“I contacted Yad Vashem,” Kyle said. “This is what they sent.”
Paul handed the paper to Cynthia. She read it and covered her mouth with a hand. “Oh, Paul,” she said, and her eyes watered before he could turn away.
Kyle stood at the edge of the kitchen, scratching Franklin just above the tail, eyeing him. What did he want? Did he think these names and numbers were supposed to mean something? Until a week ago, Paul had never heard of Slutsk. As far as he knew, it was an invented place, as unreal to him as Crown Heights must have been to Kyle. But Crown Heights was the place Paul had left, and there no one had been rounded up and shot in the street. Few had died of anything more violent than a heart attack or a slip from a tenth-floor fire escape. Why should Cynthia cry as she handed the paper back? Why should everyone look so serious, so full of pity? He read more names: Slava, 26, Grish, 82, Dora, 10. Who were these people to him? Who was Kyle, for that matter?
“It’s better to know, right?” Kyle said, his expression different from any Paul had seen on his face before, no hint of amusement or ridicule. It made him look older somehow, his features brittle with doubt. Before he could go on, Paul waved a hand in the direction of the door.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
Franklin’s tail flicked back and forth in sudden irritation, and Paul had the uncomfortable feeling that the cat had figured out what was in store for him when Kyle went away. Before Kyle made a move, Paul left the kitchen. He dropped into his chair in the living room, picked up the crossword and studied a pair of clues: 81 Across—Samantha’s daughter; 83 Down—Cacao exporter. He listed off every South American country he could think of, but none fit. And Samantha? Was she a Biblical figure he’d forgotten from tedious Hebrew school afternoons? If he recalled correctly, Enoch had begat Methuselah. Whom had Samantha begat?
He glanced at the paper again. Taube, 39, Geshiel, 64, Baila, 13.
The question occupied his concentration for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, only at the end of which did he realize he’d been chewing his pen. When he pulled it out of his mouth, the plastic was mangled and covered with blue spittle. Bitter ink washed back and forth across his tongue. He looked around for something to spit it into—a tissue, a flowerpot, the gaping fireplace, Franklin’s fur-covered ottoman—and then swallowed.
At the end of the summer, a few days before the start of freshman orientation, business took Paul unexpectedly to London. Cynthia took Kyle to New Brunswick on her own and settled him into his dormitory. “He’s ready,” she reported when Paul returned. “Whether he knows it or not.”
Together they cleaned up the mess Kyle had left in his bedroom, and among unreturned library books and magazines—some with Yankees players on their covers, some with nearly naked girls—Paul discovered a paper titled, “My Journey to Being American.” It chronicled three branches of the Demsky family, from the Ukraine to the Bronx, citing interviews and records that were obviously made up. There was no mention of Paul or Slutsk or the people Itzik Haberman had deserted. The paper was full of spelling errors, meandering sentences, unfinished thoughts, and red ink. The teacher had given it a B+.
It went into the trash with everything else. A week later, Paul called the vet to make arrangements.
Around the Cape of Good Hope
1993
It was late September and barely light, clouds squatting heavily on the horizon. If dawn had broken, Paul couldn’t tell. Across the street from his house, an unfamiliar car idled, a compact Honda from the previous decade, and behind the wheel a hunched figure in a knit cap, too shadowed to reveal any features. He thought vaguely of burglars and the cash he kept hidden in the medicine cabinet, but a year before, after a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood, and despite Cynthia’s objections, he’d had a security system installed. Any burglar would notice the warning stickers Cynthia found so ugly—“I’d rather have all the windows broken,” she’d said—and stay away. Only after he made it to the end of the block did it occur to him to take down the license plate number, just in case of trouble, but by then he was anticipating the train ride and the rumbling hour he’d have to read the paper, and he couldn’t be bothered to turn around.
He forgot about the car by the time he made it to work and didn’t think about it again until three days later, when he spotted it through the family room window, just after dinner. This time it was on his side of the street, at the edge of the property line, facing the wrong direction, wheels turned to the curb. Again he could make out only the top of a knit cap over the edge of the driver’s door, and what he thought was a finger occasionally tapping the steering wheel. The car was dusty, as if it had been speeding all night down desert roads. The light caught a crack in the windshield, beginning in the lower left corner and branching, veiny, across the width of the glass. Paul thought again about the license plate, but to see it clearly would have meant going at least halfway across the front lawn, and in the dusk the car appeared menacing enough that he preferred to stay inside.
He thought, too, about calling the police, but he was sheepish where law enforcement was concerned, ever since, a year before, he’d mistakenly dialed 911 when he was trying to reach information. Instead he called to Cynthia, who’d just gone down to her basement sewing room. After the kids had left for college, she’d dragged her old sewing machine down from the attic, but instead of making clothes for future grandchildren or replacing missing buttons on Paul’s shirts, she volunteered as a costume designer for a community theater group at the JCC. Over the summer she drove to thrift stores and garage sales all over the state, and now that rehearsals were on she was gone four nights a week, making sketches and discussing fabric choices with the director. The theater company’s selections were predictable—mostly Neil Simon and Arthur Miller—and their productions were some of the worst Paul had ever seen. But he went faithfully to at least two showings of each, straining to compliment Cynthia without lying outright. The costumes made him feel as if he were really in Brighton Beach, he’d tell her; the Puritans’ hats were so authentic he might have mistaken them for originals.
