1

HAVE MERCY


The late August night before I went away to college I stood with my grandfather on 231st Street in the Bronx. We were standing on a rise in the street, a little hill that sloped downward in either direction. I could hear the subway clatter past on the elevated tracks over Broadway, two blocks to the east.

Over my grandfather’s shoulder was an incandescent coin, a full moon. What is she doing to us? he said in a choked voice. He was referring to my mother, who had decided to leave my father. Despite Menka’s seventy years and his receding mane of pure white hair, he looked like a boy, standing there confused, despairing, under the full silvery moon, with his round, swarthy face and soft brown eyes, on the little hill.

I don’t know, I said. I don’t understand. I had always called him Papa as a child. Now that I was older I couldn’t call him that. “Grandpa” was out of the question. It lacked the almost tangible warmth of the Russian words I heard my grandparents speak to each other. Walter Brennan, on one of the TV shows I watched obsessively, The Real McCoys, was someone I would call Grandpa. Yet I could not bring myself to call my grandfather by the names everyone else called him by: Menka, which was a Russian diminutive for Emanuel, or Manny, which he somehow acquired as the American version of the Russian diminutive. He was Papa. So for some time I hadn’t called him anything at all. Instead I would smile at him, and he would smile at me. I buried my face in his chest.

Make a life for yourself, he said. Make a life for yourself. That was my grandfather’s precious phrase. So was: You have to have something to fall back on. Born in Odessa, he had lost much of his family in the 1905 Odessa pogrom, when Cossacks got off their horses to stride through the seaside town and butcher Jewish men, women, and children in the street.

My grandfather, who was barely a toddler then, never talked about the pogrom. I never knew whether his parents were killed or survived or, if they did survive, what happened to them. He never spoke about his parents. Twelve years later, he said, he made his way to Moscow with two older sisters and an older brother. I had met them once or twice when I was very young: Yeva, Nova, and Zema, all of them old, kind and quiet as they caressed me with fingers that were long and old, with peels of dry, white skin that felt rough against my face.

The revolution had broken out. My grandfather covered that event with terse comedy. Someone handed him a rifle, he said. He shot a few bullets into the air. Then he made his way to a boat. There he met his sisters and brother, and all of them sailed to America.

For Jews such as my grandfather, who had suffered in Europe, history was made strictly by the goyim. Like professional sports, history was not a Jewish field. As he told the story of his escape into a new life, with its blatant omissions, exaggerations, and possibly wholesale fabrications, his face took on a glittering sardonic aspect, hard and grasping and touched with malice. You could not imagine that face wrinkling into tears unless you had worked out the equation between excessive feeling and paucity of empathy.

When my mother, his daughter, was about fifteen, she told him that she wanted to smoke. Fine, he said, handing her his cigar. Suck on this and take in as much smoke as you can. Hold it in for as long as you can without breathing. She followed his instructions and vomited until she had nothing left to vomit. That is how you smoke, he said, laughing. Upon learning from my younger brother, who was then about eight, that he was afraid of going down alone to the basement of my grandparents’ apartment building, where there was a vending machine that dispensed milk, my grandfather took my brother by the hand, walked him into the hallway, and rang for the elevator. When it arrived, he gently guided my brother into it. Handing him a quarter for the machine, he pressed the button for the basement and, smiling, waved goodbye to my terrified brother as the elevator doors closed.

* * *

Living with relatives in the Bronx, Menka worked at various jobs until, as a young man, he found a position as a bellboy at the President Hotel on West Forty-eighth Street in Times Square. He stayed there for decades. Whereas he was reticent about Odessa, he enjoyed telling stories about his experiences at the President, a tony hotel much beloved by Harlem’s artistic elite. The fact of my grandfather working as a bellboy, not for rich white people but for rich black people, made a lasting impression on me. The black porters at Grand Central Station, whom I sometimes saw as a young boy on visits to New York City with my family, and on our occasional family trip by rail, mingled in my imagination with my grandfather.

I saw these black men through the eyes of a boy, fifty years ago, so you must forgive a description that now seems insensitive. But, fifty years ago, I thought I saw that within the yoke of their menial work they moved inside their own free space. I cherished this dignity-in-harness that I also thought I found in Menka, who carried other people’s things for a living.

The President Hotel was the site of a famous nightclub, Adrian’s Tap Room. Fats Waller and other prominent jazz musicians of the day liked to perform there. Harry Belafonte once gave my grandfather a radio as a gift, Menka told us, his face radiant with pride. Diana Ross presented him with a fifty-dollar tip. His round, boyish face suddenly gleaming and sardonic, he would tell us about the treasures he found left behind in the hotel and kept: jewelry, watches, clothes, money. He never questioned the rightness of making off with these things. They were the spoils of a vicious world.

* * *

Rose, my grandmother and Menka’s wife, was born in Minsk. She emigrated to America with her parents in the 1920s. Her four older sisters remained in Minsk and were shot with their husbands and children in a mass grave by the SS after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

Menka won Rose’s heart with a trick that he performed with money. Every day he would come into her parents’ candy store in the Bronx, where Rose worked behind the counter. He would produce a dollar bill from his pocket. Holding it up for her to see, he made it disappear. Then he produced it again. That was how Menka thought of money. It was the foundation of love, life, and happiness but also an object of contempt because, like a prostitute, it bestowed itself without discrimination.

The other side of Menka’s idea of money as something like snow, there for the taking, was his fear that once he possessed it, the money would vanish. At the end of his life, he and Rose lived comfortably in their aging, medium-rise apartment building on 231st Street, half a block from where I said goodbye to him that August night. They stayed afloat because their rent was protected by the city, and by means of Menka’s modest savings.

Nevertheless, as he and Rose sat in the back of a taxi that was rushing them to a hospital after Menka suffered a heart attack—the ambulance they called for was taking too long—he whispered to Rose, There’s forty dollars taped underneath the medicine cabinet. Then he died.

* * *

As a young girl, Lola, my mother, aspired to be an actress. At the age of seventeen, just after graduating from high school, she auditioned at the Actors Studio, even then a legendary place, and got accepted. She found herself in a class with Marlon Brando, who was either a student in the class or a visitor, I was never sure.

Brando, according to my mother, always came to class wearing old, dirty clothes that recalled the torn, sweaty T-shirt that he had made famous in A Streetcar Named Desire. One day, on a dare from some of the other young women in the class, my mother went up to Brando and asked him why he did not come to class wearing nicer clothes. “Fuck you,” Brando said.

My mother told this story over and over again. Until her separation from my father, she never used the word “fuck.” She said “Eff you.” When she said it, her eyes shone with a faraway look. You would have thought Brando had said “I love you.” My mother, like Menka, had a tremendous capacity for absorbing humiliation.

After taking a few classes at the Actors Studio, she declared to Menka that she wanted to be an actress and a singer. He slapped her face.

She was an only child and Menka was the center of her existence. When he struck her—the only time, my mother said, that he did so—he bent her spirit toward him for the rest of her life. She adored Menka as if he had been Brando himself, and she hated him with suppressed, embarrassed fury.

Even when she was in her late thirties, married with two children and living in a house in a New Jersey suburb, a withering look from Menka could turn her from a wife and mother into a little girl. She would freeze and start to stammer. By then my grandfather, about sixty-five, looked ten years older. A lifetime of heavy smoking had given him emphysema. He would start to cough, and cough and cough, then gag and choke, unable to breathe until, with a long, heavy, paper-crinkling sound, he heaved up liquid like a flame from deep inside his lungs. At moments like that, his eyes bulged almost out of his head. His dark-complexioned face turned a deep red. Tears—from his mortal cells, not from his emotions—ran down his face.

