A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  I skip my morning work session and join your mother at the kitchen table. She lowers the paper. Too far gone to be politic, I blurt out my proposal.

  Your mother swallows. She touches her neck, then folds her hands. “Now that we have this …”

  “I’ll be home Saturday morning to Monday night. Nearly half the week.”

  She inhales deeply, releasing the air through her nose.

  “It’s just for a year, until Saul gets out.” I take her hands in mine. “It’s not about you, Klara,” I say, realizing only now that this is the truth. “It’s about doing for Saul what he cannot do for himself.”

  Slowly, your mother nods. I don’t even know if she knows she is nodding.

  “Perhaps I could come in for a day each week to give you and Rena a break.” Her voice buckles on the last word.

  Now my eyes fill. “Of course, dear. Of course.”

  SUSAN, RISING TO HER best self, insists on throwing a baby shower, which your mother insists we have at our house. Your mother is terribly excited about it. For a week, she dusts baseboards, irons napkins, arranges chairs. Long conversations ensue between Susan and her regarding the menu and your mother’s decision, at the eleventh hour, to bake the cake herself.

  Rena wears a pale green dress with a white collar. Her hair falls in curls around her newly rounded face. For the first time, I feel the baby’s presence: asleep in the mound under her dress. Susan places her hands on Rena’s hips and moves her to an armchair surrounded by pastel packages with rattles and tiny stuffed animals attached to the bows. Rena coos over the baby blankets from her Aunt Betty, the hooded towels from my sister Rose, the Mother Goose clock sent by Lil. Ceremoniously, the larger items are paraded before her. A car seat from Ruth and Maggie. A high chair from her former bosses, Muskowitz and Kerrigan. A carriage from Marc and Susan. From your mother and me, a check to buy the nursery furniture.

  Wiping her eyes, Rena looks up at us all. Ruth and Maggie move to her side. Your mother shuffles out to get a tissue. Rena talks about the way so many people have helped her over the years. Rebecca. Ruth and Maggie. “And now Leonard,” she pauses, then catches herself, remembering, I presume, your mother’s promise of weekly visits, “and Klara, who will come to watch the baby after I go back to work.”

  Your mother beams. Backlit from the open window, her silver hair shines. She touches Rena’s arm. “Come, let’s have the cake.”

  WHEN RENA GOES into labor, she calls us and we call you. Ruth and Maggie take her to the hospital, stay with her through the labor and delivery. It’s a boy. Seven pounds, nine ounces: Bernardo Dubinsky Peretti.

  Your mother and I go to see Bernie the next day. I cradle him in my arms, examine the ten little fingers, the tiny nails, the surprisingly long toes. He has red hair and fair skin. My sister Eunice’s complexion. He opens his watery blue eyes and they focus on something on my face—perhaps the circles of my nostrils, perhaps the line between my lips.

  “Grandpa,” Rena whispers to the baby. “This is your grandpa.”

  She smiles at me with her huge thyroidic eyes and I think of her weeping in La Posada de las Madres the night after we were shown the body and our sitting together across from Charlie Green when he announced that I would have to put up the house to get the bail money and the first time we met in the Chinese restaurant near your old apartment.

  “Remember,” she says, “how you told me that our personal histories begin with our grandparents’ memories?” Oddly, I am not surprised that her thoughts, too, have drifted to our first meeting. We used to call it the intermingling of the unconscious—something that always struck me as a scientized label for magic. “For Bernie, that’s you.”

  My grandson slips back into sleep. I lean down and kiss his forehead, the sweet infant smell. My mother and her immigrant spunk. My father and his noble politics. My sisters and their adoration of me as their little brother. My Uncle Jack, who would have been happier somewhere lower on the animal chain than owning a shmatte factory. Merckin. Klara’s father. Maria. All of this, Bernie, I will tell to you.

  BY THE MIDDLE of Rena’s second week back at work, we’ve fallen into a pattern. Because of her night hours, I mark the beginning of each day with dinner. We eat together while Bernie has his early evening nap. Afterwards, I do the dishes and Rena breast-feeds the baby before leaving for work. He stays alert for an hour or so and then we begin to prepare for bed in the living room, which is now Bernie’s room. At ten I give him a bottle and we sleep until three, when he awakens like clockwork for another bottle. He then usually sleeps through until Rena returns at seven, when he nurses again. She bathes and dresses him while I shower and make preparations for the day. By nine-thirty he’s ready for his morning nap and she goes into her room to sleep. When he wakes, I take him in to nurse and then bring him with me so she can sleep for a few more hours. She gets up by four, after which I head out alone for a walk and the day’s errands.

