by Bruce Bauman
“Mr. Bickley left instructions for you to go right in. He and Mr. Lively are in the conference room.” Before she could direct him, he winked and disappeared down the corridor. Like almost all receptionists in mid-Manhattan offices, this demure and attractive young woman learned fast how to slough off the flirtations of the male clients. This one, though, handsome as he was, reminded her of the cultured Paul Henreid in Casablanca.
Many phone calls and three client arrivals later, William Bickley Sr., the essence of a Central Park West Manhattanite, appeared. “Hannah, may I ask you an awkward question?”
Hannah nodded, fearing if she gave the wrong answer, she’d be out of a job.
“Malcolm Teumer, you saw him before … he would like to take you to dinner this Friday.” She bowed her head diffidently. “I ask because he preferred not to put you in a compromising position. Your personal life isn’t my business, but I can attest that he is a fine gentleman and of your religion.”
Bickley did not know that in the one year since her never-discussed divorce, she’d accepted exactly no offers for a date. “Mr. Bickley, he’s twenty years older than me.”
“Not quite, but yes, he’s older. If I didn’t think it was a good idea, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
Malcolm picked up Hannah at her parents’ home in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and drove her to the Blue Mill Tavern in the Village. She sheepishly admitted Astor Place and West 4th Street were only subway stops to her, a cloistered Brooklyn girl who scurried home directly after work every night. “My dear Hannah, we must change that,” Malcolm told her.
On their second date, at Minetta Tavern, Hannah’s swoon deepened. After dessert, Malcolm abruptly pushed up the sleeves of his jacket and shirt and revealed the numbers. She gasped. She should have guessed. He quickly slipped his sleeves back down. “I dislike speaking of my past. Only … Hannah, I fancy you and I wish to see you again, so I must make you aware that I have suffered unspeakable degradations.” He crossed his arms over his chest and gripped his powerful biceps with his hands, holding his jaw tightly closed. “Stop shaking. There’s no reason.”
Her eyes began to well. “I must tell you something.”
Malcolm dropped his arms by his sides and his tone softened. “Hannah, please don’t be scared. You will soon understand very little can shock me.”
“I was married when I was eighteen. And my husband divorced me by the time I was twenty. Because I can’t have children.”
“What a horrible man he must have been not to see the beautiful treasure you are.”
Seven months later, they were married and settled in a small apartment in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. Malcolm ran an import-export business, which he had started by using funds his family had smuggled out of Europe. Hannah often thought, better they should have smuggled themselves. Soon, the evenings spent in swell restaurants dwindled. Hannah, who continued working at Bickley & Schuster, hurried home to have supper ready when Malcolm got home from the office.
One evening, after Malcolm finished a meeting with Bickley, he suggested they stop for dinner on the way home. Before they ordered, Malcolm declared, “I think you should stop working.”
“Why? Are you sure? Do we have the money?”
“Yes, I am sure. It’s time we start a family.”
Hannah blanched.
“Ach, my dear”—he clasped her hand—“you misunderstand. I’m sorry to have scared you. We will adopt. During my meeting today with William, he confirmed that he has found us a boy. He can arrange everything.”
“Oh, Malcolm,” Hannah exclaimed, “how lucky I was to find you!” And in that moment, Hannah blindly accepted her parents’ worldview—things do happen for a reason, and there is always hope.
3
THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2001)
Make Room for Daddy
“Your ghost is alive.”
Through the phone, Moses could practically feel Sidonna Cherry’s self-congratulatory pat on the back as she breathlessly relayed her discovery. He sighed. She continued, “Old and in failing health, but alive. Not only is your father still kicking, he owns a condo exactly three point six miles from your door.” Forty years of intractable angst and three thousand therapeutic miles later, and he ends up in spyglass distance from my home, Moses thought. What a cosmic joke. “West on Venice, north on Ocean. All the way to—”
“Hey, Ms. Cherry, stop.” Damn, how he wished his father had been dead. Until he again remembered that he needed him alive.
