by Michael Oren
* * * * *
She lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on 136th Street in Mott Haven, in a neighborhood alive with peppery smells and music that sounded to him like pots being dropped off balconies. They would meet on the doorstop framed between the brownstones and iron railings where Carmen’s mother—he would soon call her Mamá—could monitor them from above. She had three younger sisters and a brother, some, he suspected, from different fathers, and supported by a family of cousins who, however distant, kept one another above poverty. Carmen never felt poor, at least, though she worked after school and weekends at an uncle’s bodega in Inwood. He visited her there often, drawn—so he ribbed her—by the crispy tostones she snuck him but really for the chance of stealing into the storage closet where, between the stacks of toilet paper and refried beans, they kissed.
For kisses had to be stolen, at least at first. But how much fun was the theft! Guarded by a mother sworn to spare her the trauma she suffered at that age and observed by a vigilante corps of relatives, Carmen could rarely be alone with him. Inventively, they found not only the storage closet but also a junky-free alleyway and the struggling urban park, behind a stand of plane trees. Propped by one of these, one balmy night, Carmen let him insert his hand beneath her blouse. That first sensation of her breast in his hand—hot, trembling slightly but strangely tenacious—would remain ineffable to him always, long after they became lovers.
That could only happen in his fraternity house, in his room crammed with Mets banners and bruised hockey sticks, where the stale beer smell was hard-baked into the floor. The sex, bumbling at first, became fiery. Most wondrous for him, though, was the sight of her knees which seemed to condense the nut-colored sheen of her face and her spindly fingers with nails painted the same defiant red as her earrings. Her hair, let free, cascaded like black satin down her neck.
Carmen fit in well with his frat brothers, mostly working-class Irish guys like him but with a smattering of Italians, jocks and toughies who nevertheless cowered in front of her. Instead, they teased him for falling so obviously and stupidly in love. They dubbed him Jorge and warned him to treat her right.
He treated her right. Never one for religion, he joined Carmen and her family for Sunday Mass and even made confession. He helped them spruce up the Mott Haven apartment, dumping the detritus of Mamá’s boyfriends and clearing a space for the children to play in. He cleaned and she quizzed him—on the names of her uncles and cousins but also on math and history, preparing him for exams. For Carmen had made up her mind.
“This is not for you,” she informed him one night, sitting up abruptly in his bed.
“This. You mean what we just did?”
She socked him in the chest. “No, tonto, dummy. This frat house. This dead-end life. You’re going to give up the beer and the weed, focus on your studies. You’re going to be something, McDonough. A lawyer. No tacking shingles like your dad.”
He had told her about his father—his father who, after his army service, intended to learn accounting but never finished his degree, blaming it on his mother’s pregnancies. He described the roofing trade which, though punishing and hazardous, proved lucrative enough, and how his father drank and smoked in spite.
But talking to her about his father and introducing her remained separate. George McDonough, Sr. was no Mamá, he explained, nor was his mother, who shared her husband’s dependence on cigarettes and booze. Hard people, not prone to tolerance. One look at Carmen’s coloring was enough, he feared, to bar her from their house. Yet she told him not to worry, that his parents would love her just as she would love them.
“Everything’s always negative with you, Jorge,” she berated him, tenderly. “Everything will be fine, you’ll see.” She smiled, showing him not only the tips but the breadth of her dove-white teeth. “Life is so much more incredible than you think.”
And it was. His parents, after little more than a moment’s befuddlement, practically embraced her. Offered her a drink, which she politely refused, and showed her around their clapboard Rego Park home. Escorting her through the glass patio door to a backyard barely big enough for a picnic table, they fed her and questioned her about her family. They seemed to listen to every word she said—George hardly recognized them—except when it came to their son.
“A lawyer?” they laughed.
But Carmen stood firm. “And not just any lawyer, Mr. and Mrs. McDonough, but a successful lawyer. A respected lawyer. I know Jorge—George. You’ll see.”
