French Lessons: A Memoir (4 page)

My first fishing pole was made of bamboo and it had a red
and white bobber to weigh the hook down. I sat on the
dock with my father, my feet dangling in the water. I had my
bamboo fishing pole; he had a rod and reel. My father was
showing me how to cast his rod out on the water and reel it
back in right away, feeling for the tug of the small crappie or
the pike. Again and again, whether you get anything or not
you fling it out there. You can just see the flies up on the surface of the water where it hits, when it's dark. We didn't talk
much that evening, it was the perfect quiet time before the
crickets get into full voice. I hardly noticed him slipping
away, "not feeling great, going into the house for a drink of
water," is what he said. I stayed on the dock another hour,
fiddling with the fishing pole. I went back in the house
through the back door. My brother was sitting on a chair
looking out at the lake, pretending to read a book. I said to
my brother, "Where are Mom and Dad?" (the last time I said
"Mom and Dad" in the present tense).

"They went to the hospital for a checkup."

"Oh."

He was in one of those moods where I wouldn't get any
more information out of him, so I went up to bed in my
room off the sleeping porch. I didn't believe him, though.
Why would they go for a checkup at night?

In the middle of the night, I heard my mother come into
my room. She sat on the side of my bed and nudged me in stead of going into the sleeping porch. I rubbed my eyes
and looked up at her. She looked like a shadow of herself
because of the way the moonlight came in through my window. She said, "Your father is dead."

I went downstairs with her. Other grownups were there.
They were sitting in the official living room, not the room
facing the lake where we usually sat. They were wide awake,
even though it was the middle of the night. My mother
talked. She told them each remark my father had made that
day about how he was feeling. She had discovered a note in
his top drawer, among the ties, telling him how to cut down
on his cigarettes. He hadn't shown any signs of quitting. He
hadn't said a thing about it. She curled up in the chaise
lounge by the piano under one of my grandmother's crocheted afghans. They talked a long time, going over the details of his last week, over and over. He shouldn't have
moved that pile of wood onto the neighbor's yard. He
wasn't in any shape. By the time he got to the hospital he was
gone. A massive coronary. There was nothing Reuben could
do for him. How awful for Reuben.

When I went back up to sleep I slept soundly. I had this
dream: the word "New York" had become "Yew Nork." I
was going to Yew Nork, and I was laughing at my joke. There
was a red balloon in the dream too. When I woke up again,
the sun was coming in through the windows, a perfect June
day.

It is awful to learn about death in the middle of the night.
Because when you wake up in the morning the sun is out
and you are quite sure it couldn't have happened. You have
to realize it all over again. That's how it was, for me.

Levine Blue was already at the house when I woke up. She
came up to my room to see how I was doing. I told her my dream. "It's gonna be all right, girl," she said, looking at me.
"I guess I won't have to wash all these ashtrays anymore."
She was holding a cut crystal ashtray the shape of a top hat in
one hand, and rubbing the tobacco stain off the bottom
with a dish towel.

I could hear the extra voices downstairs. Cars came up the
gravel driveway and parked in a circle all around it. The
screen door opened and shut. By the time I got downstairs,
people were standing up because there weren't enough
chairs. People were huddled around my mother, still in her
chaise. A neighbor had made some cookies in the shape of
the letters S and K, my father's initials, and my sister and
brother and I made jokes about the cookies. My neck hurt
from looking up at all the people looking down at me.

The next morning, the morning of my father's funeral,
was my eighth birthday. I wanted to wear black, but my
mother said that I was too young to wear black so I wore my
light blue dress with the petticoat. "You don't need a black
dress, you're a little girl!" The sun came in through my bedroom window and made the dress look even lighter than it
was.

My mother and sister and brother and I drove to the military cemetery in the back of a big black car that wasn't ours.
We sat on folding chairs in front of the grave. Everybody else
had to stand. My chair squeaked every time I moved. I concentrated on keeping my chair from squeaking and afterwards I made jokes about it. Finally some soldiers folded
the flag in the shape of a triangle and gave it to my mother.
She wouldn't let them give the ten gun salute because she
didn't like guns; she had told us about that before.

