Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

  I don’t tell anyone at school, though, because I don’t consider myself kosher and my parents never ask me what I eat outside the house. I’m sure they know I don’t keep the dietary laws and I know my father doesn’t. But my mother is very serious about the dietary laws. She likes having her rules and restrictions. I know my grandmother thinks that our kosherness is ludicrous because she really did grow up in an Orthodox home and is always telling me how lucky I am to be born late in the century and about how she would have ended up marrying a bearded shopkeeper with skin the color of a fish belly if she hadn’t met my grandfather who, she says, is also responsible for my musical gift. He had wanted to be an opera singer when he was young and had a beautiful voice, but Jews didn’t sing opera in those days—they played the violin. When they visited us on Sundays, my grandfather would excuse himself after we had our coffee and the napoleons that they always brought, and spent the rest of the afternoon glued to the radio in the living room, listening to the Sunday opera on WQXR, singing along in a slightly shaky tenor.

  My grandmother told me once about the sense of freedom she felt when she first started eating pork—Wienerschnitzel, I think it was. My mother would never make Wienerschnitzel, even with veal, because of the cultural implications. I remember the first time I ate something non-kosher was at Debbie Muldoon’s birthday party. Her mother took us all to McDonald’s for lunch and I had strict orders from my mother only to eat salad, but I forgot. I was only six and my mother should have told Mrs. Muldoon about the salad, but she must have thought I would never forget something like that. I remembered right in the middle of my Big Mac, but I just kept eating because I didn’t want Debbie to think I wasn’t having a good time.

  That night I kept waking up because I expected something bad to happen. I thought my mother would have a sense of my digression and would wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me she knew about what I had done, but nothing happened. I didn’t get sick and neither my father nor my mother asked me anything about the birthday party. They didn’t even ask me if I had had a good time. After that I just went along with being kosher around my parents, but didn’t really worry about what I ate when they weren’t around. I guess my father goes along with all of it because he doesn’t really care what he eats. He always says that eating is a duty not a pleasure, although he does enjoy cooking his Middle Eastern specialties. Maybe eating isn’t important to him because he’s never starved before. Not that I’ve ever starved either, but when I was about eleven, I decided to find out what hunger was like.

  It was when my parents were in Egypt and I practically gave the babysitter, who happened to be my father’s star graduate student, a nervous breakdown. I kept trying to explain to her that I wanted to experience hunger since half the world was starving and since my mother and grandparents had experienced being on the brink of starvation. I imagine I thought I couldn’t really feel alive unless I had experienced starvation. The graduate student tried everything to get me to eat—ice cream, pizza, McDonald’s. She didn’t realize that fast food probably wasn’t the best way to tempt me. I lasted for five days. She was frantic and tried calling my parents every hour on the hour, but they were off in the desert somewhere. Unreachable. She made her boyfriend come over, and he tried talking to me, too. Finally, I just realized how ridiculous the whole escapade was. I was on my bed literally almost hallucinating when it dawned on me that I was lying on a Danish wooden bed, listening to music on my very own CD player, in a fucking four-bedroom house in New Jersey. I walked around feeling like an idiot for weeks after that, and it took me a long time not to be ashamed of eating. I suppose I’m lucky I didn’t develop an eating disorder.

  Tonight my father has a good excuse for creating a gourmet meal because his oldest friends, the twins, are arriving. Every winter their mother goes to Florida for six weeks and the twins come stay with us. “This is much better than Florida,” they say. The twins aren’t crazy about the sun and don’t understand why so many people insist on running down to Florida for the winter. “We’re not birds,” they say. When they stay at our house, they sleep in the basement.

  As far as I know, the twins have always looked absolutely exactly alike. Usually when twins get to be adults, they start looking really different because they have different lives and interests. I saw a talk show about it once at Amy’s house. But Mordechai and Samuel are over fifty years old, and they look and dress exactly alike—black shoes, the kind Southerners in the movies wear to church, khakis with brown belts that wrap almost twice around their thin waists, plaid cotton button-down shirts, and brown cardigans. Then they both have horn-rimmed glasses and thick black hair parted on the side. They look a lot younger than fifty, but I know they’re in their fifties because that’s how old my father is, and they all went to school together. I bet those clothes are what they wore thirty-five or forty years ago when they were all going to the Yeshiva.

  The twins are geniuses of sorts. In fact, the twins and my father were geniuses together at the Yeshiva; they could all argue even the oldest, wisest rabbi into a corner, and the rabbis had great hopes for all of them—the pride and joy of the Yeshiva University High School for Boys. I often think it would be cool to go to a Yeshiva (but not a girls’ one, where they just study the basic laws and then learn all the wifely duties), to spend hours and hours poring over ancient texts and studying all those dead languages. My father and the twins used to sit up all night at some coffee shop on 181st Street discussing politics in Aramaic. I wonder what the subway workers on their way home from the nightshift thought of the three young guys with yarmulkes and glasses sitting in the back booth talking heatedly in some unrecognizable language. Or did they even notice?

