TREYF (5 page)

Though we were not religious, we were surrounded by a sea of piety: follow The Champs-Élysées Promenade out to Austin Street and Sixty-Seventh Avenue and there, directly across the street from John's Candy Store, sat an ultra-Orthodox shul. Walk down Sixty-Seventh Avenue less than two blocks in the other direction, and you'd pass another one. Round the corner onto Queens Boulevard, past Ben's Best deli and the Ballet Academy, and there was the fanciful and modern Rego Park Jewish Center, adorned with magnificent stained-glass windows the colors of red and green maraschino cherries. Four long blocks the other way, past the Tung Shing House, stood Forest Hills Jewish Center, where Candy Feinblatt would be bat mitzvahed.

We belonged to none of them.

“You liff in a willage of shuls,” Grandpa Henry admonished my father one day over bowls of cold borscht in his Coney Island kitchen, waving a bony, arthritic finger at him. “And you
still
can't find vone you like? Nothing's good enough for you, Mister Big Shot? What are you? A Gentile? The baby needs to know she's Jewish.”

He nodded over at me. I was
the baby
, even at ten.

My grandfather pulled a handkerchief out of his gray pinstriped pocket and wiped smudges from his gold wire glasses. An émigré from a shtetl—a small village in the Ukraine—Grandpa Henry arrived in the United States in 1905, the year the pogroms swept through the Pale of Settlement, killing thousands. As a twelve-year-old boy, he fled alone, running from the anti-Semitic terror of the time but also the quiet horror of his tiny dirt-floored household and the regular beatings doled out by a new stepfather who hated him. He said goodbye to his mother and brothers, and ran west through Germany to France and then to England, arriving in New York after a stomach-churning transatlantic crossing. He set foot on the island of Manhattan lonely and starving; a peddler dragging a pushcart down Delancey Street took pity on him and gave him a banana. Cloying and unrecognizable, the fruit of his new world made him instantly sick. He retched over the railing of the Williamsburg Bridge, as if flinging off his past like his stepfather throwing bread into the Poltva River during Tashlikh, casting off his sins into the depths of the sea, as commanded by the Talmud.

“I vas alone, totally,” he told me, when I was a child, “and I loved no vone but God.”

“Tell me the story again,” I would beg, gaping at the nerve he mustered to run away at twelve. And he would tell me again: the ass-whippings, the shame, the running, the crossing, the hunger, the pity, the banana.

Grandpa Henry grew into a devout Talmudic scholar who spent every moment he could in temple. Blessed with a deep, baritone singing voice, he became a cantor who sang with Jan Peerce and the Lower East Side klezmer star Naftule Brandwein. He took a job as the social page editor of the Yiddish newspapers
The Daily Forward
and then
The Day
, where he counted Zero Mostel and Molly Picon among his close friends. He was a benevolent and loving husband and father to his wife, daughter, and four granddaughters—
I can see the eyes of my mother in your face
, he would say, cradling my chin in his hand.

But to his son, my grandfather's dormant rage ran like a hot wire lashing generation to generation.

“Mister Big Shot. Who do you think you are, not to take the baby to shul?”

My father chuckled softly at the old man in a familiar, taunting way that balanced on the continuum between rage and reason. My reaction to the quiet, seething fury was panic: my breathing shallowed; I took sips of air like it was hot tea and looked at the two men, back and forth, over the table. There, in the silent moments before my father's explosion—in Forest Hills, it would be an ashtray thrown; a collar grabbed; his hips peeling away from the yellow vinyl seat of his chair so that he could reach me across the table—was a place as recognizable to me as my own breath.

I waited, staring at my bowl, holding the sides of my chair until my fingertips went numb.

My father's wooden chair squealed against the yellow scuffed linoleum as he shoved himself away from the table and stood; a blue glass bottle of seltzer wearing a silver mesh snood fell over and landed across a sleeve of saltines, its wax paper curled back like old wallpaper. My grandfather grabbed his son's wrist. My father's hand turned white.

