Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“Just want to tuck Rafe in,” Uncle answered in a sheepish, unmusical voice. I was surprised by the meek tone with which he answered his wife. I had little experience of their relationship. He rarely talked to Aunt Charlotte when I was around, mostly because they weren’t often together, usually only on state occasions such as that day and thus when they had their guests to entertain. I knew she wanted him to join her upstairs for the pleasure a man could give a woman. I understood in a way that normal children couldn’t have. His abashed response interested me. Was there something frightening about having sex with her? I looked at her, considering this side of their relationship. Charlotte’s hair was in a Jackie Kennedy puff, dyed a severe, almost platinum blonde. Her full bosom was more of a formidable shelf than the warm small pillows of my mother or Eileen’s lively freckled pair. And certainly she had nothing of the mystery and thrill I associated with the birth of Julie’s passionate and idealistic breasts. I wished I could see them all bare to the waist, nipples revealed, instead of mere glimpses of white flesh flowing into intervening bras. I wished they were all on a couch together with their tops off and I could go from one to another, resting my head on each, sailing on Aunt Charlotte’s, asleep on my mother’s, laughing on Eileen’s, and growing up on Julie’s.

“Well, I’m going upstairs,” Aunt Charlotte said. “I don’t know how long I can keep my eyes open so don’t take forever.”

No doubt she believed I had no idea what all that meant. I hurried into bed while Uncle turned out the overhead light and desk lamp. I hugged my knees to my chest. I felt safe, but lonely.

Uncle’s perfumed face closed in on mine. I don’t remember which cologne he used that day. He changed brands often. He had worked in the fish market at age twelve, in the predawn before school, and had been teased about the smell by other boys. (This was another sad story of his childhood that he told proudly as a happy and formative time which had not hurt him, but helped make him great. Underneath the braggadocio, however, it was obvious he felt otherwise. He worked at the Fulton Market for only three months and yet the stink of that humiliation still clung to him in his twenty-four-room Great Neck mansion.) He hovered above me, smelling tart, the starched cuff and gold arrow-shaped link scraping my chin. His hairy fingers rested on the pillow. “You really miss your Mom?” he whispered into my ear.

That sent a jolt through my heart. I shut my eyes at the pain. “Yes,” I whispered and held my breath at the chance I took.

“You really want to see her?”

“Yes,” I leaked the word and shut the valve fast, afraid of the deluge behind it.

“But if you had to choose—” he hummed in my ear, the bow slipping and buzzing its note, “who do you want to live with, me or your parents?”

I hugged my knees, turned my face toward the pillow, away from his arrow cuff link and pungent face. “I want to stay with you, Uncle,” I said and shivered with such violence that my teeth clicked together.

He kissed my temple and left. I waited until I felt sure he wouldn’t return. Then I told myself to let go and cry. But there were no tears. I lay awake until Eileen came in from her night off. She was humming a tune. I knew she had been out on a date with a carpenter from the Old Country who had just emigrated and found a lot of work in the area. They were good times for New York; houses were going up everywhere on Long Island. I got a glimpse of Eileen tiptoeing across the hallway in her bra and panties as she went to fetch a clean nightgown from an ironed pile of laundry left by the maid outside her door. I pushed my hurt aside and instead held the fleeting image of her pink skin, mottled and bright, fixed in its place. I listened to her sing “Danny Boy” while she brushed her hair in the bathroom. She sang low so as not to wake me. Her voice was sweet, free of the darkness and intensity of my kin. I heard no sadness or loss in the lyrics. I fell asleep without tears.

AUNT SADIE WAS NERVOUS. SHE SWUNG MY HAND BACK AND FORTH TO soothe me, but her palm was gooey with perspiration. I was nervous also. I tapped my brown loafer on the marble floor, unable to stand still. We were in a large reception hall of the Hillside Psychiatric Hospital, a private facility set on four acres in Great Neck, waiting for Uncle Bernie to return from his conference with my mother’s psychiatrist. We hoped Uncle would come back with permission for me to see her.

The central hall was part of Hillside’s grand main structure, a stone and marble mansion built by one of the Roaring Twenties stock manipulators. His ruin in the crash and the forced sale of his possessions at depressed prices led to Hillside’s creation by Dr. Frederick Gulden. Gulden was an early refugee from Nazism, trained by Freud himself, who had earned the good will of a wealthy widow for the “cure,” or improvement anyway, of her manic-depressive son. In the late forties, Dr. Gulden added a three-story concrete dormitory for patients and the mansion itself was converted into offices and consulting rooms. The reception hall’s high domed ceiling and sweeping marble staircase was an oddly imposing entrance for a sanitarium. Nor did the mahogany reception desk and its sour-looking occupant, Bill Reedy, make the place more inviting. Reedy drank heavily every night, nursing his hangover while on duty, staring at prospective patients and their nervous families through bloodshot eyes. He looked enraged that anyone had dared to enter his domain.

I was intimidated by Reedy’s face: it started my foot going again. That disturbed Aunt Sadie. “Don’t tap your foot, honey,” she whispered and its echo scurried across the marble floor up to Reedy’s florid cheeks and squinting eyes. His frown intensified, as if focusing to identify me as a miscreant. That set off another fusillade of foot tapping, completing the vicious circle.

Uncle Bernie was conferring with Dr. Halston, who ran Hillside in the 1960s for the semi-retired Dr. Gulden and, given Uncle’s stature, had personal charge of my mother’s case. When Bernie returned with him, they led us into a reception room in the dormitory wing. Its walls were painted green down to the level of the mopboard, then white down to the linoleum floor. The room where I saw my mother was furnished like a doctor’s reception area; a couch, a love seat, a coffee table, a lamp, a magazine stand, and museum posters of masterpieces on the wall.

Ruth sat on the couch, shoulders slumped, eyes fixed on a copy of Time that someone had left open on the coffee table. Her hands were limp at her sides, palms up. She was very thin and her face seemed devoid of blood. I almost screamed — I thought she was dead.

Aunt Sadie sensed my panic. Her grip tightened and she pulled me close. My mother didn’t look up.

“Your son is here,” Dr. Halston said. He had thinning blond hair combed straight back and, as long as I knew him, wore glasses whose thick black frames looked more like goggles for a World War II pilot than aids for weak vision. He was a compact muscled man with a military posture, but his voice was thin and rather high-pitched. There was little natural warmth in it to begin with and Freudian training washed out any other coloration. “Ruth. Look.” Halston waved Aunt Sadie to bring me forward. “Your boy is here to see you.”

As soon as I realized she wasn’t dead, I recovered my nerve. I broke off from Sadie, rushed to the couch and tried to hug my mother. I hadn’t been given any instructions or advice by Halston about how to behave or what to expect. (I cannot fathom why not; I am amazed that no one discussed her condition with me in advance. Perhaps my memory is faulty.) Ruth didn’t move. I pressed against her awkwardly, trying to fit into her limp body. Once I had wished she would never touch me again; now I longed for the energy and passion of her abuse. I felt her love for me had died.