TREYF (14 page)

Y
ou've been away for four years. You owe it to us to stay,” my grandfather told my father, on their final drive home from Floyd Bennett Field.

My father had studied celestial navigation in Edmond, Oklahoma; Lawrence, Kansas; Hamilton, New York; and Palo Alto, California. He learned how to fly at night in Pensacola and Vero Beach, and was awarded his wings in Corpus Christi. He had spent the end of the war flying off the deck of
The
Enterprise
at night, in total blackout, landing on the unlit moving aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific, without any guidance beyond the stars above him and the plastic celestial navigation charts that lay in his lap. He watched friends crash their F6Fs onto
The
Enterprise
's runway and burst into flames; he watched another friend—the squadron buffoon,
a dope
, my father told me—miscalculate
his landing, topple off the deck into the water, and drown in his locked cockpit before a rescue crew could reach him.

He came home a man; his parents thought he was still a boy. He wanted to move to California, to attend Stanford on the G.I. Bill; they said,
No, you owe us
. So my father got a job at an advertising agency in the city and studied for his college degree at night, returning to the tiny childhood bed he'd slept in as a young boy. Every night after classes were over, he'd stop at Rolf's on Third Avenue and gorge himself on piles of bratwurst, sweet and sour cabbage, spaetzle, and pitchers of lager. And every night, he'd come home and find his father sitting in the foyer and waiting for him, reading
Der Forverts
and having a cigarette while his mother was in the kitchen, scouring their milchig dinner plates.

“Maybe,” my grandfather said, looking up as his son took off his overcoat and hat and hung them in the hallway closet, “you could possibly have dinner vith us after school,
Mr. Big Shot
?”

Before my father could answer, Grandpa Henry would sniff, dramatically, like he smelled something foul, like his son had stepped in dog shit.

“You smell,” he'd say, “like treyf.”

•   •   •

T
heir fights were mythic. They continued every night for one relentless year, beginning the minute my father walked into the apartment after school. There were accusations and arguments, complaints about disrespect and my grandparents' inability to treat my father like a man, fights over who was a real
American and who wasn't, and what made a son good or bad, according to the Talmud.

“A good son would stay home with us,” they said. “A good son would spend more time in shul. A good son wouldn't come home stinking of pork. A good son would remember where he came from.”

“
You
didn't,” my father blurted out to Grandpa Henry one night.

The world around them stopped: a line of rage had been pulled taut until it snapped like a rubber band. My father could hear nothing, he said—not the traffic outside on Ocean Parkway or the clanging of my grandmother's dinner dishes in the sink. Father and son stared at each other from opposite corners of the darkened living room. My grandfather flung a heavy, leather-bound Yiddish edition of Shakespeare's
Henry IV
at my father's head, like Moses hurling the tablets at the recalcitrant Hebrews. It missed my father by inches, struck the end table near the couch, and landed beneath the legs of my grandmother's baby grand, its spine broken, its beautiful gilt-edged pages splayed open and torn.

A week later, my father left; Manhattan wasn't far enough. California, a day away by air, wasn't far enough. Instead, he fled the country entirely; he became someone else living someplace else, crossing the northern border to a place where he had absolutely no connections, no friends from the Navy, no distant family who might call his parents and report on his comings and goings. He took a job in Canada as a road salesman for the London, Ontario–based Knit King Corporation, traveling the length of the country from one end to the other for three years, limiting
his trips home to once a month. Arriving on Friday night, he'd eat supper with his parents, and still dutifully attend shul on Friday night and Saturday morning. They'd nudge him to call the shy Jewish girls they deemed acceptable, whose mothers played pinochle with his mother, and whose fathers spent their Saturdays davening in shul with his father; the bespectacled analyst he saw in Toronto told him to placate them rather than fight, that it would just be easier, and so he did. He took the girls out, one by one; he never called them again. On Sunday mornings he'd take a taxi to Idlewild Airport and fly home to his tiny apartment across the border, blissfully alone, living a quiet life that belonged completely and solely to him, devoid of Talmudic obligation and familial expectation, and his father's fury that clung to the back of his neck like sweat.

Three years later, when my father's work visa ran out and he had to return to the States, his parents offered him his old bedroom, rent-free. Instead, he moved into a high-floor apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, on Seventy-Ninth Street. Gazing out the south-facing windows, he could see Brooklyn far off in the distance, blurry as a greasy postage stamp, its details rubbed away and obscured, the way the world had looked from inside the quiet, sealed cockpit of his plane.