Now she was working on dresses for the opening scenes of The Heidi Chronicles, short, shapeless floral sacks like the ones she’d made for herself in the late sixties. When he stuck his head in the stairwell and said her name, she didn’t answer. He heard only the hum and beat of the sewing machine, slowing down, speeding up, and slowing down again. It went silent when he called a second time, but still not a word from Cynthia. “It’s important,” he said, wishing he sounded more certain, especially when she let out a long breath and pushed her chair back, its wooden feet squawking on cement.
Of course, by the time she made it upstairs, the car was gone. He should have known it would be. To keep from having to face the look of weary frustration she was sure to turn on him—a pinching of lips that made her nostrils widen—he kept staring out the window, shading his eyes with the curtain. “He must have seen me,” he said. “He’s casing the place.”
“At dinner time?” Cynthia asked.
“I didn’t say he was any good at it.”
“It was just a kid.”
“He was up to something,” Paul said, replacing the curtain. “He’s been here twice. He was wearing a black knit cap.”
“They all wear knit caps now, even in the middle of July. It’s a fashion thing. He was probably listening to music or smoking grass. Or maybe he had a girl with him. Don’t you know what kids do on quiet suburban streets? Was I the only one who ever smelled Kyle’s clothes for four years?”
“There wasn’t anyone else in the car,” Paul said. “I would have seen her.”
“You said he was hunched down. Maybe the girl was bent over. You know, looking for something in his lap.”
Paul felt himself flush. He pushed the curtain aside once more. The street was still empty, a seedy little pool of water where the car had been.
“You should find a hobby,” Cynthia said, heading for the basement stairs. “Somethi
ng to keep you busy after work.”
He didn’t like the insinuation: that he was bored and lonely now that the kids were away, that he didn’t know how to occupy himself without Cynthia’s attention. Had she forgotten how many years he’d spent this way before they’d met, before he’d agreed to share her life with all its kid-noise and chaos? Those nights when Joy and Kyle shouted at each other down the hall, breaking whatever concentration he had to pay bills or do the taxes, he’d longed for the solitary evenings he’d given up, when he could stretch out an activity like reading the Times from six until midnight. And now that he had his concentration back, there were any number of things toward which he might direct it. For the past few months he’d been reading books about the great explorers from the Age of Discovery, and tonight he was in the middle of a detailed account of Vasco da Gama rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Only for some reason he couldn’t focus on the words. Even sunk down in his leather armchair—the one piece of furniture he’d brought from his apartment—with a cup of herbal tea on the table beside him, he couldn’t keep his gaze from drifting to the window. He stood and peered out every few minutes, finding himself unreasonably disappointed each time there was nothing to see.
Eventually he turned on the TV, keeping the volume low enough that Cynthia wouldn’t be able to hear it through the floor. And when, two hours later, her footsteps sounded on the stairs, he shut it off and pulled the book back onto his lap, blinking up at her as if he’d been so lost in the fifteenth century that he had a hard time finding his way back to the present. “Is it bedtime already?” he asked. “Seemed like you just went down there.”
“Need some water,” she said, turning the corner into the kitchen. “I’ve got to give it another hour.”
The book was heavy on his legs. He turned a page, followed a sentence halfway across, lost it, and tried again. Out the window, the street was deserted, not a hint of life in either direction.
On Monday morning, the car was back, and Paul found himself strangely relieved to spot it at the end of the driveway. In daylight he didn’t know what had seemed sinister about it before, a little maroon turtle with its head pulled in, caked with grime rather than dust, and now he had no qualms about approaching. Still, he did so under the pretense of hauling the garbage can to the curb, though it didn’t need to be out for another day. There was the knit cap sticking up over the dashboard, and when he came close, Paul half-expected to see another head rise out of the driver’s lap.
Or did he hope for it? On maybe a dozen occasions in Manhattan, he’d witnessed people engaged in sex acts—through open apartment windows, in a darkened doorway near Penn Station, once in the copy room down the hall from his office—but to see it on this placid street, where the children used to ride their bicycles, where months could pass without his hearing a car horn or a police siren or the sound of breaking glass: that would be outrageous, enthralling. Though he’d never imagined it before, now that the possibility had presented itself, it struck him as something he might have been wishing for all the years he’d lived here.
But as he dragged the garbage past, he was disappointed to see only a single head, its top covered in black wool, the lower half pale except for a few scattered patches of stubble. He caught a quick glimpse of the boy’s face before it turned away—long jaw and pointed chin, a nose that sloped steeply between half-lidded eyes, thick brows that blended with the edge of the cap. The boy sank lower in the seat, as if that would keep Paul from noticing him, and his hands, small and ruddy, with blunt fingers, jammed between his knees. On his lap was a spiral notebook, palm-sized. Paul could make out a few marks but no words. Now he could examine the license plate, but it told him nothing except that the car wasn’t from out of state. More interesting were the bumper stickers on the trunk: one from Drew University, another touting Jerry Brown for President, a third suggesting—or commanding—that he fight conformity.
