Alex Levy

Each afternoon I visited my mother at the hospital.  Sometimes we spoke, sometimes we didn’t.  She developed a craving for ginger ale.  Sometimes she just slept.  I often sat in her room while she was asleep, working on my Regents Exam schedule for George Washington High School.  The Regents Exams were the high point of the academic year for both teachers and students.  It was a week of tests for 4,000 pupils and 250 proctoring teachers, governed by rules made up by the Board of Regents and the United Federation of Teachers, my own union.  Students in exam rooms had to be separated by a row of empty desks, which meant that you needed twice as many rooms as you normally required.  No teacher could proctor more than two exams in a row.  Exams had to get to their right rooms and returned to the right departments.  It was all quite complicated, and to tell the truth, I thoroughly enjoyed making it all come out right.  So, this was what I did while my mother slept in her hospital bed.

When my mother was awake, we talked.  She expressed regret that this illness, this leukemia (which she knew to be deadly) had come up just as she was finally enjoying herself getting together with her friends, sitting on a park bench watching children play, and coming to my house to be involved with her own grandchildren.  She definitely felt this was the wrong time for a terminal illness.  When she felt a bit better, not being a passive person, she also trudged up and down the hallway, holding on to the IV drip stand, feeling that the exercise would be good for her and would help her recover.

She did get somewhat better, and although her doctor held out little hope, we were given a choice between placing her in a hospice and taking her home.   Linda and I decided to take her home with us, because we felt it would be better for her, and more selfishly, it would also be better for the rest of our family. Our children would still be involved with their Grandma Cake and learn that dying is also a part of life.  They would also learn that dying is quite natural, and not all that dreadful.  Long term goal, I also someday didn’t want to die in a hospice.

We converted our dining room into Grandma’s room.  We installed a hospital bed, an IV drip stand, and an oxygen tank.  The dining room was selected because it was probably the least used room in the house, it was close to a bathroom and the kitchen, and it would also enable her to reach the front porch, which was a lovely place to sit, if she felt like it, and which she did quite often.  Later she also took short walks, with the assistance of a walker, the length of the driveway.  She believed in exercise and that it would somehow restore her to health.  If there was anything she could do to help herself, she would do it.

Houses have memories.  I felt my mother, even while dying, was contributing textured memories to our house on Woodside Avenue.

Because of the discounts available to my mother while she worked at Saks Fifth Avenue, I was one of the better dressed teachers in the New York public school system.  My children, when they were babies, were also rather well dressed, as my mother worked in the children’s department and disliked visiting us without bringing a gift of some sort.  Eventually, however, my mother retired, and after her retirement, she brought us fancy cakes whenever she visited.  To my children she became Grandma Cake.  I didn’t know what prompted her retirement; possibly she had just reached the age at which people at Saks retired, or it could have been a result of the polycytemia from which she began to suffer.

Polycytemia is a disease of the bone marrow which produces an excess of red blood cells.  Living in New York, as she did, she was being treated for the condition by one of the top oncologists in the world, a man regularly listed in New York Magazine as one of the best doctors in New York.  I had met him a couple of times when I brought my mother to his office, and he seemed a reasonable human being.

In the evening of November 11^th, 1979, Armistice Day (or Veterans Day, if you prefer) my mother phoned me, and in a terribly weak voice told me that she was feeling awful; she thought that she had passed out, but wasn’t sure.  She had phoned her doctor earlier, but had been told that he wasn’t available, that he didn’t take calls when on vacation.  I’m not making this up.  It is real.  I told my mother that I’d be at her apartment in about forty-five minutes, the time I estimated it would take to get from Ridgewood to Forest Hills this late in the evening.  I threw on some clothes, and was on my way.

When I reached my mother’s apartment, she was in and out of consciousness.  She looked terrible.  I thought she needed immediate admission to a hospital, but the hospital with which her oncologist was associated wouldn’t admit her without his say-so.  I then phoned my friend, Dr. Robin Motz, and asked him for advice.  He told me that he would phone an ambulance service and have her admitted immediately to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, that he would be there when we arrived.  By the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital my mother was unconscious.  I tried following the ambulance in my car, but we got separated.  When I reached the hospital at about 4 AM, Robin had met the ambulance, had her admitted, and made sure she got the best of care.

