Читать книгу The Long Shadows - Andrew Boone's Erlich - Страница 6

I can honestly say that I spent my life beating the odds. I was born prematurely in July of 1906 in Denver, Colorado where my father, mother, and older brother, Ben, had emigrated from Poland. My paltry three-and-one-half-pound birth weight frightened the family, who worried I wouldn’t survive. The special medical attention I required taxed my poor parents, who barely spoke any English. Although at times I’ve been certain it would have been much easier for everyone if I hadn’t, I did beat the odds, surprised the doctors, and survived. My birth was followed by the birth of my brother, Myer, in 1911.

In 1912, when the family moved to El Paso, I was an average, normal little boy who looked like any other six year old. My health was the last thing on my parents’ minds. I was wiry and fresh-faced, with a Milky Way of freckles. My mother told me I had inquisitive, friendly blue eyes that defined my soon-to-be-angular mug. My thick, wavy brown hair was neatly combed. I remember how Mama gave us our haircuts. She particularly complained about my hair: “That mane looks like a nest for a family of tecolotes (owls).” I loved how Mama made pictures with her words. In the Erlich family, you’d typically be treated to a complete spice rack of languages: Spanish, Yiddish, Polish, and heavily-accented English.

Mama’s exotic looks and jalapeño personality seemed to fit with a savory mixture of languages. She was full figured, had red hair, and sleepy blue eyes set deep in a face with a peaches-and-cream complexion. I’m sorry to say that her face would soon be marred by wrinkles of worry and crow’s-feet from too many sleepless nights.

The first inkling that things weren’t right with me came early one morning right after I turned seven. By then we were living in Sunset Heights.

“Look, Papa, look!” Ben roared as he and I raced down the hall and barged into the bathroom where my father was shaving.

“Where’s the fire?” Papa asked, his face full of shaving lather as he set his straight razor on the sink. Hearing Ben’s excitement, Mama came quickly from the kitchen, where she had been cooking breakfast, and gazed at the scene unfolding in our tiny bathroom.

“Look!” Ben demanded. We were positioned back to back with the somber countenance of rivals about to duel. It was plain to see that I stood two inches taller than my ten-year-old brother, Ben. “This isn’t fair. I’m supposed to be bigger.”

Mama and Papa didn’t seem happy. I remember that when Ben had gone through growth spurts they celebrated. They even recorded a history of those passages with a grease pencil on the bathroom wall. But this time things were different. My growth would never be a source of pride and delight. As I remember it, Mama and Papa looked worried. I took it all in.

I would soon also outgrow my mother. Within a year, I would outgrow my father as well. My parents didn’t scare easily. Papa had survived as a Jew in the Russian Army, faced down Boxers during the rebellion in China, and immigrated to the United States with twelve cents to his name. He’d worked in Rocky Mountain boomtowns like Leadville and Silverton, selling to silver miners out of a pack on his back. Mama was his equal. When my father left for America, she had to fend for herself in Poland, raising Ben on her own for two years until they had amassed enough savings to immigrate. In the face of crisis, my parents remained dignified and resourceful. But what they were up against with me was different.

It was right after they realized I was taller than my big brother that the incident with the shoes took place. Even though I was only about seven and a half at the time, I recall everything vividly. It was Sunday, at sunset. Shadows slowly draped the untamed cholla and tumbleweeds in my family’s backyard. Those shadows made their way through our borderland window above the apron-front farm sink and slowly robbed our little kitchen of light. That’s when Papa raised his voice. It seemed to me, hunkered in a kitchen chair, as I watched him pace back and forth like an interrogator, that he didn’t speak but roared.

“Are you sure those shoes don’t fit?” Papa stopped and peered down at me. He was strong but seldom stern. He had gentle blue eyes and the kind of good looks that turned heads. His first job in the United States was as an artist’s model. Papa had ridden in the Russian Cavalry and his presence on horseback was so striking that he stood out in the crowd. He had huge forearms and gentle hands with dexterous fingers, which suited him for his work as a watchmaker. His demeanor was formal but our family mostly knew him to be warm and loving. So I was startled when the thunder of his question bounced off the ceiling and walls and rattled the black cast-iron frying pan and the purple ceramic pot that hung next to the doorway. It’s funny how a parent’s anger can come back in an instant with a photo’s clarity.

