That same Friday my father, Mort, alone in his bed in Middletown, woke in the morning from a marvelous dream. My father had had this dream before, but not in a long while. In it he was already at shul, praying at the morning service. The other men of the usual minyan were there too—Jerome Kaminsky, Nathan Novak, Abe Leiberman, Stanley Levine, Harold Sokull, Marvin Abkin, Sid Pasternack, Freddy Horowitz, Mort’s brother Nelson Leibritsky, and his brother-in-law, that sorry-ass (as my father typically put it) Leo Cohen—but special to the service was the presence of my father’s father, standing right next to him, Zelik Leibritsky’s body wrapped in his old tallis, its white fabric as aged as the man’s beard but its gold embroidery still bold and shiny. More than the others, my grandfather Zelik prayed especially fervently, as in life he always had, bowing and rocking, mumbling and sometimes singing the Hebrew words. Nevertheless, because the laws of dreams were not the laws of life, the two men—father and son—were simultaneously talking.
“How’s business?” Zelik asked.
“Good, good,” Mort answered, relieved to say as much. He explained to his father how the war had broken the relentless economic depression. And with the war over, along with its rationing, sales were so much better. In the past year—the time since their last dream-talk—Mort had felt secure enough to get the store’s floor professionally polished and its walls painted. “Business has not only picked up, but it’s gotten that good,” he said, relieved once again.
His father nodded. “And how’s the family?” he asked. “How’s the lovely Ada?”
“No one’s sick,” Mort began.
Again, his father nodded.
“And we found our cousin,” Mort told Zelik. “Reuben Leibritsky, from Poland to Palestine to Israel. A survivor.”
“Survivor,” Zelik echoed. After a pause he said quietly, “Good, good.”
“And the kids, my kids, do well, or well enough, at school,” Mort said.
Not surprisingly, Zelik raised his eyebrows; the subject of the kids, my father knew, was always a good one for the old man. He had died when Davy was two.
Mort continued. “Molly’s a good girl. And Davy, you never know, he just might be the baseball player I never was. Shortstop. Shortstop,” Mort repeated, and unknowingly repeated again, the words quickly falling into the rhythm of the prayer that the men of the minyan surrounding him uttered.
“And Howard,” he added, blinking. “Turns out Howard shows some talent in business. We had him three days after school the whole year, and while the kid may not make straight A’s, he can sure make a sale.”
Zelik raised his eyebrows even higher. He also whistled, a note that quickly rose and fell in time with the rocking of his praying body.
About then Mort woke, and though the dream faded, he nevertheless heard his father’s response as well as a strange knock at the synagogue’s door.
“That might be Howard right now,” Zelik suggested, nodding. “And about that talent,” the man added, “he got that from me.”
Mort sat up in bed, fully awakened. “Maybe so,” he told his father, smiling, glad to have pleased him.
Breakfast was an easy enough matter for my father to prepare, even without my mother to do it. A cup of Nescafé, some toast, two boiled eggs. How nice, Mort thought, that fourth morning without us, the Hartford Courant splayed before him, and beside him his toast buttered, his eggs peeled, his coffee stirred. As on the three days before, it astonished my father this morning how much peacefulness there was to family life, minus the family.
As he sipped his coffee he began to page through the Courant’s sports section, searching, as he’d been doing recently, for any updates on Babe Ruth, who two weeks ago had appeared at Yankee Stadium for its twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. He could do this, page through the sports section first thing, because he’d already taken in the latest news of Israel the night before, on the radio. At the moment, after months of battles that came on the heels of Israel’s independence, truce was where matters in the Middle East stood. And so there was hope, my father concluded. He’d emphasize that hope to his cousin Reuben, still struggling to get settled there, in his next correspondence. But for Babe Ruth, photographed at Yankee Stadium leaning on a bat as if it were a cane, hope wasn’t so obvious a matter. Hero that he was, he was sick as a dog, couldn’t possibly have many days left. You know how bad my voice sounds, Ruth was quoted as saying to the crowd that day. Well, it feels just as bad.
