The Tell

by Linda I. Meyers

“Yes,” I answered, “but given that I knew the latter was impossible, the former must be true.”

  “You know,” she said, “the squirrel need not just represent your mother, it could also represent you. I’m thinking about those radium treatments you had as a child—when you were left to lie alone on a table with a stick up your nose.”

  It was then that I’d remembered the dream.

  “I had a dream,” I said.

  I am four, maybe, five years old. It is the morning. I am standing barefoot in the corner of Grandma’s kitchen. I have slept over at Grandma’s house again. The linoleum is cold, but the heat from the radiator brushes my nightgown and warms my back. Grandma is in the bedroom making the bed. My mother has come to pick me up and take me home. I am upset, trying to tell her something important about my grandfather. “I have a secret. Grandpa and I took a nap together. He held me funny.” As I began to elaborate, she clasped her hand over my mouth and glared at me. What have I done? I must have done something very, very bad. “Shush,” she warned. “Do you hear me, Linda? Do not tell your grandmother or anybody else. It’s a secret.” She gritted her teeth. The words spit out of her mouth. “Do you hear me?” she hissed. I looked at her face and suddenly I realized that she knew what I was going to tell her, and that to tell my secret was to give hers away.

  I was sobbing. I forced myself to take a deep breath. Another. Another. Minutes passed.

  “What do you make of the dream?” Nancy asked. “It is unusual for a dream. It is not scrambled or disguised. It seems more like a memory than a dream.”

  “It’s just a dream,” I insisted.

  “Maybe not. Memories can be disguised as dreams.”

  “Yes,” I said, annoyed, “but dreams misinterpreted as memories can also be lies.”

  “Perhaps you and your mother had the same secret. You were warned not to tell your grandmother but you can tell it to me,” she said.

  “Tell you what? I have no secret. It was just a dream.”

  I left the session, certain Nancy was making something out of nothing.

  As I drove home, my mood began to lift. When I got to the curve where I’d hit the squirrel, I slowed down and looked again for the carcass—nothing. I pulled the car over to the side of the road, got out and examined the ditch. There was no squirrel. Maybe I hadn’t hit it at all.

  I got back in the car and continued to drive. There is a hairpin turn where the road leaves the woods and opens to farmland. I pulled over and stopped the car. The field was blanketed with yellow flowers from the rapeseed plant. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto was playing on the radio. A hawk, catching thermals, danced to the music.

  the hand off

  Every weekend, my ninety-two-year-old father, George, checked into the hospital emergency room, not because he was sick, but because the food was good, and he liked the company. He referred to the nurses and the doctors as his “staff,” conjuring one ailment or another and showing up every Friday night. Sometimes he’d fiddle with his medications to throw off his heart rhythm, arriving at the ER pale and bloodless. Other times, inflated with his own bluster, he’d be flushed, but there was nothing wrong with my father that couldn’t be cured by having a lady to hug and some money to burn.

  I never got used to the “He’s here again” phone call from the emergency room nurse. My second husband, also named George, had died the year before. I was trying to adapt to being on my own and taking care of myself, but my father’s antics didn’t give me much of an opportunity. I was a psychologist with a busy private practice, but I’d drop whatever it was I should have been doing and run over to the hospital. By the time I’d get there, he would have regained his normal color. He’d admonish me, but not really, for rushing to his bedside, and then happily announce that the doctors wanted to keep him overnight for a little observation.

  He kept the blue curtain around his bed open so he could survey his kingdom and watch the comings and goings of his staff. My father always knew how to sidle up to whomever he thought might matter and make them feel as if they actually did.

  When the nurses came into his cubicle, he’d have them bend over so he could read their nametags and look at their cleavage. He’d summon the doctors by their first names. When his dinner tray came, he’d send it back if the chicken was too dry or the soup wasn’t hot enough. No one seemed to know quite what to do about him. He was jovial. He made them laugh. At times, they looked exasperated, but I could tell that they were also charmed. My father had always been a player, and, at ninety-two, he still knew how to shuffle the deck and pull out the joker. By Sunday night, when the doctors concluded that nothing was wrong, he would get up, get dressed, order his car, tip the valet at the hospital door, and drive himself home.

