The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (25 page)

Leon could have been a criminal, a jewel thief, a philanderer, a swindler: nothing could have offended our social worker more than his refusal to conform and change and cast aside those values she clearly viewed as virtually un-American and utterly repugnant.

In her eyes, my father was a patriarch in a land where there were no patriarchs. He wanted to rule over his wife and children—perhaps even his social worker—even though men weren't supposed to do that anymore. “He is an extremely rigid person, with limited horizons, has an Oriental psychology, covered up by a veneer of manners,” she wrote. My dad and his views were hopelessly at odds with the enlightened society he had been fortunate to enter.

Or maybe not so fortunate. In one of her more insightful moments, Mrs. Kirschner remarked that my father “regards the immigration as a calamity rather than as an opportunity.”

Barely a week later, the six of us trooped down to the tip of Lower Manhattan to meet with the redoubtable Mrs. Kirschner.

She looked us up and down, taking notes, then came to me, peered closely my way, and took more notes. The only one she approved of unreservedly was Suzette. From the start, the two laughed and chatted as if they were old friends. My sister turned on the charm. “A very attractive, articulate young lady,” Mrs. Kirschner raved in her case files.

Not all of us fared as well.

César seemed to annoy her almost as much as my father. She didn't accuse my teenage brother of being old-world; she simply resented a sense of ambition she felt went beyond his natural abilities. Mrs. Kirschner seemed troubled by my older brother's outsize dreams, the fact he resisted taking an entry-level job as a messenger or a clerk. She stressed the need for him to be practical and start working.

Over the years, my brother would blame Sylvia Kirschner and
la Nyana
for the path he had taken, for the fact he had gone to work at eighteen, stuck in a series of menial and low-paying jobs, when he should have been attending school and building his career.

Instead, because of the fateful decree that he land a job, any job, the
college degree that César could have earned in four years took him a decade to complete. He had no choice but to attend night school, where most students were immigrants like himself, which only underscored his feelings of apartness and alienation. His master's degree, which should have taken two years, took five instead. By the time he was done, César was thirty-five.

Mrs. Kirschner was deeply sympathetic to my mother and anxious to help her, to change her, to help her take advantage of the opportunities that had been denied to her as a woman in Egypt.

Mrs. Kirschner became obsessed with my mother's appearance, the fact that she was toothless and looked older than she was. The idea that a forty-two-year-old woman would walk around without any teeth struck her as almost barbaric. In the social worker's eyes, Edith was timid, quiet, anxious, and clearly under my father's spell. Mom “gave the impression of a frightened person,” the social worker wrote, “emphasized by her enormous black eyes which stare almost childlike for protection.” Leon was to blame. All the conflicts and problems and pathology she saw in my family were largely the result of his impossibly domineering personality.

What could America do for such a woman? It might not be able to give back her self-esteem, but it could at least provide her with a set of false teeth.

After grilling both my parents on why Mom hadn't seen a dentist in Egypt, she ordered her to go immediately to a dental clinic to be fitted for a set of dentures; the agency would foot the bill, Mrs. Kirschner grandly decreed, along with her edict that we had to leave the Broadway Central.

Most of the other refugees from the Levant had landed in one small corner of southern Brooklyn. My family was so unmoored, it made eminent sense for us to rejoin our lost community. César and my father journeyed daily to Bensonhurst, the ten-block area where refugees from Cairo and Alexandria had fetched up in an urban encampment of low-lying redbrick tenement buildings and simple two-family homes. They walked in the bitter cold, searching and searching for signs in the window proclaiming “Apartment to Let.”

Early on, they stumbled on one promising prospect—a small apart
ment on the second floor of a house owned by a dentist, Dr. Cohen. My father engaged the dentist in conversation, hoping to negotiate a more affordable rent by stressing his deep commitment to Judaism, his habit of attending services every morning. Only at the end did Dr. Cohen blurt out that he wasn't Jewish. Dad, stunned and confused, left, bewildered by this land where nothing was what it seemed, not even a doctor named Cohen.

