Not Me (27 page)

It was with great trepidation that I stepped out of the car.

People were streaming by me. They were mostly old people, groups of women, couples, a few men by themselves. They moved slowly, as old people do, but with expectation, as if something great were about to happen to them. Interspersed among them were a few younger families, the women holding their daughters’ hands, the men their sons’. They marched across the asphalt as if drawn by some call, a sound I could not hear. Even in the open air I could smell the mixed multitude of perfumes and colognes rising like an offering of incense, sweet and pungent, familiar and suffocating. They laughed and chatted, gesticulated broadly, stopped occasionally to tie a shoe or make sure they had their eyeglasses, then rejoined the stream as easily as water rejoins water.

I stood behind my open car door and watched them. In my right hand was my father’s tallis bag. In my breast pocket his little prayer book.

I had spent the rest of that morning signing papers. Not many really. Dad had long ago made all his own arrangements, paid for everything, and left complete instructions about the funeral, including the plain pine coffin, the small graveside ceremony, and no viewing. He was to be interred next to Mom. He even preordered a stone. The thought of them sweltering forever beneath the relentless Florida sun made me uneasy, and I thought briefly about taking them back with me to California or returning them to New Jersey and burying them next to poor Karen. I was quite certain I didn’t want to come back here again, and I thought, when will I ever visit them? But then again, when did I ever visit Karen? The answer was never. I had never visited Karen. Ever. Not once.

I now knew that I would have to do that. I would have to look her grave in the face, so to speak. It was a sobering thought.

All this occurred to me as I was sitting there filling out those papers. I also realized that I had never in my life been to a funeral. Yes. I had not been to Karen’s funeral. That had proved impossible for me. And I had not been to my mother’s funeral either, though I was less certain why.

I had always told myself that I didn’t go to Karen’s because I was taking final exams—as if you couldn’t get your exams delayed if your sister just died—but that is exactly what I had been telling myself for years, and that’s even how I actually remembered it—pounding out those exams, tears flowing from my eyes. But there were no exams that day or even that week. I had been hiding in my dorm room, sleeping. I slept for several days, maybe longer. I roused myself only to stumble to the bathroom or to take a drink of water or stuff some Cheerios in my mouth. Then I’d fall back into a stupor. When my mother died, it was the same. Only that time, I was on the road and I told my father I couldn’t break my engagements, they’d sue me. But I did break my engagements, and stayed in my motel room watching television and drinking beer and tequila and ordering in pizza and Chinese food, until Ella, on her way back from the funeral, found me and dragged me home. I also recalled that when I told my father that I would not be coming to Mom’s funeral, he did not even berate me. Maybe he despised me then, or maybe he pitied me, or maybe he just loved me.

I remembered all this while I was signing papers and watching the morticians slide my father’s body onto their gurney. They lifted him together with the sheet and slid him off. He hit the gurney like a bag of cement, banging his head on the stainless steel frame. I winced. He, of course, did not.

I watched them wheel him out. At least they had not put him in a body bag. They had a special exit in the rear, to keep him out of sight of the other patients. It was in the dark space, at the end of the hall. I thought that was a good idea. So they quietly wheeled him away and when they reached the end of the hall, I understood it was the last time I would see him. I couldn’t help myself. I waved good-bye.

For all that I had learned, with all my clues and evidence, all my questions and reading, I still was certain of very little. I would never know with absolute certainty if the iconography of my youth—those six blue-black numbers on my father’s arm—had been burned into his skin by torturers, or cut into it by his own tortured hand—but I did know this: those numbers were the very equation of our lives, yet they added up to nothing, explained nothing, and never would, and now their mystery had doubled, tripled, quadrupled, expanded in an exponential curve out into infinite space, where they would hover over every deed and every thought and every step I would ever take.

I signed the papers they put in front of me. I nodded when the morticians told me what my father had decided upon. I shook my head when they asked me if I wanted to change anything, if I wanted a nicer casket, or a viewing, or a ceremony inside their beautiful air-conditioned chapel. They told me they would deliver the little benches for sitting shivah, and the laminated cards with the prayers on them, and they suggested a good caterer I might call, and they handed me a little box filled with funeral announcements that I could fill out “when I was feeling a little better,” and a glossy how-to kit to help me through this troubled time (how to write an obituary, how to tell family and friends, how to contact a rabbi of one’s preferred denomination), and finally they told me that the burial could not happen till after Yom Kippur, for religious reasons, but not to worry because it would still be within three days of his passing, as they put it, so it would be kosher. Then they shook my hand and went away. I looked at the hospice nurse who had been called in earlier in the day. She smiled sympathetically and told me it was time to go home.

I passed Nurse Clara at her station. I knew it would also be the last time I would ever see her. That struck me as somehow poignant.

Suddenly she hugged me.

“You be good, now!” she said.

Driving down the same roads my father used to drive, in the same car, sitting in the same overpadded seat, listening to the same stupid radio station—he always wanted big band, I always changed it to classical—I found myself slinking down as low as I could so my head was barely visible above his fuzzy-covered steering wheel. I wanted to know what it felt like to be him, but all I noticed was that I couldn’t see over the steering wheel.

