The birth of the solar system, the flowering of the dinosaurs, the melting of the polar ice caps: haunting cosmic mysteries emerged from my grandfather Zolly`s mouth in a tone of grave wonderment. In the early fifties, when I was in the second grade, he`d tell me-sitting on a black leather club chair in his living room, puffing on a hand-rolled cigar, a cut-glass ashtray balanced in his lap-that the nighttime sky was sprinkled with diamonds. God`s diamonds. When I was in the fourth and fifth grade, a time when boys my age were busy building plastic Nautilus submarines and flying fortresses, Zolly was buying me dinosaur models and geological maps of the earth`s crust. If I had a heavy cold, he`d sit at the foot of my bed and spread Vick`s Vapo-Rub on my chest and nose. ”Remember, Lenny,” he`d tell me, his pale, green irises as small as buttons. ”The giant lizards are the blueprints of the past. They tell us who we are. Study them.”
Zolly also bought me books to read when I was in bed with the mumps or chicken pox. He had me memorize the names of dinosaurs and the periods in which they lived, then he`d grill me whenever he and my grandmother Manya came over on the weekend in the summer for a swim in the oil-slicked Long Island Sound and some shish kebab or broiled swordfish steaks. He`d bolt his supper and then quiz me on the Mesozoic Era or Jurassic Period. He`d even slip me a few bucks when my father wasn`t looking.
When I was six my grandparents sold their red brick house in Pelham Bay and moved into an ornate, rent-controlled building near University Heights, a few blocks from NYU and the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. It was a sunny top-floor apartment with parquet floors, a zinc stove, a clothes wringer in the plant-filled kitchen, and cases of seltzer bottles and celery tonic behind the dumbwaiter. The rooms were filled with dark Oriental rugs, lamps with flame-shaped bulbs, heavy mahogany sideboards and rose-colored tufted upholstery. The air in their apartment always smelled of simmering peaches and lemon oil.
Zolly liked to stand at the front of the first car when he took me by subway into Manhattan. In the summer-polio weather, he`d warn me, pointing at the smiling poster child pasted on the back of a city bus, the time to avoid movie theaters and playgrounds-we`d go to the Museum of Natural History, where we`d tour the domed marble halls of iron-plated reptiles and saber-toothed tiger skeletons. A cathedral of bones, he called it. I can remember him taking my picture with his old Polaroid Land Camera as I stood in the calcified footprint of a woolly mammoth. Before leaving he fired questions at me, and if I answered them all correctly we went to the gift shop where he bought me fossil puzzles and stegosaurus piggy-banks and pterodactyl mobiles. For lunch we went to the Horn & Hardart, or to a steamy dairy restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, where I always ordered latkes and charlotte russe and watched the darkly dressed old Jews inhaling their eggplant and borscht and noodle farfel at crowded tables.
It was my younger sister Delilah who phoned and told me that Zolly had died in his room while watching Hill Street Blues. I wondered aloud how he had felt the past week. ”He sounded so-so last Sunday morning,” I said dolefully, as if that illuminated something. I heard Delilah`s breath catch. I was suddenly lightheaded and felt a stabbing pain behind my eyes.
”Lenny,” she asked gently, ”are you still there?”
”Why didn`t anyone call me last night?”
”Daddy phoned from the funeral home but your line was busy. Things were hectic; it must`ve slipped his mind, you know?”
I nodded tentatively, as if she could see me. I knew this had been coming, but that never made anything easier. ”I`m thinking,” I finally said. ”Was Zolly alone?”
”I told you he was watching TV,” she said between coughs. She told me she had bronchitis. Her voice trailed away and I heard shouting in the background. My girlfriend Martha, curled naked and tanned in the water-bed beside me, sighed. Her brassiere dangled from a hanging pot of African violets. ”I`ll tell you something, Lenny,” Delilah said.
”Don`t-tell me later.” I heard my stomach churn.
”The blood circulation to his brain had recently gotten bad. They think he died from an aneurysm. Some days he thought he was Eddie Cantor, then he had a spell doing David Dubinsky. He`d think he was at a Sacco and Vanzetti rally in Herald Square. He started walking through the house in the middle of the night, looking for Manya.”
I pulled the quilt over Martha`s behind. Little gurgling noises were coming from her mouth. I could hear the traffic outside: the gears of snow plows and four-wheel drive Jeeps, the horns and chains of passing cars and school buses. Then Leakey, my Great Dane, started barking to be let out.
