Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

  His mom got up to go after him, a slow and painful ascent that showed in her face. “Ma, no. Let him be,” Edith said, helping her back into her seat.

  It was then that the doorbell rang, and the boys jumped out of their seats. “Elijah! Elijah’s here,” they said, running out of the room, Moses apologizing to the table and getting up to see who was at the door.

  When he got there, his dad had already opened the door and let Frieda Rothman into the house. “Angel of death! Angel of death!” the boys shouted as Frieda grimaced, shooed them away, then walked right up to Moses, slapping him in the face.

  He stood there in a stupefied daze, rubbing his cheek against the sting. “She just hit Daddy,” he heard the boys telling the guests at the table, who then got up to see the commotion for themselves.

  “Your boys,” Frieda said. “They’re menaces. Now I have proof. I’m going to call my son. He’s a lawyer, you know.”

  “Get out of my house,” Pandora snarled, coming between Moses and their next-door neighbor.

  “Pandora, let me handle this, please,” he begged, knowing they were all being watched and that it was imperative he diffused the situation before it escalated. “Look, we’re right in the middle of our Seder,” he said. “Couldn’t this wait until a little later?” He knew she was there about the blood on the door, but this was the last thing he wanted mentioned in front of the entire world. “I promise I’ll come over after and we can talk.”

  “I like you, Moses, but your boys have gone too far,” Frieda countered. “What they wrote—well, I won’t repeat the words in polite company because I’m not that kind of person. Suffice it to say, I’m shocked and horrified. Milton and I both are. To think we live next door to such a bunch of hateful, insensitive hooligans and Jews no less. It’s disgraceful. Just disgraceful.”

  “Words? What words? What did they write?” Moses asked.

  “Ask them,” she said, pointing to his sons.

  “Boys, what did you write?” he demanded of them.

  “We didn’t write anything,” Bronson protested. “We just…painted.”

  “It’s on your door as well. Come here. Look.”

  He followed Frieda outside, where Moses knew for certain that a camera had been installed, and where his dad was already standing, shaking his head in dismay. Moses glanced at the lintel, which was indeed streaked with blood, but there was more to it than that, for on top of the blood in big, black letters were the words DIRTY STINKING PIG JEWS. “Boys, what have you done? Why would you write this?” he cried, appalled.

  “I’ll tell you why,” his dad broke in. “Because like father, like son. You never had any sense and neither do they. Look at the way you live, well beyond your means, and look at how they’re growing up. You spoil them rotten, and then wonder why they are the way they are? You made a mockery of our family with that stupid show for three years, and you’re making a mockery of it again tonight. I only agreed to this because your mother had her heart set on spending what is probably going to be her last Passover out here with her family. And you subject her—you subject me—to this bullshit. Congratulations, you’ve confirmed to the world what a bunch of idiots we raised.”

  Moses had no response, because what was there to say to that? What was there to say to such a man, such a father, such a grandfather?

  “We didn’t write it,” Bronson remarked.

  Yeah, sure you didn’t, Moses thought, but then he noticed a van with the network’s logo in the driveway. And he was startled by his own rash reaction and felt ashamed for doubting his sons, especially Bronson, who stood there with his sad, stern face. For in his face he saw other faces, his own, his brother’s, his sister’s, and thought, I am nothing like you, Dad, and my boys will be nothing like you. This night, I will be the kind of father you never were.

  He passed through the yard and rapped on the door of the van. Chandler slid it open, holding a sandwich in one hand, his phone in the other. Moses caught the glow of a computer screen on which Chandler was monitoring everything. “Did you see who defaced the door?” Moses asked.

  “It looked like a couple of kids, but they had on hoodies and were carrying bats. They were here and then they were gone, man. I didn’t see their faces,” Chandler said.

  “Well, were you going to tell us about it at some point?” Moses asked.

  “I’m not supposed to interfere or get involved, man.” He shrugged. “I just do my job.”

  “Nice job,” Moses said, speculating that the thugs must have seen the live feed and wanted to be a part of it, part of this show that was devolving into A Very JacobSONS Nightmare.

