The Poison Tree

by Henry I. Schvey

  “You thought it was all right to leave our girls alone with him—with that monster—without an au pair?” Patty said when she returned from California. “After all you’ve experienced? How could you? Have you learned nothing? What kind of man are you? What kind of a father are you?”

  I had no idea how to respond. “If I called and told you, I knew you would come back, and … I didn’t want to ruin your holiday,” I offered pathetically. “He’s sick. Probably dying. He seemed sincere about connecting with the girls, behaving like a grandfather … I thought—”

  “Even after Jerusha phoned and told you she was terrified out of her wits?”

  “I … I’m so sorry,” I mumbled.

  Shortly after St. Martin, my father’s health rapidly deteriorated. Blood transfusions went from weekly to daily, and there was talk of a bone-marrow transplant. I heard from Malcolm that he fell asleep in restaurants, woke up with a start and began cursing the wait staff. His erratic behavior at the airport was a harbinger of physical and mental decline. We never spoke about St. Martin’s again, and he said no more about removing the children. I chose to pretend nothing happened. Nonetheless, my sense of anger and guilt over the incident never left me.

  It was summer, and a literary conference at NYU gave me the opportunity to visit him at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The first thing I saw as I entered his suite was his bloated mustachioed visage hanging above me larger than life in bright, primary colors. His nurse was blowing up an assortment of his retirement balloons with his face on them. She rubbed them on her starched white uniform to create static electricity and then stuck the balloons all over the walls. While his face was ubiquitous, he himself was absent. The nurse directed me to McKeen Pavilion on the ninth floor of the Milstein Hospital, where a green arrow led to a luxury restaurant with a magnificent view of the Hudson River.

  Dad was lounging in a silk maroon smoking jacket, talking with a young blonde. He had lost weight and looked healthy. The restaurant was gorgeous, and looked more like a tearoom in a fashionable hotel than a cafeteria in a hospital.

  “Ah, you must be the son,” said the blonde who, at around thirty-five, was probably a good ten years younger than I. “You’re on time for high tea! We’re having a little tea party, aren’t we, Norman?” She handed me a plate, and piled it with little sandwiches—watercress, egg salad, and Nova Scotia salmon—with the brown and white crusts removed.

  “I’m Charlotte,” she said. Her hands were vascular, her handshake firm. An athlete’s handshake.

  My father gave me his cheek to kiss. My thoughts were not about St. Martin. I thought, thank God he smells like he is supposed to: musky, masculine. I couldn’t bear it if he smelled like a dying man. Since entering the hospital, my great fear was that he would carry the smell death on him. I couldn’t bear that.

  “Say hello to Miss James, Henry,” my father said loudly, and I was nine years old again intruding on a serious conversation between two adults, not a professor in my forties with three young children of my own. I made a note to myself to stay no more than half an hour, and I was determined to make things pleasant.

  “I can’t believe this place, Dad!” I said with forced cheer.

  “Why the hell not?” he growled.

  “It doesn’t look like a hospital. Or feel like one. And this food! It’s high tea at the Plaza.”

  “How the hell would you know what high tea at the Plaza looks like? Have you ever been there?” Something irritated him; I had no idea what. “Jesus Christ Almighty. You’d think at your age, you could learn to say something that wasn’t completely asinine. Christ, Charlotte, you know the boy has a PhD in something or other, but still behaves like an idiot!”

  “All right,” I said. I really didn’t want a fight here in the hospital.

  “Norman, the boy was just making an amusing observation,” Miss James said benignly. She was the comforting adult; I the child. “Besides, he’s right. And I have been to the Plaza for high tea! You’ve brought me there, if I’m not mistaken, on more than one occasion.”

  “Shut up, Charlotte,” he said between clenched teeth. “You can go to hell, too.”

  I decided to change the subject by referring to my son’s passion for science and space travel. “Aram got straight A’s on his report card. He’s going to Huntsville for Space Camp next week.”

  “How’s his tennis?” my father instantly shot back.

