It was his last apartment, though I didn’t know it at the time, of course.
After the tumult of Sixty-sixth Street and the bitter taste of l’affaire Cagno, the enveloping sorrow of the House of Prayer left us with no choice but to move again, and again only a few doors down, because by now we felt defeated and exhausted, convinced no world beyond Sixty-fifth Street would have us, and even our existence there, as my illness had shown, was tenuous.
For once, it was the proper size—not too big, not too small, fine for the three of us.
My mother, for one, was relieved simply to be out of what she called our “bad-luck” apartment.
“Pauvre Loulou—cette maison lui a porté malheur,” she kept saying; Poor Loulou, this house was unlucky.
It was as if some element of those shabby little rooms had been responsible for my getting sick every bit as much as Pouspous Jaune. No one dared to question her logic. Desperate to explain the unexplainable—why I had contracted cancer at sixteen—we insisted on pinning the blame for my illness first on a cat and then on a cramped apartment whose windows all faced a dusty courtyard in the back.
César surprised us by moving back home, and we were almost a family again. He had tired of the single life, and missed the comforts of home and the room he had shared with my dad all those years. My father was delighted to welcome him back, so there they were, roommates all over again, as they’d been when we first came to America.
I had my own room once more, small, at the front of the house, though my father didn’t speak of the pleasures of watching the street life anymore. He didn’t speak at all. What he did was position his green-and-white beach chair—which hadn’t seen the beach since my illness—close to the window facing Sixty-fifth Street.
The chair was lined with pillows to soothe his aching back and waist and hips, and he put his prayer books one on top of the other on the small tray table my mom had purchased specially for him from Woolworth’s. In the corner, within view at all times, was the suitcase he had purchased for the day he was going back to Cairo.
That became his entire world—the beach chair, the prayer books, the tray table, the window, and the small vinyl suitcase.
And the radio.
Home all day long, he was glued to the radio as he had been as a young man in Cairo, when he’d sat for hours listening to Om Kalsoum’s laments.
The soothing sounds filled the living room, and instead of the Cairo Diva, I heard the mellifluous voice of “Your host, Charles Duvall, broadcasting from the shores of Lake Success.”
“Where is Lake Success?” I found myself wondering. It seemed so alluring, as charmed and seductive as Duvall’s radio persona. Somewhere in this world, I thought, sits a handsome man with a debonair French accent inside a studio overlooking a magnificent lake, and he is so filled with confidence and serenity simply gazing at that body of water that it seeps into his voice and his words. He proceeds to calm us all, infuse us all with his confidence and serenity.
Lake Success. It was where I wanted to be; here in America nothing else mattered.
My father would sit for hours hunched over his prayer books, usually the little red book I had given him back when I came out of the hospital. As the 1970s—a horrible, wretched decade, as far as I was concerned—came to a close, it became impossibly torn. I didn’t think the book would survive another day without disintegrating in his trembling hands, the pages falling out or crumbling into dust. He had long stopped trying to repair it, so that even the Scotch tape and duct tape and masking tape and surgical tape that had held it miraculously together all these many years were all dried out, and the red jacket had turned into a somber maroon brown. The book, I realized, had become my father. The two even looked alike, all bandaged up, small pieces breaking all the time, both trying to hold on, both in danger of disappearing.
Sometimes I’d walk in and find the prayer book mercifully closed. What was propped open was my father’s sky-blue checkbook, and he was patiently, meticulously signing checks. Around him were pieces of the morning’s mail. Other than his stock statements, which continued to stream in—shareholders’ notices from Zambian copper mines, or the Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa, or Sperry-Rand, the quixotic investments of his years in America that had failed to make him rich—almost all the mail was from far-flung charities.
The orphanages and schools to which he donated money, daily and compulsively, kept in close touch. Brown packages with odd-sounding names arrived from Israel; inside, there’d be handsome brochures featuring images of large cinder-block or stone buildings, alongside photographs of young children looking anxious and troubled and filled with yearning.
The Great Orphan Home of Jerusalem for Boys, the Dispenser of Kindness Orphanage for Girls, the Institute to Uplift the Souls of the Holy, the Light of Life Girl’s Academy, Girl’s Town of Jerusalem Academic and Vocational School, the Trade Institute of the Voice of Jacob Our Patriarch, the Maker of Great Miracles Charity Box. There were dozens and dozens of charities, as if my father were hedging his bets, contributing bits of his meager savings to each of them, on virtually a daily basis. There were occupational schools affiliated with the orphanages that sent pictures of their vulnerable charges bent over sewing machines or learning how to make tools, there were orphan medical clinics and orphan dental clinics and orphan residence halls.
