He told Sheldon that he liked to stand on the pier and watch them depart for Europe and the Caribbean. “I wanted to be a pirate. Not a lot of Jewish pirates, though.” He’d placed his hands in his pockets and stuck out his chest and called himself “Errol Flynnowitz!” They both had laughed until Joseph had said, “It’s funny, it is. But you know why? Because the world can’t abide a Jewish hero, that’s why. And once you understand that, it takes the fun out of the funny.”
“You’re a hero, Dad,” Sheldon had said to him.
Sheldon knew only the contours of his father’s service as Joseph wasn’t much for discussing it. He had served in the 26th Infantry, the Yankee Division. In April of 1918, he was in Apremont-la-Forêt in France nearby the fighting in Saint-Mihiel. When that conflict had started in mid-September, American forces fired a million rounds of artillery in the first four hours. When the shelling stopped, Joseph was assigned to be a wire cutter. His job was to crawl headfirst into no-man’s-land on his belly and clip the barbed wire so later troops could storm across the earth to the German positions—storm through a hail of defensive machine-gun fire into a smoke as thick as prayer. Sheldon thought the medal given to the entire company—not to Joseph personally—made him a hero.
Joseph had tried to dispel Sheldon of all these ideas because he thought they were dangerous and might lead him into the next war—a war he was sure was coming, sometime, someplace—so he tried to deter him. And if that didn’t work, he’d already taken some other precautions.
* * *
Headlights came up behind their truck.
“Looks like someone’s in a hurry,” Joseph said, looking back. “I say we let him pass, huh?”
He applied the brakes, and the car behind them came alongside.
It wasn’t a car but a truck. Sheldon looked across his father’s arm at the driver. He had a thick mustache and wore a black suit, white shirt, and black tie. His hair was raven-black and matted down hard on his head like a helmet; his face was rounded and thuggish. He looked at Sheldon and Sheldon looked back at him. Each regarded the other.
Sheldon watched the man as he first looked down at his lap then turned upward to examine Joseph, who was wearing his British wool trench cap. The driver removed a cigarette from his lips and threw it out the window. He then placed both hands on the wheel.
“Dad?” Sheldon said.
“What is it?”
“Something’s wrong.”
That was when the trucks slammed together.
Joseph was not an experienced driver. The craving that some men enjoyed—for speed, wind, and the thrill of reckless possibility—was not part of his spirit. He was a man who had raised himself from the trenches of France to the gentle hills and woods of New England with such a lightness of touch that even the animals paid him no heed when he passed. This had been enough for him. The company of his wife. His son. The vista. The dawn.
The inexperience cost him. Rather than correcting their course, he braced himself on the wheel like it was something firm and stable and trustworthy. As his body jerked right, his hands spun the wheel. With a dark left-hand turn coming up and slick roads below, Joseph entered the turn too fast and panicked.
As he whipped the wheel hard to the left in a last-ditch effort at control, the full weight of the truck pressed down on the front-right tire and the pressure was too much—it blew out in protest. The Ford lurched and started to go over.
“Daddy!” yelled Sheldon, and he lunged for his father as the truck keeled over onto his side and skidded into the trees by the shoulder.
The front smashed into an oak, and when it did, the engine forced the steering column into Joseph’s chest and jammed the sharp edge of the floorboard into his leg.
Sheldon’s head would have slammed into the window and the earth had it not been cradled by Joseph’s two strong arms that had wrapped themselves reflexively around him at the moment of impact.
When all stopped and all was still, Joseph’s arms went slack. Sheldon fell down to the ground on his side of the cabin. His father was pinned between the steering wheel and the seat; his chest compressed, his voice wheezing: “Donny.”
“Daddy,” Sheldon said again, planting his feet and reaching up to try to free him.
Joseph knew wounds. He had seen hundreds, and though he was no medic, he knew on sight which ones caused a man to bleed out and which ones didn’t. He hung above Sheldon, his blood dripping down on his only son, and he knew this was the end.
He didn’t have much time.
“Take it,” he said to Sheldon, reaching out his hands to him.
It looked to him like Sheldon had suffered only a few scratches, and he took it as a blessing that he had lived long enough to know that his son would be all right. It is all, in the end, that a father can hope for and all he really wants.
“What?” asked Sheldon. He didn’t understand.
“Take it,” his father whispered, his lucidity fading.
There was nothing there. Nothing in his hands.
“Take it, Sheldon. Take it all.”
“What, Daddy?”
“The love. Take it. Take it all.”
Hands clasped together, Joseph Horowitz bled out and died.
