In mid-July 1958, when I was eleven
and attending summer camp in the Pocono Mountains, I was diagnosed with
leukemia. The camp director phoned my
parents in New York, and they arrived in upstate Pennsylvania right after
hanging up.
I’d spent the previous five days in
the infirmary, kneeling on the bed and watching through a screened window as my
friends criss-crossed campus on their way to meals or the lake or the rec hall
or the ballfields. Cabins where everyone
else lived were arrayed in a loose circle, with the infirmary building outside
like a moon in its orbit. I seemed to be
a million miles away from normal life already, expelled from its gravitational
force by whatever was wrong with me. I
kept a small transistor radio perched on the sill. Over and over, I heard “All I Have to Do Is
Dream,” “Tears on My Pillow,” “Summertime Blues,” “Poor Little Fool” like the
soundtrack to a movie called Woe Is Me . . . . It was easy to feel sorry
for myself.
My brother Philip, almost nineteen,
was a camp counselor that summer, and visited me every evening after
dinner. He smuggled in extra desserts,
then sat on the edge of my bed eating them since my appetite had dwindled. He tried to cheer me up by reporting about all
the activities I was missing. Scattered
throughout various bunks, some of the nine Skloot cousins would also find their
way to the infirmary, spending a few minutes with me, smelling of energy and
the woods.
But I was lonely and bored there,
unable to focus on anything except the movement of healthy kids outside, the
flow of play. Go, go, go Johnny go! Time had stopped dead, my first lesson in the
peculiar dynamics of long-term illness.
When my health failed to improve, the camp director sent me to the Wayne
County Hospital for blood tests, accompanied by my brother. After we returned, time suddenly came back to
life, and before I realized what was happening, my parents were standing beside
the head counselor’s shack, my packed trunk was ready to be shipped home, and
people were waving goodbye.
My mother cried when she saw
me. My father put his arm on my shoulder
and squeezed, looking away toward the woods.
I didn’t want to go home, since the summer was only a few weeks old and
I was sure I’d get better soon, but I could tell from their expressions that
there was no room for negotiation. Yakkety-Yak,
don’t talk back. On the long drive
to New York, my father rambled on about the Dodgers and their first season out
in Los Angeles. My mother didn’t tell
him to shut up. So I knew I must be
seriously ill.
Actually, I already knew. There had been enough partially overheard,
whispered conversations in the infirmary hallway, and that unprecedented visit
to the hospital, and a look on my brother’s face that had alarmed me. But I never dwelt on those intimations, or on
my growing sense of feeling sicker rather than better as time went on. And I didn’t get truly frightened until my
father got to talk about old Gil Hodges and Duke Snider without my mother
telling calling him a Stupid Idiot!
As we approached the ocean, I calmed
myself by counting bridges we crossed. The closer we got to Long Beach, the
more exhausted I became. But by the time
we were over the Atlantic Beach Bridge, I knew I was going to die, despite my
efforts at denial, and that I had been taken over by a one-eyed, one-horned,
flying purple people eater.
***
We’d moved from Brooklyn to Long
Island about nine months earlier, and we had a new family doctor in our new
home town. He was the son-in-law of my
parents’ old friends, the Kronenbergs, had gone to Harvard Medical School,
interned at Massachusetts General Hospital, was an expert on blood disorders,
and had opened his practice earlier in the year, just a few blocks from our house. I was allowed to call him Matthew instead of
Dr. Gelfand. In the car, my mother kept
calling him a Dream Come True.
Matthew was waiting for us at his
office, where we went even before going home to unpack. He was tall, handsome, suave, and I thought
he looked like Nick Charles on “The Thin Man,” which I could watch even though
it was on at 9:30 because there was no school the next day. Nick Charles had been a Detective before
retiring to be a Socialite, so I decided that Matthew would certainly be able
to figure out how to make me better, to track down the culprit-germ and take
care of him.
My father handed Matthew a fat
envelope that the camp director had provided, containing the medical report
that included blood tests from Wayne County Hospital. Matthew sat on a stool that was too small for
him, leaned over a desk that was too small for the report, and began flipping
over the pages. He snorted twice and I
wondered if he was sick too. He frowned
and shook his head, which seemed like a bad sign.
Then he examined me. I had the sore throat marked by pus, the
swollen lymph nodes and liver and spleen.
