March 18, 2013--Chapter 31: Mt. Lebanon--The End (Part One)

The best way to get there is to take the Long Island Expressway, heading east from the city.  Just after passing the old Worlds Fair grounds, look for an exit that comes up quickly on your right.  You will need to make a sharp turn at Exit 22E, College Point Boulevard, and in less than a hundred yards will have to hit the breaks or you will shoot right by the entrance to Mt. Hebron Cemetery, the site of the Zazlo family plot. 

Aunt Madeline is the only Zazlo I ever have any interest in visiting so I always schedule a quick stop there before proceeding to Mt. Lebanon Cemetery, where my parents and all the Malones are now interred.   This particular time I hoped seeing Madeline would be quick because I knew I needed to be with the Malones for at least an hour since I hadn’t been there for quite some time and there was much to catch up about.  But with Madeline one never ever knows.  She always has a lot on her mind and, if you’ve been following this chronicle even casually, you know she has never felt shy about speaking it.

I was still ten yards from the gravesite when I already heard her familiar bark, “So you’ve been too busy to visit me?  Some favorite nephew you turned out to be.”  From that I knew I was in for it and that this was not going to be quick; and so rather than remain standing by her headstone as I usually did, I sat on the bench my father had insisted be placed there even though it took up a precious burial plot—real estate at Mt. Hebron had always been in short supply, especially after Madeline lost her third husband and insisted he join the other two, reserving a narrow place for herself squeezed between Murray and her “lover,” third-husband Morty. 

But in spite of the personal holocaust that wiped out her husbands and thus took up two more graves than she was entitled to, my father still prevailed, asserting that a family as proudly assimilated in America as the Zazlos could afford to give up a plot for a bench.  Little did he know at the time that there would be no shortage of plots--my mother, after he died, ignored his lifelong plan to be buried to the immediate right of his father--the last expression of primogeniture for him: the first-born of a first-born—my mother, ignoring this ultimate wish, arranged to have him buried with the Malones, as close to her parents as possible, in Mt. Lebanon.  She couldn’t stand the idea that she would have to endure the Zazlos, all talking at the same time at the top of their lungs, for eternity.

“It’s just that I’ve been very busy lately,” I hemmed and hawed, “And you know we sold our car.  And . . .”   I was trying to make excuses for myself, but Madeline would have none of it.

“With all that money I left you you’re too cheap to rent a car so you can come see me?  You think this is a picnic I’m having?  My brother over there, your Uncle Sonny, is still treating me like I’m a who-er or something.  He should talk.  At least I married the men I fucked.  Pardon my French.  I wish I could say the same about him.  But what good did that do me?  They’re all good-for-nothings, my husbands.  All they do is lie around here all day pretending they don’t know me.  Even my wonderful Morty.  Now that he can’t put his hands on me anymore he has no need for me.  And I thought,” she spat, “that he was a mensch.”

“I liked Uncle Morty,” I said, hoping that might calm her and we could move on.  I had an appointment back in the city in less than two hours.

“I’m not interested in talking about Morty. I’m finished with him.”  Good, I thought, we’re making progress.  “But I am interested in talking about you.”  I moaned.  “Since I don’t like very much what I’m hearing.”

“What, Aunt Madeline?”

“Don’t what me.  I know all the tricks.  Yours included.  My dear nephew, I have a bone to pick with you.”  I didn’t say anything.  “It’s about that wonderful wife of yours.”

“You mean Rona?” I asked with a quiver of fear.  That she wanted to pick a bone with me about Rona was unexpected and put me on my guard.  Usually, if she had something on her mind, it was about money.  Especially what we were doing with what she left us.  To her, unless we put all of it in laddered T Bills, we were being irresponsible.

“Who else?  You have another one?  I’m not talking about that bag-of-bones Lydia.  The one with no chest.  Of course I mean my Rona.” 

