“Jonathan? This is your Aunt Frances. How is everyone?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“I want to ask one last favor of you. I need a letter from Jack. Your grandma’s very ill. Do you think you can?”
“Who is it?” my mother called from the living room.
“OK, Aunt Frances,” I said quickly. “I have to go now, we’re eating dinner.” And I hung up the phone.
“It was my friend Louie,” I said, sitting back down. “He didn’t know the math pages to review.”
The dinner was very fine. Harold and Susan washed the dishes and by the time they were done my mother and I had folded up the gateleg table and put it back against the wall and I had swept the crumbs up with the carpet sweeper. We all sat and talked and listened to records for a while and then my brother took Susan home. The evening had gone very well.
—
ONCE WHEN MY MOTHER wasn’t home my brother had pointed out something: the letters from Jack weren’t really necessary. “What is this ritual?” he said, holding his palms up. “Grandma is almost totally blind, she’s half deaf and crippled. Does the situation really call for a literary composition? Does it need verisimilitude? Would the old lady know the difference if she was read the phone book?”
“Then why did Aunt Frances ask me?”
“That is the question, Jonathan. Why did she? After all, she could write the letter herself—what difference would it make? And if not Frances, why not Frances’ sons, the Amherst students? They should have learned by now to write.”
“But they’re not Jack’s sons,” I said.
“That’s exactly the point,” my brother said. “The idea is service. Dad used to bust his balls getting them things wholesale, getting them deals on things. Frances of Westchester really needed things at cost. And Aunt Molly. And Aunt Molly’s husband, and Aunt Molly’s ex-husband. Grandma, if she needed an errand done. He was always on the hook for something. They never thought his time was important. They never thought every favor he got was one he had to pay back. Appliances, records, watches, china, opera tickets, any goddamn thing. Call Jack.”
“It was a matter of pride to him to be able to do things for them,” I said. “To have connections.”
“Yeah, I wonder why,” my brother said. He looked out the window.
Then suddenly it dawned on me that I was being implicated.
“You should use your head more,” my brother said.
—
YET I HAD AGREED once again to write a letter from the desert and so I did. I mailed it off to Aunt Frances. A few days later, when I came home from school, I thought I saw her sitting in her car in front of our house. She drove a black Buick Roadmaster, a very large clean car with whitewall tires. It was Aunt Frances all right. She blew the horn when she saw me. I went over and leaned in at the window.
“Hello, Jonathan,” she said. “I haven’t long. Can you get in the car?”
“Mom’s not home,” I said. “She’s working.”
“I know that. I came to talk to you.”
“Would you like to come upstairs?”
“I can’t, I have to get back to Larchmont. Can you get in for a moment, please?”
I got in the car. My Aunt Frances was a very pretty white-haired woman, very elegant, and she wore tasteful clothes. I had always liked her and from the time I was a child she had enjoyed pointing out to everyone that I looked more like her son than Jack’s. She wore white gloves and held the steering wheel and looked straight ahead as she talked, as if the car was in traffic and not sitting at the curb.
“Jonathan,” she said, “there is your letter on the seat. Needless to say I didn’t read it to Grandma. I’m giving it back to you and I won’t ever say a word to anyone. This is just between us. I never expected cruelty from you. I never thought you were capable of doing something so deliberately cruel and perverse.”
I said nothing.
“Your mother has very bitter feelings and now I see she has poisoned you with them. She has always resented the family. She is a very strong-willed, selfish person.”
“No she isn’t,” I said.
“I wouldn’t expect you to agree. She drove poor Jack crazy with her demands. She always had the highest aspirations and he could never fulfill them to her satisfaction. When he still had his store he kept your mother’s brother, who drank, on salary. After the war when he began to make a little money he had to buy Ruth a mink jacket because she was so desperate to have one. He had debts to pay but she wanted a mink. He was a very special person, my brother, he should have accomplished something special, but he loved your mother and devoted his life to her. And all she ever thought about was keeping up with the Joneses.”
