by Rita Ciresi
Still, I judged. When I was sixteen I started going out with girls, and the fantasy fell away, and in its place came this nagging feeling of responsibility toward women, as if they needed to be protected against all men, including me—because men were the ones who had the destructive impulse, or at least, the power to do the most harm. I was always very careful, always very respectful of girls—too respectful, I think. In any case, I had trouble being forward. I didn’t like playing the aggressor.
At the crudest level you could say I went in search of information about my father’s wife and son, because they stood in the way of my getting on with girls.
By this time we lived in Park Slope, and only one other kid in my high-school class—a boy—had parents who were survivors. Or at least he was the only one who admitted to it. His mother and father had been in Birkenau and got married after the liberation. We compared notes. He had it much worse than me. When I complained—“You know, they never talk about it, but yet you can’t do anything, can’t play with an imaginary friend, push a toy train around the carpet, write a girl’s phone number with pen on your arm, without it all reverberating back to that”—he told me how good I had it. His parents were nuts about it, he said—talked about it nonstop, utterly obsessive, and he grew up wishing they would just shut up about it and get on with their lives.
He told me I could find out what had happened to my relatives by calling the New York Public Library and asking one of the archivists to help find the records. It took over a month for the librarian to call me back, but one Saturday—under the pretext of going into the city to consult college catalogs—I took the train and got off at Forty-second Street. I held my breath when I walked up the long stretch of stairs to the front entrance between the stone lions—what are they called? Patience and Fortitude? I came back down a different person.
All the archivist showed me was a photocopy of a transport list. But it really was a shock—like a sock in the gut, maybe the way people feel when they see their parent’s name inscribed for the first time on a headstone—to spot my father’s name typed halfway down on the page. What was even weirder was to see my own name two lines below.
My brother’s—I mean, my stepbrother’s—name was in the Italian version. He was five. My mother—I mean, his mother—was twenty-seven. Her first name was G—. Her maiden name was L—. Sometimes names can be deceptive (you know what I mean, don’t you, how you meet a Hoffman or a Klein or a Kraus and you think you’re dealing with—well, you know, one of your own?), but I didn’t think L—was throwing off false signals. She must have been Italian—you know, true Italian, not like my father, who when he dared to say anything at all about his past talked about how his parents came down from Graz to open a branch of the family textile factory and sometimes shared the story about how isolated he felt being the only child at his scuola who did not eagerly await, each year, the arrival of Babbo Natale.
She must have been Catholic. This would have been even more romantic (you know how it is when you’re a teenager—the very idea of being destroyed for love is intensely appealing) if it hadn’t been so brutally true—that the only reason she was put on the train was because she married him.
When I told my sister she looked disgusted. She told me the whole thing was creepy—why did I have to go digging it up?—and none of my business, and that I had better not say anything to my mother about nosing around in my father’s past, because it would hurt her feelings. My sister didn’t care what I told my father; she never was close to him anyway, and there always was a lot of friction between them, especially after she turned thirteen, and my father, who seemed to equate teenage boys with the very forces of evil, began restricting where she could go and who she could see—and the antipathy between them flared up again after she went away to college, where she developed an eating disorder and had to be hospitalized.
I was close to my father—I still am—but I’ve had my own share of trouble talking to him. Besides, I had promised my mother I would keep quiet. I never could bring myself to ask why, at the start of June, he always looked so sad, as if this was his time to remember—her birthday maybe, or the boy’s, or was it their wedding anniversary, or could this have been the last time he saw her, and not even knowing what day she died, he had to remember a long stretch of days, instead of just one, as her jahrzeit? I wanted to ask if he loved her more than my own mother and why he gave me the same name as the boy. (It had been his own father’s name, so I guess he wanted to keep it alive.) But I said nothing. Maybe it suited me more to cook up fantasies.
I imagined the boy as an earlier version of myself. I saw his sturdy little calves and sensible socks, the leather shoes that connected with the black-and-white ball that he must have kicked around the town square. I imagined him eating biscotti dunked in cocoa, maybe even dropping rocks into a deep stone well and listening to the water plop as the stone hit the surface. His mother, I thought, should have been my mother. After the sexual fantasy faded, she became a dream—the woman in the white dress who waited by the lace-curtained windows for her son to come home, while soup simmered on the stove and pigeons cooed on the red-tiled roof. And my father—my link to all this—strangely never came into the picture, except years later, when I fantasized he would take me on a trip back to Italy, where he would show me the textile warehouse his father had set up, and maybe a monastery or a crawl space where he hid with his wife and child when a roundup began, and the home of the man he believed snitched on them for the measly bounty of a few thousand lire a head.
