Private Practices by Linda Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page B

wobbly, giant strokes, whereas Ben clutched a pencil in his chubby palm and tried to make the eraser write. Worst of all, Ben did not speak until he was three or at least spoke only nonsense words, meaningless to the entire family. Sara lost interest in Ben.
    Not so Samuel. Ben could still remember how his father had spent hours tutoring him, trying to teach him to speak, holding him on his lap and saying over and over, “Mommy. Dadda. Sidney.” It was his last memory of his father. Samuel had died when Ben was three and Sidney six, and Ben had learned to speak only after his father’s death and only as Sidney’s pupil. His mother still told the story of how it had happened with wonder and adoration in her eyes.
    She had awakened early one morning shortly after Samuel’s death and heard loud sounds from the boys’ room. Ben was shouting, “Maddern gail,” and Sidney was shouting back, “Sailboat, moron! Say, ‘Gimme the sailboat!’”
    A moment later Sara heard a loud, thunderous crack and a rain of whimpers and Ben sobbing, “Maddern gail thina rihm!” and she had hurried to the door of the boys’ room just in time to see Sidney stomping the wooden sailboat she had just given Ben for his birthday. He was in tears. On his knees. Clutching at slivers of wood. His groping hands were dangerously close to Sidney’s still-stomping shoes. Sara had started to rush for her youngest son when, his voice in a howl, his fingers pinioned, he had shrieked, “Gimme sailboat, moron.”
    Suddenly both Sara and Sidney stood still, and then Sidney lifted his foot arid freed Ben’s fingers and Ben grabbed and cradled the mangled boat and Sara ran across the room. Scooping up Sidney, she hugged him. “You made him talk!” she cried. “You make him talk!” Ben was howling “Gimme sailboat, moron,” and at last Sara hugged him too and kissed his throbbing fingers.
    Shortly afterwards Sara felt able to move with the two small boys to Brooklyn, where her husband’s brothers owned a mirror business and had offered her a job. She had delayed the move, ashamed of Ben, but now she was no longer ashamed. Little by little he had begun to make sense and by the time they moved and he met his uncles, Sidney had taught him to shake hands and say, “Gimourning.”
    Soon after they moved, Sidney started school. Ben stayed at home with a housekeeper and waited impatiently all day for three o’clock when he and the woman could go to the schoolyard to pick up Sidney. He would hold the housekeeper’s hand tightly until he saw Sidney’s class come into the yard in size place order and then he would run with flailing arms and tripping feet to greet his brother, shouting “Gimourning! Gimourning!” But Sidney, fourteenth in line, with knickered boys in front and in back of him, would say loudly, “Jerk” and “Shithead” and “Gedoudahere,” and after a while Ben knew those words too, and by the time he was ready for kindergarten he spoke quite well, albeit at first with a bothersome, rattling stutter.
    Still, it didn’t prevent him from tagging behind after Sidney and his friends in the empty lots and alleys in which they played stickball and ring-a-levio, although it sometimes prevented him from explaining to Sara at night his frequent torn pants and cut knees and bruised arms. Or something did. He feared the loss of Sidney’s company more than he feared scrapes and cuts and punches and the stinging flesh-reddening searing that Sidney called an Indian burn.
    But Sidney was not always cruel to him. His cruelty was chiefly a public display, name-calling and tricks and physical abuse whenever Ben followed behind in the pack of boys.
    When they were alone, Sidney was different. When they were alone, he would let Ben listen to his radio or play with the doctor kit Sara bought him on his eighth birthday, or the