by Joshua Furst
* * *
—
She wanted something from the old lady. My mother, I mean. She didn’t know what—or she did, but it wasn’t something she could put a name to. It was too all encompassing, too deeply embedded in the essence of herself. And yet wanting it seemed petty. Childish.
They fed off each other. Like each of them was compelled by some power beyond her control to do everything she could to be disappointed by the other in all the same old ways all over again.
I’ve thought about this a lot in the years since then. How my grandmother must have read my mother’s choices.
She’d come to this country at the age of sixteen, a refugee smuggled out of her native Germany at a debilitating cost to her family. Her father siphoned money from the shoe store he’d once owned but now only worked for, contacted second cousins he’d never met in Chicago, paid clerk after unreliable clerk for the documents and stamps that would allow her to travel to Britain, where it was up to her, harried, afraid, not speaking a lick of English, to find her way alone to the steamer that would bring her to the American Midwest.
This was 1937. Still early, but already too late for the rest of them. Her sister. Her mother. Her father. She waited in the care of these second cousins for word from the continent about where and how and whether everyone had escaped. None came.
And so she was stranded in that strange city. No connection to anyone except these confusing Americans, ostensibly family, who resented her presence more every day. They used her as the maid. They fed on her desire to show them she understood the sacrifice they’d made, her desire to contribute, to not be a burden.
Maybe it wasn’t them who made her feel unwanted. Maybe she generated that feeling herself. They weren’t bad people. They just hadn’t seen what she’d seen. The broken glass. The fires. How they’d slowly killed her cat. Grown men punched in the head by boys no older than she was and, instead of fighting back, letting the boys maul them. Her own father. The sounds he made as he refused to resist, almost like he was relieved.
How to explain these things to the cousins here with their big bands and pot roasts and teenage crushes? They could barely find Germany on a map. Why should they understand her maudlin past? She deserved their neglect. This she knew in her bones. They were right; she should be happy, hopeful, like everyone else in this new country that would never feel like it was hers.
To escape herself, she went to the symphony. Not the real thing. Records. Once a month on Wednesdays, a listening party for refugees at the local Jewish community center. There she met my grandfather, elegant, capable, Viennese. He saw her isolation. It pierced his heart.
His people had been importers. Keeping the cafés flush with coffee beans. They’d been proudly assimilating for generations. Patrons of the city, by which I mean they once bought a half-finished Klimt sketch. They’d had the means and foresight to board the first train out, all together, on the morning after Kristallnacht. Losing nothing but their pride, they then dispersed to Palestine, England and Africa, where they were shielded by the connections they’d built through the years. When they finally reconvened here in the States, they set about re-creating the bourgeois lifestyle that had treated them so well in the old country. The cultural mores changed, but the aspirations remained the same. They simply transferred their allegiance to the American mode. Country clubs. Tennis lessons. Ski excursions.
My grandfather, the favored son, offered all he’d been given to this lonely, vulnerable girl from the JCC. He carried her away to New York, where he used his money and the opportunities it provided to build his castle around her. Let her venture out of the darkness or not, as she saw fit. Whatever she could muster on any given day.
I’ve wondered, in light of all this, what my mother might have been trying to prove by dedicating herself to Lenny like she had. Rattling the cage that had kept her mother safe. Was this how she showed her love? Or was there something more passive-aggressive at work, a need to punish that had been passed down through the generations?
* * *
—
I remember my grandmother breaking character just once. The sun had set but neither she nor my mother had bothered to turn the house lights on. A graying in the air. Them sitting apart in that woody room, each waiting for the other to break the silence, each resisting the impulse to do it herself. The way my grandmother looked at my mother then, remote and lonely. Needing something but unsure how to ask for it.
She’d been getting calls. Hang-ups, at first, and then silences, breathing. Eventually the callers actually spoke. They asked questions. What’s your name? Do you live at 19 Coronet Lane? How long have you lived there? Mundane shit. Deep basso voices verifying the deets. And that night in the dark, she asked, pleading, “Who are these people, Susan? Why are they bothering me? I don’t understand. Every day. Sometimes three or four times. And sometimes different people, too. Their voices are different. But they don’t talk to each other. Or they don’t take good notes. They all ask the same things. I tell them, I told your friend this yesterday. But do they care? They don’t care. It’s frightening, Susan. Did you know, one of the men asked if I play tennis every Tuesday morning with Rose Liberman. At eight-thirty, he said, at the club. Why do they ask such things? What do they want with when I play tennis?”
My mother, as always, attacking what she didn’t want to hear. “It’s the Nazis, Ma,” she said.
And my grandmother, knowing this tactic, forgave it. “Hush.” Then, “It’s harassment is what it is. Preying on a defenseless old lady.”
“They’re gonna show up one day and repossess your tickets to the Philharmonic. New rules, they’ll say. No Jews allowed in Lincoln Center.”
“You think it’s a joke.”
“They’ll confiscate your subscription to The New York Times.”
“I should call the police and have them reported.”
“Ma.”
“That’s what I should do.”
“Ma.”
“Don’t you think, Susan? That’s the right thing.”
“Ma!”
“What? Why are you shouting?”
