Dog is in the Details

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Rochester crouched on the floor beside Lili, gnawing at his squeaky ball. “You could fly down for few days couldn’t you?” I asked. As the chair of her department, Lili’s role was primarily administrative, though she taught one class on Mondays.

  She pried the squeaky ball from Rochester’s jaw and tossed it toward the living room, and he took off after it. “I could. I have the vacation time, and the department can run without me for a few days. But I’m afraid my mother’s problems run deeper than just giving up her apartment.”

  “Your family did move a lot. I can imagine it’s hard to feel rooted.”

  “It can be. This apartment is the first place she chose herself, after my father died and she didn’t have to follow him around. She’s always loved the ocean and she was happy to find a building with lots of other Spanish speakers. She plays canasta with a bunch of Jewish women from South America and they do water aerobics in her pool in Spanish.”

  I had yet to meet Senora Weinstock, though I had spoken to her on the phone a couple of times. “Al fin un Judio,” she had said to me in our initial conversation. At last, Lili had found a Jew. Lili had flown down to Florida a couple of times, always in the winter, to spend some time with her family, and always returned vaguely unhappy.

  I understood what she felt. I loved living in Stewart’s Crossing, relishing in the sense of rootedness that it gave me. My family had moved from Trenton when I was two years old, and I had grown up in Bucks County.

  Back then, I’d been desperate, as many teenagers are, to escape the suburbs for the big city. After graduate school in New York I’d married and followed my wife to Silicon Valley so she could take a high-powered job. After Mary suffered her second miscarriage, I’d used my computer skills to hack into her credit records and set flags so that she couldn’t run us into more debt. I’d been caught and punished, resulting in the end of my marriage and my return to Stewart’s Crossing after a year as a guest of the California penal system.

  I finished slicing the eggplant and began breading it as Rochester returned to the kitchen and danced around underfoot. “You do not eat eggplant,” I said to him. “Go lay down, and I’ll feed you your dinner soon.”

  I pointed to the puffy round bed in the corner of the breakfast nook, and Rochester slunk over there with his tail down as if he was being punished. “I am wise to your tricks, Mister,” I said. “That sad look does not work.”

  He settled into the bed and looked up at me with a wide grin. I had inherited Rochester two years before, after the death of his previous owner, my next-door neighbor, and though it hadn’t been love at first sight, eventually he had become the main reason I’d come back to life.

  I’d come a long way since then, and I was grateful for all the blessings in my life. Now if Rochester could just keep from nosing into any crimes for a while, we’d all be able to settle in happily.

  As I layered the sautéed eggplant with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce, my brain started ticking. A year before, I’d been named the director of Eastern’s Friar Lake Conference Center, responsible for creating and managing a regular series of executive education and alumni relations programs at a former abbey a few miles from the campus.

  I’d put together a number of great events and more on the calendar, but I needed to start planning for the next year. Maybe I could put together a weekend program on the political, sociological, emotional and financial aspects of immigration

  Once I had finished layering the breaded eggplant with mushrooms, tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, I slid the casserole in the oven. I turned to Lili and told her what I was thinking. “You think people would be interested in a program like that? It would certainly be newsworthy, given the current political climate.”

  Lili looked up from her phone. “Do you know Andrea Del Presto in the sociology department? She’s been doing a research project on twenty-first century migration and immigration. Maybe you could have her put together a program for you.”

  “I don’t know her, but I’ve read about her research. We have a lot of first-generation American students at Eastern, as well as some who were born in other countries and grew up here. Many of my students are disturbed by all the anti-immigrant rhetoric you hear on the Internet these days.”

  “One of the young women in my Introduction to Photography class wears a hijab,” Lili said. “She told us on the first day of class that she liked taking pictures because she could hide behind her camera. That she felt safer that way.”

  She shook her head. “That’s so sad, that someone should feel they need to hide in this day and age.”

  “What do you call yourself if someone asks? Are you Jewish first, American first, Latina first? A hyphen of something?”

  “It’s hard to say. Ask me around Rosh Hashanah, and I’ll say I’m Jewish first. Independence Day? American. When I talk to my family in Spanish I’d probably say Latina. I guess I’m a mix of all those. What about you?”

  “I’m easier. Just Jewish and American. Hard to say which comes first because both of those identities are so ingrained in me. I wonder, though, what the next generation thinks.”

  “Sounds like something to ask next time you meet with them,” Lili said. “But I’ll bet they have the same trouble making distinctions.”

  I remembered Rabbi Goldberg’s brother Joel, and his comments about the Holocaust, and how the Germans were among us. In Sunday School we’d spent a year studying the Holocaust, including articles about Nazi hunters who had devoted their lives to tracking down surviving members of Hitler’s government, concentration camp guards and those who had ratted out their Jewish friends and neighbors.

  Were any of those people still alive? If they were, they’d have to be in their eighties or nineties, and they’d had to live for decades with the guilt of what they’d done. Was there someone like that living among us? Or was I putting too much emphasis on Joel’s statements?

