He showed me a little bundle: shoes, gloves, pictures of him and me together. “Joe left them in a heap at my door last week. He had kept them for a year, since he moved me from New York. I kept asking him about the shoes and the pictures, and he denied he had them. He said I must have dreamt it.”
My father paused and said, “Leave the door open, and I’ll look and see if anybody’s watching.” He paused again. “Michael, your coming to see me again so soon must seem strange to them. They wonder why. They’re being so nice to me now. They heat up my chicken and my soup. They seat me at the head of the table and serve me first.
“I’m finished eating before the others have even started.”
We walked down the hallway where other patients sat. We passed my cousin’s mother, my aunt Lillian, who was ninety-eight. She did not see us. “Lillian wants to die,” my father said. “Well, she always did.”
In the evening I sat by my father’s bed. A nurse peered in and took his blood pressure. “Another stall,” he whispered to me. As she began to close the door, he said to her with a smile, “You can leave it open. I have nothing to hide.”
I would be returning to Los Angeles the next day. “Michael,” he suddenly said, “Joe took all my money, not only the $5,000 I gave him. He took all my savings when I came in here. He said he would deposit the money in a joint account in my name and his. But when I asked him where the money was deposited, he said he didn’t know; that only his wife knew. This went on for weeks. I couldn’t sleep. I had saved that money all my life for you. Finally I located the bank and went there. He had deposited the money in a joint account, but with his wife, not me. But I got it back! I got it back! I went down to the bank and told them what happened.
“On the day he and his wife picked me up in New York and drove me to Roxbury, first they took me to Joe’s house. They got down to business fast about financial arrangements. I sat down at the table with his wife. But Joe, where was he? He didn’t sit down. I looked around. He stood behind me, fiddling and pacing. He wouldn’t face me. I asked Roz, his wife, what’s doing with Joe. Why doesn’t he sit down?
“‘Oh,’ Roz said, ‘he’s very sensitive about discussing financial matters.’” My father laughed and kicked his legs. Later he said, “All these things have to be truthful. And you know why, Michael? Because I’m truthful.” He closed his eyes, opened them again and said, “I got that money back for you. I was a hero.”
On an impulse, my father said, “Let’s call my pal Zipper.” Meyer Zipper was my father’s last surviving childhood friend. He and his lugubrious wife Hedda lived in Chicago. When they were children, my father had told me, they would play with Meyer’s marbles. When they finished, Meyer would count the marbles to make sure my father hadn’t stolen any.
Hedda Zipper answered, her funereal voice and baroque sentences rising instantly to the occasion. After thirty years, she spoke to me as if she had seen me an hour ago. “And so it is you, my friend of yesteryear, come to call on a darkening plain. My husband hung himself, ’twas yesterday, over the bathroom shower. Meyer is gone with the mists, gone to nothingness, and in these brackish rooms I await the call of history’s hatchets.”
I said goodbye to Hedda and hung up the phone.
“What did she say?” my father shouted.
“Dad, Meyer … Meyer committed suicide yesterday.”
My father smiled and nodded. “Oh.” Had he heard me? He seemed to be floating, as if he was dreaming. He lay back on his bed, his hands clasped, and stared ahead for a moment, smiling.
It was almost midnight. My father changed the subject.
He took out the razor I had given him and told me he had trouble opening it. “But I’ve found a way. Look!” My father wiggled all the fingers of both hands and smiled victoriously at me. Then he tried to open the razor. It didn’t open.
“You try it, Michael. Wiggle your fingers. We’ll do it together.” I was reluctant to do it.
“Come on, Michael! Get with it!”
I began wiggling my fingers and my father wiggled his. We wiggled together. He was grinning. The nurse looked in and popped her head out again quickly.
“Now!” my father said. “Let’s try.” I opened the razor. “You see!”
It was time to go. Visiting hours had been over for a long time. I walked with my father down the long corridor. He walked firmly, a spring in his step.
The cab was waiting at the front door, I held my father and kissed him.
“You’re a good boy, Michael.” I got into the cab, closed the door and looked through the window.
Planted solidly on the ground, his cane digging into the earth, not smiling, my father surveyed the cab and held up his left hand firmly in farewell.