I watched the traffic going up the Grand Concourse. A bunch of kids were waiting at the bus stop at the corner. They had put their books on the ground and were horsing around.
“I’m sorry I have to descend to this,” Aunt Frances said. “I don’t like talking about people this way. If I have nothing good to say about someone, I’d rather not say anything. How is Harold?”
“Fine.”
“Did he help you write this marvelous letter?”
“No.”
After a moment she said more softly: “How are you all getting along?”
“Fine.”
“I would invite you up for Passover if I thought your mother would accept.”
I didn’t answer.
She turned on the engine. “I’ll say good-bye now, Jonathan. Take your letter. I hope you give some time to thinking about what you’ve done.”
—
THAT EVENING WHEN MY mother came home from work I saw that she wasn’t as pretty as my Aunt Frances. I usually thought my mother was a good-looking woman, but I saw now that she was too heavy and that her hair was undistinguished.
“Why are you looking at me?” she said.
“I’m not.”
“I learned something interesting today,” my mother said. “We may be eligible for a V.A. pension because of the time your father spent in the Navy.”
That took me by surprise. Nobody had ever told me my father was in the Navy.
“In World War I,” she said, “he went to Webb’s Naval Academy on the Harlem River. He was training to be an ensign. But the war ended and he never got his commission.”
After dinner the three of us went through the closets looking for my father’s papers, hoping to find some proof that could be filed with the Veterans Administration. We came up with two things, a Victory medal, which my brother said everyone got for being in the service during the Great War, and an astounding sepia photograph of my father and his shipmates on the deck of a ship. They were dressed in bell-bottoms and T-shirts and armed with mops and pails, brooms and brushes.
“I never knew this,” I found myself saying. “I never knew this.”
“You just don’t remember,” my brother said.
I was able to pick out my father. He stood at the end of the row, a thin, handsome boy with a full head of hair, a mustache, and an intelligent smiling countenance.
“He had a joke,” my mother said. “They called their training ship the S.S. Constipation because it never moved.”
Neither the picture nor the medal was proof of anything, but my brother thought a duplicate of my father’s service record had to be in Washington somewhere and that it was just a matter of learning how to go about finding it.
“The pension wouldn’t amount to much,” my mother said. “Twenty or thirty dollars. But it would certainly help.”
I took the picture of my father and his shipmates and propped it against the lamp at my bedside. I looked into his youthful face and tried to relate it to the Father I knew. I looked at the picture a long time. Only gradually did my eye connect it to the set of Great Sea Novels in the bottom shelf of the bookcase a few feet away. My father had given that set to me: it was uniformly bound in green with gilt lettering and it included works by Melville, Conrad, Victor Hugo and Captain
Marryat. And lying across the top of the books, jammed in under the sagging shelf above, was his old ship’s telescope in its wooden case with the brass snap.
I thought how stupid, and imperceptive, and self-centered I had been never to have understood while he was alive what my father’s dream for his life had been.
On the other hand, I had written in my last letter from Arizona—the one that had so angered Aunt Frances—something that might allow me, the writer in the family, to soften my judgment of myself. I will conclude by giving the letter here in its entirety.
Dear Mama,
This will be my final letter to you since I have been told by the doctors that I am dying.
I have sold my store at a very fine profit and am sending Frances a check for five thousand dollars to be deposited in your account. My present to you, Mamaleh. Let Frances show you the passbook.
As for the nature of my ailment, the doctors haven’t told me what it is, but I know that I am simply dying of the wrong life. I should never have come to the desert. It wasn’t the place for me.
I have asked Ruth and the boys to have my body cremated and the ashes scattered in the ocean.
Your loving son,
Jack
Sunday afternoon. A peddler in a purple chorister’s robe selling watches in Battery Park. Fellow with dreadlocks, a sweet smile, sacral presence. Doing well.
Rock doves everywhere aswoop, the grit of the city in their wings. And the glare of the oil-slicked bay, and a warm-throated autumn breeze like a woman blowing in my ears.
At my back, the financial skyline of Lower Manhattan sunlit into an islanded cathedral, a religioplex.
