by Sonia Taitz
“Yes, my dear? You have some contribution to make to the current situation at our dinner table?”
“Aaron, darling, it’s nothing. They’re school friends. Nowadays, kids call each other and they talk about everything and it means nothing special. Boys and girls, Jews and non-Jews.”
It was one thing for his wife to get him to eat all the forbidden foods, to serve the world’s worst treif up to him on a plate. But he was not going to swallow this “nowadays” nonsense about matters of love, marriage, and family.
“Is that right, Colin,” he said, “it is right that it means nothing special when you come here at night, sweating and shaking, and with marks on your face, to see my only daughter? Or is it something else?”
Collum hated having his name mispronounced. Even more, he hated the way Mr. Pincus was looking at him now, his mouth twisted with what seemed to be disgust. Collum felt like a crawling bug ruining an otherwise splendid meal.
“Yes, you’re right,” he answered, spitefully.
“I’m right?”
“Now that you put me on the spot, Judy does mean something very special to me.”
“Collum—” Judy cautioned.
“No, Judy—your Dad is right. He knows it all, just how rotten a goy I am, the son of a drunk, beneath your contempt, stupid and thick! I don’t deserve to be at your beautiful table, or even use your nice paper napkins,” he said, balling up the one he had used to mop up his blood and his sweat, and throwing it down on the floor.
“You’re a little bit like my father, Mr. Pincus, if you don’t mind my saying so,” he continued. “He’s a drunk and he beats me, but you hit pretty hard with your words. They hurt, too. If you didn’t hate each other, you’d really be good friends, or should I use your word, ‘special’ friends.”
“Me? I don’t hate him or anyone else,” said Mr. Pincus. “If I’m upset, it’s because I don’t want you to be with my daughter in this way. There are very few Jews left in the world since the Holocaust. One third of the nation is dead. My whole family is lost to me, murdered in violence. This is my only child, and I want her to maintain our ties.”
“Well, forgive me, but I personally don’t care how many Jews there are. This one’s the one I care about. Maybe I can help her with this impossible burden you’ve given her. Of keeping a community alive.”
“A burden! My ignorant young man, this ‘burden’ has been an honor and a privilege, from generation to generation, for thousands of years!”
“Then does one little person really count?”
“Collum, please!” Judy implored.
“Yes, one person counts! Each one is a vital spark! Didn’t Judith tell you that she’s not allowed to date non-Jewish boys?”
“Actually, it never came up. As a matter of fact,” Collum continued, “with all that you say separates us, why do you think we are as close as can be?”
“No, Collum!” Judy shouted.
“So—you’re ‘close,’ you say? And how long has the ‘closeness’ been going on?”
“Daddy, no, listen, we’re just friends,” Judy pleaded. “Math class buddies!”
“Stop lying!” Collum said, between gritted teeth. “To him and to me and to everyone! Have you no shame?”
Judy was silent, ashamed on all fronts.
“I don’t hate Jews,” Collum continued. “Maybe my father does—he hates everyone, even a lot of Christians, hell, even a lot of Catholics—but I don’t, that’s for sure. I look up to the Jews! I love them. Anyway, I love one of them. Judy. And she doesn’t love ‘non-Jews.’ She loves ME.”
Judy wished she could disappear. Her father’s hurt stare bore into her.
“A love affair. So beautiful. Maybe for this I should celebrate?” he said. “I should take out maybe the schnapps from my breakfront?”
“I’m not asking you to celebrate. But leave us alone. Maybe I have potential. I can be your friend, too, not your worst nightmare. I mean, I’ve defended Judy to my father. I fought a battle royal for her.”
“And for this you are proud? For defying your own father?”
“Yes, actually I am. Under the right circumstances—”
“Maybe you are right. Maybe you two are both from the same piece of cloth. I asked Judith not to date a gentile, and this she promised me. She made a vow! So to lie to your father, to fight him like an animal—good things, yes?”
