“In Köln, you say? Yes, of course.”
“Da? Why ‘of course’?”
He looked at me strangely. “This is where his family comes from.”
“Really?” Teresa said. “You have family in Germany? We should go visit!”
I put my arm around her, killing all her dreams with gentleness. I never knew she wanted to travel. It had never come up between us.
Da himself was traveling, backward, faster than light. “My father’s family. Centuries in the Rhineland. My mother’s family were immigrants, you know.”
I didn’t. There was no end to what I didn’t know.
“They came from the east. I don’t even know what this region would be called now. The Ukraine, somewhere? Things … were not good for them there. So!” He squeezed a little laugh, as brittle as any that had ever come out of him. “So: Sie bewegen sich nach Deutschland.”
And his three children were the end of the line. This, too, had been his choice: to preserve the past by merging it into some other path. The size of what I’d lost broke over me. “You should have taught us, Da. At least about our relatives.”
His eyes flickered a little, at the chance that his every equation had been wrong. His glance crusted over with his own colossal betrayal. Then, in the nearness of death, he found himself again. He patted my arm. “I introduce you. You’ll like them.”
No doctor prepared me for his rate of fall. Da had asked me once, centuries ago, “What is the speed of time?” Now I knew: never a steady one second per second. My father’s life popped the clutch. Within a few days, he went from hobbling around home to one last tubular metal bed at Mount Sinai Hospital. I dashed off another note to Amsterdam: “If you’re going to come, come now.” I sent Teresa back to Atlantic City, over her objections. She had to keep her job; I’d already cost her everything else. There were things I still needed from Da, things that could happen only inside the circle of that smallest race: one father and son.
I put it to him one afternoon, when the morphine drip held him still in the middle ground between composed and improvised, between evasion and vanishing. By then, he must have realized I would be the only one of his children to be with him here on this last stop.
“Da?” I sat by his bed in a molded-plastic chair, both of us inspecting the lime green cinder-block wall six feet away. “That night? The one when you and … my grandfather …”
He nodded—not to cut me off, but to spare me saying it out loud. His face screwed up into something worse than cancer. A lifetime of refusing to talk about it, and now his mouth pulled open and closed, like a trout in the well of a boat, gasping under this sudden sea of atmosphere. He worked so hard to find the first syllable, I almost told him to rest and forget. But the need was on us both now. Worse than the need to seal a last closeness. My father had lost me my mother’s family, and never said why. The effort he went through then, in his last bed, was worse than any salvage could justify. I sat there, an impassive jury, waiting to see how he’d hang himself.
“I … loved your grandfather. He was such an enormous man. No? Grosszügig. Noble. His mind wanted to take in everything. He would have been a perfect physicist.” For a beat, my father’s ravaged face found pleasure. “He cared for me, I think. More than just for the husband of his daughter. We spoke often, of many things, in New York, in Philadelphia. He was so fierce, always ready to fight for your mother’s right to be happy, anywhere in the world. When we first told him your brother was on the way, he groaned. ‘You are making me a grandfather before my time!’ We took you babies to Philadelphia, for holidays. Everything was welcome. Yes, of course, there were problems with—what?—Übersetzung.”
“Translation.”
“Yes. Of course. My English is going. Problems with translation. But he knew me. He recognized me.”
“And you recognized him?”
“What he didn’t know about me, I didn’t know, either! Maybe he was right. Yes. Maybe.” My father fell into a reverie. I thought he wanted to sleep. I should have made him, but I kept still. “He challenged my war work. You know, I solved problems during the war. I helped with those weapons.”
I nodded. We’d never talked about it. But I knew.
“He challenged. He said those bombings were as racial as Hitler. I said I didn’t work on the bombings. I did not have anything to do with those decisions. I said such use wasn’t about white and dark. He said everything—the whole world—was about white against dark. Only, the white didn’t know this. I said I wasn’t white; I was a Jew. He couldn’t understand this. I tried to tell him the hatred I got in this country, that I never talked about to anyone. We told him that you children would not be white against dark. Your grandfather was a huge mind. A powerful man. But he said we were doing wrong, raising you children. He said we were performing a … Sünde.”
“Sin. You were sinning.”
“Sin. Ein Zeitwort?”
“Well, it’s a noun, too.”
“That we were sinning, bringing you boys up as if there would be no white versus dark. As if we were already there, present in our own future.”
I closed my eyes. My father’s was not a future the human race would ever stumble into. If my grandfather, if my own father … The words tore out of me before I thought them. “It didn’t have to be all or nothing, Da. You could have at least told us … We could at least have been …”
“You see. In this country, in this place? Everything is already all or nothing. One or the other. Nothing may be both. Of this, your mother and I, too, are guilty.”
“We could at least have talked about this. As a family. Our whole lives.”
“Yes, of course. But whose words? This is what your grandfather … what William wanted to know. We tried to talk about it, as a family, that night. But once those things were said, once we went to that place …”
He went to that place all over again. Pain that cancer had not succeeded in putting in his face, memory now did. I was a boy again, cowering in my open bedroom doorway, hearing my world, my father’s, my mother’s all cave in.