We drove home. The wife of my father's law partner
whom I barely knew brought a birthday cake to the house after the funeral. It had white frosting, frosting curlicues, my
name, and the number "8" in the middle in silver balls. The
adults whispered to each other about what to do and then
they sang me Happy Birthday. I didn't know what to do, I
didn't want the song. I put my head down so I wouldn't
have to see any of them singing to me. Even though I wasn't
looking, I could feel their smiles on me, fake smiles. I
crossed one leg over the other and squirmed. When the
singing stopped I opened some presents, a white sweater
with shiny beads on it from the wife of my father's partner,
and a set of watercolors. The watercolor set was my chance
to get away. "Thank you very much may I go out now?"

"Yes dear."

A woman I had never seen before called me "dear."

I went out on the dock again, where my father and I were
together before he died. I took my watercolor set with me, a
neat white box with the Swiss mountain on the lid. First I
tried to paint the lake and the trees across the lake, but I
couldn't get it to look right, so I changed the trees into
mountains like on the watercolor box. I thought mountains
would be easier. The green and the brown paint ran together until the whole thing was a mess. When I crumpled
the paper in my hand it was soggy from too much paint.

My father had been gone for three weeks. I was lying in
my bed, looking straight up at the ceiling, listening to the
noises downstairs. My mother was with house guests who
had arrived after the funeral. The door to the sleeping porch
was closed. My mother came upstairs, walked through my
room, and opened the door between her room and mine.
She shut it, hard, a split second later. I could hear her suck
her breath in, fast. "Oh my god!"

The light was on in the sleeping porch. I got up, stood
next to her, lifted the curtain, pressed my nose against the
glass pane. For a minute I couldn't tell what I was seeing.
Black darts were zooming in every conceivable bat pattern
across the room. There were so many bats, moving so fast, it
looked like they were making wind.

"Kids, kids, there are bats everywhere!"

It was hopeless. My father was gone, there was no one to
go after the bats with tennis rackets and flush them down
the toilet. Besides, even if he had been around, we now had
too many bats for one man to kill. It was beyond anything
my father could have helped with.

We all slept downstairs that night, my mother, us kids, the
house guests. The exterminator who came to the house the
next day found bats hanging from the top of my parents'
sleeping porch curtains in thick bunches. He used a chemical to kill them. He told us that entire nests of bats must have
hatched in the eaves over the sleeping porch. Holes in the
window and eaves construction had allowed them in but
not out. They were babies, he added. There was really nowhere for them to go after they hatched except the sleeping
porch. They couldn't get out into the night sky.

One bat was enterprising enough to escape the chemical
attack and make its way from the sleeping porch to the other
end of the upstairs hall and into a closet in my brother's
room. My brother was spending so much time in his room
with the door closed since my father died that I couldn't figure out how the bat had gotten in there, but it had. It
jumped out at my brother when he went into his closet to
get a pair of shoes.

I tried to be ready to look a bat in the eye that summer,
every time I opened a door, or even a drawer. I laid my head on the pillow. I heard crickets, water lapping up on the
shore, and the whoosh of bat wings in my head.

After my father died, there were a few more summers on
Wildhurst Road; I can't remember them. The eaves on the
house were thoroughly repaired to prevent the comings
and goings of bats. My mother rented the house for several
years, then sold it.

Loss

I walk into my mother's closet. It is full of bright colors
and delicate patterns. There is a faint odor of talcum power
in the air. Clothes are smashed together; the patterns of a
black lace nightgown stand out against a solid blue silk dress.
These are the fabrics of a life my mother has with my father
when she is not wearing her car coat or her garden smock or
her plaid fishing shirt. I recognize the dress from a photograph on my parents' dresser. In the photograph, my
mother and father stand on a dance floor, poised for a fox
trot. At age fifty, the outlines of my father's face have started
to spread; his hair has thinned. He is looking at the camera
with a grim smile set on a closed mouth. He must not like
dancing. My mother, half a head shorter than he, is wearing
the silk dress and a string of pearls that sets off her black
hair. Her smile is rushed. She has her eye on someone to the
right of the camera; she's waiting for the picture to be taken
so she can continue a conversation.

