We Had It So Good (28 page)

“The fetus was a tiny little thing, just a curled-up comma, I was only ten weeks, but I was skinny and my stomach had started to stick out slightly. I turned sideways and looked at myself in the plate glass window of a shop. I could quite clearly see that little bump. If I could have stopped it there, if it had moved neither backward nor forward, I could have accepted it, but it was going to grow and grow like some parasitic organism inside me. It would suck out my soul if I let it. No, I didn't feel any maternal instincts, whatever hormones are supposed to kick in, they didn't. Later they did, but not then. I mean years later, long after all of this. When I was in Paris the first time.

“When I went back, he said, ‘Everything's ready, you can take your clothes off in the bedroom.'

“The walls were covered with modern art, representational, no abstracts, and after I looked at them for a few minutes I understood that they were all nudes, life studies. I opened the wardrobe and I saw his London clothes, his suede brogues and all his suits with narrow lapels and narrow trousers. It seemed my father was quite a dandy. And there was a woman's perfume coming from a corner of the wardrobe, so I pushed past all the suits and there were
her
clothes, a couple of dresses, a skirt, a cashmere sweater. Down below there was a pair of stilettos and I saw these notches on the wooden floors where someone had been walking in heels.

“He called out to me to strip down to my bra and knickers, which I did, but I found his dressing gown hanging on a hook behind the door so I put it on. I came out into the sitting room and everything looked the same though he had said he had made preparations, whatever they were. ‘Where am I supposed to go?' I said.

“‘We're not doing it in here,' he said. ‘Go into the kitchen.'

“I looked at the kitchen table and wondered why a towel was laid out and a cushion from the sofa at one end, and then I realized that this was where I was supposed to be, I was supposed to lie down on his blue Formica kitchen table. This was his surgery.

“He came in. ‘Hop on,' he said.

“I was still in the dressing gown. ‘You can keep that on if you like,' he said, ‘but your knickers will have to come off. Here, I'll help you.'

“And then he pulled down my knickers and he just looked at me for a while.

“‘Very nice,' he said.

“I started crying. No one would blame me, but it didn't make anything any better, in fact I think he enjoyed seeing me vulnerable. No, I have no idea what was going on his head, and that's the point, you could drive yourself crazy trying to work out what other people think, which is why I don't. I take them at face value now. I've wasted enough of my life on my father and what was going through his twisted mind.

“And then he said, ‘Blunt end up.'

“I had no idea what he meant. So I just lay there, not moving, and he took his rubber hand and pushed it under my pelvis and raised me.

“There's a total blank about the next half hour. I'd have to have very deep hypnosis to recover it, and I don't want to. All I remember is the kitchen clock ticking, and people walking past in the street, all those tapping high heels, and the smack of expensive leather soles on concrete, and the lift ascending and descending and then the sound of the pedal bin opening and something being dropped inside and then it closing. I was in bed, waking up, and I could hear the sound of voices in the sitting room, and a woman saying, ‘Where's the lighter, Philip? I'm gasping for a cigarette.' And then a click. ‘Thanks, darling.'

“Once, the door opened and I could see her looking at me. She seemed quite ordinary, not the glamorous black widow I'd imagined. But apart from that, I can't recollect anything about her. Except that her name was Jean, I heard him call her that. And her hair was done up in a French pleat, which was fashionable at the time.

“Around ten o'clock I got up. She was gone. I felt weak and terrible.

“My father was sitting on the cream sofa in embroidered carpet slippers, watching television, the sound was turned very low. I think he was watching the news. He switched it off when I came in.

“‘Chin up,' he said. ‘It all went splendidly. You can go home tomorrow morning, you'll be fine. I've rung your mother and told her you missed your train and are spending the night here. She's expecting you. Try to eat a soft-boiled egg when you can.'