I did not understand how my mother could be afraid of such a weakened person. But Menka hadn’t just struck her. As my mother told the story, he followed his blow with a short speech about all actresses being whores. He knew that for a certainty, he said, because he had encountered many actresses in the hotel. In that one instant, he thwarted my mother’s ambition and tried to stifle the sexual yearning he felt inside it. In its place, he put a picture of his own sexuality in her head, stuck there, forever, with the adhesive of the slap.

* * *

Like the smell from a gas leak, money began to seep its way into every aspect of their relationship. If my mother wanted money to buy herself a new dress, Menka said no. If she wanted money to travel before settling down to marriage, he said no. When she met my father, an aspiring jazz pianist, Menka warned her against him because of his modest income.

With regard to my father, my grandmother drew a line. She insisted that my mother follow her own heart, and Menka relented. Rose seemed to spend most of her days in submissive silence, perfecting the art of the pot roast, but all the while she was discreetly consolidating her power over a husband who was outwardly aggressive yet inwardly meek.

A short, solidly built woman, Rose held her cigarette with an elegant delicacy that was like the tip of a submerged, different, commanding self. Simply holding her cigarette in such a way, she announced to the world that, despite appearances, she had ownership of Menka. Every once in a while, when she thought there was a battle worth fighting, she threatened to leave Menka if she didn’t get her way. My grandfather always had weak lungs, suffering from asthma and bronchitis and then emphysema, yet he continued to smoke. The thought of having to fend for himself without Rose made Menka panic.

Roused to anger, she would insult Menka in Yiddish. The old words, bristling with consonants, left her mouth as though she were spitting out the broken bones of a small animal: Vern zol fun dir a blintshik, un di kats zol dikh khapn: “May you become a blintz and be taken by a cat.” Cats made Menka struggle to breathe. He begged her to stay, often through tears, and gave her what she wanted.

* * *

I was an asthmatic child myself, prone to lung ailments throughout my life. I remember many times as a small boy awakening in the dead of night, whimpering and gasping for breath during an asthma attack. My father would rush into my bedroom in his underwear, sweep me up into his large arms, and hurry with me into the bathroom, where he ran the shower as hot as he could until the steam, and also my father’s comforting presence, enabled me to breathe again. At the age of eleven, I caught pneumonia. My mother doted on me, and I grew accustomed to being cared for. Laid up in bed and swaddled in blankets for weeks, sometimes months at a time, I watched television and read the armloads of books that my mother brought me from the public library. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which transformed a patch of sunlight on my bedroom wall into pitiless and romantic Spain; a compact volume titled Understanding the Great Philosophers, where I read about Spinoza, who supported his cosmic thoughts with a meager living as a lens grinder; an anthology of Greek tragedies told in the style of children’s stories that held me rapt with figures who were unaware of how their conscious actions were weaving a countermotion to the fate they took for granted—these were some of my favorite books. I inhabited the real and made-up lives I encountered and pretended that on account of my heroic or poignant actions all the world revered or felt for me, and wished to care for me the way my mother did.

Once I was well, though, I felt vulnerable in a different way. I had to fend for myself without anyone to care for me. I craved the attention that I had received while sick.

Soon I found a way to reclaim the importance I had enjoyed. I discovered that I could make people laugh. Comedy conferred on me something like the power I experienced in my sickbed bouts of vicarious action. The sharper my distress, the more compulsive my routines.

* * *

One of my bits of business, which I developed around the age of fifteen, took up the centrality of tears in my family. It wasn’t just Menka and I who melted. Tears were the family lingua franca.

All that family blubbering—a joke I concocted when still a boy: I was born with a silver violin in my mouth: yuk, yuk, yuk—rose up from dark places. It was blatantly manipulative, a tried-and-true gambit meant to induce guilt, but more elemental, suddenly crying was a way of coaxing someone into caring for you. During long bouts of illness, when I would read or watch television in marathon sessions, I sometimes sat rapt before the spectacle of Harpo Marx unmanning himself by putting his leg in someone’s hand.

My routine, devised for my friends, went like this. I pretended to be one member of my family, and then another.

The first member wrinkles his face and makes quiet weeping sounds.

The second member does the same.

First member begins to sob.

Second member sobs in response.

First member weeps, and sobs and moans.

Second member: ditto.

Both family members weep, sob, and moan. Then they nod their heads and embrace.

My routine incited the immoderate laughter of my friends: Paul Dolcetto, Alex Tarmanian, Teddy Di Buono, Terry Cushman, Peter Camino, Arthur Teitelbaum, Matthew Cassidy. They were all, like me, products of immigrant grandparents and white ethnic parents who had made their way out of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. My friends had become my surrogate family, a home away from my increasingly turbulent real home.

* * *

It turned out that Menka’s worries about my father were not unfounded. Unable to support his growing family on his pianist’s slender income, but also eager to make a fortune in the booming real estate market that was rippling through postwar New Jersey, Monroe gave up his career as a jazz pianist and got a job as a realtor. About ten years later, the market collapsed, and after a couple of years of growing tension at his job, he was let go.

Unable to find another position in real estate, my father returned to music. The opportunities had narrowed for him there, too. Though in his prime he had played with the likes of Stan Kenton and had never wanted for work at various nightclubs and swank private parties, he now settled for doing bar mitzvahs and weddings with his trio. He called himself Lee Sage when he was performing. To make ends meet, he gave piano lessons. It thrilled him to have a student who lived next door to Sam Sinatra, cousin of Frank.

One minute my father was composing songs that my mother had written the words for and sang while he accompanied her on the piano, the two of them recording their compositions in a studio at their own expense in hopes of hitting it big—the next minute my mother was at his throat, accusing him of negligence, incompetence, all sorts of weakness.

My father’s own father, Leopold Siegel, died of a heart attack at the age of forty, when Monroe was thirteen. This left my father permanently heartbroken. He stuttered until he was in his twenties. Throughout his life, he became tongue-tied in moments of stress. He could not stand up to my mother.

Despite my father’s crooked teeth, he was a tall, handsome, good-natured young man who seemed to regard the future with a confidence nourished by his creative gifts—besides being a pianist, he was a natural painter, self-taught, though he never thought of art as more than a hobby. My mother the aspiring actress would have fallen for his artistic side. And for the fact that my father utterly lacked Menka’s malice.

But more than anything else, it was mutual vulnerability that drew my parents to each other. Sharing faltering parts of themselves that needed to be supported reassured each of them that the other was incapable of inflicting pain. It would not have occurred to them that, at the same time, a race had begun to see which one would become exhausted by the other’s weaknesses first.

Here, as in just about everything else worldly and practical, my mother had the advantage over my father. They were both sentimental people, but my father was sentimental, period. My mother was too adept at manipulating her emotions to allow them to have the last word over her.

My father often talked about a traumatic event that occurred when he was a child. He grew up in a recently constructed white colonial in Mount Vernon, New York, a suburb just outside New York City. His family had a dog, a German shepherd named Rex, that they sometimes kept tied to a tree in the yard. My father loved him. One day someone cut the rope and made off with the dog. Whenever my father recalled what happened, his face took on a kind of stricken wonderment.

I never knew whether Rex was taken before or after the death of Monroe’s father, but marveling over the mystery of the missing dog, again and again, was Monroe’s way of grieving over his father while trying to suppress the memory of his father dying. My mother, on the other hand, was indifferent to animals. Perhaps it was because she could not perform for them.

