The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  The Broadway Central was in flames. We had to evacuate immediately.

  Since I had gone to sleep in my usual gear of wool slacks and a sweater, I sprung out of bed, fully dressed. But no one else was ready. Everyone seemed either frozen, unable to move, or scurrying around in a state of panic. My mother still couldn’t believe what she’d heard was a fire alarm. My sister fretted about what to wear. My father moved more slowly than usual, unsure what to take with him: Precious papers? One key suitcase among the twenty-six? César recovered his composure and grabbed his wallet along with odds and ends—travel papers, photos of childhood friends, a few American dollars, and, for good measure, a couple of Egyptian pounds.

  I kept yelling out to everyone, “Allons, allons,” Let’s go, let’s go, my survival skills finely honed even at age seven. There was smoke and pandemonium in the hallways, and people in bathrobes and hair curlers were crying and hurrying toward the stairs and elevators.

  Finally, after what seemed like ages, we were all ready, except my sister, who was still fussing by the closet. My father shuffled out, taking nothing except his wallet. My mother, my brothers, and I followed; Suzette threw her winter coat over her pajamas and hurried after us. We left the room and walked across a hallway filled with smoke, muddied with the foam and water firefighters were using to extinguish the blaze, and rode the elevator down to the lobby.

  It was 17 degrees outside, with a wind that tore through our clothes.

  My father took us to a coffee shop at the corner for hot chocolate and coffee, where we waited and wondered. Had we lost another home? Would we have to move again to a new hotel? Upstairs were all of our worldly belongings. It seemed unthinkable that the little we still owned could be destroyed.

  After several hours we were told we could return to our rooms, which miraculously had suffered little damage. I was in an oddly chipper mood. I’d been completely vindicated in my habit of going to sleep with my clothes on.

  In my mind, it was prudent to be on guard in this country.

  AT LAST, OUR MEANDERINGS through Brooklyn paid off, and we found an apartment: four rooms, including the kitchen. It was far smaller than Malaka Nazli, hardly enough to accommodate six people, but at least it was ours, and after nearly a year of hotel rooms, it seemed almost palatial. It was on a street where families were either from Italy or the Levant.

  Our elderly landlord, Basil Cohen—no relation to the dentist—traced his ancestry to Aleppo exactly as my father did. After negotiations worthy of two Syrian bazaar merchants, my dad and Mr. Cohen agreed to a rent of $95. It was over our budget, but we felt under so much pressure to move, we had no choice. Mrs. Kirschner wanted us out of the Broadway Central immediately. She had threatened to stop paying our bills, which would have effectively left us homeless.

  We would be like normal people again, with a real address. It was, as far as I was concerned, our most exciting day in America: we were going shopping for furniture. We would have our own beds, chairs, couches, tables—all that we’d missed for so long.

  As we trooped to Macy’s in single file, I noticed the cold didn’t bother me a bit. I spotted the sign from blocks away: “Macy’s: The World’s Largest Store.”

  I was in awe. But once upstairs, as we wandered through the vast showrooms, we realized there was nothing we could actually afford.

  The salesman showed us magnificent king-size beds that looked as if they were out of a movie set but weren’t even remotely within our budget. Noting our dismay, he escorted us to a corner where Macy’s kept its least expensive merchandise. He pointed out several spartan metal cots. The low-lying folding beds were small and forbidding, with thin striped foam mattresses barely a couple of inches thick.

  “C’est comme dans l’armée,” my mom remarked acidly; It’s like the army.

  We walked out of Macy’s having spent our entire furniture budget on six folding steel cots.

  Mrs. Kirschner blanched at the bill—$254—and accused my father of being a spendthrift. Why Macy’s? she demanded to know. Why not a neighborhood shop?

  She continued to see him as the cause of all our mishaps. A feminist before the flowering of the feminist movement, she viewed my father with such suspicion and hostility that even his attributes in her eyes turned into flaws. Why did a refugee from Egypt shop only in first-rate department stores? Why did he speak with an upper-crust British accent? she wondered. Surely it was an affectation.