• • •
But my father never said anything and so neither did I. None of it came up until my early thirties, when I got involved with a woman. Her name was Jeanne. We had been classmates at Cornell, both premed, both of us seeing someone else. Years afterward I was working for a drug company in N—that was coming under fire for manufacturing an anti-depressant that had bad side effects. We were trying to gather some support for the drug from the medical community, and I met Jeanne again at a conference. She had become a shrink. Excuse me, a psychiatrist. And yes, she had done a lot of research on posttraumatic psychosis and even had a healthy share of Holocaust survivors and incest victims and Vietnam veterans among her clients.
I have to admit her profession made me nervous. But I liked and respected her. We got to be good friends, and then we became something more than that. In many ways I was more compatible with her than I suspect I’ll ever be with anyone else—we both liked the same kinds of food and music and books, and we both had a sober, clinical sort of temperament. So we started talking marriage. She took me home to Short Hills to meet her parents. I took her back to Brooklyn to meet mine.
The parents did us in. Her parents were intensely religious; she had rejected it all, but then she brought home the son of a survivor like a prize. I can’t tell you how they fawned over me. It still makes me ill to think of it. And my parents—well, they still were disappointed I hadn’t gone through medical school; here was the doctor they didn’t get when I ditched premed to study religion (“Of all things!” my mother said, and my father shook his head), then finally “saw the light” and went for my MBA. They loved Jeanne. They were crazy about Jeanne. She could do no wrong.
From our parents’ perspective, it was just too good to be true. But something, at least from my point of view, was missing. It just didn’t seem right. Jeanne seemed like the sister my real sister had never been for me. This can’t be the real thing, I thought. Because when I thought of Jeanne my heart stopped, not from love, but from fear: of what more-daring side of myself I might lose or never discover if I married her. I thought we were drawn together more out of some weird kind of guilt and the desire to let Mom and Dad pull our strings. I don’t deny it: More than once in my life my parents have called the shots, and I’ve let them do it.
We parted on bad terms. I had let it go too far; by then we were engaged.
The worst part of the end of that relationship was telling my parents. I drove back int
o Brooklyn; it was a gloomy evening and the next day was my parents’ wedding anniversary, which only rubbed salt into the wound. I knew in the long run it was the right move—I wasn’t crazy enough about her, there wasn’t that gut feeling—yet breaking it off left me feeling more depressed than I ever had been in my life. I had just turned thirty—one. I felt tired.
I went to my father’s office first. He works in the carpet business. It was late. He had sent the secretary home, but he still had a few phone calls to make. I sat out in the lobby. I dreaded telling him—knew how disappointed he would be—and that made me angry. I thought: Why is this any of his business? It’s my life. I’m the one who has to live it.
He got off the phone and waved me in. “What’s the matter?” he asked the minute he saw me.
“Dad,” I said. “About Jeanne.”
“She’s sick?” he asked, and I said, “No.”
“Then what?” he asked.
“No go,” I said. “It’s off.”
He had a pencil in his hand, and he put it down on the desk. “Well. Did she put an end to it or did you?”
“She did,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true, although I let her have the final word, as if that were any satisfaction. “But I wanted her to.”
“But why did you want her to?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t explain.”
My father shrugged. “So. What do you want me to say?”
I shrugged back. “I don’t know,” I said. I looked around the office (the battered shades and the old steel desk, all testimony to the sacrifices he had made to be the good provider), and I remembered the way he never came home until late at night and always worked—in a Jewish neighborhood, no less—every Saturday. Around his neck hung a yellow measuring tape, and I remembered how ashamed I always had felt of that tape, that badge of the working class, which he would not give up wearing, even after he stopped crawling around on his hands and knees across the floor because he had ten salesmen underneath him to do the dirty business.
I never back-talked my father in my entire life, but all of a sudden I was the smart-ass teenager I never felt I had the right to be. “Why should I say anything to you?” I asked. “You never talk to me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Why don’t you ever talk to me about anything important?” I asked.
“What’s important?” he said.
“Dad,” I said. “Come on.” It seemed so much easier to impute all my questions to Jeanne. I said, “Even Jeanne said it was sick-unhealthy-the way you don’t talk about what happened to you.”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Go nuts with grief in front of you?”
I told him I just wanted to feel sorry for him, and he said save your pity. “Just save your pity,” he said.
“But how can you get up in the morning?” I asked him. (This was becoming a big problem for me, because I couldn’t sleep well at night.)
“What’s the alternative?” he asked.
I knew the alternative was suicide. Truth to tell, I often wondered why he hadn’t committed it—and what I would have done in his place. Just tell me how to live, I felt like begging him. Instead, I asked him the real question I had been wanting to ask for years: How could he have gotten through all that?
I thought he would tell me he believed in some kind of God, terrible as He might be, or that he hung on by imagining another life for himself.
