As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (5 page)

Finally she said to Nina, “That’s an awful expression. A
curse.
Don’t let me ever hear you say that to anyone.” Her expression stricken, she looked Nina in the eyes and then me. We hadn’t yet had a chance to ask her what she meant when she reached in front of us, grabbed one of the still uncut onions, and, as if it had spontaneously rotted, threw it away.

“Can’t you tell?” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Molly. Nina. I’m cursed.”

But the curse lifted during those cherished weeks at Woodmont, where, despite the trajectories of their adult lives, my mother was convinced there were no longer any differences of significance between her and Vivie, no one was luckier, better married, prettier, more vivacious, and all she’d ever done to Vivie, however badly she’d broken her sister’s heart (the shock, the crying, the anger, the nearly five years of silent treatment that followed), however hard were those next years of uncertainty (Would Vivie ever marry? Was it time to take up nursing yet?), it no longer mattered, and they were who they were before—before what? For my mother there were no words for what had driven her in a blind walk toward what had nearly destroyed them.

That first Friday morning at the beach, once Ada, Vivie, and Bec had stuffed their long manes into their caps, the three sisters strolled, more gingerly than before, toward the water. Arriving at its edge, Bec was the one to plunge right in, no hesitation, then to come up from under with a yelp and a smile. Ada and Vivie watched, ankle deep. They glanced at each other.
If you go, I’ll go,
Ada thought. They were only little more than knee deep but they held their arms out as if the water already rose to their waists. They laughed. They whooped. Vivie bent down and splashed water onto her belly and shoulders. Ada watched, then followed her older sister’s actions in a way that was as automatic as when she was a child. Oh, how she’d loved being a child! They had never fought then, in those days of early innocence, when Vivie, older, doing everything Ada wanted to do but doing it better, more easily, was only to be imitated, worshiped, chased, revered. Here at the beach, each morning when they dunked, all that goodness they were born into, all that they had ever been to each other, was restored. The salty air, cool with breezes, an air wholly other than that in Middletown, had to be responsible, she reasoned. How else could you explain this transformation in their relationship?
If you go, I’ll go,
her eyes told her sister once again. And at that Vivie raised her arms over her head, hands together, and dove forward, and Ada raised her arms over her head, hands together, and followed her sister into the cool waters of the Long Island Sound.

The three floated on their backs, kicking occasionally, their arms sculling beside them to keep them afloat. This was happiness, my mother knew, this early-morning chill they so willingly endured. She raised her head briefly, enough to look shoreward, in the direction of their cottage and of Hillside Avenue running behind it. Later in the day they’d confront a whole body of men: the peddlers driving past—the iceman, the fish man, the milkman, the produce man, the ice cream man—and, later still, their husbands would return for a Shabbos meal they had yet to even think about making. But for now she was here, buoyant on her back in the waters of her childhood, her sisters by her side, and not a single one of those many men had the power to change that fact. They were here, doing just what they wanted. She took a deep breath. How glorious, she thought, simply to breathe.

T
hat same Friday my father, Mort, alone in his bed in Middletown, woke in the morning from a marvelous dream. My father had had this dream before, but not in a long while. In it he was already at shul, praying at the morning service. The other men of the usual minyan were there too—Jerome Kaminsky, Nathan Novak, Abe Leiberman, Stanley Levine, Harold Sokull, Marvin Abkin, Sid Pasternack, Freddy Horowitz, Mort’s brother Nelson Leibritsky, and his brother-in-law, that sorry-ass (as my father typically put it) Leo Cohen—but special to the service was the presence of my father’s father, standing right next to him, Zelik Leibritsky’s body wrapped in his old tallis, its white fabric as aged as the man’s beard but its gold embroidery still bold and shiny. More than the others, my grandfather Zelik prayed especially fervently, as in life he always had, bowing and rocking, mumbling and sometimes singing the Hebrew words. Nevertheless, because the laws of dreams were not the laws of life, the two men—father and son—were simultaneously talking.

“How’s business?” Zelik asked.