“Just stop answering the phone. These people calling you? They are the police.”
She thought about this for a second. “I have to answer the phone. What if it was Alice Fein? How would I know who was hosting bridge?”
“Ma, really.”
“What?”
“Think! These people, Ma. They’re looking for Lenny.”
The sound that rose out of my grandmother’s throat then. Like every ounce of her being had clenched with scorn. A sound only an embittered Jew can articulate—obstinate, dismissive, cosmically aggrieved. “Ack,” she said. “That man.”
Calm now, calculating, my mother leaned in and said, “When was the last time you got a call like this?”
“A few weeks.”
“A few weeks, like two? Three? A month? It’s important, Ma.”
“A while. I can’t remember. What do you want from me, Susan? I don’t keep track of every phone call I get.”
“You should!”
And my grandmother, seeing her daughter’s dismay, relented. “It’s been four months. Maybe five? But, Suzy, what does it matter?”
A pause while they prepared to revert to form.
“You’re impossible, Ma. That’s the last thing I’ll say.” An answer that seemed to satisfy them both.
* * *
—
Whatever their conflicts, my grandmother wanted to show us off. We went to “the club,” an exclusive manse of which she was outlandishly proud to be a member. Even there, on a slow weekday morning among friends and bridge partners, women whose husbands, like her own, had seized a place for themselves among the goys, she held herself apart, letting the conversation—the interrogation, really—of her wayward daughter flow past like muddy wat
er.
They’d heard stories. Myth. Countermyth. In their eyes, you could see the questions they were afraid to ask. The awe. The nervousness. I heard you burn money. Money! What do you live on? Susan! Look at you! It’s not like you can afford to burn money. What I’ve never been able to understand is, what did America ever do to you? Why the resentment? Why so much anger?
Instead they talked about the dangers of the city. The subway. The gangs. The shvartzes and their violent desperation.
My mother played along. She laughed. She treaded gently. She was oddly comfortable there with them. Even if she was faking it. In tune with the rhythms of the society she’d so fiercely and loudly rejected.
The conversation evolved. She remembered old friends. How’s so-and-so? What’s who’s-it up to now? Exposing herself as a member of a tribe I hadn’t known existed.
I was just a prop there to be seen and not heard. Superfluous, like I’d been throughout our time in Great Neck.
I remember fidgeting, looking around. Then wandering. All those blindingly white columns, white walls, white fences, not a smudge, not a fingerprint or skid mark anywhere on them, like the whole place was repainted each and every night. I remember gawking at the pool, its tarp winched tight like the head of a drum, all the towels racked up there waiting for summer. The silverware sparkling at the waitress station. Crisp starched tablecloths draped almost to the floor. And the women gathered in the corners, in the good seats in front of the windows, sipping coffee and orange juice, fingering their jewels. So well dressed and elegant, even in polyester. All these Jews living like gentry in the land of the free.
I remember the squirming sensation in my chest, like a baby animal clawing at the nest. And my wonder at the excess of this place. You are your context. This wasn’t mine. But it could have been. Somewhere, in some past that had been denied me, it had once belonged to my mother. The shame. I made my way out of the clubhouse and into the landscaped area out front, two semicircles of lawn on either side of a hooded entryway where the extravagant cars these people all owned could lurch and idle while their passengers stepped onto the sandblasted cobblestone. I remember standing there next to a silver urn full of sand and cigarette butts, struck by what felt like a realignment of the physical properties of my being, a burning inside so powerful that it sparked along my skin, crackling, wailing, demanding to be let out. The rage. My life could have been safe. It could’ve been easy. I asked myself, what would Lenny say? Eden is in your mind. Open the door and step into the garden. There’s nothing less civilized, he would have said, than what we like to call civilized society. Our job is to expose it for what it is. Lenny would’ve said I had a patriotic duty to cause as much mayhem as possible. And then they’d learn their lesson.
And Lenny would sense what I’d done. He’d just know. He’d be proud. He’d ask me to stay with him. Wherever he was.
The ashtray seemed like a viable weapon. I could wield it like a club, heavy end out, and smash some shit up good. Maybe throw it through a window. But when I went to pick it up, I couldn’t lift it. All I managed to do was to tip it on its tripod and watch it crash to the ground. Sand and butts spilled out over the stones. Barely an act of vandalism. Could’ve been an accident.
Nobody saw it. This place didn’t have valets.
I went back inside, looking for trouble now. Headed for the bar, or what passed for the bar. It was empty, of course. These Jews weren’t really drinkers, not at this time of day. I ran my hand along the slippery polished wood. Poked at the holes in the high wicker chairs. Bars spurred thoughts of Phil, but he would have hated this place.
Next to a potted fern behind the service station I found a bowl of matchbooks, a hundred or more of them, stacked like party favors, engraved with the club’s name in a busy cursive script. I grabbed one. I grabbed ten. Stuffed my pockets with them.
I wasn’t really thinking about consequences. Like I said, I just wanted to light a fire. Get the burning inside me out into the open where I could look at it and somehow even the balance. Show these suburban grannies what a kid like me could do. Take my place as the rightful heir of the unbowed, unrepentant Lenny Snyder. And what would Lenny do? Burn the shit down. Burn, baby, burn.
