by Neil Gordon
“Tell me, Danny-boy. Where, in your Unified Goose Theory, does Maggie Calaway fit?”
And so he said nothing.
To say anything was to say it all.
Later that night, Klara left the graduation party without a word to her adoptive parents. It fell to Daniel to break the news that she was taking a Department of Commerce posting in Tel Aviv. This he did in his father’s ground-floor study, late that night after the party, and left his father to tell his mother. The news was not all bad: Danny himself was settling in New York with a job at Columbia Law School, tenure track. The other news he had for his father was about a classmate from law school whom he had been seeing for some time and whom he had decided to marry. Which, that winter, he did. It was a solitary ceremony, just the two of them, although why it needed be so, my Aunt Maggie never fully understood.
Until, that is, the Passover after my grandfather’s death, when Klara Singer flew Tel Aviv–Washington, and then, again, up to New York.
9.
Long ago they had agreed they would not fight until the children were in bed. Now Laura was in her lap, chatting excitedly, her head swiveling this way and that to watch the blocks passing, the cab as if floating up Eighth Avenue, the lights of the buildings, the buds on trees.
At home, Maggie helped her daughter into her nightdress while she chattered, overtired, excited, about Granny, cousins, dinner, the day off school, and why again could they not eat bread, Momma? Maggie answered her quietly, slowing her with the tone of her voice, easing her despite herself under the covers, dimming the light and lying by her, feeling the warmth of the child’s rich experience of family ride hard against the horrible coldness of its reality. As Laura’s breath slowed into sleep, the need to smoke came to her with force. She saw herself earlier that evening, sheltering under the chestnut while, inside, the party went on. Like the line from the Dylan song that Jack had liked to sing. And all this time she had thought it was Klara who had been left out in the rain, herself who was on dry land. It was, it was revealed to her now, a cruel arrangement with which she had lived, unquestioning, for years.
He had put Jeremy down and was waiting by the bedroom window when she came in, standing, watching out at the heave and fall of the water in the river, the high light of the moon. She lay on the bed and lit a cigarette, an unheard-of indoor activity, and only after a long time, still looking out the window, did he begin to speak.
“Her father was my dad’s first cousin. Her adoptive father, I mean. Israel Singer. He’d been at Bergen-Belsen. Klara was adopted from the Jewish agency in Israel, an orphan. Both her birth parents were Israeli, yalids, killed by an ambush at their kibbutz. Israel’s wife, Monique Singer, was French and had been sterilized at Treblinka. She died in a market bombing in Haifa in ’69. So Israel brought Klara to the States. My mother says he came here to deliver Klara. The evening of his arrival he drowned himself in Menemsha Bay while we were all having ice cream at the Bite. That was spring, 1969. Klara stayed with us.”
“You were lovers.”
“Never. Never in high school, never in college. We were so tied, like siblings. It was impossible.”
“That’s not true.”
He understood her, and answered readily. “It is true. We became lovers in grad school.”
“After you met me?”
“After I met you.”
“When?”
“The last year. In spring. The spring before we got married. For a month.”
A long silence while Maggie cried. When she could, she said: “Why didn’t you marry her.”
“Maggie. Because I married you.”
“That’s not right.” Speaking through her tears, there was a logic as clear as the brilliant moonlight in what she said. “You didn’t leave her for me. Marrying me had nothing to do with it.”
Could she see him? Unable to answer, he nodded, and as if she had seen, she said: “You never told me you were lovers, and you’ve never told my why you left her. Is that not true? Is that not true?”
More surprised than scared. He had not ever expected to tell anyone this. He had never expected that anyone would have the right to ask.
“Yes.”
“Jack and Ellie wanted you to marry.” She said the words with a flinty tone, a bitterness that betrayed the depth of her loss, not just of him, but of his parents, whom she loved.
“Maggie. It was spring, 1969 when Klara came. May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January. March was the townhouse bombing. My brother disappeared then.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“It has everything to do with it. My parents had lost everything when my brother went. It wasn’t just him. It was everything they had ever believed in. It was a whole way of life. Klary and me? We were supposed to hold it all together. We were supposed to get married and be the next generation of righteous Sinais.”
My aunt Maggie thought about that for a long time, smoking in the shadow of the bed. When she spoke, it was, at last, a bit more quietly.
“Then why? Why didn’t you?”
My uncle turned his face suddenly out the window, into the vista of silver light and absolute shadow and answered, now, without hesitation, as though he had known the answer for years. It was an honest answer, which in some ways makes it all the more tragic that it was, I am convinced, wrong.
“Because we lived an idyll. Do you understand? It was given to us to live an idyll.”
It was not what she had expected, and her voice rose again. “What does that mean, Danny?”