“Professor, there’s more.”
Professor? He hadn’t told Cherry that he was a professor of American history in the irrelevant department in the Southern California College of Art and Music (aka SCCAM) in Pasadena.
“Okay. Slowly, though.”
“He also has a place in Rio, not sure of that address, where it seems he spends most of his time. As of last night, he was here, in L.A. According to all official records, Hannah is your birth mother. Are you positive she is not your mother?”
Nothing about Moses’s past made sense anymore. Malcolm Teumer had slept with his mom. Hell, they were married. Moses was born on December 8, 1958, and for forty years he had believed Hannah had given birth to him.
“Unfortunately, I’m sure.”
“If she doesn’t know who your actual mother is, I don’t think there’s anyone left alive who can help, except your father.”
This “father” had stuck around for two years after Moses’s birth before (according to Hannah) evaporating into the suburban air. Except for a failed search at the age of seventeen, where certain scents before going dead had hinted toward South America as his ultimate landing place, Moses remained unknowing of where Malcolm lived. Or if he was even still alive.
Cherry waited on the other end of the phone for an answer as he began to imagine for the umpteenth time, in another of what he termed his “daymares,” a new version of his father’s journey, this time from New York to Destination Do-Over Land.
He gazes up at the gray clouds of the October sky, unmoved by his sister’s goodbye wave from the open window of her olive green Pontiac, and before her eyes he vaporizes into the futuristic Pan Am terminal and emerges a new man, wading in the Pacific tides of Avalon among breathless sea maidens, his exhalations emptying the toxic fumes of the Nazis’ total war, a survivor reborn with no past … and with no son.
“Yo, Hamlet, you faint or something? You want your father’s address?”
“Yes. Fax it to me now. Thanks. I’ll call you.” Almost too cautiously, Moses returned the phone to its bright yellow cradle.
His insides clenched; instead of relieved, he was livid. Now that his father was alive and so damn close, there would be, he hoped, no more forays into scores of imaginary pasts. He slumped in his swivel chair in the room that he kept dimly lit and New York winter dark. Despite two decades in L.A., Moses had subconsciously re-created New York in his room: a groggy Decemberish gray filled with the aura of dread and the resounding roar of an onrushing subway at midnight, even when it was silent. Right then, the sound in his room couldn’t have been more quiet and the bursting cacophony of confusion in his head any louder.
Eleven months before, Moses had been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. Immediately upon hearing the news, Hannah flew from New York, and after a hail of apologies, diversions, and self-recriminations, unveiled the preposterous notion that she and he did not share DNA. Believing them both to be adoptive parents, it was only after Teumer disappeared that she uncovered the truth that Malcolm was Moses’s biological father. She bemoaned her inability to help save him, for whom she had sacrificed so much. Moses and his mom fell farther into their abyss of sighs, adding yet another step to their dance of indecipherable silences.
While Moses suffered with his body’s cancerous disintegration, trying various treatments that counted as a holding-the-line action of staving off death (not a bad thing unless you had a more sanguine worldview than Moses), they attempted, without success,
to find Teumer’s whereabouts. Finally, he and his doctor had engaged in a blunt and necessary conversation.
“Moses,” Dr. Hank Fielding, a white-haired, square-headed oncologist in his early sixties, spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, “after the last round of chemo, you’re in what I like to call ‘qualified remission.’ The strong probability is that it won’t last. Your platelets are still too low.”
“Which means?”
“The bone marrow registry still has no match for you. You need a donor.” Jay, Moses’s wife of five years, clenched his wrist in panic. Afraid to look at Jay, trying to control his emotions, Moses stared at the wall behind Fielding while he continued in his avuncular tone, “I’m so sorry, Moses. You must find him.”
