Fatherhood Read online

“Summer, storm, Poe,” he repeated, his tone urgent, as if he were searching through his vast vocabulary, riffling through the great cabinet of his mind for some purloined letter that would explain his life.

  “Shiksa,” he said, paused, searched, then added, “Sarah.”

  Sarah was my mother’s name, and my father’s use of shiksa and Sarah in such juxtaposition immediately returned me to the climactic scene that seemed most disastrously to connect them. I saw my mother and father in our car on a particularly stormy day, though one whose wind and rain I’d hardly have noticed had the car come only part way up the drive and then stopped without going into the garage. Abruptly stopped, with a jolt, as if someone had stomped the brakes.

  “I was seven when we left,” I said softly, remembering that dreadful, life-altering day, the thudding rain, my mother’s anger a quite different storm, one that had proven far more devastating to the landscape of my youth.

  But this was a disturbing recollection, fraught with old rage, and so I quickly returned to Poe’s poem and began to read again:

  From the same source I have not taken

  My sorrow; I could not awaken

  My heart to joy at the same tone;

  And all I loved, I loved alone.

  “Never,” my father said. “I would never.”

  He appeared to be rambling now, his focus less clear. I barely acknowledged what he said. For despite the effort, I found myself still fixed in place at the second-floor window, the little boy I’d once been, peering down into the chasm of adulthood, where the family car halted at the rim of the house and my mother dashed out into the rain while my father sat behind the weeping glass, listening to the thump, thump, thumping of what I had considered since that stormtossed day to be his profoundly selfish heart.

  “You are …” my father murmured. “You are …”

  The callous heart of a man my mother had left more than fifty years before, left to his suburban house and big-shot college professorship, left and taken me with her and returned us both to the din of New York, where we’d lived with my grandmother in a crowded neighborhood, Ludlow Street. My mother hence known to all as Surala, speaking Yiddish to the vendors and shopkeepers, using her hands when she spoke, covering her head and lighting the candles for Friday night prayers—Baruch Atah Adonai—and from which world, with my father far away, his visits growing more infrequent, I had made my way unfathered into the world.

  “Alexander,” my father said.

  It was the name he’d chosen for me, a conqueror of worlds, and certainly inappropriate for the rabbi I was, with a synagogue on Sixth Street and a little apartment in Stuyvesant Town.

  “I’m Ezra,” I reminded him starkly. “I’ve been Ezra since …” I stopped, already irritated by my little visit to the past. “Ezra is my name.”

  My name because it was the name called out in the synagogue, the middle name that had been chosen by my mother, and so, as I saw it, forever my name, shouted in greeting by the pickle sellers on Essex Street and the tradesmen of Delancey, by the old people in the park and the young people in the handball courts, my name to my grandmother, carried on breath laced with herring, past lips crumbed with latkes, my name to all the “old world” my father had despised and back to which my mother, in her brokenness, had fled, and by which she had again been made whole, and so the world I had embraced as my world too, this island, where storms also raged, of course, but always amid the anchorage of the old traditions and blood relations and neighborhood bonds, faith and family and friends.

  “Ezra,” I repeated, like a man raising a proud old flag.

  My father drew in a trembling breath but said nothing, so I returned to the poem:

  Then—in my childhood, in the dawn

  Of a most stormy life—was drawn

  From every depth of good and ill

  The mystery which binds me still:

  He poked his chest with a single finger, eyes glaring. “I am the father,” he said with an odd fury, like a man declaring an ancient and inalienable right.

  I looked up from the page and considered this “father” of mine, a man who had renounced so many holy things—the language of his youth, the history of his people; severed so many sacred bonds—marriage, fatherhood—lost so much that was precious and irrecoverable that he seemed the victim of some monstrous theft, though I knew he was the thief. And with that thought I returned to the window, the storm, my mother dashing through the tearing wind, my father silent behind the wheel, his eyes following the rhythmic pulse of the windshield wipers, listening to the thump, thump, thump, as I imagined it, of his own telltale heart.

