What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (11 page)

“You wonder why I don’t talk to you? Listen to yourself, Rabbi. Always on the attack.”

“What, I should hold you up as an example? Say that Fein made the right choice when he decided it was easier to live without God? Congratulate you on changing your name so that the
goyishe
restaurant man doesn’t make you repeat your reservations? Fein, who goes to live in a town where there are no troubles and no Jews, so his son will be able to play soccer carefree on Shabbos morning?”

“It’s a boy?” Allen interrupts. “Claire’s having a boy?”

“I don’t know! Look at you, always worrying over the tiny details. What about the fact that it won’t be a Jew?”

“I’m all right with that,” Allen says.

This is when another partition, directly behind the row of rabbis, opens. Allen is not surprised to see Dr. Springmire, his psychologist, standing there, scratching at his short secular beard. A witness. Mann has called a witness.

“First a token,” the doctor says to his patient.

“A token?” Allen says.

“I think it would be best if you paid for my peep. Thus far in your therapy, we’ve constructed a relationship based partly on financial remuneration. We dare not put that trust in jeopardy, especially in a situation as peculiar as this.” He offers an apologetic smile.

Mann rolls his eyes as Allen inserts a token on Springmire’s behalf.

“Is Fein all right with his transformation, Mr. Doctor?”

“He will be,” Springmire says. “He has come a long way, and one day he will, I’m convinced, adjust to the life he has made—it is a very nice life. He is a very nice man.”

“Did I say he wasn’t?” Rabbi Mann strains, twists in his
chair to face the doctor behind him. “I’m here for that very reason. I want to know what makes a nice boy forget God. What makes a boy with a nice job and a nice life never question how he came to such comfort? What makes such a darling boy—with such a darling wife waiting for him at home—climb the stairs into a place like this to fondle a young girl who must sell her body to live?”

It is Allen who answers. “It’s you.” He points a finger and reaches through the window.

Rabbi Zeitler looks up from his book and says, absentmindedly, “Touch?”

“It’s you who made me this way,” Allen says. “I came here because of you.” And with a fresh sense of injustice, he recalls Mann’s classroom, and how the rabbi would bring a heavy fist down against his desk, condemning student after student for matters that surely could be settled only in the world to come.

“Really?” Mann says, a big smile on his face. “And all the time I thought it was the other way around.”

“What choice was I left with, Rabbi? When I used to play at Benji Wernik’s house, the grandson to the Galitzia Rebbe, he used to pull filthy magazines from the space between his father’s bookcase. This is where his father hid them. What am I to do if I learned the facts of life from Simcha Wernik’s magazines?”

Dr. Springmire is raising a finger. “If I may interject, it is normal to masturbate. Healthy, even. Such pictures are of no importance if in the possession of an adult man.”

“But the son of the Galitzia Rebbe. A wise man. A teacher of high school science. What is a boy raised in a world of absolutes to do when he is faced with contradictions?” Allen turns his attention back to Mann. “You painted for us the most beautiful picture of Heaven, Rabbi, then left us to discover we’d all end up in Hell. Some room—maybe if you’d left us some room.”

Rabbi Mann is fed up. He waves a fist, the loose flesh of his upper arm shaking obscenely. “You should have questioned, Fein. That is what intelligent people do. They don’t throw their religion away. They don’t turn into the sick people who first shook their faith.”

“I’m not sick!” Allen yells. “And I didn’t throw anything away! You want truth and justice and for everything to fit in its place. But some things are in between, Rabbi. They are not right or wrong. Only natural.”

“Who’s saying different? There are many ugly vices in the world.” Mann rubs his palms along his thighs. “Did I need to come here for you to admit this to yourself? To learn that you abandoned God because the world is not the way you wanted it to be?”

“That’s not what I said.”

Rabbi Mann exhales. “Then what did you say?”

“That I left religion because of people like you.”

“Me,” Mann says, voice booming. “Me?” Then, controlling himself: “If that’s what you want to tell yourself, then that’s what I wanted to know.”