“Good, good,” Mort answered, relieved to say as much. He explained to his father how the war had broken the relentless economic depression. And with the war over, along with its rationing, sales were so much better. In the past year—the time since their last dream-talk—Mort had felt secure enough to get the store’s floor professionally polished and its walls painted. “Business has not only picked up, but it’s gotten
that
good,” he said, relieved once again.

His father nodded. “And how’s the family?” he asked. “How’s the lovely Ada?”

“No one’s sick,” Mort began.

Again, his father nodded.

“And we found our cousin,” Mort told Zelik. “Reuben Leibritsky, from Poland to Palestine to Israel. A survivor.”

“Survivor,” Zelik echoed. After a pause he said quietly, “Good, good.”

“And the kids, my kids, do well, or well enough, at school,” Mort said.

Not surprisingly, Zelik raised his eyebrows; the subject of the kids, my father knew, was always a good one for the old man. He had died when Davy was two.

Mort continued. “Molly’s a good girl. And Davy, you never know, he just might be the baseball player I never was. Shortstop. Shortstop,” Mort repeated, and unknowingly repeated again, the words quickly falling into the rhythm of the prayer that the men of the minyan surrounding him uttered.

“And Howard,” he added, blinking. “Turns out Howard shows some talent in business. We had him three days after school the whole year, and while the kid may not make straight A’s, he can sure make a sale.”

Zelik raised his eyebrows even higher. He also whistled, a note that quickly rose and fell in time with the rocking of his praying body.

About then Mort woke, and though the dream faded, he nevertheless heard his father’s response as well as a strange knock at the synagogue’s door.

“That might be Howard right now,” Zelik suggested, nodding. “And about that talent,” the man added, “he got that from me.”

Mort sat up in bed, fully awakened. “Maybe so,” he told his father, smiling, glad to have pleased him.

Breakfast was an easy enough matter for my father to prepare, even without my mother to do it. A cup of Nescafé, some toast, two boiled eggs. How nice, Mort thought, that fourth morning without us, the
Hartford Courant
splayed before him, and beside him his toast buttered, his eggs peeled, his coffee stirred. As on the three days before, it astonished my father this morning how much peacefulness there was to family life, minus the family.

As he sipped his coffee he began to page through the
Courant’
s sports section, searching, as he’d been doing recently, for any updates on Babe Ruth, who two weeks ago had appeared at Yankee Stadium for its twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. He could do this, page through the sports section first thing, because he’d already taken in the latest news of Israel the night before, on the radio. At the moment, after months of battles that came on the heels of Israel’s independence, truce was where matters in the Middle East stood. And so there was hope, my father concluded. He’d emphasize that hope to his cousin Reuben, still struggling to get settled there, in his next correspondence. But for Babe Ruth, photographed at Yankee Stadium leaning on a bat as if it were a cane, hope wasn’t so obvious a matter. Hero that he was, he was sick as a dog, couldn’t possibly have many days left.
You know how bad my voice sounds,
Ruth was quoted as saying to the crowd that day.
Well, it feels just as bad.

Mort looked up from the paper. “You heard about the Babe?” Once again he was talking to Zelik, who he knew was still there, lingering, as eager as Mort was for coffee and news. His father had been the first in the family—the first Leibritsky in America—to fall in love with baseball. Thoroughly—because he missed his father, because he’d always loved talking sports with the old man—Mort told him everything he knew about Babe Ruth’s illness.

In fact Zelik had also succumbed to the kind of internal rot that was ruining Babe Ruth, and perhaps because of that connection, when Mort got to the part about Ruth’s recent words at Yankee Stadium, he heard them that second time around in the voice of his father.
You know how bad my voice sounds,
the old man, by way of Babe Ruth, repeated sadly.
Well, it feels just as bad.

Mort was going to respond to his father, tell him to hang in there and that God would surely answer his prayers, but just then his brother Nelson honked his car horn. Mort shot up, grabbed his hat, and rushed toward the back door, leaving the Nescafé half-drunk and the opened sports section strewn across the table. Then he turned around. He placed the coffee cup and other dishes in the sink, and neatly, section by section, just as his father used to do, he folded the paper.

