TREYF (4 page)

A year earlier, with the low hum of prepubescent, tone-deaf prayer overtaking our apartment building and all of my friends disappearing from our afternoon handball courts and playgrounds in order to cram for their ceremonies, I announced to my father that I wanted to join them as they embarked on their journey to man- and womanhood. I was feeling left out. I wanted to go to Hebrew school, too.

We weren't particularly practicing Jews, so my sudden compulsion could have been purely environmental, and the result of four hours spent glued to the television every Passover, watching Anne Baxter and Charlton Heston in
The Ten Commandments
, frolicking in the sands of the Sinai and leading his people to freedom with the help of tan, pouty-mouthed John Derek. After seeing it
for the first time when I was four, I sashayed around our apartment wrapped in a bedsheet, pointed at our Schnauzer, Binky, and shouted,
BEHOLD!

“Are we
Levites
, Daddy?” I chirped sweetly during a commercial break. “Like Joshua?”

“We're Altmans,” he said, looking at me over the top of his
National Geographic
, “like the store.”

In 1973, I suddenly lusted after piety and holiness the way a child lusts after a Christmas pony. On television, God-fearing people were always being depicted as being kind and loving and patient, and when Billy Graham marched across the stage shouting, GOD FORGIVES, GOD FORGIVES, I closed my bedroom door with shaking hands, locked it from the inside and watched him with longing and desire and a sort of alien burning heat that started somewhere around my navel; I turned the volume way down low, like it was porn.

“What the
hell
are you doing in there?” Gaga shouted, rattling the doorknob.
Mishegas,
I heard her mumble, before tromping down the hallway and into the kitchen.

Whoever they were, if they were on television and they were devout, I was addicted to them: the Waltons, who were drowning under the glorious weight of old-time mountain religion, which seemed to help them weather every storm from the Depression to Nazis to Ellen Corby's stroke. Eventually, I found my way to contemplative devotion in
Kung Fu
and watched the show every week, silent and gape-mouthed, as Grasshopper defused violence, racism, and anger without resorting to physical aggression. That had to be a nice religion.

“She's locked in her goddamn bedroom again, watching that Chinaman,” Gaga complained to my mother in the hallway as she banged on my door. “Careful, or she'll join the Moonies.”

I didn't care who or what they were: I yearned to join the team of the just and the right. I yearned to be forgiven for everything that I could possibly think of:
For eating my dinner too fast. For not eating at all. For not being pretty enough. For failing math. For taunting the dog. For breaking a water glass. For not doing my homework. For not being perfect, like my cousins. For not liking boys. For not being grateful. For not being good
.

One night I sat my father down after he came home from work and kicked off his cordovans onto his clothing butler: I wanted to make the officially sanctioned leap out of pubescence into adulthood, like Candy was going to. I wanted to find God in the way that she had since going to Hebrew school every week, blissed out and passionate and all aglow with piety and virtue, like an azure mood ring stuck on happy. Other kids sang
Found a Peanut
and
Billy, Don't Be a Hero
on the camp bus; she sang
Hatikvah
at the top of her lungs.

“I
want
,” I announced to my father, “to go to Hebrew school.”

I paused with drama; he stared at me, blinking.

“I want,” I said, “to become a woman.”

He raked his hands through his thinning hair.

“For Christ's sake, Lissie,” he said, reaching for the remote to switch on the bedroom television set, “we're not even religious.”

“
We're
not, Daddy,” I said, “but
you
are.”

Which was mostly true.

The religion of my childhood was mechanical and routine: we
lit an electric menorah on Hanukah and ate matzo on Passover. Gaga, convinced that nonkosher meat would somehow kill us in our sleep, only shopped at the local kosher butcher. My mother never discussed being Jewish; she scoffed at anyone provincial enough to devote themselves to Talmudic dictums designed for people living five thousand years before Pucci and Ella Fitzgerald.