The partition moves down easily, as if oiled. Allen, with two tokens left, grabs at the door and is sliding the bolt open when he understands one thing. The partition will rise up twice more. Where the rabbis are involved, there is always a path to be followed. Either you stay on it or you stray into darkness: This is the choice that they offer. And, much as Allen feels bitter and lied to for all these years, he half wishes he could live in their realm, where a man is religious or he is not, a good husband or bad. A place where the scales of justice always dip to one side and where the rabbis know what to do with Simcha Wernik, a clean man with a dirty magazine.

Running his thumb along the face of a token, Allen bolts the door again. He will face his teachers; he will not run or
hide, only to find himself haunted. He does not want to suffer the rabbis when he pulls the car into the garage or discover them in the basement every time a fuse blows. Allen checks his watch. There is time enough to spend his tokens and reach the bus. And maybe it will be the girls again. Maybe Mann is gone. He said he found what he wanted to know.

· · ·

Steeling himself, Allen drops in a token. As the partition goes up and he sees the round leg of a woman, an older woman, he is overjoyed—as simple as that. It’s over. When Allen realizes that this woman is his mother, he knows that he is wrong. Claire sits next to her, in a pair of panties, only the sides visible because of her gigantic pregnant belly. Many of the partitions are open, and Allen can see the men, their arms moving, their expressions wide-eyed, as if hypnotized. One man is wearing a yarmulke. It’s Benji Wernik, grandson of the Galitzia Rebbe.

Allen’s mother is wearing stockings and garters. In the place where other such women keep tips, she has a wad of Kleenex.

“Do you need some tissue, Ari? Did you remember to bring?” She gets up to hand him some.

“Sit,” he says. “Mother, sit down!”

“What, and let you spoil a fancy hanky? Let alone an expensive suit.”

“Mother, please, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I washed your underwear every day and know from such things.” Allen’s mother, who hates the very idea of his Gentile wife, who declared her invisible on the day of the wedding, actually leans toward Claire and touches her hand. “He wants to know of what I speak,” his mother says.
“Underwear stiffer than starched, I scrubbed. Underwear that would shatter if you dropped them to the floor. I tell you, if the Russians had dropped a nuclear bomb when I was in that basement, I would have been safe surrounded by his dirty
gatkes
.”

“You knew?”

“Of course. I’m a mother. What, you are the first in the world to do such a thing?”

“It’s normal. The doctor says so. The rabbi didn’t even dispute it—and he knows it’s a sin.” Fein is backpedaling, explaining it all away.

“Who said it wasn’t normal?” His mother speaks to his wife.

Claire shrugs and spreads her legs, giving Benji Wernik a better view.

“All I’m saying,” his mother says, tucking the tissues back into place, “is to have some sense about it. Why ruin a good suit? Why ruin a good marriage …” And then she pauses.

Claire turns, waits. Allen waits even as he prays for the partition to drop. They all wait for his mother to finish the sentence: “Why ruin a good marriage, even if it’s to her?” But she doesn’t. Claire smiles and moves her hand, placing it on top of her mother-in-law’s. She squeezes it and says, “So true.”

Allen stands openmouthed. It’s a concession from his wife, an act of betrayal by his mother. She has never before acknowledged anything that was not as she pleased.

“Is this what the rabbi means?” he asks them. “Is this how people learn to deal?”

But there is no time for an answer. The fourth dollar is spent and the window comes down.

· · ·

Allen holds the last token lightly. How good it will feel to let it drop. He is actually eager to find the rabbi and Dr. Springmire waiting for him, eager to show them both that he is resigned to coping in a situation from which he gladly would have run. He wants to turn out his pockets, to hold up for them his empty hands. Allen presses the last token into the slot.

But the window opens onto an empty chair. The three others are filled with the women who were there when Allen arrived; only his beauty has gone. The second lady addresses him, her accent strong, a native of the Bronx.

“You’re up,” she says, and pats the empty seat.

Allen is already taking off his jacket and undoing his shoes. He uses one shoe to kick off the other, maybe for the first time since he was a boy in black Shabbos loafers, his father yelling at him not to break the backs.

When Allen is naked except for his watch, he reaches down and finds a handle on the wall in front of him. He takes hold of it, as if he has always known it was there, and opens his section of wall; the hinges, he assumes, are hidden on the other side.

Allen Fein steps up onto the stage and sits in the empty chair.

