tuckahoe
Why didn’t we object? Why didn’t we rise up and challenge the authorities? I couldn’t understand it. Why didn’t we band together against the supervisors? “We’d get kicked out,” said Chick. “And then where would we go?” “Maybe one day,” Jesse said.
I was waiting for it. I felt it coming, all the while my hatred of authority, of monitors and supervisors, of rules and regimentation, infiltrated every atom of my flesh and blood and spirit. These were the circumstances that organized my world-view.
Things were different for Harry. The longer Harry stayed at the H, the more chaotic he became. He no longer complained about beatings to Mama, but he was often caught fighting with other kids. He talked back to teachers, goofed off in class, and sometimes went AWOL. Bull Pushkin, the juniors’ supervisor, offered to train Harry to box, to give him an outlet. Bull’s nickname fit him well. He was stocky and muscular with an aggressive style. Bull hated nothing more than stopping a fight. He loved sports of all kinds and coached kids at baseball, basketball, wrestling, and boxing. He liked to be thought of as a pal. Which was a bunch of bull, if you asked me. He’d egg Harry on, be his booster, and then match Harry with bigger kids and watch those kids beat the crap out of my brother. I despised the man, but he was the one supervisor Harry trusted, for a time. Harry craved attention and Bull gave it to him.
In the spring we built the Bare Ass dam as usual, with many close calls but luckily no prisoners taken during construction. One summer’s day, our paradise complete, a bunch of Homeboys were splashing around, cannonballing from a rocky precipice. I chose to lounge on the bank just upstream, fishing with a rod I fashioned from a green branch. All of a sudden Cheesie called out “Cheese it!” and everybody scrambled out of the water, except for Harry. He’d taught himself to swim just as he had taught himself to roller skate and ride a bike, but now he’d caught his foot between two stones and was wedged in tight. He grabbed onto a clump of swamp grass and called, “Brudder, help me, Clyde, don’t leave me here!” And I was thinking, shit, what if I fall in, I’m the one who can’t swim and the water’s high, but I braced myself on the bank and reached in for Harry to grab hold of my fishing rod, which snapped in half, so I waded in just a few inches and grabbed a hold of Harry’s hand, coaching him to gently turn his foot and meanwhile, I hear “Cheese it! Cheese it!” and the sound of keys jangling— Piggy Rosenthal, it sounded like. The leaves started trembling like there was a rhino thundering through the trees just as Harry’s foot came loose and he stumbled onto the bank and we ran for it. I hauled ass being lean and lanky, whereas Harry had a pugilist’s body, solid and muscular, handsome and strong but not fleet, which may have been why Harry loved wheels, roller skates, cars, motorcycles. Had to have wheels, he loved wheels and he loved boxing, and the jailor’s keys jangled louder scaring the shit out of the birds and rabbits, and out of the woods came not Piggy, but Bull Pushkin. I figured when Bull saw his little protégé he’d calm down. But no, he started yelling. I couldn’t leave Harry there. I hid behind a bush to make sure the motherfucker didn’t kill my brother. I was wearing pants but Harry was bare-assed, trembling, his trousers still in a ball under his arm, and I heard a crack! It was Bull Pushkin’s fist connecting with Harry’s skull. Harry fell back onto his ass crying, and Bull pulled him up and started screaming into Harry’s poor hurt ear about insubordination and Harry, holding his head, said, “But Bull, I was only swimming, is that a crime?” and Bull said, “Mr. Pushkin to you, boy. Put your clothes on, boy, don’t just stand there.” I ducked in and out of the shadows behind Harry following Bull down the path and back over the aqueduct, and I saw Harry put his hand to the side of his head and then look at his hand, and there was blood on it. Bull had ruptured Harry’s eardrum. He was deaf in that ear from then on. It would keep him out of the service in the world war we didn’t know was coming. Harry never, ever told the story the way it happened. When asked about his hearing over the years, he always said he ruptured his eardrum straining too hard on the toilet.
Lying awake at night during that time, in the early 1930s, when I wasn’t imagining building the dam, or going over in my mind the next steps for whatever I was making in wood shop, or plans for an editorial or the landscape I was painting in art class, I thought about how was I going to get back at the Colonel and that fat-fuck Piggy, and that two-faced son-of-a-bitch Bull Pushkin. There had to be a way. There were more of us than there were of them. If we sat on our asses, nothing would change. We had to take action. Action was everything. I went to sleep thinking about it.
