TREYF (23 page)

T
hey are buried with the Jarczowers, a society of nineteenth-century Orthodox immigrants from Grandpa Henry's hometown of Novyy Yarchev, who fled pogroms and poverty and, in the case of my grandfather, the violence of the small home he shared with his mother and siblings and new stepfather, to arrive in New York fifty years before the Holocaust. Here, inside the Jarczower Gates—towers of stone bearing the names of the long-dead founders of the society, carved in Hebrew—in a teeming cemetery nestled alongside a crumbling and decrepit racetrack in Queens, are Grandma Bertha and Grandpa Henry, Cousin Maya, and now Uncle Lee, who lies beside the plot that will be eventually taken by Aunt Sylvia.

There's the family silver—the set of Gorham Etruscan that every couple received when they married; there's also the traditional wedding gift of two Jarczower plots among the ancestors,
assuring the absolute and final inseparability of the tribe, even as one's bones turned to dust. Grandpa Henry presented my father with a deed for his two plots on the day of his wedding to my mother in 1962; my father quietly sold them both when they divorced. He would no longer be in need of them, he decided, and because his business had failed a year earlier, the money was more important in his pocket. By selling it, he relinquished his eternal connection to the tribe, just as I had when I sold the silver set.

•   •   •

S
he was never one of us anyway,” I heard someone say over a platter of cocktail franks at a cousin's engagement party at Aunt Sylvia's house back when I was a teenager. My mother, much of the family believed, had spurned them and taken my father away for the sixteen years they were married, making extended family gatherings—birthday parties, Thanksgivings, Passovers—fraught with ugly tension. My mother, Sylvia felt, was contrary, stubborn, argumentative, and resistant to the gorgeous safety and security that my father's family promised. By the time my father moved out and back to 602, Ben was already a part of her life, which became an eddy of boisterous New York City parties and rowdy evenings at Studio 54 and Maxwell's Plum, and cab rides home to The Marseilles in the wee hours of the morning, just as Gaga, who never stopped babysitting my teenage self, nodded off in one of our Louis XVI foyer armchairs while I dozed in my bedroom, my headphones on, Suzi Quatro blaring in my ears.

After the divorce, my father retreated fully into the arms of his family, and with my mother getting involved with Ben, I was hauled into the vortex of Sylvia's family parties and celebrations, ballet recitals and golf outings, vacations and concerts. I craved the order, the safety, the stability of the life that Aunt Sylvia had fashioned for her family. We stepped into her home, where life was formal—almost courtly—and seductively safe: the tribe closed ranks and surrounded me and my father with order and convention; the unexpected and the unplanned were cosmic missteps, aberrations. If the universe presented something that could not be controlled or manipulated, it was simply deleted, like a viral email. With my father and me spending so much time with Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lee, my life before my parents' divorce grew more and more hazy, as though it was fading from sight in a rearview mirror. My father was one of them and suddenly, inadvertently, so was I, pulled along like a glider plane by circumstance and obligation and what felt to me like love.

•   •   •

D
uring that time, we were a group; a pack. We ran like a herd. We vacationed together, sometimes twenty of us at a time, overrunning resorts all over eastern Florida and the Caribbean. We cooked together and celebrated holidays at Lois's immense French provincial table at her house a mile away from her mother's. At the end of every Passover seder, after the
affikomen
—the hidden matzo, wrapped in a starched white linen napkin—was found by the youngest child at the table and my father proclaimed, “May the tribe increase,” Aunt Sylvia would say, “Children, I want you
to remember that we are descended from King David and Maimonides and you”—she pointed around the table to her adult children and their children and my father, and me—“are all mine.”

•   •   •

N
o one in my family is a runner, and neither am I, but on a sweltering August morning the year after 9/11, I went for a run around Lois's neighborhood. I ran hard and fast, wearing worn leather tennis shoes that didn't fit because that's what I'd found buried in the guest room closet at Lois's house. I wanted breathing to hurt. I wanted my heart to explode. I wanted to die before my father. I was tethered to him, and I knew that when I lost him, I would become an unnecessary appendage to the family, a vestige of somebody no longer alive, floating through time and space. Rootless; tribeless.

As I turned the corner onto Palmetto Grove, I saw something in the distance lying in a heap in the middle of the road, swarmed by flies. At first, I thought it was a tattered white rag, or a single filthy sock separated from its owner. As I got closer, I could make out its feathers: a white city pigeon—the kind my father and I used to see perched on the head of the homeless bird man in Central Park, back when my parents' divorce was still fresh—had been hit by a car. It had died violently and suddenly, right there in the middle of a quiet street on a steaming morning on Long Island.

I stopped and knelt by the bird's side; I brushed away the flies, and a guttural bark belched from my lips like a car backfiring. Bunching up a corner of my T-shirt, I picked the pigeon up by
its feet and carried it to the park on the next block; its wings unfolded like an accordion, and when I set it down at the base of a Japanese maple, I could see traces of bright crimson streaking its scapular feathers. I covered the bird with a handful of fallen leaves and touched its crown, as if anointing it. It was still warm, its eyes clenched shut.

I ran the half mile back to Lois's house, where Susan and I were staying, tears cascading into my mouth, day-old black mascara running off my chin in beads. In two hours, I would remove my father from life support; in two hours, he would be dead. We would gather to mourn over platters of tongue and corned beef ordered in from the kosher deli and eaten with the family silver, as we had done so many times before.

