You Are My Heart and Other Stories (25 page)

Three months after Herschel's death, I received a call from Carolyn, asking me to please hurry and meet her at Roosevelt Hospital, in the Intensive Care Unit. Something had happened to Amos.

What had happened was that he had developed what seemed at first an ordinary rash—red spots accompanied by dark dots, and by several mysterious marks that looked like bruises even though there were no apparent causes for any bruising. By the time I arrived at the hospital, he had slipped into a coma, and though the doctors were doing all they could, they were not optimistic.

Amos died that night of what was diagnosed as a form of toxic meningitis—meningococcemia was the technical term for a bacterial infection that could take the lives of children, when they contracted it, within twenty-four hours. The doctors had given Amos massive doses of antibiotics, but by the time treatment began, it was already too late. There was an effective vaccine against the disease, I later learned, but the vaccine, except in rare instances, was given only to adolescents.

Amos was, it occurred to me when, at the cemetery, we lowered his casket into the ground, about the age I was when Joey had come home from the war. We sat
shiva
for Amos in the traditional way we'd sat
shiva
for Joey (and for Rose, and for my parents, and for all my parents' brothers and sisters), and during the seven days of mourning I found myself staying close to my granddaughter Deborah, Amos's sister, as if believing my presence could in some way be protective, even though I knew it couldn't—that in this life there was mostly pain and loss and worry, with now and then a whiff of hope or pleasure, and that if you thought you heard the flutter of wings, as I recalled Joey telling me once—something he brought back from his time overseas—chances were even-money you'd been cold-cocked and that the best thing to do was to pray the flutter you heard was coming from one of your guardian angels and not the angel of death.

When we were together that week, I found myself thinking about Joey more than I had in many years, and when I thought about him, I thought mostly about the day he showed me the house in which he thought he might have been born, and of the easy way he and Joe Louis had with each other, and of the fact that Louis, our greatest heavyweight champion—one hundred forty consecutive months of taking on and defeating all comers—had not, according to those who knew him, spoken a word until he was about six, the age Amos had been. Like his mother, who'd died in a lunatic asylum, Louis also spent time—this was near the end of his life when he was broke and addicted to drugs—in a psychiatric hospital, and when he passed away in 1981, at sixty-six, and I'd told Herschel I was pleased to hear that Schmeling had helped pay for Louis's funeral, Herschel laughed at me. Given that Louis was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, he said, it was our taxes that paid for his funeral.

And Schmeling? Schmeling—a man who would wind up dying seven months short of his one hundredth birthday, outliving not only Louis and Herschel, but virtually everyone who'd ever known him—Schmeling had probably come to believe he'd paid for Louis's funeral since he'd come to believe pretty much every other distortion and lie written about him. This was a gift of character Louis lacked, Herschel said, and he added that looking back he'd come to see that Schmeling was nothing more than an out-and-out opportunist, a man who'd devoted his life to staying fit, and to pleasing anyone and everyone, including the Nazis. But when we were together the week of Amos's death, which had followed so soon after Herschel's, and in visits afterward, I didn't talk about this, or say the obvious to Carolyn or Carl, or to Michelle and her husband Phil—that, beyond the age of childbearing, Carolyn and Carl were now out of spares.

Copyright © 2011 by Jay Neugeboren

All rights reserved.

eISBN : 978-0-983-24716-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011925178

 

 

Stories in this collection were originally published, some in slightly different form, as follows: “You Are My Heart” in
Notre Dame Review
; “The Debt” in
The Gettysburg Review
; “State of Israel” (as “The Patient Will See You Now”) in
Hadassah Magazine
; “The Turetzky Trio” in
TriQuarterly
; “Comfort” in
Black Clock
; “Make-A-Wish” in
Ploughshares
; “Here or There” in
Columbia
; “Overseas” in
Michigan Quarterly Review
.

Typeset in Garamond, the best font ever.