The Color of Water (27 page)

Mommy's children are extraordinary people, most of them leaders in their own right. All of them have toted more mental baggage and dealt with more hardship than they care to remember, yet they carry themselves with a giant measure
of dignity, humility, and humor. Like any family we have problems, but we have always been close. Through marriage, adoptions, love-ins, live-ins, and shack-ups, the original dozen has expanded into dozens and dozens more—wives, husbands, children, grandchildren, cousins, nieces, nephews—ranging from dark-skinned to light-skinned; from black kinky hair to blond hair and blue eyes. In running from her past, Mommy has created her own nation, a rainbow coalition that descends on her house every Christmas and Thanksgiving and sleeps everywhere—on the floor, on rugs, in shifts; sleeping double, triple to a bed, “two up, three down,” just like old times.

Every year we argue over where to have Christmas. Every year we spend hundreds of dollars on phone calls and letters, writing, faxing, cajoling, and bribing, trying to get out of the pilgrimage to Mommy's tiny house in Ewing. Every year, all twelve of us claim we're going to have Christmas at
our own house
and we're
not
going to travel a
zillion
miles with a
zillion
children to sleep with a
zillion
people on the floor of Ma's like we're little kids, because we're just tired, man, and we did this last year. But at age seventy-four, the president, CEO, and commander in chief of this here army still has the power. My wife, Stephanie, tells a funny story about the first time she came home with me for Christmas and met my family. We were sitting around Ma's house in Ewing, all twelve siblings, doctors, professors all—the house as wild as
it always was when we were little, our kids going crazy and our spouses numb, while Mommy's original dozen fell back into nutty behavioral patterns that would make a psychologist throw up his hands in despair—when someone shouted over the din, “Let's go to the movies!” Instantly the room sprang into overdrive.

“
Good idea
!”

“
Yeah…let's go. I'll drive
.”

From another room: “
Wait for me
!”

“
Hurry up! Where's my shoes
?”

Mommy was sitting on the living room couch while all this was happening, her feet resting on the coffee table. She yawned and said softly, “I want to eat.”

The movie was instantly forgotten.

“
Yeah! Let's eat
!”

“
I sure am hungry
!”

“
Let's order out
!”

From another room: “
I been waiting to eat all day
…!”

Now that's what you call power.

In November 1942, a twenty-one-year-old Jewish woman named Halina Wind was sent by her parents into hiding after the Nazis marched into her home village of Turka, Poland, and murdered most of the town's six thousand Jews, eventually killing her parents, a brother, and grandmother. Halina Wind fled to the city of Lvov, where she and nine other Jews hid in a sewer for fourteen months, living admidst rats and sewer filth in a wet, underground prison, never seeing the sunlight, fed by three Polish sewer workers. Halina Wind survived that horror and lived to tell the world of it.

In 1980—nearly forty years later—Halina's only son, David Lee Preston, a tall, thin, handsome dude with a lean face, dark eyes, and glasses, wandered over to my desk at the
Wilmington
(Del.)
News Journal
holding a story I had written about boxer Muhammad Ali. He was a reporter at the paper like I was, but we had never met.

“This is an excellent piece,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You spelled Muhammad wrong. It's with an ‘a' at the end, not an ‘e.' The copy desk missed it.” The copy desk is supposed to catch those kinds of errors before they make the paper.

“Okay.” I shrugged. No sweat off my back.

“I heard you're a sax player,” he said. “You ever heard of Albert Ayler?”

Albert Ayler was an amazing, avant-garde saxophonist known only to the most die-hard jazz enthusiasts. Rumor has it he disappeared into Manhattan's East River wearing cement shoes. I was completely surprised. “How'd you hear of him?” I asked.

He shrugged and smiled. From that day to this, Halina Wind's son has been one of my best friends. I didn't know David Preston was a Jew when I first met him. He didn't wear it on his sleeve. He was a compassionate, curious, humorous intellectual, a great writer, and his religious background never came up, nor did it seem important to me at the time. Only when I revealed to him that my mother was the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi did his Jewish background emerge, because he understood the true depth
of Mommy's experience immediately. “What a woman,” he said. This from a guy who was raised by an amazing woman himself.

As his life moved forward—today he is writing a book about his mother and working as the South Jersey columnist for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
—so did mine. I asked him to be in my wedding when I married my African-American wife, Stephanie, in 1991. He asked me to do the same when he married his Jewish wife, Rondee, the following year. He also wanted Mommy to come to his wedding. I agreed to ask her for him, though privately I had my doubts.

“Interesting.” That was her response when I put it to her.

“He really wants you to come,” I said. I knew she liked David immensely.

“I'll come if Kathy comes with me,” she said. Ma likes her daughters to come with her for anything emotional. Her sons she likes to brag about and say what great things they've done, and what schools they've gone to, and on and on, but in truth it's the women of the McBride-Jordan clan who hold the family together and will do so after she is gone. Like Mommy, my sisters have learned to absorb punishment and get up off the ground after the shock of life's blows wears off. The men, yours truly included, wallow about as life's details mow us down and lay us out on Mommy's couch to watch Bowl games when the family gathers at
Christmas and Thanksgiving, no matter how lousy the games are. Kathy agreed to come to the wedding with her nine-year-old daughter, Maya, and we were on.