CHAPTER 36
My mother called in sick and went with us to the Hopkins appointment. Brenda opted out, she had to be at work, so it was the four of us like old times, an American family off to see the USA in our Chevrolet, only we were going to see Samuel Geest, the renowned Johns Hopkins head
and neck surgeon. I had a canvas bag packed with methadone, a bottle of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic to wash down the tablets, the CAT scan and MRI film, hospital records, and a plastic urinal Brenda insisted he bring along.
Susan drove us down the Jones Falls, gliding around the banked curves on the expressway past church spires on hilltops, past the Beaux-Arts Belvedere Hotel and the Maryland National Bank building with its copper mansard roof. Our spirits were high. A lot of it was gallows humor, but we were hopeful about our pilgrimage to Baltimore’s own temple of scientific achievement. My father was having another good day, my mother was glad to be with her girls, and Susan didn’t seem preoccupied with thoughts of Larry and their kids. For once, Susan seemed to recognize the value of her original family. It was the last time the four of us would be together.
“I want the main entrance,” my father said. “The cobblestone drive in front of the old dome building. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Don’t worry, you’re getting the main entrance,” Susan said. “Would I take my father to any lousy side entrance?”
“If you have to come to Johns Hopkins, you may as well do it right,” said my father.
“Only the finest entrances for the Aronsons,” my mother said. “I think they have a policy, people carrying urinals come in through the front door!” My mother laughed heartily and we all joined her. We went over the Orleans Street bridge and down into the urban landscape. Leaning in from the backseat, I could see a tear shining in the corner of Susan’s eye.
“I’m weak,” my father said. “You’re making fun of a sick person.”
The brick Victorian hospital pavilion with its pitched slate roofs, spires, and a majestic dome, was the main building when it was built in 1889, but it was now the administration building and not even close to the main entrance. We went inside anyway, into the rotunda where a ten-foot Jesus in flowing marble robes greeted us with outstretched arms. My father was pleased. “Look at this!” he said. “Better than Sinai. Here you get all the trappings.”
I tried to see Jesus as a bonus as my father did, but I thought the words carved into the base of the statue were pathetic. “Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” I didn’t want to be coaxed into submission. Did he?
In the waiting room he asked for a pen and paper, apparently inspired by the words of Christ. He scribbled a poem on the back of an envelope my mother extracted from her purse.
They gave me CAT scans,
MRIs in the rain,
But all I want is
Out of pain.
“Very good, Clyde,” my mother said.
He beamed in his wheelchair like a toddler in a stroller. She had a faraway look in her eyes.
Somewhere in England
10 Oct 1944
Darling,
I want an end to this aching loneliness. It reminds me of the orphanage. Always in the midst of our jokes and horseplay, each soldier has his mind and heart thousands of miles away. We need the warmth and love of a woman to shield us and comfort us. It’s silly of a practical guy like me to make a frail 115-pound girl the repository of all my hopes. But that’s how it is. See how much I need you?
All my love forever,
Clyde
His name was called and I wheeled him in. Susan and my mother stayed behind, their choice. Dr. Geest had a strangely familiar cleft in his chin, gentle eyes, and sandy-colored hair that curled over the collar of his lab coat. “The mass is in a difficult spot,” he said. He helped my father from the wheelchair into the examining chair and felt his neck, observed his bulging eye. “How long has your voice been hoarse?” Dr. Geest asked softly.
My father frowned. “Look, I’m not here about my voice. Can you help me, doctor?”
“I may have to go in through the soft palate,” the doctor said with whispery urgency. “Or the nostril or through the ear.” He scheduled a biopsy for the following week.
“It’s an amazing coincidence, isn’t it?”
“What?” my father said.
“Geest looks so much like Johnny Dolan. The cleft in his chin. His eyes. The long, wavy hair. Even the hypnotic voice.”
“You’ve got something there.”
The resemblance irrationally gave me hope. If Dr. Geest were anything like Johnny, he would know us and care whether we lived or died.
“I still miss that boy,” my father said. “That Johnny.”
CHAPTER 37
My father and Johnny Dolan became close friends in such a short period of time they reminded me of my own friends then—thirteen-year-old girls—always whispering together, sharing private jokes and secrets. I’d watch them standing at the bottom of the driveway, my father with an arm draped around his buddy, his wrist a fulcrum on Johnny’s shoulder, his other hand busy with all kinds of gestures and punctuation. Both smoking, laughing at intervals. My father couldn’t be like that with Shep Levine. Shep was too tall, for one thing, and too good a person. Johnny was damaged. He ran away from home when he was sixteen after his alcoholic father beat him up for the last time. They were lost boys, Johnny and my father, robbed of childhood. In time, they would rob me of mine.