I turned to the cab driver.
“He’s still watching out for you,” he said.
Sabbath Candles on Brooklyn Bridge
When I began work at the offices of Jewish Punchers, a Jewish defense group, in 1986, I was led into a windowless, dark room with a refrigerator. It was cluttered with piles of yellowing newspapers and old files, mouse droppings, and two desks facing each other.
Montague Feist sat at his desk, a single unlit bulb in a drooping lamp hovering over him. He slowly turned on the light. He wore thick glasses on his jowly moonface and an eyeshade on his forehead. He was very fat.
“May I help you?” he said in a honeyed, insinuating whisper. “Please come in.”
Montague was a gay man in his late fifties. He had been working at Jewish Punchers since the early 1950s, when it had been called Jewish Dreamers. He explained what we did. We sat behind masses of Jewish data on our desks, which we were supposed to place in two files: “Good for the Jews” and “Bad for the Jews.”
He yawned and said, “I’m very hungry.” He explained the darkness: “I use very little electricity,” he said. “I dislike light. And people. But I’ll turn on the other lights now if you wish.”
I coughed. “Oooh!” Montague said, in the softest, most insinuating, tiniest of voices. “Are you in distress?”
I sat down at my creaky desk. Montague told me he had a regular routine which he’d developed over the years at Jewish Punchers. He rose at 2 A.M. and lumbered slowly across the Brooklyn Bridge and across the city to the Jewish Punchers office.
Montague yawned and threw some papers in the direction of the wastepaper basket. They missed. “There are hundreds of letters on the floor of my apartment,” he said. That dainty, docile voice. I’d never heard anything like it. In such a fat man too. “I should open them,” Montague continued.
“Why don’t you?” I said.
“I know what’s in them. I have a letter there from 1965.”
“Someone you don’t like?”
“No,” Montague said. “I like her. I just didn’t want to hear what she was going to say.” He paused and smiled. “I guess I should open it.”
Montague pushed his chair back. It was 11 A.M. “I’m so hungry I can hardly read or think,” he said.
He stood up and tucked his shirt inside his pants. “I can’t fit on a stool in the coffee shop. If people stare, I stick my tongue out at them.”
He stood with his hand on the doorknob. “Your predecessor, Flora, threw up a lot. She would watch me put papers in each of our two files and say, ‘You do that so well.’” Montague’s eyebrows went up.
The door creaked open, and he shuffled out.
II
When Robb Bernstein visited our room, the air popped with innuendo. Robb, dapper, droll, with his horn-rimmed glasses, his thirtyish air of deja vu, could hardly wait to get out of Jewish Punchers and into the literary world. Nattily dressed in real suits, striped shirts and suspenders, Robb had published articles in the Westchester edition of the New York Times and a cooking article in the Soho News.
On Monday morning, Montague and Robb were planning an evening out with two other literary types at Jewish Punchers to see Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Montague’s stomach heaved with laughter at the title.
/> Robb peered at Montague’s briefcase. “Is that your makeup kit?”
“Oh, Robb,” Montague said.
“Do you still go to hetero porn theaters, Montague?”
“Yes. I like them. I go every Tuesday evening and Saturday afternoon.” Montague paused. “But why do they focus on the come shots? All that cream.” He made a face.
As the weeks passed, I learned that Montague detested what Jewish Punchers had become. He hated the leaders on the twenty-fourth floor, macho types, and especially he loathed the director, Kipp Lewittes, who led safari hunts and lunched with Ronald Reagan at the White House.
“Those fascists on the twenty-fourth floor,” Montague said. “They’re extremely disliked and crude. Street people. When Kipp goes to a restaurant, he reverts to tribal behavior. When the waiter asks him if he wants water, he pounds the table and bellows, ‘Bread! Bring me bread!’ It’s so disgusting.
“Now Kipp’s visiting the Pope again. I wouldn’t even speak to him. I’d spit on his shoes and urinate on his pants. I could take a whip—what does Kipp do with him? Apologize for the Argentinean junta? Make little religious sounds? Fold his hands in a priestly manner? Does he refer with a purr to ‘The Holy Father?’
