CHAPTER 26

My mother and I had our squabbles, but spending short periods of time with her during the winter of my father’s illness was mostly therapeutic. It was liberating to get away from Brenda, and my mother’s place on Charles Street was so clean and free of clutter I felt a kind of lightness there, the way I felt in hotel rooms. Her apartment was so unlike the house on Cedar Drive where even the dust accumulated meaning. I’d look under the bed and swear those were the same dust balls I saw in 1959 when my mother lifted the hem of the quilt to show Susan that our missing grandfather wasn’t hiding there. “See? Nothing!” my mother said, calming Susan’s fears. In her uncluttered apartment, we could look back more objectively. Not much, but a little more.

“It was my fault,” my mother said with a faraway look in her eyes. “What we started in Ireland.”

I encouraged her to talk about herself. I wanted to know her, but I was searching for myself between the lines. “Did you come home a changed woman?” I asked. “That’s what you wanted, right?”

“Did it change me? I suppose, in a way.”

I thought it was sad how Susan and I lost our accents in a matter of months, carelessly discarding the Irish inflection like a sweater on a hot day. No one thought to record our voices.

“Your father and I were closer when we got back,” my mother said. “We’d been through a lot together. We had experiences no one else had. So things were better, at least for a while.”

I remembered family coziness when we returned—unexpected after the Caitlyn drama. Laughter, joking all the time, half the jokes in Yiddish, summer thunderstorms, rain pattering on the gravel roof, winters sledding down the backyard hill, even my mother occasionally belly-whomping on our Flexible Flyer. Dinner at 6 o’clock on the dot, my father was adamant. I liked the forced togetherness of those dinners at home in America—at least when I was little, not so much when I was older—but in elementary school the feeling I got with the four of us squeezed around the kitchen table in the yellow light was better than sleep or food or a movie.

The room was so small we didn’t have to stand up to get pickles or ice. My father tipped his chair back and swung the refrigerator door open from his seat. He had a sweet tooth so we drank orange soda or grape soda or Coke. If there was none, he put pineapple jelly in a glass of seltzer. “This is the way we made soda at the Home,” he said, and stirred up the mixture, furiously beating the spoon against the glass. After a few seconds the jelly settled at the bottom in a glob.

We told stories and whenever one of us tried to locate an event from the past, we asked the others was it “before Ireland or after Ireland?” I thought we would always divide time that way, but the “after” part kept growing and the “before” part stayed the same, until Ireland was no longer a useful marker.

But stirring the jelly soda around the table we were still tethered to that time and to each other and my father stirred and stirred but he couldn’t get the jelly to dissolve. He drank it anyway. “Delicious,” he said. My mother took a sip. “Delicious.” “You making fun of me?” he said.

They shared a private smile, and she stretched out of her chair to get her cigarettes on the counter. She wore a tight sweater and a slim wool skirt with two kick pleats in the back. My father put his hand on her rear end. “She’s making fun of me,” he said. She seemed to like his hand there, pushing back into his palm rather than moving away from him. “Not me. I’m not doing anything,” she said. She finally turned her body out of his grasp, settled into her chair, lit a cigarette, and inhaled.

“Kid. You,” my father said, pointing at Susan. “You ever go to bed hungry?”

My mother lifted her chin and blew smoke at the yellow walls.

Susan smiled at him adoringly. “No, Daddy.”

“No is right. I didn’t have a daddy to bring me bubblegum. Steak, shrimp these kids eat.”

“Tell us the rest of the Shmecky story,” Susan said. “Tell us. We’re old enough.”

“Shmuel was his real name, though. Shmecky was a nickname. . . .”

“We know! We know!”

“All right, I’ll tell you the rest of the story. You listening to your daddy? So Shmuel, or Shmecky if you want, waits for his mama every Sunday rain or shine. And she never comes, right? Until one day she does come. She shows up at the H—the H was short for the Home.”

“We know!”

“You know? OK, so Shmecky’s mother shows up at the H and she takes him back to Brooklyn with her. Nice story, right? But that isn’t the end of it. Two weeks go by, and then, lo and behold, who’s back at the Hebrew National Orphan Home but Shmuel Hefter. ‘What’s the matter, Shmecky?’ we said. ‘What’re you doing back in this shithole?’ Which it wasn’t, by the way. But that’s how we talked. And Shmecky says, ‘I forgot my Yiddish while I was at the H. And my mama doesn’t speak English.’ Poor Shmecky, for two weeks he and his mother sat across the kitchen table in Flatbush with nothing to say. He managed, though, with the few Yiddish words he remembered, to beg her to take him back to the orphanage. And so she did.”

“That’s sad,” Susan said.

“Sad? Yeah,” my father said. “But you know what? He survived. Kids get over all kinds of shit. Look at me, for instance.”

My mother laughed on cue and I glanced up. White dotted lines were darting past the window above the sink. “Look!” I said. “It’s snowing!”

My father shouted like a little kid. “It’s snowing! It’s snowing!”

We both jumped up and got our coats and clambered into the carport, Susan and my mother close behind. The four of us stood at the top of the driveway, an entirely white Cedar Drive spread before us. “It’s a veritable winter wonderland,” he said. We all laughed. He said it every time it snowed, clapping his hands together in delight, a sound that echoed in the cold. We listened to the shush of tires over on Patterson Avenue and after that nothing but the kind of quiet you feel after someone has read a poem.

“It was my fault. But he wasn’t blameless,” my mother said. “Your father wanted his freedom, too. He was confused, though. He was jealous of my affairs, and complained because I wasn’t jealous enough of his! I quoted his precious Sartre—’jealousy, like all passions, is an enemy of freedom.’ But he saw it as proof I didn’t love him. He couldn’t deny, though, that I knew him better than anyone. I knew him and accepted him as he was. How’s that for true love? Of course, with him it was never enough. And then the sixties exploded and he went wild.”

He grew a mustache and bushy ringlets. This isn’t my era, my mother conceded, and continued to get her hair teased and sprayed at the beauty parlor. She had done it all before, the rallies and protests and passionate intensity, and what had it got her? My father was surrounded by students, infected by their youth. It went to his head. He wanted to be one of them. I took her place, marching at his side to end the war in Vietnam.

For my fourteenth birthday, my parents gave me “The Sixties Songbook for Keyboard,” and our friend Johnny Dolan gave me a purple bikini. I learned “Golden Slumbers.” My father stood behind me at the piano while I played and we sang together: Once there was a way to get back homeward. My voice was high and thin. Once there was a way to get back home. His voice was so deep the walls trembled.