I was pale and fatigued, bruised where my father had gently touched me. I was yellowish here and there, and swollen
in places that I hadn’t known could swell, like under my arms or around my
groin and eyes. Fever! According to the lab report, my white blood
cells were abnormal, particularly the lymphocytes.
I had so many telltale
symptoms. But I didn’t have
leukemia.
“Harry, Lil, listen to me,” Matthew
said, spelling it out, “Your son does not have L-E-U-K.”
I was shocked to realize that I
understood what he was trying to hide from me.
The word I’d heard whispered for the last week but refused to
acknowledge. Leukemia, I knew, was very
bad. So I hadn’t allowed it to enter my
conscious mind, transformed it into Luke
Easter, first baseman for the Cleveland Indians. I still owned his ‘54 baseball card. Sure, a nurse and a doctor whispering that I
had Luke Easter. “L-E-U-K” also became
big Luke from “The Real McCoys,” who moved with his grandpa Amos from West
Virginia to settle on a ranch in California.
Became Robin Luke and his new hit, “Susie Darlin’.” I thought you knew.
My father took off his glasses and
rubbed his face. He sighed, a sound I’d
never heard him make before. My mother
got furious. She turned to glare at me,
and said to Matthew, “Then what does he have, that they needed to send him home
from camp?”
“I’ll have to do another blood
test. But I’m sure he’s got infectious
mononucleosis.”
“Oh my God! That sounds worse than You Know What.”
Matthew shook his head. “It’s not.”
Then he touched my cheek, smiled, and said , “Who have you been kissing,
young fella?”
***
I asked Matthew to write it down: MONONUCLEOSIS. On the ride home from his office, I tore the
word apart and rearranged its pieces: ME, NO, MESS, MUSCLE, CLUES, ISLE. UNCLE!
My parents were strangely quiet in the front seat. Cigar smoke mingled with cigarette smoke,
swirled in the hot trapped air, and sank over me. OMEN, SOUL, SOON and LOON, COUSINS.
With my brother still away at camp,
I had a room of my own for the first time in my life. And I had to stay in it, not get out of bed
except to go to the bathroom, for at least the next two months. OMINOUS, SECLUSION, COOL.
My parents put our portable
television on a small, wheeled cart and left it beside the bed. The transistor radio fit between my mattress
and headboard. I had magazines, comics,
a few books, a shoebox full of baseball cards strategically placed around the
bed. The room’s two small windows were
on the walls opposite my bed, so I couldn’t watch the outside world as I had
from the infirmary at camp. But I could
gaze down the long hallway to the living room, watch as my mother or father
moved from room to room. For the first
few days, though, all I wanted to do was sleep.
Sometimes I couldn’t tell if I was
dreaming or was really back at camp or was awake but lost in fantasy. I heard reveille. I saw the American flag being raised on its
pole, all campers in a large circle with hands over their hearts, the flag
flapping in morning wind. I smelled hot
cereal and burnt toast from the mess hall.
I hit a line drive to right-center field and stretched a double into a
triple. Swam before lunch. I even wrote a letter home, during rest-hour
after lunch, saying I felt fine. I
played basketball, sang camp songs, took a nature walk, lay on the grass in
front of my bunk as darkness fell. Where
are you, little star? And what I
began to understand was that these mingled dreams and fantasies were making me
sad. Though I couldn’t find words to
express what I felt, it was clear that thinking about what I’d lost was making
me feel worse than the virus that had started all this. I had to let go of camp, find other things to
occupy my imagination. I had to learn
how to be this sick. SOLO, COSMOS,
COINS. MUSIC. I continued to be obsessed with the game of
“Words In a Word,” focusing only on the long, intimidating name of my illness. ONIONS, LEMONS, LIMES, MELONS. LION, COON, MOUSE, MULE.
Every Monday, a man came from the
laboratory to draw blood. His name was
Mr. Pryor, which I quickly converted to Mr. Vampire, then to The Vampire. He loomed in the long hallway, dressed always
in a black suit, black tie, black socks and shoes, white shirt. No stripes on the tie, no white handkerchief
in the breast pocket, no watch fob looped from the buttonhole. His black hair was slicked back and his
collar was often up in back, as though he’d put the jacket on hastily after
getting out of his car, and it gave him a hooded look. He swooped toward me, that white shirt the
only source of perspective, and after the first visit, I had to work hard not
to cry as he approached. Soon he’ll be
there at your side. UNCOILS, SMILES,
NOOSE, CUSS. Have gun, will travel,
reads the card of a man.