  We finished dinner, and while Lili cleaned up I sat on the living room floor and played tug-a-rope with Rochester. I kept going back to the way he’d approached Joel Goldberg to protect him, wondering why.

  Lili came into the living room, drying her hands on a cloth towel. “I’m probably going to have to go to Florida, you know. But I’m going to try and hold out until it gets colder here so it will seem like a vacation.”

  I mimicked surprise. “A vacation? From me?”

  She pursed her lips as she sat down on the sofa. “From winter. Though if you don’t behave I may need a vacation from you, too.”

  “I could misbehave.” I reached up and tickled her foot.

  “Now that,” she said, “is not a difficult decision to make.”

  3 – Close the Door

  Monday morning, with Rochester by my side, I drove up the River Road from Stewart’s Crossing to Friar Lake. Oaks and maples lined the winding road up the hill to the original stone buildings, and they were beginning to turn the reds, oranges and golds of fall.

  As I pulled into the parking lot in front of the original slate-roofed gatehouse, which now served as my office, I looked around, as I often did, and marveled that I had been able to nurture the conversion of a run-down collection of buildings into a modern facility with meeting rooms, a dormitory and a kitchen, as well as acres of walking trails peppered by some older as yet unused outbuildings.

  I had been stunned when Eastern’s president offered me the job of converting, and then running the property, because I was a guy with an MA in English and little management experience as well as a convicted felon, still on parole.

  He’d taken a big chance on me, and I was determined to prove I could do a good job. I’d worked my butt off during the renovation, and created a kick-ass series of programs. But every day I had to justify that faith by keeping the center going, continuing to engage faculty, alumni and students. It was a pressure I put on myself; though the president was a demanding boss, he’d never criticized my commitment or my work.

  I settled down in my office,
which had a big picture window looking out on the property. Rochester plopped on his side next to my desk, and as I looked up Professor Andrea del Presto’s information I heard him begin to snore gently.

  I emailed her and was pleased that she responded quickly, agreeing to an appointment that afternoon to talk about a possible program at Friar Lake. I was still worried about the comment Joel Goldberg had made the day before, so I did some searching online for German survivors of the Holocaust. Perhaps there was a way to tie that into the program as well. The current administration had made a priority of denying admission to immigrants with criminal records, so there was definite connection to the prosecution of Nazi-era villains.

  I found a website that listed nearly three dozen Germans and Poles on a list of those slated for possible prosecution for war crimes, including radio operators, medics and camp guards, as well as many listed as simply “participated in the murder of...” or “accessory to the murder of.”

  It was chilling. But many were believed to have died before prosecution, and the youngest listed was 91. Did Joel Goldberg suspect that someone on that list was living in Stewart’s Crossing?

  Or was his interest simply a manifestation of his schizophrenia? There was certainly a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment in the air around us, and it was possible that he’d internalized that and connected it to whatever he’d learned from his grandparents about the Holocaust.

  After a while I couldn’t read anymore. One of the reasons I’d taken the job was that Rochester could come with me, and he loved the chance to romp around the property and through the adjacent woods in search of interesting smells and squirrels and field mice to chase. So I took him out for a long walk in the fresh air. We ended up sitting at a picnic table beneath a majestic maple, sharing the roast beef sandwich I’d prepared for myself for lunch.

  After we finished eating I sought out Joey Capodilupo, the facility manager at Friar Lake. He had a golden retriever too, though his was white, barely out of puppyhood, and a real handful. He often brought Brody with him to Friar Lake, hoping that Rochester would keep him in line, but the opposite was true. My big goofy golden usually followed his white partner in crime into mischief. However, I was very comfortable leaving Rochester with Joey when I had to head down to campus.

  “What are you working on these days?” Joey asked as he scratched Rochester behind the ears. “Anything interesting?”

  I told him about the immigration program. “My grandfather came here after World War II,” he said. “He got a lot of blowback from other Italians who were worried that he’d been a Fascist, that he’d fought for Mussolini, all that stuff.”

  “And was he? Did he?”

  “Not that he’d ever tell me. He was just a kid then, anyway. It really killed him that it was other Italians that harassed him. He said he expected it from Americans—when he got here he could speak only a few words of English, he had a heavy accent, all he knew how to do was farm work. He expected his connazionali, his people, to accept him.”

  I thought about what Joey had said as I drove down the hill from Friar Lake. Why would other Italians have shunned Joey’s grandfather? Was it a case of “close the door behind you?” Were they worried that newcomers would damage the foothold they’d established in the US?

  The Eastern campus sprawled over a few dozen acres of hilltop in Leighville, a small town on a crest overlooking the Delaware River. When I’d first seen it as an incoming freshman, I’d been intimidated by the hundred-year-old stone buildings, the broad lawns where students played Frisbee or practiced with nunchucks. How could I ever fit in there?

  It had to be what Joey’s grandfather, and other immigrants including those in my own family, had faced when they showed up on American shores. I had to learn a new language in order to fit in. Terms like empirical, post-modern and context. Sometimes when my professors spoke I’d lose the thread of meaning when I couldn’t immediately define hegemony or dichotomy.