From the first it had been a love affair.  At my father’s funeral service, at the most emotional of moments, as usual unable to censor herself, directed at Rona’s mother, but loud enough for all to hear, she had broadcast a non sequitur, “Don’t tell me she’s your daughter.  She’s my daughter”; and though this caused some nervous tittering, everyone knew Madeline was being more than half serious. 

“Well, she’s OK,” I managed to say, “Actually, that’s one of the things I wanted to tell you about,” I tried to fill the void with chatter, “That she’s doing very well indeed.  She got promoted at the University,” Rona had remained at NYU after I left to work at the Ford Foundation, “And she . . .”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” she interrupted, “But I’m talking now about the disturbing things I’m hearing.  You know I still have my sources.”

“I know that, but as I said, we’re doing well.”  And though I wanted to distract her and get back on the road as quickly as possible, I still was curious to know what was on her mind and so, unable to restrain myself, I asked, “So, what are you hearing?”

“You may think that things are going well, my nephew, but I hear otherwise.”

To protect myself from what I knew was about to be an onslaught, I slumped back against the pine tree that was just behind my father’s bench and folded my arms across my chest.  Then, against my better judgment, sighed and said, “OK, let me have it.”  To complete my pose of studied indifference, I looked up at the sky and took in the drifting clouds to give the further impression that I was only half-heartedly listening.   A jet hovered overhead as it circled on its final approach to nearby LaGuardia.

“Don’t get smart with me Mr. Fancy Columbia.  Let me have it,” she mocked my insouciance, “I told your father if he let you go there you’d graduate thinking you were a big shot.  And did he listen to me?  Of course not.”  I could almost feel her eyes boring through me.  “None of them ever did.  But look at how right I was.  Just look at you sitting there all smug and puffed up.  And remember, I was the only one to die with a pot to pee in.

“But enough of that,” she continued, “What’s past is past.  That’s what we all say now.  Look around you here.  What do you see?  A bunch of ghosts.  That’s what.  What good would it do us to keep fighting?  So therefore let me tell you a little story,” unexpectedly her tone softened.  Perhaps, I thought, she realized she had gone too far with the invectives.  But for whatever reason, I preferred this gentler, rarely-seen side of my eccentric aunt. 

“It’s about me and Morty, but if you listen carefully you’ll see it’s also about you and Rona.  But to see the connection, you will have to think about yourself as if you were me.”  I was confused, but intrigued, and leaned forward, unsticking myself from the sappy tree trunk so I could hear better.

“He was very devoted to me.  He was always concerned about my well-being.  He couldn’t do enough for me.  And I don’t mean just in bed.”  She laughed.  “But that too.”  I recalled how much she enjoyed telling me how they would spend days lying together naked in their bed.  Reading, listening to the radio, and frequently making love.  “Fucking,” as she would starkly put it.  “What was most special was when he would do something for me that was unnecessary.  Did you hear that?  Unnecessary.  Yes, when I had a chest cold he was wonderful—bringing me my medicines, getting me juice and tea, massaging my back—with no funny business--even taking me to the doctor to get a shot.  I know I was lucky that I had a man that would do these things. 

“That nogoodnik Sonny wouldn’t lift a finger even when his wife had a stroke.  But Morty was different.  On his way home from work he would stop at Ebingers Bakery to buy me my favorite, a pecan coffee cake.  He would sneak it into the apartment and hide it from me, though I of course knew what he was up to.  And when at night after I got up to go to the bathroom, when I came back to the bed, I would find a slice on a dish on my night table with a glass of hot water.  For my constipation.  He was also the first to notice when I got my hair cut, not that I had much hair, from dying it so much I was almost bald like my brothers.  He would tell me how beautiful I looked even though I knew that there was no haircut in the world that would make me look anything but ugly.”

“No Aunt Madeline, you always . . .”

