by Ruby Namdar
Andrew was on a sabbatical in Paris with Linda and Rachel when he received the news of his father’s death and hurried to buy a ticket to Miami. Only at the last minute was he told that the funeral would be in New York, Walter having insisted on being buried in the Westchester grave that he and Ethel had paid good money for, in the place where he had lived and raised his children, the place that he loved always. Westchester was his Promised Land, his America, the place that enabled him to re-create himself as the man he always wanted to be. New Rochelle was the polar opposite of the Lower East Side ghetto that he wished to escape in his death just as he escaped it in life. Was it really a misunderstanding, an administrative error, that landed the grave site he bought outside the fence of the designated Jewish plot?
Sunk in grass, his no-frills headstone, looking more like a memorial plaque than the top of a grave, was tucked away among the megalomaniac tombs of granite and marble that surrounded it.
It wasn’t planned that way. Ethel so took it for granted that he would be buried among Jews that she hadn’t bothered to confirm it before boarding the flight from Miami that bore his coffin. But the funeral was rushed; sleet cast a foggy pall over everything; and not until later was it discovered that Walter’s grave had mistakenly been dug in the nondenominational part of the cemetery. The family hadn’t wanted to make a fuss. The thought of exhuming and reburying Walter was unimaginable, nor was anyone up to threatening the management with a damage suit. The fact was that he not only wouldn’t have minded what happened, he probably would have preferred it. He felt completely American and had no use for the Jewish tribalism that struck him as an Old World relic. He would have come back from the Beyond, Linda not unaffectionately joked, just to make sure that, as she put it, “Ethel didn’t stick him in a ghetto of the dead.”
Should Andrew have felt guilty he wasn’t with his father in his last moments? That was difficult to say. Walter had faded and become a shadow of his old self, and even in better times, the communication between them was strained. Andrew was a guest lecturer at the Sorbonne that year; the news reached him at the last minute; he could hardly have been expected to fly back to America three days before the end of the semester. And even had he arrived in time, Walter had lost consciousness and could not have been counted on to recognize him. His brother, Matthew, was there, and in a way (not that Andrew held it against him, at least not in so many words), Matthew was closer to his father, just as Andrew was more his mother’s boy.
Linda and Rachel did not attend the funeral. There was no point in dragging a small child back and forth across the Atlantic. He stood at the fresh grave by himself, his jet lag and emotional exhaustion compounded by the wet and cold that penetrated the thin soles of his shoes. No one cried. Even in death, Walter was not someone in whose presence one cried easily. Andrew flew back right after the funeral. All he remembered was the strange, dreamlike silhouette of the airplane in flight, the long, lingering sunrise, and the French accents of the Air France stewardesses. The plane was almost empty and he had an entire row to himself, wrapped like a mummy under layers of blankets and still shivering in his only black suit; meant for all seasons, it didn’t suit a single one of them. Although he desperately wanted to sleep, he wasn’t able to. Not even a double Johnnie Walker Black Label, the standard airborne scotch, had an effect. The trivial things one remembered twenty years later! The thought of the whiskey sent a surge of bile up Andrew’s throat, making him gag. Stumbling to the bathroom, he groped in the dark for something against heartburn. There was nothing. What did he expect to find? He almost never suffered from reflux. Another wave of acid scorched his esophagus. For a moment he half-seriously thought of dressing and going down to the corner drugstore, but the damp, the dark, and the cold outside rid him of the unreasonable impulse. Perhaps a glass of milk? They said it helps.
19
November 24, 2000
The 26th of Heshvan, 5761
Eleven a.m. Andrew, shocked by the late hour, gathered himself wearily and forced himself to get out of bed, stumble to the kitchen, and turn on the espresso machine. He wasn’t accustomed to being hungover. Moderate by nature, he didn’t take well physically to extremes. The headache and fatigue caused by the bourbon were joined to the sour taste of last night’s events. He mulled it over, as if trying to solve a puzzling riddle. Rachel’s strange outburst. Poor Kenny! What had gotten into her? What was bugging her? He had never seen her lose her self-control like that before.