But he went on as if she had not said a word. “Summers at the Vineyard, the school year at Elizabeth Irwin, our lives with my parents. We were surrounded by heroes, by people who were right. The sit-ins they took us to, the vigils—the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement. We were at home the way no one is anymore. But it wasn’t life. We didn’t know it. Maybe they didn’t. It was an idyll. The world didn’t work the way they thought. There was nowhere to go from there. Jason put an end to it. Running, hiding, sending messages of hate from a dirty, criminal dimension. Those cruel communiqués from the underground? They weren’t about politics, they were about parents. They made a mockery of my father’s life, everything he did. Everything was ruined after them. Then he became an accessory to murder. It was a dying world, and Jason killed it.”
“That’s not true. You had a beautiful childhood. You and Klara have happy memories.”
“I know we do.” He spoke as if soothing a child. “But it turns out that having shared happiness doesn’t only bind people together. It drives them apart, too. It turns out that, to live with shared happiness after it’s lost, it’s better to do it apart.”
Perhaps he did not understand what he had just said. Maggie Calaway, however, did, and she answered without the slightest pause.
“God damn you.”
She stopped then for crying too hard, in the darkness, the tip of her cigarette lighting her wet face between sobs. For a long time they were like that, he at the window, she at the bed so long that her cigarette went out and gradually, her crying quieted, and perhaps she slept. He saw her as he had seen her those ten years past, her small freckled body, the light behind the green of her eyes, an aqueous green, like seawater under midday light. But my uncle stayed at the window.
Somewhere, some other family was in its flowering, perhaps in Ireland, or Iraq, all the while his dissolved like wood in water, crumbling with age, battered with tide. The little children at the seder tonight would no more remember their heroic grandfather and his heroic times than he himself remembered the Yeshiva bochers and shtetl storekeepers who had given their genes to him, and as for the principles of his life, never mind those of his father’s, they already meant nothing. It would even be forgotten, what he had done to Klara, ten years before. As if holographically inhabiting the fall of the spring half moon outside the window, a vision came to my uncle of his daughter as she would one day be, a high-cheeked, shocki
ngly pretty young woman. With real longing felt himself drawn into the thin moonlight falling over the Hudson. Then, as though there were an actual risk, he felt himself step back. There were the children, you see, and the vacuous hope that they would one day be happier than he. And then there was Maggie Calaway, whom he had married without loving, and to whom he had now to try to make amends.
Chapter Twelve
Isabel Montgomery
August 16, 2011
Monterey, California
1.
Look at me.
I’m as helpless as a kitten in a tree.
First Cuntmuscle and my trip to New York; then my exciting days being a girl reporter and, incidentally, going to jail; then I get to be in New York and the Island with Maggalah and Los Angeles with Molly and in between in Paris, Tel Aviv, all great fun, and really, when you think of it, the only actual thing I have had to do, the only actual act of commission, is to pack my bag and catch a plane, a move at which I excel, have long excelled, have done so many many times in my life to and from many many places, with and without many many people, and when I get where all I have to do is ply my trade—research, interview, interview, write: I could do it on an Etch A Sketch if I had to—and now, as I finish writing the piece of prose you just read about my uncle and my aunts, guess what?, oh guess what?
Yep, you got it: Trident calls up having finally—six weeks late—read my script—and mind you, they are paying six hundred dollars a night for my suite at the Viceroy—true, they think I’m in it, waiting for them, which is after all an actual job description in Los Angeles, “Writer wanted. Salary: six figures with huge benefits. Primary responsibility: waiting for producer. Qualifications: willingness to feel worthless”—and how do they feel about the script? It’s beautiful, it’s fantastic, we have Brit Marling’s office waiting for it, and Dana Forrester wants to cast, and this is going to be a big deal, a really really big deal, only could you take on a little rewrite, just a few notes, yes the script’s at the Viceroy now, oh no hurry, would a week be enough?
Tell me, would you wander through this wonderland alone?
Well, let us not exaggerate the coincidence. The call actually came more like a week ago, maybe two, while I was in Paris writing the chapter you just read and I left it on my iPhone—the message, I mean – till I had found my way through Passover of 1996 and then a day or two more while I slept off my last forty-eight hours of writing which was fueled by some very rough, very effective methamphetamine, all I could actually score in Paris where I have fewer connections in the gutter and rather more in the drawing room or, to be precise, the runway, as Momma likes to buy couture. And now, when my bags are packed and I’m ready to go, saying goodbye to my Uncle Danny in his office, I can hear in the timbre of his voice, in the tiny hesitations in his syntax, the depth of the pain with which he lives and which I now know all about, all about. Now. It is not just the speed, the work, the travel, the drinking, the drugs. It is that I am a tuning fork. I am the tuning fork of the Sinai family. You know it by now as well as I: they’re the disease; I’m the symptom. I tremble at every minor note in the orchestra of their sadness, the Sinais. I tremble and never, ever will I be able to communicate it, and like Danny, it is going to die with me.
