3
After my mother died, my father would sometimes stop in the middle of the street, tuck his head into his shoulders and swivel around in a slow, suspicious circle, his eyes in search of imminent peril. Dad was seventy-six years old then – tiny, slender and fragile. My wife claimed she still spotted an optimistic bounce in his walk, and my nine-year-old son, George, trying equally hard to cheer me up, said that Grandpa looked like one of those amazing old guys who competed every year in the Boston Marathon.
As for me, every one of my strained and hesitant breaths seemed like a pledge to never accept the injustice of Mom leaving us when she was only sixty-four years old.
The morning after she passed away, Dad brought his clunky cassette player into the kitchen before making his coffee and started listening to an interview she’d done with a Sephardic singer from Istanbul whom she’d befriended. A few minutes later, he found me standing by the back fence of our garden. He’d brought me the bowl of oatmeal I’d left behind in my desperation to get away from my mother’s cheerful voice. As he handed it to me, he said, ‘I’m sorry, Eti, but I won’t be able to go on without hearing your mother every morning. So just be patient with me.’
Three days after Mom’s funeral, while my father and I were walking through the parking lot of his Chase branch, he stopped and peered around, his hands balled into fists.
‘Is it a ghost you’re looking for, or an old enemy?’ I asked.4
‘What do you mean?’ he shot back. His eyebrows furrowed into a V, implying that he found my question nonsensical.
My father has eyebrows like hairy caterpillars. When I was a kid, they sometimes seemed ruthlessly critical of me – especially when I dared to ask him about his childhood in Poland.
‘You seem convinced that somebody dangerous is going to show up around here,’ I told him, trying to sound casual.
‘Around here where?’ he asked.
Rather than say I have no idea, I swirled my hand around to indicate the shopping centre, the bank parking lot, Willis Avenue and the rest of what we normally consider reality.
‘Bah!’ he said, flapping his hand at me as if my version of reality didn’t count for much from where he was standing, but he also shivered, which was when a familiar latch opened inside me and I felt time slowing down, and I made the old mistake of gazing into his big, black, watery eyes for far too long, and when he started gulping for air, tears leaked out through my lashes, and that’s when I started thinking that he really was a marathon runner, and not just him but me, too. I’ve been running behind you, you wayward lunatic, since I was maybe eight years old, I thought, trying to catch up while you look around frantically for a secure hiding place.
In answer to his worried glance, I told him it was the frigid wind that had made my eyes tear. I also tied his woollen scarf around his neck and kissed him on the forehead.
Children of Holocaust survivors learn to hide their irritation early on, of course.
All the time we were in the bank – while he was writing out his withdrawal slip and bantering with our favourite teller, Lakshmi, and drinking a cup of coffee with the bank manager, and making a quick pit stop in the employee bathroom – I kept imagining my father as a panicked eleven-year-old boy standing at the window 5of the tailor shop where he spent his afternoons inside the Warsaw ghetto, waiting for his parents to return home.
As a kid, I used to try to imagine what my father’s parents looked like. From clues he dropped, I ended up picturing them as rumpled, ravenously hungry versions of Edward G. Robinson and – if you can believe it – Barbra Streisand.
Why Barbra Streisand? Dad said his mom used to sing to herself while she cleaned their apartment. He once hummed a bar of her favourite tune to me. Mom later told me its title: ‘Chryzantemy złociste’ – Golden Chrysanthemums.
My father had a sweet baritone, but he only sang when he got a little tipsy or when a synagogue service called for us to join in on a hymn or psalm. It always seemed to me as if Dad believed that showing too much happiness or love in public might get him selected for the ovens – though that speculation of mine turned out to be slightly off target.
The lyrics of ‘Chryzantemy złociste’ begin like this: Golden chrysanthemums in a crystal vase are standing on my piano, soothing sorrow and regret. Occasionally, I find myself singing that verse to myself. My own voice has come to sound to me like a form of defiance – of the way the world has tried to keep my father and me apart.
Dad always grades the public bathrooms he uses for cleanliness, but this time he had no comment. ‘I didn’t notice a thing,’ he said when I asked for his report.
Though he looked a bit weary on shuffling back to me, he regained his energy the moment Lakshmi fetched him a second cup of coffee. He appreciates coffee more than anyone I’ve ever met – even the bank’s stale brew. He licked his lips after every sip as if it were honey – and to make Lakshmi grin at him.
I admired how he charmed everyone, even now, after Mom’s 6death, and also how he jabbered away so knowledgeably with the bank manager, Ed, about the upcoming baseball season, his coat open to reveal his University of Utah T-shirt – a gift from an old friend – unconcerned about its fraying collar and holes.
When Ed gave me the familiar signal with his eyes, I told Dad it was time we let our friends at Chase go back to earning profits.
Just before he and I walked back through the Chase parking lot to my car, I did up the top button of his overcoat, and he smiled at me – a tight, boyish one meant to look sweet-natured and to cover what he was really thinking.
The smile, my mother and I called it.
Did Dad learn how to shield himself with that smile when he first entered the ghetto in November of 1940, or only after his parents were loaded on a transport to Treblinka a year and nine months later? I never asked; I learned to avoid leading him back to the cramped, nearly lightless ground-floor apartment where he lived in the ghetto with his parents.
Dad told me only the vaguest outlines of this story; it was my mother who filled in the details.
After his parents disappeared and until his escape on April 7th, 1943 – for eight straight months – Dad stood every afternoon at the window of Willi’s Tailoring Workshop on the third floor of his apartment house on Koszykowa Street. It afforded him a wide-ranging view over the entire block, and my father figured he’d spot his parents from up there the instant they appeared on the sidewalk.
Throughout the many months he waited, he guarded in the inner pocket of his coat a topaz ring and some other jewellery that his grandmother Luna had given to him; she’d told him to use them as bribes if he ever found himself arrested or threatened by Nazis.
During the first two months his cousin Abe would join him 7in Willi’s workshop, and they’d sometimes play chess. Abe was a wizard at the game. When he was thirteen, he’d played the great Paulin Frydman to a draw. ‘He’d have become a grandmaster, for sure,’ Dad would assure me every time the subject came up.
Then Abe was arrested by the Nazis and taken away.
My father was lucky to escape when he did – the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising started twelve days after he was smuggled out, and his chances of surviving the bloody battles the Jews fought against the Nazis would have been close to zero.
Willi the tailor had already vanished by the time Abe was captured. Once an apprentice on Savile Row in London, he’d insisted on speaking English with my father, claiming that Jews had no future in Poland and that Dad had to learn to speak like a British gentleman if he was going to survive in this world. He’d gone out to buy bread and cigarettes on August 6th, 1942, however, and never returned. Dad was pretty sure that he was one of the fifteen thousand Jews who lined up for a fake bread giveaway organised by the Nazis and forced onto a freight car to Treblinka.
Two weeks earlier, the slender, long-haired, dandyish tailor had handed Dad his scissors and shown him how to cut woollen fabric. Each fabric had its own personality, Willi had told my dad: wool was stubborn but generous, cotton straightforward and honest, linen deceptively complicated but often comic. Then, while Dad watched his neighbour sewing the collar on a shimmering-blue waistcoat that he was making for a friend, my father realised that great skill and beauty resided in his hands, though Dad couldn’t have expressed it that way at his age. When the tailor winked at my father and called him over for a hug, Dad discovered that he wanted to study with him – and follow the same path in life.
If Willi had survived, would he have learned to shield off his 8friends and family with a smile like my father’s? I suppose I could have found out how common such a strategy was by spending time with the handful of leaky-eyed, joke-telling veterans of Auschwitz and Treblinka at our synagogue, but I avoided them; one old Jew stifling my questions about his childhood with his eyebrows and showing me the smile was more than enough.
My father’s great-grandmother, Rosa Kalish, was a famous matchmaker from the Polish city of Garwolin. That was also where Dad was born, but his parents moved to Warsaw when he was just two years old. Rosa’s family name was Zarco. Her ancestors on her father’s side had come from Portugal, she said, which was why she could speak Ladino. And why she had been named Rosa and not Róża. She had a fox-like face and short silver hair. Her hands were affectionate and slender.
Rosa was murdered at Treblinka in May of 1943, at the age of ninety-three. Before her death, her family and neighbours believed her to be the oldest woman in the Warsaw ghetto. And probably one of the smallest, too. Forty-two kilos – that’s what Rosa weighed just before she was picked up by the Nazis. ‘Boy, was she skinny!’ Dad once told me, bursting out with a short, dry laugh that seemed uncharacteristically mean-spirited to me. ‘Her ribs stood out like … like the beams of one of those Roman ships. What’s the English word for them?’
‘Galleons.’
‘Galleons – right!’
When I was at college, a friend whose mother had survived Bergen-Belsen told me that the laugh of my father’s that I described to her wasn’t really a laugh. ‘How could you not know that?’ she shrieked at me, and I had nothing to say to her except what seemed 9like the truth – ‘I guess I was afraid to know more about what had happened to him and his great-grandmother.’
Dad knew her weight because his paediatrician father insisted on giving Rosa a check-up every week to see if he was succeeding in fattening her up with the cheese and schmaltz he requested as payment from his patients.
Putting weight on Rosa didn’t work, my father told me. Although he never told me why, I picked up clues from the sprinkling of stories that he told me about her that she must have offered most of her grandson’s high-calorie treats to the kids in the family – to Dad and his cousins, Abe, Esther and Shelly. Shelly was the only other person in the family to survive the war.
Four months ago, after Dad’s Valium overdose, Shelly told me in a conspiratorial whisper that their favourite meal in the ghetto had been pumpernickel bread smeared with schmaltz. Though Shelly didn’t say that these treats came from Rosa, he implied it when he held his finger to his lips and warned me not to tell my father what he’d said. ‘He’ll scream bloody murder at me if you let on that you know!’ he whispered.
