A Savage Life by Michael Savage

Author:Michael Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

My Silent Brother

I REMEMBER THE DAY THEY GAVE JEROME AWAY. MY UNCLE Murray was crying like a baby in front of the South Bronx tenement we lived in. All the neighbors were out watching; think Calcutta, a Satyajit Ray film. The little blond boy with blue eyes was only five. I was seven; my sister was nine. He was packed off like an animal to live and suffer and die in silence, alone in one New York snake pit after another. The “doctor” told my parents he would only live to age seven—he lied. The great man also told my parents “it would be better for the other children” to give him away. This created a lifetime of shame and guilt for me. I became emotionally responsible for discarding this helpless little boy, whom I loved more than anyone else in my entire life!

How I loved my little defenseless brother, born blind and deaf and unable to hold himself up! All those times I would secretly sneak into the kitchen where he sat propped up in his high chair.

“Don’t go in there. Don’t bother him. He can’t see you or hear you anyway.” But I would go and whistle to him, and his eyes would light up! I would see a sparkle where the “doctor” said there was only darkness. So I knew he could hear me whistling to him and see my shadow or smell me. He was alive, and they were told to exile him, for my sake!

After he was gone, the little apartment became more silent than when the silent boy was there. For years afterward, I would sneak into the dresser drawer where my mother preserved his little clothing and eyeglasses (they tried to see if they would work). I would hold one of his laundered shirts to my nose, pressing the fabric right into my nostrils to glean a few molecules of his scent. I even wore his eyeglasses, making the room all blurry. My brother! They took him away.

For decades (not just the two years she was told he would live) my poor mother took buses and subways all the way out to Staten Island or up to Poughkeepsie to visit him. Sometimes my sister went with her, but mostly she went alone. The new clothing she brought for him, on each and every visit, was never seen on him. They wheeled him out in the same institutional sackcloth. She would come home wrecked and hopeless for days afterward. The arguments between my parents started to get very bad after this, with both blaming each other, when it was really the doctor’s fault. There was some kind of medication given during pregnancy that damaged my brother’s central nervous system during development.

Finally, after about twenty years in one hellhole after another, he died, after being attacked and bitten on most of his body by a maniac, housed there with helpless, innocent souls unable to defend themselves.

Jerome is buried in the same cemetery as my mother and father: in hard clay soil, in an old, Long Island potato field.

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