Moving my desk chair over to the
bed, setting the television on the floor so he could use its cart as a tray,
The Vampire sat close and tried to chat as he opened his black bag, spread a
cloth, and laid out his instruments. He
noticed my baseball cards and asked who I rooted for. He noticed my radio and asked if I liked
Perry Como. He saw my Hardy Boys books and comics, and asked if I’d ever read
Mark Twain. I tried not to look at his
needle and syringe lying there on the cart, gathering afternoon light. He would tie a rubber strap tight around my
biceps, spray a freezing mist on the crook of my elbow that stung but then left
me numb, and draw out the blood. Then he
would snap loose the rubber strap, bend my elbow up over a cotton ball, slap on
a band-aid, and sweep from the room. I
knew I could hear his wings flap.
Now and then Matthew would stop by
to feel my spleen and liver. It hurt
when he pressed hard under my rib cage and asked me to breathe in deep. He snorted his snort and asked how I
felt. SLIME, MINUS, MOONLESS. My mother, standing just behind his shoulder,
informed Matthew that I got worked up watching baseball games and cowboy shows,
and wondered whether I’d get better faster if she took the television
away. He winked at me and said he didn’t
think so.
It didn’t take long before I
wondered why no one told me how I was doing.
What were the blood tests showing?
Why did my fever spike every afternoon?
Was my spleen going to explode?
Was I going to turn chartreuse now that the yellow was fading? COLON UNCOILS! CONSUMES. August grew thick and slow, even with breeze
from the nearby ocean, and stopped passing altogether.
***
As far back as I could remember, I’d
been sent to sleep-away camps in the Poconos for eight weeks every summer. There’s a photograph in my family album that
shows ten young boys in white tee shirts and shorts, all seated on a long
bench, hands folded in laps, socks sagging around dark leather shoes. I am in the middle of the row, with my feet,
like the feet of three others in the photograph, not quite touching the
ground. I’ve written the word “Me”
across my chest with a pencil. There are
five counselors standing behind us; a sign on the ground says Camp Equinunk,
1952. That was the summer I turned five.
So I did not remember ever being at
home or with my parents during a summer.
I’d never seen how they behaved together when the weather heated up and
their home was their own. Did they get
along more peacefully, as I imagined, when my brother and I weren’t there to
bother them? Did they take walks or play
cards or watch television together?
I also did not remember being at
home all day, day after day, in the company of my mother. That hadn’t happened for the last half dozen
years, since I started kindergarten after coming home from that summer at Camp
Equinunk. The prospect had worried me,
since there would be so much more opportunity for her temper to flare, her
rages to erupt in violence. Matthew had
said that one reason I needed to stay in bed was the risk of a ruptured spleen
if I played like a normal eleven year old boy.
Once, at the end of my first week at home, my mother took my
temperature, read the results, and slapped me across the face. What if she pushed me into the wall or
punched me in the belly?
As the days went by, I found myself
watching carefully everything that went on in the house. I felt like an invader, an outsider, someone
dropped into their midst. And by
almost-false pretenses, since I was not in fact fatally ill, just
inconveniently ill. If I had to stay in
bed for a month or two, then I had to be waited on, as my mother described it
over and over during her many phone conversations, and that was not how she
wished to spend her summer.
This wasn’t how I wanted to spend
the summer either. In the first week, I
worked out a routine, studying my baseball cards and sports magazines first,
then playing a dice baseball game I’d invented, then watching television. After lunch I read comics for a while, Hopalong
Cassidy or my favorite, Aquaman, who could live underwater and call
in the sea creatures when he needed help against his enemies, and who had
struggled so hard as a kid to master his great powers. I liked some of the Classics Illustrated
comics, too, especially Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with the cover image of
a ghostly, leering Hyde rising from the vapors of a green drink to hover over
the doctor’s head, and The Ox-Bow Incident with its three cowboys seen
through the frame of a thick noose. The
late afternoons and evenings were given over to music and television, or a ball
game on the radio. Dull, strange,
sweltering, it was a time when the air seemed to weigh more than it should,
when light hurt, sheets and blankets grew sharp, and the least sound scorched
its way into my brain.
