Devotion

by Dani Shapiro

  Fight or flight.

  “Yours are out of whack,” he said. “I can feel an inflammation.”

  No kidding.

  “My chain ganglia,” I repeated. From the depths of my euphoric state, I loved the sound of it: a gang, a chain gang gone crazy.

  “It’s hereditary,” said the osteopath.

  I thought about my father—the way he would sometimes be overcome by a sudden and inexplicable terror. His eyes would sharpen, and he would press two fingers against his carotid artery, checking his pulse. He carried with him a constant awareness of his own fragility. I had never understood how this fear coexisted alongside his faith. If he believed the religious doctrine by which he lived, wouldn’t that have offered solace and protection? And with my soul, my body too, God is with me, I shall not fear. But here was a possible theory: my father’s head and heart were in one place, but his chain ganglia were in another. Faith and fear—spirit and biochemistry in a constant tug-of-war.

  And what about Jacob? He jumped at loud noises, covering his ears. He avoided scary movies, and had never been on a roller coaster. He wouldn’t try any new food—not even if I bribed him. I hoped he had inherited Michael’s cool, calm, collected genes—but I wouldn’t bet on it.

  “These nerves send your brain a signal that there’s a tiger in the room,” the doctor said. “Your neurons fire—your heart rate accelerates, your blood vessels constrict. Your whole body goes into survival mode. You think you’re under attack, even when there’s nothing there at all.”

  21.

  After a few days—after the thin layer of ash blew away and the air no longer stung our eyes or burned our throats—I took Jacob out in his stroller. I wheeled him down the streets of Brooklyn along our usual route: across the wide, busy expanse of Flatbush and then down shady side streets lined with elegant brownstones to Seventh Avenue, the main commercial strip in Park Slope. We passed the Korean deli, the pizza place, the hardware store. The usual neighborhood types were out: an older man in a windbreaker scooped up his terrier’s poop with a plastic baggie; a girl in a tank top drifted by, carrying a rolled-up yoga mat; a group of high school boys in falling-down pants congregated at the corner.

  It seemed like a normal Park Slope morning, as long as you didn’t look too closely. People were sitting on benches outside Ozzie’s coffee shop, drinking their iced decaf lattes. Yoga classes had resumed. Strollers and dogs once again clogged the sidewalk. Shops were open, their signs—25% off all silver jewelry! Brand-new shipment of Italian rustic table settings!—like a relic of a sweet and innocent past life. But the faces of passersby told a different story: raw, dazed, going through the motions. We had been stripped down, as if a layer of skin had been removed. People met one another’s eyes, nodded slightly. A recognition—Michael told me this happens in war zones—of a shared intimacy. We had been through something together, even if we never exchanged a word.

  I didn’t have any particular destination in mind as I wheeled Jacob along. I wanted to be outside, to be around other people. Maybe to stop and get a frozen yogurt.

  “And how are you, my little boo?” I asked Jacob, keeping up a constant one-way banter. “Everything all right down there?”

  I saw the sign—Warren Lewis Realty—and stopped. I had walked past this real estate office dozens of times, had examined the pictures in its windows with Michael.

  4 story single family Victorian. Mint, mint, mint!

  North Slope 3 story. Needs TLC.

  Michael and I kept an eye on brownstone prices. We had bought our house in Brooklyn at a good time, and had been enjoying watching the theoretical value of our house go up and up. For a couple of writers, it was as close as we had ever come to a windfall.

  “We’re going in here for a minute, okay?”

  I wheeled Jacob through the doors of the office. Seated at a desk near the window, behind a computer monitor, was a man I recognized as one of the owners of the company. He looked up when I entered.

  “Do you have time to talk?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “Let’s go sit outside.”

  He stood, then ushered me into the back. We passed rows of desks, most of them empty. A set of French doors led to a small, well-tended garden. I sat in a wrought-iron chair across a table from him.

  “I think…,” I began. Took a deep breath and started again. “I think I might want to sell my house.”

