Goodbye Without Leaving

by Laurie Colwin

  “A lovely place!” said Mrs. Hornung. “So soothing. Do you swim?”

  I said I did.

  “All American girls do, yes?” said Mrs. Hornung. “When I was a girl in Munich we had such a swimming club! And, of course, after we swam we went out to stuff ourselves with cakes. We were such gooses! You know, I am allowed one guest at my pool but I have no one to be my guest. I am the only old lady I know who swims. My granddaughters live in California. Geraldine. You know, they go surfing. It is so strange for me. These great big American girls in those black rubber clothes—how do you call these?”

  “Wet suits,” I said, looking down at her.

  Mrs. Hornung clapped her hands together. “Exactly so!” she said. “Wet suits! It is quite terrifying to watch. I stand on the shore and say, This is the Pacific Ocean, and these big girls with blond hair are my granddaughters. And you know, Geraldine?” She dropped her voice. “Although they are Jewish, frankly they look exactly like those blond girls from the Nazi propaganda posters.”

  Her pool was in a small building owned by the Heinrich Heine Haus. A group of writers and artists had scrounged together the money to buy the building many years ago as a cultural center, and then, courtesy of a rich benefactor, had built the pool. It was Olympic-sized, tiled in black and white and overseen by a ferocious woman named Martine who checked your name against a list on a clipboard every time you came. To be a guest member cost three hundred dollars, which I paid out of my Ruby and Vernon money. I had not gone swimming in years, except to splash around in the lake at my mother-in-law’s with Little Franklin.

  My first time at the pool, I went with Mrs. Hornung, who wore a shapeless swimming garment. She said to me, “I look terrible, no? I am seventy-nine, but I assure you, Geraldine, that if I do not swim I look much, much worse. My poor suit, you see, has this white worm disease. The chlorine eats the material and the little white rubber threads poke their heads through, so.”

  After I had been introduced to Martine, handed over my check and entered my name in the guest book, Mrs. Hornung and I entered the water.

  She swam an idiosyncratic backstroke, pulling both arms back at the same time and fluttering her little feet. She looked exactly like one of Franklin’s bath toys, a wind-up woman who swam around in a circle.

  On rainy days I was often the only person in the pool. I was always the youngest. These men and women, all elderly, seemed content in a way I could not understand. They had been uprooted from their homelands. Many of them—there were a number of people with numbers on their wrists—had been through things more terrible than I could imagine. They had had everything taken away from them: their language, their landscape, their sense of stability, and here they were, greeting each other happily in German, English and Yiddish, complaining about their hairdressers or dentists or stockbrokers, comparing the prices of shoes at Saks Fifth Avenue, and swimming up and down, up and down, in a slow, determined way.

  The ceiling of the pool was blue, and often, when imitating Mrs. Hornung for a lap or two to stretch my shoulders, I felt as if I were suspended between two skies. I had not felt so effortless since my days on stage, when I often danced myself into what felt like a state of weightlessness. I could make my body do anything I wanted it to. At the best times there was no mind or body, just one flowing, sliding unit.

  None of my friends except Mary had ever seen me perform. By the time I was on the road awhile my friends had faded away—except for Mary, who was not Ruby’s biggest fan. She liked Ruby’s early hits. When I came on the tour, Ruby was into her middle period, which was less raw and more jive. Mary often said she could hear in her mind what Ruby would eventually become: a kind of millionaire torch singer backed by a double orchestra.

  The first time I sang solo, Mary was in the audience. A ring of light surrounded the Shakettes. Ruby stood in darkness on the other side of the stage. Doo-Wah stepped forward and played his riff. Then Grace and Ivy stepped back and I was alone in the light. I sang:

  You don’t love me like you used to do

  Darling it’s just, just, just not the same anymore

  I’ll always love you no matter what you do

  Even if you don’t love me like you used to do.

  Then Ruby stepped into her spotlight, and Grace and Ivy joined me in mine. It was the most thrilling moment of my life.

