October 20, 2007--Saturday Story: Mt. Lebanon--The End (Part Four)

In Part Three Lloyd finally made his way over to where his parents were at eternal rest. Still pressed for time, he planned to make two stops—first briefly with his mother and then an even shorter one with his father. He had not been to see them for quite some time and promised he would return soon. Perhaps realizing she might not see him for a while, the gaps between visits had been attenuating, his mother wasted no time in telling him how disappointed she was in her Number One Son. For at least two reasons: first, as the first-born of a first-born it was his responsibility to take the lead in maintaining a close extended family—just as her parents had and as she had attempted to do—and that he was failing in this; and second, cutting him deeper, she chastised him for being unfair to the family, perhaps even maligning them, in the stories he was beginning to publish that drew upon their personal history. His first instinct, as always, was not to upset her by telling half-truths about his work; but he decided it was about time that he represented himself more honestly, and so he stood up for the “truth” of what he was trying to do in his writing. Perhaps to provide him with more material, perhaps to correct his version of the family record, she began to tell him her version of her life with his father, including the rapturous way in which they first met. This sparked the prurient interest of our hero and he ask to hear more, even if this meant that he would miss his meeting back in the city. So in Part Four, Lloyd’s mother picks up where she left off and . . . “This may sound strange to you, but it was his tallness and all that it represented that at first attracted me to him. Almost everyone I knew were immigrants. They were small people. So literally short. I was five-feet-two and few were taller than me. Including the boys. This was because of the physical hardship of living and working in the shtetl. The work was endless and difficult and we always feared for our lives—when would the next pogrom descend upon us? And the food we ate was all made of starch—potatoes and turnips and bread, endlessly bread and potatoes. We had meat maybe once a week, and it was more bone than meat. Without good food, and living in such fear made everyone sickly and runted. Even the boys who were born there and came here on the boats at the same time as we did reminded me of those I remembered back in Poland. At most my parents hoped I would marry one of them, someone from an orthodox family who would become a good provider. But I hated the looks and, forgive me, smell of decay on these little Polish Jewish boys. I was hoping for more from America. I was not naïve, I knew that as someone who wanted to become an elementary school teacher at that time I would experience discrimination, that most of the teachers and principals were Irish and would try to keep me and others like me from ever getting assigned to one of their schools. I knew that but still I persisted and became a good student to at least give myself a chance. But I was not about to marry, much less fall in love with a tailor or a grocer. I didn’t care about how much of a living they might make. I was never interested in money of things. It was that I didn’t want their hands on me. “So you can only imagine how the sight of your father looked to me. At six-feet he was at that time a giant. The memory of this still makes me quiver. Because I saw from the very first instant, in that hard, long American body, what I was seeking. But there was more. My neighborhood and school friends, the boys, were not just small in size but in spirit as well. They arrived here already defeated. Yes, some of them made it out of the neighborhood and found ways to become successful; but still, no matter how powerful they seemed to the rest of the world, they still lived under a cloud of their own fear and suspicion. Their spirits were blighted, runted too. But not your father’s. He shone in that sunlight not just because he was tall and wet from the effort of changing the tire but because he also carried with him the radiance of optimism and promise that is only born in America. And so I eagerly gave myself to him. But later, but not that much later, I began to pay the price for that embrace and surrender.” I so much wanted to hear about the later, about how he became the man I knew, but hoped she would pause for a moment so I could attempt to envision him as she that day first saw him. And that radiant, optimistic picture of him was just beginning to come into focus in my mind when she continued, now in a voice in a minor key. “Soon after we married, against my parents’ fierce opposition—they said they would never to come to my house of traif to eat--it was clear that we would always have to struggle financially. It is true that his family was comfortable; but after he failed to complete college—more truthfully he was asked to leave because his grades were so poor (he spent more time with his friends and me and his sports than with his books), since they refused to help him get on his feet, they were so disappointed in him, he drifted from one failed business to another. He worked for an uncle in the grocery business, but that no-good uncle ran off with a floozy and all the money; with my brother-in-law Harry, just there next to him, he bought a bar and grill, which for a Jew was a shonda, and it too went bankrupt in less than two years, and he never again ever spoke a word to Harry; and then with another worthless uncle he bought a parking garage in a neighborhood where there were lots of safe places in the street to park. So it too was not much of a business. As I already told you, I never cared about money, and I was earning enough by teaching to help support us; but to him money was the way he measured his manhood. And by that measure he was a failure. “His frustration turned to anger and, it is true, as you witnessed, much of that anger became directed at me.” And some later at me, I thought. “As if it was my fault that he didn’t finish school and go into the family