“Thank you, but never interrupt when I’m telling the truth.  It is important that everything comes out.  In my current circumstances, what’s to hide?”  Actually, with her, very little had ever been left unsaid.  “My point is,” she continued, “the point of the story is not how Morty behaved but how I did.”

“I’m confused, Aunt Madeline, are you saying that . . .”

“Again, Lloyd, you need to be patient.  Since I still have most of my marbles in a minute you will understand.”  She paused to take a deep breath, “And what did I do to return all of his caring and love?  I disapproved of everything he did.  Especially of those things about which he was sweetest and most giving.  I know this must sound strange to you.”  It did.  “And even cruel.”  It did.  “And it was that.  Cruel, I mean.”

I was in fact stunned and couldn’t compose myself quickly enough to suppress my reaction.  “You purposely did that to him?  Why?  If he was so wonderful why did you . . . ?”

“Once more, I told you to just be quiet and listen.”  I did as I was instructed but got up from the bench and stood right by her grave, peering down at the ivy that covered it as if to look directly at her.  
“I already told you,” she continued, “about the coffee cake.  How nice he was to bring it home and put it out for me to discover.  But when I would get back into bed I barely acknowledged it.  Or him.  Yes, after a while I did eat it and did thank him, but not in the way he was hoping.  And needing.  I knew he depended on my approval, my acknowledgement, to make him feel good about himself.  To be a man.  He was very insecure and needed this from me.  So what did I do?  Knowing this about him, I intentionally did the opposite.  I withheld from him what he most craved.   You know how bad I was?”  I didn’t respond.  “I will tell you.  Almost every day I looked for things about him to disapprove of.  And I became so good at it that I didn’t even have to do this actively.  Just a certain critical look on my face or an extra second of ignoring him before responding to something he said was all it took.  Actually, it was these kinds of disapproval that worked to my best advantage.”

She paused to let this sink in or because she needed to catch her breath.  Then she said, “I can sense this is shocking you.  No, don’t say anything more.  There is no need for you to say another word.  But you must hear one more thing.  Why I perversely did this to the most beloved of my husbands.  That is a fair question.  Which I will now answer for you.”  I bent over to get closer to her because I did need to know. 

“I did this so I could take total control of him.  I was a very spoiled person, my mother’s darling, and wanted to have everything just the way I wanted it.  By taking advantage of his insecurities I could have my way with him.  And stop smirking please because I am not talking about the things I’m sure you’re imagining.  Though yes I had power over him in that way too.  But more important to me was to have him in my emotional control so I could ignore him when it suited me and get him to play any role I wanted when I wanted anything else from him.”

For a few moments there was silence.  The wind had picked up and scattered pine needles among the gravestones.  But then she resumed, and in a hoarse whisper said, “In this way I took possession of his soul; and though this worked to what I thought to be my advantage.  It also killed him.  Take a look at the date on his footstone.”

I turned to where Harry was and realized they had been married for only three years.  She had made short work of him.

“Now go away,” Aunt Madeline said; and, in her more-familiar roar of a voice, added, “And don’t come back here until you understand.”

*   *   *

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 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 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 chance 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 Rona’s mentor at work, her lover, her friend, and now husband I was certain that I was devoted to helping 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 that 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 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 beginning to set 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 more permanent manner.  No wonder they named the Interboro after Jackie—to negotiate it required all 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”—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 Gehenna, our Jewish version of 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 Beckinsteins 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 modern world.   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 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--that I needed to make some strategic choices about how I would spend my now precious time.  Though I had much to report to Uncle Morris, 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 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 Morris’’s son, my Cousin Chuck who at just 70 died on a treadmill while over-exercising at the glittering, gated Rancho Rio 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. 

Checking my watch again, I decided to skip to the head of the line and begin with my mother’s parents, my grandparents, Frieda (né Frimet) and Louis (né 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 as a child 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 had befallen 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 double 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 Alan?  He lives where?  I forget.”  She never forgot to ask about those who would now be her great and great-great grandchildren and her great-great nieces and nephews.

