“Every Saturday, for a year,” my grandfather told me. “No matter where I was. And I was a lot of places. Your dad and Ray, let me tell you, they had really spread that mess of theirs around.”
It was a warm afternoon. At his request I had helped him out onto the patio he liked to observe, through the window, from his rented hospital bed. The abutilon was in flower, hung with a thousand plump red lanterns. The birdfeeder had been getting a lot of action, and the pebbled concrete beneath it was scattered with seed. “They managed to get themselves sued in four states. New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.”
“Delaware.”
“That’s right. Delaware. How did you know that?”
“I used to snoop.”
It was the only way I ever reliably found out anything as a boy.
“You remember one time, or maybe you don’t remember. The summer you and your brother stayed with us.”
“Mom was studying for the bar.”
“The two of you were playing outside. And he, I guess he must have stepped in some dog poop. Without knowing.”
“Vaguely.”
“After a while you and he come inside, you’re done playing. He goes into the kitchen. He goes into the living room, the TV room. Up the stairs, down the stairs. The bathroom. The garage. He goes into the coat closet! Like he’s giving a house tour. Every room, there’s a stinky little brown footprint.”
I laughed.
“See?” he said. “You’re not the only one with the fancy metaphors.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m talking about the mess your father and my goddamn brother made.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“I mean, your mother’s just starting out with her law degree. Now her credit’s going to be destroyed? She’s going to lose her house? At first I went around, D.C., Baltimore. I was just trying to find out how much shit there was and how far they had tracked it. Then I started trying to get on top of it, negotiate with the IRS. Negotiate with the ones suing them. Sam Chabon was suing your father, did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
“His own uncle, suing him.”
“A proud moment.”
“I’m sorry,” my grandfather said. “He’s your father, you should love him.”
“I shouldn’t,” I said. “But I do.”
“Anyway, no matter where I was, if it was a Saturday, I would go and say kaddish. Adath Jeshurun or maybe B’nai Abraham in Philly. Ahavas Sholom in Baltimore, of course. Rodef Sholom in Pittsburgh. Beth El in Silver Spring.”
“You took me to Beth El.”
“A couple of times.”
The momzer appeared over the top of the roof and began to case the joint.
“I really don’t know why I was doing it, to be honest. Week after week, shlepping out Reisterstown Road or wherever to say a prayer.”
“You must have gotten something out of it.”
“I must have wanted to get something out of it, anyway.” He stuck out his tongue. “Moment of weakness.”
The momzer inched his way down the roof.
“Look at this guy.”
“I know. I kind of just want to give him some damn birdseed.”
“He wouldn’t know what to do if you did,” my grandfather said. “He would think you put poison in it.”
“You think he’s that smart?”
“He’s a momzer.”
We didn’t say anything for a while, and he closed his eyes. He had already told me that he could feel the sun “in his bones” and that the warmth of it was “pleasant.”
“We’re good at death, I will say that,” he said.
“Jews?”
“It’s ‘Do this, do that. Don’t do that.’ That’s what you need, somebody just to tell you what to do. Tear a ribbon, cover the mirror. Sit around for a week. Grow your beard for a month. And then for eleven months, every week you go to a synagogue, you stand up, and you just . . . it’s . . . I don’t know.”
He closed his eyes again. A faint breeze stirred his soft white forelock. “If your wife, your brother, or God forbid, your child dies. It leaves a big hole in your life. It’s much better not to pretend there’s no hole. Not to try to, what do they say nowadays, get over it.”
I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the clichés and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the clichés and conventions of the young.
“So you, you know, when it’s time for the kaddish. You stand up in front of everybody, and you point to the hole, and you say, ‘Look at this. This is what I’m living with, this hole. Eleven months, every week. It doesn’t go away, you don’t ‘put it behind you.’”
“That’s another one.”
“And then after a while you get used to it. I mean, that’s the theory. That’s why I went every week, no matter where I was, so I would get used to it. It worked that way with my parents. I guess I thought it would work with your grandmother, too.”
*
Congregation Beth Isaac was housed in a midcentury modernist chalet whose A-frame gables of azure blue betrayed its original career as an International House of Pancakes. Indeed, the shul was known locally, my grandfather learned, as Beth IHOP. In a showcase on a wall just inside the front entrance, among some newspaper clippings eulogizing the generosity and community spirit of various congregants living and dead, my grandfather noticed a trophy topped by a gold shaygets with a racquet. Beside it was a photo of a beefy young Jew shaking hands with a lanky fellow, both men wearing white polo shirts and white shorts. The lean-faced athlete was said to be British Open champion Geoff Hunt. The strapping Jew on the other end of the handshake was identified as Rabbi Lance Teppler.
An elderly female congregant saw my grandfather looking at the showcase as she was entering the sanctuary. She told her male companion to wait a minute, hold on a minute. She was wearing shapeless knit pants, cheddar orange, and a shapeless knit pullover top, black-and-orange poppies on a white ground. Her glasses were orange, too.
“Rabbi Lance is the world’s greatest Jewish squash champion,” she informed my grandfather.
My grandfather laughed, louder and harder than he meant to. Louder and harder than he had laughed in months, in years, than he had laughed since taking my father to see Buddy Hackett* play the Latin Palace in 1966. There was something absurd not just in the assertion but in the woman’s solemn expression and old-country accent—skvash tchempyin—when she made it. It hurt to laugh; it made his heart ache. And he felt sorry when he saw that the old woman was understandably offended. His effort to disguise his laughter as an uncontrollable coughing spasm did not fool her. She turned her back on my grandfather.
“A crazy man,” she said in Yiddish to her male companion, employing the audible whisper relied on by old Jewish ladies for millennia in their generous efforts to ensure that no one, in particular the target of their aspersions, ever be left in the dark about who was the target of their aspersions. My grandfather was just able to make out her companion’s English reply: “Looked a little hungover to me.”
Attendance was spotty that morning at Beth IHOP, and when he bounded onto the bimah, Rabbi Lance immediately picked out the new congregant with the poorly knotted necktie sitting in the back row. He nodded once, his expression hovering somewhere between smugness and reassurance: You are in excellent hands. He was blond and big-jawed, good-looking in the George Segal manner.