The Kindness of Strangers
I spent most of the Christmas holidays getting to know Smith. I learned his family was indeed Jewish. They lived in a rather expensive-looking house a few blocks from St. Sebastian’s, near the old polo fields and at the end of a cul de sac, a few blocks from El Camino Real. His father was a famed opera singer. No one in my family knew much about opera, but Smith told me he’d traveled all over the States and in Europe singing in the best opera houses. But in the early 1950s, he contracted polio and spent most of his days at home in an iron lung.
It was a sad situation, but somehow Smith and his mother carried on. One day, I met his father and it was a weird experience talking to him while looking into a small mirror above his head while he lay in that strange con