And here’s the ferry from Ellis Island. Listing to starboard, her three decks jammed to the rails. Sideswipes bulkhead for contemptuous New York landing. Oof. Pilings groan, crack like gunfire. Man on the promenade breaks into a run. How can I be lonely in this city?
Tourists stampeding down the gangplank. Cameras, camcorders, and stupefied children slung from their shoulders. Sun hats and baseball caps insouciant this morning, now their serious, unfortunate fashion.
Lord, there is something so exhausted about the New York waterfront, as if the smell of the sea were oil, as if boats were buses, as if all Heaven were a garage hung with girlie calendars, the months to come already leafed and fingered in black grease.
But I went back to the peddler in the choir robe and said I liked the look. Told him I’d give him a dollar if he’d let me see the label. The smile dissolves.
You crazy, mon?
I was in my mufti grunge—jeans, leather jacket over plaid shirt over T-shirt. Not even cruciform I.D. to flash at him.
Lifts his tray of watches out of reach: Get away, you got no business wit me. Looking left and right as he says it.
And then later on my walk, at Astor Place, where they lay their goods on plastic shower curtains on the sidewalk: three of the sacristy’s purple choir robes neatly folded and stacked between a Best of the Highwaymen LP and the autobiography of George Sanders. I picked one and turned back the neck, and there was the label, Churchpew Crafts, and the laundry mark from Mr. Chung. The peddler, a solemn young mestizo with that bowl of black hair they have, wanted ten dollars each. I thought that was reasonable.
They come over from Senegal, or up from the Caribbean, or from Lima, San Salvador, Oaxaca, and find a piece of sidewalk and go to work. The world’s poor lapping our shores, like the rising of the global-warmed sea. I remember how, on the way to Machu Picchu, I stopped in the town of Cuzco and watched the dances and listened to the street bands. I was told when I found my camera missing that I could buy it back the next morning in the market street behind the cathedral. Sure enough, next morning there were the women of Cuzco, in their woven ponchos of red and ocher, braids depending from their black derbies, broad Olmec heads smiling shyly. They were fencing the stuff. Merciful heavens, I was pissed. But, surrounded by Anglos ransacking the stalls as if searching for their lost dead, how, my Lord Jesus, could I not accept the justice of the situation?
As I did at Astor Place in the shadow of the great, mansarded, brownstone-voluminous Cooper Union people’s college with the birds flying up from the square.
A block east, on St. Mark’s, a thrift shop had the altar candlesticks that were heisted along with the robes. Twenty-five dollars the pair. While I was at it, I bought half a dozen used paperback detective novels. To learn the trade.
I’m lying, Lord, I just read the damn things when I’m depressed. The paperback detective never fails me. His rod and his gaff, they comfort me. Sure, a life is lost here and there, but the paperback’s world is ordered, circumscribed, dependable in its punishments. More than I can say for Yours.
I know You are on this screen with me. If Thos. Pemberton, DD, is losing his life, he’s losing it here, to his watchful God. Not just over my shoulder do I presumptively locate You, or in the Anglican starch of my collar, or in the rectory walls, or in the coolness of the chapel stone that frames the door, but in the blinking cursor…
—
TUESDAY EVE. UP TO Lenox Hill to see my terminal: ambulances backing into the emergency bay with their beepings and blinding strobe lights. They used to have QUIET signs around hospitals. Doctors’ cars double-parked, patients strapped on gurneys double-parked on the sidewalk, smart young Upper East Side workforce pouring out of the subway walking past not looking. Looking.
It gets dark earlier now. Lights coming on in the apartment buildings. If only I was rising to a smart one-bedroom. A lithe young woman home from her interesting job, listening for my ring. Uncorking the wine, humming, wearing no underwear.
In the lobby, a stoic crowd primed for visiting hours with bags and bundles and infants squirming in laps. And that profession of the plague of our time, the security guard, in various indolent versions.
My terminal’s room door slapped with a RESTRICTED AREA warning. I push in, all smiles.