My father's link to his religion was one of rules and regulations and violent thrashings brought down on his tender young head by my Orthodox cantor grandfather, who believed that corporal punishment against his son—forcefully applied for everything from giggling during services to kicking his feet against the back of the synagogue seats to misreading his Hebrew lessons—was simply God's will; to my father, the religion of his birth translated into rage, frustration, and betrayal. So how could he trust a God who would allow him to be beaten by the man he loved most in the world? What kind of God would allow that to happen? But even young, I recognized the primal yearning for spiritual connection on my father's face. The piles of Roman Vishniac books sitting on our marble coffee table depicting black-hatted old men shuffling through the dusty streets of some nameless, long-forgotten shtetl with the shadow of death and destruction in their phlegmy eyes brought him to his knees every time he glanced at them; those men could have been him.

“Don't
look
at me,” he would bark at my mother after erupting into sobs of shame and need. She glanced at him nervously and he slammed his books closed, put the leash on the dog, and went out for a walk.

The stacks of liturgical albums—Moishe Oysher singing Kol
Nidre and Jan Peerce's
Passover
leaning up against my father's teak Garrard turntable next to The Modern Jazz Quartet—brought him back to the days of his Brooklyn childhood, when he thirsted for a God he could love, who would love him back as the little boy he was, instead of one who seemed to betray him with every blow willed to his father by
Hashem, Blessed Be He
.

Twice a year, we left my mother at home and made the long drive out to the tepid, airless Coney Island shul where my grandfather carried the Torah down the center aisle while I watched from upstairs in the
mechitza
, the separate women's seating where, since the age of five, I had been forced to sit. Looking over the railing into the sparse sanctuary, I watched my grandfather glide past his congregation as if on air, his eyes swollen and streaming with tears of devotion that began to flow the minute the service began. My father always positioned himself on the aisle so that my grandfather could see that he was there, that he really
was
a dutiful son after all and deserving not just of his father's love, but God's; from above, I would watch him try to catch my grandfather's eye as he carried the Torah down the middle of the shul. Even from high above his seat, I could see my father's yearning and straining. He longed for my grandfather to simply reach forward—
just reach forward
—and touch his shoulder, to acknowledge him. But rapt in Kabbalist keening, his mournful chest-beating during the
viduy
—the litanies of confession recited on Yom Kippur—my grandfather floated past his son without seeing him, his eyes closed, lost in reverie.

My father sighed at my pleading. But on the following Sunday morning, he threw his Burberry trench coat over his pajamas and
tossed the Sunday
New York Times
Magazine
crossword puzzle onto the backseat of the Buick so he would have something to do while he waited for me. We left my mother standing alone in the kitchen, nursing a cup of Sanka and smoking her breakfast cigarette, and drove the mile to my first Sunday school Hebrew class at Young Israel of Kew Forest.

My teacher, Miss Kranowitz, was waifish and wide-eyed. She strode around the room decorated with crayon renderings of the Hebrew alphabet wearing knee-high white vinyl go-go boots, her honey blond hair piled up on her head like a Gibson girl, and trailing a cloud of Tabu eau de cologne that made my mouth hang open. She blinked purposefully, like she was sending Morse code; when she put her hand on my shoulder, I thought I'd pass out.

I sat down next to my friend Rudy, who I'd known since kindergarten. Rudy's parents had divorced a year earlier and his mother, a square-jawed Viennese Lutheran, had been forced by her Jewish ex-husband to agree that their son would be bar mitzvahed, even though the only exposure Rudy had to Judaism was Allan Sherman and
The 2000 Year Old Man
. Rudy had no idea what aleph and bet—the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—were, but if you asked him what he thought about God, he'd point to the sky and repeat Mel Brooks's punch line with a thick Yiddish accent:
There's something bigger than Phil. . . .

When Miss Kranowitz asked the class if we knew what day the Sabbath was, I remembered Mama Walton, and the way she always forced the children to wash behind their ears and put on their best clothes on the Sabbath because it was the Lord's Day
.
My arrogant, pious little hand shot up like a rocket.

“Sunday!” I exclaimed.

Miss Kranowitz winced, like she'd stepped on a small shard of glass in her bare feet.

Idiot,
Rudy murmured.

I was not invited to return to class the following week: the school cited my small assimilation problem as the cause for my predictable failure to fully learn and comprehend the lessons of the Talmud.