Mort looked up from the paper. “You heard about the Babe?” Once again he was talking to Zelik, who he knew was still there, lingering, as eager as Mort was for coffee and news. His father had been the first in the family—the first Leibritsky in America—to fall in love with baseball. Thoroughly—because he missed his father, because he’d always loved talking sports with the old man—Mort told him everything he knew about Babe Ruth’s illness.
In fact Zelik had also succumbed to the kind of internal rot that was ruining Babe Ruth, and perhaps because of that connection, when Mort got to the part about Ruth’s recent words at Yankee Stadium, he heard them that second time around in the voice of his father. You know how bad my voice sounds, the old man, by way of Babe Ruth, repeated sadly. Well, it feels just as bad.
Mort was going to respond to his father, tell him to hang in there and that God would surely answer his prayers, but just then his brother Nelson honked his car horn. Mort shot up, grabbed his hat, and rushed toward the back door, leaving the Nescafé half-drunk and the opened sports section strewn across the table. Then he turned around. He placed the coffee cup and other dishes in the sink, and neatly, section by section, just as his father used to do, he folded the paper.
He and Nelson were approaching the synagogue when Mort recalled Howard’s promise to drive that morning from Woodmont to Middletown in time to join the minyan. Then he recalled that knocking in his dream. His father had been right, he realized. It probably was Howard.
As he and Nelson closed their car doors, Mort looked up and down Broad Street, scanning the cars parked along the curb for his Dodge. When he didn’t see it he looked in both directions again, this time searching not for his car but for Howard. He didn’t see him either. The person he saw instead, opening the synagogue’s side door, was his brother-in-law Leo Cohen, a man so frail it seemed for a moment that the simple feat of pulling the door wide enough to slip inside would be too much for him.
Mort turned from the sight of Leo to that of Nelson. “Any minute now,” he told Nelson about Howard’s arrival, patting his brother’s ample back as the two headed toward the synagogue door, which by then had already closed. Mort realized, too, that Howard might in fact already be there, having parked the car behind the synagogue, where they wouldn’t have been able to see it from the road. Yes, any minute now, he sang to himself.
Mort surged ahead of Nelson, his eagerness to get to it motivating him as always. His outpacing Nelson also had to do with Nelson’s being fat; his younger brother always lagged behind. Still, once at the door Mort waited for Nelson, holding it open for him. Standing there, hand clenched on the metal handle, one foot on the sidewalk outside the building, the other foot a step inside, he could almost taste it, the sweetness of entering the shul, the satisfaction he’d feel just a moment later, after closing the doors behind him to that whirlwind of American society, that melting pot of everybody from everywhere. For a few minutes each day, behind the synagogue’s shut door, my father could pretend it was just them: the Jews. They were in a little shtetl somewhere in eastern Europe, doing what Jews always did, and they weren’t getting blown to pieces. Or, he sometimes imagined of late, they were in Israel, the Israel that could be once the current truce matured into a lasting peace.
As he and Nelson ambled toward the utility room used for the morning minyan—no reason to muddy the upstairs sanctuary for such a routine occasion—Mort could hear the mutterings, the hellos and how-you-doings, of his fellow minyan brothers. For a moment he thought he might sidestep Nelson, who in the hallway blocked his way and stalled him. But soon enough he was standing inside the utility room, a bare place with nothing but white walls, a wooden floor, and a flood of fluorescence pouring from the ceiling. Because the minyan would stand the whole time, the metal folding chairs that might have served the group remained pushed against the walls. For a few years already theirs had been a Conservative synagogue, not Orthodox as in Woodmont, which meant that the women could stand right there with them, but, truth was, the women had other things going on in the morning; they never showed for the service.
So there he stood amidst his friends, the same pious group as in his dream. He glanced at Jerome Kaminsky, who stood by Nathan Novak, chatting. Then he joined Abe Leiberman, Stanley Levine, and Harold Sokull, who weren’t talking but waiting, and in doing so formed a kind of row.
But where was Howard? he wondered, glancing from face to face.