“I loved it here in the old days,” Montague said. “There really was anti-Semitism to fight against. We worked with Negro organizations. We went in teams, testing landlords to see if they would rent to Jews and Negroes. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. helped us. But do you know, he simply couldn’t be trusted with a woman?
“Mr. Roth, the director then, came to work with his dog. He had a shower in his office. A member of the staff had mental problems and didn’t leave the office for a year. At night he slept in Roth’s office and used the shower. He left his laundry hanging over all the chairs. Roth was brilliant, but sometimes cruel. When he got mad, he called us into his office. He’d be standing on his desk, screaming at us. He would take off his shoes and socks. It was terrifying.
“There was a woman in the office, old Mrs. Cert. She wasn’t Jewish. She hated her husband, who was a neo-Nazi, so she spied on his group for us out of revenge.
“She was tiny, and there were no duplicating machines in those days. So we lifted her up through the transom of the Nazi group’s office. She got the stuff and brought it here. The next day we returned it the same way, lifting Mrs. Cert through the transom.
“After that, Roth, who got famous off this case, had to keep her on as she got old. After all, she made him a national name. His book, The Dirt on Cert, was a bestseller.
“So Mrs. Cert worked here in the office. She read magazines for us. She hated Jews. We heard her shouts, ‘Jews! Jews!’ She was also getting senile.
“She would dance for us. She had great legs. She was married four times. She called each husband by his last name, ‘Mr. Shaw, Mr. Cert.’ One was an FBI agent. When he was away, she slept with a gun under her bed.”
Montague yawned. “It was wonderful.” He resumed work, picking up a newspaper.
I heard a thud. The paper had fallen onto a huge pile on the floor. Montague was asleep, smiling, his head over his uppermost stomach.
At 4 P.M., Barbara Streff, assistant director of the office and shaped like a plum, came giddily into the room. She was usually bordering on hysteria by that time of day.
“Michael Goldberg, Sir!” she shouted. “Two of my finest pens are missing. Now I know it wouldn’t be your doing.”
I rose to the hilarity of the occasion. “Oh ho ho! I have my own pens; why would I take yours?”
“But what do I spy there,” Barbara said, “but two of my niftiest peepees?”
“Right! Goldberg, there’s a devil in you.”
“Well, they were nifty pens,” I said.
“Exactly. Precisely. Case closed.” She was excited and full of heck, pointed her “naughty” finger at me.
Suddenly, her mood darkened. Her eyes popped. She looked at the floor and said, “I weep for this land.”
“Oh?” Montague said.
“I must go again and give blood now,” she said. “Light a candle, friends.” She abruptly turned and went out the door.
“Must she come in like that every day,” Montague said, “that vile piece of shit? I shall piss in her shoes.”
“She does give a lot of blood,” I said.
“You haven’t been here very long. She does give blood, Michael, and she does announce it weekly. But she’s giving it to herself. It’s her own personal supply, in case somebody stabs her. I can’t imagine who would do such a thing.” Montague’s eyebrows went up.
In the evenings after work, I would wend my way home slowly. I would stop in at a place Montague had mentioned, Dapper Dan’s Burlesque and Mardi Gras, on Forty-Ninth Street and Broadway.
Basically, I was trying to master my fear of the vagina. I thought if I stared at it long enough, I might get over it.
During the Mardi Gras, a perfumed girl in a bikini, her breasts in my nose, wiggled on my lap and told me how she met her boyfriend. She was carrying a mouse in a blue box in the elevator of the Chelsea Hotel. Every forty seconds, she asked me for a dollar, her fee, which I had to fish out of my pocket. I tried to interest her in a conversation about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but she said she wasn’t into magic.
The girl went away, and the burlesque show began. Sharlene, Mikki, Kitty Hawk and Jaguar were on the bill. My favorite was Kitty Hawk, who once said to me from the stage, “You’re closing your eyes.” How well she understood me. I had a crush on her. After she removed her last spangle, she said, “Are there any questions?”
In the darkness, I took out a notebook and prepared a list of questions for Kitty Hawk.