Andrew turned to go to the bathroom. Another memory, of something similar, was coming back to him . . . right: that time she came back from Israel. He took off his boxers and stepped into the shower, trying to remember the exact year in which this trip had taken place. Her group, composed of Jewish students from several large universities in the New York area, had also gone to Jordan, to Petra. The refreshing downpour of hot water on Andrew’s head and shoulders helped dispel the vile feeling he had woken with. They had visited some mountain where local tradition claimed that Aaron, the biblical priest, was buried, and their Israeli guide had jokingly told Rachel, “Young Miss Cohen, it’s your great-great-grandfather we’re talking about.” Andrew shut off the faucets, stepped out of the shower stall, and reentered the bedroom. Rachel was not amused. That poor guide, Andrew thought with a smile, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. Her anger still resounded when she returned home in late August and told him about it, expecting him to share her indignation at the guide’s pretentious naïveté. “How could he believe in such crap? Doesn’t he know the Ellis Island immigration officials called Jews Cohen and Levi because they couldn’t cope with all those long, strange East European names? None of that biblical stuff can be proved, and anyway, it’s a scientific fact that there’s no such thing as a genetically pure people. All that talk about bloodlines . . .” Andrew’s mind wandered. He felt vaguely uneasy. All the arguments and counterarguments were known to him, as was Rachel’s way of thinking. It wasn’t what she was saying. It was how she was saying it. It was crude and nasty, full of unconcealed anger. “Anger at what?” Andrew wondered. “At whom?”
20
December 22, 2000
The 25th of Kislev, 5761
How easy it sometimes was to love New York!
A sunny, clear, balmy winter day. You might almost have thought the weather this year had decided to skip winter entirely and begin spring in December. Riverside Drive’s curvaceous elegance next to the solemn, ruler-straight line of the Hudson was like the other, sensuous, feminine side of a single whole. Broadway hummed with life like a country fair. The used-book sellers were out in force on the gray sidewalks, streaking them with loud, bright color. Andrew and Ann Lee, slightly intoxicated by a night of wild love and the irresponsibly late hour at which they had risen, walked hand in hand down the street on their way to a late, a very late, breakfast at Tom’s Diner. How nice it all was, a small campus town in the middle of the city! An old, deluxe edition of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers caught Andrew’s eye. The tall, gilt, cathedral-like Gothic letters stamped on its heavy binding bespoke respect, morality, ambition, dignity, and severity, all qualities Mann would have approved of. Andrew toyed with the thought of buying the book from its savvy vendor but decided in favor of a bottle of German wine. Its label, in Gothic print, too, was like a drunken parody of Mann’s novel, with a comical, pseudo-medieval-style illustration, as though taken from Boccaccio’s Decameron, of a fat, debauched friar seated by a barrel while two young urchins poured a tankard of wine down his gullet. The wine was cheap and probably not very good, but Ann Lee liked the label. She also liked a dramatically striped dress hanging in the window of the Liberty House clothing and gift shop.
“Would you like to try it on?”
“Yes! No. Maybe later. I’m starving. Let’s go eat.”
Tom’s Diner, New York’s most world-famous diner thanks to Seinfeld, was a real place. Standing on the northeast corner of Broadway and 112th Street, it was also a congenial one,
at least for anyone with a taste for Americana. The winning banality of its decor, with its soda fountains, large tin coffee urn, and gleaming round metal stools at the counter, their cheap varnished wooden legs and fake pink leather seats reminding one of a Queens wedding hall or an emigrant aid society in Little Italy, was an accurate re-creation of the neon diner aesthetics of the 1950s. The only challenges to its mirage of authenticity, greatly prized in Manhattan, were a signed poster of the TV series’ four stars above the cash register and a large portrait of Kramer, the most popular and beloved of them. Although these gave cause to suspect an ambition to be a New York institution, itself reason to be denied such a status, it was enough to glance at the broad-faced old matriarch dozing by the cashier in her black widow’s clothes and cheap, ugly plastic glasses when not chatting with or scolding in Greek—over the heads of the diners—her son standing by the entrance, to be reassured: greater authenticity was nowhere to be found.
