“Drop it, Pa,” he says. Only he doesn’t. Instead, he starts enumerating Katya’s myriad virtues—her kindness and gentleness and dedication to him. I dare not ask why anyone would want to leave such a saint. “You and I are different people,” he tells me stoically.
I grin and bear this. “All right, Lenny,” I say, “but even decency has to be matched by means. Where are you going to get the funds to pay this alimony? Are you working right now?”
The color leaves his face. He rakes his bitten fingers through his hair. “I knew it. Nobody in this family can keep their goddamn mouth shut.”
“So your sister told us. So what? If you’re in trouble, we want to help.”
“Did she tell you how Austin and the rest of my friends sold me down the river?”
“At least now you know who your friends are. Druzhba druzhboi a tabachok vroz’.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not crying over it. I’ve already got some opportunities lined up.”
I bite my lip. “Maybe you shouldn’t be rushing into something so soon. Take some time. Think about all your options.”
He doesn’t answer right away. “What do you suggest?” he says at last in a tone mistakable for either despair or sarcasm.
I seize my opportunity and remove the two GMAT tomes from my briefcase. Lenny winces as if he’s just watched me drop soiled underpants on the table. “Let me guess whose idea this was.”
I smile. “I’ve got another two in my hotel room.”
“Is this supposed to be some kind of bait?”
“It’s a serious offer, Lenny. You come back home. Live with us for a few months, or as long as you want. Study. Once you get into business school, we can help pay for the first year.”
“And Mama can bring cucumber-and-bologna sandwiches up to my room, right? I’m thirty-four, for chrissake, not sixteen.”
Before I can bite my tongue, I say, “And what’s your plan? To stay here and compete with the homegrown phys-mat geniuses?”
The hurt on his face is more immense than I expected.
“You and Ma still think a framed degree is the answer to everything. It’s your fucking immigrant delusion.”
“Come on, Lenny.” I try to smile.
“And anyway, I’m too old to go back to school.”
I see a chance to redeem myself. “You’re not too old. I was two years older than you when I left this country and started over.” But I can already hear my wife’s admonishments about talking about myself. According to her, all my advice to Lenny boils down to “how you’re a something and he’s a nothing.” I suspect some of this is the influence of our daughter, Masha, a champion of Freudian analysis, who likes to say that my upbringing by a single, psychologically “damaged” mother has made me “second-generation dysfunctional.”
“Look,” I say, “you’ve been here—what—nine years? I happen to know that every seven years a man is released from all his obligations. He can wipe his hands, walk away, start clean. Take a look in the Torah if you don’t believe me. It’s called the Sabbatical Year.”
He stares at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Since when have you been cracking the Torah?”
I smile. “You don’t have to decide right now. Just—consider it.” I get up, beckoned by the men’s room, and leave Lenny to do just that.
When I get to the toilets, I find my entry blocked by a tiny babushka with a short-handled broom. I step right. So does she. I make a move to the left, but she’s one step ahead of me, serenely determined not to let me pass. She flashes me an apologetic gold-toothed grin and points to the women’s room. I decide I’d rather hold it in. I turn around and rejoin Lenny at the table.
We eat in silence for a while, the GMAT books between us like the Berlin Wall. Finally, he says, “What the hell is going on over there?” I look up. One of the stooges who’d dragged Sava to the men’s room is back. His hand seems to be bleeding. He plucks a cloth napkin from the table, wraps it tourniquet-style around his meaty palm, and upends half a bottle of vodka on the wound. Then, like nothing, he sits back down with the others and resumes drinking. The gentleman in lavender tosses some bills into the general chaos of the table and within a minute the rest of them take their cue and are heading for the door. I figure it’s as good a time as any to revisit the little boy’s room. To my relief, the babushka isn’t standing guard anymore. But when I swing open the door she’s right there, perched on a footstool and sponging the mirrors above the sinks. A clean arc of crimson spatter covers both of our reflections. I shut myself in the stall. From the neighboring stall issue retching sounds, punctuated by almost prim gasps of strangled respiration. As I leave I give a captain’s salute to the babushka sponging blood off the tiles.
“All right, I’ll take the books,” he says when I come back. “If you promise to stop bugging me about coming home.”
“I have my orders, Lenny.”
He slides them back to me.
“Please, just keep them. I can’t take them back to your mother.”
He shakes his head. And then, as if on cue, drunken Sava is back. From the men’s room he weaves his way between the empty tables like a passenger swaying in the aisle of a train. His misbuttoned shirt is covered with unspeakable stains. A cloud of panicked disappointment steals over his face as he realizes his friends have all left him. Lenny and I trade glances as bruised, bloodied Sava staggers out through the glass doors, then pauses to look left and right, searching in vain for his friends and tormentors.
A grin opens up in Lenny’s face. “Velkom home, Dad!” he says, opening his arms ceremoniously. “Velkom home.”
My wife might be right when she says, in her moments of ire, that I make so many missteps in communicating with our grown son because I had no father to walk me through to manhood. But what she scornfully calls my “hands-off approach” isn’t a consequence of ignorance, as she believes, but of too much knowledge. What lessons there were to be fished from the black hole between my abruptly aborted childhood and my premature young adulthood were not the sorts of things I was eager to pass on to my own children. The little I learned that was worthwhile…well, I can’t say for certain it has any value in the world we all live in so innocently and publicly now.
Whenever I tell anyone that I spent ages six to thirteen inside of public orphanages, they tend to arrange their face in a reaction I call the Purple Heart Ceremony. It’s as if they’ve discovered that my legs are actually prosthetics. They want to see the stumps but are careful to maintain eye contact. Their voices grow pious with sympathy.