World's Fair (13 page)

I
n bed with a cold, I called loudly to my mother to bring me some orange juice. I heard her rustling about. Slam of refrigerator door. Footsteps coming down the hall. I threw myself half off the bed, my head back, my eyes staring wide, tongue extended and hands dragging on the floor. Screech. A shattering of glass. I sat up and laughed. Eventually, after sitting down on my bed to catch her breath and recover, she laughed too. “What a terrible thing to do,” she said. My mother had been trained in death and disaster. She was vulnerable. She had lost two older sisters and her father. She had grieved and mourned three times, an experience I could only wonder about. She looked at Grandma every day with frowns of concern. Her blue eyes went dark. She played the piano, when she had time, almost as a form of prayer. Big chords, dashing arpeggios. My mother sat regally at the piano. Her arms reached wide.

O
ne morning, after my breakfast of oatmeal and milk and toast and jelly, I took Grandma her tea. Carrying the glass and saucer carefully with two hands, I walked slowly down the hall to her room, next to mine, at the back of the house. In the saucer beside the glass were two white cubes of sugar—the same size Donald marked with a fountain pen to make homemade dice for one of his games. I tapped on her door; I waited for her to call “Come ahead” in Jewish so that I could push open the door with
my foot and set the tea on the stand beside her bed. Grandma was interesting to me at these morning meetings. In bed she would not yet have dressed her hair—it lay in long grey braids on her pillows. She looked like a girl. Her light blue eyes were rested, and in the sun coming in the window the thin, fair skin of her face was quite smooth and you could see a little freckle here and there. She did not fear being poisoned in the morning. I enjoyed her approval. I basked in her love. In the back of my mind was also the idea of building up some reservoir of good feeling so that if she became unhappy during the day and started cursing and screaming, she would look at me and remember how she had loved me earlier and take it easy on me.

I thought now I heard her call to come in. I pushed open the door and saw immediately that something was wrong. “Grandma?” I said. I whispered, “Grandma?” She was lying in bed on her back with the blanket pulled up to her chin and her hands clutching the blanket’s edge. She emitted a strange sound—like marbles spilling on the floor. Clumps of the blanket were gathered under her fingers. She was very yellow. The sound stopped. Her eyes were neither closed nor open—as if the lids were between sleep and awakeness. Her chin looked collapsed somehow, the mouth was slack. Now I felt the overall stillness of her, a declared inanimateness, the monumental event of death recorded here for me as another kind of life, a superseding condition with more visible torment than I could have imagined was possible. I put the tea down on the bureau far from her bed. I ran down the hall to the kitchen, where my mother and father were having breakfast. I thought Grandma was behind me and coming to get me. My parents saw me in the doorway and I said, “I think Grandma has died.” I had not yet in my brief life been thought of as a reliable witness of anything. My parents exchanged glances as if looking for each other’s assurance that what I had said could not possibly be true. But they knew something of her precarious health, and the edge of despair on which she lived and often tottered. My father pushed his chair back and hurried to the back of the house; my mother stared at me and put her hand to her cheek.

L
ater, with the thing officially acknowledged and phone calls made and the visit of the doctor, I felt better. That the adults had taken charge was comforting to me, and no moment since my discovery of my grandma had been quite as bad. Everyone talked in whispers. I had not yet begun to think of her as dead, only that she had died. These seemed to be two separate ideas in my mind. She still lay in her room. It was still her room. I peeked through the half-closed door and saw Dr. Gross examining her with a stethoscope. He was our family doctor, a short, round jowly man with greying black hair and a moustache who wore looped across his vest a chain with a membership badge of some sort depending from it. I had studied that little badge many times as he attended me through my wheezes and hacks and earaches. His office was only a few blocks away. He had removed the covers from my grandma and taken off her gown. She lay white and slender; I could not see her face, but her body, the female whiteness of it, was dazzling to me, not at all wrinkled and not bent but straight. I had just a glimpse before my mother saw me and told me to go about my business and shut the door firmly. I wondered if it was a thing about death that made grandmas into girls.

The next day my mother and father and Uncle Willy, all of them dressed in dark clothes, went off to the synagogue, which was around the corner and one block down on 173rd Street and Morris Avenue. Donald stayed home from school, but neither he nor I was allowed to go to the services. But we were drawn there somehow, and so we walked with my hand in his to where we could stand across the street from the synagogue and hear what traces of the music and prayer could be heard. It was a large square synagogue faced in a pebbly texture of concrete. I had touched it many times. It had white granite steps in the front that narrowed toward the top, and curving brass handrails. It had
stone columns on either side of the front door, like a post office, and a translucent dome for a roof. At the very top, where pigeons sat, were two tablets connoting the Ten Commandments. Around the side where we stood, stained-glass windows were tilted open in a way that didn’t allow you to see inside. We heard singing.

“Poor Grandma,” Donald said. “The only fun she had was going to services.”

We saw the black hearse, and another black car behind it, move slowly to a stop in front of the synagogue. “People will be coming out in a minute,” Donald said and we walked back home.

