Fatherhood And Other Stories Part 5

My father closed his eyes, but I could see them moving about beneath the lids, back and forth and up and around like following a flying bit of paper.

I lifted the volume toward him. "Poe," I said firmly, since my mother had made me promise never to speak of my father's betrayal, a promise it had been easy to keep since my father had never seemed to feel the slightest guilt concerning Lenore, or my mother's abrupt departure, or even the loss of me. The deep grudge I'd nursed against him, a fire from which he'd finally drawn away, with fewer and fewer visits and phone calls until my bar mitzvah, and after that, as if freed by my full embrace of the faith he had so fully rejected, I could without guilt, and almost as if commanded, hold him in a searing contempt I had made since my thirteenth year no effort to conceal.

After that rupture, my father's phone calls had dwindled into nothing, and we'd retreated into our vastly separate worlds, he the strolling luminary of a gra.s.sy college campus, I, a familiar figure on the old fabled streets, Ess.e.x and Orchard and Rivington, well known and not without honor in the little shtetl of my life.

I pointed to the open book of Poe's poems. "Shall I go on?"

My father eased back wearily and closed his eyes like a man defeated in some final purpose.

I returned to the poem and began to read: From the torrent, or the fountain ...

From the red cliff of the mountain, I stopped, but why? What did I want? I knew quite well what it was, of course. I wanted an apology. I wanted my father to tell me that he was truly, deeply sorry not only for what he'd done, but for what he was. I wanted him to tell me that he had been wrong in everything, wrong in all he had rejected and in all he had taken up, that his every guiding thought had been wrong, that he'd been wrong at every turn, wrong about my mother, wrong about me, and coldly, cruelly wrong in destroying our family over some nothing of a girl, this poor, distraught Lenore.

He'd gone to her that same wind-driven afternoon. I'd watched from the second-floor window, oddly transfixed by what I'd already seen, and so held by the curious prospect of what would happen next. My father sat, as if in mute suspension, behind the wheel of his spanking-new sedan, while downstairs I could hear my mother as she strode from room to room, her feet pounding angrily against the hardwood floors below.

And so I was still at the window when my father came to his conclusion, slapped the gear into reverse, and guided the car back out of the driveway, where he stopped again, though only briefly, perhaps turning some final notion over in his mind before pressing down upon the accelerator and heading east, toward Lake Montego.

Meanwhile, as the public record later showed, Lenore had also journeyed out into the storm, her body wrapped in an old wool coat, her yellow hair bound in a red scarf, her shoes protected by her very English "wellies," and so, by all accounts, a careful young woman, careful with her clothes, her shoes, her modest ambitions, careful with the feelings of her family and her female reputation, careful in everything, as it had later seemed, save in what she'd let herself feel for my unfeeling father.

My father had driven directly to the little bungalow Lenore shared with two other English girls, one named Betty, who later told authorities that he looked angry when he came for Lenore, and one named Dotty, who said he looked fl.u.s.tered and a little confused. Neither had known of their summer roommate's relationship with the man they called Professor Green before he'd shown up at their door, though they had noticed a change in Lenore, a nervousness they'd attributed to anxiety about her studies. Her long hours of walking in the nearby woods had taken a toll, they thought, as well as her late hours at the college library. Then, in an instant, it had all come clear to them, they said, Lenore crying, distraught, pulling on her coat and galoshes, barging out into the storm, my father banging at their bungalow door a few minutes later, the motor left running in his car, windshield wipers thumping in the rain.

Back on Giddings Street, of course, I'd heard a very different thumping, first my mother as she climbed the stairs, and after that, the soft thump of her suitcase as she tossed it onto the bed. I didn't hear the whisper of clothes hastily packed, however, and so I had no idea of anything so dire as the decision she'd made until she suddenly called to me from the hallway, "Alexan ..." A pause. "Ezra."

And so everything had changed.

But less for me, as it turned out, than for yellow-haired Lenore.