“Sit down and eat, Schmeel,” my grandfather said softly. “Tell me about vork.”

My father's face was the same color as the borscht that had been placed in front of us. It was genetic memory: we both loathed the soup. Earthy, dusty, sweet, spicy, the magenta of my Crayola box, borscht tasted to me like dirt, like the vegetal scrapings from the bottomless schissels used to cook vast quantities of the pink gruel that would keep our ancestors alive long enough to be murdered by Cossacks and Nazis; it tasted of the past, and we choked on it.

This is who you are
, the soup said to us.
This is who you will always, ever be
.

Dos eyfele est nisht ken borscht,
my father mumbled to my grandmother, who was puttering around behind us.
The baby doesn't eat borscht.

Es vet esn maynem,
she answered.
She'll eat mine.

Mamenyu, ikh es im oykh nisht,
my father said.
Ma, I don't eat it either.

Vest im esn du oykh,
she replied, padding around us in her house slippers.
You'll eat it, too.

My father and I were two children at the same table, separated by a gap of forty years; to my grandparents, we were the same age.

My grandmother hung over me, her heavy bosom resting on my shoulder, and whacked a spoonful of sour cream into my soup plate, swirling it around and around until it resembled a dizzying rose and white kaleidoscope that made my stomach lurch and my head spin. She folded her arms and stared down at me while my grandfather watched and shook his head at me in disgust. I dipped the end of my spoon into the bowl and touched it to the end of my tongue. I swallowed and gasped; burning acid shot through my stomach and singed the back of my throat and I thought I'd vomit on the spot, right there, across my grandmother's petunia-flecked vinyl tablecloth. I got sick on the food of the old country, just as my grandfather had gotten sick on the food of the new.

“You'll eat it,” Grandpa said to me without looking up, tapping his spoon against the side of his bowl. “Now, Schmeel, I vant to hear about vork.”

•   •   •

T
hree years later, my grandfather came home from saying his morning prayers at shul, ate the same chopped chicken liver sandwich on rye that my grandmother fed him every day on the same blue and white Meissen plate, took his daily early afternoon nap, and never woke up. He was eighty-six.

Following Talmudic law and the tug of the primal on his shirtsleeve, my father said the Mourner's Kaddish—the obligatory prayer for the dead—every morning for a year, the time
period that the deceased is considered to be under the threat of divine judgment. After my mother served us soft-boiled eggs with thin slices of diet white bread, my father and I walked Binky through the dank basement, past the communal laundry room, and up towards The Champs-Élysées Promenade to meet my school bus. My father's lips moved silently and his eyes filled with tears as he mumbled the five-thousand-year-old Aramaic prayer, turning his back to me.

I dragged along behind him in my nylon olive green snorkel parka and brown corduroy bell-bottoms, my canvas knapsack hanging heavy and low on the small of my back. I hummed something from television.

He spun around and jammed his index finger against his mouth.

Y'hei sh'lama raba min sh'maya

V'chayim aleinu v'al kol Yisrael

V'imru: Amen.

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life

For us and all Israel,

To which we say Amen.

I hummed.

He turned, his still lips curling in furious, compulsory devotion, and pounded his fist on the locked bicycle room door.

“Stop noodging!” he raged. “Can't you
see
what I'm doing?”

We emerged from the basement out into the bright morning
light that made me squint. I climbed up the school bus stairs and sat down next to Candy; I watched my father through the bus window as we pulled away. He stood with the dog, talked to Eugene, and lit his day's second cigarette.

For a year, my father prayed where no one but I could see him; it was our secret. He chanted silently in the dark of the clammy cellar, as we passed the entrance to the garage beneath The Marseilles; prayer felt dangerous and shameful, and something to be hidden from the world around us. The sanctity that my father was drawn to tortured him; as we descended into the bowels of our building, he choked on hot tears as he chanted like the dutiful son he was, ignoring the portion of the law that also commands that the Mourner's Kaddish be said in a synagogue, provided there is one in walking distance.