In those moments when my mother berated him, my father would cry: Hab rachmones! which is Yiddish for “Have mercy!” My father knew about four words in Yiddish, and those were his two favorites.

* * *

My mother’s increasing unhappiness with my father turned her into a different person. She screamed at me over my slightest infraction. Modest requests that I made, like being permitted to stay up a little later, or asking her to drive me to a friend’s house, or even to allow me to have a friend over for a visit, she denied me with a gleam of malicious defiance in her eyes. Discontent with my father’s slowly worsening situation at his job seemed to bring out the Menka in her. I fell into the category of disappointing child. It was around then that she began to get physical with me in her anger, something I had never experienced with her before. It made me wonder whether she was telling the truth when she said that Menka only hit her once.

She never hit me in the face. She hit me on my arms and legs, preferring to slap me on my bare legs whenever she burst into my bedroom and caught me partly dressed or naked, in which case I hurriedly threw my blanket over myself in mortified rage.

In these scenes with my mother, which started when I was about fourteen, I surrendered to hysteria, sobbing and struggling to breathe, the way I had learned to give myself up to fever when it arrived with all its accompanying luxuries of care, attention, and dispensations from my everyday obligations. My only defense against my mother was to implore her in this way to mother me again.

Instead she yelled and continued to slap me. Her eyes flashed with Menka’s malice, and also with defiance of her own self-loathing. This made her hate herself even more, which fueled her defiance, and on and on, until she whirled away. She disappeared into her bedroom and slammed the door. I was left with red marks on my legs and arms.

During my mother’s slapping fits, I would pretend to be standing outside of myself. I invented an inner voice that I called the Old Man. The Old Man would comment on the scene with detachment. “She is hitting you,” the voice would say. “She is trying to scratch you. She is screaming at you. She is leaving the room.” By transforming these scenes into a kind of living story, I felt that the world was witnessing what I was passing through. Imagining that I was commenting on my experience for other people, the way my cherished authors wrote for other people and for me, made me feel less miserably alone. The ability to lose myself in the parallel worlds I found in books, and especially the joy I felt in coming up with my own ideas about life, became my deepest consolations. From that time on, intellectual reverie established itself as my favorite mode of escape from painful events and thoughts.

* * *

My father bore the brunt of my mother’s rage. She spit at him and tried to scratch his face. They became less like people and more like acting and reacting inanimate objects repeatedly colliding with each other in space. In my horrified eyes, material worry reduced them to scrimmaging chunks of matter themselves; to things. As if in an effort to recover his humanity, my father often fled from my mother’s wrath to the den of our small split-level house. There he spent hours listening to his modest collection of recordings of jazz pianists: Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner. Garner he prized above all the others.

What distinguished Garner was his percussive left hand. While other pianists used their left hand to seek out complicated chords that added depth and dimension to the melody, Garner’s left hand supported his melodies with a constant rhythm. He caressed, stroked, or pounded the piano with it. There was a joy to the way the steady, percussive left hand made the melody buoyant, propelled it upward. It was a joy that seemed to rise from Garner’s loins.

Garner began to play the piano at the age of three and never learned to read music. When he was eleven, he started playing on riverboats traveling the Allegheny River, and by fourteen, he was performing in nightclubs. For him, playing the piano was seamless with existence itself; his work was his life, and his life was his work. Somewhere my father shared Garner’s joyous self-fulfillment. You could see it in his glowing face when he sat down at home to play the piano, an old stained and nicked dark brown spinet that we kept in the den, a narrow room just down a flight of stairs from the kitchen. Perhaps this simple fulfillment explains why Monroe was so happy whenever he returned from a modest gig in a cavernous banquet hall somewhere. Even giving lessons seemed to cheer him. He didn’t seem to register the fact that he was scarcely making enough money to support us. He was playing piano. This is partly what drove my mother into her violent frenzies.

A depressed person, my father was easily transported out of himself by strong appeals to his senses like Garner’s music. His depression was rooted in the fact that pleasure filled his head with dreams of happiness and success. Once life imposed its demands, rigors, and restrictions, he retreated with sadness into himself. He needed the self-affirmation that pleasure briefly affords. Without that, life was just too hard for him, and he almost automatically resigned himself to setback and disappointment.

One of the ways I occupied myself, during long spells laid up in my sickbed, was to read book after book about the Holocaust. It became an involuntary passion; an escape from my sickness by immersing myself in an unfathomable disease of human nature. A passage in one of the books buried itself in my imagination. An SS officer distractedly mutters to a Jew he finds annoying, Why don’t you just kill yourself? The inmate shrugs his shoulders, finds a corner somewhere, away from the SS man who is no longer even aware of his existence, and hangs himself. My father, broken by his own father’s death, seemed not just to shrug but to nod in satisfaction when he lost his job, and when he began to lose my mother. It was as if he had always expected those things to happen.

* * *

My father and I watched Laurel and Hardy movies on TV together on rainy Saturday afternoons, my head resting on his stomach. Knowing how much I liked to hear the ticking of his watch, inherited from Leopold, he placed his hand over the side of my face so that I could hear the inner motions of the watch. While I listened, he gently stroked my face. Laurel and Hardy made my father laugh so hard that my head heaved up and down on his stomach as he roared. He adored slapstick. The spectacle of physical calamity that had no ill or fatal effects delighted him. We bought a slot car together and raced it at a place in a neighboring town once or twice a month. I was surprised to see how skillfully my father managed the turns at high speeds. Pitching for my Little League baseball team, I could hear him cheering me on, despite the fact that he knew nothing about baseball or about any sport. He was intimidated by athletic contests that fostered hard certainties about who should win and who should lose. Still, I could hear him yelling as I hurled the ball: Go, Lee-boy! Strike ’em out! You can do it, Lee-boy!

Gradually, though, he slipped from my grasp. His weakness, the way he fled from my mother, the fact that he could not fend for himself out in the world—all of that embarrassed me. Embarrassment, no matter how much I tried to suppress it, led to pity, and pity, no matter how hard I fought against it, incited my contempt.

* * *

I was fourteen when one afternoon on my way home from school I was confronted by two bullies. I was riding my bicycle near our house on an overpass that spanned Route 17. Our house was situated right off Route 17, which ran north into New York state and south toward New York City. I often walked to the overpass at night and lingered there. When it was clear, you could see the Empire State Building. The soaring obelisk’s spire was illuminated at night. During the day, it trembled in a blue haze.

That afternoon one of the bullies planted himself in front of me. We were all in the same junior high. I used to see them around, always together, always apart from everyone else. They wore denim jackets over white T-shirts: at the time, the outsider’s equivalent of a prep-school blazer.

One was blond, the other had dark hair. They would have been handsome, but nature had betrayed them. The first had dark red splotches on his cheeks, beneath high cheekbones. A giant brown pimple had grown on the fine, aquiline nose of the other.

I could have ridden straight into the boy who stood in front of me, but I might have knocked him into the road and the oncoming traffic. So I braked and stopped. The other boy came up close to me and butted me with his chest. The boy in front of me grabbed the handlebars of my bike and began to push and pull the bike. You’re a stupid faggot, said the one who was next to me. Each of them grabbed one of my arms. At that moment, Monroe drove by in his Buick Electra. All I had to do was wave and cry “Dad!” and they would have given me one final push and slouched off. But the possibility that my father might stop the car, walk over, and try to help me filled me with terror. I had an image of the two boys beating him. So I smiled and waved.

My father, I confessed to them after he had safely passed. The two bullies looked at me in surprise. Faggot, said one. Wuss, said the other. They pushed me a few more times and left. When I got home, my father grinned and patted my shoulder with affection. Your friends look like nice boys, he said. I’m glad you were having fun.

