When I came downstairs it was past seven, and an argument had erupted between Bruce and Uncle Serge, my father`s oldest brother, a blowhard in a waxed flattop who had a nose and mouth shaped like wire pliers. After a few minutes everyone had jumped into the debate, citing newspaper and magazine articles they`d seen or heard about, quoting the opinions of celebrated professors remembered from Donahue and MacNeil, Lehrer. Before I sat down, Serge demanded to know if I sympathized with the PLO.
I told him I thought the West Bank dilemma was hopeless.
”You bet your ass it is,” he said. ”You`re an educated man and that`s all you got to say on the subject? The Arabs won`t be happy until they throw us into the sea. Even Zolly knew that.”
”Lenny`s entitled to have his own opinions,” my father said.
My mother had had enough food catered to feed a dozen grieving families:
slabs of brisket, casseroles of potato kugel and stuffed derma, side dishes of wax beans and sauerkraut. A place had been reserved for me between Delilah and Ginger, her new boy friend. Ginger worked in a drug-rehab center and wore a three-piece suit and a braided ponytail.
I smiled and looked down. Circles of fat swam in the sour red-cabbage soup. ”Can someone pass me the salt?” I said.
”Salt,” Goldie shouted, ”is bad for your blood pressure.”
”What isn`t bad for you nowadays?” my mother asked.
”Are you aware, Lenny,” Goldie bellowed, ”that your Zolly was the first man in his line to hire colored people?”
”Papa took nothing for granted,” my father said. ”He thought of the future. He was a pioneer in his business.”
”What a story,” Serge said. ”You make him sound like Albert Schweitzer. He was loaded, he could afford to be a big shot.”
”He struggled and worked his tail off,” my father shouted.
”He was too good for this world,” Goldie said, sobbing.
Uncle Mickey was smacking his lips. He made noises in his throat like a dog coughing up a bone.
”I`m not so bad, but my brother was some pincher,” Aunt Frieda said.
”He had strong fingers like a kosher butcher.”
”I had a little clothing store on the corner of Hoe Avenue and East 173th Street,” Uncle Moe, Goldie`s husband, said. Moe was shaped like a cello-he had an enormous behind and a thin neck. His fuzzy eyebrows were like caterpillars. ”I knew just how to take in Zolly`s pants, how he liked his cuffs should fall. All the time we lived with him and Manya he never raised the rent on us.”
Serge dropped his knife and fork and laughed. ”Spare me.”
”Please-enough already, Serge,” my father said.
Serge`s face and crown glistened with sweat; his fingers were laced across his big stomach. ”Don`t boss me around Benny.”
”You just don`t want to hear any of this,” my father said.
Serge threw his napkin on his plate and left the table.
”Serge-I wouldn`t trust that louse with a crummy nickel,” cousin Leo said. ”Gussie, you went and married a real momzer.” Leo`s cataracts looked like panes of frosted window-glass.
”Ben, sweetheart,” my mother said gently, ”go say something to your brother.”
”I don`t have to tolerate such foolishness from him. For more than fifty years he`s resented his father and me and Goldie. The hell with him.”
Aunt Gussie leaned over her plate and pointed her finger at my mother.
”Bernice-must I tell you that with Serge everything`s a production?”
”People are people, darling,” Moe said. ”Nothing adds up.”
”I`m tired of being the one in the middle of everything,” my father said, glowering at everyone.
He told my mother he had no room for cake and ice cream and asked her to save him some rugalech. ”I`m taking Lenny for a ride,” he said, tossing me my parka, and we started for the door.
Once outside, my father put on a pair of black earmuffs. I turned around to look at him, but his face had disappeared into the collar of his dove-gray topcoat. He made harsh grunting noises behind me and slipped on the ice. Rock music-”Born in the U.S.A.”-blared from down the street. He pointed to the garage. ”Let`s take the Bonneville.” he said. ”The heater doesn`t work so well anymore in the Cutlass. Here, take these. You drive for a change.” He handed me his rabbit`s-foot keyring.
The funeral home was a three-story, umbrella-shaped building linked by tunnels to a limestone pavilion full of tubbed bonsai trees and glaring cobalt floodlights. ComEdison repair crews were digging in the Boston Post Road;
twisted cable lay everywhere. The neighborhood around Besser`s had changed in the past few years. All the residential side streets were named after poets. Goldlake`s Delicatessen was gone, as were the Rexall drugstore and Robard`s soda fountain. Driving there we passed The House of Tahiti, a pagoda-shaped Polynesian restaurant on the site of the demolished Knights of Pythias lodge. Flanking the mortuary was a Century 21 franchise and a Subaru dealership.
