TREYF (13 page)

“Just like Ratner's—” he mutters, and they both laugh and shake their heads before my grandmother continues to read.

I have a huge private room complete with carpeting and mahogany desk, for which I pay thirty-five cents a day, since I'm staying in the status of a visiting officer. There is a colored boy whose
job it is to keep my room spotless, make my bed, shine my boots, and practically brush my teeth. The Navy has wonderful traditions along those lines since in previous years all Naval officers were of the wealthy aristocracy. So who am I to kick about being treated like a lord?

My grandfather puts his spoon down and looks up from his bowl.

“So now he's a vealthy aristocrat? Let him just come home in vone piece.”

And come home he does: on this day in early autumn, 1944, my grandfather, his fedora tipped back on his head, is not prepared for the star-spangled American spectacle that awaits him at Floyd Bennett Field. My father confidently lands his plane and is waved over to the hangar. He pulls open the cockpit cap, reaches over his shoulder for a small dark green Navy-issue valise, climbs out onto the wing, and slips to the ground. He disappears into the hangar and, ten minutes later, emerges in his mid-weight woolen green uniform, his new wings gleaming like an ingot on his left breast.

“Vow,” my grandfather murmurs, as his son steps up to him; they hug, stiffly. My grandfather pats him on the back like a baby who needs burping.

“Velcome home, Captain America,” he says, unsmiling. “Your mother made supper, and then ve'll go to shul.”

They drive home to 602 Avenue T, where gefilte fish and boiled chicken and potatonik—the special comfort foods of my father's childhood that his mother knows he loves—are waiting
for them. They walk down the hallway and the sounds of their heels on the tiled floor and the smells of Shabbos cooking bring tears to my father's eyes in a rush of homesickness and want. When dinner is over, they walk to temple: my grandfather steps onto the bimah to sing the Shabbos services while my father—wearing his yarmulke, his bar mitzvah tallis, and the uniform of a Naval officer—prays for the safety of his nation. The next day, Grandpa holds the Torah scrolls aloft by their wooden handles, then rolls them up and slips them into their velvet sheath. His massive, cantorial prayer shawl covers his head, and he lays the Torah on his shoulder so tenderly, like a baby, as he floats up and down the aisles of the airless synagogue, his eyes closed in a meditative trance. He is elsewhere, in a dream; he is a child, running through the dusty streets of Novyy Yarchev. Tears cascade down his cheeks as he passes his son, who reaches forward to touch his tallis to the Torah resting in my grandfather's arms. He floats past my father like a ghost.

Three days later, my father flies himself back to Cape Cod, and from there, returns to Corpus Christi on a troop plane. He arrives at the officers' club in time for dinner and watches a rock-jawed lieutenant commander sitting at the next table gingerly sip a crystal clear cocktail from a tulip-shaped glass, a small onion nestled in its dimpled notch; my father orders one and drinks it down like cool water, the taste of juniper coating his lips with a surprising burn. The waiter carries over a silver bowl laden with a dozen massive Gulf prawns surrounding a small dish of cocktail sauce; he uses his fingers, chewing down to the fantailed stump of each shrimp. A block of pâté arrives, with a small silver basket
of black bread and tiny pickles that look like shrunken versions of the ones he used to pluck from the barrels on Delancey Street. The main course is two thick pork chops, half a rack of smoked Texas pork ribs mopped with spicy sauce, and two obscenely long German sausages, which remind him of the tough, uncircumcised Italian boys in his gym class, and he giggles to himself like a naughty child at the thought. He eats all of it with a combination of rage and fervor; at first, it tastes bitter and alien, but then washes his father's rejection clean and leaves in its place the sweet flavor of acceptance and belonging. He has broken the code and scoffed at the law; he is a Jewish boy dressed in an American Naval uniform, living and eating like the Gentile everyone on base will believe him to be.

