by Linda Grant
“You should try them, it’s like wearing slippers all day long. I never had such comfort.”
Later, in the lobby of the hotel, his father took off one shoe, picked it up in his hands, the dust of the Polish landscape still clinging to the sole and to his sock, and extolled their many virtues, how they had been engineered, and how cheap and indestructible they were. A craze had taken hold in California for these shoes. The president had a pair.
Stephen thought, I must have been in Europe too long, because to me they seem like an abomination. Their ugliness astounded him. He always wore the same white leather Nikes, he bought five pairs at a time and kept them in their boxes until one pair was too soiled to wear anymore, then he moved on to the next. In his side of the wardrobe were: his Nikes, one pair of tan leather boots for the winter and two pairs of leather shoes, Florsheim penny loafers he had bought in Saks on a visit home twelve years ago, and black lace-up shoes from a fancy shop that specialized in footwear for Englishmen, which had been a present from his wife.
Arriving home in London, he had said, “Dad, did you bring any other shoes?”
“Of course, these are just for sitting on a plane when your feet swell, and for sightseeing. Don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you.”
His father had purchased a lime green nylon fanny pack in which to keep his money, plane ticket and passport. He had a blue baseball cap to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was ready to be a tourist.
“You don’t really need that thing around your waist. All it does is draw attention to where your money is.”
“But I’ll be robbed.”
“No, you won’t. Give your money to me, and anyway, you don’t need to spend anything. It’s all my treat. I’m rich.”
He was not rich, not compared to the neighbors, but it was a word his father understood, and the many-floored house had so deeply impressed him, with its garden and Andrea’s consulting rooms, that he believed his son to be a huge success, wealthy and contented and admired. His name appeared on the TV screen at the end of science documentaries on PBS and the Discovery Channel. My son, he told everyone he knew, is an important man.
So he surrendered the fanny pack but not the orange plastic shoes, which he insisted were so heaven-sent for old guys like himself, with corns and blisters and fallen arches and hammertoes and all the other ailments of the foot that took him to a monthly appointment with the podiatrist, that he would not take them off for any occasion except their evening meal. Out of respect to his daughter-in-law who cooked. And even so, who could see them under the table? But he agreed to some formality.
They set out from Islington on the bus, because Si’s first request was to travel on the top of a red double-decker. Seated at the front, Si felt as if he was in the cockpit of a plane, flying through the unfamiliar streets of a city not as vast as Los Angeles, but L.A., he realized, was not a city like London was, but just a conglomeration of suburbs. Warsaw was a city, London was greater and grander than Warsaw. London to his eyes was unbearably beautiful, its houses, its public buildings, its shops, its triumphal arches, palace gates, parks, the red road leading to the Queen’s house, the snaking river and its bridges, some graceful, one a kind of drawbridge, the Parliament and its clock, the boats on their way to Greenwich or the open sea or upstream to Teddington Lock.
The stores with beautiful clothes in the windows, watches, couches, the street markets with fruit and other produce and cheap clothes and shoes and CDs. The blue sky under a sun warm but not scorching, not a sun anyone would ever need to escape from, even in July. And all the gardens, the roses and other flowers he had no names for and the beautiful trees heavy with leaves and bearing fruits you couldn’t eat that made new trees, little things that grew from any piece of ground they found themselves in—all making an effort. To grow, to be, to become.
And all the people walking and talking on their cell phones, and dressed very differently from people in Los Angeles, something more formal, more in keeping with life in a city. Everyone amazed him, when he overheard them speak, their accents sounded like an orchestra tuning up at the beginning of a musical show, discordant, crying, weaving through the words, and himself in this crowd, the American who was born on this continent. He had the right to be part of all this.
The fur shops were all closed. The addresses he had once known, the famous furriers, were long gone. Harrods did not sell furs anymore or keep them in cold storage. The people in England liked their animals, they kept them close by them in their houses and they preferred a dog or a cat to the sight of a woman in a mink. It was tragic, and he was a relic of a way of life which had died under him. In his own lifetime, his occupation had been made obsolete, by whom? Moral puritans, zealots, people with no appreciation of the finer things in life like a lovely face under a sable hat. They threw paint at such women. Barbarians. The Hollywood stars were afraid of them, they were frightened of the mob, the spoilt babies.
Stephen took him across the river to the great wheel. They stepped into a capsule which rose without the sensation of movement up into the sky until the panorama of the city was revealed to him, the hills in the distance, the river winding through its banks and toward the west, Stephen said, Oxford. This is what it’s like to be a bird, he thought, not the plane, where you were strapped into your seat and could see only clouds or darkness. He wished his wife could have been here with him. Tears in his eyes, remembering her in bed next to him, her light snores, the opulence of her skin, her black hair smelling of scented oil and the bathroom full of her secret potions which were still there, in the cabinets. He could not throw her away.
The magnificence of London on a clear day. “Thank you, Son,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
Stephen, towering over his diminished father, the gnome, bent down and kissed his head.
