Hello Darkness, My Old Friend Read online

  The doctor took my hand, opened it, placed the rest of the cookie in my palm, then closed my fingers around it. “Please finish it,” he said. “If you were my son, I would very much want you to. It would kill me if you didn’t. That’s what I would want my boy to do.”

  I obeyed. I was terribly hungry and ate the rest of the cookie quickly. I began to feel euphoric. My eyes felt as if someone had put a mentholated salve on them.

  “I’m glad you took it,” the doctor said.

  “I am, too.”

  “Food is a great thing. It’s everything, really. I’m a doctor, I should know.”

  “What is happening to me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, although this was clearly something of a lie. “All I know is that bones grow and then they stop. Sometimes they break. We heal them. They have in them this ability. They have a memory. The body remembers certain things.”

  “I feel as if I can’t remember anything,” I said.

  The conductor came by and announced that the train was arriving at Schenectady. “This is my stop,” the doctor said.

  Distracted, I asked him, “Where are we?” I had no memory of the trip or how I had arrived at the place where I was.

  “We’re at Schenectady. I’ve got to go now. Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yes,” I said. I truly believed then that I would be. I knew, however, that things would not be easy. My heart felt as if it were wrapped with leather.

  The doctor left, but what happened to me next was one of those extraordinary events that take over the mind unexpectedly. The space in front of me, where he had been sitting, was now like a vacuum—an absence. I was alone. No roommates, no comforting background noise of fellow students. Alone in simple fact, yes, but also alone with the gnawing dread about my eyesight, in a panic that suddenly mushroomed. I felt as if I were in an enormous shadowy cavern, a void empty of anything or any sensation. Struck with a sudden rush of terror, I stopped registering even the occasional small sounds coming from the idling train. My mind froze—there was nothing and no one there, or anywhere in my world. There was no world. There was no past, no future. There was only my stunned, frozen self, alone. My stomach turned to stone, and I am sure my heart stopped beating during this negative epiphany—for how long I couldn’t say.

  The train began to move. “Going home will be fine,” I told myself again and again as the train made its way toward Rochester and…home. Just fine. The air is so clean up there on Lake Erie, and the Dutch elms on my street provide good cover.

  2

  Survival Skills

  In my early years, I had a recurring dream.

  It is a sunny late-summer weekend day at Crystal Beach, just west of Buffalo in Canada. A tall, handsome father in a bathing suit is carrying his five-year-old son on his back about twenty yards from shore out into Lake Erie. The father’s face blocks his son’s; a viewer from the beach would see only the boy’s arms clutching his father’s neck. Both are laughing as the father runs through the waves. The father playfully lowers himself and his son into the lake, and as the water slaps at the child’s bathing suit, the boy begins to tremble and laugh excitedly. Danger titillates him; he has never been out in the water before. But in his father’s arms, he is safe.

  Suddenly, the father, still holding the child, pivots and pushes through the water toward the shore. The boy is surprised and at first amused. At the shoreline, the father hesitates for an instant—then, with board-like rigidity, slams heavily facedown on the hard, wet sand, forcing the boy’s face into it. The boy rolls his father over and sees his glazed and vacant eyes, blood pouring from his mouth.

  The father is dead. The boy sits and stares blankly.

  The reason for this dream is clear. In 1946, I went on my first trip to the beach. Later that same year, my father died. He was a tailor who, because he struggled to keep his shop open, had trouble making time for his children.

  On my father’s last morning, my younger brother, Joel, and I walked him to the streetcar stop and waved goodbye as he left for work. At lunchtime, we were told later, he walked to the corner pharmacy, where he collapsed and died.

  That evening, his coffin lay in the center of our living room in Buffalo, draped with a black velvet cloth embroidered with a Star of David—as if it were keeping him warm. Candles representing the divine spark in the human body burned in red glass containers. I touched the coffin with my fingers, playing on it as if it were a piano. I sat under it like a good boy. I recall fiddling with the loose stitching of the cloth that hung below the bottom of the casket. I knew it was a terrible occasion, although I did not know precisely why. I was frightened and bewildered.

