DESPITE PRAYER AND VARIOUS ELABORATE WASHING RITUALS, I would feel illness close upon me like a dark storm. It could happen day or night, lying in bed, walking with a friend or watching a tense basketball game at the Garden. Any manifestation of disease might set me off. A man sitting next to me with a lump in his arm or an article in the newspaper about a dying actor would precipitate a crisis in my life. In an instant my body was covered with the rancid sweat of fear. Death was pointed my way. The constant threat of illness created a new internal logic: Doctors became the agents of bad news. I avoided being around them or even making eye contact when I was forced to be in the same room. I avoided friendships with the children of physicians lest I run into their parents. I steered clear of the news sections of papers like germ-filled rooms. But sometimes even the sports pages described diseased athletes. My eyes would shoot away from dire sentences about stars of the outfield or back court struck down in their prime by leukemia or testicular cancer.
The princess who could feel the pea beneath her mattresses had nothing over me. The faintest ache or twinge had dark meaning and swelling importance. I was forever prodding, testing, discovering my aching ribs or that my jaw hurt to open, the glands under my arms were bigger than usual. My intestines were bloated. The Clinic had missed a few cells of disease. Now it was growing.
One night I was up late finishing a report for school when I went to the bathroom and found a lump in my scrotum. Soon this small nodule between my fingers began to throb. The pain quickly spread until my world itself was this menacing discomfort, my demise.
In the first light of dawn I hailed a cab and raced down the West Side Highway toward my father. I tried to restrain my hysteria as I pounded on his door at the Concord. Why wasn’t he coming? Finally Dad opened the door an inch or so but the chain remained latched. He was alarmed by the commotion. I pleaded with him to let me in. But he kept insisting that it was too early, I should come back about nine. I could not believe he would turn me away. I left the door feeling confused and miserable. I sat in a dreary coffee shop on Second Avenue staring out the window.
Shortly before nine I was at his door again. My father was in his robe and had a sheepish expression. Kate, his secretary for a dozen years, was sitting in an armchair in the front room. She was also wearing a robe and her graying hair was badly disheveled. After an awkward silence we took refuge in our old factory banter. I asked about the job they were working on for Ruby and she answered that blueprints were just about finished by the engineering department. Things were moving along. That’s terrific. My father’s bony leg stuck out from the crack in his bathrobe. None of us was prepared for this. Kate looked out the grimy window at the traffic moving on Third Avenue.
Dad and I walked into the bedroom and I dropped my pants. For a moment my father held my testicle in his fingers, worked his way to the lumpiness and rolled it like tough macaroni. He shrugged and shook his head. “Why don’t you see a doctor?”
This hit me like electricity. I paced back and forth. What’s the big deal? he said. I don’t think he ever realized that for me doctors were shamans. They could kill me with words and innuendo, plant seeds of terror that would take hold months later. I told him finally that I wanted to see Dr. Nelson in Great Neck. He had saved my father on a hundred desperate nights. He was the only one I trusted.
At last my father agreed to the extravagant idea of driving all the way out to Great Neck to see the old doctor. He asked me to stay in the bedroom for a minute while he talked with Kate. The instant he left I turned down the blanket of the double bed and searched the sheets. I quickly found a small round damp spot as though someone had spit and without hesitating I smelled the spot, my nose grazing the cool sheets and the small dampness, surprisingly a neutral smell, next to nothing.
When I came back into the front room, Kate pulled the brush from her hair and avoided my earthy gaze. In her increased wakefulness she was entirely forlorn. But I knew that my balls were fine even before leaving for Great Neck and my last visit with the great healer of my father. I was swelling with well-being.
In this manner my life swung between the blackest illness and manic health. I was thankful for good times and never knew when I would be blindsided. Dad was my lifeline. He always had the answers. Sometimes he brought me to doctors, but often just a few words from him were enough to return me to Riverdale reenergized to hunt the fervent breasts of high school girls, to revel in the melancholia of Keats and Kerouac and to perfect my jump shot at dusk beside the Hudson River. I knew that as long as he lived, I would survive.