They stopped laughing. And soon they started believing, as he moved out of the frat house and buckled down at school. His grades skyrocketed, propelling him near the top of his class. Carmen, meanwhile, finished high school—so many family members crammed the commencement photo that there was barely room for her boyfriend—and kept working at the bodega, all the while studying for her real estate broker’s license. There was a path for them, straight and obstacle-free. They merely had to stroll it.
So they strode up the aisle in the church where Carmen became Carmen McDonough and danced in the modest hall where the guests got plastered on Jameson and Mama Juana. A few days later, as they lay dreaming out loud of someday taking a honeymoon, the acceptance letter arrived from Fordham. There was a money issue, but Carmen said, “No worries, Jorge. We’ll both work. We’ll get you through,” and they did.
He liked the law, its clear, clean dimensions. Torts, contracts—somehow they reminded him of roofing, the elevation, the way each shingle overlapped the next, shielding every inch. He was a diligent, if not brilliant student, proficient enough to be hired by a mid-sized firm out on Long Island.
They moved into a house—no mansion, certainly, but their own real house—and launched into their lives. No one, of course, could resist Carmen’s pitch for real estate, and, together with her husband’s salary, they more than made do. That Christmas, he unwrapped his gift to find a pacifier, diapers, and a rattle. He kissed her and, for the first time since grade school, he cried.
Deidre, their firstborn, was followed by Rosa, both girls whose complexions clashed with their names. Deidre dark, midnight-haired, and Rosa, cinnamon and cream. Good, fun, adorable girls. Rushing to hug his knees when he returned from the office, they made him feel princely, enchanted almost.
“What have I done to deserve all this?” he frequently asked Carmen.
She still punched him in the chest. “You know the answer, tonto. You knew it that morning on the train.”
Yes, that morning on the train. He would recall it many times over the next ten years whenever he cared for Harry.
Henry, Enrique, who somehow merged into Harry, became the family’s heart. That was because Harry’s own heart—so said a doctor with a face as pale as his gown—was congenitally damaged. Procedures were required, therapies, and even then, the chances were few. And yet, beautiful at birth, angelic through childhood, Harry never once complained. He never sobbed as his father did, out of view, into Carmen’s arms. “There, there,” she’d comfort him. “Where’s my brave young Jorge? Harry will get better, you’ll see.”
Most times Harry indeed acted like the healthy one, bucking up his parents and sisters whenever his condition looked bleak. “Lighten up, folks,” he reprimanded them when, at age twelve, he was hospitalized for a month. “I’m the sick one around here, remember?” Perhaps it was because he never appeared ill—on the contrary, he had his father’s freckles and his mother’s glinting eyes. His heart, though, impish and indomitable, was all Carmen’s. Even weak, it seemed to beat for them all.
“Why don’t you chuck it out already?” Harry once suggested, referring to the tricycle that remained in the backyard, the only place he’d been allowed to ride it. But his father refused. As if it had become a talisman, as sacred as a Virgin statue, the tricycle stayed throughout rain and snowstorms, a reminder of the suffering Harry endured and his grit to overcome it.
That single-mindedness hauled him through high school and into college at Georgetown. An honors stud
ent, handsome, easy-going, Harry was enormously popular—the president of this, chairman of that—and prized by women. They wanted him, even when warned of his limitations. Vacations, those handicaps kept him at home where Carmen could dote on him and his father could silently fret. Only once, did they get called down to see him, in the second semester of his junior year which, according to the surgeon at Georgetown Hospital, would likely be his last.
They raced from Long Island, so heedlessly that Carmen had to chastise him, “Tonto, you’ll get us all killed!” Still, they reached the hospital safely and learned from the surgeon that Harry, already unconscious, would have to be operated on at once. The situation was desperate, yet there was this new protocol involving a piece of somebody else’s son’s heart. A one-out-of-ten shot, the surgeon reckoned.
They stroked Harry’s hair, kissed his forehead, and watched as he was wheeled into prep. As usual, it was he who cried and Carmen who stayed implacable. “No, Jorge. None of that now. Harry needs us strong.”