  My father’s lips twitched and jerked as he tried to speak, now moving his head from side to side as if laboring to shake the words from his mind.

  “Lenore,” he said finally.

  Lenore.

  So now, I thought bitterly, now when he could no longer speak whole sentences easily, when he was too weak to sustain anything resembling conversation, when he had to rely on some kind of associative code, now, at the very border of coherence, after all the damage he had done, the terrible betrayal he had inflicted upon my mother, now, now, my father finally wanted to talk about her, this young girl who’d listened as he’d pontificated about Poe, this shiksa whose life had ended early and violently, in the throes of a passion my father held in the very contempt he’d expressed so starkly in that storm-tossed car, the cruelty of which had caused my mother to stomp the brake. For God’s sake, Sarah, she’s just a girl.

  Her name, this “girl,” was Lenore. She had pale skin and yellow hair, just like the Lenore of Poe’s poem, and it was easy for me to imagine just how beguilingly my father had used her name’s connection to Poe’s pining love song as a way of seducing her, how he must have asked her to linger in the arbor after the other students had left, sat with her in that deep shade, quoted Poe to her, made her believe that she was “fair and debonair,” like the lost Lenore.

  I never knew how my mother found out about her, or learned any of the details of her immediate response, save the terrible admission that had caused her to stomp the brake of the family car as it had drawn up to the garage that stormy afternoon.

  “Lenore?” I said to him now. “Spare me.”

  My father closed his eyes, but I could see them moving about beneath the lids, back and forth and up and around like following a flying bit of paper.

  I lifted the volume toward him. “Poe,” I said firmly, since my mother had made me promise never to speak of my father’s betrayal, a promise it had been easy to keep since my father had never seemed to feel the slightest guilt concerning Lenore, or my mother’s abrupt departure, or even the loss of me. The deep grudge I’d nursed against him, a fire from which he’d finally drawn away, with fewer and fewer visits and phone calls until my bar mitzvah, and after that, as if freed by my full embrace of the faith he had so fully rejected, I could without guilt, and almost as if commanded, hold him in a searing contempt I had made since my thirteenth year no effort to conceal.

  After that rupture, my father’s phone calls had dwindled into nothing, and we’d retreated into our vastly separate worlds, he the strolling luminary of a grassy college campus, I, a familiar figure on the old fabled streets, Essex and Orchard and Rivington, well known and not without honor in the little shtetl of my life.

  I pointed to the open book of Poe’s poems. “Shall I go on?”

  My father eased back wearily and closed his eyes like a man defeated in some final purpose.

  I returned to the poem and began to read:

  From the torrent, or the fountain …

  From the red cliff of the mountain,

  I stopped, but why? What did I want? I knew quite well what it was, of course. I wanted an apology. I wanted my father to tell me that he was truly, deeply sorry not only for what he’d done, but for what he was. I wanted him to tell me that he had been wrong in everything, wrong in all he had rejected and in all he had taken up, that his every guiding th
ought had been wrong, that he’d been wrong at every turn, wrong about my mother, wrong about me, and coldly, cruelly wrong in destroying our family over some nothing of a girl, this poor, distraught Lenore.

  He’d gone to her that same wind-driven afternoon. I’d watched from the second-floor window, oddly transfixed by what I’d already seen, and so held by the curious prospect of what would happen next. My father sat, as if in mute suspension, behind the wheel of his spanking-new sedan, while downstairs I could hear my mother as she strode from room to room, her feet pounding angrily against the hardwood floors below.

  And so I was still at the window when my father came to his conclusion, slapped the gear into reverse, and guided the car back out of the driveway, where he stopped again, though only briefly, perhaps turning some final notion over in his mind before pressing down upon the accelerator and heading east, toward Lake Montego.

  Meanwhile, as the public record later showed, Lenore had also journeyed out into the storm, her body wrapped in an old wool coat, her yellow hair bound in a red scarf, her shoes protected by her very English “wellies,” and so, by all accounts, a careful young woman, careful with her clothes, her shoes, her modest ambitions, careful with the feelings of her family and her female reputation, careful in everything, as it had later seemed, save in what she’d let herself feel for my unfeeling father.