  I hadn’t planned on this—hadn’t discussed it with Michael, even. Over the last few years, we had talked about living elsewhere. Seattle, Los Angeles, Marin County, Sag Harbor were a few places that had come up. But we had never been particularly serious. Just trying on different ways of living because…well, because we could. Jacob hadn’t started school yet. Our family life hadn’t taken root in one particular place, the way it would over the next few years. And we could do our work from anywhere—so why not?

  But this was very different. I wanted out, I suddenly realized. And I wanted out now. I didn’t want to move toward something as much as I wanted to move away from it. My awareness of this was immediate and stunning in its clarity.

  “Let me give you one piece of advice,” the real estate broker said. “You’re the sixth person to walk in here today. Put your house on the market immediately. There’s going to be a line behind you.”

  Birds chirped in the garden. In the distance, a siren. The metallic hiss of a city bus pulling into its stop. Urban sounds—as familiar to me as the cicadas and sprinkler systems of my own suburban childhood.

  I looked down at Jacob, who had fallen asleep in his stroller. He was okay now. I had to remind myself of that every single day. He was healthy, seizure-free. Untouched by an illness that—like an enormous, nearly extinct bird—had soared across the landscape of our lives, casting its shadow over us before moving on.

  “Let’s do the paperwork,” I said.

  Tears rolled down the broker’s cheeks. He made no attempt to wipe them away. He reached across the table—this stranger—and held my hand.

  22.

  My father’s mother lived on the twenty-seventh floor of a huge prewar building on the corner of Seventy-second and Central Park West. The building—called the Majestic—was directly across from an entrance to the park. From high up in the tower, cyclists, roller skaters, dog walkers looked like colorful darting specks. The walking paths were dark gray ribbons, winding through swaths of green. The skyline of Fifth Avenue rose in the distance. But my grandmother wasn’t able to see any of this. She had been bedridden, fading in and out of consciousness, for most of my childhood, since suffering a massive stroke at my grandfather’s funeral.

  My grandmother was cared for in her apartment by two nurse’s aides who were with her all the time. Not a seat cushion was out of place in the formal living room. Ashtrays gleamed on coffee tables; inlaid marble floors were polished to a high gloss; crystal decanters sparkled in the bar, as if the whole apartment was prepared to wake up from a long and deep slumber. A portrait of my grandfather in a gilded frame hung above the fireplace mantel. Bald and imposing in a gray three-piece suit, he gazed sternly through his pince-nez, a green leather-bound volume of some sort held loosely in his hand. A Bible? Or perhaps a prop supplied by the artist to imply intellect—or piety.

  Although visiting my grandmother used to frighten and unnerve me, still I looked forward to Sunday-morning drives into the city with my father when he went to see her. The city was my father’s hometown. He had grown up there, and still retained traces of a New York accent. On our Sundays in New York he parked the car in a garage near his mother’s apartment, and together we walked along the streets of the Upper West Side. Often, we stopped at Fine & Schapiro, a delicatessen on Seventy-second Street, where my father ordered his usual meal for us to share: turkey, tongue, coleslaw, and Russian dressing on rye, and a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda. To this day, I can taste the sharp, carbonated celery, feel the sheer size of that sandwich as I tried to get my mouth around it to take a bite. I didn’t
understand that tongue was actually tongue.

  A few blocks south of my grandmother’s apartment, on a stretch of Broadway above Lincoln Center, stood an Orthodox shul that my grandfather had helped to create. When we passed that modern white building—as I did for many years into adulthood—I looked for my grandfather’s name on the sign out front. The Joseph Shapiro Institute. I was proud to be a grandchild of this man I had never known, who had died when I was an infant. I treasured the single existing photograph of the two of us together: in the backyard of our house in Hillside, he sat on a chaise longue in his yarmulke and short-sleeved shirt, cradling me in his arms. As I grew up, I imagined he was watching me from a perch high up in the sky. He was that godlike to me. Being Joseph Shapiro’s grandchild—the youngest of ten grandchildren—made me feel protected and special. It seemed we were enveloped in some kind of grace.