In Moses’s presence, Jay obeyed her father Al Bernes’s (né Bernstein) credo, voiced in his art-dealer jargon: “equipoise and stoicism in the face of crisis.” Her twitching and bouncing legs, outbreaks of canker sores, and forced reassurances that “It’ll be all right” (along with a more frequent late night dipping into the alcohol cabinet) belied the truth. Beneath her varnished exterior brewed a cauldron of fear.
After Fielding’s unspoken or else, Moses and Jay agreed, although a bit appalled at becoming a California cliché, to hire a private detective to track down his father. Moses told him, “The family name was Temesvar, taken from a city in Hungary where they lived before moving to Germany. I guess it was an assimilated name even then. I think it got rearranged when he came here. Maybe he went back to using it.” With so little to go on, the first and then a second detective came up empty.
With her worry outweighing her hesitancy, Jay contacted Randy Sheik, least offensive of the Sheik brothers who owned the successful indie Kasbah Records. After leaving Miami in 1985, where her father owned a world-class art gallery, Jay had attended UCLA, and after graduation she and Geri Allen opened a chicly influential art consulting firm. The Sheiks and Kasbah became a major client. Randy, always happy to hear from Jay, suggested a woman with the Baskin-Robbins 31-Flavors name of Sidonna Cherry. “She’s unorthodox. She don’t ever let you meet her in person. But she watches you. And she sure the fuck gets results.”
Unorthodox suited Moses. Unlike the other PIs, after he explained his situation, Cherry didn’t try to snow him about the benefits of a joyous, fairy tale father-son reunion.
Cherry’s call delivered the first of many messages from the suddenly undead, which like a siren’s unholy song could not be silenced or ignored, unshrouding decades-old secrets and lies repeated so often that they had become truths.
Sitting at the desk waiting for Cherry’s fax, he tried to conjure his father’s face from the one and only picture he’d ever seen, when he was five, his parents’ wedding picture. He remembered that afternoon clearly: His grandmother, who lived with them, had gone to the A&P grocery store so he sneaked into his mother’s bedroom closet, her haven against chaos with dresses, shoes, blouses, skirts, coats, umbrellas, and pocketbooks all in their assigned places. If he moved any object one inch, she’d know. He turned on the light and on an upper shelf he spotted stacks of papers and boxes, one labeled PHOTOS. With his little hands he tugged the black step-chair from the back left corner. He climbed up and reached as far as he could and pulled down a beat-up sky-blue metal safety box. A few days before, he’d spotted his mother crying while looking at the photos in the box. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the closet. He found pictures of himself as a baby and of his mother with her naturally auburn hair bleached blond. Then he found it—their picture. His father with a solemn demeanor and furnace-hot glare. Dark hair combed in a pompadour with a yarmulke atop his skull. The picture was black and white, but Moses also knew that his father had blue eyes; he, Moses, had small blue-gray eyes, unlike Hannah’s hazel eyes. Despite the perfection of her hair, the shine of her gown, the delicacy of her makeup, his mom looked sad in that photo. Beautiful, but irredeemably sad.
He put the box away, hurriedly trying to reproduce the order of the closet; his grandmother would be back from the store any minute. A few days later he again sought the photo, and only one half remained. His father was, once again, gone.
No sound. No smell. No taste. No touch. No image. No words. His father’s physical legacy: empty space and a name. He was Moses, son of Hannah and Malcolm, the father who had died in his heart in 1961. His struggle, before he consciously knew it, was to find expression for the inexpressible, the pain of a mother’s tears, and the blunted scream of loss that an abandoned child with no words feels when grasping for answers.
Over time, Moses compiled these few facts from vague memories and overheard conversations: Hannah was forced to leave the Yorkville apartment and they caravanned with relatives for over a year until settling into a serviceable, boxlike, and minimally furnished apartment in Stuyvesant Town on 20th Street. Moses’s widowed grandmother came to live with them. Soon after Teumer’s abandonment, Bickley & Schuster rehired Hannah. Suddenly, or so it seemed, this small-statured woman, who moved with the cautious gait of a shtetl Jew, acted with a fierceness and determination contradictory to all previous behavior. She began her career ascent, an obsession that excluded all except caring for her son.