  And then the burial. A bleak, gray day.

  Wind swept across the cemetery. We huddled together like peasants. I stood among the adults at the burial site, unable to make sense of the silent scene—as perhaps no five-year-old could. The mounds of dirt surrounded a large rectangular hole in the earth. The coffin rested to one side. Amid the anguished sobs of those gathered around me, the rabbi began chanting a prayer. We put my father in the ground. The coffin was lowered until it was nearly at the bottom. There were only a few inches between him and the cold ground, but the space, I thought, confirmed that he wasn’t quite buried, and if not buried then perhaps not dead. We could open the coffin. He could come out. Climb out of the hole, come home, and shower. Have lunch, live a life. And the pain would go away.

  Then the heavy, worn leather straps suspending the coffin were unhooked and whipped out. Next came something that seemed even more cruel. Those who volunteered were each handed a shovel, and they took turns throwing soil onto the coffin. I know now that this act is thought by Jewish people to be a mitzvah, a good deed. But at the time it felt the opposite. I had a strong urge to jump into the hole to rescue my father. Yet I stood immobile as each new shovelful of earth landed on top of the coffin with a thud.

  My father’s death devastated me. I was now the man of the family—something I recall comprehending even at that young age. I felt responsible for my mother and my little brother and sister. How could that be? My father, as a man and a breadwinner, was the indisputable head of the family. But now we were down to four, and I was the oldest male.

  I also remember experiencing an uncomfortable sense of freedom. Yes, there was a wretched feeling of loss that has stayed vividly in my memory, but blessedly, there was also a counterbalance—an unfocused, frightening epiphany that I no longer had the same limits and restraints. Perhaps this was nothing more than my own way of surviving the trauma of my father’s sudden death, but I recall that strange, joyless thrill to this day.

  My mother’s survival challenges were far more direct. Dad’s death left her with a total of $54 to support herself, me, Joel, and Ruthie, our six-month-old sister. In desperation, she approached the Jewish Federation for assistance and was told that it would be forthcoming—but only if she agreed to place her children in three separate orphanages. The notion not only revolted her but kindled her resolve never to permit any institution or individual to compromise the integrity of her family. To support us, she took a sales position at Sattler’s department store and then at the Broadway Market, both in Buffalo.

  Sarah, my mother, was a quiet person, but she loved to dance. She liked coffee more than tea. She went on vacation with my father to Florida once. They sat by the pool, held hands for a moment, found the light too bright, and left. They went out to dinner. She thought about her girlfriends. She thought about her children, the neighborhood, wanting us to be safe.

  Mother would hold my hand as we crossed the railroad tracks, and she would hold me back as the Erie-Lackawanna train roared past. She held my hand when we went to synagogue. She held my hand whenever we crossed the street, went on trips to see Niagara Falls, went to an apple orchard, went to Crystal Beach. Her hand had seen hard labor—a layer of tough skin covered the softer skin, mostly from her later work assembling airplane parts at the factory.


  In the 1940s, until well through elementary school, we lived in a kind of shtetl, a bleak place on the East Side, in Buffalo’s poorest section. In the early years of our childhood, following our father’s death, my mother had had to shuffle us from place to place. We understood the tenuous nature of our existence. “Don’t disturb the landlord” was the evening credo. By day it was the similar “Be seen, not heard.” We finally rented a house, at 163 Butler Avenue on the East Side, but I continued to carry a generalized anxiety over our uncertain living situation, which somehow turned into a specific dread of blindness and cancer. The first poem I wrote spoke of the horror of each.