My father returned to Madison Avenue as an advertising copywriter and worked his way up to vice president of a major agency. He ate like a Gentile; he dressed like a Gentile. He filled his closets with Brooks Brothers sack suits and J. Press shirts monogrammed with
SIA
on their cuffs; he carried a small antique snuff tin; he wore stiff Lobb's of London wingtips that tore apart
his ankles, and whose soles he had to scuff with a knife, like a little boy's, to keep himself from slipping. An eligible bachelor straight out of the movie
The Apartment
, he decked out his kitchen like a man hell-bent on entertaining: there were silver chafing dishes from Hammacher Schlemmer and Arabicaware from Carole Stupell, carbon steel knives from Hoffritz, and a Dansk service for eight from Bloomingdale's. He took cooking classes with Dione Lucas and learned how to make things that never saw the inside of his parents' kitchen: steak Diane and duck à l'orange, cherries flambé, and tender, lean silvertip roasts barded in bacon, specially cut for him at the German butcher Schaller & Weber. He learned how to bone out and butterfly a pork loin, open it like a book and stuff it with dried fruit, tie it, and gently braise it. Every Saturday night, he cooked for the fine-boned, delicate Gentile girls who worked with him at the office, bringing them back to his apartment after long afternoons spent walking around the Museum of Modern Art, analyzing the Pollocks and the Frankenthalers, believing secretly that the art possessed no humanity or warmth. It was just a modernist conceit, he would tell me, an artistic arrogance, like comparing Bartók to his beloved Chopin: it was rule-breaking just for the sake of rule-breaking.

“So
nu
, Mr. Fancy Bachelor—” my grandfather would say during Shabbos dinner. My father never mentioned girls or had any inclination to bring one home to meet his parents. He refused to call Miriam Rubenstein, whose mother pleaded with Grandma Bertha to have Captain America take out her beautiful baby girl. He could find his own girls to go out with; he would never bring
them home to his parents, though. He would never allow them
that
close to his life.

“It's
bashert
, Bertha,” Mrs. Rubenstein said to my grandmother. “The children will be together. I just know it.”

It was a fix-up like from the old country; the Hasids still did it. My father refused.

“What's wrong with you anyway? A
fagel
, maybe?” Grandpa asked, chuckling at the thought that maybe, just maybe, my father liked men.

If you only knew,
my father thought.

T
he weekend before he moved out of our apartment, my parents and I sat around a square table at the Tung Shing House, draped with a starched, dark gold linen tablecloth. Platters banged in the kitchen and small baskets of beige fried rice noodles with the consistency of baked cardboard appeared in front of us. Tiny dipping plates of duck sauce and incendiary mustard and deep Buffalo China bowls of wonton soup arrived; none of us looked up.

Four nights a week, we ate out: the Tung Shing House; London Lenny's for fried seafood; Cookie's Steakhouse, on the top floor of the Queens Center Mall, where my father ordered chopped steaks passed off as filet mignon, I ate baskets of greasy deep-fried chicken that shed its salty, dry coating like beach sand from a towel, and my mother pushed around on her plate limpid green iceberg lettuce leaves plucked from the iced Hall crocks at the salad
bar; and Jahn's Ice Cream Parlor for foot-long hot dogs. There, ten years earlier, George Hoffmann would perform at my birthday party and turn everything he could lay his hands on into a burst of flame, igniting my lifelong fear of fire.

On this Shabbos night, my parents have decided to punctuate the end of the small life we've made together in Forest Hills over a final Chinese dinner. Three blocks away, at the Forest Hills Jewish Center, services are beginning.

We stare at our empty plates in silence; I am undone by quiet panic that will sit on my shoulder like a parrot for the rest of my life. Cold sweat trickles down between my shoulder blades through the small of my back and into my jeans. My heart races and I try to get up to use the bathroom, but my knees won't hold me, and I'm certain I'll faint; the wet, cold bathroom floor at the Tung Shing House stinks from ammonia, which will make me sick. I drink tall glasses of ice water as quickly as the waiter can pour them. When they speak, my parents' conversation feels forced, a charade based on the myth of courtliness. I imagine an obituary writer documenting the last moments of our life together, and my parents want to make sure it looks good.

Their end was civil
.

At home, there is shouting. Something is flung, a door is slammed.

But tonight, we're at the Tung Shing House, and
Muskrat Love
pours from a small radio in the kitchen. My father chain-smokes Merit filters and stares blankly over my mother's shoulder. Dressed in chocolate brown suede jeans and a tight ribbed, shoulder-padded turtleneck the color of putty, my mother sits next to me,
focused on the pork dumplings bobbing like small apples in her bowl. For the first time in years, she actually seems to eat, extracting long slivers of pink-tipped meat from the broth and eating them one by one with her fingers, as though the end of her marriage has suddenly launched a latent appetite. I'm hopeful, suddenly.
If she eats
, I think,
will he stay?

My mother slurps her soup; she pokes and stirs and fishes out of the bowl a flaccid, dark green bok choy leaf. She places the white ceramic spoon in her mouth and makes the queer, contorted face of someone who is politely attempting to extract a chunk of gristle from between two teeth without using her fingers. She dexterously shifts her tongue and I see the muscles in her neck strain and tighten; her heavily mascaraed eyes scan the dining room for someone's—anyone's—attention: they land on an older man in a powder blue leisure suit having a quiet dinner with his wife at a table on the other side of the restaurant. My mother smiles broadly, and I wonder if she knows him. It's just a game: she has stretched the thick dark green, slippery bok choy leaf tightly, like a condom, over one of her capped front teeth.

The man gasps.

“Please, Mrs. Altman,” our waiter says, rushing over. “Don't make fun—please. It's food. You eat it. Please.”

“For god's
sake
—” my father says. His voice shakes with rage.