I reach up to touch her clothes. I feel the crinkles of the
lace. I run my cheek, which only comes up as high as the
skirt, over the rough silk fabric.

I walk into the same closet three years later. It is empty, ex cept for a zipped plastic bag smelling of moth balls. There is
not a hanger in sight. I breathe in the ammonia from the
moth balls. There is dust on the wood floor. My mother has
moved her clothes downstairs to a new bedroom where the
den used to be.

My sister is going away to college in two weeks. She and
my mother let me come along when they go shopping at
Peck and Peck for my sister's college wardrobe. My sister
tries on a worsted wool suit in different shades of brown
and yellow. I stand behind her in the dressing room; I watch
her put on her college outfits; I watch her college face in the
mirror. A neighbor has given her a bottle of perfume for a
going-away present: "L'air du temps" by Nina Ricci. She even
smells different.

My grandmother is at our house for dinner. My mother
starts to cry, so quietly I can't tell except for a tear or two that
shows on her face. She excuses herself from the table. "Your
mother has an infected finger, you know," my grandmother
explains. "I know, Nanny." I have seen my mother's hands,
formerly soft and smooth to the touch, looking bony, with a
gauze dressing and bandage on one finger. I walk into my
mother's downstairs bedroom to say good night. She isn't
under the covers. She is lying on top of the bedspread,
wrapped in an afghan, her head on the pillow, her eyes
closed. I don't wake her. I try to sleep in my room on the
second floor. "She'll be dead in the morning, when I wake
up my mother will be dead and I'll be an orphan." I rehearse
my fear.

When I am upstairs, alone, I walk from room to room,
looking in all the closets. I play a game to see how many
hints of each person remain in the room they vacated. Every
room in the house has changed. I've moved into my sister's room. My brother has moved to the two rooms behind the
back stair case where I used to sleep. My mother has moved
to the den downstairs. The television room has moved to
the bedroom upstairs, where my brother's room used to be.
I walk into the bathroom that is now all mine and remember
the time my sister and her friend locked themselves in there
because they didn't want my brother and me bothering
them. I walk in my parents' old room and smell the mothballs in the closet. I walk up to the attic and open the trap
door where the attic fan vents onto the second floor landing. I look down at the second floor from on high. No one
sees me.

I take my trolls, three little plastic monsters with swatches
of red hair, and line them up on the windowsill with props.
I take Instamatic pictures of them so when the pictures get
developed it looks like they are human size and live in the
real world.

My mother got rid of my father's clothes so efficiently that
I didn't know they were gone until I snooped around upstairs. She didn't get rid of his books, though. Books on Stalin and Hitler and Truman and Roosevelt, all the volumes of
the Nuremberg trials still lined his study. My father was a
lawyer at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials where they punished Nazi war criminals. He was connected to a world
more significant than ours, to important men in suits and
uniforms, to good and evil itself.

I asked my mother what happened to people after they
died. "Jews do not believe in an afterlife. We believe that
people live on through their achievements." That year in
school, third grade, I racked up sixty book reports.

My mother kept the flag from my father's funeral on the top shelf of the closet in her new bedroom downstairs. Every week or so, if no one was looking, I opened the closet
door to see if the flag was still there or if she'd given it away.

My mother gave each of us a copy of the letters my father
had written to her from Nuremberg. She had them typed
onto onionskin paper and bound in a green folder. There
was a picture of my father in the folder, wearing a uniform.
There was an engraving of the city of Nuremberg before it
was bombed. There was a folding chart of the Nazi chain of
command. In the letters, my father told what he was eating
and drinking, what plays he was seeing, what arrangements
he was making to come home to my mother. My mother
was in Chevy Chase with their first child, my sister. My father
wanted to know how the baby's formula was working, were
her bowel movements normal, was she sleeping through
the night. Preparations for the most important trial since the
trial of Jesus Christ were a snafu. He would talk to Robert
Jackson as soon as the war of aggression section was written
up. He wanted to come home to his daughter.