The Great Good Thing (7 page)

I don't remember the party afterward. This strikes me as odd. I was thirteen, after all. It was a big occasion. I should remember. But I don't. I've blocked it out. My conflicting emotions must have overwhelmed me. On the surface, I surely felt happy enough. I'd gotten through the ceremony. There was a party in my honor. Food, music, dancing, gifts. But inwardly, I think I was half insane with rage and shame—more rage and shame than I could feel or know—at having been forced to violate my deepest sense of things.

I do remember this, though: Being a Klavan thing, the
party was supposed to be more tasteful than the usual
nouveau riche
Great Neck affair. There was no rented hall, no pink walls, no chandeliers, no fountains. We did have a tent in the backyard, but it was just a small one over the badminton court, which was serving as a makeshift dance floor. There was no live band. My father was an expert with electronics and sound systems. He received most new records free from producers. He had made what today would be called “mixes,” tape cassettes with various songs on them. My friends and I ate food and danced to the taped music beneath the tent. For the time and place, it was meant to be very restrained and genteel.

But in one regard, there was no restraint at all: the presents. In that neighborhood, in those days, a bar mitzvah boy received a fortune in gifts. Cash and savings bonds. Gold watches and gold pen sets, not one but half a dozen of each, maybe more. Silver identity bracelets that were the current fad. Money clips and tie clips, chains and rings set with diamonds and other precious gems.

I've never worn much jewelry. I don't like the feel of it against my skin. For decades, I never wore even a wedding band or a wristwatch. So a lot of these baubles weren't actually useful to me. But I was absolutely dazzled by the worth of them. It was the first wealth that ever belonged entirely to me. Before that, I had once saved my allowance for months to put together forty dollars to buy a rare stamp. This, though, this was—who knows how much?—thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of precious metals, gems, and legal tender. Riches beyond my imagination, and it was all mine.

I collected the haul in an elegant leather box that was itself one of the gifts. I stored the box in a toy cabinet built into my bedroom wall. In the days and weeks that followed, I would take the box out of the cabinet sometimes. I would sit on my bed and hold the box on my legs and open the lid and gaze down at the contents. I would run my fingers over the chains and pens and watches. I would sort them in the box's various compartments and try to guess at their value. It seemed a sparkling treasure to me, like the contents of Aladdin's cave.

I don't know how long my enchantment lasted. Six months maybe, maybe eight, summer into spring. But slowly over that time, a deep misgiving grew in me. I would open my treasure box and find my delight in my wealth had become intermingled with a sense of self-reproach. There was something wrong with this, wasn't there? At first, I couldn't admit to myself what it was. But then I could, and my guilt soured to anger. I would sit on the bed and stare down at the open box on my legs. I would stare down at the gold and the silver and the gems and the bonds. I would run my fingers over them and hear them clink and rattle. And I would think,
Why did you do it? Why did you let them make you do it? Why did you say those things that you did not believe in front of everyone? Why did you sing those prayers you did not even understand?

I didn't think this then but I think so now: if deep down I had not believed in God, it would not have troubled me as much as it did. If you had asked me the question at the time, I probably would have come out with some pseudo-sophisticated agnostic blather about the unknowability of the infinite. But I'd have
been conning you—posing, parroting the adults. I believed, all right. It was in my nature to believe. I felt God there. Why else would I have been so distressed? If it had not mattered to me that I had lied in a temple, at an altar, with the Torah open under my hands—if it had not mattered, I mean, in some essential spiritual way—I think my guilt and shame would have been less intense. I think they would have faded away in time.

But they did not fade. As the months went on, they grew stronger. I grew angry at myself. I grew angry at my parents. I grew angry—not at Judaism specifically but at religion in general. I resented the whole machinery of godless ritual and mindless tradition. I resented its authority without integrity, big people wielding their power over small. With great pomp and sacred ceremony, they had made me declare what I did not believe was true—and then
they had paid me for the lie with these trinkets!
I felt that I had sold my soul.

Now, when I opened the leather box, when I looked down at the gold and silver and gems and US Bonds, it was a bitter, bitter thing. Even the pleasant chill of metal seemed to have faded from the stuff. It felt warm and clammy under my fingertips. I took the box out of its cabinet less and less often and finally not at all; I just left it in there. I pushed it to the back of its shelf, stacking old board games in front of it. Even so, even with the cabinet door shut, I felt its presence, a weight, a sorrow, an accusation.