In our case, there were four.

M
y father was a Fifth Avenue
mad man ad man
of the teak credenza–Modern Jazz Quartet variety, who was obsessed with Clint Eastwood, Chopin, and British equestriana to the degree that by the time I was nine, he had taught me to name every part of an English bridle, hauling me out at parties to show our inebriated neighbors what his daughter, who had never been near or on a horse, knew. My friends wore bell-bottoms and traded Mets baseball cards and memorized the names of The Partridge Family: Shirley, Keith, Laurie, Danny, Chris, Tracy, Mr. Kincaid. I proudly explained the difference between a seven-gaited horse and a five-gaited gelding and was frequently dressed in the smaller version of the matching mother-daughter houndstooth tweed hacking jacket and jodhpur outfits my father bought for us at H. Kauffman and Sons, the riding store on East Twenty-Fourth Street in Manhattan.

When summer became autumn, my mother and I donned our English hunting clothes for everyday activities like going to the mall or to Alexander's, our local department store that carried everything from notions to monkeys. Off we'd go, my size two mother in her blue-lensed Jean Shrimpton aviators and her sleek blond hair swept back in a tiny ponytail held in place with a black velvet bow, and me in my miniature tweed hacking jacket, riding pants, and hunting boots; our neighbor's heads turned as we'd march out onto The Champs-Élysées Promenade and up to Austin Street, past John's Candy Store and the neighboring pizza shop, which shared a wall with Tony's Shoe Repair. Every pizza pie stank from the pungent blend of shoe polish and warm leather, and every pair of my mother's resoled riding boots reeked from garlic and pork sausage.

“Everyone's staring at us,” I'd wail, when our neighbors looked at us and pointed. I hung on to my mother's manicured hand like a chimp.

“Don't be silly,” she'd say. “It's only because they're jealous. Now hold your head up. Let's go.”

My mother taught me to stride like a model, to keep my shoulders forward and still, and sashay smoothly from my nonexistent hips, one foot behind the other. We strolled through Forest Hills as though we were on a catwalk, stopping to talk to whomever we ran into. There was Tess, who owned the dry cleaning shop down the street and expunged the secrets of every local marriage. Sallow and gaunt with a missing front tooth and a crackling voice like the Wicked Witch of the West, she smelled of the gin that she carried in a silver flask in her gray smock
pocket, which clanged against the counter when she leaned forward to give us my father's freshly laundered suits. We frequently ran into Marion Feinblatt and Candy exiting the Ballet Academy on Queens Boulevard, where Candy was studying to become the next Gelsey Kirkland. Laura Steinman would stop us to chat, offering my mother a Virginia Slim; they'd stand there, puffing away, sizing each other up like two wrestlers in a ring, neither of them noticing that nine-year-old Stuey was trying to pin me up against a parked car so that he could jam his sweaty little hand down my English riding pants. Raven-haired Judith Garbfeld, whose cheekbones were set as high on her head as her brown eyes, and who had just moved in next door to us with her Orthodox husband (or was it her boyfriend? We never knew for sure), Moishe, and their ten-year-old daughter, Shaina, never smiled and kept her terse chitchat to a minimum. When Judith saw us in our riding habits, she stared us, head to toe, up and down, and sighed.

“I just love your costumes,” she said, grinning.

“Keep walking,” my mother whispered.

Judith was skeptical, a smug eye-roller, like the life she found herself living in was an error. The neighbors whispered:
Are they married? Is Shaina his? If not, who does she belong to? Jews don't live together.
It was the building mystery, and the subject of dinner party conjecture among the neighbors, who gossiped as though we were still living in a small shtetl. Shaina, bucktoothed and flat-chested, never smiled, like her mother; she went to a yeshiva, kept to herself, and screamed at her mother in Hebrew, which I could hear through the wall that separated our bedrooms.