  Since tomorrow is Rena’s birthday and the day your mother visits, I stop first at a bakery to order a cake. Ruth and Maggie have called to say they’ll bring prawns and a salad. Your mother has promised to bring candles and the presents: two pairs of nursing pajamas and a gold locket that belonged to her grandmother for which she’s had a miniature photograph of Bernie made.

  Leaving the bakery, I walk north to Riverside Church. Inside, I take the elevator up to the bell tower and climb the three hundred steps past the enormous iron bells of the carillon to the observation platform, where I can see all the way to Connecticut. All the way, I like to think, to you.

  A crystalline day, the river is the rippled blue of an eye. The sun hovers above the horizon, preparing for a glorious descent. Last night, giving Bernie his bottle, it occurred to me that you are the one who knows everything. About myself, I have told you everything of import. Were I to die tomorrow, I would feel that you know what you need to understand me and therefore yourself. Rena, I would wager anything, would say the same. That is why she was so devastated by your arrest: not simply because of the violence it did to her life, not even because of the way you brushed lips with danger, but rather the way you damaged yourself as her touchstone—one of the few people she had chosen to know her. In a way, I feel sadder for you than for her; she will either learn to rely more deeply on herself or find someone else. It is you who will have to live with having disappointed her. It is a hard cross to bear: that I tell you from experience.

  Still, my son, you are the one who knows—the true historian—and because I believe that when you are freed next year, you will go on to be a fine doctor (I feel certain that you will make this happen) and a fine father (Rena told me how Bernie let you hold him right off, how you rocked him back and forth so that he fell asleep in your arms), my grief at your plight has begun to dissolve into my faith in you.

  When I come in, Rena points to the floor, where she’s spread out a quilt. Your son is on his belly and he’s lifted his head up in the air. “Look,” she says, “a body rising.”

  Over dinner, Rena reads to me from one of her books about the settled baby, the baby who has acquired a rhythm for sleeping and eating, whose distress has shed its mystery. The baby for whom the world is no longer a trauma but contains within it the possibility of the womb, who now finds pleasure in an array of activities, whose caretakers can interpret his cries and without thought do what it takes to comfort him.

  Rena laughs. “That sounds like Bernie. Only it’s hard to know who it is that has settled. The baby or us.”

  “All of us,” I say. Were you here, across the table, you would provide the catalog: Rena, your mother, yourself. Me. I suppose you would include me. Rena allows the us to hold who it may.

  The baby wakes, and Rena lets him nurse while she finishes eating. The phone rings, your nightly call guaranteed by Marsden Stem, Grand Marshal of the Blackjacks, who insists that now that you’re a father the others give you first chance at the phone. Rena holds the receiver next to Bernie’s mouth so you can hear t
he gurgling sounds, and it is as if you were a father away on a business trip. Not in prison, not on the way to being divorced.

  “It’s been three years tomorrow,” you say when I take the receiver. For some thick-skulled reason, it is the first time I put it together, that you were arrested on Rena’s birthday. Despite everything, your mother was always the one who remembered birthdays, who wrote the cards. And even though it would be me she’d send to the mailbox, I never looked at the envelopes, never let the names and dates sink in.

  IT WILL SURPRISE YOU, given all that I’ve said, to learn that every night I say a prayer for my grandson. God bless our baby. God grant him a long happy happy healthy healthy wonderful life. God grant us all the wisdom and self-control and goodness—yes, I do believe in such a thing—to provide for him a joyous home in which he will flourish and thrive. I repeat these words, shamanistically, ritualistically, superstitiously three times. I am embarrassed to reveal this piece of irrationality to you, and I hope you will only smile and be amused and perhaps touched but not disdainful of me.

  I repeat these words three times lest, should I not, they not happen. I repeat them because I did not do these things for you. I repeat them because I love you, my second-born son.

  Epilogue

  It’s two in the morning, her nightly break. No clock is needed. She knows. The tingling as her breasts fill, the dampness inside her nursing bra. She locks the door to the secretaries’ lounge and unpacks her electric pump and the plastic bottles she carts back and forth from home. She pumps—the relief of her glands emptying, the satisfaction of watching the containers fill with the milk that will feed Bernie tonight while she’s gone.

  Afterwards, she places the bottles in her cooler pack, washes the pumping tubes, and gathers up her coat and gloves to get the taste of night air her lactating body has demanded since her return to work. She presses the down button, watches the panel as the elevator rises to the twenty-sixth floor.