An entire universe dedicated to the care of motherless and fatherless children looked to my dad for their salvation.
My favorite was the Orphan Bride’s Aid Fund. I imagined a young girl, weary of years of institutional life and with no one but other orphans for company, using my dad’s slender savings from brokering bolts of white lace to purchase a white lace gown of her own, or a veil.
Pay to the order of “The Institute to Uplift the Souls of the Holy,” $5; pay to the order of “The Orphans of Jerusalem,” my father would write in his tremulous hand, $10. Pay to the order of “The Light of Life Girls’ College,” $15. Pay to the order of “The Maker of Great Miracles Charity Box,” $20.
I didn’t immediately grasp the purpose behind the flow of donations, whose receipts and expressions of gratitude cluttered up our mailbox.
They were for my benefit. My father had asked orphanages and charities to pray for my recovery. The checks kept flowing—to this girls’ institute, this boys’ vocational school—all with the explicit request that recipients effect my cure with their prayers.
They seemed delighted to comply. We were deluged with offers of bountiful blessings—special prayers by orphans who enjoyed God’s ear.
“Loulou, Dieu est grand,” my father exclaimed when he received a note confirming prayers had been recited.
The Maker of Great Miracles, which seemed to bear a mysterious relation to the shrine of my Cairo childhood, offered my father an amulet. Behind a large, square blue-trimmed receipt that looked a bit like a stock certificate or a high school diploma was a special prayer with instructions that it be read out loud three times: “I give this donation for my poor brethren, I give this donation for my poor brethren, I give this donation for my poor brethren, God of the Maker of Great Miracles,” went the amulet. “Answer me, answer me, answer me.”
My father, having seen me through my treatment, was now watching over my recovery in the only way he knew how: by pursuing a miraculous cure.
Over the years, the orphanages and hospitals, old-age homes and youth towns and vocational schools and rabbinical schools were very diligent about keeping in touch, and that was the mail that he shuffled to the small metal box in the hallway each morning to collect. He was completely homebound as the decade came to a close; that was the extent of his travels—the five yards or so from the door to the mailbox in our building’s lobby.
Our house became overwhelmed with tokens of gratitude—calendars, greeting cards, certificates of appreciation, more amulets. They came in a cavalcade of colors—orange, blue, purple, sea green. I began to imagine Israel as a country of orphans, all of whom depended on my father to get by. I would go to sleep at night and dream of the wide-eyed little girls in the brochures, appealing to him to rescue them.
As if the Captain were capable of rescuing anyone.
Eager to curry favor was the Great Orphan Home of Jerusalem for Boys, which acknowledged every gift with a handsome hand-engraved certificate. “May the father of all orphans reward you with all kinds of prosperity,” it stated. On the back was a black-and-white photograph of the Orphan Home’s bearded founder, the saintly Rabbi M. J. L. Diskin, smiling dolefully into the camera.
Below his picture, the long-dead rabbi promised to “intercede in heaven for all who support this Orphanage.”
There were different rates for these celestial interventions. A onetime contribution of $50 meant an orphan would recite the kaddish, the prayer for the dead, one time—immediately after the donor passed away. For $100, the orphan would say the memorial prayer repeatedly, every year. A thousand dollars would enable the donor’s name to be engraved over the bed of an orphan. My dad chose the more modest $5 and $10 route to God, and that was fine, because Rabbi M. J. L. Diskin still smiled sadly from his heavenly photo studio, and promised to do what he could on our behalf.
The Guardian of Life Orphanage for Girls was perhaps the most appreciative. It sent along a small pistachio-green book, complete with a calendar and a list of all the benedictions the children would be immediately conferring upon us. “You will be rewarded with bountiful blessings for good health,” the green book vowed.
As I flipped through the calendar, I noticed that Dad had made small notations next to certain days and months of the year. They were the dates marking the passing of his mother and his father and six of his nine siblings, all carefully circled. There was my aunt Leila, in July. My grandfather Ezra was remembered a week later, with only a one-word notation, “Papa.” I found it strangely jarring that as he turned eighty, my dad still called his own father “Papa,” like a little boy. My grandmother Zarifa, “Mama,” appeared one week after that, next to a note about his sister, Tante Rebekah. My tragic aunt Ensol, killed along with her husband, had an entry in November, as did Oncle Joseph, the oldest of the ten children. In one cruel month straddling January and February, my dad noted the passing of his two favorite siblings, Oncle Raphael and Oncle Shalom of the clubfoot and the humble demeanor and the gentle heart.
