Light Fell (24 page)

They fall silent. Together they notice the sky, light now. It will be a cloudless winter day, and a bright warm sun will summon people to the streets and the parks and the beaches. Already the early walkers are out in full force.

“You won’t say anything to anyone.” Gavri states rather than asks this.

“I won’t say anything to anyone. But I hope this won’t be the last time we have such a discussion. If anyone can understand what you’re going through, it’s me.”

Gavri hangs his head, then lifts it as a small, wry smile curves his lips. “Yeah, that’ll be fine.” He places both hands on the counter and pushes himself up. “I’m gonna get myself cleaned up for morning services.”

The smile of encouragement carved onto Joseph’s face fades the moment Gavri is out of the room. A new worry crops up in his mind, or really just an old one suddenly made real, a worry about having somehow infected his sons. He will mull this over when the boys are gone. It will figure into the balance of success and failure of this weekend, will take its place among the events and ideas that shaped it. It will become part of the narrative, his narrative, of their family history.

The kitchen door flies open, slaps the wall, and starts to swing closed again. Gavri pushes through, pajamaed, in a headlong dash for the sink. But the change is too drastic and Joseph realizes that this is not Gavri but his twin.

“You were probably too cold in front of that open door.” Gidi does not respond, his back to Joseph at the sink. Too late Joseph recalls the morning blessings—no talking until the hands have been laved and a dozen blessings recited.

After several minutes Gidi turns around. His face wears the angry scowl of a man wronged but his hair—cowlicked here, matted there—is all boy. His voice is spiked with accusation: “I had to walk more than four paces to lave and say the blessings because I forgot to put a pitcher of water and a basin next to the couch.”

Joseph nearly apologizes, though he feels no remorse, and besides, Gidi’s forgetfulness cannot be blamed on him. Still, he feels sorry for Gidi, knowing this will probably ruin his day. He gestures around the kitchen. “Your wife is really something. She did one amazing job on this kitchen, better than I could have done myself. I’m sure she keeps house beautifully for you.”

“For a retard she’s not bad.”

A hot pulse of anger shoots through Joseph’s body, spitting out the unexpected response: “If that’s your attitude, then you certainly don’t deserve her!”

Gidi does not move from the sink. He blinks hard several times.

Joseph stares into Gidi’s eyes, seeing not his son but himself, the impossible husband. Could this be yet another part of his legacy? He breathes in deeply, calming himself. “She’s lovely, Gideon. A real
neshama
. And she loves you deeply. Don’t ever forget or exploit that fact.” He climbs down from the stool. “Now I’m going to set out some goodies for breakfast before you go to shul. You’ll have a bit before you go, right?”

Gidi nods.

“Good,” says Joseph, feeling he has gained a point. “Go get dressed and by the time you come back I’ll have everything ready.”

Gidi turns and leaves the room without argument.

Joseph knows they will eat little before shul, just enough to keep their bellies from rumbling during prayers. Still, he lays out an assortment of pastries—glazed, jellied, creamed, and frosted to perfection—and coffee, cream, sugar, hot water for tea, honey, and wedges of lemon, all meticulously and artfully arranged. He has just set the kitchen table with glass plates and cups and a fan of silver teaspoons when Gidi reenters the room, dressed and groomed now, followed by Batya.

“Good morning!” Joseph calls to Batya, his voice too loud for this early hour.

His exuberance takes her by surprise and she looks at the floor. He intuits that their midnight chat is a secret, their intimacy off-limits to Gidi. He says, softly now, “You did a brilliant job on this kitchen. It must have taken you all night.”

“Oh no. Oh no. Not all night!” She is nearly breathless, her eyes and mouth round with the fear of being misunderstood. But Joseph thinks he can also detect a note of pleasure in her protest.

“Well, I never thought anyone could be more thorough than I.”

Her gaze drops to the floor again.

Gavri plunges through the swinging door. “Oh good, you’re still here,” he says to his twin. “I thought I’d missed you. Ethan’ll join us in a minute.”

“Come on, everybody, have some cake and coffee before you go.” Joseph shepherds them to the kitchen table. Everything is suited to Gidi’s kosher standards but Joseph prefers to avoid another confrontation, so he tries a different angle. “These cinnamon pastries taste exactly like my mother’s. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that the baker is Swiss, Orthodox, and about the same age as your grandmother would be today.” He lifts the plate to Gidi. “Please.”