  Since then I’d mastered the language enough to become a professor myself. Now those stone buildings were warm and welcoming, holding memories of intellectually challenging seminars and undergraduate antics. It was an interesting metaphor for the immigrant experience and I made a note to include it in planning for the seminar.

  I found Professor Del Presto’s office in the building where I’d taken my sociology and political science classes years before. She was younger than I’d expected, with long brown hair in a center part over a heart-shaped face. I introduced myself and told her what I’d already come up with in terms of programming.

  She said she was eager to help me, because as a grad student she’d done some work with the continuing education department, and enjoyed the different viewpoints adult learners brought.

  “One of my academic interests is in social media, and I’ve been compiling data from Twitter and Facebook posts about immigration and using it to make comparisons with earlier attitudes. Looking at hashtags like #immigration, #uslatino and #noamnesty tell me what people on social media are thinking.”

  I remembered what Joey had told me about his grandfather’s experience. “How do you compare that to what people were saying in the past, before there was Twitter and Facebook?”

  “People have been socializing and sharing information and ideas since man developed spoken language,” she said. “For my purposes I’ve been looking at trends in the mass media, particularly when I can find those ‘man-in-the-street’ reports and interviews. Colonial broadsides, yellow journalism and early iterations of scandal sheets all have given me insight into how people felt at different times about immigrants.”

  “I’ve just been rereading Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, ‘The New Colossus,’ for the Jewish American Lit course I’m teaching,” I said. “It’s probably one of the most quotable works within that canon, and I remember reading it in elementary school when we studied immigration.”

  “That’s an interesting piece, because it represents an ideal of immigration – Lady Liberty welcoming the huddled masses – that was unrealized then, and even now. Going back as far as the American Revolution, we experienced prejudices against new immigrants from England and Scotland. Americans couldn’t believe we’d embrace newcomers from the country we had just battled to leave behind. And then, during the time of the two world wars, people were very suspicious of German, and then Japanese, immigrants.”

  “And Italian,” I said. I told her about Joey’s grandfather’s experience.

  “One of the less appealing attributes of the American experience is the desire to shut the door on anyone coming in behind you.”

  “And you’re finding that expressed today in social media?”

  “What we think of as a fairly new phenomenon has its roots in the early computer networks of the 1970s,” she said. “As soon as the use of networked computers moved from purely military and government uses, people began using them to share information and ideas. Bulletin board systems, CompuServe, and AOL began to gain traction in the 1980s.”

  “I was there,” I said. “I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, when I was sixteen, and I played around with bigger systems when I was an undergraduate here at Eastern in the late 1980s.”

  “Then you know how much easier it is to say things when you’re shielded by the anonymity of an avatar or a screen name.”

  I knew from experience the hubris that came from the assumption that what you were doing online couldn’t be tracked back to you. It was, after all, the reason I’d been bold enough to hack into Mary’s credit reports—I’d thought no one could track the actions back to me.

  Wrong.

  We talked for a few more minutes about how Professor Del Presto could shape a program, what kinds of materials she could provide and so on. Once again I was reminded of the excitement of learning something new, of living the life of the mind in an academic environment.

  As I drove back to campus, I was at a four-way stop sign behind a pickup truck on high wheels with decal on the back window with
some writing squeezed into the shape of North America. I leaned forward and read “Fuck off we are full.”

  Wow. That was the same sentiment that had sent Lily's parents to Havana and prevented so many other Jews from immigrating to the US. What would Emma Lazarus make of our contemporary attitude toward that “wretched refuse?” Would she still idolize Lady Liberty, lifting her lamp beside the golden door? Would she tell the Old World to keep the huddled masses unless they had the skills necessary for an H-1 B visa or a half million dollars to pour into our tired economy?

  4 – Ethnic Enclaves

  The course I’d mentioned to Professor Del Presto that I was teaching was one on Jewish-American Literature. In addition to my administrative work, I often picked up a class in the English department as a way to keep my finger on the pulse of the college, and so I could continue to experience those moments of transitory academic delight like the one I’d shared in the sociology professor’s office.

  In the past I’d taught freshman comp, technical writing and mystery fiction. Lucas Roosevelt, the chair of the English department, had been very good to me when I returned to Bucks County from prison, giving me my first paid job as an adjunct, so I owed him a bunch of favors. He had called me in the late spring to ask me if I could teach the Jewish-American literature course that fall. It hadn’t been offered in a while because there was no one on the full-time faculty interested in teaching it, and he was worried that it would fall out of the catalogue if too much time passed.

  I’d taken the course myself as an Eastern undergraduate, so I agreed. I’d been worrying that all the reading and preparation for discussion would be difficult to carry out while running Friar Lake as my full-time job, but so far I’d been enjoying it. That night, as Lili and I relaxed on the couch after dinner, I reviewed my notes on the materials I’d given the students to read in advance of our second meeting the next day.

  I’d pulled a couple of excerpts from Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story that epitomized the desire of immigrants to succeed in the New World. I was surprised to note that I’d selected a section in which David distinguishes himself as a scholar of the Talmud while still in Russia, and how that mental rigor presaged his success in business later in life.