He and Nelson were approaching the synagogue when Mort recalled Howard’s promise to drive that morning from Woodmont to Middletown in time to join the minyan. Then he recalled that knocking in his dream. His father had been right, he realized. It probably was Howard.

As he and Nelson closed their car doors, Mort looked up and down Broad Street, scanning the cars parked along the curb for his Dodge. When he didn’t see it he looked in both directions again, this time searching not for his car but for Howard. He didn’t see him either. The person he saw instead, opening the synagogue’s side door, was his brother-in-law Leo Cohen, a man so frail it seemed for a moment that the simple feat of pulling the door wide enough to slip inside would be too much for him.

Mort turned from the sight of Leo to that of Nelson. “Any minute now,” he told Nelson about Howard’s arrival, patting his brother’s ample back as the two headed toward the synagogue door, which by then had already closed. Mort realized, too, that Howard might in fact already be there, having parked the car behind the synagogue, where they wouldn’t have been able to see it from the road. Yes, any minute now, he sang to himself.

Mort surged ahead of Nelson, his eagerness to get to it motivating him as always. His outpacing Nelson also had to do with Nelson’s being fat; his younger brother always lagged behind. Still, once at the door Mort waited for Nelson, holding it open for him. Standing there, hand clenched on the metal handle, one foot on the sidewalk outside the building, the other foot a step inside, he could almost taste it, the sweetness of entering the shul, the satisfaction he’d feel just a moment later, after closing the doors behind him to that whirlwind of American society, that melting pot of everybody from everywhere. For a few minutes each day, behind the synagogue’s shut door, my father could pretend it was just them: the Jews. They were in a little shtetl somewhere in eastern Europe, doing what Jews always did, and they weren’t getting blown to pieces. Or, he sometimes imagined of late, they were in Israel, the Israel that could be once the current truce matured into a lasting peace.

As he and Nelson ambled toward the utility room used for the morning minyan—no reason to muddy the upstairs sanctuary for such a routine occasion—Mort could hear the mutterings, the hellos and how-you-doings, of his fellow minyan brothers. For a moment he thought he might sidestep Nelson, who in the hallway blocked his way and stalled him. But soon enough he was standing inside the utility room, a bare place with nothing but white walls, a wooden floor, and a flood of fluorescence pouring from the ceiling. Because the minyan would stand the whole time, the metal folding chairs that might have served the group remained pushed against the walls. For a few years already theirs had been a Conservative synagogue, not Orthodox as in Woodmont, which meant that the women could stand right there with them, but, truth was, the women had other things going on in the morning; they never showed for the service.

So there he stood amidst his friends, the same pious group as in his dream. He glanced at Jerome Kaminsky, who stood by Nathan Novak, chatting. Then he joined Abe Leiberman, Stanley Levine, and Harold Sokull, who weren’t talking but waiting, and in doing so formed a kind of row.

But where was Howard? he wondered, glancing from face to face.

In the next instant, as if the minyan had been waiting for him and Nelson, the service began, a chorus of Hebrew muttering. Perhaps because his brother-in-law Leo Cohen was standing just outside the clump of men, the group soon enough considered Leo their minyan leader, and within minutes Mort heard Leo’s Hebrew mumbles rise above the mumbles of the others and sharpen into defined words every so often, enough to keep the pack praying at the same pace. Good for nothing was the way Mort thought of Leo at the store where he employed him, despite how frail and sick he was, because he owed Vivie that much. He knew he did. But right then, surprisingly enough, Leo Cohen was good for something. The rabbi, as was often enough the case for morning minyan, was nowhere in sight. Mort was glad, for he liked it better this way, a minyan of equals, men perfectly able to get the job done, without supervision. God was with them, after all, and that was all the supervision they needed.