  My father had lived his entire life by a code of honor. In Egypt, he had been respected and admired precisely for his principles. Yet the chasm was so immense between him and our social worker she found almost nothing to admire—not even his lovely English. His insistence on tradition made him obdurate in her eyes. His devotion to faith and ritual was hopelessly quaint. She cast a wary eye on the religious passion that had always defined my father; because she was so secular, the product of a secular society, she didn’t share that passion and dismissed it as superficial and devoid of sincerity.

  There was also the notion that he was unemployable—or at least, that was the verdict rendered by la Nyana within weeks of our arrival. The agency simply couldn’t envision a place for my father in the vast and abundant land of opportunity known as America.

  “I have always worked, madame,” he told Mrs. Kirschner. Though he had always been secretive with us about his business dealings, he spoke at length with her about his experience as a grocer, an investor, and a pharmaceutical and chemical salesman.

  He was desperate to work. When Mrs. Kirschner pointed out his physical limitations, he exclaimed, “Le bon Dieu est grand.” But this only led her to complain in her case notes about Dad’s tendency to always invoke God. My father, she wrote, “resorts to denials, distortions, and evasion, and his philosophy is that ‘God is Great,’ which he constantly expresses in French.”

  She cast a cold eye on his impassioned plea that he needed to work to support all six of us, as he had always done. The social worker suggested he apply for welfare, instead. It was, again, a quintessentially American idea, certainly for the early 1960s. But nothing she said could have offended him more. He didn’t want charity, he told her coldly. Besides, he had a better idea.

  In his walks around Manhattan, he’d noticed the hundreds of little stalls and stands that were everywhere, in the subway stations, on street corners, by bus stops, near any crowded venue, manned by one or two people selling cigarettes, newspapers, chocolate bars, candy, chips, cookies, magazines. Now there was a business that seemed manageable. It reminded him of the old days when he and Oncle Raphael had peddled groceries together.

  He was prepared to start small, and besides, in his mind, these micro-businesses had enormous potential: New Yorkers wanted their morning paper and their Almond Joy and their pack of Camels in the same way that in Cairo, the typical Egyptian could be counted on to purchase a bottle of olive oil and a can of sardines.

  My father decided he was going to open a candy store.

  He started combing the classifieds for newsstands and tobacco stalls that were for sale. If no one in America would hire him, it seemed the ideal solution. He decided to appeal to Mrs. Kirschner and la Nyana to help him. A loan of $2,000 would do the trick, and then he would be able to support my mom and the rest of us entirely on his own as he always had.

  Mrs. Kirschner wouldn’t hear of it.

  She didn’t think she was being arbitrary or unkind. On the contrary, she felt she was being solicitous of my father, whose limp had gotten worse in the months since we had arrived. Prominent doctors the agency consulted said he should stay off his feet and give himself time to heal, yet there he was, proposing a venture that would require him to stand all day. Besides, he didn’t even have a coherent business plan—only supreme self-confidence that he could support us.

  My dad’s impossibly modest wish was turned down. The man who had done business with Coca-Cola couldn’t be trusted to sell cigarettes and bubble gum.

  In the middle of January, a major blizzard
hit New York and left more than a foot of snow. It was more snow than we thought possible. A few days later, we left the Broadway Central for the second floor of the Cohens’ brick two-family on Sixty-sixth Street in Brooklyn. Mr. and Mrs. Cohen were waiting to greet us. “Etfadalou,” they cried, Arabic for welcome, and with typical Syrian hospitality, they offered us a platter of khak, salty ring-shaped biscuits covered with sesame. We hadn’t eaten them since Cairo, and biting into the delicious treats made us realize both that we were far from home and that we’d finally arrived. The cots from Macy’s were waiting for us. We still didn’t have a table, and there was one chair for all six of us.

  Yet even here we couldn’t quite escape Sylvia Kirschner’s wrath.

