An Uncommon Education (10 page)

He was a terrific distraction from everything that felt full of holes: school, my mother, my father’s heart. We had invented a world; the universe had turned upside down and given us mastery over our lives. We felt bold together, invincible, capable of doing anything and everything, and the more this feeling overcame us, the more time we spent together, so that almost every waking moment of our lives was either at school or in each other’s company, both of us delighting in our imaginary worlds as we spun them out beneath us.

That fall, the Jewish Youth of New England sponsored a drawing contest for children in grades four through six. Five winners would be selected, and each would enjoy two days with his family at the Milnah Resort in southern New Hampshire after school let out. The contest guidelines stipulated only that the entrants draw a family tree; beyond that we were free to interpret as we wished. Everyone in Teddy’s class at Maimonides was entering, and my father saw no reason for me not to enter, too.

The right side of my tree, my father’s side, was a series of lines and names, many with question marks after them. The left side, my mother’s, was a jumble of leaves and flowers and berries. I think the judges must have thought it was an abstract rendering, though to me it could not have been more literal. Teddy’s was gorgeous, the veined bark six different shades of brown, each leaf carefully engraved with the Hebrew letters of an ancestor’s name, a small picture beside each one to represent the individual: Elhanon Rosenthal with his white feather; his wife, Rifkah, with her lit candle; their child, Saul, b. 1875, d. 1877, with his miniature wood wagon.

We both won, and the local media made a huge deal of having two winners in the same district, never mind that we lived within shouting distance of each other. We had our picture taken for the
Brookline Times
, and it was written that, as winners of the contest, we would be treating our parents to a stay at Milnah. Even my mother experienced a rare infusion of delight at the prospect of staying at a resort for a few nights, and my parents packed that spring with unprecedented enthusiasm, “Shall I bring the pearls or the diamonds, Sol?” my mother called from their bedroom. “The EMERALDS!” my father called from the hallway closet, where he was extracting his swim fins.

Teddy’s parents weren’t as thrilled, though none of us would have expected otherwise. Milnah had a glatt kosher kitchen and a separate house for the Orthodox, but his parents, getting out of their car in front of it, looked like they might have been arriving at a funeral. At least his mother did. I think his father was probably a little excited when he took in the lake and the wide lawns, but he deferred to her misery.

Until we found the mushrooms, the time passed slowly, all of us tiptoeing around Mrs. Rosenthal, who would have been better off locked in her room, but who positioned herself in a folding chair on the front lawn. She could see all three of the residences on the property as well as the lake, so that when we ran from the water to the house, she could track us with her eyes.

Teddy and I went into the woods to avoid his mother, and to ignore the fact that mine was already inside with the shades drawn. We ended up wandering fairly deep into them, pretending we were stranded there, that we had survived an airplane crash and had to forage for our food. Because we never got in each other’s way, Teddy’s and my make-believe games seemed to know no bounds; the longer we played, the more invested we became in their details and how it might feel if everything we decreed became real. I found the mushrooms first, and was so sure they looked every bit like the ones my mother used that I feigned nonchalance, serving them up to both of us as rare delicacies.

Almost at once, Teddy became practical. “They could be poisonous,” he said, not touching them.

I lifted my palm to his face so he could smell them. He still looked wary. “I’ve seen my mother
cook
with them, Teddy,” I said impatiently, not wanting to be doubted. His mouth was screwed into a frown.

“Also,” I said, “there’s no way a Jewish summer camp would allow poisonous mushrooms in the woods.” He looked at me doubtfully. I sighed. “They wouldn’t be kosher, Teddy,” I said, putting one in my mouth.

Here’s what I remember about the next three days: stomach pains deep enough to scare us both out of the woods and to our parents. My father’s face when I told him: the round “oh” of his mouth, with no sound coming from it. Then, later, my father arguing with a doctor. I only remember the doctor’s voice, not his face. I was in a bed, I didn’t know where, and I was awake long enough to see that Teddy was in another bed nearby with a doctor beside him. His eyeglasses were wire-rimmed and glaring, and he seemed tense with fury. The fact that he was even attempting to argue with my father made him seem like a god.
Dr. God
, I thought to myself. Of course.