I had the distinct impression death was Jewish. It had happened to my grandma, who spoke Jewish, and everyone had immediately repaired to the synagogue. A memorial candle in a glass now stood flickering on the kitchen table for Grandma, whom I had seen light similar candle glasses for her own dead. Hebrew letters were on the glass label as on the window of the chicken market where dead chickens hung on hooks by their feet, some plucked, some half plucked, some with all their feathers. Chickens, I knew, were Jewish. For days after Grandma’s burial, the mirrors were covered in our house and my mother walked around in stockinged feet. We were visited by friends, who brought many white bakery boxes tied with string and put them on the kitchen table. Pots and pots of coffee were made, and women I didn’t know, friends of my mother, stood strangely at the kitchen sink and washed dishes. My mother hugged me in front of visitors, drew me to her and hugged me till it hurt. She was tearful, sentimental, easy to deal with. She complimented me and told everyone how bright I was. “This is the boy who knew before any of us,” she said. “He came to tell us and he knew exactly what had happened.” But she also spoke Jewish to these people, just as she had to my grandmother. I went to my grandmother’s room. The bed was stripped, the closet had been emptied. But in her cedar chest there were still her treasures, shawls of lace and folded dresses, and wool sweaters and knitted things all wrapped in thin white paper and with mothballs between the layers. There were also old sepia pictures of
her family when she was a child, many little girls and boys standing and reclining around old men with white beards and black hats who sat stiffly in chairs, behind which stood several stern-looking women with their hands on the old men’s shoulders. The little boys and girls were dressed oddly and all seemed to have drawn faces and dark hair hanging over their ears and enormous staring dark eyes. On the top of the chest was my grandma’s prayer book, her Siddur, and the cover had those Jewish letters on it that looked to me like arrangements of bones. In my room I played with my pick-up sticks to see if I could arrange them in Jewish letters, but they lacked bony width, they lacked the knobby thickness even of chicken bones.

Now it was my mother who, on Friday nights at the kitchen table, placed white Sabbath candles in the wobbly old brass candlesticks, and drew a kerchief over her head and lit the candles and prayed with her hands over her glistening blue eyes.

TWELVE

M
ore frequently now there came to the front door the old men in black who wore their prayer shawls under their coats and carried letters from rabbis and credentials from yeshivas. Now they were invited in. My mother sat them in the parlor and gave them tea. They told their stories in hushed tones or spoke only in Jewish, and so my eavesdropping didn’t yield anything that specific. But I was getting the gist of things. And finally one man spoke enough English to make it clear. “The
kinder
from the schools are pushed, so now they can’t go. And the business of the fathers are taken from them. Little by little. And in the street they revile them, the brownshirt heathen, and spit on them. And to the
polizei
they must report. Thousands are leaving, Missus. Their homes, their livelihood is gone. All of it gone. To Palestine, on boats, but anywhere! Where can they go! What can they do!”

My mother produced two crumpled bills from her purse, folded them, and pushed them into the old man’s coin box. It was a blue box with white stripes and a white six-pointed star.

My mother joined the Sisterhood of the synagogue and began going to services on Saturday morning. She had never been religious before. “I never had the patience,” she told her friend Mae. “When I was a girl, I gave Mama such a hard time because I wouldn’t go. I thought it was all so old-fashioned and unnecessary.
We were bohemians, Dave and I. And look at me now.”

One Saturday I went with her just to see what it was all about. The women sat upstairs in the synagogue. The men, who were the bosses, sat downstairs. Sometimes there was crying, sometimes singing, but mostly Jewish death words. Jewish death was spreading.

I left and ran home by myself. Through a grate in the sidewalk on the 173rd Street side of the synagogue I could see into the basement windows. Another synagogue was down there where the poor people prayed.

I was familiar with the texture of sidewalks and the embellishments in brick at the sides of buildings. Most brick was red and of a pocked cracked surface that scraped the finger; some brick siding was yellow and was smoother. The steps of my front stoop were worn white granite, very smooth to the touch.

After this summer I would be going to school. This had been discussed several times by my parents. They were pleased about it. I was ready for school—eager, in fact—but now my mother was saying that I would also go to Hebrew school twice a week in the afternoons. She said this as a kind of declaration and she put her hand on my head. I secretly resolved to fight the edict. It seemed to me a reckless, even insane act of public exposure. I already knew that if I found myself in the wrong part of Claremont Park I could be knifed and robbed for being Jewish. I knew from the old men’s whisperings in the front parlor that similar things, though even worse, were happening in Europe, especially Germany. A little boy who went to Hebrew school would live in endlessly concentric circles of danger, beginning with my park, and rippling out over the globe. Everything connected in a circle of being that, unfortunately, had assigned to us the life of prey, as on the steppes, or the veldt, where the herds of beautiful zebra or wildebeests were run down and this or that animal isolated and slaughtered for the evening meal of the predator cats, I could not have reasoned consciously that European culture took revengeful root in the New World, to which it had been transplanted. Yiddish-speaking households were not foreign to me, they were American. I did not speak the language,
but I understood bits of it as spoken by my grandmother to my mother or in less purist fashion by my father’s parents to him. In my comic books purchased at the candy store on the corner of 174th Street, or on the faces of the bubble gum cards, stories were told of wars between gangsters or wars between countries. Planes dive-bombed the agonized faces of screaming civilians, tanks rearing like horses on their hind legs loomed over Oriental babies crying for their mothers, and G-men and crooks, who were dressed alike, drilled each other with tommy guns. It all seemed of a piece to me, and insofar as it had something to do with the strategy of survival, I attended to it. I understood that one had as resources oneself, one’s brother, one’s parents and then perhaps President Roosevelt.

O
f course I knew virtually nothing about religion, beyond a few of the major Bible stories and the holidays associated with them. I knew so far that most of the Jewish holidays were not as much fun as the regular ones. There was some forced insistence behind them. This was not true of the Fourth of July or New Year’s or Thanksgiving, Purim, where you got apples and raisins and noisemakers and little blue-and-white flags, was sort of fun; and Chanukah, of course, where you got presents. But spinning the wooden top, to see which Hebrew letter would fall, like a gambler in death, was not to my liking. And the Purim story seemed to me not as victorious as it was made out to be. One bad man was shamed and deposed, but the king was still there who was the real problem.