  Throughout my life, whenever my father “needed” me, I’d run to his side. This was not a normal father-daughter obligation; it was servitude with a smile. My indenture began at birth. I was conceived for the express job of keeping my father out of the army. Before I was born, the draft board declared my father 4F. At minus three months, I had already failed to achieve my intended purpose. I was like the kid who flunked out of college but was still stuck with the student loans.

  My mother and father had different ways of calling in their chits. My mother conscripted me immediately—lifetime employment with no benefits that I could see. Along with being the draw for my father, I was to be her confidante, best friend, and marriage counselor. This entailed a myriad of duties, none of which were appropriate for a child. I was to listen to secrets about my father’s infidelities, to always take her side, and intervene with my father as the situation required. My labors on her behalf were fruitless, given his proclivities and the fact that she didn’t stop nagging him for one second.

  My father—having no instincts for parenthood and recognizing my mother’s plan for me—responded by ignoring both of us. He stayed away from the house as much as possible and, when he came home, hid behind the newspaper. He sat in his chair, the smoke from his cigar wafting up from behind his paper. When he came to the table, the paper came with him. My mother was a pressure cooker; by the time we got to the dessert, she was ready to blow. I did what had to be done—spilled my milk or fell out of my chair, whatever it took to deflect her rage. My father gave me a smile of appreciation for my sacrifice, and went back to reading The Daily Mirror about the Brooklyn Dodgers, J. Edgar Hoover, or whatever was the news of the day.

  My father’s childhood deprivation became the rationale for his entitlement. He was a good-looking guy. Had he looked like the average Joe, he might’ve stopped trying to make it big and been satisfied with making it at all. But my father wasn’t willing to settle for “small potatoes.” With money that came from who knew where, he started a series of manufacturing businesses: handbags, ladies’ underwear, and women’s hosiery. He usually went from riches to rags within three years, tops.

  When he went bankrupt, and he always went bankrupt, it was never his fault. His partners were jerks; the factors (the middleman between the banks and the manufacturer) were ganefs, thieves; and his wife, well his wife—if she’d only stopped her incessant nagging and supported him just once in her life, his current situation wouldn’t have occurred. This last remark was a call to arms, and the battle would begin. It didn’t matter that they were climbing the same hill over and over again or that I was in the line of fire—there is always some collateral damage in a war. Here’s the fight:

  “Don’t listen to him,” she’d start. “I support him plenty. Ask him how much I borrowed from my brothers on his behalf, like they have it to give? Why did I borrow it? Ask him why I borrowed it, Linda, go on ask him.”

  Hearing my cue, I’d look up from my Nancy Drew mystery. “Why did she borrow the money?” I’d ask. He would keep reading his paper. I’d go back to my mystery.

  “I’ll tell you why I borrowed it,” she’d say, her voice raised by an octave. “I borrowed it so they wouldn’t put your father in jail!”

  That woul
d always get his attention. He’d throw down the paper in disgust.

  “What’s the matter with you, Tessie? What are you telling the kid? Linda, don’t listen to your mother. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. No one gave me nothin’!” he’d shout. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. How many times do I have to tell you, your brothers didn’t give me a loan—they made an investment.”

  Then he’d turn his back to her and look at me. “I don’t know what she’s talking about. They made an investment. I gave her brothers a chance to make a lot of money. It didn’t work out. If it had worked out, they’d be rich, and your father would be a hero. It didn’t work out, so now I’m the bad guy. You make an investment, you take a chance.” He’d slam his fist on the table, and the lamp would shake.

  “An investment? What are you talking, an investment?” she’d yell. “By you, it’s not an investment, it’s a donation!” Then finally she’d scream, “You’ll be happy when I’m six feet under!”

  She would storm out of the room; he, out of the house.

  I never would have admitted this to my mother, but I was dubious about my father’s monetary intentions. I had been robbed at age five. Someone broke into my cash register bank and stole thirty-five dollars out of the cash drawer. This was hard-earned money. I earned this money by putting up with stranglehold hugs from my grandfather. He’d give me a dollar for endurance, and I’d put it in my bank. I ran to my mother back then, to tell her that we’d been robbed.