  My father had driven directly to the little bungalow Lenore shared with two other English girls, one named Betty, who later told authorities that he looked angry when he came for Lenore, and one named Dotty, who said he looked flustered and a little confused. Neither had known of their summer roommate’s relationship with the man they called Professor Green before he’d shown up at their door, though they had noticed a change in Lenore, a nervousness they’d attributed to anxiety about her studies. Her long hours of walking in the nearby woods had taken a toll, they thought, as well as her late hours at the college library. Then, in an instant, it had all come clear to them, they said, Lenore crying, distraught, pulling on her coat and galoshes, barging out into the storm, my father banging at their bungalow door a few minutes later, the motor left running in his car, windshield wipers thumping in the rain.

  Back on Giddings Street, of course, I’d heard a very different thumping, first my mother as she climbed the stairs, and after that, the soft thump of her suitcase as she tossed it onto the bed. I didn’t hear the whisper of clothes hastily packed, however, and so I had no idea of anything so dire as the decision she’d made until she suddenly called to me from the hallway, “Alexan …” A pause. “Ezra.”

  And so everything had changed.

  But less for me, as it turned out, than for yellow-haired Lenore.

  She had gone to the boathouse, and when I think of her at the moment my father found her there, I imagine her sitting, wrapped in her own arms, eyes red with crying, the very picture of a broken-hearted young woman, innocent and naïve, the perfect prey for a man such as my father. Professor Green, smooth-tongued, erudite, with his prized Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from his watch chain, this great, learned warship of a man whose seductive wiles the small craft that was Lenore surely could not have resisted.

  For as I later learned, Mary Lenore Leeds was a lowly working-class girl, little more than a scullery maid, who’d won a summer semester in America at a Liverpool dance hall. She’d picked my father’s course on Poe from the great variety of academic offerings open to her because, according to Betty and Dotty, she’d liked penny dreadfuls, read them by the score, and thus had been surprised when Professor Green disparaged them. But they had had a talk, Lenore told her roommates, and after that …

  I had always had trouble imagining the “after that” of my father and Lenore, not because it is almost impossible for children to imagine a parent in the act of sexual congress, but because my father had never seemed physical at all. He’d been all brain to me, all books and learning, all authority and judgment, a secular father of biblical proportions. Aristotle, in the inflated way he seemed to think of himself, to my Alexander.

  But he had hardly turned out to be that sort of sage, a sad fact of life my mother had often made clear. Rather, he was the phony ba’al torah who’d lacked wisdom to hold his family together, a vain and haughty man, always farputst, with his scholar’s key and gold watch, a puffed-up feinshmeker who’d fallen victim to his own exalted image of himself, taken advantage of a young girl and murdered her, to use my mother’s phrase, though she well knew he had not done that.

  Or had he?

  For murder, or at least the possibility of it, was surely what I’d taken from the newspaper accounts of Lenore’s death. I’d been a freshman at Yeshiva before I’d actually read them, warned away from the story by my mother, who had seemed to bury the details of her leaving my father in a deep grave of secrecy. But after reading the newspaper stories, the notion of foul play had lingered in my mind, so that once, after watching that sad and frightening scene from A Place in the Sun where an ambitious, social-climbing Montgomery Clift rows the distraught, pregnant working girl who loves him out onto a lake and murders her for his own advantage, I’d felt a dreadful question circle through my mind. For Lenore had died like that, drowned after somehow falling over the side of the small boat she’d taken out onto storm-tossed Lake Montego. But had she gone alone? Or had my father gone with her, done what he had to do in order to get rid of this inconvenient little strumpet, one he had himself dismissed as “just a girl”?

  It would be easy, I thought, to kill someone who could be dismissed with the very words my father had said in the car that afternoon, words that had always seemed to me the true mark of his cruelty. And if he had done nothing, why had he never gained high position at the college, never become a dean or head of his department, never soared up and up as he’d no doubt expected to soar?