21
December 26, 2000
The 29th of Kislev, 5761
Early morning. A gray light glinted through the windows. Thin snowflakes swirled against them, cradled by a heavy fog. Andrew took pleasure in the lull before the day’s storm, savoring it to the full: the burble of frothing milk, the throaty tone of the cello, the smell of fresh coffee, and the streaks of frost on the windowpanes, which made one want to press one’s nose against them in a momentary reversion to childhood. A dull thump made him stir. The morning delivery of the Times had landed on the doormat. He rubbed his hands in a tingle of anticipation: the timing couldn’t have been better. Just when the coffee was ready!
He went to the door, lazily shuffling over the wooden floor in his woolen slippers. Come round me, little childer; / There, don’t fling stones at me. Where was that from? It was so familiar. My man was a poor fisher, / With salt lines in the say. It was on the tip of his tongue. And sometimes from the saltin’ shed / I scarce could drag my feet, / Under the blessed moonlight, / Along the pebbly street. Damn it! Where? I’d always been but weakly, / And my baby was just born; / A neighbor minded her by day, / I minded her till morn. Of course. “The Ballad of Moll Magee”! Yeats. How could he have forgotten? I lay upon my baby; / Ye little childer dear, / I looked on my cold baby, / When the morn grew frosty and clear. Terrible! What had made him think of it? A weary woman sleeps so hard! / My man grew red and pale. When had he read it? Thirty years ago or more, in college. Maybe even in high school. Pilin’ the wood or pilin’ the turf, / Or goin’ to the well, / I’m thinkin’ of my baby, / And keenin’ to mysel’. So many years and he still was moved by it. So now, ye little childer, / Ye won’t fling stones at me; / But gather with your shinin’ looks / And pity Moll Magee. What was it all about? Why now? It astounded Andrew that the poem still had such power over him. He took a deep breath, steadied himself, opened the door, and bent to pick up the newspaper.
22
December 27, 2000
The 1st of Tevet, 5761
The fall semester is over. The term papers have been submitted. The bureaucratic procedures are out of the way and the students have gone home for the holidays. They will sleep in their old beds, on familiar, time-softened mattresses; eat Mom’s food, which tastes as good as ever even though Mom rarely makes it anymore and prefers to buy it at the take-out counter; have uncomfortable, awkwardly intimate talks with Dad; explain to a high school boyfriend or girlfriend why they yielded to temptation despite pledges of loyalty; quarrel with their parents, sulk, make up, embrace, cry, and smoke a joint in the guest bathroom.
Those bittersweet winter vacations! How much longing they arouse! We, too, will go away. We will take time out for a trip to the wintry sea. There, to the strains of a melancholy string quartet, a dim maritime light will fall like dew on the gray day’s yearning. Swift storm clouds will race across the sky. Distant thunder will rumble, lightning will flash. An electric crackle will rend the air. Coffee, cigarettes, sweetly astringent liqueurs. The feel of a naked body, the feel of a cold fresh sheet. Light filtering through the shutters, sketching pale webs on the wall. The rain will beat against the shut windows and we will lie, cuddled like puppies, beneath a sea of blankets, among a mountain of pillows.
The tip of Long Island, the tip of the continent, a long finger thrust into the ocean, pointing back toward the Old World. The ostentatious mansions of East Hampton and its vacationing celebrities gradually give way to older homes that were once, twenty or thirty years ago, loudly pretentious, too, but that have been weathered by time, painted over with the peeling pastels of nostalgia that bathe them, like distant hills glimpsed in twilight, in a violet, soulful haze. Here and there, remnants of the island’s former, agricultural life are still visible: rusting tractors, red barns, cornfields, fruit and vegetable stands brightened by vividly, almost shockingly orange, jack-o’-lantern-colored gourds. But then the fields vanish, the highway narrows, and the ocean’s light-drenched, sandy, austere presence begins to be felt.
