Chains Around the Grass (28 page)

He threw down his cigarette, crushing it under a determined heel. They’d be waiting, his mother, sister and brother. Slowly, reluctantly, he began to walk homeward.

Sitting in her old spot by the window, Sara watched her brother enter the building. She hurried to slam her bedroom door.

Why couldn’t she be happy for him? “Be happy he was well and home, and they were all together again, just like it used to be?” as her mother had scolded her all week long.

Partly, because she’d never really believed he’d been sick. He’d always been a bully, he’d just gotten worse. Someone had taken pity on her and locked him up. Why should she feel joy at his return? Remorse she’d never gone to visit him? Why should she pretend? The truth was that his absence had returned some precious normalcy to her existence. She’d found peace and safety within the walls of her home. Her grades had gone up. Her friendships grown. Her teachers praised her work, and gave her extra encouragement. She didn’t need the challenge of her brother.

Sara was right to be worried. The years ahead will not be easy. She would have to fight every step of the way to earn her place and keep it. But she had no real reason to fear. Although many years will pass until the two of them can face each other without ghosts, closing that chasm brought about by the earthquake of their father’s death, eventually the war will end. As adults, they will find each other, perhaps for the first time. They will stand together at their mother’s grave reading the newly etched tombstone: “Beloved Mother, Grandmother and Great-Grandmother,” and weep the way they never did at their father’s, holding each other, knowing they are the only two people in the world that understand that they are now, in their fifties, truly orphans.

Sara is destined to be very lucky. In the end, the separateness forced on her by pain and loss and poverty will be transformed into a unique sense of destiny. She will leave America for good, leaving its dreams and values behind. She will never get over the loss of her father, but she will know many more answered prayers than unanswered ones. God will be with her always, warming her heart and casting over her being a mantle of unconditional love that will last until her dying day. She will try to make this love tangible to her wonderful husband, beautiful children and grandchildren, and many strangers, through her books. Sometimes, she will succeed. It will be, for the most part, a rich, beautiful and fulfilling life, more wonderful than even an imaginative child, or the father who loved her, could ever have hoped for.

Ruth heard him knock. She wiped her hands on a towel, and closed the oven door on the roasting turkey, her heart suddenly still. There was a warm apple pie on the counter with little bubbles of tart juice that rose through the golden-brown crust. She’d got the day off and had worked all morning in the kitchen. She glanced into the living room at the new couch and the new chrome lamp with its bright yellow shade, thinking: the honest work of my own hands. No one’s charity, not the city’s or benevolent societies, or reluctant, pitying relatives. She straightened her back. A job with the Civil Service, because she’d scored so high on all their exams. A good job, in the Board of Education, working for a professor, who told her that she was the best secretary he’d ever had. Who told her to please call him Harry, instead of doctor. Who noticed when she wore a new dress bought on sale at Abraham and Straus in downtown Brooklyn during her lunch hour.

Louis, sitting on the floor of his bedroom playing, breathed in the warm, good kitchen smells. He couldn’t remember the last time there’d been so much food in the house. Usually when Sara took him home from daycare, the kitchen was cold and empty, and they’d wait a long time for their mother to come home on the subway and finally give them something to eat. He’d been allowed to stay home from daycare today, so he was happy about that too. It wasn’t so bad there, but he liked being home with his mother better, playing by himself with his box of blocks, building things that other children wouldn’t break.

He’d missed his brother Jesse (who’d gone—not passed—away; not like his daddy, whom he hardly remembered at all). He’d gone to visit him on long, dusty train rides, in the place full of wide lawns and doctors. He remembered the sandcastle they’d built together at the edge of the sea, and wondered why it was people had to go away.

Ruth opened the door.

“Jesse,” she reached up, smoothing the fine dark hair out of his searching, still unsatisfied, eyes. Then she put her arms around him and simply rested there for a moment. “Sara! Louis! Your brother’s home! Come say hello!”

Sara came out of her room, hanging back cautiously, curious to have a look at him.

Jesse took an uncertain step toward her. “You’ve grown.” He grinned. “Not bad.”