  “But it’s cool, because I’m getting all of this,” he continued. “I put a camera up there.” He gestured at the lemon tree. “Excellent stuff, really personal and controversial. Beats the hell out of the Kardashian reunion I shot a few months ago.”

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Moses said. “Now kindly fuck off.”

  “Dude, you can’t say that on live TV.”

  “Oops. Well, I just did, didn’t I?” Moses said, turning to his family, but they’d all gone back into the house.

  For a moment, all he wanted to do was to get into his car and drive away where no one could find him, least of all his producer, who was going to ream him out. It didn’t matter. The whole night was a complete fiasco from start to finish and now he had this crime to contend with, these awful words to sand away come morning. Frieda was still in her yard, gazing out into the dark, her face stricken.

  “Do you and Milton want to join us?” Moses called.

  If she heard him or not, he couldn’t tell, for she turned and hurried into her house, slamming the door. The porch light went out a moment later, though he knew she’d be keeping vigil all night, worrying that whoever had desecrated their door would come back to do worse. Things like this happened, had been happening for a few years.

  Back in his own house, Moses found his family at the windows, peering out. “It’s over,” he said, though he had no idea to what he was referring—the vandalism, the Seder, the show, his marriage, his mother’s life, his career. Everything caught in those two little words as he moved past them all and back into the dining room, picking up his fork and clinking it against the side of his wineglass. They shuffled in, reluctant to begin again, but begin again we must, he thought, trying not to look at his father, who sat with a self-satisfied smirk on his face, as if he were somehow happy about all of this. I’m so much better than this, said that pernicious smirk of his. I’m so much better than you.

  They all settled back in their seats and the Seder went on, because it had to, although Moses would have liked to bash every single webcam, and his father, for good measure. But this was important, this special, and Moses, ever the professional, dredged up a camera-ready smile. The meal was served and conversation resumed, wine was poured and drunk, spirits lifted, smiling facades went up, and everything was forgiven and forgotten, at least while they were all on live television. His dad had done a terrific job hiding the Afikoman on his own person, so that none of the boys could find it, but this was cause for laughter that night. His dad deposited one gold coin apiece into his grandsons’ open, expectant palms, then continued eating his brisket. Pandora kept checking her phone and Gibbs kept glancing down at his, but even this didn’t matter to Moses anymore. He was thinking about the man beside him, his dad, their own angel of death, their own walking ten plagues, who sat there, absorbed in the world of his dinner, licking his fingers when he thought no one was watching—except of course the entire world was watching. The world had seen him for what he was when he roared at Moses in the front yard, indicting him for his terrible parenting skills. The cameras saw and heard it. Now Moses thought back to all the death threats the trips had gotten, even after they’d changed their email addresses, and he realized that it had to have been his dad who sent them. It all made sense now, considering what he’d just said out on the lawn. Those threatening emails—“Hitler h
ad the right idea,” “There’s no good Jew like a dead Jew,” “Gas the women and children first”—it had been his dad all along, trying to get the show canceled. Oh, he understood why his dad might not want the world to see into their lives. But to threaten his grandsons simply out of embarrassment?

  It’s unforgivable, Moses thought, reaching for his fork and wanting to jam it into his dad’s neck. Now those would be some ratings, he mused, stabbing a piece of tangy, juicy meat and sliding it into his mouth. They ate and they laughed, they told stories about their lives, Jacob and Dietrich about Berlin, Edith about Atlanta. It was a good time. And his dad sat there in silent judgment, feeding his face, and his mom sat beside him, fiddling with her oxygen, trying not to let anyone see her do it. But Moses saw, and he took a sip of wine and then another to wash the bitterness of it down.

  Moses opened the doors to the backyard to let in some fresh air, the candles fluttering in the breeze. When he sat back down, he noticed a peculiar thing—his dad’s face was bright red and he was clawing at his throat. His mom was turned to Edith and Elias, and Pandora was glued to her phone, texting Gibbs, no doubt. The boys were huddled around Jacob and Dietrich, who were telling them about the Brandenburg Gate, and no one but Moses himself seemed to take notice or care that Julian was choking. He stared at him in awe and wonder, for he couldn’t quite believe his eyes or his luck—their luck. It wouldn’t be long now, a couple more minutes. He could say and do nothing, and it would all be over. Yet Moses realized he couldn’t let it happen like this, he couldn’t allow himself to be implicated on live TV. Against his better judgment he leaped up and grabbed his dad and pummeled him from behind, expelling the piece of gristle that had lodged itself in his dad’s esophagus—all of this before the rapt audience at the table and in living rooms and dens across America. His dad reached for a glass of water, his eyes on Moses the entire time, and Moses knew then that his dad knew that he’d hesitated a second too long.

