Great Kisser (12 page)

III

On Friday the nurse calls from Roxbury. My father is pulling out the intravenous cords. “I think he is fading.”

I wait. She calls again on Saturday. My father has died.

I borrow the money and on Sunday I fly to New York. At the funeral home, the director asks me if I want to see my father. I say no. Then I change my mind. The coffin with my father in it is moved back from the hearse to the chapel. I see my father's waxed face, touch it and weep.

No one else has come.

The rabbi asks me, “Were you close?”

“Not really.”

“Would you like to say a few words at graveside?”

“I don't think so.”

The coffin before me at the cemetery, the rabbi and the grave diggers standing by, I say a few parting words to my father. “You always spoke of FDR's words, ‘You have nothing to fear but fear itself.' For most of your life you were governed by fear. In spite of it, you managed to do some really loving things.”

IV

I climb back into the limousine to return to Manhattan. The Italian driver, his fifty-five-year old face bright with cologne and talcum powder, is named Joe.

In the car he speaks of his father. “Once I ran away from home with my father,” he says. “We went to Atlantic City. But we had to come back because we had no money. When my father got sick, I got in the bathtub with him, I changed his diapers. Things I wouldn't do for my own kids because it nauseated me. I slept in the same bed with him. I was up most of the night for six months. The doctor warned me I would kill myself that way. Sure enough, I got pneumonia after his death and wound up in the hospital.

“Growing up was a very simple life. We had our garden. He planted his tomatoes. Made his own wine. And I did it with him. At school you had to put a white handkerchief on the desk and lay your hands on it. The teacher would walk up and down the aisle. She checked hair for lice and nails to see if they were clean. In the wine season, my hands were all stained: you couldn't get it off your skin, working with the barrels and the grapes. I used to scrub them with lemon. They sent me home, my hands were so dirty. I was crying.

“My father went up to school and he was a madman. He said, ‘My son's got cleaner hands than anybody in this building. His hands are pure.'”

I listen to this enchanting story of a father.

“You were lucky,” I say to Joe.

V

Returning to Manhattan, I recall a conversation I had in the morning with Benjamin, who is celebrating his fourth birthday tonight. He is the son of my friends Aviva and Norman, with whom I am staying in Manhattan. This morning Benjamin pointed to a toy drum in a children's book and said it looked great.

I tell the driver to let me out at 89th street. I go into the toy store.

The store is crowded on this lovely afternoon with mothers and little children. One of the voids of a childhood spent listening to your father recount his own unhappy childhood are the gaps in basic knowledge that you seem to carry forever. I am not sure what a toy drum for a four-year-old boy should look like, and spend an inordinate amount of time checking each drum with bemused clerks. I am afraid I will not know what to say to Benjamin, how to play with him and keep his attention.

I finally pick out the drum and wait a long time for the gift wrap. The sounds of the chirping children enfold me in their embrace. I feel that I am floating, that I could stand there forever.

VI

Benjamin's party begins.

Now that Benjamin has taught me how to play peek-a-boo with him, I do it constantly. Then I bring out his presents.

First I have a train whistle for him. The size of a charm or a dreidel, it has a picture of a train in a meadow and when you squeeze it, the sound of the whistle and the chug-chug of the wheels is amazingly loud and clear.

I have brought the whistle with me from Los Angeles, since Benjamin lost the first one I gave him. Until he lost it, every time he saw me, he would begin our conversations by asking, “Michael, remember your present?”

I squeeze it and shout, “Holy smoke! What can that be? Watch out! Here it comes! Watch out! Here it comes! Here it comes!”

Benjamin holds the whistle in his hands. “You remembered it.”

He stares at the wrapping of the next present. “I love surprises,” he says.

He opens it. “Look, it's a drum!”

He pulls open the rest of the wrapping. “But does it have drumsticks?”

I hand him the tiny sticks.

“But how do I hold it?”

I'm stumped again. Then I see the attached string, and put it around his neck confidently as if I have often given little boy drums.

“I have a drum and a drumstick!” Benjamin shouts.

He pounds it, walking around the room.