For what seemed like an eternity, the only sound in that kitchen came from the tick-tocks of the handmade gingerbread clock on the mantle above the stone fireplace in the next room. Sitting there in the center of the kitchen, at the family’s secondhand tiger’s oak table, I avoided his eyes.

I remember squirming on the chair and picking at my patched, gray knee pants. They were held in place by cut-down black suspenders that originally held up my father’s, then my brother’s, trousers. The blue hue of my short-sleeved shirt had all but disappeared. My clothes were threadbare, but clean and well-pressed. The only part of my wardrobe that weren’t hand-me-down were my shoes, because my feet were bigger than my big brother, Ben’s.

“I can’t believe it. That’s not possible—your mother just bought them,” Papa bellowed.

The tone, rather than the words, wounded me. It was not a superficial injury, the type that came from tripping on one of the clumps of red caliche that dotted our unpaved street or from being thumped by an itinerant elbow from Ben. I’d heard my father speak harshly to others, but never to me; he didn’t have to.

I was an aware, sensitive boy, a good son, and a helper. I was the type of kid who would think before reacting, almost always measuring my responses; a young dam that cautiously released water to irrigate, not destroy, the valley below. I automatically tuned into what I thought others expected. That would become a real problem for me. I knew my parents had high hopes for their sons. Throughout my life, I’ve never wanted to disappoint them. Though I was only a child, like the desert tortoises in the nearby Franklin Mountains, I understood how to blend in. As a child of immigrants, that innate ability—one I would soon lose—served the family well. I was gentle, like my father; all the more reason to be upset by his uncharacteristic display of what I read as hostility. I never got into trouble. When Ricky Feuille invited neighborhood boys to play with matches and smoke Camel cigarettes behind the Bernat’s house, I was the only one to refuse. Whenever mischief beckoned, I imagined the look of sadness in my mother’s eyes. Throughout my life, I’ve felt that, at times, my conscience has hog-tied and handcuffed me. As a child, it was as if I had a premonition that foretold the anguish I would soon cause my parents. Looking back after all these years, I see that that uncanny ability to see the future robbed me of my boyhood.

Be still, I remember ordering myself, as I waited for what my father would do next. Trying my best to be a good boy, I sat on my hands. I pressed my palms into the wooden breakfast room chair so hard that I almost levitated.

“Look at me when I talk you!”

I remember my father’s voice like it was yesterday. I looked up at him, but only for an instant. I couldn’t bear to see him angry. I never could. I noticed that he was only using English. Languages have a special way of communicating feeling. English is good at icebox coldness. A pleaser by nature, I was devastated that my father was displeased. Invisibly, I trembled.

“Let me see them,” Papa ordered. I reached down and picked up the shoes from their place by my stockinged feet and presented them to him. That was the third new pair of shoes I had gotten in the past six weeks. Generally, my mother was the parent in charge of shoes. When my shoes got too tight, I went to her. Papa took hold of those shoes, examined them for some anomaly, and muttered to himself. He resumed pacing.

I wondered why my father, a man whom I respected and adored, a man who worked from sunrise to late at night six days a week in our little family store, would not only be interested, but mad about my shoes.

Does he think I’m not telling the truth? I remember asking myself. Truth was important to the Erlichs. And it has always been important to me. I recalled the day my father lectured and spanked my big brother after he lied about a case of eggs purchased especially for Passover that had gone missing. Ben had appropriated them as a secret weapon to heave at the neighbor boys in a dirt-clod fight.

“In German, Erlich means honest,” he’d said. Although I was an innocent bystander, he’d lectured both of us. When Papa enunciated the word “honest,” I had thought of our name as a badge of honor. I visualized my family as Apache Indians in the Sonoran Desert, brandishing our war shields, announcing to everyone who we were and what we stood for.

“When you don’t tell the truth you bring shame not only on you but on your family,” my father warned. Looking back, I can say I feared shame more than I feared my father’s belt, which on occasion I’d seen him use on Ben.

Though it was wintertime and not at all warm in that unheated kitchen, I began to sweat. “Papa, my shoes don’t fit anymore,” I insisted. “I’m not lying to you. I swear.”

