As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (6 page)

“Then I choose not to.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

Zelik had stepped back, as if wounded, and they’d walked away from each other for the afternoon. Later, as my father had come down the stairs for dinner, Zelik met him at the landing. His words, heated earlier, were now calm, even kind.

“Listen,” he told Mort. The unusual sweetness of his father’s voice captivated Mort and he did listen. “What this is,” Zelik said, “is a responsibility. This is how you were born: Jewish. This is the family you were born into: of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You can’t change that, and this is how it comes: with responsibilities. We have to meet them, or—”

Zelik looked at him and the words, which at first came so easily, and had sounded almost like music, were now seemingly beyond his grasp. “Don’t you see?” he added, shaking his head as if to clear his mind. “Responsibilities,” he repeated quietly.

This moment was the first time his father had talked to him like that, like Mort actually did have a choice, to meet or refuse to meet his responsibilities. In a few months the bar mitzvah would mark him a man, at least in religious terms, and with that his full participation in adult Jewish life could begin, but it was this moment that my father always thought of as the one that truly began his adulthood. He did have responsibilities, he realized, blinking his eyes, as if to push past the dust of sleepy denial. He just hadn’t seen his life that way before. He didn’t know he had the will to do it, but in the end he did: he made his choice, and it was against baseball.

The words of the Amidah continued, and as Mort rocked forward and backward, his eyes focused again on his prayer book, his mind working to find that center point, that place that stilled his increasingly bewildered thoughts—Where’s Howard? Where is he?—he let the Hebrew ground him: “Restore our judges as in former times,” he prayed, “and our counselors as of yore; remove from us sorrow and sighing, and reign over us, You alone, O Lord, with kindness and compassion, with righteousness and justice.” He read and he davened and still he heard Howard telling him, convincing him, “I’ll come back early, in time for morning minyan.” In his prayer book he read, “Blessed are You, Lord, who crushes enemies and subdues the wicked,” and in his mind he was wagging his finger at Howard, telling him that the thing about Judaism was that either you were in or you were out. The chosen people. Well, it didn’t work to be chosen unless you chose right back. And he had. Mort was in. He was there. He was present.
But where the hell are you?
he asked Howard.

He shook his head, attempting to clear it, bowed deeply, and began again.

“Look with favor, Lord our God, on Your people Israel and pay heed to their prayer,” Mort prayed, though at the same time he heard his father say, speaking of Howard, “He gets that from me.” Mort read, “You are the Beneficent One, for Your mercies never cease,” while the words forming in his mind were
goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit.
The prayer was coming to a close. “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable before You, Lord,” Mort intoned while inwardly he said, strangely enough,
shortstop, shortstop.
Then, suddenly speaking of Davy and his talent with the glove and ball, he turned to his phantom father and said, gloating:
He gets that from me.

That was not the prayer, the Amidah, Mort had anticipated. Rather than transcendence he felt in its wake disgrace. His prayer book, usually weightless to the touch, might as well have been made of stones. Even his body, filled by that lightness of spirit he’d gained upon entering the shul, felt deadened by his failure, wobbly, weak. His face, he soon realized, was damp with sweat.

When he looked around he noticed the men had gathered near him, and Nathan Novak, leaning closest, soon wrapped an arm around his shoulders. Jerome Kaminsky pulled a chair from against a wall and unfolded it, then pointed at Mort, then at the chair.

You know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad,
he almost began to explain to them, his knees quivering just like Babe Ruth’s reportedly had at Yankee Stadium.

Internal rot. Surely, he reasoned, considering the rancor of his prayer, he had it as bad as Ruth, as bad as his dead father. He wondered: Was he going to die of it too? Was the morning’s visitation of spirit—his father’s and Babe Ruth’s—a kind of premonition? Was that knocking in his dream the knocking not of Howard but of the other world? He then thought of something else, even worse: Did he not know how to be a father?

For a moment all prayer ceased and the men gathered even more tightly around him. Harold Sokull urged him to sit; he was tired, Harold told him, he didn’t look so good, maybe he needed a rest. It had to be hard, Freddy Horowitz suggested, what with the family gone and all. Abe Leiberman and Stanley Levine pointed at a chair; Jerome Kaminsky was patting his back.

