The train left the city behind. Green fields fell away to either side. It had been raining for days, and it kept raining.
Many times I’d imagined where Isaac lived. I’d found it on a map. Once I even called up Information: If I want to get from Manhattan to my son, I asked, how do I go? I’d pictured it all, down to the last detail. Happy days! I’d come bearing a gift. A pot of jam, perhaps. We wouldn’t stand on ceremony. Too late for all that. Maybe we’d toss a ball around on the lawn. I can’t catch. Nor, frankly, can I throw. And yet. We’d talk baseball. I’ve followed the game since Isaac was a boy. When he rooted for the Dodgers, I, too, was rooting. I wanted to see what he saw, and hear what he heard. I kept abreast, as much as possible, of popular music. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan—“Lay, Lady, Lay,” you don’t need a brass bed to understand it. Each night, I’d come home from work and order from Mr. Tong’s. Then I’d pull a record from its sleeve, lift the needle, and listen.
Every time Isaac moved, I mapped out the route between my place and his. The first time he was eleven. I used to stand across the street from his school in Brooklyn and wait for him, just to catch a glimpse; maybe, if I was lucky, hear the sound of his voice. One day I waited as usual, but he didn’t come out. I thought maybe he’d gotten in trouble and had to stay late. It got dark, they turned off the lights, and still he didn’t come. I went back the next day, and again I waited, and again he didn’t come. That night I imagined the worst. I couldn’t sleep, imagining all the awful things that might have happened to my child. Even though I’d promised myself I never would, the next morning I got up early and went by where he lived. Not went by. Stood across the street. I watched for him, or for Alma, or even that shlemiel, her husband. And yet. No one came. Finally I stopped a kid who came out of the building. You know the Moritz family? He stared at me. Yeah. So what? he said. They still live here? I asked. What’s it to you? he said, and started to go off down the street bouncing a rubber ball. I grabbed him by the collar. There was a look of fear in his eyes. They moved to Long Island, he blurted out, and took off running.
A week later a letter arrived from Alma. She had my address, because once a year, on her birthday, I sent her a card. Happy Birthday, I’d write, From Leo. I tore open her letter. I know you watch him, she wrote. Don’t ask me how, but I know. I keep waiting for the day when he’ll ask for the truth. Sometimes when I look in his eyes I see you. And I think you’re the only one who could answer his questions. I hear your voice like you were next to me.
I read the letter I don’t know how many times. But that’s not the point. What mattered was that in the upper left corner of the envelope she’d written the return address: 121 Atlantic Avenue, Long Beach, NY.
I got out my map and memorized the details of the journey. I used to fantasize about disasters, floods, earthquakes, the world thrown into chaos so that I’d have a reason to go to him and sweep him up under my coat. When I’d given up the hope of extenuating circumstances I started to dream about our being thrown together by chance. I calculated all the ways our lives might casually intersect—finding myself sitting beside him on a train, or in the waiting room of the doctor’s office. But in the end, I knew that it was up to me. When Alma was gone, and, two years later, Mordecai, there had been nothing anymore to stop me. And yet.
Two hours later, the train pulled into the station. I asked the person in the ticket booth how I could get a taxi. It had been a long time since I’d been out of the city. I stood in wonder of the greenness of everything.
We drove for some time. We turned off the main road onto a smaller road, then a smaller one yet. At last, up a bumpy wooded drive in the middle of nowhere. It was hard to imagine a son of mine living in such a place. Say he got a craving for a pizza, where would he go? Say he wanted to sit alone in a dark movie theater, or watch some kids kissing in Union Square?
A white house came into view. A little wind was chasing the clouds. Between the branches, I saw a lake. I’d imagined his place many times. But never with a lake. The oversight pained me.
You can drop me here, I said, before we reached the clearing. I half expected someone to be home. As far as I knew, Isaac had lived by himself. But you never know. The taxi came to a halt. I paid and got out, and it backed away down the drive. I made up a story about my car breaking down and needing a phone, took a deep breath, and pulled my collar up against the rain.