The diagnosis was a sudden onset of leukemia.  Grandma Cake was in deep trouble.  There was irony of the situation in that my mother’s oncologist was the one who had written the article in the medical encyclopedia on the sudden transformation of polycytemia into full-blown leukemia.  Without Robin’s help, she would probably have died in her apartment.

The time my mother spent in the hospital was also somewhat strange for me, as every other day I visited the New York Blood Bank on East 63^rd Street to give platelets, which at the time took about three hours. The medical technicians tried to make the platelet donors comfortable during those hours of inactivity.  They turned on the TV, and introduced me to Luke and Laura, and their troubles on General Hospital.  After leaving General Hospital, I visited my mother at a real hospital.

Somewhere buried in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon there is an insight which I remembered every day I was in the classroom.  Well, that’s probably an exaggeration, but I did remember it.  The line, roughly translated, is “Zeus loves the kindly teacher,” and I did want to stay on the good side of Zeus.   At times, this was difficult to remember, as some of my classes were certainly rough, but teaching is a learning experience.  What made the line stand out in my mind was that with the exception of “Good Bye, Mr. Chips,” I had never seen that quality displayed in anything I had read or seen about American teachers (who were usually English teachers) real or fictive.  The American teacher, when I began my career was supposed to be fair, firm and consistent, and somewhat stern.  I liked the “fair” part, but stern has never been my strong suit.

Teaching is often presented in technical terms.  You do this to achieve that result, and your students will learn, although there was a great deal of disagreement about curriculum and methods.  I really wasn’t good at that stuff.  For me, teaching was performance and magic that I had to invent as I went along, and that I couldn’t teach anyone else.  I saw teaching as a seduction process.  Kids would learn from me because they found what I had to say interesting, because I tried to get into their heads, anticipating their questions, and because I liked having fun with them.  I think they also saw me as a reasonable role model, a rebellious adult in an often nutty environment.

I believe one of the lessons I taught them was how to circumvent the power structure without ruffling a feather.

Teachers are observed in the classroom by their supervisor.  This used to happen fairly seldom, once of twice a year (now it is much more often), but it always made teachers nervous to have a supervisor sitting in the back of the room taking notes on whatever was going on.  The kids were well aware of what was taking place, and were usually on their best behavior on these special occasions.  Along the way, I decided to try an “experiment.”  I told the class that on the following day we would be hosting an assistant principal, and it was time to have some fun with him.  I told them to raise their hands whenever they didn’t know the answer to a question I asked, and that I would call on students who didn’t raise their hands.  This took some practice, and we drilled for this new classroom recitation method for the rest of the period.  The following day, when the supervisor took his seat at the back of the room, he was highly impressed by how well my class behaved.  He was also quite impressed by the fact that so many kids participated in the classroom discussion, as evidenced by the forest of eager, raised hands whenever I asked a question.  He was absolutely amazed when I called on kids who didn’t have their hands up, and obviously didn’t know the answer to my questions (or so he believed), but nevertheless answered them correctly.

I have no idea whether the adults, who were the kids in that class then, remember anything of the subject matter of that particular lesson.  I do think they remember the topsy-turvy methodology I introduced that day.

My near-championship season began in a normal way, by attending try-outs.  I had already made up my mind to ask one of the fathers with an athletically outstanding son to become my assistant, and he agreed, and then we jointly picked the rest of our team.  The assistant was important because he actually knew something about baseball, having grown up in Ridgewood.

Our season opener was a ghastly nightmare.  My assistant picked the pitcher, and by the top of the first inning we were behind 19-0 with no outs.  All I wanted was for the pitcher to be removed and the inning to end.  However, my new assistant wouldn’t remove the pitcher, being of the opinion that it was a good learning experience for him.  I tried to explain that what he was providing for this boy was a nightmare that would come back to haunt him the rest of his life.  Finally, I asserted my managerial authority, replaced the pitcher, and blessedly, after three easy outs, the inning came to an end.  My assistant manager quit.  Great baseball minds do not always agree.