“I went back into the bedroom. He spent the night on the sofa. The next day when I got up he was gone. He'd already left for the hospital. He'd left me another five-pound note on the kitchen table with a note saying I could take a taxi to Victoria if I wanted. I still had the money he'd given me the previous day. I left the second five pounds where it was.

“On the train going home to Sevenoaks the rain was coming down in weary patches, it couldn't make its mind up what it wanted to do. I thought, When I leave home I will
never
live in London. He wanted me to go to art school, he thought I was very talented, he said I should go to the Royal College and study painting, but I said no, I'm going to Oxford. If he said black, I'd say white, that was the only reason I went to university. I won't entertain the idea that he might have been right. No, not even now, forty years later.”

A
fter Stephen's mother died, at the end of the 9/11 year, his father was alone for a long time, until he was befriended by a widow named Mrs. McLean who had recently moved across the street. Stephen knew his father couldn't boil water. He was a magnet for what Andrea called the hot dinner brigade, elderly widows and divorcees who lustered their charms with pot roasts and pies.

Even at the age of ninety, Si remained physically much the same man he had been in his thirties, short, wiry and still with a surprising strength in his hairy white forearms; his stamina astonished his children. Yes, he had gone a little deaf and had an expensive hearing aid Stephen had bought for him but his body seemed immune to most of the usual ailments which afflicted old age. No high blood pressure, no cancer, no heart condition, no peeing blood, no diabetes, maybe some arthritis in his knees but otherwise an indestructible force whom Stephen, the hypochondriac, sometimes feared would outlive his own son. There was no reason at all why he shouldn't hit one hundred, a shame he had no birth certificate to prove it. His date of birth was a notional set of numbers based on what the child, arriving in America in the twenties, speaking no English, had supplied to the relevant authorities. He might be younger or older than he thought was, according to what long-forgotten lie he had glibly provided for the interpreter.

The widow began inviting him to dinner. She was a good cook and she prepared steak, with mashed potatoes and some indeterminate greens. Afterward, there was always a slice of cake. It was a satisfactory arrangement for both of them.

Following the meal, they retired to two armchairs to watch television. There were no books in her living room, but a long shelf by the TV held a library of movies on videotape, and so it was, in May 2005, that she turned to Si Newman with disbelief and said, “
What?
You never saw
Schindler's List
?”

Mrs. McLean had seen the movie three times already, and she wasn't even Jewish. She went out and bought a bottle of Scotch to fortify him for the ordeal. She positioned a box of Kleenex on the coffee table, because she knew she would cry in the scene with the girl in the red coat, and again near the end when they light the Sabbath candles. By the time she reached the end credits she would be sobbing, and she was a Scots Presbyterian who had never left California, so what might it mean to the old man who came originally from Poland, where all this had actually happened?

“Not bad,” he said, when it finished. “Did you notice the fur Schindler's wife was wearing? I used to look after furs like that.”

“It didn't upset you?”

“Upset me? Why? It's just a movie. They're actors, movie stars, they go home to servants. I saw that Neeson on the street once. Good-looking feller.”

“But what about the end, the people they made the picture about? You understand that was the real people the actors played?”

“Of course I understood. I wonder how much they paid them. I hope they made a lot of money out of it.”

After that, Mrs. McLean stopped preparing meals for Si Newman. He was an insensitive man, a horrible man.

*   *   *

Since he had arrived in America, Si had left the state a few times to visit Las Vegas with his wife to see a big show, paid for by the Cuban cousins, trips to Boston and Phoenix to see his daughters and the momentous journey back to New York to see off his son on the SS
United States
. After his mother had died it was understood that every year Stephen would make the trip home to check up on his dad. A couple of years before, Stephen had bought his father a cheap laptop and signed him up for a Hotmail account so they could converse by email. His dad had always been a dutiful if infrequent letter writer who would not pick up the phone to dial London on account of the expense.

