Just when you think you’ve graduated from the school of experience, someone thinks up a new course.—Mary Waldrip
In June 1994, I celebrated graduating from Brooklyn Law School by upholding family tradition. I didn’t attend my graduation either. I wouldn’t have attended even if subpoenaed. I worked that day as an independent contractor for a Manhattan law firm with a niche practice in estates and trusts. I did so to gain experience so I could pretend I knew what I was doing when I started my own legal practice. I also needed the dough. The firm paid me ten dollars an hour, and I couldn’t afford to give up the day’s wages. At the graduation ceremony, my name was called as the recipient of an award as the best student of taxation in the graduating class, but I wasn’t there to accept.
I took the New York and New Jersey bar exams the last week of July. The next week, it was back to work. But freed from the time law school had taken, I could dedicate myself exclusively to expanding my practice. I had no choice; we could not get by for much longer on my current billings. As always, my prime motivation was anxiety born of fear of failure—in this case, failure to provide.
One evening that week, I received a hysterical call from my mom.
Your father, colon cancer, surgery, yesterday, successful, stable, hospital.
The next morning, Mom and I entered Dad’s hospital room. He lay in bed, the midday sun shining directly on his face, revealing clear eyes and remarkably good skin tone. He started chirping at us in a surprisingly strong voice as soon as we walked in. “I’m all right. I’m all right. They got it early before it had a chance to spread.”
Mom and I sat at the foot of his bed, and we talked for hours. Apparently, they had discovered the cancer early during a regularly scheduled colonoscopy.
“From now on,” I said to my dad, “you must let me know what’s happening. Tell me ahead of time if you are going into the hospital for surgery. I can only help if I know there’s a problem. No more secrets, okay?”
“You were taking the bar exam and had enough on your mind.”
I remembered seeing a television interview from Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising. The camera showed two elderly Chinese grandparents. The man could not get out of bed; the woman could barely walk. They lived in a multiple-floor walk-up. The city had exploded in violence all around them. They kept pleading to the camera, to their children and grandchildren in America, “Don’t worry about us, we will be okay. There is nothing to worry about.”
After I pestered my dad some more, he agreed I was right.
“In the future,” he said, “we will call you in an emergency.”
This was a bigger breakthrough than mainland China surrendering to Taiwan and turning democratic.
Then Dad leaned back on his pillow and lifted his chin. “Go to New York and empty out the box.”
By New York, I knew he meant Manhattan. “What box?”
“Uncle Harry’s post-office box.”
“What does Uncle Harry need a post-office box for?”
Mom screamed at me, “Don’t ask so many questions!”
“He gets a lot of mail,” my father said.
He told me Mom would give me the keys and that I should also check out the mailbox in the lobby of his apartment.
“And while you’re there, go upstairs and see what’s doing in the apartment.”
What could be doing in that apartment? I figured the roaches must be having a field day. Mom and Dad kept paying rent on the apartment to sustain Uncle Harry’s fantasy that he might someday return there, despite his worsening dementia.
“I’ll go tomorrow afternoon. We’ll come to visit you in the morning.”
“Now go with your mother and get a bite to eat in the hospital cafeteria. You both must be hungry. The food is excellent.”
Great. Just what I wanted for lunch—hospital food. But to my parents, this was a rare opportunity. The cafeteria was kosher. Here they could eat meat at what was in their minds a kosher restaurant, at subsidized prices. I followed orders and took my mom to the cafeteria.
After lunch, I drove Mom back to my parents’ apartment. On Bedford Avenue, we passed a huge house that sprawled over four lots—two on Bedford Avenue, and two directly behind them on Twenty-sixth Street. Four houses had been ripped down to build this one three-story house, which dwarfed every other home on the block. It was surrounded by a high brick fence with steel posts. The edifice screamed: Look at me, I’m rich—but you keep your distance outside my massive walls.
I made the left onto Kings Highway and got lucky. I found a parking spot right in front of my parents’ tenement. Alternate-side-of-the-street parking had ended at 2:00 p.m., and most people had not yet returned from work to grab the choice spots. I even got to parallel park. For a city boy lost in suburbia, somewhere between the mall and my driveway, that was the highlight of my day.
The graceful sixteen-foot-high lobby of my youth, once filled with furniture—cream-colored leather chairs and sofas and a leather bench encircling a large pillar in the center of the room—was now barren. The lobby’s sole piece of furniture was an unfinished wooden bench built around the pillar. The high, majestic windows, with their stained-glass panels of medieval knights and castles that had charmed me as a little boy, were broken, replaced with regular glass or cardboard. Only a few stained-glass panels remained. A garish yellow paint sullied the once-proud lobby walls.
Inside my parents’ apartment, no lights were on; all the shades were drawn; and it was hot as hell. But the apartment was not vacant. Uncle Harry sat in the living room, his feet resting on a hole in the once green Karastan carpet. He floated on pillows and newspapers tucked beneath him, and I feared if I removed those he might plunge clear through the seat and worn-out carpet down to the first floor of the building.
“Hello, Uncle Harry.”
No response came, only the dull gaze of bewilderment.
“It’s Morton,” Mom yelled at him. “Harry, remember Morton?”
I was surprised at how far Uncle Harry had deteriorated. He nodded, his eyes vacant, without a spark of recognition. I held his arm while I helped him up to go eat lunch. His whole body had shrunk. He disappeared inside a long-sleeved white shirt that was too big for him. I remembered how he could lift crate loads of merchandise from the trunk of his car. Now he shuffled across the carpet and the linoleum floor to the foyer to the dining table. The linoleum was so worn that in spots the wooden subfloor showed through.
After a few minutes of frantic frying, Mom put together a plate for Uncle Harry—a tuna-fish cake with some lettuce and tomato and a piece of Wonder Bread. When I was a child, the only bread I remembered Uncle Harry eating was fresh bread from the Store. How the mighty had fallen. If Uncle Harry had known he was eating prepackaged Wonder Bread, he would have keeled over and died from shame right then and there. I sat down across from him. Uncle Harry cut the fish cake with his fork, picked it up with his sharp knife, and started to bring it to his mouth. His hand shook from Parkinson’s. I reached out and yelled for him to stop, but he just kept going. Mom grabbed the knife out of his hand, cut up his food for him, and left him with only the fork. There was no conversing with Uncle Harry. It didn’t matter what topic I brought up. The man who had always had a joke to tell now said okay and nothing more. I couldn’t even tell what he was saying okay in response to.
It was a sweltering August afternoon. The clatter of jackhammers blasted through the open dinette window. Distracted, I got up and sat down on the fourth matching vinyl chair from the dining-room set. It served as the telephone chair and was located in the hallway next to a wire stand covered with cardboard, phone numbers scribbled all over it. From above my head, a river of stains ran down the walls from the ceiling. When I had lived here as I child, sleeping in the dinette with my head next to the Frigidaire, the upstairs apartment bathroom had leaked. Some things never change.
But some do.