So unlike Marcus Goldberg and Lisa Epstein, tidy and neat Candy Feinblatt and Rudy of the Lutheran mother, I did not become a sanctified member of my community, and I was not officially expected to carry out the rules and commandments handed down to the people Israel from Hashem, Blessed Be He, all the days of my life.

Instead, to mark the occasion of what would have been my bat mitzvah the following June, a month after Candy's, my father simply decided, like Mrs. Dalloway, to have a party: he hired a gleaming white Mercedes twenty-seater bus and a driver to shuttle me and my friends to the Spaghetti Factoria in Manhattan. There, after Sid the Clown finished his animal balloon shtick and our hands began to tremble from too much Fanta, we were invited to grab a plate and sidle up to the restaurant's wall of disposable aluminum foil chafing dishes, where we could marry any number of varieties of butter-laden noodles—linguine, fusilli, elbows, ziti, rigatoni, spaghetti—to a spicy or mild red sauce containing, respectively, thick links of fennel sausage and golf-ball-sized cheese-stuffed polpettone.

Remembering the glory of Candy's bat mitzvah platters at the Tung Shing House, I chose both.

That night, intoxicated by the promise of my ersatz coming-of-age, I slept soundly and dreamt of gorgeous Miss Kranowitz, who, through a fragrant fog of garlic bread and Tabu, placed her hands on my shoulders, bent down, and whispered in my ear, “Congratulations, Elissa. Today you are a woman.”

W
e lived in a thirteen-story redbrick apartment building in Forest Hills, Queens, called The Marseilles, which in style, sensibility, and aroma, bore no resemblance to the light-splashed city of the same name. My mother's brief addiction to espadrilles was as close as we would ever get to the South of France.

Built in 1960 along with The Brussels, its larger partner across the fractured cement courtyard, the buildings boasted shared amenities that included The Fontainebleau swimming pool, The Champs-Élysées Promenade—an aquamarine-tinted, crumbling stone walkway that connected the two buildings—and The Riviera Garden Terrace, a brown concrete sundeck dropped onto the roof of one of the buildings' three attached single-story garages. At the height of rush hour, when all of the fathers who lived in The Marseilles and The Brussels arrived home from work, invisible plumes
of car exhaust wafted up and out of the garage, dizzying the sunbathers and forcing them to flee as the sun began to set.

Luxury in Every Detail
, the original rental brochure promised;
A Lavish Builderamic Design!
Suites Styled in The Riviera Tradition of Elegance and Spaciousness!
Which is why my grandmother, Gaga, woke up one morning in 1960 and made the executive decision, without consulting my grandfather, Philip, to uproot my twentysomething mother, who was still living at home, and get out of Dodge.

“We're moving to the country,” Gaga announced to my mother over breakfast, the family story goes. She opened the
Daily News
and pointed to the full-page real estate ad. “It's just like The Riviera.”

“What about Daddy?” my mother asked.

“What
about
Daddy?”

“Are we just
leaving
him here—?”

“He'll come home on Friday night, for Shabbos,” Gaga said.

My grandfather, a furniture store owner, often slept on a dusty Victorian-era kilim fainting couch in his back storage room next to a potbellied stove so that he could tend to the flock of homing pigeons he kept on the roof of the building; limiting his visits to Friday nights wouldn't, my grandmother believed, ruffle his feathers.

And just like that, my mother and grandmother packed themselves up from the two-bedroom apartment on Grand Street in Williamsburg where they had lived since before World War II, and headed west to a community just seven miles from Manhattan. Forest Hills was known for its restricted, Brigadoon-like
planned village of Edwardian mansions just down the street from The Marseilles and The Brussels, called, simply, The Gardens. Three blocks north stood the magnificent, ivy-covered West Side Tennis Club, original home of the U.S. Open, which wouldn't, my parents used to say when I became fanatical about the sport in grade school, have people like us as members.

“But why can't we join?” I whined after watching Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in 1973. “It's right down the street.”

“You'll hit against the schoolyard wall, like everyone else,” my father said.

Off my mother and grandmother went, just as Ebbets Field was being demolished, to a large, south-facing apartment that overlooked the Long Island Rail Road tracks and shook every time the train blew past. After they moved in, Gaga painted the walls and the ceiling and all the trim the same milky mocha color, which gave their rare visitors the sense that they were drowning inside a cheap cup of coffee.