I knocked. There was a bell, so I rang it. I knew he was dead, but a small part of me still hoped. I imagined his face as he would pull open the door. What would I have said to him, my only child? Forgive me, your mother didn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved; perhaps I didn’t love her the way she needed, either? And yet. There was no answer. I waited, just to be sure. When no one came, I walked around to the back. There was a tree on the lawn which reminded me of the tree on which I’d once carved our initials, A + L, and she never knew, just as for five years I never knew that our sum had come to equal a child.
The grass was slippery with mud. In the distance I could see a rowboat tied to the dock. I looked out across the water. Must have been a good swimmer, took after his father, I thought with pride. My own father, who had great respect for nature, had dropped each of us into the river soon after we were born, before our ties to the amphibians, so he claimed, were cut completely. My sister Hanna blamed her lisp on the trauma of this memory. I’d like to think that I would have done it differently. I would have held my son in my arms. I would have told him, Once upon a time you were a fish. A fish? he’d have asked. That’s what I’m telling you, a fish. How do you know? Because I was also a fish. You, too? Sure. A long time ago. How long? Long. Anyway, being a fish, you used to know how to swim. I did? Sure. You were a great swimmer. A champion swimmer, you were. You loved the water. Why? What do you mean, why? Why did I love the water? Because it was your life! And as we talked, I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he’d be floating without me.
And then I thought: Perhaps that is what it means to be a father—to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I.
There was a back door with only one lock, a basic pin tumbler, versus the double lock on the front. I knocked one last time, and when there was no answer I got to work. I labored over it for a minute until I could ease it open. I turned the handle and pushed. I stood unmoving in the doorway. Hello? I called. There was silence. I felt a chill down my spine. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. It smelled of wood smoke.
This is Isaac’s house, I told myself. I took off my raincoat and hung it on a hook next to another. It was brown tweed, with a brown silk lining. I lifted his sleeve and touched it to my cheek. I thought: This is his coat. I brought it to my nose and inhaled. There was a faint smell of cologne. I took it down and tried it on. The sleeves were too long. But. No matter. I pushed them up. I took off my shoes, which were caked with mud. There was a pair of running sneakers, curled at the toes. I slipped them on my feet like a regular Mr. Rogers. The sneakers were at least a size eleven, maybe eleven and a half. My father had tiny feet, when my sister got married to a boy from a nearby village he spent the whole wedding staring with regret at the size of his new son-in-law’s feet. I can only imagine his shock had he lived to see his grandson’s.
Like so I entered my son’s house: draped in his coat, his shoes on my feet. I was as close as I’d ever been to him. As far away.
I clopped down the narrow hallway that led to the kitchen. Standing in the middle of the room, I waited for the police sirens that didn’t come.
There was a dirty dish in the sink. A glass left upside down to dry, a hardened tea bag in a saucer. On the kitchen table there was some spilled salt. A postcard was taped to the window. I took it down and turned it over. Dear Isaac, it began. I’m sending this from Spain, where I’ve been living for a month. I’m writing to say that I haven’t read your book and I’m not going to.
Behind me there was a bang. I c
lutched my chest. I thought I was going to turn around and see Isaac’s ghost. But it was only the door blown open by the wind. With shaking hands, I put the postcard back where I found it and stood in the silence, my heart in my ears.
The floorboards creaked under my weight. There were books everywhere. There were pens, and a blue glass vase, an ashtray from the Dolder Grand in Zurich, the rusted arrow of a weather vane, a little brass hourglass, sand dollars on the windowsill, a pair of binoculars, an empty wine bottle that served as a candle holder, wax melted down the neck. I touched this thing and that. At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.
