Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  He always lavished special attention on me, I never knew why, as if I were his student or something. And I picked up a lot. We’d sometimes be there for Chanukah or Passover, major holidays, endless prayers and rituals.

  Imagine this, twenty years of visits maybe 10 hours a visit, four times a year, eight hundred hours, it was like getting a degree in Menke Katz.

  The years passed, Marion, Harry’s wife, got brain cancer, had surgery, survived, but barely; was hardly with us any more at all, more in the next world than in this one. But the visits went on, Menke would pray for her, pray to the Angel of Death to stay away, away, away . . . and Marion survived on.

  Menke was eighty-four, always said “I want to die at eighty-five. None of this ninety-plus stuff. That’s when everything begins to go wrong. I want to go out the way I’ve been all my life; no endless years of torture.”

  And he did die at eighty-five.

  But when he was eighty-four and a half, one night after dinner and songs and prayers, just before we left for the long drive back to New York City, he grabbed my hands and looked into my eyes.

  “Listen, become a Jew. What are you now? Zero! Become a Jew, it will immensely enrich your life,” stopping a moment, then “And what was your grandmother’s maiden name?”

  “Wait a minute. ‘Become a Jew’ I can understand. It’s true, I’m out in the middle of nowhere full-time. But my grandmother’s maiden name?”

  “Trust an old kaballist, trust me,” he said, “I’ve had some intuitions for a long time now—”

  Intuitions? About what?

  “It’s a funny question because my father used to always write her name ‘Ross,’ but she told me one time Roos, which means ‘cockroach’ in Czech. I remember when the Russians came into Czechoslovakia they used to play around with Rus/Roos for Russian, and cockroach, like the Russians were cockroaches . . .”

  “Roos,” he said, grasping my hands even firmer, “Ashkenazy Hebrew for ‘prophet,’ ‘Ruth’ in Sephardic Hebrew; just what I thought, she was a Jew.” Tears in his eyes, releasing my hands and sitting back, “So I was right: your grandmother was a Jew.”

  Totally unexpected.

  Now, looking back on it, now that I’ve been inside Judaism for ten years, I think I must have been some kind of cretino (idiot) for not having picked it up.

  But I hadn’t. My grandmother, in my mind, was this old Czech peasant—period. My sweetie pie, pal; her place the only place I could go to to find total peace and acceptance, away from my parents’ constantly picking at him, motivating me, directing me; away from Heaven and Hell and sin, ambition . . . the only place where I could just be me.

  “Let me call my mother up, OK? I can use my calling card,” I said to Menke.

  Mr. Confrontation. I’d learned, hadn’t I . . .

  “Just call, forget the calling card,” said Menke, and I dialed my mother’s number in Mount San Antonio, this old people’s home in Pomona, California, where she had moved after my father had died from a ventricular aneurysm rupturing a few years earlier.

  I dialed, and she immediately answered the phone as if she’d been waiting for me.

  “Hello.”

  “Hiya. Listen, I’ve just been told that my grandmother was Jewish. What do you have to say about that? Roos is a Jewish name, a Hebrew word that means ‘prophet.’”

  A moment of silence, a regrouping of (psychological) forces, and then . . .

  “What are you talking about? Aunt Mame was from England itself. And James Patrick Mangan . . . Mangan, Mangan, Mangan. Who could be more Irish? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Grandma ROOS, that’s who I’m talking about.”

  “Well, talk about it with someone else!”

  And she hung up.

  “She hung on up me,” I explained to Menke and the others.

  “That’s what you’d expect, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  But it still was vague, ambiguous, still guesswork, speculation, full of maybes and mightbes, wasn’t it?

  When my grandmother died, my cousin Judy (Jake’s daughter, remember?) was at her deathbed, and a few more things came out about her past.

  Jake had finally moved out to the edge of Tucson, right on the edge of the desert, and my grandmother had moved out there with him.

  I’d visited her once before she died.

