“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
