by Pete Hamill
“Come,” Lev said, and led me to his room. It was very small—a bed, a bureau, a chair. But it felt like a library. There were stacks of comic books everywhere, grammar books, two fat dictionaries. And drawings that Lev had made: Batman, the Green Lantern, Captain America, Donald Duck. There were other drawings, too; buildings with spirals of black cloud issuing from chimneys; barefoot men with shaved heads and gray pajamas; watchtowers; barbed wire.
“You’re an artist,” I said.
“An artist?”
“Yeah, an artist.”
“Pete Reiser is an artist?”
“Yeah,” I said. “In a way.”
“Like Christmas every day,” Lev said. “An artist.”
IV
Fall arrived. The days shortened. Most of us went to the Catholic school, but Lev enrolled in public school, where Ralphie Boy became his protector. Ralphie Boy had been kicked out of Catholic school.
“The kid is scared all the time,” Ralphie Boy told me. “I gotta teach him how to fight.”
Every day now, the woman named Bridget Moynihan was coming to Barney’s house. She was about forty and lived with her mother and had a plain, sweet face. Barney hired her as a housekeeper, to make sure Lev ate properly and washed himself and always had clean clothes.
“I tried,” Barney said to my father one day. “But I just got no talent for being a mother. This kid is family, you know. I’m his only living relative. But a mother I’m not.”
They started to go to the movies together: Barney and Charlie and Bridget and Lev. They took walks, and went shopping together, too. Then at Thanksgiving, Barney prepared a big dinner. He asked us to come over after our own dinner and make Lev feel like he had a home. But Lev was in his room when we got there, and he was crying. Barney asked me to talk to him.
“Go ’way,” Lev said, turning his back on me, sobbing into his pillow.
“What’s the matter, Lev?”
“Go ’way, go ’way.”
“You don’t like turkey, Lev?” I said.
He whirled around, full of anger. “Too much! Is too much! All food, food, food. Too much!”
I was a kid then, but looking into the eyes of a boy who had survived a death camp, even I understood.
V
After Thanksgiving, the Christmas season began. Down on Fifth Avenue, store windows magically filled with toys and train sets and red stockings. Christmas banners stretched across the downtown streets, painted with the slogans of Christmas, about peace on earth and good will toward men. Christmas music played from the loudspeakers, and there were Salvation Army bands outside Abraham & Straus and men selling chestnuts and rummies dressed in Santa Claus costumes, ringing little bells. We took Lev with us as we wandered these streets, and he was full of amazement and wonder.
“But what is?” he said. “What is they mean, Christmas?”
“Hey, Lev, fig-get it,” Ralphie Boy said. “You’re a Jew. Christmas is for Catlicks.”
“Explain, please.”
A theological discussion of extraordinary complexity then took place. Was Santa Claus a saint? Did they have Christmas bells in the stable in Bethlehem, and who made them? Did Joseph and Mary put stockings over the mantelpiece, and was there a mantelpiece in that stable? How come the Three Wise Men didn’t come on reindeer instead of camels, and, by the way, where did they come from? If Jesus was the son of God, why didn’t God just show up in person? It got even worse as we roamed around. But Lev stayed with it, almost burning with intensity, as if torn between the images in those store windows and the fact that he was a Jew.
“Why is not for Jews?” he said.
“Because Jesus was a Catlick, Lev,” Ralphie Boy explained.
“No, he wasn’t,” my brother, Tommy, said. “Jesus was a Jew.”
“Come on,” Ralphie Boy said. “Stop kiddin’ around.”
“I ain’t kiddin’,” Tommy said. “Jesus was a Jew. So was his mother and father.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You could look it up.”
“Well, when did he become a Catlick? After he died?”
“How do I know?” Tommy said. “All I know is, while he was here on earth he was a Jew.”
“Ridiculous!” Ralphie Boy said.
If Lev had any doubts about the essential craziness of the goyim, they were not resolved by this version of the Council of Trent.