Dad’s father used to summon him up onto the scale just after Rosa, but my father always claimed not to remember his own weight. Still, I know that his ribs must have stuck out like a Roman galleon as well, because I overheard him telling my mother once that when he ate a boiled potato covered in sour cream just after finding refuge in the home of Christian friends on the other side of the ghetto wall, he threw up because his stomach wasn’t used to so many calories.
Though Dad was named Benjamin, after Rosa’s long-dead husband, everyone in the family called him either Benni or – because he was small and slight – Katchkele, which was Yiddish for ‘little duck’.10
Rosa didn’t want to go for a medical check-up every week but she agreed in the end because she realised it helped keep her grandson – Dad’s father – hopeful.
As to why her grandson, whose name was Adam, insisted on weighing her, Rosa told Dad, ‘He’s found a plan inside his pain.’
‘What do you mean?’ my father had asked the old woman.
‘A strategy.’
‘And what’s his strategy?’
‘To keep his grandmother and his Katchkele alive long enough to make it out of here. And it wouldn’t be very nice for us to spoil his efforts, would it?’
After he retired, my father started studying kabbalah every day with help from a professor of Jewish mysticism at the University of California. Whenever I was over his house, I would sneak into the bedroom and look at the esoteric texts he stacked in rickety towers on his desk and wonder what the hell he was looking for.
The book he always kept on his night table was Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, by his hero, Gershom Scholem, who had single-handedly revived interest in kabbalah among both scholars and practising Jews in the 1940s and 50s. The text had dozens of dog-eared pages, and so many of Dad’s notes in pencil – and even his tiny illustrations of the mythological beasts that Scholem describes – that I once told my father that he ought to try to publish an annotated version, but he scoffed and said that he had never gone to university and nobody would be interested in his opinions, and in any case his notes were really just for himself.
Dad always lacked confidence in his own intellectual abilities, though Mom always said that he had trained himself to evaluate all her articles on Sephardic music with such uncommon depth 11and insight that she would never have considered publishing one without getting the go-ahead from him.
Once, when Mom and Dad were on vacation in the Bahamas, I slept at their house while on a trip to New York, and I read all his hundreds of notes in the margins of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. One particular comment he’d written in blue pencil caught my attention: Do you really think so, Mr Scholem?
The sentence next to that comment read: ‘The long history of Jewish mysticism shows no trace of feminine influence.’
Another of the books I found on Dad’s night table on that visit was Greek Religion by Walter Burkert. My father was always reading about the ancient Greeks. When I was maybe just five or six, he told me that in a previous life he’d worked at the Library of Alexandria.
‘What did you do there?’ I’d asked him. He was walking me to school and we were holding hands.
‘Nothing important – I just kept things neat and tidy,’ he replied, as if it were completely reasonable to think so.
‘Did you like working there?’
He showed me a delighted face. ‘Boy, did I! I could read all the scrolls I wanted, and I was fluent in Greek and Egyptian, and at lunchtime I’d go swimming in the Mediterranean. Warm seawater, pretty women, sun, beer, good books … Eti, I had it all!’
From that brief list of delights, I discovered what Dad’s vision of paradise was. And it sounded pretty good to me, too, but a few days later I realised that the list didn’t include me, and I was upset about that for years, though it embarrasses me now to admit it.
While Dad was in the hospital recovering from the Valium overdose, I’d go to his room and sit on his bed and wonder when he’d be able to come home. One time, I found a second book under his copy of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. It was They Came 12Like Swallows, a novel I’d recently given him. On the first page, he’d written in Yiddish: Present from Eti. Excellent writing – too good, in fact. After that, in parenthesis, he’d written to my mom: Tessa, I think the author would understand how much I miss you.
They Came Like Swallows was written by William Maxwell. It’s about a young boy whose beloved mother dies in the flu epidemic of 1919. Maybe I ought to have given my father a more cheerful novel to read, but he had told me many times that he preferred tragedies.
‘When I start to sniff a happy ending, I always look for the doorway out,’ was his exact quote.
My mother’s father, Maurice, had come to America from Greece in 1937, when he was twenty-four years old. He was the only grandparent I got to know, since Dad’s parents were long dead and Mom prevented me from seeing her mother, whom she described as toxic.
Imagine leaving home just after completing your master’s degree in music history and never seeing your parents again. All the time I was with Grandpa Morrie – every time he took me to a jazz club or classical concert – I never thought once about the hardships that must have still been throbbing inside his old man’s heart. Or about his terror at having to raise two little daughters alone. These days, there are times when my youthful obliviousness seems unforgivable, but maybe it’s a blessing that kids don’t ever feel the need to gaze out over the length and breadth of their grandparents’ lives.
Once, when I was drawing with my father, he told me that we never saw Mom’s mother because she was a mean person and didn’t want what was best for me.
‘Why not?’ I’d asked him.
He put down his crayon and looked at me, and I could see him 13trying – and failing – to find the right words in English. He lifted me up and sat me on his lap. I must have been about four or five years old. We were in the kitchen at our dinner table.
‘Listen, Eti, your grandmother … I think she got lost and never found her way back home,’ he said, but he spoke in an unsure voice.
Confusion made me study my father’s eyes, because I’d learned I could sometimes find emotions there that he tried to hide from me. This time, I wasn’t sure what I saw, but it might have been distress or fear, because it made me want to stay on his lap for a long time.
‘How did she get lost?’ I asked.
He took a deep breath, which made me think – in the itchy way that insights come to kids – that he wasn’t going to tell me the truth. ‘If I said she was jealous of your mother and Grandpa Morrie, would that make any sense to you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She’s angry, baby,’ he tried next. ‘Though that’s not exactly what I mean. It’s more like …’ Dad looked past me, and I didn’t understand that he was looking for a more perfect term, so I turned around to see if Mom was there, but she wasn’t. Neither of us found the right words at the time, or maybe Dad really didn’t want to tell me the truth, though an odd and angry letter I would receive from my grandmother fifteen years later would make it clear what he ought to have said: Your grandmother holds a deadly grudge against your mother.
Grandma’s letter was handwritten on four sheets of light-blue paper, front and back, with her name engraved at the top in gold: Dorothy Spinelli. I received it two weeks after I’d spoken to her on the phone. She said she would be overjoyed to make me lunch at her apartment in Great Neck, on Long Island, but also said that she thought it only fair for me to know her feelings about my mother first.14
At the time, I was studying painting at the City University of New York, and I’d found my grandmother in the Nassau County phone book. The letter she sent me two weeks after our phone call listed a series of injustices my mother had inflicted on her. The first one was, When she was five years old, your ‘oh-so-sweet’ mother refused to eat the moussaka I’d made for your grandfather’s birthday, and she ran out of the room shrieking when I took some on my fork and held it up to her mouth.
‘Oh-so-sweet’ was written inside quote marks, as though I wouldn’t otherwise understand she wasn’t really praising my mother.
Grandma Dorothy had pressed so hard with her pen while writing that sentence – and again while warning me to beware of my mother’s ‘vicious temper and horrid betrayals’ – that she had torn both times through the paper.
To hold a grudge against a five-year-old girl who refused to eat moussaka seemed insane, of course. And vicious temper? My mom had raised her voice at me on a number of occasions when I was little, but she’d never spanked me or humiliated me in any way. Though I thought of calling my grandmother to give her another chance, it seemed a lot safer for me to reply with silence. And she never wrote me again.
Every Friday night, Mom and Dad and I would have Sabbath dinner with Grandpa Morrie at his apartment in the East Village. He lived inside three small rooms that he painted in bright colours to highlight the black-and-white photographs of Mom and Aunt Evie that he hung all over the place, even in the bathrooms. The picture he kept above his bed was of himself and his daughters with his hero, Louis Armstrong, and he’d had it blown up to twice the size of a record cover. In it, Morrie, Mom, Aunt Evie and Mr Armstrong are standing in front of Saul’s Bagels & Bialys, 15where my grandfather used to pick up breakfast every Saturday morning. It is October 24th, 1953. Mom is ten years old and Evie is eight. Mr Armstrong is laughing sweetly while gazing down at Evie, whose lips are pursed and cheeks sucked in. She is making her famous tropical fish face, and, as anyone in my family can tell you, her elbows jutting out are her fins.
Morrie is gripping Evie’s shoulder to keep her from moving, since her tropical fish imitation usually involved swimming around in circles. Louis is holding my mother’s hand.
Mom’s eyes are wary. Her painfully slender shoulders are hunched. ‘I was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list at the time,’ she tells people whenever they first see the photo and ask her why she looked so terrified.
‘Your mother was just crazy shy,’ Morrie explained to me when I asked if Mom had been upset that day. Then amusement widened his eyes. ‘But that changed when she got interested in boys. Thank god for oestrogen!’
Morrie used to play bootleg albums of all the great jazz musicians for me and Dad when we’d visit, though sometimes we’d also watch Mets games on Channel 9. When Mom would join us, the three of them would talk about Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and all the other warmongers, as they called them. Their voices were contemptuous. Mom and Dad despised Nixon more than anyone else, it seemed to me. As for Morrie, he never referred to the president by name but nearly always as that Jew-hating fíjo de puta – ‘son of a bitch’ in Ladino. He kept a newspaper on his upright piano of two New York City cops arresting him and Dad during a protest against the Vietnam War. ‘One of my proudest moments,’ he used to tell me.
Grandpa Morrie died of a heart attack when I was twenty-one years old. He was seventy-four. After the funeral, I played in a 16baseball game organised by old friends at a local park, and the first time I came up to bat, I knew I was right where my grandfather wanted me to be.
During high-school baseball season, Morrie used to come see me play as often as possible. Once, when I’d hit a triple down the line in right, I looked up from third base to see him weeping. He told me later that while I was running the bases, he’d realised with growing excitement that our family genes had skipped two generations. ‘Papa was a really fast runner, just like you, Eti. He almost made it to the Olympics in Stockholm in 1912 – in the 400 metres.’
I overheard him once saying to my mom, ‘Me, a near-sighted Greek Jew with bad knees, and I’ve got two gorgeous daughters and Willie Mays for a grandson. Who’d have figured it?’
