The Poison Tree

ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR
THE POISON TREE

“Like watching a great stage drama enacted on a meticulously designed set in which all of the principal players surprise us with the deep register of their flaws and fortitude.”

—Kathleen Finneran, author of
The Tender Land

“A testament to the power of art, literature, and ideas.”

—Rabbi Susan Talve, Central Reform Congregation

“This ‘Remembrance of Things Past' is neither ‘sweet' nor ‘silent,' and I cite that sonnet because Henry Schvey's mother quotes Shakespeare frequently and his father is a character straight out of one of the tragicomedies: tempestuous, driven, hateful and hate-filled yet kind. Their son's memoir is closely watched and keenly heard: a riveting account of childhood and young manhood from the wounded adult who survives.”

—Nicholas Delbanco is the author, most recently, of
The Years

“With chilling accuracy, Henry Schvey reveals the cruelty that simmered beneath the seemingly placid surface of 1950s America. With artistry and skill, wisdom and compassion, Schvey exposes not only his complicated relationship to his highly successful but sadistic father, but also the ways in which literature, art, and love can save a young man's soul.”

—Eileen Pollack, Professor, MFA Program in
Creative Writing, University of Michigan

“Wickedly funny and heartbreaking in turn, this incisive and ironic sweep of his family's foibles and the America of the 60's 70's and 80's makes for compulsive reading. This is writing from a master of the genre which deserves a wide readership. Hugely enjoyable and compelling.”

—Jane Lapotaire, Royal Shakespeare Company Hon Associate
Artist, Tony Award, Helen Hayes and Olivier Award winner

a memoir

H
ENRY
I. S
CHVEY

Copyright © 2016 by Henry I. Schvey

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Walrus Publishing

St. Louis, MO

Walrus Publishing is an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC.

4168 Hartford Street

Saint Louis, MO 63116

The material in this book reflects the author's recollection of events. Some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted.

Dialogue has been re-created from memory.

Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission from the publisher. For information, contact us through our webpage at
www.amphoraepublishing.com
.

Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors' rights.

Cover by Kristina Blank Makansi

Cover art from Shutterstock

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938148

ISBN: 9781940442167

This book is dedicated with love to my wife Patty, my children
Aram, Jerusha and Natasha, and to my grandchildren Evan, Julian
and Livia. Each day they remind me of what a loving family can be.

T
HE
P
OISON
T
REE

a memoir

Demand me nothing, what you know, you know.
From this time forth I never will speak word.
—Shakespeare,
Othello

So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.
—Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby

Christmas morning, and my father and I are camped underneath a lavishly decorated Christmas tree. Dozens of opened presents lie strewn all over the floor, and they're all for me. Scraps of blue paper and silver ribbons fly through the room. I have just opened an amazing gift: a Joe Palooka punching figure—it's huge! Taller than I am. The rubber base is filled with sand, so I can stand and punch him and he pops right back up, smiling, daring me to punch him again. I am five years old. I sit on the floor with my legs crossed Indian style, dressed in Superman pajamas. My father wears a green flannel bathrobe, the color of Gerber's peas. I love that bathrobe and find it strangely comforting.

I dump a small wooden box of toy figures on the floor, and Dad and I divide them up into Good Guys and Bad Guys. We call the game Cowboys and Indians, but the “cowboys” are really a motley assemblage of G.I.s and cavalry officers; the Indians are mixed with some metal German soldiers left over from my father's own childhood. As they face across one another waiting for the signal to attack, the two armies shimmer and glow green and red from the lights on the Christmas tree. Dad and I pepper one another's forces with marbles. First I shoot—then Dad—then I again. The marbles, too, are divided up like the Cowboys and Indians. A ragtag bunch of cat's-eyes and onionskins; even the occasional chippie, big as a walnut. Our duel lasts for hours, and only ends when one of the two of us has defeated the other's men by knocking them all over on their sides. I'm happy to have cavalry soldiers and cowboys on my side, since men on horseback are almost impossible to knock down. Germans fire at cowboys from the prone position and offer miniscule targets. What I have to do is hit a Kraut at just the right
angle with one of the smaller marbles, in the crease between his cocked left elbow and the rifle. Only then can I kill him by successfully turning him over on his side. Indians are easier to kill, but there are so many they wear you down. Germans and G.I.s are made of cast iron, so that even a perfectly placed shot sometimes bounces off and does no damage. You need a really big marble fired at maximum velocity—and a lot of luck.

In this memory, my mother is absent. She floats in and out at odd intervals, a woman in a Chagall painting, wearing a snowflake apron. She appears, serves her men hot chocolate, and floats away.

