October 27, 2007--Saturday Story: Mt. Lebanon--The End (Part Five)

In Part Four, Lloyd Zazlo’s mother spoke more about her initial attraction to his father—how his very tallness represented to her, an immigrant girl, the promise of America. How he carried himself as if all things were possible and how he radiated an air of optimism, which was so different from what she was used to in the, as she put it, physically and spiritually “runted” boys from Poland, one of whom her parents hoped one day she would marry and who would “provide” for her. But after the intoxication of that first encounter and what at the time would have been considered a highly-charged courtship, after he was asked to leave college and a series of failed attempts in the business world, things with them began to change. This frustration and gathering anger, which he soon deflected to her, transformed what had been blissful into a life of harsh compromise. But she stayed with him for the sake of Lloyd and his brother, and also, she confessed, for his sake—to take care of him too but also, in her way, to love him. Closer to home—this complexity she said to her first born was what was missing in the representation of the family in his writing—this balanced, more nuanced picture, full of contradiction and ambiguity. This subtler truth, in his terms “essential truth,” she pressed on painfully, should be what he sought. Though he attempted to defend himself, still emotionally crushed, he threw himself to the ground and tearfully embraced her grave. Whereupon, in Part Five he hears . . . “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.” At his order, I immediately stopped sniveling. As a young boy he had taught me to “steel myself” by having me lie on my back on the living room carpet while he tickled me, barking at me to stifle myself, to steel myself whenever I could no longer contain my laughter. This basic training had been so effective that I not only lost my tickle-reflex but I would, at the sight of just his raised eyebrow, shut off my tears. “That’s better. Now get up off of that and come over here,” he ordered, “I have a few things I’ve been wanting to get off my chest.” At that I hoisted myself up from the ground. “And stand up straight.” Standing rigidly at attention had also been part of the drill. “You look like a shlump.” Instinctively, as in the past, I thrust my shoulders back until they hurt and moved around to the other side of where he was interred. Since this was undoubtedly not going to be pleasant I thought to get as far away from my mother as possible. To shield her, as I had tried to in the past, from my father’s anger—she had had quite enough of that. “I heard what just went on over there.” It wasn’t clear to me what he was referring to. Sensing that, he said, “What your mother said.” “Well she was upset with me for not having come to visit for such a long time. I told her I had been busy and not feeling . . .” “Maybe you think you can get away with those kind of lies with her. Why don’t you try telling the truth for a change? Say it, you’re a grown man, say that you have your own life now and don’t want to be bothered any more with the rest of us.” “No, no, that’s not it. I do want to be bothered. I mean, I do want to come here. It means a lot to me to stay involved with you. All of you. I mean . . .” “Stay ‘involved’? What does that mean?” he was mocking me. “You need new material for your scribbling? We didn’t supply enough already? You seem to keep yourself quite busy with what you have.” It was as if he could read my mind. But I also did feel secure and comforted by visiting them. Even in their current state. Just by being there. Coming to Mt. Lebanon had been such a significant part of my life. “It’s more than that. Yes, it’s true, what Mom just told me is something I think I might one day want to write about. To at least try to. Actually, some of what she said about my work, though I have to think about it some more, could be helpful to me. She said that I didn’t . . .” “I heard what she said.” He pronounced each word separately as if they were intended to be distinct, crushing body blows. “And I heard what you didn’t say.” I managed to say, “I don’t think I’m following you.” “What you didn’t say to defend yourself. To stand up for yourself, for your work.” This startled me—that maybe, could this be, that he regarded my writing as something worth standing up for, something worthy of defense? My father who had nothing but contempt for books and anything he thought to be “literary.” He would spit that word out contemptuously whenever I would on rare occasions in his presence utter it, always proclaiming that books and reading were the source of his brother Ben’s and my weakness, Ben’s and my affliction. “Your mother loved books. As she told you, the day we met she was reading something. I forget just what, but it was how I first saw her. With a book in her hands when I crashed my car into the front of her tenement. What