  I should have gone out there every year like I went to visit my mother in California, but I was so involved with my own problems, with divorces and kids and more kids, Fulbright professorships to Caracas and Brazil, writing, literary friends, and money limitations, that I only visited her once.

  Walked into her bedroom, Jake right behind me, egging me on, not wanting to announce I was there, make a big surprise out of it all.

  She was sitting there with her elastic stockings off, her varicose veins not all that bad. A rocking chair. It had to be a rocking chair didn’t it? Sitting there just thinking as always, rocking back and forth, thinking, thinking, thinking . . .

  Give her a little education and she would have been Spinoza.

  I walk in, she looks up.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, Hughie—”

  “Little Hughie?! I wouldn’t recognize you,” holding her hand four feet above the floor as if she hadn’t seen me since I was a kid. Of course she had. She’d been at my wedding (first marriage) and everything; but I guess she was getting a little senile-ish, too much solitude out there facing the vast desert.

  “It’s me all right. So, how you doing?”

  “I miss Chicago. Downtown. Shopping. The old neighborhood. You.”

  I sat down on a chair next to her, Jake said “I’ll let you two alone,” and I listened to her complain for an hour about missing her old life in Chicago, finally moving into her life in Arizona, “I’ll tell you one thing. Remember how I used to always complain about Gertrude? Well, no one could have been more wonderful to me than her. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. She’s a wonderful person. A little sloppy, OK, but who cares, as a person there’s no one more wonderful . . .” tears in her eyes, wiping them on a handkerchief she had tucked up one of her sleeves. I bet she used it a lot.

  What she’d just said about Gertrude really impressing me. Her ability to change opinions, admit she was wrong, coming out carrying the truth in her hand.

  But no big revelations to me. Just closeness. Tears in my eyes most of the visit. My life without her had been full, OK, but she was like a window in the living room. Take it out and there goes the big light.

  When she was on her deathbed though, a lot more came out, not the whole story, but here’s the way Judy told it to me:

  “I was there until the very end. She just kept talking. ‘I was really cute when I was younger. I used to work in Mrs. Seidel’s bar; the Seidels had a bar and I used to work there. Red boots. That was my favorite. Red boots. And one time I went out with this customer, some guy, I don’t know, he drove out to the western edge of town, we started kissing, what’s wrong with a little schmoozing, right? But then he started going too far, tried to rape me. I broke away from him, ran away from the car, there was this streetcar line right next to where we were parked and it was a miracle, there was this streetcar coming right toward me, I waved my hands, it stopped, I got on, and the streetcar conductor was James Patrick Mangan, who became my husband, took me home with him, no hanky panky, just really cared, was always that way, care, care, care.’”

  So that’s how she met my grandmother, huh?

  Jewish girl meets Irish Catholic, they get married.

  She must have converted, right?

  Maybe made promises to renounce all former religions and beliefs, embrace Catholicism, period.

  Maybe that was at least part of the reason that Judaism was swept under the carpet, right?

  But it still was all very vague, wasn’t it?

  The real confirmation of my grandmother’s being Jewish came when my mother died, just after I had bec
ome Jewish myself.

  I always visited her, my mother, once or twice a year. No matter what.

  There she was out at Mount San Antonio Gardens in Pomona, and no matter how nasty she was over the phone (or in letters) I invariably went to visit her.

  On my last visit I found her in the hospital at the Gardens.

  Looking pretty good, actually. Stretched out in her bed with a hospital gown on, with stockings on though. One of her fetishes: stockings, stockings, stockings. All made up, wearing her diamond rings and diamond watch.

  “So you’ve come to see me die, huh?”

  “You’re not going to die. Come on. You’ve got another ten years.”

  “I’m eighty-nine, maybe that’s enough.”

  Always over-pronouncing: eight—ee nine, may-be that’s e—nough; it was like visiting Bette Davis.

  “So you’ve really become Jewish?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “About what?”

  “You’ll find out!” Then suddenly very tired. Beautiful acting. A forced yawn. “I need my afternoon nap, if you don’t mind!”

