The German Money, page 9
I felt the same dread approaching him that I’d felt before, even though it had been over seven years since I’d last seen him, as if he was merely a doorway to some horrible universe of oblivion and pain, and I could succumb if I got too close. Dina also held herself back, talking to him stiffly, talking to watery, pouchy eyes that registered nothing. Dad’s face had lost its comic edge and looked swollen, melted, drained. His skin had turned splotchy and what was left of his hair looked like the lines children scrawl on a pencil drawing of a head. No wonder we never talked about him.
Simon surprised me. He was gentle and loving with Dad, feeding him patiently when he visited, speaking in a reassuring undertone as if to tame a violent horse. Simon had gone to see him almost every day that my mother couldn’t.
Thankfully, Dad had just been fed and we circled around him in the sunny alcove where he was marooned in his gerry chair, rigid, unseeing. The air around us was stifling—with some kind of flowery disinfectant covering up a staleness, an emptiness, and the weirdly metallic scent of old people’s shit.
“Dad,” I said, as if I had to speak first because I was the eldest. “It’s me, Paul. Mom is dead. It was a heart attack.”
Nothing. Not a flicker of change in either of us.
Simon knelt by my father’s chair. “Tatinkeh,” he said in Yiddish. “Di mameh is geshtorbn.” Daddy—Mom’s dead. He turned to me and said, “I’ve told him already. I keep telling him.”
“When did you start speaking Yiddish?” Dina asked. I tried not to look surprised that this was something Simon hadn’t shared with her.
Not turning around, Simon muttered defensively, “Since he got sick. It’s just to him.” Dina shook her head and grimaced as if Simon had taken up water-skiing in an attempt to reach Dad. To me, Simon’s gesture seemed quixotic, and brave. It would have hurt me to try.
Dad blinked, and Simon took one of his stiff hands. The twisted spotty fingers did not stir. I think Dad once had powerful, thick-fingered, manly hands. But I wasn’t sure.
“This would kill him,” I said to Dina, as I had before, in person and over the phone.
“I know.”
We both were referring to his former vigor, how shocked he’d be if the impossible could happen and he was able to see what he had become. But in truth, I think that each time one of us said over the last nine years, “This would kill him,” it was like a tiny hopeful prayer. Please. Soon.
Simon and I waited down in the lobby while Dina found a Ladies room. I tried not to look around because the expressions of visitors were too wrenching, too naked.
“Are you ever glad they’re both dead, now?” Simon asked so quietly that at first it didn’t register. When the question sunk in, I must’ve looked surprised, because Simon sounded a little sharp: “Well, Dad is dead, isn’t he? That’s how I think of him. What’s there—that’s not really Dad anymore.”
“But you come here so often—you said so. You spend all that time feeding him. You talk to him.”
“It’s like a memorial.” He blinked rapidly a few times. “Well, are you glad?”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t hurt so much.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Hating them.”
We took another silent drive back to Simon’s apartment, only this time heading west. These were the boundaries of my time in New York: death and vacancy, first the cemetery in New Jersey and now another kind of death park. No, that wasn’t right—there was more here in the city, there was the German money. But that still seemed polluted to me, almost dangerous. My mother had never spent any of it. Had she been unwilling? Afraid? Had she feared it would somehow harm her, that there was a trap involved? Perhaps it was her superstitiousness, because she knocked on wood more than anyone I’d ever known. Maybe she felt cursed to have survived, or haunted.
One time years ago, I’d woken up near dawn to take a leak and heard something strange when I opened the bedroom door, a shushing down the hallway. I edged out and peered down it in the darkness, trying to see and hear better. It came from the foyer. Creeping forward, I began to make out a figure seated at the foyer desk—Mom. Gradually I saw that she was alone. She was talking to herself, whispering in Polish or Yiddish, I couldn’t tell. “Shaydim,” was one of the words I seemed to hear. I’d heard the word among Mom and Dad’s friends. It meant ghosts, malicious spirits. I couldn’t make out the rest of what she said; I was too scared to call to her or move. The whispering stopped, I retreated into my room. I don’t know if she’d noticed me or how long it lasted. I don’t know why she sat there and said anything at all. I lay there thinking I’d seen something unbearably intimate, wishing Simon had woken up, too, so that I wasn’t alone. Shaydim. Or was it shame?