That remark seems so typical of him – and so generous – that I often think of it when I study the picture of him and me that I keep on my night table. It’s a photograph that my father snapped of us just after a baseball game. All these years later, I can still feel the soft perfection of my blue-and-grey uniform and how it made me want to show off for my family. I’ve put my baseball cap on Grandpa Morrie, and my arm is over his shoulder because it makes him feel proud that I’m taller than him and nearing manhood. His eyes are a bit tentative and embarrassed, since he suspects that a little old Greek Jew might look ridiculous in a baseball cap, though everyone who sees the picture invariably says something like Your grandfather looks so cute. My wife Angie never knew Morrie but came closer to the truth when she said, ‘He looks like he never stopped being a kid!’
I once asked Morrie what it felt like to know he’d never again see the family of his childhood – his parents or his little brother and sister.17
He replied, ‘Every morning I light four candles inside my mind, and I’m aware that it’ll never be enough, but it’s all I know how to do. And I’ve been doing it since 1947, when I began to accept that no one survived.’ He also added in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘The secret I’ll only tell you, Eti, is that sometimes I’d like to blow out the flames, just for a day or two, and forget what happened.’
I questioned how he could talk about missing his parents so easily with me but my dad could never talk about them. ‘Benni lost them too early. He was only eleven years old. Me, I was twenty-four and already a man. I understood what had happened. He didn’t.’
On weekends during the summer, Morrie would take me to the pond in Central Park that’s near Fifth Avenue so that we could sail the little wooden boat we’d made in his apartment. He would puff gleefully on his pipe as we watched the boat make its way across the water.
The pond seemed a world unto itself back then – a sea of possibilities shimmering in the summer sun.
Morrie warned me never to tell my mother he still smoked when he and I were alone. He’d draw a finger across his throat and say, ‘If she finds out, she’ll cut off my head!’
How adult and important it made me feel to have my grandfather confide in me!
Morrie sometimes asked me to draw his portrait when we were alone, and when I was finished he’d sketch me. He’d lean forward and study me with his small, experienced eyes – eyes that suggested contemplation and refinement – and after a while I’d become aware that there was a great deal between us that I couldn’t explain but that made us seem like the only two people in the world.
A couple of years ago, just after Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, she and I walked all the way up to Central Park and went to the pond where Grandpa Morrie used to take me. I 18almost blurted something out about the sweet smell of his pipe tobacco, and how it used to make me feel protected, but I heard him shout inside my head, Dear God, Eti, don’t you dare tell her! Which made me laugh to myself, of course.
When we finally reached the pond, I discovered – to my astonishment – that it was tiny.
While Mom and I watched two slender little Chinese kids fixing the sail on their tall-masted toy boat, I wondered what else I had failed to comprehend when I was young. And would never now understand.
Twelve days after Mom’s funeral and seven days after my return home to Boston, I got a call from Dad’s mailman, Peter, saying that he hadn’t seen my father for a while and that the mail was piling up in the metal box on his stoop. He said he’d knocked on the door that afternoon, but that my dad didn’t answer.
When I called my father, he said, ‘Oy, zat Peter is such a nudnik!’ thickening his Yiddish accent for comic effect – and to conceal his true feelings.
I laughed so he wouldn’t realise how worried I was. ‘So, is everything okay?’ I asked.
‘Hunky dory.’
Dad always loved to use corny American slang like that because it made him feel like he was no longer a youthful immigrant lost in a gigantic, foreign city.
‘Peter knocked on your door today,’ I told him. ‘Didn’t you hear him?’
‘No, I must have been taking a dump or something.’
‘So why aren’t you picking up the mail?’
‘It’s mostly just bills. Who needs that tsuris right now?’19
Dad’s reply seemed genuine, so I said, ‘You don’t have to pay anything – I’ll visit you in a couple of weeks and write out all the cheques – but please just take the mail in so Peter can stop worrying.’
My father agreed to my request without any fuss, but Peter called again three days later and said the mail was still piling up. Worse, Mrs Narayan, Dad’s across-the-street neighbour, phoned that afternoon to say that a young man driving a van had brought two big brown bags into my father’s house that morning. ‘That driver looked frightfully suspicious,’ she told me.
Mrs Narayan uses adverbs like frightfully because she went to a British school in Mumbai and got her degree in political science at King’s College in London.
‘Suspicious in what way?’ I asked.
‘Well, his trousers were too large. And he looked Mexican.’
‘Was he wearing a sombrero and eating a taco?’ I joked.
‘Ethan, my darling, you may laugh if you want,’ she said with regal reserve, ‘but I’m telling you, it all looked very odd.’
I had a drawing class to give in ten minutes, so I thanked Mrs Narayan and waited until I was done with my teaching to call Dad.
‘Did you get a delivery today?’ I asked.
‘A delivery?’
‘Two bags of something brought by a young man who looks Mexican.’
‘Eti, what in God’s name are you talking about?’
‘Mrs Narayan called and she said the delivery boy looked Mexican.’
‘Why is Mrs Narayan calling you? And how the hell does she have your number?’
‘I gave it to her after Mom fell down at home – near the end of her radiation treatments. Mrs Narayan is worried about you.’20
‘I wish everybody would stop worrying so much about me!’ he snapped.
‘Okay, but who brought you a delivery?’
‘He’s a kid from Waldbaum’s. And he’s from Iran. His name is Farid. He’s a senior at Hofstra majoring in psychology. And he’s about as suspicious as matza ball soup.’
‘You’re getting deliveries now?’
‘Why go out in this cold? I could fall on the ice and wake up dead.’
‘But you always liked going to Waldbaum’s.’
‘I liked going with your mother.’
I made no reply; I felt as if Dad had clobbered me over the head. ‘Are you there?’ he asked.
‘I’m here. So, is Farid reliable? We could hire someone to bring you groceries on a regular basis, you know.’
‘Nah, it’s not worth it. I just buy scraps. Who can bother cooking for just one person?’
Would you please stop making this more difficult than it needs to be! I screamed at him in my head. ‘Listen, I’m coming to visit this weekend,’ I said instead. The words just popped out of me. The regret I felt for speaking them was like a corrosive, rusty weight in my chest.
‘I told you, I don’t need anyone checking on me!’ he snarled. But his voice wavered and he seemed close to tears.
‘Yeah, well maybe I need to visit you!’ I shot back.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I almost shouted, My mother just died, or have you forgotten that? Instead, I told him I needed to come down to New York to meet with the owner of the gallery in Queens where I had an exhibition coming up.21
Dad’s cousin Shelly was eleven years older than him. He’d been forced into the ghetto when he was twenty years old. After escaping through a tunnel, he fled through the forests of Poland to the Soviet Ukraine and ended up in Odessa, where he boarded a freighter to Marseille, and from there he’d taken another boat to Algiers. ‘I lived out the war offloading cargo ships, drinking cheap wine and fucking,’ he told me while staying with us on the weekend of my bar mitzvah.
Shelly was the first adult who ever spoke to me about sex, and about three years later, when I was a skinny, pimply and unhappy sixteen-year-old, he told me – sitting with me on my bed – that he’d had relationships with both men and women in Warsaw, Algiers and Montreal – ‘And everywhere in between!’ he said with his infectious, big-hearted laugh. He also assured me that anything I wanted to do in bed was just fine, and that I shouldn’t allow anyone – even my parents – to tell me what to do with my cock or ass. He probably thought I was gay, and I wasn’t sure myself, but in the end it turned out I was just hopelessly awkward.
A year later, while Dad and I were visiting him in Montreal, Shelly stayed up late with me one night and got drunk on rum and told me about Claude, a French stevedore he’d fallen in love in Algiers. ‘But the man who really takes my heart,’ he said, thrusting up his hand as if to stop an onrushing bus, ‘is George Bizaadii.’
When he was drunk, Shelly would forget how to form the past tense in English, so he tended to talk mostly in the present.
‘Uncle George?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, boy is he handsome when he is young!’
George was the half-Navajo, half-Jewish artist whose paintings were all over our house. He’d helped Shelly locate Dad after the war. Me and my cousins called him Uncle George. His long-time partner 22was an architect named Martin. We celebrated Passover with them every year at their adobe home on the outskirts of Moab, Utah.
‘You and Uncle George were in love?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely!’
‘For how long?’
‘A few years. That is when we take a boat to Poland and find your dad.’
‘So why’d you split up?’
Shelly fluttered his lips as if he were a balloon losing air. ‘George once said that I speak French, English and Yiddish but not Monogamy. He kicks me out. Lucky for me, I spot your Aunt Julie a few months later, and that is that.’
‘Love at first sight?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely! Julie’s face, it radiates a kind of light. And it still does. What a knockout! And when I sleep with her, it’s as if … well, how can I explain …?’ He lit a cigarette while trying to come up with the right words. In a no-nonsense voice, he added, ‘It’s like this, kiddo, we all know that Julie is smart as a whip, and she has a great sense of humour, and she is the most good-natured person I have ever met. But I’m going to be honest with you. After all, you’re not a little kid anymore. I was young, and I was always ready to fuck, and what I like most – at least at first – is that she has a pussy made in heaven.’
Shelly used the word minette for ‘pussy’ and paradis for ‘heaven’.
‘And just like that, pow!’ he said, snapping his fingers, ‘I have two hungry little girls and a mortgage on a three-bedroom house in the suburbs.’
Shelly offered to take me that night to what he called a swanky cathouse near Mount Royal where I could get anything I wanted, but I was too scared to go with him and he was way too drunk to drive, in any case.23
Throughout my childhood, Shelly would stay with us for two weeks every Christmas, and we would drive up to visit him and Julie and their kids every summer. He seemed like a movie star from the 1940s to me back then, with his slicked-back hair and stunning green eyes.
Shelly would always bring me fancy sneakers as a present, since he owned a sporting goods shop in downtown Montreal.