Soon I began to find unobtrusive
ways to extend my time out of bed. Long
soaks in the tub, for instance. Splish
splash, I was takin’ a bath. The
bathroom had been specified as a place where I could be when not in bed, but my
mother was vigilant, despite her complaints, and before long would knock on the
door to demand what I was doing in there so long. Rub dub, just relaxin’ in the tub. Sometimes I ate a meal in our kitchen rather
than in bed, an exception I’d dreamed up by saying I might spill my soup if I
ate it in bed. Soup in the summer? Well, it got me out of bed. Then there were times when my mother actually
left the house to shop or visit with a friend, and I was on my own. I would drift from room to room, keeping my
hands to myself to avoid leaving evidence, but loving the sense of
movement. I risked standing on the front
porch, conscious of the time so that my mother didn’t return and catch me.
The thing that surprised and
frightened me was that I didn’t feel like running, didn’t yearn to ride my bike
or throw a ball against the garage door.
I wondered how long this would last, whether I would ever feel up to the
activities I’d lost, the freedom, the ease and vitality. Whether I’d been transformed. OILS into SOIL, LINENS into MUSLINS. My body seemed to know what it needed, but I
wasn’t sure I agreed.
As August neared its end, I had seen
enough to understand that my parents were, in fact, always hostile toward each
other. It wasn’t just when my brother
and I were around and active. I was
present, of course, but stuck in the back room, not my usually intrusive self,
and I saw that their fights were really not about me, even if my name popped up
in the middle of the action. They were
not caused by anything I’d said or done during the day that bothered my mother
and led her to erupt at my father. He
would come home from work in New York City, enter the house, and the arguments
would begin as though triggered by chemical reaction. They always fought, even when they didn’t
speak. They never touched. They seldom spent time together except at the
dinner table. COLISEUM, UNISON, LESSON.
***
I began to read the afternoon
newspaper and a few magazines that my mother’s friends brought for me when they
came to visit. In that way, I came to
understand that 1958 was the year of the V.
There was the Van Allen belt, a zone of radiation encircling Earth that
was discovered by a satellite, and then there was a satellite named
Vanguard. There was a pianist from Texas
named Van Cliburn who’d won a big contest in Moscow, and Venezuela was a
country where Vice-President Nixon got attacked in his car, and the Dodgers had
an ancient pinch-hitter named Valo. Over
and over on the radio, I was hearing a song called “Volaré” by Domenico
Modugno, and reading in the newspaper about an actress named Gwen Verdon in a
movie about the Yankees.
And, of course, The Vampire. One Wednesday he swooped down the hall and
alighted next to my bed with a book under his wing. He dropped it at my feet, said “Here, this is
a book you’ll like,” then began his blood drawing ritual. Unwilling to look at him or at his
instruments, I stared at his gift, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court. It was by Mark Twain. I’d read several of that author’s Classics
Illustrated, but hadn’t realized he wrote regular books too.
By now, I was as afraid of the
burning-freezing spray as I was of The Vampire’s needle. I dealt with that by singing to myself one of
the week’s new hits. Just a dream,
just a dream. I didn’t want to be
rude, but I couldn’t listen or respond to The Vampire’s questions till I heard
the rubber strap snap loose, and knew that the week’s blood draw was over. It’s oh-only make believe!
“He wakes up,” The Vampire
whispered, “and discovers that he’d somehow gone back thirteen hundred years,
to England in the time of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Just like that, he’s in a whole other
life.” After placing a band-aid over my
elbow, he looked over at me and said, “What do you think about that?”
I shrugged. “Does he ever get back home?”
“Read the book and find out.”
After I heard the front door close,
and saw my mother drift into the kitchen, I picked up the book. It was long, but there were a lot of
pictures, so it seemed like the next step up from a Classics Illustrated comic
book. I was hooked right away. A guy gets whacked in the head, goes through
a period where he doesn’t feel or know anything, then finds himself totally
removed from the world he knew. I might
not have gotten whacked in the head, but everything else about this Hank
Morgan’s story seemed familiar to me.
What would he do and how would he adjust?
Before dinner, I’d learned that Hank
was already trying to take over the kingdom, and shape it to his own
interests. He became The Boss. Very clever.
I didn’t understand all the stuff about Knights Errant, or politics, or
holy fountains, and some of the writing was baffling to me, but I knew Hank had
the right idea.
