A Master Plan for Rescue (2 page)

T
he following day, my father took me to see Dr. Shaperstein, the optometrist on Broadway and 207th Street.

Dr. Shaperstein’s office was nothing more than a brown blur, except for a model of an eyeball the size of a grapefruit that appeared to be floating in space and Dr. Shaperstein’s white coat, which hovered over me.

“Tell me what you can read on the chart,” Dr. Shaperstein said.

I squinted into the brownness.

Dr. Shaperstein dropped his hands on my shoulders and pushed me forward a foot.

“Better?”

I shook my head.

His hands fell onto my shoulders once more, and he pushed me again. Then he kept pushing me, asking every foot or so what I could see. Not until I was near enough to touch the chart, press my palms flat against it, did I finally say, “E. I can see E, the big letter at the top.”

Dr. Shaperstein turned to my father. “Your son has the most remarkable case of myopia I have ever encountered.”

He did not say
remarkable
as if I had developed a special skill like flying. He said it as if I might have wandered over from the Coney Island sideshow.

My father told him my eyes had been fine only a couple of days before, and Dr. Shaperstein said it wasn’t uncommon for boys on the cusp of puberty to experience a sudden deterioration of vision. Then he moved me back and forth in front of the chart to see exactly what I could and couldn’t read, and repeated
remarkable
a few more times, until my father said, in his voice that still contained enough Irish to push around the American, “How about you knock it off and see about making him some glasses.”

After that, there was the noise of wooden drawers opening and shutting, and finally, Dr. Shaperstein said, “You’re in luck. The luck of the Irish.”

“I believe history has shown,” my father said, “that the Irish have never been particularly lucky.”

•   •   •

Dr. Shaperstein told
us the glasses wouldn’t be ready for a week. Because I couldn’t go out without someone to guide me, I spent that week at home. Mostly, I listened to the radio, sitting on the green and brown checkerboard linoleum in front of our big cherrywood Silvertone, spinning the dial, searching for something familiar, some program that hadn’t been preempted by war news. But like my eyes, everything that poured out of the Silvertone’s speakers seemed to have been altered by those Japanese bombs.

I tried to put my faith in Dr. Shaperstein and whatever he’d found in those wooden drawers. Told myself that the glasses he was making would restore the world to order, reinstate the boundaries between objects, send the colors back within their borders.

I decided, too, that the Holy Skully Cap was a kind of relic, as potent as Holy Water, or the Communion Host after Father Barry had blessed it. During the day, I kept it in my pocket, running my fingers over its scalloped edges. Each evening, I placed it—always with two hands—on my night table next to my luminous-face alarm clock. Then I prayed to it—this beer bottle cap filled with melted wax—asking it to grant my request for the gift of sight.

I did not want to believe that something fundamental might have shifted. That for me, much like for the rest of the world, nothing would be the same.

•   •   •

When we returned
to Dr. Shaperstein’s office, he again placed me in front of the eye chart, this time settling the glasses on my nose. The weight of them was like coming down with a head cold.

“Well?” he asked.

Without hesitation, I read the rows of letters, my eyes stopping smartly against each sharp, black line.

Then I turned to my father, sitting on the other side of the room, wanting to see his expression. But his features—his eyes, his slightly freckled skin, his mouth—had gone soft-edged and smeared, as if somebody had rubbed an eraser over them.

Starting to feel breathless again, I ran my eyes around Dr. Shaperstein’s office. Some of the things were clear. The floating eyeball, three feet away, the fountain pen next to it. But when I looked across the room at my father, he remained blurred.

I pushed the glasses closer to my eyes, slid them down my nose. But my father stayed out of focus, and the room was starting to feel airless.

“Something’s wrong,” I gasped.

“With myopia this bad, there’s a trade-off,” Dr. Shaperstein said. “Correct for distance, and you lose what’s close up. Correct for what’s close up, and you lose the distance.”

I walked across Dr. Shaperstein’s office, keeping my eyes on my father’s face, bringing his features back into sharpness, turning them recognizable. But when I got too close, close enough to touch him, they began to drift out of focus again.

“What if I want to see something up close?”

Dr. Shaperstein lifted the glasses from my face and rested them on the top of my head.

“Now I can’t see anything.”

“Get closer,” he said.

I stepped closer to my father, close enough to smell the chemicals he used to develop his photographs—a smell that was both bitter and sweet, a smell that made me think of science. His face moved back into focus.

“What exactly did you correct him for?” my father said.

“The best I could,” Dr. Shaperstein told him. “Something in the middle.”

He pushed the glasses back in front of my eyes and handed me a mirror. I stretched out my arm to put myself into better focus.

The glasses he’d made for me had black frames and lenses as thick as the bottom of a Nehi soda bottle. They looked like the X-Ray Specs advertised in the back of comic books. The ones that claimed they would let you see through walls and ladies’ dresses. They took over my whole face.

I pushed the mirror back at Dr. Shaperstein.

“Any chance he’ll grow out of this?” my father said.

“Anything’s possible,” Dr. Shaperstein told him. “But probably not that.”

As my father and I walked back down Broadway, the people coming toward us—men in overcoats, women wearing hats—snapped into and out of focus without warning, as if they possessed the power to control how much of themselves they would allow the world to see.

I kept shutting my eyes, opening them again, willing everyone to stay still, stay in the three-foot distance where I could focus. But they kept moving, going from blurred to clear to blurred again.

“I’m thinking you’ll get used to that,” my father said.

“What about how they’re staring?”

“That might take some time.”

•   •   •

When we arrived home,
my mother lifted the glasses off my face and held them in front of her own eyes.