“In Oregon, grandma, in Portland.”  He is Chuck’s son.

“Is that a place for Jews?”

I doubted that she knew that she knew much about Portland.  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 Oregon.  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 Portland 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 Louis 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 Carl, 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 Rose in California and Mark in Connecticut and Lorelei in Florida and now you tell me again Alan is where?

“Oregon, grandma.  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 to.  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, Alan 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.  But do not be fooled.  Nothing has changed.  All you have is your life and each other.  That is it.  It was enough then.  And it still is.”

I thought I heard my grandpa softly say, “With this I agree.”

*    *    *

I had just enough time to see my mother and for a quick stop with my father.  To get to her, I needed to step carefully over the ivy-crusted grave of my Uncle Herman which was pressed up close, as he had been in life, to his in-laws, my grandparents; next I had to pass by where his wife, my Aunt Estelle was situated (ignoring the thistle that was beginning to invade the closely cropped yew that encased the three-sided border of their linked plots—I would tear that out next time if I remembered to bring my leather gardening and cemetery gloves); and then I needed to turn quickly past Uncle Carl and Aunt Linda, to whom my mother was so close during their life time and now.

A bit out of breath, and, checking my watch again, I made the excuses I had rehearsed: “Sorry I haven’t been here in a couple of months.  I’ve been very busy at work and to tell you the truth I haven’t been feeling that well and . . .”

“I knew it.  I knew it,” she wailed.  “You’re always holding things back from me.  If you never tell me the truth I’ll always be worrying about you.  I’ll always think something is wrong.  Didn’t we agree you wouldn’t . . .?”

“Yes, we did.  But I didn’t want to worry you.  It wasn’t anything serious.  Just a stomach virus.”

“You’re telling me the truth now?  Not like when you had your operations?  Then you also said it was just a ‘nervous stomach.’  And look what happened.  You almost died.  And almost killed me in the process I was so worried.  It’s not a natural thing for a child to go before his parents.  I don’t know what I would have done.  Tow things--died of grief or killed myself.”

“You did fine, Ma.  I was stupid.  I ignored the symptoms and got myself in big trouble.  But here I am.  Feeling like my old self.  Better than new!”  I tried to put the best face on my situation, which had in fact been almost deadly.  She never knew the half of it.  We strategically decided to tell her the minimum, just that I needed to go to the hospital for some tests and intravenous medication, coldly calculating the value her concern and support would provide against how much of a burden it would be to manage that concern—it was enough to have to deal with my own needs; but Rona and I knew there would eventually be a reckoning, which I was now facing. 

What she never knew was that the infection in my intestines had ruptured the wall of my colon and went on to infiltrate my bladder.  It had gotten so serious that, at the risk of being indelicate, I wound up pissing through my rectum and farting and defecating through my penis.  The surgeon, who I eventually found my way to, said that the infection was so severe and the damage so extensive that it was unlikely I would survive.  But after three operations and five hospitalizations here I was at Mt. Lebanon, on my feet.  The plot reserved for me remained miraculously unoccupied.

“Rona told me that you almost committed suicide.”  Until then I hadn’t realized that my mother knew about this.  “That you were in Europe and so afraid that you wrote a note that she found and that she confronted you with.  Learning from it for the first time how sick you were.  You lied to her too, didn’t you?”

It was true, but I had nothing credible to say back to her that would make it better, make it go away.  I was, two years later, still so tortured by guilt and now remorse that all I could whisper was, “I know what I put you through.  Both of you, who have been so wonderful to me.  I wish I could . . .”

“Forget about me.  I was old and almost dead and had seen many terrible things.  But how could you have done that to her?  My wonderful Rona.”

Since for that I had no acceptable answer I tried to shift the subject.  “I did stop to see Grandma and Grandpa.”  Knowing she would like to hear this, I told her how I had brought them news about the family--just as she used to do—including a good report about one of her favorites—Alan.