In the next instant, as if the minyan had been waiting for him and Nelson, the service began, a chorus of Hebrew muttering. Perhaps because his brother-in-law Leo Cohen was standing just outside the clump of men, the group soon enough considered Leo their minyan leader, and within minutes Mort heard Leo’s Hebrew mumbles rise above the mumbles of the others and sharpen into defined words every so often, enough to keep the pack praying at the same pace. Good for nothing was the way Mort thought of Leo at the store where he employed him, despite how frail and sick he was, because he owed Vivie that much. He knew he did. But right then, surprisingly enough, Leo Cohen was good for something. The rabbi, as was often enough the case for morning minyan, was nowhere in sight. Mort was glad, for he liked it better this way, a minyan of equals, men perfectly able to get the job done, without supervision. God was with them, after all, and that was all the supervision they needed.
The prayers began, the Bar’chu, the Sh’ma, and they were racing already toward the second Kaddish, not a mourner’s Kaddish, just a regular Kaddish, a kind of marker, five sections of the service, five Kaddishes. That’s how it went. My father could almost glide through them, saying each Kaddish without even knowing he was saying them. In fact, if he didn’t snap himself out of it he could get through the entire morning service that way, waking up at the end as if from a nap. He’d done that on so many occasions he felt ashamed; come Yom Kippur he always had much to atone for. That was a hazard, yes, but there were so many days that were otherwise; there was that point, and perhaps they were nearing it just then, when he’d become immersed in prayer, when the sound of the Hebrew mumblings around him, and the sound of Hebrew issuing from his own lips, and the sound of Hebrew swimming through his mind, transported him and he felt that the language and he were one, that the prayers and he were one, that God and he were one. This phenomenon, he understood, was the transcendence of prayer, a kind of freedom he’d experienced now and again as a kid but more and more as an adult, and the older he got the more frequently he found himself in that place—foreign, unmapped, lost—a wonderful, ethereal place conjured forth by the beauty of the ancient words, and his soul would nearly burst with the gratitude he felt for them, and his heart ached with joy. It’s true, your heart can literally hurt with joy, my father said to us on more than one occasion, though when he did we had no idea he was speaking of prayer. It can really be a pain you feel, he continued, a terrible, wonderful pain. I always assumed he was talking about fatherhood.
At shul that Friday morning Mort hoped that he was nearing that moment when he was to achieve that blessing of transcendence, hoped it was just around the corner, following the second Kaddish, swooping in at the start of the next prayer, the Amidah, and, like the others, he took three steps back then three steps forward to ready himself for the presence of God that he would meet, if he were steady and focused, in prayer, in this most serious prayer, this prayer so big, so central, one of its many names, his father had once taught him, was simply The Prayer. But just then, three steps backward, three forward, a quieter Hebrew muttering began, a mentioning of the ancestors, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, and another relation came to mind, an extant one, his son Howard, who had promised to arrive that day from Woodmont in time for morning minyan but clearly wasn’t going to come through.
God of Abraham, God of Jacob, God of Isaac, God forgive me, Mort continued, ad-libbing, which was not allowed, which was another thing for which he’d ultimately have to atone, God forgive me, but you grant a son a wish, help him and the family get to the beach, a summer of all play and no work, a summer of paradise and sunshine and endless bowls of fruit salad, a summer unimaginable to me and my father, and what does that son do but take it all for granted. God forgive me, he told himself, but I expected more from Howard, never would I have broken my word to my father, ignored my father, God rest his soul, God hope the old soul’s not really hurting, God help him if he is, and then Mort was back to the written text, back to God, busy and industrious—so very unlike Howard—sustaining the living with loving-kindness, resurrecting the dead with great mercy, supporting the falling, healing the sick, releasing the bound, and fulfilling his word to those who sleep in the dust.
He’d once slept in the dust, Mort realized, his heart seized by the word, and by dust he meant ignorance, and by ignorance he meant himself, before his awakening, for which he had his father, Zelik, to thank. At the time he’d been a few years younger than Howard was now, just twelve, his bar mitzvah nearing, but he was far more in love with baseball then than with Judaism. Games and practices were on Saturdays and he’d appealed to his father for permission to forgo the rules of Shabbos for the freedom of playing Saturday games. His team wanted him, a natural as a shortstop, and he wanted them. But Zelik had shaken his head; the law was the law, he’d said, not without sympathy for Mort’s request. After all, baseball was certainly a worthy concern. But, his father had remarked, you couldn’t compare the pursuit of baseball with the rules of Judaism, the teachings of Torah, the love of God, and—here Zelik cleared his throat for dramatic effect—the fate of the Jewish people. There was talk then of the old life before America: of expulsion from Moscow, of life within the Pale, of dire poverty, robbings, even killings, of every law designed to keep you down. This was what the family, because of their Judaism, had suffered. But hadn’t Mort heard all this a thousand times before? He looked to his father. “We have to remember the Sabbath,” the man concluded. “We can’t choose not to. That’s the same thing as choosing not to be a Jew.”