He is embarrassed, most especially because his erection persists. He covers it for a moment and then drops his hands.

When Allen hears the partition behind him open, he hopes that it’s Claire. He does not want to be touched by his mother or by Rabbi Mann. He turns around gracefully and finds the Latino man wearing the familiar tie. This he can handle. In this way, he can bend.

“Touch?” Allen says.

The Latino man does not answer, but Allen understands
the man’s wishes; he is surprised by his own sensitivity in knowing, an art of sorts.

Standing up, Allen walks toward the man. He moves slowly and with an air of detachment. Just the right amount, he feels, befitting an object of desire.

1. Watch the husband and wife walking down Broadway together. Even looking at their backs, even from a distance, you can see the wife is making big sweeping points, advising. There is wisdom being shared. But she is a kindly woman, the wife. You can see this, too. Because every few paces, the wife slows and reaches toward the husband, hangs an arm around his shoulder, and pulls him close. There is clearly love between them.

2. If we weave through the crowd with a little gusto, we’ll make progress. If we take advantage of the pause when the two stand by a table of trinkets—bracelets and lighters and watches, all of them, oddly, embossed with the faces of revolutionaries—we get close enough to become suspicious of their relationship, about the nature of its husband-and-wifeness.

3. The two stop right in the middle of Canal Street. The wife faces the husband, and the point she argues is so large, it’s as if the wife believes traffic will stop for it when the light changes, as if, should the cars roll on, it’s worth being run down to see her point made.

It’s then that we catch up, then that we’re sure—as the woman smiles and hooks her arm through the man’s, guiding him safely across—that the wife is not a wife and the husband not a husband.

4. What they are, it seems clear now, is boyfriend and girlfriend. And that girlfriend, upon closer inspection, seems to be a cat-eyed and freckle-faced Bosnian. Standing next to her, looking ten years older and with a mess of curly hair, the other one—the boyfriend one—is, we see, just a little Jew. And recognizing the face, taking it in, we see that the little Jew is me.

5. It’s because of how they walk and talk, in the way their shoulders bump and how her lower back is held and released by him at every corner, that we assume a different type of intimacy. There is an ease—a certain safety, you could call it—that just makes a person think husband and wife. From a distance, it just seemed another thing.

6. The argument that they—that is, that she and I—settle in the middle of Canal Street sounds, in a much truncated form, like this, with me earnest and at wit’s end: “But what do you do if you’re American and have no family history and all your most vivid childhood memories are only the plots of sitcoms, if even your dreams, when pieced together, are the snippets of movies that played in your ear while you slept?”

“Then,” the girl says, “those are the stories you tell.”

7. Her family tree is written into the endpapers of a Bible whose leather cover has worn soft as a glove. She was raised in the house in which her mother was raised, and her mother’s mother, and in which, believe it or not, her great-grandmother was born. Think of this: The ancient photos around her had grown old on the walls.

When the Bosnian came to America with her parents, they took the Bible, but the pictures, along with the still-living relatives in them, were left behind.

8. We’re still in the street, arguing over my family history gone lost, and I say what I always say to this girl who was swaddled in a quilt sewn from her grandmother’s dresses: “Oh, look at me, my uncle shot Franz Ferdinand and started World War One, then Count Balthus came to Sarajevo to paint a portrait of my mother playing badminton in white kneesocks.” For this, there’s always a punch in the arm and a kiss to make up. This time, I also want a real answer.

9. “What you do is tell the stories you have, as best you can.”

“Even if they’re about going to the mall? About eating bagel dogs and kosher pizza?”

“Yes,” she says.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I don’t mean that,” she says. “You find better stories than that.” And looking at me, frustrated, “You can’t, not really, know nothing! Tell me about your mother. Tell me an anecdote right now.”

“Everything I know about my family on my mother’s side wouldn’t even make a whole story.” And she knows enough of me, my girl does, to know that it’s true.

10. The Bosnian, my Bean—and, admittedly, that’s what I call her—she fills me with confidence. I go from saying it’s hopeless to telling her about the Japanese beetles, about the body in the stairwell, about the soldier with the glass eye. “You see,” she says, “there is story after story. Plenty of history to tell.”