I backed the car into a diagonal space between an El Dorado and a hearse with lace curtains on its windows. My father went around to the trunk and checked the bumper and tailpipes. He pulled his gloves off with his teeth and kicked snow off the tires.
”I didn`t hit anything,” I said. ”I hardly recognize the place.”
He stood up. ”Mamaroneck`s a regular city now; you can`t expect to see it all in one trip.” His face glowed in the jagged beams of the floodlights; his collar was spiky with snow. Down the street a neon sign flashed the time and temperature from the wall of a Pier 1. ”Zolly called this the Jewish section of town since he got his whitefish and bialys at Goldlake`s.”
Inside my father scribbled our names in a spiral ledger open on a rosewood secretary, as if we were visitors instead of immediate family. The place was decorated in solid shades of brown and gold and smelled of soggy cigars and cologne. The odor of wilted flowers lingered in the air. ”Flowers in a Jewish funeral home?” I said.
He shrugged. ”Nothing`s the same anymore.”
We threaded our way through several dozen mourners grouped around a silver coffin and a wailing family. We passed three gray-faced men in overcoats talking casually in front of a room filled with caskets, as if they were merely browsing. A barrel-chested man wearing soft shoes and a knitted yarmulke appeared out of a stairwell and directed us to an elevator whose walls were lined with velvet drapes. ”Sunrise, Sunset” funneled through the concealed speakers.
Zolly`s coffin was beneath three chandeliers dangling from parallel crossbeams. It was moored like a kayak on stilts. My father walked over to the heating vent and waved his hand in front of it, making sure that warm air was coming out.
I drummed my fingers on the coffin lid. ”Do you mind if I open it for a minute?”
He took a deep breath. ”Serge was out of town when I bought the coffin. I know he`ll make a stink about it. He`s not happy unless he makes a federal case out of everything.”
”Who cares?” I said. ”Screw Serge.”
He shook his head. I opened the coffin. Zolly`s head lay on a light blue pillow. He was closely shaved, and his face was powdered pink. His hands were dry and chalky; there was a speck of dirt beneath his left thumbnail. On one arthritic finger, almost smothered in hair, was his wedding ring. He was wearing his wire-rim bifocals, he had on his royal blue sharkskin suit, black suspenders, and the nut-brown tie dotted with tiny gold seahorses that I`d bought him for his birthday many years before. I leaned down to kiss his cheek; it was cold.
”Christ. Sometimes I wish it was thirty years ago,” I said, looking over my shoulder at my father.
”It won`t ever be thirty years ago, Lenny.”
”I just wanted you to know how I was feeling.”
He nodded. ”And besides, what makes you think it was such a picnic then? You were a kid, what did you know? Your life is someplace else now, but we`ve all had time to get used to Papa`s death, watching him waste away on us the past year or so. He`d sit around in front of the TV and drift. He hated his useless body, Lenny. He had the works: kidney and prostate trouble, bleeding colitis, even a bum ticker. It`s funny, but I would have figured him for a killer stroke, or the big C. Someone dying of old age can put a family through the wringer, take my word on it. I only thank God he didn`t have Alzheimer`s on top of everything else. I feel terribly responsible for some reason, like I should`ve done something.
”You shouldn`t blame yourself,” I said, closing the coffin.
”You were a good son. Take my word on that.” He made a sour face.
”It`ll be a relief when we get him in the ground tomorrow.”
”I read the will before dinner,” I said. ”It surprised me.”
He sat down on the mourner`s bench and pressed his fists against the padded cushion as if to propel himself. He leaned toward me a little. ”Can I ask you what you`re going to do with all your loot? First-follow my advice and find somebody you can trust. Those investment guys can take you to the cleaners.”
”What loot?”
He smiled and scratched at a mole beneath his eye. ”What loot,” he said mordantly. ”How come everything`s a question with you? Papa left his entire estate to you, including his portion of the business. We`re full partners now. I want your honest input, Lenny. I`m seriously thinking of merging with another line of bakeries. We`ll be a chain, like McDonald`s.”
I was flustered. ”You must be kidding? I mean, the will simply said I got whatever he owned, and I just assumed he had a few dollars stowed away and maybe some life insurance. I thought you automatically got his share of the company. I`ll write it over to you-it`s all yours as far as I`m concerned. All I heard growing up was how you two busted your rear ends for years and barely managed to break even. How the overhead was crushing and the profits went into machinery and the pension plan, right? Jesus-is there anything else I should know?”
He flushed and ran his hands through his hair. ”I make no bones about it, Lenny. I worked like a bloody horse, six days a week, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Not like some men I know with soft jobs and big paychecks. Most people break their assess for nothing all their lives. We`re not a wealthy family, but I`m not ashamed of being comfortable. I`ve earned it.”