Finally, one night, after I'd gone to bed, I forced myself to stay awake. I waited in the dark for more than an hour. My father had to go to work so early in the morning that he was often asleep by nine, by ten at the latest. By midnight,
usually, the whole house was quiet. When I felt I'd waited long enough, I opened the toy cabinet—quietly, quietly. I slid the boxes of board games aside. I drew out the leather box full of jewels. Barefoot in my pajamas, I crept downstairs with the box tucked under my arm.

Just in back of the house, down a flight of three steps, there was a concrete platform. It was set beneath the kitchen window, beside the cellar door. Two garbage receptacles were built into the cement, side by side. When you wanted to open one, you would step on a foot pedal to lever up the iron lid. Then you could lower in the old grocery bags full of kitchen trash.

I remember—I can feel it as I write—the cold of the concrete on my bare feet as I hurried tiptoe down those steps. I can still feel the rough surface of the cement through the knees of my pajamas as I knelt on the platform beside the receptacle. I pressed on the foot pedal with one hand to lift the iron lid. I can still feel the cold of the iron against my palm. With the other hand, I stuffed the leather box into the sodden garbage bag. I remember—I can feel as I write—the damp coffee grounds and the brittle egg shells that rose around my forearm as I worked the box deep, deep into the trash. I wanted to make sure it would not be discovered before the garbage men came in the morning and took the bags away. When the leather treasure box was well hidden, I lowered the heavy lid carefully so it wouldn't make a noise.

I crept back inside—crept quickly back upstairs, two stairs by two. I slipped back into my bedroom, closing the door behind me.

W
hen did I first become aware of Jesus Christ? Every idea comes with its own history. What was the history of this idea in me? During those months of self-searching in the hills above Santa Barbara, I asked myself that question continually. I had heard a call to be baptized, but why? Why baptized? Why Christ?

The thing was, the figure of Jesus had been at the center of my thinking for a long time. Even before I had any faith at all, I had written an entire novel about him—two novels, in fact, though the second was just a slapdash abridgment of the first, as I'll explain. By the time the call to baptism came to me, I did have faith, a general faith in God. And yes, the God I believed in looked very much like the God of the New Testament: the
logos
of Love that redeemed a tragic world. But that only begged the question: Why? Why that God? Why Christ?

Finding the answer was not as simple for me as it would
have been for someone who had been raised in a Christian household. As a child, I had never been taught that Jesus was even special, let alone divine. I couldn't recall ever having been inside a church as a boy. I don't think I seriously discussed Jesus with any of my little Christian friends. I didn't
have
that many Christian friends, only a few. Mostly, I grew up a Jew among other Jews. So how had Jesus entered my imagination? How had he come to occupy its core?

It took an effort of memory, but after a while I reached back and recalled the first time I truly noticed him. It happened on a Christmas Eve. I don't know how young I was, but young, a little boy, five or six maybe. I had been sent to stay overnight at the house of a woman named Mina.

Mina had come to work for my family shortly after my younger brothers were born. My older brother was six then and I was three. With the two of us underfoot already, my mother needed help taking care of baby twins. Mina came to live with us for a while, a year or so, I don't know how long exactly. But even after she moved out, she remained our regular babysitter. She was more than that to me, though, much more. To me, she was almost a second mother.

My first mother—my real mother—was an enigmatic figure. I find, when I try to describe her, pale adjectives replace the living presence. Restrained. Self-protective. Gracious with strangers; they loved her. With her family . . . not cold, no. But aloof. Purposely insubstantial, somehow. Emotionally invisible. Even in my memories, the light seems to pass right through her, making her difficult to see. I can get at nothing
solid about her but her fears and foibles and unfulfilled desires. She was afraid of authority figures. She yearned for a more glittery and urban life. She was afraid of testing herself and her talents. She was afraid to fail. I remember one or two titanic and terrifying rages from her, one or two shockingly icy and cruel remarks. But those were rare moments when she flashed into relief, a ghost revealed by lightning. Mostly, she was atmosphere.

Mina, on the other hand, was nothing if not a vivid personality. She only stood about five feet tall, if that, but they were five feet of gruff peasant cheer and practical energy. A Yugoslavian immigrant with a thick accent, she was lavishly affectionate, comically quaint, and down to earth. She never learned to speak good English and I sometimes had to help her read hard words. But she knew what she was about, all right.

