Part XII: Norton

The Byron Blog consists of writings, photographs 

and anecdotes related to my father, 

Byron Dobell (1927-2017)  

 

My uncle, Norton, and my grandparents, c. 1936 (Norton's foot is bandaged)

My father’s older brother, Norton, died in 1936 at age 19. My father was nine. 

 

Norton died of an infection from a foot injury.

 

In the 1950s my father wrote this short piece about his last memories of Norton.

 

The Collection

 

My brother, like a young wounded toreador —olive skin, dark hair that hadn’t been cut for two months, was encased in white adhesive around his back and chest. On his chest, where he rested it, was a soft-covered volume of The Decameron. He was 19 and burning with an infection the doctors could, in 1936, do nothing about. A few years later, penicillin would have cured him. He would have lived, probably fought in the war, perhaps come back to the Bronx and be alive, married, disturbed by his parents.

 

I was nine, suddenly aware that my brother, who had always seemed to disdain talking to me, was paying attention to what I was doing. In my hand was a 1 and ½ cent brown Harding. I had peeled it off of an envelope sticking out of an ash can. My brother inspected it. “You should start a collection of these, find all the stamps in this series.” I lunged back to the empty lot across the street, rummaged through boxes, kept my eyes open for envelopes. Every twenty minutes, I would dash back up to the apartment, round the corner into my brother’s room, show him a new find. He gave me stamps from the letters at his side. A notice went out to my father, mother, sister – all stamps to me. 

The next day he was sent to the hospital. I was shipped to my aunt in Teaneck. That was the last time – except once in the hospital when I saw him unconscious – that I ever spoke to him. I would have liked to have shown him the stamps I was carrying in my pocket.