I could see snowflakes swirling into the parking lot. For a moment I wondered if he thought I was ashamed of him. He went over to the window. The moonlight shone through the slatted blinds and lay in curved stripes across his chest. I suddenly felt anxious, as if I were on display, and had a crazy notion that Zolly was watching my reaction from inside the coffin, through a one-way mirror, like the kind they have in police shows.
He pivoted about gracefully. ”I`m sure you remember Zelig Fuchs, Papa`s cousin? He had a ranch house in Mount Vernon.”
I nodded. ”He`s the one who had all those German shepherds running around his back yard. Wasn`t he a cop?”
”Zelig`s a rich man now, he lives like a sheik on a golf course in Boca Raton. He was a homicide detective, a powerful lieutenant with serious connections. Papa`s business-the small bakery on Tremont Avenue he ran with Mickey-was going under and with Zelig`s influence he was able to get a big loan when the banks turned him down. Certain agreements had been made. He welcomed this opportunity, Lenny; he was ready to take advantage of a chance to get ahead of the game. In those days nobody could afford to be idealistic. When Papa had some trouble paying back the vigorish, he drove a truck for Zelig`s friends and smuggled whiskey and molasses in from Quebec. The rest is history.”
”What`s the score?” I said. ”How much are we talking about?”
He held his arms out. ”A bundle, kid. Six figures, never mind the business, plus some beachfront property in Miami Beach, and bonds.”
”This is great,” I said. ”The family will think we rooked them out of Zolly`s money. Who else knows about this?”
He made a harsh, throat-clearing noise. ”Don`t worry, Serge always talks like he`s piss-poor; he`ll sic his army of fancy lawyers on us. There`s no way that bastard won`t contest the will.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and felt my heart knocking about like a cornered bird inside my chest. My hands were clammy, and I was afraid I was on the verge of an anxiety attack. ”I can`t deal with this,” I said, rubbing my forehead. ”My grandfather in Dutch with the shylocks, running errands for boot-leggers and crooked cops. It`s unbelievable.”
”Believe it,” he mumbled, dropping his eyes.
”Why was I kept in the dark about all this? Didn`t you even try to convince him his will was slightly off the wall?”
He was looking into space; his flannel shirt was stained with perspiration. ”C`mon-what`s done is done; it`s all in the past now. Papa doesn`t need me defending him. He was a generous man and it was fortunate he had something for us to fall back on. Be proud of him, Lenny; what matters most is how much he loved you. There are things in our life-mine and Zolly`s-that are none of your business. Why do you want to open old wounds?” The skin on my skull was so tight I had trouble blinking. ”Because I want to know the whole truth, that`s why,” I said.
He squinched his face and patted the air between us. ”The whole truth, is it?” he said nervously. ”Well, there are two reasons why I didn`t mind that he left everything to you. First, for starters, there`s no law against it. And second, it made him happy, it`s what he wanted. As for his days smuggling booze and running with racketeers, he wished that part of his life be kept a secret. Despite what you may think, he was a tyrant and he treated your grandmother like she was his maid. He always wanted his way and no matter how much money he made it was never enough to make him feel secure. All his life Zolly griped that the competition was breathing down his neck, trying to knock him out of business. He had a closed mind and was always climbing all over my back. He smothered me, and for a long time I hated him. You always put him on a pedestal and he adored you for it. It`s taken me a lifetime and many disappointments to realize that fathers are not above the weaknesses of their children.”
He paused to blow his nose into a monogrammed handkerchief. I went over to the window and watched a pair of crows bathe themselves in the snow on a burled telephone pole. He started talking again, this time in a measured, subdued tone-about the risks Zolly had shouldered in order for our family to grow and prosper-and I couldn`t shake the feeling that my father wished he were talking about me, as if I were the one who had died and left behind a past richer and more daring than the timid and ordinary life I had always led. ”We`re driving Papa to the cemetery tomorrow,” he said. ”A rabbi`s going to say Kaddish over him. I want you to join us.”
”What for?” I said. ”The last time Zolly went to temple was for Delilah`s Bas Mitzvah. He used to tell me the God of Abraham and Isaac was like a blind umpire calling balls and strikes.”
”Grow up,” he said, his voice lowering. ”Don`t treat me like a stranger. You`re not doing this for Papa, but for me.”
”I can`t-it`s a sham,” I said. ”It wouldn`t feel right.”
”You were always such a bad sport,” he said, a shadow of disgust crossing his face. ”I blame my father for that.”
On the way out of the funeral home he told me I should look at the pile of clothes Zolly had left. When a blast of cold air hit me I panicked and stumbled; something hard melted in my will. I felt like a little boy, the snow frigid against my pants. He helped me up and whistled slowly, checking my face for bruises. I told him in a shaky voice that I would accept his judgment on all matters relating to the burial and Zolly`s estate. He put his arm around my hips and squeezed.
