An Uncommon Education (4 page)

I thought of what the intern had said, about the organ being even uglier in person than it was as a purple-and-red plastic model. Maybe it was brave to look at something ugly and draw it anyway. “Has anyone tried to make a new one?” I asked, turning back to him. “So it could just be perfect, right from the start?”

This time his smile was real. “Not yet,” he said. “Not exactly. You’re young enough, though. You might just see that done in your lifetime.”

I went back to my seat in the lobby and resumed staring at my mother. So far that evening, I had been able to stare at her for nine minutes and forty-three seconds without attracting her attention. She saw me settle in and returned to her magazine.

Sometime during that night, I discovered the package I had found under the piano in my backpack. I hadn’t realized I had put it there, and a quick wave of fear passed through me when I realized I’d stolen it. I glanced toward my mother, but she was sleeping in her chair. Very gently, worrying that the papers themselves might even object to being taken from their rightful home, I pulled out just the photograph of Amelia Earhart, running my finger over Rosemary’s name as though the ink might still be wet. I looked over at my mother dozing fitfully.
She could fly
. I watched my mother’s expression shift in her sleep, wondering what sort of beliefs she might have held as a child, if she had always been unhappy or if unhappiness was something that she had learned. Maybe she, too, had written letters to someone she hoped would answer.

I opened my backpack and shoved Amelia back in, zipping it until it was as secure as I could make it, wanting, suddenly deciding, that the papers should be mine. Rosemary would never have wanted them to be hidden forever, I told myself. In fact, she must have just had them there for safekeeping, waiting for someone to find them who would see to and care about them. It didn’t seem, all of a sudden, that Rosemary was so hard to understand after all.

I sat up straight in my chair, oddly comforted by the sight of my sleeping mother in front of me and the knowledge of my sleeping father near me. Around us the hospital still hummed, the doctors in their coats, with their models and confidence, rushing about, readying themselves to save even more lives. I was tired and overwhelmed and my mind began to drift again, my convictions growing unchecked and giddy. If they could save lives, I would, too, I thought. I wouldn’t be just a doctor, I would be the very best of doctors—a cardiac surgeon—maybe even one who could design a replacement heart. I would keep my promise to my father and I would never let him fall again, and I would keep my mother from sinking too low to be found.

I, too, had been lost for a moment, and when I came back to my life it was in a form just slightly, but critically, different from the one I had left. I walked away from that hospital believing that I could one day learn to heal, that healing itself was something that could be hounded and captured, like a quarry that only needed to be chased to be won. It was a belief so strong that I would continue to build myself upon it, unable to let it go until I had tried and failed to save three of the people I most loved: two who, at very different times in my life and in very different ways, became the sort of friends we think we might never be able to live without, and then my mother, who in the end might have saved me.

Three

M
y father was expected to come out of the bypass surgery by noon the following day. When it was done, the surgeon, heralded by a nurse in pastels, arrived busily within moments, his white coat flaring like a sail behind him.

“Mrs. Feinstein”—he held out his hand and my mother rose awkwardly to meet it. I stood with them. We’d already talked about my father’s heart with him more than we ever had with anyone else, even each other, so it was strange to be so formal, as though the postoperative situation had reset our relationship and required us to meet again. “Your husband is resting comfortably,” he told us after shaking my hand, too. “The surgery was successful.”

And so we arrived home excited, with a tentative sense of enormous relief, but also with the understanding that complete recovery would happen only if my father took the time to rest.

I
t was shortly after that that we had one of our last formal Sabbath observations. We were never religious, but when I was a young girl my family still practiced a few collective Jewish rites that made us feel part of a whole. My mother had prepared an unusually nice dinner, taking the time for ceremony. The luxury of time spent so carefully would slip away from us as I grew older, as my mother would grow sicker, as my father and I poured every ounce of our weekend energies into my studies.

Before we ate, my father rested his hands on my head and said the blessing for daughters, something he had recently told me I was growing too old for. I felt the warmth of his palms, their weight on my scalp, and closed my eyes, letting his words surround me:
Y’Simech Elohim ke-Sara, Rivka, Rachel, v’Leah. May God make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. Ye’varech’echa Adonoy ve-yish’merecha. May God bless you and watch over you. Ya’eir Adonoy panav eilecha viy-chuneka. May God shine His face toward you and show you favor.
When he was done I looked up at him, weak with the gratitude that he was there. He smiled back at me, thumping his chest harder than I thought he should or could.

In a few more months he would be so well that we could trick ourselves into shelving his illness away completely, eventually managing to deny even the thought of a repeat attack, though I know now that one would have been likely. But in that moment I let myself think of how lucky we were to have him back.
Abba-leh
, I whispered into his chest, a word I hadn’t used since I was very small. I was thinking I would never let him go, even if it meant I would one day need to reach into his chest and place a heart there of my own design. He kissed me, pretending he didn’t notice my sentimental lapse. “Enough,
Naomi-leh.
Stop worrying about me. You look like a little old
skeyneh
, with your eyebrows pulled together like that.” He rubbed his thumb between them. “It’s no good to look like you always have a question.”

S
chool let out a few weeks later. We weren’t the type of family to make summer plans, even before my father’s heart attack, so I was able to spend large parts of my day reading to him: the newspaper in the morning, mail in the afternoon, literature at night. He was worried about me, wanted me to get outside, but he was also tired, or liked to see the fight in me, and relented. I must have been overbearing, caring for him with my books and papers and unwavering attentions. But one of the greatest kindnesses about him was that he was pleased when I was pleased, not just because he enjoyed my pleasure, but because he willingly adopted it. He even let me help my mother dress his incisions in the beginning, then check them regularly, allowing me to believe they required my opinions to heal.