Just as he settled the garbage can behind the car, the neighbor to his south—a black man about his own age—pulled out of his garage. Some years ago, when the man and his family had first moved in, Paul had unintentionally offended him. Cynthia had baked cookies as a welcome and asked Paul to deliver them, but when the neighbor answered the door, Paul mistook him for one of the movers—he was wearing faded dungarees and a frayed sweater—and asked to speak to the new owner. The man identified himself, crossing his arms over his chest, and Paul apologized but forgot to hand over the cookies. The neighbor hadn’t spoken to him since.
He drove a dark green Corvette from the mid-seventies, impeccably maintained, washed and waxed every week, and no matter how many times Paul told himself there was nothing odd about a black man in a suit driving a Corvette, nothing at all out of the ordinary, when he was safely out of sight, he couldn’t resist the impulse to stare as the neighbor rolled down the street. Now, though, in plain view, the last thing he wanted was to face him as he drove past, to have his polite nod and awkward smile ignored. He might have made a break across the front lawn, but unless the neighbor was fiddling with his radio, he was sure to catch sight of Paul running away. Instead, almost without thinking, he opened the Honda’s passenger door and slipped inside.
As soon as he sat, the boy startled and turned to him, flipping his notebook closed. He wore a flannel shirt and black work boots, and if not for little metal hoops in both lobes, he might have been trying out for a part in a remake of On the Waterfront. Behind one ear was a cigarette, a pen behind the other. Paul wondered what the neighbor would make of a scruffy white boy in a filthy import, loitering at the curb. Would he think to take down the license plate number? If he slowed to look, Paul didn’t know it; he hunched even lower than the boy as the Corvette thundered past, and stayed that way as the engine grumbled into the distance. The inside of the Honda smelled of ashes and wet moss. The grime on the windows dimmed the light. Now that the boy was looking at him, Paul thought he had a morose face, nothing at all threatening about it, his features seeming to slide downward toward the patchy stubble on his jaw. “Morning, Mr. Demsky,” the boy said, his voice a croak, as if he’d been smoking for thirty years, though he couldn’t have been older than twenty-two.
“Mr. Haberman,” Paul said.
“Aren’t you Joy Demsky’s dad?”
“Stepdad.”
“Right. I knew that. She told me about you. Paul.”
“Mr. Haberman.”
The boy pulled the pen from behind his ear and scribbled, holding the notebook close to his chest. “I don’t mean to bother you or anything.”
What would be noteworthy here? Paul wondered. How early he left the house in the morning? How long he ran the sprinklers? Mostly, though, he was curious to know what Joy had said about him. Had she told the boy he was paying her college tuition, because her real father, who owned a house on Budd Lake and another in Vermont, who last winter had vacationed in Thailand with his fourth wife, claimed his cash was tied up in investments and business inventory? Or had she mentioned instead that once, when she was ten, she’d caught him at the open refrigerator, with his finger in a tub of whipped cream? He had the urge to leaf through the boy’s notebook and tear out anything incriminating. Though there was no one to see him now, he stayed low in the seat.
“Joy’s not here,” he said. “She’s away at school.”
“She told me about this place, but I could never really picture it. You know, with all the details. Those trees, and that big rock, and those ugly bushes. The smell of cut grass.”
“Those are rhododendrons,” Paul said.
“The way the paint’s peeling up there on the eaves. The whole weird suburban nightmare.”
“We’re painting the trim next summer,” Paul said.
“Not like my version of it’s any different. Not the overall picture. But the details.”
“She doesn’t really live here anymore,” Paul said. “She’s not planning to come back after graduation.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” the boy said, an
d let out a scratchy laugh that turned into a brief cough. “Trust me, I know. My life would be a lot different if it wasn’t true.”
“I told her she should move into Manhattan. That’s the place for young people. But she’s thinking about grad school in Boston. Or else California.”
The boy sat up and slapped the notebook against his knee. When he spoke again his voice wasn’t raised as much as strained, as if it cost him terrible effort to push air out of his lungs. “I know she’s not here. I’m trying to soak up the atmosphere.”
Paul’s vision for his later years had always included both kids living in Manhattan, Joy in a SoHo loft, maybe, Kyle in a hovel on the Lower East Side. Then he and Cynthia would join them when they retired—finding a place as close as possible, he thought, to his old apartment—and the four of them would go to shows together, and museums, and even lectures. They’d all ride the subway to visit his childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn. He’d let the kids choose restaurants, let them talk him into Ethiopian or Tibetan; he’d always snatch the bill before either of them could think about paying. But neither of the kids had ever expressed an interest in living in the city, or anywhere close. Nor had Cynthia, for that matter. Lately she’d been complaining about the cold and her circulation and suggesting they take vacations to the Caribbean. It wasn’t impossible to imagine her wanting to spend winters in Florida, stretched out beside a pool.
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