October 6, 2007--Saturday Story: Mt. Lebanon--The End (Part Two)

In Part One, of the last chapter of this seemingly endless “fictional memoir,” Lloyd made one of his infrequent visits to the Zazlo and Malone cemetery plots. As was his habit, he planned a brief initial stop at Mt. Hebron to see his Aunt Madeline and then would drive over for a longer visit at Mt. Lebanon to spend time with his mother’s family. But for those of you who have met Madeline on previous Saturdays, you would not be surprised to learn that she kept him much longer than he anticipated. Or that she shocked, confused, and upset him with a story about her marriage to Harry, her third husband, who resided restlessly just to her left. She shocked him because Lloyd had always thought of Harry as her “lover”—that is how Madeline always represented him after he committed suicide—but now he heard a very different kind of story. Which confused him, because the story she told cast their life together in a very different light than previously recounted—she spoke of how by playing upon Harry’s needs and insecurities she was able to control and dominate him and in this way knowingly took possession of his very soul. And Lloyd was upset because Madeline insisted that he think about the story metaphorically, not her word, as if it were also about him and Rona, being clear that he do so by comparing Rona to Harry and himself to her. So, puzzled, confused, and upset, in Part Two we find Lloyd on route to . . . With much to think about but also mindful of the time—I had slightly under an hour to get to the Malones and then back to the city for my meeting—I careened out of Mt. Hebron through the same set of gates through which I had entered. I needed to put Madeline out of my thoughts and concentrate on the driving. I had to get onto the Van Wyck Expressway as if heading toward JFK Airport; and since there were a number of tricky moves I needed to negotiate if I was to avoid making a wrong turn and thereby wind up heading in the opposite direction, toward the Triborough Bridge. I had blundered thus a number of times in the past and did not want to find myself once again lost in Harlem. At Main Street, just up the road from Mt. Hebron and right down the road from Queens College where I had had, shall I say, a circumscribed career, I made a careful left turn left and passed over the now traffic-clogged Long Island Expressway. I made sure to drive west, as if back toward the city, paralleling the LIE on the service road so as to avoid the snarl and to give me a number of opportunities to connect with the Van Wyck. From the LIE itself there was just one opportunity to make that connection; and if there was a stream of 14-wheelers hurtling along, it would be easy to get swept past that poorly-marked exit. It was therefore fortunate that I was forced to creep along. It gave me an opportunity to think about what Madeline had said, the meaning or lessons she claimed were embedded in her story, as well as help assure that I wouldn’t miss my turn-off. I did understand that she was claiming that there were similarities in my relationship to Rona and hers to Harry. That much I got, but there was no truth whatsoever to her implication that there was anything equivalent to the sadistic way in which she took control of Harry’s very soul, as she had put it, and the manner in which I related to Rona. Why, as her mentor at work, her lover, her friend, and now husband I was devoted to help her become strong and independent. Even of me! Wasn’t that what she had sensed in me from the very beginning? That I . . . . “Shit,” I sputtered, so distracted by replaying Madeline’s prattling I missed the exit and had to race further west, down to Queens Boulevard before I could make a version of a U turn back up and over the LIE. Thankfully traffic had thinned out. I determined I would force myself to wait until later to think more about Madeline. Now, I had to concentrate on my driving or I wouldn’t have time enough time for the Malones and still enough to make my meeting. Since by missing the connection to the Van Wyck, and as a result having to head back east as if to Mt. Hebron, I was able to catch the turn south onto the Grand Central Parkway. In some ways, though longer, this was the preferred route to my mother’s cemetery since the GCP linked directly to the old Interboro Parkway, recently renamed the Jackie Robinson, which I needed to take in order to thread my way to Mt. Lebanon. After being careful not to nick the walls of the JR’s tight S-shaped underpass that cut west beneath the six lanes of Queens Boulevard. (To get around in Queens as if a native, by using just highways, one often has to go east first before heading west and then east to again go west—just what I had inadvertently done.) Thus when I emerged back into blazing daylight—the sun was setting and igniting my streaky windshield--I was less than a quarter of a mile from the Mt. Lebanon exit, Forest Parkway, a sharp turn that required one to slow quickly from 50 to 25 miles per hour. A necessary tricky feat if one was to avoid winding up in Mt. Lebanon in a very different but permanent manner. No wonder they named the Interboro after Jackie—to negotiate it required all of his deftness. I managed to make all the necessary maneuvers and glided quickly to the traffic light at Myrtle Avenue, then turned left, and in less than a hundred yards was at the entrance to Mt. Lebanon, a world apart from Mt. Hebron’s. The latter was classic and austere, the very picture that Our-Crowd-aspiring German-Jewish families who bought plots there wished in death to proclaim about themselves; while the Malones’ final resting place was more evocative of the ghettos of Eastern Europe, from which all of the cemetery’s residents had earlier escaped. At the gate was a lineup of rabbis, or men dressed as such, who for a dollar or two would walk over with you to whomever you were visiting and help you mutter a transliterated version of Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Others, similarly garbed in their literally Kosher clothing that forbade the combining of linen and wool, these men seemingly from another era, lunged at you as you poked your car through the huddled crowd toward the parking lot, thrusting pushkes at you, small, round