“Hi,” she answered coolly.

“You know I’m just kidding,” he said, surprised at her hostility. He tried to remember what had gone on between them. Some toy breaking, some yelling. What difference did it make now? He felt so far away from his childhood. Silly, childish games, all of it, that should now be put away and forgotten. “I mean, you look different. Prettier.”

She stared at him. A compliment? “You too,” she admitted warily, taking in the neatly combed hair, the face that had lost some of its brooding hardness along with some of its youth. She felt an inexplicable twinge of sadness that she hadn’t sometimes joined her mother and brother on visiting days.

“It’s your teeth.”

She smiled shyly. “I had braces.” “Mom, how could you afford…?”

“I have a job. A good job. I’m now a senior stenographer at the

Board of Education,” she said proudly.

“You’ll have to find something else to torture me with now!” Sara announced.

“I’m sure I’ll think of something…” he smiled, looking around. “Where’s Louis?”

He walked though the apartment, peering into the familiar rooms, almost hearing the echoes that lingered like cobwebs in every corner. “When the movers get here, pick out any room you want, fix it up beautiful, just like in Jersey…”

It was all so familiar. All so dreadful. But in a strange way consoling too. Everything was the same as he’d left it. Or better. Nothing had been destroyed.

“Hello, Louis.”

“Hello,” he answered, not looking up from his blocks.

Jesse crouched down beside him. “What’ve you got there?”

“A bicycle. But the boy can’t ride it very well.” He knocked off one of the blocks, sending it flying into Jesse’s leg.

Jesse rubbed the spot, then picked up the block and replaced it. “Well, why doesn’t the boy get someone to help him ride then?” He picked up a few blocks and placed them in a protective circle around the first.

“Someone to hold the seat and push and run with him?” Louis said, looking up.

Jesse nodded.

“But what if he can’t? What if everyone leaves and goes away and then the boy could fall off and get hurt bad, bad.” His arm smashed into the middle, sending the blocks in all directions.

Jesse pulled him up, hugging the small body against his own, surprised to see how tall he’d grown. A recent haircut made his ears look tender, his neck vulnerable. “I’ve missed you a lot, Louis. And I’m back now. I’ll teach you how to ride a bike. And we’ll build more sandcastles. You’d like that Louis, wouldn’t you?”

Louis wriggled free. Slowly, thoughtfully he went back to building his bicycle again, carefully balancing the block on top. “If he holds on tight, he won’t fall off.”

Jesse nodded gravely. “And now can I get a kiss?”

The child nodded, not looking up, passively allowing himself to be lifted again and hugged. But when Jesse tried to put him down, he felt the child’s hands fly up and clench around his neck.

Unlike their father and uncle, the two brothers will be partners all their lives. Together they will build furniture, then kitchens, and finally houses. They will turn old buildings in the Bronx and Harlem into bright new apartments for welfare families, and the City will pay them well. Their own sons will want nothing more than to be just like them. And their families will live in beautiful homes with wide lawns.

“Come children, it’s time to eat,” Ruth called from the kitchen.

She stood by the table, anxiously smoothing the crisp new tablecloth, her mouth trembling. She put a kerchief on her head, struck a match and then lit the two Sabbath candles in their silver holders. The candlelight playing on her face kindly washed away some of the wrinkles and worry lines so that when Jesse looked at her, he was startled to see the mother of his youth, the one who’d stood with his father’s arm around her waist behind the counter in the candy store. He loved her.

Later, much later, when she is old, he will take her in, and she will live in his house for eighteen years, helping to bring up his sons.

She will love her grandsons, the room in her son’s house looking out on old oak trees. And she will always say: Those were the happiest years of my life.

“Baruch ata Adonai Elohenu Melech Haolam, asher kiddishanu bemitzvotov vetzivanu, lehadlik ner shel Shabbos.”