VI
Then Barney Augstein got sick and was taken to Methodist Hospital. There were whispered conversations about what was wrong with him, and then plans were made by Bridget and my mother and Charlie Flanagan. Bridget moved into Barney’s house, and my mother and Tommy and I came over every night to help Lev with his homework, and the women decided they could give a Christmas party anyway. They would combine Hanukkah and Christmas, get a Christmas tree, hang pictures of Santa Claus around the house, but leave out all the mangers and statues of Jesus. Barney was part of the planning; he called each night from the hospital and talked to Lev and then Bridget, and later Bridget would talk to my mother.
“He wants to get the lad everything,” Bridget would say. “Train sets, and chemistry sets, and a big easel so he can paint. A camera. A radio. And I have to keep stopping him, because he’s gonna spoil that kid rotten.”
Then on December 19, the first snowfall arrived in the city. Lev was in our house and we took him up to the roof and we stood there while the snow fell on the pigeon coops and the backyards, and obscured the skyline and the harbor, and clung to the trees, all of it pure and white and blinding. We scooped a handful from the roof of our pigeon coop, explained to Lev that it was “good packing,” and started dropping snowballs into the street, hoping that we would see Nora the Nose. She wasn’t there but others were, and soon Ralphie Boy was with us, too, and Eddie Waits, and Cheech, and we were all firing snowballs from the rooftops, as skillful as dive-bombers, and Lev was with us, joining in, one of the crowd at last.
“Good packing,” he shouted. “Good packing!”
That night, while we all slept, Barney Augstein died.
VII
They took Lev away two days later. A man and a woman in a dirty Chevy arrived at Barney’s house at eight in the morning, showed Bridget their credentials, and took Lev to the children’s shelter. Somewhere downtown. Where the courthouses were. And the jails. Bridget swore that she looked across the street and saw Nora McCarthy at her window, smiling. We learned all this that afternoon, when Ralphie Boy told us that Lev wasn’t at school. We went up to Barney’s and Charlie Flanagan was there with Bridget.
“He didn’t have papers,” Charlie said. “Barney got him in through Canada. The kid never had papers.”
“So what’ll they do?”
“Ship him back.”
“To the concentration camp?”
“No,” Charlie said. “To Poland.”
“Well, maybe not,” Bridget said. “Maybe he’ll just go to an orphanage.”
“An orphanage?”
We were filled with horror. Poland was bad enough, over there between Germany and Russia. But an orphanage was right out of Oliver Twist. I could see Lev, like Oliver on the H-O Oats box, holding a wooden bowl, his clothes in rags, asking for more gruel. That’s what the book said. Gruel. Some kind of gray paste, what they always fed orphans, and I thought it was awful that Lev would have to spend all his years until he was eighteen eating the stuff. Worse, he could be adopted by some ham-fisted jerk who beat him every night. Or, even worse, someone who hated Jews. And all of us, in that moment, seemed to agree on the same thing.
“We gotta get him outta there,” Ralphie Boy whispered. “Fast.”
The phone rang and Charlie answered it. He talked cop talk for a while, and mentioned the State Department, shook his head, and said he couldn’t adopt a kid because he was single. He hung up the phone, lit a cigar, cursed, and stared at the wall. Then he turned on us.
“All right, you bozos,” he said. “Beat it.”
I was halfway down the block when I
realized I’d left my gloves on the kitchen table. I went back. Bridget answered the door and I hurried past her to get the gloves. Charlie was on the phone again.
“Hello, Meyer?” he said. “This is Charlie…”
He glowered at me until I left.
That night it snowed, and kept snowing the next day, and on the day after that, they closed the public schools, and we listened in the morning to “Rambling with Gambling,” praying for more snow and the closing of the Catholic schools, too. The snow piled up in the streets, and we burrowed tunnels through it, and made huge boulders that blocked the cars in the side streets. The park was like a wonderland, pure and innocent and white, the leafless trees like the handwriting Lev used when he showed us his own language, and kids were everywhere—on sleighs, barrel staves, sliding down the snow-packed hills. All the kids except Lev. He was in the children’s shelter, eating gruel.