Shelly’s grandmother – his mom’s mother – had been from Rouen and had taught at an international school in Kraków for nearly twenty years. After moving to Warsaw just before the Second World War, she became good friends with the French cultural attaché and his wife, and that was how Shelly ended up with the papers he needed to make it to Algiers and later Montreal. It was Shelly who also managed to bring Dad to Canada two years after the end of the war, and from there my father made it down to New York, where he began working as an assistant to a fashionable Midtown tailor in the autumn of 1949.
‘I won’t ever apologise to anyone about who I fuck or anything else,’ I once overheard Shelly telling Rabbi Simon, who had performed my parents’ wedding ceremony, in an angry whisper. They’d been conversing in my parents’ kitchen. ‘Not you, not anyone! All my apologies ended in the ghetto!’
I insisted on visiting my father over the coming weekend because I suspected that his refusal to shop at Waldbaum’s meant that he was hiding some illness that kept him housebound. I drove down from Boston early Saturday and arrived around eleven in the morning. Upstairs, I found a shard of blue porcelain in the hallway. Had a robber broken in? My heart dove toward panic, but Dad was comfortably asleep on his bed. A smashed blue cup was on the floor by Mom’s dressing table.24
The bedroom smelled like a pet shop and books were scattered across the blankets.
It looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a week and his thick silver hair was scattered in wild tufts. The whiskers on his cheeks were white, but they were grey on his upper lip. His head leaned back against two pillows and his mouth was wide open, and he was taking wheezing breaths. Now and again, he’d lick his lips. It seemed as if he might be talking with someone in his dreams.
A book was open on his chest: On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, by Gershom Scholem. I started thinking that maybe what he had been studying in kabbalah had upset him and made him scared to leave the house. I sat on the end of the bed and started rubbing his feet through the blanket.
Isn’t it strange how we do things before deciding to do them? One minute I was wondering what the hell was going on with my father, and the next I was sitting beside him and caressing his feet and wishing that my mother was around so she could order him into the bathroom for a shower and a shave.
While I tried to nudge Dad awake, I imagined what I’d want to say to him after he was gone, and I decided it would be this: You and I missed every chance to talk to each other about what life was like when you were a little boy in Poland and how you suffered. I wish we hadn’t.
I made him a strong cup of tea, brought it up to him and kissed him on his forehead. ‘Eti?’ he asked once his eyes were opened.
‘Yeah, it’s me. I made you tea. With lemon and honey, just like you like it. I’ll help you sit up.’
‘I was dreaming,’ he told me, gripping my arm.
‘Were you in trouble in the dream?’
‘Yeah, I was in the ghetto, and Rosa was there – your great-great-grandmother.’ Tears welled in his eyes. ‘There was a gigantic wolf 25or dog in the room with us, and he looked like he was starving, and he was going to eat us.’ Dad looked past me and said something in Yiddish in a panicked voice.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘I think there was a dead wolf on the ground with us, too,’ he continued. ‘Grandma Rosa, she shot arrows at the one that was alive, and the arrows formed this kind of mesh in front of him, so he couldn’t get at us. He picked up his dead friend in his jaws and dragged him up the stairs. He wanted to lock us in the house – to trap us. He had a key hanging around his neck, on a chain. And then … then I woke up.’
He looked at me questioningly, blinking his eyes as if startled by too much sunlight. ‘I’m glad Grandma Rosa was there to protect you,’ I said.
He stared at me in shock, as if I’d understood too much. Then he showed me his smile that wasn’t a smile and apologised for bothering me with what he called my silly memories.
‘I like hearing your memories,’ I said, but I was thinking, How could two giant wolves or dogs be part of a memory? Did they represent the Nazis who’d nearly discovered him in his hiding place on the Christian side of Warsaw?
After I brought Dad a second cup of tea and some toast, I asked him to tell me more about Rosa. I think I may have already sensed – without knowing it – that she held the key to his troubling behaviour.
He furrowed his eyebrows at me. ‘There’s nothing to say,’ he replied.
‘You just don’t want to tell me,’ I told him in a hard tone.
After I reached his doorway, I looked back to see if he would at least show me a little regret, but he had already opened On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead and put on his glasses.26
Dad came downstairs in his blue flannel pyjamas. Around his neck was a bolo tie of the sun god that Uncle George had given him as a Hanukkah present before I was born. The solar disc was made of shimmering mother-of-pearl rimmed with turquoise and made me think of how he’d lived in near total darkness while hiding in Christian Warsaw, much of the time reading by candlelight in a small alcove at the back of a storage room belonging to old friends of his mother, Piotr and Martyna. This was after he’d escaped from the Jewish ghetto in the early spring of 1943. In December of that year, after eight months in hiding, his Polish saviours rolled him inside a rug and took him to a more secure hideout in the countryside, where he lived with an elderly and childless piano teacher named Ewa. She knitted Dad a gorgeous blue pullover that he still hid in his underwear drawer, though I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to know that.
‘Hey, how about some banana pancakes?’ my father asked with a big smile.
Whenever Dad was rude or thoughtless to me or Mom, he would make it up to us by cooking us pancakes or French toast, or by buying us little presents, or by being particularly affectionate to us over the next few days. Simply saying I’m sorry was never enough for him.
My heart leapt out toward him, but I wasn’t ready to let go of my anger and didn’t answer. Undeterred, he grabbed a banana from the wooden bowl on the counter and handed it to me. ‘Your job, Katchkele, is to mash it.’
Dad nearly always turned making pancakes into a comedy routine. Sometimes he’d flip one up to the ceiling and miss catching it with the pan on purpose and it would splat on his foot. Mom would always laugh – even if it meant having to clean the kitchen 27floor – because with Dad, clowning around was an important part of his love for her and me. It sometimes also seemed as if she understood things about him that no one else did, and because of that, she could forgive him anything.
I stood next to Dad while he made our pancakes and he gave me pointers about how to cook them evenly. After he breathed in their aroma and faked a swoon, he held the pan up to my nose. ‘Heaven on earth, no?’
There was only a little maple syrup in the jar in the refrigerator and Dad poured it all on mine. He ate his with brown sugar instead.
Such easy and spontaneous generosity made me feel selfish for wishing he would reveal the secrets of his past to me. Isn’t it enough for him to have always tried so hard to make me feel secure and cherished? I’d ask myself, though I knew it wasn’t.
After we’d eaten too many pancakes and while we were drinking the decaf coffee I’d made, he asked me for a cigarette.
‘I haven’t smoked for fifteen years,’ I said.
‘Nobody smokes anymore,’ he said with an ugly frown.
‘I think Shelly still smokes on the sly.’
‘So where the hell is Shelly when I need him?’
‘In Montreal.’ I looked at my watch. ‘It’s a safe bet that at this very moment he’s trying to convince Aunt Julie to hop under the bedsheets with him.’
Dad laughed merrily – kidding Shelly about his sexual appetite was part of our family comedy routine.
I might have tried to throw my arms around my dad and kiss him while he was giggling, but he got up to fetch one of the beanies he wears on his head when it gets cold.
Had he sensed I was about to embrace him?
Dad had often held my hand when I was a kid, and he’d cuddled with me all the time at home, but I remember him kissing me only 28once in public. I’d fallen while ice skating at a pond in Queens and opened a gash on my forehead. I started crying, and he picked me up and ran me to our car. Just before we got in, he kneeled down to my height and dried my eyes, and he held my head in both his hands and told me everything would be all right. ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said, ‘I won’t ever let anything bad happen to you.’ He whispered my name and pressed his lips to mine, and he told me that he loved me beyond the edge of the world. And then he kissed my gash as if his love could heal it. His lips and cheek ended up bloody but he didn’t care.
Neither of us ever mentioned that amazing moment, but I often polished the memory as if it were made of gold.
Now, while Dad was fetching his beanie, I looked in the fridge and found four cartons of Tropicana orange juice, a half-gallon of skim milk, two eggs and some mouldy strawberries. I threw out the strawberries. The only other food I spotted was a can of tuna, two bananas and a limp-looking tomato that was sitting on the microwave.
‘What are you eating these days for dinner?’ I asked as soon as he returned to the kitchen.
‘Try looking in the freezer, Inspector Poirot,’ he replied.
I found nine bags of Libby’s Steam and Go frozen peas. ‘All you eat for dinner are peas?’
He was licking the brown sugar off his plate but paused long enough to say, ‘Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.’
‘You need to eat something else.’
‘Says who?’ he said with a scandalised expression.
‘Says me. I’m taking you out for dinner. We’ll go to the Sea Cove.’
‘Eti, the Sea Cove hasn’t been any good since you were peeing in your diapers.’29
‘We lived in Manhattan when I was peeing in my diapers. We never knew the Sea Cove even existed.’
He looked up to heaven. ‘What did I do to deserve a kid who can always argue better than me?’
‘We’ll go to Cactus Taqueria,’ I said. ‘You love their burritos.’
He thought about that. ‘Call them up for takeout. Get me a vegetarian burrito with no cheese and extra hot sauce. I’ll give you money.’
‘You need to get some air. We’ll pick them up together. And you can save your money.’
‘So, did your medical degree from Harvard finally come in the mail?’ he asked with his eyebrows making a stern V.
‘And you need a shower,’ I told him. I held my nose for comic effect.
‘Bah!’
‘And take off those pyjamas. I need to put them in the laundry.’
‘Are you finished with the lectures?’ he asked, showing me a nasty frown.
‘I’ll finish them when you tell me what’s going on.’
‘Nothing’s going on.’
‘Well, what’s with the bolo tie?’ I asked.
‘I felt like dressing up,’ he said defiantly. ‘Can’t I dress up in my own house?’ He looked past me as though enchanted by a memory. ‘When you were small, I used to always wear a suit and tie whenever I’d go out. Those were the days!’
‘You know what, you should put on a really nice shirt – one of the linen ones you made for yourself – and show everyone at the taqueria how handsome you look in your bolo tie.’
‘Nah, I’m tired of being in the world. I’ve been out there,’ he said, flapping his hand in the general direction of the street, ‘for seventy years. When do I get to stay home?’30
It seemed a reasonable query for a recently widowed man to ask, so I backed off. And I picked up vegetarian burritos for the two of us. But after I’d fluffed up his pillows and neatened his sheets that night, I questioned him if he was looking for anything special of late in all his kabbalah books. He was seated on the armchair in his living room, watching a black-and-white movie on TV.
