The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (26 page)

The salesman showed us magnificent king-size beds that looked as if they were out of a movie set but weren't even remotely within our budget. Noting our dismay, he escorted us to a corner where Macy's kept its least expensive merchandise. He pointed out several spartan metal cots. The low-lying folding beds were small and forbidding, with thin striped foam mattresses barely a couple of inches thick.

“C'est comme dans l'armée,”
my mom remarked acidly; It's like the army.

We walked out of Macy's having spent our entire furniture budget on six folding steel cots.

Mrs. Kirschner blanched at the bill—$254—and accused my father of being a spendthrift. Why Macy's? she demanded to know. Why not a neighborhood shop?

She continued to see him as the cause of all our mishaps. A feminist before the flowering of the feminist movement, she viewed my father with such suspicion and hostility that even his attributes in her eyes turned into flaws. Why did a refugee from Egypt shop only in first-rate
department stores? Why did he speak with an upper-crust British accent? she wondered. Surely it was an affectation.

My father had lived his entire life by a code of honor. In Egypt, he had been respected and admired precisely for his principles. Yet the chasm was so immense between him and our social worker she found almost nothing to admire—not even his lovely English. His insistence on tradition made him obdurate in her eyes. His devotion to faith and ritual was hopelessly quaint. She cast a wary eye on the religious passion that had always defined my father; because she was so secular, the product of a secular society, she didn't share that passion and dismissed it as superficial and devoid of sincerity.

There was also the notion that he was unemployable—or at least, that was the verdict rendered by
la Nyana
within weeks of our arrival. The agency simply couldn't envision a place for my father in the vast and abundant land of opportunity known as America.

“I have always worked, madame,” he told Mrs. Kirschner. Though he had always been secretive with us about his business dealings, he spoke at length with her about his experience as a grocer, an investor, and a pharmaceutical and chemical salesman.

He was desperate to work. When Mrs. Kirschner pointed out his physical limitations, he exclaimed, “Le bon Dieu est grand.” But this only led her to complain in her case notes about Dad's tendency to always invoke God. My father, she wrote, “resorts to denials, distortions, and evasion, and his philosophy is that ‘God is Great,' which he constantly expresses in French.”

She cast a cold eye on his impassioned plea that he
needed
to work to support all six of us, as he had always done. The social worker suggested he apply for welfare, instead. It was, again, a quintessentially American idea, certainly for the early 1960s. But nothing she said could have offended him more. He didn't want charity, he told her coldly. Besides, he had a better idea.

In his walks around Manhattan, he'd noticed the hundreds of little stalls and stands that were everywhere, in the subway stations, on street corners, by bus stops, near any crowded venue, manned by one or two people selling cigarettes, newspapers, chocolate bars, candy, chips, cookies, magazines. Now
there
was a business that seemed manage
able. It reminded him of the old days when he and Oncle Raphael had peddled groceries together.

He was prepared to start small, and besides, in his mind, these micro-businesses had enormous potential: New Yorkers wanted their morning paper and their Almond Joy and their pack of Camels in the same way that in Cairo, the typical Egyptian could be counted on to purchase a bottle of olive oil and a can of sardines.

My father decided he was going to open a candy store.

He started combing the classifieds for newsstands and tobacco stalls that were for sale. If no one in America would hire him, it seemed the ideal solution. He decided to appeal to Mrs. Kirschner and
la Nyana
to help him. A loan of $2,000 would do the trick, and then he would be able to support my mom and the rest of us entirely on his own as he always had.

Mrs. Kirschner wouldn't hear of it.

She didn't think she was being arbitrary or unkind. On the contrary, she felt she was being solicitous of my father, whose limp had gotten worse in the months since we had arrived. Prominent doctors the agency consulted said he should stay off his feet and give himself time to heal, yet there he was, proposing a venture that would require him to stand all day. Besides, he didn't even have a coherent business plan—only supreme self-confidence that he could support us.

My dad's impossibly modest wish was turned down. The man who had done business with Coca-Cola couldn't be trusted to sell cigarettes and bubble gum.

