Fatherhood Page 6

  “Joey?” I asked again.

  My father nodded fiercely.

  I recalled Joey O’Brian as tall and very skinny, with bad skin and bad teeth, a red-headed young man I’d once found staring quizzically at the little mezuzah my mother had tacked up at the front door of our house—Waz zat, guv? When I’d answered, he’d chuckled and shaken his head, so distant from it all, not just Jewishness, but college towns, professors and their little boys, rooms lined with books.

  “You’re saying it was Joey … the father?”

  My father nodded and his eyes brightened like a man who at last understood.

  “You and Lenore never …”

  My father shook his head firmly.

  But if this were true, why had my mother ever left him? I wondered. If my father had not even had a fling with Lenore, much less murdered her, then why had my mother packed her bags, called me Ezra, dragged me from the house, and taken me back into the world of her father and out of the world of mine?

  I leaned forward and stared into my father’s eyes. “Why did my mother leave that day?”

  My father shook his head, as if surrendering to silence, to something that would forever remain confused.

  “Why?” I repeated.

  He closed his eyes, and in the silence that settled over us, I took the book from his hand, returned to the earlier poem, and read its final stanza softly.

  From the lightning in the sky

  As it passed me flying by

  From the thunder and the storm

  And the cloud that took the form

  (When the rest of Heaven was blue)

  Of a demon in my view

  My father opened his eyes slowly, and to my surprise, they were glistening. He nodded toward the book, and I could see that he was too tired to speak, that the haze of drugs or perhaps even the weight of his own impending death was exerting an irresistible power over him. Still, he seemed to think that somewhere in those tattered pages he might find words he could no longer say.

  And so I began to turn the pages again, through poem after poem, past “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells,” on to “The Raven,” and past it, too, until I reached “Tamarlane,” and heard my father groan, a signal it seemed to me, that this was the poem he wanted.

  I put my finger on the first line, and looked at him. He shook his head and so I continued down the page, his head shaking and shaking until I reached these lines:

  The rain came down upon my head

  Unshelter’d—and the heavy wind …

  “The day of the storm,” I said.

  My father nodded and smiled, and it seemed to me at that strange moment we suddenly returned to the world we had once known and loved, he the patient teacher, I the adoring student.

  And so I recited the events of that day as I had come to know them.

  “Okay, the day of the storm. You and my mother came home. You were in the car together.”

  He nodded again, paused briefly, like a man gathering up his strength, then with the greatest effort he had made so far, he spoke.

  “Argument,” he said in a tone very different from the one my mother had described or my bitter imagination had created and which seemed to embody the depth of his loss.

  “But it was not over Lenore? Is that what you’re saying?”

  My father nodded excitedly, as if to say, Yes, yes.

  “Over what?” I asked.

  My father seemed even now reluctant to tell me what had passed between him and my mother on that stormy afternoon. His pause was long and thoughtful before he lifted his hand and pointed to me.

  “Me?” I asked. “You were arguing about me?”

  The old twinkle came into his eye, as when I’d been a boy in his study, he my devoted teacher, often speaking to each other through verses quoted from the great poems of the West, whole conversations carried out in that erudite yet oddly intimate way.

  “What about me?” I asked.

  My father pointed to the book and began waving his hand, a gesture that sent me flipping back through the pages of Poe’s poems, slowly one by one, thinking that he sought a poem, perhaps certain lines.

  I’d almost returned to the first of those poems by the time he groaned, a signal I should stop.

  I looked at him, utterly puzzled. “Why here?” I asked. “It’s a blank page.”

  He struggled to speak, but only a few slurred sounds came out, nothing I could make sense of.

  “It’s a blank page,” I repeated. “There’s nothing on it.”

  My father shook his head violently, clearly denying what I had just told him.

  “There’s nothing on this page but the number,” I told him.

  He nodded fiercely.

  I looked at the number. “Thirteen?”

  Again he nodded wildly. Then with great effort he said, “Never … never.”

  So the argument had been about me, had something to do with the number thirteen, something my father associated with the word never.

  “Me,” I said, turning the first of my father’s words over in my mind. “Thirteen. Never.”

  And suddenly I knew what he was struggling to tell me, what the number thirteen could only mean in relation to me, and what he must have said to my mother about that relationship.

  “You told my mother that you’d never allow me to be bar mitzvahed?” I asked.

  He nodded solemnly.

  I saw my mother as I knew she must have been at that moment in her life, that moment as they sat with the rain thudding around them, and she saw him fall like a man through a gallows floor, fall utterly from the world they’d once shared, the rabbinical student my father had once been, how deeply my mother had expected to live as a rabbi’s wife, and how different that life had become, the suburban life of a professor’s wife, unrooted and unmoored, as she must have thought of it, though never, never as utterly lost to all that was holy until that moment in the storm when my father had effectively told her, and no doubt bluntly, that her son was not to be a Jew.