“Then I choose not to.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Zelik had stepped back, as if wounded, and they’d walked away from each other for the afternoon. Later, as my father had come down the stairs for dinner, Zelik met him at the landing. His words, heated earlier, were now calm, even kind.
“Listen,” he told Mort. The unusual sweetness of his father’s voice captivated Mort and he did listen. “What this is,” Zelik said, “is a responsibility. This is how you were born: Jewish. This is the family you were born into: of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You can’t change that, and this is how it comes: with responsibilities. We have to meet them, or—”
Zelik looked at him and the words, which at first came so easily, and had sounded almost like music, were now seemingly beyond his grasp. “Don’t you see?” he added, shaking his head as if to clear his mind. “Responsibilities,” he repeated quietly.
This moment was the first time his father had talked to him like that, like Mort actually did have a choice, to meet or refuse to meet his responsibilities. In a few months the bar mitzvah would mark him a man, at least in religious terms, and with that his full participation in adult Jewish life could begin, but it was this moment that my father always thought of as the one that truly began his adulthood. He did have responsibilities, he realized, blinking his eyes, as if to push past the dust of sleepy denial. He just hadn’t seen his life that way before. He didn’t know he had the will to do it, but in the end he did: he made his choice, and it was against baseball.
The words of the Amidah continued, and as Mort rocked forward and backward, his eyes focused again on his prayer book, his mind working to find that center point, that place that stilled his increasingly bewildered thoughts—Where’s Howard? Where is he?—he let the Hebrew ground him: “Restore our judges as in former times,” he prayed, “and our counselors as of yore; remove from us sorrow and sighing, and reign over us, You alone, O Lord, with kindness and compassion, with righteousness and justice.” He read and he davened and still he heard Howard telling him, convincing him, “I’ll come back early, in time for morning minyan.” In his prayer book he read, “Blessed are You, Lord, who crushes enemies and subdues the wicked,” and in his mind he was wagging his finger at Howard, telling him that the thing about Judaism was that either you were in or you were out. The chosen people. Well, it didn’t work to be chosen unless you chose right back. And he had. Mort was in. He was there. He was present. But where the hell are you? he asked Howard.
He shook his head, attempting to clear it, bowed deeply, and began again.
“Look with favor, Lord our God, on Your people Israel and pay heed to their prayer,” Mort prayed, though at the same time he heard his father say, speaking of Howard, “He gets that from me.” Mort read, “You are the Beneficent One, for Your mercies never cease,” while the words forming in his mind were goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit. The prayer was coming to a close. “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable before You, Lord,” Mort intoned while inwardly he said, strangely enough, shortstop, shortstop. Then, suddenly speaking of Davy and his talent with the glove and ball, he turned to his phantom father and said, gloating: He gets that from me.
That was not the prayer, the Amidah, Mort had anticipated. Rather than transcendence he felt in its wake disgrace. His prayer book, usually weightless to the touch, might as well have been made of stones. Even his body, filled by that lightness of spirit he’d gained upon entering the shul, felt deadened by his failure, wobbly, weak. His face, he soon realized, was damp with sweat.
When he looked around he noticed the men had gathered near him, and Nathan Novak, leaning closest, soon wrapped an arm around his shoulders. Jerome Kaminsky pulled a chair from against a wall and unfolded it, then pointed at Mort, then at the chair.
You know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad, he almost began to explain to them, his knees quivering just like Babe Ruth’s reportedly had at Yankee Stadium.