  I remember standing hand in hand with my mother at the local ritual slaughterhouse while she ordered a kosher chicken, our Friday-night dinner staple. The shochet would chop its head off right in front of us. The blood squirting from its neck would run down a trough, and the chicken’s head would lie on the side like nothing at all, staring up at you as if to say, “Can this be? Is this possible?” One time, the sight was more than I could take. Before I could be sick, my mother dragged me out into the fresh air, where I promptly stumbled over a blind beggar. He was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. He was lanky, hunched over in soiled and torn clothes, wearing oversized and disintegrating shoes, and holding a metal cup. His unfocused eyes were milky with small black spots, his teeth misshapen and decayed. Anyway, that is how I recall him, and from that moment to today that is the form in which he has been a regular visitor in my dreams.

  The park near our home was dangerous. Thugs lurked there even in the daytime, and they often beat us up just for the fun of it. For amusement, we would go behind our house to play—to call the miserably small area a backyard would be misleading. My great-uncle Abraham, who owned the house, worked back there, stripping metal from bedposts over an anvil. All day long, that old white-haired man would hunch over the anvil, clanking away. His weary horse stood in its tiny stable in the rear, likely grateful for the break from hauling my uncle’s heavy junk cart. Joel and I had to be careful not to get in Uncle Abraham’s way.

  You could hear every conversation in the upper rooms of all the homes in the neighborhood—conversations that were not always enjoyable to be privy to.

  Mostly, though, our neighbors were guarded in their speech, for many of them had fled a holocaust. Although I was young then and did not know what lay behind, around, and under that silence, I sensed a bit of it. All in all, it was as if we were living in the Dark Ages. My brother and I would play football or baseball in the middle of the street until early evening. It was hot and muggy, and we loved it.

  You could hear the bugs whirring up near the streetlamps. The old neighborhood women would be in their housedresses, watching us from their porches. Will Ludwig, an old blind man, would stand and “watch,” too. No one knew what he did or where he came from. He just stood there in his white T-shirt and gray slacks hiked up on his hips. He was creepy but benign, like a friendly ghost. If he wasn’t there, you wouldn’t notice his absence. He would always stand on the same spot, arms folded, erect and intent, as though he was a referee. Somehow, his presence softened the harshness of the light from the streetlamps. There came a time when we realized that he no longer appeared in the evenings. I do not know what became of him.

  Is recall being too dour? Maybe. The smell of my mother’s cold cream and the scent of her perfume; the look and feel of the cloth of her worn dress; the swish of her house slippers against the wood floors; the smoothness of her voice; the sounds of her sipping tea and the clink of the saucer; her tired voice in the morning asking what I would like for breakfast; the pattern on the window drapes in her room; the joy of coming in from a frigid walk with my little brother after services during the winter, entering an envelope of warmth and calm, singing “Shalom Aleichem,” reciting the blessings, sitting down, and beginning to eat. These were the little things that underpinned my world. But in those lean days, there was a lot to underpin.

  Mother also supported my beloved grandmother, Pauline Fox. We called her Grandma, or Bub. Born in Poland, Grandma was a survivor of Jewish ghettos, poverty, and pogroms. When she was eight years old, she suffered a bizarre accident that resulted in the loss of her left eye. While babysitting in Poland as a young girl, a spring popped out of a crib and hit her in the eye. She never spoke of her partial blindness, but on late evenings Joel and I would see her remove her prosthetic eye and place it in her dresser. Sometimes we would secretly open the drawer, shivering at the specter of the eye staring back.

  Grandma escaped pogroms in Poland by resettling in London, where she operated a candy store in a less-than-posh part of town. Shortly after arriving in Buffalo early in the twentieth century, she fell ill and continued in poor health for the remainder of her life. The only things standing between her and a sense of personal annihilation were family and the weekly Sabbath. She and my mother used to cover their eyes when they lit the candles for the Sabbath. We do the same today. It is a ritual, and it is impossible to separate one set of candles from another, even across great distances and across the many years.