  Inside, she leans against the rear wall. There’s a flutter in her heart as she detects the fall, her breath and muscles locking, her body knowing it first that the descent is too fast. Frantically, she pushes the red STOP button but the car continues to drop. She pulls the alarm, hears the bell sounding through the popping in her ears, crouches to the floor, arms covering her head. She screams. The elevator hits the bottom and like a yo-yo starts up again, all the lights flashing at once and then suddenly nothing as it comes to a halt.

  She stays crouched, afraid to move. Five minutes, maybe more, then a man’s voice: “Okay, we’ll try and bring it up a little closer to nineteen.”

  The doors open and she sees above her the scuffed tips of two work boots. Slowly, the car inches upward. A man’s dark hands reach down to steady her as she climbs, first one knee, then the other onto the landing.

  He cups her elbows as he brings her to her feet. “Got her,” he says into a walkie-talkie. He looks her over, head to toe. “Anything hurt?”

  She shakes her head. Her teeth are chattering.

  “Here.” He keeps an arm out for her to hold on to as he takes off his shirt and drapes it over her shoulders. The cloth smells of tobacco and sweat. On his other arm, there’s a mermaid with a snake coiled around the tail.

  Dizzy, she leans into him and then begins to heave, her face pressed against his white undershirt, her fingers squeezing the mermaid, as she thinks about the cable snapping and how she was certain she’d plummet, a free fall, to the bottom. The fear not so much of having all of her bones smashed, that would last but an instant, but of Bernie losing his mother, his future stamped with grief.

  WHEN SHE GETS HOME, both Leonard and Bernie are sleeping. Still shivering, she puts on pajamas and wool socks. With Bernie’s cry, she tiptoes into the living room and lifts him out of the crib. Settled in the rocker in her room, her breasts fill immediately. Bernie sucks avidly, happily, greedily. Outside her door, she can hear Leonard moving around. “Hungry little monkey,” she whispers. “Say happy birthday to your mummy.”

  Leonard knocks while she’s burping Bernie.

  “Come in.” He’s smiling, carrying a tray with a glass of orange juice, a mug of tea and a bud vase with two yellow roses. Tucked under his arm is a tube wrapped in Venetian paper.

  “Happy birthday. The present is from Bernie and me.” Leonard puts down the tray and tube and reaches out his arms for the baby. With Bernie on his shoulder, he continues Rena’s pats.

  Rena takes the gift. Carefully, she undoes the wrapping. A sea swirl: lapis, moss, coral, sand. She pulls the rolled paper from the tube and spreads it out on her desk, weighting the corners with books.

  It’s an antique map, prepared for the Valentine’s Manual of 1865 by a Mister M. Dripps. “Oh! It’s wonderful.”

  “Look at your neighborhood. The grid of streets was laid, but there was no Riverside Park, no Riverside Drive.”

  She leans over the map. “The only marked buildings are a lunatic asylum and an orphanage.”

  “The New York Lunatic Asylum. And the Leeke and Watts Orphan Asylum.”

  Bernie burps. He twists to look at her and then breaks into one of his radiant toothless grins. “I’ll give him his bath,” Leonard says. “You get some extra sleep.”

  Rena kisses Bernie on the nose, Leonard on the cheek. “Thank you, my dears.”

  Warm now, she cracks the window. There’s a fresh dusting of snow on the sill. Icicles descend from the upper tree branches. Shimmying on the river are the reflections of the New Jersey shoreline, the towers doubled on the water.

  She studies the map. The dozen ferry crossings from before the bridges. Downtown, Thompson Street where her mother grew up, Fulton Street where her grandfather’s fish market had been. Leonard’s West End Avenue not yet paved. The Bronx, where her father was raised, still farmland. The street where he resided as a law student, where, presumably, she was conceived, sandwiched between the lunatic asylum and the orphanage.

  She finds the block where she and Saul had lived together. Crossing the parchment, west to the Hudson, north along what was then called Strikers Bay, she finds herself, where she is now.

  Acknowledgments

  My sincerest thanks to my agent, Elyse Cheney, who found my novel its perfect home, and to Antonia Fusco, dream editor; our collaboration has extended through every aspect of this book. For their generosity of spirit and time, I thank the many people who read the manuscript in various drafts or helped in other ways to shepherd it into being: Ann Braude, E. L. Doctorow, Mark Epstein, Candida Fraze, Alejandro Gomez, Marian Gornick, Vivian Gornick, Ken Hollenbeck, Lila Kalinich, Amy Kaplan, Carole Naggar, Michele Nayman, Arlene Shechet and Barbara Weisberg. Finally, my deepest gratitude to Shira Nayman and Jill Smolowe without whom this work would not have seen the light of day.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2002 by Lisa Gornick. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-367-2

 

 

 
are-buttons">share