Love Is a Rebellious Bird

by Elayne Klasson

  I’d listen to his ranting, until, eventually, he’d finish with politics. Then he would ask, more gently now, “And you, Judith? How are those momzers treating you at school?”

  “School’s okay, I guess,” I said one night when I was fifteen, troubled, but not knowing how to begin. I didn’t realize then that momzer was a curse. It meant bastards. My father never swore in English, but both my parents sprinkled colorful Yiddish phrases into their speech. Even if I didn’t know their meaning, the words always seemed completely appropriate.

  “Your teachers?” he asked.

  “My teachers are good this semester,” I answered, looking down at my hands. “We’re reading A Tale of Two Cities. I like Dickens.”

  “Good.” He nodded from behind the paper. “Dickens was a great writer. He exposed truth. Made people see what they wanted to keep hidden.” Even though he kept turning the pages of the paper, I knew, somehow, that I had his complete attention. He was waiting, always knowing when I had something on my mind.

  “Dad, a lot of my friends joined this club,” I slowly began. “They’re called the Devlons. They have weekly meetings at different houses, in the girls’ basements.”

  “Their basements?” my father asked, puzzled. He was clearly thinking of our own apartment building, where the dank basement housed spider webs as well as the furnace and my mother’s old wringer washing machine.

  “They’re the rich girls,” I said, “from the houses on Virginia Avenue or Mozart. They have finished basements with knotty pine paneling and thick carpeting. Not like our basement. The basements in their houses have bars and barstools that swivel.”

  “I see,” he said and sighed. Although my father had managed to move us to this affluent community, ours was a street of undistinguished brick apartment houses on the perimeter of the avenues with big, luxurious Georgians and Colonials—those single family homes where most of my friends lived. Compared to our two-bedroom apartment with its single bathroom, these houses were mansions.

  “What’s so wonderful about the Devlons?” he asked.

  I didn’t know how I could explain these clubs, the high school versions of elitist college sororities, to my father. “They have leather club jackets, Dad,” I started. “Black leather. With Devlons written in a pretty turquoise script on the back. The girls wear their jackets to school. Every single day. They never take them off. Even when they’re inside, in classes.” As soon as I’d seen them, I had coveted one of those black and turquoise Devlons jackets. I had been surreptitiously writing the word Devlons, copying that flowing script into my spiral-bound notebooks for a year.

  “The teachers allow this?” my father asked. “Children are allowed to wear leather club jackets in the classrooms?”

  I nodded miserably.

  He shook his head in disapproval. “So these princesses, your so-called friends, did not ask you to join the club with the leather jackets? The Devlons?” he asked, saying Devlons in the same tone he’d earlier used when he said momzers.

  “No, they haven’t,” I said and looked down. It had been a terrible humiliation when so many of my friends had been invited to join the Devlons. I’d wanted to stay home from school rather than admit I’d received no envelope. “The invitations went out last week and the new members got their jackets yesterday,” I admitted to my father. I had not told my mother, knowing she would overreact, perhaps make humiliating calls to some of her friends, and I would be further embarrassed. “But there is this other club, the Ravens. They asked me to join. I got their invitation in the mail.”

  “But you don’t want to be a Raven,” he guessed and poked the newspaper with his unlit pipe. “What color are their jackets?”

  “Red and black,” I said. “But wool, or something. Scratchy. Not leather,” I added.

  “What’s the problem, Judith?” His voice was soft, tender. “It isn’t just the jacket, I’m sure.”

  “Those girls, the Ravens, they aren’t really my friends,” I said and looked over at him, his luxurious, dark hair just beginning to be shot with silver at the temples. “They’re kind of the leftovers. The friends I hang out with have all joined the Devlons.” For not the first time, I wondered how my mother, a somewhat plain woman with frizzy, unruly hair, and only an eighth-grade education, had managed to marry such a handsome and bookish man as my father. I just didn’t understand it. It wasn’t until many years later, after they were both gone, that the pictures were brought to mind of how often I had seen them kissing on the back porch, my father’s hand slipping onto her round bottom, which she moved pliantly under his touch.

