“That’s always been her weak spot.” My father chuckled. “She actually cares what her neighbors think. It’s given me great tactical advantage over the years. Look, get out of my way. There’s a doctor on Hilton Head who can cure your mother. He uses that medicine made out of apricot pits that you can only buy in Mexico.”
“Yeh,” I said. “Nobody dies of cancer in Mexico. Mom’s already got a doctor. He’ll do just as good a job killing her as anyone else.”
He unscrewed the cap of the bottle and took one quick swallow of the Old Grand-Dad. I had seen my father consume a whole pint of bourbon without coming up once for air. He studied me.
“You were the weirdest of all my children and that’s saying something,” he said at last. “That’s a sweepstakes you should take pride in winning. What a happy nest of losers.”
And then he said, unscrewing the bottle cap again, “You were born ugly, son. Even I can’t be blamed for that, although you and the rest of them would like to blame me for the ocean having too much salt. No, I had people tell me you were the ugliest baby ever born in Waterford, all red-faced and colicky and runty. Your face has always looked like roadkill to me.”
My father’s capacity for meanness could always take my breath away. Woe to the child born with freckles, astigmatism, birthmarks, or red hair. He could always find his adversaries’ softest flanks and there was nothing he would not say to damage the people he loved most on the earth.
“Mom’s not here, Dad,” I said. “She got Leah and Jim out of harm’s way when she saw you coming. She sent me out here to get rid of you.”
“You and what army?” he said.
I shook my head and said, “Dad. Mom’s married now. She’s got a new life. You don’t need to embarrass her or humiliate her in front of her new husband.”
“We took vows before almighty God,” he said grandly. “The King of Kings. The Lord God of Hosts. The Maker of All Things Great and Small.”
“She dissolved the vows,” I said. “With the help of a lawyer. You heard of lawyers?”
“She deserted me in my time of greatest need. I was helpless, vomiting in every gutter, lifting my arms into the night for an angel of mercy. Alcoholism’s a disease, son. Your mother deserted her post like a nurse forsaking a leper. That’s why God struck her down with cancer.”
“I’ll tell her. She’ll be glad to hear it,” I said. “Clear out, Dad. Let me walk you back to Grandpa’s.”
“I don’t tolerate assholes and degenerates for escorts. I consider you both. I’ve taken a look at all your pansy cookbooks. I’d like you to know that I wouldn’t touch any of that shit during a famine.”
“I’ll write a cookbook just for you, Dad. One chapter’ll be ‘Dry Martinis.’ The next could be ‘Margaritas,’ then ‘Scotch and Soda,’ then ‘Bloody Marys.’ ”
My father said proudly, “I drink my liquor straight.”
“Then I’ll simplify my cookbook. The recipe could read: ‘Buy a bottle of liquor. Open it up. Drink that sucker down. Throw up in the sand. Pass out at your leisure.’ We could call that recipe: ‘Breakfast.’ ”
“Have some respect,” Johnson Hagood said. “I already told you it was a disease. I need compassion, not censure.”
“Get out of Mom’s front yard,” I said, my temper fraying slightly.
“I’m not in her front yard. The piece of land on which I’m standing belongs to the littoral of the great state of South Carolina. No man or woman can purchase or lay claim to the beach itself, which belongs to the state and the people in perpetuity. Don’t argue law with me, idiot child. I’m the best goddamn lawyer you’ve ever seen and I’ve forgotten more about South Carolina law than you’ll ever dream about.”
“You threw your law career away in a bottle of Jim Beam.”
“I’m a deeper man than you’ll ever be, Jack. I drink because of despair, disillusionment, and emptiness of the soul. Things you know nothing about.”
“Because of you, I could give a course at Harvard on all those subjects,” I shot back. “But let’s be clear: you drink because you love to get drunk.”
“Why should I listen to what you say?” my father answered and there was a new venom in his voice. “You’re nothing but a faggot who writes cookbooks. A mama’s boy who mastered the arts of the kitchen and hearth because he couldn’t tear himself away from his mother’s skirts. You were always easy to shop for. I’d just think about a nice present for Lucy and buy it for you instead.”