Two siblings were absent from Dad’s ledger of memory: Bahia, who had perished at Auschwitz and whose date of death had never been learned, and Salomon, the priest and convert who had indicated on his résumé, on file with the monastery at Ratisbon, that he’d wanted my father, along with Oncle Raphael, to be notified in the event of his passing.
There had once been ten, and now only he and his little sister Marie were left, and he hadn’t seen her since 1956. Yet he continued to remember and pray for all of them and to memorialize them in the little green book of the dead. He seemed content simply making out the small checks. It became a full-time job. The checks were for the same amounts that he had written month after month over sixteen years to pay back the debt for the Queen Mary—mostly $10 increments, occasionally a little more, occasionally less. The sums were deceptively small; he wrote so many checks, day after day, that he was actually giving away a significant share of his impossibly small income.
César, who worked as an accountant, worried like a wife whose husband gambles with the grocery money. My father reassured him, but kept on as before. It was his calling, now, every bit as important as selling ties had once been, or brokering the sale of yards of brocade or trading stocks at la bourse. In a culture of ambition and greed, my father was, as always, resolutely against the grain. He had become the Dispenser of Kindness, the self-appointed guardian of the orphans of Jerusalem.
Officially diagnosed with Parkinson’s, his hands trembled more than ever, so that the amounts he made out and the names of the objects of his largesse were almost illegible.
I felt so much better, I didn’t even stop to consider how he was faring. Nor did I give him and his otherworldly approach much credit for my miraculous recovery, the fact that in the course of my continued checkups with Dr. Lee, my physician marveled at how well I seemed.
In my father’s case, Charles Duvall’s dreamy mantra, “From the shores of Lake Success,” sounded increasingly distant and remote, as if Dad were a passenger on a boat floating farther and farther away from those desired shores.
He was not well. He was descending into a physical and mental purgatory. But he was so used to keeping silent, to being stoic about his travails, that now that he needed us, needed us to mount an intervention to rescue him in the way he had summoned the orphans of Jerusalem to save me, he didn’t know how to request it—demand it—of us, his children.
One morning, he called me at work. It was unusual—he never phoned at the office, and it was as if, years later, he still hadn’t made his peace with my decision to find a job and support myself instead of heeding his counsel to find a man, a rich and powerful man—un banquier—to look after me. Who ever heard of a woman working?
“Loulou, je ne me sens pas bien,” he said; I don’t feel well. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. I listened, a tad impatiently. I had so much work to do.
“Loulou,” he repeated, “je me sens très mal.” I feel very bad.
I’d try to look in on him later, I promised, and hung up. It was the dawn of the Me Decade, and by focusing obsessively on work and my own needs, I was acting out its distorted values, values that had nothing to do with the far more compassionate underpinnings of my Cairo girlhood.
Like my siblings, I too had drifted. Even holidays like Passover, once so sacred, a time of waiting for Elijah, were now an afterthought. I observed them only in the most careless and minimal fashion. There were no more candlelit expeditions through the house in search of crumbs, and no sifting of the rice. I barely cleaned my apartment and usually celebrated the Seder meal itself in someone else’s home, not my own, or in a restaurant.
Except that once in a while, I’d find myself yearning for those little Cairo spoons, and the musical sound they made as Dad tapped them against his wineglass. I had lost track of the steel box where they were stored, had long stopped wondering what had become of it, and the little spoons, and all the other treasures within it.
Only by chance did I learn of its fate, when it finally occurred to me to ask what had become of the box that housed so many of my childhood illusions.
A mysterious fire had raged one night through the basement and claimed the twenty-six suitcases, and all that had been so carefully arranged inside them—the handmade clothes, the brocade, the women’s lingerie, two dozen pairs of a child’s flannel pajamas, and saddest of all, the dark silvery box belonging to my two grandmothers, Alexandra of Alexandria and Zarifa of Aleppo. The delicate teacups and saucers, the glasses wrapped in tissue paper, the silverware, the spoons—all of the fragments and mementos of our former life were gone.
The blaze had occurred when I was living away from home, and my siblings had long since left, and no one was around to help my parents cope. Leon and Edith had never mentioned their loss. What did it matter, anyway? they must have thought in their loneliness and despair. A lot of old fineries that meant nothing to anybody anymore, and certainly nothing to their distant, assimilated, self-absorbed, and thoroughly Americanized children.