  I felt the darkest suspicion of my life rise like a gush of bile in my throat.

  “Did you kill her?” I blurted suddenly. “Did you kill that … pregnant shiksa?”

  My father’s eyes burst open.

  “Is that why my mother left you?” I demanded. “Not just that you schtupped that girl, but that you killed her?”

  My father began to kick and pull at his sheets, twisting his body and jerking his head. But none of his contortions summoned the slightest pity in me. Let him kick and toss about forever, I thought. Let the dogs of his conscience, the ghosts of all he’d so recklessly thrown aside, even the ghost of Alexander, that little boy who’d loved him so, let them all have their way with him, chew his flesh and drink his blood and break his bones, and finally reduce him to the same dust his betrayal had made of my childhood adoration of him.

  Then quite suddenly he stopped, and with what seemed a mighty effort, said “Nischt mein.”

  I’d seen other people revert to words and phrases they’d not used since childhood, people long rooted in the suburbs who’d abruptly returned, as it were, to the shtetl of their parents or grandparents, the blasted villages and charred ghettos of a vanished Poland. But this latest of my father’s reversions to Yiddish seemed less natural than calculated, perhaps his way of mocking me.

  “I’ve always wondered if you did it,” I said. “If you rowed her out on that lake, into that storm, with nobody around, no other boats on the lake, just rowed her out into that storm and tossed her over the side.”

  My father jerked his head to the right in a way, it seemed to me, a guilty man would turn from his chief accuser.

  I waited briefly, thinking he might look back toward me, actually address the accusation I’d made, but he didn’t, and after a time I went back to Poe’s poem.

  From the sun that round me rolled

  In its autumn tint of gold,

  My father released a long, weary breath. “Farblonschet.”

  It was an almost comic term for being confused, and again I wondered if he was mocking me.

  “So, you’re confused?” I asked, now determined to speak to him only in English, as if Yiddis
h were my language, and could never be his, Yiddish and all that clung to it just another worthy thing he’d brutally renounced, a language that was like me, something he never visited or called, a Yid to this anti-Semite, a piece of dreck.

  My father twisted around and pointed to me with a shaky finger.

  “So, I’m the one who’s confused?” I laughed. “About what?”

  My father began to squirm, so that I could see the effort he was making, the energy it took for him to say simply, “Sarah … never … never …” A jumble of sounds followed, none of them decipherable. Then, quite clearly, though with failing strength, he said, “Not mine.”

  He saw that I had no idea what he was talking about, and with a labored movement reached out for the book.

  I handed it to him, and watched as he thumbed through the pages until he found the one he wanted, then tapped the title of the poem.

  “Lenore?” I asked. “Lenore wasn’t yours?”

  But that was absurd, I thought, for had not my mother discovered the whole sordid business, confronted him with it in the car on that stormy afternoon, heard his heartless dismissal of Lenore—She’s just a girl.

  “What about the baby?” I asked.

  He shook his head furiously, clearly and forcefully denying that Lenore’s baby was his.

  “Not mine,” he repeated. He twisted about, lips fluttering, so that it seemed to me that he was using up the last dwindling energy of his life in some final effort to communicate what I’d once hoped might be an apology, but which was clearly something else.

  I leaned forward. “Whose then?”

  Again my father seemed to take up a mighty struggle, hands jerking at the sheets, legs ceaselessly moving, lips twisting, his eyes darting about, until they settled on the window, emphatically settled, like a pointing finger.

  I looked out the window, the grounds empty save for the young workman in the distance pushing a lawnmower, and made a wild guess.

  “Joey?” I asked. “The kid who mowed our lawn?”

  My mother had always called him the Shabbas goy. He’d mowed the lawn and trimmed the shrubbery and done anything else that she required any time one of her girlhood friends from the old neighborhood visited, always frumpily dressed, these now middle-aged women with herring on their breath, and the old country in their voices and memories of their but recently slaughtered kindred still hanging like hooks in their hearts.