by Noah Gordon
He couldn’t speak. He reached to touch her, but she held him off. “Not now. Please, not now.”
He couldn’t believe it. He wanted to howl. He wanted to smash her in the mouth and violate her. His fingers dug into her shoulders. “Not now? Well, when? When, for Christ’s sake?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“What’s different about tomorrow?”
“Try to understand. Please.”
He gave her shoulders a little shake. “What the hell is there to understand?”
“I don’t know anything about sex. Hardly anything.”
Her voice was so low he could barely make sense out of what she was saying. Under his hands he could feel a steady shivering that made him want to hold her close until it went away, and he felt ashamed and oddly afraid. He pulled her face into his shoulder.
“Honestly, Ellen?”
“I want you to tell me about it. Everything. Exactly how it will be. Don’t leave anything out. I want to think about it and think about it, every second from now until tomorrow. Then I’ll be ready.”
He groaned. “Ellie.”
“Tell me,” she said. “Please.”
So they lay there together, naked in the dark, with her lips on his shoulder and his hand moving in small circles in the beautiful hollow at the small of her back, which was the least inflammatory place he could find to touch. He closed his eyes and began to talk. He talked for a long time. When he had finished they lay without moving for a couple of minutes. Then she kissed him on the cheek and picked up her bathing suit and ran.
He stayed stretched out on the sand long after the shower had ceased its hissing. Then he took the wine out of the bag, opened it and waded into the surf. The sherry tasted of cork. He wanted to say a brocha, but he suspected it would be sacreligious. The warm tide pulled at his unprotected genitals and made him feel very pagan. He took a long drink from the bottle and then poured some into the sea, a libation.
She had been right. Thinking about what was going to happen that night was a torture, but it was pain of the most pleasurable variety. He lived in a state of ecstatic anxiety while he waited to catch his first glimpse of her from the pantry.
Had she been disgusted by his little recitation? Had it added to her fears?
The moment he saw her he knew that everything was all right. She came bustling in for a tray of orange juice and just stood there and looked at him. Her eyes were very soft and very warm and her lips granted him a small, secret smile before she fled with the juice.
Suddenly he became aware that there was blood all over the avocado he was slicing.
The next few minutes were confused. The cut was in the fleshy part of the index finger of his left hand. He felt little pain, but he grew faint at the sight of blood, even other people’s. He could feel his face becoming pale.
“I take care of it,” Bobby Lee said. He stuck Michael’s hand under the tap and then poured half a pint of peroxide into a bowl and kept the hand in it until a scum of tiny bubbles formed over the cut.
The kitchen phone rang. A second later Mr. Bousquet stuck his head through the door.
“What the hell?” the chef said, surveying the carnage.
“Just a cut. Clean as a baby’s ass. I diaper now,” Bobby Lee said.
“Long distance for you, Mr. Kind,” Mr. Bousquet said courteously.
At that time in his life a long-distance call was guaranteed to mean something very important. He jumped up and walked quickly to the telephone that hung on the white-tiled wall, trailing several drops of bright blood and Bobby Lee, who was saying things he didn’t understand, probably Korean swear words.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Michael?”
“Who is this?”
“Michael, it’s Dad.”
Bobby Lee stuck a basin under his hand and went away.
“What’s the matter?” he said into the phone.
“How are you, Michael?”
“I’m fine. Is there anything wrong?”
“We would like for you to come home.”
“Why?”
“Michael, I think you’re going to be needed here.”
He held the receiver tightly and looked into the mouthpiece. “Look, Dad, you tell me just what the hell is going on.”
“It’s your grandfather. He broke his hip. He fell down at the home.”
“What hospital is he at?”
“He’s at the home’s infirmary. They have everything, even an operating room. I called in a big specialist. He put in a pin. Like a nail to hold the bone together.”
Bobby Lee was back, carrying iodine and bandages.
“Well, that’s not good, but that doesn’t sound too serious.” He knew that Abe wouldn’t have called long distance if the situation were not serious, but a gigantic overriding selfishness had assumed command. “I can’t come today, but I can take the first bus out tomorrow.”
“Today,” his father said loudly.
“There are no buses,” he said. It was not until later, following the sorrow, that he felt the shame and guilt.
“Rent a car or something. He’s calling for you.”
“How bad is he? Really.” Bobby Lee held the basin under his hand and poured iodine into the cut.
“He has pneumonia from lying on his back for so long. He’s eighty-seven years old. The lungs fill up with fluid when they’re that old.”
He felt the sharp bite of remorse and the tearing pain of the iodine at almost the same instant, and he drew his breath with a sibilance that his father heard in New York.
Strange noises answered him from the receiver, and in a moment he realized that it was a sound he had never heard before. The rough, hoarse grunting was Abe Kind, weeping.
10
Night was falling on the Borough of Brooklyn by the time he left the taxi and ran up the yellow-brick stairs of the Sons of David Home for Aged and Orphans. A nurse took him down the shiny brown linoleum to the infirmary, where in a small private room his father sat in a chair next to the bed. The shade was pulled to the bottom of the window and only a small nightlight burned to dispel some of the darkness in the room. An oxygen tent covered the upper half of the bed. Through its transparent plastic windows he could see his zaydeh’s shadowed face and white beard.