  “It went down the wrong way, Roz,” he moaned petulantly. “I was choking. I couldn’t breathe.”

  “You’re okay now, Julian. Moses saved you,” his mom soothed, stroking his hand and glancing up at Moses with the strangest look on her face.

  Ten minutes later, the webcam lights went dark simultaneously; the broadcast was finished. Moses pushed away from the table, exhausted yet energized at once. He’d saved his dad’s life—a life that in a few hours he was going to end—and he couldn’t help laughing at the incredible irony of it all, at the twisted logic of the universe.

  “Why the hell didn’t you just let him choke?” Jacob asked later, cornering him in the pantry, where Moses had stashed a package of Oreos, verboten and against Passover law. Moses shook his head at Jacob’s question. “Yeah, letting him die on national television would have won me lots of points with the network. And the police,” he said.

  “It would have solved our problem, that’s all I’m saying,” Jacob said. “Because we’re running out of time for the plan to work.” From the pantry, Moses could see that Edith and Elias were sitting in the backyard, having some kind of serious discussion that only they could have. Edith’s face was drawn and Elias’s strained and he wondered if she was telling him about her afternoon with Zion Abdullah Cohen, justifying it all over again, though perhaps this time looking at it through the eyes of someone she had once been intimate with, as intimate, he understood, as Edith could be with anyone. He hoped, for her sake, that what she’d learned from Zion had broken whatever juvenile spell Sheik had had on her, that from now on she’d be able to proceed more cautiously with men who weren’t wildly and wholly inappropriate for her and that she’d mended one fence, Elias, at the very least, a fence that would serve to corral her desire, say, the next time a male student showed up in her office, distraught over his grade and beside himself with personal sorrow. Edith, good, kindhearted Edith, had done what any person would, reaching out to comfort the boy. But she wasn’t just any person—she was his professor. How exactly she was going to untangle herself from it all Moses still had to wonder, but he hoped she would.

  While his dad roamed the backyard, shaking his head in disappointment while kicking at large clumps of the freshly mown, dried grass, which, Moses knew, his dad had expected Jacob or Moses himself to have raked up and bagged, and Elias and Edith chatted, Moses told Jacob about the backup plan, in case the video blackmail failed. “Fishing on Lake Calabasas.” Jacob grinned. “It’s kind of genius. I’m surprised I didn’t think of it first. I think we should just bypass plan A and head straight to plan B,” he said, lightly punching Moses on the arm. “Good work, mein Bruder.”

  “Keep the German to a minimum, okay?”

  “So when is this happening?” Jacob asked, a little too excitedly, thought Moses, who was not excited at all. There was nothing about this that was right, not in the strictest sense of the word, and he had to keep reminding himself of what his dad had shouted on the lawn, as if this and not everything that came before it were the proof he and his conscience needed to carry the plan out.

  “Soon,” Moses said. “I just want to give him some time to recuperate.”

  “It’s after nine already,” Jacob complained.

  “We’ll get him out on the boat. We’ll present the evidence we have, and he’ll go for it or he won’t,” he said, pulling an Oreo apart and eating the middle. “Good for him if he does. Good for us if he doesn’t. We win, regardless.”

  “You mean Ma wins,” Jacob amended, depositing an Oreo whole in his mouth and chewing.

  Moses remained in the pantry after Jacob left to go check on Dietrich. He liked it in the cool, silent dark, nibbling on his private stash of cookies and imagining waking up in the morning free of his dad either way. After eating another six cookies, Moses left the pantry and went to knock on the guest room door. His mom was already in bed in her nightgown, her makeup removed, the oxygen tank beside the bed, the clear tubes running from it to her nose. “That was a lovely Seder.” She smiled. “Do you think your producer was happy with it?”

