by Neil Gordon
“So, Iz. You’re on a mission without permission, aren’t you?”
“Was permission required?”
“I hear you’re taking no prisoners. The little avenging angel, aren’t you?”
“Please don’t call me little. And how did you know? You spoke to Klara?”
“No, of course not. I spoke to Maggie. Maggie spoke to Molly. Molly spoke to Klara.”
My iPhone is on the desk.
“Can we get started?”
He is trying to look amused. But what he is about to do, there is no way to keep any ironic distance.
I own this motherfucker.
“Are you planning on interviewing Maggie again too?”
“I am. She said she’d take me down to the Sologne for a couple days when we’re done here.”
“Okay.” He swivels now in his chair and looks out the window, over the little garden. “Where shall I start?”
“Passover of 1996. Then ten years earlier. The time you and Klara walked out on the beach at Hammonasset.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I’m not.”
And so he does. And when he is done, several days later, Maggie and I go down to the Loire, and talk for several more days.
And when she is done, this is what I know.
Chapter Eleven
Maggie Calaway
Passover, 1996
New York City
1.
In April of 1996, a few months after my grandfather died, my Aunt Klara was recalled from Tel Aviv for a series of meetings by Deputy United States Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, her boss.
She flew Tel Aviv–Washington overnight on a diplomatic flight carrying three bureaucrats from the State Department, her first time ever on a jet this small. Partly because they were civil service and she the subordinate of a political appointee, the fellow passengers on the plane did not talk: it would have required careful attention to Separation of Powers at a time all wanted to rest. The entire flight was in darkness. She did not sleep.
In Washington, she had just time to check into the Mayflower, undress, shower, and dress again before she was due on Capitol Hill. Later in the trip she would meet with Clinton; today she was booked on a round of visits to the offices of Congresspersons on Ways and Means, meet-and-greets to prepare for Barshefsky’s up-and-coming push on a complicated offset deal. The deal was a lucrative exchange of Turkish steel and Israeli communications technology which, drawing on many American patents, required many permissions under the Export Control Act. In both Israeli and American industry circles it would be appreciated that the licensing of this deal would make possible, in the future, conversion to military applications. Thus the meeting my aunt would have with the President: the deal also required an executive order. This was not a part of her brief that pleased her and she was, during her days in Washington, somewhat more reserved than Barshefsky, whom she liked, had wished—so much so that in due course my aunt would leave Commerce for a professorship at Bar-Ilan University where she would later become dean. But Barshefsky didn’t understand what my aunt’s reserve was really about.
By six o’clock of that first day, notwithstanding either her exhaustion or the pressure she was under, my aunt was at the airport again, catching a plane to New York.
It was April 3, the first night of Passover, and she was going home.
The Delta shuttle climbed out of DC like a rollercoaster going up the initial hill, a short, even acceleration at fifty degrees off the vertical before leveling suddenly out into the evening sky.
Klara did not expect to be on time for the seder—she was never on time. She did not expect, either, to feel quite as awful as she felt, although she had expected to feel awful. This was her first trip home in ten years and she had not previously admitted to herself, quite as clearly as she did now, that she cared far less about that offset deal she did not support than about this trip to New York.
She had sat watching out the little window at the thickening evening and how, instead of the bland east coast sky, she was seeing herself, ten years earlier in 1986, standing on the chill edge of the Long Island sound, with my Uncle Danny, looking up at the sky.
2.
“Maggie, who’s missing?”
While Klara Singer was coming up from Washington, Maggie Calaway leant to peer into the oven held open by her mother-in-law, understanding the gravity of the question in terms of the timing of the oven’s contents.
“Just Klara, Ellie. Has she called?”
“Klara?” Eleanor Sinai was teasing the brisket with a fork, aged face tense with concentration. “Klara hasn’t been home in ten years, and she likely won’t even know she’s late.”