  Whenever I stayed with the twins in Queens, we always played Yeshiva. They actually taught me Blatts, pages from Talmud, and I got really good at finding all the possible interpretations, especially after they told me that we were all committing a sin together, that a woman is not supposed to study Talmud. We used to go out for huge, greasy breakfasts at a diner on 41st and 9th Avenue. The waitresses all knew and loved the twins, so they gave me free milkshakes and showed me around the kitchen. Then we would go for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry or walk all over the Lower East Side while they pointed out things like where their grandparents used to have an underwear store. On other days, we would go to Chinatown to watch the dancing chicken—you put a quarter in the slot and this live chicken starts dancing. And then, to top it all off, they would buy me mango ice cream. Or sometimes we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and I never tired of hearing about how all those people were trampled to death the day it opened because someone yelled that it was collapsing.

  On Sundays, they took me with them to the Yeshiva where I got to sit in the library and look through the oldest books I could find while they helped bored Yeshiva boys research U.S. labor history or the Romans or laser surgery. The rabbis had allowed Mordechai and Samuel to build up the little library according to their interests. With their own hands, the twins built bookcases that reach all the way to the ceiling and require special ladders that can be slid along a rail to reach the top shelves. At first the boys were always trying to climb the ladders or slide each other around on them, so the twins had to make a rule that only they could climb to the library’s heights. Up and down those ladders they would climb, like long, skinny monkeys, fetching books for the boys or me. “That one,” I would say, “that old crumbly one about Celtic monsters.” There was no subject matter that you could not look up in their little library at the Yeshiva University High School for Boys.

  The twins are the best storytellers I have ever known. They told me stories about working at the Chrysler plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, when they were members of the Communist Party. They told me how they used to sit there during lunch with all the guys talking about things that they didn’t know much about, waiting for an opportunity to bring up the workers’ struggle and never finding the righ
t moment. Not in four years. Every morning they took the bus out to Mahwah from the George Washington Bridge Bus Station, and they never told anyone at the plant that they didn’t know how to drive. They still don’t know how to drive. Who needs a car in New York City? There was a guy at the plant who used to come to work drunk all the time, and then one day he pushed the wrong button on the machine that lifted the body of the car up onto the chassis, so instead of lifting it, he dropped the body on this young kid who was just out of high school. The kid died and the drunk killed himself the next day. The twins thought they would be able to talk about the workers’ struggle after that, but, in fact, the accident made it even more difficult. So after four years of grease and sweat—they’re actually really strong even though they’re so skinny—they quit the Communist Party and started working at the library of their old school. The rabbis were glad to have them back even if they sometimes tried to talk to the boys about the Revolution. The twins cried when the Berlin Wall came down, not because it was the end of communism, but because communism had failed. Of course they always knew it would fail, rife as it was with logical fallacies that even I could detect at an early age. In fact, they taught me to find logical fallacies by using Marxist theories and the Talmud; then we would all laugh that the world had been fooled for so long.

  I asked them once why they became communists if they knew the theory was unsound. They said it was because they needed to ease out of their religion gradually. After they had concluded that Judaism was based on a false assumption—the existence of a God who had chosen the Jews to carry out his laws on Earth—they needed to exhaust another system, find all its false assumptions, all its mistakes. They couldn’t tear themselves away from the need to have a truth that easily, they said.

  I used to think that the twins hated my mother because she took my father away from them, and then I thought maybe they were all in love with her, that my father was just the one she chose. Now I know they neither hated nor loved her. Still, the twins loved to talk about my parents’ courtship. The three of us would walk aimlessly around and around Central Park, not knowing which direction we were pointing in or where we would end up, and they would talk and talk about my parents.

  My mother was, according to the twins, the most striking woman at City College. They called her the Moor because of her thick, dark hair and Middle Eastern looks. She was as close as they could get to Sephardic in the cold Ashkenazic halls of City College. The twins were the ones who first told me that my mother used to write poetry, beautifully sad poetry with strange, surrealistic images—goats playing the cello and elephants eating their children. I used to believe the poem about the goat playing the cello was prophetic, but now I almost think that the twins made that up about the cello and the goats.

  According to the twins, when my mother was at City College, she spoke to no one and hardly spoke in the literature seminar where the twins and my father first laid eyes on her. Only once in a blue moon would my mother offer a quiet analysis that no one else had even dreamed of. She especially loved Blake. “Blake knew that God was really the Devil and the Devil was really God,” she reportedly said in class once.

  When I was younger, I believed everything the twins told me about my mother, but now I can’t help but think that only to my father and the twins was she such an extraordinary mystery. Not that you can’t tell that she was an attractive woman. She still is attractive and her Moorish hair going partly gray is even more stunning than it was in the photographs. For days in a row, sometimes, my mother would not appear in class and my father and the twins were sure she had a secret rendezvous somewhere mysterious, in Harlem perhaps. Sometimes they imagined she smoked opium—her eyes were often so far away.

  My mother was the one who sought out my father and the twins. She had heard that they were Talmudic scholars and was wondering if they wouldn’t mind sharing their knowledge with a woman. But my mother had no head for Talmud. In fact, she was terribly disappointed in the sacred texts. What had she expected to find there? After a few months, she announced that she preferred Blake, and then it was summer. It was my father who ran into her at a concert and invited her out for a walk. They walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and along the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights.