Then on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Charlie Flanagan rang our bell. My mother went out to the hall and met Charlie halfway down the stairs. There was a murmured conversation. Then she came up and told us to get dressed.
“Charlie’s taking you to see Lev,” she said. She gave us a present she had bought for him, a picture book about Thomas Jefferson, and down we went to the street. Ralphie Boy, Eddie Waits, and Cheech were already in Charlie’s Plymouth, each carrying a present.
“Now, listen, you bozos,” he said, “Don’t do anything ridiculous when we see him. Got it straight? Just do what the hell we tell you to do.”
We drove to downtown Brooklyn, where the government buildings rose in their mean, gaunt style from the snow-packed streets. Charlie pulled the car down a side street and parked. And in a few minutes, a Cadillac parked in front of him. He looked at his watch.
“The party for the orphans is already started,” he said. “So you bozos just come in with us.”
Two men dressed like Arabs got out of the Cadillac. They had headdresses on and mustaches, and shoes that curled up, and pantaloons, and flowing green-and-orange capes. One of them was the largest human being I ever saw. The other one was Meyer.
“Hello, sports,” Meyer said, pulling a drag on a cigar. “Hello, Charlie.”
He handed Charlie a box, and Charlie opened it and took out an Arab costume, and put it on over his suit. In a minute he, too, was a Wise Man from the East, his face covered with a false beard and mustache. We followed the three of them around the corner and into the children’s shelter. There was a scrawny Christmas tree in the lobby, and windows smeared with Bon Ami cleanser to look like they were covered with snow, and cutouts of Santa Claus on the walls, and a few dying pieces of holly. A guard looked up when we walked in, his eyes widening at the sight of the three wild-looking Arabs.
“We’re here for a Christmas party,” the big guy said.
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” the guard said. “Second floor.”
We walked up a flight of stairs. The three Arabs glanced at each other, and Meyer chuckled and opened a door. They stepped into a room crowded with forlorn children, and then started to sing:
“We t’ree kings of Orient are…”
Everybody cheered and they kept on singing and patting the kids on the head, and looking angelic, and then Lev came running from a corner, right to Ralphie Boy, and hugged him and started to cry and then Ralphie Boy started to cry and then everybody was crying and the three Wise Men kept right on singing. They did “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” and “White Christmas.” The two guards cheered, and the other kids sang along with them, and then Meyer couldn’t stand it any longer and he lit a cigar, and then the other two lit up, and they were singing “Mairzy Doats,” and the big guy slipped a bottle of whiskey to one of the guards and a cigar to the other, and they went into “Jingle Bells” again, and moved closer to Lev, and after a little while, we couldn’t see Lev anymore. The singing went on. The guards were drinking. And then it was time to go. Meyer, Charlie, and the big guy backed out, doing one final chorus of “We t’ree kings of Orient are…” We followed them outside, waved good-bye, wished all the other kids a merry Christmas, came into the lobby, wished the guard a merry Christmas, too, and headed into the empty street.
Around the corner, Meyer stopped, lifted his whirling Arab costume, and let Lev out.
“Merry Christmas, sport,” Meyer said to the kid. “Merry Christmas.”
For the first time, Lev Augstein smiled.
VIII
That night, we sneaked Lev into our house, far from the eyes of Nora the Nose, and said our tearful good-byes. Then we all went down to Meyer’s car. The trunk was packed with suitcases, but they wedged in a few more packages, and then Lev was driven out of our neighborhood, heading into Christmas Day, never to return. A few weeks later, Charlie Flanagan put in his papers, retired from the cops, married Bridget Moynihan, and moved to Florida to live on his pension and serve as a security boss in a certain hotel in Miami Beach. It’s said that he and Bridget adopted a young boy soon after, and raised him as a Jew out of respect for the boy’s uncle. Christmas was a big event in their house, but then so was Hanukkah.