As I race-walked out of the bar, hands dug into the pockets of my jeans to cover the bulge of matchbooks—staring at my feet, like, Who, me? I’m not guilty—I slammed into a dude barely bigger than me. A busboy or something. A midget with a feeble strip of hair above his lip, straining under a bin of napkins the size of his torso. They fluttered to the floor like dying doves.
“Thanks a lot, kid.”
He didn’t scare me. He was just some fifteen-year-old honky punk working in a country club. I was city tough. I was Lenny Snyder’s kid. “Watch where you’re going, motherfucker,” I said.
And I left him there to wonder what the hell just happened.
Retracing my steps around and around the place. Nothing. Or nothing worthy of my purpose. Nothing that would make the dramatic statement I needed if I was going to impress Lenny. My mother was still out there with my grandmother’s bridge buddies, smiling at the things they said, appreciating them. If she was unhappy, she sure didn’t look it. Maybe this wasn’t a cover at all. Maybe we were gonna stay here. Pull the ladder up after us. And then what? I’d spend my summers flailing around in the pool, holding girls’ heads underwater, doing cannonballs, shouting “Geronimo!” midair. A shamefully easy, ignoble life. But what a relief it would be to relax for once.
What would Lenny say? What would Lenny do?
I was losing my will.
I fled the building and wandered to the far end of the pool, near the wall behind the lifeguard stand. I pulled one of the nubby white towels from the racks, unfurled it and stood there, legs wide, waving it in front of me like a flag. I started sparking matches—they wouldn’t hold their flame. The breeze blew them out one after the other. But I stuck with it. Match after match after match. What would Lenny do? Lenny would be relentless. And finally I managed to get a flame going and I warded off the wind with my body and tipped the match to a corner of the towel, willing the terry cloth to catch. It did, weakly. I lit more matches, dipping them to the fire. Flares and sparks. Individual strands of thread burning up like wicks. The flame sputtered and coughed. It didn’t want to take.
At some point I realized I’d succeeded at one thing. The whole club was watching me through the windows. I’d made myself the center of attention.
The flames grew. The towel was really cooking now.
Then the kid with the peach fuzz came racing toward me. He shouldered me in the chest, commandeered the towel and with a single snap snuffed the fire right out. He dropped it to the ground and I saw then that I’d barely charred the fucking thing.
My mother dragged me out of there, a walk of shame past the table where my grandmother’s friends sat. Even from a distance I could see the effect my stunt had had on these women. They’d known I was no good, and hey, look, they were right. Closer up, nuance and variation was visible on their faces. Something almost lustful in the one who’d secretly loved witnessing my mayhem. Something sour in the one who was genuinely afraid of me. The itchy fingers of the gossips raring to spread the news.
And my grandmother, mortified, trying not to show it. She followed us out, betraying nothing from behind her dark glasses.
* * *
—
I remember, then, finally, at three, four in the morning, my mother shaking me to my feet and guiding me, sleepwalking, out of the house.
I woke the next day to learn we’d stolen the Impala and were rolling up a highway somewhere in Massachusetts.
If someone was tailing us, we didn’t see them. We barely saw any other cars at all. It was just us and the highway and the FM dial. Cat Stevens, Harry Chapin, the Carpenters. Mom sang along. She’d gone batty with excitement. Linda Ronstadt, Wings, the Doobie
Brothers.
I was hopped up too, reeling with all these fantastical ideas about what would happen when we got to wherever it was Lenny was hiding. Maybe he’d be clean-cut and shaved, his joy and his rage, always so bound to each other, sanded flat and smooth by the starched shirt he wore. Or maybe he’d be literally underground, living in a nuclear fallout shelter and eating pork and beans out of cans with his fingers. His hair matted in dreads. Cockroaches nesting in the kinks. His wispy beard not grown in but grown out, a patchy scraggle tailing off his chin like some Hasidic mystic, John the Baptist in the desert. He might be living in that clapboard shack I’d been imagining since the day he’d disappeared, dressed like an Indian, armed to the teeth, preparing for the moment when the pine needles rustled and he peeked through the slats to see flatfoots stalking among the trees, his final stand come at last. Maybe we’d get there in time to join the battle, me and my mother and the Queen of Sheba—what would she be like?—manning the barricades. If he’d have us. If we proved ourselves worthy.
“Will we get to stay?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She gazed up at the bone-cold sky above the windshield and allowed herself a small selfish smile. “Maybe.”
* * *
—
Hours later and we were still on the road, in Vermont now, off the highway.
“The Mad River Valley,” my mother told me. “We’re getting close, I think.”
We bounced along dirt roads barely wider than the car, wheezed up impossible inclines through the mountains. Thick forest. Shadows and decomposing leaves. We saw deer, wild turkey. It was late April. The ground was still patched with snow and sometimes the road was so pocked with sinkholes that we had to drive around it, easing over rocks, scraping past brittle shrubs. These roads, they had no names. They weren’t on the map. That’s how we knew we were close—that and the spiking anticipation, the sense that the more lost we felt, the closer we must be getting there.