You can’t keep the world’s troubles outside your door forever
January 8, 2020 | 4-MINUTE READ
Shh!
Of all the words expressed over hundreds of shared Friday-night dinners with the Cantor* family, that’s the one that stands out in my memory.
Shh! We don’t talk about mental illness.
Shh! We don’t talk about homosexuality.
Shh! We don’t talk about sexual misconduct.
Add “B-U-L-L” to the beginning of “Shh” and “I-T” to the end and you’ll have a reasonable facsimile of what I think about banning adult conversation “in front of the children.” As strict as my own parents were about religious practice, they believed that a religious life did not preclude mealtime conversations that ranged widely, even uncomfortably, over matters my father termed “menschliche zachn” — everyday matters of human life.
Aside from the indignity of having an adult friend shush me in front of our kids, I was not in a position to un-see the issues Karen Cantor* found objectionable. During my long-ago friendship with her, I was working at Montefiore Medical Center where you could avoid seeing the saddest cases of human distress by wearing a blindfold. In Montefiore’s Norwood neighborhood, people lived out their lives on the streets, under the elevated train tracks, in the Jerome Avenue mom-and-pop stores and in the corridors of the hospital. Depending on what tenement-lined street you were on, you could cut human desperation with a tongue depressor.
How do you un-see the skinny young men who would hang out at the Montefiore Women’s Center, a kind of halfway house that gave newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS victims a place to eat delicious roast chicken and connect with others like them expected in those pre-antiretroviral days to die young?
How do you un-see the petite seventeen-year-old girl who contracted HIV/AIDS from her drug-abusing boyfriend?
Or the young boy, twisted up like a pretzel, who would get around in a wheelchair the size of a solid rocket booster?
Or the freaked out patient I interviewed, who unbuttoned her blouse and showed me what her flat scarred chest looked like two years after her mastectomy?
Or the dignified old woman with a globe of Clairol-sprayed white hair, who straggled down a long hospital corridor with shit streaming down her legs?
The first head of Montefiore’s Child Advocacy Center told me about an eight-year-old boy whose father pushed him out a high-rise window. The child, paralyzed from the waist down, sobbed and sobbed. All he wanted was his daddy.
How do you scrub a story like that from your head so you don’t offend a delicate missus who needs to believe that the nightmare world four miles to the east has nothing to do with her?
The camouflage and secrets I endured at the Cantors’ lunches and dinners often felt worse than the misery I saw at Montefiore. Disease, substance abuse and non-traditional sexual orientation — they are all out there, as traps or lures or choices. You may as well bring them into your dinnertime conversation because you — or somebody you love in this generation or the next — may not be any more immune to them than the people of Norwood are today.
More in touch with the Montefiore reality than the Cantors was my office mate Marigold.* Her father was a Vietnam War veteran who died after he fell down a flight of stairs, drunk. Marigold herself admitted to an exorbitant love of alcohol. “My friends and I are all Seventh Day Adventists, we’re all single mothers and we all drink too much,” she told me. She also told me she and other African-Americans resented the Jews in her old Brooklyn neighborhood. Not the most endearing confession you could make to me but, hey, good to know. Maybe my perverse nature has me thinking that compared with “Shh,” at least Marigold’s animus helps me understand something about the world around me.
And yet the abiding image I am left with from my Montefiore days is of a long yellow school bus disgorging dozens of little kids in front of the public schools on Steuben Avenue around the corner from the hospital. In the midst of broken people everywhere, with ambulance sirens blaring, and junkies sniffling under awnings and train trestles, the best hope for a good life was there for me to see too. But if you can’t hear about the bad, you can’t hear about the good. Those brave little kids never came up in conversation with the Cantors either.
* Not the real name