a broken-down place that was. Full of Polocks right off the boat. But what she said to you, even though books and I never got along very well, about your stories, including the one about the washing machine, well she got it wrong.” What he was saying now was beyond amazing to me. That he would be seeing my work to be worth talking about and especially that he would think to disagree with her about a piece of writing. “She said that you caricatured me. That to write a good story you needed to be more truthful, to write about all sides of things. In order to be fair.” Clearly, in spite of being seriously hard of hearing, he had pretty much heard and understood her. “The point often is not to be fair.” Incredulous, I said, “What?” “If you want to tell a good story, and I don’t just mean by that an amusing or entertaining one--a good one is about the truth, which your mother and you agreed was what you were trying to do. But to succeed, to produce something worthwhile that anyone will remember fro more than five minutes, being what she calls ‘fair’ can get in the way.” “I’m not following you.” Maybe hearing him say even one word about writing without being contemptuous was so startling, so unexpected that that in itself short-circuited my ability to follow his words much less comprehend them. “I mean, Mom was right, wasn’t she, that when I turned what actually happened into that story about the washing machine, I failed to include any deep understanding of what caused the father to behave as he did. That I . . .” “You mean ‘the father’ or me?” “Sort of.” “What’s this ‘sort of’ crap?” “Well you know, I fictionalize.” “That sounds to me like one of the words you learned from my brother.” “Can we maybe stop talking about him that way? Books didn’t make him what he was. He was gay, all right? What was the big deal?” I didn’t know where I found the audacity, that’s what had always been required, to confront my father this way. We had had our fights about my plans for the future and my girlfriends—he objected to all of them, the plans and the girls—but about his homosexual, to him, disgrace of a brother? This was something that I never had been able to manage to push myself to talk with him about, but here I was doing just that and thus I kept going. “In fact, books saved him from you and the rest of the Zazlos. Just as they saved me.” I expected him to hit me with a barrage of abuse, but he remained silent. I thought that maybe it was a good time to leave. To escape before he exploded and even get to my meeting before it ended. I had had my say. “You said,” he said softly—his calmness also was a surprise--“that you turn what ‘actually happens’ into stories.” In fact I had and I did. “Well if you have any plans to turn what your mother just told you, claimed actually happened that first day and thereafter,” indeed I planned to do so, “well then you had better know then what actually happened.” For this from him I had plenty of time. “Shoot,” I said and immediately regretted my choice of metaphor. “I won’t dispute that I was taking a shortcut through her neighborhood and that I had a flat tire and she brought me a glass of water. It was as she said--a hot day in June. And though I can’t know what she saw in me I can tell you what I first saw in her.” “I’d very much like to know that. Yes. Please.” “All the girls I had known to that time were mainly the ones who came to our fraternity parties. Girls mostly from good families in the city. From places like Hunter College. They were nice enough but they felt dry to me. I don’t know how else to put it. As if the sap had already been drained from them. And all they were interested in was finding husbands, ones who would get good jobs as engineers or doctors and make enough money to rent a three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan or buy a house with columns up in Westchester or out on Long Island. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was looking for something very different; and I’ll confess that when I first set eyes on your mother, glowing in that sunlight she told you about, I knew in an instant that she was exactly what I hade been waiting for.” I stood there transfixed—to hear my father, the man who trained me not to feel, to have him confess to me how he felt, to talk about how my mother looked in the sunlight, this was not the man I had known, who I had grown up fearing . . . and despising. “She to me seemed like something that had emerged directly from the natural world. She was not of Brooklyn or any city. She was more like a creature who had lived her whole life in a meadow or forest. By saying this I do not mean to diminish her by comparing her to an animal. Rather I want you to understand her power and her superiority. She was a glorious human creature who gave back to the sunlight as much as she received from it. She glowed with a life from within that was unlike anything I had ever seen or imagined. I knew immediately why all the other