Later he approaches me, pauses, thinks.

Benjamin sits on my lap for the first time. I hold him.

Later he says, “Michael, do you remember this morning when I told you I wanted a drum like in that book?”

“Yes, Benjamin, I do.”

“Is that when you decided to get it for me?”

“Uh huh.”

“I thought so,” Benjamin says.

Aviva has been standing there, watching us. Her friend Marion asks her, “What is it about Michael?”

“Michael has a special way with children,” Aviva explains.

VII

After Benjamin's party, it is his bedtime and the adults have dinner.

Aviva is a therapist, working with Holocaust survivors. Her parents were survivors, and she was born in a displaced persons camp. Norman is the editor of a Jewish magazine. At their house there's the feeling of rounds of kids' parties, baby sitters, laughter, music—children at the center. Renewal. Where is the darkness of life? I cannot find it.

Glasses tinkle, through the window lights shine over the Hudson. Norman intones the Hebrew prayers. What do they mean? Search me. Probably God's great, bow down to him, he's terrific, whatever. You have to imbibe this stuff from childhood to feel it.

There are miracles here. Not so long ago, before he met Aviva and into his mid-forties, Norman stuttered badly and on weekends sat writing poems in Washington Square Park, or waited for me at my street corner to show me them. Now his speech is clear and articulate, the part of him that was stifled has begun to fly out, he is presiding at the head of the table. Benjamin himself is a miracle. After years of struggling to conceive, subjecting herself to countless medical experiments and drugs, in her forty-seventh year the intrepid Aviva, the fighter for the survivors, conceived Benjamin in vitro.

I sit watching in the corner of the room, where my father might have huddled had he been here. But like Norman, I am beginning to be less of a stutterer. My stutter was my contempt, which has only lately begun to leave me. Daniel, a film critic, is at the party with his new bride Marion and his elderly father Martin. Daniel has married for the first time at fifty-two. Father and son have an unusual relationship which for some reason I have always found amusing until tonight. Whatever Daniel goes, his father is always beside him or seated near him. Martin, an Auschwitz graduate, attends most of Daniel's meetings, goes to screenings with him and parties like this one. Now that Daniel has married Marion, I've asked Aviva, will the father sleep in a bed beside them? Martin, who is seventy-eight and a retired pharmacist, has a new profession: he is teaching film history at City College.

But today I see how tenderly Daniel attends to his father, and I understand this additional miracle before my eyes. Martin is following in his son's footsteps.

VIII

Seated next to me on the plane back to L.A. is a girl named Gina. She has a classic Italian beauty. She describes a mother like my own was. She recalls having a cavity when she was six and being afraid to tell her mother because it would anger her. Gina's brother, acting as a buffer, told her mother instead. She remembers her mother's reaction to the news; the image of her mother's hand reaching out through the opened door of the house and furiously grabbing her hair.

She hesitates, then takes the locket from around her throat to show it to me. It has a photogravure of a young girl's face, not her own, in the shape of a heart. On the other side is engraved her birthday. “My grandmother gave it to me. It makes me feel like I have a mother.”

For a moment my failures stop cascading over me like black rainfall.

And yet I know that I will never see her again.

My father's curse, I think, is still intact.

IX

He often said to me, “You're lucky to have me to write about. I'm your best subject.”

My father was handsome, a gentleman of the old school. Born in Austria in 1904, he came to America a year later and settled in Roxbury with his mother and tyrannical father, five brothers and two sisters. He was a creature of the Depression. He seemed like a homeless man in a world of homeless men. He lived in a greasy boarding house room after the divorce and ate in cafeterias where the lonely men gathered over coffee to pass the time. He sought out the darkened streets of the Bowery and the Third Avenue El and dimly lit cafeterias and lobbies. He came up for air during the day, smiling in his Cadillac, but at night went back to his single room. Even when he had the Cadillac and fancy shirts and suits from Hickey Freeman or Rogers Peet, he was never free of the apprehension of disaster.

On the Bowery, he pointed out to me where the homeless and the legless beggars gathered in filthy hallways or stared out of storefront hotel windows, and told me how lucky I was.