“The boy’s mother is having a fit,” my father yelled.

“They become agitated when separated,” the doctor hissed. He had a thick, Eastern European accent, and he brought to mind the Nazi doctor in a PBS special my father had watched earlier that fall that I wasn’t supposed to see. I moaned softly. He paid me no mind. “I will keep them together; their fevers cannot escalate.” As he turned to go, the sun flashed off his glasses in a brief, brilliant explosion.

“Treatment initiated for substance abuse and withdrawal,”
I heard myself mutter.

“What? Did she say something?”

Dr. God was angry, I thought. He needed more explanation.
“3/28/74 PROM,”
I said.
“3/28/74 PROM.”
He was peering in on me and I had to close my eyes.
“3/31/74 delivered of 4 lb 2 oz (SFA) boy. 4/6/74 further obtunded. 4/7/74 manifested right hemiplegia. Expired 4/9/74. PM revealed ruptured left cerebral aneurysm in the distribution of the left middle cerebral artery.”

“Please—” The doctor tried to speak.

“Massive intracranial hemorrhage. Also fibrosis of the liver; portal hypertension; mild early ascites.”

“She’s delirious,” my father said, his voice coming through a tunnel. Not delirious, I told myself, no longer able to speak. A nurse rushed in from the corner, her white skirt holding her back. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again she was pulling the curtain between my bed and where Teddy had lain. I thought he had died. I tried to die myself. When I opened them again, Teddy was no longer in the bed beside me. I sat up, ready to scream, when a hand grabbed my right arm. “Naomi?”

It was my mother. I looked at her, terrified.

“No, no, sweetheart,” she said softly, hurriedly, “he’s already left for home. He already went home.” Her voice was shaking as she tried to finish whatever it was she meant to say. “Naomi”—she gathered me into her arms so that I was almost pulled from my bed—“I wasn’t here,” she said into my hair, “when you came in. Your father said—” She drew away from me, staring into my face. “Naomi,” she said again, my name coming into her mouth instead of a flood of buried words. She was stroking my face, her hand both light and insistent, her eyes unusually bright. “I’m so, so sorry. They said you’d lost your mind.” I wrapped my arms around her and, for the first time in my life, she grabbed me tighter than I could her, pulled me into her lap and held us there.

I
think my mother had tried to say she was sorry she wasn’t a better mother to me. I think she’d tried to say this many times in my life, though I couldn’t be sure. I’m not sure I needed her to say such a thing. I would never have fooled myself into thinking that her constant sadness didn’t make me feel incomplete, but that incompleteness was tied up with wondering who she could and might be, and with the ache of that wonder. I never thought for a moment that she didn’t give me everything she could have given a daughter.

Yet I wonder if part of my fascination with Mrs. Rosenthal didn’t have a little to do with the fact that I knew how deeply she loved her own child, how far she would go to protect him, and how deeply she disliked me.

To our collective surprise, Mrs. Rosenthal continued to allow me into her home after we had all returned from Milnah and settled back into the routines of life, but only for snacks, never a full meal. And she wouldn’t serve me fresh food, only packaged or overripe, even though her kitchen frequently smelled of baking bread and homemade soup. I tried, with feigned offhandedness, to impress her. I’d chat with Teddy and reference my grades, or how I was the only kid without a tardy that year, or how my teacher had picked me to clap erasers after school because I was the only one who had understood the math lesson. Teddy would open his eyes wide and nod his amazement, but she didn’t buy our show. She rarely even looked at me. I went so far as to bring
War and Peace
with me one afternoon, setting it casually on the table beside me. She took one look at it and started muttering in Yiddish, the only word I understood being
goy
, which she repeated several times. I put the book on the chair beside me and slid it under the table. No orange segments that day, only the red cheese.

Alone, I would wander the possibilities of covering my hair in a long, dark wig, throwing away my shorts and T-shirts, and finding heavy skirts and blouses to wear, becoming modest. I savored this fantasy the way other children imagine they are the secret offspring of royalty or aliens. I knew, and I suspect Teddy did also, though we never discussed it, that Mrs. Rosenthal was always looking for a reason to separate us, to explain to Teddy why he didn’t need me.