“I know, I know,” my father said, in a quieter but still stern voice. Papa stopped pacing and kneeled in front of me. I noticed that his brow was wrinkled and a bluish-purple vein above his right eyebrow throbbed. Thankful to be distracted for a few seconds, I watched it move. Papa further unlaced my barely scuffed, black high-top Buster Brown shoes and loosened the tongue. With a firm, determined grip, he took the shoe in his right hand and slid my foot partway in, just past my toes and instep. I remember how Papa pushed harder; I had to avert my eyes. I was embarrassed, but not sure why.

I looked down and saw my father’s brown oxfords, which he cleaned and spit-shined daily. I was fond of those shoes. I remembered all the nights I had peered out from under my bedcovers at Papa’s shoes. He would come home late as usual from work and tiptoe into the room that Ben, Myer, and I shared. Then he would bend over and give us each a kush on the forehead. I looked forward to the predictable, soothing squeak my father’s shoes made on our wooden bedroom floor. It was a talisman of safety, a blessing, a sound that reminded me things were secure in that dimly lit room. When I heard that sound, I could let myself fall backward through space into sleep. That’s a feeling I haven’t had too often in my life. That evening sitting in our kitchen I wondered how my father saw my shoes. From the look on his face, and the way he was straining, they seemed more like a curse.

Over the years, when I recall how my father struggled with those shoes, it reminds me of the tale of Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel that I’d learned when I was a little boy in chader—Jewish School where we went to study Monday through Friday after school and on Sunday. In that Bible story Jacob scuffles with a seraph and won’t stop grappling until the angel blesses him. Watching this unfold, God laughs. He changes Jacob’s name to Israel, which means “you who struggle with God and prevail.” Though Papa was single-minded and strong, it was impossible for him to have known that was the beginning of a lifelong wrestling match with an invisible menace he would not and could not win.

“Papa,” I asked, trying my best to connect with him and lessen the distance I felt growing between us, “when your shoes didn’t fit, did your father get mad?” My father was so focused on what he was doing that he didn’t say a word.

I knew I must have done something very wrong. Only two Mondays before, after school, Mama and I had gone to Givens and I had picked out a pair. In those days it was the only place to buy kids’ shoes in El Paso. Two months before, when Mr. Silverman measured my feet, he couldn’t believe that I was only in the second grade. I liked the attention and felt proud to be big for my age.

Upon our return, Silverman looked surprised and muttered, “Das ist ungaublich.” My mother shot him a disapproving look. When she paid Mr. Silverman, pulling coins from her purse, she’d looked at me and frowned. “These have to last you until Pesach,” she said.

I remember worrying that the salesman must have given me a smaller pair by mistake or maybe when I had walked through a puddle of water in front of the Azar’s house on the way home from school the day before they had shrunk.

“Stand up on that foot, Jake.” Papa tried and tried to force my foot into the small opening, but it was no use. He pushed so hard his face turned red. I pushed, too. I felt that forcing my foot into that tight leather shoe was imperative for the family’s survival. I knew that shoes were expensive. I imagined that if my parents spent all of their butter and egg money on me, Ben and little Myer would have to go without. Maybe the family would starve. I knew I was lucky to even have shoes. After all, some of the kids at Vilas School went barefoot.

“Ouch, that hurts, Papa,” I said, no longer able to keep silent. Papa sighed, sat up, and wiped the sweat from his brow. I felt guilty that I’d hurt my mother and father by not wearing my shoes at least until spring, as I knew I ought to. I was comfortable with oughts and shoulds. In those days they defined my world, like the North Star. “I’m sorry; sorry I made you buy those awful shoes for me, Papa,” I started to cry.

Papa reached up and put his right hand on my shoulder. I knew he wanted to comfort me, but he must have felt strangely unequal to the task. I know Papa was uneasy with his sense of inadequacy in the face of my sadness.

“It’s nicht gaferlach mien kind. It’s not so important,” he said. But I didn’t believe him. My father didn’t know how to tell me that he wasn’t angry; he was frightened. Papa just sighed, picked up the shoes, and stared out of the window into the moonless night. I stood there for a few seconds, waiting for him to turn around. Then I silently retreated to my bedroom. I wondered if Papa would give me a kush that night.

The next day, Mama and I made our way to Givens.

“You two, again?” Mr. Silverman said in a loud, overly familiar voice.

I avoided his eyes by watching the salesman’s belly shake as he spoke. I smiled to myself and thought, It moves like the jelly on top of Mama’s gefilte fish.