Home
SHELDON WAS LONG GONE when an early-morning newspaper delivery van discovered the accident and Larry Evans, the young driver, found Joseph’s body. Larry had never seen an overturned truck before. Its failing headlights cast a candle-yellow light across the face of the beech tree forest. He approached the wreck fearing the worst. Inside, he found Joseph; his body was limp and hanging like a forgotten rag doll, still pinned by the steering column. Raised in the city and unaccustomed to death, Larry left Joseph there and sped off. A few miles later, calmer with the distance, he felt guilty and ashamed, and drove to the local police station to share what he knew. The cops took note and headed down unhurriedly, an ambulance in their wake, to collect the body. It was brought to the quiet hospital in Northampton. The night nurse found a cracked leather wallet in Joseph’s pocket containing an expired military ID and photographs of a very beautiful woman and a little boy. Calls the next day to the Veterans’ Bureau eventually led from Joseph Horowitz to his brother, Nathaniel, down in Hartford. The search for family was hindered because Nathaniel Horowitz had changed his family name to Corbin for business reasons.
* * *
When Larry found Joseph, Sheldon was walking. He walked through the rain that washed off the blood and trailed it behind him. He walked because he had to get home. If he could be at home, the feeling of his parents would return to him and it would be light there, and warm, and the smell of them would be on the sheets and in the scent of the kitchen and the aging of the wood.
The villages did not have big electricity yet. The main lines were installed but many families like his own—still pinched from the Depression or unable to make the transition to modern ways—were opting to wait. Three hours later, cold and shivering, he slowed his walking when the rain stopped. Ahead, candlelight flickered from the darkened windows of the predawn houses where working men were waking and women were preparing their breakfasts to send them off to fields and factories. With the lights to guide him, Sheldon crossed into familiar land where he often bicycled with Lenny Bernstein after school along Mill River.
Sheldon had the impossible feeling that his parents were up ahead, behind the beech trees, waiting for him.
His mother would be finishing a dress from a design she had copied from the Sears catalogue with fabric bought in Springfield and his father would be washed and cleaned, his black hair nicely combed and his shirttails tucked in, his fingernails scrubbed back to white with a brush that Sheldon had once tried using but had found too painful. Clean and ready for the day but not prim, not delicate like Uncle Nate with his soft hands and weak lips. His father’s shoulders were nine miles wide.
* * *
They had been fine-looking parents when they were preparing for town, and Sheldon had been pr
oud of them. He was not alone in thinking his mother looked like Hedy Lamarr—her eyebrows more natural, though; her lips less severe; her eyes less moody.
Lenny tried to get Sheldon interested in pictures of Lamarr in the same way he tried to get him interested in pictures of naked French girls, but it never took for the obvious reason. Lenny had spent almost every day since birth with Sheldon and should have known better. And yet, he didn’t.
“The movie is called Ecstasy, Sheldon. You’re not even trying,” Lenny had said to him one day down by the river where they often met to chuck stones and compare notes.
“I’m saying she looks like my mom,” Sheldon said. “What do you want me to do? Not notice?”
“Your mom’s a knockout, Sheldon, but she’s not Hedy Lamarr,” Lenny said.
“Try to imagine my mom in black-and-white.”
Lenny looked at the picture anew and relented. The bad news was that he started to look at Hedy Lamarr differently. The good news was that he started looking at Sheldon’s mom differently too. Sheldon, however, was not amused.
* * *
Still walking—fifteen, twenty miles from the crash—Sheldon tried to picture what his father had handed to him as though it were an object. The best he could imagine was a glowing blue ball. What kept Sheldon warm, though, was imagining the many ways he wanted to kill the man with the mustache.
* * *
The sun was rising over the rooftops of Whately when Sheldon finally arrived at the edge of town. The pastel sky was clear and the light was more promise than relief. Autumn was coming, but the dawn reminded him of last spring. In April, still silent with grief, Sheldon had been stunned by the depth and richness of the sunrises and sunsets. He and his father would sit out and watch them. They blazed most unnaturally and haunted his dreams.
* * *
Sheldon had dried off and his clothes, like his muscles, were stiffening. He approached his own house with the gait of an old man. In his head, he knew the house was empty and that he was an orphan now. But the idea—like fine sand in still water—had not settled into his soul. The notion that he would never see his parents again . . . ever . . . was too outlandish to grasp. He was abandoned but didn’t feel abandoned. He felt they were only separated by a divide he couldn’t see or name.
One day, after a class on astronomy, Sheldon and Lenny Bernstein had plopped themselves down on the grass by Mill River and decided to try to imagine the entirety of the universe.
Sheldon had said it couldn’t be done because even in your mind you’d have to keep spinning your head around to take it all in. “Like a camera,” Sheldon had said. “You can only see what’s in front of you. And since you’re in it . . . you can’t see it all.”
Lenny had had the bold idea of moving the stars. “Just stick all the stars in the front. You know?” Lenny had said. “Group them all together. It’s your imagination. You can do that.”
“Then what’s left in the back?” Sheldon had asked.
“Nothing. Nothing’s in the back. You just moved it all to the front. The stars and rocks and moons and stuff. So now you can see it all,” Lenny had said, feeling creative. “You can put stuff wherever you want.”
Sheldon hadn’t been convinced. “Just because you moved the furniture, doesn’t take the room away,” he said. “You’re still trying to look at the whole room while you’re standing in the room. But the rest of the room is still behind you. Doesn’t matter where you stacked the furniture.”
Lenny had thought this was a good point. They had agreed finally that it was impossible to imagine the entire universe because there was no place to stand to take it all in.