It was held at Temple Beth Shalom in Wilmington, where Halina Wind Preston had taught for three decades. I was an usher in the wedding, and as I marched down the aisle wearing a black tuxedo and a white yarmulke, behind six Jewish musicians who played the traditional Israeli folk song “Erev Shel Shoshanim,” I felt somber, moved, and proud. David Preston married his wife with the kind of gusto and enthusiasm and seriousness with which he attacks everything in life. They signed a contract. They were married under a
huppah
, a wedding canopy. Two cantors, one of whom was David's sister, Shari Preston, stepped forward and sang. David's uncle, Halina Wind's brother, Rabbi Leon Wind, presided over the ceremony, and spoke eloquently, with reverence and power. “My heart is filled with deep and conflicting emotions today,” the seventy-eight-year-old rabbi said. “I'm overjoyed that your marriage has come. Yet my heart aches because my sister, for whom this would have been the supreme moment of her life, did not live to see it.” David's mother, Halina Wind Preston, died after open heart surgery in December 1982 at the age of sixty-one. The rabbi's heartfelt words moved the entire congregation, and my thoughts traveled to my own Jewish mother, who was sitting in the fourth row.

I turned to peek as Mommy wiped her reddening nose with a handkerchief, a camera strapped around her wrist. At moments like this she usually likes to shoot pictures. She catches all of her important moments with a camera, waddling down Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue from the A train to Long Island College Hospital to take pictures of my daughter Azure's first days of life; standing my toddler son, Jordan, up against a tree in her yard so she can snap a quick picture of him in his Easter outfit. Her photos are horrible, heads cut off, pictures of nothing, a table, a hand, a chair. Still, she shoots pictures of any event that's important to her, knowing that each memory is too important to lose, having lost so many before. However, she is snapping no pictures now. She's staring straight ahead, wearing a white dress with a necklace this rainy afternoon, her long nose and dark eyes seeming to blend in perfectly with the mostly eastern European faces surrounding her. She'd had no problems walking into the synagogue. She looked about the lobby and nodded her approval. Oh yes, this is the memorial wall where they put the names of the ones who died, she pointed out. Oh yes, the men will leave the room if a woman cantor performs. She talked as if she were visiting a museum.

“How do you feel being here?” I asked her.

“I feel fine,” she said. “I'm happy to see David getting married. He's a nice Jewish boy.” She laughed at the irony of it. I realized then that whoever had said kaddish for
Mommy—the Jewish prayer of mourning, the declaration of death, the ritual that absolves them of responsibility for the child's fate—had done the right thing, because Mommy was truly gone from their world. In her mind, she was a guest here. “I don't have this left in me anymore,” she remarked at one point.

Downstairs at the reception following the ceremony, Mommy perked up even more as the klezmer musicians played traditional Jewish folk songs. She ate kosher hummus, tahini, and baba ghanouj, and explained the importance of kosher food to my niece Maya; she laughed and joked with a group of Jewish ladies who sat next to us, and even got up to watch me help other men place David Preston in a chair, lift him up, and carry him around the room in the traditional Jewish men's wedding dance. But not long after, she came back to our table and announced, “It's time to go,” in a tone and manner that said she really was ready to leave.

When we opened the synagogue door, it was raining outside and we had no umbrellas. Kathy and Maya made a quick dash for the car, running ahead while Mommy and I followed. “That's how it's done,” Ma said as I helped her down the synagogue stairs, her arthritic knees aching in the damp weather. “That's how the old Jews did it in my day too. You marry under that thing, the
huppah
. You break the glass. You know that could've been me,” she said as she took the last stair and her foot landed shakily on the sidewalk.

“I know,” I said, releasing her arm and walking toward the car, “and where would that have left me…?” But suddenly I was talking to myself. She was gone. I stopped and turned to look behind me. She was standing in front of the synagogue entrance, staring up at the doorway from the sidewalk, lost in thought, the rain billowing into puddles around her. She stood there for a moment in the downpour staring thoughtfully, before turning and hurrying toward the car, her bowlegged waddle just the same as it always was.

The subject of this book can be found on any given Sunday morning in the Trenton, New Jersey, area, driving a late-model Toyota with manual roll-down windows, bearing down on any one of four local churches. She goes to a white Lutheran church or a black Baptist church—make that three black churches. The ensuing pages, I hope, will explain why.

At eighty-four, she drives like a demon, slowly weaving to and fro, holding up traffic behind her, motoring along at thirty miles per hour in a fifty miles per hour zone, sometimes with her turn signal blinking for several miles because she can't hear that well anymore. She refuses to wear a hearing aid. She has a good one, a fine—custom-made—one, bought at great cost, which only gives her greater disdain for it. She
calls it “The Thing.” She regards it as evidence, clear proof, that the purchaser, yours truly, got suckered once again. “What a racket,” she scoffs. “Your nickname should be ‘Sign here.”'