Internal rot. Surely, he reasoned, considering the rancor of his prayer, he had it as bad as Ruth, as bad as his dead father. He wondered: Was he going to die of it too? Was the morning’s visitation of spirit—his father’s and Babe Ruth’s—a kind of premonition? Was that knocking in his dream the knocking not of Howard but of the other world? He then thought of something else, even worse: Did he not know how to be a father?
For a moment all prayer ceased and the men gathered even more tightly around him. Harold Sokull urged him to sit; he was tired, Harold told him, he didn’t look so good, maybe he needed a rest. It had to be hard, Freddy Horowitz suggested, what with the family gone and all. Abe Leiberman and Stanley Levine pointed at a chair; Jerome Kaminsky was patting his back.
As Mort eased himself into the chair, Nathan Novak wouldn’t let him go, had his arm in a grip. Once seated, Jerome Kaminsky stepped forward, loosened Mort’s tie. His brother-in-law Leo Cohen then stood before him, holding a glass of water he’d seemed to conjure forth. For an instant my father stared at Leo in disbelief: all those years in the store he’d never seen Leo move so swiftly. But soon his attention shifted. Marvin Abkin was speaking to him, his voice as gentle as he’d ever heard it. “Drink up, big boy. Drink up.”
Not one man continued to pray without him.
Finally, Marvin Abkin said, his voice hushed, “Heart? Heart bothering you?”
Mort shook his head. “Not a heart problem,” he said quietly. “God, no. Just a touch of worry. That’s all.”
He looked up at the concerned men surrounding him. How glad he was to know them, he thought, scanning the familiar faces. How lucky each morning to be right there with them. Indeed the minyan’s love at that moment was as palpable and clear as any my father had known, even Ada’s, he realized, even his kids’. He sat in the chair and the cluster of men moved in one motion, like an amoeba might move, a shifting blob of life and energy, inches closer toward the chair, toward him. Jerome Kaminsky began fanning him, while his brother Nelson and Nathan Novak gripped him, one man to each of his shoulders. As Mort observed the men’s attention he was reminded of his wedding day, when he’d been lifted in a chair by a group of men not unlike this group, lifted high in the air in this very synagogue, this very room, which that day was decorated with flowers and had tables of food set out that were overflowing. He felt just that way again, like they’d gathered around him and in doing so had lifted him up. With gratitude he looked once again from one man, one friend, one prayer brother to the next. Howard, he would tell his son when he saw him, gently and wisely teaching him, just as his father had once taught him: This Jewishness is no game. It’s nothing to toy with. It’s your essence, he’d say, simply enough. It’s your very soul.
Now that he’d recovered the men returned to their prayer, for they could pray and they could keep an eye on him and they could shift like an amoebic blob when necessary and all the while they never missed a beat of the service. The last of the Kaddishes now approached and this would be a mourner’s Kaddish, Mort knew. As he struggled to stand and then, feet planted, to steady himself, the group turned to him, and looking out he saw many pairs of eyes questioning his rising at all, much less his rising to mourn.
“Babe Ruth,” he said, by way of explanation. All the rest was just too complicated. “I’ve been anxious, lately, for the Babe.”
But that was all the explanation needed.
Suddenly, with Ruth recalled, they were all mourners, though the great man—not a Jew but close enough—hadn’t fallen just yet. Nevertheless, they bowed their heads, began the Kaddish, and, together, the men prayed.
When he left the shul moments later my father felt as he always did: cleansed and clearheaded. He shook hands with his minyan brothers, smacked their backs, and watched them scatter.
When you got right down to it, he understood anew, trailing Nelson at this point as they made their way back to the car, life was pretty simple. Just one rule, above all others. He looked up to the sky, a flawless, bright blue, and then at the houses and buildings on Middletown’s Broad Street, the rows of cars parked neatly along each side. Everything was God, he told himself, nodding.
Then he inhaled deeply.
For every breath was Him.
* * *
Howard snored. That’s how I knew he was going to be late that Friday morning, by the sounds emanating from the thin walls of the cottage well past seven a.m., when he should have risen. Freedom can be a complicated thing, and even at the very start of summer Howard had grabbed a little too much, too soon.