I felt dizzy and grabbed the mantel for support. I went back into Isaac’s kitchen. I didn’t have an appetite, but I opened the refrigerator anyway because the doctor told me I shouldn’t go without eating, something to do with my blood pressure. A strong odor hit my nostrils. It was some leftover chicken gone bad. I threw it out, along with a couple of brown peaches and some moldy cheese. Then I washed the dirty dish. I don’t know how to describe the feeling I had, going through these casual motions in my son’s house. I did them with love. The glass I put back in the cabinet. The tea bag I threw away, the saucer I rinsed. There were probably people—the man in the yellow bow tie, or a future biographer—who wanted to leave things exactly as Isaac had. Perhaps one day they would even make a museum of his life, brought to you by the people who saved the glass from which Kafka took his last sip, the plate from which Mandelstam ate his last crumbs. Isaac was a great writer, the writer I could never have been. And yet. He was also my son.
I went upstairs. With every door and cabinet and drawer I opened, I learned something new about Isaac, and with each new thing I learned, his absence became more real, and the more real, the more impossible to believe. I opened his medicine cabinet. Inside were two bottles of talcum powder. I don’t even really know what talcum powder is, or why one would use it, but this single fact about his life moved me more than any detail I’d ever imagined. I opened his closet and pushed my face into his shirts. He liked the color blue. I picked up a pair of brown wingtips. The heels were worn down to almost nothing. I put my nose inside and sniffed. I found his watch on the night table and put it on. The leather strap was worn around the hole where he used to buckle it. His wrist had been thicker than mine. When had he grown bigger than me? What had I been doing, and what had he, at the exact moment my son had surpassed me in size?
The bed was neatly made. Had he died in it? Or had he felt it coming, and gotten up to greet his childhood again, only to be struck down? What was the last thing he’d looked at? Was it the watch on my wrist, stopped at 12:38? The lake outside the window? Someone’s face? And did he feel pain?
Only once did someone die in my arms. I was working as a janitor in a hospital, this was the winter of 1941. It was only a brief while. In the end I lost the job. But one evening, during my last week, I was mopping the floor when I heard someone gagging. It was coming from the room of a woman who had a disease of the blood. I ran to her. Her body twisted and convulsed. I took her in my arms. I think I can say there was no question in either of our minds about what was about to happen. She had a child. I knew because I’d seen him visit once with his father. A little boy in polished boots and a coat with gold buttons. He’d sat playing with a toy car the whole time, ignoring his mother unless she spoke to him. Perhaps he was angry at her for leaving him alone with his father for so long. As I looked into her face, it was him I thought of, the boy who would grow up without knowing how to forgive himself. I felt a certain relief and pride, even superiority, to be filling the task that he couldn’t. And then, less than a year later, that son whose mother died without him was me.
There was a noise behind me. A creak. This time I didn’t turn. I squeezed my eyes shut. Isaac, I whispered. The sound of my own voice frightened me, but I didn’t stop. I want to tell you—and then I broke off. What do I want to tell you? The truth? What is the truth? That I mistook your mother for my life? No. Isaac, I said. The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.
Now I turned and saw myself in the mirror on Isaac’s wall. A fool in fool’s clothes. I’d come to get back my book, but now I didn’t care whether I found it or not. I thought: Let it be lost like the rest. It didn’t matter, not anymore.
And yet.
In the corner of the mirror, reflected from across the hall, I saw his typewriter. No one had to tell me it was the same as mine. I’d read in a newspaper interview that he’d been writing on the same manual Olympia for almost twenty-five years. A few months later I saw the exact model for sale in a secondhand shop. The man said it worked, so I bought it. In the beginning I just liked to look at it, to know that my son was looking at it, too. Day in and day out it sat there smiling at me, as if the keys were teeth. Then I had the heart attack, and still it smiled, so one day I rolled a sheet in and wrote a sentence.
I crossed the hall. I thought: What if I found my book there, on his desk? The strangeness of it hit me. I in his coat, my book on his desk. He with my eyes, I in his shoes.
All I wanted was proof that he’d read it.
I sat down in his chair in front of his typewriter. The house felt cold. I pulled his coat around me. I thought I heard laughter, but told myself it was only the little boat creaking in the storm. I thought I heard footsteps on the roof, but told myself it was only an animal foraging for food. I rocked a little, the way my father used to rock when he prayed. Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end.
