He sang it again the week my mother was taken to the hospital.
I have only vague memories of the darkness and fog of that week. It was January. I had just turned six. There was a phone call. My father rushed from the apartment and returned a while later, the blood driven from his face. Then my mother began to scream. The phone rang endlessly. The apartment filled with relatives and friends. My mother continued screaming. People moved about aimlessly, their faces filled with horror and shock. I was in my room, peering out the door, which I had opened to a tiny crack. I watched the faces of the people and listened to my mother’s screams. A cold uncontrollable trembling took possession of me. Something had happened to my mother. I could not endure the screams. They cut—like the sliver of glass that had once opened my hand, like the curb of the sidewalk that had once gashed my knee. The screams cut and cut. People were becoming frenzied and hysterical. I heard loud weeping. Then, suddenly, the noise died. My mother stopped screaming. There were whispers. I peered into the hallway. Two tall dark-bearded men came along the hallway. Behind them walked a man of medium height, wearing a dark coat over a dark suit. He had a short dark beard and wore an ordinary dark hat. He walked in the path cleared by the tall dark-bearded men. People murmured softly as he passed. His presence seemed to fill the apartment with white light. It was the Rebbe. Behind the Rebbe walked two more tall dark-bearded men. The Rebbe was in my house. I was certain my mother was dead. I lay down on the floor in my room, and wept.
Later, someone remembered me. I was taken to a neighbor’s apartment. The next day, I was brought back. My mother was not dead. She lay in her bed, but I could not see her. Uncle Yaakov had been in an accident, my father explained. A car accident. In Detroit. While traveling for the Rebbe.
My Uncle Yaakov was my mother’s only brother. He had been to our apartment only three days before. He would visit us all the time. He lived alone two blocks away. He was short and slight and dark-haired, with brown eyes and thin lips. He looked like my mother. He was studying history and Russian affairs. He was to be an adviser to the Rebbe. His favorite expression was “What’s new in the world?” He spoke in a soft voice and was gentle. Now he was dead of a car accident at the age of twenty-seven.
The following day, my mother was taken to the hospital. That Shabbos, my father sang his father’s melody to Yoh Ribbon Olom. We were in his older brother’s home a few blocks away from us, for his sister-in-law would not hear of us having Shabbos in our apartment without my mother. We sat at the table that Friday night and there were long silences and feeble attempts at zemiros by my father’s brother. And then, suddenly, my father began to sing his father’s melody.
There was an unearthly quality to the way he sang that melody that night—as if he were winging through unknown worlds in search of sources of strength beyond himself. His eyes were open, fixed, but gazing inward. There was a sweetness and sadness, a sense of pain and yearning in his voice—soft, tremulous, climbing and falling and climbing again. And when he was done there was a long silence—and in that silence I thought I heard distant cries, and I was afraid.
Late, late that night, I came slowly awake from dream-filled sleep and heard the melody again and thought I was still dreaming. But even when I knew I was truly awake the melody still went on. It was my father’s voice coming from our living room. I saw him standing in front of the window. The huge Venetian blind had been pulled up. It stood rigidly perpendicular to the two tall rectangles that were the window’s frames. A single small light glowed faintly in the baseboard socket near the window—the light we left on in that room all through Shabbos. It cast weak shadows across the floor and a soft reddish glow on my father’s face. He stood looking through the window at the street outside, quietly singing his father’s melody. He wore his dark-red dressing gown over his pajamas. A tall skull-cap covered his head. His sidecurls hung uncombed alongside his cheeks. The room was dark save for the single weak night light. I stood in the doorway behind him and saw his face reflected in the window. I saw his eyes and watched his lips move. He held his hands to both sides of his head. Standing there, with the room in shadows and his faintly illumined features reflected in the window that looked out onto the dark street, he seemed to spread himself slowly across the wide night, to embrace and cover the darkness with his blanket of melody and soft light.
My mother returned from the hospital and my father stopped traveling.
The Rebbe’s staff had suffered a number of casualties since its reorganization in America after the Second World War: one of its members had had a heart attack while on a mission in West Germany; a second had been in a serious car accident in Rome; a third was badly beaten one night in Bucharest. There had been others. But my mother’s brother was the first to die.
There had been a special kind of relationship between my mother and her brother, and his death almost destroyed her.
She had always been thin; she returned from the hospital skeletal. At first, I did not know who she was. I thought there had been an error, that somehow they had sent back the wrong person.
For the first few days, she remained in her bed. Then she came out and moved specterlike about the apartment in her nightgown, her eyes dark dead pools, her short dark hair uncombed and uncovered by a wig. She would not speak to anyone. I thought she had lost her voice until I heard her talking in the living room late one afternoon and found she was talking to herself.
“You had to go?” she was saying. “Yes? Why did you have to go? How will I cross the street?”
I felt cold listening to her. I said to my father that night as he was putting me to bed, “Is my mama going to die?”
He drew in breath sharply. “No, Asher. No. Your mama is not going to die.”
“Is my mama very sick?”
“Yes.”
“Will my mama get better?”
“Yes, with God’s help.”
