Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (28 page)

I lied energetically to my father. I told him I knew I was bad and spoiled and that I was glad to be sent to school in Barcelona. Francisco was startled by the apparent totality of his victory. I understood I was confirming his belief that I needed discipline, but that didn’t matter since I was going to do everything in my power to escape my father, to be free of his impossible goodness. I would somehow
get
word to my uncle and thrive in the truer uncertainty of living as his ward.

Chastened, I was permitted to go out. I bumped into Gabby as I lingered near the office eyeing the public phone, heart pounding, mind racing, trying to think how I could call Uncle. Gabby scolded me, gently, for having lied. “Your father is very angry,” he said. He saw that I was upset and added, “But hell get over it. Want a Coke?” he asked brightly.

I declined. I had one avenue, perhaps, of escape. It wouldn’t be through good-hearted Gabby; he belonged to my father’s world. It was Tommy. He was a bad man, even if my suspicions were exaggerated. He drank too much, he admired a “foolish, decadent woman,” as my father once called the Tennessee Williams heroine, and he owned comic books—“worthless trash” in Francisco’s eyes. He wanted my company and that was wrong, no matter how far he intended to take it, and I could use that.

I was terrified, of course. Don’t be fooled by the cold-blooded manipulativeness I had to affect to carry off my desperate act. All the fanciful ideas of neurotic, traumatized Rafe were an elaborate camouflage for the simple, although apparently paradoxical truth—I was fighting for survival. I climbed the stairs to be alone with a man I believed was a child molester so that he could help me become the ward of an evil man. In order to feel worthwhile, I had to live among people who were worse than me.

Tommy wore a bathing suit and nothing else. He reeked of cologne.

“Hey,” Tommy said, startled. “You alone?” he asked nervously, although the answer was obvious.

He pulled me in roughly and shut the door fast. I saw all that pink flesh, soft belly overhanging the elastic band of his suit, droopy breasts, smelled his perfume and knew my suspicion was correct. He pushed me into his living room. The sun filled the room.

“Look who showed up,” Tommy said to someone. I saw a figure in a chair, shadowed by the day’s brilliance behind him. He was skinny and dressed in a seersucker suit.

I was convinced that Tommy had lured me here for this man. I was sure they would do something dirty to me and then kill me, perhaps because the killing was part of their pleasure.

“What’s your name?” the thin man asked.

I was ready to accept my fate. A slow death as the disappointing son seemed worse than this quick one.

“Come on, kid. We know, anyway,” Tommy said. He put his thick hand on my neck and pushed me forward.

The thin man stood up. “Well … ?”

“I’m Rafael Neruda,” I said.

“Do you know a Bernard Rabinowitz?” the thin man asked. His tone was as formal and dry as Perry Mason’s on TV.

I didn’t answer at first, amazed that in this death there was resurrection.

“He’s my uncle,” I said. “Is he here?”

“He’s on his way. He wants to see you. Find out how you’re—”

“Can I go home with him?” I interrupted.

The thin man moved closer, appearing out of the sun as he blocked it. His nose was long and thin. He had pale blue eyes.

“How the hell do you like that?” Tommy said and grunted.

“You want to go back to the United States and live with your uncle?” Perry Mason asked.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you want to live with your father?”

“No.”

“He mean to you, kid?” Tommy asked, massaging my neck.

“I’ll ask the questions,” the thin man said sharply.

“Okay, okay,” Tommy said and backed away from me.

“My father
is
mean to me,” I said.

The thin man turned his head to one side. He brought a long elegant hand to his ear and pulled on the lobe thoughtfully. “Call the Madrid office,” he said to Tommy. “Tell them to have Mr. Rabinowitz phone here as soon as he lands.”

“Maybe we should take—” Tommy began.

“Do it,” the thin man said in a soft voice but with such conviction it had the effect of a barked command. Tommy left the room.

“How did your father get you out of the country?” he asked me.

“We took a plane from New York.”

“No, that isn’t what I meant.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced one of those light green passports with the gold embossed letters and the terrible eagle. “Did he have one of these for you?”

