Whipping Boy (2 page)

After the war, my father returned to Europe under the European Recovery Program, known informally as the Marshall Plan. Whenever he wasn’t designing machinery—everything from room-size metal lathes to a tabletop “Automatic Orange Juicer”—he’d head for the Alps. By 1958, he had lined up enough consulting work among Italian machine-tool manufacturers to resettle in Milan with his second wife (my mother), two stepchildren, and a pair of handmade hiking boots. I was born two years later.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why I spent winter holidays in Switzerland. My father would load Mom, my much older half siblings, Ron and Vivien, and me into his Chevy Impala—an elegant, powerful, and generously proportioned first-generation import purchased by an engineer who was himself an elegant, powerful, and generously proportioned first-generation import. He’d then drive the family to Villars, a sleepy village in the Vaud, a French-speaking canton celebrated for its watchmakers, ski slopes, and international boarding schools.

A preference for the rustic charms of Villars over the glitz of Gstaad or Saint Moritz shouldn’t suggest that my father was immune to luxury. Quite the opposite. A classic example of what the Swiss call
a
Cüpli-Sozialist,
or champagne socialist, he spent lavishly on friends and family and, in particular, on me. While his generosity found expression throughout the year, my father, lapsed Jew that he was, waited until Christmastime to go whole hog, transforming the Villars of my early childhood into a life-size snow globe filled with Steiff animals, LEGO bricks, Märklin trains, milk chocolate, and candy. (It was my father who introduced me to Sugus taffies, a superior antecedent to Starbursts.)

Dad was particularly immoderate when it came to winter gear. My closet in Milan quickly filled with goose-down snowsuits and double-bladed skates, wooden skis and leather lace-up boots small enough to have hung from the Chevy’s rearview mirror. Not that Dad himself did much skiing or hiking by the time I came along. Arteriosclerosis and severe angina made prolonged exertion impossible. Yet even in sickness he found a way to honor the Alps. He kept his meds in a silver pillbox shaped like the iconic whiskey cask associated with the Saint Bernard rescue dogs once bred for alpine rescue.

{Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}

One of the thousands of photographs my father took of me in Villars. I’m around three in this one.

When I turned four, my father had a heart exam. That exam led to further tests, and the tests revealed he had cancer. He rejected the treatment options recommended by the local doctors, arguing that Italian hospitals were far more life threatening than any disease. When my mother finally strong-armed him into consulting an oncologist in the United States, it was too late. Dad spent his final Christmas in a New York hospital bed and died in a morphine haze on April 19, 1966. He was fifty-four and I was five.

A sketch from a notebook my father started when he was ten years old.

{Courtesy of Edith and Len Kurzweil}

Further evidence that my father, Robert Kurzweil, loved the mountains.

Widowed in a foreign land, Mom saw no future for us in Italy. She moved me, along with Ron and Vivien—both bound for college—into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The new place was sparsely furnished and bleak, made bleaker still by the sorrow of its two principal occupants.

While my father was alive, our home had been filled with his photography. (He always traveled with a boxy Rolleiflex camera strapped around his neck.) One long corridor of the Milan apartment had been given over to a set of images he’d shot of me, age three, tottering down a dirt road above Villars. After our relocation stateside, those photos never got rehung. In fact, no image taken by my father, or
of
my father, was displayed.

Such acts of wholesale erasure were not unusual in the 1960s. Grief experts commonly advised widows with young children to banish all physical reminders of the deceased and to shroud in euphemism any reference to death. So when I was told that my father had gone to his “resting place,” I felt confident he’d eventually get bored, wake up, and rejoin his family.

Mom did what the shrink advised her to do; she kept me home the day of the funeral. It was only at the Yahrzeit ceremony a year later (again with the therapist’s approval) that she brought me to my father’s gravesite. When, as Jewish tradition dictates, my mother placed a rock on the headstone, I had a meltdown.

“Stop!” I screamed.

Mom froze, confused by my outburst.

“Stop! You’re hurting Daddy!”

“But sweetie.”

“You’re standing on him! You’re crushing him! Get off! Get off!”

“But—”

“
GET OFF!
” I shoved my mother off my father’s body and ran away in a blind fury. She remembers it taking the better part of
the afternoon to find me. I was discovered weeping, inconsolably, behind a marble crypt.

Even as my notions of death matured, I continued to dream of a father-son reunion. A survey of the Manhattan phone book, conducted when I was eight, revealed that a “Kurzweil, Robert” resided a few blocks away from our apartment. While Mom was out, I would sometimes start to dial the number listed in the directory. But only once, as far as I remember, did I have the courage to allow the call to go through. I hung up before Kurzweil, Robert, answered. I couldn’t handle the possibility that the voice on the other end of the line belonged to my father. Or worse, that it didn’t. I never dialed the number again.