“I want my mama to get better. I want to make pretty drawings for her.”
My father hugged me to him. I felt his beard on my face. “Now go to bed, Asher. And let me hear your Krias Shema.”
She wept easily. She tired easily. She cared nothing for the apartment, for food, for the things a person must do to stay alive.
A woman came into the apartment every day to clean and cook. Her name was Mrs. Sheindl Rackover. She was a widow with married children, short, plump, stern, energetic, and fiercely pious. She spoke only Yiddish. My mother avoided her. My mother avoided friends and relatives. She avoided me. She avoided my father. She seemed to cringe in the presence of another person.
One day, sitting alone in our living room, she began to sing. It was a Hasidic melody, but I did not recognize it. She was imitating a soft voice.
“Why does my mama sing that way?” I asked my father that night.
“What way?”
“In Uncle Yaakov’s voice.”
He was helping me put on my pajamas. His hands trembled. “Your mother is remembering her brother, may he rest in peace.”
“Papa, you remember Uncle Yaakov.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t sing like that, Papa.”
He turned his head away for a moment. Then he said, “It’s time for sleep now, Asher. Let me hear your Krias Shema.”
I found her alone in the living room one afternoon about a week after she came back from the hospital. I said to her, “Mama, are you feeling better?”
She gazed at me but did not seem to see me. Then I saw a flicker of light in her eyes.
“Asher?”
“Mama?”
“Asher, are you drawing pretty things? Are you drawing sweet, pretty things?”
I was not drawing pretty things. I was drawing twisted shapes, swirling forms, in blacks and reds and grays. I did not respond.
“Asher, are you drawing birds and flowers and pretty things?”
“I can draw you birds and flowers, Mama.”
“You should draw pretty things, Asher.”
“Sh
all I draw you a bird, Mama?”
“You should make the world pretty, Asher. Make it sweet and pretty. It’s nice to live in a pretty world.”
“I’ll draw you some pretty flowers and birds, Mama. I’ll draw them for you right now.”
“Never mind,” she said sharply. She looked out the window. “It’s not complete. Can it make a difference? Tell me how.”
And the dead look returned to her eyes.
She seemed to hate the kitchen and would flee from it as soon as she was done eating. She never came into my room. She either lay in her bed, sleeping or staring at the ceiling, or she sat on the sofa in the living room, gazing out the window at the street below.
She began to smoke. She sat in the living room wreathed in smoke, the ashtrays on the end table beside her spilling over. Mrs. Rackover muttered to herself as she cleaned the ashtrays, but she said nothing to my mother. I began to find stubs of gray ash on the floor of the apartment.
About two weeks after my mother returned from the hospital, I came into my parents’ bedroom late in the morning and found her in bed. It was a large double bed. She lay beneath the green quilt, looking shrunken. Her face was sallow. Her bony hands protruded from the sleeves of her nightgown. She had seemed dead when I came in, but now her eyelids fluttered open and she raised her head from the pillow and looked at me. She started to speak, stopped, and lay back on the pillow. She gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, then closed her eyes. Her closed eyes looked like ashen knobs in the blue-gray darkness of their sockets.
I stood there for a long time. She seemed to be barely breathing. There was a strange fetid odor in the air.
I had come to show her a drawing I had made earlier that morning. It was a drawing of two birds. One of the birds was in a nest; the other was settling into the nest, its wings wide and fluttering. The nest was pale yellow, the birds were orange and deep blue, and there were green leaves and red flowers everywhere. There was a pale-blue sky and white clouds and birds off in the distance. The bird in the nest had large round black eyes.
I stood alongside the bed and watched my mother’s slow breathing.
“Mama,” I said.
Her eyes fluttered faintly but remained closed.
“Mama,” I said again.
Her hands moved then, and she turned her head toward me and opened her eyes.
I held up the drawing. She gazed at it blankly.
“Here are the birds and flowers, Mama.”
She blinked her eyes.
“I made the world pretty, Mama.”
She turned her head away and closed her eyes.
“Mama, aren’t you well now?”
She did not move.
“But I made the world pretty, Mama.”
Still she did not move.
“I’ll make more birds and flowers for you, Mama.”
Behind me someone came quickly into the room. I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Rackover whispered fiercely in Yiddish.
“I made a drawing for my mama. I’m making my mama well.”
“Come away from here.” Her fleshy face quivered. She seemed frightened my mother would wake.
“My mama asked me to make a drawing.”
“Come away, I said.” She turned me forcefully around. I felt her pushing me out of the room. “What kind of boy disturbs a sick mother? I am surprised at you. A good boy does not do such a thing.” She sent me to my room.
I sat on my bed and stared at the drawing. Then I was frightened in a dark and trembling way I had never known before. I went to my desk. A long time afterward, Mrs. Rackover called me to lunch. I found myself in front of a drawing filled with black and red swirls and gray eyes and dead birds.
Relatives and friends came to visit my mother. Often my mother would refuse to see them. Sometimes she would let my father persuade her to join a group of visitors in the living room. She would sit in one of the easy chairs, looking small and fragile, and say nothing. There would be awkward silences, feeble attempts at conversation, and more silences. In those moments, my mother seemed a ghostly spectator, hollow, without a core to her being.