When he did wake it was already twenty past, and the sisters, who had left some time ago for their dunk, weren’t back yet. The cottage was quiet. Howard changed that with a thud, then a worried “Oh, shit. Shit.” Soon enough he was making his way down the cottage’s creaky and by then quite sandy stairs, then tiptoeing around Nina and me lying in the sofa bed, as he looked for the car keys he’d last dropped into a living room ashtray. A moment later he walked past us again, into the dining room, where he rummaged through the mound of unfolded laundry covering the large oak table, and then he went into the kitchen, where I could hear him open the fridge. I could have told him that I, at least, was already awake, that the sisters, who had left for their dunk, had woken me up. I could have. But to take in Howard struggling, at least in the days before we lost Davy, was one of the best kinds of fun.
Well over an hour later Howard pulled into Middletown and parked the Dodge on Broad Street, slamming its door as he raced toward the synagogue. But he’d taken only a few steps when he spotted them: Mort and Nelson. Their yarmulkes, which covered their bald spots perfectly, were already off their heads and stuffed in their pockets.
Nervously, my brother called to them. When they looked his way he waved, and they in turn waved back, Mort’s hand lingering in the air.
“So you made it,” Mort said, sounding strangely matter-of-fact, a tone that worked to relieve Howard of some of the worry he’d been shouldering as he drove.
“Sorry,” Howard said. “Got going a little late.”
As Mort observed him—the wrinkled khakis, the partially untucked shirt, the loafers worn without socks, the chin stubble (Howard realized, scratching at it)—Howard shifted on his feet. While he tucked in the shirt, Mort’s expression, which at first had almost seemed friendly, shifted in increments until it was decidedly grim.
“Don’t tell me,” he finally said. “Tell God.” He walked past Howard and waited beside the Dodge. “Throw me the keys,” he said, and Howard did.
When Mort started the car Howard gave him a questioning glance. Howard was standing yards away, beside Nelson. He didn’t know if he was expected to get in the car or not.
“I’ll see you at the store,” Mort said, his tone still matter-of-fact but his gaze removed from Howard and focused on the road ahead of him. In the next moment he pulled away from the curb.
“It’s going to be a long day,” Howard told Nelson. As Howard watched Mort drive off, his stomach dropped from the middle of his body to his feet, a sensation he’d experienced before, and always in connection with his father. A long day, he repeated to himself.
Just then Nelson threw his arm around his nephew’s shoulders. “Tell you what,” Nelson said, patting his back. “Stick with me.”
Leibritsky’s Department Store on Middletown’s Main Street was where the men all worked: Mort, Nelson, Leo, and sometimes Howard. I often thought of my brother’s time there during his high school years as a male rite of passage, as if the bar mitzvah alone hadn’t been enough of an ordeal to transform him from boy to man. But some regularly logged hours at Leibritsky’s Department Store would do it. Years ago the store had been a snug sell-anything kind of place located at the north end of Main Street—at least that’s the legend we children had always been told—but all throughout our childhood it was the spacious five-section (men’s apparel, women’s apparel, children’s apparel, shoes, and housewares) department store located toward the south end that my brother, from his time there, came to know as intimately as our home. First thing that morning, to Mrs. Rossetti, mother of the same Lucinda Rossetti who had yet to mail the beginnings of a picture to Davy, Howard promptly sold the latest Sunbeam Mixmaster.
“It’ll make your life easier. You deserve that,” he told Mrs. Rossetti, who looked at him with surprise and then agreed.
On a good day, a normal day, a substantial sale like that would be cause for Mort to proudly slap Howard’s back, but that morning when Nelson clapped his hands, calling attention to the sale, and then said with deliberate volume, “Nice one, Howard, nice one,” Mort, though standing only yards away, pretended not to hear. Once again Howard’s stomach dropped to the floor and for some time after that his head hung low. He could have made another sale, or at least have tried to, but he didn’t feel like approaching anyone. Instead he closeted himself in the back area of the store, unnecessarily folding and refolding children’s play clothes.
Later that morning, close to noon, Nelson found Howard and asked him out to lunch, just the two of them. Howard explained that though he hadn’t had much of a breakfast, and was maybe a little hungry, he nevertheless didn’t feel like eating.
