The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  I didn’t leave my partner the entire evening. The louder and more frenetic the music became, the more other couples crowded around us, the more closely we danced. As we swayed to songs whose lyrics I didn’t understand but whose tunes were enthralling, he tightened his grip, and I felt at last grown-up.

  We left the party only when Stella, who didn’t have as much luck finding a partner, insisted we had to go home or risk catching hell from our parents. It was well past midnight—the latest that I’d ever stayed out without telling my family where I was going.

  “Ciao, carina,” my partner told me, and he leaned over and kissed me tenderly. Sometime in the course of the evening, I’d realized that I was far too young for him. He had grasped that long before I did, yet continued to dance with me. He hadn’t so much as left my side—either out of gallantry, friendship, affection, or desire.

  Upstairs, both my parents were waiting up for me, but it was my father who seemed especially agitated. “Où est-ce que tu étais?” he demanded to know. I replied as nonchalantly as I could that I’d gone to a party with Stella and her cousins, and had forgotten the time.

  “Il y avait des garçons là-bas?” he asked, getting straight to the point; Were there boys there? He was absolutely livid.

  “It was very crowded, and there were lots of people,” I answered evasively and in English. It seemed somehow the safer language.

  Loulou as an American teenager.

  “Tu vas ruiner ta réputation, tu vas gâcher ta vie,” he shouted; You will destroy your reputation. You are going to ruin your life. He employed the tone and words he had used only with my sister.

  For Leon, watching the social transformation under way across America in the late 1960s and early 1970s was like observing the goings-on on a distant planet, not his own—and certainly not the one he wanted his youngest daughter to inhabit.

  Now that I was catching the full brunt of his anger, I felt more resentful than contrite. What was this reputation I had to guard so zealously? Honor, standing, community—the notions that consumed my Levantine dad—seemed so quaint and irrelevant in my world. What did the values of Old Aleppo have to do with life in New York?

  OUR LIVING SITUATION HAD to come to a head, of course, and it did one morning when I was least prepared for it.

  As I left the house with my father, we were stopped by Mr. Valerio and his in-laws. They were leaning against the stoop, their arms folded across their chest. My father continued walking but they moved to block his way. Mr. Valerio, standing alongside his mother-in-law, a heavyset woman who always wore black, began telling my father we had to leave at once.

  “We are calling the marshals,” Mr. Valerio declared.

  His in-laws joined the fray. I had assumed they didn’t know English, but the old woman, whom I dubbed the Black Spider, knew a phrase or two.

  “Dirty Jews,” she muttered. “Dirty Jews,” she repeated more loudly, in case we hadn’t heard her.

  My father didn’t even blink. “I am calling the police,” he yelled back. “They will put you in jail.”

  I stood there petrified. At any moment, I was sure blows would be exchanged and then what? Who would defend my father—and me, for that matter—from these raging strangers I had thought were my neighbors and even my friends?

  That is when I started to cry. As I stood a few feet from my house, facing an old woman hurling worse epithets our way than any we’d heard in Egypt, I suddenly found that I couldn’t stop crying. Nobody seemed to take note of my anguish except my father. He was, momentarily, more annoyed with me than with our antagonists.

  “Loulou, ne pleures pas. Il ne faut pas pleurer en face des étrangers,” he told me; Don’t cry. Never cry in front of strangers. Fight back, he hissed. As he fought the Battle of the Stoop, he was convinced I was only showing weakness, and weakness was the character flaw he could never tolerate.

  The confrontation left me so shaken, I began to dread leaving the house lest I run into the Black Spider. Even more troubling was the prospect of a marshal coming to grab our belongings and turning us into refugees again. In my mind, it made sense to move immediately.

  My father acted unperturbed. He wasn’t afraid of a marshal, and he certainly wasn’t afraid of an old woman.