The rest of the season proceeded remarkably smoothly.  We lost a few games, but mostly we won.  We won enough games to make us contenders for our division championship.  I was surprised at how much emotion that generated, and I worked hard at producing perfect batting orders.  We lost the last game of the season to the champions, but I really always thought of it as our championship season, although we didn’t quite make it.

The next season was a disaster.  I had decided for sentimental reasons that it was silly for boys to play against their neighbors and best friends.  So, when tryouts came up again in March, I selected a team made up entirely of neighborhood kids I knew and liked, as well as Josh’s friends.  Among Josh’s friends was David, a boy who lived across the street as part of a musical family.  Under the guidance and encouragement of their mother, he and his brothers had sung the lyrics to a nationally broadcasted cat food commercial.  David was small, and whatever musical talent he possessed hadn’t transferred to baseball.  I had to do something with him however, as everyone had to play.  I put him out in left field where he wandered around looking for a four leaf clover.  Occasionally, a ball would be hit in his direction and we’d all yell,  “David! David! David!”  and David would wake from his reverie and yell back, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” while looking up and running, glove up high, and then the ball would fall to the right of him, or to the left, or behind him.  But that was the kind of team we had that year.

We went an entire season without winning a single game, except for the last one, and David was its hero.  He showed up with a portable tape recorder on which he had recorded Bizet’s March of the Toreadors, the theme music from The Bad News Bears.  No one missed the joke.  Listening to that tape changed the mood of the team. The game became fun again, and somehow, we won that last game of my managerial career.

Little League emblem

I knew nothing about baseball.  Yes, as a teenager, I had memorized batting averages just to have something to talk about with other kids, and later, one afternoon (while in the Brooklyn College cafeteria) I remember the excitement attending Don Larsen’s perfect game in a World Series.  However, I had never played baseball or attended a professional game.  Watching Josh play his various team sports was my introduction to a Ridgewood subculture of fathers and sons which I thoroughly enjoyed.  I thought I would be bored or indifferent to such mundane displays, but no.  I had a wonderful time watching my son having a good time, and I was amazed at some of the things he could do.  And when he was mistreated by an umpire or referee, I was outraged.  However, I knew next to nothing about these sports.

Which is why I was surprised when Tony Argente, the commissioner of Little League baseball for the west side of town, one early March morning phoned me and  asked me to meet him.  He wanted me to become a Little League team manager.  I explained to him that I knew nothing about the game, that I wouldn’t know where to begin.  Tony was convincing.  He wouldn’t hear it.  He told me that he would help me pick a team at tryouts, and that after that all I had to do was yell, “Good eye, kid”, whenever the ball was swung at and missed.  To make a long story short, Tony was desperate for a manager, and I agreed to become a manager for that season.  I wound up managing a Little League team for three years.

Needless to say, I am rather competitive.  There are few more competitive activities than chess, and I was a serious chess player, no matter what else I was doing.  One year I had won the Rockland County chess championship, and another year I had won a national title.  I was as competitive as anyone I knew and maybe a bit more.  Once sucked into baseball I immediately began to scheme and plot about winning my division championship.  This did involve some reading (I had to know the rules), and developing warm-up exercises, and doing all those other things that are supposed to be done before a game.  When I should have been grading papers at work, I worked at assigning fielding positions and created batting orders.  Then the season began, and I was a manager!   Contrary to the popular myth, the parents of my little players were not blood-thirsty crazies; just nice people who enjoyed watching their kids play and win, but not overly troubled by a loss.  I enjoyed them almost as much as I did their kids.

Tony had picked a good team for me.  It won as many games as it lost, and we finished my first season right in the middle of the pack.  Josh, my son, had himself a wonderful time, and I was surprised at how naturally and well he hit.  As for that “Good eye, kid!” it came in handy.

By the end of my first season I had figured out that championships were not won or lost on the playing field.  Championships were won and lost during tryouts, and I made up my mind that the following year I was going to pick my team much more carefully.  It would also help if I could get the dad of a really good player (preferably a pitcher or power hitter) to become my assistant manager.  Like all managers, I looked forward to next season.