My mother and I also tried our luck. We ventured out to Brooklyn and wandered around, on the lookout for To Let signs. Most were beyond our means. Exhausted, we decided to pay a call on my mom's relatives and the stepsister she hadn't seen in five years, not since Tante Rosée and her brood had left Egypt.

I had never met Rosée, but my mom had spoken worshipfully of this older woman who had been like a mother to her. She loved to recall her engagement, when Rosée took it upon herself to sew her bridal gown. At the end, Rosée had tucked strands of her own hair inside the hem for good luck. My mother could never part with it, and there it was, lying in one of the twenty-six suitcases that had followed us to America.

My aunt lived on a staid two-way street of shops with apartments upstairs. It was the Christmas season, and the area glistened with holiday decorations. What astonished me most wasn't the abundance of trees and lights and plastic reindeers but the lone Hanukkah menorahs with their soft orange glow on display in so many windows. I had never seen an electric menorah before; at home, we lit small wicks that floated in a pool of oil and water.

I was used to a culture where religion was practiced discreetly, behind the closed doors of one's house or synagogue, yet here were Jews observing their holiday as openly and assertively as their Catholic neighbors with their wreaths and garlands and Merry Christmas signs.

Tante Rosée and my mother embraced, and the obligatory
café Turque
was brought out on a tray, but later, Rosée began to lecture Mom on the etiquette of visiting in America.

New York wasn't like Cairo, she declared. The custom of dropping in on friends or even relatives without prior arrangements simply wouldn't do. “Here, in America, you have to call first,” she told my mom. I noticed my mother freeze, then smile blankly.

We wandered back into the street, but suddenly, the glimmer of the holiday lights seemed a lot less hopeful. We felt far away from Malaka Nazli and the stream of relatives and friends who dropped in on us constantly, and on the long trip back to Manhattan, we were both silent. It had begun to dawn on us that this culture we were being asked to embrace, with its promise of riches and opportunity, could be as savage as the December night air that pierced our flimsy Cicurel garb.

The tough, forbidding woman we had met this evening bore little resemblance to the Tante Rosée my mom remembered from Egypt. She preferred to think of the last exchange as an aberration, a mistake, and remember her stepsister as the person who had taken it upon herself to sew her a magnificent wedding dress and had brought her back to life as she struggled with typhoid and the loss of her blue-eyed baby girl.

 

IT WAS CERTAINLY THE
coldest winter we had ever known, but it was also one of the coldest winters New York had ever known.

Every day, César and my father trudged arm in arm through the streets of Brooklyn, humbled by the snowdrifts that were several feet high. My dad's limp grew worse, aggravated by the perilous walks on snow and ice. My brother wasn't faring well either. He was so thin—nearly six feet tall, he weighed only 140 pounds and suffered from a terrible cough, the result of the frigid weather and his habit of smoking several packs of cigarettes a day.

Mrs. Kirschner suggested he and my father go immediately to the Northern Dispensary, a clinic in the Village.

To help César recover, the agency also approved the purchase of a winter coat. Together with my dad—the two had become inseparable—my brother set out for S. Klein's, the discount department store in Union Square. There was a sale, and out of a combination of prudence and panic and confusion, my brother selected an overcoat that was nearly ten sizes too big.

The days of the sleek, fitted black leather blouson were over. The dark woolen coat on sale for $17.50 was size 46—suitable for a man several inches taller and many pounds heavier. It reached past his
knees, the sleeves were way too long, and the shoulders drooped, so that its style was raglan.

When César modeled his new coat, my father nodded his approval and remarked that my brother would grow into it. It would surely help him survive his first American winter. Alas, the opposite proved to be true. The coat was so large it shielded him far less effectively than one his own size.

It was as if, marooned in America, we had lost our perspective, our sense of proportion. My brother, who had always liked well-tailored, fashionable clothing, ended up purchasing a coat that was neither. My father, who had paid such meticulous attention to cut and style, was now unable to look at a garment his eldest son was buying and point out its obvious flaws.