The island’s end is rimmed by a dramatic ellipse, a curved road that bounds it like sacred ground. The moment your vehicle turns onto it, the trip becomes ceremonial, symbolic, almost ritualistic. In the distance, a large lighthouse sits on a grassy lawn like a diamond cushioned in velvet. Beyond it, in the far background, swells the Atlantic. Great whales prowl its depths, past old naval mines, skeletons of shipwrecked vessels, and lost continents. Andrew, wearing a felt hat, and Ann Lee, in a bell-shaped flapper’s bonnet, stand, two long, thin silhouettes, looking down from a cliff at the foaming water. A white seagull is perched on a wooden pole. The rusty frames of the lighthouse’s windows stand out against its white walls. Between the stormy sky and the stormy sea runs a clear, metallic strip of immense silence. If only you could frame the moment and hang it on the wall.
END OF BOOK TWO
BOOK
THREE
1
Late December. While the days are cold and short, the fast-falling evenings are festive and gay. A week before Christmas, the taciturn Canadian lumberjacks, who appear every year, unloaded their different sizes of Christmas trees at the corner of Broadway and 110th Street, perfuming the air with the pungent, familiar fragrance of a young forest. The doormen, excited by the prospect of generous Christmas tips, placed little decorated trees in the lobbies alongside electric Hanukkah menorahs, an additional flame-shaped bulb of which lit up on each of the holiday’s eight days. The shop windows were covered with paper cutouts of snowflakes, menorahs, dreidls, merry Santa Clauses, and red-nosed reindeer. The same mawkish Christmas songs were played and replayed so often in the crowded stores that the whole city seemed to be running on a single sound track. Would there be a white Christmas? An innocent question, asked by children and grown-ups alike.
A year ago, the apocalyptic shadow of the Y2K bug clouded the celebrations of the new millennium. As always at such times, the notorious figure of Nostradamus, the false prophet of Rotterdam, was invoked, his name sending chills down the spines of chronic worriers. The anxiety was like the bitterness in a fine whiskey, or the pale scent of danger at a medieval carnival. At midnight, thousands assembled in Times Square to watch the fall of the traditional crystal ball. At the stroke of twelve, a great shout burst from tens of thousands of mouths. The ball fell slowly, gliding down the column of light on Times Tower. A year had gone by. Another had begun. A century had passed. A thousand years went by—and now there would be a thousand more. The lights shone on. The neon signs continued to blink on their giant billboards. Mouths reeking of alcohol, steak, and mentholated breath freshener met in the midnight kiss. The world had not come to an end. Nostradamus was proven wrong once again. The universal relief was tinged with a touch of disappointment. Nothing had happened. Everything was the same as before.
This year was more ordinary, less histrionic. Andrew gave Ann Lee a New Year’s gift of a lovely, burgundy-colored organza scarf from Bergdorf Goodman. Ann Lee gave Andrew a gorgeous, coal-black cashmere scarf from Barney’s. Andrew reserved a table at Harr
y’s New York Bar. They had a wonderful dinner, washed down by a bottle of 1985 Château Latour that justified every one of the superlatives lavished on it over the years, and then strolled hand in hand down a Fifth Avenue lit by the magic twinkle of thousands of gaily colored glass baubles. Carefully sidestepping the human swarms heading for Times Square, they managed to position themselves, exactly at midnight, in front of the main display window of Saks Fifth Avenue for a long, elegantly executed, cinematic kiss. What a way to start the new year!
2
Day follows day, season follows season. The quality of the light, the peculiar quality of the air, the cycles of growth and decay: all keep changing. Cold and warmth, summer and winter, day and night have no end. Was not this the promise? Innumerable clocks tick the flow of time: the white steam eddying up from the manholes to the frosty azure above, its shadows dancing on the red and white brick of the old apartment buildings; the parade of flowers filling the front shelves of the Korean delis; the different blues of the sky that merge with the blues of the river only to part from them again. This year, too, there will be buds on the naked branches that had seemed beyond resurrection. The trees will groan again in late summer under the weight of their dense, heat-stricken foliage. The world will once more catch fire with autumn flames that blaze for weeks until quenched by the cold, gray rains of November. Everything will be as it was the year before.