“Fabian is a weakling, a coward. He was a miserable, weepy child who shunned responsibilities, recoiled from physical exertion and took pleasure at fomenting intrigues that deepened the chasm separating me and his mother. Tears came easily to him, the way they do to an actor or a charlatan.”
That’s how Abraham described his son to me during a hastily convened secret meeting. Abraham had slipped a note in my pocket when no one looked.
“Please come to my room at noon. You must know what I know.”
Careful not to arouse suspicion, eager to know what Abraham knew, I left the communal lunch table on some pretext and made my way to my great-great-grandfather’s room.
“We don’t have much time,” he said. “I can’t keep this secret any longer. It’s consuming me, poisoning my days, haunting my nights. Please hear me out.
“Legends sprout new limbs with every retelling but lies never die. They grow stronger and more difficult to refute. Fabian mastered the art of pretense long before his mother passed away, and he exercised it with malicious skill well after I remarried. Truth be told, my first wife was a shrew, a coarse and irritable woman who punished me for much of our marriage because I didn’t match the grotesque blueprint of the perfect husband that existed only in her mind. I took it on the chin for as long as I could. I said nothing to kin or relations. I didn’t even confide in my rabbi. Only Fabian knew the inner turmoil that consumed me, only he heard the shouting matches, the ugly words, only he witnessed my sleepless nights, my moments of despair so profound, so devastating that I often contemplated suicide.”
Abraham paused, besieged by memories, overwhelmed by the weight of words rehearsed but never spoken.
“The boy was incapable of saying a kind word; he never put his arms around me. And he never saw the tears I shed when no one looked.”
“But you did engage in an extra-marital affair, didn’t you,” I ventured with staggering hypocrisy. “Surely that was bound to envenom your life.”
“Yes, I began to see another woman, young, vibrant, attentive, loving, and in her arms I recaptured my own waning youth and discovered that I possessed undiminished reserves of love that needed to be shared. When Fabian’s mother died, I married her. I was the happiest man on earth. All the years of conflict and turmoil dissolved in one magnificent, cathartic, rejuvenating burst of euphoria. Instead of sharing my joy, Fabian proceeded to spoil it for us from the start. He criticized her cooking, ridiculed her childlike exuberance, mocked her amorous nature and conspired to destroy our relationship.”
“He was jealous. He felt slighted. His mother had died and you now lavished your love and attention on another woman.”
“Fabian never really loved his mother. He resented her tyrannical governance and loathed me for cowering like a dog and surrendering to her aberrant whims. I will never forget when, enraged by something his mother had said, he lunged at her, grabbed her by the throat, lifted her off the floor and pinned her against the wall. I thought he was going to kill her. I just stood there, stunned, elation secretly coursing through my being.
“One day, when Fabian caught my new wife and me in a tender moment in the kitchen, he lounged at her, pulling her away from me and screaming, ‘You’re not my mother! Get away from my father.’”
“What about the attic? He told my father that he was forced to...”
“Repeated often enough, lies take on the appearance of truth. Fact is it was his choice. He could have slept in his own room, under the thick eiderdown we had bought him. But bedding down in the attic reinforced his self-inflicted sense of martyrdom. Besides, in winter, with the wood-burning stove on all night, the attic was the warmest part of the house. And in summer, with the bull’s-eye windows ajar, the attic was breezy and cool.”
“Fabian also alleged that he was being fed leftovers.”
“Nonsense. There was always a setting for him at the table but he refused to eat with us. When hunger finally tugged at his innards, he’d devour the odds and ends we had set aside.”
“Is it true you sent him away, miles from home?”
“I had no alternative. He was surly and combative. He made my new wife’s life miserable. So I apprenticed him to a friend of mine, a candle maker because he had no disposition for anything else. He was fired twice for laziness and insubordination, and I had to beg my friend to take him back. He grew up, a morose, pugnacious, unmotivated individual who blamed the world for his own shortcomings and sought refuge from imaginary affronts in confrontation or tearful lamentations.”
Abraham looked at me, his eyes ablaze, shaking his head as if to say, “Do you get the picture now?” Then he looked down at his feet, sadness turning to shame.
“The apple never falls far from the tree. Fabian’s own son, your grandfather, also a candle maker, did not amount to much. Seldom gainfully employed, he had no real trade. He kept a small candle-making business but he was too proud to work. He spent much of his time at the synagogue or immersed in his precious books -- the Torah, the Talmud, the Zohar -- or strolling up and down Main Street, deep in thought and attired in fine three-piece suits bought on credit and rarely paid for.
“So now you know. Not a word to anyone, you hear! Let the others believe what they wish. I’ll do without their sympathy as I have all these generations.”
I took Abraham’s wizened hand into my own and held it for a moment.
“You can count on me.”
I then put my arms around him. He wept.