“I’m so happy you did that.”  I remembered how she always smiled when I visited in Florida and would fill her in about those cousins with whom I kept in touch.  Not as many as she would like—she would press me to do better and I would have to resist lecturing her about how times were different and how most of us had scattered to form families and lives of our own.  But she would wave that off and remind me, as her mother just had, about how all we had was each other.  “But what have you heard about Rose’s children?  And her grandchildren?”

“You know, Ma, we’ve talked about this in the past, though I loved all our time with Rose when we were growing up, in recent years we haven’t been that close.”  I chose not to tell her that it had been at least ten years since I had seen or spoken with her because this would not sound to her like anything resembling being “close”—much less “that close.”  To my mother, this would seem to be exactly what it was—complete estrangement.  But since I did hear secondhand reports about her from her brother, Mark, with whom I had maintained a truly close relationship, I tried to pass them off as if I had obtained them more directly from Rose herself.  “I can tell you that Sandi, her daughter [“I know who she is thank you.”] is a very good businesswoman and with her father [“Peter.”], yes him, they started a medical aide service. [“This they did more than five years ago”—I knew this was not working].  Well, yes, it’s true, that was some time ago but . . .”

“This is enough of a report from you.  With my parents you can maybe get away with this kind of fibbing.  But not with me.  I know too much and you too well.  You are not doing what I expect of you.  The first-born of a first-born of a first-born.”  Was she mocking me?  “As such, it is your responsibility to maintain the family.  I love you very much, this you know, but about this I am disappointed.”

She had never spoken this directly to me much less expressed disappointment that was so profound.  At most she had corrected me for minor breaches of etiquette, for not opening the door for one of my aunts, or, rarer, gently rebuked me for neglecting to speak proportionately to all of the elderly relatives at a Passover Seder.  But never had there been anything like this.  And as a consequence, feeling, frankly, unfairly chastised—what after all was so terrible about the little dissembling I had done: hadn’t I as her number-one Son, out of concern for her, done this to avoid upsetting her?—but nonetheless shaken by her rebuke, I slumped onto the nearby bench. 

“And there is something else even more important I need to tell you.”  Something else that is more important and to tell me, not discuss?  What could be more important than criticizing me for being a failure as the first-born of a first-born?  Thankfully seated, feeling faint, I grabbed at the bench to keep from toppling to the ground.

“I hear what you’ve been saying, I mean writing about your father and me.”  I had no idea where this was headed but began to tremble.  “You make him sound like such an ogre.”  I had indeed published a story, loosely derived from reality, about the rage he felt, the impotence he experienced when her brother, who was financially the most successful of our relatives, had bought his sisters washing machines so they would no longer have to clean our underwear by hand on a washboard in the kitchen sink.  Perhaps I had exaggerated the extent of his anger and frustration, she might be right about that, but I thought that doing so had made for a better story.  And I had changed all the names.

“But you know, Ma, this is what I do now.  I always wanted to write and now that I finally have the time I did my best when I wrote, in a disguised way, about the Malones and the Zazlos.  I tried always to do this with respect and love.”   As these words spilled out of me I felt nausea in addition to the dizziness, caused, I was certain, by the fact that I was again trying to get away with a half-truth.  In much of my more personal fiction I attempted to do the opposite—I had tried to cut through the family pieties of closeness and sacrifice to expose the raw nerve of competition and even jealousy that defined and dominated so much of their lives.  Yes I knew that some of this family mythologizing was to protect us, the children, from the harsh realities of discrimination and the deprivations of post-war life.  But still, there had been so much schmaltzy writing, glop really, published about the proverbial Jewish family, especially the all-sacrificing Jewish Mother and her tirelessly laboring husband--all for the sake of their children’s future—and though some of these clichés, like all clichés, were derived from truth, some minimal truth, in many real situations, in many actual families, mine included, I came to understand that other things were churning, and being obscured, in the sentimental haze.  I had no illusions that anything I had produced, or ever would produce, would be equal to that of any of the great writers who spoke about the need to cut through these deceptions to get to the deeper truth, no matter how noble some of the roots; but through the persona or alter ego I had invented, I hoped he, Lloyd Zazlo, would add at least, perhaps a footnote to what we had learned from Stephen Daedulus or, much closer to my heart, Nathan Zuckerman.