  I could only imagine the utter fury with which my mother must have received this final proof of my father’s demonic secularism, proof once and for all of how arrogantly he had discarded the sacred values, how deeply and irrevocably he had dismissed the commandments and commentaries, the centuries of accumulated wisdom, and with it the fierce need she must have felt to flee this dead-souled modernist, this despiser of ritual, of all the honored customs, this pragmatist who believed in quick solutions, in getting rid of obstacles, this radical assimilationist who was ashamed of his own people, felt no pity for the great heaps of European dead, who wished only to throw off the yoke of the past, make himself new … this American.

  He eased himself back into his pillow and released a long deflating breath, so that I saw that even now he remained unsure of what he’d done, whether he’d been right or wrong, even though this seemed to matter less to him at that moment than what I would do with this strange revelation.

  He tried to speak, but nothing came. So after a moment, and with what appeared to be the very last of his vital force, he motioned for me to give him the volume of Poe. I rose and sat on the bed beside him, holding the book open and turning the pages until he found the verse he wanted.

  “Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,” I shrieked, upstarting—

  “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!

  Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

  Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!

  Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

  Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

  He placed a single, trembling finger on that final word and looked up at me quizzically, no doubt wondering, perhaps quite desperately, if I could intuit the question his eyes asked. Will you answer as the Raven does? Will you refuse to abandon me?

  For my answer, I took the book from his hands and read the last stanza o
f Poe’s great poem:

  And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

  On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

  I looked up and saw that he understood.

  “I won’t leave you alone,” I assured him.

  Had the world been less the thing it is, and more the thing we wish it were, then my father would have recovered, and we would have had a few more years to work out the long confusion of our lives, come to graceful terms, so that by the time his death at last arrived, I would have been a truly loving son, he a loving father, the two of us at last in some accord with what he had done, and I had done, what he was and what I became. But it was too late for that, as I could see by his waning strength. And so I accepted what the Talmud teaches, that no act can be wholly undone. But then, “The Raven” teaches that, too, I thought, and so I returned to it and began to read to my father again, this time from the beginning, a land both dark and dreary rising before me as I read, that place denied all true atonement, and where, as Poe so darkly knew, each second turns Forever into Nevermore.

  RAIN

  Battery Park

  A burst of light releases the million eyes of the rain, glimpsing the Gothic towers in dark mist, falling in glittering streams of briefly reflected light, moving inland, toward the blunt point of the island, an outbound ferry as it loads for the midnight run.

  So like I said before, it ain’t like she has long, you know?

  Yeah, mon. She just hangin’ on now.

  Rain streaks down the ferry’s windows where the night riders sit in yellow haze—Toby McBride only one among them, single, forty-two, the bowling alley in trouble, thinking of his invalid mother on Staten Island, money leaching away, watching her Jamaican nurse, such big black hands, how easy it would be.

  I figure you could use twenty grand, right?

  Twenty, huh?

  The rain falls on intrigue and conspiracy, trap doors, underground escape routes, the crude implements of quick getaways. It collects the daily grime from the face of the Custom House and sends it swirling into the vast underground drains that empty into the sea. Along the sweep of Battery Park it smashes against crumpled cigarette packets, soaks a broken shoelace, flows into a half-used tube of lipstick, drives a young woman beneath a tattered awning, blond hair, shoulder-length, with a stuck umbrella, struggling to open it, a man behind her, sunk in the shadows, his voice a tremble in the air.

  You live in this building?

  Long, dark fingers still the umbrella, curl around its mahogany handle.

  Name’s Rebecca, right?

  The rain sees the fickle web of chance meetings, the grid of untimely intersections, lethal fortuities from which there will be no escape. A million tiny flashing screens reflect stilettos and box cutters, switchblades and ice picks, the snubnosed barrel that stares out from its nest of long dark fingers.

  Don’t say a word.

  Off West Street the rain falls on the deserted pit of the ghostly towers, and moves on, cascading down the skeletal girders of the new construction, then further north to Duane Street, thudding against the roof of an old green van.

  So, when you get here, Sammy?

  Don’t worry. I’ll be there.

  Eddie squeezes the cell phone, glances back toward the rear of the van, speakers, four DVD players, two car radios, a cashmere overcoat, a shoebox of CDs, some jewelry that might be real, the bleak fruit of the hustle.

  I need you here now, man.

  You that hyped?

  Now, man.

  In the gutters, the rushing rain washes cigarette butts and candy wrappers, a note with the number 484 in watery ink, a hat shop receipt, a prescription label for Demerol. It washes down grimy windshields and as it washes, sees the pop-eyed and the drowsy, the hazy and the alert, Eddie scratching his skinny arms, Detective Boyle in the unmarked car a block away playing back the tape, grinning at his partner as he listens to the voices on the ferry.

  We got McBride dead to rights, Frank.

  A laugh.

  That fucking Jamaican. Jeez, does he know how to work a wire.

  At Police Plaza, the wind shifts, driving eastward, battering the building’s small square windows, a thudding rumble that briefly draws Max Feldman from the photographs on his desk, Lynn Abercrombie sprawled across the floor of her Tribeca apartment, shot once with a snubnosed .38, no real clues save the fact that she lay on her back with a strand of long blond hair over the right eye, maybe done by a fan of Veronica Lake, some sick aficionado of the noir.