Around this time, my father, a big man, with thinning brown hair, crooked teeth, and bespectacled light blue eyes, was starting to flounder. His large frame began to sag with despair. The experience of my large father suddenly becoming vulnerable haunted me. Yet he proceeded as if his material circumstances hadn’t changed. He had some sharply tailored suits left over from his days in real estate that he liked to wear. He continued to indulge a weakness for expensive shoes, of which he had several pairs. Every year, as he had when he still worked as a realtor, he leased a gleaming new Buick Electra. The car was one step down from the Cadillac he dreamed of but never had the money for. He barely had the money for the Electra, either, but that didn’t stop him.

All these small boosts to his self-esteem belonged to the happy, oblivious piano-playing Monroe. The real Monroe could no longer afford them. One night my mother went into his closet, pulled out several pairs of his shoes, and confronted him. She threw them at his face, one after the other. He stood before her, transfixed by her rage. I hated her for humiliating him, and I hated him for allowing himself to be humiliated.

* * *

Burdened by stress, some people garden or take up photography. My mother went berserk. In these crazy bouts, there was not an impulse that she did not act on. There was not a sentiment that sprang into her mind that she did not express. Ya zig moi, vrog moi, the razor-tongued Menka liked to say in Russian. “My tongue is my enemy.” By means of hysteria, my mother turned herself into a riveting presence. Her hysteria was a plea for help, but it was also how she controlled her environment. Flying apart was how she kept herself together.

At the age of twelve, I broke my leg skiing at night with my junior high school ski club, at a place called Sterling Forest, just over the border in New York state. The binding didn’t release when I fell. My leg broke in two places; a spiral fracture wound its way up half of it. The ski patrol arrived in a cloud of flying snow. They bound me to a sled and raced with me down the mountain to an ambulance. By the time I got to the hospital the middle of my leg below the knee had swollen to the dimensions of a grapefruit. Numbness was giving way to pain. Orderlies rushed me on a gurney to a table in the emergency room, where a nurse began to cut away the leg of my pants.

Enter Lola. The conscientious, if unwitting, ski-club chaperones had called her to report my accident. I watched her with dread as she stood, timidly at first, in the doorway. Slowly her attention revolved from me to the emergency room’s bright lights and small audience of doctors and nurses. I began to moan to myself. I knew what was going on inside her head.



Paramount Pictures Presents

A Mother’s Ordeal

Starring

Lola Siegel

Introducing

Lee Siegel as “The Son”

With

A crowd of handsome young doctors, any one of whom could play the leading man in Lola’s next feature film, Say You’re Sorry!

Lola enters the hospital emergency room. Her striking brown eyes flash as she looks around for her son. There he is, lying on a table, wearing the same torn and filthy sweater he has been wearing for two weeks. People say Lola looks like Mary Tyler Moore. They are wrong. She is a dead ringer for Jennifer Jones. Maybe Loretta Young. But not Mary Tyler Moore.

LOLA

(touching her stunning coal-black hair as she flies past an admiring young physician)

My son, my son! What have they done to you? What have these vicious ski-club people done to you?

LEE

(clearly confused by his pain)

Mom, please.

LOLA

Oh, my son, my only son!

LEE

(confused and disoriented)

What about Nathan, Mom? My brother?

LOLA

Try not to talk, my darling. (Suddenly she becomes alarmed. Turning to the nurse, she exclaims:) Do you have to cut his pants? They are the only pair he has that are clean and without holes!

LEE

(transformed by his selfish adventure into a thankless child)

Mom, please leave!

(Lola’s heart begins to break. She turns to the doctors and nurses. She bursts into tears.)

LEE

(to the nurse)

Could you get her out of here? Please?

LOLA

What drugs have you given him? This is not my child!

(Lee turns away and moans softly.)

LOLA

(clutching her heart)

My son is in pain. I can’t breathe. Let me sit. Will he be able to walk again? Will he be able to make a living? Oh, I feel dizzy.

THE NURSE

(a vicious, envious little bitch)

You’d better wait outside, Mrs. Siegel.

(Sobbing quietly, Lola begins to exit the room. She stops.)

LOLA

(addressing herself to the evil nurse)

I will be in the waiting room all night, if you need a transfusion. (She pauses. Then she faces the doctors and nurses.) Or a transplant!

Lola returns to the waiting room and lowers herself into a chair. Soon she is brought a glass of water by a young doctor who looks like Keir Dullea in Madame X, the finest movie about a woman ever made, after Joan of Arc. She tells the young doctor, who has exceptionally straight teeth, the story of her life. He is moved beyond belief.



Original behavior, like my mother’s, is hard to resist. If you are dependent on it, as I was on my mother, you experience it as a type of power. And power awes. Whoever is being subjected to power makes no distinctions between the different forms of it. Power that has its origin in strength is indistinguishable from power that has its origin in weakness. I shrank into myself before my mother’s helpless jet streams of emotion. Still, they imprinted themselves on my reflexes.

For all her embarrassing or painful conduct, my mother embodied an attractive alternative to my father. In contrast to his weakness, she displayed strength. As my father’s inability to earn a living diminished his power, my mother’s emotional flights dominated our household. My weak, histrionic mother was power incarnate.

My father came home from the office one day with terror on his face. I heard him tell my mother that some of the men he worked with had been taken out in handcuffs. This was nothing new in the Walpurgisnacht of New Jersey real estate. People were getting arrested all the time. As I learned later in my life, the real estate industry in Jersey was rife with the fraudulent sale of trust deeds, forged escrow instructions and forged grant deeds, and the use of nonexistent buyers to purchase properties.

But my father was an innocent. He had strayed from the realm of making music, where he had given and received pleasure. That was the only world that he felt comfortable in. You walk into a room and sit down at the piano. Two other people enter and take up their positions behind a string bass and a set of drums. You play apart while at the same time playing together. No one expresses himself at the expense of someone else. No one can express himself without the collaboration of someone else. Even if you have a dead father dragging on you like cement shoes, you have the safety net of intertwined melodies below you.

Suddenly Monroe found himself in a world of calculating hardness. He found himself in business. Instead of collaboration he encountered collusion.

* * *

My socially uncertain parents rarely entertained, but they once had a small dinner party for a man who I assume was either my father’s boss or someone he worked with whom he had to impress. The honored guest was dark-suited, all starched white cuffs and collar. His watch and cuff links flashed under our tarnished brass chandelier. Under the light, his short, wavy black hair, controlled with gel, gave the top of his head a shiny, corrugated look. His face was genial, fleshy, and tan.

My younger brother was sequestered in his room as usual, obsessed with his coin collection. I wanted to come down, I guess I was about ten, to say good night to my parents.

We lived in a modest split-level, at the top of a dead-end street that ran up a hill. A split-level is just that; not two floors, but one floor split into two. Neither is an actual floor since they are separated by a staircase consisting of a mere three steps. A split-level is really two halves of two different houses.

I had picked up the names for different types of houses by hearing my father talk about them. My father loved the terminology of real estate. Leopold’s death had forced Ann, Monroe’s mother, to sell their white Mount Vernon colonial, and selling real estate for a living later offered my father the illusion of controlling parcels of the precarious physical world. The fact that he was a mostly ineffectual realtor made no difference. Music came too easy to him. A little boy who allowed his dog to be taken from him, who permitted his father to leave him forever, didn’t deserve an easy time of it. Sweating, laboring, forcing himself against his nature to sell real estate was the way my father punished the little boy that he had been. Leopold, in fact, had been a realtor.

