A Private Sorcery (45 page)

The wish indulged is the dream. The dream enacted is the crime. All the times we don't see because what we see is not what we want.

I stare at the paper. What was it Merckin had said in those last sessions before I jumped ship? His voice from behind the couch, slow and deliberate, as though he were talking to someone in a state of shock: “You did not try to kill Maria. Maria tried to kill herself. It was your lust for her that made you think you were the one slicing her wrists.”

I didn't laugh, did I? I didn't taunt, No job-y, no couch-y, right, Doc? “Guilt that fed on guilt you'd felt about earlier fantasized crimes. The revenge you wished you could take on your Uncle Jack for fucking your mother.”

He did not fuck my mother.

“Dubinsky. You are playing the idiot. You know we are not talking facts in this room.”

Only Merckin never called me Dubinsky. And Merckin would never have said fuck.

I wait a week to mail this to you. By then, I've expanded the diagram to include my own oedipal and infanticidal crimes. I scratch out these sections and add a long postscript begging your forgiveness for my indulgence in this all.

Y
OUR MOTHER COMBS
through guidebooks. She charts our itinerary. Three days in Milan. The train to Venice. Six days in Venice. A car to drive to the Amalfi coast. A weekend in Portofino. Five days in the Tuscan hills. A week in Florence. Battling a cold, I lie on the couch with a blanket pulled over my chest while she reads aloud passages about twelfth-century walled villages and palazzi converted to hotels. I am happy to let her make the decisions, grateful that my cold provides a shield for this feeling of things rapidly decompressing, this sense of the pressure suddenly released.

I alternate between excitement about what lies ahead and a desperation to do anything—sleep, eat, drink—so as not to think. Waiting for your response, I am unable to touch my book. The putrefied, morbid agenda of the historian hidden behind the dictum to examine the past lest we otherwise repeat it: set the bones in death that were left broken in life.

As a youth, when I was anxious, before certain important exams, before certain difficult encounters, I would close my eyes and wait until I saw a third eye, a pale shimmering blue light. Seeing the blue, I would have the sensation of having found my deepest self, of being bathed in a cool protective calm. Now, my skin burns and everything is colored hot hues. Oranges, yellows, reds.

When you write back, it is only a few hurried lines. I have to remind myself that you are not a man of leisure. That by day you make shelving brackets, that by night you wear foam earplugs.

A brilliant case analysis, dear Father. But aren't you committing a kind of genetic fallacy? The fact that there are parallels between Mitch and Maria does not mean you caused me to aid some two-bit hoodlums.

P.S. I should be more ceremonious about telling you this, but we seem to be cutting to the chase on all matters here. Rena has asked me to father her child. I have decided to do it. Perhaps, after all, you will be a grandfather.

To my surprise, I am not really surprised. Rather, I am anxious,
afraid that any intrusion on my part will cause one or the other of you to change your mind. It takes every ounce of self-control to wait until Thanksgiving day to call Rena. We make small talk for a few minutes. Then, without segue, she announces that you have begun your conjugal visits. Conjugal. Conjugate. A word you can push back and forth like the disk on a Catskills shuffleboard court.

“And the divorce?” I say it so hesitantly, so softly, that for a moment I think she hasn't heard me.

“Morton's doing the paperwork. We'll file after I get pregnant. If I get pregnant.”

I touch wood. Three times.

We don't talk again until New Year's, when I call again. She says nothing about your visits. Instead, we speak of the trip to Italy your mother and I will make in March. At the end of our call, she says, “Don't even think about Saul while you're gone.”

Afterwards, I don't know if she was telling me that I'm not to call her until I get back or that she'll watch over you or you don't need watching over or I should think only of Klara or I should leave the two of you alone.

I
TELL YOUR MOTHER
about Rena's plan the night before we leave. She crosses herself—something I've not seen my High Anglican wife do before. She smiles seeing me watch her, then takes my hand.