Aaron’s face was now purple and blotchy.
“Collum, could you please, please just go,” Judy said quietly. She tried to meet his eyes, to find him in this chaos.
He would not share his eyes with her. He sat there puzzled. Go? Where was he to go now? She was a little girl trying to please her father, a good father unlike his own, but he was cornered. He had nothing in the world. No one.
Still, Collum stood up, and Judy stood up, too. They went to the door together, and stood there, alone for a moment.
“Go back home and wait for me,” she said.
This time, he did look into her eyes.
“Really? Go home? I can’t go home, Judy!” he said, beginning to crumble and cry. Judy’s heart began to break for him. She saw it all and would remember it all. His sad blue eyes shone gorgeous in the night, sad for the love of her. She wanted to grab him, to cover and be covered with kisses. She wanted to lose herself in her boy and never look back. She knew they would be happy. But her parents were waiting for her, and she steeled herself.
“Yes, you can. Pretend to make up with your dad. I’ll do the same. I need a little time to get ready. I can’t just run when it’s like this.”
“I was willing to,” said Collum, tears pouring freely as she shut the door behind her, leaving him alone and outside.
Matriarchs 1
Well, I have got a fabulous dessert,” said Janet ridiculously, after the visitor had gone.
She and Aaron had sat soundlessly, frozen until their daughter returned to the dinner table. But now that all three were together, as on every other night, perhaps normalcy would return. They could have peach crumble, couldn’t they? Janet thought they could.
“Is this all a bad dream, Judy?” said Aaron. “I pictured you with a nice man one day, from a nice family. Maybe even a doctor, a lawyer. And now there is this wild boy and his violent, drunken father, an anti-Semite yet—”
“It’s—let’s try to have a new dream, Daddy. Something that you might not have thought about before. Collum is nothing like his father. He’s special, he’s alone, he’s his own person. He’s different.”
“Yes, not so many Jewish boys are fighting their fathers.”
“But his father beats him!
“Not a surprise, and not an excuse. He beat him back a real beating, not just self-defense, but as real offense. To end the matter.”
“He defended me. Us.”
“Today. But maybe tomorrow he’ll beat you, too?”
“That day will never come.”
“He’ll get drunk. He’ll call you Shylock. He may even want you dead and gone. You think his father’s words go nowhere?”
“Collum is a good person. He’d never be like that! He’s interested in Judaism, maybe he could study, you could teach him, he has no one—”
“From this boy, you will get misery. His family will not disappear. They will hate you and they will hurt you—they will even destroy you. Is that the life you want for yourself? For me and for your mother?”
“Well, that’s possibly a little extreme,” said Janet, trying to introduce a more pleasant tone to the proceedings.
“I mean, look at the Lindens,” she continued, “you know the nice couple that we had over for cocktails a few years ago, when I was trying to get on the flower committee? He’s Presbyterian, and she’s Jewish, and they could not be happier or more lovely people.”
Aaron considered this for a minute.
“The Lindens, you say? Like the tree?”
“Yes, I suppose their name is the same as the tree,” said Janet, getting up and walkin
g into the kitchen to fetch her peach crumble. She had also made real whipped cream.
In her absence, Aaron Pincus rose from the table and intoned:
“I’ll give you trees—the lindens, the elms, the oaks, the pine trees of Bavaria that you could smell all the way to Dachau but it didn’t stop the stink of death, and most of all—”
He clutched at his head, as though to stop it from thinking.
“THE POPLARS! THE POPLARS OF PONAR FOREST!!!”
Janet called out from the kitchen:
“What’s that, dear?”
Judy cried, “Calm down, Daddy, your face is so dark!”
“THE POPLARS IN THE FOREST!” her father screamed, so hard that he felt his chest would burst, but didn’t care. It was the loudest he had ever screamed in his life, and he screamed for the lives of all the lost and martyred:
“BY THE DITCH!