You enter a split-level house through a brief foyer that runs into the kitchen, which overlooks the backyard. To the right of the foyer is the living room. Situated perpendicularly to the living room, and connected to it, is the dining room. The bedrooms are off a short hallway to the left of the foyer that begins at the top of three steps. My brother’s bedroom was first, on the left, across from the pink bathroom he and I shared. My parents’ bedroom, with their own bathroom, was farther down, on the right side, at the end of the hall. My bedroom was at the very end.

I went downstairs and my parents introduced me to their guest and to his attractive blond wife. I have forgotten their names. They were warm and pleasant to me. I must have been wearing my favorite pajamas. Red with black piping, they consisted of a button-down shirt and loose pants. The picture of a panda bear with its mouth open, probably meant to indicate a yawn, appeared on the shirt pocket. I never changed them. The pajamas must have smelled of sweat, sleep, and dried urine. He’s adorable! the special guest’s wife exclaimed. My mother fluttered over me and my father smiled. I made my way back upstairs to my room.

Once there, I turned off the light and jumped loudly into bed. My brother banged on the wall in protest. He seldom spoke because he had inherited my father’s stutter. In his mysterious nighttime chamber, he worked out the first stages of his destiny in coins, then drums, then weights and martial arts.

I lay still in my bed. After a few minutes I quietly opened the door. I made my way past the pink bathroom on one side, and my brother’s den on the other. Carefully I perched at the top of the stairs. That was the place from where I would customarily eavesdrop on my parents.

I recall hearing my mother talk and laugh, and the guest and his wife talk and laugh. My father, who never drank, was mostly silent. Alcohol probably would have pushed his emotions out of him like rain melting snow off a roof in heavy chunks. A drink or two and all his pain would have tumbled down. But one sip of wine made my mother giddy.

Finally the evening took the turn for which I had been waiting. The two couples moved into the living room for “cake and coffee.” The plastic had come off the green silk sofa that my mother had saved for years to buy. Two armchairs, newly reupholstered with gold-embroidered, dark blue velour, stood on either side of the sofa. When I heard my parents and their guests rise from their chairs, I withdrew to a spot in front of a closet that was at a ninety-degree angle to the pink bathroom. I could sit there, hidden from view, and now and then snatch a glimpse into the living room.

I could barely make out what they were saying, or make sense of what I heard, but I saw them clearly enough. My father and the special guest’s wife faced each other from across the room in the rehabilitated chairs. The special guest and my mother sat at either end of the green silk sofa. At one point, the guest bent his glossy head toward my mother as if he couldn’t hear her. She emitted a laugh that had been loosened by the wine and laughed again. With a playful smile, he bent his head once more. My mother rose and sat down beside him.

Sitting with their knees touching, my mother and the special guest talked in hushed whispers, broken by regular intervals of shared laughter. My father and the special guest’s wife sat in their armchairs, on either side of the sofa. After a while, my father fell silent, his eyes cast toward the floor. As an adult he often grew silent when in younger years he would have stuttered. I wondered why he wouldn’t look at my mother or try to join their conversation. He sat there awkwardly fingering his glass of what I assumed was ginger ale.

By contrast, the special guest’s wife sipped her drink in comfort. She gazed around with an air of superior detachment at my parents’ tentative approximation of middle-class culture: a copy of Renoir’s Woman at the Piano that hung on the wall across from the large picture window; two oil paintings that my father’s mother had given to my parents and that had been placed over the sofa: both, from different perspectives, of a narrow street winding through an old city until it disappeared into the shadows. The twin pictures depressed and frightened me when I was a boy.

The broad, soft chest that I laid my head on, Leopold’s gold-plated watch, twice beloved, by Monroe and by me, the long, beautiful, fragile-strong fingers on the hands that applauded me with happy ignorance of the sport I was playing—my father’s bulk rested inert on one of the embroidered armchairs while my mother bent her head toward the special guest, crossing and recrossing her legs until her skirt slid up the middle of her black-stockinged thigh.

My father took these social gatherings at face value. He enjoyed my mother’s exertions in the kitchen and the meals she cooked. He was grateful for her outgoing manner. It distracted people from his timidity. Her extravagance even endowed his diffidence with a flattering possibility—if Monroe’s wife is so intense, Monroe must satisfy her nature somehow.

My father thought these evenings could win him friends. Perhaps that misperception was why he didn’t have any. No, Dad! Protect yourself! Harden yourself! Gird up thy loins! Your special guest is a coldhearted son of a bitch who wants to rip you to pieces. He wants to eat you. He wants to devour you and then slip his hand, with its diamond ring and gold watch, between Lola’s legs. And all the while his wife, perfectly composed, even cheerful, will be pretending, with that freshly acquired air of cultural superiority, to be interested in the name of your upholsterer.

* * *

Growing up without money, my mother entered Hunter College, part of the city university system, determined to become a teacher. She needed a way to make a living. But like many people drawn from a young age to a vocation that is never realized, she kept the possibility of being an actress alive even as it was becoming more remote. The waiting itself became a comforting habit.

Our happiest times as a family were those occasions when we assembled a little band, with my father on piano, my brother on drums, me playing the electric bass guitar, and my mother singing. My mother closed her eyes and belted out the songs with a gutsy, Shirley Bassey voice that bounced back and forth between the narrow den’s thin walls: “What Kind of Fool Am I” and “More” were favorites, along with some ballads that she and my father had written together.

Slowly, gradually, she reduced her theatrical aspirations to make them fit into the life she was living. I never saw her teach, but from time to time, other kids who had been in one of her classes told me how much they had enjoyed her, though whenever anyone began to talk about her as a teacher, I wanted to run away rather than risk a glimpse of my mother through someone else’s eyes that might have made me cringe.

* * *

My mother was part of a wave of first-generation American women, the daughters of mostly European immigrants, who found work in public education after the war. They had to support themselves while they looked for husbands or helped their parents out. In rare situations, a steady income was necessary for those women who had chosen an independent life.

In my mother’s case, she lived at home with Menka and Rose, contributing to the household expenses. She met my father on a blind date. She waited for him while he went off to the Korean War, where he served in the artillery. Upon his return, they got married. A few years later, they moved first to a garden apartment in Bergenfield, New Jersey, a working-class suburb, where I arrived, and then to the split-level house in Paramus, a mostly lower-middle-class borough with some pockets of modest affluence, about twenty-five miles northwest of Manhattan.

My father never graduated from college. For years I believed him when he said that he had gotten his bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York. After he lost his job, my mother told me that he had been lying. When I confronted him with what she had said, he turned away. I didn’t pursue it. He looked too wounded by the exposure of his lie. I could not bear his wounded look.

* * *

Money was a good part of the reason that my father gave up music for real estate. On the most basic level, he could not make enough money with his music to support a family. But there were emotional forces driving him, too. Though not Hollywood-obsessed like my mother, who sat sobbing through the Academy Awards every year, my father had his own movie playing in his head. Leopold had had some success as a realtor before he died. If my father felt that he deserved to fail as punishment for his father’s death, he was also driven to follow in Leopold’s professional footsteps as yet another sacrifice to his father’s memory.

My father worked at Albatross Realty. After a few years, fortune smiled on him, and they elevated my father to vice president. For the first time, my parents were flying high. We undertook a series of, for my parents, extravagant vacations, each one more exotic than the last: Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and, the ultimate destination, the Virgin Islands.

