The Belief in Angels (15 page)

When I wake up the next morning, groggy, I think I’ve dreamed the entire night’s events. Then I hear the combined voices of Paulina and my father travel down the length of the long hallway from Wendy’s room. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but his voice booms out over Paulina’s whine. I hold my breath. I have no idea what will happen. After a while I hear the sound of a door slamming somewhere downstairs and his voice shouting at someone. I can tell he’s on the phone. A few seconds later, there’s a soft knock on my door. I nervously open it, and I find Moses standing there. I pull him inside.

“Somebody broke in and left a fish on Daddy’s bed,” he says.

“How do you know?” I quiz him, wanting to be certain.

“I heard them talking, and Daddy said he got a message from one of his rookies.”

I become confused. I’m afraid my “mafia message” has been misinterpreted and will lose its intended effect. But then I realize Moses misheard the word. My father said “bookie.” I know this because he repeats the word several times to various people on the telephone as the morning goes on. I know what a bookie is, having read The Godfather, and I become satisfied he’s made the right connection from my message. I can’t remember any specific mention of my father’s bookies, and I don’t know enough about bookies to know why they might be blamed for the fish delivery. But I do have a clear understanding that he lost more money than
he won at the track, and that caused trouble for him. In using the old racing form, I somehow hit the jackpot of my intention.

An hour later, my father and Paulina drive away without a good explanation regarding their quick exodus. He tells us Wendy feels better and might get back from the hospital in a few days. He feels sure we can take care of ourselves.

He also tells us he’s arranged for Jack to visit us and check in once a day to make sure everything is all right. This seems unlikely, but Jack shows up, and he ends up staying with us until Wendy’s discharged from the hospital two weeks later. Maybe he just wants to be sure he’s still got a free place to sleep, or maybe he thinks Wendy might die after all and he feels bad about the possibility we’ll be put in orphanages.

Jack teaches me how to make spaghetti and tomato sauce from scratch. It’s his one culinary masterpiece—he learned it from his Italian mother—and I become equally masterful. He also takes us to the drive-in movies and go-cart racing, and he buys a huge carton of vanilla ice cream that my brothers eat in about ten minutes.

People can be very surprising sometimes.

When Wendy comes back from the hospital she wears a neck brace and is still fairly immobile. She stays either on the couch or her bed. She holds court from both places to a constant stream of visitors—her new friends, the Boston chapter of the Hells Angels.

One day, I overhear her telling the true story behind my father’s quick exit.

Not surprisingly, Howard originally left Withensea after having accrued immense gambling debts, which was his biggest reason for not announcing his presence for the previous six months. When he got the “sleep with fishes” message I left wrapped in the racing form from the day of his biggest single loss—which Wendy had spitefully kept without his knowledge—he assumed his bookie had found him and that
he
had sent the death threat.

Before that day at the races, my grandfather had given him twenty thousand dollars as an investment to build-on a restaurant next to the Little Corporal. My father lost the money at the track, and Wendy said he’d doubled the loss in loans he took out with a particular bookie named O’Reilly in an effort to try and win it back.

Wendy, the only other person besides his bookie who knew about the loans, still lay in the hospital the day he found the fish in his bed. So he ruled her out as a suspect. Which left only O’Reilly.

In an arrogant attempt to bully the bookie into backing off from what he thought was a death threat, he called O’Reilly and announced he wasn’t going to be “intimidated by some two-bit thug.” O’Reilly, confused about Howard’s fishy
accusations, at first denied his involvement, but he must have felt it an opportune time to collect on the loans he’d made to him.

Howard had been laying low in Withensea while he was under probation for petty larceny in Florida. He’d been flying down there every few months to meet his probation officer and pretend he still lived there and was looking for a job. O’Reilly had heard about Howard’s situation through mutual friends, and now he threatened Howard with exposure to local law enforcement for violating the terms of his probation in Florida. I guess he also threatened to break his kneecaps, or at least that’s what Wendy says.

Howard fled Withensea because a dead flounder convinced him O’Reilly had his number.

He went back to Florida and served a short prison sentence for skipping probation, and when his new probation terms were met, he moved all the way to California. So we didn’t see Howard again for a while, which was fine with me. The next time we saw him, Paulina wasn’t with him. They were divorced.

Wendy told us Paulina’s kids had been living with her ex-husband because she lost custody of them during her first divorce. Her husband left because she’d been having an affair. Paulina developed a drinking problem, the kids stopped going to school, and the neighbors called Social Services. The kids were put into foster homes temporarily, and afterwards Paulina’s ex-husband won custody.

Howard met Paulina two years after this sequence of events. I think he felt embarrassed by her status as a deadbeat parent and how it reflected on him, which is why he was paying for the lawyer to help Paulina regain custody. I thought it was pretty hypocritical—he never seemed embarrassed or apologized for his neglect of us, after all.