For me, Italy is an endless mother and child, a chamber of funhouse mirrors for Mary and the baby Jesus. Mary lush as fruit, the baby plump as a sausage. Mary with tilted head and tragic eyes, the baby with a golden halo overhead. Your mother amazes me with her energy. Every morning over breakfast, she lays out the day's itinerary. In Venice, walks through the maze of medieval streets and hidden courtyards. The vaporetto to Murano, Burano and a meal on Torcello. A footbridge across the Canareggio to find, my one request, the Ghetto Vecchio, where for half a millennium Jewish life has survived.

In Florence, I get the flu and lie feverish on a feather bed, the windows to our room flung open onto the garden so I can smell the early
flowering vines, while your intrepid mother sets off on her own. She comes back with postcards from the Uffizi and a book about Michelan-gelo for you. She shows me her flea market purchases: a cashmere sweater for Marc, a leather satchel for Susan, a silk scarf for Rena, a packet of notepaper for Mrs. Smiley. A lace tablecloth, beeswax candles, a leaded glass picture frame for us. Buried at the bottom of her bag, a yellow baby's bonnet.

W
HEN WE GET HOME
, there's a letter from you. The baby is due in September.

Your mother counts the months on her fingers. “Four,” she announces. “She's four months pregnant.” At night, we talk about our fear of telling Marc and Susan with their too ardent advocacy of their
lifestyle.

I spend a day in the stacks at the Columbia library and then meet Rena for an early dinner before she begins work. Except for a new high color to her cheeks and the slightest thickening of her middle, the pregnancy is still imperceptible. She drinks a glass of milk and eats a spinach salad. She tells me that her mother will come for the first two weeks after the baby is born. How she will have to return after twelve weeks to her night word-processing job if she is to keep her excellent health insurance.

“Who'll watch the baby?” I ask.

“I'll have to find a sitter.” An anxious look passes over her face and, I imagine, over mine, too, as I wonder who she'll be able to find for the hours she works and how she'll afford it all.

On the train home, it occurs to me that I could do it—watch the baby. By the time the train pulls into my station, the idea has become a plan: I'll stay with Rena Monday nights through Saturday mornings so that I can take care of the baby while she's at work.

I cannot sleep. Tossing and turning, I interrogate myself about my motivations. By four, I'm longing for Merckin who compared to my own accusations would have been a lamb: I'm trying to castrate you, I'm trying to destroy what's happening with your mother.

I skip my morning work session and join your mother at the kitchen table. She lowers the paper. Too far gone to be politic, I blurt out my
proposal.

Your mother swallows. She touches her neck, then folds her hands. “Now that we have this …”

“I'll be home Saturday morning to Monday night. Nearly half the week.”

She inhales deeply, releasing the air through her nose.

“It's just for a year, until Saul gets out.” I take her hands in mine. “It's not about you, Klara,” I say, realizing only now that this is the truth. “It's about doing for Saul what he cannot do for himself.”

Slowly, your mother nods. I don't even know if she knows she is nodding.

“Perhaps I could come in for a day each week to give you and Rena a break.” Her voice buckles on the last word.

Now my eyes fill. “Of course, dear. Of course.”

S
USAN, RISING TO HER
best self, insists on throwing a baby shower, which your mother insists we have at our house. Your mother is terribly excited about it. For a week, she dusts baseboards, irons napkins, arranges chairs. Long conversations ensue between Susan and her regarding the menu and your mother's decision, at the eleventh hour, to bake the cake herself.

Rena wears a pale green dress with a white collar. Her hair falls in curls around her newly rounded face. For the first time, I feel the baby's presence: asleep in the mound under her dress. Susan places her hands on Rena's hips and moves her to an armchair surrounded by pastel packages with rattles and tiny stuffed animals attached to the bows. Rena coos over the baby blankets from her Aunt Betty, the hooded towels from my sister Rose, the Mother Goose clock sent by Lil. Ceremoniously, the larger items are paraded before her. A car seat from Ruth and Maggie. A high chair from her former bosses, Muskowitz and Kerrigan. A carriage from Marc and Susan. From your mother and me, a check to buy the nursery furniture.

Wiping her eyes, Rena looks up at us all. Ruth and Maggie move to her side. Your mother shuffles out to get a tissue. Rena talks about the
way so many people have helped her over the years. Rebecca. Ruth and Maggie. “And now Leonard,” she pauses, then catches herself, remembering, I presume, your mother's promise of weekly visits, “and Klara, who will come to watch the baby after I go back to work.”