  The rain falls upon the tangle of steel and concrete, predator and prey. It slaps the baseball cap of Jerry Brice as he waits for Hattie Jones, knowing it was payday at the all-night laundry, her purse full of cash. It mars Sammy Kaminsky’s view of Dolly Baron’s bedroom window and foils the late-night entertainment of a thousand midnight peepers.

  On Houston Street, it falls on people drawn together by the midnight storm, huddled beneath shelters, Herman Devane crowded into a bus refuge, drunk college girls all around him, that little brunette in the red beret, her body naked beneath her clothes, so naked and so close, the touch so quick, so easy, to brush against her then step back, blame it on the rain.

  Lightning, then thunder rolling northward over Bleecker Street, past clubs and taverns, faces bathed in neon light, nodding to the beat of piano, bass, drums, the late-night riff of jazz trios.

  Ernie Gorsh taps his foot lightly beneath the table.

  Not a bad piano.

  Jack Plato, fidgeting, toying with the napkin beneath his drink, a lot on his mind, time like a blade swinging over his head.

  Fuck the piano. You hear me, Ern? 484 Duane. A little jewelry store. Easy. I cased it this afternoon.

  Ernie Gosch listens to the piano.

  Jack Plato, slick black hair, sipping whiskey, cocksure about the plans, the schedule, where the cameras are.

  Paulie Cerrellos is backing the operation. A safe man is all we need. Christ, it’s a sure thing, Ern.

  Ernie Gorsh, gray hair peeping from beneath his gray felt hat, just out of the slammer, not ready to go back.

  Nothing’s ever sure, Jack.

  It is if you got the balls.

  It can’t if you don’t got the brains.

  Plato, offended, squirming, a deal going south, Paulie will be pissed. No choice now but to play the bluff.

  Take it or leave it, old man.

  Ernie, thinking of his garden, the seeds he’s already bought for spring, seeds in packets nestled in his jacket pocket, thinking of the slammer too, how weird it is now, gangs, Aryans, Muslims, fag cons raping kids in the shower, deciding not to go back.

  Sorry, Jack. Rising. I got a bus to catch.

  The eyes of the rain see the value of experience, the final stop of crooked roads. It falls on weariness and dread, the iron bars of circumstance, the way out that looks easy, comes with folded money, glassine bags of weed, tinfoil cylinders stuffed with white powder, floor plans of small jewelry stores, with Xs where the cameras are.

  At 8th Street and Sixth Avenue, Tracey Olson leaves a cardboard box on the steps of Jefferson Market. Angelo and Luis watch her rush away from inside a red BMW boosted on Avenue A, the rain thudding hard on its roof.

  You see that?

  Wha?

  That fucking girl.

  What about her?

  She left a box on the steps there.

  What about it?

  That all you can say, whataboutitwhataboutit?

  Luis steps out into the rain, toward the box, the tiny cries he hears now.

  Jesus. Jesus Christ.

  On 23rd, the rain slams against the windows of pizza parlors and Mexican restaurants, Chinese joints open all night.

  Sal and Frankie. Sweet and sour pork. Moo goo gai pan.

  So, the guy, what’d he do?

  What they always do.

  He ask how old?

  I told him eighteen.

  Sal and Frankie giggling about the suits
from the suburbs, straight guys who dole out cash for their sweet asses then take the PATH home to their pretty little wives.

  Where was he from?

  Who cares? He’s a dead man now.

  That plum sauce, you eatin’ that?

  At Broadway and 34th, the million eyes of the rain smash against the dusty windows of the rag trade, Lennie Mack at his desk, ledgers open, refiguring the numbers, wiping his moist brow with the rolled sleeves of his shirt, wondering how Old Man Siegelman got suspicious, threatening to call in outside auditors, what he has to do before that call is made … do for Rachel, and the two kids in college, do because it was just a little at the beginning. Jesus, two hundred fifty thousand now. Too much to hide. He closes the ledger, sits back in his squeaky chair, thinks it through again … what he has to do.

  From Times Square, the gusts drive northward, slanting lines of rain falling like bullets, exploding against the black pavement, the cars and buses still on Midtown streets, Jaime Rourke on the uptown 104, worrying about Tracy, what she might do with the baby, seated next to an old guy in a gray felt hat fingering packets of garden seed.

  So I guess you got a garden.

  My building has little plots. A smile. My daughter thinks I should plant a garden.

  Eddie Gorsh sits back, relaxed, content in his decision, grateful to his daughter, how, because of her, there’ll be no more sure things.

  Daughters are like that, you know. They make you have a little sense.

  Near 59th and Fifth, a gust lifts the awning of the San Domenico. Dim light in the bar. Bartender in a black bolero jacket.

  Amanda Graham. Martini, very dry, four olives. Black dress, sleeveless, Mikimoto pearls. Deidre across the small marble table. Manhattan. Straight up.

  Paulie’s going to find out, Mandy.

  Amanda sips her drink. How?

  He has ways.