Gavri and Batya look to Gidi. He stands motionless. Slowly, his eyes fixed on the pastries, he raises his fingers to the plate and takes one cinnamon roll. “
Blessed are you, o
lord our God, king of the universe, who creates nourishment of
every kind.
”

His small audience says, “Amen” in unison with gusto, and they all laugh. Suddenly there is a bustle, a rush to drink and eat and talk as quickly as possible. Gavri leads the final blessing and all three tumble out of the kitchen. As they prepare to leave, Joseph notices that Batya takes nothing with her and the men take only the cloth bags sheathed in clear plastic that hold their prayer shawls, so he has the final sign he needs: they will, in fact, all return to his apartment after shul; there will be a grand and happy luncheon for them all together.

Ethan emerges from the bathroom as they are standing in the doorway. “Wait up!” he calls as he ducks into the kitchen just long enough to snatch a fistful of pastries. Though all three are careful not to touch Batya, they jostle one another to the stairwell. Joseph will not ruin this moment with an offer to summon the elevator for them, and it makes him laugh to watch them play.

“It was Hillel Gross who plucked the ivory off all of Mrs. Metz’s piano keys,” says one son, picking up on some discussion they had had during their time washing dishes together.

“No, it was
Ariel
Gross!” calls another.

They are shouting to each other as they descend, joyously oblivious to the sleeping neighbors. Joseph lingers at the door to capture every last sound they make.

The kitchen takes no time to tidy up and lunch is still hours away, so Joseph casts about for some worthwhile way to spend his time. He considers reading a book in bed or on the terrace, thinks about a beach stroll or even a bubble bath. He feels quiet and restless at the same time. He is cautiously optimistic, imagines himself a sun with his boys in orbit around him: Gavri and Gidi, twin planets floating closer in tiny increments, just beginning, maybe, to feel his warmth; Noam and Ethan, large and self-contained, drifting at a comfortable middle distance; and in the cold outer reaches of space, Daniel, barely visible so far away. His reverie reminds him of a long-ago outing to a planetarium with the boys, and at once he knows what he wants to do.

The album Joseph is looking for is a large and bulky brown one at the bottom of the stack in the living room, but before reaching it he pauses at another, one that holds photos of their years in Cambridge. He is briefly surprised to see that he appears in only one photograph, conspicuously absent from all family outings depicted in the album. This photo, snapped by Daniel, catches him at the typewriter, a hand extended in surprised warning toward the camera. He remembers slapping Daniel for having dared touch it.

Even now, when he thinks about those years, the pressure of pursuing a doctorate at Harvard with five boisterous boys at home, he feels his face tighten, pulling around itself, taut. His mouth clamps shut and his teeth lock together. His head and neck always hurt in those years, aching to detach themselves and roll about free. At night it took him long minutes that dragged into hours to fall asleep and in the morning he awakened exhausted from dreams with too much happening in them: long lines of poetry that had to be memorized, freshly laid eggs that needed counting, the chattering of his children as they vied for his attention. All these at once. So evening tension led to morning tension, which grew throughout the day. How he envied Rebecca her peaceful slumber, her lack of urgency, and the calm, detached manner that got her through each day.

Now he relaxes his shoulders, forces his facial muscles to go slack, lays aside the album, and pulls out the heavy brown one from the bottom of the pile.

This album contains photographs of the boys collected from the years after he left home, each snapshot hard-won. Their outings never went according to his carefully planned itineraries. He had lost the family car to Rebecca, but after a few chaotic bus journeys with the boys he learned to rent an auto or hire a taxi whenever he took them out. In those days he pored over the “Fun with Children” section of the news-papers and called all the local theaters and museums in his search for appropriate cultural events. The boys made noise, fidgeted and fought; later they refused outright, Daniel in an enraged state of indignation and all the others in various levels of collusion. After a particularly disastrous outing to see a Hebrew staging of
My Fair Lady
, Joseph gave in. From then on he took them to the beach, the pool, bowling, ice skating. On all of these excursions he would sit on hard benches watching, tying shoelaces, occasionally arbitrating fights, always providing money; later he brought newspapers with him, then novels. The photos in this album are grainy, gray, and out of focus. He had the cheapest camera available in those days, just wanting something to capture their images for a bit longer than those difficult outings.