WHERE THEY SHOT THEM!
YOUNG MEN! BOYS!
MY COUSINS, UNCLES—IN LITHUANIA!!
AND NO ONE—NO ONE EVEN SAID A WORD!!!!”
With that, a strange expression became fixed on his twisted face, as though his eyes had seen the contours of that ditch.
Aaron Pincus dropped to the floor. Heavy and hard, like a shot person collapsing.
Janet Pincus, coming into the dining room, let go of the dessert tray. It clattered downward. Dishes, spoons, crumble, and cream. Reflexively, she bent down to pick up the pieces, to clean up the mess.
Judy stared at her father’s prone position for a good thirty seconds before she could move. Shards of china clinked as her mother lifted them up from the floor. Finally, she heard her own voice shrieking:
“Call 911, Mommy!! He’s dying!!”
Her mother dropped everything and ran to the kitchen phone.
Judy knelt down to look into her father’s eyes. They stared at her, half unseeing and half pleading. He could not speak, and his face was contorted in deep disappointment. It twisted more, into hatred, and froze.
Judy was deeply horrified at herself. How could she have brought him to this point? She was terrified that he would never come back from this moment, that he would remain this way, forever frozen in accusation.
Only when the ambulance arrived did Janet address her daughter.
“You should stay put. Finish cleaning up the mess.”
“But Mommy—”
“First of all, you’re too young to see such things. Second, I want you to keep your mouth shut. All right, Judy? You’ve said enough for one night.”
“I didn’t mean to!”
“You knew your father was sensitive! You knew the effect this very conversation would have on him!”
“But I didn’t plan for Collum to come over. I never wanted that—it was his idea, not mine.”
“You should really start to think about the consequences of your actions. I don’t blame him! That poor boy! But really, Judy, you’re a smart girl. Where did you think a friendship like that would lead?”
When Aaron Pincus had oxygen on his face and was strapped securely on a gurney, the emergency technicians raced him out to the ambulance. Janet followed, leaving the front door open.
Judy stood in the doorway of their home, watching men load her father into the back of an ambulance. Her mother got in with the EMT people. She sat by her husband and stroked his face. Then the driver got in, the doors were slammed, front and back, and they were gone.
She continued to stand at the entry to her childhood home, neither inside nor out, but in between.
Matriarchs 2
For the next week, Judy stayed home from school, twisting in bed with a raging fever. Her mother, softened by her daughter’s illness, took care of her, bringing her cold compresses and cups of weak tea.
On the seventh day, her mother asked Judy if she was well enough to let her go out for more than a few hours. Each day Janet had gone out to shop for groceries and to see her husband in the hospital. Now she had been invited to her friend Mimi’s house to unwind and relax. All these days, Janet, too, had looked pale and wobbly, and Judy had worried about her.
“Sure, Mommy, have a good time.”
“Should I bring up some toast and orange juice before I go?”
“I’d like that.”
“And a fresh cold compress?”
Her fever was down, but Judy said, “Yes, thanks.”
“OK,” said her mother when she had brought all the creature comforts she could think of to her child. “You have the little TV set, your OJ, toast. Do you have something to read?”
“Yeah, I have my Seventeen magazine and some stuff for school.”
The class was now finishing Romeo and Juliet, and Judy wanted to keep up. Her good friend Nessa had dropped off her notes.
“Good, all right. I’ll be back in about three hours or so. Want me to call you from Mimi’s and see if you need anything? A Baby Ruth or something?”
“No, I’ll be fine,” said Judy.
She hadn’t expected her mother to leave for so extended a time. But now that the opportunity had arisen, Judy knew that she would try to reach out again to Collum. As soon as the sound of her mother’s sturdy stride faded and the front door shut, she sat up and strategized.
Collum was at school; she couldn’t go there. Maybe she could go to his house and leave him a note. All this time since her father had been taken away by ambulance, she hadn’t been able to speak to her boyfriend. When she had called his home, his father had answered, and Judy had hung up immediately.