I thought about Lev every year after that, when the snow fell through the Brooklyn sky and turned our neighborhood white, or when somebody told me that the snow was good packing, or when I heard certain songs from hidden speakers. I also thought about him when I met people with tattoos on their wrists, or saw barbed wire. But I didn’t worry about him. I knew he was all right.
The Price of Love
IN THE MORNINGS NOW, Levin walked the winter beach, his body buffeted by the hard sea wind, his heart blown through with emptiness. Gulls watched his progress. He plucked shells from the receding surf. He combed the sand for man-made things. He was accustomed now to the permanent grieving sadness of the summerhouses, sealed with boards and plastic sheets against the invasions of winter. On some mornings, Levin was sure he could hear laughter from their porches, remnants of summer evenings frozen in ice.
Alone, bundled in down and wool, his boots heavy, Levin walked about three miles each morning, with the Atlantic pounding the shore beside him, and then went back. He never had breakfast, and no longer read the newspapers or watched television. Across the long mornings, he worked with his hands in the small rented house, carving wood into birds and small animals and the heads of vanished friends, amazed that after so many years his hands were again capable of intricacy and control. The wood shavings helped feed the fireplace. Mozart fed his heart. He only thought about her five or six times a day.
He ate a late lunch, always in a pub called Magic’s, where he liked the chili and the cheeseburgers. Nobody talked to him. He was just another middle-aged customer. If the pain came over him, as it sometimes did when he saw a waitress brush back her hair, or heard a woman’s laugh, he would try to remember a melody by Mozart. This usually worked. After lunch, he would stop at the post office to pick up his mail, most of which was junk; his friends didn’t know where he was, and that was all right with Levin. He didn’t want to experience their pity, or have them ask for an explanation. His wife didn’t love him anymore. It was as simple as that. And she had gone. That was all. He didn’t want to explain that to anyone.
In the afternoon, he would polish whatever piece he had been working on that day, sitting in the large, soft chair beside the fireplace. The nights were more difficult. In those first weeks, after quitting his job, and closing his apartment, and coming out here to the beach to do things he had never had time to do, Levin’s pain was most terrible at night. He would see her laughing with other men. Faceless men. He would see her cool gray eyes accusing him of misdemeanors he had not known he’d committed. He saw her empty closet. He would get up and walk around the small house then, and try to read, and lie again on the brass bed, hearing the house settling and the distant roar of the sea. And sometimes he was afraid. Thinking: I could die here, and nobody would know.
The fear of solitude slowly left him. It had been years since he’d slept alone, and for a long time he wo
uld still awaken and reach for her. But then, knowing that she was not there, and would never be there, he learned to accept her absence, and made new habits. Indifference replaced fear. And he began to look forward to the luxury of his solitary bed. I must be healing, he thought. I don’t fear, I don’t love, I don’t hate. The wound is closed. I am alone. I am indifferent. I have survived.
And then one gray afternoon after lunch, he went to the post office and opened his box and removed the little bundle of mail. And along with the circulars and the tax forms from his accountant and the catalogs, he saw the letter. His name was written in the familiar handwriting, the round letters made by a fountain pen on a pale-blue envelope. But he did not open it, and then walked slowly back to the rented house.
He sat before the fire for a long while, dropping junk mail into the flames, until there was nothing left except the pale-blue envelope. He looked at the flames, considering whether he should simply throw the letter in with the other junk of his life. He decided not to do this, but could not open it, either. He laid the envelope on a table and went into the workroom to polish a head he’d carved of W. H. Auden. He thought about Auden’s ravaged face and gentle eyes, wondering what his own face would look like after time had finished its erosions. I have time yet, he thought. Another twenty years. Maybe a few more than that. And will leave the world as alone as when I entered.
That night, he fell asleep while a heavy rainstorm lashed the village. He dreamed of Prospect Park when he was a boy, running across meadows. Then he was in the zoo, and the bars of the cages had all been removed, and the animals roamed around, free at last. They seemed almost timid in the dream. And then a panther was before him, sleek and black, with yellow eyes, and Levin was afraid. He tried to move, but his legs seemed encased in concrete. And then he was awake, and sweating, and still afraid.