by Jane Shore
Years later came rumors that, although
he was sunny in public, in private
he was ice. He threatened to disinherit Dena
if she ever wrote a word about him.
“Not our Danny,” my family said.
We knew him before he was famous,
right after he changed his name from
David Daniel Kaminski to Danny Kaye,
Duvideleh to his parents, double-talker,
before he was Walter Mitty, Red Nichols,
Hans Christian Andersen, the Court
Jester, Pied Piper, Inspector General,
Anatole of Paris, the Kid from Brooklyn,
we knew him before he stood in front
of a symphony orchestra and conducted
“The Flight of the Bumblebee” using
a fly swatter as his baton—when there
was still time for him to become
my uncle Danny—who kissed my left
cheek, the last and first time we met.
My Father’s Shoe Trees
After giving away his Italian suits,
I couldn’t find a taker for the pair
of wooden shoe trees he slipped
inside his custom-made dress shoes
imported from England. Themselves
a luxury protecting his investment,
the cedar shoe-trees kept those shoes
in shape, kept the chestnut leather
from shrinking, so you could say
they prolonged the pampered life
of his shoes, though not his own.
Every so often he would lightly sand
the wood burnished from years
of wear and oil from his fingertips,
and the lovely cedar scent returned.
Since his death, I’ve displayed them
on my coffee table like objets d’art,
keeping their provenance secret.
Is it any stranger than casting baby
shoes in bronze? When I ask a man
his size—the size of his feet, that is—
they’re either too long or too wide.
My father’s shirts fit most slender
medium-sized men; they were easy
to dispose of. But his shoe trees
continue to be a problem.
Straight out of a classic fairy tale,
like the infamous glass slippers,
they’ll only fit inside the shoes
that only fit the one pair of feet
of the future prince they’re fated for.
Last Words
Once the patient stops drinking liquids, he’s got up to fourteen days to live. If he takes even a sip of water, you reset the clock.
Eleven days without a drop. The rabbi
made his rounds. They stopped her
IV and her oxygen. I asked them
to please turn off the TV’s live feed
to the empty hospital chapel, lens
focused on the altar and crucifix—
it seemed like the wrong God watching
over her, up there, near the ceiling.
And because hearing is the last
sense to go, the nice doctor spoke
to me in a separate room. He said
it’s time to say goodbye. Next day,
he returned her to her nursing home
to die. Her nurses said just talk
to her; let her hear a familiar voice.
I jabbered to the body in the bed.
I kept repeating myself, as I’d done
on visits before, as if mirroring
her dementia. I rubbed her hand,
black as charcoal from the needles.
I talked the way a coach spurs on
a losing team. Suddenly she opened
her eyes, smiled her famous smile,
she knew me, and for the first time
in a year of babbling, she spoke
my name, then, in her clearest voice
said, “I love you. You look beautiful.
This is wonderful.” I urged her
to sip water through a straw. Then
two cold cans of cranberry juice,
she was that thirsty. Her fingertips
pinked up like a newborn’s.
I wanted the nurses to acknowledge
my miracle, to witness my devotion
although I’d been absent all spring.
They reset the clock, resumed her oxygen.
I was like God, I’d revived her. Now
I’d have to keep talking to keep her alive.
Pickwick
That dog never barked, not a whimper,
so it was heaven living next door
to Pickwick and his mistress, Elzbieta,
the Polish novelist on Brattle Street,
my first apartment, my first year
out of grad school. Elzbieta had escaped
the Warsaw ghetto, then worked
for the Resistance during the War.
What had I accomplished at twenty-four?
At her holiday party, tongue-tied and
outclassed, stuck in a clot of Harvard
literati, I bonded with a fellow poet
(dressed in Marimekko) who excused
herself (she needed to pee) and set
her sloshing cocktail glass on the floor.
And before anyone could stop him,
Pickwick was lapping up her martini
like water, the olive too. Then that
scruffy knee-high mutt, who’d breezed
through puppyhood without a whine,
barked—a loud rusty hinge of a bark—
which shocked us into silence, mainly
Pickwick, who, recoiling from the report,
ricocheted around the room, frantic
to see where the noise had come from.
In the short weeks that followed,
Pickwick was a regular bar mitzvah boy
belting out his Torah portion. He barked
at what normal dogs all bark at:
doorbells, strangers, sirens, thunder,
his bowl of kibble twice a day. He growled
if you took his bowl away, howled
when other dogs within earshot howled,
igniting the poodle on the second floor.
By Easter, Pickwick was barking in long,
rhythmic stanzas that kept me awake
at night. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t write.
But excited dogs love to bark, and if
you yell at them to stop, they think
that you’re barking right back at them,
and they only bark harder and louder,
so I didn’t shout or pound on the wall,
or bother asking Elzbieta to shush him,
but suffered with earplugs until another
apartment on a different floor was free.
Like a poet finding his voice,
once Pickwick started barking,
nothing could make him stop.
Gratitude
After Mom died we all worried about him,
alone in the apartment above the store.
But every day he took a three-mile walk.
Learned to meditate. Watched what he ate.