For the second time in a month, my mother and I sat silently in front of the eager seller of shoes. Silverman had been selling shoes and boots in west Texas since the turn of the century. He was like a walking ledger, a veritable shoe maven. If you asked him, he could recite by heart the shoe sizes and preferred styles of most of the men, women, and children that made up the tiny but growing Jewish community in El Paso, Texas. But he had never encountered a customer like me.

Silverman measured my feet, shook his head as if he were having a conversation with some unseen audience, and quickly disappeared through the worn, velvet curtains that hid the stockroom. Within a few seconds he came through those curtains with the exuberance of an actor bounding on the stage for an encore. He cradled several boxes as he made his way to where Mama and I sat.

Silverman presented the same style high-tops that I had just outgrown. I looked up to see my mother biting her lower lip, which I would come to recognize as a telltale sign that she was worried. The pride I had felt at being “big for my age” a few short months before had disappeared. It was replaced by foreboding. Not knowing what to do, I closed my eyes tightly and descended, inside; a lifelong way I had of escaping. Sitting in Givens, embarrassed and worried, I sought refuge in an inner world where I longed to find something to soothe me. But no comfort materialized out of that murkiness.

As if he couldn’t tolerate the vacuum, Silverman filled it with chatter. “This is a first for us,” he said, looking over his spectacles and down his nose. “I mean I’ve never sold so many shoes to one kleiner bocher (little boy) in so short a time. Chaa, Chaa.” He laughed with a German accent. I wondered if he was laughing or struggling for air. “What are you feeding this boy, Mother Erlich?”

I squirmed and Mama’s jaw clenched. Silverman’s loud voice was a magnet for attention in that small store. He, like many others over the years, seemed unaware of my increasing anguish. Another mother, this one towing a little girl who wore a yellow bonnet, craned her neck to see what all the fuss was about. The cashier and another salesman, like deserters from the Foreign Legion, left their posts to see what was happening. That was the first time I remember drawing a crowd. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I felt mortified. At that point, I would rather have gone barefoot.

Unfortunately, I would become a constant visitor to Givens Shoes. Within a few years, Givens could no longer accommodate me; I would bust out of even the largest shoes in El Paso. At great expense for any family, I would have to have shoes custom made.

XXXX

Two months and four pairs of shoes later, I sat on Dr. Epstein’s leather-covered exam table. In those days, he was the best doctor in town. My mother and father flanked me, sitting on uncomfortable iron chairs that had been painted white. I was nervous. I subtly scanned my parents and sensed their apprehension.

“Dr. Epstein came by the store last week. I sold him a zeiger. He should be on time,” said my father, trying to lighten the mood in the sterile examination room. “Then again, maybe the watch is already kaputt.” He smiled at me. I forced myself to grin back.

“Once in Poland during an influenza outbreak, when I got deathly ill, they made me take kerosene,” said Mama, frantic for something to talk about. I recall that I grimaced, imagining what kerosene tasted like. I wondered if Dr. Epstein would prescribe it for me.

“Weh es mir, Dora!” said Papa, rolling his eyes. “Are you trying to scare the poor boy?”

Mama folded her hands and looked down. I watched. Something’s the matter. Papa never leaves work for something like this, I thought. It was rare for me or anyone in the family to even visit a doctor. It only happened when someone was very sick. Mama had told us boys that when she and Papa were children, neither of their families had geld for doctors or medicine. Babies were born at home, delivered by midwives. Often, children got very sick and even died without ever seeing a doctor or going to a hospital.

“Dr. Epstein will have an answer for us,” my father said, directing his comment at my mother. A forced smile came to her lips. She slowly looked away and out of the third-story exam room window in the Blumenthal Building onto the plaza below. I tried to see her face. I noticed that she opened her purse, took out a linen hankie, and dabbed at her eyes.

“Mama, what’s going on? I don’t feel sick. Why are we here?” I asked. “When we came last week, why did the nurse take my blood?”

Just then, Dr. Epstein entered the examination room. That middle-aged physician had prematurely gray hair. He walked with the stooped shoulders of a man who often bore the heavy burden of bad news. Epstein wore a stethoscope around his neck and carried a manila file in his right hand. He placed the file down on the exam table next to me and carefully opened it as if it were a prayer book. Then he put his right hand on my knee and looked over at my parents. He made no small talk but immediately spoke in a grave tone. If his words had a color they would have been gray like the stones in the cemetery.