  Six months after our move, she decided to make a home visit. That morning, my father asked me if I wanted to go into Manhattan with him. I nodded yes, eager to accompany him on what seemed like an adventure. I didn’t realize that my dad was whisking me out of the house so I wouldn’t run into our social worker.

  The two were now openly at war, any semblance of civility gone. He had watched as she befriended Suzette, encouraging her to flout his authority by telling her that in America, it was fine for a young woman to be independent. My sister was now threatening to leave the family and live on her own. My distraught father called Mrs. Kirschner and complained she had sent Suzette hurtling down a path that could only lead to disaster. “We will be ruined, madame,” he told the social worker. She shrugged and scribbled in her notes that he was being “extremely melodramatic.”

  My father had other plans for my sister.

  At the end of our block, my father had found a new home for himself—the Congregation of Love and Friendship. There it was, the old Cairo synagogue he thought was lost forever, resurrected from the dead, even down to its original Hebrew name, Ahabah ve Ahavah. The Congregation was warm and inviting, and he was reunited with several of his old friends from Egypt, who had undertaken the same sad journey. They prayed with the familiar melodies of Cairo Jewry, in the cherished cadence and rhythm of the temples around Malaka Nazli.

  Many of the men had sons Suzette’s age who were eager to get married and rebuild their lives. He told the social worker he had suitors lined up for my sister. He couldn’t help boasting how skilled he was at arranging marriages—he had helped each one of his five sisters find a husband. Surely he could make a fine match for his own daughter.

  Mrs. Kirschner wasn’t impressed. In America, girls didn’t have to be married off while they were young. They could leave the hearth, pursue an education, have a career. She didn’t think my sister had any obligation to get married—or to obey my father.

  Dad found all of this unconscionable. On that hot summer day, he determined that he wasn’t going to let Sylvia Kirschner get anywhere near me.

  I helped him carry the large brown box he carted everywhere these days. My father hadn’t found a job, but he was working. He had become a necktie salesman. Inside the box were dozens of ties, soft and silky and patterned in the most wonderful shapes and colors I had ever seen—a treasure trove that any adult male would be certain to want.

  An hour or so later, Mrs. Kirschner arrived to find my mother alone. Where was my father? she asked. And where was I? She seemed dismayed we weren’t all there, as she’d specified. She was also annoyed. What on earth was Leon doing taking a little girl out on such a scorching day?

  My mom tried to soothe her. She brought out a platter piled high with cakes and cookies, and some lemonade, and said I had gone with him to work.

  Sylvia Kirschner was beside herself. She decided that he must be using me to boost his chances of making more sales. With my dark hair and dark eyes, I “could easily attract attention,” she scribbled furiously. She couldn’t imagine why he would take me with him “unless of course, it was for the purpose of using” me to “get a sympathetic reaction” from customers.

  I was very lucky: decades would pass before the country embraced a “Take Your Daughter to Work” day and little girls began joining their dads in cubicles and at computer screens and in corporate boardrooms, and having the time of their lives.

  It was clear he was struggling in his new business venture, and there were days he didn’t make any sales. But on that hot summer morning, as we walked hand in hand, he was hopeful and tender and solicitous. He smiled as he asked me, “Loulou, tu vas m’aider à vendre les cravates?”; Will you help me sell some ties?

  He thought that I would bring him luck.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Hebrew Lesson

  That first year in America, I often woke up with a start after dreaming of Pouspous. Lying there on my Macy’s cot, I’d think about my cat in Egypt and burst out crying. Had Pouspous even survived? I’d wonder. Had she managed on her own, with none of us to look after her on Malaka Nazli? I was so agitated my father had to be summoned to reassure me, though I was past the age when I trusted him as completely as I had the day we left Cairo.

  Each one of us fixated on an object or being that emblematized what we missed about our lost life. For me, it was Pouspous. For my mother, it was the feel of the heavy sapphire ring on her left index finger, how the stone glistened and caught the light. For César, it was a boyhood friend named Gaby, a young Coptic Christian who had idolized him and looked up to him; now, my brother carried Gaby’s picture in his wallet. Isaac would later recall the particular angle the sun fell in the room facing the alleyway, the most wondrous room in the house because it had so many incarnations: as Zarifa’s bedroom, Dad’s office, and, at the end, storage room for our suitcases.