Mine was not the only house with a history.  I’m sure that each of these homes had an interesting past, but there was one in particular that seemed  steeped in trouble.  It was the house on the corner of Highwood and Linden, the last house in Ridgewood before reaching Glen Rock across the street. It was a house that had burned down twice.  The first fire provided quite a show as the neighbors came out at night to watch it burn, while the firemen struggled to extinguish the roaring blaze.  The house burned to the ground.  No one was hurt as no one was living in it at the time.

The house was rebuilt, and it looked like it was going to be even prettier than the original. However, as luck would have it, just before the restoration was completed, there was another fire, this one caused by some electric device that had been left on when it shouldn’t have been, at the end of a day of work.  And again, after fire had completely gutted the place, it was rebuilt, and I kept track of the progress of the restoration as I walked my dog past it each day.

On one of those dog-walking tours of the neighborhood, I noticed a couple sitting in a small, foreign convertible, looking at the nearly reconstructed house. They were in their forties, with the woman probably wearing a bit too much makeup, but otherwise unremarkable.  I asked them if they were looking at the house because they were interested in purchasing it.  As the chief dog walker of the neighborhood, I often got into conversation with people I barely knew or didn’t know at all.  The man said that as a matter of fact, they were considering making an offer on it.  We talked a bit about the fires that had gutted the building twice, and from there we moved to the fact that the man was interested in purchasing this house because it was in the neighborhood in which he had grown up.  Naturally, I wanted to know where exactly in the neighborhood he had lived, and it turned out that some thirty years earlier he had lived almost across the street from my house, just four houses from the Cole place in which George C had spent his childhood.  Naturally, I asked him if he had known George and his brothers when he was living on Woodside.  “I knew George quite well.  We went to school together, but what brothers?” he asked, looking at me somewhat strangely.  So, I told him about the brothers who had died in the train accident.  “Wait a minute,” the man said to me.  “There were no brothers, and there certainly was no train accident.  George was an only child.”   George had been in a bad car accident, he continued.  After he was pulled out of the wreck he had to have extensive surgery, some of it on his head.  A metal plate had been inserted at the top of his skull.  He was fine now; however, all he did now-a-days was wander around  Ridgewood telling these fantastic stories about a fictional train wreck, his non-existent dead brothers, a leg transplant that never occurred, or anything else people were willing to believe.  Somewhat embarrassed, for once I kept my mouth shut.

I wanted to get back to the conversation we’d been having when I first met George C.  I wanted to find out more about the old lady who lived upstairs, next door, when I first moved in, but George knew no more about her than I already did.  She was just a former high school music teacher, who after she’d retired gave private music lessons, and he occasionally washed her windows.  So, I asked him about Dr. Henry’s suicide in my house; did he know in which room it had taken place?

“That was a terrible scene,” George said.  He didn’t die in any of the rooms.  He had simply hanged himself from one of the hooks from which my porch swing was hanging now.  At the time there had been no swing, and so it had been pretty easy to do.  Mrs. Henry was the one who found him.  She had been sweeping inside and came out to sweep the porch when she saw her husband just hanging there.  She was really angry when she saw him.  She picked up her broom and began beating the body as hard as she could, cussing and yelling at him all the while she did so.  Dr. Henry had accumulated a lot of gambling debts on his trips to Washington, where he participated in a regular, high stake poker game.  She now had no idea of how she was going to make ends meet or pay off the debts that had accumulated with almost all the merchants who provided services.  So, she was angry and she beat that corpse with her broom. Finally, she stopped, but it was a terrible scene.

Now that the suicide had been clarified for me, I asked George if he knew what had happened to Mrs. Henry afterwards, but he didn’t know any more than what he had told me.  So I asked him if he knew anything about the barn fire.  Oh, yes, he said.  That was the Rat Boy.  Who was the Rat Boy?  The Rat Boy was the doctors Henry’s son, and he was crazy.  But why was he called the Rat Boy I wanted to know?  Simple, George said, he just looked like a rat.  One night he got really drunk and set the barn on fire.  Actually, he was caught, and arrested, and spent a lot of time in reform school before being transferred to a psychiatric hospital.  No one liked the kid, but still, it was not a good way to wind up.