Just then, we rolled over a pothole so big the jarring made me feel like a college running back getting one of those hard tackles Keith Jackson called a “slobber knocker.” I glanced back at Dina and over at Simon, but neither one registered having just been shaken and not stirred. That was life in New York—perpetually screening out whatever was unpleasant, I supposed, until you were numb. But who was I kidding? Wasn’t I numb out in Michigan?
No, not completely. I could feel the sunsets, I could enjoy the plangent murmur of mourning doves. I wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway.
Dina sat quietly in the back seat until her tiny cell phone rang and she started speaking very low in French. I knew it was Serge, but couldn’t make out much of what she was saying. But I did hear the word “Allemagne” more than once. German. She must have been talking to her husband about the German money. Why?
When I turned to look at her, her head was down but she was grinning so triumphantly, I wondered if the call was part of some game she was playing, and she had won this round.
When she was done talking to Serge, she said, “Serge wants me home. I’ll leave today. I can come down some other time and go through things at Mom’s.”
She was so ebullient I wanted to shoot her down and ask her why she was no longer worried about Simon or me stealing anything of our mother’s, but I kept quiet. Simon didn’t respond to her announcement or even look back at her, but even from the side I could tell he looked surprised, maybe even hurt. Surely he thought he was support enough.
We bounced along home. People in Michigan complain about the state of the streets and highways; well, they should all try a day driving in New York and they’d feel much better. I couldn’t believe the ravaged-looking roads that wouldn’t have been out of place in a disaster movie, the kind I couldn’t watch because the screaming, fleeing crowds always made me think of my mother in the War.
Dina was back on the phone, pulling out her date book and dialing Air Canada. By the time we drove up to Simon’s, she had already switched her flight and Simon drove her to La Guardia as soon as she was packed. She kissed me goodbye as if embarrassed to do it, and I wondered if she was running from the threat of closeness between us, the possibility of change.
Opening a can of soup for lunch, I imagined Simon and Dina at the airport, fond, affectionate, even holding hands. Sometimes people took them for twins as much for their connection as any resemblance. Picturing them there I felt once again excluded and alone. When Simon returned from the airport, I told him I might want to stay at Mom’s apartment a day or two before heading back to Michigan. Staying in Simon’s strange garish apartment that seemed like a disguise whose purpose I couldn’t guess was even less comfortable after having had a real bed and real space at my mother’s.
Simon looked relieved. Maybe he wasn’t used to having guests, or maybe he wanted to bring someone home he didn’t want me to meet. I’m not sure it mattered why. I packed up methodically, as if arming myself for a hazardous encounter. Simon had mentioned the subways once or twice as a possibility since I’d brought just one bag, but I countered with stories about people being pushed off the platforms.
“That doesn’t happen anymore,” he said, as if it were out of fashion. But the very idea of it terrified me. Growing up, I’d worried—as everyone else did—about crime in the subway, but murder hadn’t been a threat back then. You could be mugged, or more likely grossed out, coming down a reeking staircase to find a bum laid out, his head haloed by vomit, or watch rats scrabble on the greasy tracks late at night. I understood from articles I’d read and reports Dina and Simon both had given me that the subways were safer, cleaner, more salubrious—but they still weren’t my idea of a sane place to be.
When I was ready, I called my boss at the library and got a few more days of bereavement leave. It was easy, almost too easy. When I’d announced my mother was dead, I’d been annoyed by the melodramatically sympathetic looks of my co-workers. They all seemed to be acting out an image of commiseration they felt uncomfortable with. Perhaps they were embarrassed at the demands they thought my situation made on them, since I kept my private life so private. All I’d wanted was silence, and to get away.
Simon gave me his extra set of keys for Mom’s apartment. We surveyed each other at his door, moving together awkwardly for a quick hug, acting as clumsily embarrassed as tyros at a dance studio.