Feverish and lying in bed at the base hospital the next day, an IV drip in his arm, my father was covered from head to toe with thick, angry welts of contrition; broken to his soul that his father had again not recognized him, he shed his Levitical virginity like a wounded foreskin, breaking his Talmudic contract over a massive platter of treyf in the officers' club. While the buxom Texas nurses pumped him full of antihistamines they hoped would keep him from blowing up like
The
Hindenburg
, my father slept on and off like the child he still was, dreaming dreams of a grandmother he would never know, toothless and gummy, the words
Hashem, Hashem
falling from her lips.

Dearest Mother
, he wrote when the fever finally broke,
It was wonderful to see you and Sylvia and the baby. I'm writing to you from the base hospital. I am fine, but perhaps I ate something I shouldn't have. Don't tell Papa. Love, Cy.

A
t the same time that my fighter pilot father was flying his Grumman F6F Hellcat off the deck of the USS
Enterprise
in the Pacific, my mother gazed at the mirror and dreamt that she was Ava Gardner, born to southern Catholic tobacco farmers in Johnston County, North Carolina, up from nothing. At seven years old, after seeing Ava's walk-on as a Parisian store clerk in
Reunion in France
, she waited until her parents were busy with customers in their Williamsburg furniture store, and walked herself down Grand Street to Perretti's Pharmacy, where she dumped her allowance on the counter and asked for a bottle of black hair dye.

“Does your mother know you're buying this?” the druggist asked.

“Yes, Mr. Perretti; my mother knows. And I'll take a lipstick as well, thank you,” she said, putting a tube of Revlon Cherries
in the Snow alongside the bottle of Clairol Blue Black #124. Trundling home with her booty, she locked herself in the bathroom, lopped off her long mousy blond banana curls with her mother's blunt sewing scissors, and dyed what was left a color that does not exist in nature.

Shortly after the beating was over, Gaga hauled my mother off to one of her four sisters, who owned a beauty shop and had significant experience undoing bad dye jobs.

“Fix it, Blanche—” my grandmother ordered, dumping my mother in a chair.

“If I dye it back, I'm afraid it'll burn. She could lose it all, Clara—”

I am certain, having heard this story over and over again through the years, that Clara—Gaga—considered having my mother completely shorn, had it not been for her firm, undying belief that, ugly or not, a girl's hair is her crowning glory. This belief was handed down like a myth; at fifty, when I finally cut my thin, unruly hair short, my mother didn't speak to me for a week, as though I'd committed an unpardonable sin.

Blanche's husband, Harry, carrying an ivory walking stick and his skin barbecued to a dark cordovan from too much time visiting his family in Cuba, came into the back room where my mother was sitting, weeping quietly.

“Let her hair come back to itself naturally, even if she has to go school with it like that—” he said.

“She'll look like a skunk, you idiot,” Gaga groaned.

“It'll serve her right, like a scarlet letter,” Harry snarled. He poked my mother hard in the cheek while she cried like the baby
she was, simply for wanting to be something that Gaga regularly assured her she wasn't: beautiful.

•   •   •

Y
ou are
not
a movie star, for God's sake,” Gaga would say to her little girl, throwing her heavy hands up in disgust at my mother's penchant for spending every last cent she had on Hollywood magazines and makeup, from the time she could remember.

“—and we're
not
tobacco farmers, you might have noticed,” she continued, pointing around the thickly draped, mauve-painted living room packed with fancy, claw-footed Duncan Phyfe furniture.