William Bickley Sr. acted as a cross between guardian angel and parental watchdog while she worked part time and attended City College, where she excelled. She went on to Fordham Law School. After graduating, B&S hired her full time and she became a top-notch estate attorney. Moses was given love and whatever material offerings she could afford.
Yet there hovered, like the unseen particles of nuclear fallout, one unspoken condition: The name of Malcolm and the years they were together became unmentionable. Hannah directly informed her young son of only this one fact: “Your father’s experiences in the death camps made him unstable.” And with that, the young (and even now the older) Moses had asked no more questions. The language of silences and pauses and wordless expressions became Moses’s idea of hell.
Sitting at his desk, Moses’s upper back burned with stress; his head throbbed with the surging thunderclaps of a migraine, as a single thought pummeled: I have this schmuck’s genes and now I need him to save my life.
Drawing on the commanding component of his voice, which was as assuring as the crackling embers of a Christmas fireplace yet tinged with a Wellesian eminence (a formidable tool in the classroom), Moses yelled out from “his” room into the backyard where Jay had her office. “Hey, Jay, come on in.” He watched as she walked from her office and came down the hallway, admiring how she moved with the same fluidity and focus as she had in water, a former high school swim team captain. Her midback-length auburn hair swayed behind her. Their connection so strong, she felt his distress before he uttered a word. He recited Cherry’s news. She rubbed his back and cradled his head against her body. “What’re you going to do?”
Jay and Moses had met six years before at a fund-raiser for SCCAM at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Jay, then twenty-nine, after a decade of unfulfilling sexual serenades gone off-key, was simultaneously wary and hopeful that she could meet someone who could offer her the security she craved and stimulation she desired. Moses, at thirty-seven, was a scarred veteran of two failed long-term relationships, separated by years of aloneness, questioning whether he possessed the emotional wherewithal to make the final leap to lifelong commitment. They were equally astonished by the compatibility of their desires and lifestyle choices and how quickly they developed a synchronous nonverbal understanding of each other’s deeper emotional needs. As nonpracticing Jews (Jay’s father was Jewish, her mother Episcopalian) but proud of their Jewish cultural heritage, they were married by a reformed rabbi in a very small ceremony. Both believed their marriage would be forever. It had been a half decade forever which, with a stunning suddenness, was razed by the wrecking ball of Moses’s illness.
Jay, who possessed what her father termed “gravitas” and what others might call “attitude,” wanted him to go over to Teumer’s and, at least emotionally, decapi
tate the deadbeat.
“First, I need to call my mom.” Moses sat in the desk chair in his room, paralyzed. Jay picked up the phone and held it out to him. He did not reach for it. The phone had become a scepter that would unleash unwanted plagues.
Moses repeated, “I need to call my mom.”
“Are you sure now’s the time?” Jay asked.
“Yes, she needs to know.”
“She’ll be out here tomorrow.”
He shook his head. He took the phone and dialed her office.
“Hi, Mom.” Moses hesitated. This woman who had loved him, vowed to never let anyone ever hurt him, made him the sun in her solar system, would shudder at the idea that the soulless apparition, Malcolm Teumer, could be walking the streets of Los Angeles at that very moment.
“What’s wrong?” Hannah heard the tremors in Moses’s voice.
“Ma … I found him.”
He heard the breakdown on the other end of the line, the crack in the voice, the sigh expelling decades of encapsulated dread of hearing that singular phrase. “Did you see him? Talk to him?” Her tone almost pleaded for him to say no.
“Not yet. I have to.”
She sighed. “I know. I’m still trying to find out the name of your, you know … Do you want to wait for me and I’ll go meet him with you? The red-eye will get me in very early.”