In the middle of January, a major blizzard hit New York and left more than a foot of snow. It was more snow than we thought possible. A few days later, we left the Broadway Central for the second floor of the Cohens' brick two-family on Sixty-sixth Street in Brooklyn. Mr. and Mrs. Cohen were waiting to greet us. “Etfadalou,” they cried, Arabic for welcome, and with typical Syrian hospitality, they offered us a platter of
khak,
salty ring-shaped biscuits covered with sesame. We hadn't eaten them since Cairo, and biting into the delicious treats made us realize both that we were far from home and that we'd finally arrived. The cots from Macy's were waiting for us. We still didn't have a table, and there was one chair for all six of us.

Yet even here we couldn't quite escape Sylvia Kirschner's wrath.

Six months after our move, she decided to make a home visit. That morning, my father asked me if I wanted to go into Manhattan with him. I nodded yes, eager to accompany him on what seemed like an adventure. I didn't realize that my dad was whisking me out of the house so I wouldn't run into our social worker.

The two were now openly at war, any semblance of civility gone. He had watched as she befriended Suzette, encouraging her to flout his authority by telling her that in America, it was fine for a young woman to be independent. My sister was now threatening to leave the family and live on her own. My distraught father called Mrs. Kirschner and complained she had sent Suzette hurtling down a path that could only lead to disaster. “We will be ruined, madame,” he told the social worker. She shrugged and scribbled in her notes that he was being “extremely melodramatic.”

My father had other plans for my sister.

At the end of our block, my father had found a new home for himself—the Congregation of Love and Friendship. There it was, the old Cairo synagogue he thought was lost forever, resurrected from the dead, even down to its original Hebrew name, Ahabah ve Ahavah. The Congregation was warm and inviting, and he was reunited with several of his old friends from Egypt, who had undertaken the same sad journey. They prayed with the familiar melodies of Cairo Jewry, in the cherished cadence and rhythm of the temples around Malaka Nazli.

Many of the men had sons Suzette's age who were eager to get married and rebuild their lives. He told the social worker he had suitors lined up for my sister. He couldn't help boasting how skilled he was at arranging marriages—he had helped each one of his five sisters find a husband. Surely he could make a fine match for his own daughter.

Mrs. Kirschner wasn't impressed. In America, girls didn't have to be married off while they were young. They could leave the hearth, pursue an education, have a career. She didn't think my sister had any obligation to get married—or to obey my father.

Dad found all of this unconscionable. On that hot summer day, he determined that he wasn't going to let Sylvia Kirschner get anywhere near me.

I helped him carry the large brown box he carted everywhere these days. My father hadn't found a job, but he was working. He had become a necktie salesman. Inside the box were dozens of ties, soft and silky and patterned in the most wonderful shapes and colors I had ever seen—a treasure trove that any adult male would be certain to want.

An hour or so later, Mrs. Kirschner arrived to find my mother alone. Where was my father? she asked. And where was I? She seemed dismayed we weren't all there, as she'd specified. She was also annoyed. What on earth was Leon doing taking a little girl out on such a scorching day?

My mom tried to soothe her. She brought out a platter piled high with cakes and cookies, and some lemonade, and said I had gone with him to work.

Sylvia Kirschner was beside herself. She decided that he must be using me to boost his chances of making more sales. With my dark hair and dark eyes, I “could easily attract attention,” she scribbled furiously. She couldn't imagine why he would take me with him “unless of course, it was for the purpose of using” me to “get a sympathetic reaction” from customers.

I was very lucky: decades would pass before the country embraced a “Take Your Daughter to Work” day and little girls began joining their dads in cubicles and at computer screens and in corporate boardrooms, and having the time of their lives.

It was clear he was struggling in his new business venture, and there were days he didn't make any sales. But on that hot summer morning, as we walked hand in hand, he was hopeful and tender and solicitous. He smiled as he asked me, “Loulou, tu vas m'aider à vendre les cravates?”; Will you help me sell some ties?