His father looked up at him. “Nu, Michael?” Abe was unshaven and his eyes were red, but he seemed in perfect control.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Sorry? We’re all sorry.” He sighed heavily. “Life is a chelem, 2l dream. Before you know it, it’s over.”
“How is he?”
“He’s dying.” Abe’s voice had its normal loudness, and the words ground down on them like the heel of doom, causing Michael to look in fright at the figure in the bed.
“He’ll hear you,” he whispered.
“He hears nothing. He hears nothing and he knows nothing.” His father said this resentfully, his inflamed eyes glaring.
He walked to the bed and put his face to the celluloid window. His zaydeh’s cheeks were sunken and the hair in his nostrils was untrimmed. His eyes were unseeing. His lips were dry and cracked. They were moving, but Michael couldn’t make out the words they shaped.
“Is he trying to tell us something?”
His father’s head made a tired movement of denial. “He babbles and burbles. Sometimes he thinks he’s a boy. Sometimes he talks to people I never heard of. Mostly he sleeps. Longer and longer, now, he sleeps.
“Yesterday he called you a lot,” Abe said after a moment. “Me he didn’t call at all.”
They were thinking about this when his mother came back from supper with a clatter of high heels. “Have you eaten?” she said as she kissed him. “There’s a good delicatessen next block. Come on, I’ll go back with you. They have good soup.”
“I ate,” he lied. “Just a while ago.”
They talked briefly, but there was nothing to say, nothing that compared with the old man in the bed. There was another chair near
the window; his mother sat in this and he stood, now on one foot and now on the other. His father began to crack his knuckles.
First one hand.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Then the other.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Abe’s thumb would not make a noise. He struggled with it valiantly.
“Oy, Abe,” Michael’s mother said with a shudder. She looked at her son’s hands and gasped, for the first time noticing the bandaged finger. “What did you do to yourself?”
“It’s nothing. Just a cut.”
But she insisted upon seeing it and then fussed until he accompanied her in meek obedience down the corridor to the office of one Benjamin Salz, M.D., a balding middle-aged man with a British mustache who was lying in his shirtsleeves on a couch, reading a tattered copy of Esquire.
The doctor struggled wearily to his feet after Dorothy had explained their errand, glanced indifferently at Michael’s finger and then took two neat stitches in his flesh. The pain had by that time dulled to a familiar ache, but following the stitches it leaped into life with new enthusiasm.
The doctor looked longingly at Esquire while Dorothy questioned him first about Michael and then about his grandfather. Hot epsom salt soaks for Michael, he said. No telling how long for Mr. Rivkind. “He’s a tough old man. I’ve seen them hang on.”
When they got back his father had fallen asleep, his mouth open and his face gray. An hour later Michael asked his mother to take a taxi home, convincing her to do so by telling her that he wanted to stay and that he needed her chair. She left at ten-thirty, and he pulled the chair close to the old man’s side and sat there, watching him. His finger throbbed with regularity, his father snored, the oxygen hissed gently in the tent, and the liquid bubbled in his zaydeh’s lungs, drowning him with infinite slowness.
At midnight he dozed and was awakened by a voice weakly calling his name in Yiddish: “Micheleh? Micheleh?” And again, “Micheleh?”
He knew that Isaac was calling little Micheleh Rivkind and, more asleep than awake, he knew that he was Michael Kind and could not answer. Finally, coming to with a start, he bent forward and looked through the celluloid window.
“Zaydeh?” Michael said.
Isaac’s eyes rolled wildly in his head. Would he go, Michael asked himself, with only me to watch? He thought of waking his father, or running for the doctor, but instead he pulled the zipper in the corner of the oxygen tent and opened it. He pushed his head and shoulders inside and took his grandfather’s hand. It was soft and warm, but light and dry as rice paper.
“Hello, Zaydeh.”
“Micheleh,” he whispered. “Ich shtarb.”
His eyes were filmed. He was saying that he was aware he was dying. How much of the earlier conversations had he heard? Michael grew angry with his snoring father, cloaking himself so selfishly in guilty grief that he had invented the certainty that the old man was already dead, a corpse without ears that could hear the words of the living.
Behind the film Isaac’s eyes contained something, a flicker, a light—what was it? And then he knew with a certainty: fear. His grandfather was afraid. Despite a lifetime spent in search of God, now that he stood on the brink he was filled with terror. Michael tightened his grip on his grandfather’s hands until he felt the bones, brittle as old fishbones, and he slackened his hold for fear that they would snap.
“Zaydeh, don’t be afraid,” he said in Yiddish. “I’m here with you. I’ll never leave you.”
The eyes were already closed. His mouth worked like a child’s. “I’ll never leave you,” Michael said, knowing as he repeated the words that they couldn’t erase the long years of the old man’s walking alone up and down the long corridors of polished brown linoleum, a bottle of whiskey his most comforting relative.
