The Sea Beach Line (4 page)

I remembered the first time I visited Sheepshead Bay, when I was eleven. My mother, sister, and I had been out in Nassau County for about a year and a half. It had been two years since we last saw Alojzy, at our old apartment on East Ninety-Second Street. Neither my mother nor my sister mentioned Alojzy, and so I didn't either.

Alojzy had sent my sister and me a few postcards from places like St. Louis and Las Vegas when we still lived in Manhattan. He was never much for writing, and aside from a few words here and there, he mainly filled the backs of the cards with little sketches of him and
us, or of the places he was writing from. We hadn't received any since moving out of the city, and it didn't seem that the old postcards had survived the move. Maybe he didn't know our new address. We had Bernie, who was childless until we came along, and was more attentive than many actual fathers. He was more consistently attentive than Alojzy had ever been, in fact, so we didn't feel a glaring absence. But I still missed Alojzy.

People where we lived liked to talk about Israel a lot. It was some sort of fantasy world, not quite real, but terribly important, where they were a stronger and purer type of people. The word was spoken with slow reverence, and conversation ceased when the region was mentioned on the news. People walked around fearlessly in their green Israel Defense Forces T-shirts, as if the thin fabric were bulletproof. They stuffed cash into preprinted envelopes in the belief that it would blossom into trees as soon as it arrived in
Eretz Yisrael
.

When I heard the word “Israel,” I saw my father, because he had actually lived and even fought in a war there. He was the only real thing I could associate with the place. But I couldn't be sure he wasn't part of the fantasy too.

Bernie called my sister and me into the dining room. We came in to find him and my mother sitting at the table. We ate there on holidays or when we had company; otherwise we sat at the table in the kitchen. The only person who used the room on a regular basis was Bernie, who would spread the files he brought home from the office out on the table in the evening. My mother warned Becca and me against entering the room when Bernie had his files out, for fear that we would disturb one of his carefully sorted piles. She would shout at us if we even made too much noise in another room of the house while he was working, but he himself never complained. He just smiled half a smile, without looking up from the screen of his laptop or the sheets of numbers in front of him.

When Becca and I came into the dining room that day, though, nothing was on the table except my mother's mug of tea, and a paper towel to protect the finish of the wood from the tea's heat. The mug was still full to the brim, and the paper towel was shredded into little
pieces. Becca and I sat down facing our parents. Were we in trouble? We must have been, because my mother was silent. But I hadn't done anything.

“Your mother,” started Bernie—we looked at her, but her grinding fury was terrifying, and we looked back at Bernie—“and I have been in touch with your father. I should say, he's gotten in touch with us. He's back in New York now, in Brooklyn, and he would like to see you kids.”

“You don't have to see him,” my mother interjected. “Don't feel bad if you don't want to. There's nothing he's done for you that you need to feel obligated.”

“No,” said Bernie, “you don't need to feel obligated. You needn't feel obligated one way or the other. This is a decision you have to make for yourselves. He's invited you to spend next weekend with him. If you need some time to think about it—”

“I don't want to go,” said Becca, who was fifteen and getting pretty good at saying things with indifferent confidence. “I'd rather spend the weekend with my friends. It's Sarah's party, and you said I could—”

“That's fine,” said Bernie.

“I think you made the right decision,” said my mom. “There's no reason, considering how well you guys have adjusted, that you need to—”

“I'd like to go,” I said. I didn't know if this was true or not. I missed Alojzy, and going alone without Becca seemed scary. But they were dangling something in front of me—something they didn't really want me to have—and I had to snatch at it. “I'd like to see him.” Becca glared at me, like I'd said it just to spite her. My mother frowned, but nodded in acceptance. Bernie smiled his usual distant smile behind his round glasses and neatly clipped beard.

Bernie was going to drive me to Brooklyn the following weekend, but he got called in to work. Alojzy didn't have a car at the time. My mom made different excuses for why she couldn't take me. In the end, Bernie and Alojzy worked it out that I would take the Long Island Rail Road into Brooklyn.

No one was waiting for me when I got off the train at Atlantic Terminal. I leaned against a pole and listened to a hip-hop radio station
on my headphones, trying my best to look cool and tough so no one would bother me.

Nearly an hour passed, and I became afraid, then sure, that Alojzy wouldn't come. Maybe if Becca were with me, because he couldn't leave his
królewna
alone at night. But he wouldn't come just for me. He had better things to do. Business that came up, that he had to take care of. Maybe he'd never meant to come. Maybe he wasn't even in the city. Maybe Bernie had misunderstood. Maybe I had misunderstood.

Just as I was beginning to despair, and considered calling my mother, a body flew at me from the shadow. I stuck out my arms in defense, but failed to block the hard jab to my side.

“Getting big, eh there, fella?” My father jabbed me again in the side with his right, faked a third right, then landed a light left to my chest.

“I was afraid you weren't coming,” I said, still not believing it was really him.

“Why would you think this? Never doubt me, boychik.” His voice was strong and true. I wouldn't doubt him.