You got medicine, Father? You gonna make me well? Then get the fuck outta here. The fuck out, I don’t need your bullshit.
Enormous eyes all that’s left of him. An arm bone aims the remote like a gun, and there in the hanging set the smiling girl spins the big wheel.
My comforting pastoral visit concluded, I pass down the hall, where several neatly dressed black people wait outside a private room. They hold gifts in their arms. I smell non-hospital things. A whiff of fruit pie still hot from the oven. Soups. Simmering roasts. I stand on tiptoe. Who is that? Through the flowers, like a Gauguin, a handsome, light-complected black woman sitting up in bed. Turbaned. Regal. I don’t hear the words, but her melodious, deep voice of prayer knows whereof it speaks. The men with their hats in their hands and their heads bowed. The women with white kerchiefs. On the way out I inquire of the floor nurse.
SRO twice a day, she says. We get all of Zion up here. The only good thing, since Sister checked in I don’t have to shop for supper. Yesterday I brought home baked pork chops. You wouldn’t believe how good they were.
—
ANOTHER ONE HAVING TROUBLE with my bullshit—the widow code-named Moira. In her new duplex that looks across the river to the Pepsi-Cola sign she’s been reading Pagels on early Christianity.
It was all politics, wasn’t it? she asks me.
Yes, I sez to her.
And so whoever won, that’s why we have what we have now?
Well, with a nod at the Reformation, I suppose, yes.
She lies back on the pillows. So it’s all made up, it’s an invention?
Yes, I sez, taking her in my arms. And you know for the longest time it actually worked.
Used to try to make her laugh at the dances at Spence. Couldn’t then, can’t now. A gifted melancholic, Moira. The lost husband an add-on.
But she was one of the few in the old crowd who didn’t think I was throwing my life away.
Wavy thick brown hair parted in the middle. Glimmering dark eyes, set a bit too wide. Figure not current, lacking tone, Glory to God in the h
ighest.
From the corner of her full-lipped mouth her tongue emerges and licks away a teardrop.
And then, Jesus, the surprising condolence of her wet salted kiss.
—
FOR THE SERMON: OPEN with that scene in the hospital, those good and righteous folk praying at the bedside of their minister. The humility of those people, their faith glowing like light around them, put me in such longing…to share their innocence.
But then I asked myself: Why must faith rely on innocence? Must it be blind? Why must it come of people’s need to believe?
We are all of us so pitiful in our desire to be unburdened, we will embrace Christianity’s rule or any other claim of God’s authority for that matter. God’s authority is a powerful claim and reduces us all, wherever we are in the world, whatever our tradition, to beggarly gratitude.
So where is the truth to be found? Who are the elect blessedly walking the true path to Salvation…and who are the misguided others? Can we tell? Do we know? We think we know—of course we think we know. We have our belief. But how do we distinguish our truth from another’s falsity, we of the true faith, except by the story we cherish? Our story of God. But, my friends, I ask you: Is God a story? Can we, each of us examining our faith—I mean its pure center, not its comforts, not its habits, not its ritual sacraments—can we believe anymore in the heart of our faith that God is our story of Him? What, for instance, has the industrialized carnage, the continentally engineered terrorist slaughter of the Holocaust done to our story? Do we dare ask? What mortification, what ritual, what practice would have been a commensurate Christian response to the Holocaust? Something to assure us of the truth of our story? Something as earthshaking in its way as Auschwitz and Dachau—a mass exile, perhaps? A lifelong commitment of millions of Christians to wandering, derelict, over the world? A clearing out of the lands and cities a thousand miles in every direction from each and every death camp? I don’t know what it would be—but I know I’d recognize it if I saw it. If we go on with our story, blindly, after something like that, is it not merely innocent but also foolish, and possibly a defamation, a profound impiety? To presume to contain God in this unknowing story of ours, to hold Him, circumscribe Him, the author of everything we can conceive and everything we cannot conceive…in our story of Him? Of Her? Of whom? What in the name of our faith—what in God’s name!—do we think we are talking about!