Michael held his hand as he hallucinated, talking to some of the people who had left footprints on his memory when they had walked across his life. Sometimes he sobbed. The boy let his wrinkled cheeks stay wet with his tears; somehow it seemed as though to wipe them would be to invade his privacy. He was reliving the argument with Dorothy which had led to his leaving their household. He ranted and raved about Michael’s sister Ruthie and a little skotz named Joey Morello. Suddenly he squeezed his grandson’s fingers hard. His eyes opened wide and they stared. “Have sons, Micheleh,” he said. “Many Yiddisheh sons.” He closed his eyes and for five minutes or so he appeared to be sleeping peacefully, his breathing regular and the color high in his cheeks.
Then he opened his eyes wide and half-started out of his bed in rage. He tried to scream, but he didn’t have the strength; instead his words came out in a cracked whisper. “Not a shickseh!” he said. “Not a shickseh!” His fingers dug into Michael’s hand like wire claws. His eyelids slammed shut and his face twisted into an almost-comical grimace. Then the blood flooded into his cheeks, turning them gray-black underneath the transparent skin. He fell back heavily, no longer breathing.
Michael pried his fingers away from his zaydeh’s hand one by one and got his head out of the oxygen tent. He stood in the middle of the floor, trembling and rubbing his bandaged finger. Then he walked over to where his father sat snoring with his head against the wall. He looked defenseless in his sleep. For the first time Michael noticed how like Zaydeh Abe was in appearance, his nose hooking into prominence as he aged and his receding hairline already showing bald skull. The stubble on his face was more white than gray; if he didn’t shave during the week of shiva he would have a beard.
He reached out his hand and touched his father’s shoulder,
11
The funeral was held in the chapel of the Sons of David Home, with a eulogy by an elderly, asthmatic Orthodox rabbi and a long limousine ride to the crowded cemetery in Long Island. Many of the old men from the Home came along. On the way, seated between his father and mother in the rented car that smelled of floral offerings, Michael watched the neighborhoods roll past and wondered how many times his grandfather had made the trip to say good-by to friends.
Isaac was buried in the plain wooden box of the devout Jew, along with a new prayer book with ivory covers and a handful of earth from Eretz Yisroel, the Promised Land. Michael would have buried him with the tattered old siddur he had prayed from for so many years, and he would have enclosed a sack of candied ginger and a bottle of booze. When the rabbi shoveled in the first spadeful of earth, stones clattered down on the lid of the box and his father’s knees sagged. He and his mother had to hold Abe up while the rabbi cut the black ribbon pinned to his lapel. He said the kaddish through gulping sobs, while Dorothy turned her head and cried like a little girl.
They held the seven days of shiva in the apartment. On the second night of mourning, his sister Ruthie returned from Palestine. They hadn’t wired her, and she took one look at the covered mirrors and went into hysterics that started his mother and father weeping again. But gradually things quieted down. There were always too many people in the apartment, and too much food. Every day people brought gifts of food, and every day a lot of yesterday’s food was thrown out. Most of Zaydeh’s real friends were dead. The people who visited the Kinds were their friends, neighbors, and customers and employees of Abe’s. They brought cakes and fruit and cold cuts and chopped liver and nuts and candy. Mimi Steinmetz came in and squeezed Michael’s hand while her father told his father to sign up for perpetual care of the grave, because then you didn’t have to worry about details every year, you could just forget about it.
Michael thought a great deal about the things his grandfather had said before he had died. He knew they were the kind of things he might have expected Zaydeh to say, and that his warning had nothing to do with Ellen Trowbridge. But he was troubled that Isaac had died full of fear of death and the gentile, even though the first was inevitable and the second wouldn’t bother him ever again. He tried to tell himself that
Zaydeh was an old man from a world that no longer existed. On the fifth night, while his parents and their visitors sat in the living room and listened to Ruthie describe orange-picking in Rehovob, he went into the kitchen and took the phone off the hook. He dialed operator. The line buzzed twice and the operator came on. “I want to call long distance,” he said.
“What is the number of the party you wish to reach?”
His mother came into the kitchen. “I’ll put on some tea,” she said. “Ah, I’ll be glad when this is over. People every day and people every night.”
He replaced the receiver in the cradle.
The night after the week of mourning ended, they went to a restaurant for dinner. Halfway through the steak he was eating, he couldn’t swallow. He excused himself and walked out of the dining room. He gave the cashier three dollars and took the change in quarters, dimes, and nickels. Then he went into the telephone booth. He sat on the little seat and pressed his head against the glass, but he didn’t place the call.
The next day when his mother asked him to stay home instead of returning to The Sands, he felt relieved. “It will help your father to have you around,” she said.
He called the hotel’s New York booking office and they said they would send him a check. He had four hundred and twenty-six dollars and nineteen cents coming.
His father went back to work and Michael saw very little of him. He took long walks and he started going to small theaters that showed old movies. When the time came, he registered at the university. On his third day as a student he went to his mailbox on campus and found a letter from Ellen Trowbridge. It was a short letter, friendly but a little formal. She didn’t ask why he hadn’t gotten in touch with her. She just said that she was living at a place called Whitman Hall if he wanted to write to her at school, and she said she was sorry about his grandfather. He put the letter in his wallet.