girls I had been dating had not been right for me. Yes, with some I did have some fun and occasionally one let me touch her; but until I saw your mother sitting on her patched-up stoop with her skirts pulled up above her knees, I hadn’t understood what I had been hoping to find. Someone to lure me out of my comfortable and secure world. To capture my imagination and fulfill my dreams. Just as she told you that in me she saw someone with the potential to take her away from her stifling, old-world existence.” “This is amazing Dad,” I stammered. “I never would have thought of Mom this way. Having this power. I mean, how could I? I was her son and could see her only very differently.” “Stop blathering for a moment, will you. Of course you couldn’t. For a change this is not about you and your fictionalizing. I’m telling you about me. What I experienced and felt and what she meant to me.” “I know. I know. I mean, I don’t know what to say or how to say it. You’re catching me so off guard. You know that . . .” I was soaked through with perspiration though the sun was beginning to set and it had become chilly. “I don’t think you have the faintest inkling about the meaning and importance of what I’m telling you. My point is that your mother and I began with each other from our own versions of the same place, with our own powerful needs to escape. You heard what she sensed in me and now you know what I felt from her. Do you at least have that straight?” I nodded though I was by then totally confused—hadn’t he said that he had heard what she told me and that he disagreed with her story? Wasn’t he now contradicting himself, claiming that they in effect had both been instantly and viscerally attracted to each other? “I am confused. It sounds as if both of your stories are in alignment, that they match. I’m not getting where you disagree.” “This thus far is the easy part. The attraction, the passion, the falling in love, the deciding to be together, to get married. Actually, the getting married part was not just difficult for her—her parents were very orthodox, as she told you, and thought I was worse than a gentile since I did not practice my religion. I hadn’t even been bar mitzvahed. But my parents too were against the wedding. They thought she came from a family of Mokies—shtetl-brained peasants who spent all their time praying in schul for the Messiah to come. So we didn’t get their blessing, rather their approval either. But still we got married. “Again, this is the easy part,” he continued, “and if you were to write about it that too would be easy. It’s what happened next that is difficult and complicated.” “I know. That’s the part that Mom also said I didn’t understand.” “And that’s my point—it’s about this that she and I disagree. Take the washing machine for example. It will . . .” For the first time in my life I interrupted him, “But aren’t you jumping way ahead? You were just beginning to tell me about getting married and the washing machine came so many years later. What happened between . . . ?” “We don’t have all day here. They close this place at sundown and it must be getting close to that time. And it isn’t important to talk about everything. I want to concentrate on a few things that are essential to the story because they illustrate so much. You can get too lost in too many details. Listen to me—I’m telling you how to tell a story!” “Clearly, I’m not that much of an expert yet.” “You made a big deal out of that fucking machine.” Here we go again I thought. I caught myself starting to cringe. “But you were right to do so.” Right? “Yes, because if you had really understood its meaning you would have really achieved something. Your mother told you what she thought was important. And, as she and you would put it, the truth it represented. That’s the way she spoke about it, right? About getting to the truth?” “Yes, the ‘essential’ truth.” “Whatever. No one ever said she didn’t have a better education than me, and a way with words. So let’s leave it at that. But here is where we diverge. She and me. She was right, yes, that I was a failure and . . .” “No you weren’t Dad,” I interrupted for a second time. I did not want to hear this from him. It hurt too much. “You worked so hard and tried so many things and you . . .” “Look, we’re telling the truth here, aren’t we? So we can cut the pretending and the bullshit. I don’t have time for any of that any more. You understand?” Again, I nodded. “That’s what I was, a failure at making money and plenty of other things. I’m sure your mother gave you an earful about that too.” I shook my head but admit that I hoped on another visit she would. “And that did make me bitter. She was right about that. Especially what it felt like to have to go to work for my younger brother. That didn’t help at all though I needed the job and the money. You were about to begin college. She said I felt emasculated. OK, I’ll go along with that.” I was hoping he would go not further with this—just