“Come on. Do you some good. What do you say?” Nelson asked again.
This time Howard nodded. Nelson had always been good to him. Howard didn’t remember this, exactly, but he’d been told at least a hundred times how he’d taken to Nelson right away, even as a baby. When he’d cried, touched at times by colic, Nelson’s ample arms were a reliable comfort and Howard would quiet right down, even sleep. And when Howard was still a small boy Nelson would come by to take him for walks, often to the local playground, where Nelson would gently push Howard’s back as he sat on a swing. In the years following that, Nelson had taken Howard to the Saturday movie matinee at the Palace Theater on Middletown’s Main Street. Just him. Together they’d seen The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and The Wizard of Oz. There was even a couple of years, 1942 and 1943, when Howard was twelve and thirteen, when he and Nelson had gone to the movies together once every month during the school year. They’d watch the show and Nelson, always armed with bite-sized Tootsie Rolls, would pass Howard candy throughout the story’s progression. That was all in the past—high school had come along, and with that a natural enough orientation more toward friends than uncles, however kind—but even so Howard had continued to feel good in Nelson’s company, important, and Nelson, in turn, unfailingly lit up simply at the sight of him.
They ate together that Friday at Regina’s, a tiny restaurant, four tables total, in the living room of the home of Regina Scantelli. They might have eaten at Angelina’s, in Angelina Tucci’s living room–turned–restaurant, but Nelson preferred Regina’s. Only one other customer was there, Judge Luigo, of the Middlesex County municipal court. As Nelson took his seat he nodded, and the judge nodded back. “What’ll it be?” Regina then asked Nelson and Howard, and by that she meant either the spaghetti and meat sauce or the chicken parmesan. That was what she’d cooked up that day, so far.
Since there was such a good chance of chicken that night for the Shabbos meal in Woodmont—roast chicken, not chicken parmesan, but chicken all the same—Howard ordered the spaghetti. Besides, the chicken parmesan, combining meat with cheese, wasn’t kosher, even in the relatively loose way his family defined that term. But Nelson, who wouldn’t be coming with them to Woodmont for the weekend, who was single and who had once told Howard that he ate bologna sandwiches for dinner most nights, ordered—without hesitating, and apparently without worrying about the rules of kashruth—the chicken parmesan for lunch.
They didn’t talk while they ate, but over coffee Nelson said, “You can’t see it now, but you made your father happy this morning with that sale and all. He’ll forget about the rest. It was just one minyan out of a million.”
“I didn’t mean to be late,” Howard said, the memory of Mort pulling away from the curb and driving past him revived in his mind.
“No one said you meant it,” Nelson offered. Quietly, he tapped his fork on the edge of the table.
Howard paused, watched his uncle play with his fork, and then glanced at Nelson’s face. “He might as well have meant it. You saw it. The way he drove off.”
Nelson nodded. He lifted his fork then placed it on his empty plate. Glancing toward the kitchen, he looked as if he wanted something else, but then he turned back to Howard. “It can be hard to be a son,” he pronounced at last. “I know what I’m saying.”
A look of deep sadness overcame Nelson. Howard waited for him to say more—being a son was indeed a difficult business, the most difficult of his life—but Nelson wouldn’t. Instead he flagged Regina over to the table. “You got any dessert?” he asked, suddenly agitated. “A little for me, a little for him. We’ll split whatever you’ve got.”
When Regina brought them two bowls of fruit cocktail, Nelson dug right in. Howard, who hadn’t been able to finish his meal, had no appetite for it. He slid his bowl toward Nelson.
“I’ll tell you about it sometime,” Nelson offered at last, his voice calmer, the two bowls of fruit cocktail eaten clean. “It’s not about your father, it’s about my father,” he added, and that was at least something.
Howard nodded.
At three o’clock that afternoon Mort and Leo grabbed their weekend suitcases, stuck in a corner of the back office at the store, and, along with Howard, headed off, out of Middletown and toward Woodmont. Because Leo was prone to car sickness, he sat in the front seat beside Howard, who drove. Leo was reading a book by Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms. With a title like that, Howard didn’t even want to begin to ask about the book. Behind Howard, Mort sat compliantly enough in the backseat, though for Howard the sight of Mort in the rearview mirror, serious as ever as he gazed out the window, and even as he nodded off napping, was more than a little daunting.