‘No, nothing,’ he answered.
‘I’m not sure I like you reading all the time about angels and demons and spirits, and all that other weird stuff.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’re exhausted. We both are. You need a break.’
‘I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other,’ he said.
‘Look, Dad, if you tell me what you’re looking for, I won’t tell anyone, not even Angie.’
He turned down the volume on the TV and said, ‘There’s this piano player, and he plays only one note, and everybody in his family thinks he’s crazy. And then one day …’
‘No jokes,’ I said, rolling my eyes.
‘Ssshhh! And one day the piano player’s son asks him why he only plays one note, and the piano player, he says, “Everybody else is looking for it, but I found it!”’
Dad looked at me defiantly.
‘What exactly are you trying to say?’ I asked.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘In the Yiddish original, maybe. In your English translation, no.’
‘I’ll know what I’m looking for in my books when I find it.’
My father refused to leave the house with me even once that weekend, and I don’t think he ever ventured further than his own 31front yard over the ensuing weeks. I insisted that he tell me why on my next visit, which was about a month after my first one, but he just kept repeating to me that he was too tired to participate in the world any longer.
Had he developed agoraphobia? My sister-in-law Mariana was a clinical psychologist in Denver, and she raised that possibility with me when I called her, but she also said that Dad’s grief might simply have sapped all his energy. ‘If that’s the case,’ she added, ‘he ought to recover his vitality bit by bit. But either way, you ought to get him into therapy.’
He isn’t ever going to sit in a room and tell a stranger or anyone else about his life, is what I didn’t tell her. Instead, I thanked her for her help and told her I’d do my best.
In late May, three months and a week after Mom’s death, I had trouble reaching my father on the Friday before I was supposed to come for another visit, this time with my wife, Angie, and our son, George. He didn’t answer the phone all morning, so at about eleven-thirty I called Mrs Narayan and told her where I’d hidden a spare key to his front door.
‘There’s a problem,’ she told me when she phoned about ten minutes later. She was crying.
I felt as if I were standing high up on a cliff and that I’d fall a thousand feet straight down if I made a false move. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ I whispered.
‘No, I thought he was, but he’s not.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve called an ambulance. They’re on their way.’
I sat down because the world had started revolving slowly around me. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I found him lying on the kitchen floor.’
‘Where is he now?’32
‘Still where he was. I didn’t want to risk moving him – in case something is broken.’
‘Is he breathing?’
‘Yeah – but slowly.’
‘And where are you?’
‘Sitting in the dining room.’
‘Would you hold the phone to his ear so I can talk to him?’
‘I’m afraid he … he isn’t going to hear you.’
‘A part of him might hear some of what I tell him.’
‘Okay. Wait a minute.’
I waited for Mrs Narayan to tell me she was ready, then started telling Dad that help was on the way. Without intending to, I also told him that I loved him in Yiddish, over and over, as if I were keeping him in the world with those four little words: ikh hob dikh lib.
Shelly joined us at the hospital two days later. Dad was out of Intensive Care by then and in his own room, and eager to complain to me about the wretched hospital food. He assured me that he’d had no intention of committing suicide; he’d simply had trouble sleeping and lost count of the number of Valiums he had taken and had maybe drunk one or two schnapps as well. ‘To settle my stomach,’ he told me.
The combination of alcohol and tranquilisers must have dangerously lowered his blood pressure and caused him to pass out when he went downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of orange juice. His forehead had hit hard against the kitchen floor and a big bandage covered the wound. He and Shelly joked in a mixture of Yiddish and English about how hard his skull must be not to have been cracked by the impact.33
When Dad got up to pee, his hospital gown opened, and I saw how skinny he’d become; it occurred to me that he was slowly but surely turning himself back into the lonely orphan he’d been in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Do we prepare for death by going back to our worst times? I began to wonder.
A couple of days earlier, when I’d first seen him in the Intensive Care Unit, attached to tubes and with an oxygen mask over his gaunt face, I began looking for ways to make sure he would never suffer alone again. My mind began spinning out toward the ways I would get him to rejoin the world, and a few of them seemed reasonable at two or three in the morning, but when I woke up at dawn they seemed absolutely impossible, especially because I knew he would never accept having a live-in nurse or healthcare worker.
Insomnia assailed me the entire time he was in the hospital, and on his fourth day there, I nodded off in his room while Shelly was reminiscing with him about his mother’s gefilte fish, and how she would keep a live carp and pike in the bathtub until she was ready to make it. When I woke up, Shelly had moved real close to Dad, who was propped up by two pillows. My father frowned and said something abrupt in Yiddish, but Shelly replied to him in English. ‘Are you kidding?’ he said. ‘You did great, Benni. I’m really proud of you. Vraiment fier!’ Then he pressed his lips to my father’s, and he kept them there for far longer than most men would consider appropriate, and he held my Dad’s shoulders as well, and when they finally separated, Dad was crying, and my arms and legs were tingling, and my head seemed to be encased in glass. I pretended that I was still asleep so that they would keep talking, but for a long time they didn’t say anything, and I found myself drifting back to another time and place, to the first time I met Shelly, and I remembered him tossing me high into the air 34and catching me – and kissing me all over – maybe because that’s when I first realised that he had a boldness that was missing in my dad, and all of a sudden the easy, affectionate way the two cousins had always complemented each other made perfect sense, and I realised that they had meant even more to each other that I’d thought, and that their lives were far more nuanced and complex than I’d ever suspected.
I drove Dad home the next day. The crab apple trees in his yard were fluffy pink clouds, the breezes were warm and welcoming for the first time in months, and blue jays and squirrels were darting everywhere. Once my father was settled in his bedroom, Shelly asked me to come with him for coffee at the Starbucks on Willis Avenue. The moment we were outside, he requested that I tell him everything that had happened with my father over the past few months.
I got the story out of me without choking up, but while Shelly was buying a chocolate mandelbrot for Dad at the Seven Dwarfs Bakery I had to go outside to keep from crying in front of the salesgirls.
Dad’s favourite food in the world was chocolate mandelbrot. Mom told me that for years he used to hide a piece under his pillow at night – folded in a napkin – in case he woke up hungry.
‘Hey, kiddo, we’ll figure this out!’ Shelly told me when he got outside. He handed me the bag to carry. ‘Don’t you worry, Eti.’
We walked home arm in arm.
Would my life have been easier if Shelly had been my dad? I tried not to ask myself that question, but I did.
On his last night at my father’s house, Shelly and I got drunk after Dad was already sound asleep, and we sat around the kitchen 35table talking about what life was like in Algiers in the 1940s. In the middle of his story about how he and a friend once stole a bunch of car tyres from a French cargo ship, Shelly shook his head and said, ‘Jesus Christ, why do I talk about such bullshit?’
I shrugged. ‘Because we’re both upset.’
‘Non, c’est pas ça. I just try to keep from breaking my word to your dad,’ he replied. ‘But I’m going to. Listen, kiddo, your father, what is happening to him now … It has to do with Grandma Rosa and the ghetto. I think your dad is on strike.’
‘On strike for what?’
‘Fuck if I know, but that’s what people do who don’t have power – they organise a strike.’ He swirled his finger around the rim of his whisky glass while trying to locate the right words. ‘I need to tell you some secrets … secrets about Rosa. I mean if you’re going to understand your father and me and everything else – even yourself.’
Shelly’s slurred speech made me realise he was smashed and that he probably needed to be in order to divulge secrets to me that had been hiding in his heart for sixty years.
I wasn’t sure if an eighty-seven-year-old man ought to drink so much, and I almost confiscated the whisky bottle, but I figured that if Shelly survived the Nazis hunting him down in the forests of Poland, he could survive a couple of glasses of Jack Daniel’s.
He leaned forward in his chair and, in his slurred, idiosyncratic, French-accented English, told me that my great-great-grandmother Rosa wasn’t the simple matchmaker I’d thought. ‘Once, you know, she revives a man who has died,’ he told me in a menacing voice.
He explained that the resurrected man was a candlemaker named Schmuel. A rooftile had fallen on his head during a snowstorm in January of 1941 and killed him.
‘Rosa brings Schmuel back to life with one of her prayers,’ Shelly said. ‘And just a few days later, he returns to work.’ Shelly 36shrugged. ‘As if nothing at all has happened. After that, people start whispering about Rosa and her special talents. She is …’
‘But wait a minute,’ I cut in, ‘was Schmuel really dead or just knocked out?’
‘No pulse, no breathing – you tell me!’
He stuck a cigarette between his lips but didn’t light it because his doctor had told him that his lungs were shot and he couldn’t risk it. He rubbed his eyes as if he needed a break, so I stood up and gazed down at the crab apples by the back fence, and it was while I was admiring how the moonlight turned their branches to silver that I remembered what Dad had written in blue pencil: Do you really think so, Mr Scholem?
I went back to Shelly. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow.
‘We could go up to your room. I’ll get you into bed, and you could tell me what you need to, then go straight to sleep.’
He patted my leg and smiled. ‘I’m okay, kiddo,’ he told me. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
Shelly sat up straight and rubbed a hand through his thinning grey hair to rouse himself. I noticed then how beautiful his long-lashed, green eyes still were. They seemed to indicate that he was chosen in some way – perhaps to tell me all the stories my dad wouldn’t. ‘Pretty soon, Shmuel begins coming to our Sabbath suppers,’ he continued. ‘And he brings us little gifts.’
‘What kind of gifts?’
He waved his hand at me with disgust, just like Dad. ‘Molasses candy, bad books, bags of sawdust … And that horrible ghetto soap that melts when it sees water! And candles, mon Dieu, we have enough candles to set Poland on fire. And you know what, maybe we should have!’ He laughed in a burst.
‘Why sawdust?’ I asked.37
‘The makeshift ovens we have – they burn sawdust.’