Note to self: never have a family. Because if you don’t, then you don’t have to leave them with the legacy of your suffering. Note to self: try to die unremembered. But that’s not how it works, is it? Because you may never have a family, but you still likely come from one. And your family may last a great long time. It just ain’t your choice. Continuity, belonging, it gathers in little pools on terrain formed by glacial movements of history. Once a shrink—one I was nailing, not seeing—told me that neurosis can be inherited over seven generations. I was fucking floored. You have a transient moment of nausea in a diner in New York when some fuck raises his voice at his daughter at a table nearby, then it passes and you lose your appetite. A century earlier your great-great-grandmother, a child in the mud of a shtetl, gets yelled at during breakfast by a Cossack passing on a horse, and you are fucking programmed to see pogroms everywhere.
And so on and so on. What do I know?
Just look at me.
I’m as helpless as a kitten in a tree.
But I get ahead of myself, all for the benefit of rhyme.
And we are supposed to be free?
You tell me: what the fuck is free?
Listen. Listen! You cannot be free if you are not happy, and happiness itself is a function of historical accident. Whether your life is one given to pain or happiness has nothing to do with you. If my little trip into the sad life of my family tells me nothing else, ever, surely it has told me that?
But aren’t you just the little philosopher? Let’s get our asses back to Paris, rue d’Ulm, and Uncle Danny, a little embarrassed—how about that little rhyme: embarrass in Paris? Come on, that’s good—he doesn’t know what I know, but he knows what I’ve been asking—the lighted window framing his face, says:
“Well, doll. I hope you’re finding what you’re looking for.”
I think: Doll.
I say: “Thank you, Danny.”
But Danny’s my father’s brother, isn’t he?
He says: “By the way, what the fuck are you looking for?”
And I, I am my father’s daughter. I smile appreciation. “Ah good point.”
Outside the open window, over the little garden next to the rue d’Ulm. It is August, and already there is an autumnal hint to the light, though the air itself is still warm and tourists are still sweating on the street. And suddenly I don’t feel like lying to my uncle.
Perhaps it is because I know now that he, too, knows how elusive is the moral high ground.
Perhaps because this latter quality, shame, which we share, is not a very common awareness in his family, which tends more, in its response to its own faults, toward righteousness.
And so I tell him. About Sinai. Dying and shit.
When I finish, there is a long silence, he watching me with a stunned expression, the noise from the street filling the office.
Finally, he says, “How long have you known.”
I respond a bit curtly. “A while.”
But here’s the difference between me and Danny. I understand myself to be going through an experience with which he is familiar. After all he was hardly ten years older than me when Jack Sinai died. He, however, doesn’t even dream the connection, and why? Because he’s an idiot. Though, of course, I’m the tuning fork, not him. Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference, because not knowing what they’re talking about is never any reason for anyone to stop.
You can’t stop anyone.
They just talk their asses off.
Soulful expression on Danny’s face.
“I don’t know your father very well, you know. He was gone for so much of my life. Then . . . then, somehow, he was always there between me and. . .”
I’m holding my breath here, and thinking, Please, please, say he was always there between me and Klara and now is between me and Maggie, but when he finishes he says:
“My father.”
Idiot, I’m yelling in my head. They let you in front of a classroom? They let you have kids? Get a fucking shrink. But I say, “I understand.”
There is another long silence, this time filled by a police siren passing by with that European whine dropping in pitch with the Doppler effect.
“You know, Iz, after . . . your father passes. You always have a home with us. Always.”
And what a home, I’m thinking. It’s like offering a hundred bucks and a pipe to a crack ho.
But what I say is: “Thank you, Danny. I better get my plane.”
Los Angeles. A September afternoon. The job, of course, is a total rewrite, a month’s work easy, and it takes me a couple-three days even to open the envelope containing the script.
Even here, a chill light hangs over the Pacific, a slight sterility of sun and wind and ocean void that
lets you know that the summer is on the wane.
Standing at the window, I make a serious mistake, which is, I follow my thoughts into my iPhone library of Sinai’s songs and play Luciana Souza’s version of Leonard Cohen:
And here is the dawn
Until death do us part
And here is your death
In your daughter’s heart
The next six days are very harsh. I spend them in a hotel in Malibu, the first three with a bottle of bourbon and an eight ball.
I’m not going to tell you about those days. Fuck you. This isn’t a book about me. It’s about the Sinais and I am not one of the tribe. I am not one of the tribe.
The next three, I spend straightening out.
When I am good, again, or what passes for same, I go back to the Viceroy—I have not let go of my suite, which costs more per night than a week’s salary for the average Los Angeleno south of El Pico—and I begin a five-week marathon working on Cuntmuscle: the Movie. The notes I get from the studio I entirely ignore, instead writing the thing from the ground up but, this time, good as opposed to bad.
I work this one in a very different way. For one thing, I have a huge corkboard delivered to the room and start using Final Draft to produce index cards. For another, I work twelve to fourteen hours a day and in order to do so without my many little chemical friends I go to the gym daily and nightly. And finally, I am relentlessly—and successfully—on the prowl. This last activity is efficiently enhanced when I am introduced to a women’s screenwriting group, which, in turn, introduces me through a girl called Teora to a whole circle of lesbians. That helps a great deal.