Forty-Seven

 

The folder contained several letters, both to and from Sandy. And as I read the first letter (which I’ll share with you), I crossed the line from rational person to raving lunatic. I’m still trying to figure out why I reacted so strongly. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I went pretty bonkers.

The first letter, even at a glance, seemed quite long for an initial query meant to reestablish an old acquaintance from fifty years past. The Facebook or email equivalents I’ve personally sent and received are typically pretty short—Hey, So-and-so, is this you? Do you remember me? If so, I hope to hear back from you. Not so with my dad. This letter (typed on a typewriter rather than a computer) ran two pages long, single-spaced with eighth-inch margins.

July 9, 2008

Dear Sandy,

You will remember me as a Stanford acquaintance, laboratory instructor in biology, admirer and confidant. We dated a few times, and I was highly enamored with you. I was delighted when you told me you are Jewish, and responded by telling you that I am half Jewish.

Here we go, I thought to myself. Rushing in with a big bang, zero to a hundred in no time flat, Save Mart style. Jewish, three lines in?

My dad was Philburn Firstman (1905-1993). He was born in Chicago, and came to California when he was eleven with his parents, who settled in Highland Park, a suburb of LA.

He’d inserted my grandfather’s dates as if he were rattling off the dates of Susan B. Anthony from one of his favorite coins. And just five sentences in, we get a genealogy lesson that links to Judaism.

The Firstmans came to the United States in the mid-1880s from Lithuania. Some of them spell their surname Fürstman, and they are all Jews. My great-grandfather, Max Firstman, and his wife, Sarah, were Orthodox. He died in 1939, and Sarah died in 1941. She taught me a few words in Yiddish, which I still remember. I am very proud of my Jewish heritage, so much so that I went to the Jewish Temple on Fairfax, in LA, to take the course of instruction to become converted to Judaism in 1967.

As I sat on my father’s couch reading (in the very spot Charlotte had often occupied), he sat in the wingback chair across the coffee table, watching me.

Contrary to what the letter says, he’d never identified with his Jewish heritage, at least not to my knowledge. The reason he (and my mother) went to temple in 1967 was because he was having an affair with my mother’s best friend, Fretta (who lived in the detached granny flat behind our house), who happened to be Jewish. My father dropped out of the classes after a while (after some sort of confrontation between Fretta and my mother), but my mother completed her own conversion. I was raised Jewish as a result—I attended Hebrew school, completed my confirmation in tenth grade, attended synagogue services every Friday night for some twenty years, and even had a full-blown Jewish wedding (the first time around), huppa and all. My father, on the other hand, dropped out of the religion when Fretta moved out of our house. Today, my father could not recite the Sabbath blessing over the wine if his life depended on it. (He often drinks Mogen David, though, which makes him the only person I’ve met, Jewish or not, who actually consumes it as a cocktail rather than choking down few ceremonial sips.) So why mention his Jewish heritage to this long-lost woman?

“Interesting,” I said, hoping he’d stop staring at me.

He offered to turn on the reading lamp, or perhaps I’d like a glass of wine. Or a flashlight? He had plenty of those around, and maybe I’d like one. To see better.

“No,” I said, “no flashlight.”

You invited me to attend your graduation from Stanford in June of 1959. I couldn’t attend because I was embroiled in marrying a student at City College of San Francisco. The marriage didn’t work and ended in annulment, but the worst part was that it precluded me from seeing you graduate.

“Embroiled?” I asked.

Thinking I had trouble seeing the text, he jumped up and fumbled for one of several flashlights he kept on top of and underneath the coffee table, which was cluttered with several crystal bowls of hard candy, a box of Kleenex, a half-dozen crumpled tissues, four-by-six-inch glue-top notepads, pencils and pens and Smithsonian and Scientific American magazines, quite a few DVD boxes, a glass dragon sculpture, and a Native American–style urn filled with artificial flowers.

“No flashlight,” I said. “I can read it just fine.”

In 1959 you sent me your “goodbye” letter, along with your portrait photo...

Ah, the black-and-white portrait, photocopied and arranged on the dining-room table.

...on the back of which you wrote Gute Glück immer! with your name, Sandy.

“Good luck always”—in German. I would later make the connection that simply because this woman had included a phrase in German, he presumed an explanation—via a huge leap in logic—as to why she ended up marrying someone else. German equals Jewish equals no third or fourth date. In his mind, she had given him a version of the “It’s not you, it’s me” breakup line.