  I dipped underwater and heard myself sing it in my head. I used to sing it to Johnny, and I had sung it to Little Franklin as a lullaby when he was a baby.

  As I swam my laps, one crawl, one breaststroke, I thought of Hannah Hausknecht, who had described sitting on the steps of the children’s barracks at Auschwitz singing:

  Was müssen das für Bäume sein

  Wo die grossen Elephanten spatzieren gehen

  Obne anzustossen.

  What kind of a tree is it, I asked myself, where the big elephants can take a walk or promenade without bumping their heads?

  My college German was slowly coming back to me, and sometimes at night I found myself singing this very song to Franklin, always a big fan of elephants, in his bath.

  58

  One night while wandering around the neighborhood I stopped in front of the Neighborhood Synagogue, which I had been cruising for months, and saw that the door was open. It was a square building that looked something like a Quaker meetinghouse. A sign on the gate announced the times of services and that Rabbi Noah Pivnik would speak on the subject “What Are Jews For?” In the lobby I found an old black man wearing a skullcap and talking to a large orange cat. I was not prepared to see either of them.

  “Hi,” I said. “Is the synagogue open tonight?”

  The man pointed at a room on the right. I poked my head in the door. There was a man—his back was to me—putting children’s books onto a shelf. He was small and square. In fact he looked a little like one of those man-shaped blocks in a set called Bill Ding. He wore a crocheted skullcap, and when he turned to me I saw that he had a pleasant, mournful face and a shock of thick brown hair.

  “Are you looking for someone?” he asked.

  “Yes. I mean, no.”

  “I see,” the man said. “Confused, right?”

  “Listen,” I said. “Do you teach Hebrew to grown-ups?”

  The man smiled. He looked like a tired but kindly doctor.

  “We call them adults,” he said. “Class starts tonight. Would you like to join?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know anything.”

  “Can that be?” the man said. “Everyone knows something.”

  “About being Jewish,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s a different story,” the man said. “But that’s what education is all about. I’m Ben Cohen. I’m the head of the religious school.”

  “Would you take me?” I said. “Do I have to sign up?”

  “There’s nothing to sign,” Ben Cohen said. “Just sit down. We don’t charge, but you can make a donation to the synagogue if you like.”

  I looked at him as a starving dog might look at a steak.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m a complete moron.”

  “Take it easy,” Ben Cohen said. “Don’t be anxious. I can teach anyone. Tell me a little about yourself.”

  I told him a little—I felt I could have gone on all night. It seemed to me that he had heard it all before.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve turned Methodists into Jews. You at least have a head start. We also have classes for children and reluctant spouses.”

  I sat in my chair and waited for my classmates to appear. There was a woman my age, an elderly woman and a few older men. We were given a beginner’s workbook, the kind, Ben Cohen told us, that he gave to the seven-year-olds.

  For the next few minutes Ben Cohen talked to us. He swore that if we applied ourselves we would be following the prayer book within six months. “You might not know what you’re reading, but you’ll read,” he said.

  I looked down at my book. On each page was
a series of Hebrew letters and a little picture of a sturdy-looking boy and girl engaged in such tasks as cooking, woodworking and greeting their father at the end of the day. The father wore a hat and the mother wore an apron. He carried a briefcase; she, a tray of cookies. I stared at the meaningless black shapes and realized that Little Franklin saw almost the same thing when I read to him. Since the letters in his books were as incomprehensible to him as the Hebrew letters to me, he was crazy about punctuation, which he could easily identify, and he knew everything from an exclamation point to an ampersand, which was his personal favorite.

  Then we were asked to say who we were and why we were there. Mrs. Singer was eighty years old, a large woman with pure white hair who said she was tired of coming to services and not having a clue what she was reciting. Mr. Pizer, a businessman in his fifties, had made a five-thousand-dollar bet with his aged father that he would master the prayer book. Mr. Kapock said that if he learned Hebrew his wife had promised him a bar mitzvah—he had never had one as a boy—with a real orchestra. Erna Wilson was a serious-looking redheaded schoolteacher who was converting from Methodism to marry her Jewish sweetheart. Then it was my turn.