  “I haven’t heard from him, so probably not. It doesn’t matter. Not really. I’m just glad you were able to be here.”

  “Me, too,” she said as his dad stepped out of the bathroom. Moses was surprised to see him in his pajamas, and his heart sank. “Your dad wants to be on the road bright and early.”

  “Five in the morning.” His dad nodded. “Beat this damn L.A. traffic.”

  “Tomorrow’s Easter,” Moses pointed out. “No traffic.”

  “Still,” his dad said, “we have a long drive ahead of us.”

  “So I take it you don’t feel like going out on the boat?” he asked.

  “Another time,” his dad said, eyeing him. “Tell Gary thanks anyway.”

  “Of course,” he said. “But are you sure? When’s the last time we all went fishing together?”

  “I told your father he should go, at least for a little while, but he doesn’t want to leave my side.”

  “My place is here, with your mom.” His dad leered, smirking that horrible smirk again. He knows, Moses thought. He’s got to know. Well, it’d be easy enough to whip out his phone right then and there, to finally show his mom that this man, who didn’t want to leave her side, had tampered with her spare oxygen tank. He pulled out his phone—it was now or never—his heart racing a mile a minute, his stomach doing cartwheels. He sent a text to Edith, telling her to get Jacob and meet him in the downstairs guest room. Hurry, he wrote.

  “Ma, I—we—want to show you something,” he started, as his dad climbed into bed beside her.

  “What is it, Mo? Pictures of the boys?” she asked, sitting up. “They have such gorgeous voices. Don’t they, Julian?”

  “They sounded like castrati. You know castrati? The little boys they castrated so they would sing like girls,” his dad said. “You know who had a truly remarkable voice, though, was my sister. She sang in the choir at the synagogue. We used to joke that she had a schwartze living inside her.”
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  “Julian, you know I don’t like that word,” his mom said.

  “Which word?” He snickered.

  “You know what’s always amazed me about you,” Moses said to him. “Just how utterly oblivious you are to everyone around you. It takes a special kind of chutzpah to use a word that you know is offensive to everyone, especially when you’re talking about my sons to me. You can’t say something bigoted and horrible like that.”

  “Boy, you watch who you’re talking to.” His dad glowered.

  “Or what? What can you possibly do to me that you haven’t already done?” Moses asked. “Embarrass me on national TV? Done that. Make sure I know what a worthless piece of shit I am? Done that, too.”

  “You embarrassed yourself,” his dad said, sneering. “And you are a worthless piece of shit most of the time.”

  “Julian! Moses! Both of you knock it off,” his mom commanded as the door swung open and in walked Jacob and Edith.

  “Sounds like we’re missing all the fun, Thistle,” Jacob said to Edith, who glanced at the rollaway, then knowingly back at him. “I take it, Mo, that we’re not going fishing as planned. Well, that’s a pity. I was so looking forward to spending some real quality time out on the lake with you, Dad, so you could tell me again how bad my last play was and how I should have gone to law school. I’ve always wondered if you wanted to raise children or lawyers.”

  His dad just sat there. None of them had ever spoken to him quite like this before. Perhaps if we had, we wouldn’t be in this particular situation, Moses thought. “I just wanted to raise children who’d actually make me and your mother proud, that’s all,” he said. “Instead, we got you—a faggot playwright, a barren, spinster sex offender, and a talentless cuckold. Your mother and I have so much to be thankful for in you.”

  “Do not speak for me, Julian,” his mom exclaimed. “You have been at them their entire lives, and I want it to stop. They are your children. They are our children.”

  “They haven’t been children of mine since they walked out of my house. Do you three want to know a little secret? If it hadn’t been for your mother, I would have left years ago. You don’t think I couldn’t have found someone else? You don’t think I couldn’t have had loving kids who appreciated all that I did for them? Think again. You all have been nothing but constant disappointments since the day you took your first breaths. Each of you damaged in some spectacular way. No doubt you blame me for most of it. But as far as I remember it, you grew up with two loving, adoring parents. And here’s another little secret—I blame you for not living up to the Jacobson name, and now I have to watch the same thing happen to those five boys. It’s despicable.”