Her older sister, a short robust woman in her early thirties, came in one day from Boston, where she lived with her husband and four children. She sat with my mother in our living room.
“Rivkeh, you have a husband and a son. How can you neglect them? You have a responsibility.”
My father was in the room at the time. There were other relatives there, too, but I do not remember who they were.
“Look at the boy,” my mother’s sister said. “Look at him. He’s dirty. How can you let him be so dirty?”
“Asher is always dirty,” my father said. “Even after he’s bathed he’s dirty.”
“He should not be left alone. How can you leave a little boy alone?”
“He is not left alone.”
“A boy left with a housekeeper all day is alone. A boy without children to play with is alone.”
My father said nothing.
“You should send him to your kindergarten.”
“Asher doesn’t want to go to the kindergarten.”
“Then he should come and live with me,” my mother’s sister said. “We have a big house. There are four children. A boy Asher’s age should not be by himself all the time.”
“Asher likes being by himself.”
“It isn’t healthy. It leaves scars. You don’t want to leave scars on the boy. Let him live with me.”
There was a brief pause. I felt myself shivering inside.
“Let me think about it,” my father said.
My mother had been staring blankly at her sister and saying nothing.
“It’s wrong, Rivkeh,” her sister said. “The boy will have scars.” Then she said, “Rivkeh, it is forbidden to mourn in this way.”
My mother was very still.
“Rivkeh, the Torah forbids it.”
My mother sighed. Her frail body seemed to shrink even more in the large chair.
“Papa and Mama would have forbidden it,” her sister said.
My mother said nothing.
“Rivkeh,” her sister said. “He was my brother, too.”
A dark light flickered in my mother’s sunken eyes. “The Torah forbids it?” she said quietly. “It is forbidden? Yes?”
“Yes,” her sister said.
“But there are scars everywhere,” my mother said. “And who will hold my pennies?” She stared out the window at the afternoon sunlight on the trees below. “Who will tell me about the fox and the fish? Yaakov, you had to go? You left it unfinished. Who said you had to go?”
Then she lapsed into silence and would say nothing more.
Her sister stared at her, open-mouthed. Then she turned her head away and shuddered.
That night, alone in my room, I drew my Aunt Leah. I drew her in the shape of a fish being eaten by a fox.
“What did the doctor say?” I asked my father the next evening as he was helping me out of my clothes.
“To have patience.”
“Will my mama get well?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“It will take a long time.”
“Will you send me to live with Tante Leah?”
“No. We’ll think of something else. Now let me hear your Krias Shema, Asher.”
The weeks passed. The visitors ceased coming.
In the first week of March, my father began to take me with him to his office. He worked at a desk in the Ladover headquarters building a block and a half from where we lived. The building was a three-story house of tawny stone, with Gothic windows and a flagstone front porch with a whitestone railing. It contained offices, meeting rooms, a room with about a dozen mimeograph machines, two suites of rooms for the editorial offices of the various Ladover publications, and a small press in the basement. Men came and went all day long. They sat behind desks, met in conference rooms, rushed along corridors, talked frenetic
ally, sometimes quietly, sometimes in loud voices. All the men were bearded and wore dark skullcaps and dark suits with white shirts and dark ties. No women worked inside that building; secretarial work was done by men.
On the second floor of the house, in an apartment facing the parkway, lived the Rebbe and his wife. To the left of the entrance hall beyond the carved wooden doors that led into the house was a carpeted wooden staircase. There was endless two-way traffic up and down that staircase: men with and without beards; young men and old men; men who were obviously poor and men who were clearly affluent; men who were Jews and men who, it seemed to me, were not; and an occasional woman. Twice during those weeks, I saw a tall gray-haired man in a black beret climb the stairs and turn into the second-floor hallway. I noticed his hands; they were huge, rough, and calloused. I wanted to climb those stairs, too, but my father had told me never to go beyond the first floor of the building. I would wander through the first floor of the building alone, trying not to get in anyone’s way. People knew I was Aryeh Lev’s son; they patted my head, pinched my cheek, smiled, nodded indulgently at my drawings—I took my pad and crayons with me every day—and fed me cookies and milk.
My father’s office was the third along the corridor to the right of the entrance hall. It was a small office, with white walls, a dark-brown linoleum on the floor, and a window that looked out onto the parkway. There were filing cabinets along the wall opposite the desk. The walls were bare, except for a large framed photograph of the Rebbe that hung near the window. My father’s desk was old and scarred and seemed a relic of ancient academies of learning. It was cluttered with piles of paper and copies of Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. Often he sat tipped dangerously back in his swivel chair, his feet on the desk, his small velvet skullcap pushed forward across his red hair onto his forehead. He would sit reading a newspaper or a magazine and I would worry that he would fall over backward, but he never did.
There were two telephones on the desk. Frequently he would talk into one or the other of them and write as he talked. Sometimes one of the men from another office would come in and sit on the edge of the desk and speak quietly with my father. I heard the word “Russia” often in those conversations.