”How`s Dad doing?”
”The way you`d expect, I guess. But it was a bummer for Bernice,”
Delilah said. Bernice is our mother. ”She found Zolly in his La-Z-Boy recliner when she went in to give him his pills.”
The last time I saw Zolly was in La Guardia Airport. It was getting on toward midnight and he couldn`t stop yawning. My father was on his knees undoing Zolly`s boots. On our way into the terminal, Zolly had slipped off the curb and freezing slush had filled his socks. His clawlike feet were the color of mackerel. My father reached a hand up and swept the damp, stringy hair from Zolly`s broad forehead.
I massaged Zolly`s shoulders and teased, ”You`ll be a new man soon, Papa.”
He bowed beneath my hands. ”Don`t humor me, Benny.”
”It`s Lenny,” I said softly. ”I`m right here, behind you.”
He moved his head slowly from side to side. ”Where the hell were you?
Don`t hide from me next time.”
My father turned to watch a poodle-haired stewardess in knee-high boots run past. ”Hot stuff,” he said, rubbing his temples as if he had a headache. ”Everyone`s in a big rush,” I said.
”Lenny, you`ve got quite a pot on you. Would it hurt you to drop a few pounds? You need a heart condition at forty?”
I touched my belly. ”I have a lazy metabolism,” I said.
He frowned. ”Last year you said you were big-boned.” I crouched down and brushed mud off the cuffs of Zolly`s corduroy slacks, and he smiled, holding my hand in his for a moment. There were thin violet lines along his wrist, and his watery eyes burned with illness and decay. A black comb was sticking out of the breast pocket of his shirt. His gaze rested on my briefcase at his feet and he mouthed my name impressed into the burnished leather: ”Leonard A. March.”
My father squinted into the glare of a recessed light and gestured with his hands for me to say something. ”Lenny, talk to him for God`s sake.”
I touched Zolly`s thigh. ”Are your legs cold, Papa?”
He tilted his big head sideways and stroked his jaw.
Spittle gleamed at the corners of his mouth. ”I can`t tell anymore. My circulation is for the birds. Your father will explain how I sit in my pee since I can`t feel the wetness. I reminded myself last night that I`m going to give you a bit of money.”
My father gripped my shoulder. ”He wouldn`t be so sick if your grandmother had lived.” He squeezed the withered rabbit`s-foot keyring in his free hand. ”It`s all been downhill since. The guy used to be a damn powerhouse. Remember how he could swim in the ocean? Promise to shoot me if I get like this.”
When I was growing up, Zolly taught me how to swim in the surf at Orchard Beach. My father has sepia photographs of Zolly that I`d thumbed through as a boy which show him riding the waves at Far Rockaway in the middle of January, his glossy black hair piled high on his head, alive in the fierce wind. Shmendricks swim in pools, he always told me; a mensh swims in the ocean. In the restroom, with his bathing trunks dropped to his ankles, he would clean the toilet seat with a single sheet of tissue paper. When I asked-as I always did-why he didn`t tear off more paper, he sighed like a man falling into a deep sleep and told me he was saving the city money. ”I hate waste,” he`d say in a raw, Slavic accent. At his bakery he copied phone orders with pencils sharpened down to their pink erasers.
Zolly looked asleep, his head dropped to his chest. I checked the time on a digital clock suspended by wires above a treadmill and rowing machine on a revolving pedestal. A chinless man with soaking red hair and blue crescent earrings held out a folded sheet of paper and asked me for some spare change. It was a Jews for Jesus leaflet. I handed him a buck in dimes and quarters and he gave me the peace sign.
”Even at this hour,” my father said irritably, throwing his topcoat over his arm, ”the panhandlers are earning a living.”
”Why don`t you drive Zolly home and hit the sack? He looks exhausted and this delay`ll probably take most of the night. I`ve got plenty of stuff to read.”
He lifted the brim of his felt hat slightly and leaned close enough for me to smell cigar smoke on his breath. ”Stay here,” he said directly into my ear, and left to see if my plane was still grounded in Pittsburgh due to the weather.