  Years after I had fled the city that I loved—moving with my family to a part of Connecticut my grandparents would never have heard of—I was in town for a speaking engagement. A book club of employees at HBO had asked me to come talk to them during their lunch hour. That day, I was very much living in my mother’s New York: I had stopped at Bergdorf Goodman to replace a lipstick. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but when I wanted to feel close to my father, I did something Jewish. And when I wanted to feel close to my mother, I went shopping.

  I walked out of the store on West Fifty-eighth Street and hailed a taxi. I gave the driver HBO’s midtown address, then rummaged through my bag for my cell phone.

  “You’re lucky, you know—Fifth Avenue just opened up again. Traffic’s been terrible.”

  Something about the voice: I felt it in my body before I registered anything else about it. The hard landing on the k. The soft, almost nonexistent d. A very specific accent—equal parts New York, New Jersey, and yeshiva. It was as if a piece of me had come loose. My eyes shot over to the identification card attached to the cloudy plastic partition. Then to the quadrant of the rearview mirror where his forehead was visible.

  “David?” I asked.

  “That’s me.”

  “It’s your cousin Dani here.”

  He tilted the mirror and looked at me. It had been nearly twenty years since we had last been together at his father’s—my uncle Harvey’s—funeral. Our fathers were buried next to each other in the Shapiro family plot in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The brothers hadn’t gotten along, but in death they were together for eternity.

  “It’s you, all right,” David confirmed. His tone was oddly flat. We hadn’t known each other particularly well as children. A series of family rifts had kept the cousins apart.

  The taxi stopped at a red light.

  “Let me come up front,” I said, reaching for the door handle.

  “No, no—you stay back there.”

  David was a middle-aged man now. He was also overweight, and looked tired. He had deep purplish circles under his eyes. I searched for traces of the handsome boy I remembered.

  “Do you remember the name of our great-great-grandfather?” David asked after a minute. “I’ve been working on a family tree.” He went on to explain that his oldest son was about to be bar mitzvahed.

  I tried to remember—but I couldn’t go beyond the names carved into the tombstones in the family plot.

  “His name might be in that film—you know, that film about Poland, when Grampy—”

  I hadn’t thought of the film—a documentary called Image Before My Eyes—in years. It was a history of Jewish shtetl life in Poland before the Holocaust that included some family footage. In the 1930s our grandfather had made a pilgrimage to his ancestral shtetl, bringing with him one of the early home motion-picture cameras. As a college freshman, I had gone to see the film when it opened in New York. I sat in the darkness of the theater, watching a grainy black-and-white scene of my grandfather and great-grandfather saying the Mourner’s Kaddish at the foot of our great-great-grandfather’s grave in a Polish village that surely no longer existed.

  “I think I have a copy at home,” I said. “Give me your address and I’ll send it to you.”

  We lapsed into silence. Small talk seemed out of the question. Our common ground was an empty landscape, littered with misunderstanding and loss that had nothing to do with either of us. As we inched downtown on Fifth Avenue, I thought about that tower high above Central Park. I could hear the sound my shoes made on the marble floors. I could smell the leather desk blotter in my grandfather’s study. I thought about my grandfather—buried along with his two sons in the Brooklyn cemetery—and wondered what he would make of his ten grandchildren, who had scattered far and wide, creating their own tribes like the children of Genesis. Some of us had prospered, and some were struggling. Among us were a commercial builder, an acupuncturist, a taxi driver, a computer programmer, an Orthodox rabbi, a businessman, a psychoanalyst, two housewives, and a novelist. My grandfather’s patriarchal spell did not extend itself into my generation. There was nothing keeping us together. Had it been inevitable that we lose track of one another? That our children would be strangers?

  We pulled up in front of HBO. David carefully wrote his name and address on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. I reached for my wallet. I didn’t know what to do. What was the etiquette here?