He thought that I would bring him luck.

T
hat first year in America, I often woke up with a start after dreaming of Pouspous. Lying there on my Macy's cot, I'd think about my cat in Egypt and burst out crying. Had Pouspous even survived? I'd wonder. Had she managed on her own, with none of us to look after her on Malaka Nazli? I was so agitated my father had to be summoned to reassure me, though I was past the age when I trusted him as completely as I had the day we left Cairo.

Each one of us fixated on an object or being that emblematized what we missed about our lost life. For me, it was Pouspous. For my mother, it was the feel of the heavy sapphire ring on her left index finger, how the stone glistened and caught the light. For César, it was a boyhood friend named Gaby, a young Coptic Christian who had idolized him and looked up to him; now, my brother carried Gaby's picture in his wallet. Isaac would later recall the particular angle the sun fell in the room facing the alleyway, the most wondrous room in the house because it had so many incarnations: as Zarifa's bedroom, Dad's office, and, at the end, storage room for our suitcases.

My sister, rebellious and defiant, insisted there was nothing she missed.

It was the reverse in my father's case; there was nothing he didn't miss about Egypt, though perhaps it was the roses he longed for most of all. His favorite complaint about our fall from grace between Cairo and Paris and New York concerned the flowers. They had no scent, he lamented.

To my father, the flowers of America were odorless and lifeless—artificial even when freshly gathered, and altogether inferior to the flowers we had left behind.

Leon was particularly upset about the roses. Lovingly cultivated by our Italian neighbors, they bloomed by the hundreds up and down Sixty-sixth Street, in the front yards of our working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, yet they emitted not a hint of perfume. Whether purchased from the corner florist or picked from a nearby bush, they still had no fragrance, a fact that filled him with a kind of existential despair, a sense of all that was wrong with our New World. How stark the contrast to the sprigs of jasmine whose perfume filled Cairo's night air, to the lilies and honeysuckle that grew wild in the streets, and to the roses, above all, the roses, the small, red, overpowering damask roses, descendants of the very first roses to grow on earth.

Even more unimaginable, stores sold plastic flowers, often for much less than what the real ones cost. They seemed extraordinarily alluring to me, and I kept clamoring for them, oblivious to my parents' angst.

Woolworth's, the five-and-dime located a couple of blocks away from us, featured shelf after shelf of artificial flowers that sold for only pennies a stem. There were also pretty, slightly more expensive silk flowers. Until we moved to New York, I had never seen artificial flowers, and I found them utterly exotic, a beguiling symbol of the new land.

I noticed fake plants in neighbors' homes and plastic centerpieces on coffee tables. Some families even kept them behind glass, on display along with the silverware and crystal, as if they, too, were valuable. These houses had shiny plastic slipcovers on their sofas and armchairs, and Formica tables in their kitchens. I found it wonderful.

I wanted a plastic slipcover, and a couch to go with it, a Formica table, and, above all, plastic flowers.

In a walk through Woolworth's, how I longed to gather up the imitation tulips and daisies, to pluck them from their green Styrofoam moorings and fashion a bouquet to decorate our new apartment, which was stark and barely furnished and badly in need of cheer.

My mother firmly said no. “Loulou, ça suffit, non c'est non,” she snapped; “Loulou, enough already, no means no.”

My father, who tried to indulge me in so many of my requests, also made it clear he wouldn't contribute a penny.

My father could never acknowledge to us how much he longed for the texture of the life left behind. He fixated instead on the flowers as an emblem of all that was bewildering about his new home and his new country, and all that he missed about his old home and his old country.

Perhaps that is why we still hadn't bothered to unpack. The twenty-six suitcases were securely stored in the basement of our first American apartment. Many still contained exactly what had been placed in them two years earlier. My mother never retrieved the pretty polka-dot dress
la couturière
had made for her on the eve of leaving. My father's brocade robe remained neatly folded, where we had packed it.

Nobody wore brocade dressing gowns in Brooklyn. None of the clothes the tailors and dressmakers had sewn for us those final weeks seemed appropriate, somehow.

