Fatherhood (6 page)

Billie Withers was buried two days later in an unvarnished wooden coffin. You could hear the muffled sound of his body bumping against the sides as the men lifted him onto their shoulders and carried him to the cemetery behind the Mountain View Church of Christ.

It was a cold, overcast day. A small breeze fluttered the pages of the hymnals the people used to sing a farewell hymn. Their voices did not soar like the town choir I was used to. They sang in a flat, featureless monotone like ghosts rooted to earth, bound to it by invisible wires. The old people hugged themselves, holding their coats close about them, and the children watched the bleak ritual of Billie's burial with patient, respectful eyes.

A final prayer was said, and then the small congregation filed silently out of the cemetery. A few of the older ones lifted their collars against the wind.

Only Mr. Withers remained. He stepped over to my father and shook his hand. “You didn't have to come,” he said. “Thank you.”

“I'm sorry I couldn't help him.”

Mr. Withers wiped a film of moisture and grit from his eyes. “Maybe it was meant to be.”

“Someday it'll be different,” my father said firmly. “We'll find the answers to these things.”

Mr. Withers nodded, allowing my father's distant faith to pass without argument. “Well, thank you for what you done,” he said.

He walked a few feet away, picked up a large, flat stone and sunk it into the ground at the head of Billie's grave. Then he took a small one and placed it carefully at the foot. He stood for a moment, staring at the grave, then clapped the dust from his fingers and walked away.

I looked curiously at the two stones. “Are those tombstones?” I asked. In the town cemetery they were made of marble.

“It's the way they mark the grave,” my father said.

“But they don't even say anything, even a name.”

“Poor people,” my father said quietly.

He took my hand, and we began walking toward our car. The clouds to the east gathered behind us, gray and dense and invulnerable like the mysteries of God.

NEVERMORE

M
y father's last request was that I bring him a book. We had not been close, or even very much in communication, since the day my mother left him. Over the years, the many years, my anger with him had not abated. But in his final days, I'd decided to offer him at least an occasion for atonement, despite the fact that he'd never given any indication that he had anything for which he felt the need to atone. At times I'd even felt my presence in his hospital room reduced to that of a Shabbas goy, performing servile tasks like turning on a light or adjusting the volume on the television that hung opposite his bed.

“I'm a rabbi,” I reminded him sternly one afternoon when my lowly status in his eyes became particularly irksome.

“So was I,” my father said. “Almost.”

Almost? I didn't think so. For although he'd been a rabbinical student in his youth, he'd later chosen Columbia over Yeshiva, and from there gone on to the life of a liberal arts professor, complete with pipe, tweed jacket, and, as I'd been told, an occasional mention in scholarly magazines.

“Poe,” he said one Friday afternoon when the sun was setting and I was hurrying to leave.

“Poe?” I asked.

“The poems,” my father said. “There's a volume of them somewhere around the house.”

He'd been in the hospital for several days by then, suffering from the usual infirmities of old age, though this time with the added problem of pneumonia. His breathing was labored, and he seemed generally exhausted, not at all the vibrant man who'd daily escorted me into his study, whipped a book from the shelf, and taught me the classics and ancient history.

“Bring it on Monday,” he added with a tired wave of the hand.

I recalled my father as a quick discarder of old books, always on the lookout for the latest edition, so when I got around to the latest humble task he'd asked of me, I found it surprising that his Poe was an old volume with yellowed, crumbling pages, a book that had the present look of my father, once sturdy and tightly bound, but now tattered beyond repair.

It had been nearly fifty years since I'd entered my father's study, but I found the look of it quite at one with the man himself. From the time he'd first left the Lower East Side, he'd been a “modern” man, with high, upwardly mobile ambitions. The glass-topped desk seemed perfectly in keeping with his character, as did the sleek leather chair with its gleaming chrome legs. There was a flatscreen monitor and an ergonomic keyboard, and just to the right, an iPod stood perkily in its white plastic stand.

I shook my head at the sheer predictability of it all. How fitting that this was where my father did his thinking, beneath halogen lights, with the silvery louver blinds open to reveal a neat, suburban lawn. For he was not at all the somber black-clothed scholar I thought myself to be, a man of prayers and fasting, immersed in the Torah, not in some lengthy study of imagery in
Lolita
. The fact is, we'd gone in completely opposite directions, and because of that my father's existence now seemed transparently thin to me, the man himself a cellophane soul, utterly without mystery, his life a story without twists or turns, one that surely would have proven an unfit subject for the inventor of the detective story.

“Why Poe?” my wife asked when, after my return home, I showed her the book my father had requested I bring him on Monday morning.

“I don't know,” I answered. “He taught Poe only that last summer.”

My wife covered her head and prepared to light the Shabbat candles. “Maybe that's what's on his mind,” she said.

I shrugged. “If so, it's too late to make amends.”

He took a severe turn for the worse two days later, so that when I arrived at the hospital that morning, I found him barely the shadow of the man I'd left the Friday before. He'd clearly been given something, as my mother had in her last hours. Like her, he'd been unable to speak coherently, though he appeared to be fully conscious. After offering my usual terse greeting I brought the book within view, showed him the spine. “The book you wanted,” I said. “Poe.” I drew a chair up to his bedside. “I thought I might read a few of the poems to you.”

He stared at the book with what seemed the quiet affection and admiration he had once offered me, but which I had long ago rejected and continued to reject.

“So, let's begin.” I flipped past the melancholy visage of the author, the title page, the table of contents, to the first poem in the volume. “‘Alone,'” I said like a speller cautious to follow the rules of the bee, pronouncing the word before defining it.

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were; I have not seen

As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring
.

My father's eyes darted about, and for a moment he seemed disoriented.

“You're in Room 1213,” I told him. “Clark Memorial.”

He squinted hard, like a man trying to bring something small into focus.

“Shtorm,” he said, then much more clearly, “Storm.”

“Storm?” I asked, glancing at the poem again, now focused on the last line I'd read,
I could not bring my passions from a common spring
.

“Summer storm.” One hand rose and floated out and away, like a boat into vastness, and his gaze went to the middle distance.

“What summer storm?” I asked.

He seemed frustrated, grasping at words, determined to say something that either his weakness or the drugs prevented him from saying. “Poe,” he said softly, then louder, more emphatically, “teaching Poe.”

So my wife had been right. He
was
thinking about the idyllic three months during which he'd held forth on Poe, often in a little arbor beside Lake Montego, deeply shaded and oddly romantic, with his few exchange students gathered around him.

He struggled to speak again, faltered, then blurted almost vehemently,
“Shiksa.”

I stared at him, stunned. For although before leaving him my mother had often used the old world languge of her parents—
meshugana
, for a crazy person,
mitzvah
for a good deed—my father had shunned Yiddish entirely, thought it fit only for comedy, and even then for the lowest kind. He'd even corrected my English when it slipped into what he called “foreignness.” “In America we don't ‘close' the light, Alex,” he'd once said to me when I'd inadvertently used one of my mother's phrases. “We ‘turn it off.'”

“Shiksa?”
I asked. “Since when do you …”

“Summer, storm, Poe,” my father said, connecting all three words, though without giving the connection any decipherable meaning.

“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
.