11. My mother’s father had two brothers, both of them long dead. My grandfather never told me about either brother. These are the stories he told me instead: “During Prohibition, we drank everything. Vanilla. Applejack. When I was down in Virginia, we used to go out to where the stills were hidden in the woods and buy moonshine. Always, you take a match to it first. If it burns white, you’re all right. If it burns blue, then it’s methanol. If it burns blue and you drink it, you go blind.”

12. Applejack, it’s just hard cider. My grandfather told me how to make it. You take fresh cider and you put it in a jar and throw in a bunch of raisins, for the sugar. You let it ferment, watching those raisins go fat over time. Then you put it in the freezer and you wait. Alcohol has a lower freezing point than water. When the ice forms, you take out the jar, you fish out the ice (or pour out the liquid), and what’s not frozen, that’s alcohol—easy as pie. I tried it one Thanksgiving, when suddenly, even in suburbia, cider abounds. I threw in the raisins. I waited and froze and skimmed and drank. I don’t think I got drunk. I don’t think anything happened. But neither did I go blind.

13. If you were to climb into my childhood head and look out from my childhood eyes, you’d see a world of Jews around
you: the parents, the children, the neighbors, the teachers—everyone a Jew, and everyone religious in exactly the same way. Now look across the street at the Catholic girl’s house, and at the house next door to hers, where the Reform Jews live. Now what do you see? Is it a blur? An empty space? If you are seeing nothing, if your answer is nothing, then you are seeing as I saw.

14. Now that I’m completely secular, my little niece looks at me—at her uncle—through those old eyes. She asks my older brother sweetly, “Is Uncle Nathan Jewish?” Yes, is the answer. Uncle Nathan is Jewish. He’s what we call an apostate. He means you no harm.

15. My great-grandfather gave up on religion completely. And my grandfather told me why he did. This is true, by the by. Not true in the way fiction is truer than truth. True in both realms.

16. What he told me is that his father and two other boys were up on the roof of a house in their village in Russia. One of the boys—not my great-grandfather—had to pee and peed off that roof. What he didn’t see below him was a rabbi going by.

Like a story, every stream has an arc that has to come down somewhere. The boy pissed on the rabbi’s hat. The three children were brought before the anointed party. They were, all three, soundly and brutally beaten. The punishment meted out was an injustice my great-grandfather couldn’t abide. He thought, in Russian, in Yiddish, in his version, Fuck the whole lot, I’m done.

17. Up until this story, all I knew was that our family was from Gubernia. That’s where we hailed from. And when I tell my sweet Bosnian, who also speaks some Russian, she shakes her head, looking sad, as if maybe everything I know really isn’t enough. “
Gubernia
just means ‘state,’ ” she says, “like a county. To say you were born in
gubernia
would be like saying you were born in
state
. As in, New York State or Washington State. To be from there is to be from everywhere.”

“Or nowhere,” I say.

18. It’s when I’m asking my mother about the other side, about my grandmother’s side, that she says, “Well, it’s when Grandma’s grandma, that is [and here, the middle-distance stare, the ticking off on fingers], when my mother’s mother’s mother came from Yugoslavia to Boston—” And that’s when I stop her. Thirty-seven years old, and for the first time, in writing this, I find that my great-great-grandmother—my people—came from Yugoslavia. How does that not ever come up? I’m flabbergasted, and I want to call the Bosnian to say, “Hey, neighbor, it’s me, Nathan. Guess what?” But she is not the person to call with such news—not anymore. That’s how quickly things change. Some truths, you can hide forever, but when you finally face them, finally take a look … well, with me and the Bosnian, it’s done.

19. About Yugoslavia, about the news, my mother doesn’t pity me over stories suppressed. She says, “You have nothing to complain about. I had it worse in my not knowing.” Her uncle, my grandfather’s brother, died at age eight of a brain tumor. There was nothing to be done. A brain tumor killed the littlest brother of the three. My grandfather was twelve at the time, his middle
brother ten, and his dead-of-a-brain-tumor brother eight. And my mother worried about every headache I had in my life. She worried about every little twitch and high fever in my childhood. She waited for the malady to start, the disease that eats the brains of young boys.