Worse still, Dad had become oblivious to his own appearance. For the first time in his life, he was dressing sloppily, and paying almost no attention to the way he looked. Mrs. Kirschner was struck by my father's battered, impoverished garb. Once the essence of style as he ambled through Cairo in his immaculate white suits, he was described in her notes as “shabbily dressed.” What about all the clothes in the twenty-six suitcases? she wondered.

My father was silent, both when he sat in Sylvia Kirschner's office and back at the Broadway Central. He had always kept his own counsel, and he wasn't about to start confiding in her or us or anyone his despair over finding himself stranded in a hotel room in Greenwich Village in winter, with no means and no prospects and a little girl asking for white bread and fruit wrapped in cellophane.

And so the only sign of his inner struggle was in his clothes—frayed, careworn, slightly askew.

One morning, we woke up to the sound of clanging bells. We could hear people shuffling in the hallway, then more bells. It was barely five o'clock—we had no idea what was going on. We were only days before Christmas, yet my mother sat up and cried out delightedly, “Ce sont les cloches de Pâques”; They must be Easter bells. There was furious banging outside our room, and then the cry, “Fire!”

The Broadway Central was in flames. We had to evacuate immediately.

Since I had gone to sleep in my usual gear of wool slacks and a
sweater, I sprung out of bed, fully dressed. But no one else was ready. Everyone seemed either frozen, unable to move, or scurrying around in a state of panic. My mother still couldn't believe what she'd heard was a fire alarm. My sister fretted about what to wear. My father moved more slowly than usual, unsure what to take with him: Precious papers? One key suitcase among the twenty-six? César recovered his composure and grabbed his wallet along with odds and ends—travel papers, photos of childhood friends, a few American dollars, and, for good measure, a couple of Egyptian pounds.

I kept yelling out to everyone, “Allons, allons,” Let's go, let's go, my survival skills finely honed even at age seven. There was smoke and pandemonium in the hallways, and people in bathrobes and hair curlers were crying and hurrying toward the stairs and elevators.

Finally, after what seemed like ages, we were all ready, except my sister, who was still fussing by the closet. My father shuffled out, taking nothing except his wallet. My mother, my brothers, and I followed; Suzette threw her winter coat over her pajamas and hurried after us. We left the room and walked across a hallway filled with smoke, muddied with the foam and water firefighters were using to extinguish the blaze, and rode the elevator down to the lobby.

It was 17 degrees outside, with a wind that tore through our clothes.

My father took us to a coffee shop at the corner for hot chocolate and coffee, where we waited and wondered. Had we lost another home? Would we have to move again to a new hotel? Upstairs were all of our worldly belongings. It seemed unthinkable that the little we still owned could be destroyed.

After several hours we were told we could return to our rooms, which miraculously had suffered little damage. I was in an oddly chipper mood. I'd been completely vindicated in my habit of going to sleep with my clothes on.

In my mind, it was prudent to be on guard in this country.

 

AT LAST, OUR MEANDERINGS
through Brooklyn paid off, and we found an apartment: four rooms, including the kitchen. It was far smaller than Malaka Nazli, hardly enough to accommodate six people, but at least it
was ours, and after nearly a year of hotel rooms, it seemed almost palatial. It was on a street where families were either from Italy or the Levant.

Our elderly landlord, Basil Cohen—no relation to the dentist—traced his ancestry to Aleppo exactly as my father did. After negotiations worthy of two Syrian bazaar merchants, my dad and Mr. Cohen agreed to a rent of $95. It was over our budget, but we felt under so much pressure to move, we had no choice. Mrs. Kirschner wanted us out of the Broadway Central immediately. She had threatened to stop paying our bills, which would have effectively left us homeless.

We would be like normal people again, with a real address. It was, as far as I was concerned, our most exciting day in America: we were going shopping for furniture. We would have our own beds, chairs, couches, tables—all that we'd missed for so long.

As we trooped to Macy's in single file, I noticed the cold didn't bother me a bit. I spotted the sign from blocks away: “Macy's: The World's Largest Store.”

I was in awe. But once upstairs, as we wandered through the vast showrooms, we realized there was nothing we could actually afford.