You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  When my uncle had lost his ability for that compromise he could no longer remember. Sitting at the desk a suite of quick images passed through his mind: Nat and the Dies Committee; the family shunning his father after he was blacklisted by McCarthy; the FBI files Ron Jacobas got under Freedom of Information, which showed that Simon Levit had told the FBI that Jason Sinai—Danny’s elder brother—had been with Ted Gold the night before Ted Gold died in the Weatherman Townhouse explosion. His father—year after year his father overlooked all of that. But in the living room today, Danny had witnessed a catalog of reasons he could not, had not for years, been able to do the same. Stephen Raskin coined money on Wall Street as a tobacco industry analyst. Ray Levit devoted his Yeshiva education and Harvard law degree to managing large real-estate holdings in Queens and Brooklyn, in constant battle with his low-income tenants. Larry Singer, pouring a drink for his cousin Freddy even though Freddy was an alcoholic, had done defense work for Oliver North. All of them—even the most liberal among the family—were resolutely Zionist, as if it were impossible to be Jewish without being so. Now, what were those ties that united him to these people—family, religion? Flawed ties, they seemed to my uncle, as early as when he was in high school, and he argued as much to his father, often, in the long series of words, carefully and lovingly put together, that comprised their relationship. His father had never argued the point back.

  “I hear you, Danny-boy.”

  “But you think I’m wrong.”

  He could see him, his father’s face across the table at Wolf’s Deli, pausing in the search for words. “It’s not that you’re wrong. It’s that I’m closer to the source. I have a connection you don’t.”

  And now it was his father inspecting him. “You know, Daniel, this was the kind of feeling that made Little J. do what he did. And if you feel the same, I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  Neither had Daniel known.

  Soon enough, of course, they found out.

  And now?

  Danny lowered a cheek to the surface of the oak desk and felt the pain of grief as freshly as if it were never going to diminish, never going to go away. He could smell him, far in the back of his throat, the dry and slightly bitter smell of his Bay Rum aftershave. He could hear him, the low rasp of his voice, the hesitant chuckle, his long cough. His father and he had never touched each other, avoiding all physical contact, doing whatever had to be done between them with words: long strings of them, well and subtly put together. Now those words struck him as less in their sum than a small gesture of affection. For a long time he sat there, eyes clenched shut. Then he opened them to the dim light of the empty room.

  There was so much he wanted to say to them. He wanted to tell them that his father’s religion had been such an expansive one, such a generous one, and that now, in the rising tide of neo-orthodoxy and fundamentalism, it was an endangered one. He wanted to tell them that the Jerusalem of this night’s ceremony had nothing to do with the real Zionism of the real Israel; that it was not an ideology but an idealism, a way of touching the divine, and that to turn it into a blueprint for political dominance was the death of the Jews because statehood corrupts and absolute statehood corrupts absolutely. He wanted to tell them that this people who sat at seder tables across the world, rich with food and family, were only truly the Chosen People if they remembered that only they, only they had escaped a slavery that existed the world over, and that to celebrate their unique escape—just as it was to mourn their unique victimization—without mourning the ubiquity of those who have no country to run to, that was an obscenity.

  And there was more. He wanted to say that his father had never been wrong. Not when he fought fascism in Spain, not when he fought apartheid in Israel, not when he fought the totalitarian impulse that ran through American democracy like a melody. He wanted to say that his father had fought the tide for over sixty years, and nothing that had happened had ever proved him wrong: not Reagan’s Cold War victory; not the resuscitation of McCarthy by neo-conservatives nor the abandonment of liberalism by Clinton; not the disappearance of any credible Left in America nor the stock market that was making the Left irrelevant: none of it proved his father wrong, none of it.