My brother cured his stutter on that last trip. Slipping out of the hotel room he and I were sharing, which was adjacent to my parents’ room, he walked out onto the terrace joining the two. He returned with what would become a permanent grin. He had seen my parents having sex, and in some sort of reverse trauma he never stuttered again. He simply stopped talking altogether, except for talking when he had to, and making snide remarks, through that strange rictus of a grin.

My father, in the manner of a man of leisure, took up a hobby: photography. Suddenly he went from being someone worked on by the world to someone recording the world. His creative gifts had given him, beneath the insecure withdrawal, a touch of aristocratic confidence. There was the way he handled those sharp turns at high speeds with such aplomb when racing slot cars, for example. In that glorious season of his life, his innate gifts, which had been buried under all his flaws and misfortunes, bloomed.

Our house itself took on, in my eyes, magical dimensions. Not long before, I had seen Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet on public television, and though I had trouble understanding the play, I had absorbed the movie’s enchanted chiaroscuro through my pores. Now the new atmosphere of happiness and fulfillment transformed the split-level into a castle, with long corridors, stone walls, battlements, and a keep, out of which came, late at night, my parents’ laughter.

Meanwhile, my father’s newfound contentment was imposing a tariff on his fate. In hindsight I can see the catastrophe coming.

Nature had given my father beautiful hands. The sight of them enriched your impression of him. They were the hands of a born pianist—he had perfect pitch—and playing piano was where he found all the pleasure in his life.

One Saturday afternoon when I was about twelve, sitting in the kitchen having lunch, I heard my father scream. It was an anguished, horrified, animal shriek. Trying to put up a shelf in the garage, my father had hit his thumb with the hammer. The nail was shattered and his thumb swelled to the size of a pinecone. I heard the scream, and I saw him run up the stairs to my mother in the living room with a look of astonished helplessness on his face.

The second portent occurred a few summers later. I wasn’t home at the time. My father was mowing the lawn. At one point, he noticed that the lawn mower was no longer cutting the grass evenly. Tilting it over, he saw that a wad of leaves had gotten caught in the blades and he decided to remove it. Incredibly, he did not turn the lawn mower off first. He thought that if he was careful, he could catch hold of the edge of the clump of leaves that was sticking out of the blades and tug on that to get the whole thing out. The lawn mower lopped off the tip of one of his fingers.

When I got home, he was sitting in the living room, in one of the gold-embroidered, blue velour armchairs, his hand bound with surgical tape. The mound of bandages wrapped around his finger made it look like an animal’s paw. It was weeks before he was able to play piano again.

* * *

“Money,” wrote the Dutch philosopher Spinoza in the seventeenth century, “has presented us with an abstract of everything.” Money embodies the power to purchase and to own. It is the consummate medium for the human desire to possess: territory, objects, even other human beings. Money puts everything within reach. The problem then becomes how to acquire money.

Since the essence of being human is to desire, and money is the universal medium of desire, then every exertion, or enervation, of intellect, will, and emotion eventually becomes an economic event. That is why the back of the dollar bill has a picture of an all-seeing eye suspended over a pyramid. All creation submits to the dynamic of money.

Freud famously believed that the way you have sex is a revelation of your personality. I would amend that. Your relationship to money is also a revelation of your personality. The way you handle money and the way you have sex are mutually illuminating.

Yet I have often wondered if money is a natural feature of human existence. Would there be the equivalent of money in any world, in any universe, the way there must be the equivalent of oxygen anywhere there is human life? Or is money as the abstract of everything an artificial abomination that human beings must contend with, weary generation after weary, beleaguered, exasperated, fed-up, infuriated generation?

Albatross had my father on what is known as a draw. I don’t know anything more about the arrangement than that. I don’t know if all the brokers were on a draw, or if my father had any choice in the matter of how he was paid. All I know is that the company paid my father a certain amount of money every week against his future commissions. The idea was that he would pay back the money that had been advanced to him out of the commissions he received from the deals he closed.

This worked for a while. Like the Platonic form of Beauty, from which is derived our instances of mundane, earthly beauty—a painting, a full moon, a face—my father’s and therefore my parents’ happiness derived from the Draw. The Draw recalled a novel I read as a boy about a magical “wild-ass’s skin,” which allows its owner to fulfill his wildest dreams but shrinks after each dream is fulfilled. In my father’s case, the more he depended on the Draw to live, the more it shrank his life.

* * *

I once felt the power of the Draw the way Moses felt God’s power in the heat of the Burning Bush. In the mid-1960s, when I was about seven or eight, I emerged from my bedroom in the middle of the night, intending to make my way to the pink bathroom to relieve myself of excess water.

The castle was still. Not a sound was there in the long, stony corridor. I heard nothing except, now and then, the sound of clinking coins emanating from the bedrooom of my brother, the younger prince. He liked to remove his ducats from the slots in their folders at night to count them. Outside, the courtyards, the stables, and the woods beyond were silent. The servants were abed.

My bedroom, that of the eldest prince and heir to the throne, lay at the end of the corridor. The stronghold where my king and queen slumbered was situated next to mine. I slipped out of my chamber. As I was turning around after gently closing the door, I nearly bumped into the king as he was exiting the royal boudoir.

His face was red and sweaty. His features were slightly distended. Stretched across his face was a smile that I had never seen on him before. It was a frank and uncomplicated expression of pleasure, rooted so deeply and confidently inside him that when he saw me, he didn’t flinch or draw back in surprise.

He was so absorbed in the cause of his smile that he encompassed me in its warmth. He glanced at me while still smiling, but smiled right past me, as if our near collision was part of the flow of his current happiness.

I looked down and saw that the boxer shorts he always wore to bed had something like an outstretched hand beneath their front. He turned away, still smiling to himself, and proceeded to the pink bathroom. My mother must have been using the one in their bedroom. I returned to my room tense and bewildered.

* * *

The Draw brought out my father’s and mother’s natural endowments. Our little band convened and played more often. Monroe and Lola composed more and more songs. The Draw hovered over Monroe and Lola while they made love.

The Draw resembled the force of love itself: binding, expanding, rooting. It projected the illusion of permanence onto a crumbling, uncertain world. It was like Athena casting an aura over her favorite warriors on the Trojan plain.

The Draw was exactly that: a drawing-out. It extracted the excellent and rare qualities of my parents that circumstance and serendipity had all but obliterated. Of course their own human weaknesses contributed to the obstruction of their gifts. Yet I have always wondered if my father’s infirm will and lack of confidence would have had a different outcome if money had not been the means by which they produced their effect. My father’s guilt and self-doubt would have obstructed him in any universe. But whatever forces of character and circumstance determined my father’s relationship to money, money was the decisive factor in everything that came to pass. In a universe—or a society—where money was not so gravely consequential, would his personality have destroyed his life?

Perhaps Monroe could not be blamed for taking, and taking, and taking the Draw, even as his commissions dried up. To finally be what he wanted to be was the most normal circumstance in the world. If the Draw was what made it possible for him to be happy and to support his family, then, in his eyes, the Draw was a natural condition. Lola, who for the first time began to accept the place where she found herself in life, even if it was composing songs and performing them at home, embraced her husband’s faith in the future.

* * *

Kindness, theoretically speaking, begets kindness. The next time you are standing behind your overloaded cart on line at the supermarket, invite the quiet, thoughtful young man waiting behind you with a bottle of Coke and a Snickers bar in his hands to go ahead of you. When he bursts into the movie theater where you are sitting with your wife and children, shooting people in their seats with a semiautomatic rifle and seven handguns, he might recognize you and allow you and your family to live. People often remember the nice things that you do.