Now that I had gotten the whole story of what had happened in the house before I’d bought it, I was rather pleased with myself.  I had achieved some sort of completion, and I could tell Melissa that the man had not hanged himself in her closet.

It had been a long talk, and the sun was beginning to set.  It was time for George to leave, but I invited him to come back whenever he was in the neighborhood or could remember anything else about the house.  George limped off my porch, slowly made his way to his car, and left.  I never saw him again, but his story didn’t quite end there.

Postcard of early Corning Glassware plant

After my last comment, the one about the fact that he did have two legs, George said,“Well, it’s the leg I was coming to, because that, in a way, is the strangest part of the story, and for me the most important.”

The Corningware being produced in Corning (the glassware is named after the city, not the other way round) was a by-product of the space age, the material of the glassware having been developed to harden the nosecones of the original rockets used by NASA in the 1960’s.  Since then Corning has invested about 10% of its annual budget in research and development, and this in turn has led to innovations in a variety of fields, optical fiber among them.  One of the fields of interest at Corning was organ and other types of transplants, using some of its glass and fiber products.

As soon as the laboratory at Corning heard about the train accident, they thought that this might be an opportunity to try out some of one of their new products on a human subject.  So, George and the bodies of his brothers were immediately transported to Corning, and when he awoke in a hospital bed, George was asked if he might be willing to have the right leg of one of his brothers transplanted to his own.  It was a dangerous procedure from which he might never wake up, but they would have two opportunities at the transplant, as they had the bodies of both of his brothers and both were in good condition. Cost would be covered by Corning; would he agree?

It sounded outrageous.  Implants in those days were in their infancy, and George had never heard a thing about them.  Nevertheless, he thought long and hard about whether he wanted to risk it.  He phoned his parents to ask their advice, and then decided to go ahead and chance it.  The operation took 17 hours, and he had to stay in the hospital for six difficult months.  But eventually, he had a responsive leg that did more-or-less what he wanted it to do.  Months of physical therapy followed, as well as a series of casts, and finally, he had worked up to his present condition, able to live a normal life, although still wearing his flexible cast and dragging the leg.  Naturally, he was most grateful to his deceased brothers, as without their matched DNA none of this would have been possible.

The story of George’s leg was amazing.  I had never heard of an entire leg transplant, and in a way it confirmed my habit of asking people who had been hurt how it had happened.  We sat on the porch, George and I, drinking beer, when after listening to his story I decided to ask him, because I still didn’t know, which George was he?  “I thought you’d get to that eventually,” he said.  “I’m George C, the youngest of the three, and probably the luckiest.  Without my brothers and the accident taking place just where it did, and the Corning people being interested in transplants, I probably wouldn’t even be here to talk to you about it. Yes, I’m one lucky guy!”

Although I expected George to tell me just the story of the blue cast on his leg, he insisted on telling me his story from the beginning.

He was born right here, at Valley Hospital, in Ridgewood.  When his mother went into labor in the obstetrics section of the hospital (which was much smaller in those days), his father paced nervously in the waiting room, smoking one cigarette after another, which is what men did in those days.  After some time, the nurse appeared, congratulated him and told him that he had a son.  He would be admitted to his wife’s room in a moment, but in the meantime, what name should she write on the birth certificate?  My father was prepared for that, and told the nurse that the baby would be named George.  About fifteen minutes later the nurse reappeared and congratulated him again.  He was the father of another boy, and what should she enter as his name on his birth certificate?  My father was not ready for this one, and not being a man of quick imagination, and thinking he could always change the name later, he told the nurse to make this second baby George B.  The nurse was surprised, but did as she was told.  When she came back a third time, she congratulated him again, and told him that he was the father of a set of triplets, all boys, and what should she enter as a name for this one, and again my father said, “George also.  Make him George C .”

Having three boys named George was unusual, but for Valley Hospital–having delivered a set of triplets–was even more unusual, and they wanted the world to know.  This was 1948, and triplets were highly unusual, although not unknown.  The Dionne quintuplets had been born in 1934 to a national frenzy of publicity.  Triplets weren’t quite in that league, but nevertheless, it was deemed newsworthy.