The old words came back to him with a new, unfamiliar beauty. He looked around the table, realizing for the first time what it was that his father had done wrong. It wasn’t being a sucker, giving Hesse the money—no—that wasn’t an evil thing. The opposite. It was a sign of his innocent trust in his fellow man, his goodness and his loving heart that couldn’t see evil. No. His father’s weakness, the one and only thing for which he needed to be forgiven by his family was that he hadn’t understood how much he was really worth. He’d measured his life by the wrong yardstick. He’d let it beat him to death. He hadn’t understood that he’d succeeded at all the important things: at loving and being loved. At being a good man. As long as any one of them lived, his memory would be blessed, his passing mourned.

Ruth handed Jesse his father’s silver wine goblet. “Please, Jesse, will you say it? We need a man.”

He didn’t protest, lifting the moist chilled cup and holding it in the center of his palm, as he’d remembered his father doing. He felt his obligations. But this time, they were not burdens crushing him down; but simply roots anchoring him to a nourishing earth, a place painfully cleared and reclaimed from the wilderness.

“Veyehi erev, veyehi boker…” (“It was evening and then it was morning; the sixth day. Heaven and earth and all their host were complete…Blessed be You, God, our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us with his commandments and taken pleasure in us and in love has given us His holy Sabbath as an inheritance…”)

They sipped the wine, then washed their hands and ate the challah bread. Ruth looked around at her children. In a few months time, encouraged by Jesse and Sara, she would rent an apartment in a two-family house on a quiet tree-lined street near her daughter’s school. She would hire a moving truck, call a yellow taxi, and move the family out of the projects. She would succeed in paying the rent, buying the food, the clothing, the furniture—with help from no one. And not a day would go by that she wouldn’t think of her husband.

She studied her tall, handsome son, her growing daughter, and her sweet little boy and realized, amazed, that she was happy. “Your daddy would have been so proud!”

The echoes moved out of the corners, beating like wingless birds around the room.

This is not the end of the story. It is only the end of what I know. With every child born, a family’s story begins anew, rolling forward into the future, further than our eyes can see or hearts imagine, transforming the tale in ways we could not have dreamed possible, explaining it in ways we could not have hoped to comprehend… As long as life rolls forward, no story ever ends; and no tale is ever really a tragedy.

Glossary

Alrightniks—“people who are all right”, the formation derived from the way people who live on a Kibbutz are called “Kibbutzniks.”

Bar Mitzvah—the rite of passage moving a child into the responsibility of adulthood regarding the Jewish Mitzvot (religious obligations), established for a boy at the age of thirteen. The ceremony for boys, as we know it, probably dates back to the Middle Ages; it is also an entry into formal Jewish education, since historically parents provided education for children in their early years.

Bubbies—Yiddish for “grannies,” old women.

Challah—Hebrew for “dough offering.” Egg bread used for ritual purposes for Shabbat and festivals, in the form of a braid to represent the mystical Sabbath bride’s hair, braided and round for Rosh Hashanah to represent the cycle of the year. There are always two challot for Shabbat, to remind Jews of the double portion of Mannah they received on Fridays in the desert so they would not have to gather food on the Sabbath.

Chumash—The Five Books of Moses.

The Four Questions (also known as Mah Nishtana in Hebrew)—a high point of the Pesach (Passover) Seder night service in the home, recited by the youngest child present.

Gefilte fish—fish that has been filleted, the bones removed, and usually cooked with breadcrumbs and carrots to give it a sweetish taste. A delicacy often made with carp, left to set and gel; it is eaten cold, often with horseradish.

“Gotteinu! ”—Yiddish exclamation, “God help us!”

Haftorah—weekly reading on Shabbat and holidays from the Prophets, following the main Torah reading. Its theme reflects and amplifles the weekly Torah reading.

“Im Yertza Hashem”—Hebrew: “God Willing”

Koshered chicken—chicken that has been soaked and salted to remove any excess blood in accordance with Jewish dietary laws that regulate the lives of observant Jews. Kosher literally means “fit”, and it can be used to refer to religious items that are fit for use (such as a kosher mezuzah on the threshold of a Jewish home) as well as for food that is kosher or non-kosher (such as pork or various kinds of seafood) or food preparation itself, where dairy and meat dishes, ingredients and utensils are kept strictly separate.