In the sudden, warm silence of the kitchen, Maggie touched her mother-in-law on the arm, though as to whom the gesture was meant to comfort, she was not sure. Jack Sinai had led and Eleanor cooked the family seder in this house for an astounding fifty years. This year, the first seder since Jack’s death, Eleanor had left the bulk of the cooking to her daughter-in-law. That was a judicious move: Maggie was held up to wives all through the clan, always with the standard line about the only shiksa in the family being the finest Jewish cook. It did wonders for her popularity, as did her exotic green eyes and red hair; as did the fact that besides cooking and raising children she earned very serious money as an associate at Frankfurt, Garbus, Klein, and Selz and ran a study group at the Council on Foreign Relations. The funny thing of course was that this food was little different than what she had learned in her mother’s kitchen in Wellesley, Massachusetts: brisket was pot roast, kreplach were dumplings. Now she stood from the stove, her face of freckles glistening from the heat.
“Ellie, I think we can leave the brisket fifteen minutes more. And I’m sure Klara will be here by then. Come upstairs now.”
“But what can be keeping her?” Eleanor spoke anxiously, helplessly, laboring up the stairs, as if her lifetime of domestic authority had at last, before this crisis, collapsed. “Is she coming straight from the airport?”
“Yes, but apparently not from abroad. From Washington.” Leaning close to speak into her mother-in-law’s ear, Maggie negotiated her way through the crowded living room, where the vast Singer–Sinai–Levit clan had all arrived save Klara, to an empty armchair. But Eleanor’s comment had been overheard, because when she rose Wendy Sobel—née Levit—drew her aside and spoke in a whisper.
“Maggalah, I hate to agree with your mother-in-law, but effing Klara’s spoiling the evening. The fact is, Freddy Singer’s managed to get drunk.”
“Has he?” Alone in the crowded room, the two women regarded each other, each calculating behind her eyes. “Christ, Wendy, who gave him a drink?”
Wendy nodded. “I think he got to my husband, that wimp. And right now, don’t look, but Freddy’s telling your cousin Diane—who, I assure you, is simply lapping it up—how his uncle Nat’s seder will be the first real seder this family’s seen in fifty years.”
“Good God, Wendy. Go tell him Danny’s doing the ceremony, not Nat. He’s been up all night getting it ready.”
The other woman laughed. “You think Freddy doesn’t know that? Now look, let’s make sure he sits between us. We’ll keep him busy.”
Maggie Calaway agreed, her eye still on her cousin, all sense of order fled. But there was no point in panicking now. She hurried back down to the dining room to change the place tags on the big table, set for twenty-five in china, silver, and linen. And when she was done, as if summoned by the dual worries of the brisket and of Freddy’s drunkenness, she crossed through the den, where the children’s tables were set, past my grandfather’s study and through the open door to the backyard where, sheltered from the light under the massive chestnut, she fumbled a cigarette out of the pack she kept under a piece of bluestone and, hands shaking, got it lit.
She’d started smoking again after Jeremy to help lose the weight—or so she told herself, because now Jeremy was six months. Taking hungry drags
, the cigarette burning too hot, she admitted to herself that all the weight that was going was already gone. The rest, which was there to stay, was not entirely unwelcome: full breasted now and round of hip where she’d once been slim as a boy. As for her face, green-eyed and pale-lipped, the gravity of age was welcome here too.
Through the living-room window she could see Freddy Singer, glass in hand, talking to someone. Calmer now, letting the ash cool on her cigarette while the first wave of nicotine washed waves of relief into her stomach, she told herself that drunk or sober, Freddy was not the problem. Klara was ruining the evening. Klara, who had not been home for the ten years since Maggie and Danny were married.
