Voices of a Summer Day (21 page)

Israel, Israel, my name is Israel and I want you to get that man out of my house.

And,
Tell them I’m not a Jew—
the voice of his Uncle George, the hoarse, workingman’s voice—
I’m an American. I was born in Cincinnati.

Cincinnati! Don’t make me laugh. All they’ll remember is Jew.

For the walls that are overthrown…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

For our majesty that has departed…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

For our great men who lie dead…

We sit in solitude and mourn.

1957

I
T WAS AT THE FUNERAL
of his father that he saw his Uncle George for the first time since the evening when George, with his bandaged head, had come to the house in Harrison to ask for a loan. Death binds families, transiently and too late.

Now nearly sixty, George had grown into a scholarly looking man, thinned, bowed, the violence fined out of his face by suffering, by a late-flowering interest in books, by a self-discipline in training a brute intelligence that had always been there dormant and caged. Even his voice had become lighter, with an educated and polite tone to it, and his eyes, still a clear deep blue, now looked out on the world forgivingly and with humor. He had stopped working with his hands and for some years had been, not surprisingly, a minor official in the National Maritime Union.

Benjamin felt himself attracted to the man he had not seen since the silent, adolescent farewell at the foot of the stairs in Harrison, New Jersey. He went over to George, standing in a corner of the dining room, where the family were gathered around the cold meats and the whiskey bottles after the cemetery.

The two men shook hands and George said, examining Benjamin, “Well, you turned out better than I thought. You’re not even fat. How old are you now?”

“Forty-three,” Benjamin said.

“Thirty years…” The old man shook his head. “Some day you must make me a full report.”

They talked briefly of Israel Federov. “Did you ever hear him say he forgave me?” George said.

“No,” Benjamin said.

George nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Your father was a good man, but he was confused about the nature of patriotism. He thought it was abasement before authority. It’s a first-generation Jewish disease.”

“Not necessarily,” Benjamin said, although he didn’t feel he had to defend his father. “What about the hundredth-generation Germans who felt the same thing?”

George smiled. “You’re right. I hadn’t thought about it. As I get older, I guess I see everything more and more from the viewpoint of a Jew.
That’s
the real disease.”

Federov saw George off and on after that, taking his uncle to dinner in a steak place that George liked near Pennsylvania Station. Sometimes George showed up with a man he thought might interest his nephew, sometimes alone. One evening he came into the restaurant with a tall, slender man younger than he, but with white hair. “Sam Sternberger,” he said, introducing him to Federov. “He’s one of the lawyers who tries to keep us all out of jail when we do naughty things like asking for showers in the fo’c’sle.”

They ordered drinks and oysters and steaks and while they were eating, Sternberger entertained Federov with courtroom anecdotes and instances of corruption on the part of shipowners and government officials.

“Hey,” George said, interrupting Sternberger in the middle of a description of how he had had to deal with a judge on the take for a bribe. “Hey, Sam, tell him about you and the Sacco-Vanzetti case. I didn’t see this boy”—he waved a fork at Federov—“for thirty years because his father kicked me out of the house because I was in the demonstration in Boston that day. How old were you then, Benny?”

“Thirteen,” Federov said.

“I had a lump on the side of my head as big as a cantaloupe,” George said. “A cop got me against a wall and really laid it on. He must’ve weighed two hundred pounds. Tell him, Sam.”

“I was a student at the time,” Sternberger said. “Columbia. My family lived in New York. I was majoring in philosophy. Don’t ask me why. I had a job that summer selling frozen custard on the boardwalk in Coney Island. All of a sudden I got a telephone call from my mother. I had to come right home, she said. She wouldn’t tell me why—” He speared a slice of tomato from a platter and put it on his plate next to his steak and French-fried potatoes. “Nobody ever said no to my mother. Not in a German-Jewish family. So I took off my apron and told the boss I didn’t know when I was coming back and I took the subway up to Morningside Heights, where we lived. My mother was waiting for me in the kitchen. She was finishing wrapping some sandwiches for me. She had a bag packed for me and a ticket on the train for a round trip to Montreal, Canada. ‘Go,’ she said, ‘go to Montreal. Your Tante Elsa needs you. She is dying. And she needs you tomorrow.’ ‘Yes, Mama,’ I said. You took orders in my family. ‘But why tomorrow?’