“He said there was a struggle. A struggle we were—what? ‘Turning our backs on.’ Your mother and I said no; we were that struggle. This: making you children free, free to define. Free of everything.”
“Your mother and I” no longer sounded like a whole. And “Free of everything,” a kind of death sentence.
My father lay propped in his bed, the kind of motorized bed that can be set to every position except comfortable. He spoke through narrowed mouth, his eyes closed, from a place I’d banished him to. “Horrible things, we said, that night. Terrible things. We played ‘Who owns pain?’ ‘Who has suffered the greater wrong?’ I told him the Negro had never been killed in the numbers of the Jews. He said they had. This I didn’t understand. He said no killing could be worse than slavery. Centuries of it. The Jews had never been enslaved, he said. In one heartbeat, I was a Zionist. They were, I said; they were enslaved. Too long ago to count, he said. How long ago counts? I asked. Yes, how long ago? When is the past over? Maybe never. But what did this have to do with the two of us—this man and me? Nothing. We were to live now, in the present. But we just couldn’t reach there.”
I touched his ravaged shoulder through his flimsy hospital gown. My palm said, You can stop. You don’t need to do this. Da felt the touch prodding him on.
“Your mother was silent. Watching everything break open. Her father and I were talking enough for all humanity. He … called me a member of the killer race. I … used my family. My parents and sister, in the ovens. I used them as proof. Of something. The hatred I took in, for being something I never was.”
“I understand, Da.” I would have said anything to close that box back up.
“When William left that night, he said we forced him. He said we didn’t want you two to know your Philadelphia family. ‘If they’re not going to be black, these boys, they can’t have their black family.’ This made your mother furious. She said unfortu
nate things. Everything her father had ever taught her, everything he believed … But this, we never said. We never said you would not be black. Only that you would be who you were: a process, first. More important than a thing. He called this idea ‘the lie of whiteness.’”
“A quarter of a century? You don’t cut off all contact because of a single night. Angry words. Every family has anger. Every family says things it wishes it hadn’t.”
“Your mother and I, the two of us, we knew what would come. Your future had already talked to us. Your future made us! And made us choose. We thought we knew what things would come to you. But your Papap …” He darkened. Messages missing, disappearing, unopened, unsent. “Your Papap did not see these.”
There was a thing stronger than family, wilder than love, worse than reason. Big enough to shred them all and leave them for dead. All my life, that thing had pinned me. Its nurses wouldn’t let me into this hospital room, couldn’t accept I was this dying man’s son. And still I didn’t know what this thing wanted from us, or how it had grown so real. “So that’s it, Da? One night’s craziness caused a permanent break? For this one night, we—Mama never saw her own family again?”
“Well, you know, it’s a funny thing. I didn’t see that night would be a break. Neither did William. For a long time, I thought he would come to us, that we were right and he would come to agree, in time. But he must have been waiting for us, too. Then, in that waiting, righteousness took us over.” He closed his eyes and thought. “And shame. It was ourselves we didn’t know how to find. Ourselves we didn’t have the heart to go meet again. This is the force of belonging. After that, after your mother died …” I put my hand on him again. But he’d already been convicted. “After your mother died, I couldn’t any longer. The last chance had closed up. I was too ashamed even to ask that big man’s forgiveness. I sent them the news, of course. But I thought … I was afraid she died because of me.”
I would have cried out, Impossible, except his own daughter had said as much. He looked at me, pleading. I could not exonerate or condemn. But there was something I might do. “Da? I could … find them. Now. Tell them.”
“Tell them what?” Then he heard what I was asking. His head went back into his pillow. Everything he knew about time made him believe that only perception divided the future from the past. His eyes flickered, as if our family were already here, in this green cinder-block room, all false world lines redrawn. Then his lips spasmed, his brows and cheeks collapsed on each other, and his face blanched, condemning itself. He shook his head. And with that shake, he slipped the last dragline with which life held him.
He went fast after that. He passed in and out of consciousness. We didn’t say much more to each other, beyond logistics. He called out two mornings later, in blinding pain: “Something is wrong. We have made a terrible mistake. We have chopped up our house for firewood.” His eyes still looked at me, but they sat so deep with animal incomprehension, they no longer knew me. Disease and the morphine drip split him between them. The maze of muscles around his eyes showed him hearing all sorts of sounds, the most glorious music. But he couldn’t get over the wall, where the sound came from. The eyes pleaded without focus, asking if I remembered. In his face was the horrified suspicion that he’d made it all up.
I remembered the day he took us to Washington Heights for the magic substance, Mandelbrot. The day he told us that every moving object in the universe had its own clock. One look at his face showed how uncoupled our clocks had become. In the five seconds I spent taking that glance, decades sheared off into his silent bay. In my few breaths, he had time to audition the entire available repertoire. Or maybe, as I raced, my clock buzzing around in front of him, his own had already stopped, stranding him on the upbeat of some permanent open-air concert on the mind’s Mall.