  The eviction notice arrived: we had to vacate immediately. Dad decided he would continue to fight, though his weapon of choice was hardly ideal. With no means to afford a private lawyer, he turned to Legal Aid. The organization that offered legal help to the poor was at the height of its powers, filled with cadres of idealistic young lawyers. My father—law-abiding, elderly, facing an eviction he didn’t deserve—could have been their poster child, and he was assigned a young firebrand who instinctively hated landlords.

  Our neighbors fought us in the quintessentially American way—by hiring an expensive private attorney.

  The day of the hearing, we arrived in court looking like a Mediterranean version of the Hatfields and the McCoys. My neighbor was flanked by his wife and his mother-in-law. The Black Spider was dressed, if possible, more somberly than usual, as if she had stepped out of some Sicilian village. Their attorney, polished and elegant, stood at their side. He seemed seasoned in the ways of Court Street, the nerve center of the legal community, where judges, attorneys, and hangers-on made deals and reached understandings before even walking into the courtroom. I noticed that he bantered with everyone from the judge to the clerk.

  My parents and I also marched in together. I had skipped school on the advice of Legal Aid to show the judge “there is a child involved.”

  Our lawyer finally sauntered in. His hair was dirty blond and flowing, his beard bushy and unkempt, and for our legal showdown, he was dressed in corduroys and sandals. He came over to my father and put his arm around him. Why, he couldn’t even imagine how we could lose.

  The Valerios’ lawyer, a small man in an expensive suit, began by making an eloquent plea before the judge. He argued that his clients—decent, hardworking immigrants—needed the entire house for the benefit of their frail relatives. As he made the case for evicting us, I heard my family described as thoroughly undesirable tenants.

  While the attorney launched attack after attack on our character, our lawyer listened intently. Yet he never responded or stood up to yell, “Objection, Your Honor,” as I’d watched Perry Mason do countless times on TV. He simply nodded and took notes as the other lawyer made the case that his clients were the true victims—not my refugee father, who sold ties on the subway to pay the rent, or my anxious mother, who wanted only to achieve a modicum of peace and contentment in a country that, so far, had denied her both.

  The judge rendered his decision then and there. Flashing a cordial smile at the landlord’s lawyer, he declared that we had to move.

  Our public defender seemed as stunned by the verdict as we were. He put his arm around my father once again and walked him out to the courtroom steps. My mother looked crushed. I felt that familiar longing to cry.

  After the court hearing, my parents and I began searching in earnest for a new apartment in the neighborhood. I was terrified of being homeless. Would we have to move back into a hotel? What had become of the Broadway Central?

  We grabbed the first place we found. It was a block away on Sixty-fifth Street, a breezy four-lane street my parents decided was like Malaka Nazli. Located on the ground floor of a two-family house, it was spacious enough for me to have my own room. My mother had wrangled it for me by insisting to Dad, in one of her rare assertive moments, that I was growing up: “Loulou est une jeune fille maintenant”; Loulou is a young lady now.

  Because it was at the front of the house, I could look out the window and enjoy the street life, my father told me wistfully, as if this were our house in Cairo. But at our landlady’s insistence, our first act was to put up window shades. That is what people did in America: they installed screens and venetian blinds and drapes to prevent anyone from looking in, and to stop themselves from looking out. We’d never bothere
d with curtains on Malaka Nazli; only shutters that we hardly ever closed. But our new shades were thick and white and opaque, and I pulled them all the way down.

  Our first Sunday in the new house, my father and I escaped by car service to Mansoura’s. We sat down at the lone wooden table off to the side of the pastry shop while Isaac Mansoura himself went and fixed us a simple meal that wasn’t on the menu. He cooked a pot of ful medames, the quintessential dish of Cairo: fava beans simmered in olive oil and lemon, with one hard-boiled egg floating in the middle.

  We shared a large bowl, while the owner, whose friendship with my father dated back to Cairo, pulled up a chair and joined us. The two chatted in Arabic, and I hadn’t the foggiest notion what they said, other than they looked supremely happy, my father dipping his bread into the flavorful brown sauce while Mr. Mansoura nodded intently, smiling at every bite my dad took of the dish he had so lovingly prepared. When we were done, he brought out a tray of assorted pastries, and only when we’d devoured the last piece of honeyed desserts did Mansoura call a car service to take us home.