leave it out there as a metaphor. “But she missed entirely two other things. Which to my mind are at the heart of things. From my point of view of course.” He was now mocking himself. He paused to take a deep breath as if this was exhausting him. “First of all, soon after I was thrown out of college, to tell you the truth more because of all the time I was spending with her—neither one of us could get enough of the other, shortly after that happened she went to teacher training school and did very well there. She was always a good student, and all she thought about was becoming an elementary school teacher. I was fine with that but felt after I started making a good living of my own she would quit and take care of the house and have time to be with her sisters and their children. She loved children. But very soon, which didn’t bother me at first, she started to correct me. This began with my grammar. It made her crazy when I mixed up ‘that’ and ‘which,’ or ‘who’ and ‘whom.’ One of her favorites was to criticize me, because that’s what it became—criticism, whenever I used ‘good’ when I should have said ‘well.’ And yes, ‘me’ and ‘I.’ Not that she was wrong about this, mind you, a scholar I wasn’t. At first she did it with a smile, even flirtatiously—it was one of our games: she played the teacher and I was her misbehaving student.” I didn’t want to hear more about this either. “But over time she began to do this more and more in public and also started to correct and contradict almost everything I said. If I pronounced a word wrong, she corrected me. If I forgot who the Secretary of State was she jumped in before I could remember it to give his name. “Under ordinary circumstances this would not have been a major issue, I liked becoming better at things, to improve myself, but the circumstances that I was starting to find myself in were anything but ordinary. My family always had money. So when I was living with them I had what I needed. More than I needed. You heard about my convertible. But when I was on my own and couldn’t make a go of anything, when I couldn’t support my wife and we needed to depend on her salary to live, not only did I become angry and frustrated, you got all of that right, but your mother, out of disappointment in me, turned on me. Yes, that’s what she did—turn on me. There were little signs of that initially, like all the correcting; but as one business venture after another failed, she began to distance herself from me, disassociating herself from me, as if to say ‘I am not part of this, not part of him and what he is becoming, what he has become.’ She held herself aloof and presented herself as the arbiter of competence and, harder to take, all virtue. She became self-righteous in her pursuit of perfection. The grammatical correcting expanded to include passing judgment on everything I said or did, on who I was or had become. On the simplest level, if I hit my thumb with a hammer, I would hear her snickering in the background. This hurt because I prided myself on the fact that I was physically adept. If I wore clothes that didn’t match, she would walk one half-step ahead of me so as to make it look as if she wasn’t with me. And this too cut me because even as I was failing I still took pride in my appearance. I tired to put on a good front, especially to her family since she had so disappointed them when she announced to them that over their objections she was going to marry me. But she took that away from me too. My pride in how I looked. These to you may seem superficial—being corrected, being judged for insignificant things; but I was feeling so wounded by feeling inadequate, from having let her down, by not holding up my end of the bargain, that her stream of judgments broke what little remained of my spirit.” I stood there by his side, wanting to get closer to him, but was not able to do so or say anything that I thought might ease his wounds. “And then there are other things that happened, that even now, when claiming it’s finally time to strip away the pretending, there are things that are difficult for me to bring up, though I remember them well, things that are hard for me tell you. Suffice it to say these were a part of our private life. That’s how we referred to it in my day—our ‘private life.’ “So if you are going to continue to write about me, about us, and I suspect and hope, yes I hope you will (and, let’s be truthful, none of this should be a surprise to you—you are supposed to be a sensitive and perceptive person), what I am telling you must be a part of the story.” I realized that he was right—I did know most of these things, at least I had intuited them from the daily evidence of their lives—but, again he was correct, I had failed to push myself to write about them. They were too painful and, I confess, embarrassing to reveal since everyone who might read what I was writing would know my stories were derived from thinly-disguised incidents from our lives. It was simple--I lacked the courage to do that. “But there is more. Remember I told you that there are two things you have not been sufficiently understanding or considering if you want to get closer to your truth?” He in fact had, and for the moment, when mentioning “truth,” had ceased disparaging me. “Did you ever wonder why we didn’t have children until nearly ten years of marriage?” Indeed I had. “I suspect you thought there was something wrong with us. I mean physically. That I was shooting blanks or your mother was infertile.” Indeed as the first-born I had had those thoughts. I even thought I might have been adopted. “Well, we were both fine. At least in that regard.” About this I wanted to hear more since in this he was talking about me. “Your mother was desperate to begin a family, but I refused. Don’t look so puzzled.” Which I was. “It was, though, the one thing I could do to hit back at her for what she had been doing to demean and humble me.” “And?” “But there you are. Evidence that something happened, didn’t it? To produce you.” “Yes?” The wind began to whip through the huddled tombstones. He had stopped speaking and its sound was all there was. The light that remained lanced obliquely across the swollen graves. The few other visitors had long since departed. I assumed he had said all he intended. It would be up to me to struggle to imagine what his refusal to participate in having a child had been like for my mother. And, more profoundly, to understand more about his motives. “We did still have a private life.” I was relieved that he had more to say. “As I told you, it too was no longer what it had been like at first. But it must have been one night after I had had too much to drink at some cousin’s wedding that I failed to protect myself, and a month later your mother told me she was expecting. So I couldn’t make that work either! “There was nothing to do about it. She was thrilled and so there would be no discussion about ending the pregnancy. If I had even implied such a thing, she would undoubtedly have left me for good, as she had at times threatened and gone back to live with her parents. Maybe that would have been a good idea. Who knows. “But in those days, no matter the circumstances, no one ever divorced. The most any couple did, if they had the room, was move into separate bedrooms. We didn’t have an extra room, especially with you on the way; but we bought separate beds and placed a two-foot wide night table between them. You remember that? Back in our East Flatbush apartment?” Indeed I had. In fact, one day when home alone with the croup I had rummaged through the drawer of that table and among the tissues and envelopes and pads I found an illicit treasure—a flaming red box of Trojans. It suggested to me that indeed, though separated by more than an arm’s distance, they still had a ‘private life.’ “But, Dad . . .” “I’m getting to that. Back to you, your favorite subject. But first there is a little more I have to say. The months raced by and soon I had to rush your mother to the hospital and eighteen hours later you were born. You looked like a skinned rabbit you were so long and skinny. The doctor said you were the longest baby he had ever delivered. And you were ugly--this is about the truth, right?—so ugly that if they hadn’t kept you and your mother in the hospital for ten days, which is what they did back then, and you hadn’t gained some weight during that time, I was planning to bring you home at night so none of the neighbors would see you.” I had heard that version of the story before—it was part of the family lore—but what I had just heard about him not wanting children provided another explanation to the plan to sneak me out of the hospital after dark. “And to my own surprise, though I did not want any children for the reasons I already told you about, I began to be interested in you. Even more than that--to be drawn to you. To pick you up out of you bassinette and hold you. Why should I hold back now—it is also true that I began to feel love for you, in spite of myself, and to want to be responsible for you. I had no interest in the feedings and the diaper changing, that I will acknowledge, but I did want to be a father. A real father. You remember when you were about five how I used to ask you ‘Why are you such a lucky boy?’ and trained you to answer, ‘Because I have a wonderful father.’” I did remember that. “I wanted to be that wonderful father. I couldn’t wait for you to become old enough to understand what I meant when I called you ‘son.’” His voice broke. I had never heard that from him before or anything like this. After a moment, again fully composed, he added, growling in a more familiar manner, “But she wouldn’t let me. When your mother sensed my interest, which wasn’t hard to do, in small ways she withdrew you from me. She made it clear that you were her child. All I had done as far as she was concerned was perform a biological service.” “How did she . . . ?” “By lavishing so much attention