My face erupts with heat; I can't feel my hands. I've left myself, the way I left myself when Buck took me hiking in Kissena Park after school, before my parents came home from work. A slow burn of shame crawls up into my belly. I gasp with awe at my mother's audacity; she has broken through the filmy barrier that
separates our small family from the rest of the world. She ropes innocent onlookers into our story, and then performs for them, the way she did when she was on television in the 1950s; life is a show, and they watch our story unfold the way passersby watch a car crash. The nice man in the leisure suit gapes at us, his eyes widening with surprise at our story:
This once was a family
,
well-dressed and mannerly. And then, the mother smiled.

“Forgive me,” she says with dramatic contrition to my father, and to the man across the room. She places her hand on her chest and closes her eyes with remorse. She takes another spoonful of soup, looks for another victim, finds one, and smiles again. They gasp at her, this bombshell with the blacked-out tooth playacting the ugly girl her mother assured her she was, all those years before. This time, she has the last laugh.

•   •   •

T
he next morning, it is the first and last time that the three of us sit side by side at our Danish modern breakfast counter. My mother has her usual cigarette and cup of Sanka, and flicks glowing ashes onto her brown earthenware breakfast plate while my father breaks the news to me: she has asked him to leave.

I listen, unmoved and tearless, fixating on a half-eaten box of Entenmann's donuts on the counter that my mother has secretly ravaged during the night. My father sounds far away, like he's making this announcement through one end of a cardboard paper towel tube. I'm already ahead of them: she is a survivor; she will be fine. But I imagine him somewhere on Skid Row chugging Thunderbird from a pint in a brown paper bag, or sleeping fitfully
on a stained blue-ticking mattress at a vermin-infested YMHA, or in the tidy resplendence of one of Aunt Sylvia's four guest rooms. In the piles of diaries I keep from this time—gray cardboard laboratory notebooks covered in Mylar-coated sheets emblazoned with the names of Ivy League colleges I will never attend—the pages that correspond to this sticky, warm day in September are blank.

By 1978, my mother is bringing home a bigger paycheck as a fur model than my father, whose business is failing. She comes home from work later and later every night while my father and I eat frozen dinners in opposite ends of the house; he doesn't have the stomach to cook for the two of us and so he sits at the dining room table, alone, reading
The New York Times
, while I eat in front of the television in my bedroom: there are French bread pizzas heated in the toaster oven that bursts into flame at least once a month; frozen Salisbury steak; frozen Welsh rarebit; sleeves of Mallomars and boxes of Fig Newtons. After dinner, we stand together silently on our terrace, side by side, hanging over the gate eight stories above The Riviera Garden Terrace to see if a taxi or a private car will drop my mother off at The Champs-Élysées Promenade. Sometimes she'll come in at nine, sometimes at eleven, and often after midnight; it's the beginning of the fur season, and she's out with clients and buyers, I hear her tell my father through the bedroom door. This last Saturday morning, she leaves us at the breakfast table, puts on her jacket, and heads into the city for work: it's the time of year when every wealthy woman in New York makes appointments to look at new fur coats. She pats the dog, kisses me on the head, grabs her bag and her
keys, and closes the door on her former life as if it were just another day.

•   •   •

T
here is the donut box, and the dog.

There is my father, and his plate of cold bacon and eggs.

There he is, standing up, gently placing our plates in the sink. He opens the hallway closet door, the repository for the family suitcases, and extracts the one they carried on their last trip to Europe. It's beige and soft-sided, stained and covered with peeling travel stickers from France, Austria, and Italy, where my mother sang at Alfredo's on the Piazza Augusto Imperatore in Rome the summer that Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lee came to visit me at camp.

There is the suitcase, unzipped, catching drawerfuls of his life: his underwear and his socks and shirts and a balled-up tangle of striped rep ties from Brooks Brothers. There are brown and gold paisley ascots and identical silk pocket squares, and white vinyl belts that match white loafers. I sit on the bed and watch him. Two weeks later, Uncle Lee rings the doorbell on a weekday morning while I'm still in my robe and, unsmiling, thrusts an envelope into my hands. I'm happy to see him—I'm relieved; he and Aunt Sylvia are so safe, so proper—
Hi, Uncle Lee,
I chirp like an idiot, while my mother appears in a towel behind me, dripping wet from the shower, and screams for the police. My father can't afford to hire a process server; my uncle, expecting my mother to answer the door, serves the divorce papers to me.

My father's face is red and hot with anguish as he packs; his shoulders rattle like bare bones. He cries out like a broken animal:
it's an ancient and preverbal sound and one I don't recognize. After he is gone, Gaga comes over and rifles through our cabinets and the refrigerator. She throws out every edible trace of her former son-in-law and his food: his cans of Spam, his plastic-wrapped packages of Oscar Mayer bacon, his sandwich bags holding the remnants of the fancy hams and charcuterie he liked to bring home from Koch & Nord, our local German butcher near Forest Hills Gardens. By the time she's finished, all that's left in the cabinets and the fridge are two six-packs of Tab, a container of leftover chow mein from the Tung Shing House, a box of Weaver frozen chicken, and a half-eaten box of Ayds diet candies.