  “I don’t want to be in the Ravens,” I said.

  “So why do you need to be in any club?” my father asked and shrugged. “You’re so busy. The honors English class, your temple youth group, the school newspaper. These are important things, Judith. Every Saturday, you get up early and volunteer at the Swedish Hospital. Didn’t you say they’ll hire you when you turn sixteen? With all that you do, how can you make room for a club? Sounds like a waste of time to me,” he said, and picked up his newspaper again, shaking his head.

  “Do you think so?” I asked him behind the paper. I stood up and I think that what I felt was relief. Suddenly, everything about the Devlons looked and felt different.

  “Of course I do. And I think you do, too. What do these clubs do, anyway?” he asked.

  “I don’t think they actually do anything. You’re right, it probably is a waste of time.” I started down the hall to my bedroom at the back of the apartment. “Night, Dad,” I said. “Thanks.”

  It was on that green brocade couch that he answered so many questions about my future, and tried to help me make sense of my adolescence. He rarely put down his paper, as if the questions I asked about high school loyalties, my Jewish north side world, could be found in its pages. He answered as thoughtfully as he knew how. He failed just that once, when I tried to ask him about sex, but on that subject, I’d expected too much of him. He tried as honestly as he could with everything else. He was not a physically demonstrative man, he rarely kissed me, but as I left him reading in the living room that long-ago night, the street outside our apartment building dark and still, my dad lowered the paper to give me a small nod and smile of encouragement.

  “You need a new jacket?” he asked, calling after me. “I’ll buy you a jacket.”

  The last time I saw him alive was on a visit to Chicago. It was winter. Walt had been gone just over a year, dead from the cancer that caught us all by surprise. I was still in shock, not quite believing I was a widow after only six years of marriage. I wasn’t ready to lose my father, certainly not so closely on the heels of Walt’s death. How could I bear this second loss? But in a lengthy phone call the week before, a Chicago doctor made it clear that my father was suffering from congestive heart failure and did not have a lot more time.

  I brought Joseph, who was nearly eight, to Chicago with me. His teachers said he was already so far ahead of his class, the time away from school was no problem. The twins were away at college and anyway, they’d had more time with their grandfather through the years. But Joseph had so few memories of my dad. I also thought, foolishly, that having us both there, Joseph and me, might convince my father to stay alive a bit longer. What I remember most acutely from that visit was how much, this time, it was my father who wanted to be seen. And I, the beloved only daughter, who’d always had such communion with her intellectual and book-loving father, denied him this. What a stupid woman I was. I rationalized my behavior because Walt had died only the year before and that other grief was so fresh. I was not ready to say an honest goodbye to my father. Perhaps that was true, but I think now it was weakness of character. Immaturity. Nearly fifty, despite having lost Walt, I was still too young, not comprehending what my father needed. My father was the one who had always given me what I needed.

  We’d come the evening before, Joseph and myself, arriving during a freezing cold spell. I saw immediately how feeble my father
had grown. The night before, as I’d unpacked our suitcase while Joseph was having a bath, my mother stood in the doorway of my old room. She told me that Dad moved little now. Breathing was difficult and he spent his days looking out the front window to the street below or reading on the old green brocade sofa, faded, but lovelier and more comfortable now that its clear plastic covers had finally been discarded.

  “I’m glad you’re here. I know it hasn’t been easy for you, either,” my mother told me. “We’re so happy you brought Joseph. What a beautiful child he is.” She reached into the sleeve of her cardigan for a tissue, wiping her reddened eyes. “So smart.” I wondered what my mother would do, how she would survive when my father was gone. I don’t think she’d ever used a checkbook. I would have to teach her this week.