  “I’m a kind of wandering Jew,” I said. “I wander around trying to figure out how to be Jewish. It’s the problem assimilated people who never had any traditional upbringing have. You know you’re Jewish. You just don’t know how to be Jewish.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Ben Cohen. “We’ve dealt with characters like you before.”

  “But you already have a Jewish identity,” said Mr. Kapock. “You already know what you are.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be enough,” I said. “I want to know how to be what I am.”

  Then we got down to business. I had not studied anything in years and I was daunted by how hard I found it.

  “Once you learn the vowels, you won’t need them anymore,” Ben Cohen said. “In newspapers they leave them out.”

  “They what?” shrieked Mr. Pizer.

  “You won’t need them, I swear it,” Ben Cohen said.

  “Oh, my God,” said Mrs. Singer. “They told me the brain hardens with age. Mine is like a block of stone. They give us the vowels and then they take them away.”

  “Now, now,” said Ben Cohen. “Really, I could teach Hebrew to this pencil.”

  “That pencil is smarter than I am,” said Mr. Pizer.

  Johnny was considerably surprised when I told him what I had done on my night out. He assumed I had gone to a movie, but I flung my beginner’s Hebrew book down on the bed beside him. He looked through it. “A fiendish people, these Hebrews,” he said.

  “You’re a Hebrew, too, and don’t you forget it,” I said.

  The next morning Franklin seized upon my book. “What’s this, Mom?” he said.

  “It’s Mommy’s Hebrew book, Pankie,” said Johnny.

  “Don’t call me that baby name,” said my boy.

  “What would you like me to call you?” Johnny said.

  “Call me Mr. Franklin,” said Little Franklin. “Mom, can I have your Hebrew book? Can I, Mom? Is it mine?”

  “No, it’s mine,” I said. “But you can look at it.”

  “It’s not fair,” said Franklin. “Read it to me, Mommy.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m just learning.”

  My son gave me a curious look. It had not occurred to him that adults ever had to learn anything. When I was a child I had been given to understand that grown-ups knew everything, and I had never heard of one studying anything.

  On the way to school, my son told Amos and Ann Potts that I could read Hebrew.

  “A new fact revealed,” Ann said. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I was thinking of taking a class and last night I found one. It doesn’t look easy.”

  “It’s so restful to belong to a religion that requires you only to read English,” Ann said. “Protestantism actually requires next to nothing. Jews and Catholics always seem to be so busy, what with Mass and nuns and all those holidays, and Latin or Hebrew. Being a Protestant takes up so little time, but it comes in handy for those special days like Christmas, Easter and weddings.’

  Little Franklin and Amos walked ahead of us. They were the same size and wore almost the same clothes: blue jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. The morning sun glinted off their hair.

  I thought of all the things I would be unable to give my boy without a monumental effort: a sense of community, a sense of order in the universe. I could not imagine him at thirteen studying his Hebrew lesson while I watched. I said as much to Ann.

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “Order in the universe—who needs it? When he’s thirteen I’ll give him a fountain pen and you can say he had a bar mitzvah.”

  59

  Although I ought to have been used to it, I found it hard to say goodbye to Franklin in the morning. I stood in his classroom watching him and his little mates hard at work—painting, woodworking, making block buildings on the floor—for a few minutes until my beloved child made me realize that it was time for me to go.

  Often as I left I felt I was crossing a physical barrier. My life was divided into four parts: school, family, work and swimming. Under the category of swimming I put Leo Rhinehart and my newly acquired Hebrew lessons. Both of these were another element, like water.

  As I opened the door to the office I heard Dr. Frechtvogel coughing. I could smell him before I saw him. The very air that surrounded him was permeated with cigar smoke.

  “Where is the mail?” he demanded.

  “It’s not here yet.”