While sitting there on that cemetery bench spinning and, confessedly, enjoying these soaring thoughts, I almost missed hearing my mother when she resumed:  “You did not know him as I did.  Of course not.  How could you?”  It was as if she were whispering to herself and I was unexpectedly there to overhear her.  “I didn’t get pregnant until eight years after we were married.  So how old were you when you feel you really began to know and understand him?  Ten?  Twelve at the earliest?  By then he was at least forty and much, too much had happened.  And changed him.”  Though not expecting this change of direction or tone, I felt certain what she was now recounting was going to be a good source for my fictionalizing work and so I leaned closer, moving as imperceptibly as I could, to make sure I did not miss a word.  If only, I thought, I had brought my notebook.

“I know this will surprise you, maybe shock you since you think of me as an old and shriveled woman, but the first time I saw him he was not wearing a shirt.  I will never forget that glimpse of him.  And if I believed in love at first sight, which at the time I did—I was just seventeen--I knew that I loved him.”  I wasn’t shocked at all—I had seen pictures of him taken at about that time and he was handsome in an Errol Flynn sort of way; and with his perfect pencil-moustache, and as best as one could tell from the grainy images, almost as sexy. 

“We didn’t live near each other, actually in many ways we came from different worlds.  His father had money and they had an elegant house on Bedford Avenue in one of the best parts of Brooklyn.  It was made of brick. This was before my parents had saved enough money to buy their own house, which was really more a place for the entire family and friends to live and sleep for a few nights as they passed through New York from Europe on their way to getting settled elsewhere.  And they were all born in America.   While we were immigrants.  Even I, the youngest, was born in Poland and arrived in this country at Ellis Island. 

“The Zazlos’ house had a backyard and a garden in front with flowers.  We had a third-floor walkup on Pacific Street in Brownsville.  A railroad flat.  The only doll I had was made from clothespins.  I didn’t have a bed of my own until I was sixteen.  But we did have hot water.  And the house was full of love.  So how then could we meet, your father and I, and how come I saw him that first time without a shirt?”  I was wondering that.  “He had this wonderful car.  It was his, not his father’s.  A gleaming black convertible that I think he must have waxed every day.  It had a white canvas top and whitewall tires.  He kept them spotless.  I can still see that car.  My parents never had one. 

“On that day, it was a hot day—two days before my birthday in June--he was on his way to visit a friend from college.  A fraternity brother.  Victor Herbert was his name.  Like the composer.  That’s why I remember it.  Victor had two first names—‘Victor’ and ‘Herbert.’  My Papa said only gentiles had two first names.  Your father had gentile friends.  I didn’t know anyone else who did.  He was a student at Brooklyn Polytechnic, studying to be an engineer.  So he could go into the Zazlo family business with his father and uncle.  It was a good business.  They installed skylights and ventilators in apartment houses all over Brooklyn, and even in Manhattan.  They had money.  But I already told you that.”

“I did know that.  I’m sorry I never met dad’s father.  He died so young.”

“Yes, he did.  At only forty-eight.  He was a very gentle man.  He wrote poetry, if you can imagine a Zazlo writing poetry, special poems for every birthday and anniversary.  Including when someone died.  Your father’s mother, on the other hand, was a cigarette-smoking, card-playing, hard-drinking woman who could curse like a man.  Actually, she was more like a man than a woman.  Which was another issue in the Zazlo family.”  She paused for a moment.  “You of course know about your Uncle Ben?”