I was brokenhearted, of course, but I soon realized that your marriage to Gary L. Seaborne was the best thing for your long-term happiness. He gave you more affluence and security than I could possibly have given you at that time. I surmise that Gary was Jewish, and an established widower, with kids, and with property in both Mexico and California (but I’m just guessing).

And if she’s Jewish, he reasoned, he would disclose his own Jewishness in this letter as a point of common ground.

I’m also guessing that he was employed with Stanford, either as a teacher, or with SRI. Is Richard Lee Seaborne your son by Gary Seaborne? I assume that by now he is married, and the Internet tells me he lived at various places in Huntington Beach and Foster City. The Internet also tells me that you lived in various places in Foster City, and that you married Samuel Schulenburg in 1977. He is two years older than you; you were married in Santa Clara, and you just celebrated your 31st anniversary on July 3. Congratulations! I am happy that you are well established.

My dad had recently asked me if I knew how to find people “using the computer” because he wanted to reconnect with an old friend. I’d shuffled him off, lied and said I didn’t know how to search names, not because I thought he was up to anything sinister, but partly out of my own laziness and partly because I generally try to keep my interactions with my father as brief as possible—even the simplest interactions with him require a mental complexity on my part that feels like tremendous work. He’d evidently gotten someone to Google this woman’s name, though, probably my brother. Or my mother.

But here’s the deal: so far, this stuff about why she married this guy, the husband being Jewish and a widower with kids and where he works and them owning property in Mexico...it’s pure assumption on his part. With no evidence, he creates these fantasies (here, with Charlotte, with countless others) that account for:

a)    why he’s alone

b)    the possibility of his not being alone in the near future.

This happened because of that. Cause and effect. Direct correlation: I’m alone now, these forty years later, because you are Jewish. Ah, that explains it. (She’s not, Dad. She’s Catholic. But we don’t know that yet.)

And what about the word “embroiled” from the previous paragraph? Embroiled? Doesn’t this term, in the context of this letter, speak volumes? Might your current use of that word, Daddy dear, shed light on your perpetual loneliness? The state of your current life, your sudden but desperate need to reach out to this woman after all these years? What the hell?

The last time I saw you in person was an accidental encounter at the San Francisco Opera House, where I took my mother to share with me the opera Wozzeck. You sat with friends (or relatives) in the seat row just ahead of ours. I didn’t get much out of the opera, but I enjoyed seeing the back of your head during the 2-1/2 hours of the opera.

Stared at the back of her head? Aha! He was crazy then and he’s crazy now, I thought. Evidence of his insanity.

In 1974 I think I saw you driving a pickup truck with kids in the back of the truck while I was driving through the city of Cuernavaca, Mexico. I was with my Mexican fiancée. Was that you? All of these years I have wondered. We married in 1976.

I hope this woman’s husband isn’t a member of the NRA.

I met my dear Mexican wife, Marina (1941-2005),...

Again, the dates.

...through a correspondence club for meeting Latin women.

Marina: mail-order bride number two, after number one—a young, spicy-hot number named Gerramina—didn’t work out and fled back to Mexico after six months. He had been engaged to both women at the same time, via correspondence. He went to Mexico to meet them both in person for the first time, decided G was prettier than M—gorgeous, in fact—and called it off with M. G didn’t work out, but luckily for my dad, M was still game.

She was from the city of Irapuato, in Guanajuato. We were married 29 years before she died. We had a daughter, Liza, who died of cancer in 1999, just nine days before her 21st birthday. Her demise was devastating to me;...

Demise: one of his oft-used words. Classic. So him. What would I think if I were this woman? What if I were to receive a letter like this out of the blue?

...at that time I didn’t have faith in personal immortality, as I do now. Modern Null Physics supports the view that we humans are multidimensional, and that there is a dimension of us which is non-physical, and immortal.

Modern Null Physics. What a comforting thought regarding your dead daughter.

As I read, the phone rang again.

“Hello?” I answered.

Silence, then the faint sound of something ruffling against the receiver on the other end. Click. Charlotte again, no doubt.

“Who?” I said into the disconnected line. “Donald? No Donald here. You must have the wrong number. Uh-huh. You too.”