Alas, cruelty responding to cruelty is more of a certainty than the reciprocity of kindness. The push on the playground or in the bar provokes a counterpush. Onerous terms of surrender at the conclusion of a war guarantee a second war. A slight, once embedded in someone’s mind, metastasizes into rage. The pendulum of getting what you give has a bright side, too. Daring all might lay, after an excruciating period of suspense, the world at your doorstep.

Energy spent is always energy exchanged. The action in the Garden of Eden, even if it was lying around all day looking at the sky, had to have a reaction. God would have eventually cursed Adam and Eve and their descendants with the punishment of laboring in the sweat of their brow even if Eve had not disobeyed Him. You have to pay up sooner or later.

As it turned out, waiting for Adam or Eve to defy Him and display their autonomy as persons was a stroke of genius. God was saying: for this good thing, autonomy, you have to trade another good thing, autonomy in a different degree. Thus was born the eternal law of something given, something taken; something taken, something given.

My father proceeded as if that law did not exist. In this, he was one of two things. Either he was a child, a blind, clueless, Eden-person, unaware that, as a poet once wrote, “in dreams begin responsibility”; obligations accrue; debts must be paid. Or he was—absurd as it sounds given his mildness, defenselessness, and incompetence in practical matters—a descendant of Lucifer, the angel who rebelled against any trade-off or exchange that would diminish what a person truly was.

* * *

In the 1970s, the interest rate for borrowing money reached the highest levels in American history. With no money available to people who needed to take out loans to buy a house, the real estate market collapsed.

Of course the wealthy could still purchase a house without a mortgage loan. Through the blessing of inherited wealth, for example, something similar to the Draw continued its elevating influence, though the exchange of energy in the case of inherited wealth—something given, something taken; something taken, something given—is obscure.

But for everyone else, the great uplifting that had powered America after the Second World War, thanks in part to the GI Bill, which had enabled my parents to buy their house in the New Jersey suburbs, came to a halt.

Interest rates went up. Male erections came down. Women who depended on men for pleasure and procreation went unfulfilled. The fate of tens of millions of men and women hung in the balance as President Nixon tried to persuade his chairman of the Fed to substantially lower interest rates.

The president’s efforts were unsuccessful. By the mid-1970s, the birth rate in America was the lowest it had been in modern times. The tools Nixon put in the hands of his Watergate “plumbers” were like the president’s own desperate attempt to keep himself at full mast. When I see footage of the American flag being taken down over the American embassy in Saigon in 1975, I think of Nixon, Watergate, birth rates, and my father.

The commissions stopped coming, yet my father took, and took, and took the Draw. Either he felt life owed it to him, or he felt that he owed it to himself and to his family, obligations and/or consequences be damned. One way or another, he had unconsciously devised a catastrophic revenge on the little boy who lost so much without lifting a finger to stop it. Within a few years, Monroe accumulated fifty thousand dollars in debt, which is equivalent to about three hundred thousand dollars now. When he couldn’t pay it back, and after a couple of years of lowering, raising, and then again lowering the amount of the Draw, Albatross fired him.

* * *

Monroe returned from work on the day he was fired from Albatross and sat down to dinner at our kitchen table as usual. I was about sixteen. Because my mother was quiet, we all ate in silence. My father must have given her the news earlier in the day, or in private, upon arriving home. Nathan, who rarely spoke by that point, usually sat in such a slouching way, darting his eyes around, that you felt he was communicating something, if not actually taking part in the conversation. But that night his posture and expressions were neutral.

We finished dinner, still without speaking. My father was eating the grapefruit my mother had wordlessly served him for dessert when, all of a sudden, he began to weep.

I had seen him cry before, every year in fact, on the Jewish High Holy Days, as he stood in the synagogue to say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for Leopold. Throughout the ten-day span of that holiday, he wept intermittently. He would run downstairs every couple of hours, even in the middle of the night, to check on the flickering Yahrzeit candle he had set up on the kitchen counter in memory of Leopold, to see if the flame had been extinguished. It was like making sure his beloved Rex was still tied to the tree. His annual spells of weeping made me shrink even more from him. But I associated his displays of emotion with the pathos of the holiday, so I was not overpowered by them.

That night, however, I sat aghast as I watched the tears roll down his cheeks. Grapefruit was my father’s favorite dessert. He relished eating it. Now his face was wet from the grapefruit’s juices and from his tears.

My mother went to him and put her hands on his shoulders. Monny, she said, using his nickname, everything will be all right. Then, as if feeling that she had fulfilled her function or satisfied an obligation, or perhaps experiencing the same startlement and revulsion that were sweeping over me and my brother, she stormed upstairs in a hint of the histrionics that she would fall victim to, and indulge in, for the next few weeks.

* * *

Most real estate companies that have their employees on a draw rather than a salary are prepared to eat their losses. For whatever reason, Albatross came after my father for the money.

Maybe it was too large a sum for them to simply write off. Maybe my father had overstepped a boundary and they were getting even. Maybe he had crossed someone there. (The seductive man with the corrugated hair!) It could have been that Albatross itself was endangered and they were attempting every recourse they could to stay afloat. But for whatever reason, Albatross pursued my father with implacable force. Unable themselves to collect the money my father owed, or to get it through the efforts of a court officer once they had obtained judgment against him, they passed the debt onto the sheriff’s office in Bergen County, New Jersey.

The doorbell rang one afternoon a few months after my father’s breakdown at the dinner table. A stranger was standing there when I opened it.

Now it was not Bill the Mechanic, with his rheumy green eyes, who smelled pleasantly of grease and motor oil, and who flirted with my mother in a high, squeaky voice. It was not Larry the Butcher, who also smelled of his work, of the fresh meat he delivered in crisp brown paper, and who was too shy to flirt with my flirtatious mother. Instead he spoke to her with a knowing, leering smile that was the way he concealed his shyness when dealing with female customers.

Nor was it my favorite presence at the door, Dr. Etra, who came to the house whenever I had one of my annual attacks of flu or bronchitis. His iodine smell meant that effective protection had arrived. Dr. Etra was short and rotund with a beefy face. He looked like Fiorello La Guardia in the pictures I had seen of him. When pneumonia raised my temperature to just over 105 degrees, and I felt that I was hovering outside my body, and that my skin had the sensitivity of an open wound, he stood a few feet from my bed, speaking in low tones to my distraught mother and father. Passing in and out of consciousness, I clung to the sight of his solid stockiness, his baggy black pants flooding his oversize black shoes. The heat had made my mind grow hands, beautiful hands with strong fingers, and with the new prehensile warmth growing out of my throbbing brain, I hung on to Dr. Etra’s bulk and pulled myself away from the oblivion that was enticing me toward it.

These figures were reliable people in our suburban life. They were creations of economic relationships that grew into half-business, half-personal relationships. They were both the guardians and the fruit of our stability. The stranger standing before me that sunny spring afternoon in a long white raincoat was an abrupt break with everyday reality. He was the product of a broken economic relationship with the world.

He slowly took his hand out of the pocket of his raincoat and showed me his badge, which identified him as a Bergen County sheriff.

* * *

Like many American boys, especially at that time, I had absorbed into my conception of myself the idea that, on some level, I was a law-enforcement officer. Deep down, I felt that I was the typical cop or detective of American popular culture. At war with his superiors, he had to break the departmental rules in order to enforce the law.

The cops of movies and TV, and also the sheriffs of Westerns, were really ingenious versions of American adolescents who, in their minds, were at war with their mothers and fathers and had to break the family rules in order to enforce the laws of romance, gratification, adventure, Musketeerian solidarity, and so forth. At the age of sixteen, I wanted to belong to society; I wanted to belong to everything, everywhere; I just wanted to belong in my own intractable way—all the more intractable for my discomfort about being, deep down, open to everything and everyone. On the small or big screen, the appearance of a badge signified to me that the person brandishing it had, so to speak, invented his own conformity. The real badge being flashed at the top of our front steps had the opposite effect on me. It was a denial of my actual life.

