Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [157]
“Well, just how badly does he play?” Mother asked angrily.
“When that boy sits down and plays ‘Für Elise,’ I wish it was my ears that had gone instead of my eyes.”
But that didn’t keep Gideon from loving music all his life and he was really super singing duets with Uncle Dom.
Old man Abruzzi heard them once and remarked, “That boy’s voice is going to kill somebody—we’d better start him on a fishing boat.”
I read aloud very well, because I aspired to be a great actress, and every night I read to Gideon. Books like Jews Without Money by Michael Gold, or we would act out all the parts of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! and Waiting for Lefty. When he learned to read, Gideon couldn’t get enough, and that’s when we began thinking, maybe he will become a writer.
As I said, I was going to be an actress, and usually the Jewish Workers Federation had a Yiddish acting group in every city. I got so good that Maurice Schwartz, the great Yiddish Shakespearean actor, came to see me perform to possibly recommend me for a scholarship to study in Brooklyn.
It turned out to be a disaster. The play was a sort of Yiddish Communist children’s version of the American Revolution. In the last act, George Washington gives his farewell speech to his troops and tells them they must always be on guard against colonialism, imperialism, deviationism, and cosmopolitanism. Then George Washington tells everyone to free their slaves. It was a stirring moment.
The only trouble with my acting was that I got stage fright sometimes. After the farewell speech, there was a finale in which I rode a wooden horse, rigged up to gallop on a treadmill. I was Paul Revere, and as the horse “galloped” I cried in Yiddish, “The fascist redcoats are coming!” Gideon was a drummer boy and also on the treadmill, running with all his might to stay even.
Well, the stage manager never did get the treadmill to work right. On the night that Maurice Schwartz was sitting in the first row, the electrical circuit got overloaded and blew all the fuses. The treadmill stopped abruptly, but Gideon and I kept on going and shot off the stage like cannonballs. We landed on Mr. Schwartz and all of us went to the floor.
My career was over before it began.
But every day and every week, Gideon kept opening secret doors through reading, and I knew he would be a real writer someday, because he was always thinking about stories.
AMONG THE FIRST WORDS Gideon remembered must have been Momma saying, “This is not a well child.” Momma kept six huge scrapbooks filled with articles on symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of everything from the common cold to rare tropical skin diseases.
Because Momma was often out of the house on some kind of Party business, I was left to take Gideon to the clinics. We spent long, morbid hours in the cavernous, peeling waiting rooms of the university hospitals and charity clinics. Gideon would be squeezed in between an old man in a wheelchair and a kid with braces, while I filled out the endless forms required for proof of inability to pay. He didn’t mind, though, because the long hours gave him a chance to read more and more novels.
Sometimes I went with him and Momma, like during the summer. I remember her litanies to those snotty-nosed interns who were barely shaving. “I held this child in my arms the entire night, pleading with him to keep breathing. All he has to do is look at a cottonwood tree and he’s gasping for air. He went on a hayride against my wishes and came back with a rash, from head to foot, the color of a bowl of strawberries. His Uncle Hyman, may his soul rest in peace, had the most horrible case of hives Johns Hopkins had ever seen.”
Momma located a clinic of specialists in asthma, hay fever, and sinus problems in Richmond, Virginia,