  “You know he’s not interested in sports.” Somehow, I was being drawn into a fight. I checked my watch; less than five minutes had elapsed.

  “Norman, we were having such a nice time,” Miss James said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why has your mood changed so suddenly?”

  “Him!” A crooked, arthritic forefinger waved in my direction.

  “You’re cruel, Norman. Cruel and mean-spirited. You know he came all the way to see you from—where did you say you were teaching?” Miss James asked me.

  “Leipzig,” my father answered.

  “Actually, it’s Leiden. Leipzig’s in Germany.” It was still fifteen minutes shy of the half hour I’d promised myself. I’d never make it. “I think I’ll head back to the hotel, Dad. I’ll see you later.”

  “No, Henry, please stay,” Miss James said. “You’ve come all this way—from Germany, you said? Please stay with us! Especially since he’s behaving like such an old fart.” She said this with a smile, but my father exploded.

  “Fuck you! Fuck you both! Nurse! Nurse, I’m going back to my room.” A nurse appeared. But he stood up and walked back to his room by himself, the nurse pushing his empty wheelchair from behind.

  By the time we returned to his suite, party balloons were all over the place, and his moustache was staring at us from every angle. My father was propped up in bed, and Miss James and I were on either side.

  He turned to me suddenly. “You see that body? Jesus Christ! Even with a business suit on, you can tell she’s got it.” This was said far too loudly, and it was impossible to say who was most embarrassed: Miss James, his nurse, or me. He continued, however. “Look at that stomach!” He ripped the blouse up from her skirt, and smacked her bare midriff with the flat of his hand. “I’m telling you, you could bounce a goddamn quarter off that. Yup, and those breasts! Best money can buy—believe me, I know! Built like a Lexington Avenue hooker!” Miss James turned white, and I opened my mouth to change the subject. But it kept on coming. “The way she dresses … you’d never know. I mean, you’d think she belonged on Wall Street, among the right kind of people, among people who know. You’d never think only a few years ago she jumped off a bus from Dubuque or Wichita, or wherever the fuck it was, literally begging for a job, would you? No, you wouldn’t. And that once she got that job, she parlayed it into another. And another. And now—just look: a brilliant young executive at Bear Stearns!”

  The nurse stole out of the room. Charlotte James walked to the window, sobbing. Smelling blood, he continued. “Breeding shows, doesn’t it? Huh? Not only among cattle, but women. In their genes. Still an ignorant bitch beneath the Calvin Kleins.” Then he jerked his head away as though he couldn’t bear her sight. Miss James closed her eyes, trying to stand her ground, but her voice betrayed her when she finally spoke.

  “Norman, you are a son of a bitch. I’m leaving.”

  “No, ple-e-e-ease don’t leave! We want you to stay, don’t we, Henry?” he said dripping sarcasm. “Of course we do. She brightens up the room! Like the wallpaper or a decorative plant.” Miss James pressed her forehead against the windowpane. Without the window, she would have crumpled to the floor.

  I had no idea where this venom came from, but I couldn’t help feeling a little pleased that it was not directed at me. After this last outburst, we sat there in silence while the nurse peeked in to see if the storm had abated. I exchanged brief, helpless glances with Charlotte. We were both trapped. Neither of us wanted to be there; but my father, I knew, enjoyed our discomfort as much
as we hated it—perhaps more. We were his captives, and there was nothing either one of us could do about it.

  After a while, he grew calmer. He politely asked Miss James to go so he could talk with his son. She bent over to kiss him on the cheek. There was no indication in her face that she had been humiliated moments before. She strode to the door, metamorphosed into a sophisticated young woman again. She was free; I remained behind.

  “Come over here. There’s something I want to ask you.”

  In the course of our lives together we had never spoken truthfully about our relationship or our feelings. Not once. Now there was something in his changed tone that made me think such a conversation might be imminent. I moved a bit closer, expecting the Reconciliation Scene. I was familiar with this scene from novels and plays. I hoped it would give us a chance to repair the damage of a life in which neither one of us had told the truth for one minute about what we thought.