Harry S. Truman was in full campaign mode that 1948, and it wasn’t long until George and his family found themselves in the White House, being photographed with the president.  There was even a photo of the three boys being held by the president in his lap.  It was the photo of the whole group, with his mother, father, and the three boys with the President that  was published in newspapers all over the country.  That photo was still a valuable family heirloom.  The years passed, and George and his two brothers grew up on Woodside Avenue rather conventionally, attending the local school and trying to make a little money doing various chores for neighbors.  This was not to last, however, as his father changed jobs and moved the family to Corning, New York, to work as an engineer at the Corning Glassworks.

About two years before George told me this story, he and his brothers had met in New York City to celebrate their joint birthday after which they had boarded a train together, to visit their parents in upstate New York.  It was while passing through Elmira that the accident had occurred.  187 people had died that bitter cold, winter night, among them, George’s two brothers.  He had survived, but his right leg had been severed mid-thigh.  When he awoke in the hospital, he now had only one leg and his two brothers were dead.

Naturally, I had to find out what happened after that, as obviously he now had two legs.

Prologue to Von Eschenbach's Parzival

Today I can’t find the name Schiunatulander anywhere, not even on Wikipedia, but I’m sure he is a minor character in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, written in the first quarter of the 13^th Century.  It is because of Schiunatulander (who could forget that name?) that eight centuries later I still ask people, both friends and acquaintances, who have been injured how they came by  their injuries.  It is a somewhat complicated story, so please stay with me.

While in college, like all good English majors, I was introduced to Thomas Stearns Eliot’s The Wasteland.  Before I knew it I was suddenly sucked up in the story of the Fisher King, his impotence, how it affected his land, and the Greater Arcana of the Tarot deck, the regular playing cards being the so-called Lesser Arcana.  It followed quite logically that I then should become interested in King Arthur and his knights, particularly in the quest for the Holy Grail, as in most versions of that quest you get to meet the injured Fisher King, and the four symbols which always show up in the Castle of the Holy Grail, the four symbols bearing an amazing resemblance to the pips of the regular playing cards.  Sufficiently complicated yet?  If you don’t get the various connections, don’t worry too much about it, and just accept my word for their being there.

The story of Parzifal (or Parsifal) is the story of the knight who achieves the quest by finding the Holy Grail.  The Holy Grail itself is somewhat of a problem, but the Indiana Jones’ version of it will do for our purposes.  There is also the version involving the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood of the crucified Christ before his burial.  Take your pick.

Joseph of Arimathea collecting the blood of Christ. The lance is the Lance of Longinus, which also become a symbol in the Grail stories.

Schiunatulander is the knight who precedes Parsifal on the quest.  The knight had to be young, pure, innocent, and without fear even to be allowed to go on this quest.  Schiunatulander goes on this quest, and wanders the face of the earth in his search.  One day he emerges from a dark wood, and finds an old man sitting at the base of a tree.  The old man is obviously sick.  Schiunatulander asks the old man whether he knows the whereabouts of the Castle of the Holy Grail, and the old man, in a weak voice, tells him that he does, and gives him directions on how to reach it.

Schiunatulander follows the directions he has been given, but when he reaches the Castle, he is denied entry.  Naturally, he wants to know why he is not to be admitted to even view the Holy Grail, and he in turn is asked if he remembered the old man he had met just outside the forest?  Schiunatulander admits that he does remember the old man, and that he was grateful to him for giving him the directions that got him here.  Yes, he is told, but you meet an old man who is obviously ailing, and you just ask him for directions and move on?  What should you have asked him?  Where was your compassion?  Go home, young man, you are not quite ready to achieve the Holy Grail.

Schiunatulander must have seen the same thing

So, all these years later, I am still very careful, and always ask the ailing what is the matter with them, and if necessary, how can I help?  One never knows. . .  And so I ask George about his leg in the cast, and on this hot Friday afternoon, in the shade of my porch, he begins to tell me his story.