Instead, my father told me he was given a screwdriver. He broke open jaws and dug gold out of teeth.
Plenty did worse, I know it. Still, it made me so scared my hands tingled. And when I asked him how he did it, he answered, “It was easier than you think.”
And now here I sit. In many respects I feel just like any other person. I get up every morning and report to work. On Saturdays I clean my car. I run errands. Twice a month I visit my parents. The visits are sometimes dull. Other times they’re aggravating. Most of the time they’re pleasant enough.
On the sheet of questions you sent, you asked if I ever fantasized about having a so-called “normal” family. The answer, I guess, is that I never wanted to be anyone else’s son. Well, maybe most of the time I felt that way. Because when I was a boy and my father reached out his hand to ruffle my hair, there seemed to be electricity between us—a current that coursed deeper than the average one between a parent and a child. When he passed me food at the dinner table, when he hugged me when I got into Cornell, when he shook my hand that first vacation I came home, it was with an intensity that I never saw or felt when I looked at my friends and their fathers. Everything meant more between us. I wouldn’t have given that up for anything. Yet I felt guilty about that privilege, because I knew the source of the strong emotion between us came from something evil.
After I broke with Jeanne, a month later there was a fallout in the company I worked for—about another product that was doing more harm than good and also because of business practices I considered unethical—my father stuck by me. He was the one who told me to do the right thing, even if it cost me the job, which it did. He helped me out financially. He asked me one more time if I wanted to come into the business with him, even though I knew it cost him his pride to ask me again after I already had told him I wasn’t interested.
I love my father. And yet the fierceness between us seems to have gotten in the way of my forming other relationships. I felt I might have had a chance at it with Jeanne if only he wasn’t who he was, or rather, if what happened to him hadn’t happened. But then I think Jeanne probably wouldn’t have been interested in me at all if I weren’t my father’s son. I know because she took an inordinate amount of interest in my dad, and she always wanted me to tell her my dreams in the morning. I don’t like to admit this, but I often have nightmares and insomnia so persistent it sometimes makes me feel crazy.
I have trouble getting close to anyone. I would like to meet someone who would value the real me—not some romantic victim of evil (which, if you think about it, lurks everywhere and isn’t that hard to find in everyday life). I have a little pact with myself—if I ever get serious with someone again, I won’t tell the woman about my father until I’m sure I love her. Because I don’t want my father getting in the way. After Jeanne, I realized there were plenty of people for whom the grand scale of such suffering has endless fascination. People want to be attached to it, without taking any of the consequences. Maybe in that sense I’m as guilty as all the rest. After all, it’s my father’s experience. It’s not mine. I keep telling myself it’s not mine. Yet it’s me. It still seems like some part of me went through something too—but I’m not sure what that something is.
I don’t want you to think this issue dominates my life. Days, weeks go by—I fly to Columbus or Saint Louis for a conference—and I don’t think about it. But then it comes back, in a flash, always at some inappropriate moment—at a company reception, or in the middle of a meeting, I look across the table and know I’m the only person in the room who has to deal with this. And then comes another flash, which helps me get through it—the realization that they all have their own burdens to live with too. That’s when I appreciate the obligation of being my father’s son, because I feel that without this trigger of sympathy inside me, I couldn’t relate to the rest of the world.
Yet I’m ashamed that it’s only inherited pain. I’ve grown up believing that something awful should happen to me, that it’s only a matter of time before God puts me to the test. I keep waiting and wondering why my father can sleep at night and why I get the nightmares, the bad dreams that should have belonged to him. I dream I’m standing at the edge of a cliff—no, a ravine—and I keep standing and waiting for the bullet to come, or the hand that will push me over.
Chapter Eight
Lower and Lower
I replaced the onionskin letter, then slipped the book back on the shelf. The shower squeaked off. I thought about the “shower rooms” in the crematoria. My face flushed and my ankles felt
numb. I had the urge to storm the bathroom—to run in and embrace Strauss.
Instead, I went downstairs to make him coffee.
As I slowly lowered my feet upon each step, I thought it was little wonder I felt like I knew Strauss well right from the first. His was the last section I read. But I only had gotten halfway through, putting down my blue pencil when I got to the girlfriend named Jeanne. My relief to pass the project on to someone else had been immense. With the exception of Strauss’s section—which had an even, level tone that contrasted with the voice of all the rest of the sons and daughters interviewed—the whole manuscript hummed with anxiety. Some of those interviewed had joined kibbutzes; others had joined ashrams. One was a concert pianist who specialized in playing music written by people destroyed in the camps. Another had gone off the deep end and had multiple suicide attempts. All of them loved and hated their parents with a fury that would have shocked me if I hadn’t felt the same intensity toward my own.