Dad didn't stay out late anymore, yet he was still a night creature, and rarely fell asleep before dawn. Wearing cotton pajamas and
sheb-shebs
—vinyl house slippers from the five-and-dime—he simply buried himself in his old prayer books. They were among the few items we did retrieve from the suitcases.

Even as we were beginning to feel settled, Suzette declared that she was leaving. Although she had been threatening to move out for months, none of us had taken her seriously, least of all my father. His reaction alternated between fury and desperation. What so many American families would view as part of the natural order—a daughter growing up, longing for independence and a place of her own—was anathema to him. He regarded the prospect of her departure as the worst misfortune to befall the family since leaving Egypt.

His rages and invectives proved to be too much for Sylvia Kirschner.
She was relieved of our case, no doubt voluntarily. My father blamed her personally for Suzette's rebellion. Dad was sure our family would be disgraced, that news his unmarried daughter had left home would spread among the ragtag group of refugees. Honor, reputation, social standing—that is what really mattered to him, far more than money.

Our new social worker, Shulamit Halkin, also cast a cold eye on Dad's old-world concerns and what she, too, saw as his patriarchal tendencies. But she didn't seem quite as beguiled by my sister as her predecessor had been. Suzette, bored with her clerical work at the First National City Bank, had confided to Mrs. Halkin her desire to become a doctor and save the starving children of India, and for that matter of the whole world.

“She could not quite explain to me what motivated her interest in all the children of the world and what she hoped to do for them,” Mrs. Halkin noted wryly in the case files. It was hard for her to see why my sister worried about the sufferings of distant peoples in Asia when her family was barely making ends meet in Brooklyn.

There were times my father couldn't even afford the $95 rent, and Basil Cohen had to look the other way. The tie business wasn't as lucrative as he'd hoped. He wasn't making nearly enough to pay the rent, and if Suzette left and stopped chipping in, our financial situation would go from precarious to dire.

Newly enrolled at the local elementary school, I was shielded from most financial worries, as was my brother Isaac, who attended junior high.

César was carrying all five of us on his frail eighteen-year-old shoulders. That first year, he went from one menial job to another, never staying more than a couple of weeks or a couple of months: salesman in a Syrian-owned record store, clerk at a French bank, until finally settling down in an entry-level post at an American conglomerate named Continental Grain that was blessed with a cosmopolitan, amiable culture.

I shared a bedroom with Suzette, and assumed we were ideal roommates. I didn't realize that I was a seven-year-old nuisance who cramped her twenty-year-old's style in a thousand different ways. While she yearned to flee, to come to terms with her emerging womanhood, I
wanted to hunker down and reclaim the childhood I had lost. While she kept sparring with my dad, I felt closer to him than ever in his alienation and distress. While she thought of our house as impossibly confining and wanted only to run away, I loved its simplicity, the fact that we were no longer on the run.

My formula for achieving permanency and stability? I would decorate our room on Sixty-sixth Street with white voile curtains. I had glimpsed them fluttering about the display windows of home furnishing stores up and down Eighteenth Avenue, our shopping mecca, and they became my version of the all-American fantasy of the white picket fence.

“What about the white curtains?” I asked the night before she left home for good. I was watching her fold clothes into her new suitcase, not one of the twenty-six. I couldn't quite manage a light tone. I felt wounded and every bit as betrayed as my dad by her departure.

She shrugged. I would have my white curtains one day, she assured me. “But maybe not in this room on Sixty-sixth Street,” she added. That was how I knew that she was really leaving, how I grasped it before my parents, who still thought this was all a big bluff by their contrarian, wayward daughter.

My father wasn't about to use my brand of gentle suasion.

“Mogrema”—Criminal—he shouted as Suzette left.

The door slammed, and there was silence. A few minutes later, I heard my father's halting steps down the stairs, and the door closed again.

