Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil Read Free

earlier in the day with her oldest sister, Sadie. Aunt Sadie had picked us up at the Great Neck train station to drive us to Uncle’s estate. Conversation had been pleasant until we pulled into the driveway, and then she said to my mother, “Don’t make trouble today with your brother.”
    My mother laughed. “Its a non-aggression pact. If he doesn’t fire I won’t shoot back.”
    Aunt Sadie warned her again, repeating in different words that Ruth shouldn’t fight with Uncle Bernie. “Even if he does shoot first,” Sadie added.
    My mother lost her temper. I was startled. I had seen her angry with my father, but that was only once or twice, and never with anyone else. Her thin face and smooth white skin were quite different in color and shape from her dark brother’s oval head. Enraged, her high cheekbones lifted, pulling back her lips to expose her small bright teeth, and her green eyes narrowed. She might have been a big cat in a furious fight for her life. She bobbed her chin at Sadie and said, “Don’t tell me how to behave! I’m not a child! I’m not on this planet at Bernie’s sufferance! I’m not living off him like the rest of you! You’re terrified I’m going to blow up the Bernard Rabinowitz gravy train—well, don’t worry, it won’t be me who cuts his throat. It’ll be the working class. It’ll be people like those workers down South. Those poor people he brags he brought to their knees.”
    “Shut up already,” Sadie said, both scared of the cat’s angry motions and also conscious of my presence. She indicated me with a nod to my mother.
    “I’ll never forget him gloating about how his paid thugs drove a truck over one of the strikers!”
    “All right, I’m sorry I said anything!” Sadie opened her door and fled. My mother panted, angled at Sadie’s vacated seat as if her prey were still there. From my back-seat view, I saw a single green eye in profile. That eye seemed to find me, with the spooky myopic stare of a bird. “Come on, let’s go in,” she said to me. She added, without irony, “We’ll have fun.”
    What I got from all that was that my uncle was a powerful man, a dangerous man, an important man. If he had devised a test for me, then I wanted to pass it: to avenge my earlier defeats at tennis and football, to win my cousin’s love, to please my mother, to represent my alien father well, and also, finally, to hold the gaze of my terrible and handsome uncle.
    “A test of their character,” Uncle Bernie said to my mother. He continued quickly to us children, “I’ve hidden the Afikomen somewhere in this house.” His fingers continued to play a silent tune on the white cloth.
    “You haven’t left the table,” Cousin Daniel said. “You still have the Afikomen.”
    As Leader, at the beginning of the service, Uncle Bernie had broken off the Afikomen from a plate of matzos on display at the table. He wrapped it in a thick napkin with a shiny white satin border and put it in his lap. As he did, I overheard my cousin Daniel whisper to his older brother, “I’m gonna watch him this time.” I didn’t know what Daniel meant. At eight I didn’t remember the previous year’s Seder. He meant that he would keep an eye on Uncle, waiting to see where he slipped away to hide the Afikomen. Bernie hadn’t left the table during the Seder and therefore, Daniel had reasoned, he must still have it in his lap.
    Bernie’s mouth widened into his beneficent smile. “You mean this.” He lifted the napkin from his lap. “Very clever, Daniel.”
    “Yes!” Daniel got to his feet. “I win!”
    “Not so fast,” Bernie said and raised his hand like a traffic cop. There was something comic, not mean, about Uncle’s expression and tone. Most of the adults chuckled and commented on Bernie’s wisdom and Daniel’s greed. Uncle ignored his grown-up audience and continued to address us children. “This year we’ll do it differently. This is only the symbolic Afikomen. I hid the