The prayers began, the Bar’chu, the Sh’ma, and they were racing already toward the second Kaddish, not a mourner’s Kaddish, just a regular Kaddish, a kind of marker, five sections of the service, five Kaddishes. That’s how it went. My father could almost glide through them, saying each Kaddish without even knowing he was saying them. In fact, if he didn’t snap himself out of it he could get through the entire morning service that way, waking up at the end as if from a nap. He’d done that on so many occasions he felt ashamed; come Yom Kippur he always had much to atone for. That was a hazard, yes, but there were so many days that were otherwise; there was that point, and perhaps they were nearing it just then, when he’d become immersed in prayer, when the sound of the Hebrew mumblings around him, and the sound of Hebrew issuing from his own lips, and the sound of Hebrew swimming through his mind, transported him and he felt that the language and he were one, that the prayers and he were one, that God and he were one. This phenomenon, he understood, was the transcendence of prayer, a kind of freedom he’d experienced now and again as a kid but more and more as an adult, and the older he got the more frequently he found himself in that place—foreign, unmapped, lost—a wonderful, ethereal place conjured forth by the beauty of the ancient words, and his soul would nearly burst with the gratitude he felt for them, and his heart ached with joy. It’s true, your heart can literally hurt with joy, my father said to us on more than one occasion, though when he did we had no idea he was speaking of prayer. It can really be a pain you feel, he continued, a terrible, wonderful pain. I always assumed he was talking about fatherhood.

At shul that Friday morning Mort hoped that he was nearing that moment when he was to achieve that blessing of transcendence, hoped it was just around the corner, following the second Kaddish, swooping in at the start of the next prayer, the Amidah, and, like the others, he took three steps back then three steps forward to ready himself for the presence of God that he would meet, if he were steady and focused, in prayer, in this most serious prayer, this prayer so big, so central, one of its many names, his father had once taught him, was simply
The Prayer.
But just then, three steps backward, three forward, a quieter Hebrew muttering began, a mentioning of the ancestors, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, and another relation came to mind, an extant one, his son Howard, who had promised to arrive that day from Woodmont in time for morning minyan but clearly wasn’t going to come through.

God of Abraham, God of Jacob, God of Isaac,
God forgive me,
Mort continued, ad-libbing, which was not allowed, which was another thing for which he’d ultimately have to atone, God forgive me, but you grant a son a wish, help him and the family get to the beach, a summer of all play and no work, a summer of paradise and sunshine and endless bowls of fruit salad, a summer unimaginable to me and my father, and what does that son do but take it all for granted. God forgive me, he told himself, but I expected more from Howard, never would I have broken my word to my father, ignored my father, God rest his soul, God hope the old soul’s not really hurting, God help him if he is, and then Mort was back to the written text, back to God, busy and industrious—so very unlike Howard—sustaining the living with loving-kindness, resurrecting the dead with great mercy, supporting the falling, healing the sick, releasing the bound, and fulfilling his word to those who sleep in the dust.

He’d once slept in the dust, Mort realized, his heart seized by the word, and by dust he meant ignorance, and by ignorance he meant himself, before his awakening, for which he had his father, Zelik, to thank. At the time he’d been a few years younger than Howard was now, just twelve, his bar mitzvah nearing, but he was far more in love with baseball then than with Judaism. Games and practices were on Saturdays and he’d appealed to his father for permission to forgo the rules of Shabbos for the freedom of playing Saturday games. His team wanted him, a natural as a shortstop, and he wanted them. But Zelik had shaken his head; the law was the law, he’d said, not without sympathy for Mort’s request. After all, baseball was certainly a worthy concern. But, his father had remarked, you couldn’t compare the pursuit of baseball with the rules of Judaism, the teachings of Torah, the love of God, and—here Zelik cleared his throat for dramatic effect—the fate of the Jewish people. There was talk then of the old life before America: of expulsion from Moscow, of life within the Pale, of dire poverty, robbings, even killings, of every law designed to keep you down. This was what the family, because of their Judaism, had suffered. But hadn’t Mort heard all this a thousand times before? He looked to his father. “We have to remember the Sabbath,” the man concluded. “We can’t choose not to. That’s the same thing as choosing not to be a Jew.”