For hours, my father and I are transported into another world. At some point, we agree to a ceasefire while he toasts Aunt Jemima frozen waffles. I drown my buttered waffle with maple syrup—but he says nothing. Not one word. Later, we break for Mrs. Paul's fish sticks, Swanson TV dinners, and
The Lone Ranger
on television. The day flashes by in seconds.

Those early images of joy on Christmas morning, however precisely remembered, feel fraudulent, surreal—too good to be true. I angrily part the curtain which separates me from my past, and peer into that glowing room where, on my RCA Victrola, Burl Ives is always singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” I watch the turntable slowly meander around in circles. The forty-five rpm record skips a bit, then continues on its way. For a moment, time has stopped.

Four decades later, I am standing outside my father's apartment, a key in the palm of my hand. My father's initials—NIS—are cut deep into the metal. I wonder how it must have sounded when the letters were forcibly etched into the brass. I have returned home from the Netherlands where I have been teaching English literature for several years now. My father is in the hospital being treated for lymphoma, and I have come back to New York to visit him. I don't know if he will survive. After our brief visit, he sent me to his apartment at 405 East 56th Street to pick up an address book from his desk.

Just who is he, I wonder? A combination of steely resolve and intense charisma, Dad was the personification of 1950s suave. He was Don Draper decades before Don Draper existed: manicured, handsome, powerful. That's
how he appeared to me as a boy, and how he appears to me today. He could also be cruel and vindictive. And even now, I was, and still am, desperate for his love. Decades after leaving New York, years after leaving the United States, I am still confused. I still want to know,
who is he
? I am a child at a crosswalk, waiting for a signal, a nod that it is safe to cross the street alone.

I unlock the door and enter his apartment. Immediately, his cologne rushes at me. Not Old Spice. Something much more expensive. It is on everything. Musky, masculine, intoxicating. Even the furnishings—a large yellow kimono hanging on one wall; two black, lacquer Chinese chests, one decorated with jade green birds, the other with flowers—radiate his scent.

As I stand there revisiting the phantasmagoria of his things, I feel strange. Instinctively, even after all these years, his posessions evoke a sense of danger. I want to walk away, no—run. Forget the elevator; just race down the ten flights of stairs, not look back. Never look back. Panic overtakes me. My heartbeat escalates; my palms sweat. But, really, it's hardly appropriate for me, a grown man in my forties—an adult myself, married with children and a mortgage—to turn and run. I'm a reasonably successful professor teaching in the Netherlands and lecturing all over Europe. I am not only a son, I'm a husband and father, with three young children of my own. But, here, in this room again, my other identities melt. I'm his son—Norman Schvey's son. I breathe in deeply, shut my eyes, and wait for this wave of irrational panic to subside. I know it will. It always does. Besides, what could I possibly say to the doorman if I ran into him in the lobby? That I was standing in the entryway of my hospitalized father's apartment, took a look around, and concluded that I was too afraid to stay up there alone? I smile at this feeble joke at my own expense. Anyway, I'm here for a purpose—I'll find his address book and return to the hospital.

My eyes open again, and there I see an eighteenth-century English grandfather clock across from a lithograph of a bare-breasted Indian girl, a cheap work he picked up at a flea market in the Village for a hundred bucks after flirting with the artist. A brilliantly colored, hand-woven Turkish carpet lies beneath a seven-foot-tall tennis racket he didn't knew what to do with, so he leaned it against the wall. Permanently.

The things around me have nothing to do with him, or his taste, but I recall that furnishings don't, or least didn't, really matter to him. Unlike his
wardrobe, they don't have to be precisely coordinated. Upon his desk is a bag of colored balloons with his face on them. I blow up a green one and watch my father's head expand to grotesque proportions, then shrivel to nothing. Beside the balloons is a carved mahogany Merrill Lynch bull with its “We're Bullish on America” inscription. Beside the bull is a rough-hewn, marble paperweight I have never seen before. Inscribed with Gothic lettering, it reads:

“I Don't Hold a Grudge—I Get Even.”

However ill-matched, each object is in its proper place. The only thing not in perfect order is a single, white coffee cup and saucer resting on the rubber rack beside the sink. They've been washed and rinsed, and are ready to be wiped and placed on the shelf when he returns.

There is a vast collection of overcoats in the front hall closet. I try on a bowler hat. When did my head grow bigger than his? I draw my fingers along a green Loden coat from Austria; its fur prickles like the pelt of a wolf. Nothing fits. His coats are all way too wide on me; his hats too small. I watch myself twirl an antique English walking stick with a silver head in the hall mirror. I swing the stick and the handle comes loose. There is a dagger hidden within.