 

I LIKED TO STARE
out the curtainless window of the room I now had all to myself. Up and down the street and in the adjoining blocks were other families like mine, new arrivals from Cairo and Alexandria. In the mornings, I'd watch my father walking to attend the first service of the day at the Congregation of Love and Friendship. His step seemed painfully labored.

Sometimes, we wouldn't see him the rest of the day. He'd stay for the second set of prayers, intended to draw those laggards who couldn't make it by 6:00 a.m. Afterward, he'd linger, most likely because he had
nowhere else to go, but also perhaps because he didn't want to come home. Deeply upset about Suzette's departure, powerless to stop her—or persuade Mrs. Kirschner to stop her—he withdrew to the little shul down the street.

He sat by himself, somewhat removed from the other men, though he enjoyed amicable relations with all of them. They'd banter, laugh, trade rumors, discuss how their lives were going in this confounding new land. The men relished exchanging the latest gossip every bit as much as their wives and daughters, who came only on Saturdays and sat crammed together behind a tall concrete wall, chatting nonstop in the makeshift women's section.

My father, on the other hand, sat there silently, and spoke up only when a reader, or even the rabbi, had made a mistake—and then it was to call out the proper wording or intonation. He had such a prodigious knowledge of the liturgy, he could recite by heart almost every single prayer. He was meticulous and so strict he didn't tolerate the slightest error or deviation in the reading of a sacred text.

He was a biblical security guard—a policeman of the holy word—challenging anyone who dared to change what was perfect and deathless and immutable. When it came to questions of God and religion, my father was once again the Captain, a figure of authority. Some of the older congregants were annoyed by his interruptions. But Dad was unyielding, and forced them to reread the offending word or phrase.

Oddly, the younger boys didn't mind; they deferred to him on all religious matters, and dubbed my father the tzaddik—the saint, the holy man.

When the synagogue emptied out, as the men left to go to work or home to their wives, my dad would linger. Sometimes, Rabbi Halfon would join him. The ancient little rabbi, who had reigned over the original Congregation of Love and Friendship, hadn't seen my father since Egypt. Their reunion on Sixty-sixth Street had been one of the unexpected joys of moving to America. The two liked to sit together at the same table, reading. They didn't exchange a single social pleasantry, yet they were the closest of friends, joined together by their shared passion for the holy texts.

Even after the rabbi went home, Dad stayed. If the door was open,
I'd catch a glimpse of him as I walked to school, a lonely, solitary figure bent over a large book. His lips moved silently, and he didn't even see me when I'd wave. His injured leg stretched out, his cane perched on the side of the table, he fidgeted and shuffled from side to side to alleviate the pain. But then he'd usually settle into a position he could tolerate, sit back, and resume reading.

He would peruse the weekly portion of the Bible, review sayings of the prophets, study obscure codes of Jewish law. His favorite readings were the Psalms, the heartfelt pleas to God authored by King David. It was customary to recite them in a group, typically on the anniversary of the passing of a loved one, but my father liked to read them by himself every day. He'd go through the psalms one by one, and read the entire book from beginning to end.

He sat in the same spot from the late morning through the afternoon and early evening, without a break, helping himself to little snacks left on the table by the caretaker—colossal black olives and pita bread. The bread and olives were his lunch and dinner. He'd look up in the late afternoon and see a crowd of men entering. It was time for the evening services, and he hadn't returned home, and he hadn't sold any ties, and he hadn't made any money.

Elie Mosseri, twenty-two and newly married, liked to sit near him when he could. He was from our old Cairo neighborhood, and he and his family had lived, like us, in a building on Malaka Nazli. He had vivid childhood memories of Leon in Egypt, a tall, commanding figure who always sat by the synagogue's altar, and didn't hesitate to speak up when a word in a prayer was misspoken.

He was shocked at the change he saw in him in America. Elie plunked himself into a chair next to my father and began to read from the large frayed Hebrew books that came from the library of the abandoned Congregation of Love and Friendship in Cairo.

Elie could tell Dad was struggling, that he didn't have a job or very much to do. Why else would a man stay nine, ten hours in synagogue?