by Rita Ciresi
The first picture showed a middle-aged couple and a serious little boy standing in front of a stone fountain; the woman held a tightly wrapped bundle in her arms. I peered closely at it. The boy was Strauss—young Eben, with an expression that seemed to politely request of the photographer, Please hurry, for I am being massively drenched by the spray from this antique but powerful fountain. The bundle with no face must have been Eben’s soon-to-be-beautiful sister. The couple, whom I took at first to be Strauss’s grandparents, probably were his mother and father. Dressed in their fifties best—a suit and tie for Strauss’s dad, and a below-the-knee lace dress for his mom—they smiled for the camera. Strauss’s mom had a thin, pale face. His dad was a big bear of a man, with coarse features and huge hands—so ugly it was positively sexy.
The other three photographs were of children. Smiling children. Smiling dark-skinned children. These head shots bewildered me, until I connected them back to the envelopes from the charities. I bit my lip. Strauss was a foster dad. He sponsored Third World children. Every month he sent money so these children could have beans and wheat and straw hats for their heads and a chance to attend the one-room mud schoolhouse. In return, he got these dolled-up photographs. He got notes, perhaps twice a year, like the one posted beneath the first photo of a young girl in tight braids wearing what looked suspiciously like a Catholic-school plaid jumper. Dear Mr. Struss, I like the shoes and I read the books. I am your Angie.
The note depressed me—for it brought home the sad truth that poverty was the worst epidemic, seeping through the pores of the planet like groundwater ran through the earth. The note also made me feel ashamed—for in the city, I had walked by the homeless people slumped in Grand Central, and I always slipped my measly fistful of change into the red Salvation Army bucket without looking in the eyes of the thin, white-haired lady ringing the bell or the wrinkled old black guy playing the trumpet. Charity was one of the theological virtues that so far had escaped me. But I admired it. As much as Dodie and I liked to laugh at the saints, tortured on wheels and splayed with arrows and skinned alive—we drew the line at Mother Teresa jokes. We knew somebody had to mind the poor, and those who couldn’t look suffering right in the face had better find their own guilty way to help the saints among us to do it.
So there was Strauss’s guilt, tacked right up there on the corkboard—his mother, his father, his sister, and his foster children. And it seemed to tell me Lisar, Lisar. Do not chide this man for neglecting his Chekhov and for playing golf. Compassion is the highest form of imagination.
On top of the high bookshelf Strauss actually had some college texts—an earlier edition of the economics text I struggled with at Albertus Magnus, and then, surprisingly, Dante and Machiavelli and even some novels by Moravia and Lampedusa. Below this—even more of a surprise—sat the books that, judging from their yellowed pages and hopelessly outdated prices on the back, must have consumed him after he quit premed at Cornell: his Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Hume and Spinoza, the Bhagavad-Gita and Confucius’s Analects. Beneath this stood a row of history books—medieval and Renaissance and even some art history—and below were three rows of books that at first I thought were about World War II battles—but when I looked closer, I saw every single one had to do with the Holocaust.
For some reason this bothered me. I was about to turn away when I spotted, on the end, the melodramatic title of the very book I had been proofreading when I left publishing: The Cursed Generation: Children of Holocaust Survivors Speak. Since I left the company before I could even finish the manuscript, I never had seen the book in its final form, although I could have guessed they’d market it in a blood-red dust jacket with black lettering meant to evoke the colors of the Nazi flag.
You want to know why I left publishing? I’d once told Strauss. Because I got sick of the way they tried to sell books by putting either an Irish setter or a swastika on the cover.
How had he answered?
I remembered he pushed up his glasses.
I remembered he changed the subject.
I stared at the red-and-black spine of the book, and then I remembered more and more—in fact, a strange wave of déjà vu overtook me. I remembered: Italy. Park Slope. Carpet. Cornell. A sister. A father who was fifteen years older than his mother. A second marriage. His mother …
The shower, on the other side of the wall, continued running. As Strauss soaped his feet or scrubbed his neck or got up a good lather on his scalp, I grabbed the book off the shelf A piece of onionskin fell from between the pages to the floor. It was a letter, typewritten on what appeared to be a manual Olivetti or Brother, from the author of the collection. The letter was addressed to Strauss, thanking him for contributing to the book, and informing him that his section began on page 238.
