Exophoria

The time my eyes decided they wanted to spend some time apart.

The last time I saw my father, Paul, as himself was on a train platform at Grand Central Station. It was the summer between my junior and senior years at college. A few days earlier, on the phone, he’d asked me if I could possibly stay at home in New York City for a while before heading out to Chicago for a summer job I’d landed at a socialist newspaper called In These Times. He’d been going through hell. For two years he’d run a project of his own design in the Stamford, Connecticut, middle school where he taught: He and three other teachers had taken the four “lowest” classes entering the seventh grade at that school; all of them were illiterate. At the end of two years those students were reading The Grapes of Wrath (well, you didn’t think my Communist father was going to assign them Atlas Shrugged, did you?) and also doing well at math and other subjects. The success of his project proved that these kids could learn once they been given the proper support, and Dad took every opportunity to tell his bosses that they’d been failing to do so — which got them so pissed off that they eventually fired him (a pattern throughout his work history, alas). Losing his job was crushing to him financially, as he and my stepmother, Sue, were raising three small children.

Grand Central Station. (Photo by Stephen H on Unsplash.)

“Can you stay in New York a week or so?” he’d asked me. I can still hear — feel — the plaintive tremble in his voice, though this was 44 years ago. I must have been in my dorm room at Princeton — a little prince, albeit one who’d nearly flunked out a bunch of times. I couldn’t wait to get to Chicago — to my first real job, even if only a summer one. This would possibly be where I discovered my true calling as a swashbuckling journalist, having already flamed out in college at, let’s see, math, physics, chemistry, Russian language, and science writing (though it would be another year before I’d fail to complete — or even begin — my senior thesis in political theory, thus delaying my graduation indefinitely).

No, I told my father curtly — pausing in New York for a week or two was not an option. Like Woody Guthrie, I was bound for glory.

So there we were on the train platform. We hugged — our last true hug ever, as it would turn out. As the train pulled away from the station, I looked out the window and saw him waving. I waved back.

It was during that train ride to Chicago that my eyes started to diverge — or tried to, at least. I’d been hanging out a bit between two of the train cars, the only nonsmoker in a small group that had clustered there. Suddenly an eerily familiar sight came into view.

We were going past the Three Mile Island nuclear facility, which had experienced a partial meltdown just a few months earlier and scared the bejeezus out of pretty much everyone. My alarm at being so close to those infamous cooling towers was only accentuated when one of my companions drolly remarked, “Hope you’re all wearing your lead jockstraps!”

Back in my seat, my mind began catastrophizing about all the horrible things that might now be happening to me, following this unexpected exposure to who knew how much radiation. I noticed a headache forming, and a kind of pull: my eyes were trying to go out.

I’d been afraid of this eye thing happening for years. When I was 12 or so, I’d begun to notice that when I opened my eyes, it took a second for a double image to resolve into a single one: one of my eyes had to swing in so it aligned with the other. I’d gone to an eye doctor and he told me I had exophoria — the tendency for one’s eyes to go apart. If I didn’t rigorously do certain eye exercises, he warned me, eventually one eye — the dominant one — would do most of the seeing, and the other eye would either wander around or just swing all the way out and stay there. Yikes!

He gave me a few exercises to do, but the one I remember is eye pushups. It involved a string with a knot in the middle of it. I attached one end of the string to a hook in my bedroom wall. I’d hold the loose end of the string to my nose and then, alternately, focus my eyes on the end of the string (at the hook), then on the knot, then back to the end of the string, and so on. When I focused on the knot, the string would transform into an “X,” with the knot at the center. When I shifted my focus to the end of the string, it became a “V,” with the end of the string being the bottom point. After doing that over and over for just 10 minutes or so, I’d be exhausted!

I did my eye pushups regularly — for a few months. But then, as in so many areas, I began to let things slide. Even so, for years my eyes had pretty much stayed together. Until that day on the train.

Once I got to Chicago, my joy at meeting everyone at In These Times and beginning my work there — not as a swashbuckling reporter just yet, but rather as a proofreader — was undercut by my growing concern at the condition of my eyes, which kept wanting to diverge. (Double vision is particularly unhelpful when you’re trying to catch typos!) I spent a couple of weeks mostly trying to literally hold it together.

And then, one afternoon, as I worked at a desk in the newsroom, someone handed me a phone. It was my father’s friend Sam Vogel, calling from New York. Sam said, “Your father’s had a heart attack. Come back home.”

It turns out that Dad had had a stroke, not a heart attack. A terrible stroke. I later learned that when he’d first been taken to Columbia-Presbyterian (now New York-Presbyterian), their usual blood-pressure monitors couldn’t be used on him: his blood pressure was too elevated. Eventually, they located a special device — it was outrageously high, three hundred something over two hundred something.

New York-Presbyterian (formerly Columbia-Presbyterian) Medical Center.

Many months of hospitalization followed. First in the ICU, then in a private room. Then, when the hospital’s administrators realized we didn’t have any money, a public hospital in the South Bronx where they left him to lie in urine-soaked sheets. After four horrible years, he passed away.

From the moment I got that call from Sam Vogel, I don’t remember ever worrying about my eyes going apart. I think a lot of that exophoria episode had been kind of a neurotic game I was playing with myself, as I dealt with a combination of thrill and terror — not from passing Three Mile Island but from beginning to pass into an independent version of myself, rather than the boy whose worship of his father had determined virtually all of his major life decisions to that point. Since I was little, I’d only really known myself as I saw myself reflected in my dad’s eyes. Looking up at him as he tucked me into bed after reading to me from the Red Fairy Book. Across a table from him at a greasy-spoon restaurant. As that train pulled away from Grand Central Station.

Even that summer job at In These Times was, at least in part, to make him proud. One birthday, years earlier, he’d given me the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, a pioneering left-wing journalist.

But I’d finally made a small break from him: I’d rushed off to Chicago when he’d asked me to linger a bit in New York. I’ll be honest with you: for a long time, I thought that I’d killed him, by leaving town so soon. Many years later, in Boston, I’d walked directly into a telephone pole as this realization hit me. Subsequently I realized that my father’s stroke wasn’t my fault. Maybe it was his fault, for never following his doctor’s instructions to take his blood-pressure meds, lay off the salt, lose weight, etc. (His sister, my Aunt Isabel, once remarked that the doctor-averse Kornbluths were “the closest that Jews have ever come to Christian Scientists.”) Maybe it was the Stamford school administration’s fault for coming down so hard on him. Maybe it was God’s fault, for not being more protective of this delightful atheist.

During those long months when my dad was hospitalized, even after he came out of his initial coma, he didn’t look at me the way he had before, with adoration and pride. Much of his brain had succumbed to what I now can name as vascular dementia. And since I no longer saw myself reflected in his eyes in the same way, I no longer knew who I was.

I’m still working on it. And even though I stopped doing those eye pushups a half-century ago, since that week in Chicago my exophoria hasn’t ever gotten that bad. There’s another kind of exercise I do. So very many times, I’ve replayed that memory of my father on the station platform drifting farther and farther away: of my shifting my focus from him — the point of a “V” — to something closer to myself — the crux of an “X.” It hurts.