As Mort eased himself into the chair, Nathan Novak wouldn’t let him go, had his arm in a grip. Once seated, Jerome Kaminsky stepped forward, loosened Mort’s tie. His brother-in-law Leo Cohen then stood before him, holding a glass of water he’d seemed to conjure forth. For an instant my father stared at Leo in disbelief: all those years in the store he’d never seen Leo move so swiftly. But soon his attention shifted. Marvin Abkin was speaking to him, his voice as gentle as he’d ever heard it. “Drink up, big boy. Drink up.”

Not one man continued to pray without him.

Finally, Marvin Abkin said, his voice hushed, “Heart? Heart bothering you?”

Mort shook his head. “Not a heart problem,” he said quietly. “God, no. Just a touch of worry. That’s all.”

He looked up at the concerned men surrounding him. How glad he was to know them, he thought, scanning the familiar faces. How lucky each morning to be right there with them. Indeed the minyan’s love at that moment was as palpable and clear as any my father had known, even Ada’s, he realized, even his kids’. He sat in the chair and the cluster of men moved in one motion, like an amoeba might move, a shifting blob of life and energy, inches closer toward the chair, toward him. Jerome Kaminsky began fanning him, while his brother Nelson and Nathan Novak gripped him, one man to each of his shoulders. As Mort observed the men’s attention he was reminded of his wedding day, when he’d been lifted in a chair by a group of men not unlike this group, lifted high in the air in this very synagogue, this very room, which that day was decorated with flowers and had tables of food set out that were overflowing. He felt just that way again, like they’d gathered around him and in doing so had lifted him up. With gratitude he looked once again from one man, one friend, one prayer brother to the next. Howard, he would tell his son when he saw him, gently and wisely teaching him, just as his father had once taught him: This Jewishness is no game. It’s nothing to toy with. It’s your essence, he’d say, simply enough. It’s your very soul.

Now that he’d recovered the men returned to their prayer, for they could pray and they could keep an eye on him and they could shift like an amoebic blob when necessary and all the while they never missed a beat of the service. The last of the Kaddishes now approached and this would be a mourner’s Kaddish, Mort knew. As he struggled to stand and then, feet planted, to steady himself, the group turned to him, and looking out he saw many pairs of eyes questioning his rising at all, much less his rising to mourn.

“Babe Ruth,” he said, by way of explanation. All the rest was just too complicated. “I’ve been anxious, lately, for the Babe.”

But that was all the explanation needed.

Suddenly, with Ruth recalled, they were all mourners, though the great man—not a Jew but close enough—hadn’t fallen just yet. Nevertheless, they bowed their heads, began the Kaddish, and, together, the men prayed.

When he left the shul moments later my father felt as he always did: cleansed and clearheaded. He shook hands with his minyan brothers, smacked their backs, and watched them scatter.

When you got right down to it, he understood anew, trailing Nelson at this point as they made their way back to the car, life was pretty simple. Just one rule, above all others. He looked up to the sky, a flawless, bright blue, and then at the houses and buildings on Middletown’s Broad Street, the rows of cars parked neatly along each side. Everything was God, he told himself, nodding.

Then he inhaled deeply.

For every breath was Him.

Howard snored. That’s how I knew he was going to be late that Friday morning, by the sounds emanating from the thin walls of the cottage well past seven a.m., when he should have risen. Freedom can be a complicated thing, and even at the very start of summer Howard had grabbed a little too much, too soon.

When he did wake it was already twenty past, and the sisters, who had left some time ago for their dunk, weren’t back yet. The cottage was quiet. Howard changed that with a thud, then a worried “Oh, shit.
Shit.
” Soon enough he was making his way down the cottage’s creaky and by then quite sandy stairs, then tiptoeing around Nina and me lying in the sofa bed, as he looked for the car keys he’d last dropped into a living room ashtray. A moment later he walked past us again, into the dining room, where he rummaged through the mound of unfolded laundry covering the large oak table, and then he went into the kitchen, where I could hear him open the fridge. I could have told him that I, at least, was already awake, that the sisters, who had left for their dunk, had woken me up. I could have. But to take in Howard struggling, at least in the days before we lost Davy, was one of the best kinds of fun.

Well over an hour later Howard pulled into Middletown and parked the Dodge on Broad Street, slamming its door as he raced toward the synagogue. But he’d taken only a few steps when he spotted them: Mort and Nelson. Their yarmulkes, which covered their bald spots perfectly, were already off their heads and stuffed in their pockets.