But my mother couldn't be blamed for her fixation on Hollywood and glamour: it was Gaga's fault that her young daughter had become so smitten with the movies and the enthralling tales of other people's lives. From the time she was five, she was deposited at the local Williamsburg playhouse, where she could sit through as many movies as she could stand, emerging bleary-eyed after an imaginary romp with Cathy and Heathcliff on the Yorkshire moors, or from Judith Traherne's bedside right after Dr. Steele diagnoses the brain tumor. But after the movies were over, my mother returned home to her unhappy parents: a kind, soft-spoken, gentle-tempered furniture store owner devoted to another woman who happened to be a nun so faithful to him that despite the fact that he was Jewish, she posthumously made him a member of the St. Vincent's Purgatorial Society, where novenas are still being said for him to this day; and a tantrum-prone eldest daughter of a towering kosher Williamsburg butcher
who dropped down dead in the middle of making a Shabbos sale, right in front of my ten-year-old grandmother. Practical even as a child, Gaga finished wrapping the fresh helzel for Mrs. Mandel so that the old lady could get her soup done before sundown.

“Seeing a parent die like that changes you forever,” my father once told me, shaking his head. “It makes you mean.”

And perhaps it did. Although Gaga's rage might have had more to do with being what my mother once called a
different sort of woman
. One by one, her sisters began to marry; one by one, they began to have children. The eldest, she was still single when the last one left and neighbors began to talk. Forced into marriage at thirty-four by wagging tongues and the kind of gossip that could destroy an entire family in the early days of the twentieth century, Gaga fulfilled her conjugal duty exactly once, on her wedding night, and nine months later produced a sallow, somber baby—my mother—who, with every day spent in front of a Hollywood movie, suckled on the promise of stardom and beauty as though it was the food of life itself. The sustenance—the love, the comfort—that I found in the kitchen, at the table, my mother would find on the stage, in the spotlight; her saving grace would be the magnificent singing voice she was blessed with, and the lithe beauty she eventually grew into. While I nurtured myself with food, my mother did the opposite, and molded and shaped her body into unnatural svelteness: she grew up to resemble not a single member of the family, as if she weren't even related.

In a black-and-white family photo taken in the 1940s, my mother is wearing heavy, dark, wartime clothes and a knit beanie, her parents perched behind her on the sidewalk in front of their
Grand Street apartment building; if the picture had been shot in color, the image would have been the same—dull, gray, devoid of life and warmth. My grandparents didn't tell my mother to smile, and she didn't come by it naturally; even at seven, she looks heavy and tired and big as a teenager, and utterly unlike her pretty and thin cousin Rebecca whose father, Gaga once told me, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

“Just like Edward G. Robinson,” she added, nodding.

By nineteen, after my mother has starved herself to bony, skeletal slimness and devoted her life to performing and singing on television, Robinson will lean over to her in a taxi after they leave the Stork Club together, across a haze of Shalimar and the crinkle of black taffeta, and whisper softly in my mother's ear that
No, sweetheart, he was certainly not.

•   •   •

G
aga kept a kosher home and served her husband and daughter buttered toast and farina for breakfast, steak for lunch, and every night, a full-fat milchig—dairy—meal: there were cheese blintzes and potato blintzes and mock chicken à la king. There were cheese knishes and cheese pierogi and scrambled eggs, noodle kugels sweetened with sugared farmer cheese, raisins, and cinnamon; there were foot-long cheese strudels and almond horns and babka. After dinner, believing it would keep her daughter healthy, Gaga sent my mother to bed with a glass of warm whole milk, a thick layer of skin floating on the surface like a blanket. Every time, my mother threw it up:
drink, vomit; drink, vomit.
One night, my mother flatly refused it; Gaga chased her down the hallway with
the glass until my mother tripped, fell down the stairs ass over elbow, broke her nose, and couldn't eat anything for a week. She lost eight pounds.

“That,” she told me years later, “was the best weight-loss regimen I was ever on. I looked fabulous.”