She had gone to the boathouse, and when I think of her at the moment my father found her there, I imagine her sitting, wrapped in her own arms, eyes red with crying, the very picture of a broken-hearted young woman, innocent and naive, the perfect prey for a man such as my father. Professor Green, smooth-tongued, erudite, with his prized Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from his watch chain, this great, learned warship of a man whose seductive wiles the small craft that was Lenore surely could not have resisted.

For as I later learned, Mary Lenore Leeds was a lowly working-cla.s.s girl, little more than a scullery maid, who'd won a summer semester in America at a Liverpool dance hall. She'd picked my father's course on Poe from the great variety of academic offerings open to her because, according to Betty and Dotty, she'd liked penny dreadfuls, read them by the score, and thus had been surprised when Professor Green disparaged them. But they had had a talk, Lenore told her roommates, and after that ...

I had always had trouble imagining the "after that" of my father and Lenore, not because it is almost impossible for children to imagine a parent in the act of s.e.xual congress, but because my father had never seemed physical at all. He'd been all brain to me, all books and learning, all authority and judgment, a secular father of biblical proportions. Aristotle, in the inflated way he seemed to think of himself, to my Alexander.

But he had hardly turned out to be that sort of sage, a sad fact of life my mother had often made clear. Rather, he was the phony ba'al torah who'd lacked wisdom to hold his family together, a vain and haughty man, always farputst, with his scholar's key and gold watch, a puffed-up feinshmeker who'd fallen victim to his own exalted image of himself, taken advantage of a young girl and murdered her, to use my mother's phrase, though she well knew he had not done that.

Or had he?

For murder, or at least the possibility of it, was surely what I'd taken from the newspaper accounts of Lenore's death. I'd been a freshman at Yeshiva before I'd actually read them, warned away from the story by my mother, who had seemed to bury the details of her leaving my father in a deep grave of secrecy. But after reading the newspaper stories, the notion of foul play had lingered in my mind, so that once, after watching that sad and frightening scene from A Place in the Sun where an ambitious, social-climbing Montgomery Clift rows the distraught, pregnant working girl who loves him out onto a lake and murders her for his own advantage, I'd felt a dreadful question circle through my mind. For Lenore had died like that, drowned after somehow falling over the side of the small boat she'd taken out onto storm-tossed Lake Montego. But had she gone alone? Or had my father gone with her, done what he had to do in order to get rid of this inconvenient little strumpet, one he had himself dismissed as "just a girl"?

It would be easy, I thought, to kill someone who could be dismissed with the very words my father had said in the car that afternoon, words that had always seemed to me the true mark of his cruelty. And if he had done nothing, why had he never gained high position at the college, never become a dean or head of his department, never soared up and up as he'd no doubt expected to soar?

I felt the darkest suspicion of my life rise like a gush of bile in my throat.

"Did you kill her?" I blurted suddenly. "Did you kill that ... pregnant shiksa?"

My father's eyes burst open.

"Is that why my mother left you?" I demanded. "Not just that you schtupped that girl, but that you killed her?"

My father began to kick and pull at his sheets, twisting his body and jerking his head. But none of his contortions summoned the slightest pity in me. Let him kick and toss about forever, I thought. Let the dogs of his conscience, the ghosts of all he'd so recklessly thrown aside, even the ghost of Alexander, that little boy who'd loved him so, let them all have their way with him, chew his flesh and drink his blood and break his bones, and finally reduce him to the same dust his betrayal had made of my childhood adoration of him.

Then quite suddenly he stopped, and with what seemed a mighty effort, said "Nischt mein."

I'd seen other people revert to words and phrases they'd not used since childhood, people long rooted in the suburbs who'd abruptly returned, as it were, to the shtetl of their parents or grandparents, the blasted villages and charred ghettos of a vanished Poland. But this latest of my father's reversions to Yiddish seemed less natural than calculated, perhaps his way of mocking me.

"I've always wondered if you did it," I said. "If you rowed her out on that lake, into that storm, with n.o.body around, no other boats on the lake, just rowed her out into that storm and tossed her over the side."

My father jerked his head to the right in a way, it seemed to me, a guilty man would turn from his chief accuser.