So he acted strong when all he really wanted was to weep and beg the God his wife so staunchly believed in. He wanted to grasp her hand and feel it girding his and to look at her, her body now as plump as her mother’s once was, and its features blunted, but with the same enameled eyes, the skin still lustrous.
“What would I have been without you?” he found himself asking her. “I was all alone. Frightened of riding subways.” For an instant he became that kid again, indifferent, reticent, hiding behind a hockey stick. “But then you came and gave me everything. A life, a family. You gave me Harry.”
She shook her head and the harsh light of the waiting room silver-streaked her hair. “No, Jorge,” she said. “You gave all that to yourself. It was your decision. Without it, we wouldn’t have anything. No Deidre. No Rosa. We wouldn’t have Harry.”
Four hours passed, six. Dawn was peeking through some blinds when the doors to the ward swung open. The two of them stood while the surgeon emerged and untied his mask. The face behind it was worn but his expression nevertheless beamed. Carmen, with a cry, hugged her husband.
* * * * *
He can almost imagine that cry still over the roar of the game—Mets versus Cardinals—on the radio. His truck turns down Queens Boulevard toward 63rd Drive and pulls onto a side street lined with clapboard houses. Parking in its single driveway, he kills the engine and smokes a cigarette while listening to the top of the eighth. But then the inning ends, and he has no choice. Exiting, he finds the front knob left unlocked, though he’s told her a dozen times not to.
The house is quiet inside, but he knows he’s not alone. A soap opera’s arguing somewhere in the den and the air tangs with smoke. Another odor—gin, maybe, or bourbon—also lingers. On rubberized boots that pad his steps, he sneaks into the kitchen and helps himself to a beer. Then, sipping, he crosses to the patio door.
The sun’s blazing in the backyard where the grass has long expired. Patches cower under lawn chairs and embrace a rusted tricycle. It’s been there for years but he refuses to throw it out or even to trim around it. Wincing into the heat, he stands for a moment, motionless, over the bike.
“Are you home?” a slurry voice calls out from the den. “Is that you, George?”
He pauses, as if to ponder his answer.
“George?”
He glances down at the tricycle and then at the name stitched over his pocket. His voice decrescendos. “Yeah, it’s me.”
With a last bitter swig of his beer, he retreats from the yard and begins to shut the door. But then she appears to him, just as she always does. In jeans and platform shoes, red plastic earrings, her hair pulled back from a face far too radiant to forget.
“Jorge,” she whispers and pivots away. “Jorge.” Glancing over one of her bared shoulders, she smiles at him sadly as she did that morning so many years ago, while her mother led her off the platform and George just sat there and watched. He couldn’t move, couldn’t leap onto the alternate path—at the conceivable love—proffered him. Rather, self-deprecatingly, he returned her smile and remained hunkering behind his stick.
The glass door closes like those on the subway that clattered and screeched as it bore him, lonely and scared, to his life.
Aniksht
In the forest, the butterflies look like flakes of folding sunlight. I love the forest. Its trees are birch, with bark that reminds me of the zebras I once saw in a book. The birds, cowering in the branches, call out warnings as I pass. Why fear me, I want to ask them, an eleven-year-old who wishes not you nor anybody harm? Who wants only to escape from the town where everything is darkness and noise and to wander in the forest with its shavings of light, its birches and birds, where my shoes sink silently in the moss?
My town, Anyksciai—Aniksht, in Yiddish—is the biggest, they say, outside of Vilna. But I have never been to Vilna. For all people know, I never venture beyond our house near the main square and the state school down the street and the shul where, Sabbaths, my mother still insists on taking me. One of her hands drags mine while the other pushes the pram of my baby brother, Emmanuel. We go alone, my mother’s head held high above the tide of our neighbors’ whispering that rises as we pass. In the women’s section, we pray—actually, she prays, with eyes closed tightly and her fingers in fists on the siddur. “God is near to all who call upon Him,” she chants. “To all who call upon Him in truth.” But I do not call upon him. I do not like the truth.