“I might have made some promises,” I told my father as I sat with him on the afternoon of my birthday that June. “To make you better,” I continued. I rubbed the edge of the sheet between my fingers, avoiding his gaze. “Promises,” he said, a leading statement more than a question. I nodded. “To do well in school.” “You already do well in school” he exclaimed. “To do better”—I was failing at this. “You couldn’t possibly do better!”

I glared at him, frustrated. He took the hint and waited me out.

“To not have any regrets,” I said finally, tense. I wondered if now would be the time when he would explain to me what that really meant, if there was a way to get him to tell me more about the idea of regret. “You know what I mean?”

He was on to me immediately. “Do
you
know what you mean?”

I sighed, blowing the hair on my forehead as I jutted out my jaw, affecting annoyance while I bought some time. I often pretended I completely understood the meaning of words or ideas I didn’t fully understand. My father was constantly chiding me for this habit, leading me to the dictionary. But I didn’t like how everything I read there stuck. I was afraid it was taking up space in my mind that might have been used for something I’d thought of myself. My father didn’t know I could remember everything I read, and at that point I still wanted to keep it to myself.

“Yes,” I said finally, feigning exasperation. “It means I will do everything I want to do.”

“Good, but not exactly. It means you won’t look back and wish you could have done certain things you didn’t do.”

I wasn’t sure I understood the distinction, but I was busy acting smarter than I was. I kept my face fixed in the
And so?
expression that bugged him.

But he wasn’t looking at me. “No regrets. We should be so lucky.” He leaned back heavily on his pillow. I was surprised to see him so philosophical about the whole thing. He’d never expressed anything but full support for my enthusiasms, often translating them into ideas far greater than those I might have come up with on my own, like a magician taking a simple coin and changing the laws of the physical universe with it.

“I don’t see why not,” I said, imitating an adult’s diction. He smiled a little. “Of course not, Naomi.” He looked out wearily from his pillow. “You’ll be the mother of a president and five other children and go to Wellesley and become a doctor. I have no doubt.”

I frowned. The way he put it, anyone would have a doubt. “Not all those things,” I said. “I don’t think I want all those children.” He laughed out loud, long and fully, bringing my mother to the room. She began smiling herself, as I was by that time. It was so good to hear him laugh like that. I let myself hope that, after the worst, things might be changing.

A
mong other things, I was excited that my mother had risen to the challenge of caring for my father. She usually spent most of her days in their bedroom, but when my father came home from the hospital we moved him into the guest bedroom at the top of the stairs, so he could be within shouting distance of anyone in the house. My mother drifted in along his wake, staying to tend to him. I saw her more around the house in those six weeks than I had during the previous six months. It was wonderful to run into her incidentally.

In general, she was someone whose life remained curiously undiscussed. Her past, as the daughter of second-generation Irish Catholic immigrants, was effectively erased the moment she converted to Judaism and married my father. It was like living with someone who had no script, whose life story was permanently sealed. It wasn’t for lack of trying, on my part. I was forever trying to pull stories from both my parents about who we were and where we came from. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that trying to get more out of my mother than she wanted to tell only led her further into retreat, and the short but impassable distance she placed between us was prohibitive enough.

And so, instead, I learned to be mostly with my father and to keep my questioning to any subject that didn’t have to do with my mother. That was how he preferred things, too; it was, I’m guessing, much easier to answer questions about the world at large than the microcosmos that existed within our household.

M
y father claims he first made headway with me as a scholar during potty training. “A captive audience for the first time in three years. What I read to you!” When I was four he began to buy me notebooks and pencils the Tuesday after Labor Day; by age seven he was slipping standardized tests into my homework pile. For entertainment I was given such things as
Infamous Women
coloring books; Shakespeare’s plays in comic book form; my own miniature Torah, the scroll of which was covered in wavy black lines; historically correct figures of Clara Barton and Abigail Adams; math games made pretty with glass marbles; and a jump rope with a booklet of illustrated counting rhymes to accompany it. In addition to our regular visits to the Kennedy home, every April 19th we drove to Lexington before dawn to witness the reenactment of the Battle of Lexington and Concord; every July 4th we walked the Freedom Trail.

Because my father was an immigrant, he claimed, the great American promise was on the tip of his tongue. But because he had immigrated as such a young boy, and because my mother was uninterested in dreams, the language by which he translated this promise was not his own. He didn’t exactly describe the streets as paved with gold, but he did everything short of this, so that I grew up with the most overtold stories in American history ringing in my ears, the ones whose melodies were easiest to follow. I loved those stories: Longfellow’s Hiawatha, John Hancock’s flamboyant signing of the Declaration of Independence, General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the stories we told each other about that famous picture of a sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day in Times Square. My father had a blow-up of it on the wall of his study, its clean black-and-white romance overwhelming the scattered prints carpeting the surfaces below it.

Not one to limit his daughter to American tales, my father branched out into the Western canon of knowledge and achievements. There was only one present for my birthday the year of his heart attack, a special edition of
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
. It was an expensive hardcover that was almost too heavy to lift. My mother must have had to order it, but it came in the mail in a heavy cardboard box addressed to him, so that after I trudged it up the stairs he was able to tell me it was mine. I was delighted, opening it in front of him.

I quickly singled out the Virtues as my favorites: Faith, Hope, and Charity, with their round shoulders draped in stone gowns. It was the closest I would ever come to a Barbie, though when my father saw me doodling them—Charity’s hair short and spunky, Faith’s hair modestly short, Hope’s long and flowing—he warned me that the Greeks often thought of hope as evil. I wanted to know more.

“It’s like this, Naomi,” he said, settling down next to me. He was unshaven and wore a tattered sweatshirt. There was some chocolate smudged just outside his mouth, and his eyes were bright with excitement. “It can be dangerous to look forward too much, to think always of what should be instead of accepting what is.”