“
‘Dummkopf,’
my mother said, ‘don’t you ever read the newspapers?’

“‘Yes, Mama, I read the newspapers,’ I said. It wasn’t true. I thought that a man who was studying Kant and Hegel and Plato insulted his intelligence by reading newspapers, but I couldn’t explain this to my mother. You couldn’t explain
anything
to my mother. ‘But why does Tante Elsa need me
tomorrow?’
I asked her.”

Sternberger had the lawyer’s gift, which Federov had always admired, of being able to talk in coherent, unhesitating, grammatical sentences. Even in the minute or two that Sternberger had been telling the story, the image of the austere mother in the kitchen and her imperious domination of the young, unformed philosophy student who had just put off the white apron in Coney Island was clear and real.

“‘The Italians,’ my mother said, ‘the two anarchists—they are executing them tomorrow. You know your Tante Elsa, you know how she feels about this. And she is dying, besides. It is one day she cannot be alone.’”

“His aunt was famous,” George said. He told Federov the name. It was the name of a woman who hadn’t been forgotten even after all these years, a professed anarchist, a woman who had gone to Russia during the Revolution, who had sat with Lenin on platforms, who had broken with the Bolsheviks, who had been implicated but never convicted in the attempted assassination of a great industrialist in the Middle West. She hadn’t been convicted, but she had been deported, at the time of the Palmer raids, in the 1920s, first to Mexico and from Mexico to Canada.

“My mother hadn’t spoken to her sister Elsa for years,” Sternberger went on, comfortably chewing on his steak. “When my aunt came back from Russia my mother told her she’d disgraced the family name and that she was ashamed to show her face on the street and in the synagogue and that she never wanted to see her again. She never did, either. But it was a big family, my mother had four brothers, and they kept in touch with Tante Elsa and my mother got all the news. And I myself went to visit her every Christmas.

“‘She has tuberculosis,’ my mother said. ‘The doctors only give her days to live, she can’t be alone tomorrow. And you’re the only one in the family she likes. You’re the only one in the family she says isn’t German. I suppose she means that as a compliment,’ my mother said. ‘Maybe she’s right. Who knows what goes through that poor woman’s head? Anyway, you’re the only one she ever asks about in her letters to the rest of the
Mespucheh.’”

“‘Mespucheh’
means ‘family,’ Benny,” George said.

“That much Yiddish I know,” Federov said.

“Just in case. You never can tell with you young fellers.”

Sternberger went on. “‘She says you’re wasting your time studying those old dead Greeks, Elsa,’ my mother said. ‘She has an opinion on everything, that woman. But no matter. You go to Montreal. You stay by her side. You represent the family. You give her comfort. Here’—my mother gave me the sandwiches. ‘Put these in your pocket. Eat. The tickets cost enough as it is, there’s no sense in making the thieves in those dining cars rich. And God knows what they feed you, with all those fancy prices.’”

Sternberger smiled faintly, enjoying the memory of that powerful, obstinate woman, his mother, that strong voice silenced these many years, that rigid code of honor, that pride of family, that queenlike insistence on traditional deportment, now only a subject for amusing anecdotes at weddings and funerals.

“So I went to Montreal,” Sternberger continued. “I sat up all night. Aside from being thrifty, my mother thought Pullman cars were immoral. All those people, men and women all mixed up, sleeping together with only wavy little curtains between them. Men sleeping on top of women, women sleeping on top of strange men.