I don’t remember much about my father. In point of fact, I have only one clear memory. It’s in early March 1966. Daytime. I’m standing at one end of a long hallway when, from the other end, I hear the sound of squeaking wheels. I look and see Dad rolling toward me on a hospital gurney. When he reaches the spot where I’m standing, he takes hold of my hand and gives it a squeeze. I can’t recall what he says to me or what I say to him, but I retain the physical sensation of my hand in his, and I can still see the watch he has strapped to his wrist. I remember the face of that watch more vividly than the face of its owner.

With my father gone, Mom needed to figure out a way to pay the bills. After reviewing her options—managing a family-owned granite and marble warehouse or becoming a professor of sociology—she chose the latter path. That meant getting a PhD, which in turn meant writing a doctoral thesis. She wrote her dissertation on Italian industrialists, a familiar subject given my father’s commercial pursuits. Still, the research required a year of fieldwork in Italy. For the single
mother of a ten-year-old that presented certain logistical challenges—challenges further complicated by the extracurricular attentions of a Marxist sociologist for whom Mom was working part-time. I realized pretty quickly that while she was pursuing her degree, the Marxist was pursuing her. So intense was his ardor that he took a sabbatical from his post as a professor at Amherst College and joined her in Italy.

And where did that leave me? Mom suggested that I spend sixth grade at an English boarding school in Villars.

In Villars?
She might as well have proposed Disney World, which, everyone knew, was just about to open down in Florida. No, this was better than Disney World. Mom was giving me a chance to return to a realm I imbued with far more magic than any trademarked magic kingdom.

Before the start of school, Mom took me on a road trip through Italy. First stop: Bologna, to pick up the Marxist’s spanking new river-blue Audi 100 LS automatic. (My father wasn’t the only champagne socialist in my mother’s life.) The vehicle came fully loaded—sunroof, tinted glass, FM stereo. It also included a couple of hidden charges: the Marxist’s two French daughters, ages eleven and thirteen.

{Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}

My mother, Edith Kurzweil, circa 1972.

The girls were even more put off by the travel arrangements than I was. Although fluent in English, they boxed me out of all backseat diversion by restricting their conversations to French and German. When not conspiring against their de facto stepbrother, or squabbling between themselves, Anna and Antonia would gang up on their father. At one point, the bickering became sufficiently unbearable that the Marxist halted the Audi, dumped his elder daughter, Anna, by the side of the road, and zoomed away. It took
my mother the better part of an hour to convince him to turn around and retrieve her.

The girls weren’t the only troublemakers sitting in the back of the Audi. I pulled my weight, too. It wasn’t hard. I campaigned against museum visits, sang Beatles tunes to drown out the Bach, and undermined travel schedules by wandering off at rest stops. Every guardrail of every Esso station became a tightrope stretched over a pit full of poisonous snakes, a volcano covered in molten lava, a lake stocked with piranhas.

It was this sort of impromptu escapism that caused me to scramble onto the roof of a seaside
pensione
. While searching for pirates through a spyglass fashioned out of two clenched hands, I tripped on a terra-cotta tile and, to avoid breaking my neck, lunged for, and caught, a tree branch. Then, with equal grace and dexterity, I planted my foot in a hornet’s nest the size of a soccer ball. The ER doctor who treated me was so impressed by the broad constellation of welts dotting my body that he rustled up a camera to document the attack.

After surviving stepsisters and hornets, it was a relief to return to Villars—the alpine wonderland inextricably linked to my father. I made a friend the very first day at school, even before settling in. His name was Woody. I think we hit it off as quickly as we did because we were both newly arrived no-rank Yanks. “That puts us at the bottom of the food chain,” Woody said. I admitted not knowing what the phrase
food chain
meant, so drawing on his knowledge of sharks—Woody
loved
sharks—he explained the term and proposed we stick together. I agreed, then dragged my brass-cornered trunk up the spiral staircase of Belvedere, a converted hotel that served as the principal dormitory for the lower-school boys of Aiglon. My room, at the very top of a tower, accommodated five metal bunks in a space
originally intended for two. Although the room had a balcony that opened onto a breathtaking section of the Alps that my father had climbed before the
Anschluss,
I’d be lying if I said I took much notice of the views. My focus was directed inward, at the four roommates I’d be bunking with: three Americans and a kid from Manila.