  My sister, rebellious and defiant, insisted there was nothing she missed.

  It was the reverse in my father’s case; there was nothing he didn’t miss about Egypt, though perhaps it was the roses he longed for most of all. His favorite complaint about our fall from grace between Cairo and Paris and New York concerned the flowers. They had no scent, he lamented.

  To my father, the flowers of America were odorless and lifeless—artificial even when freshly gathered, and altogether inferior to the flowers we had left behind.

  Leon was particularly upset about the roses. Lovingly cultivated by our Italian neighbors, they bloomed by the hundreds up and down Sixty-sixth Street, in the front yards of our working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, yet they emitted not a hint of perfume. Whether purchased from the corner florist or picked from a nearby bush, they still had no fragrance, a fact that filled him with a kind of existential despair, a sense of all that was wrong with our New World. How stark the contrast to the sprigs of jasmine whose perfume filled Cairo’s night air, to the lilies and honeysuckle that grew wild in the streets, and to the roses, above all, the roses, the small, red, overpowering damask roses, descendants of the very first roses to grow on earth.

  Even more unimaginable, stores sold plastic flowers, often for much less than what the real ones cost. They seemed extraordinarily alluring to me, and I kept clamoring for them, oblivious to my parents’ angst.

  Woolworth’s, the five-and-dime located a couple of blocks away from us, featured shelf after shelf of artificial flowers that sold for only pennies a stem. There were also pretty, slightly more expensive silk flowers. Until we moved to New York, I had never seen artificial flowers, and I found them utterly exotic, a beguiling symbol of the new land.

  I noticed fake plants in neighbors’ homes and plastic centerpieces on coffee tables. Some families even kept them behind glass, on display along with the silverware and crystal, as if they, too, were valuable. These houses had shiny plastic slipcovers on their sofas and armchairs, and Formica tables in their kitchens. I found it wonderful.

  I wanted a plastic slipcover, and a couch to go with it, a Formica table, and, above all, plastic flowers.

  In a walk through Woolworth’s, how I longed to gather up the imitation tulips and daisies, to pluck them from their green Styrofoam moorings and fashion a bouquet to decorate our new apartment, which was stark and barely furnished and badl
y in need of cheer.

  My mother firmly said no. “Loulou, ça suffit, non c’est non,” she snapped; “Loulou, enough already, no means no.”

  My father, who tried to indulge me in so many of my requests, also made it clear he wouldn’t contribute a penny.

  My father could never acknowledge to us how much he longed for the texture of the life left behind. He fixated instead on the flowers as an emblem of all that was bewildering about his new home and his new country, and all that he missed about his old home and his old country.

  Perhaps that is why we still hadn’t bothered to unpack. The twenty-six suitcases were securely stored in the basement of our first American apartment. Many still contained exactly what had been placed in them two years earlier. My mother never retrieved the pretty polka-dot dress la couturière had made for her on the eve of leaving. My father’s brocade robe remained neatly folded, where we had packed it.

  Nobody wore brocade dressing gowns in Brooklyn. None of the clothes the tailors and dressmakers had sewn for us those final weeks seemed appropriate, somehow.

  Dad didn’t stay out late anymore, yet he was still a night creature, and rarely fell asleep before dawn. Wearing cotton pajamas and sheb-shebs—vinyl house slippers from the five-and-dime—he simply buried himself in his old prayer books. They were among the few items we did retrieve from the suitcases.

  Even as we were beginning to feel settled, Suzette declared that she was leaving. Although she had been threatening to move out for months, none of us had taken her seriously, least of all my father. His reaction alternated between fury and desperation. What so many American families would view as part of the natural order—a daughter growing up, longing for independence and a place of her own—was anathema to him. He regarded the prospect of her departure as the worst misfortune to befall the family since leaving Egypt.