His father, he realized, retained his feeling of the wonder of the world, he was still alive, not half-dead. His generation was indestructible, they had passed through the worst of what the twentieth century had had to offer, born during the first fighting in Europe. You could step on a train at Warsaw station in the year of his father’s birth and step out of it at a station a car’s drive from the trenches. His parents and sister were dust in Europe. He had arrived in America with nothing, begun with nothing and had made a modest something. But its modesty belied its tremendous success: a job, a marriage, a family and no one coming to any harm. It had taken hard work and fortitude. I have grown up with a loving father, he thought, remembering suddenly the hard whack on the side of his head as his father, turning, saw his son twirling in Marilyn’s mink. He smiled. It was done from love. All love and pride and hope.
High in the air, he pointed out to his father the sights of London. “This is the Parliament, this is Canary Wharf, which is offices, this is what they call the Gherkin, this is the South Bank where they have theaters and films and concerts.” The two men stood together, the younger with his arm round the shoulder of the older one.
“I’m glad you thought up this plan,” Stephen said. “It turned out well.”
“I always wanted to travel,” said his father. “It never happened.”
“But you traveled from New York to California, at least you had that.”
“Yes, of course, I forgot.”
A few hours later, when Stephen suggested that they take a taxi home, Si said definitely not. It was now time to take the famous London underground train. The bombs the previous week seemed not to faze him, “That was last week,” he said. “They are all dead now, the terrorists, they can’t come back to hurt me.”
They were at Pimlico. Stephen took him through the gates with his ticket and they stepped onto the escalator.
“This has been a wonderful day, Son,” Si said. “What a city London is. What a place! Warsaw was nothing compared to this. If I live for another ninety years I don’t think I’ll have another day like this one.”
The moving stairs went down and down. As they reached the final stage of their journey,
Si’s plastic shoe caught in the side of the machinery and, unable to extricate himself, he fell on his face, smashing his nose against the metal staircase, which dragged him along until it came to the final step. The screams of the passengers brought someone running who turned off the motor and Stephen’s father lay there, blood all over his face, and either, Stephen thought, dead or unconscious.
Guilt
In the hospital, shocked, sedated, Si thought, Is this my time? Does it end in this place? He shared a room with three others but he could not see them, he was partitioned off behind screens. The doctors and nurses came and went and he heard his son talking to them in a high, quick, angry voice. I wanted to be buried next to my beloved, he thought. Our bones belong together. I’d like to be in a soil which has the sun warming it. I don’t want to be in a place that is damp.
“You’re not going to die, Dad,” Stephen said. “You’re going to be fine. Everything is going to be okay. Tell me if there is pain, I don’t want you to feel a thing. Are you thirsty, do you want me to give you a drink? I have a beaker here, I can hold it to your mouth. We’re going to get you out of here in a few days and your schnozz will heal in time. Everything is going to be okay.”
Not that Stephen believed this. He had interrogated the doctors about brain damage, internal injuries and anything else he could think of from the school of hypochondriac medicine. They had assured him they had run the usual tests. The usual tests? He had watched enough medical dramas to know that the usual tests were never enough, there was always a medical genius who had a brain wave and ran the test that no one else had thought of, which revealed the rare condition that was moving through the patient’s body like a death ray, aiming at the most vulnerable organs. Stephen thought of illnesses as comic book villains, you were Superman, your illness was Lex Luthor. In the comics, Superman always won, in life Lex Luthor always did, in the end.
But it was only a broken nose, gashes to the face and legs and bad bruising that ailed his father. The plastic clogs were in orange shreds, lodged in the machinery of the escalator. Stephen brought in new shoes, Nikes identical to his own, soft on his father’s feet. He sat by the bed holding his hand, thinking back to his childhood in Los Angeles, and how, if he had never left America, if he had never applied for that Rhodes Scholarship, had risked the draft, or gone to Canada like everyone else he knew, and returned a few years later, he would have had his whole life with his parents instead of abandoning them for this country which had nothing to do with them or their histories.
Si was thinking about how it was possible to live an entire life based on a falsification and wondering whether the accident on the escalator was a punishment to him for telling such lies to his wife and children. This idea was expressed in his mind more woozily, an inchoate floating thought, a slight nausea in the stomach, a sense of guilt and dread. It manifested itself, in a postmorphine hallucination, as a small animal with a snout that pushed its way through the fabric of the screens around his bed. The first shot had given him a sense of overwhelming peace and happiness, not just being free from pain but a release from all suffering into a woolly realm of bliss.
The second shot was not quite so good, the third was just a painkiller. And now he felt confused and occasionally frightened, burdened with an anxiety that the truth would fall out of his mouth by accident. This trip had been a terrible mistake. He had unleashed bad things into the world, not just to himself but the poor people on the subway trains who had died a couple of days before he arrived. You can never go back. He had said that to his wife many times, when she wept for Havana. That’s all gone, he said, and she said, “But it’s okay for you, you have nothing to go back to.” He said nothing. Lies on lies.
He had lived for so long with his secret and now it exhausted him. There were people who built their lives on fabricated foundations and came to believe in them, forgetting the truth, they could look back on memories of what had never taken place. The stories they told themselves became their reality, but it was a trick that Si had never learned. He did recollect the past, and it had informed everything he had done, all his decisions had been based on what had been.