Chapter Seven
Solid
E, a 34-year-old executive, grew up in Brooklyn. His father, a native of Ferrara, spent six months in Treblinka.
My earliest memory—or one of my most complete memories—has to do with my dad and the war. The memory also is linked to the birth of my sister.
We lived in Astoria then, in a walk-up owned by an old Italian couple who lived on the ground floor. They kept their distance but treated us decently enough. The apartment was pretty run-down, but they repaired the leaky faucets and the broken heater and the shaky top step the day we reported the damage. My mother said they probably were afraid of us. But I noticed how kind they were to my father—smiling and greeting him in Italian if we passed on the stoop—and they didn’t play their radio on Friday nights, until I think my father told them their silence wasn’t necessary, because we weren’t religious. At least not very. After that they gave us cookies on Christmas, and once the landlady, after asking my father in Italian if it was all right, even gave me a chocolate rabbit on Easter. My mother frowned when I bit into the ear, but my father remarked with approval—we weren’t very well off then, and it didn’t take much to impress him—“Ah, solid.”
Out in the tiny backyard the landlords had a fig tree, which they had planted to celebrate the birth of their first son. (I may have this wrong, but I think it’s a tradition to wrap the discarded umbilical cord of the boy around the seed of the tree before it’s planted. I’m not sure if this is done to protect the parents’ fertility or to guarantee the son long life.) In any case, the landlords’ son was grown—he was almost as old as my own father, who was in his forties then—so the tree was tall, and the trunk was treated with tar in the summer to keep the insects from damaging the fruit.
One hot summer day—this was before air-conditioning—our landlords went to the shore, and my mother suggested we have dinner outside in the shade of the fig tree. She brought out food that didn’t need to be cooked—egg salad and challan, a bowl of sliced peaches, and a tub of peanuts, which my father, who never helped with food preparation except to make coffee—he was very particular about his coffee—actually volunteered to shell. He sat in a webbed lawn chair, the tub in his lap, and he offered us peanuts, two at a time—first to my mother, who smiled as she accepted them—then to me. Only after he fed us first did he pop a peanut into his own mouth. I was only four, but already I had noticed my father had the habit of making sure there was something on my plate before he picked up his fork.
He was tapping one of those stubborn single peanuts against the metal of the lawn chair when I noticed it. I’d seen it before, I guess, but never before had it seemed so blue against his pale skin.
“Somebody wrote on your arm,” I told my father.
The minute the comment came out of my mouth, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. A squirrel scrambled up the fig tree, its claws scratching the tar. The backyard became so quiet you could hear the grass rustling.
“That’s my number,” my father said.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked.
My mother made a noise, as if she were about to say something, but my father cut her off. “In the war.”
“Neat!” I was abo
ut to say, but something stopped me. “What’s it for?”
“It’s like a name,” my father said.
“Where’s yours?” I asked my mother, and she looked down at the peaches she was slicing, as if she was ashamed.
“I don’t have one,” she said.
To make her feel better I stuck out my arm. “I don’t have one either. See?”
My father pushed his glasses up and pretended to inspect me. “Good,” he said. “Have a peanut.”
But I refused the peanut and turned back to my mother. All of a sudden she looked different—fuller, softer, distracted.
“Are you going to have a baby?” I asked her.
Her face turned red. “Enough questions,” she said.
For five years I was the only child. I stayed home with my mother, just the two of us—my father always worked late—and I should have gotten closer to her, but the minute my father came through the door and hugged me—he always kissed and hugged me first—I knew I was first and foremost my father’s child. My mother was the odd one out. Things changed when my sister was born. My mother fussed over her all day long, obviously preferring my sister to me, just as my father—although he loved them, please don’t get me wrong—seemed to prefer me to my mother and my sister. So the alliances in our family were clear: On one side were the men, and on the other, the women.