“Don't get too friendly with her,” Gaga said, shaking a finger at me.

My father and I were in the elevator one morning when Moishe stepped on. When the door closed and we were alone with him, he asked my father,
Were you in the camps?

It was the bind that connected Jew to Jew, survivor to survivor in the sixties and seventies; I heard old women ask it in my grandfather's shul near Coney Island.
Were you in the camps?
they whispered to each other. Their faces dropped, palsied, when the answer was yes; they pushed up a sleeve to reveal a faded green number. I looked away; I had been told not to stare.

My father shook his head no and straightened his tie.

“Us neither,” Moishe sighed, pushing back his black fedora a little. “But the Nazis came when Judith was five. Her parents left her with the local Catholics, walked into the field behind their farm, and shot themselves. Judith ran away and hid in the forests with the Partisans. She killed her first Nazi at seven. We met in Israel.”

The elevator rattled against the brick shaft; sweat trickled through my father's graying sideburns.

“Zei gezunt,”
Moishe said when the door opened. “Have a good day at school, little girl,” he added, gazing down at me.

My father and I walked out of the elevator in silence; we stepped out of the lobby into the morning sun and when the school bus pulled up in front of the luncheonette the way it did every day, he reached down and hugged me tightly, as though someone had just died.

•   •   •

M
y father's love for horses came from a childhood spent glued to
The Lone Ranger
radio broadcasts, dreaming of the freedom that hoofbeats evoked for a city-bound boy living in a two-bedroom apartment stinking of schmaltz. It might have also been the promise of control: a slight, thin Jewish boy on the back of a massive beast, manipulating it, directing it, riding with the wind at his back like Audie Murphy. He loved them all: old horses, young ones, tall ones, short ones, but especially the rickety, even-tempered ones he would ride on lazy ambles through the hills surrounding the singles' dude ranch he visited every weekend towards the end of the 1950s, before he married my mother. Like many other New York City ad men of the time, he left Manhattan at the end of the workweek, but instead of pointing his rental car towards the borscht belt, he headed instead for a non-Jewish part of Orange County, sixty miles from the city. Every Friday night, from the early spring into midwinter when it became too cold to ride, my father drove an hour north, arriving for predinner gin Gibsons at the ranch's immense, timber-framed, German Tudor–style main house. There, in the cavernous living room, he met single ladies who also spent their country weekends riding ancient horses with barely a pulse, acquired by the ranch for equestrian neophytes who didn't know a saddle from an Edsel. Dressed in tweed jackets, dusty whipcord jodhpurs, and knee-high hunting boots, my father and his harem dined on what was billed by the ranch as the Finest European Country Cuisine—sauerbraten and
spaetzle and escargot and chateaubriand—and spent the weekends living the lives of landed gentry before going home to their tiny apartments in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens to get ready for the workweek ahead of them.

My father ceased being a dude when the ranch fell into disrepair and eventually shut down, and his carefree days riding the imaginary range were relegated to memory. His boots, the loose-thighed Knickerbocker jodhpurs that made him look like a Canadian Mountie, and his beloved shearling ranch coat were all he had left of his horsey bachelor life when he married my mother. She got rid of the coat when I was five, convinced that it was making her bedroom smell like a barnyard.

“PEE-
EWW
,” she cried, pulling open her closet door.

My mother pinched her nose and twisted her face in dramatic disgust while Binky and I watched from the bed. Her blond hair had just been trimmed and sprayed into a George, and tiny bits of it still clung to her tight black turtleneck and denim hip-huggers. She pushed up her sleeves and the gold charm bracelet that hung off her arm, reached in, shoved my father's suits, pants, and sport jackets to one side, pulled out the coat, and held it up for inspection. It was the color of dirty caramel, and a darkened, ancient stain adorned the right patch pocket from the time when my father's favorite gelding had dipped his head and horked up a thick wad of spit and hay and snot while my father was saddling him ten years earlier.