It was a gaslit world I shared with him into the late 1960s, with memories of the El rumbling overhead, the Willy Lomans and Frank Cowperwoods still making deals, the Laffmovie on 42nd Street where the silents and Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers still reigned. In the 1960s he was consigned to the “bullpen” at the insurance company he worked for, one room filled with the men who weren't doing enough business to rate offices of their own. There his colleagues tortured each other, sizing up each other's suits and stroking each other's ties disdainfully.

My father never kissed, but waited to be kissed, like a boy waiting to be taken care of. I would embrace him and he would sit quietly, full of aggrievement and wanting me to make up for all the wrongs that had been done to him.

“The world is your oyster, kiddo!” or “It's your America, mister!” he shouted in his manic moods, waving his arms and skipping down the streets, jerkily running like a robot out of control. On weekends, like Cinderella at the ball, glowing and jazzed up, keeping time to the radio music by bopping the driving wheel or belting out “Smile, Darn Ya Smile,” “When You're Smiling,” “Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella On a Rainy, Rainy Day,” “The Best Things In Life Are Free,” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” he drove me up to the Concord or Grossinger's in the Catskills, where he somersaulted across the lobbies. There we would mingle with a “better class of people” and my father would practice his rhumba steps with the platinum blondes. He would always say he wanted me to “feel that you are as good as the next person.” He asked me, “What father would do what I do for my darling son?”

Beside the pool at the Concord, composer Henry Tobias sat at the piano and crooned his hit, “Miss You (Since You Went Away Dear),” Sophie Tucker played cards in her bathing suit, towel bunched atop her head, and Buddy Hackett wooed Cherie, his wife-to-be, with funny faces and his squeaky voice. On Sunday nights, we would gloomily return to Astoria near the Greyhound bus arcade and climb the stairs of his boarding house (he'd moved out of the Paris Hotel room again) with its stale food smells.

But the wildly sunny, perfect moods could not last. There would always be something to disturb him, some outrageous speck of reality: a dirty fork I left in the sink, my turning a soup spoon toward rather than away from myself in the classy hotel dining room, and my father would be sent reeling to earth in a spasm of rage.

How had he become a father, this man of smoky hotel lobbies and boarding house rooms?

X

He was not a good father, but he saved my life—at the start, from my mother, who would have let me go under when she and my father separated. Years later, my mother would frequently ask me when I was going to be drafted. The Vietnam war was on and she didn't want me to miss it. I asked her if she wanted me to be killed. She would never reply, but smile at me silently.

Although my father was anything but a wealthy man, he sent me away to boarding school in Connecticut, and on to St. John's College in Annapolis and the New School in New York.

For forty-two years, we would reunite at the same table at the Automat, where he would hold forth in his very loud voice with that same monologue, recounting my faults while an audience of strangers at our table and nearby listened with fascination. Our best lines:

He: You're not a man! I was too good to you. I made you soft. You're soft.

Me: I am a man! I am a man!

He: Sure you are. I was only kidding. Listen, I couldn't cut the mustard either.

Sometimes, gritting his teeth and clenching his hands, he would say, “I just want to murder you, you make me so mad.” I believed this was true. His hatred and jealousy would boil over about my going out with girls, or about my writing. His favorite story, by W. Somerset Maugham, was about a young man who gives up everything (which he thought I was doing by not becoming an insurance salesman like him) to pursue a career as an artist—a concert pianist. My father always climaxed the story by asking me with gleaming eyes: “Guess what happened to him?” And I let him have the punch line again and again: “He discovers he has stubby fingers and can't play worth a dime!”

And then he took out his fucking calculator. “Just for fun, Michael, let's figure out how much money I've given you over the years. Let's see—you're fifty years old”—he gleefully punched the buttons—“ I've given you $323,857.23. Let's see how much you've given me.” He punched away with a big grin on his face. He laughed wildly. “Guess how much, Michael! Fifty years—$67.18, and that includes the tie you just sent me. Sixty-seven dollars and eighteen cents! Isn't that amazing?”