“Come on, now, fella.” He put his arm around me, and we walked off toward the subway. Still shaken from his greeting, I chafed from the tightness of his arm around my neck, but did not want him to let go. I was proud to be walking down the street in Brooklyn with him. Of course he had come.

We didn't talk too much on the train. He asked me how I was doing, how my sister and mother were doing. They were fine, I told him. I was struggling hard to remember that he was my father, the same man who had once lived with us, danced with my mother to the radio in the kitchen, and taken us all to Greenpoint on Sundays to eat cheese dumplings and potato pancakes.

He wasn't part of a Middle Eastern fantasy. He was a real man, with strong arms and a little potbelly. He tucked in to the
Daily News
, and I pulled a schoolbook from my backpack.

We picked up a pepperoni pizza and a two-liter bottle of Coke on the way to his apartment from the train station. Alojzy placed the pizza on the coffee table, the only table in his one-bedroom apartment, and we ate straight from the box. We washed our pizza down
with mugs of Coke. Alojzy poured arak into his, and the sweet licorice smell filled the room as we ate. Above the couch was a large black poster, bearing the coat of arms–like logo of the rock band Queen. The only other decorations on the wall were a plastic Israeli flag and an old snapshot of the four of us in Central Park, when I was about six and my sister maybe ten. Like the flag, the photo was held on the wall by bits of black electrical tape. When I went into the bathroom to pee, I saw a faded pink bra hanging on the shower curtain rod.

The apartment felt very small at first. It was not really much smaller than our old two-bedroom in Manhattan, but living on Long Island had already warped my sense of scale. There was hardly any furniture besides the coffee table and couch in the main room, and the bed in his bedroom. The rest of the space was packed full of cardboard boxes and stacks of books. They were mostly large hardcovers, in piles so dense and tall I thought of them as integral structures, not stacks of individual objects. I asked Alojzy if these were all books that he had read.

“No, no,” he said. “In my life I've left behind two entire libraries. I wouldn't risk another. I read a book and let it go.”

“So what's all this?”

“Merchandise. Got to make money, kiddo. You'll learn that sometime. Hey, take a look at this.” He pulled out an old leather-bound atlas from the middle of a stack and showed me the various places he had lived. I could locate Israel by myself, but wasn't quite sure where Poland was. It turned out it was tucked in the shadow of the USSR.

My father had a small TV, which sat on one of the stacks of books, and we watched the TGIF lineup of sitcoms on ABC. I followed the plots, while my father made comments about the teenage actresses.

“Your girlfriend look anything like that?”

“I don't have a girlfriend.”

“A good-looking guy like you? Not even one girlfriend? I find that very hard to believe. You got your papa's charm. You must drive the girls crazy.” After a few shows, and a few more araks for my father, he turned off the TV.

“Look, I know I ain't been around lately, buddy.”

“Okay.” I wished the TV was still on.

“No, it's not okay. It's gonna change. Because I'm your papa. But listen: It's never been that I don't love. I'm father, of course I love. It's just, I've had my life. You see, I am the wandering Jew of Europe.” He saw my confusion. “It's an old story about a curse. But it's a true story, about the life I've had to lead.” I didn't say anything. I was only eleven and didn't know how to respond to a whole life. “Izzy, buddy,” he said. “We're friends?”

“Sure we're friends.” I didn't want him to doubt me.

“Becca couldn't come with you?”

“No,” I said, worried he would see through the lie. “She wanted to. She had a school thing she couldn't miss.”

“Oh. Well. Tell her what I tell you.”

“Sure.” I knew I wouldn't, but I wanted to please him.

“But you and me, fella, we're friends.”

“Yes.” We were. He knew it and I knew it. He clicked the TV back on.

“I was thinking,” he said a few minutes later, “in the morning we could go crabbing?”

“What's crabbing?”

“Like fishing. You know. But for crabs instead.”

“Okay. Sure.” I still didn't exactly understand what we'd be doing, but other boys' fathers took them fishing. “That sounds fun.”

Leaving the bay now, I headed up Shore Parkway, passing a sushi restaurant that had not been there before and an Irish pub that had always been there. Just under the exit ramp from Shore Parkway was a small side street, also called Shore Parkway. This was where my father had lived, all those years ago. I had spent a lot of time here. Becca didn't come with me very often. It had been an obligation for her, but for me it had been a refuge.

The street I turned down did not match my memories. Everything looked different. Had I forgotten which block Alojzy lived on? No, this was the right address, and the exit ramp was in the right position
in relation to where I stood. Alojzy's building was gone. In its place was a new building, a box coated in lumpy plaster, with blue trim and shiny railings on the narrow balconies that faced the ramp.

I stared at the new building, half hoping that time would run backward if I waited long enough. That the new building would be torn down, my father's old building rebuilt with a wrecking ball. I pictured the boards falling off the third-floor window and the light flicking on and off, then Alojzy pushing open the front door and inviting me in.

I remembered waking up in my father's apartment that first morning, after I fell asleep watching TV with him, how normal it had felt. Waking up on my father's couch in Brooklyn felt far more natural than waking up in my own bed out on Long Island.