Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“Read it,” I said in a gloomy voice. Perhaps its violence would teach her not to play at being my mother.

“Okay,” she said and sat at the desk.

She was very beautiful. Her skin was brilliantly white and her cheeks were red with good health. She was on the swimming team at her school; the daily workouts lent her an energetic and luminous appearance. Her neck was a column framed by long black hair that was also luminous. She glowed from her new maturity, her nascent womanhood. Looking at her, entranced by her reposed and yet robust beauty, feeling that she didn’t see me as a lover — as a man who would satisfy her — but merely as a boy whom she ought to soothe and encourage, I got my first truly spontaneous erection. It is difficult for me to know, despite years of analysis, whether my feelings for Julie would have occurred anyway without my premature sexualization and my abandonment by Ruth and Francisco. But what is the point of such speculation? Those events are me, as much a part of me as my face, as much of a mask or an honest countenance as I make of them.

“It’s very sad,” Julie said, lowering the pages of my story. She frowned and her tone was stern. She appeared not moved, but disapproving.

“It’s supposed to be sad,” I said petulantly.

She softened. “You have a great imagination.” She put the story back on the desk and turned to me purposefully. “Are you happy living here?”

Was Polonius behind the arras eavesdropping? I wondered. “Oh yeah! It’s great here. Uncle Bernie’s great to me. He gives me everything I want.”

“He’s very generous. But there are no kids living here. Aaron and Helen are all grown up. I heard you didn’t want to live with Aunt Sadie, but maybe you want to live with us. We’re only fifteen minutes away. You could still see Uncle Bernie. We come here practically every other weekend. And you would be close to your Mom.”

I was mesmerized by the prospect of living in daily proximity to Julie, within hearing of her gentle voice, within range of her warm brown eyes, within reach of her angora sweaters and what gave them shape.

“You know Bill can’t be bothered by me, but he’d love to have a kid brother.” Bill, her sixteen-year-old brother, was present for only the must-attend family functions: Passover, Thanksgiving, Uncle’s birthday. He was a moody adolescent, in rebellion against his coarse businessman father. He grew his hair long, he played bass guitar in a rock band; I was told he asked to join the Freedom Rides. I don’t think I’d ever heard him speak more than a mumbled monosyllable. He didn’t seem companionable.

Not certain whether to refuse or accept, I looked toward the window. A taxi entered our driveway, heading for the front door. There was a single passenger, a woman who appeared, in the flash I got as it went by, somewhat like my mother.

“Think about it,” Julie said. “I’ll go with you to talk to Uncle Bernie about it. He won’t mind. I mean, he’ll miss you, but he’d understand that it’s better for you to be with other kids.”

The doorbell rang. The mansion was so large there were two extensions for its bell. One was at the head of my hallway, near the kitchen so that the gong sounded loud to us.

“There’s somebody here!” I said, thrilled, and ran off, to get to the door first. I saw a woman’s figure through the side panel of glass. My heart raced as I pulled on the handle.

I got it open and there was my mother, an unexpected and, for a moment, unmitigated joy. Her head was covered by a scarf (she had been shaved near the temples for the electroshock therapy), there were black half-moons under her eyes that turned them stark and vacant, and she clutched a small overnight bag to her stomach, as though protecting it from a thief. I was so happy I couldn’t speak. I ran to hug her. I pressed into the bag rather than Ruth.

“Hello, Rafe,” she said in a high singsong. She held on to the suitcase with one hand and hugged me into the luggage with the other.

I didn’t answer or question why she had given up her pretense. I pressed my chest into the overnighter and buried my face into her neck. I was blind to the crowd that gathered to confront her; I listened while she greeted her family over my head.

“Hello, Julie. You look so pretty. Is everybody here? What’s the occasion?” Ruth’s words implied she felt at ease, but she spoke haltingly and at least an octave above her usual range. She sounded weak.

Julie didn’t respond.

“Ruth,” Aunt Sadie said. “Does Dr. Halston know you’re here?”

“Hello, Sadie. Hello Bernie. Charlotte, you look gorgeous. As usual. All of you look so handsome and beautiful. I came to see Rafe. He’s gotten tall, hasn’t he? He’s almost up to my chin. Come on, let me see you, Rafe.”

She pulled me off her. I looked into her big haunted eyes. There was no glint of green, no mischief, no sexiness. Only hunted desperation. “There … Don’t cry.” She smeared tears off my cheek with a cold hand. I didn’t realize I was crying. “I came to visit for a little while. That’s all right, isn’t it Bernie? You won’t object to that.” Her voice squeaked with false lightheartedness. It was grating and worried me. Where was she? Where was my mother? Each time I saw her she was refashioned into a grotesque version of one of her extreme moods. (Indeed, I was witnessing, and had been witnessing for a year, the steady disintegration of her personality, accelerated by stress and her improper treatment.) “You have to let me see my boy once in a while, don’t you? That’s just common decency. Even under capitalism they have rules about that.” Now there was a hard, furious undertone. “Even sharecroppers are allowed to see their sons.”

Bernie mumbled that of course she was welcome. Sadie led us into my bedroom. Sadie was the only one who came along and she appeared to be nervous, wary of my mother. I guess, because of the spitting incident at the U.N., they thought of her as violent. Or perhaps it was that Ruth used to throw things when she fought with them as a child. She was the youngest of a large family and no doubt she felt frustrated at her relative smallness and consequent inability to impress them. I had heard stories of her rages: once, she hit Harry with an ashtray; another time she had poured syrup over Bernie’s head. Since she had done violent things when they thought of her as normal, it was natural to be fearful of her in this unbalanced condition.

My mother didn’t enjoy seeing my room or my schoolwork or spending time with Sadie and me. She looked at everything I showed her as if it were a potentially infectious object. She handled my story, for example, the same one Julie read, with the tips of her fingers and dropped it almost immediately back onto the desk.

“Sadie, could you get me something to drink?”

Sadie hesitated. “I don’t know what they’ve got. Let’s go in the kitchen and—”

“They have everything here,” my mother interrupted. She didn’t sound sarcastic, she said it gloomily. “Right, Rafe?”

“They don’t have Coke,” I said. “They have Pepsi.”

“I’ll have a Pepsi. Could you get it for me, Sadielah? Please, big sister?” She pretended to be little. She put her hands up in front of her chest, cocked her head, and pursed her lips. It wasn’t good mimicry. There was too much mockery in it; whether of her own helplessness or of Sadie’s attitude, wasn’t clear.

It irritated Sadie. She stood up straight and said sternly, “Ruth, don’t do anything foolish. You’re out. That’s the important thing. If things continue to improve you’ll …” Sadie looked at me and stopped talking.

“Get visiting privileges?” Ruth spoke very softly, without threat, and yet she was ominous.