“I brought you something,” he said proudly. My mother seemed genuinely excited by this rare piece of good news. “That’s really thoughtful of you, Sandy,” she said, and asked him to unwrap the gift. He quickly obliged. It was a record.
She read aloud the title on the record jacket—Victory at Sea—adding, “What a nice record.”
“It’s more meaningful than you can ever imagine, Hoffman,” I said. “The idea of victory has been in my mind these past days—but not victory just for me. I made a deal with God. If he gets me out of this hole, I’ll do everything I can to prevent others from going through grief like this in the future.”
“You know, Greenberg,” he said, with an intensity meant to buck me up, “I think you’ll triumph over any obstacles put in your way. Do you remember when you were on the track team and you told me that you didn’t mind throwing the shot put, running the mile or 440, but you could never do the hurdles? I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.”
I never did find out what my mother made of my “deal with God.” Maybe it just passed by her. I was in extremis, and the young are prone to sweeping announcements. Besides, Sandy seemed to have closed the subject out with his encouraging words. But a half century later, that hospital-bed promise would blossom into the abiding passion of my life, almost my raison d’être.
As we sat there, my mother mentioned that another rabbi had walked in. Obviously sent to inspire me, he began lecturing. It developed that he himself was blind and had come with his guide dog. His comments were clearly expected to exert a special force on me. I put it to the rabbi—not at all in a hostile way—about how the whole thing was unfair and nobody really understood. Then I started to talk about how nothing really seemed worth it any longer. I’d had such big plans—graduate school and government and all that. Now everything was ruined. Seeing that I was not being suitably responsive, the rabbi grabbed my blanket, tore it off my bed, took my arm, and, with his guide dog in tow, dragged me up and into the corridor. He repeatedly screamed, “I will teach you how a blind man lives!”
Finally, a nurse rushed over to us, pulled him away from me, and led me back into my room. I sat on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, perspiring profusely. Oblivious to everything around me—Sandy seemed to have made his exit—I finally lay down and after a while closed my eyelids and fell asleep.
I seemed to wake every few moments and turned from side to side. Repetitive dreams: the placard appeared again, those black letters monopolizing my mind. The door to my room was shut, and I could hear nothing. I could see nothing. It can’t happen here.
Those four days and nights in the hospital were interminably long. They gave me plenty of time for reflection—too much. One afternoon I heard my mother’s whispered response to a question from a hospital staff member: “We cannot pay Dr. Sugar in full at this time.” My head reeled from the implications of that little exchange. Despite Dr. Sugar’s blunt way of speaking, he was a compassionate man, but his horror at my previous treatment and his prompt efforts to control the damage to my eyes had left little time for conversations like this.
I would lie in bed, and my mother would be seated in the room’s only chair. Every so often one of several nurses would come in to check on me, removing the bandages and gauze that covered my eyes like small pillows. She would wipe off the ointment that had been smeared over my eyes and apply a fresh coat. She would ask me how I was doing, and I would say fine, even though that reply was as perfunctory as her question, and a huge lie to boot. They would chat with my mother, sometimes talking about what was in the newspapers.
Britain was boosting its arms budget. Castro hoped to reestablish friendly relations with the United States, provided we stop arming his enemies. A mob had attacked the Soviet Embassy in Belgium. I would hear them discussing what was going on in the world, trying to make conversation, and I would think, “The world is still out there?” Then I would chastise myself for thinking such a self-centered thing—for thinking that because I could not see something, it was not happening at all.
I do not recall my mother leaving my side once during that entire week in Detroit, but there must have been times when she called home to report on my condition. One of these times she learned that her other son’s stomach had started to bleed, so consumed with worry was he. A wonderfully symmetrical disaster. It was something for a philosopher to smile at, only my mother did not display humor about any of it. And yet I cannot say that she saw horror in it, either. She had lived her life with a sort of resigned sadness, as if things would always be grim. She was a woman not taken to laughing a lot, so when we did hear her laugh, it was especially nice. She was reserved, quiet, thoughtful, deliberate: as the Israelis say, sabra—like the prickly-pear fruit from which the term derives, tough on the outside, sweet on the inside. She had the skin to deal with grimness.
Dr. Sugar came in only once, I think. He had little to say. I suppose he just wanted to make sure my eyes had not become infected. He, too, probably asked me how I was doing, and