cardboard canisters with slots on top into which they pleaded with you to deposit spare nickels or dimes. All, they claimed, to help fund a yeshiva in Jerusalem or a home for orphans in Beersheba. Though ever suspicious about where the money would actually wind up, still hearing my mother’s words—“If they need it that badly for themselves that they would do this, give to them Lloyd, give”—and so I always rummaged for spare change and plopped it into a random selection of pushkes as my mother would have rapturously done. After emptying my pockets as a gift to her sainted memory, at no more than five miles per hour, I crept along, seeking the Malones, up the familiar lanes that were so narrow that it was impossible for two cars to proceed in opposite directions without one having to drive up onto the line of graves closest to the road, which would be more a desecration than a simple shonda. Halfway up the hill upon which the Malones were buried I passed the grave of the Metropolitan Opera star Richard Tucker (né Ruvn Ticker). An unadorned granite monolith on an expansive site very different than the squashed-together Hebrew-etched stones that looked more like they were cast from cement, many in the shape of tree trunks that had been brutally hacked from the scorched logs of a forest fire that had raged in Hell. On his stone, in elegantly incised English characters, were his name, his birth and death dates, and a few musical notes that I suspected were more likely from one of his legendary operatic roles, perhaps Radames from Aida, than from his earlier life as a cantor at the Brooklyn Jewish Center. Still further along, stuffed between the precariously tipping grave markers for Lipskys and Weinsteins and Abromovitzes was another simple stone, this one to denote the final resting place of another well known landsman, Nathan Handwerker (né Handwerker—Hard Worker), made famous and wealthy as the founder of Coney Island’s Nathan’s Famous. As a child, visiting the rapidly filling-up Malone plot, it pleased me to note how we were moving up in this still-alien land as the Richard Tuckers and Nathan Handworkers took up residence, joining our family in the democratic leveling of death. Then there was that final, dreaded right turn, so twisted and compressed that one was required to negotiate it through a series of careful back-and-forth adjustments and then, when they were completed, to swing carefully onto the narrowest car path in the cemetery, because that’s what it was--more evocative of the cart paths in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement than anything resembling a road suited to the vehicles of the 20th century. How appropriate for the misnamed Malones, and how different from the virtual boulevards of the Zazlo’s fancy Mt. Hebron. My mother’s family, when purchasing their family plot, chose to buy the one right between two families from their native Tulowice, Poland from whence they all had fled so that at the end, as during their interrupted life spanning two continents, two worlds, they would be reunited forever. The Zazlo’s in contrast sought to be as disassociated as cemetery real estate would allow from anything that might remind them of the Old Country. In this then, uniquely for both families, where contrasts abounded, both had done equally well: Their lives, lived in vivid competition as on occasion they eyed each other across the aisles that separated the two families at weddings and funerals, ended in a tie. They both got what they were ultimately seeking from their two Americas. * * * It had become so late. I had only 45 minutes left for the Malones. Thus I needed to make some strategic choices about how I would spend my now precious time. Though I had much to report to Uncle Eli, who had given me my first adult summer job working in his meat processing plant in the South Bronx, a place I had labeled the Tongue Factory since one of my most-adult assignments there was to pump more pickling juice into each tongue to be cured than the law allowed. Though I was not adult-enough to be told, when that law came to take him away in handcuffs for committing various felonies, just what those felonies were that were being committed while I was in his employ and engaged, under his direction, in intoxicating misdemeanors of my own. I think his, as opposed to my trespasses, involved not withholding the required withholding taxes much less forwarding same to the government, which was we know the ultimate withdrawer and holder. I thought perhaps now that I was more than a mere legal adult, in the privacy of my visit, and considering his current condition, that he would tell me the truth about this most heinous, and to me still most exciting, family secret. But it would have to wait for another time. I knew he could wait, and suspected I could as well. And, pressed for time, I chose not to visit Eli’s son, my Cousin Chuck who at just 70 proceeded to drop dead on a treadmill while over-exercising at the glittering, gated Polo Club in Florida, the first of the stratum of cousins who, very much including me, until his sudden passing were by no means ready to begin our own dying off. I needed to hear directly from him why he precipitated this on all of us who formed that family layer of relations who now had to live the rest of our lives exposed to and unprotected from the final reaping. And further complicating this existential terror from which he ripped the veil of comforting self-deception, he also predeceased two older cousins who, if things were to unfold actuarially should have by rights preceded him along the trail to dusty death. His stepping out of turn, and this should not be entirely surprising since he was among us by far the most transgressive, let me be honest, forced me to think I might very well be the next to go, though there were still, with his departure, three who should, by age, be in line ahead of me. But now, thanks to him, things were that disrupted and out of joint. What could he say to me about this, to enlighten and perhaps soothe me? This too would have to wait. But this much I knew--in fear and trembling, as a result of his timing, his untimeliness, I now understood I had maybe less time to wait to visit with him, seeking answers, and thus made a mental note for myself to