“What do we think about
this
?” my mother asks me, that afternoon. She shows me the coat, front and back, back and front.

“Daddy's horse coat—” I say, proudly identifying it.

“Let's buy him a new one,” my mother says brightly. “We'll pick it out
together
.”

I clutch my knees to my chest and begin to rock; we never shop for my father together.

She folds the coat over her arm and walks out of the bedroom, out our front door, and down the hallway to the incinerator. I follow—my heart races; I know how much my father loves it—and watch as she props the heavy metal door open with one foot, and stuffs the odorous garment down the chute.

My father arrives home from work that night, kicks off his shoes, opens his closet, hangs up his suit jacket, and inhales deeply. The pungent essence of horse sweat, sweet to him as Proust's madeleine, is gone.

Instead, Lysol.

I watch from my parents' bed, their bedroom television set blaring
Laugh-In
, as he tears through the contents of his closet, frantically pushing each hanger aside: there's the blue striped suit, the brown striped suit, the blue seersucker suit, the navy blazer, the camel's hair blazer, the banker's gray pants, the terrycloth robe, the riding jodhpurs, the Glen plaid hacking jacket, the powder blue leisure suit with the white buttons accidentally melted by Tess during an overzealous dry cleaning. He shoves everything back and starts all over again, like a shopper searching a rack for the right size. His ears are so red, they're almost blue. I can hear my mother in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator door; I hear her pull the cork on a bottle of wine. From where I sit, I can see my father's dingy white Jack Purcell's, his brown loafers, his wingtips, his tan suede bucks, his riding boots, his
leather opera slippers lined up on the closet floor. A colorful cardboard box containing his electric race car set topples over from where it is leaning against the inside closet wall; the lid separates from the bottom and long sections of black plastic track fall out and into the entryway to the bedroom. He grabs them and heaves all but one back into the closet; that one he smashes against the wall, where it explodes into shards of extruded black plastic that fly everywhere.

“Where
is
it?” he yells. My mother is watching from the narrow hallway between their bedroom and mine, smoking a cigarette and sipping her wine from a blue glass goblet.

“Not in front of her,” she says, calmly, nodding over to me on the bed.

“Where IS it?”

“It stank like a stable. I'll get you a new one.” She draws a puff and the tip of her cigarette grows into a long, smoldering ash the length of a pencil eraser. I'm fixated on it; if it drops, I'm certain that it will set the wall-to-wall carpet on fire like on the television shows I watch, and we will burn and we will perish and the building will be a hollowed-out shell of brick, the blackened holes where windows used to be now empty and gaping like toothless sockets.

My father slams the closet door, which jolts me out of my pyrophobic panic. He storms into the foyer, pulls out an ancient, hard-sided brown tweed Pullman suitcase, drags it past my mother and her cigarette back into the bedroom, and flings it open onto their bed right next to me; its leather handle grazes my leg. He empties a drawer's worth of clothes into it, slams it
shut, and stomps out into the hallway, grabs his car keys from the candy dish on the entryway table, and pulls the front door closed behind him so hard that the doorbell rings and the dog barks.

It happens in thick, slow motion; I watch it like a movie, through a scrim, from a distance.

The mother, heavily made up like a movie starlet, is talking to the small child lying on her parents' bed. The mother's mouth moves slowly. The child's lips are parted; she's barely breathing. She's sweating a little; she's shivering. Her color has gone sallow. She vomits all over her flannel pajamas, the powder blue ones with the tiny apples; there is Hawaiian Punch everywhere.

“Don't worry, honey,” the mother says to the child, taking her by the hand into the bathroom, where she sits her on the toilet and tenderly strips off her soaked and wretched pajamas. She washes her daughter's face with a cool washcloth that's lost its nap; it feels like cold sandpaper on the child's face. “He'll be back,” she says, while the child sits stunned, exhausted.