Read Miracle Boy Grows Up for Free Online Page B

changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity.”
    —Calvin Trillin, About Alice
    O ver Thanksgiving weekend back in 1955, my parents meet. It’s a blind date set up by Dad’s Aunt Clara. Dad—then just Everett—is twenty-seven, visiting home (Columbus, Ohio) from Los Angeles, where he’s been the past five years, since graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. He’s earning a master’s in English at UCLA and working as a sales clerk at the May Company on Wilshire Boulevard, among other odd jobs. He has considered law school for next year, yet finds the reading list intimidating. In truth, he isn’t at all sure what to do with the rest of his life. He’s also grown tired of LA’s beautiful but, alas, intellectually mediocre women.
    He ventures to Paula’s Cincinnati home—a tidy, cramped, two-room row house—with some trepidation. Paula, just nineteen, is home from Wellesley College, where she’s a junior. An only child from a poor family. What could they possibly have in common?
    After shaking hands, Paula’s father immediately washes his right hand. He’s an odd bird with a kind-eyed but brittle-looking wife, who doesn’t want to let Paula go when it’s time to leave.
    Paula, petite and pretty in an unconventional way—not too pretty, thankfully!—seems eager to hightail it. She wears her shoulder-length wavy brown hair in a modern, unfussy way, and owlish black-rimmed glasses.
    At the candle-lit restaurant, chosen on the authority of Aunt Clara, their conversation moves quickly to literature and art and philosophy . . . his passion for Lionel Trilling . . . hers for Joyce . . . his chauvinism for Dickens, Thomas Mann, and the masterful E. M. Forster . . . hers for Graham Greene and Maupassant . . . the influence of Benjamin Disraeli and the rise of Jewish secularism . . . and the pleasures of European cinema, especially Renoir’s La Grande Illusion and De Sica’s Bicycle Thief “and a rising Swedish director named Ingmar Bergman. He’s beguiled by her academic curiosity—her very vocabulary!—and even her enthusiasm for Tom Lehrer. So different from the empty chatter of LA girls.
    Three weeks later they set a wedding date—December 27, which will be Paula’s twentieth birthday. Yet a few days before the wedding, Mrs. Plotnick confronts Everett. “If you’re having second thoughts, say so now. Hurt my daughter before the wedding, not after.”
    It’s uncanny! Has Everett let slip that he’s feeling too young to be sure of anything, let alone love, and thinking Paula, though poised and self-confident, is practically a child who couldn’t know what she’s doing? “Don’t be silly,” he says.
    “Come now. You can tell me . If you don’t want to face Paula directly. Be a mensch.”
    But isn’t a mensch supposed to be married, certainly by his age? It’s the right thing to do. After all, to put his cold feet in perspective, he’s never sure of anything.
    In retrospect, their intellectual compatibility notwithstanding, their backgrounds are substantially different. Everett’s family is well-to-do. His father, Jacob—whom he finds a contemptible, intimidating, Old Country boor—is a shrewd businessman. Arriving at Ellis Island at age twelve all alone, in steerage from Russia by way of England, Jacob Mattlin made his way to Columbus with nothing. He had distant family there who provided scant help, only a geographical destination.
    Once settled in Columbus, Jacob Mattlin launched a successful cooperage. He made pickle barrels for the H. J. Heinz Company; other customers may or may not have included bootleggers. Jack, as he became known, married a beautiful American woman—the daughter of a previous generation of Russian immigrants, who had grown up in the neighboring state of Kentucky—and they had two sons. When Irwin, the younger one, died at the tender age of nine from influenza, Jack and Jennie went and had another. They named the