  If he could say it? Somehow, it seemed to Daniel Sinai, that if he could say it, here, tonight, the growing uncertainty of the past ten years, the diminishing confidence with which he wrote, and acted, and thought, would all disappear. Nothing had meant anything since his father told him, just after Laura was born, that he was dying. In the year of his father’s death everything had fallen apart: his work, his writing. His father had been everything to him, a catalog of human virtues, an exemplar of integrity, a monument to the highest hopes of the twentieth century, an encyclopedic store of information. The impoverishment of the world, without him, was astonishing. One by one, Danny found himself examining the institutions available to him—the fractious, ineffective argument of the Nation; the insiderish neo-conservatism of the New York Review; the Liberal Zionism of Dissent; the careerism of his students at Columbia, pausing briefly in his constitutional law course in between lucrative internships at corporate firms; the incredible sway of money in New York of the ’90s . . . It was as if not only his father who had finally died, but his father’s world too.

  And now? Now, standing at the window of his father’s study—without even being conscious of having risen from the desk—staring out at the swaying, dripping limbs of the chestnut he had known all his life, listening to the footfalls of his family descending the stairs to the dining room where, in moments and under the disapproving eye of nearly the entire assembly, he was expected to lead the fifty-first consecutive family seder? Now, when the only things that survived the death of his father were the memories these people had of him? Now, what was he to do? Holocaust and heroism were what these people had come for: the Holocaust of Pharaoh and the heroism of Moses which they would sagely and with infinite self-satisfaction transform to the Holocaust of Hitler and the heroism of Ben Gurion, a neat moral lesson that justified all their comfort, all their conservatism today. And they wanted that lesson served with righteousness and brisket: a healthy dose of the former and several helpings of the latter. And if they did not get it, this fifty-first continuous seder at his father’s table, they would not come back and this family would shatter like glass breaking on concrete.

  For a long moment, holding his father’s Haggadah in one hand, Daniel Sinai stared out the window into the backyard of his childhood home with its towering chestnut tree. The rain had passed, a rising spring full moon, lighting the sky from below the rooftops north. And to his surprise, suddenly, with an immediacy that belied the complexity of the present, he felt himself in another spring—not that spring, a decade before on Hammonasset Beach, when he had carried out another decision he did not understand with a hardness that even then surprised him, but a spring even earlier, the spring night when he was twelve when he’d realized, irrevocably and with certainty, that his brother had run away and was going to stay away for ever.

  5.

  There had been a camera-flash vision of Bedford Street under light rain when she got out of the cab, an eyeful of the brick townhouse dappled by streetlight shadow from the new leaves of the London plane in front, and then the door had swung open into the living room. In quick succession she saw orange light on the drapes over the big bay window to the garden, a Raphael Soyer she had not known she remembered, a woman she recognized as a second cousin, and then Eleanor was before her and all else ceased as she shut her eyes and buried her face in her mother’s hair.

  When Klara’s vision returned there was a series of faces in staccato sequence, rendered super-really clear by the film of tear on her eye. There was a flood of talk, and then with what seemed to her abruptness—Klara had no idea that she was late—they had been called to table, and Eleanor, holding her arm tight, was leading her downstairs, pulling her down toward her as she talked.

  “My darling, are you all right?
You look so pale.”

  “I’m fine, Mama,” Klara whispered back. “I’m tired. I’ve been traveling too much.”

  “I’m a selfish old woman to make you come here.”

  Tears came to her eyes with their recent surprising ease. “God, I miss him.”

  “My girl, remember what I wrote you. We’ve all done our mourning here. It’s just for you that it’s new.”

  “I know, Mama.” With effort, Klara calmed herself, wiping her eyes with a rapid movement. “Danny’s doing the seder, right?”

  Now, despite the stairs, Eleanor Sinai looked up at her adopted daughter, her only daughter, with attention. “I believe so, Klary.”

  That was good. She didn’t think she could have stood seeing that old fraud, Nat, in Jack’s place. Now they were in the warmth and smells of the dining room, air rich with the meat roasted in wine and cloves, and she was looking first at the china and silverware, then the lace tablecloth before her. As if of itself her eye rose and sought out the Jacques Lipschitz, the Leon Golub, Ellie and Jack’s Katubah, and that of each of their parents. And then Klara sat suddenly for a swoon was passing through her, a swoon of the purest unreality, a hot flush of finding herself entirely, completely, at home.