Darkness fell. Rain fell.
I never asked: What question?
And now it’s too late. Because I lost you, Tateh. One day, in the spring of 1938, on a rainy day that gave way to a break in the clouds, I lost you. You’d gone out to collect specimens for a theory you were hatching about rainfall, instinct, and butterflies. And then you were gone. We found you lying under a tree, your face splashed with mud. We knew you were free then, unbound by disappointing results. And we buried you in the cemetery where your father was buried, and his father, under the shade of a chestnut tree. Three years later, I lost Mameh. The last time I saw her she was wearing her yellow apron. She was stuffing things in a suitcase, the house was a wreck. She told me to go out into the woods. She’d packed me food, and told me to wear my coat, even though it was July. “Go,” she said. I was too old to listen, but like a child I listened. She told me she’d follow the next day. We chose a spot we both knew in the woods. The giant walnut tree you used to like, Tateh, because you said it had human qualities. I didn’t bother to say goodbye. I chose to believe what was easier. I waited. But. She never came. Since then I’ve lived with the guilt of understanding too late that she thought she would have been a burden to me. I lost Fritzy. He was studying in Vilna, Tateh—someone who knew someone told me he’d last been seen on a train. I lost Sari and Hanna to the dogs. I lost Herschel to the rain. I lost Josef to a crack in time. I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes, I’d taken them off to sleep, the shoes Herschel gave me, and when I woke they were gone, I walked barefoot for days and then I broke down and stole someone else’s. I lost the only woman I ever wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that somewhere along the way, without my knowing it, I didn’t also lose my mind?
My book was nowhere to be found. Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.
IF NOT, NOT
1. WHAT I LOOK LIKE NAKED
When I woke up in my sleeping bag the rain had stopped and my bed was empty, the sheets stripped. I looked at my watch. It was 10:03. It was also August 30th, which meant there were only ten days left until school started, a month until I turned fifteen, and only three years left until I was supposed to leave for college to sta
rt my life, which, at this point, did not seem very likely. For this and other reasons my stomach ached. I looked across the hall into Bird’s room. Uncle Julian was asleep with his glasses on, Volume II of The Destruction of the European Jews open on his chest. Bird received the box set as a gift from a cousin of my mother’s who lives in Paris, and who took an interest in him after we met her for tea at her hotel. She told us that her husband had fought in the Resistance, and Bird stopped trying to construct a house out of the sugar cubes to say: “Resistancing who?”
In the bathroom I took off my T-shirt and underwear, stood on the toilet, and stared at myself in the mirror. I tried to think of five adjectives to describe what I looked like, and one was scrawny and another was My ears stick out. I considered a nose ring. When I raised my arms over my head, my chest became concave.
2. MY MOTHER LOOKS RIGHT THROUGH ME
Downstairs, my mother was in her kimono reading the newspaper in the sunlight. “Did anyone call for me?” I asked. “Fine, thank you, and how are you?” she said. “But I didn’t say how are you,” I said. “I know.” “You shouldn’t have to always be polite with your family.” “Why not?” “It would be better if people just said what they meant.” “You mean you don’t care how I am?” I glared at her. “Finethankyouhowareyou?” I said. “Fine, thank you,” said my mother. “Did anyone call?” “For instance?” “Anyone.” “Has something happened between you and Misha?” “No,” I said, opening the refrigerator and examining some wilted celery. I dropped an English muffin into the toaster, and my mother turned the page of the newspaper, scanning the headlines. I wondered if she’d even notice if I let it burn to a black crisp.
“The History of Love starts when Alma is ten, right?” I said. My mother looked up and nodded. “Well how old is she when it ends?” “It’s hard to say. There are so many Almas in the book.” “How old is the oldest?” “Not very. Maybe twenty.” “So the book ends when Alma is only twenty?” “In a way. But it’s more complicated than that. She isn’t even mentioned in some chapters. And the whole sense of time and history in the book is very loose.” “But there’s no Alma in any of the chapters older than twenty?” “No,” said my mother. “I guess not.”