Phoned every Sunday to report the usual.
One Sunday in March, he called, excited,
as if Perrier was running through his veins.
On his walk in the park that day a squirrel
was blocking the path right in front of him.
It had somehow gotten one of those plastic
thingamajig rings that holds a six-pack
together stuck around its neck like a yoke.
The squirrel looked as if it was asking for
help, so my father bent down and flipped
that whatchamacallit over its head
and freed it. The squirrel stood a minute
as if studying him, then scampered across
the busy traffic circle into the woods.
The next night, Monday, he called again.
Not an emergency, he was quick to say.
Today in the park he saw that cockamamie
squirrel standing directly in his path,
waiting to thank him! Was he deranged?
Maybe solitude was finally getting to him
or he needed a medication changed.
What a story, I said, but really,
how could the squirrel tell my father
from all the other walkers on the path?
By his scarf? His mustache? His smell?
And how did my father know it was
that same squirrel? Don’t get too close,
I said. Next time, you could get rabies!
He was a harrowing five-hour drive away.
I could just see him on his rounds that day,
telling Kenny at the deli his new best story
and Jack the bank teller and Henry and
people at the ShopRite waiting in line
beside National Enquirers and TV Guides—
perfect strangers, nodding, agreeing
with him about the strangeness of life.
It’s like that Aesop’s fable where a slave
named Androcles removes a thorn
from a lion’s paw. The moral?
“Gratitude is the sign of noble souls,
be they human or animal.” That winter,
my father died. Along with everything
else about him, I miss his Sunday calls.
Gratitude’s reciprocal: my father saves
a squirrel and the squirrel gives my father
a story to tell.
A Reminder
My husband gets a forwarded postcard in the mail
from Temple Beth Israel: it asks him
to light a Yahrzeit memorial candle
for his (beloved father Larry)
on the evening of (January 14)—
the blanks for name and date, in parentheses,
filled in with blue ballpoint ink.
I don’t want to see my husband’s face
when he reads it.
I never met my father-in-law.
He never met our daughter,
his granddaughter.
A year ago my husband flew to the funeral in Ohio.
He sat shiva at his uncle’s house,
with strangers—his father’s friends and business associates,
and buddies his father played poker with
every Friday night for the last twenty years.
Tomorrow’s the 14th.
There’s not a candle in the house.
My husband’s working, out of town.
I’ll have to go to the Grand Union’s Jewish shelf,
where they keep the matzoh meal and kasha,
to buy a Yahrzeit candle.
His father walked out on his wife
of thirty years, stole the family savings, cleaned out
the safe-deposit box, disappeared
to another state for two decades,
his whereabouts a blank. Apparently
he found a girlfriend, a house, a job, another life.
Every morning for the last ten years,
he ate breakfast at McDonald’s
with his best friend, Sol.
Sol told my husband,
“You could have knocked me over with a feather.
In the whole time I knew him,
your father never once mentioned
that he had a son.”
Four sons. My husband’s brothers
all written out of their father’s will.
The obituary arrived a week after the funeral:
The deceased has no immediate survivors.
My husband will be home in plenty of time
to light the candle at sundown.
But he’s ambivalent.
Guilty if he lights it.
Guilty if he doesn’t.
American Girls
The first of the dolls she asked for
was Addy, a Negro slave escaped from the Civil War.
Addy arrived at Emma’s sixth birthday party
wearing her historically accurate dress,
drawers, stockings, cap-toed boots,
and carrying a paperback copy of Meet Addy.
But Addy’s kerchief, her “half-dime
from Uncle Solomon,” her cowry shell,
her authentic Underground Railroad maps
and what the catalogue calls “the traditional
family recipe for sweet potato pudding,”
and the hardcover book—they cost extra.
Our daughter didn’t get them, and she didn’t get
the wooden hobnailed trunk to store them in.
Catalogues were coming every month now.
We didn’t want to spoil her,
but on Emma’s seventh birthday
a Victorian orphan joined the family:
Samantha, who’d lived in a mansion and slept
in an easy-to-assemble brass-plated four-poster bed.
Samantha let Emma remove her checked
taffeta dress, and slip her into her pink, lace-
ruffled nightgown and matching bloomers,
and tuck her into her bed—
on the floor at the foot of Emma’s bed—
beside Addy’s authentic rope bed,
which cost more than any actual Addy’s actual bed
would have cost, if Addy’d actually had one.
The next morning, poring over the catalogue,
Addy and Samantha started fighting
just as real sisters do.
Fought over who should wear the Kwanzaa outfit,
who would wear the genuine sterling silver
Star-of-David necklace,
tearing each other’s hair out over
the red silk Chinese pajamas, and who’d get to keep
the brass gong and pretend firecrackers
after the Chinese New Year’s celebration was over.
They fought over the ballerina tutu,
hula skirt, Girl Scout uniform,
items introduced to the catalogue
when the “American Girl of Today” was born.
For her eighth birthday, Emma’s father and I
custom-made ourselves a “Girl of Today.”
We chose from (blonde, red, brunette, black)