  She held her adoptive mother’s paper-dry hand, waiting for the dizziness to pass, watching Eleanor watching the family settle in at the table, her eyes and face alive with animation and interest that made her age as if irrelevant. Again she felt the heat of tears behind her eyes, and perhaps actual tears would have fallen had not she become aware of the silence that had descended on the table. Looking around, she saw that every seat was filled save the one at the head of the table, Danny’s. The red-headed woman across from her, that would be Maggie—she had seen her once or twice at Yale, not more. The infant in her lap would be Danny’s Jeremy and the little girl running in to whisper something in her mother’s ear, now that would be Laura and Uncle Joe sitting uncomfortably in an ill-fitting suit. But still, there was no sight of Danny, an absence that was evidently responsible for the sudden awkwardness at table—an awkwardness that, she suddenly felt, she had been aware of upstairs, too. And thank God for Freddy Singer, the only one guileless enough, or drunk enough, to break the silence—with gratitude, she heard Freddy’s voice come from across the table where he sat in a cloud of booze.

  “Klara, is it good to be back?”

  Somewhere she found her voice. “It is Fred. Very good indeed.”

  “And where do you go in Tel Aviv for yontiff?”

  “Oh, to a friend or another.”

  As if Freddy had broken the discomfort of her ten years’ absence, several people spoke to her now, one asking if she ever went back to the kibbutz, another asking after distant family in Rehovot, and a third, still, a political question, which Uncle Nat, who had not been in Israel since ’48, began to answer. And while he did she saw Danny come into the room, holding, she was glad to see, Jack’s Haggadah, and wait politely for his uncle Nat to stop talking. For the briefest moment their eyes met. Then both turned their attention to Nat.

  “I’m likely the only person in the world who can still remember Yankel Sinai’s seder. Two, three hours, and he thought nothing of it. There were no separate tables or children’s services in those days, either. Jack and I were the youngest, but if ever we said a word, well . . .”

  “You won’t see that kind of seder any more, Nathan Singer.” It was Harriet Rosenthal, Eleanor’s sister and the third and last remaining member of that generation speaking. “Now they have women’s seders, gay seders, mixed-marriage seders. And you won’t keep children still for three minutes without a computer game, never mind three hours.”

  “But can’t these new things be good, Aunt Hattie?” Freddy Singer’s voice, too loud and slurring its sibilant consonants, now held the entire table’s unwilling attention. “I mean, can’t Pesach be relevant to gays and feminists?”

  Nat took it on himself to silence Freddy again. “It’s good for it to be relevant, Fred. But only if it’s still Jewish. Passover is about remembering the past, and the past doesn’t change to suit the times.”

  But Freddy was not to be stopped. “Well, you may say so, Uncle Nat. But with all due respect, we came out of Egypt thousands of years ago. You old ones are only a single generation closer to Moses, which isn’t that much. I think you can be Jewish and gay, or Jewish and feminist.”

  “Freddy’s right, I think.” In the shocked silence, Danny’s voice sounded for the first time, and Klara looked directly at his face, which wore a strained smile. “You can be Jewish and gay. Or Jewish and feminist. In fact, you can even be Jewish and Republican. Now there’s a fact that never failed to surprise my father.”

  Listening to this, Klara felt her neck stiffen. Danny was moving to his chair with authority, a solid man, heavier than she remembered but with wide shoulders and light hair in the open collar of his shirt. That gave the right impression: strong, reliable. She had seen him on CSPAN or Bill Moyers: a convincing, articulate, impressive speaker, a man of the Left. Slowly, she conducted an examination of his face. A net of wrinkles around the deepening eyes, the widening forehead under the receding hairline that divided his face. It was not bad: he was handsome enough to lose a little to baldness. It didn’t scare her. She had expected that.