I remember her making beds and cleaning rooms with curt, blunt, almost military efficiency. Chasing my brothers and me around here and there. Laughing, scolding, tickling, threatening to spank but never actually doing it. Driving us with elaborate care in her galumphing jalopy of a car. Always cooking something or baking something, sometimes both at once. I don't remember ever seeing her sit still to look at a book or magazine. Even when she'd watch TV with us, she'd get so involved in the story she would shout at the hero—“Look out!”—to warn him that the villain was sneaking up behind him. It used to drive us crazy. We tried again and again to explain to her that the characters on screen couldn't hear her. She'd just laugh at her own silliness and go right on.

She lived with her family in a tidy little clapboard house in the nearby town of Port Washington. It was a working-class enclave at the time, distinctly lower on the social and economic scale than Great Neck. Her family, as I understood it, was a collection of refugees, chased out of southeastern Europe by the Nazis or the Communists, I was never sure which. There was her older sister, the widow of a German Luftwaffe pilot who'd been shot down in the war. She was gaunt and tart and rather Germanic herself, but kindly for all that. Then there was their brother, a carpenter, who had come to America in time to serve in Korea. He'd been badly injured there when his jeep overturned. He'd had a metal plate installed in his head and was never quite right afterward. A sweet-natured, jolly enough fellow most of the time, he was given to sudden bouts of obsessive agitation, flashbacks to combat, and depressive drinking binges.

Finally there was Mina's niece, the daughter of her sister and the dead Luftwaffe guy. She was in her teens then, about ten years older than me. She used to babysit us sometimes. She was a gentle, dreamy girl of truly astounding beauty, blond and slender and delicate as a porcelain figurine. Her ethereal personality turned out to be the forewarning of a mental illness that blighted her adulthood—schizophrenia, I think. But back then, she was always just very kind and soft and patient with me, and I . . .? I fell so deeply in love with her that she left a permanent impression on my soul. Her face became my standard of beauty. Her name became my favorite female name. Sweet, gentle, mentally ill women
turn up with alarming regularity as characters in my novels. The psychiatrist's patient in
Don't Say a Word
, the mother in
Empire of Lies
, the hero's friend in the young adult story
Crazy Dangerous
. I'm sure there are more of them. They're all she. Conjuring her this very moment, I can feel again the pang of my childish devotion. I never got over her.

I'm not sure how much of Mina's family history I've gotten right here. I'm not sure how much of what I've gotten right is true. This is just what I knew about them, or thought I knew, when I was little. My parents used to hint that the sister and the Luftwaffe pilot had never really gotten married, that it was a wartime fling and the beautiful niece whom I loved was illegitimate. In later years, I myself sometimes wondered if the whole family wasn't actually German, if they hadn't pretended to be Yugoslavian to avoid the anger that Americans, and especially Jews, still felt toward Germans after the war.

Never mind, though. None of that bothered me when I was a child. None of it bothers me now. Mina and her family simply became part of my family. And Mina gave me a substantial portion of what mothering I had.

My own mother resented motherhood. “Even a cat can have kittens,” she once told me bitterly. She loved her children, but she had no use for the day-to-day job of us. She didn't like to cook, for instance. I think Mina taught her every recipe she knew. I don't remember Mom ever going to a PTA meeting or volunteering to participate in a school event. She did show up for all the mom necessities. She nursed us through our illnesses. She dispelled our nightmares. She dried our
tears and bandaged our bruises after our Western-movie-sized brawls. But she generally performed these tasks with a brusque air of impatience and distraction. She was not like other moms we knew who seemed to mother with their whole selves and as if by nature.

Mina, though, who had no husband or babies of her own, nurtured children as she nurtured everyone else around her. She just took care of people, that's all. She took care of her own family—she ended up supporting the lot of them as they declined into disability and old age. She took care of babies as an obstetrics aide at a local hospital. She was a nanny to other families as well as ours. She even won awards for the charity work and church work she did all around her town.

Much of what she was expressed itself in the kitchen, her dominion. She was an incredible country cook, and her baking was beyond the power of praise. For us children, of course, this was the best thing about her. The Weiner schnitzels she sometimes made us, the steaks, the enormous but nonetheless crispy french fries—incomparable delights of my childhood. And next to the taste of the pastries and cookies she created, all other physical sensations of pleasure paled! It was she who baked our birthday cakes every year. (It was considered bad luck if she spelled your name right in the icing, which thankfully she never did.) But her Christmas cookies, or Mina Cookies as we called them, these were her unbelievably delicious masterpieces.

The impression those cookies made on me was deep, very deep. When I was forty, I went to Germany for the first time,
to Munich. It was right around Christmas. I stepped into the famous
Christkindl Markt
in Marienplatz: a huge seasonal market in the city's main square. I took one whiff of the baked goods on sale in the stalls and I was thunderstruck by a visceral, Proustian sense of having stepped into my own memories. It was the smell of Mina Cookies. It was the smell of home.