At four o’clock Howard pulled the Dodge into the parking lot at the Savin Rock amusement park in West Haven. His father was still napping, but this detour was expected, Howard knew, and so with only Leo’s consent, but not Mort’s, he drove toward that part of the parking area abutting Jimmies hot dog stand. They would each get a hot dog at Jimmies, known for its split dogs, perfectly fried. The stop was a secret from the women at Woodmont. The men knew that the women would scold them for ruining their appetite, but because dinner wouldn’t be served until at least half-past seven, the fortification was indeed helpful, and besides, “there comes a point,” Mort had said the first of the two previous times Howard had joined them, “when a man has to take a little time out from the family.” As they sauntered moments later toward Jimmies, Howard trailing his newly awakened father, he noted to himself how odd a rationale that was, for the men had already taken time out—at the morning service, for example, not to mention during the whole week at the store. But Howard didn’t dare question it: the men, Leo as much as Mort, were religious about their pre-Shabbos hot dogs. Apparently they needed the stop, couldn’t quite make the transition from Middletown to Woodmont without it. And today was not the day to start even a friendly argument with his father.
Their hot dogs paid for, the men settled themselves at a nearby picnic table. Off in the distance was the famous Savin Rock roller coaster. Closer by, at their feet, was a veritable sea of littered napkins. The place was seedy, Howard always thought. But the hot dogs sure were good. For a few minutes the men ate in silence. Howard glanced several times Mort’s way, but his father was steadfastly gazing out toward Long Island Sound. Leo’s gaze was similarly seaward. Then Leo spoke.
“Your father frightened us at minyan.” He turned to Howard. “He looked like he might pass out.”
“It was nothing,” Mort said, glancing at Leo then back to the water.
“Maybe a little more than nothing,” Leo insisted. Again he looked Howard’s way. “His face was pale. His heart was pounding.”
“You don’t know that,” Mort told Leo firmly but not unkindly. “My heart was fine the whole time. I just grew weary suddenly. Needed to sit.”
“I don’t know,” Leo said. “Seems bigger to me. Pull it out of him, Howard.”
But Howard didn’t say anything. Clearly, Mort didn’t want him involved. In fact he was deliberately ignoring him, Howard understood, staring out at the ocean as he was, his back to Howard even when Leo addressed him.
Howard turned toward the ocean, which looked friendly enough, then toward Mort’s icy back. The summer before, a Friday in July, everything had been different, more convivial. Mort had been driving that day. When they’d pulled in to Savin Rock and Howard had asked what was up, Mort began laughing. “Something for us,” he’d finally said. Then they’d risen from the car and as they walked toward Jimmies, the smells of fried foods increasingly wafting their way, Mort had slapped Howard’s back over and over. “Us, us, us,” he’d eagerly repeated. Then he’d added, winking, “Don’t tell.”
Howard had gone with the men to Jimmies again, later that summer. Once more Mort welcomed Howard’s joining them. He was even proud of Howard, who had come back to Middletown for a week to help with the store’s summer inventory. “Eat up,” Mort had told him then, adding a moment later, “What the hell, have two if you like.”
But this day Mort merely said, “Ready?” exclusively to Leo, who nodded.
At five o’clock they arrived at the cottage.
Walking into a spotlessly clean kitchen, then past a dining room table perfectly set with flower-patterned china, wineglasses, and candlesticks, and then into a living room with the sofa bed folded up and no signs at all of two girls spending their nights there, Howard called, “Whoa, what happened here?”
Mort stood behind him, and Howard turned in time to see him remove his hat and place it, for one of the women to pick up, on the little telephone table in the dining room.
Mort looked around, nodded his approval.
“At least some people have respect,” he said, finally staring at Howard, but only for the purpose of directing the implied criticism his way. He then turned from Howard and toward the dining table, where he focused his gaze on the unlit candles at the table’s center.
When he spoke next, Mort was still staring at the candles as if mesmerized by a flame they didn’t yet emit.
“Lovely, lovely,” he said.