My grandfather grudgingly came home on Friday nights as Gaga required. The trip took two subways and over an hour from the Bedford Avenue stop in Williamsburg through the length of Manhattan and out to the wilds of Queens. Every Shabbos, Grandpa Philip walked in just as Gaga was hastily lighting her candles, and sat down to a meal prepared with neither piety nor ceremony: there was bland chicken soup with a tangle of narrow egg noodles that my grandmother cooked in the bottom half of her glass stovetop coffee percolator. There were saltines. There was a plate of skinless soup chicken. When the meal was over, my grandfather pushed himself away from the table, lit up a Super
Corona, and puffed it out the window towards the railroad tracks before going to sleep in his single bed on the other side of the nightstand that he shared with his wife, their yellow Big Ben Moonbeam alarm clock casting a ghostly glow on the ceiling as the trains rattled by. And every Saturday morning, he got up, got dressed in the high-collared brown woolen suit and old-fashioned wingtip boots he always wore, opened the living room window, and sliced a thick wedge of Limburger from the block sitting on the sill where Gaga demanded he keep it. He left for the week and took the subway back through Queens and Manhattan into Brooklyn, to open the furniture store for his devoted, largely Italian Catholic clientele. Asked by leaders of the local Williamsburg Hasidic community to shutter his store on Shabbos, he politely but resolutely declined; he was a man of the people and if the majority of his customers would be in church on Sunday, he would remain open for them on Saturday. Until he died when I was four years old, Grandpa Philip repeated his Shabbos ritual every Friday night: Queens, dinner, cigar, sleep, Limburger, leave.

My mother lived in that apartment for two years, commuting by subway to her modeling and singing gigs in Manhattan, coming home to sleep in my grandfather's single bed when he wasn't there, and on a dark gray chenille pull-out sofa in the living room when he was, like a guest.

•   •   •

I
had to get out of the house,” my mother tells me years later, “so I married your father.”

She snaps closed the silver Tiffany compact I gave her on her
birthday twenty years earlier, in the 1990s; we're sitting at her favorite bistro in Manhattan, surrounded by gleaming white subway tiles and mirrors bearing the gray scuffs of intentional Frenchness. The bar, a few feet away, is a throng of drinkers sipping martinis: artists, writers, attorneys, brokers. The women are all the same color blond; their hair is all the same length and cut in the same style. They're all exactly the same height: tall. The place exudes beauty and glamour and a certain kind of effortless chic; it is everything my mother has strived for since she was a child in love with movies and fashion, and achieved.

I've begun peppering her with questions about her marriage to my father, about when they met, and how, and under what circumstances. My father, on our weekends alone after the divorce, told me his version when I was an older teenager; I'd never heard hers and I wanted to—I wanted to know what it was that drew her to him and kept them together for sixteen acrimonious years of constant, relentless fighting. Was it the Talmudic promise of marriage? Was it lust?

My father, when we were on one of our many weekend getaways back when I was in college, mentioned taking her to a party filled with advertising executives on their first date.

“That's right,” she says, nodding her head, dismantling the insides of a sourdough roll. “And then he borrowed ten dollars from me for a taxi to take me home to Forest Hills, because he was out of cash. I should have known right then and there. I should have known the way women know about these things.”

She sighs and shakes her head dramatically.

To hear him tell the story, it was a different date: he did bring
her to a party in Greenwich Village, packed with fancy Doyle Dane Bernbach executives whose success in the early 1960s had just bought them a new Upper East Side apartment, or a house on Long Island, or a Jaguar. Three of them knew her.

“Good luck,” they said to my father, when his date went off to the ladies' room.

“I sent her a tiny gold pinkie ring the next day, from the family jeweler,” my father tells me.

“After your first date? Why? What did she do to deserve that?” I say, immediately regretting my question.

It comes out: my father was short on cash, and he couldn't take her home to Queens, which she expected him to do. There were no ATMs in those days, so he had to wait until Monday, when the banks reopened. He ran over to the jewelry district on his lunch hour, bought the ring, rolled up a ten like a joint, stuck the ring on it as if it were a finger, and messengered it off to the showroom where my mother was modeling furs.