I pulled into a gas station and threw away the hypo. Actually I squeezed it out into the toilet, and bent the needle till it snapped. Walking back to the car, I felt that familiar heaviness against my chest—his journal in my breast pocket, the final volume that I had finished reading just moments before he died. The story had abruptly ended with the words “My name is Heshel Rosenheim.” No mention of how he got to America, how he met my mother, how his past tied to my past. If he had just connected his story to my story, to the world I had known, to my mother, my sister, me, the house in New Jersey, the wallpaper store, anything—I might have been able to make more sense of it. I might have been able to break through the
secret
—

With a sigh, I tossed it onto the car seat.

Just then, a bit of yellow paper, tightly folded and neatly creased, slipped out from between its pages. It must have been stuck to the back cover, and the force of my throw dislodged it. Stained with little spots of mold, and brittle as old newspaper, bits of it fell off in my hand as I unfolded it. I was surprised to see it was in English, written hastily, and with an unsteady hand, as if the police were about to knock down the door.

My Darling Dear Michael,

It is not likely you will see these notebooks while I am living. Only if I should be suddenly crazy, or if someone else gets hold of them, or if for some reason you really need to see them, if they will somehow help you at a desperate hour in your own life, then maybe.

The man in this story could not erase the past. He did not want to erase it. He did not want to forget it. How could he forget it? He wanted merely to transform the past into something else. He wanted to turn the shadow into light. He wanted to believe that some part of him was still good and life-giving. He did not ask to be forgiven, nor did he seek punishment. He sought redemption.

The man in this story made a choice. He chose, as we Jews love to say, Life.

God might continue to torment him
—
as God had every right to do
—
but what was required of this man was to simply live his choice. What else could he do?

As for me, I, too, thought all was lost. I thought no help would come, and all would remain in darkness. But one day something happened. It was the day you were born. On that day, I held you in my arms and I knew there was holiness in this world. I looked at your face and saw for the first time the face of Mercy.

Now I must stop my writing. Enough is enough. But I praise God that you are my son, and my love for you is eternal and full of gratitude.

I pray that when it is time for you to make your choice, you too can recall the past, and embrace the future.

Your loving father,

Heshel Rosenheim

I sat in the car a long time, holding the letter in my hands, and reading it over again and again.

I got home close to four. There was a note on the door from April. It was a condolence card. How she knew he was dead, I didn’t know, but I’d stopped asking such questions. I went in and collapsed on the sofa, exhausted.

Voices outside my door awakened me.

“Jonathan! Jonathan! Are you there? It’s Rose Gitlin! Time to go!” Her voice was as warm as honey, not the slightest impatient or upset. “Are you in there, sweetie?” she called. “Listen, we have to go. But if you change your mind, we’ll wait downstairs a few minutes. And if not, we’ll save a seat for you.”

“This is Harry,” another voice said, “the husband. If you’re late, no big deal. Just come!”

I heard their footsteps move away, and then I heard one of them shuffle back.

“We’re all thinking of you,” Rose Gitlin called through the closed door.

And then she ran off to join the others.

I sat alone in my father’s apartment thinking. Around me were piles of loss, missed opportunity, lies, secrets, resentments, and also smiles, pleasures, joys, a whole history of a family that was no more.

Finally I got up and stood in front of my wall. All the items I had so carefully posted did, in fact, tell a story, but not the whole story. They could never penetrate to the core. I reached for the map of Berlin. I took it down and folded it up. Then I reached for the pictures of German soldiers cut from magazines, and then the wedding invitation, the photo of my grandparents, the train ticket marked GvH. As I was setting them down, I noticed one item lying on the floor that I had never gotten around to putting up—my mother’s straw hat, the very one that had floated across the surface of the swimming pool the day she collapsed playing mahjongg. Kept all these years in the dark of the closet shelf, the creamy orange straw was bright and cheerful, as was the floral band and floppy brim. It even still smelled of suntan lotion. Without thinking, I put in on my head. Instantly I realized I had found the final clue. I reached for a Post-it. On it I wrote:
She knew.

I returned in my mind to the scene of the German argument, as it came to be known in our house. My father had just stormed from the room, the dishes rattling on the table and the screen door slamming behind him. His volume of the
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
was still sitting like a mammoth hunk of bad cheese right in front of my nose.

“That wasn’t nice,” my mother had said to me about my behavior toward my father. I had told him German was just a language, and that obviously he was still reading it, too, and there was no harm in it, and then he called me a Nazi.

“Well, he wasn’t nice to me, either,” I told her.

“He’s your father,” she said. And it seemed like that was the end of the matter. But now as I stood there with my mother’s Creamsicle-colored bonnet on my head, I recalled how she had walked around the table, and hands trembling—those delicate nurse’s hands that were always so stoic and fearless when we had gashes on our heads or blood pouring from our knees—with those hands now in a vortex of trembling, she hefted the huge volume to her breast, and swayed side to side, almost as if praying. Tears welled up in her eyes.

Perhaps at the time I told myself she was just upset that we had argued, but I knew even then that these were not those kinds of tears. Finally she ran into the bedroom and put the book away in some secret place. And that is what I now understood was the key, remembering it as if for the first time. For I never saw that book, or any of its other twenty-three volumes, again. Nor, I now realized, had I ever actually seen them before. No. I assumed I had, but I hadn’t. They had never been out on the shelves. They were held in a private, secret place. And my mother knew exactly where.

“He’s your father,” she said again when she returned to the dining room. She seemed to be herself once more.

But her hands were red, as if from wringing. And around the edge of her wedding band was a deep purple line, as if she had ground it into her skin over and over and over again.