I tried to get control of myself again and said, “I’ve heard it all before, Dad. You forget everything you say because you’re drunk. All of us remember everything because we’re sober. The only part you’ll remember is me kicking your ass up and down the beach. We’ve been in this dance for too long. Let’s look for another way.”
“I like this way. I need it to express my contempt for you. My utter loathing. Dear boy, you can always pretend you don’t care what I say. But you’re like the rest of your siblings. You care far too much. I look for things that’ll hurt you the most, then I use them for pleasure. It’s a sport I invented. It’s my favorite recreation. I call it kid-fucking. You find out where they’re weakest. You work away at that spot like a dentist probing at a small area of decay. Go deep enough and you hit a nerve. Probe a millimeter deeper and you can put them screaming on their knees.”
“Don’t do it, Dad,” I whispered. “I’m warning you.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, help me welcome to our center stage, the lovely and ethereal Shyla Fox.”
I rushed at my father and grabbed him by his throat, lifting him up in the air on his tiptoes. He struggled and tried to hit me in the face with the pint bottle but I grabbed it and threw it far out into the raging surf.
“Your sorrow about Shyla’s all an act,” he spat at me. “Everything about you’s fake. I’ve watched you walk with your little girl out of the Foxes’ house. It’s so sweet. The loving father. The grieving widower. Yet it’s all play-acting. If Daddy makes believe long enough then the whole world’ll think he loves his little daughter. All I see is your coldness, Jack. I see the Iceman Cometh. Because I’ve lived with that cold inside me and it’s ruined my whole life.”
“I’m not anything like you.”
“You got me written all over you,” he boasted, laughing. “All my sons wear that mark of ice that I’ve been fighting my whole life. Look at poor Dallas. My law partner. He’s got a nice wife and a couple of kids, but it’s not enough for him. So he goes looking for the first girl who’ll spread her legs for free and he thinks he’s discovered the mother lode. All of you’ll be looking for love your whole lives and you’ll never even know when it’s sleeping right beside you.”
“You don’t know anything about us,” I whispered savagely.
“Look up there,” Johnson Hagood said, looking toward Lucy’s house. Lucy had returned with Jim and Leah from the store. I watched as she walked up to the picture window framed in the false light and peered out into the real darkness. We could see her perfectly and she could not see us at all.
“That’s what I lost,” my father said to me. “Because I didn’t know what I had. I’ll bet you didn’t have a clue how much you loved Shyla until you saw her in the morgue. Did you, Jack?”
He looked at his ex-wife one last time, then screamed out, “I love you, Lucy. I still love you.”
As Lucy fled from the window he added, “I love you, you monstrous cunt.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Max and Esther Rusoff took great pleasure in the conduct of their business pursuits in Waterford. Max was a wizard at selling and Esther kept the account books with an infallible accuracy and a penmanship as pretty as a row of tulips. To them, business was an extension of the arts of courtesy and welcome, and anyone who entered their store came as an honored guest. Max was the greeter, the kibitzer, and the joke teller, while Esther worked behind the scenes in accounts and monitoring the stock.
They prospered. Their small food store became the to
wn’s first supermarket and they opened Rusoff’s Department Store in the spring of 1937. The department store quickly became famous for its fashions and the fairness of its prices. The first woman to drive from Charleston to Waterford to shop received a free purse and got her picture in the next week’s edition of the local paper. To the Rusoffs’ surprise, they discovered they were good at marketing and advertising. Everything they touched turned golden and they could not believe their good fortune or the blessings that God had showered upon them.
In 1939, the God of the Jews went into hiding. For years letters had arrived at Max and Esther’s house from relatives scattered through Russia and Poland. Esther had been religious about corresponding with everyone who was family and from the very first days of his residence in Waterford, Max had always sent money back to his family in Europe.
In 1939, the letters from Poland stopped forever. The mails grew quiet and the Yiddish language died for Esther Rusoff that year.
