In the Land of the Living (2 page)

Ezer reserved most tirades for Burt. This marked something very different, it seemed, a mutation in the atoms of the air and the ground, and Isidore felt himself compelled to memorize the light of the sun before it disappeared, as if it might not ever return.

“What name do you call me?” his father said.

“I called you Tateh.”

“After.”

“After what?” Isidore said.

“After the dirty towel that you wish it doesn’t touch your foot! Sir Isser!”

“I called you Tateh!” Isidore said loudly.

“You said Ezer!”

“Okay, Tateh,” Isidore said quickly, “I’m sorry!”

Ezer looked into the living room, where Burt was standing on the steps with Dennis behind him. “This doesn’t concern you!” Ezer said. “For once!” Again, he chopped at the air.

“
You’re
wrong, not him!” Burt yelled, leaning forward into the yell and stepping halfway up into the kitchen.

“Zol zein shah!”
Ezer yelled.

Burt scrambled up the steps, ran into Ezer, and slapped at his arms. Ezer swung Burt around in a sort of awkward dance step and Burt fell against the stove and got back up. Then, employing a technique he’d presumably learned at the Kishinev School of Cossack Child-Rearing, Ezer picked up a pot and knocked Burt in the head with it.

“Don’t you trip! Don’t you stumble, you actor!” Ezer yelled. “Don’t you cry! A boxer, I’m not! I didn’t hit you hard. I didn’t
touch
you.”

The sun was gone now. The yard had rapidly capitulated to a darkness that sealed the boys and their father up tight in the small kitchen as inside a coffin ship: the windows became dim, distorting mirrors, and displayed not the outdoors, but a bad replica of the kitchen instead. The yard and the glass seemed to collaborate to encircle them with warped images of themselves.

“Don’t look at
me
with hate!” his father yelled.

“I’m not!” Isidore said.

“Do not judge me, Isser! You know nothing! You’re a child!”

“He didn’t mean to, Tateh!” Dennis cried out from the bottom of the steps into the kitchen. “I asked him to get me some milk.”

“I have a terrible headache,” Ezer said, suddenly quiet, and he clutched his head. “I am going to bed.”

He mumbled some Yiddish curses, things about dark dreams for devils such as his sons, and he said the word
chaloshes
and said it again. As he went up the stairs, he mumbled on, about weakness,
shvachkeit,
and what happens to weakness in this world, which he said like “oiled” with a “V” on the front. The word made Isidore think of a valley with its “V,” the
voiled,
valley of darkness and toil.

They did not see their mother. She was already dead.

It would have been a good time to get help from the boys’ aunt and uncle, Sophia’s brother and sister-in-law, Mo and Mara, but Ezer wouldn’t speak to them anymore, because Mo said Ezer owed them money. It would have been a good time to get help from Ezer’s brother, Hermann, who was a furrier in New York and made a decent living, but Ezer had cut Hermann off years ago, and pointedly hadn’t even spoken to him when Sophia went to New York for her treatments. Ezer had a sister who might have helped too, but Ezer hated her husband. And while he
was
on speaking terms with his other sister, who ran an antique shop, she and her husband had no kids and they said they wouldn’t know what to do with one, let alone three. For a time the Jewish family service sent housekeepers to look after the boys.

Then one day Ezer told them Burt would be sent to Bellefaire, an orphanage on Fairmount Boulevard. Isidore and Dennis, he said, would go to a foster home in University Heights. The brothers stood together before their father and one and all held on to each others’ shirts.

At times like these, their father surprised them. He didn’t care what they wanted, but he also didn’t fight. Instead he called the foster home, as if it merely hadn’t occurred to him that there might be room for Burt.

So an old woman came in a green car with a bent antenna and all three boys climbed in. Ezer kissed Dennis hard on the head, but he didn’t kiss Isidore or Burt.

As the car rolled slowly backward toward the street, the old woman repeatedly slammed on the brakes, which slammed the boys’ heads into the unforgiving vinyl behind them.

Their father called out to them from the top of the brick steps that had no railing: “You must come back to visit to me!” And he waved slowly from under the dark porch, with eyes sadder than ever, as if the boys were abandoning him, when in fact he had sent them away.