  “Put that away.” David waved his hand. I noticed a thick gold wedding ring, and hoped that he was happy. “Please—it’s on me.”

  I climbed out of the taxi and walked around to the driver’s side window. Then he rolled it down. I leaned in to give my cousin a kiss. I wondered if we would ever see each other again.

  23.

  I have become intimate with a stand of trees in our front meadow. Grouped together near a crumbling stone wall, they are old and stately. On a sturdy branch of a maple extending out toward the driveway, Jacob’s rope swing hangs, swaying in the slightest breeze. Halfway through my yoga practice, after the sun salutations and twists and inversions and side angles, I look out my bedroom window as I do a variation of tree pose. Fix your gaze, yoga teachers say. Soften your eyes. These two instructions seem contradictory. How to fix a gaze softly? How to hold steady and also let go? Standing on one leg, the other foot pressed into my upper thigh, I reach my arms over my head and then—then, I bend. I lean to the side, and allow my head to be dead weight. I forget about the idea of balance. I forget that there is a self who is balancing. I have learned that this is only way that balance is possible. The minute I start thinking about it—Oh, look at me! Look how far I’m bending today—I will fall.

  All the while, I keep my eyes on the trees. My fixed gaze softens. The stone wall, the sky, the sweep of meadow, go slightly out of focus. This is how I most vividly see the seasons change: in winter, the branches are stark, like charcoal slashes against the gray-white sky; in spring, the reddish cast before the buds appear; in fall, the distracting riot of color; in summer, the lush, verdant thicket. No matter what the season, the trees are bending. They are indifferent to the people who come and go. They were here long before we arrived with our SUVs, our bicycles and rope swings. Their branches are gnarled, knotted, twisted, but still reaching out.

  24.

  The house in the country was on top of a hill that we would later discover old-timers referred to as Lightning Ridge. A classic New England saltbox painted a weather-beaten gray, it looked out over miles of rolling hills. Stone walls curved along its ten acres of woods and meadow. It was October; the property was aflame. Orange, red, yellow—it seemed that every leaf had turned color but hadn’t yet fallen. Halfway down the hill, vines and bramble partially covered what must once have been a tennis court.

  It was perhaps the tenth house we’d seen. Michael and I had drawn a geographical circle around New York City. We wanted to be an easy two-hour drive away. What might have seemed an intelligent and informed decision was in fact arrived at by a series of random criteria: I came from New Jersey, and didn’t want to go back; Long Island had too much traffic; Westchester was too expens
ive, and besides, we didn’t need to commute, so why live in the suburbs? A good selection of schools was important; were there other young families? Artists? Writers? Democrats? Jews? And what about people’s connection to New York? Did they move to the country and slowly but surely abandon city life forever? Did they begin stenciling their walls, making their own quilts? Did they drink too much and have key parties? Everything I knew about the state of Connecticut, I had learned from the novels of Richard Yates and John Cheever, with a bit of Martha Stewart mixed in.

  Arthur Miller takes the bus, the real estate agent said, killing four birds—writer, Jew, Democrat, New Yorker—with one stone. The bus being the sole mode of public transportation to New York City. Arthur Miller being a resident of one of the towns in which we were house-hunting. Arthur Miller takes the bus became such a frequent refrain that I began to envision a blow-up doll of the great playwright propped up in the back seat of the Bonanza bus from Southbury to the Port Authority.

  In truth, Michael and I had no idea what we were doing. We were flying blind—amazed that the proceeds from the sale of our brownstone could buy us these ten acres, this house. It was safety, security, peace of mind, we were after. It had been a rough couple of years. The plain facade of the saltbox, the hand-split wood roof reflecting the autumn light, the gentle slope of the land—it spoke of a simplicity that seemed not only preferable but essential to our family’s well-being. But beyond the proximity of Arthur Miller, we knew next to nothing about the place where we were setting down our roots. We were going on instinct. This sense of rightness about the house was a feeling—nothing more.