on you, by making you so totally dependent on her, slowly the need for me diminished. Yes, we still did things, you and I, but they were simple things like roller skating together or playing catch in the driveway or occasionally shopping for a new pair of pants or a jacket.” “I do remember them Dad, and I really . . .” “I’m happy to know that, but I wanted to do more. I came to want to be a father who on the weekends did more than throw a ball back and forth with his son. This is where my much deeper frustration came from. Yes, I wanted to be a better provider. What man didn’t? Yes, I wanted to be respected in the family. Her family. But more than anything else I wanted to be a good father to you and to your brother when he came along.” Again he paused to gather himself and then said, “I’m almost done. But here’s the worst of it.” I could hear him breathing deeply. “As a result of all the attention and devotion and love your mother gave to you, I am ashamed to admit it even now, I became jealous of you. I began to compete with you. And at times this jealousy and competition took strange forms. If you ever wondered why I gave you such a hard time about your grades, even when they were excellent, it was less to motivate you to do better than to pull you down. I suppose down to where I thought I was.” I could not stand there any longer listening to this and so I exploded, “This is pure bullshit. In effect you’re saying because you and Mom couldn’t make it work, because you couldn’t figure out how to do better, or minimally talk to each other about what had been happening between you that was eating away at you, about what you had originally found in each other—wonderful, loving things—since you couldn’t do any of that, you now look back on what happened and claim it was all my fault? This is totally outrageous. You now say that if I hadn’t been born, things would have gotten better between you. If you had been able to be a real father to me, you now contend, you would have found a purpose for your life. Bullshit like that. Well, I’m not buying any of it. I’m not accepting your version of things to be the truth,” I spat “truth” out as if now mocking myself, “In fact, I think you’re the real fictionalizer in the family. And if you ask me whose version of reality I believe—yours or Mom’s, since they are irreconcilable--I have an easy answer for you. Which you don’t want to hear. And beside that . . .” “Again,” he cut me off, but gently, “you’re not understanding. You’re missing the point.” “And what might that be?” I snapped back at him. “It was all my fault. Everything. I made stupid business choices. I went into things that anyone with his eyes only half-open would have realized were doomed to fail. When your mother showed the first signs of concern, I did nothing but ignore her. I cut her off as much as she eventually pulled back from me. And when I did that, in spite of her efforts to talk with me about what I was experiencing and feeling, when I as a result turned passively aggressive toward her, her concern turned into disappointment and then that hardened into contempt.” He let me take that in and then said, “Which I now confess I deserved. “I thought, feeling sorry for myself, trying to justify how inexcusably I was behaving toward her, turning my disappointment in myself into anger directed at her, and eventually you—the washing machine being a case in point—I wondered, in moments of clarity and honesty, about which I of course said nothing: Whatever happened to that girl in the sunlight?" Once again that day, in the setting sun, I found myself sobbing at the graveside of one of my parents. “It breaks my heart, but I know.” It took all my strength, all my pride to keep from again hurling myself to the ground. For what purpose, to do what, after all this time, I still do not know. And as I struggled with that and to steel myself, using the well-honed techniques he had drummed into me, he said, “If you can manage to compose yourself,” he was back to his old self again, “let me now bring this closer to home.” With tears still streaming, exhausted, I thought—can there be more? “I want to bring this back to you. And we’re no longer talking about your mother and me and what you, in your writing, have been attempting to do while reflecting on our lives. Though you could certainly do better at that.” Of course! “There is something of greater importance that you need to pay attention too. Immediately.” “And what is that?” I truly couldn’t imagine. “I’m talking now about Rona. About you and Rona.” This caught me so off guard that I almost fainted. But I quickly realized that, thankfully, this would have to be brief since they would be closing the gates to Mt. Lebanon is fewer than fifteen minutes. More than anything else, I didn’t want to get locked in there for the night. I had heard stories that this had happened to some visitors. And who knows what might have happened to them. Hopefully, to be concluded next Saturday . . .