Zolly stared at the baggage carousel and tapped his cane against the chrome base of a standing ashtray. It struck me that everything about him had dwindled. His once big hands were now starlike and matted with wiry gray hairs, and he had trouble catching his breath after walking short distances. Bending, my father told me, put a strain on his heart. A slim spare woman with auburn curls sat down across from us and began humming ”Memories” with her eyes closed. We could see the tops of her stockings when she crossed her legs. Zolly winked at her.
He clutched my wrist. ”Where`ve you been hiding? I don`t care for being around strangers.”
”I haven`t gone anywhere, Papa.” I said. ”I`m right here.” I stooped beside him and tied his shoelaces.
”And my Benny?”
”He went to check on my flight.”
”Again?” His breath smelled like boiled milk.
”Again.”
His face sagged. ”With Benny everything`s an emergency. Did you have words?”
”He lives to worry, Papa.” I kissed the top of his head. His cottony hair had thinned into the shape of a halo. ”Don`t give me a hard time,” I said. running my fingers over his hand.
”I`m not his responsibility,” he said. His croupy breathing came in high sharp wheezes.
With his heels drawn against each other, the taps on his wet saddle shoes scraped the concrete floor. Since Manya died nine years ago he hardly left the house. They were on a cruise in the Bahamas-a sixtieth anniversary gift from their children-when Manya had a stroke. Zolly had been out of their stateroom since early morning, sunning himself and playing dominoes and three-card monte. He found Manya in bed-when he went in to get her for lunch-on top of the chenille bedspread, her lips having already turned blue. She`d been reading an Agatha Christie mystery, her finger poised to turn the page. She was air-lifted by helicopter to a hospital in Nassau, then Zolly had insisted on hiring a nurse and chartering an executive Learjet and having her flown to Kennedy. Manya was driven by private ambulance to Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, where she died from renal failure five days later. We buried her in an old cemetery near Crotona Park, in a family plot Zolly had purchased the day before they were married, and after the funeral he sat on a mourner`s stool in my parents` house and stared out the kitchen window. He spoke to no one.
I remember coming into the kitchen a few days after the funeral and asking him if he wanted company. He looked up at me and smiled sadly. His face was disbelieving and mottled and his liquid eyes were wreathed with twisting hairs. I told him to eat something and I put water on to boil. I gave him a tangerine and watched him peel the rind in one long coil when his tea was ready he stirred two teaspoonfuls of sugar into his glass and tipped the tea into a saucer, sipping it through a lump of sugar wedged between his crooked yellow teeth.
He traced the marbled grain of the wood in the maple breakfast table with his finger, and I remembered how he would stick that same finger inside my shirt collar and tickle my neck. The lines in his hands were like badly crumpled paper. When I turned to leave he reached for me. ”It`s all right if want you to stay, Lenny,” he said. ”I like having you here.”
I poured myself a glass of tea and sat down across from him. His eyes were restless in their milky, purple-veined sockets, and his fists were clenched. In profile, with his high, pointy cheekbones and his nose curled like a snail, he looked like I knew I would some day. People had always said our faces were exactly alike, Sephardic-looking, troubled. Both Zolly and my father had ears like satellite dishes and palms as wide as saucers. When I was a child I used to imagine that I could sleep in their hands. They were both six-two and swaybacked from years of braiding dough into challah and pumpernickel. The three of us had leathery complexions etched with fine, sword-shaped fissures, coarse brown hair, and reddish-brown quill beards that stirred in a stiff breeze. The three Freuds, my ex called us.
I cut him a slice from an Entenmann`s prune babka and we talked about the family. Zolly rarely reminisced about his own childhood and when he did he sounded angry. His father, a dairyman from a market town not far from Budapest, had died from rabies when Zolly was ten years old and he said he couldn`t remember much about him, except he hardly ever spoke to him. ”He didn`t let me touch him, Lenny,” Zolly said. ”Kissing was for ninnies and mama`s boys. I hated him for that and I still do. Can you imagine? All I`ve got left of him is the sound of his voice when he was hitting me with his strap. Nothing else.”
I felt suddenly bleak then-reminded of all the misunderstandings I`d had with my father, and the week-long silence which always ended in dubious truces orchestrated by Zolly, who told me to take back whatever I`d said if I didn`t want to suffer from a bad conscience later on, when I was a man.
He rolled the band of his Longines wristwatch around his hand. I could almost hear him thinking about her. ”Manya wouldn`t put up with your not eating and moping around,” I said.