III
On a Friday morning, a new directive came from the twenty-fourth floor of Jewish Punchers. Montague was burning. He and I were now to work with four files instead of two: “Very Good for the Jews” and “Very Bad for the Jews” were now added to the earlier categories. It meant doubling our workload. Montague muttered to himself through clenched teeth: “Scum. Gestapo.” All the drawers of Montague’s desk were already stuffed to the gills with documents he had hidden rather than read, and scores stuck out of the drawers. He was so angry that morning that he clipped only one newspaper story, an innocuous account of a bar mitzvah. (“Good for the Jews.”) Pleading a headache, he took out a cake and ate it.
The head of the department, Bart Stone, came in as Montague was licking his fingers. Bart always looked as if he had just come off the golf course, with his white seersucker jacket, white shoes, white hair, ruddy pink complexion and American flag lapel. He sucked on a candy and walked in a jerk-like way. Bart xeroxed every document six times, lest it be lost. “Gaps, there are gaps,” he said, gritting his teeth and sniffing the air ominously.
His fists were clenched. “Montague, you have clipped only one story today. And it’s about a bar mitzvah. What about civil rights, politics, anti-Semitism, the Middle East, Congress? Montague, be reasonable.”
Montague tried to stand up. “Those animals on the twenty-fourth floor … sons of bitches … fascists … memo … beast of burden …” He could hardly speak.
Bart was turning beet red. “Montague, what are you talking about?”
“They’re like trained dogs. The masses are asses. I hate them … I …” Montague looked around wildly, picked up his chair, and threw it against the wall.
Bart bounded backwards. He held up a hand. He was really a pussycat. “Calm down, Montague. You’re upsetting yourself.”
“Kipp can stick those files up his ass, that opportunist.”
“My dear Montague,” said Bart, “You’re dwelling in the past. Please calm yourself.”
He closed the door gently.
“That racist,” said Montague. “I wouldn’t care if the South African blacks slit the throats of the whites indiscriminately. It would give me great satisfaction. They’re all racists here.”
In the afternoon, when Montague returned from havi
ng his lemon in the cafeteria, he was in a much better mood. He gazed at the hole his chair had made in the wall. “Oh dear,” he said with a mischievous look.
He reminisced about the Communists in Manhattan in the 1940s: “In those days, they were heavily into folk songs. Women with Slavic blouses, closely cropped hair and earrings would sing on the third floor of not very durable buildings on the Lower East Side. Those songs were very sad, so those who listened to them sat with their faces drooping for hours. And they had tiny folk song hang-outs in the Village, where most of the women were named ‘Manya.’ They had poetry readings too.”
“I went to poetry readings later,” I said. “In the 1960s at the Nine Arts Coffee Gallery on Ninth Avenue and Forty-Third—Ray Bremser, Corso, Ginsberg—and on the Gansevoort pier in the Village. There was a terrible poet, Risa Lactate, who always read at these arty things, and seemed to be in charge of them.”
“I knew Risa Lactate,” Montague said.
“You did?” I said, surprised that our lives had intersected.
Holding his bottles of paste and blue in the air, Montague said, “Well you see, Michael, even though you’re much younger than I, our paths have crossed. I was never a creative person, but I knew them. Dancers. Poets. Musicians. I was on the periphery. I would sit in the Waldorf Cafeteria off Sheridan Square where Maxwell Bodenheim hung out with his wife. They would throw knives at each other. There was a girl there named Sheila Stern. She was six foot five and had a receding hairline. She wore clothes covering her arms and every part of her body.”
And then I realized that Montague really liked me. And, of course, I liked him. My only fear was that Montague would kill me.
IV
“When my father’s coffin went into the ground,” Montague said the next afternoon, “to me it was like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I hated him. I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me. When I was born, he didn’t bother to come to the hospital.
“He would watch boxing matches. It was a horror. I was five, and hid under a chair. When I was nine, I had a severe case of scarlet fever and had to stay in bed. My leg muscles stopped functioning. I had no physical activity for three years. When the boys had gym, I sat with the girls in spelling. I took violin, Yiddish and Hebrew lessons. In gym, I was always the last one to be chosen for the team.
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