  After breakfast the next morning, I told my mother to go back to bed, take a rest. Her best hours for sleep had always been in the mornings, and she was spent from caring for my father. My dad sat reading in the living room of the same flat on Chicago’s north side that I’d grown up in. I still remember the put-upon noises my mother made as she packed up her old, familiar kitchen, banging one pot against another in protest. After that, my father was unable to persuade her to move ever again. While the Jews of Chicago continued their march north, almost to Milwaukee, my mother, an immigrant who had been displaced once too often in Russia, insisted on staying put.

  “Want more coffee, Dad? There’s still some left from breakfast,” I called from the kitchen as I put away our few dishes.

  “No, no coffee,” he answered, his voice now raspy and weak. He’d always had such a strong voice, it broke my heart to hear him now. His once athletic arms were stringy. His big, barrel chest had been replaced by a torso that looked shrunken. “Bring some of your mother’s cookies for Joseph,” Dad said. “She spent all day yesterday making him those chocolate chip cookies.”

  At the mention of his grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies, his favorite, Joseph looked up happily. He was on the floor with the pirate figures he’d brought in his suitcase from California, contentedly marching them up and down the gangplank of their plastic pirate ship, creating an involved story with many characters and subplots.

  I brought in a plate piled high with cookies, as well as a glass of cold milk, and placed them both on the low table in front of the sofa.

  “Don’t spill, honey,” I said. “You know Grandma doesn’t like people eating in the living room.”

  Joseph continued playing on the floor, but reached behind from time to time for a cookie, devouring nearly the whole plate. My father nodded his head with satisfaction each time Joseph took another. I sat on the couch. The childhood memories of sitting beside my father on that couch were powerful. It was where our most important talks had taken place—sitting next to one another on the sofa. He wore the same slippers he’d had since I was a girl, the brown leather now crackled and peeling. He seemed more comfortable when we sat side by side, not looking into each other’s faces. He always listened intently, but held the paper up in front of him.

  On this last visit of my father’s life, however, I could tell that this time he had something on his mind. Uncharacteristically, he looked directly at me, his eyes tired and watery, but not wavering.

  “Sure I can’t get you anything, Dad?” I asked, uncomfortable under his gaze.

  “No,” he said. “I’m fine. Look. Your mother already brought me four glasses of juice this morning.” He pointed to the end table beside him where tumblers of orange, yellow, pink, and purple liquids were lined up, untouched.

  “How’re you feeling? The doctor says you’re having more trouble breathing.”

  “Not so bad,” he answered. “You don’t get to be my age without aches and pains.”

  I heard the rattling in his chest and remembered the once-constant pipe he’d held in his mouth, the sweet, yet deadly, smell of his tobacco that I’d loved so much.

  “You’re not so old,” I said with dishonest cheer.

  He continued to stare at me. I was awkward and embarrassed and couldn’t meet his eye. Instead, I folded the paper beside us.

  “Judith, how about we face facts? It’s almost the end, even if you and your mother don’t want to talk about it,” he began, waving me quiet when I started to protest. “I want to tell you, before it’s too late, that I’ve tried,” he said. “I’ve tried to be a good father to you. I know it wasn’t always enough. I wish I’d given you more. Especially since you were all we had. Your mother wanted more children, but we didn’t have any luck. She lost the two babies before we had you. Both of them with heart trouble.”

  “Mom lost two babies? When?” I asked. “You never told me there were other children. Why didn’t either of you tell me about them?”

  “Because then we had you. It was enough. You were healthy and you can’t imagine how happy you made us. You should have seen your mother after you were born. Every single day, she wrapped you up until you almost couldn’t move. Rain or shine, she walked the neighborhood with you. She said you had to have lots of fresh air—and it made her so happy showing you off in the neighborhood. ‘Such a beautiful baby,’ everyone said. She loved it. We lived up on the third floor then, and she’d drag the baby carriage down three flights, then run upstairs and carry you down wrapped like you were a piece of bone china.”