He began removing snow from the windshield with his bare hands. I started the engine and put the defroster on; then I got the ice scrapers out from under the front passenger seat. ”Don`t knock yourself out,” I shouted.
”I`ll do that.”
A light fringe of snow lay like a tallis on the shoulders of his coat.
”Put that thing down,” he said, ”and look at the stars.”
An icy wind bore into my face. ”It`s freezing, Dad.”
”I know. But tell me, Lenny. What do you see?”
I blew on my hands and studied the murky sky. ”It`s pretty cloudy. There`s the Big Dipper, I guess. Is that Venus or Jupiter?”
He threw his arms up in a pleading gesture, his palms cupped, grasping at the falling snow. ”Nah. nah,” he said impatiently. ”I mean-what do you see?”
I braced myself for his pained look. ”I give up. Tell me.”
He pressed his hands against my ribs and tucked me under his arm. ”A wonderful mystery,” he whispered, pinching my cheek between his thumb and pinkie like he`d done when I was a boy.
We buried Zolly next to my grandmother in a Bronx cemetery surrounded by a wilderness of empty warehouses and vacant lots. It was almost noon before we had arrived, a convoy of flat-bedded trailers bearing Army field artillery having slowed traffic down on the Hutchinson River Parkway to a crawl. It had snowed during the night and the rock salt crackled under our boots as we picked our way along the pathways to their plot. The misty air tingled with the bite of winter. Two gravediggers sat on the hood of a dump truck, leafing through a Penthouse. The interment lasted no time at all. Outlined in a circle against the tinted bronze light, the rabbi-an arthritis sufferer who glided across the snow-washed ground with metal sticks, as if he were cross-country skiing-led us in the mourner`s prayer, and then my father, with rime forming on his goatee and a blank expression on his pale, oval face, asked if anyone wanted to say anything. I felt dazed, my knees buckled slightly, and for a few seconds I wanted to yield to my anxiety and flee. To keep my balance I focused on the plaques and cut-stone tablets, their wind-bleached Hebrew letters like brittle bones, the women wrapped in furs and shawls, the men in black skullcaps and leather-palmed driving gloves, their overcoats ballooning behind them. Moving forward in slow plodding steps, delicately placing pebbles on the casket, the mourners were like figures in a snowy paperweight.
The following morning I watched the silent snowflakes settle against the skeletal trees. Defying the weather, a few of the branches were alive with buds. My face, reflected in the small, rain-streaked glass, seemed to float above the house. In the window, what appeared to be tears on my cheeks were merely beads of snow. I climbed stiffly out of bed and went across the darkened landing. I stood at the edge of Zolly`s room, staring at his bed. and saw my fingernail scratches of 35 years ago on the walnut headboard. I entered on tiptoe and peered into the walk-in closet; it smelled of talcum and moth balls. Dead flies were hanging in a spider web from the ceiling and paint was flaking off the walls. On the floor, beside his beach thongs and Weejuns, were some of Manya`s hatboxes, a copper samovar, a can of Butcher`s wax, four loose shoetrees, a beauty parlor hair dryer, a bundle of racetrack tout sheets and a stack of paint-by-number dinosaurs I`d done as a child. A pair of his false teeth floated in a glass of baking soda on a nightstand next to his bed. I stripped off my pajamas and stared at myself in the full-length mirror nailed to the back of the bedroom door. I looked fat and battered, with a maze of violet stretch marks across my thickened hips and belly, patches of psoriasis- like frost-on my elbows and knees. Zolly`s smudged fingerprints on the glass were like splintered fossils petrified in quartz.
I changed into one of Zolly`s long-sleeved white shirts, the collar stiff as bone, and found a paisley silk necktie and a pair of woolen argyle socks in the cedar bureau with the cut-glass knobs. From a shelf below his trousers and belts I took a pair of oxblood wing tips. Next came the suit, a vested blue one with narrow gray pinstripes and a missing button and a wide-brimmed felt hat. When I finished. I stared somberly at my reflection in the mirror and had the eerie sensation that I was two people. My pulse was racing so fast I had trouble focusing. I stood in the silver glow of the window and couldn`t shake the knowledge that Zolly`s life had been superior to mine-that he had made things happen, provided for a family, had seized his life somehow. The realization that what little I knew about the dinosaurs was more than I knew about my own family struck me like a permanent burden, and a wave of bitterness passed over my heart. I stood there for a long time, as still as the snow streaming blindly from the veiled translucent sky, and strained to hear myself make a sound like living breath flowing down a current of time-watchful, feeling as if something were just about to happen.