It’s possible what happened next was the power of the lenses, possible their strength was more than she’d been expecting. But the moment my mother looked through them, her head startled back, as if those thick lenses had shown her something she didn’t want to see.

She took the glasses away from her face, set them back onto my nose.

“Your eyes won’t stay bad,” she told me.

“I suggested that same possibility to the doctor,” my father said.

“And?”

My father repeated what Dr. Shaperstein had told us.

“What does he know?” My mother shrugged.

And what did he know—this doctor who could only correct me for something in the middle—against a woman who had no belief in her own bad luck. A woman who had witnessed her father—that man known as the Gentleman Bootlegger—shot point-blank on three separate occasions. And on three separate occasions, had seen him rise unharmed.

It was a story my mother repeated often. I suspect because it was about signs—in which my mother placed a good deal of faith—and also because I think she liked talking about the time she and her father lived in the warehouse full of illegal alcohol on Tenth Avenue. When it had been only the two of them, Aunt May having gone off to the convent school in Poughkeepsie, believing she possessed a vocation.

The first shooting had occurred at mid-morning, not a time a man expects to be shot. My grandfather had just finished his second cup of coffee and was about to head out the back door to the privy, when Red Nolan, a small-time nightclub owner, burst through the front door and shot him in the chest. My grandfather staggered back, exclaimed, “You should not have done that, sir,” then took out his gun and shot the stunned nightclub owner in the center of his forehead. Not until he and my mother, who was fourteen at the time, dragged Red’s lifeless body to the back of a saloon on West 37th Street did my grandfather show her the dented timepiece in his breast pocket.

The second shooting occurred in the early evening, while my mother and her father were setting out poison pellets for the rats that liked to nest in the straw that came packed around my grandfather’s Canadian whiskey. This time the would-be murderer was called Johnny Nack, though his reason for wanting to kill my grandfather was much the same as Red Nolan’s—a short shipment. On this occasion, my grandfather’s life was saved by his great fondness for the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Indeed, he read one of Mr. Yeats’s poems at Johnny Nack’s funeral, reciting from a volume that had a bullet hole in its cover.

The third shooting took place at night. My mother and her father were on their way home from the Saturday pushcart market under the Ninth Avenue El. My mother was carrying a bag of peaches, and my grandfather was carrying nothing because he believed that gentlemen did not walk in public with groceries in their hands. The two of them turned the corner at West 39th Street and Billy Cremore, another speakeasy owner who’d been shorted, stepped out of the dark and fired his gun. Billy Cremore aimed for my grandfather’s head, but it was dark and Billy Cremore wasn’t much of a marksman. The police never did figure out why Billy’s killer left a bruised peach perched on his chest.

“These shootings were a sign,” is how she would finish this story. “God had taken my mother and wanted to make the point that He was done. Nothing bad would ever happen to anyone I loved.”

“God sent Red Nolan, Johnny Nack, and Billy Cremore to shoot at your father to make a point?” my father would tease her.

But she’d only smile, showing him that gap between her teeth, and he’d have no further argument.

As for me, I would much rather believe my mother than Dr. Shaperstein. And that night, after I took off the glasses, I walked around my room, squinting at the objects there—the Holy Skully Cap on the night table, a model airplane on a shelf, the cowboys and Indians riding across my bedspread—attempting to pull the color of each thing back within its boundaries, trying to hurry along what my mother believed would happen. And it did seem after a while that the edges of things were growing more sharp.

But deep in the night, I woke to the sound of my glasses clinking against the lamp, and caught the scent of my mother—her unlikely smell of new cut grass. I sensed her standing beside my bed, looking at me, then I heard her bare feet crackle along the linoleum to the kitchen. After a moment there was the splashing of water, and I realized she was washing my glasses.

I lay there thinking about all the reasons my mother might have gotten up in the middle of the night to wash my glasses. Or perhaps I was thinking about all the reasons that weren’t what I already suspected, what I might have already figured out, that washing the glasses was a ritual—practiced alone and in the dark—for luck. That my mother—who put so much faith in signs—had made a connection between clearing the lenses and clearing my vision.

I can’t say if it had been those Japanese bombs, or what she’d seen through the thick lenses of my glasses, but whatever it was, I feared that the belief my mother had in our own good luck had been knocked out of focus as surely as my sight.

My mother’s footsteps moved back along the linoleum toward my room. I tried to slow my breath, make it sound as if I was still asleep. But I could feel it moving fast and shallow in my chest, and I could only hope my mother would think I was in the middle of a nightmare. And somehow, as she set the glasses back on my night table, she didn’t notice my breath, so I can only assume she was in the middle of her own nightmare.

•   •   •

The moment I stepped
through the chain-link fence that surrounded P.S. 52 wearing the glasses, people who had been throwing balls stopped and held them motionless in the air, people who had been shouting ceased and stood openmouthed in the cold. I focused on my feet as I moved across the macadam, heading for the overheated building.
No one will notice me inside
, I was thinking.
It will be like I’m invisible
.

I slid into my seat and kept my head down, staring at the pencil-carved initials on the top of my desk, initials that were now soft-edged and blurry from the glasses. As the rest of the class rumbled in, bringing with them the smell of wool coats and bologna sandwiches, I felt everybody’s eyes on me, crawling over my face, over the glasses—exactly like the X-Ray Specs in the back of comic books—making me feel exposed, like the Visible Man. The man on the poster Miss Steinhardt unrolled when we studied biology, a man with his skin peeled back and all his colorful organs exposed—blue lungs, orange kidneys, purple spleen.