  I smiled, but I couldn’t stop thinking about those other babies, those lost babies. Growing up, I’d detested being an only child. The house always seemed so quiet and lonely. I could never escape my mother’s scrutiny. Her eyes followed me everywhere. She hovered over me when I coughed or sneezed. I had fervently wished, even though my parents seemed so old, that there had been other kids at the dinner table, kids to fight with, to play with, someone else for my parents to worry about.

  “Taking care of you, being a good father, that’s been the most important thing in my life. But I don’t know how successful I’ve been at it. You had such struggles, Judith. I wished I could have protected you more. I should have done more for you after you got divorced, but you always seemed so independent. We should have tried harder to get you to move closer to us here in Chicago. We could have helped you more with the twins if you were nearer. When you met Walter, we were so happy. Relieved. Such a good man. But, may he rest in peace, now you’re alone again. I worry about how you’ll manage when I’m dead. How you’ll take care of everything with the boy.” He looked down at Joseph, who’d gotten very quiet as he played, no longer making pirate noises.

  I tried to argue, but he waved me quiet again.

  “Here, have a look at my savings account,” he said, and pulled a worn bank passbook from his pants pocket. When he tried to show it to me, I refused to take it, embarrassed. The wrinkled green passbook taken from his pocket seemed so intimate. We’d spoken little of money in our household, but I knew that my father had simple finances. There were no investments or hidden assets, only a worn passbook from a savings account at a local bank. He paid cash for even large purchases, including his cars. My father was terrified of all debt, even a mortgage. He and my mother rented, never owned their own home.

  “There isn’t a fortune,” he said in his rasping voice and put the little book down on the couch beside him, defeated that I wouldn’t take it from him and look at it. “I never made much money,” he said and shrugged. “But there should be enough for your mother, and some for you and the kids.”

  I worried again about my mother. Would she stay alone in the apartment?

  “I know it’s been hard since Walter died. He was a good husband and father. Your mother and I liked him very much.” My father grew breathless and stopped speaking. Silently, he stared at me for a few seconds before he went on. “I’ll be gone myself, soon. I only hope I helped you enough. I regret that I did so little.”

  His eyes were so watery. It was clear that what he wanted most of all was to be heard. He was dying soon and he knew it. Desperately, he wanted this last meaningful talk with me, his only child. He
wanted me to reassure him. I saw he wanted honesty between us. But I couldn’t do it. I was too scared and too sad about losing him. I looked away and denied him this one time when he wanted so much to be heard and seen by me.

  “Dad, don’t tire yourself,” I said. “You’ve done great.” I spoke brusquely, not meeting his gaze. “I’m fine. We’ve got everything we need. Joseph and me. Walt had good insurance, even a trust fund. The twins are doing great. Seth helps them. Their father pays for their college.”

  Instead of listening to what else my dad had to say, his fears and hopes at the end of his life, I stood up from the couch and kneeled on the floor and played with Joseph. I began to move my son’s plastic people around and make silly pirate talk. “Okay, matie, let’s get this rig off to sea. Do you blokes think we have all day? Grrrr.”

  Behind me I heard my father pick up the newspaper again, and crack out the folds. Not ten days later, just after Joseph and I returned to California, he was gone.

  10

  Being Seen Part 2

  I recently asked my daughter, Miriam, now in her early forties, about her marriage. Sensible Miriam has been married to Gray, the sweetest man (excepting my sons) on this earth, since she was twenty-five. He regularly cooks dinner for the children, always calls Miriam “honey” or “sweetheart,” and pulls my chair out for me when I visit. They seem happy, the household seems happy, but still I wondered. Women are so different now. Miriam says she is one of the younger mothers in her children’s school classes. Most of her friends are closer to fifty, and have toddlers in tow. With advances in fertility medicine, some are even older. All these women, my daughter included, are so frightfully busy. Do they ever take time to ask themselves whether they are truly seen by their husbands? They don’t seem very introspective at all; perhaps they left all that behind them as they got older and busier. Or perhaps it is a generational difference. Miriam and her friends laugh at women my age when they hear we had consciousness-raising evenings when we were young. “Didn’t they have anything better to do?” I heard one say.