“I do.  I mean I did.  I liked him.  I think I was the only one who did.   Every else made fun of him.  Because of what he was.  But he was the only member of that family, until Madeline much later, who paid attention to me.  He gave me books to read.  It’s because of him, I always felt, that I came to love books and literature.  And Dad always thought that because of that I’d ‘turn out’ just like him.  That I’d become, he would spit out the epithet, effeminate!”  Now I paused to recall the pain of that.  “But you were telling me . . .”   I wanted to bring her back to that day when she met my father.  That hot day when he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“Yes, I was telling you about that day.  He was driving through my neighborhood to visit his friend Victor who lived with his family in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.  It had three floors.  They occupied all of them.  Just Victor, his younger brother, and his parents.  They all had rooms of their own.  But I’m digressing again.  I was telling you about how your father loved to take shortcuts.  So on that day he drove through Brownsville, which was the shortest route from Bedford Avenue, where he still lived with his parents, to the Herberts.  And just as he was racing down my street, Pacific Avenue, wouldn’t you know it, he had a blowout.  The car jumped the curb right in front of our house and knocked over two ash cans!  What a mess he made.  I should have known from that what other messes were in store for me.”  I could hear the excitement as she recalled this remarkable act of fate but was more eager to learn about all the messes.   I had been a witness to just some of those.

“I was sitting on the stoop, which I did whenever it was that hot, to catch a breeze, and doing my homework.  I even remember that I was reading Silas Marner, by George Eliot, who I think was really a woman, though they didn’t tell us that in my day.”

“Mom,” I interrupted, “this is all very interesting but I have to get back to the city soon and was hoping you’d tell me more about meeting Dad.”

“That is what I’m doing.  But this is how I tell my stories.  You have to be patient with me.  This is not easy for me.  To remember those days.”

“I’m sorry.  I understand.  But, please, tell me more.  I’ll make the time.”   So I’ll be a little late for my meeting, I thought.  They can begin without me.

“Before I could see exactly what had happened to his car he was standing on the street and already taking off his shirt—it was a splendid shirt, crisply ironed and full of starch.   And then one, two, three he had the car jacked up and was putting on the spare tire.  As I said, it was very hot and though he did this effortlessly his arms and that part of his chest I could see were glazed with perspiration.  This emphasized the shape of his body.  It was a beautiful body.  He was an athlete and very masculine, but also beautiful.  I don’t know what got into me; but, as if in a trance, I got up off the steps on which I was sitting and was pulled toward him.  I stood over him as he bolted the tire in place, watching his rippling back.  When he was done he arose from his crouch and almost bumped into me.  Not the least bit surprised or startled, as if this happened to him every day, he looked directly at me, now having to look down as I had to do when he was working on the tire—he so towered over me—and said, ‘My don’t you look splendid.’  He stood there with his greasy hands on his hips, breathing heavily and still wet all over, not caring if he soiled his trousers, and just smiled radiantly.  Not saying another word.  I almost swooned—I am prone to that—but managed to say back to him, ‘You look thirsty.  Can I get you a glass of water?’  He didn’t respond or even nod.  All he did was hold me with his eyes. 

“I raced up the stoop and then the three flights of steps to our apartment, filled a glass with water from a pitcher in the icebox, and ran back down to him as quickly as I could, fearing that while I was gone he would have looked more carefully at my house and my street and, realizing this was not his part of town, would have driven away, back to his friends who lived in his world.  But there his remained, I was ecstatic to see, wiping his hands on a rag he retrieved from the trunk of the car, and came over to me, took the glass I held out to him and sat down on the step where I had been and looked over at the book I had been reading.  He gulped down the water in a single swallow and said, ‘This is a novel isn’t it?  To tell you the truth, I hate novels.  I like my science and engineering courses well enough, and love to read about sports, but I almost failed literature.’   He grinned at me and shrugged his shoulders.  ‘But I bet you like these kind of books.  Most girls do.’  And in what would be the first of thousands of accommodations to him, though I loved to read and George Eliot was one of my favorites, I said, ‘They’re OK.  But I also like science,’ which was more than an accommodation since I always struggled with anything that involved math.”