be sure that during my next excursion to Mt. Lebanon, which should be sooner than the last one, I would see him first and then walk over to find out what I could learn from his father. So, checking my watch again, I decided to skip to the head of the line and begin with my mother’s parents, my grandparents, Frimet and Leubus. Just as she always did. As with Madeline, but in a very different tone, before I could get to within even ten yards of them, I could hear my grandma gently calling out to me, “Tatele, you look so thin. Have you been eating?” This was the way she greeted me on my visits there; and, though she died of stomach cancer when I was very young, I have memories of her worrying about how thin I was and how she saw it to be her responsibility to make sure I and her other little ones had the nourishment and love we required to survive in what she saw to be this strange and dangerous country. When we visited, she was always standing by the stove in her cramped kitchen, beckoning me, in halting English, “Sit. Sit, Lloydele, I have some soup for you. But watch. It’s very hot. You should be careful not to burn yourself.” And if the gods were ever to make soup, on a good day, it might be almost as delicious and restorative as hers. I always felt if she had only managed to live until I was an adolescent, I would have consumed enough of that miraculous soup to inoculate me from all the ills and humiliations that befell me in various classrooms and schoolyards. But that was not to be. “No grandma. I’m fine. Just a little tired.” I was beside their headstone now and couldn’t help myself from kneeling there to tear at the weeds that had invaded the ivy since my last visit. “But are you sleeping ziskeit? You know how important that is.” “Not enough, that’s true. I’ve had so much on my mind.” I tried to catch myself before that confession slipped out because the last thing I wanted was to upset her. Thus far, I heard nothing from my grandfather. “Well, you’re all grown up now. So tall and handsome. Just like your tate. But you need your rest. And to eat.” “I’ll try to do better. I promise, the next time I’m here you’ll see the difference.” I admit I was attempting to cut the visit with them short. “I know you’re busy [how did she know?] but have you heard from Eric? He lives where? I forget.” She never forgot to ask about those who would now be here great-great nieces and nephews. “In Utah, grandma, in Salt Lake City.” He is Chuck’s son. “Is that a place for Jews?” I doubted that she knew that it was the center of Mormon life. Only that any place not in Brooklyn or in certain towns on Long Island were not to her a natural or safe habitat for Jewish people. “Things have changed. There are now many places in America that are good for Jews. Even in Utah. And, yes, I do hear from him occasionally. He is married, has a good job, and is very happy.” “You don’t see him?” “Not as much as I would like. But Salt Lake is so far away and he doesn’t come to New York very often.” “What kind of way is this to live? So far apart that you can’t visit. What kind of life?” “That’s the way it is now. No one from the family lives in New York any more. Just Rona and me. Some are in California, others in Florida and Connecticut. And some I’m not even sure about. Things are very different than they were.” “I know they are different, but this I do not like. When Leubus and I, your grandfather,” I though I heard a grunt, “when we left Poland we came to the Lower Eastside where we had people. Then when we saved a little money, we moved to Brooklyn and after a while bought a house. You remember that house? Many of your aunts and uncles and cousins lived there. And we took in anyone who needed a place to live or just for the night. Your Uncle Jac, before he was married, when he was traveling as a salesman, cousins from Europe would sleep in his bed. And when he was back, and went to the office in the day, other cousins who worked nights also slept in his bed. That was the way we lived. We had very little but just enough to take care of each other. And we survived while others were being killed.” I waited in silence for her to continue. “So now there is Ruthie in California and Murray in Connecticut and Nina in Florida and now you tell me again Eric is where? “Utah, grandma, Utah. Out near California.” I rushed to add, “And as I said, he is happy. Very happy now.” “You say ‘now,’ but not before?” I didn’t want to get into the details. I knew that my mother in the past would have, but would not want me. She wouldn’t want me to upset her beloved mother who had sacrificed so much for two generations of the family. It was time for her to rest. But in spite of what I thought my mother might have urged, I believed in telling at least some of the truth, and said, “Yes, Eric did have problems. His life was not easy growing up. You know that. I’m sure my mother told you.” “Yes, tatele, she did,” she said in a tired voice. “He was and is a remarkable person—brilliant, loving, and sensitive—but he was also fragile, easily hurt, as so many like him are; and it took him time to recover, to heal from all the pressures and scrutiny he felt were placed upon him. And they were. I was a witness to some of this and regret to this day that I did not try hard enough to intervene. To help him.” I was whispering, half hoping she wouldn’t hear my confession; but of course she did. “This is not all your burden,” she said. I could almost feel her touching me. “You did what your mother and your grandfather and I would have expected of you. But now, even though you are so many miles apart, you must still stay close to him and the others. Even though, as you say, he is well and happy. Which is good. Which is what he deserves. But he still needs you. He needs to know now that, though sadly his father is here with us, that you have him always in your heart. Close to you. This is the way you must live now. Though you are no longer all together in one place, as we were, and feel safe, and I do understand what you always tell me about how things are different, nothing. Do not be fooled. Nothing has changed. All you have is your life and each other. That’s it. But it was enough then. And it still is.” I thought I heard my grandpa say, “With this I agree.” * * * To be continued . . .