“Yes.”

He was disappointed. “I see …”

“But it was fake,” I pleaded. “A man brought it to him. It isn’t my picture inside.”

The thin man smiled without showing teeth. “Whose picture is it?”

“I don’t know. Some other boy’s.”

The thin man put his passport away. Tommy entered and reported, “He’s coming though customs right now. He’ll call in a few minutes.”

“There won’t be any difficulties,” the thin man said and he smiled again without showing a single tooth.

Two months later, in the chambers of a judge on Long Island, I was seated across from a small man in his sixties who had a bad cold. Beside him sat a black woman typing on a stenographic machine. As the judge asked me each of his questions, he blew his nose, so that I had to wait before answering if I wanted him to hear me. I gave the answers I was instructed to by my uncle’s lawyer. I said my father was a Communist employed by Fidel Castro. I said he had taken me out of the United States against my will using a fake passport. The judge showed me the fake passport and asked if that was it. I said yes. When asked, I said I wanted to live with my uncle and that I was frightened even to see my father, much less visit him. I had had to say the same things to a Spanish official in Madrid. Other than those two nauseating confrontations, my return as a ward of my uncle was undramatic. I never saw my father. Later, I learned he had been put under arrest until we were back in the States. That was a matter of several days. In exchange for not contesting Bernie’s custody, no charges in Spain or the United States were brought for his use of a fake passport.

The events of my life were at last tranquil. I worked hard to please my uncle. I tried to become a winner at all things, from academics to athletics. My pursuit ran all day and night, from early practice for the basketball team to college-level courses for advanced students offered by a community college. I gathered As, chess tournament awards, swimming meet medals, praise from my teachers and offered the harvest to my beaming uncle with the innocent air of a maiden, revealing no personal motive for the bounty but to confirm the power of his fertile soil. By the time I was sixteen I had no conscious memory of the choice I had made in Spain. I believed simply that I had been raised by a madwoman and a Communist coward. I thought of myself—with the preposterous arrogance of the young—as a genius.

Uncle casually referred to me as a genius, in the way someone might comment that a teenager was tall or could run fast. His son, meanwhile, defied all his values, disappearing into the burgeoning counterculture of the sixties, abandoning contact altogether after Bernie cut off his trust fund allowance. His daughter married a vice-president in Bernie’s company, moved to a grand house nearby and had three miscarriages. With each failure, her weight shrank and her drinking became more noticeable. Bernie spent little time with his wife—he had a mistress in the city I discovered later—and not much with me either except on the high holidays when he ignored his immediate family to talk to me about my future.

He decided I ought to be a scientist. “You’re too smart to be wasted on business,” he told me in his study, by the pool, or late at night in my room. Always the same words: “You’re too smart to be wasted on business. Of course you could turn my millions into billions but that would be a disgrace. With my resources you could cure cancer.” He confided to me, on my fifteenth birthday, that he had disinherited his son, taken care of his daughter through stock options for his son-in-law and that I would receive at least fifty percent of the bulk of his estate if he died before his wife, and all of it if she predeceased him. “But she’ll bury me is my guess,” he added in a neutral tone. “You take those millions and do something that the world will remember forever.” He paused and looked thoughtful. His eyes glistened. I wondered if the shimmering was incipient tears. He stood up and said casually, “Just remember to mention my name at the Nobel ceremony.”

“Thank you, Uncle.”

He came over, ran his thick warm hand across the wispy hairs of my baby beard and whispered, “You’re a good son,” hurrying out before I could answer.

I thought myself so clever and deceiving. I didn’t like him. I was grateful and moved that he had thrown over his son for me and I thought him bad and weak for doing so. Such ambivalence, this dual judgment of every situation, was my continual state.

Of course the unstable chemistry of my personality finally ignited. The match was my beautiful, good-hearted cousin Julie. My sexuality had been so compromised that for years she had been the focus of my fantasies. It is glaringly obvious, at this distance, why I would be attracted to a female family member who believed in equal rights for blacks and for an end to the Vietnam War, a passionate Jewish woman who felt protective toward me, who always looked past my precocious intelligence to the hidden lonely boy. I didn’t have that insight into my libido: I was mesmerized by the movement of her white breasts under her black leotards and the fall of her shimmering black hair down her firm back.