The foster parents were old, and they lived not so far away from Hildana, in University Heights in a house that smelled like dogs, but it felt like another country. The old lady had her own kids, one who still lived there and seemed quite old himself, and two dogs, and she didn’t hear well, but that first day she did give them some cranberry bread and it seemed to be edible. There was evidence that the old man’s ears were fine, but he seemed disinclined to use them. He liked to play with the dogs in the backyard and had a bunch of weird magazines next to his bed that had pictures of women in their underwear. They said
MAN
on them in big letters. The boys went to the foster home in University Heights in the winter, and Isidore changed schools.

They shared a room and a dresser and even socks and underwear, and Isidore opened the drawers for Dennis and showed Burt that you had to lift as you pulled or they wouldn’t open at all. It seemed important that the top drawer should be for those sacred articles worn against the privates, and that was where he’d put their underwear, even though that drawer was slightly too high to reach into comfortably and hurt the elbow and the armpit to reach into the back of it, where he kept his mother’s lilac blouse. After their first dinner he came back to the bedroom and scraped his elbow while pulling out the blouse.  He went into the closet with it and brushed a sticky spiderweb off it, and there he unrolled the blouse and tried to smell her on it, but all he could smell was the unfamiliar chest of drawers and the musty closet. In the hot stuffy air underneath his winter coat, with his elbow burning, he cried till his nose ran and his brothers heard and came to him and, for their sakes, he made himself stop.

Ezer did visit them after all, and especially in the winter they dreaded news of his arrival. In the winter, when other carpenters picked up side jobs, Ezer collected unemployment. He would bring the boys back to Hildana Road and sit around in their old house reading
Morgen Freiheit,
the Yiddish communist newspaper, and bitch at the air in Yiddish. Isidore figured that he sent them to Yiddish school three days a week at
Der Arbeter Ring
instead of Hebrew school just so he’d have someone around who could understand his bitching. In the summers, when he was working, he came to see them less and sometimes he took them to the picnics that the Jewish communists threw on Sundays, and those were best—not because the picnics were any fun (they weren’t, though there were generally hot dogs), but because Ezer could complain to sympathetic ears about the plight of the workingman, or talk about the Yiddish theater, and the boys usually got through the picnics without any shouting matches between Ezer and Burt.

At the end of three years at the foster home, Ezer got married to a woman whom the boys called the Bitch. Her son was a drug dealer, and one time he threatened Burt with a gun. Ezer bought a new house, on Meadowbrook Boulevard. A few months later and, as far as they could tell, having nothing whatsoever to do with the loaded gun in Burt’s face, Ezer and the Bitch were divorced. But the Meadowbrook house was big enough and the boys were old enough to move into it with or without a Bitch.

By the time Ezer took the boys back, Isidore didn’t think of himself as a boy anymore. He could ride a bike and do his own laundry. He could make scrambled eggs. He had seen weird pictures of women in their underwear, and could throw a baseball and a football, could tell time both by hour and minute (you had to consider them separately, then add them back together), he could multiply, and he could read anything, even the
Cleveland Press
or
Morgen Freiheit
.

There were enough bedrooms for the boys to sleep separately—which was desirable considering the odor and quantity of Burt’s farts. But Burt didn’t even have to say anything. When it got late enough to go to sleep, Isidore and Burt dragged his mattress into the room with the other beds and they stayed all together in one room as it had been at the foster home. Their father didn’t know or care where they slept, and the other bedrooms remained empty, without any shades on the windows.

To eyes less jaded than Isidore’s, the new photographs on the wall of the dining room might have hinted at new developments in Ezer’s soul, but Isidore perceived immediately that his father was unchanged. For one thing, while new to the dining room wall, the photos were otherwise old. One showed Ezer and his brother, Hermann, but Ezer had evidently cut the picture in half and thrown his brother away so that it was just Ezer by himself now, reaching off the edge of the world toward a space that had formerly been Hermann, but was now just the brown underboard of the picture frame. There was another of Ezer and Sophia, which had a magic force about it, as though it had caused something new to exist that didn’t before, but again, his parents’ youth, while new to Isidore’s eyes, in fact belonged to the past. His mother was not smiling and her skin looked the color of porcelain and hard—another lie. Ezer looked smart and radical in it, like a 1930s socialist playwright or somebody like that. Aunt Mara said he’d wanted to be a Yiddish-school teacher and in fact had tried to get certified once and, before he met Sophia, Mara said, he’d even acted a bit in the Yiddish theater in New York.