  “Still bite your fingernails, don’t you?” he began as I pulled my chair up to the bed.

  I glanced at my reddened cuticles, then at his manicured hands. I thought I don’t think this is how this scene is supposed to begin.

  “You remember Fionna?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t be an idiot! Fionna, Fionna Bingley! Fionna! Fionna! Of course you remember her. Blonde—British, friend of mine, Portugal!” He was furious I could not remember her for some reason.

  “Yes.…” I remembered her as Fee, but never knew her first name was actually Fionna.

  “She just had a baby boy. In England. I need to congratulate her.”

  “How can I help?” I wondered about this sudden interest in a former mistress and her infant son. Fionna must be in her early forties, close to my age.

  “Go to my apartment, find the address book in my desk. Here’s the key.”

  I took the key. I noticed his initials NIS had been scratched into the brass. “And?”

  “And nothing. That’s it,” he said. “Find the goddamn address book with her address in it and bring it back here. You think you can handle that?”

  “Yes, I think I can just about handle it.”

  “Don’t be a wiseass. Get the address book—bring it back here. There may be other people I need to contact while I’m stuck in this shit hole.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, what did I ask you to do for me?”

  “I think I can remember, Dad, I’m forty-five years old, I have a PhD in—”

  “Repeat it, I said! Goddamn it, now—repeat it!”

  I tried to speak. But when I opened my mouth to try and repeat his instructions, nothing came out. It wasn’t defiance. Or maybe it was. The words got caught and for three seconds that felt like an hour, I stood there with mouth open, unable to utter a sound. Then I left the room without turning back.

  So, there was to be no father-son reconciliation; no epiphany. Such moments, I realized, were better left to theatre. Or grand opera.

  I spent the night in my father’s apartment and had a strange dream. I was in a small room at Riverside Chapel, and a funeral service has just concluded. People wander in and out, poking their heads through the black drapes to peer at me. A bald man in a white short-sleeved shirt with hairy forearms rushes in wearing a black tie and yarmulke. He snatches a sign, which reads Norman I. Schvey—Funeral, tucks it under his armpit, and starts out of the room. “I’ve got to change the letters,” he says, asking if everything is to my satisfaction. I don’t know what to say, but before I can respond, he has vanished.

  There is a coffin standing on the Bimah.

  I rub my hands over the bronze handles, trace my fingers along the cherry wood sides of the casket. I peer inside. It is my father all right, with salt and pepper moustache and slicked-back silver hair. He is immaculately dressed, and I am mesmerized by his hands. No longer crippled by arthritis, they are beautifully manicured and folded across his chest. His fingernails gleam. There is just the right amount of white shirt cuff visible under the suit jacket. Silver cufflinks. I recognize everything, but something is wrong. I don’t know what it is, but something is wrong.

  The body springs upright in the coffin.

  I’m frightened. The face isn’t his. It belongs to someone else … it could be my face. The mouth opens, and a scream comes out, shrill and ear piercing. It wails like a siren, drowning out everything, including the traffic down below in the streets.

  I wake up screaming and jump out of bed—mouth dry, heart racing.

  Three days afterwards, I am back at the hospital and find my father near death. He is unshaven and shivering, rocking restlessly from side to side. The hospital blanket has been kicked off, his hands are buried deep in his crotch. In the fetal position, it appears he is trying to dig upwards into his own viscera. His thighs are thin and weak, and I remember how he looked in the locker room after tennis—his strong legs compared to my weak ones, his thick penis emerging from a forest of pubic hair.

  How do I become a man? It’s not going to happen.

  I watch him quiver and moan; hands ineffectually reaching for safety between his legs. It’s like watching an animal suffer. I want to put it out of its misery, but I have to see it through. I cannot leave until this is finished.