•   •   •

M
y father was obsessed with the planes he flew during the war. There was the Grumman F6F Hellcat, the World War I–era biplanes that were so easy to fly that, according to him, everyone in my father's squadron learned on them. The parallel wings let the lightweight plane ride the air like a helium balloon, and kept it there, aloft. They were hard to crash, he said: rolls were safe to do and simple to correct; the planes righted themselves the way a bar of soap, held down in sudsy bathwater by a baby's hands, always pops back up, to the baby's delight.

Years later, when I was a young child and airports were perfect places to entertain small children, he would regularly take me and my mother out for dinner to LaGuardia; the odor of jet fuel comingled with the rich food served at the ersatz-fancy
window-side restaurants that allowed diners to eat while watching planes take off and land. Dishes—like chicken Kiev, which spurted fountains of butter into the air when you sliced into it, and sticky, stringy duck à l'orange, steak Diane, and pineapple-glazed ham steaks like what Velma made for Christmas—were cloying and heavy, and teetered on china plates as the roar of the planes taking off rattled the floor beneath our feet.

By the time I was seven, my collection of fake pilot's wings had grown exponentially, and every dinnertime visit to the airport resulted in my adding to my stash; every stewardess walking by had seemingly bottomless pockets full of them to hand out to children, and when they invariably came over to our table, bent down on one knee, and pinned me, I swooned. And then I saluted.

My father loved the food and the show, but mostly, the planes.

My mother loathed it.

I grew to be a good, calm flier over the years because my father had taken pains to explain to me the rules of aerodynamics; it didn't seem possible that anything could bring down a plane, and long after my parents divorced, when we flew together on family trips with Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lee and hit a nervous-making patch of turbulence, I instinctively checked my father's face for any sign of worry or concern. If he was safe, I was safe. We were all safe.

On the morning of 9/11, my father watched as his beloved planes took down the World Trade Center, as they became weapons of war rather than a fond memory. “I won't live through the year,” he told me. He didn't.

•   •   •

M
y father and Shirley were driving their maid to her next gig when they were T-boned by four uninsured teenagers doing seventy in a rusted-out Honda Accord. My father's gold, boat-sized sedan spun out and slammed into a streetlight half a block away. Their maid survived, as did Shirley. My father never regained consciousness: not when I sat at his bedside, holding his hand and pleading for him to open his eyes; not when Aunt Sylvia leaned down to his ear to sing his favorite Yiddish song from their childhood, which no one had ever heard her sing before; not when the nurses came in to move his IV because his veins were collapsing; and not when I begged them to be gentle because, all his life, he'd hated needles as a child does, passing out at the sight of them.

“When he gets out of here,” Aunt Sylvia promised as we ate hospital cafeteria tuna salad sandwiches on damp, pasty white bread, “I will bring him home to my house, and he will be fine.” She nodded and her jewelry clanged together, and she beamed as though everything
would
be fine; it had to be.

“But he has a home,” I said. He and Shirley had been living together for almost twenty years.

“Not mine,” Aunt Sylvia said with such clear conviction that, for a moment, I almost believed that she could save him.

The day after the accident, standing in the hallway outside his room in the ICU, a cherubic, baby-faced doctor handed me a clipboard and asked me to sign my father's do-not-resuscitate order.
Surrounded by Sylvia and Lois, I asked what the chances were of his ever recovering; I choked as the words came out, one by one. “He is already gone,” the doctor said. My family gasped; I placed my hand on the wall.

Sylvia, dressed in paisley silk, her lips coated with frosted pink lipstick, hung her head and rested her chin on her chest. The long pendant necklace she wore for luck—four articulated enameled Chinese fish dangling like a fresh catch at the end of a gold rope chain—swung back and forth as she shook her head
no, no, no
. Her eyes were closed; tears cascaded into her lap. Lois turned and walked away.

I panted and felt disembodied, as if my arms were too long and weighed too much; the floor tilted beneath me and the world began to blacken—I was seeing everything through a darkening scrim. I was fainting; I was dying slowly. I would be without him for the rest of my life, and without him, I would also be without them. Sylvia and I stared at each other, gaping, frozen, tired, and ancient, the weight of our family's primal grief hanging heavy on our shoulders. I would lose my father; she would lose her baby brother. His death, neither of old age nor sickness, could not be contained or controlled. The act of removing him from life support couldn't be tidied up; it couldn't be molded into something other than what it was. No one other than me—my father's next of kin—could do it. Aunt Sylvia, always her little brother's protector and savior, couldn't change his death or revoke it or massage it into beauty; she couldn't safeguard him anymore. In the coming year, she grew distant; a gate tumbled down between us like a rolling postern.

My father would die at my hand; I would break two commandments.

I was treyf.

•   •   •

T
he hospital took care of his needs while he lay in a coma, shaving him and bathing him, but they forgot his hands, which had begun to peel and crack with dryness; holding them, I felt our past—the hands that held the hot frying pan handle in Forest Hills, washing the incendiary bacon grease out from our breakfast skillet under a stream of cool Queens tap water; the hands that grabbed the boiled brain out from beneath my wide-eyed stare at 602; the hands that curled into a fist when I misbehaved, sending me sprawling to the sticky bathroom floor at the Tung Shing House; the hands that grabbed Tor's collar at Velma and Buck's Christmas celebration; the hands that touched his prayer book to the Torah and brought it to his lips.

We buried him in the Jarczower plot, not far from his mother and father and Uncle Lee; he wore his childhood bar mitzvah tallis, which, Shirley said, he had begun wearing every morning when he faced east out their condominium den windows, across the suburban tennis courts he had lusted for when I was a child. Every morning towards the end of his life, Shirley said, he davened the Shacharit, just as Grandpa Henry had done every day of his life. No one but she knew, or saw him do it.