FIRST LOVE

3 9 R F I R S T L O V E S E T H L E R E R The autumn I turned fourteen, I came down with whooping cough. Like everybody of my generation, I was vaccinated as a child, and by the late 1960s incidences of the illness had been reduced to one in a hundred thousand. But as ninth grade began, I found myself uncontrollably wheezing after what seemed like a mild cold. Half a dozen deep coughs would come, followed by a grip across my chest that stopped my breathing. I’d stand up, gasping for breath, the air coming in through my tightened throat with a high-pitched whoop. And then I breathed again. It’s not as if I’d been a sickly child: no chronic illnesses, no months in bed, no frail, fantasy-ridden birthdays. All I remember is that from the age of about six to twelve, I always had a cold. Days would go by when I would sniΔe, blow, and watch packs of handkerchiefs fill with a sticky green snot. ‘‘If you sniΔe one more time I’ll cut your nose o√,’’ I remember my father blurting out once in the car. When I was seven, I was taken to a doctor who drained out my sinuses with a pneumatic syringe, and I sat in his o≈ce chair, watching a glass jar fill with bubbling mucous. I read and sniΔed my way into adolescence. Propped up in bed, I’d reach for a tissue as often I turned a page. Finally, at twelve, I had my 4 0 L E R E R Y adenoids removed, an awful hospital procedure that left me bleeding from the throat for days and had me eating Jell-O for a week. One day, when we were in a store after the operation, I coughed up some blood. A blob of dark, congealing goo stared up from the store’s carpet, and as we hustled out the door my mother said, ‘‘Well, that’s the last time I can go to Loehmann’s.’’ Mom took her anger out on me, but she may have been angrier with my father. Just a year before, he had uprooted us to follow his ambition. Some men dream of being firemen, or doctors, or air aces. My dad dreamed of being a high school principal. A dozen years of classroom history teaching and low-level junior high administration weren’t paying o√, and so at thirty-nine he applied and, miraculously , was accepted into Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Now he could be ‘‘Dr. Lerer’’ and lead one of the great high schools that made Brooklyn famous: Midwood, or even Erasmus. It was 1964. We moved into a little house near Cambridge, where I grew strawberries in the backyard and read science fiction in my room. The first day of school, Dad was sent home because he wore a sports shirt to class. ‘‘Mr. Lerer, all my students wear jackets and ties,’’ he reported his professor as saying. The Harvard Club was serving horsemeat in mushroom sauce on Fridays. Radcli√e girls wore tartan skirts with their hair in buns. And I was reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and George Orwell’s 1984 imagining myself a hero in the future, with clean sinuses, while Dad went out and bought a dozen white shirts and a clutch of skinny dark ties. He smoked, I sniΔed, and I watched him read and study all the books that would define the social science of the 1960s: Daniel Moynihan and Gunnar Myrdal on race; Staughton Lynd on class. I scanned his bookshelf: H. R. Hays, From Ape to Angel; Edgar Friedenberg, The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms. I had no idea what an atavism was, but I knew I had little dignity. And though I never dared to open up From Ape to Angel, I imagined it a book of evolutionary science fiction on a par with Huxley – creatures captured by ambitious scientists, placed in some marvelous machine, and transformed into ethereal beauties. Three years later...