The sheriff processed me with hard, hooded eyes. With a smirk, he brushed past me into the castle without telling me why he was there or waiting for me to invite him in.

I started to tremble. An encounter with power has an effect similar to a car accident. All at once, it wakes you up from the daily slumber of familiarity and routine, and it causes you to feel that you are inhabiting a dream.

To change the terms of your existence: that is real power. What the sheriff’s badge and his twinkling, apathetic eyes meant was that everything that mattered to me was of no importance out in the world.

He went past me along our short foyer into the kitchen. He walked with a slow gait, taking his time, glancing into the living room to his right and then up the three steps down the hall toward the bedrooms on his left.

These places had grown to giant dimensions for me. His scrutiny made them look puny. The castle, with its turrets, and long hallways, and winding staircases, and mysterious bedchambers, dissolved into a white split-level house on a dead-end street that was separated from a car dealership and hissing Route 17 by a decaying gray stockade fence.

As for the sheriff, well, he was no Wyatt Earp or Matt Dillon—they were real lawmen. This man had a drinker’s veined, bulbous nose and pink splotches on his pasty white skin. Not to mention that smirk. Real sheriffs, that is to say, Hollywood sheriffs, never smirk.

The stranger walked right past me. He moved along the foyer with a brutish intimacy. Years later I hated it whenever a cop who had pulled me over for a traffic infraction adopted a sudden intimacy with me and called me by my first name. School-yard bullies use your first name to mock you. The sudden intimacy of the police aims to obliterate the familiar emotions that you depend on to structure your life. It is a threatening intimacy meant to demolish the sympathetic bond on which genuine intimacy is based. “Tell me, Lee, why were you going eighty miles an hour in a forty-miles-an-hour zone?”

I followed the sheriff as if he was the new master of the house. In fact, new terms of ownership were what his deliberately unhurried gait implied. Our home was his if that was the course the law decided to take. It was obvious that my father did not have the money to repay Albatross. So the firm demanded his assets. These, aside from his shoes and clothes, consisted of the split-level house that my parents had bought in the first flush of parenthood and economic success, as they moved out of their rented apartment in Bergenfield. The court had sent the sheriff to serve my father notice that it had a legal right to seize the house on behalf of Albatross.

The sheriff entered the kitchen and continued to look around. He took in all our major appliances. This included our refrigerator, onto which my mother, a walking compendium of treacly sentiment, had stuck one of her favorite inspirational tidbits: “I once had no food to eat / Then I met a man who had no teeth / I once had no shoes to wear / Then I met a man who had no feet.”

The cop had preserved his smirk, in much the same way that Nathan had preserved his grin. Seeing him turn his smirking face toward the poem whose vulgar sentiment made me wilt whenever I saw it was too much for me. I could not endure the shame I felt.

I decided to attack him and, if necessary, to kill him.

Everything happened in a blur. He turned toward me and began to speak. A crow made its raucous sound somewhere. Out of the kitchen window I could see a dog bounding in freedom across the backyard, his leash flying behind him. I grabbed the sheriff by the lapels of his raincoat. He punched me in the face. I pushed him into the refrigerator and gripped his neck with my hands. Wrapping my fingers around his neck, I began to press on his throat. “Say you’re sorry, you little prick,” I said. He tried to knee me in the groin, but I placed my leg alongside him and flipped him over it. He hit the ground with a thud. “That poem has a lot to teach us about life,” he said, as he struggled to raise himself off the floor. I thought for a minute. I replied, “The creation of art has nothing to do with the inability of the artist to fufill an obligation unworthy of his exceptional gift.” I then drove this important point home by walking behind him and kicking him in his balls just as he was getting on all fours to lift himself off the ground. He shot forward, his head slamming into our aging dishwasher. His lifeless body slumped to the floor. Now I had to figure out how to dispose of the corpse. I knew Nathan needed money to buy some more rare coins. If I gave him twenty dollars, he would probably help, though I wasn’t sure. You could never tell what mood Nathan was in.

As all this action was unfolding deep inside my head, the sheriff asked me where my father was. I was still trembling. I don’t know, I said.

Where is your mother, he said softly.

Out, I said. Food shopping.

He regarded me with his hard, hooded eyes.

Where is your father, he said.

He’s out, I said.

Where, he said. He didn’t ask questions. He made statements that demanded answers. But he did it in a soft voice.

He’s out working, I said. He teaches. He teaches piano. He’s out giving a piano lesson.

The sheriff took a white envelope out of his raincoat pocket. He now spoke in such a low tone that I thought I heard kindness in his voice. I began to imagine that another form of protection had arrived, that he was there to help us keep our collapsing household from falling completely apart. All that TV and movie watching had instilled in me a demented romanticism. His low and gentle tone meant only that he had attained the apex of his power in his little visit to our home. He did not have to go to any effort to destroy us.

What’s your name, he said. His smirk had given way to a travesty of a smile.

Lee, I said.

I’d like you to do me a small favor, Lee. I have to hand this envelope to your father myself. That’s the law. He gave a faint shrug, as if to say, “The law is as much a pain in the ass for me as it is for you.” Then he continued to smile into my eyes, as if to say, “I bet you wish that was true.”

But, he said, if he’s not here, I can’t give it to him, Lee. Do you understand that.

Yes, I said. I do.

Good boy, he said. You just tell your father that I was here, okay.

I nodded. Okay, I said.

He smiled one last time, walked back down the foyer without waiting for me to lead him out, and left the house.

My mother came home carrying bags of groceries. I helped her put them away. After that I told her about the sheriff. She gave me a pained look, to show me how much my father was making her suffer. Then she rubbed her hand up and down my upper arm. Don’t worry, she said. Everything is going to be all right. Yeah, yeah, she sighed to herself so that I would hear her. Her eyes began to moisten.

These days she wanted only to win me to her side, partly to hurt my father, and partly because, even in her wildest furies, she still felt a sentimental attachment to me.

* * *

That autumn, a few months after the sheriff’s visit, I was playing basketball in our driveway. My friends and I had put up a backboard and hoop. Though I could not dribble the ball to save my life, I was a fair shot. I spent hours shooting hoops well into the night, when I turned on the naked bulb that years before someone, I had no idea who, had wired to the front of the garage.

I had just come back from school. My mother wasn’t home. Because my father’s income from his piano lessons and the few performing gigs he and his trio were able to get was not enough to support us, she had returned to the elementary schools as a substitute teacher.

She usually had three- or four-day stints at a time. The Paramus Board of Education would call her early in the morning to tell her that she was needed and to ask if she was available. She always was, unless she was sick as a dog, which was not an infrequent occurrence for either of my parents. They were both chronically depressed and often down with a cold or the flu. On the mornings when my mother got the call informing her that there was an opening, she roused herself from the heavy, underwater slumber of those depressed people who sleep too much rather than too little, shuffled downstairs, and, gradually, after one cup of coffee that was mostly milk, and a bowl of cereal, went off to work.

I returned from school and had my customary snack of cherry pie that my mother had picked up for me at the supermarket, and a glass of Coke. Then I retrieved the basketball from the garage. I started to throw the ball toward the net. Imagining that I was playing with friends, I shouted out their names as I pretended that I was passing them the ball and they were passing it back to me.


Copyright © 2017 by Lee Siegel