The truth is with my father, at home in the salon where he smokes and reads the papers, smokes and reads his books. Not prayer books but stories translated from other languages, mostly, about war and evil and love. Especially love. Though he tries to hide them behind the broom closet, I have found those books and read them, or at least tried to. The words are difficult but the tales—of virtue lost, hearts and promises broken—even harder. “Go,” he sneers at my mother as she leaves the house for shul. “Go and delude yourself—and them,” meaning Emmanuel and me. “This,” he says and drums a red leather cover. “This is my truth.”
But I know it isn’t. Or at least not all of it. The truth which all the people of Aniksht seem to know, and my mother struggles to forget, is that my father is a man of secrets. He is an accomplished man, one of the town’s four lawyers with an office right on the main square. There, he fills out forms and makes petitions for anyone—workers, teachers, farmers unable to write their own names. He is ruthless, I’ve heard people say, but skilled. He wins most all his cases. But not only his mind is sharp but also his clothing, cut in the latest double-breasted fashion and from the finest imported cloth. With his thin, fine-featured face, his eyes so light a brown they are often mistaken for blue, the pencil moustache, the pomaded hair parted on the right third of his scalp, he could easily star in movies.
Nobody would guess that my father was the son of an impoverished Talmud student, a reader of mystical books and the writer of even more fabulous ones. He lived in a village not far from here, a cluster of wooden shacks with basements where the people used to hide from the Cossacks. The shul was of wood as well, little more than a barn. Orphaned after his birth, my father hated that village, and as soon as he could, he moved here, to Aniksht. He hated everything that drove his own father mad and left his mother to die.
So Dovid Leib Gryn became Darius Leibas Girenas, attorney at law, a devoted secularist and intellectual. Fluent in five languages, only one of which, Yiddish, he hesitates to speak. When not calming clients or arguing their claims in court, he busies himself with the news of the day. Russians, Germans, kicking us back and forth like footballs, Britain asleep in the stands. He reads and curses, reads and sighs, and when my mother takes Emmanuel and me to shul, he waits for the clatter of the pram to fade.
Only then does my father put down his paper and close up all of his books. Only then does he sneak out the back door and cross the yards, ducking behind steepled wells and stinky outhouses until he reaches the part of town where our people don’t live, where my mother tells me
never to play. The church bells clang in spiky silver towers, warning us away. But my father doesn’t hesitate. Instead, he enters another house. Hers. And then he stays for several hours while my mother closes her eyes and prays. He closes his eyes as well and forgets all about the crazy mystics, the Russians and the Germans and the world. There, finally, my father finds peace.
How do I know all this? From the forest, of course. It knows how to impart secrets and how to keep them as well. It is a wizard of sorts, ancient and wise, a confidante, a friend. Located less than an hour’s walk from town, the forest is easily reachable even by a speck of a girl like me. Easy, when my mother thinks I’m out playing, to slip away to. I suppose I should be afraid, ambling alone in the woods, but somehow I’m just the opposite, sheltered. On the contrary, it’s home that I fear.
Home is where, if not for Emmanuel’s crying, I can hear my mother weeping in her bedroom. Home is where my father sleeps separately, leaves early for work and returns long after I’m asleep, or at least pretend to be. In fact, I lay listening to my parent’s arguing, exchanging words of hate. And other words as well—of anxiety about the future, about whether, despite their anger, they could reunite long enough to take the family far away from Aniksht. To Palestine or even the United States. Anywhere safe. Such times it’s all I can do to keep from leaping out from under my covers and shouting, “We don’t have to go far! Just down the road—to the forest!”
But I say nothing, at least not to them. Why can’t they love each other, I ask the trees? Why can’t we just live our lives without worry and threat, quietly in Aniksht? And the forest replies: look.
I don’t want to, but I have no choice. The forest only gives me a moment’s warning and they almost discover me. Instead, I hide behind a birch—I’m that skinny—and observe them. My father and Mrs. Vilkas, the butcher’s wife. A tall, high-cheeked woman, with golden hair braided peasant-style and eyes the color of knife blades. I see my father pulling her by the hand, running as fast as they can without tripping over fallen branches, and then stopping, panting, with her back against a tree, and there my father kisses her.