Now, at the door of his home, Sheldon tried to imagine the entire universe gone. Jewish learning taught that every human being is a universe and that the death of a person is the destruction of a universe. If picturing it all was impossible, so too was picturing it all gone.
What was strange, though, was how it seemed more impossible.
And so Sheldon wondered: If two things are impossible, can one be more impossible?
Yes. Yes, it can.
His mother dying was impossible. His father dying was also impossible. Each alone was impossible. And both of them? Reduced to ash and carbon? Infinitely more impossible, an impossibility built from the collision of two impossibilities—a sort of antiuniverse imploding ever inward into a smaller and smaller space that is infinitely deep because how could loss be anything but?
As Sheldon reached the door of the cottage, it was past eight o’clock in the morning. Instead of opening the door, though, he collapsed in front of it because he didn’t want to go inside where nothing was waiting for him. He fell asleep there on the porch until long past noon when an orange sun woke him with a light that was nothing like warmth.
* * *
No one came for Sheldon that first day. For most of it, he stayed in the kitchen and waited, though he wasn’t certain for what. His father’s clock was one of his few relics from the Great War. The others were his brass lighter, his Mauser rifle, and his trench cap, which was still with him on the road. It was the clock, though, that possessed all the magic. It was an eight-day clock and it hung on the kitchen wall looking properly foreign, elaborate, expensive, and incongruous but still elegant and welcome.
“Much like your mom,” Joseph once joked.
She heard. Didn’t laugh.
The clock was still running. It was Joseph, as always, who had wound the still-beating heart of the house, but Sheldon didn’t know when. As he sat there and listened to one second following the next, he felt a compulsion to keep listening as if he were obeying an ordinance from an authority he couldn’t name or understand. He needed to hear time passing. He needed to hear each tick of the clock his father had wound because these were his last words, and when the clock fell silent, so would his voice.
In time, as the sun settled on Sheldon’s first day alone, the feeling of stillness and even anticipation—surely his parents would be home any minute—began to pass. By ten o’clock at night, the ticking of the old clock stopped. Alone for the first time, Sheldon remembered that he was supposed to be sitting shiva for his father.
No. It was more than that. Sheldon had not been to Hebrew school or regularly attended synagogue. His Jewish learning had come from conversations in the woods. There was something else he was supposed to be doing.
He pictured Joseph there, his lifeless body in the truck.
Sheldon had left his father’s body alone. He had left the dead unattended. Wasn’t that against Jewish law? Wasn’t someone always to stand guard over the body? Had he failed already in his first duty as a man?
* * *
“You can never do wrong in my eyes,” Joseph had once told him.
Lila, who had been listening, wasn’t so magnanimous.
“Really?” she’d said. “So, when Sheldon and Lenny snuck into the high school last Christmas and replaced the baby Jesus with a stuffed monkey named Scopes, you were only pretending to be mad at him?”
* * *
Unwilling to think any more about having abandoned his father in the truck, Sheldon stood and wound the clock again. When it started, he placed his finger on the black edge of the smaller steel hand and started turning the hours backward.
* * *
Shortly after dawn of the third day, a knock at the door woke Sheldon. Groggy and weak from not eating, Sheldon was disoriented when he rose from the kitchen floor rather than a bed. His shoulder hurt and he realized—standing to look in the mirror—that he was bruised from the accident. There was a purple welt on his forehead and some scrapes on his cheek. His hair was matted, and his neck was smudged with grease.
He hadn’t changed his clothes since the wreck, and the presence of someone else made him aware of it. As his mother would have expected, he buttoned the top button of his bloody shirt before answering the door.
It was Lenny Bernstein. Lenny barely glanced at Sheldon as he burst inside looking for something to
eat. Lenny’s own mother was a notoriously bad cook. She boiled the life out of everything and served what was left as soup.
“Why haven’t you been in school? You were supposed to be back from Connecticut two days ago,” said Lenny.
There was nothing interesting in the icebox. Lenny found some dried beef and started chewing on that. The fact that he didn’t complain was telling.
Satisfied now, Lenny finally took a good look at Sheldon, and said, “Jesus Christ. You get in a fight? What the hell happened to you?”
As Sheldon opened his mouth to explain, Lenny interrupted. “You need a bath. You got to get out of those clothes.”
Lenny stepped over to Sheldon and tried to pull his shirt off. It stuck to Sheldon’s chest and Lenny peeled it off him as if he were skinning a fish. “Were you cut? Is this your blood? This isn’t even your blood. You’re bruised up,” Lenny said, looking at the black and blue marks on Sheldon’s shoulder and abdomen. “But there isn’t a scratch on ya. Did you cut somebody else? Damn, that’s one tough synagogue.
“Come on. Strip. Down to the bone,” Lenny instructed. “I’ll warm up some water on the stove and get it in the tub. You can take a shallow bath. I’ll fetch you some clothes. Miss Simmons knows you were down at the funeral home, so you can lie about it and say there was some family emergency. What’s she gonna say?”
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 2