Shelly said that the gifts stopped a few months later when Schmuel was picked up by the Jewish police and put on a crew working outside the ghetto.
‘So you never saw him again?’
‘Nope.’
‘Was he killed?’
Shelly shrugged. ‘Probably. Just after the war, I hunt for everyone. I have to find my sister Esther and your father. And then I go back a second time with George, of course. After that visit, I realise that the Nazis murder nearly everybody. So I do what I can to forget.’
The first time Dad ever took me to Montreal was when I was six years old, and that was when I discovered that Shelly kept a framed newspaper clipping of Grandma Rosa’s ninety-second birthday party on the piano in his living room. The article was written in Yiddish – which uses Hebrew characters – so I was unable to read it. The postage-stamp-sized photograph of my great-great grandmother impressed me as a kid, however. Rosa’s face was as wrinkled as a walnut but her deep-set eyes were so keenly intelligent and mysterious that they made me shiver. My father told me that they’d been light brown, but when I drew Rosa with my crayons I made them emerald green; they seemed that bright to me.
In the photo, she sits behind a small round cake topped with two slender candles. She wears a pursed and amused smile, as if she is indulging the photographer, who is clearly someone she adores.
The photographer was her youngest son, Karl – or Carlo, as most everybody called him.
On that same visit, Mom told me that Shelly had inherited 38Rosa’s stunning, Arabian-Nights eyes. I hadn’t noticed their frame of dark lashes until I studied them from afar a little later. And when he noticed me staring, he swooped me up, and I touched my fingertip to them, which made him growl and bite my neck. After I’d finished laughing, he put me down and whispered, ‘My eyes are powerful magic, Eti.’
‘Can you even kill Germans with them?’ I asked.
‘You bet!’ he replied with a confident nod.
But I only found out what Shelly really meant years later when I overheard Dad telling a customer – while pinning the bottom hem on a dress he’d made her – that his cousin had bedroom eyes like nobody since Rudolph Valentino.
Now, seated opposite each other in Dad’s kitchen, Shelly told me that the article he’d kept on his piano said that Rosa had revived Schmuel the candlemaker with a kiss and not a prayer.
When I suggested that it must have been a great temptation for a half-starving ghetto reporter to make life seem like a happy fairy tale, Shelly disagreed. ‘No, Rosa must tell him about the kiss. She never likes to talk about her special ways.’
‘Are you saying she knew spells and incantations?’ I asked, though that suggestion seemed absurd the moment I spoke it.
He drizzled more whisky into his glass and considered how to reply. ‘She is a kind of holy woman,’ he finally said. ‘People whisper that she is a mekhasheyfe – a Jewish sorceress. Eti, I know you don’t believe in all that stuff – and that you don’t even believe in God. And I’m with you on that. Back in Poland, I realise that there isn’t anybody up in heaven who cares about any of this shit down here. But the world is so different then. It is normal for everybody to think that Rosa is maybe a mekhasheyfe. For Christ’s sake, people pay her to make marriages! And there are anti-Semites hiding under every bush, and some streets in big cities 39are still just dirt, and the synagogues are huge wooden castles. People like Rosa … She cures you with her hands and prayers. You might think I’m lying, but I see her help people. It works sometimes. Maybe because most everyone is convinced that she has that kind of power.’
I felt as if a gate had just opened, and I became anxious to rush through it to where Shelly wanted to take me, which was back to his childhood. And my father’s, too. ‘Rosa the Mekhasheyfe,’ I whispered to myself, as if it were the title of a novel that my dad might have spent many years writing in secret.
‘Did you ever learn any of Rosa’s incantations,’ I asked.
‘Me? No. She tells me they would be dangerous to me.’ He winked and made a fist the way he does to indicate an erection. ‘She knows I’ll use whatever she teaches me to have my way with pretty girls!’
After I made Shelly and me a pot of coffee, he recited the prayer that Rosa had used to bring Shmuel the candlemaker back to life: .בָרוּךְ אַתָה ה', אֱ-לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, אֲשֶר קִדְשָנוּ בְמִצְוֹתָיו, וְצִוָנוּ לְהַדְלִיק נֵר שֶל שַבָת
Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to light the lights of Shabbat.
Jewish women speak this prayer when they light the candles at the supper table just before the traditional Friday-night dinner. Shelly told me that Rosa whispered the blessing over Schmuel seven times.
A minute or so earlier, she’d seen him crumple to the ground. She’d been sitting in the clock repair shop where Luna, her eldest daughter – my father’s grandmother – was employed. ‘Rosa spends her afternoons there,’ Shelly told me, ‘because the owner bribes the Nazis to get coal for his stoves, and it is well heated.’40
It suddenly seemed as if the past were too complicated for me – that I might get tangled in all of Shelly’s details and never find my way out. ‘It’s really good to find all this out,’ I told him, ‘but I don’t see what this has to do with my dad’s refusal to leave the house over the last few months.’
‘Wait, kiddo, I’m coming to that!’ he replied, and he took a big, satisfied sip of his coffee.
He told me that when Rosa made a match between a young man and woman, she would look deep into each of them to see the direction that their souls were facing. An individual soul, she’d explained to Shelly, Benni and their other cousins, normally faced either north, south, east or west. In rare instances, however, a person’s soul might face up or down. ‘Grandma Rosa tells me that souls that face up should not marry,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘They focus on God’s hidden life and other loony subjects – all those things that your dad likes to read about. They tend to make bad husbands and wives – too distant. And they never earn a decent living.’
‘So does my dad’s soul face up?’
‘At the moment, I think it’s facing west. It makes a turn when your mom … when she leaves us. His soul is kind of unique – it can twist around. That’s part of what I need to tell you. Anyone with a soul facing west … They get depressed. The world to them seems really dark at times. Rosa told me once that that was why they make the best poets. Like your Aunt Julie. She works on poems in her diary. And some of them are pretty good. Though she only reads them to me. She has a western soul. Me, I face east, as you’ve probably figured out.’
‘And my soul?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I can’t see into you like Rosa. But 41what I mean to say is that your father has developed a type of … inclination toward sadness. Because of the current direction his soul.’
‘Shelly, do you really believe all this?’ I asked.
‘Oui, absolument. Because east and west and north and south aren’t just physical directions. It’s more subtle than that. Though I’m not sure I really understand it. But what’s important is that your dad believes what Rosa tells us. And maybe he understands.’ Shelly took another long sip of his coffee. ‘And now we come to the last part of what I need to say to you.’ He raised a hand over me as if to partake in a ritual, closed his eyes and whispered what sounded like a Yiddish blessing.
When I asked him what he’d said, he replied, ‘A protective incantation that Rosa taught us.’
‘So she did teach you some of what she knew!’
‘Yeah, she figured we needed a little extra help if we were going to survive the Nazis. So back then, when I’m by myself, when I’m frightened, I whisper that incantation over and over. Your dad does the same. Rosa tells us that the human voice … It is very powerful and protective.
‘Okay, so we come to July 22nd, 1942,’ Shelly continued. ‘Your father goes out hunting for discarded clothes and anything useful in the rubbish heaps near Sienna Street. That is where the wealthiest people in the ghetto live. But on the way back home, a Jewish policeman in a wagon, he stops your dad and orders him to climb up. About a dozen men and women are there. A second policeman is with them. Your dad doesn’t know where they will go. But an old man in the wagon …’ Shelly’s voice faltered and he cleared his throat. ‘He tells your dad they go to Umschlagplatz.’
Foreboding gripped my heart; the freight trains that took Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka left from Umschlagplatz.42
‘Why did the Jewish policeman choose my father?’ I asked.
Shelly replied that Dad had been holding a torn lampshade that he’d found on the street and very likely the policeman had taken a liking to it. He confiscated it from my father right away.
Shelly shook his head at the sad impossibility of it all.
‘I’m sorry I’ve made you speak about these things,’ I told him.
He patted my hand and said, ‘No, I want to remember.’ He took a steadying couple of breaths. ‘Anyway, the wagon goes by the clockmaker’s shop where Rosa visits her daughter. The owner – Mr Kessel – sees your dad. He grabs our Grandma Luna and they run outside. Rosa hobbles out after them, and they all shout at the policemen to stop. “Give me back my grandson!” Luna yells. But the head policeman says it is too late. “Go away!” he tells her. So you know what, Eti? Luna lays down right in front of the horse. My God, what a woman!’
By then, a crowd began to gather, Shelly explained. And Rosa limped up to the wagon. ‘“Give me back my boy!” she orders the policemen.
‘“The Nazis give me a quota,” one of them tells her. “If I don’t make it, more people die.” He points to his colleague. “Ten Jews for him, and ten for me. If the boy leaves, who will substitute him?”
‘“I will,” Rosa tells him, so the policeman says, “Why should I accept you instead of him?”
‘She shouts back, “Because if you don’t, I will curse you and your family, and all of you will die in the ghetto! And no one – not even a rabbi – will say any prayers for you, and you will walk the earth as a spirit – a dybbuk – for all eternity!”’
Shelly looked at me with blazing eyes – he was still fighting the Nazis after all these years.
‘So what happened then?’ I asked.
‘The policemen, they give up. Rosa scares them too much.’43
‘And my dad goes free?’
‘Yes, Benni jumps down off the wagon. But then,’ he added, his voice darkening, ‘Mr Kessel and some other people help Rosa into the wagon. And that is that.’
‘That is what?’
‘They go off to Umschlagplatz.’
‘Grandma Luna just let her mother go?’
Shelly tilted his head and waved his hand at me, as if to indicate I’d said something silly. ‘Sorry, Eti, that you even ask such a question means you were never there.’ He leaned forward and took my shoulder. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising you. I’m happy … more happy than you can ever imagine that you were not with us in the ghetto. But what you ask – it’s just not a question that means anything … not to Luna or me or anyone else who was there.’