Only Betty would be home at this hour, she thought. It would be nice to say hello to Collum’s mum, confide in her, even. She would write a note for Collum and give it to her for safekeeping. Betty had a soft heart. Neil Whitsun was a monster, but Betty was the heart of that family. Thank goodness Collum had her.
Judy took a piece of loose-leaf paper from her three-ring binder. She began writing, explaining that her father had fallen ill and was still lying in the hospital. He’d suffered a “cerebral infarction on the left side.” He would have to go and get rehabilitated so he could recover and walk and talk the way he once did. He might even still die.
As she wrote these words, Judy started crying. Her tears splashed the page as she continued:
“So even though I want to be with you and give you everything—”
She blushed when she wrote that. It seemed so silly now, she almost crossed it out. But she left the words as they were and continued:
—even though I love you so much, we have to wait a while. We have to.
I can’t leave my father now. What if I never saw him again? How could I live with that? On top of which my mother, who is very angry at me, is a nervous wreck.
I know you have to get away from your horrible mean disgusting bigot of a father. And I know you will. And I know that we will be together forever, no matter how long it takes. But this is not the right time, OK? We have eternity, Collum, so let me have a few more days, maybe a week or so.
I’m going to help my mother take care of my father. When the time is right, I will show you that love is stronger than anything else in the world.
Yours, forever, Judy
Running into her parents’ bedroom, she took a long business envelope from her father’s desk, folded the paper in, sealed it, and kissed it. Tucking her thoughts in and sealing them up made her feel hopeful. This letter was not just a letter. It was a document, a contract. It was her vow.
Now she jumped on her bike and cycled over to the Whitsun house as fast as she could. As she stood by the front door, Judy thought she could hear Betty singing, as she liked to do as she did her chores.
She listened. It was hard to hear the words, but something in Betty’s voice unsettled her. She was singing in a guttural way, as though she’d been drinking. And the song sounded like the one she’d heard Mr. Whitsun sing that day she’d visited. A cruel chantey. Betty was chuckling, too.
Poor Collum, she thought, almost paralyzed with fear. The way he had to live. Tha
t bleeding statue. She could feel it all now, now that she stood there alone. That was how he must have felt all the time. And all she had for him was a promise, some words tucked into a business envelope. But time would show him that her love was true. A friend to the end she would be.
Judy took the letter out of her pocket. She’d folded it in half, and now it was wrinkled, too, and warm and soft from her body. She smoothed it out over and over. When it was straight and nearly whole, she kissed it again. Her eyes closed, as though she were kissing her own Collum. For a second, she felt a twinge inside of her, remembering his touch below the bleachers, and how she’d swooned with desire and surrender.
Judy slipped the note under the front door. It went to the other side and was swallowed into the Whitsun household. There was no more she could do. She cycled away, back to her own home, jumped back into bed, and waited to hear from her boy.
Collum’s Vigil
The night of Aaron’s stroke, Collum had come home. With nowhere else to go, he’d tiptoed into an eerily quiet household. Had everyone gone to bed? Was that possible after such a big fight?
“Is that you, son?” said Betty, calling out from the master bedroom. Wordlessly, Collum walked toward the sound of her voice.
His father lay atop the olive green chenille bedspread, hand gripped on his chest, eyes closed tightly, as though in pain. The top buttons of his shirt were open, and Collum could see the white hairs of his chest. Betty hovered over her husband, daubing his face with a damp washcloth. She looked up to see her son in the doorway.
“Welcome back, dear,” she said, a bit flatly, as though concealing anger. “We were worried about you, darting off like that. It might be better if you went to your room now.”
His father looked terrible. Had he had a heart attack? No, Neil was holding his hand over his right side. Collum knew the heart was on the left.
Relieved, he went in, pushing past his mother.
“I want to talk to my dad,” he said, with an authoritative voice.