  “You’re telling me,” was all she said. On one of my father’s weekend forays to the emergency room, he was actually admitted and given a bed on the floor. The doctors were less cavalier this time and said it would be a good idea if I stuck around. I sat by his bedside for hours. Around one in the morning, he came out of his stupor, sat straight up in bed, and declared that he wasn’t going to die. I figured this was probably true, as his color had come back, his voice was strong, and besides, I don’t know that he ever did anything he didn’t want to do.

  I’d been playing around with the idea of asking him a question I’d always wondered about, but never had the guts to ask. I figured now was as good a time as any.

  “Do I have any siblings?” I blurted out.

  “What, are you kidding me?” He looked at me like I was crazy.

  “It’s a legitimate question,” I defended.

  “That’s very funny, you ask a legitimate question about illegitimacy. You’re a funny kid. Ask me something else.”

  “Okay,” I said, while the nurse took his blood. “What was the best time of your life?” He thought a moment.

  “You want to know? I’ll tell you. The best time of my life was when I was president of the Amboy Dukes.”

  “President? When were you president?”

  “What’s the difference when I was president, I was president. We had red satin jackets with ‘Amboy Dukes’ and our names written in gold across the back. Mine said, ‘President.’”

  I couldn’t tell if he was making a fashion statement or bragging about his status.

  Here’s how I’d first found out about the Amboy Dukes:

  It’s 1970. I’m twenty-eight. My father is fifty-three. My father changes his shirt at my mother’s shiva, and I see this ugly looking mole on his back. I beg him to go to the doctor, and he resists, but finally he goes. He has a malignant melanoma. They operate immediately and the operation is successful. As he’s recovering in the hospital, I’m shaken by the strange realization that my mother’s death has saved my father’s life. He would never have gone to the doctor without my bugging him, and I would never have seen the mole if we hadn’t been sitting shiva. She could have been the bereaved widow instead of the lunatic wife. All sympathy would have been with her. All I could think was that this may have been the only bitter pill she didn’t get to swallow.

  I go to visit him in the hospital after the operation, and he introduces me to Marge the mistress. I recognize her as pink angora from years ago at Longchamps. She’s about half his age, give or take, with orange hair and red lipstick. This time she’s wearing a lavender angora sweater. She’s pretty. They hold hands and smile. I stare in disbelief: my mother’s dead two weeks, and he introduces me to his mistress? Chutzpah isn’t even the word. Everything my mother said, his running around with other women, was true. I felt like I had been harboring a felon, aiding and abetting a criminal, but he’d had cancer; he might die. I remind myself that I’d supported their separation and that I’d rooted for him to have a better life. Well, he does, I thought. Yes, but I had betrayed her.

  The nurse comes in to change his dressing. Marge takes me out into the hall, mutters condolences about my mother, and then, in a lame effort to engage me, she asks, “Did you know that your dad was a member of the Amboy Dukes?”

  “What’s an Amboy Duke?”

  “It was a cellar club in Brownsville,” she says. “You know, the gang Irving Shulman wrote the book about.”

  “I don’t know the book. When did it come out?” I hate to indulge her, but by now, I am curious.

  “Nineteen forty-seven.”

  “I was five in nineteen forty-seven.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she says. Oh great! “I thought you might have heard about it.”

  She smiles, raises her eyebrow, and gives me a smile that says I knew and you didn’t. I am trying to like her for my father’s sake, but she’s starting out at zero and losing ground fast.

  After I leave my father and Marge at the hospital, I go to the library and look up The Amboy Dukes. The Dukes were named after Amboy Street, a few blocks from where my father grew up. Irving Shulman’s novel was a tawdry bestseller, considered soft porn at the time. It’s a misogynistic tale of rape and murder by teenage hoods, sons of immigrants, who, unsupervised, ran the streets of Brownsville Brooklyn. By Fifty Shades of Grey standards, tawdry would have been a grand overstatement, but, back then, it was a must-read for every horny adolescent.