There was a picture of Ezer’s father, Nachem, on the wall also, with a visage remnant from another era and cold-blooded, just exactly like the haunting, cold, reptilian visage of a crocodile with eyes that move but do not seem to see. The crocodile on the wall had made and sold barrels. It had been that cooper and father of eleven whose bed the Russian officer had slept in, that man whom the Russian officer had driven into the basement with his wife and eleven children and threatened to shoot in the head when the cooper stuck it through the cellar door to ask for water while the soldiers were at cards.

Perhaps it was that crocodilian old cooper whose iron grip on past and future had stunted Ezer’s means of expression in English. True, Ezer had no ambition anymore and never tried to learn English really well, but it also seemed that for him there was hardly any need for those tenses apart from the present; for past was merely the stain of injury on the film of the present; and future the corresponding photogravure of permanent resentment. He couldn’t change himself any more than he could change the expression of that old cooper on the wall.

Their neighbor, Mrs. Polanska, said she was sorry for Ezer. “He just needs a lady friend to help keep the house,” she said, but suggestions as to who were not forthcoming.

Like the Bitch, perhaps? She had not seemed like much of a housekeeper. Mrs. Polanska and her shtetl ways! She couldn’t help Isidore, or his brothers, either. He had to take care of his little brother, Dennis, and of his older brother, who told Isidore he was the closest thing he had to a mother. They didn’t even have a cousin or an uncle worth half a pancake. Their foster mother would write, she said, and Isidore believed her. Yet he had known from the day the green car with the bad antenna rolled up their drive: he had his own mind and his own body and his sense of humor and a belief in something better, if only mind and body and humor hungered after it hard enough—and that was it.

Before he had finished grade school, Isidore had learned not to try to change his father, but to circumnavigate him instead. False apology, the oldest of their strategies, remained available to them, but as they got older, they acquired new and more powerful means of resistance, like the boot full of coins they called their
unger bluzen
fund. He and Dennis regularly trolled the gutters for old Coke bottles and traded them in at the grocery store for a nickel or a couple of pennies. They put the coins in a boot in the bedroom closet and when a fight erupted between Ezer and Burt, and Ezer went to bed with a headache in the middle of the afternoon and refused to go grocery shopping, they could buy cereal and milk with their
unger bluzen
coins even if their father lay in bed all day. No one had to utter a single false apology.

That strategy was standard operating procedure until high school, when Isidore quickly grew and became bigger than his father, much bigger, in fact. (When he was six feet tall, Mrs. Polanska started calling him a “long noodle.”) If it came to it, he could defend his brother with his body. For example, one night when Burt was making dinner, he dropped a hot dog on the floor and Ezer started to ride him for being a klutz and they yelled, nose to nose. Ezer got so mad he went and grabbed a crowbar out of the basement and chased Burt up the stairs with it. But before it ended up lodged in Burt’s cranium, Isidore wrested the weapon from his father’s hands. He threw it out the back door into the snow, where it landed with a pleasingly dull thud.

The old era came to a close with evident permanence the night before they went to wash the garbage trucks. By the back steps, Burt slammed the garbage can down and kicked it twice and ripped his shirt open, stripping off the buttons and tearing the shirt, which he probably did (knowing Burt) just to give himself a reason to open up their father’s
verboten
sewing kit.

Burt rode out on the trucks on Saturdays in spring and summer, when garbage smelled worst. He’d wed himself to the job, like Sisyphus to his stone, for three years. Isidore had worked the garbage route between Cedar Road and Lake View Cemetery the summer before, and he’d signed up to do it this year too, since he needed a job and told Burt he would, but he’d be goddamned if he ever did it again.