business which after the War was booming. They were now doing heating and ventilation work in all the big office buildings that were going up in the city. His brother Sonny, who did go into the sheet metal business even though I’m not even sure he graduated from high school, became wealthy and moved into a mansion on the water on Long Island. “And that anger intensified when, after failing at everything he tried, and I will grant that he tried very, very hard—he was not lazy—at his sister Madeline’s suggestion, which was the only kind or generous thing she ever did—she was working for Sonny—he was taken in by his brother Sonny, that’s how your father described it—being taken in—and given a job that he hated but desperately needed. You were about to go to college and we couldn’t pay the tuition without Sonny’s agreeing to take him in. “Sonny, you of course know, was your father’s younger brother, and being given a job, being rescued by his baby brother ate away at your father more than all his failures. He was a broken man. Still tall and handsome, a wonderful dresser—that he remained until the day he died—who could put on a good show to the world; but everyone in the family knew the truth. And most important, so did he. It was right before him every hour of every day.” At these last words her voice broke and I could hear her sniffing and clearing her throat. But I wanted her to continue. There was more I needed to hear, more to know. “So why then, Mom, do you object so much to what I’ve been writing?” Again, I couldn’t help myself from relentlessly, in spite of the pain she was obviously feeling, pull these painful recollections back to me and my work. “What you’ve just said, I feel, is not so different from what I’ve been writing.” Her voice was strong again when she responded, “It’s not that you write about us that I object to.” “What is it then?” “That what you write is so imbalanced.” “I don’t follow. Please, tell me what . . .” “Take the washing machine story as an example.” “That’s a good example, but tell me what’s unfair about it. What you object to. Didn’t it happen as I wrote it?” “Yes, some of it was as you described it.” “Didn’t your brother, Uncle Jack, without asking you or your sisters, just one day send each of you a washing machine as a gift?” “Yes.” “And wasn’t Dad upset about that? More accurately, wasn’t he furious?” “Yes, he was.” “And didn’t he want you to send it back?” “Again, that’s true.” “And when you refused to do so he destroyed the machine?” “He did do that but not as you wrote.” “So your problem with my story is that I exaggerated a little to make it a better story? That he didn’t smash the washing machine with a hammer, as I wrote, but that he ‘only’ tore off the hoses and cut the up?” “That’s what he did—he pulled the hoses off and destroyed them.” “So . . . ?” “What you wrote about this, and in many of your other stories, is only a part of the truth.” “But no writer can write about all of it, about everything.” “You’re missing my point. That’s not my problem with you. Remember, I told you how I loved literature as a girl and I always tried to read good books during the rest of my life? So I know what authors want to achieve. But to quote you—you claim that you want to write not just about the literal truth of things but more, the essential truth. Do I have this right? Isn’t this what you’ve been fighting about with your friend Heshy Perlmutter?” “Well, yes. But how do you know about that?” “You’d be surprised what you learn around here. The Perlmutters are just on the other side of this hill. But, please don’t try to distract me. I want to finish my point.” “I’m sorry. I was just curious and . . .” “My point being that you turned your father into a caricature. A stereotypical, frustrated, emasculated Jewish father. There’s very little essential truth in that. Among other things he was hardly Jewish and until his prostate operation, when he was nearly seventy, far from emasculated.” This latter information I was not much interested in gathering right then. He always said the operation turned him into a capon, and I thought it best to just leave it at that. It also contradicted how I had been presenting him in my work, which is what I wanted to keep talking about during the remaining time. My mother continued, “If you want to tell the truth about him, you must be fair, even if by doing so it leads to contradictions and ambiguities. In fact, not even if it leads to this but rather because it must do so if what you report is to be what you’ve called ‘essential.’ In your father’s case, when transforming him into a character, this means knowing all that I’ve told you today, and more, and assimilating it through your imagination into your representation of him. Unless you struggle to do that, which I know is hard work, your stories will have no more value than the clinical notes of the therapists you’ve been seeing.” “You know about that too?” I cried and slipped off the bench where I had remained seated during all of this. Ignoring me, she said, “And do you want to know what was essential for me?” Without waiting for anything back from me, I was on my knees beside her, she answered her own question, “To stay with him, to endure him, and to love and take care of you and your brother. And him. Yes to love as well as take care of him. Regardless of what our life had become, considering how it began. All of which I told you today. Because, in spite of the sadness, and at times the pain, I realized there was nothing else I could imagine for myself that had a higher purpose.” I tumbled forward onto the grass that covered her grave. The grass that I had so lovingly tended as a child. Her voice, as she concluded, had been strong, without any evidence of tears; but I on the other hand sobbed as I embraced her. * * * “Get up. On your feet. What kind of way is this for a grown man to behave?" This familiar voice and its admonishment could only be my father’s. “I always expected that this is what your Uncle Ben would turn you into. Stop sniveling and acting like a girl. If I wanted a daughter I would have had another child.” To be continued . . .