I had to become The Boss of this place, this world of
illness where I’d been stranded. My
mother might be some combination of Morgan le Fay and Merlin, and my father
might be the shadowy and subdued king, but that, I saw, left plenty of room for
me to manage things for myself. Like
Hank, what I needed to do first was figure out what I wanted. This, in itself, was a whole new way of
seeing my situation. I was sick, and
that limited my choices, but I did still have choices. I might even have choices beyond which
program to watch or listen to, which thing to read or play with. “You can’t depend on your eyes,” Hanks says, “when
your imagination is out of focus.”
Well, the main thing I wanted was to
be healthy again. But Matthew said that
would take time, and if I tried to rush my recovery I would only make myself
sicker. I wanted friends to visit me,
but my best friends were either still away at camps of their own, or on family
trips, or staying with relatives. I
wanted to spend more time out of bed!
That was a good one. I realized
that my mother was making me stay in bed all the time because I needed rest and
had to avoid injuring my swollen innards.
Suppose I told Matthew that I understood those things, and promised to
rest wherever I was? In a chair on the
porch or in the small backyard or in the living room where there was a larger
television. Then he could tell my mother
it was okay, and she would have to go along with his recommendation.
With Hank as my example, I started
to make a list. I wanted a record player
of my own, since I wasn’t allowed to use my brother’s, so I didn’t have to
listen only to songs that the disk jockey’s selected. I wanted to have records of my own, too. Rave On! I wanted a notebook so I could begin to
compile statistics from all the dice baseball games I was playing. I wanted my mother to stop bringing her
friends into my room so they could feel my swollen glands. It was as though reading about the displaced
Connecticut Yankee had completed some kind of circuit in my brain, connecting
my desires with my ability to speak about them, sparking the capacity to
release my frustrations, to give them voice.
I finished the book in a few days.
Then I asked my mother to buy me a copy of another book, a real book and
not a comic book, by Mr. Mark Twain.
The next time Matthew came to
examine me, I asked him to show me, on the Visible Man Anatomy Model I had in
my closet, where my spleen and liver were.
Together, we took the breastplate off the model and I touched its
organs, removed the spleen and liver, listened as Matthew explained their
functions. I saw that snorting was a
habit he had when he spoke, not a sign of dismay. I asked him what was being found in the
samples of blood The Vampire took, and how I’d caught my illness. Now, forty-six years later, I can still
remember the way he smiled at me then, ran his hand over my crew-cut head, and
instead of teasing me about kissing, told me I’d probably eaten from a fork or
spoon that hadn’t been cleaned properly, and contracted the Epstein-Barr virus
from it. I would, he thought, have to
miss the first few weeks of school, but if I was careful, I could certainly go
outside for a while every day.
The morning sun hit the porch where
I sat in a plastic chaise lounge the next day.
I remember the sun, and the view of two lush trees across the street
that I hadn’t really noticed before. I
remembered something that Hank Morgan said, and that had made me cry when I
read it in my bed: “it was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a
dream, and as lonesome as Sunday.” But
now, even though I was no less alone than before getting to sit on the porch, I
didn’t feel so lonesome, and wouldn’t have cried over Hank’s comment. About four weeks had passed since my parents
arrived at camp to bring me home. The
corner of my mind that had believed I was going to die now believed I was going
to get well. But I didn’t dwell on it,
as I hadn’t dwelt on dying. Soon, my
brother would be home again, and would begin working for our mother’s uncle in
a Manhattan dress factory. Soon, I would
be able to go to school and it would be like Hank Morgan waking up again,
returned to the America he’d left, changed for good by all he’d gone through.
The next Wednesday, I was ready for
The Vampire. When I saw him at the far
end of the hall, I realized that he didn’t really swoop, but walked with his
arm held out to one side under the weight of his black bag. I also saw that he nodded when he saw me, and
wondered if he’d always done that. He
pulled the desk chair over, began lifting instruments from the bag, and glanced
as usual at my pile of things on the bed.
Then he stopped. He reached over
and lifted up The Prince and the Pauper.
“Ah,” he said, “the boys who switch
places with each other.”
He hefted it once or twice, as
though demonstrating the weight of a real book compared with a comic book, then
put it down and went back to his work.
When he reached for his numbing spray, I surprised myself by saying “I
don’t think I need that anymore.”
***
Originally published in Boulevard #59/60, Spring 2005
Reprinted by permission of the author
This essay will be included in the author’s
forthcoming memoir, The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life, from the U of Nebraska Press, fall 2008