Maggie had heard about her at the family table: about her steady rise through Clinton’s Commerce Department. Jack and Eleanor had visited her every year in Jerusalem after Passover, and often met her in the fall in Madrid, where Jack went every year to a steadily dwindling meeting of the brigadistas. The last visit had been a year ago, just after my grandfather’s diagnosis, and even the Memorial, last Summer, had not brought Klara Singer home. Klara wouldn’t be coming even now, Wendy Sobel had said, if it weren’t for the fact that Eleanor had asked her to: this would be the first Passover in fifty years that Jack Sinai would not lead the seder, and Eleanor was not sure she could bear it alone. Nor, Maggie suspected, could Danny, especially since he had beat off Nat Sinai’s challenge to lead the seder tonight. Without Big Jack Sinai and his moral authority, only Danny stood against the steady Zionist tide of the family. Klara, prominent in Peace Now, and who counted Ilan Pappé and Amira Hass among her closest friends, would be, Maggie knew, an enormous boost to Daniel.
But she was taking too long, far too long. Maggie Calaway took a last, hot drag from her cigarette, resolving to tell Eleanor that it was time to start the dinner: Klara or no Klara. She hurried through the drizzle inside again, washed her hands at the kitchen sink, and climbed back into the noise of voices and laughter, from upstairs, then crossed again to her mother-in-law, still in her armchair.
“Ellie, you know it’s getting really very late.”
“Yes, Mag. But let’s let stomachs rumble just a little more.”
“Are you sure?” The girl’s green eyes were on her now.
“Darling, Jack waited ten years for Klara to come back to this table. There’s no point in starting without her now.”
And instantly, as Maggie watched her, Eleanor Sinai regretted what she had just said.
3.
The sort of thing old folk do, Eleanor told herself, angrily, stroking her daughter-in-law’s hair in apology. She got confused: confused in what she said to whom, confused among the children of Danny’s generation—sometimes, truth to tell, among Danny’s contemporaries too, although many of them were nephews and nieces. Who were these cheerful people who seemed all to make endless amounts of money and live somewhere in Brooklyn, or in the suburbs? Jack would have died sooner than leave Manhattan. As for money, why, he had never put a penny in the market in his entire life, not until Danny took over the finances. But then, he had also never been willing to fix a legal fee, had he, taking on defenses purely for their ethical or political bearings, and that they had lived in any ease at all was only because of the prosperous few clients who insisted on making up for the many who had no resources at all.
And there it was again. My grandmother brought her focus back to Maggie like a sleeper waking, or a swimmer surfacing from the depths. The equality that had come to exist between her internal and external realities: she could become, literally, lost in thought, even in the middle of this crowd. With effort, she picked up one of the young woman’s warm, strong hands, around her own with their papery dry skin, and made herself speak. “Maggalah, who is that man talking to Danny?”
The young woman looked over, her green eyes sharpening, her red hair flat against the round of her skull, like feathers. Not for the first time she saw her daughter-in-law as a sleek, rare animal; a prize Danny had brought back from the world. Imagine a woman like that interested in a Jewish man in the old days. Maybe a Greenwich Village bohemian, for a fling, or one of those rare WASP radicals drifting into the circles of the intellectual Left, in and then out again. Eleanor could not deny that in her daughter-in-law she also saw a trophy, a sign of the acceptance that Danny’s generation took for granted. She watched, thus, her daughter-in-law, herself watching the man they shared, son and husband, as he stood, holding his own son on an arm and his daughter by the hand, talking to a slim, handsome man of perhaps forty.
“Now, that would be Joshua Raskin. Marcus Levit’s daughter Miriam? Married Stephen Raskin, who was in the Reagan cabinet? Her eldest son.”
“Is that Miriam’s son? My God, I haven’t seen him since they used to come up to the Island for summers. And what does he do?”
“He’s in equities, somewhere. Or arbitrage. Goldman Sachs, I think.”
“I see.” The number of them on Wall Street, she could not understand it. Their actual professions were making money itself, nothing more, nothing less. But why did they do that? Her own children, at least, were not tarred with that brush, and that was only right: Danny and Klara and Jason—her eldest son, the one, as she put it, they had lost to the ’60s—both had sat in this living room as children with Lenny Boudin, with Annie Stein, with Izzy Stone. In a little flash—a kind of flash that had become almost as familiar as the reality around her—she saw Annie, an unfiltered cigarette in her mouth, a cloud of smoke around her head like the argument she listened to with the detached frown of her interior process, sifting the concepts she was listening to against the complex Marxist theory by which she tested everything. God, the young of the family were so much less vivid than her contemporaries, so much less . . . focused than her peers, so sharply drawn by the hard battle they had done, not just in Spain and Europe, Mississippi and Washington, but in courts, in hospitals, in businesses, and for nearly all of whom the comparative comfort of their old ages had been a byproduct, rather than the aim, of their professions.