  “There is no law in this country!” he barked. “This is a lawless outpost! There is no civilization where a man cannot count on routine mail delivery.”

  He shook his ashes at me, scattering them on his sleeves. I brushed them off.

  “When I was young in Vienna,” Dr. Frechtvogel said, “I hired a servant to do just this and brush the ashes away. I called this person Aschenbecker. Now you have replaced him. Ah! I hear the mail.”

  He tore out of the room, flung the door open and bearded the mailman by the elevator.

  “What is the meaning of this outrage!” he shouted at the cowering mailman. “What have you been doing to waste time that the mail is so late! I will complain to the postal department.”

  The mailman, who was used to this treatment, leaned against the wall and said, “Hey, Doc. Don’t beat up on me.”

  “The post office is a disgrace!” yelled Dr. Frechtvogel.

  At this point I took him by the arm and led him back to the office, where I knew the sight of the delivered mail would pacify him. He pawed through the stack of letters, as mollified as an occupied child.

  Our office was obsessed with the affair of Manfred Kirschbaum, who had retreated to Paris and spent his time sending threatening letters, or commanding his French lawyers to write to Bernard saying that they would sue him for denying Kirschbaum the right to publish what the lawyers believed to be an authentic manuscript by the great Felix Kindervater.

  “It is a fraud,” said Dr. Frechtvogel, smoothing out a letter. “Here is proof. Oh, I forget—you don’t read German with ease. This manuscript is a sham.”

  “Gee, do you think Manfred wrote it?”

  “We will never know,” said Dr. Frechtvogel. “The world is full of such little mysteries. All his work, all ours, all yours—nothing! This matter will evaporate and we will never hear of Kirschbaum again. He will live off the Bonfiglio like a sponge.”

  “And will that be the end of it?”

  “It will vanish as smoke,” said Dr. Frechtvogel. “I am very old. The Kirschbaums of the world are very tiresome. I have seen a great many of them. Kirsehbaum is a little scoundrel. There are much worse.” He closed his eyes and smoked his cigar.

  “I started taking Hebrew lessons,” I said. Dr. Frechtvogel did not open his eyes. “I think I’m going to take a course in Jewish history. I want Franklin to have some se
nse of heritage.” I looked at him, wondering if he had fallen asleep.

  Suddenly he bounded out of his chair and began to shout. “Make him an American!” he said. “Do not confuse him with this silly business. Religion makes war! There would be no Holocaust without religion. One has it, the other hates it. Be glad your boy is a nice American. Take him to baseball games. Let him spend his money on bubble gum.”

  “But what will he know?” I said. “Where will he get his sense of identity?”

  Dr. Frechtvogel sat down in his chair and closed his eyes. “He will be himself. He will be himself in the cosmos,” he said. “If you are worried, plant a garden. Take him to the Planetarium.”

  “We did plant a garden,” I said. “Franklin planted a bunch of sunflower seeds and almost drove himself crazy until they sprouted. Johnny took him to the Planetarium, but it was too scary.”

  Dr. Frechtvogel motioned for me to relight his cigar.

  “I just want him to have what I didn’t have,” I said.

  “I will die soon,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t do that,” I said.

  “I wish to die,” he said. “Last week I went to visit Mrs. Weinberg. Along the way a large man came and demanded my money. He says I must give him my money or he will kill me. I said, ‘Kill me at once! I long to die. I am very old.’”

  “What did he do?”

  “He dropped his knife and ran away,” said Dr. Frechtvogel.

  His face had the sheen of parchment. He resembled one of the big cats that drowse, fully alert, with its eyes closed. His great eyebrows shot up, but he wore a faint smile, like a sleeping newborn or a Buddha.

  “I don’t want you to die,” I said, sitting in the chair next to him. Dr. Frechtvogel took my hand. His was as soft and worn as an old kid glove. “I need you to be alive,” I said. “Are you sick?”

  “I have had enough of life,” said Dr. Frechtvogel. “I will be happy to enter heaven, where I can smoke in peace.”