My mother paused, I assumed to savor her recollections, and then said, “I know you’re busy and have to get to the city; so, if you’d like, we can talk next time more about when I first met your father.  But let me quickly tell you before you run away--and I hope I’ll see you next time sooner than between this visit and the last one--that your father and I began seeing each other two days later.  It was a Saturday and your father took me to a party at his fraternity house where I met Victor and all his other friends.  And we arranged to be together every other every Saturday for months after that.  I couldn’t tell my parents I was seeing him.  Though his mother and father were Jewish, they were not the kind of Jews my parents considered real Jews—they never went to synagogue and didn’t keep a kosher home.  To them, they were the same as goyim.  Maybe worse. 

“But I couldn’t get enough of him.  During the rest of June and through July I continued to see him, having to lie about where I was going on Saturday nights.  And all during that time I couldn’t get the first sight of his glistening arms and chest out of my mind.  But before the end of that summer, one night he drove us to Brighton Beach, I saw all of him and he saw all of me in the slivers of moonlight that filtered through the slates in the boardwalk under which he had spread a blanket and took me into his golden arms.”  At this memory I heard her chuckling to herself.

Though I was tempted to ask for more details about his golden arms and what that moonlight exposed and must inevitably have led to, even in that more suppressed time, I decided to let my imagination fill in the rest of that part of the story, thinking it could do at least as good a job as whatever the reality itself might reveal.  Her imagination after all was captured by the sight of his beautiful body and he clearly was similarly interested in hers; and by choosing to see him covertly she was as risk-taking and transgressive as any “fast” young American girl of her era.  It had to be a good story, which I could shape and tell in my own way at some later date.  But with the time that remained, I wanted to hear more about what had happened, what had transformed that enchantment into their life with which I was familiar.  So I said, “This is a remarkable and beautiful story.  I can only imagine how happy you must have been, how he made you feel.  But as you said, I didn’t ever see or know this version of Dad.  The one I knew was when he was older and many things must have happened between your first meeting, the Saturdays with his friends, and especially that night at the beach.  I mean, he was so different when I knew him, and I am wondering what . . .”

“This is fair to ask,” she cut me off, “but first you must know a little more about what he did for me.  What he meant to me.”

“I do want to understand that.  I do.”

“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 I was.  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 or 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 fears and suspicion.  Their spirits were blighted.  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 I began to pay the price for that embrace and eventual capitulation.”

I so much wanted to hear about the latter, about how he became the man I knew, but hoped she would pause for a moment so I could attempt to envision him as on that day she first saw.  As that radiant, optimistic picture of him was just beginning to come into focus in my mind, she continued, now 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 Henry, 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 Henry; 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 to himself 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 later, I thought, some at me.  “As if it was my fault that he didn’t finish school or 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 even graduated from high school, became wealthy and moved into a waterfront mansion on Long Island.

“And that anger intensified when, after failing at everything he tried, and I will grant that he tried 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, 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.  Every hour of every day.”

At these last words her voice broke and I could hear her sniffing and clearing her throat.  But, as the sun began to descend and the shadows lengthen over the gravestones, 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 have been writing?”  Again, I couldn’t help myself from relentlessly, in spite of the pain she was obviously feeling, pulling 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 Carl, 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 them 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.  So I know what authors can 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 childhood friend Heshy Perlmutter?”

“Well, yes.  But how do you know about that?”

“You’d be surprised what you learn around here.  His people, some of 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 interested in gathering right then.  He always said the operation turned him into a capon, and I thought it best to 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 leads to contradictions and ambiguities.  In fact, not even if it leads to this but rather because it must do that 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 have 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.  Much 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 tried helplessly to embrace her.