The first year after my sister was born I got lonely. She was colicky and peevish and my mother seemed to spend all day—and sometimes half the night—trying to keep her from crying. One night—it must have been one of those nights when my sister kept wailing—I kept falling asleep and waking back up, and I had a weird dream. There was a little boy—all white and waxy, a ghost boy—standing in a tall doorway. Behind him was a stairway, and beyond that, even though I couldn’t see it, I knew there were dozens and dozens of rooms, all empty, all waiting. At first I thought he was my shadow, or another version of me. Because he looked like me. But then I also saw myself standing at the bottom of the stairs, and I knew the boy was a separate person.
I might have forgotten that dream, but my sister began crying, and I woke up with the feeling that the dream-boy stood in the same room with me-for just a moment—before he disappeared again. The next day, when my mother was feeding my sister, I remembered the boy and I decided to play with him. I had some metal cars and a little wooden train, and I took them out, and from then on I wasn’t lonely, because I had an imaginary playmate. I called him by my full name, my real name. No one ever called me by my proper first name; my parents had given me a nickname when I was small, and it has stuck ever since.
On weekends my mother would try to catch up on all the sleep she lost during the week, and my father spent time with me. One day my mother and the baby were napping. I was playing on the front-room rug—it was Oriental and had an elaborate pattern I would use as a racetrack for my cars—and my father came and stood over me. He seemed so tall when I looked up. For a second I was scared of him. I remembered the time we went to the Catskills for the weekend to visit my mother’s sister and her husband, who had a cabin on the lake. Outside of the cabin was a burrow hole, and every morning when we sat on the deck to eat our breakfast we saw a chipmunk stick out his head, then scurry over to eat the Cheerios and Wheaties that had fallen through the slats of the picnic table. One morning before breakfast—I don’t know why—I went outside, and before I knew it I had stuffed the hole with enough dirt to smother the chipmunk inside. Then I looked up and saw my father standing over me on the deck.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Instead of saying, I don’t know—because really, I had no idea what possessed me—I lied and said, “I was trying to make the hole look nice.”
The look in his eyes made me realize I had done something wrong. “Think,” my father said. “Think before you do things. Now uncover it.”
I undug the sand and grass until my nails were black with dirt and my fingers rubbed raw and red. My mother grew angry because she just had given me a bath. For weeks afterward I felt as though my father was watching me and censoring my every word and movement. Then that feeling went away.
But for some reason the feeling returned when he stood over me on the carpet that one afternoon. I found myself hating him for knowing I wasn’t perfect and for finding me guilty of doing something destructive. So I ignored him, until he made it clear he hadn’t come to yell at me or scold me, but to take me out for ice cream.
“Can E. come too?” I asked.
Then there was that silence, just like the time in the backyard, only this time instead of the squirrels and the grass, I could hear the footsteps of the tenant on the third floor and the clock ticking on top of the mantel.
“Who’s that?” my father asked.
“My friend.”
“Where does he live?”
“Here.”
“A friend who is pretend, then,” my father said.
“Is he pretend or real if he comes in a dream?”
“He comes in a dream?” my father asked. “Does he ever say anything? In the dream?”
I shrugged. “I don’t remember.” Then, because my father looked down at the pattern on the chair and seemed so disappointed, I lied and said, “Oh, yeah, I forgot. He said to tell you hi, Daddy.”
My father got up and opened the door to my parents’ bedroom, which was right off the front room. I saw my mother’s stockinged feet on the bed. They looked strange, like they belonged to a corpse or to a pair of legs disconnected from a body. My father sat down by her feet. He put his head in his hands. And out of him came horrible sounds—like an animal. The whole house seemed to be shaking. Everything in our house—the furniture and the carpet and even the few books on the shelves—was so heavy and ornate, as if my parents were afraid that a strong wind might come and blow everything in the house away. Yet even the couch and the hutch in the dining room where my mother kept all her special plates seemed to tremble.
