“You were perfect, when you first came out,” my mother insisted. But between the moment of my birth and her next inspection I suffered an injury to my right eye. How it occurred is a mystery. Some blunder made in handling was all she would murmur—drops, doctors, nurses, vagueness: “These things happen.” My mother probably didn’t know the details of the eye injury—if it was an injury—for it would have been sacrilege for her to have questioned a doctor at that time and in that place, Brooklyn on the eve of war, a locus of customs and mythologies as arbitrary and rooted as in the Trobriand Islands or the great Aztec city of Teotihuacán where ritual sacrifices were performed monthly, the victims’ blood coursing down the steps of the great Pyramid of the Sun. In comparison, my damage was minor. Her vagueness still puzzled me, though, because her favorite retort, when she suspected me of lying, was “To thine own self be true.” As it happened, lying was not my style; I leaned more towards omission.