  Her illness may also have been an expression of relief and exhaustion, as when a marathoner crumples after the finish line. She had eluded death in Europe. She had supported herself at a marginal business in an alien and not especially welcoming land, England, with a language new to her, and had made her way to the United States across a famously cruel and capricious ocean. It was all a mammoth endeavor for this rather slight woman who had come from a tiny, insignificant place in Eastern Europe. But within her still burned the spark of life, the stability, endurance, and wisdom that had surely sustained her throughout her erratic movements across a troubled world. It was a spark that she passed on to her grandchildren. So long as I draw breath, I will think of her with unutterable gratitude.

  She lived with us, and we thought of her as a second mother. In our tribe, she was the Elder, the Matriarch. She was also like a sage. We received doses of advice and wisdom from her, more than we sought. She was mythical. It was possible to believe she had the ability to do magic. Moreover, she was dignified, which lent itself to the effect. To sit with her was good fortune. Her hands were solid—they had experienced so much. In them there was great knowledge. We would be lucky if one day our hands would know half as much. It was almost too much to be close to her, as if you might not be worthy of it. We were around her like excited pullets—always at her feet. When I grew taller than her, it was still the same way. To hug her was to be anointed; you left feeling stronger. Her age was the source of her strength; the false eye was the source of fear.

  She would sit on the porch watching us play ball in the street. She never had to say anything to us, never had to shout, “Good hit” or “Good catch.” It would have demeaned her. She supervised. She was beyond language, perhaps. When she did speak, it was in Yiddish. We listened to every word as if no one else in our lives would ever say something like it again, as if what she told us was how we ought to be. She was like an angel that way.

  I remember the feel of her cotton housedress against my face as I hugged her. Her papery hands on my neck. Her lips on the top of my head. The layer of white sand she kept in the bottom of my old baby dresser—brought back by friends, at her request, from trips to Israel. Her black rocking chair on the left side of the porch. The solitude of listening to the radio with her on Wednesday and Thursday evenings: Paul Whiteman and the Firestone Orchestra playing “Rhapsody in Blue”; Mr. Chameleon; Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. Our alone time. Those times lasted past childhood, into my adulthood, and even past her death—a death that took something sacred from me but left behind something sacred, too.

  3

  Brighter Days

  I was still in grade school when my life took two dramatic turns for the better. The first involved my Uncle Carl. Carl had been a confirmed bachelor, but in the Jewish tradition, he began courting my mother a few years after my father—Carl’s brother—had died. When I was ten, they
married, and my uncle became my second father.

  Carl was a junk dealer. Junk was a family calling back then, and a far from glamorous or lucrative way to earn a living, but Carl was still able to buy us a home, at 182 Saranac Avenue in North Buffalo, and the home made all the difference. It had a yard, a true living room, and even a television set. The home sang with respectability; it was not a mansion, nor did it need to be. The kitchen had an eastern exposure from which we could see the sun rise. We could see the sun set, too, through the picture window in the den. I contentedly observed that shift many times in that modest house—my house, our house. I also watched it in the nearby park with my little brother, Joel, while playing basketball, as the day would wear on into evening. After our half decade of borderline survival in dark apartments, it was as if we had emerged from a tunnel into daylight. Three years into this new marriage, my baby sister Brenda came along to share the bounty with us.

  In Carl Greenberg, I also found the strong male role model that my father’s early death had denied me. Carl was powerful and quiet in equal measure. The quiet side of him meant that I got only sketchy details of the Greenberg family’s flight from Europe.

  In 1934, I learned, the family moved from Poland to Cologne, Germany, believing it would be a place of enlightenment and culture. Two years later, Carl and a handful of friends and family left in the middle of the night, crossed the Rhine, and eventually went on to England and the United States. From there he worked to save the rest of his family. My birth father, Albert, and others had endured a harrowing months-long journey in 1939, walking from place to place, knocking on doors, looking for shelter, before reaching Paris and finally migrating to the States before the Nazi invasion.