  Hours later I am still there. I have lost track of time. The terrible shivering and rocking has stopped. He is quiet beneath the two extra layers of blankets a nurse has brought in. I am sitting now, though I have no idea when I sat down. A physician enters. I do not see his face. He tells me my father is on morphine and in a deep coma. It is a coma from which he will likely never wake. He pronounces these precise words: “If he does wake up, your father will be a vegetable.” He asks if I want to stop the antibiotic drip, and tells me, “You are your father’s executor.” But I hear him say, “You are your father’s executioner.”

  A nurse brings me a paper cone of ice water.

  Malcolm walks in with Bobby and someone else. Bobby sports a moustache. He is dressed in a dark pinstriped suit and blue dress shirt with white spread collar. His cuffs are white and monogrammed: RMS. He wears a plum-colored handkerchief with five points in his breast pocket. He is a bloated caricature of my father; like one of those balloons in his hospital room. I have not seen my brother in a decade, and he has grown obese. My father carried his excessive weight with elegance; Bobby looks like a mafia don.

  The three men do not look at my father; instead, they circle me.

  I am introduced to the other man as Malcolm’s lawyer. He is old, frail, and very tall. He is dressed conservatively in white shirt and striped red tie. Stretched out, he must be at least 6’5”, but his spine is so crooked he looks like a walking candy cane. I begin to recount what the doctor has just said, but Malcolm stops me with a wave.

  “It’s bullshit. I’ve heard it all already.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The story that Norman’s brain dead. I know half a dozen neurologists here at Presbyterian who’ll swear exactly the opposite, y’understand. Your father can and will recover. His brain function will return to normal. That’s why I brought him with me—just in case.” He signals Candy Cane. He bows gravely, forehead almost touching the floor.

  “In case what?” I ask.

  “In case you’re thinking about killing your father. Terminating life support.”

  “What are you talking about, Uncle Malcolm?”

  “It’s not going to happen,” he snarls, “so don’t go getting any stupid ideas.”

  The three of them surround me in a tight circle.

  I tell the doctor not to disconnect the antibiotic drip. Another five days later, my father dies in his sleep.

  At the reception at Riverside Funeral Chapel, an old Chassid in a yarmulke comes up and introduces himself in Yiddish. I assume he is looking for one of the other funerals being held on a different floor, and offer to escort him out. He looks so absurdly out of place among the elegantly attired businessmen and trim blondes in black dresses. I try to lead hi
m out, but he turns and waves his arms and makes guttural sounds intended to tell me something. “Machatoonim! Machatoonim!” he bleats. “Shloime! Here for you fater! You fater Nachman.”

  I remember my father’s response to my grandmother’s grief at Grandpa’s funeral, and imagine what he would say to this shabby intruder. In my imagination he takes this old Jew by his scruffy velvet collar and tosses him out onto the street. But Shloime is here and will not leave. He points to his slashed black necktie, which he has cut with a razor according to Orthodox custom honoring the deceased. He is agitated and perspiring; I offer him a seat, a plate of cookies, and a cup of tea. He eats a cookie and it seems to calm him, so I ask how he knows my father. He sighs. He explains that they are—were—first cousins. Best friends as little boys. Shloime’s father, Harry Schvey’s younger brother, was a rabbi in Philadelphia. While Grandpa went on to become a rich businessman, his brother—Shloime’s father— attended rabbinical school in Philadelphia and became a Tzaddik, a man of wisdom, according to Shloime. Shloime tells me his father never learned to speak English, and that the two brothers from Riga went their separate ways. And after being childhood friends, he and my father lost touch.

  It is very sad, he says, and tells me he is glad to have met me, even on this sad occasion. “Vat you do?” Shloime asks in his best English. I explain that I live in the Netherlands with my wife and three children, and teach English literature at Leiden University. He is quiet for a moment, then nods impressively. “Tzaddik, a Tzaddik like mine own fater, of blessed memory,” he says. I smile and tell him he is mistaken, I am not a wise man, but he is undeterred. “No! No! Tzaddik! Tzaddik!” he shouts. “And now you must tell me, tell me all about how Cousin Nachman turned out, yes? Come, you tell me! I know he was a great man, you fater, an honorable man in business.”