In case I had any doubts about the significance of what he’d just told me, Shelly whispered, ‘Your father cannot forgive himself for substituting Rosa. He thinks he sends a holy woman to a death camp. When he is young and strong – when he has your mom – he can fight against all that guilt. He knows he must give you a good home, he knows he must help your mom, he knows he must make suits and dresses and earn decent money. But now that your mom isn’t with us …’ Shelly reached for his coffee and downed the last of it. ‘Our little Benni can’t go on the way he always has. Maybe he doesn’t think he deserves a good life anymore. He looks in all those kabbalah books of his, but still he does not find the doorway out of guilt. And maybe there isn’t one.’ Shelly leaned back in his chair abruptly, which made his spine crack.
‘Hey, be careful!’ I told him.
He shrugged as if it were of no import. ‘It’s just old bones.’ His expression grew serious. ‘Let me tell you something, kiddo. Guilt – after a while, it’s like swallowing stones. And your father 44swallows thousands over the years. All that weight inside him … He can’t get up anymore. I mean, he walks around, but he’s not really walking.’
A little later, I helped Shelly get into bed, and his eyes closed as if he might not open them again for a long time, and I kissed them because he’d seen too many terrible things in his life, which made him caress my cheek. ‘Go to bed, kiddo, you’re tired too,’ he said.
I went to my father’s room and made a nest for myself in the armchair where he tossed his clothing and watched him sleep, picturing the moment he stepped down from the horse-drawn wagon in Warsaw as both the best and worst I could ever imagine.
After a while, I moved to Dad’s bed, but I didn’t touch him because I wanted to feel my need to comfort him as deeply as possible, and only when I couldn’t bear it any longer did I lay my hand on his chest, and I thought, No wonder you always had to say you were sorry with more than words.
I sensed that I’d arrived somewhere new and unexpected – a place where I forgave him for everything he had ever done wrong. And where he forgave me too.
But it was Rosa whose pardon he needed, wasn’t it? She had been fighting with her prayers and incantations – with a thousand years of Jewish mystical knowledge – to protect her family and friends, and maybe everyone in the ghetto. It must have occurred to my father – probably not long after his rescue – that he could never hope to replace her.
I tried to act normal around Dad and Shelly the next morning at breakfast, but my expression must have given away how jittery I felt.
‘You look like you’re coming down with a cold,’ my father said. ‘Lean down.’45
He was seated at the kitchen table opposite Shelly. He held his hand to my forehead. ‘You don’t feel hot.’ He glanced over at his cousin. ‘I don’t think he has a fever. You check.’
I stood back up. ‘I’m not coming down with anything,’ I told him with a put-upon sigh.
Shelly held up his fist. ‘The poor kid just needs to get laid,’ he said to make us laugh.
He packed his bag after breakfast, and I got ready to take him to the airport.
He and my father kissed cheeks at the front door and spoke in rapid-fire Yiddish. I heard Dad say Julie very clearly, so he must have asked Shelly to give her his love. When my father finally let go of his cousin’s hand, he said, ‘See you later, Shel.’
‘À plus tard, Benni,’ Shelly replied, fighting to smile.
They always spoke the same formula when they had to say goodbye. The idea of a definitive parting was simply too terrifying.
Once Shelly was buckled up in the passenger seat of my Volvo, he patted my leg and said, ‘You look like shit.’
‘I’m okay. Just a bit disoriented. I feel like I’ve finally stopped running – after forty-five years of trying to catch up to my father.’
‘That’s probably a good thing.’
After we were on the freeway, Shelly looked over at me as if he were afraid to ask something.
‘Go ahead,’ I told him.
‘What do you plan to do with your father’s secrets?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘He’s going to scream at me because I told you, you know.’
‘I’ll make sure he screams at me instead of you.’
He shrugged. ‘I guess it no longer matters. Living with the Angel of Death changes things. Can you believe I’m eighty-seven years old?’46
‘No. And I’m not ready to say goodbye to either of you,’ I told him.
‘Here’s another secret, baby – no one’s ever ready.’
For dinner that evening, I picked up burritos again from Cactus Taqueria. Dad ate his with his hands and ended up licking the hot sauce from each of his fingers and also the aluminum foil.
‘You have a tongue like an anteater,’ I said, laughing.
‘So, who wouldn’t want a tongue like an anteater? Anyway, this hot sauce is my cocaine.’
When it came time for me to carry his dish to the sink, I squatted next to him, and I saw him as a man and not just my father, and we seemed to have been connected forever, since even before I was born, and I pressed my lips to his.
I felt a jolt inside him, but he didn’t lean back or fight me.
When I pulled away, he looked like he’d swallowed another one of his guilt stones, so I told him that everything was okay – that he didn’t have to say or do anything. ‘I just love you,’ I said in a confessional voice.
He blinked twice, unsure of what to say, and then he motioned me forward and whispered in my ear, ‘I love you beyond the edge of the world.’
The unfallen tears in his eyes took away my voice and started me crying as well. We looked at each other as if we’d reached home after a long journey – and were completely safe. Soon, however, our intimacy became too much for him and, with a pat on my shoulder, he said that there was an NBA basketball game on TV that he wanted to watch, since the San Antonio Spurs – his favourite team – were playing. I have no recollection of how the game went or if the Spurs won. Dad kept his hand on my leg like 47he used to do when I was small, and whenever our eyes met he showed me the smile of his that meant that he was just where he wanted to be. It seemed that we both knew that something amazing had happened but that talking about it might spoil it. I ended up thinking of Mom and wishing that she was with us, and my mind travelled back to all the times the three of us had been together in this house and watching Poirot or Inspector Morse on Channel 13.
The next morning, I woke up thinking, It’s now or never; I’d told Angie that I’d drive home that evening, so I had to come up with a way of convincing my father to rejoin the world right away.
I think that the kiss I’d given him the night before must have given him insomnia, because he yawned through breakfast. Just after he’d taken his blood pressure pill, he said, ‘I think you must have seen me and Shelly.’
‘Seen you in what way?’ I asked.
‘In the hospital room. When we … hugged.’
I was eating a second bowl of oatmeal and paused just long enough to say, ‘Yeah, I saw that.’
‘You were only pretending to be asleep,’ he said.
‘Guilty as charged, your honour.’
‘He shouldn’t have hugged me like that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Didn’t it bother you?’
‘Why would it bother me to see two men who love each other kissing?’
‘I don’t know.’ He twisted his lips back and forth while considering what to say. ‘It’s not so very normal.’
‘It seems perfectly normal to me.’
He took a deep breath. ‘If you want to ask me, you can.’
My gut tensed up because he looked so upset. ‘Ask you what?’ I said.48
‘Ask about me and Shelly.’
‘I don’t need to ask anything. That’s between you and him.’
Dad gazed down. I could tell his heart was battering against his ribs.
‘No more stones,’ I said. ‘Not with me.’
‘What?’
‘You don’t need to feel guilty about this – not with me. It’s a very good thing that Shelly loves you so much. You two … I think it was maybe the most beautiful kiss I’ve ever seen.’
Dad gazed down again. ‘Shel was my first. I mean, I was lost. He helped me. He had returned to Poland to try to locate Esther and me. When he found me … I was just sixteen.’
‘I’m glad your first time was with a real expert.’
Dad laughed as if he might soon start crying. ‘This conversation is meshugge,’ he said, rubbing his hand over his face as if to wake himself up. ‘Who has these conversations with their children?’
‘Well, maybe we should have them a lot more often.’
While I was cutting tomatoes for lunch, Dad came up beside me and studied my technique as if it were the most interesting thing in the world, which meant he had something urgent to say but wasn’t going to say it. Or so I thought. When I put my knife down, he held my hand in both of his and moved his fingertip over the lines in my palm. ‘Your hands were so tiny when you were a baby. And so beautiful.’
When I looked up at his face, he was fighting tears so hard that he’d folded his lips inside his mouth.
My heart seemed to leap inside my chest. ‘Are you okay, Dad?’ I rushed to ask.
‘Yes, I’m fine.’ He wiped away his tears. ‘I used to study your lifeline and think, I want this boy to outlive me by fifty years, 49no matter what. I want him to be happy. I don’t want him to be burdened with any of my sadness.’
‘I’ve had a good life,’ I said.
‘No thanks from me,’ he said with a frown.
I suddenly understood the conversation he’d had with Shelly in the hospital. ‘You did the best you could,’ I told him. ‘That’s all any kid can ask his father, isn’t it?’
‘It wasn’t nearly enough,’ he said, misery creasing his face.
‘You did great. I always knew you loved me. You were a wonderful dad! And you used to make me and Mom laugh all the time. And I’m doing fine. I’ve got a good life.’
He didn’t seem comforted by my words, so I sat him down at the kitchen table and took his hand. I studied the lines in his palm just like he’d studied mine, but they didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. ‘I think Grandma Rosa realised she had no other choice,’ I told him.
He pulled his hand back. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Shelly told me about you and Rosa.’
His face turned accusatory. ‘What did he tell you?’
‘About the Jewish policemen who chose you for a transport to Treblinka and how Luna stopped the wagon.’
‘That bastard!’ He looked toward the front door as if he still might be able to catch Shelly and scream at him.
‘It was my fault,’ I rushed to say. ‘I made him tell me.’
‘That’s crap. No one can make Shelly do anything he doesn’t want to do! No one!’
‘I guess he did what he felt was right.’
‘With my life – he’s playing with my life!’
‘It’s my life too.’
Dad fumed at me with his eyes bulging – his dragon face, I used to call it – then got up and started looking in kitchen drawers.50
‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.
‘My goddamn cigarettes!’
He couldn’t find where he’d hidden them. I tried to calm him down, but he pushed me away.
‘Listen, I know I’ll never know what it’s like to have been where you’ve been,’ I said. ‘And I know that there are things you don’t want me to know. But I also know that if you hadn’t lived, I wouldn’t have been born. I wouldn’t be here.’
‘Don’t you think I know that?!’ he shouted.
‘And my kids wouldn’t be here.’
‘Listen, there’s nothing you could say to me that I haven’t already thought of. I’m not a dummy. And I’ve had seventy years to think about what happened.’