  But then, which she had not expected, she suddenly saw Jack, just where Danny was, a slight sheen of moisture on his forehead as he looked around the table, a dimple in his left cheek that had never been there before, and the smooth-shaven skin of Jack’s cheeks as they fell to his jaw.

  A few people were laughing now, the tension just beginning to ease. And Danny, holding a hand out toward his Uncle Nat, went on in the same high voice.

  “Which is why my father’s seder was always so wonderful. Because he brought out in us the one, central thing that transcends all the difference between Jews; the essence of Judaism. And that, in turn, is why I’d like to welcome my uncle as he takes my father’s place tonight to lead us, as my father did for the past five decades, through the story that defines us, gay, feminist, and Republican alike.”

  General approval murmured at the table as Nat took up the Haggadah.

  And Klara, when her shock subsided, felt rise, in her belly, the long-lived acid of rage.

  6.

  Sudden silence fell as Klara stepped from the dining room into the library, the words of Nat’s first brucha disappearing behind the closed door. Crazy patterns, cast by the moon through the big chestnut that canopied the back garden, played on the walls from the wooden-sash windows. Her eye filled with the reflection of that chiaroscuro on the gray casing of the old Zenith TV. Around it the bookshelves rose with paperbacks, the order of which she had not known she remembered—Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh, D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, John Sanford, the collected Yeats, Joyce’s Dubliners in the green cloth first edition Jack’s father had bought the day of its US publication, and as if he were here in the room, she heard Jack saying: “The Irish are the lost tribe of Israel, of course. Or vice versa.”

  A dreamy, childish feeling. Like returning from summer camp after six weeks away, or a college year abroad. This house, in which she had come to live after her father died—that is, her first adoptive father, Israel Singer—had become home so quickly that sometimes she could not recall any specific locale from before. She had not known him well, her father: the kibbutz—a hardline Hashomer Hatza’ir community that housed children communally—made it possible for children not to know their parents well, and she, like several other children adopted by survivors, had availed herself of that opportunity. There was grief after his death, but as it faded—she turned twelve that summer, a wildly growing, curious child, come to live in America—she came to realize something fundamental: this place where she lived now, it was infinitely more interesting than the kibbutz, infinitely more complex. There were old things here, beautiful old things, books, mad paintings, polished wood. Nothing smelled of cows, or silage. In winter, li
ttle steel radiators glowed with a warmth that, unlike the kerosene heaters at home, ensured you were never wet, or cold. And there was virtually no credible threat of getting your legs torn off by a bomb.

  Each detail of her surroundings must have found a corresponding lack in her for she absorbed it instantly: the rules of the new household; the mythology of her new family, the provenance and worship of the household gods. She memorized the locales of her new world as a baby its mother’s features. She was, she thought, born to live here, and she became not just an American, not just a New Yorker, but a Sinai as quickly and thoroughly as her English became not just fluent but native.

  As for her new parents, my grandparents, they had taken her in as if she had been born to them, immediately, without a second thought. When, not a year after she arrived, they lost Jason, then they made her theirs with all the depth of that loss. They sent her with Danny to Elizabeth Irwin, Yale, and Yale again for law school; they fed her, clothed her, nursed her through disease and nightmare, heartbreak and adolescence, with never a single word that made her feel less than entirely their daughter as much as Jason and Danny were their sons.

  And Danny? Ah, God, Danny-boy. The whole universe had conspired in their friendship, the whole march of the century’s history that had made them adolescents, sharing a house. Of course a great diffidence had existed when first she arrived, of course: an adolescent boy and an adolescent girl, they ignored each other for a time. The first day of her new school was their first time alone, unmediated by Jack and Ellie. Without a word they had left the house together, walking side by side down Bank Street, shoulders occasionally touching, in silence. And only when they had arrived at Elizabeth Irwin, joined in a crowd of longhaired, smoking young folk in baggy clothes, negotiated a series of crowded, noisy hallways and come into a classroom did she realize that throughout it all, without saying a word, this disaffected young man with half his face covered by a fall of blond hair, he may never have said a word to her, but he had never left her side.