  We assumed that we could breathe easy, regain the peace we had lost. I missed Stella, of course: though we lived less than two blocks away, our friendship ceased after the move, and I never again saw the handsome Italian from the party.

  But our new place had its advantages. Our landlords, the Cagnos, were a retired Jewish couple whose background was Eastern European.

  We would never again be attacked merely for being Jewish.

  SUDDENLY THERE WAS SO much space. Room after room, and almost no people and no furniture. We had brought the card table and folding chairs that had constituted our dining room set, and the six metal cots from Macy’s, but we didn’t own so much as a plant or a poster.

  Our new landlords liked to come by and check on the apartment. They expected, no doubt, that we would become friends. We wanted only to be left alone.

  A staircase led directly from their apartment to our kitchen, and they didn’t hesitate to use it. We found it disconcerting to hear Mrs. Cagno’s insistent knock. I noticed she was always peering at the other rooms, a disapproving look on her face.

  Why didn’t we have a couch? she’d ask. A dining room table? Drapes? Carpets? Chairs?

  My father said nothing, and resumed praying. My mother was terrified of “La Cagno,” as she dubbed her. Handling our landlady fell to me.

  Left to my own devices, my instinct was to stall. I spoke of bedroom sets on the way, of a velvet sofa arriving any day. I almost believed my fanciful stories. But then the promised pieces failed to arrive, and our landlady grumbled again. I begged my parents to take me furniture shopping. They looked at me, bewildered. What was the point of buying couches and credenzas? It is not as if the six of us would ever live together as a family again.

  Suzette and Isaac were gone, never to return. And now, even César had shocked us by starting to look for his own apartment.

  One morning, as I walked slowly with my father toward Twentieth Avenue, where he was going to find himself a synagogue, I spotted Mrs. Cagno making her way toward us, a squat figure with a loud voice swaddled in a dark shawl and a skirt that touched the floor.

  “Why aren’t you people taking better care of the apartment?” she demanded. “Why are you people leaving it unfurnished?”

  She was shouting, and she kept referring to me and my parents as “you people.”

  My father kept silent, leaning on his cane that he didn’t even raise, then resumed walking.

  I didn’t. If the Captain had lost the will to fight, I had found in me a well of rage and indignation. “You leave us alone,” I cried. “You go to hell.”

  She seemed taken aback by my fury, but only for a moment.

  “You people would be better off in a tent in the desert,” she said, shaking her head before waddling away.

  I stood with my father on the corner. Neither of us said a word; I was trembling. We parted, and he resumed his daily quest for a temple. We had reconciled since the night of the red dress and now were joined together in our sadness. I had finally grasped the lesson from our earliest days in America—that I should tell no one that I came from Cairo.

  It was so clear now: to be from Egypt meant you were from a primitive country, backward, unsavory.

  For weeks and months, I replayed the scene with Mrs. Cagno. I should have called her a liar, I thought. I should have told her my family had never lived in a tent, that we had owned a lovely apartment on a broad tree-lined boulevard named after a queen, with a maid, a balcony, and a cat with a coat of many colors. I should have said I had attended a private girl’s lycée that taught me more by the age of six than I’d learned in all my years at my American elementary school. I should have informed her that only an unfortunate twist of fate had placed us at the mercy of fellahin like the Cagnos of Sixty-fifth Street. As for the tall silent man at my side, I should have let her know that once upon a time, he had bantered with princes and gambled with a king.

  We didn’t know any princes or kings anymore and my father had long stopped playing poker and frequenting casinos. Within a few weeks, we moved to another apartment down the block.

  CHAPTER 21

  The House of Prayer

  When I least expected it, the Cat Scratch Fever seemed to return.