“I have never had a patient like this.” My eyes darted back and forth from the doctor to my mother and then my father. “If Jake was my boy, I’d take him to Los Angeles, maybe Chicago…to a specialist,” said Dr. Epstein, shaking his head.

Los Angeles or Chicago; I’ll miss school, I thought. I liked school. The thought of leaving home, El Paso, and Doogan—our new police-dog puppy—made me queasy.

“Was ist a specialist?” Mama asked.

“In my training I did study about this type of syndrome: monstrous growth, consistent with that of giants,” Epstein said, ignoring Mama’s question.

Two words, monster and giant, pierced my ears like bullets. This would be the first of many callous doctors I would come to dislike; doctors who would want to poke, prod, and measure me like some kind of prized specimen; doctors whose callous words would almost destroy the only man I ever met who was taller than me.

I was dizzy. My heart began to pound. I felt my throat closing.

“If he keeps growing like this, by his eighth birthday he’ll be close to six feet. I don’t know what’s going to become of him. We’re not looking at the development of a normal child here.”

I remember he talked as though I wasn’t even there.

“What’s going to happen with his schooling?” asked Mama.

“Mrs. Erlich, this is serious,” Epstein rebuked her. “School should be the least of your concerns at this point. I’m worried about him.”

I started to feel strange, almost like I was eavesdropping on a conversation about someone else.

I thought my father looked pale. “Dr. Epstein, is there nothing you . . . ?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Erlich. There’s nothing more I can do.”

My ears buzzed. I got up off the examination table, unable to contain myself, and moved away from Epstein and my parents. My thoughts raced. I’m not like the normal kids. Something must be wrong with me. I moved toward the window, as if to fly right out of it.

“Jake, sit still! You’re distracting me. Mind your manners,” Papa commanded.

I forced myself to sit down on the exam table. My thoughts ran in no particular direction other than away, like the lizards that Doogan chased in the yard. My parents and Epstein continued their conversation. I tried to listen but all I could hear was my heart thumping. I can’t breathe, I thought. The room grew dark, almost black. That was my first panic attack.

I had to escape. I jumped to my feet and ran to the door. Before anybody could grab me, I bolted. I almost knocked down the nurse standing in the hallway as I charged by her. Then I sprinted through the waiting room that was full of patients and dashed down the stairs and out onto Oregon Street.

I ran. I ran past the benches in the plaza and the tiled fountain with the two sleeping, olive-green alligators. I ran across the train tracks and by the St. Regis Saloon, where the old cowboys drank.

I was going at full steam when I flew off the curb at Stanton and Mills. I saw a huge mass of white out of the corner of my eye. Instantly I glanced up from the pavement and froze. The old white horse that pulled Kapilowitz’s dairy wagon was rearing backward to avoid trampling me. I only hesitated for an instant. I didn’t stop as I normally would to apologize for much more minor offenses than that one. I just looked back over my shoulder and heard my father’s friend yell “paskunyak” and some other Polish cuss words that my parents used when they were furious.

After another few minutes I finally did stop. I was dog-tired. My shirt was soaked with sweat. When I began walking up the incline on Mesa Street towards Sunset Heights and our home, I plotted how I would pack a bag, some food, and run away. I could sleep in the plaza at night and go to school on my own. There was no way I would leave my brothers and Doogan to see some strange doctor in Chicago or Los Angeles or wherever.

Looking back on my life, that was the first time I tried to run away from the inevitable. Running away would become a constant theme in my life. I often wonder how a seven year old could possibly comprehend the cyclone of feelings that came with the abrupt doctor’s terrible decree; feelings that were punctuated by words like “giant,” “abnormal,” and “monster”—words I would hear all too often in my life. Kids have trouble with emotions. Hell, so do adults.

It was dark by the time my parents got home. When I heard them approach, I looked up from my place on the wrought-iron bench on the front porch. I was sobbing, bewildered. Doogan was curled at my feet. I wanted my mother and father to make it all better. They sat down on either side of me, as they had in Dr. Epstein’s examination room. My mother hugged me and drew me close. “Sha, sha mein kind.”

“Jakey, I swear to you we’ll do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this,” my father said.

If only Mama’s hug and Papa’s promise could have stopped the nightmare. My parents took me to many specialists in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, any and everywhere they heard there was someone who might help me. But all of those doctors were unable to fulfill that most ancient of healing rituals. No physician could even name my condition, let alone explain or stop it.