NORA EISENBERG
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could trip in , breaking their back. Studying my scarf, she told me that it
could tighten as I slept and strangle me . This had happened, she ex–
plained, to Isadora Duncan, one of her idols. But when I then tried to
sleep in a shower cap, she said that it could slip on my face and smother
me.
A terrible truth about both of my parents those days was that when
they weren't busy suffering or inflicting torments, they sometimes could
be amazingly sensitive, reaching out in the respite between battles in
sympathies that were as potent as they were unpredictable and fleeting.
Seeing me in my desperate get-ups, they each tried to reassure me that
no one would come to get me . My mother went so far as
to
allow me
to lock all our windows at night and to string, as an alarm, small silver
bells across our fire escape, which she then helped me camouflage with
sprightly red bows. My father, who had belonged to street gangs on the
Lower East Side before he joined the Young Communist League, tried
to reassure me by explaining how gangs worked then and now - gang
versus gang, not gang versus little girl in bed. But I found all his reassur–
ances less convincing than the St. Brendan's boys' descriptions.
It didn't help that waking in the middle of a fitful night, I came
upon my father pacing the living room, smoking and sweating. He
looked worried, not angry, so I walked up close to him and asked him
what was wrong. As a boy, he said, he had pierced another boy's eye
ball with a fountain pen, and some nights , remembering still, it was hard
to sleep. Was he mean? I asked, suppressing a gag. My father shook his
head. He was very nice. And I did that to that very nice boy with my
Waterman's pen, just like that. Imagine that, just like that.
You were young, I said, to try to normalize things and comfort him
and me, hearing, of course, even at that young age of nine or so, the
hollowness of my remark, which my father must have heard too, for he
just stood there dragging on his Lucky Strike, shaking his head, repeat–
ing, A nice boy with blue-gray eyes. Imagine.
Years later, as our father lay dying in a hospital bed, frail and loving,
I thought often about the younger him, and one long vigil of a day, sit–
ting at Nick's side, taking turns wiping our father's brow as he slipped
away, I remembered the story about the boy whom my father had
blinded, and asked my brother if he remembered too . Nicky did, but ac–
cording to him, in other tellings, it seemed less certain that our father
had hit the eye - maybe just the area near the eye - and maybe the boy
wasn't such an angel but a tough who had held a broken bottle to our
father's young neck.
Whatever version is true or closer to the truth, I'll never know. I
know only that in the middle of that awful night my father offered his
harsh version, which I accepted as one of the sad truths pouring into my