“My aunt was living in one room in a boardinghouse. A dying neighborhood. Big old mansions in what used to be a rich quarter of the city, now cut up into small apartments, boardinghouses. Spinsters, widows, old bachelors, people with small pensions, people with night jobs, a hot plate for cooking behind a screen in the corner of the room, everything on the decline and no hope of its ever getting better. My aunt’s room was tiny, filled with books and papers. Cigarette butts overflowing from saucers and a coffee pot always going. Somehow, wherever my aunt lived, even though she was German and had lived in North America most of her life, her rooms looked as though they were in a poor quarter of Moscow under the Czar. No windows open, even in summer, because she was dying. ‘I have the winter of the grave in my bones, Sam,’ she told me that morning, all wrapped up in sweaters. Everything she wore was brown or black or dusty green. Everything about her, her clothes, her complexion, her hair, was the color of dust. She was nearly a skeleton already. Her face was sharp, translucent, like the edge of a seashell. She kept walking up and down that little room all morning, smoking one cigarette after another, holding the cigarettes the Russian way, with the hand cupped under them, so weak she had to hold onto the back of a chair, onto the bedpost, the edge of the washbasin, my shoulder, to keep from falling. But she wouldn’t sit down. ‘I am like an old horse,’ she said. ‘If I sit down, I will never get up again.’

“‘Your mother is a narrow, ignorant woman,’ my aunt said. ‘If she were a man she would be a tax collector in Prussia. Her horizon is the kitchen stove. She has only slept with one man in her whole life. Your father. Imagine the outlook on life of a woman who has only made love to one man. Made love! Hah! Taken off her corset for ten minutes on a Saturday night twice a month. She thinks I’m crazy. A woman rules the house, she thinks, men change the world. But she sent you here to me today. For that I forgive her everything, tell her. For today. Somewhere inside the corset there is the remnant of a heart, she remembers that we slept in the same bed together when we were children, that we gathered raspberries in the fields along the Rhine in the summer in white dresses and blue aprons, that we stood beside the grave of our grandfather in the cemetery in Cologne when we were both under ten years old. I thank her for it, tell her, she sent me her son when I needed him.’

“She kept tottering from chair to bed to basin,” Sternberger said, “and I was afraid she was going to fall and die right then and there. She couldn’t stop talking and she couldn’t stop smoking and she couldn’t stop walking up and down. And it wasn’t because she was dying. She had a contempt of death. She wouldn’t cry for anybody else’s and she wouldn’t cry for her own. She wouldn’t cry for Sacco and Vanzetti, either. ‘What a farce,’ she said. ‘Those hypocritical holy Puritans from Boston pretending they are saving the world, pretending they are upholding justice, proud of themselves because they are killing two poor little Italian workmen. Beware people in power, Sam, beware the rich. They’re frightened somehow their money is going to be taken away from them, they strike out blindly—in all directions, at people passing by in the streets, at children, at poets, at shadows, at two little Italians. Beware systems. Beware rulers. They are all the same. Everything to keep them where they are—on the workingman’s back. And don’t think the Russians are better. They’re worse. The hypocrisy is deeper. They tell the world they are workingmen, they are for the workingman. Liars. Rockefellers in caps. Bismarcks without a tie. All for effect. How many Vanzettis they’ve killed already, how many poor dumb Saccos. They could sit down at lunch with the Governor of Massachusetts, they could shake hands with Judge Webster Thayer, and if you changed their clothes nobody could tell the difference.’”

Sternberger finished his beer, put the glass down on the tablecloth. He had long, fine hands and he used them with precision. He paused. He was remote. He was not in a crowded and noisy restaurant in New York any more. His hair was not white. He was a young philosophy student again in a dingy room in Montreal, awed by the elemental cry of outrage of a dying woman, a woman through whose veins ran the same blood as his but who, as if with a contemptuous actor’s aside on a stage, had cut her ties with family, with security, with everything small and safe, to plunge into bitter depths where only courage counted, where only the purest and most dangerous honesty could be tolerated, where love was nothing, sympathy nothing, hope nothing, conviction everything…

It’s amazing, Federov thought, how everybody remembers every detail of that one day in 1927. Like the survivors of Pompeii who watched from afar as Vesuvius stained the sky and who must have described with grieving accuracy the flaming rock, the day-long cloud, each moment of the death of the city, to their great-grandchildren; like the four or five inhabitants the Germans had neglected to kill when they wiped out Ourador and who would always know what the church looked like as it burned, what the cries sounded like from within.

A waiter came over and put three glasses of beer on the table. The movement, so close to Sternberger, brought him back to today, to the restaurant, to the men at the table with him. He took a long draught of the beer, then played with the glass, tapping lightly at its stem.