And then, one last time, time started up again. I was sitting by his bed flipping through a six-month-old copy of Health and Fitness that the hospital scattered around its rooms like warrants. I thought today might be the day. But I had thought that for the last three mornings running. It had been forever since Da had said anything. I talked to him as if he were still there, knowing my words had to sound like spinning galaxies. I sat with the magazine spread on the rolling meal table, reading about living with rosacea. I had one ear on him, waiting for any change in his breathing. It felt exactly like the years I’d spent accompanying Jonah, bent over my score, listening for the silent indicator that the piece was about to head off into uncharted waters.
Then it did. Da leaned forward off his canted bed and opened his eyes. He coughed up something that took me some seconds to identify. “Where’s my darling?” I waited, paralyzed. The shudder would wear him out, break him again. But then, harsher, more terrified, he burst out, “Wo ist sie? Where is my treasure?”
I stood to calm him, lower him back to the pillow. “It’s okay, Da. Everything’s all right. I’m here. It’s Joseph.”
He flashed in anger. My father, who was never angry at me in his entire life. “Is she safe?” His voice belonged to someone else. “You must tell me.”
I stood at the crash of two lives, not knowing which to answer. “Da. She’s not here anymore. She … died.” Even now, I couldn’t say burned.
“Died?” His voice suggested some misunderstanding, probably simple, he couldn’t puzzle out.
“Yes. It’s okay.”
“Died?” And then his whole body bucked in electroshock. “Died? My God, no! My God! It can’t be. Everything—” He flailed at the IV tubes and made to swing his feet out of bed. I was around the bed faster than he could move, pinning him. He shouted, “She can’t be. Das ist unmöglich. When? How?”
I held his wasted one hundred pounds back against the bed. “In a fire. When our house burned. Fifteen years ago.”
“Oh!” He grabbed my arm. His whole body relaxed in gratitude. “Oh! God be thanked.” He settled back, satisfied.
“Jesus Christ. Da? What are you saying?”
He closed his eyes and a smile played on his lips. He clawed the air until his hand found mine. “I mean my Ruth.” He slipped back against the bed. “How is she?” The words exhausted him.
“She’s good, Da. I saw her not long ago.”
“Really?” Pleasure battled with irritation. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“She’s married. Her husband’s name is Robert. Robert Rider. He’s …” A big man. An enormous man. “Grosszügig.”
Da nodded. “This much, I have already thought. Where is she now?”
“Da. I’m not sure.”
“She’s not in trouble?”
“Nothing serious.” My concert days were over, but I’d learned to improvise.
The morphine washed back over him. He drifted, and I thought he fell asleep. But after a moment, he said, “California. Maybe she is in California.”
“Maybe, Da. Maybe California.”
He nodded, calmed. “I’ve thought so.” When he opened his eyes again, they were salt. “She disowned me. She said her struggle is not mine.” Acid filled his face, as if what was coming might still destroy everything that had already been. He worked to breathe. I sat calming him, as I used to calm Jonah when his attacks were on him. “When you see her, you must tell her. Tell her …” He fought for clarity, waiting for that message from the past to catch up with him. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. “Tell her there is another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.”
Three times, he made me promise to tell her. That night, without talking again, my father died. It was something like a hemiola, a change in meter. A sudden, unprepared cross into a new key. In every piece of music worth playing, some moment gathers, moving its chords forward, casting ahead for one quick tightening of the air around it to the endless organizing silence beyond the double bar.
Da died. There was no death rattle, no relaxing of the bowels. I told him he could go. Instead of taking that next small step into his local future, he doubled back and forever re
joined where he’d already been. I called the nurses. And then my own line bent on, away from his, into an unknown place.
I thought death would be different this time, knowing in advance. It was. It was steeper. Mama never had a chance to disappear, she was gone so instantly. But she didn’t really die for me until the man who chatted with her in the kitchen in the middle of the night fifteen years after her death joined her. Da was gone, taking with him all my connection to her, to us. When he stopped, so did my past. Everything was fixed now, beyond growing. The bird and the fish can fall in love, but their only working nest will be the grave.
I turned helpless in the face of the hundreds of tasks death requires. The hospital helped; they’d seen this before, apparently. Da had told me nothing of what he wanted. He’d made no preparations for the inevitable. Jonah and Ruth were nowhere. Cremation seemed simplest. It had done for Mama. That was the easiest of the choices. At the moment when I most needed to be out of this world, up in the star map, among the rotating galaxies, I was dragged back to make countless decisions about things I couldn’t care about. Everyone needed signatures: the university, the state, the federal government, the bank, the neighborhood—all those anxious poolings that Da had gotten through his life largely by ignoring.
Teresa held me together, phoning from Atlantic City. She came up for one long weekend. She seemed to grow surer and more capable as I fell apart. Everything she did was one more thing I didn’t have to. “You’re doing fine, Joseph. All the right things.” She supplied a steady source of practical advice to the heir of a family that had always been practicality’s sworn enemy. She stayed alongside me for the million deaths by decision that surviving requires.
After I’d made all the most irreversible choices my father’s death demanded, Jonah called. His voice was full of buzz and echoing delay. “Joey. I just got your message. I’ve been away. I’m … not with that old management anymore.”