When Silas McCall learned of the Rusoffs’ fears for their relatives, he arranged a meeting with the Honorable Barnwell Middleton, the representative from their district in the United States Congress. Hard-nosed and aristocratic, Middleton sat in Harry’s Restaurant in Waterford in October of 1941 and stared at the weathered face and enormous arms of Max Rusoff. Silas McCall sat beside him as Max told of the disappearance of his and Esther’s families when the German Army entered Poland and then invaded Russia. When Max had finished speaking, he handed the congressman a list of all their relatives, their names and addresses. There were sixty-eight people on the list, including four infants.
Middleton cleared his throat and took a sip of black coffee before he spoke. “It’s a bad time, Max.”
“What do you know?” Max asked.
“That it’s bad. That it’s worse than you think. That it’s worse than anybody thinks.”
Silas interrupted angrily, “Goddamn it, Barnwell. The man’s worried sick. Don’t make it worse until you know something for sure.”
“It’ll be bad news, Max, whatever I find out.”
“We are Jews,” Max said. “We have had bad news before.”
Over a year passed and the Rusoffs heard not a single word from Barnwell Middleton. By then the United States was fully engaged in the war. Max had heard no news at all of Kironittska’s Jews and the silence that had first fallen on Poland now fell on Russia. It was the year that their two sons, Mark and Henry, enlisted in the United States Army. Sending their sons off to fight the Germans made Max and Esther Rusoff feel like Americans as nothing else ever had. Max had given both boys miniature replicas of the Statue of Liberty when they were shipped overseas and they kept the small statues on their persons for the entire war. They fought as American soldiers with great fierceness and resolve, and as the sons of the Great Jew they were unafraid of Cossacks. They fought north toward the Europe where the collective voices of all the Rusoffs on both sides of the family had fallen silent.
In the middle of 1943 Barnwell Middleton met Max and Silas for lunch for the first time since he had promised Max he would try to find out the fates of his and Esther’s families. For the first fifteen minutes of the meal, Barnwell talked about the progress of the war, the victories and defeats of the Allies, and the somber mood in Washington.
Silas listened impatiently, then said, “Get to the point, Barnwell.”
“Have you been able to check on our families?” Max asked.
“Yes,” Middleton answered, his voice grave. “I wish I hadn’t received any answers. But I have.”
Then Barnwell leaned across the table and took Max by the hand and held it fiercely as he delivered the news from Eastern Europe in a South Carolina café known for its bad coffee and good pie.
“Max,” he whispered. “All the names you gave me. All of them … All dead, Max. Every one of them is dead.”
Max said nothing. He neither tried to speak, nor thought he could utter a sound if asked a direct question.
“There’s no way for you to know that,” Silas said. “It’s wartime. There’s confusion. Armies in the field. You can’t know for sure.”
“You’re right, Silas,” Barnwell conceded. “Some of these people could’ve escaped or been overlooked. Some could’ve hidden. The information was a long time in coming. I’m not even sure where it came from or who retrieved it. The source is in Switzerland and I know he’s German. That’s all I know. He says that all your family is dead, Max. All of Esther’s family is dead. There are no Jews in any of the towns or cities you gave me with the list of names.”
“Judenrein,” Max said, at last.
“They’re killing every Jew they can find,” Barnwell said. “Except the ones they’re forcing into slave labor. Your family was mostly slaughtered in fields. The Jews were forced to dig their own pits, then were machine-gunned en masse.”
“There were four infants. Babies,” Max said.
“The Germans aren’t particular,” Barnwell said.
“They machine-gun babies?” Silas asked.
“Or bury them alive after they kill their mothers,” Barnwell said. “There was one teenage girl they thought was Esther’s niece. She’s in hiding in Poland. But it turns out she only has the same name as a girl on Esther’s list, Ruth Graubart. A shame. It turns out she is no relation at all.”
“What happened to this child’s family?” Max asked.
Barnwell shrugged his shoulders and said, “I suppose the same thing that happened to yours. They said the Polish underground could smuggle her out.”