My mother’s feet stirred. She bolted up. She started to rush into my sister’s bedroom, then stopped when she saw it was my father crying, not the baby.
She glared out the door at me. “What did you do to him?” she demanded.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“You made him upset. Can’t you see how upset you made him?” and my father kept crying, and then, from the other side of the house, my sister started screaming. My mother ran to get her, and the configuration seemed to represent something—my mother and sister in one room, my father and I sitting separate from them and also from each other. Then my mother came back in with the howling baby, tears on her face from the stress and lack of sleep, and wanted to know what was happening.
“What’s happening?” she kept asking. “Oh God, what’s happening?”
What happened next? My father blew his nose, went into the bathroom, and threw water on his face.
“Ice-cream time,” he told me. “Leave your friend here.” And we left the house.
• • •
In retrospect it seems romantic, even contrived—a story some boy might make up to win himself the sympathy of a girlfriend. Yet it was true. I don’t know how I intuited my father had another son, with another woman—before the war—who had the same name as me. It must have been something I overheard—late one night when my parents thought I was asleep—or maybe something referred to in passing by my mother’s parents (who always seemed suspicious of my father, until he started making money hand over fist, and then he could do no wrong). Maybe even as a child I could see my parents were a little mis-matched—at least in terms of age (he’s fifteen years older than she is; they met when my mother went to Europe with the Red Cross after the war; people sometimes would take my father for my grandfather, which embarrassed me). Maybe something that passed between my father and our landlords—although it was spoken in Italian, which I could only understand in bits and pieces—gave it away. Maybe it was the way my father sat in his chair, sometimes, and looked so sad, as i
f he were looking down a long dark well at some treasure that had fallen and couldn’t be recovered. Or maybe—and here, I suppose, might be the beginning or end of any faith I have—that vision of the waxy-skinned boy really was a visit from beyond the grave.
But in any case—you know how the origin of knowledge sometimes is a haze?—I think I knew of the other son even though no one directly spoke of him until my mother sat me down when I was eight or nine and told me that during the war my father had lost his family—that’s the expression she used, lost his family—and she said, “Another boy just like you, do you understand?” I remember nodding. I remember nodding again when she told me never to talk to my father about it unless he started talking about it first. “Do you promise?” she asked, and I said yes. I always said yes.
The older I grew the more I could see that I was meant to take the place of the other boy, and therefore I had to be doubly smart—doubly good—doubly polite and doubly wonderful—if I didn’t want to let anybody down. And I was good, so good that even my mother—who I knew on some subconscious level was bothered by my father’s past because it made her the second wife, and therefore only second-best—probably felt indebted to that first boy. It made her job with me that much easier.
Until I was a teenager I thought only about the boy, as if he had come into the world by osmosis. And then—with the onslaught of adolescent hormones—it suddenly dawned on me that my father had been married before, to a woman who was not my mother. The idea intrigued me. I used to lie in bed and try to imagine her. She always surfaced as the opposite of my mother—hot and dark and throaty-voiced, her blouse opened at her throat. She played a big role in my teenage sexual fantasies.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You asked me at the beginning of this session if I ever was ashamed of being my father’s son, and this probably answers it—yes, certainly I was ashamed that I could cook up this wild fantasy about the equivalent of my own stepmother, conveniently forgetting she had been destroyed. Of course, I didn’t know that then. I knew she was dead, but I didn’t want to think about how or why, and neither of my parents told me anything that would keep my thoughts in check. I doubt I would have harbored those fantasies had my father done any justice to her memory—or even just acknowledged her. Why did he hide her, as if she were something shameful that ought to be hung in the closet sheathed in a bag full of mothballs and cedar chips? But people do what they have to do—I don’t want you to think that I’m being critical of my parents. I mean, this was my father’s experience and he had his own way of dealing with it, which was to keep totally quiet about it—and I knew it was wrong to judge.