Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [179]
Dom and I had to clean up Hannah’s affairs and had no choice but to sell the Monroe Street house to pay off a large accumulation of debts. Who should take in Zayde Moses but Al and Fanny.
Gideon passed his sixteenth birthday, but his heart was not in high school. He always managed to be pleasant as a member of my family and sometimes he’d put on a hilarious skit with one of my daughters. But mostly the boy was very sad and depressed. To read his stories had once been a joy, but now the pages were filled with an overwhelming sense of despair. Sometimes I got a terrible feeling that he was searching for death. Simone and Molly also picked up on this.
Gideon was in Forest Park High School, a co-educational institution. There were lots of pretty girls—this was the time of life when tight little blooms opened into flowers. There was a nice Jewish center for the kids in the neighborhood and dances every weekend after the Sabbath. It seemed that every girl Gideon met, who liked him, became the object of a fantasy.
He was desperately, desperately seeking someone of his own. Someone who could love him more than an uncle or a sister. And he pretended that every new little romance was a matter of life and death. He was a charmer and got all of the girls he wanted, but many became frightened of him. He was far too serious, far too soon.
DANNY SHAPIRO was finally released from the hospital, but he had to find work where he could sit at a bench. The accident had left him with one very weak leg and he had terrible headaches from the fractured skull. I took him in as an apprentice pharmacist and let him and Molly fix up a little room in the rear of the drugstore to live.
It wasn’t exactly paradise, but I had three children in college and was sending support money for Zayde Moses, as well as taking care of Gideon, Molly, and Danny. I was stretched and it would be a year or two of real hard work for Danny to get certified. So, we made do. Nobody starved.
It went like this for a year. Danny improved steadily and worked like a horse. Gideon ... he raged inside and failed in school and had the drudgery of summer school. Can you imagine that boy flunking English. No reason for it, except he just didn’t care.
A letter came from Leah in Washington. We always dreaded that envelope. She wrote that she was coming to get Gideon and take him to live with her and her Sears shoe salesman.
“LAZAR! LAZAR!” Simone screamed.
I tore down to the basement, where Gideon had his “office.” He was face down on the floor, unconscious, an empty pill bottle in his hand. I pried it loose and read the label. Oh God, God, God! Phenobarbital ... one-grain tablets. It appeared to be a new bottle he had taken from the store ... oh God ... one hundred pills were in him. I put my head to his chest. He was breathing, but his breath was becoming labored.
“I want an emergency police ambulance!” I shouted. “Tell them to bring a doctor and a tube. They’ll have to flush him on the way to the hospital.”
Simone responded instantly, without panic. My daughter Priscilla came in and I screamed to her, “Get the ipecac out of my medicine cabinet and put on coffee! Go!”
She returned with the ipecac and I grabbed him by the hair while Priscilla held his mouth open and I poured the medicine into him, pulling him to his feet. “Give me a bucket!” We held his head while he vomited.
“Let me die ...” he mumbled with slobber and puke running down his chin.
“Come on, buddy, keep walking. Here! Take some more of this ipecac. Come on, buddy, keep walking! Quick with that coffee!”
The siren of an ambulance was heard. “Let me... ! Let me die!”
THE LORD SMILED on us that day. If we hadn’t found him that moment, he would have done himself in. We all broke down and wept when the doctor told us