Nervously, my brother called to them. When they looked his way he waved, and they in turn waved back, Mort’s hand lingering in the air.

“So you made it,” Mort said, sounding strangely matter-of-fact, a tone that worked to relieve Howard of some of the worry he’d been shouldering as he drove.

“Sorry,” Howard said. “Got going a little late.”

As Mort observed him—the wrinkled khakis, the partially untucked shirt, the loafers worn without socks, the chin stubble (Howard realized, scratching at it)—Howard shifted on his feet. While he tucked in the shirt, Mort’s expression, which at first had almost seemed friendly, shifted in increments until it was decidedly grim.

“Don’t tell
me,
” he finally said. “Tell God.” He walked past Howard and waited beside the Dodge. “Throw me the keys,” he said, and Howard did.

When Mort started the car Howard gave him a questioning glance. Howard was standing yards away, beside Nelson. He didn’t know if he was expected to get in the car or not.

“I’ll see you at the store,” Mort said, his tone still matter-of-fact but his gaze removed from Howard and focused on the road ahead of him. In the next moment he pulled away from the curb.

“It’s going to be a long day,” Howard told Nelson. As Howard watched Mort drive off, his stomach dropped from the middle of his body to his feet, a sensation he’d experienced before, and always in connection with his father.
A long day,
he repeated to himself.

Just then Nelson threw his arm around his nephew’s shoulders. “Tell you what,” Nelson said, patting his back. “Stick with me.”

Leibritsky’s Department Store on Middletown’s Main Street was where the men all worked: Mort, Nelson, Leo, and sometimes Howard. I often thought of my brother’s time there during his high school years as a male rite of passage, as if the bar mitzvah alone hadn’t been enough of an ordeal to transform him from boy to man. But some regularly logged hours at Leibritsky’s Department Store would do it. Years ago the store had been a snug sell-anything kind of place located at the north end of Main Street—at least that’s the legend we children had always been told—but all throughout our childhood it was the spacious five-section (men’s apparel, women’s apparel, children’s apparel, shoes, and housewares) department store located toward the south end that my brother, from his time there, came to know as intimately as our home. First thing that morning, to Mrs. Rossetti, mother of the same Lucinda Rossetti who had yet to mail the beginnings of a picture to Davy, Howard promptly sold the latest Sunbeam Mixmaster.

“It’ll make your life easier. You deserve that,” he told Mrs. Rossetti, who looked at him with surprise and then agreed.

On a good day, a normal day, a substantial sale like that would be cause for Mort to proudly slap Howard’s back, but that morning when Nelson clapped his hands, calling attention to the sale, and then said with deliberate volume, “Nice one, Howard, nice one,” Mort, though standing only yards away, pretended not to hear. Once again Howard’s stomach dropped to the floor and for some time after that his head hung low. He could have made another sale, or at least have tried to, but he didn’t feel like approaching anyone. Instead he closeted himself in the back area of the store, unnecessarily folding and refolding children’s play clothes.

Later that morning, close to noon, Nelson found Howard and asked him out to lunch, just the two of them. Howard explained that though he hadn’t had much of a breakfast, and was maybe a little hungry, he nevertheless didn’t feel like eating.

“Come on. Do you some good. What do you say?” Nelson asked again.

This time Howard nodded. Nelson had always been good to him. Howard didn’t remember this, exactly, but he’d been told at least a hundred times how he’d taken to Nelson right away, even as a baby. When he’d cried, touched at times by colic, Nelson’s ample arms were a reliable comfort and Howard would quiet right down, even sleep. And when Howard was still a small boy Nelson would come by to take him for walks, often to the local playground, where Nelson would gently push Howard’s back as he sat on a swing. In the years following that, Nelson had taken Howard to the Saturday movie matinee at the Palace Theater on Middletown’s Main Street. Just him. Together they’d seen
The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington,
and
The Wizard of Oz.
There was even a couple of years, 1942 and 1943, when Howard was twelve and thirteen, when he and Nelson had gone to the movies together once every month during the school year. They’d watch the show and Nelson, always armed with bite-sized Tootsie Rolls, would pass Howard candy throughout the story’s progression. That was all in the past—high school had come along, and with that a natural enough orientation more toward friends than uncles, however kind—but even so Howard had continued to feel good in Nelson’s company, important, and Nelson, in turn, unfailingly lit up simply at the sight of him.