  What did she see in my father, a small man with rounded shoulders and a short torso? When I was little, I was always embarrassed to be seen in public with them together because my mother is a good three inches taller than my father. At the time of their first meeting, my father was renting a room in an old woman’s apartment near City College. He was not allowed to have lady visitors, so he was often a guest at my grandparents’. On Sunday afternoons they listened to the opera on WQXR together and my grandfather talked of the great singers he had known and heard in Vienna. My father didn’t particularly like or understand opera, but he liked being in their apartment, sitting on the couch next to my mother.

  The twins didn’t see as much of my father after that summer. No more late night sessions in all-night diners. No more Sundays on the Staten Island Ferry. No more long walks through Woodlawn Cemetery. The twins immersed themselves in U.S. labor history and my parents spent long afternoons in the New York Public Library, sifting through the Holocaust Collection. They were going to write a book—part poetry, part history, part philosophy. My father’s little room in the old woman’s apartment was cluttered with letters sent from Israel, South Africa, Australia, Chicago, Newark, Miami, Oklahoma, California—stories of dead relatives and little girls with numbers on their arms who had grown into middle-aged women with numbers on their arms. Once, when my parents were in Syracuse at a conference, I spent an entire weekend searching through my father’s papers, trying to find those old letters. In those days I would never have doubted the twins, nor would I have asked my parents about such a personal project. All I know is that they never wrote the book and I never found the letters. When they graduated from City College, my father went on to Columbia to get his Ph.D. and my mother taught English at Stuyvesant High School. But that was all before I was born, before they moved out here to New Jersey to start a family.

  Once, when we were walking to Riverdale along the El in Upper Manhattan, the twins told me that my parents first had sex in a parking lot near the 200th Street El stop. I don’t think they meant to freak me out with this information. It just came into their heads because we were walking underneath the Elevated, but for months after that I was beleaguered by images of my parents, their clothes torn open, with the subway screeching by above them.

  I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day with Mordechai and Samuel. But a psychologist would probably have a field day with me too. And the sad thing is that if I told a teacher or the social worker at school all the things the twins used to tell me when I was still in middle school, they would immediately be arrested for child abuse when all they were doing was trying to help me understand my parents. Isn’t that something every child needs and craves? Even though after a weekend with the twins, roaming all over the underbelly of New York City, I would have weird dreams of my mother locked in a cage, naked, screaming for me to help her.

  The minute I walked in the door this evening, my father said, without even saying hello, “She wants to see you.” So, upstairs I went to see why she required my presence, but she didn’t require it at all. I knocked and there was no answer, so I opened the door anyway. The room was totally dark, but I could tell she was awake by the stillness in the room. It was as if she were holding her breath. The smell was really strong—a vinegary sweetness that emanates from all her pores, and especially from her hair, when she is depressed. My father says it’s because she doesn’t eat and it’s the toxins that are being released from her body. I tried not to gag too much, not to let her know that I could smell her.

  “Is it very cold outside?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I said even though, according to the radio, it was in the teens.

 
I stood there for a while longer, but she didn’t have anything else to say, so I left. She didn’t say anything, not even “good night,” and neither did I. That was it, so I went back downstairs.

  In the living room, my father and the twins were in the middle of a heated discussion about whether or not, if a man falls out of a window and falls on top of a woman and accidentally penetrates her, it would be a rape according to Judaic law. My father and the twins can talk about something like that for hours. The consensus seemed to be that it is not a rape since there was no malicious intent, no sin involved, because sin cannot be unconscious. I wanted to say that the fact that he had a hard-on while he was falling might have had something to do with the fact that he saw this woman right below him and that it might not have been unmalicious at all, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t feel like talking about sex with my father and the twins.

  What I really would have liked was for all four of us to take a walk to the Tenafly Diner like we used to do. I would have liked for Samuel to set me up on his shoulders and run wildly through the quiet cold streets, screaming something crazy like Eureka, but they didn’t notice when I got up and left the room. I went upstairs and tried to read, but I was hungry and it didn’t seem like we were going to be eating dinner soon because no one was cooking, so I did something I never do. I called Mercedes up just to say hi. I thought maybe we could go get some pizza, but she wasn’t home. Her mother said she was in New York with Leon, so I just lay on my bed in the dark, listening to my father and the twins laughing.

  The Sanatorium

  Tommy has pneumonia again and I have decided to stay here with him night and day until he’s over it. They have set up a little cot for me in his room, which is quite comfortable since I’m not used to luxuries. Fruit and yogurt from the Korean grocery on the corner make up my breakfast and then a salad, which I can also buy from the Korean grocery, is sufficient for dinner. The doctors say that most AIDS patients don’t survive pneumonia twice, that the second time is almost always the last time. But my story seems to have a healing effect on Tommy; he has said so himself, said that he would have died last week if it hadn’t been for me and Karl. And yesterday I was so close to his letting me call his parents. Extremely close. But then he laughed and insisted it must be the morphine getting to him, that his parents had turned into mild-mannered Disney characters in his drugged-up brain and that I was taking advantage of him.