A Song in the Night Read Online Free PDF

things, a new emotional equation took hold: if my suffering prompted people to help me, then when others were suffering, perhaps I should try to help them.
    The intuition started to influence my actions. I began to admire my parents and other adults when they took offense at injustice. I became incensed when I witnessed small acts of unfairness. Indeed, one of my earliest memories involvesdefying my elementary school classmates to defend a boy I did not even like.
    I was in the first grade at the Valhalla Elementary School in Hartsdale, New York. One of my classmates brought his lunch every day in a brown paper bag. He was pudgy, abrasive, and loud—not someone I wished to get to know. His daily meal was dreary: a piece of bread, a stick of celery, an apple, and a hard-boiled egg. Every day at noon, when we arrived in the cafeteria, he would walk over to the lady at the cash register, reach into his pocket, and plunk down a nickel for a small container of milk.
    Over time some of the boys in my class—the little lords of the lunchroom—began to object to the hard-boiled egg. His lunch was ridiculous, they said, snickering. It
smelled
. In a sense they were right—the eggs often did exude a slightly sulfurous odor that made me wonder how old they were. With each passing day, the egg boy’s lunch became the focus of greater and greater ridicule. Finally, one day, when I was sitting at a nearby table, he sat down with some of these boys. When he pulled out his lunch, the cackling band pretended to gag. They punched him in the shoulder and demanded that he throw his whole lunch away. When he refused, they stood up, gathered their lunch trays, and marched as a group to another table on the other side of the lunchroom.
    I watched him carefully. He slowly took another bite of the egg and wiped his eyes and nose on the back of his sleeve. With alarm, I realized that he was crying.
    Up until that moment I had been an observer, eager to stay out of the line of fire, but his misery moved me. Withoutthinking, I picked up my tray, limped over to his table, and sat down beside him. He did not look at me or speak to me. For five awkward minutes we ate together in silence. From the corner of my eye I noticed the other boys giggling and smirking. Then, without a word, he and I stood up and went our separate ways.
    In a movie version of this tale, he and I would have gone on to become the best of friends, but that did not happen. He remained loud and abrasive. His egg did smell pretty bad. And though I still didn’t like him very much, at some elemental level, I had understood his feelings.
    At other times I was only an observer of events that affected my parents and friends. During this period of his career my father worked for magazines such as the
Saturday Evening Post
. His editors would assign a story, he would spend weeks working on it, and at the last minute the piece would be blocked, leaving my father with a tiny “kill fee” instead of the more substantial payment he had expected and deserved.
    On another occasion, my mother, still working part-time for Time-Life Books, had come up with the daring idea that they should produce a cookbook series. The editors asked for her ideas, so for weeks she pounded out suggestions, including proposed book outlines for two, the first on French provincial cooking and the second on Russian cuisine. The publishers loved the idea, and then my mother heard nothing more about it. Eventually she discovered that the whole project was being moved forward with substantial support from Time-Life Books.
    The new editor in chief was a man without cooking experience.She rocketed into New York City and demanded to see the relevant executive.
    “Why didn’t you at least give me the chance to run this series?” she demanded.
    The executive looked bemused.
    “You couldn’t possibly have thought that we would allow this series to be run by a
woman
, could you?” he asked her contemptuously.
    When she