I waited briefly, thinking he might look back toward me, actually address the accusation I'd made, but he didn't, and after a time I went back to Poe's poem.

From the sun that round me rolled In its autumn tint of gold, My father released a long, weary breath. "Farblonschet."

It was an almost comic term for being confused, and again I wondered if he was mocking me.

"So, you're confused?" I asked, now determined to speak to him only in English, as if Yiddish were my language, and could never be his, Yiddish and all that clung to it just another worthy thing he'd brutally renounced, a language that was like me, something he never visited or called, a Yid to this anti-Semite, a piece of dreck.

My father twisted around and pointed to me with a shaky finger.

"So, I'm the one who's confused?" I laughed. "About what?"

My father began to squirm, so that I could see the effort he was making, the energy it took for him to say simply, "Sarah ... never ... never ..." A jumble of sounds followed, none of them decipherable. Then, quite clearly, though with failing strength, he said, "Not mine."

He saw that I had no idea what he was talking about, and with a labored movement reached out for the book.

I handed it to him, and watched as he thumbed through the pages until he found the one he wanted, then tapped the t.i.tle of the poem.

"Lenore?" I asked. "Lenore wasn't yours?"

But that was absurd, I thought, for had not my mother discovered the whole sordid business, confronted him with it in the car on that stormy afternoon, heard his heartless dismissal of Lenore-She's just a girl.

"What about the baby?" I asked.

He shook his head furiously, clearly and forcefully denying that Lenore's baby was his.

"Not mine," he repeated. He twisted about, lips fluttering, so that it seemed to me that he was using up the last dwindling energy of his life in some final effort to communicate what I'd once hoped might be an apology, but which was clearly something else.

I leaned forward. "Whose then?"

Again my father seemed to take up a mighty struggle, hands jerking at the sheets, legs ceaselessly moving, lips twisting, his eyes darting about, until they settled on the window, emphatically settled, like a pointing finger.

I looked out the window, the grounds empty save for the young workman in the distance pushing a lawnmower, and made a wild guess.

"Joey?" I asked. "The kid who mowed our lawn?"

My mother had always called him the Shabbas goy. He'd mowed the lawn and trimmed the shrubbery and done anything else that she required any time one of her girlhood friends from the old neighborhood visited, always frumpily dressed, these now middle-aged women with herring on their breath, and the old country in their voices and memories of their but recently slaughtered kindred still hanging like hooks in their hearts.

"Joey?" I asked again.

My father nodded fiercely.

I recalled Joey O'Brian as tall and very skinny, with bad skin and bad teeth, a red-headed young man I'd once found staring quizzically at the little mezuzah my mother had tacked up at the front door of our house-Waz zat, guv? When I'd answered, he'd chuckled and shaken his head, so distant from it all, not just Jewishness, but college towns, professors and their little boys, rooms lined with books.

"You're saying it was Joey ... the father?"

My father nodded and his eyes brightened like a man who at last understood.

"You and Lenore never ..."

My father shook his head firmly.

But if this were true, why had my mother ever left him? I wondered. If my father had not even had a fling with Lenore, much less murdered her, then why had my mother packed her bags, called me Ezra, dragged me from the house, and taken me back into the world of her father and out of the world of mine?

I leaned forward and stared into my father's eyes. "Why did my mother leave that day?"

My father shook his head, as if surrendering to silence, to something that would forever remain confused.

"Why?" I repeated.

He closed his eyes, and in the silence that settled over us, I took the book from his hand, returned to the earlier poem, and read its final stanza softly.

From the lightning in the sky As it pa.s.sed me flying by From the thunder and the storm And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view My father opened his eyes slowly, and to my surprise, they were glistening. He nodded toward the book, and I could see that he was too tired to speak, that the haze of drugs or perhaps even the weight of his own impending death was exerting an irresistible power over him. Still, he seemed to think that somewhere in those tattered pages he might find words he could no longer say.

And so I began to turn the pages again, through poem after poem, past "Annabel Lee" and "The Bells," on to "The Raven," and past it, too, until I reached "Tamarlane," and heard my father groan, a signal it seemed to me, that this was the poem he wanted.