20. And then, in 2004—“That spring,” my mother says—she drives up to Boston because Cousin Jack needs a new hip, a new shoulder, a new valve; she drives up to Boston because Cousin Jack is getting fitted for a replacement part. There she learns a different story from Jack, different from the one she’s carried her whole life. My grandfather, all of twelve, was crossing Commonwealth Avenue with his littlest brother, with Abner, when a car came over the hill and clipped him. Knocked little Abner from my grandfather’s grip. Abner got up. Abner looked fine, except for his right hand. A deep cut in the hand that might have been of concern to the driver had he taken a closer look. Instead, he got out of the car, stared at the little Jew boys looking fine enough, and drove off.

21. My grandfather led his brother home. Great-Grandma Lily (my grandfather’s mother) screamed in shock. “A car? An accident? Look at this cut.” She cleaned the wound. She wrapped the wound. And she made her littlest son lie down. She cleaned and wrapped, but she did not call a doctor. My great-grandfather did not call a doctor. It would get better. It would get better even after the fever took, even when, running up the arm, was a bright red line, an angry vein. The boy would mend, until he didn’t, so that my grandfather’s littlest brother died from nothing more than a cut to his hand. Lily would not recover. Her husband would not recover. My grandfather
would not recover. But, in a sense, they did. Because on the outside they did. Because it turned into a brain tumor. It turned into what was so clearly God’s will and so clearly unstoppable, a malady that begs no other response than a
tfu-tfu-tfu
.

22. There were two brothers left. And then there was, a decade or so later, a world war. My grandfather, legally blind, could not be sent over. He was drafted, but worked an office job.

23. His office mate was a soldier with a glass eye. At night, this soldier would drink and drink, and then, when everyone was as drunk as he was, he’d pop out his regular glass eye and pop in one that, instead of an iris, contained one red swirl inside another—a bull’s-eye. A little trick to get a laugh, to make the uninitiated think they’d had one too many, which they already had.

24. My grandfather’s brother was killed in the war. His brother died fighting. That’s how it was, until right now.

25. My favorite family story didn’t come to me through blood. It’s about Paul, my grandmother’s father, and it came by way of Theo (who married Cousin Margot) and was, for the next thirty years, my grandfather’s best friend. Inseparable. They were inseparable, those two.

26. “Your Great-Grandfather Paul, he had a bull’s neck. Eighteen, nineteen inches around. He was a tough motherfucker.”
Theo tells me this on the day we bury my grandfather. We’re outside a restaurant near the graveyard; everyone else has already gone in. Theo and I stand in the parking lot. He stamps his feet against the cold. “One day, after work, me and your grandfather and Paul, we went to a bar for the train workers. We were sitting at the bar, the three of us, and the man right next to your great-grandfather, he turns to Paul and says, ‘You know what the problem with this place is?’ Your great-grandfather sizes him up. ‘What’s the problem?’ he says. ‘I’d like to know.’ So the man tells him. ‘Too many Jews,’ he says. Your great-grandfather puts down his drink. He’s still sitting, mind you. Still facing forward and seated on his barstool. Without even much of a look, he balls up a fist and he just pops the guy—crosswise—just clocks that guy right in the jaw. Sitting down! And then your great-grandfather picks up his drink like it’s nothing, and he throws it back. One quick punch, and he knocked him out cold.” Theo shakes his head in remembering. “That mutt just fell off his stool like a sack of corn.”

27. And I can’t even handle it, it’s so good a story. “What’d you do?” I say. “What happened?” And Theo is laughing. “What do you think?” Theo says. “I said, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ Then me and your grandfather, we grabbed Paul and got the hell out of that bar.”

28. And what can I contribute to my own family history, what stories have I witnessed firsthand? I can tell you about breakfast. My grandfather cooked like nobody’s business. And, above all, it was breakfast he did best. Burned coffee and burned eggs and bacon burned black. Bacon that we did not eat as a religious family—though our mouths watered at the smell. When
we stayed at my grandparents’ (my parents, my brother, and me), we’d wake to a cloud of burned-bacon smoke filling the house. It would summon us, cartoonlike, lifting us from bed with a curling finger of smoke.