“Then you should do it,” Silas said.
“The price was a tad high,” Barnwell said, his voice ironic and detached. “They were asking for fifty thousand dollars cash.”
Silas whistled and Barnwell released Max’s hand at last. Twirling his finger, Barnwell gestured to the waitress for another round of coffee.
“Nice world,” Silas said. “Tell me one nice thing about the human race.”
“That girl,” Max said.
“What girl?” Barnwell asked.
“The one in hiding. The one you thought was Esther’s niece,” he said.
“No relation at all. She’s from another part of Poland entirely.”
“Still. She is a Jewish girl in trouble.”
“Yes,” Barnwell said.
“Esther and I would like to bring that girl to America,” Max said.
Both men looked at Max as though they had both misheard him.
“She’s not yours, Max. And she’s not Esther’s,” Silas said, “and she comes with a fifty-thousand-dollar price tag.”
“She’s a Jewish girl in trouble. That makes her mine. It makes her Esther’s. You say her family is probably dead. Like my family. If we do not help her, who will?”
“The life of one girl doesn’t make much difference in a war this big,” Barnwell answered.
“I think it does,” Max answered.
“But you don’t have fifty thousand dollars cash,” the congressman said, with finality, rising from the table with the air of a man who has spent enough time on a disagreeable subject. “Nobody in this town has that kind of cash.”
“Except you,” Silas said. “Elect a man to Congress in this state and he’s a millionaire in four years. Tell me how it works, Barnwell.”
“God smiles on lambs and fools,” Barnwell answered.
That night Max took Esther out on the veranda overlooking the Waterford River and together they watched the sun gild a low-lying herd of clouds with an unearthly, brokered gold. They drank schnapps from small crystal glasses. It was a ritual that celebrated their prosperity and their need to relax after the endless labors of their first years in the town.
Max could not figure out a way to tell the woman he loved best in the world that she had lost her entire family. Esther came from a family of enormous intimacy and affection, and he did not know how to tell her that her Europe had died.
Max had a second schnapps and then told her in Yiddish.
F
or six days, Esther Rusoff mourned and then a young rabbi conducted Sabbath services in their house. Max and Esther pledged to build a synagogue in Waterford to honor their families.
When shiva was over, Esther lay in Max’s arms again and whispered to him before they went to sleep.
“That girl, Max. The one that Barnwell mentioned to you.”
“I have been thinking of her too,” Max said.
“What can we do?”
“Sell everything,” Max replied. “This house. The department store. The supermarket. Start again.”
“Can we get fifty thousand dollars? It is a lot. Too much maybe.”
“The bank will lend us the difference,” Max said. “I am sure of it.”
“Then this is what we will do,” Esther said.
“Yes,” Max said.
“You would do it whether I agreed or not,” Esther said. “I know you, my husband. I am smart enough to go along with what you have already decided. But it is right. Even if it may take away from our own children.”
“How does it hurt our own children to save another child?” Max asked.
In the following months, Max sold the department store to the Belk’s chain out of Charlotte, sold the food market to a retailer out of Charleston, and sold their house on Dolphin Street to a lieutenant general in the Marine Corps stationed on Pollock Island and nearing retirement age. He wired the fifty thousand dollars to Barnwell Middleton in Washington and received back a sobering telegram that stated how long the odds were and how improbable it was that this rescue could actually be consummated. But Barnwell Middleton pledged he would try his best.
Max had not sold the building of the small store that he had first opened in Waterford so many years before, and it was empty. The Rusoff family moved back into the top floor, and in no time, Max and Esther were back in business.
Nearly a year passed before Max received a telegram from Barnwell Middleton informing him that a merchant ship would arrive in the small port of Waterford on July 18, 1944. A girl named Ruth Graubart was listed among the passengers. Max called his wife and told her the good news, then called Silas McCall who told the news to Ginny Penn. The news moved from house to house in Waterford the way news travels in small towns, light and frisky and buoyant because the story brought such a sense of joy into a world too familiar with the news of hometown boys dying overseas.