  “No problem. I’m leaving tonight.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure you are.”

  Turning over, her back to me.

  I came back in a few hours, one last look at her: still rather beautiful at eighty-nine; slim, carefully marcelled hair, perfect makeup. I certainly never thought that that was the last time I’d see her. But it was. I was back in Michigan just two or three days when I got a call from Mount San Antonio Gardens.

  “I’m calling you to inform you that your mother died last night in her sleep. A painless death.”

  “From . . .?”

  “We always say ‘old age;’ I don’t know anything more than that, I’m just a secretary, not a doctor.”

  “OK . . . I’ll come out for the funeral . . .”

  “As you see fit. Many thanks for your time.”

  All very officious and institutionally polite.

  I called my travel agency, got a reservation for the next morning, and then that afternoon, I got a one-day express letter from a lawyer in Pomona:

  Dear Professor Fox:

  I am the lawyer who handled your mother’s legal affairs over the last few years.

  Enclosed you will find a letter (which I haven’t read) from her that she asked me to send you on the occasion of her death.

  Also enclosed, find a copy of her final will. As you will see she willed everything to Judy Wieznewyski, her brother’s daughter, which I found very irregular, but I merely fulfilled her wishes. Perhaps we will meet at the funeral.

  Sincerely,

  Sam Weinberg

  Of course she’d have to have gotten a Jewish lawyer. Like my father’s lawyer in Chicago, Maurey Greiman. Irishmen never went to law school, right?

  And what was this about willing everything to my cousin Judy?

  All the years that my mother had cackled on about “When we die you’ll get a considerable fortune, just depend on that . . . a considerable fortune . . .”

  Saving, saving, saving all their lives, never buying a house until they could pay cash. Nothing “on time.”

  And now Judy got it all?

  I opened up the sealed envelope and there it was all scrawled out in a desperate old lady’s faltering handwriting:

  Everything costs. And don’t say you weren’t warned.

  Let’s see how you enjoy being Jewish. Everything, and I mean everything, goes to

  your non-Jewish cousin, Judy.

  Love (?),

  Your Mother

  Was I surprised? Not really. She was a real harpy, wasn’t she? Dracula’s bride. A werewolf. Medusa, snake-hair writhing all over her head.

  It didn’t make any sense though, her and her Jewish jewelers, Jewish tailors, Jewish lawyers, going over to South Shore Temple with Mrs. Greiman all the time for this or that sale. And after I’d become Jewish and let my hair grow out a little, a couple of visits back she’d said “How can you wear a kepu with such hair? It looks terrible.” “What do you know about kepus?” I’d asked her. Her answer: “I know everything there is to know about them and everything else Jewish.”

  I think all her life she was frustrated that she wasn’t simply a Jew, simply and openly a Jew, openly part of the Jewish community. She hated me because I was going to have what she’d never had: a sense of unabashed oneness with Judaism at large, as if the whole world of Judaism were one vast little village where everyone knew and cared for everyone else.

  At first I thought I might as well cancel my trip out to California, just forget about it, forget about her, wipe the whole thing out, erase it, ignore it as if she’d never been and nothing at all had happened.

  But I couldn’t, didn’t sleep much that night, but the next morning went out to Pomona anyhow.

  The people at Mount San Antonio Gardens couldn’t have been nicer to me.

  A Mrs. McGrority, white hair fluffed up on top of an overlarge head, lots of makeup, lots of wrinkles, all busty in black, shirt skirt, black shoes with little practical heels. All sorts of rings and necklaces, like the incarnation of a particularly affluent and glitzy garage sale. But very nice. A plus version of Mrs. Negative, my mom.

  “Your mother is already at the funeral home in Hemet. The funeral is scheduled for the day after tomorrow; your cousin arrives tomorrow afternoon. We’re going to put you in your mother’s quarters, if that’s OK with you. We’ve had a maid straighten everything up, so you should find everything in, how shall I put it, ‘tip-top shape.’”