I think that’s why I began to look to see if I had within me the power to reveal some nugget of myself that would make her turn from the stove when she saw me, her face first blank with surprise then quickly open with recognition, her steps quick as she went to the cupboard and pulled out one of the five china bowls she kept there, filling it carefully and generously with hot, fragrant soup from her stove.

A
s it turned out, Teddy was the one who came up with the idea that we should go to the library. He was convinced that if I just carried the right book, she would be won over.

“My dad’s really smart,” he’d say, as we sat side by side on the Green Line to Copley Station to get to the Boston Public Library downtown, our hands intertwined between us. For my tenth birthday, my father had taken me to get my own library card, and now Teddy had one, too, which emboldened us to argue that if we were old enough to be responsible for books on our own, we were old enough to go to the library on our own.

Teddy always whispered on the subway, as though the people around us might be trying to listen in. “She loves to watch him read. She brings him his book every night and makes me be quiet. And when the paper comes, she wants to know if anyone has made the news for winning an award. A Nobel winner is more exciting to her than an Emmy winner,” he confided. His lips almost touched my ear.

We went through Asimov, Aleichem, Amichai, Heyse, Pasternak, Bellow, and Singer: she recognized none of them, or at least she made no show of recognition. We had a dark moment with Kissinger, a brief flash in her eyes and a sneer; like Tolstoy, he was quickly removed from her sight. We were too young to know we needed to move beyond fiction and non-, to know that if we would just make our way into the sciences we’d find her beloved Ehrlich and Bohr, the Konrad Bloch whose achievements made her blush with pleasure. But we did know about Einstein. Everyone, even the
goyishe
kids, knew about Einstein.

Of course Teddy suggested him early on, but he had what I thought of as the ability to find the least appropriate passages. His favorite book was a book of Einstein’s “life quotes,” a little volume that opened with a rumination on relativity and love. He took deep pleasure in reading me the following when I felt frustrated and annoyed by him: “How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it feels like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” I’d roll my eyes and sigh, but it never stopped him.

I was probably right to guess that the very last thing his mother wanted was to be reminded of romance, especially if the reminder were to come from me. In fact, I was sure that the only chance I had with her was to harness her undeniable attraction to intellect. Anyway, I argued, who ever reads Einstein for love? Teddy frowned but didn’t challenge me. He just waited, bringing Albert up every few weeks, and placing him gently back on the shelf when I shook my head.

The truth is, I was still working up the courage to admit even to myself what I was planning for Einstein, though I knew I was saving him. I guessed that Mrs. Rosenthal would have the same reverence for him that my father did: the Jew to define all Jewish success stories, the one who actually changed the world’s perception of itself.

And despite my outburst in the hospital, thinking I needed to save Teddy’s life, it had been more than two years since I’d convinced myself to be quiet about my memory. Perhaps in those years my fears had softened, but I knew I was losing my willingness to hold back. Anna Kim would never like me; I wasn’t any closer to finding friends at school who could be brought back home; I was tired of feeling ashamed enough to hide something from my father. So the timing was right, that summer, for me to sit down deliberately in a chair at the Boston Public Library and scan the row of Einsteins, finally deciding that, above all, I needed to stop pretending. Teddy followed my gaze.

He walked over to the shelf cautiously and studied the spines. After trailing his finger lightly over them for a few minutes, he pulled out a thick yellow one, about two inches wide. It was a nice-enough-looking book, with its friendly color and simple print. Teddy opened it like a magic trick, looking down at where he’d landed. Then he brought it to me, the book still open in his hands.

I flipped through the first few pages, understanding nothing, looking for nothing in particular. The book’s title was
Out of My Later Years
, New York, 1950. A note at the beginning claimed that the piece we had stumbled upon originally appeared as a foreword to Philipp Frank’s
Relativity—A Richer Truth
, Boston, 1950. Everything in the middle seemed opaque. And then I found what I was sure was a sign: a chapter on the laws of science and the laws of ethics. Surely such a connection could bring even Mrs. Rosenthal and me together, the female scholar and the female watchdog.