Within the course of my last year and a half in high school, all of the families of I.R.’s children had broken apart, the grand houses on Long Island were sold. No more pools, tennis courts and quiet moorings in Great Neck Estates Park; cousins had moved off somewhere, we were all in new schools and rarely heard from one another. Alfred was dead and within a few months Laurie remarried and family members gossiped darkly that this new husband must have been her longtime lover.
If you looked up from the sidewalk at the Globe showroom on 40th Street, the windows were blackened and smudged. The luscious secretaries were no longer directing customers through rooms of infinite fixtures. Globe was out of the huge Maspeth factory. To me this was the most astonishing change. On Friday evenings there was no longer a flood of Globe workers pouring onto Flushing Avenue heading for families and bars and ball games with fists of Grandpa’s dollars.
But my dad was at the Concord Hotel landing jobs. He was my steady compass, proof that we were still on course. Just the sound of his raspy voice on the phone, a little bullying or dismissing, gave me purchase. Dad still knew the right person to call for courtside seats for the Celtic game or airplane tickets to Florida when all the flights were booked. He was so solid. Fixtures remained our glory. Fixtures and big fish. I dreamed of thousand-pound blue marlin cruising off the north end of Bimini in front of George Albert Lyon’s majestic home, where he, Ernest Hemingway and Mike Lerner had toasted the sunset with mixed drinks and stories about their ten-hour battles on the blue ocean.
But more and more I began to define myself within arguments I had with my father. While he smirked: Get with it, I’d tell him my ideas about Raymond Radiquet and Keats. I’d talk about Dylan Thomas and the greatness of mutability. Dad, that means the passage of time. He made a bigger smirk and I’d use some word like “pathos” he didn’t know. Stupid kid. I could never have moved away from him except that he was there, luring me back.
Dad, I’m thinking of going to Kenyon College in Ohio, I said, bracing for his anger. To study literature. He nodded a couple of times. You know, they have a top English department at Kenyon. Robert Lowell, John Crowe Ransom. I tossed out names I knew nothing about.
So you’re a real big shot, he answered. What’s wrong with Harvard? It’s just around the corner from Celia’s house. Is Harvard so goddamned bad?
Dad, I don’t have the grades for Harvard. I’d never get in.
That’s not your concern, he snapped. You just have to fill out the frig’n application.
I don’t know, I said. Dad scowled: Are you nuts? His eyes bulged with incredulity. I knew he could pick up the phone and take care of it. I was tempted. But Kenyon struck a chord, and I figured what’s the harm in trying. I could always transfer. Harvard wasn’t going anywhere. Dad could always make a phone call.
Some weeks later I visited him again at the Concord and he brought up a conversation with his sister. He had been feeling under the weather, his back was out, and when Celia had called, Dad couldn’t stand and had to crawl to pick up the phone. Celia had said to him, Abe, you don’t have to live like this anymore, in a hotel. Come home. I can take care of you. Your family is here in Cambridge. As Dad spoke, I wasn’t sure where he was going with this and I thought, What’s wrong with her? Doesn’t Cele understand the deals he has in the air, what Abe Waitzkin has accomplished in New York?
Celia invited Abe to move back into the house in Cambridge, to have meals at her place on the second floor and share the downstairs with his dad, who was now old and sick. Abe, you can work for Lee, she had said. It’s your business.
How ridiculous. Lee Products was hardly more than a garage and had a workforce of only six or seven men. The little shop couldn’t manufacture one of his orders in fifteen years. I looked at my father for reassurance. He’d always told me that his sister and her husband were never going to accomplish anything in business, they didn’t understand the big picture.
But this was not another occasion to commiserate about his father and brother-in-law’s small-mindedness. Dad was making plans to move back to Cambridge to work for Lee Products selling wiring troughs and electrical enclosures as he had done during his first years with Mom. He was looking forward to making a study out of the sunroom of the Fayette Street house, where he’d played with blocks as a little boy, put in a color television.
Dad had already convinced Alan Fischbach to take on Kate as his private secretary. He paused so I could appreciate the loftiness of this legacy. Kate Turner was going to sit at Alan’s side at the very top of Fischbach and Moore.
I was speechless. How could he go back to Cambridge? After so many big deals. The UN, the Socony Building. Aqueduct Race Track. What about the lighting business? How could he go back to that droopy house and his sick father who didn’t understand selling? Wouldn’t he lose all of his connections? What about the Bahamas?