  The symptoms were eerily the same as ten years earlier. A light, almost imperceptible fever that came and went. Night sweats. A sense of sluggishness that made it hard to keep up with my classes or take part in the bustle of activities that went with being a high school senior. And it was hard to fall asleep at night, no matter how tired I felt. I was only sixteen in the winter of 1973, but I felt exhausted, more like sixty, or how I imagined a sixty-year-old must feel. Most curious of all, the swelling at the top of my left thigh made a reappearance. There it was, the strange little bulge I had first noticed as a little girl in Egypt. It seemed a bit bigger, harder.

  I tried not to look at it too closely.

  The only good change, as far as I could tell, was that I was losing weight. Stepping on the scale each morning, I noticed that I was effortlessly shedding pounds. I could at last mimic the American girls I so admired with their slender waists and close-fitting jeans, who wandered airily through the corridors of New Utrecht, my Brooklyn high school. I would happily have traded all my Levantine curves for the svelte, compact figures of my classmates.

  I didn’t dare tell anyone at first how I was feeling. Surely, I thought, the swelling would go away, the fever would subside.

  “Loulou, qu’est-ce que tu as?” my mother asked me as she noticed me struggling to put on a new pair of shoes. I was getting dressed to attend my friend Celia’s wedding. But I barely had the strength to slip on the floor-length dress I had purchased for the occasion—my first evening gown. It hung loosely around me, though incongruously, my shoes felt too tight. My ankle, my foot, looked distended, and when I tried to walk, it hurt to take even a few steps.

  Would I be able to dance tonight?

  You should see a doctor, my mom said pensively as she ran her finger lightly over my ankle. She asked me how long it had been swollen. I shrugged: “A couple of weeks. Maybe a couple of months.”

  Mom frowned and turned to my father, who sat in his armchair in the living room, buried as always in his prayer book. Pouspous Jaune, my American orange tabby, was curled up on his lap. As my mother spoke, he didn’t look up but continued to read silently from a frayed, tattered prayer book with a red cover, one of dozens he kept at his side, on a small rolling table piled high with the remnants of his lost life.

  My mother glared at the cat, who gazed placidly her way. Pauvre Loulou is sick, she told Dad. Could it be Cat Scratch Fever?

  I couldn’t believe I was back to being Pauvre Loulou, or that we were talking about a malady that hadn’t been mentioned in years. Mom, of course, was only voicing out loud what I secretly dreaded.

  She described some of my symptoms to my dad as she shooed the startled cat away. Pous
pous Jaune meowed as he scurried out of the room. We hadn’t even consulted a doctor, yet she was already speculating that this poor creature was to blame.

  My father, who listened without asking a single question, merely said that she should take me to Maimonides—our local hospital, not the Cairo shrine. Then he resumed praying. It was always time to pray in New York, though there were fewer and fewer people with whom he could pray, rarely the quorum of ten men, or minyan, needed to conduct a proper service. Once overflowing congregations were nearly all shuttered.

  We were still in the cramped two-room apartment we had rented after the Cagno fiasco. I didn’t have my own room anymore, but slept on a bed in a corner of the living room. Our family had been in America ten years, but with Suzette now in Los Angeles, and Isaac and César in Manhattan, my mom and dad wondered what they had to show for it.

  My father, now in his seventies, was much frailer. On one or two mornings a week he attempted to venture out to pray, as was his wont. But finding a working congregation at 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. in our forlorn little corner of the world had become almost an impossibility, so that my father roamed and roamed the streets of Bensonhurst in search of any surviving temple where he could worship with the other old men who had also stayed or been left behind.

  I watched as he tried to cross Twentieth Avenue, a tall, stooped figure with a limp so conspicuous every step seemed painful. He walked with his cane, which he raised menacingly in the air, waving it like a weapon at the cars that whizzed by him. I held my breath for fear he would be hurt or run over as he battled the morning traffic, forcing trucks and motorcyclists to screech to a halt to accommodate his deliberate pace. Miraculously, he never was. It was as if he wore an invisible shield that protected him against all odds. I would continue walking only after making sure he had made it safely across, following him with my eyes until he turned a corner.

  On this bitter cold February night, as Mom and I headed to Celia’s wedding, it was my turn to have difficulty walking.