‘Maybe Rosa saved you for a reason. Maybe she saw something that you could do but she couldn’t – something really important.’
‘Listen, smart guy, why do you think I’ve been reading Gershom Scholem all these years? But you know what I learned? That God can’t be known. Which means we can’t know our destiny either. Because there’s no such thing! Grandma Rosa didn’t have to die in a camp.’
‘All I know is that if she thought she had another option, she’d have taken it. She had insights into the way things work.’
‘You don’t really believe that!’
‘I don’t know what I believe anymore. But Shelly told me that he believes. And that you do too. Rosa must have known that she had only one chance to save you. People can know things like that. They sense them. I’m sure of it. She must have wanted to go on living, but she …’
‘Of course she wanted to go on living!’ he shrieked.
‘So the only possibility is that she couldn’t have lived with herself if you had been taken to Treblinka.’51
‘That’s idiotic! She could have lived with herself. You weren’t there. You don’t know anything. People gave up their grandchildren and children all the time.’ To himself, he whispered, ‘If she’d never figured out about …’ And then he said something in what might have been Yiddish, that sounded like mesrat nesh, though I discovered later that the correct term was mesirat nefesh.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘Rosa could have gone on without me just fine, Eti. That’s what I mean. Christ, the whole world went on after my parents were turned to ash. And who the hell remembers them now? Who the hell remembers them or Rosa or any of them?!’
‘I remember them. And you and Shelly remember them.’
Dad opened the big drawer that held all the kitchen implements. I thought he was still looking for his cigarettes, but instead he grabbed his corkscrew and took it in his fist and hurled it at the kitchen window as hard as he could. Astonishingly, it made only a single small crack.
Dad held his head in his hands. ‘Look at me, I can’t even break a fucking window!’
He looked as if he might retrieve the corkscrew and try again, so I rushed to it and snatched it up.
‘You’re a big help,’ he sneered.
‘Dad, imagine having to give me up to the Nazis.’
He faced me as if I had gone too far, vibrating with rage. ‘If I had to give you up, I would have!’ he said in a trembling voice.
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Believe what you want. I was there, you weren’t!’ Tears gushed in his eyes. ‘Oh, God, you don’t understand anything.’ His shoulders hunched and he began to sob. Then his legs gave way and he dropped to the floor and curled his arm over his eyes.
I sat with him and embraced him while he shook.52
‘Dad, I’ll never know Rosa, but Shelly told me that she believed she could see the destiny of every person’s soul. So if that’s true, then she saw yours when you were up in the wagon. And she saw what you would do in the future – or at least she sensed it. And whatever she sensed must have convinced her that she had to save you. And not just you. She had to save me and your grandchildren. And she knew that she wouldn’t get a second chance to do it, and it was so incredibly important to her that she got up into that wagon and did what she had to do.’
When he grabbed my hand, I thought he was going to tell me again that I understood nothing, but he said in a sad voice, ‘I’ve thought of that too, Eti, and I hope you’re right, but I just don’t know.’
Dad went to a kennel in Glen Cove when I was seven and brought me and Mom home a Shetland sheepdog named Dena. It was love at first sight for me and my mother.
Dena learned to go up the stairs in our house over that first week, but she was too terrified to go down them. She would shiver and whine until one of us picked her up.
Mom overcame Dena’s fear by placing a Lay’s potato chip on each step of the staircase; Dena loved potato chips more than anything in the world, and by the time she got to the ground floor, she was licking the salt off her lips and her fear was cured.
Things didn’t work out quite that well with my dad, but I used the same technique.
By then, Angie had come down from Boston, since I’d told her I couldn’t go home yet. She and I coaxed Dad to come with us to the Seven Dwarfs Bakery by telling him they had a sale on chocolate mandelbrot.53
My father had a panic attack while we walked there, but we sat with him on the curb, her arm over his shoulder. While he panted and sweated, I squatted down in front of him and told him that we wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him, but that only made him snort at me and tell me to make myself useful and get him some water.
Shortly before he finished the bottle I bought, he stopped panting, and I handed him a napkin to dry his face and neck.
‘Should we go home, Benni?’ Angie asked.
‘What, and miss the sale at the bakery?’ he said in disbelief. ‘Are you nuts?’
Once he’d picked out the mandelbrot he wanted, we convinced him to come with us to Starbucks for coffee. From there, we walked all the way to Waldbaum’s – a half-mile away – to get him chocolate sorbet and pick up a pack of Marlboro Lights, though I talked him out of the cigarettes once we got there.
Two Costa Rican workers from Mineola Glass came and replaced the cracked window in the kitchen while we were eating our sorbet. Dad offered each of them a bowl with a couple of scoops to thank them for working so quickly.
After they’d gone, he started eating the sorbet out of the container and announced that he wasn’t going back out for a few more days at least. ‘That was the panic attack from hell,’ he told us. ‘And I’m getting too old to risk anything worse.’
‘You’ve got to go out again,’ Angie told him. ‘It’s really important.’ She gathered her long brown hair behind her head and got out a hair-tie and made herself a ponytail, which was a sign that she was steeling for a battle.
‘No, in point of fact, I don’t,’ he replied. ‘And it’s not important – not even for me.’
‘So, what does a panic attack from hell feel like?’ she asked.54
‘I’ll put it like this – it’s like my heart is going to explode,’ he said.
‘And if it does, what’ll happen?’
‘I’ll drop dead, of course.’
‘Benni, my love, we’re all going to drop dead one day.’
He pointed his spoon at her, and some sorbet dripped on the floor. ‘But not with a heart explosion!’ he snarled.
Angie tore off a paper towel. ‘I’m pretty sure that from where you’ve been, you can imagine deaths a whole lot worse than a heart explosion.’
While she cleaned up the spill, he squinted at her, as if she’d outsmarted him. Still, he wasn’t about to give up. ‘You know something, Miss Anthropology Professor,’ he said dismissively. ‘You’re even worse than my son.’
Peter the mailman called me five days after Angie and I returned to Boston to say that the mail was piling up again.
Was that Dad’s way of asking for additional help?
By then, I’d spotted what I thought was a workable plan inside all my crazy, wayward solutions, so I drove down the following Thursday, since I didn’t have any classes on Friday. After supper, I gave him a big glass of port wine and he fell asleep in the living room in front of the TV. I tiptoed upstairs and packed a bag of his favourite T-shirts and trousers, and another with all his books on kabbalah and a selection of my mother’s cassette tapes.
The very next morning, before doubts could undermine my resolve, I told him I needed to buy spring clothes and coaxed him out for a ride to Macy’s. ‘You won’t even have to get out of the car,’ I told him. ‘I’ll go shop and you can listen to WQXR.’ That was Dad’s favourite classical station; Grandpa Morrie had turned him into an avid listener long before I was born.55
‘I guess that’ll be okay,’ he told me.
When I kept on going past the exit for Great Neck, he said, ‘You missed the turn-off, Eti.’
‘Did I?’
‘Absolutely.’
When I didn’t get off at the next exit, Dad showed me a suspicious look. ‘What’s going on? Are you kidnapping me?’
‘It’s your grandson George’s birthday tomorrow, and I told him you’d be there.’ I showed him a challenging look. ‘He adores you. And you’re not going to turn me into a liar, are you?’
‘Are you nuts?’
‘Yes.’
He pounded the dashboard. ‘Turn around!’
‘Too late.’
‘I can’t go to Boston. I don’t even have a change of clothing.’
‘You do – I packed a bag for you.’
‘You did what?’
‘I packed a bag of clothing for you. And put everything Gershom Scholem ever wrote in a box. And I have all your medications, too. It’s all in the trunk of the car.’
‘Who gave you permission for that?’
‘No one.’
‘This is meshugge!’
‘Yeah, welcome to my life.’
‘But I can’t go without tapes of your mother!’ he said, groaning.
I congratulated myself on being able to predict his deepest worry. ‘I packed them, too, Dad. Including the one of Mom and Belle where they sing together.’
Belle was an elderly Appalachian woman who became a good friend of my parents back in the 1960s.
My father gazed out the window while considering what move 56to make next. ‘I haven’t heard your mom and Belle in years,’ he said in a dreamy voice.
‘Then you’ve got a treat in store,’ I said.
‘I seemed to have raised a dictator!’ he snapped, which made me flinch, but when I turned to him I spotted amused admiration in his eyes, and when I rested my hand on his leg, he let it stay there. A little later, while we were crossing the Throgs Neck Bridge, I asked how he was doing. He was looking out the window back at the houses along the north shore of Long Island. ‘It’s a really nice view from up here,’ he said. He flapped his arms. ‘It’s like we’re flying.’
We stopped for Mexican food in Mystic, and he wolfed down his guacamole tacos with a big cup of coffee. While I was enjoying how he licked his lips, I realised that I had no idea where the two of us were headed – and didn’t care.
Is half the trick in life learning to improvise? And if Angie and I timed our request just right, could we get him to stay with us indefinitely?
Dad needed to pee, so I waited for him out by my car, and I found myself humming ‘Chryzantemy złociste’ to myself. As he came to me, he smiled and said, ‘The toilet didn’t flush so well, but the sinks were spic and span and the mirrors were shiny. B-plus.’
‘Not bad,’ I said.
After I helped him into the passenger seat, I started thinking that B-plus is about as good a grade as any of us can expect to have at the end of our days.
After I’d buckled Dad in, I started the car, and as we left the parking lot, he asked in a hopeful voice if I’d mind stopping at some swanky clothes store in Boston before going home so that he could buy something wonderful for his grandson. ‘And I want to go to your studio right away, too. I haven’t seen any of your new paintings.’57
I felt a click in my chest as he said that – a sign of renewed trust, it seemed to me – and I rose to meet his enthusiasm, telling him that I wanted him to pose for me at my studio, and he nodded his agreement and turned on the radio to find a jazz station, because he’d had enough of Bach and Mozart and was in the mood for some Louis Armstrong or Chet Baker, and we drove down the main street in Mystic toward everything that we didn’t yet know would happen.58