Johnny was twenty-seven when he and his wife Linda first came to Cedar Drive, a tantalizing age in those days. Young enough to trust and old enough for experience. He took Susan out to practice driving. When my mother was washing dishes, he came up behind her and kissed her neck. I was the only one who told him to get lost. I said I wasn’t going to be his pretend little girlfriend like Susan. In the beginning, I told him to take his hands off me. We were on the sofa. Linda was helping my mother in the kitchen. I slapped him and twisted out of his grasp. Johnny was patient and things were changing so fast. He was interested in what I thought about everything. At my parents’ cocktail parties he was at my side, choosing my company over the adults. What was my favorite flavor of ice cream, had I read Narcissus and Goldmund, why did I prefer the woods to the beach? No one had ever asked me questions like that. I complained about family life and he wanted to know every detail. I told him I was tired of sharing. I couldn’t take the last slice of cantaloupe because God forbid somebody else might want some. I didn’t have my own bicycle. It belonged to Susan, although I rode it so much, the bike was like an extension of my body. It would be a waste of money to buy another bicycle since Susan never used hers. The next day, Johnny came to the house with a cantaloupe. We hid it in the milk box in the carport, and when he left and I was alone, I took the melon down to the curb with a knife and sat there and ate the whole thing, minus the rind, of course. I punctured the globe with the point of the knife and sat there hacking off pieces, gobbling up the sweet orange flesh, juice running down my hands, my arms, dripping from my elbows into the gutter.
The world was black and white, and then the sixties happened, the Beatles arrived, the world exploded into living color, and Johnny pulled up to the curb in his red Triumph. He entered the house and all four of us came alive.
For two weeks after the camping trip, I didn’t speak to my father. Two weeks—nothing in a lifetime—but try it for a while, not speaking. I still emptied his ashtrays when I came home from school—the ashtray on the end table next to the sofa, the ashtray on the elephant leg table from Delhi, the one on his night stand, on the dining room table, the kitchen table, all heaped with disgusting butts. I scraped the yellow crust of sunny-side-up egg from his breakfast plate and loaded his dishes into the dishwasher. When necessary to avoid confrontation, I grunted yes or no to a question, but nothing more. It wasn’t long before my mother knew about Nola, just as Johnny predicted. It was hard not to know. My father was in love. He could barely keep from grinning when he wasn’t storming the house in a fury. My mother approached me cautiously. She touched my shoulder. When I didn’t flinch, she put her arms around me. “That was a difficult trip for you,” she said. I nodded in the warm curve of her neck. She pulled away to look at me.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she sai
d.
“No,” I whispered, and she left me alone. That was all.
“What happened?” Susan said, but she didn’t stop walking down the hall.
“Ask him,” I snapped.
All week he raged. “Why isn’t the kitchen cleaned up? What’s that bag doing on the table? Get that shrieking off the stereo!” He was in love and the rest of the world could go to hell. He went to see her on the weekend.
“Where are you going?” my mother asked.
“Out,” he said. He didn’t come back until Monday.
I despised the sight of the green Torino nosing into the driveway after an absence. My sister was angry, but not at him. She was mad at my mother—why had she let her man get away? Why didn’t she do something? Scream, cry, bake his favorite cake? I couldn’t accept my mother’s role in this even a little, and I gave Susan no credit for understanding some things better than I did. She was Daddy’s girl, though. All I had was my mother.
On Labor Day, the last day of the season at the swimming club, my father approached me. He loved the club, though he didn’t swim. He’d sit on a chaise and trade recipes with the women. When it was really hot, he’d dunk himself up to his shoulders in the five feet end. He shuffled over to where I was sitting. I kept my eyes down and stared at his untied desert boots. Eventually, I lifted my gaze to his wrinkled swimming trunks, his round but strangely hard belly, his ridiculous straw gondolier’s hat. I was eating a chocolate snowball. I drew the cold paper cup to my chest. He wasn’t getting even a chip of ice. The red ribbon on the gondolier’s hat was feminine, but he was able to carry it off, he said, because like a real gondolier, he had machismo. At that moment, though, the limp ribbon was pathetically girlish. He stuck out his lower lip in a pout. “Are you ever going to talk to me again?” he asked.