He finds one photo that demands attention—a snapshot of Daniel, Ethan, and Noam at some sort of carnival, in front of a booth. The two younger ones seem to have formed a chaotic ring around Daniel who, placid and contemplative in the eye of the storm, stares unabashedly into the lens of the camera and through it at Joseph. He seems to be asking a question, one that begins with “Why,” a question that his father will not succeed in answering.

There is a light knock at the door and Joseph half expects young Daniel will be there, with that same questioning look.

In fact, it
is
Daniel, flesh-and-blood, grown-up Daniel. He slips past his father without a word and with barely a glance, but once in the room he seems at a loss until he spots the open photo albums. Joseph closes the door and follows him to the sofa, careful to sit one cushion away from his son. Daniel leans forward to examine the photographs, and Joseph leans back to examine his son’s face in profile. He wonders both where Daniel has been and why he has returned.

“Where were these taken? I don’t remember any of this.” Daniel flips through the album. He stops at the same photograph that caught Joseph’s attention. “These must have been taken in Israel but I don’t recognize anything. Is this when you were still married to Mom?”

“No,” Joseph says, clearing his throat. “It was after our divorce.”

“
You
took us to this fair? I don’t remember ever going out with you after you left us.”

Joseph lets this comment penetrate him for a moment. Could Daniel really have forgotten those outings, the time they spent together? Was he blocking out any potentially positive memory of his father? Joseph cannot resist wondering about Daniel’s tale of Rebecca’s near suicide. Such detail, such vivid imagery! Didn’t they all sit around the dinner table last night while Daniel drew a perfect picture of that event, every sound, sight, and smell precisely registered? Hadn’t the abundance of minutiae convinced them all of its truth? But memory plays nasty tricks, never yielding every last detail. Any scene from the past should feel like an oil-painted landscape not yet finished, whole sections blank or merely sketched in pencil. Daniel’s version was full, rich, and vivid. So how now can he not recall years, a whole period of his life, trips that repeated the same patterns with frightening regularity—the arguments, the awkwardness, the tension, the bitterness? These are years Joseph still frets over. It makes him laugh to think of the endless hours he spent first enduring then reliving those times, while Daniel had erased them from his memory.

“What’s so funny?” For the first time Daniel looks into his father’s face.

“Life is very funny sometimes. Don’t you remember Rita starring in
My Fair Lady
? A picnic in Yarkon Park, when Ethan ran headfirst into a tree? The planetarium?”

Daniel pauses, poised to remember. Joseph watches him explore his mind for those events, knows he is trying to separate memory from dream and emotion and desire. He wishes he could explore with him, poking at an association here or an image there. What colors, he wonders, are this son’s memories? How does he remember Joseph? Which memories are comforting and which terrifying?

Daniel’s eyes flicker, then focus on Joseph. He opens his mouth to speak, looks into himself again, then stops short. “No. Nothing. I don’t remember.”

They sit, silent again.

“Maybe,” Daniel begins after several minutes, “maybe. Did you take us once to a dig? Archaeological. Somewhere near the sea?”

Joseph nods in encouragement.

Daniel sits up straight on the edge of the couch, bright with memory. “And I found something, didn’t I? A coin. I wanted to keep it. I wanted that coin in the worst way. I knew it was wrong, but I had to have it. You explained how they would clean it and catalog it, how maybe it would be put on display in a museum where lots of people could see it and I could visit it. Nothing helped. I held on to that coin like my whole life could be bought with it.” He frowns, his head drooping.

Joseph continues Daniel’s story. “I finally brought you to this young man, a student archaeologist, who showed you the whole process and let you hold the special brushes and sieves they were using.” He does not mention the young man’s perfect beauty, how Joseph had flirted with him while Daniel poked his fingers into seventh-century broken pottery. “I think he might have even let you clean it yourself. Then he offered you a trade: the coin for a beautiful piece of sea glass. The glass was worthless to them, of course, but to you—well, you were suspicious at first, thought you smelled a trick, but eventually you agreed.”