We did not celebrate Christmas at my house. Or that is, we did for a while, and then we didn't. It was never a big event, even when we celebrated it. Hanukkah with its nightly candle-lighting ceremony, its eight days of one present after another—that was really the main attraction. But when I was very little, my father's radio partner, Dee Finch, a churchgoing Protestant of some sort, would send over a few gifts. We would find them hidden behind a chair on Christmas morning.

Then, one afternoon, as I was playing in the dining room, I overheard my mother talking on the phone in the kitchen. She was speaking to Finch's wife. She was asking her not to send us Christmas presents anymore. It was “too much” for my brothers and me to have Christmas and Hanukkah both, she said. Looking back, I've come to feel that she was acting on a directive from my father. I think he was moving to protect our Jewish heritage from the seductions of the Christmas festivities all around us. In fact, I have a sweet memory, dating from about this time, of Dad trying to fill the role of Santa Claus in our lives with a character named Hanukkah Harry.
¹
He played the right Jewish old elf himself, of course. I remember giggling uncontrollably as he took my brothers and me on
his knee one after another and listened to our present requests while responding in one of his funny voices.

At that moment, though—the moment when I overheard my mother on the phone—I was in no way concerned with matters religious. I remember my reaction very clearly. I didn't care about the loss of Christmas at all. But the presents! The loss of the presents! That, madam, was an outrage! I felt as if I had stumbled on a misguided, not to say evil, parental plot, a conspiracy to cause us to receive fewer gifts. Fewer gifts, I tell you! And the Finches gave good gifts too! Electric football games and those jumbo dump trucks that actually dumped. Really nice stuff. This was no small catastrophe.

I thought it stank and I didn't mind saying so. I lodged an eloquent protest, stomping back and forth in front of my mother across the kitchen floor as I declaimed on the injustice of it all. Maybe it was to mollify me—or maybe it was just an excuse to get rid of an annoying child for an evening—but in any case my mother arranged for me to stay overnight at Mina's house that Christmas Eve.

I don't think it had ever occurred to me that Mina was a Christian. I don't think I would have had any very clear conception of what that actually meant. She was, though. She was a true Christian. Religious, I mean, even devout. She went to church on Sunday. She said her prayers at night. She believed in supernatural presences and events with the faith of a child. She did the sort of charitable work in her community that my parents never did in ours. I don't think she ever mentioned Jesus to me, but he was alive and real to her. He was—as I see
now—the reason she was the way she was, the reason she did the things she did.

Christmas at Mina's was an elaborate occasion. The little clapboard house in Port Washington was transformed into what, to me, was a wonderland. There was a towering fir tree scraping the ceiling in one corner of the small front parlor. Mina's brother climbed a ladder to string the colored lights on the branches while I stood below, craning my neck to watch him. Then I got to help hang the ornaments. And when the lights went on, reflected in the shining red and silver glass of the decorations, my mouth opened in an
o
.

Under the parlor windows—the windows that looked out onto the winter streets—there was a long table with a white cloth on it. The cloth was sprinkled with Styrofoam bits like snow. In the midst of the snow, a miniature village of porcelain country houses had been set up. Each house was lit from within by a tiny bulb. Tiny people—the policeman, the businessman with his briefcase, the mom with her carriage—stood on the lawns and sidewalks and streets. A train track encircled the town with a small electric train clacketing round and round on it. You could even put a white pellet in the locomotive's smokestack so it would send up white smoke and give a whistle:
whoo-whoo
.

To decorate the windows themselves, the real windows above the porcelain village, I was given a pack of paper stencils and an aerosol spray can of synthetic frost. I would spray each stencil with the frost and the white powdery shape of it would appear on the glass: Santa Claus or a star or a winged
angel. I cannot properly describe how much this delighted me or how beautiful I thought these frost shapes were.

In the corner opposite the tree, there sat the television set, an old black-and-white one in a wooden cabinet. On top of the cabinet was a record player, a turntable with a spindle at the center of it. A stack of records was held in place at the top of the spindle, and as each album finished, a new one dropped into place and began to play. The songs were sung by the then-still-living singers of an already-passing age: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Ella Fitzgerald. There were carols of strangely elevated loveliness, like “Silent Night,” “Adeste Fideles,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” And there were more contemporary numbers—“Sleigh Ride,” “Silver Bells,” “White Christmas”—that had a rollicking but wistful charm of their own.