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When Rochester and I returned home from our walk that evening, I heard Lili’s voice floating down from the second floor of the townhouse, and realized that she was speaking rapid, almost angry Spanish. While I knew that she’d grown up with the language, and that it still flavored her speech, I rarely heard her speak it with such fluency.
Her voice grew louder as she descended the stairs. “Adiós, mamá. Te hablaré mañana.”
“Your mother?” I asked as she walked into the kitchen, her cell phone in her hand. I had taken out a big eggplant from the refrigerator and was ready to start preparing the eggplant parmigiana I’d learned to make from a vegetarian friend in college.
Lili sat on one of the Windsor-style kitchen chairs and nodded. “She’s mad at my sister-in-law for the eighteenth time this week. I can’t wait to hear Fedi’s side of this one. They’re really pressuring my mother to move in with them.”
Lili’s brother, his wife, and two children lived in Parkland, Florida, which I understood was about as far west of Fort Lauderdale as you could get without falling into the Everglades. Fedi had added a mother-in-law unit to his house, but their mother refused to leave her oceanfront apartment, even though she was having more and more difficulty living on her own.
“I can see why she doesn’t want to move. It would be a big change for her,” I said. “No more independence, no more living by the beach. She’d have to have someone drive her everywhere.”
“I know. But change is inevitable and at some point she’s going to have to get with the program.” She sighed. “I have a feeling that the only way I’m going to make any impact with her is to see her in person.”
Rochester crouched on the floor beside Lili, gnawing at his squeaky ball. “You could fly down for few days couldn’t you?” I asked. As the chair of her department, Lili’s role was primarily administrative, though she taught one class on Mondays.
She pried the squeaky ball from Rochester’s jaw and tossed it toward the living room, and he took off after it. “I could. I have the vacation time, and the department can run without me for a few days. But I’m afraid my mother’s problems run deeper than just giving up her apartment.”
“Your family did move a lot. I can imagine it’s hard to feel rooted.”
“It can be. This apartment is the first place she chose herself, after my father died and she didn’t have to follow him around. She’s always loved the ocean and she was happy to find a building with lots of other Spanish speakers. She plays canasta with a bunch of Jewish women from South America and they do water aerobics in her pool in Spanish.”
I had yet to meet Senora Weinstock, though I had spoken to her on the phone a couple of times. “Al fin un Judio,” she had said to me in our initial conversation. At last, Lili had found a Jew. Lili had flown down to Florida a couple of times, always in the winter, to spend some time with her family, and always returned vaguely unhappy.
I understood what she felt. I loved living in Stewart’s Crossing, relishing in the sense of rootedness that it gave me. My family had moved from Trenton when I was two years old, and I had grown up in Bucks County.
Back then, I’d been desperate, as many teenagers are, to escape the suburbs for the big city. After graduate school in New York I’d married and followed my wife to Silicon Valley so she could take a high-powered job. After Mary suffered her second miscarriage, I’d used my computer skills to hack into her credit records and set flags so that she couldn’t run us into more debt. I’d been caught and punished, resulting in the end of my marriage and my return to Stewart’s Crossing after a year as a guest of the California penal system.
I finished slicing the eggplant and began breading it as Rochester returned to the kitchen and danced around underfoot. “You do not eat eggplant,” I said to him. “Go lay down, and I’ll feed you your dinner soon.”
I pointed to the puffy round bed in the corner of the breakfast nook, and Rochester slunk over there with his tail down as if he was being punished. “I am wise to your tricks, Mister,” I said. “That sad look does not work.”
He settled into the bed and looked up at me with a wide grin. I had inherited Rochester two years before, after the death of his previous owner, my next-door neighbor, and though it hadn’t been love at first sight, eventually he had become the main reason I’d come back to life.
I’d come a long way since then, and I was grateful for all the blessings in my life. Now if Rochester could just keep from nosing into any crimes for a while, we’d all be able to settle in happily.
As I layered the sautéed eggplant with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce, my brain started ticking. A year before, I’d been named the director of Eastern’s Friar Lake Conference Center, responsible for creating and managing a regular series of executive education and alumni relations programs at a former abbey a few miles from the campus.
I’d put together a number of great events and more on the calendar, but I needed to start planning for the next year. Maybe I could put together a weekend program on the political, sociological, emotional and financial aspects of immigration
Once I had finished layering the breaded eggplant with mushrooms, tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, I slid the casserole in the oven. I turned to Lili and told her what I was thinking. “You think people would be interested in a program like that? It would certainly be newsworthy, given the current political climate.”
Lili looked up from her phone. “Do you know Andrea Del Presto in the sociology department? She’s been doing a research project on twenty-first century migration and immigration. Maybe you could have her put together a program for you.”
“I don’t know her, but I’ve read about her research. We have a lot of first-generation American students at Eastern, as well as some who were born in other countries and grew up here. Many of my students are disturbed by all the anti-immigrant rhetoric you hear on the Internet these days.”
“One of the young women in my Introduction to Photography class wears a hijab,” Lili said. “She told us on the first day of class that she liked taking pictures because she could hide behind her camera. That she felt safer that way.”
She shook her head. “That’s so sad, that someone should feel they need to hide in this day and age.”
“What do you call yourself if someone asks? Are you Jewish first, American first, Latina first? A hyphen of something?”
“It’s hard to say. Ask me around Rosh Hashanah, and I’ll say I’m Jewish first. Independence Day? American. When I talk to my family in Spanish I’d probably say Latina. I guess I’m a mix of all those. What about you?”
“I’m easier. Just Jewish and American. Hard to say which comes first because both of those identities are so ingrained in me. I wonder, though, what the next generation thinks.”
“Sounds like something to ask next time you meet with them,” Lili said. “But I’ll bet they have the same trouble making distinctions.”
I remembered Rabbi Goldberg’s brother Joel, and his comments about the Holocaust, and how the Germans were among us. In Sunday School we’d spent a year studying the Holocaust, including articles about Nazi hunters who had devoted their lives to tracking down surviving members of Hitler’s government, concentration camp guards and those who had ratted out their Jewish friends and neighbors.
Were any of those people still alive? If they were, they’d have to be in their eighties or nineties, and they’d had to live for decades with the guilt of what they’d done. Was there someone like that living among us? Or was I putting too much emphasis on Joel’s statements?
We finished dinner, and while Lili cleaned up I sat on the living room floor and played tug-a-rope with Rochester. I kept going back to the way he’d approached Joel Goldberg to protect him, wondering why.
Lili came into the living room, drying her hands on a cloth towel. “I’m probably going to have to go to Florida, you know. But I’m going to try and hold out until it gets colder here so it will seem like a vacation.”
I mimicked surprise. “A vacation? From me?”
She pursed her lips as she sat down on the sofa. “From winter. Though if you don’t behave I may need a vacation from you, too.”
“I could misbehave.” I reached up and tickled her foot.
“Now that,” she said, “is not a difficult decision to make.”