  “Wonderful. Wonderful.”

  And I was ushered into my mother’s ‘‘quarters,’’ as Mrs. McGrority had put it. I shook hands with Mrs. McGrority and thanked her, closed the door and stood there for some long moments looking at much of the furniture that I’d grown up with, all those fake antique needlepoint chairs and her Napoleon and Josephine sofa (carved medallions of Napoleon and Josephine at the top of the frame), a Georgian clock that wasn’t really Georgian at all, a mother-of-pearl fake Louis XV rectangular snuffbox on one of her little fake Wedgewood tables, a carved oak shelf filled with Chelsea, Bristol and Worcester porcelain copies, little baskets, birds, teacups. A box in the bathroom filled with diamond rings and watches.

  And, ahhhhhh: the magnificent silver set they had bought in Oaxaco, Mexico some twenty years earlier, this huge silver platter with massive cream and sugar pieces, an even more massive coffee pot, next to it a huge yellow satin-covered box filled with my mother’s sterling silver, complete table settings for fifteen people.

  Now that’s where the money was.

  I put my bags in the bedroom, sat down and meditated a little.

  So Judy was coming tomorrow. OK, OK. I loved her, she was like a sister to me, no problem with that.

  But I was the only child, nicht wahr?

  Everything belonged to me, period.

  This whole idea of bypassing me for Judy was insidious, criminal, diabolical.

  I lifted up the phone and called information in Lansing, got two phone numbers, one of the Sharrey Zedek synagogue in East Lansing, the other the home phone of Bruce Wetzler, the cantor at the synagogue, the guy who had taught me Hebrew and the basics of Judaism, and become one of my best pals ever. I got him at home.

  “Hey, Bruce, howya doin’?”

  “So where are you? “

  “My mother just died, willed everything to my cousin, Judy, because I became Jewish. I’m staying in her place right now. The funeral is scheduled for the day after tomorrow. I don’t know what to do . . .”

  A long “hmmmmmmmmm,” and then, “You’re the only child, right? Just you. Nobody else, right?”

  “That’s right. One abortion before me, then a tubal pregnancy after me, and my father went in and tied off the other tube. I was it.”

  “I don’t want to sound primitive or anything, but there are certain primitive, primal, primordial, ancient, basic hu
man rights. You are the only child, everything is yours. You can contest the will in court, your mother sounds ‘crazy’ to me. And, if you win, give ten thousand, something like that to your cousin, just for her trouble. You can’t blame her for your mother’s games.”

  “I was thinking of taking the silver, the jewelry, giving it all to my kids.”

  “Whatever you want to do, it’s all yours to do with as you see fit.”

  “OK, my friend. And thanks.”

  “That’s what I’m here for, my friend. Shalom.”

  “Shalom.”

  Hung up and went back into the dining room and looked at the Mexican silver set. It was a classic.

  I could just see it in an auction. Going, going, gone, for fifty thousand smackaroonies.

  It should go to Margaret, my twenty-five year old daughter with a Ph.D. in German Philosophy from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. The one who taught philosophy at Harvard. Married to a French Jew she’d met at the Hillel Foundation in East Lansing. Who taught French at M.I.T.

  One daughter, Rebecca, who I always called Rivka, the Yiddish version of Rebecca. Menke Katz’s wife was Rebecca, too; Rebecca/Rivka.

  And the gorgeous, chunky Louis XIV pattern silverware, that could go to Marcella, pushing forty, big computer expert, married to this guy who was CFO, Chief Financial Officer, or something like that, at Ford no less. One daughter, too ...Gabrielle. Who looked exactly like me. Blonde and blue-eyed. Like her mother. Which was kind of a genetic miracle because her grandmother, my first wife, was a Peruvian who was mostly Indian, with just a smidgen of Hungarian in her, and out Marcella had come with a headful of blonde hair, the doctor (a Hungarian himself) telling me later, “When I first saw her -- you know, I know your wife pretty well -- I couldn’t quite believe it.”