I headed downstairs and hailed a cab, nervously aware that I could probably afford it now. I refused all invitations to chat with the driver, who was Haitian judging from his name. He tried roping me into complaints about Congress and Jennifer Lopez and people who let dogs lick their faces. The last topic seemed to make him angriest and I did wonder if there was some ethnic basis for his disgust, but kept my eyes closed while he ranted. I tipped him well out of relief to be leaving his cab.
And then there I was, in my mother’s apartment, surrounded by the air she had been breathing just a little while ago. Temporarily, at least, I was in complete possession—but of what? There was furniture here and clothing and dishes and books and porcelain figurines and jewelry and framed Modernist prints, but what did any of that have to do with Mom, or Dad?
In the kitchen I opened the liquor cabinet, which, as always was sparsely stocked with inexpensive vodka and some sweet liqueurs like Cherry Heering. As kids we’d thought it was somehow made from herrings, even though we’d tasted the coughsyrupy drink and knew the difference. Dad had loved Cherry Heering, smacking his lips before he even filled his heavy shot glass, and to tease us he always called it “Cheery Herring.” For him, though, liquor was all basically “schnapps” the way they say Southerners refer to all pop as cokes.
There were some unopened gift boxes in the cabinet and in one of them I found a bottle of Seagram’s. My mother had liked Seven-Up and always kept a lot in the pantry, so I was soon seated with a very stiff drink back in the living room.
Questions jostled me. My father had been an only child; his parents died long before he met my mother. Now I would never be able to ask her what he’d said about them, what they were like. And Mom—what must it have been like to come to America after having survived the Nazis and see some home-grown fascists rise up with McCarthy? I knew that she had met Dad in Paris after the War, but couldn’t recall if either one had ever told me how exactly they’d crossed paths, what they’d said, how they’d looked at each other. I know there were some photographs of them, Mom with a 40s pile of hair, Dad in a rumpled Army uniform, but there was nothing written on the back to tell us where the picture had been taken, or by whom. I’d never asked Dad about serving in the Army, and he had never volunteered anything. I’d been afraid of his reminiscences, knowing that they would invariably lead to meeting Mom, eliding from his War to hers.
But all that was lost. I’d been so desperate to escape New York and the past, but now I felt starved for it. And I would be hungry in a way that could never be satisfied.
I had lost, through my parents, access to my own past. Looking through photo albums, finding old souvenir postcards, I would not be able to plumb their memories, to hear the stories. I hadn’t just lost a chance to retrieve details of vacations, illnesses, scholastic triumphs—I had lost the very details themselves. My mother’s death, Dad’s disappearance into a virtual death, had taken huge chunks of my life. I wasn’t just alone, I was diminished, reduced.
No wonder people had kids. How else could they feel they weren’t being erased with each passing year? But I had never met a woman I’d want to have kids with, except Valerie.
I made myself a third drink. Hell, I wasn’t going anywhere—in more ways than one—so what did it matter? In the silent kitchen, the ice cubes and gurgling pop bottle sounded admonishingly loud, but there was no one to snap at.
Back in the living room, I let myself be drawn to the wall of framed photographs, seeking out the ones featuring Val. She was tall, slim-hipped, with full and pointed breasts, and had never considered herself beautiful, perhaps because her freckled face was too angular, her nose too thin. But when she smiled it seemed to ignite her deep red hair and hazel eyes. Angel Eyes, I called them, after the song on Roxy Music’s comeback album that we had listened to so much in freshman year at Columbia.
I downed half of my drink, perched myself on the window seat Simon had claimed yesterday when Dina and I were arguing, gazing out at the thick oily-looking dark water of the Hudson, shot through with lights from the myriad buildings across the river forming an uneven crenellation of the Palisades. The beams reaching out across the water struck me as sad, incomplete almost. New Yorkers had traditionally mocked “Jersey,” but growing up, I had studied the stretches of green and brown between buildings and factories that made the state across the river seem so different. I’d wondered what it would be like to live somewhere that wasn’t completely covered in concrete and asphalt, but the stretch of Jersey shoreline I could see just seemed to be aping Manhattan. Had Val and I gone there once on a double date with Dina and someone I couldn’t place, off to a jungle theme park? I tried to track down the memory, only glimpsing Val in a halter top, insubstantial sandals, and thin cotton skirt buttoned down the front. And I remembered getting sunburned. Nothing more came back, but it made me happy to have just that.