“He
was
creative,” she admits. “He was cute. He was Jewish. I needed to get away from your grandparents. So I married him.”

She takes a bite of her roll.

“The timing was right,” she adds.

So it was that simple: a business transaction devoid of the Talmudic guarantee that my parents were predestined for each other—
bashert
, they call it
—
and that after the ceremony and a little nookie in their hotel room, their souls would become one for all eternity.

In 1962, after a five-month courtship, they married, and my mother crossed the East River and moved into my father's bachelor
apartment on East Seventy-Ninth Street and First Avenue, nudging the southern border of Yorkville where you could still hear pinched whispers complaining about
das Juden
at the strudel shops lining East Eighty-Sixth Street. My father's apartment was a twenty-first-floor Danish modern aerie decorated in high-gloss cherry reds and enameled blacks with an Arne Jacobsen sideboard leaning against one wall, real Hirschfeld sketches autographed to him and framed in gleaming J. Pocker ebony and linen, a four-foot-square Jackson Pollock knockoff hanging behind a massive black tufted silk sofa, and a silver Sputnik chandelier, which hovered like a satellite above the white Carrara marble foyer floor. My father's bachelor apartment was conveniently located just steps from an old-fashioned butcher shop run by a bespectacled Bavarian who knew that the diminutive Jewish advertising executive who strolled around town dressed like a WASP preferred Eisbein—smoked ham hock—to schnitzel, and had a standing weekly order for a three-rib pork roast stuffed with dried fruit. Before he met my mother, my father found respite and peace in his small kitchen, slow-cooking the forbidden meat for hours after returning home from dutifully visiting his Orthodox parents every Sunday, as though treyf itself could wash away the bitter memory of his violent childhood and the desperate yearning for his father's love, which my grandfather had reserved strictly for God.

When my mother moved in, she brought with her Gaga, who was attached to her daughter by an invisible tether as heavy as a dog's backyard chain; my mother slipped her a set of house keys that Gaga believed gave her carte blanche to take control of my parents' apartment and their life. She visited four times a week,
arriving before eight in the morning, traveling by subway from her apartment in The Brussels. Gaga made herself at home in my parents' minuscule kitchen, scouring it from cabinet to cabinet, throwing out anything that was alien to her—my father's squeeze-tube pâté; pickled cocktail onions for his Gibsons; duck mousse in a can from Butterfield Market—and picked a fight with the Bavarian butcher from whom, after she called him
The Nazi
, there would be no more pork roasts forthcoming. Instead, she opened up an account at the local supermarket and anointed herself the domestic head of my parents' new household.

When my mother met my father and moved into his East Seventy-Ninth Street apartment, she thought she'd said goodbye to the provinces for good. The city was what she lived for, what she yearned for, and moving to an Upper East Side zip code was synonymous with the sort of success that announces its presence subtly: there would be no taxis back and forth to the dingy apartment she shared with her mother in Queens. Her life with her advertising executive husband would be one of museums and movies, music and fashion.

But two years later, with my infant self in tow, my mother returned to Forest Hills with her new husband, just in time for the 1964 World's Fair. They rented a two-bedroom apartment with a terrace in The Marseilles, directly across the courtyard from Gaga and overlooking The Champs-Élysées Promenade. Now a semi-suburban family of three, they acquired Binky, a vicious miniature Schnauzer who peed on my father's pillow every morning, and an annual membership to The Fontainebleau swimming pool, which was attached to our building via a damp basement passageway
adjacent to the communal laundry room and a locked bicycle closet. It was there, amidst a spiderweb of rusting Schwinn bicycle spokes, that the bored housewives of The Marseilles, with keys filched from our befuddled doormen, entertained their neighbors' older sons while their husbands were at work in the city, seven miles away.

•   •   •

A
part from the requisite baroque silver mezuzah that Gaga stuck to our front-door frame with Elmer's Glue and the twice-yearly father/daughter excursions to a shul in the far reaches of Coney Island where we watched Grandpa Henry daven for hours, the extent of our devotion was limited to Gaga's roast chicken on Friday night; her potato latkes; and eight nights of orange electric menorah candles that flickered and buzzed during Hanukah.