After Howard and Paulina moved to California, he found a job at a car dealership. The two of them socialized fairly often with his new boss and his family. They even spent time at his boss’s beach home on weekends. I guess this guy had a teenage son, and Paulina and the teenager spent a lot of time alone. Paulina’s inability to follow adult conversation may have influenced this activity.

One day, Wendy told me, Howard’s boss walked in on Paulina and his son in the bathroom. Paulina was sitting on the edge of the sink, and his son was bent over, his head under her skirt and between her legs. When Howard’s boss demanded to know what they were doing, Paulina claimed she was showing him a birthmark on her thigh. I guess he didn’t buy it, because Paulina got arrested for child molestation and Howard got fired.

Wendy loved to tell that story.

Samuel, 69years | August, 1979

BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

UNTIL NOW I thought I am writing this for you, Chavalah. Now I know I am also writing this, my story, for myself. This is the way I write all the things I would not ever say. All the things I could never speak. Maybe these things will remain on the page and leave my brain.

September 19th, 1924. Ivnitza, Russian Empire.

“Look at me, Szaja!” my younger brother Idel shouts at me.

His dark head is bobbing and shimmering a brilliant bronze glow in the sunlight.

My sister Reizel, her husband, Berl, my brother Oizer and I have been pulling potatoes since dawn in the fields of what used to be my bubbe’s vegetable gardens. We pull potatoes while my twin sisters, Ruchel and Sura, make soap back at home. This new trade, soap-making, we began this year to make ends meet.

It has been a year since my parents left with the young ones for America. It feels like forty. Much has changed.

Potatoes grow easily, and they have become the one crop we can legally grow since the Red Army seized control of the village farms. The apple and cherry orchards remain. They stand like silent soldiers. Their limbs produce more fruit than our family can harvest, and we can no longer pay workers. Now the orchards are framed by rows of long earthen hills. Within those small hills we grow our farm’s main crop—potatoes. I hate potatoes. They smell of drudgery. When we dig them,
they create small
kartofl
blisters on my fingers. Their smell ekes out of my pores.

But they feed us. We are left with almost nothing after the tithing we are forced to offer to the Russian armies.

Berl works beside me. He has become more than a brother-in-law this year—he has become my good friend. Berl, a man who usually remains composed, is kind and gentle.

I think of an evening early this spring when we rested wearily in the field after digging potato trenches all day. The sky had begun to darken into the color of steel, and we waited for the first spittle of the rain that had teased us with its entrance all day. I asked Berl about his missing toes and, with great sadness, leaning his chin against the handle of his shovel, he told me of what he and his brother had endured in Poltava, in Southern Ukraine.

“My father was led away to join the army, and me and my younger brother suffered the agony of our mother’s eventual death during the droughts and the famine. We became two of the
bezprytulnimore
—the orphans who sometimes rode on top of the trains from town to town—searching for work and food. One freezing morning, I awoke with terrible throbbing pains in my feet; my toes are numb.” Berl dropped his forehead to the handle with an exhausted thud. He wept as he continued his story. “I tried to wake my brother and realized his heart had stopped. Hundreds of children died a frozen death that night on top of the trains.”

My fingers, hands, arms, and back ache. This pain distracts me from my memory. Reizel and Oizer use the potato forks while Berl and I dig, twist, and pull with our hands.

“Look, look at me Szaja; I am the red-haired basket maker in the market,” Idel says. He stuffs two large potatoes into his shirt, and with the one arm not hanging in a sling he holds his potato breasts as he dances in the muddy field.

I stretch up and arch my back, straightening the square of my shoulders and flexing my fingers into my palms. I feel too cross and tired to laugh, but his show is too funny to stifle a smile.

Idel giggles with joy and runs to Oizer, Berl, and Reizel to show them his new body.

Idel.

He is playing in a wheelbarrow with neighbor children a few weeks ago and broke his arm. Not the same arm he broke when he fell out of the apple tree, his healthy, good arm. I worry what to do with Idel. He’s trouble. Why didn’t
Foter
take him to America? He is useless as a field hand. Still, he does provide wonderful amusement, and I feel gratitude for any distraction offered.

This is our life. We grow vegetables and fruits for the Volga—the Russian
Army and the administrators who occupy our village—and they let us keep a part of our property.

AFTER
FOTER
LEFT, we are visited by the new general’s officers with an official deed stating that our property had been divided for the “benefit of the community.” And it is so. No explanation. No financial compensation. Our return comes in the form of our lives. We hear of the families sent to prison camps—or worse, killed—because of their disobedience.

We are Jews. We are easy marks.

The administrators have begun what will be a focused program for the Volga regime: the “redistribution” of almost all the land in the Ukranian countryside. It is not only the Jews who are being forced to give up our lands. Our farm is one of the few remaining working farms dotting the countryside.