Food, in my mother's life, will become dangerous, forbidden, the devil on her shoulder; it will terrorize and taunt and harass her. As a child, I will find her sneaking Entenmann's chocolate-glazed donuts in the kitchen in the middle of the night; she will inadvertently leave a trail of crumbs that the dog will Hoover up and then barf near my bedroom door before sunrise. And still, when I'm eleven, with the television blaring
Tony Orlando & Dawn
at the end of the table while my father sips his scotch and reads the
Times
, she will ask me over a dinner of bland fillet of sole wrapped around canned asparagus whether, during the day, I've had any of the special Ayds candies she's left for me on my stereo; she glares at me and waits for an answer. Gaga, who is puttering in the kitchen just a few feet away, has taken on the job of picking me up from the school bus every afternoon; instead of bringing me directly home, we stop off at the luncheonette or the pizzeria, where she feeds me after-school snacks of grilled cheese and bacon, or thick, square slices of Sicilian pizza topped with rounds of pepperoni. My mother doesn't know.

“Eat,” Gaga says, sitting on the green leatherette luncheonette stool next to me. “It's good for your strength,” she says. “It's good for your heart.”

So I eat; Gaga and I keep an eye on the luncheonette door in the tarnished mirror over the soda fountain to make sure my
mother isn't strolling in, which she never is. Food becomes our secret; it becomes my sustenance, my love.

While I poke at my fillet of sole, Gaga doesn't look at my mother. When I don't respond to her, she gets up, leaving my father and me at the table, and walks into the bedroom. The box of Ayds candies will remain on my stereo for weeks, on top of The Eagles'
Their Greatest Hits
. It will be like this forever: my mother will imply a weight problem, even though, until I hit puberty, I'm so thin that I'm almost concave. Gaga will continue to feed me on the sly; my father will take me out for secret Saturday afternoon meals while my mother is having her hair done. Piles of
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
will magically show up in my bedroom, strategically placed on my dresser, in front of the mirror.

•   •   •

M
y mother has been blessed with the miraculous voice of a child-angel and will sing for anyone, anywhere. At twelve, she sings
Bess, You Is My Woman Now
with the kind of overwrought, outsized emotion reserved for professional actors twice her age. She sings in the furniture store for my father's customers, and for Sister Redempta; they gawk at her like she's a sideshow and applaud for her as though she's on the stage at Carnegie Hall.

Overweight and glum, my mother summons up another person when she performs, even if just for the mirror: she croons with sad irony at eleven, performing love songs so vivid and tender and completely inappropriate for a child her age, that she seems possessed by the devil himself, for simply longing for the arms of
adult love in whatever form it may come. It's as if she somehow knows, from the day she is born, that she is the unintended consequence of marital duty as commanded by The Mishnah; she is a child objectified and rarely loved. Fifty years later, after a flock of psychiatrists can't knock the depression out of her system, she admits to me that she grew up knowing far too much, that living daily with two people prevented by time and consequence from having the lives they wanted was too much to fathom. She knew about Ken Johnson, who, at fifteen, had kissed Gaga in front of the old Stanford White Madison Square Garden. Ken, a schoolmate, was Catholic and unsuitable for marriage to a young Jewish girl; my grandmother would keep his letters, caked with the mud of the Somme, until the day she died. She retreated, ultimately, into the arms of her beloved friend Norah, until one day Norah had a stroke and no longer recognized her. I came home from school to find Gaga sitting in our foyer armchair, in the dark, her chin on her chest, weeping alone.

Grandpa Philip, married to a woman who didn't love him, devoted his emotional life and affection to the poor Catholic parish down the street, and to feeding, clothing, and providing furniture for St. Vincent's Home, the orphanage connected to it. When he died, in 1967, he would, according to the mass card that bears his name,
share in five thousand masses celebrated each year by Missionary Bishops and Priests; in all masses celebrated at St. Vincent's Home; in a Novena of Masses said each month, and in all spiritual and corporal works of mercy performed by the Home in its mission of charity to the underprivileged and neglected youth committed to its care.

My grandfather had turned his love elsewhere—to the only
other woman in his life, Sister Redempta—when Gaga slapped him for trying to make love to her.

They never slept in the same bed again.

“When I met the Sister,” he told my father, “it was like I found God.”

“Well,” my father said, “you sort of did.”