I put my finger on the first line, and looked at him. He shook his head and so I continued down the page, his head shaking and shaking until I reached these lines: The rain came down upon my head Unshelter'd-and the heavy wind ...

"The day of the storm," I said.

My father nodded and smiled, and it seemed to me at that strange moment we suddenly returned to the world we had once known and loved, he the patient teacher, I the adoring student.

And so I recited the events of that day as I had come to know them.

"Okay, the day of the storm. You and my mother came home. You were in the car together."

He nodded again, paused briefly, like a man gathering up his strength, then with the greatest effort he had made so far, he spoke.

"Argument," he said in a tone very different from the one my mother had described or my bitter imagination had created and which seemed to embody the depth of his loss.

"But it was not over Lenore? Is that what you're saying?"

My father nodded excitedly, as if to say, Yes, yes.

"Over what?" I asked.

My father seemed even now reluctant to tell me what had pa.s.sed between him and my mother on that stormy afternoon. His pause was long and thoughtful before he lifted his hand and pointed to me.

"Me?" I asked. "You were arguing about me?"

The old twinkle came into his eye, as when I'd been a boy in his study, he my devoted teacher, often speaking to each other through verses quoted from the great poems of the West, whole conversations carried out in that erudite yet oddly intimate way.

"What about me?" I asked.

My father pointed to the book and began waving his hand, a gesture that sent me flipping back through the pages of Poe's poems, slowly one by one, thinking that he sought a poem, perhaps certain lines.

I'd almost returned to the first of those poems by the time he groaned, a signal I should stop.

I looked at him, utterly puzzled. "Why here?" I asked. "It's a blank page."

He struggled to speak, but only a few slurred sounds came out, nothing I could make sense of.

"It's a blank page," I repeated. "There's nothing on it."

My father shook his head violently, clearly denying what I had just told him.

"There's nothing on this page but the number," I told him.

He nodded fiercely.

I looked at the number. "Thirteen?"

Again he nodded wildly. Then with great effort he said, "Never ... never."

So the argument had been about me, had something to do with the number thirteen, something my father a.s.sociated with the word never.

"Me," I said, turning the first of my father's words over in my mind. "Thirteen. Never."

And suddenly I knew what he was struggling to tell me, what the number thirteen could only mean in relation to me, and what he must have said to my mother about that relationship.

"You told my mother that you'd never allow me to be bar mitzvahed?" I asked.

He nodded solemnly.

I saw my mother as I knew she must have been at that moment in her life, that moment as they sat with the rain thudding around them, and she saw him fall like a man through a gallows floor, fall utterly from the world they'd once shared, the rabbinical student my father had once been, how deeply my mother had expected to live as a rabbi's wife, and how different that life had become, the suburban life of a professor's wife, unrooted and unmoored, as she must have thought of it, though never, never as utterly lost to all that was holy until that moment in the storm when my father had effectively told her, and no doubt bluntly, that her son was not to be a Jew.

I could only imagine the utter fury with which my mother must have received this final proof of my father's demonic secularism, proof once and for all of how arrogantly he had discarded the sacred values, how deeply and irrevocably he had dismissed the commandments and commentaries, the centuries of acc.u.mulated wisdom, and with it the fierce need she must have felt to flee this dead-souled modernist, this despiser of ritual, of all the honored customs, this pragmatist who believed in quick solutions, in getting rid of obstacles, this radical a.s.similationist who was ashamed of his own people, felt no pity for the great heaps of European dead, who wished only to throw off the yoke of the past, make himself new ... this American.

He eased himself back into his pillow and released a long deflating breath, so that I saw that even now he remained unsure of what he'd done, whether he'd been right or wrong, even though this seemed to matter less to him at that moment than what I would do with this strange revelation.

He tried to speak, but nothing came. So after a moment, and with what appeared to be the very last of his vital force, he motioned for me to give him the volume of Poe. I rose and sat on the bed beside him, holding the book open and turning the pages until he found the verse he wanted.

"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend," I shrieked, upstarting- "Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian sh.o.r.e!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken!-quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"