When I told my parents Val and I had broken up after five years, Dad was disappointed and angry. “Idiot! Valerie’s a prize. What are you, meshugah?” But my mother had put it far more painfully because she was so much more precise: “You will never meet a girl more kind.” Whether that was a threat, a curse or simply an observation, it was just like my mother to zero in on something irreplaceable. Lots of girls were pretty, smart, talented, affectionate, even Jewish—but kind? It was an oldfashioned, uncommon quality.
Time and my own fuck-ups had proven my mother absolutely correct. I raised my glass to a picture of Valerie off behind me. A group shot of both families on the July 4th when we’d had a party and used our bit of river view here to the fullest, watching boats on the Hudson. Even my mother was smiling in that shot, standing stiffly behind us kids with Dad and Val’s parents as if they were somehow ushering us into the future. And she was smiling in another photo with Valerie and some little girl I didn’t recognize.
Dina and Simon had both been fond of Valerie, and the reverse was true. I’d liked her parents and they had approved of me. A love fest all around, right? But I had jumped off the carousel, unwilling to snatch the brass ring.
“You’ll regret it,” Dina had said, her voice harsh and vengeful, as if I had somehow offended her personally, and she was weaving a spell that would guarantee my unhappiness. That wasn’t necessary—I’d done enough to fulfill her prophecy. Simon’s reaction was more befuddled, but that may have been due to whatever drugs he was into at the time. I suppose if he had broken his sibylline silence, he would have made some dire predictions, too. Maybe he held back because he knew how right Dina was.
Angel Eyes. I found myself humming that song. I trailed back to Simon’s and my old bedroom to see if I had left the Roxy Music album behind with the others when I’d moved from New York and taken mostly cassettes because they were so much easier to pack. Rifling through the junk on the closet floor, I found “Manifesto” and their “Siren” album too with probably their best-known song: Love is a Drug. Oh yes, Bryan Ferry got that one right.
Simon’s battered secondhand Bang & Olufsen turntable was still on our particle board wall unit, and I slipped “Manifesto” on without bothering to do all the needle and record cleaning he’d performed with surprisingly ritual exactness.
I lay back on my bed listening to the music I had discovered with Valerie, trying to place where exactly we’d been the first time we heard the song and I thought of her. “That’s you,” I’d said with a grin of discovery, marveling at Bryan Ferry’s brilliance. “Angel Eyes.”
I did see Valerie blushing and turning away, but snuggling against me, beautiful eyes averted. She had said quietly, “Okay.”
Listening to the album, eyes closed, I was surprised to remember very different music. One winter when we’d had tickets to Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall, I’d waited for her on the chilly plaza of Lincoln Center, imagining every possible urban disaster when she was late because she was scrupulous about being on time, and then spotting her, finally, striding along in her black, fur-collared Dr. Zhivago coat, grinning at me because she’d instantly read my panic and my relief. How we’d hugged there and I’d wanted the weight of her body in my arms to know she was all right, I was all right. Inside, when she took off her coat, men and even women stared. She looked like a model, and much older, in a new long-sleeved lilac woolen sheath that was tight at the bust, violet hose and high heels, and the antique garnet necklace I’d given her for her twenty-first birthday. That evening, every note in the coppery, golden hall sang of her and I felt dumbstruck by how stunning she was. Valerie was like an undiscovered country that an explorer has dreamed of and knows with ineffable intimacy: strange and blessedly familiar at the same time. I had trouble speaking during the intermission and we just held hands and enjoyed the beautifully-dressed crowd. Did we drink something? The first half had been a Mozart Piano Concerto played by Alicia della Rocha, and it didn’t prepare me for the emotional juggernaut of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique after the intermission. I knew the piece from the radio, but didn’t even own a recording and had never heard it performed. As the symphony progressed and the music worked on me like a storm about to tear the roof off a Florida home, I felt seized by a desire to ask Val to marry me, but not just to lean over and whisper it. No, I wanted to clutch her slim wrist, drag her along our row, up the aisle and out onto that open gleaming plaza, to whirl her around in my arms and shout it as if life were a musical: Marry me! Marry Me!