He resolved that it was time to tell someone. He could not face his son. You want your children to look up to you, you do not want to see contempt in their faces. But the wife, she was a good soul, an understanding woman, she had a kind face and a kind heart. I’ll tell her, he thought, and she can tell my boy. He’ll take it better coming from her.
With this decision, he felt a weight lift from his chest, the iron box that lay inside it unlocked and its burden emptied. The box folded up to the size of a dime. He could throw that dime across the room. The little animals with their snouts departed back into the screens, their curled tails twirling as they went until there was nothing left of them but a tip, then pfff, they were gone.
He could hear the voices of the nurses, the moaning of someone in pain and the smell of half-eaten meals on trays.
“Dad,” Stephen said, “they’re going to do another couple of tests, just to make sure everything is completely fine.”
Si did not need more tests. He began to feel well, he could sense his blood circulating strongly and his breathing grow more peaceful. He touched his face, the skin was warm but not overheated. His little pulses were beating in all the normal places. He looked at his hand. I need a manicure, he thought, his nails looked to him like horns.
Canada
“It never happened like I said. Nobody got left behind in Europe. No one died. I mean they must all be dead now, maybe my sister, Gittel—she called herself Gertrude when she came over and had her hair shingled like the movie stars—she could be alive still, ninety-five she would be, but the rest all gone. Gittel was a good girl, even with the movie-star hair, and I was the wild one, the wayward boy.
“We never came to America, we never went to Ellis Island, if anyone is left they’re in Canada. We went to Montreal first and then my father found work through one of his landsmen in Manitoba, what a terrible place, oh, awful. The cold. The horrible cold. Your eyes froze over, I don’t mean the lashes, I mean the water on your eyes. You couldn’t shut them, you couldn’t blink. When the blizzards came and you weren’t safe indoors you’d die, you could die a dozen feet from your own front door because you couldn’t see your front door. It got cold in Poland but this wasn’t cold, it was razor blades in your face. The weather was everything. And the summer, flies. That’s all I remember about the summer, and the other bugs that bite.
“My father told me we were going to Warsaw because I always wanted to see that place. But what a journey! I never knew it took a train and a ship and another train and another ship to get to Warsaw. It was a month. And then we got there and it was no Warsaw, it was a country called Canada and I had been kidded. When are we going home to Łomża? I asked him. Well, he says, we are never going home. We lived in a slum with all the other Jews, you never saw such a slum, with everyone on top of each other and the women who couldn’t talk the language and we kids having to learn and do the talking for them. I knew French once, I forgot it all. It was hard times, 1925. There was no work my father could do in a city, he was a farm man, a man who looked after horses. He smelt of horse shit. Even before the Depression we were poor and my father hated the city life, he only liked the fresh air, so he hears he can get a job out in Manitoba and that’s where we went. On another damned train.
“It was a little place in the middle of nowhere and all the company you had was the sky. The stars out there were tremendous. But I never learned the names of them, I was too busy being made into a laboring boy, like my father. Clean the yard. Go fetch the oats. I wanted something better. I didn’t know what exactly, but I hated the life. Wolves came into the outskirts of town, you heard them howling, horrible, horrible beasts, I used to dream of killing them. This is why I was so happy when I got a job with the furs. It was my revenge on all those animals that tormented me, the dogs that barked and the wild things like the raccoons. I wa
s happy to tear their skin off. The wilderness is no place for men, we don’t belong there. Maybe some men do, not me.
“I don’t know if I said that I hated my father. Nothing to do with the horses or lying to me about going to Warsaw. I couldn’t stand him, not because he was coarse but because he was a very big man and I was hardly growing, I was going to be short, everyone could see that, and every month he’d put me against the wall where he’d made a mark from the last time, and he would measure me, and every month he would say, Not grown. Still a rat. This is what he called me, the rat. The rat doesn’t need to eat, he only has the stomach of a rat. A rat doesn’t mind going hungry. And he would laugh. My mother said nothing. Many years later I realized what was underneath it all. He was saying I was someone else’s, I wasn’t his boy. My mother pulled down her pants for another man. I don’t know if that’s true, it could be. Gittel was his, she looked like him, a big girl. You know Marianne to me looks a lot like Gittel. I never saw it at first but when she came of age, then I saw. I mean when she started to grow in the chest.
“So I was seventeen, it was 1932, and one day… I had enough. I don’t remember it very clearly, all the things that happened afterward rushed toward me and the incident I have trouble recalling. My father said something, I picked up an iron bar and hit him across the head. He looked like I looked when I fell down the moving stair and they took me to the hospital—blood all over his face and in his hair.
“What did he say that provoked me? One day we went into town to the movies. It was very rare that this happened, but Cagney had just released a picture called Taxi! and it was a big deal because in it he spoke Yiddish, so all the Jews wanted to see this movie. To hear an Irishman talk our language. His father was a boxer, you know, and he grew up above a saloon. I saw him many times on the street in Los Angeles.