In 1968 Julie was a senior at Columbia University. She had joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), a left-wing organization which was, that very year, beginning its transformation from a non-violent anti—Vietnam War organization into what would eventually become the ill-fated terrorist splinter group, the Weather Underground. As late as 1968, Julie’s family and Bernie didn’t appreciate—nor did the rest of America—how serious those young demonstrators were about changing the basic structures of American life: eliminating institutionalized racism, capitalism and imperialism. Julie was still regarded by her family as a bright, good girl whose participation in peace marches, lack of makeup and torn jeans were merely symptoms of a harmless phase, the young adult equivalent of an adolescent girl’s fascination with horses.

[That analysis is not entirely wrong. The faith that society can be altered may flourish in middle and old age, but is far more likely to bloom in people with little experience; and the bravado required to take arms against the world’s greatest military power is easiest to find in the invulnerable delusions of youth. We are animals, although we expend so much effort convincing ourselves we aren’t, and the chemistry of explosive growth in adolescence, full maturity in the twenties and the rapidly accelerating decay of middle and old age are powerful tides that push and pull our supposedly objective brains from idealism to pessimism. Nevertheless, some revolutions succeed and others fail.]

That same year, my sixteenth, Uncle put me up for participation in a program at Columbia University created to nurture precocious math students. Dr. Raymond Jericho, a professor at Columbia, taking note of the historical fact that all great theoretical mathematicians had begun their breakthrough work while still adolescents and completed it by their early twenties, amassed a small fortune in grants to gather bright kids from the area, aiming to discover another Isaac Newton. We met on Friday nights and all day Saturdays at the university, so our regular schooling wouldn’t be disrupted. The
Times
did a piece about us on the first day we met, dubbing it the “genius program.” Even then the publicity struck me as a sign that Dr. Jericho didn’t have his priorities straight. I got into hot water with him immediately, because I told the
Times
reporter, when asked what my specialty was, that I was working on an equation for time travel. “Really?” the reporter began to scribble and moved toward me. “He’s kidding,” Dr. Jericho said and punished me by forbidding me to work with Yo-Yo Suki (who later did important work in chaos theory) on cracking the Beroni paradox.

“It’s too hard,” Jericho told us.

“But you said we’re geniuses,” Yo-Yo said with his now famous deadpan. In those days, it baffled everyone.

“You two shouldn’t be paired,” Jericho said. “I’ve studied your files and you’re too alike.”

Yo-Yo, a very short, plump and pale Japanese boy with thick glasses, looked up at me—a six-foot-tall Jewish-Spanish kid, and in the best shape of my life thanks to swimming and tennis. Yo-Yo finished his survey and said, “Congratulations Dr. Jericho, you’ve just rewritten genetics as we know it.”

We
were
an odd group of teenagers. That remark caused the room to laugh as hard as if we had been watching the Three Stooges and Mo had been decked with a two-by-four.

Our meetings began in January. By February, I was disheartened. It was the first chink in the armor of my image as the brightest student in America—an image that I believed was crucial to maintain my uncle’s love and to secure his money. Of course (and this made it worse) the flaw was visible at that time only to me. We were divided in groups of four and asked to solve mathematical mysteries. My partners weren’t the most brilliant (indeed, none of them distinguished themselves later in life, as did Yo-Yo and another boy, Stephan Gorecki) but it became apparent to me that although my partners were average for the group, they were much faster than I, both in calculation and in grasping theory. After four sessions, I had nothing to contribute to the group meetings, and it took hours upon hours of hard work between sessions for me to do the relatively routine homework on transitional proofs, proofs that had been discovered centuries ago. I knew I was seriously out of my depth when a student named Jerry Timmerman tossed an equation I had worked on for thirty hours back at me, commenting, “This is junk. If you’re not going to really work hard you shouldn’t be here. What did you do? Scribble this on the subway?”