Your mother beams. Backlit from the open window, her silver hair shines. She touches Rena's arm. “Come, let's have the cake.”

W
HEN
R
ENA GOES
into labor, she calls us and we call you. Ruth and Maggie take her to the hospital, stay with her through the labor and delivery. It's a boy. Seven pounds, nine ounces: Bernardo Dubinsky Peretti.

Your mother and I go to see Bernie the next day. I cradle him in my arms, examine the ten little fingers, the tiny nails, the surprisingly long toes. He has red hair and fair skin. My sister Eunice's complexion. He opens his watery blue eyes and they focus on something on my face—perhaps the circles of my nostrils, perhaps the line between my lips.

“Grandpa,” Rena whispers to the baby. “This is your grandpa.”

She smiles at me with her huge thyroidic eyes and I think of her weeping in La Posada de las Madres the night after we were shown the body and our sitting together across from Charlie Green when he announced that I would have to put up the house to get the bail money and the first time we met in the Chinese restaurant near your old apartment.

“Remember,” she says, “how you told me that our personal histories begin with our grandparents' memories?” Oddly, I am not surprised that her thoughts, too, have drifted to our first meeting. We used to call it the intermingling of the unconscious—something that always struck me as a scientized label for magic. “For Bernie, that's you.”

My grandson slips back into sleep. I lean down and kiss his forehead, the sweet infant smell. My mother and her immigrant spunk. My father and his noble politics. My sisters and their adoration of me as their little brother. My Uncle Jack, who would have been happier somewhere lower on the animal chain than owning a
shmatte
factory. Merckin. Klara's father. Maria. All of this, Bernie, I will tell to you.

B
Y THE MIDDLE
of Rena's second week back at work, we've fallen into a pattern. Because of her night hours, I mark the beginning of each day with dinner. We eat together while Bernie has his early evening nap. Afterwards, I do the dishes and Rena breast-feeds the baby before leaving for work. He stays alert for an hour or so and then we begin to prepare for bed in the living room, which is now Bernie's room. At ten I give him a bottle and we sleep until three, when he awakens like clockwork for another bottle. He then usually sleeps through until Rena returns at seven, when he nurses again. She bathes and dresses him while I shower and make preparations for the day. By nine-thirty he's ready for his morning nap and she goes into her room to sleep. When he wakes, I take him in to nurse and then bring him with me so she can sleep for a few more hours. She gets up by four, after which I head out alone for a walk and the day's errands.

Since tomorrow is Rena's birthday and the day your mother visits, I stop first at a bakery to order a cake. Ruth and Maggie have called to say they'll bring prawns and a salad. Your mother has promised to bring candles and the presents: two pairs of nursing pajamas and a gold locket that belonged to her grandmother for which she's had a miniature photograph of Bernie made.

Leaving the bakery, I walk north to Riverside Church. Inside, I take the elevator up to the bell tower and climb the three hundred steps past the enormous iron bells of the carillon to the observation platform, where I can see all the way to Connecticut. All the way, I like to think, to you.

A crystalline day, the river is the rippled blue of an eye. The sun hovers above the horizon, preparing for a glorious descent. Last night, giving Bernie his bottle, it occurred to me that you are the one who knows everything. About myself, I have told you everything of import. Were I to die tomorrow, I would feel that you know what you need to understand me and therefore yourself. Rena, I would wager anything, would say the same. That is why she was so devastated by your arrest: not simply because of the violence it did to her life, not even because of the way you brushed lips with danger, but rather the way you damaged
yourself as her touchstone—one of the few people she had chosen to know her. In a way, I feel sadder for you than for her; she will either learn to rely more deeply on herself or find someone else. It is you who will have to live with having disappointed her. It is a hard cross to bear: that I tell you from experience.

Still, my son, you are the one who knows—the true historian—and because I believe that when you are freed next year, you will go on to be a fine doctor (I feel certain that you will make this happen) and a fine father (Rena told me how Bernie let you hold him right off, how you rocked him back and forth so that he fell asleep in your arms), my grief at your plight has begun to dissolve into my faith in you.