Emails from his father arrived in Stephen's in-box in the mornings, written in California in the evening, after extensive use of the spell-checker, which made them more comprehensible, though certain words changed meanings altogether under the spell-checker's suggestions. But at home one evening in early spring, when the clocks had gone forward and the days were growing longer, Stephen was surprised to find an email from his old man. His father never knew what to put in the subject line. It wasn't mandatory to fill it out with anything at all, Stephen had pointed out, but his father regarded the demands of email as he would a form from the IRS.

So the subject line was the word
Trip
.

The night the widow had asked him to watch
Schindler's List,
he dreamed of his parents. In his dream he could see his mother with the braids pinned around her head, the cameo brooch at the neck of her blouse, in the kitchen pulling bread from the iron door of the oven, and his father yanking the bridle of a horse in his shirtsleeves, the smell of shit on his boots.

He walked through the house on light feet and no one could see him. He climbed the stairs to the bedroom where his older sister was combing her hair in front of the mirror and singing a
Polish song.
Gittel!
he cried out in his sleep and when he awoke he touched his papery cheeks and eyes, surprised that no tears had fallen.

Drinking his coffee, looking out at the dry grass on the lawns, he asked himself where he was, and was frightened for a moment that the blank cloud of forgetfulness had suddenly descended on him; like others he knew from the fur depository who nodded in old people's homes, he understood that the small town was still there on the plain by the Narew River.

The traffic lights along the street, changing color moment to moment, the high blue Californian sky, the automobiles parked by the curb, the sound of hip-hop coming from a pair of cruising neighborhood kids, this whole American morning was no more real than Łomża, with its heavy skies looking down on the winding river.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected] Subject: Trip

Dear Sun,

I just saw that movie Chandlers List. You seen it? Not bad! I saw Poland again and it got me thinking of my mother and father. And my sister Gutter. I want to go and see what became of my home town Lima. I want to go to Europe. Can you fix this trip for me?

Your loving father

Reading his father's email, Stephen was struck by the reversal of their situations. He was always thinking that one day he would go home to America, while here was his father, announcing at the age of ninety that his heart's desire was to return to Europe. Stephen had grown up in a silence. His mother and her brothers spoke of Cuba, of the island of their childhood, and the women selling fabric in the stores on Muralla Street. Havana was a city anyone would
feel nostalgic for, but that ugly place in the middle of Europe had aroused no feeling or spoken memories in his old man. He remained mute on the subject of the past. For the first time, Stephen learned he had an Aunt Gutter. Weird name.

Andrea, who was always the instigator of any project which resulted in a change in the direction of his life, said when he showed her the email: “Maybe you could get some funding to make a documentary about it.”

But this proved to be one of her rare unsuccessful ideas. No one was interested in the story of an old American Jew returning with his son to Poland. Jews, Stephen understood after several meetings, were out of fashion. No one was interested in them anymore and the Holocaust, he learned, had “been done to death.” A few years ago everyone had been raving about a wonderful new novel he had to read, “Simone says it's the first book she's read about the Holocaust that isn't upsetting,” Ivan said. This was what they wanted these days, so Stephen organized the trip for just the two of them, father and son.

“I came from Warsaw and to Warsaw I go back,” his father said, when Stephen suggested that he fly from L.A. to London, rest for a few days and then make the much shorter flight to Poland. “But this time I get on a plane and I'm right there.”

“Okay,” Stephen said. It was a stupidly expensive plan, the way Si wanted to do it, but he did not have the heart to argue with his dad about cost.

In early July, Stephen flew to Warsaw and waited anxiously for his father to emerge from customs. Two hours in Poland, most of it spent at the car rental desk, had induced in him a primitive angst about the place where everything came from, and which there was no good reason to go back
to
. Eventually, his father appeared, on the arm of a young woman in the LOT Polish Airlines uniform, who smilingly presented him to his son. “Your father speaks excellent Polish,” she said.

“What?” Stephen said. “I didn't know you spoke Polish.”