  Years after my father died, I learned that the Amboy Dukes was a feeder gang to Murder Incorporated, aka the Brownsville Boys. Not just in Shulman’s novel, but for real. Murder Incorporated was the “enforcement arm” of the Jewish Mafia in the 1930s and 1940s. Read Tough Jews by Rich Cohen. It’s right in there, about how boys from the Amboy Dukes were recruited by Abe “Kid Twist” Reles and Louis Lepke to carry out their dirty business. I don’t know about Dad and Murder Incorporated. All I can tell you is that whenever we went through airport security, he started to sweat, held his arms straight up, and turned to face the wall.

  In a pretense of caring and a feeble attempt at protocol, my father waited exactly one year to the day of my mother’s death before he married Marge. Aunt Laura said there was no way she was going to watch her brother marry a call girl. She said that her brother was an idiot, and my mother … “well, your poor mother,” was all she could mutter. Two years after they married, they divorced. This was not a surprise, as Marge thought she was getting a big shot, and he thought he was getting eternal youth. I was in the process of getting divorced myself and struggling to balance my new life. There was no money. I’d taken out loans to pay for college. My father, having been kicked out of her house, asked if he could move in with me for a while. Was I supposed to say no?

  Tired now of trying to convince my father that the hospital is not a spa, I got up to leave.

  “Sit,” he said. “I have something to tell you. I’ve never told you this….”

  “I’m sitting. What?”

  “Do you remember when you handed off the money?”

  “What are you talking about?’

  “I’m talking about when you handed off the money. Your mother knew. I wouldn’t have told her, but I needed to borrow you for a day.”

  “Borrow me …”

  “I had no choice,” he continued. “You had to help your father out.”

  “What? When? How old was I?” I didn’t know what to ask first.

  “You were four.”

&nb
sp; “I was four? I’m four years old, and I’m handing off the money? To whom?” By now he was no longer looking me in the eye. He rang for the nurse. He decided he was hungry, and he wasn’t going to talk until he ate his dinner.

  They brought him his dinner.

  “What are you looking at me for?” he asked, pleased that he had my full attention.

  “Just tell me what you’re talking about, please.”

  “It was nothing. We needed to give over some money to the other guys. It wasn’t safe, so I needed your help.”

  “I was only four!” I was incredulous. “How could you get me involved?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “we tied a rope around your waist so we could pull you back if they tried to snatch you. What, you think I wouldn’t protect you? I’m your father. What’s the matter with you? After you handed it off, we took you up to the Laurel-in-the-Pines Hotel for two weeks until the heat died down. We were worried they might kidnap you.”

  “This is preposterous!! I don’t believe—”

  “Go to my apartment. Go in the box on the top shelf of the hall closet. There are a couple of pictures from the hotel. Your mother doesn’t look too happy. She had to stay alone with you for the second week. We still didn’t think it was safe, and I had to get back to New York. Go get the pictures. I’m going to sleep.” He turned over and that was that.

  The Laurel-in-the-Pines Hotel in Lakewood, New Jersey, was the place to go in the ’40s if you were rich and famous, or, as the case seems to have been, infamous. It was what Grandma would have called “fancy schmancy.” An all-year-round resort; in the winter they had horse-drawn sleighs. I remember going on a sleigh ride, tucked in a big warm blanket. The bells on the horses’ bridles jingled. The sleigh pulled us into the woods. I could smell the pine. The bows were heavy with snow. This was the closest I ever got to the Currier and Ives childhood of my dreams.

  On the next page are the two pictures I found in my father’s closet.

  I’m the cute little kid with the leopard-collar coat. I remember it came with a matching leopard muff. I think I lost the muff. My mother is standing next to me. I can’t tell if she’s scared or if she’s cold, but her smile looks frozen. According to my father, the man standing next to her is the big honcho. He wouldn’t tell me his name, so I can’t tell you who he is. I don’t know if he was being secretive or he just couldn’t remember. If it’s the latter, then as far as I’m concerned, it makes the whole story suspect. Until, that is, you take a look at the first picture. Now, that’s not a group of average Joes! I particularly like the guy on the right with the Jimmy Durante nose. If he wasn’t a gangster in real life, he could easily be cast as one in a movie. The little guy in the back with the smile, desperately trying to get into the picture, is my father.