Then, in another little hypnagogic flash, Eleanor saw her husband’s face as he sat at the head of the massive dining-room table, his gently sagging cheeks shaven clean, his black eyes sparkling as if showing, in anything he did, only a hint of his depths. To look at that face was to feel stronger. There were few such faces left, she thought. Perhaps there were none. But how did they, these young people, live without them? Was that why they needed so much money?
All these thoughts Eleanor Sinai thought as she watched her shiksa daughter-in law in profile, absently stroking her feathered head as if she were not human but animal, while around her conversation rose and fell in waves. And in other circumstances, she would have kept sitting, stroking Maggie’s hair, in the comfort of being solitary in the middle of family. Now, however, she had this child to attend to. And so she leaned over, putting her lips next to Maggie’s, and said, quietly: “Maggalah, my love, you get the brisket out then, okay? I’ll give you ten minutes, then I’ll tell Wendy to bring them all down to the table.”
4.
My uncle watched his wife rise and then turn for the stairs, at which his daughter Laura tugged free of his hand to follow. Stephen Raskin was regarding him with his black eyes, pitch black, they seemed, under black bangs and thick eyebrows. He was, Danny registered dimly, only becoming handsome now, in middle age. Danny was becoming somewhat less so, but he had been so much better looking to start with. Stephen knew that also, which was why he had already referred twice to the price of his house in Sag Harbor and the fishing boat he kept there. And yet Danny managed to nod attentively, smile agreeably.
At last Stephen moved on, and Daniel Sinai crossed the room to his mother, handing her his infant son and settling onto the stool next to the chair just vacated by Maggie. For a moment his mother was occupied with Jeremy, who fell nearly instantly asleep. Then she looked up to him.
“So, Danny-boy. Having a horrible time?”
He nodded and she smiled. He smiled, the
n, too, and said:
“Mom, I can’t stand the thought of Nat Singer sitting in Dad’s place.”
“I know.” And she did know, Daniel thought, watching his mother’s gaze abstract for a moment. In this entire room, only he and his mother knew that in 1941 Jack Sinai had asked Nat Singer, who worked on Henry Stimson’s staff, to intervene with the Dies Committee when they had denied Jack Sinai a US Army commission on the grounds of “Premature Antifascism.” Nat had refused, and so Jack Sinai, with command and combat experience from Spain, had been denied a place in the war against Hitler.
“And yet—” and now Eleanor Sinai’s focus was on her son again—“your father wouldn’t have minded. You know that, Danny-boy, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Danny answered as softly as she had spoken.
“Good.” Now her voice strengthened and she motioned for Wendy Sobel to come over. “Go on down to get the Haggadah then, darling. Wendy and I will get these people seated.”
Surprised. “Is Klara here?”
“No dear. But Maggalah’s brisket is going to be ruined if we don’t get started.”
Your father wouldn’t have minded. Downstairs, in the quiet of his father’s study, my uncle sat at the desk in front of the Haggadah and the notes for his seder on which he had worked for much of the night. And that was true too. The seder, for Jack, was—precisely—the one time politics was not personal: the one time each year when this entire family sat at his table, and liberal, conservative, or—the ultimate crime—neo-liberal, everyone was welcome. “Fundamentally, Dad,” Danny had liked to say to his father, “fundamentally, you’re a Shtetl Yid in a Brooks Brothers suit.” It had been a statement with which his father had, he suspected, secretly agreed. But he had said, only, “Family is compromise, Danny-boy. Harmony usually is.”