Uncovered

by Leah Lax

  Later, I read in the bathtub as the water grows cold and children bang on the door. I read in bed, only to find the book splayed on the floor, pages bent, when I wake before morning. I pick up the book, try to smooth the wrinkled pages. I am going to become a faceless plague to librarians.

  I get up in the dark house to wander, and wonder.

  I thought the dreams, the visions, the demons would go away if

  there was enough love to put them down.

  —Sylvia Plath

  Let her be let her be let her be to be to be shy let her be to

  be let her be to be let her try.

  Let her try …

  —Gertrude Stein

  If the mind were clear

  and if the mind were simple you could take this mind

  this particular state and say

  This is how I would live if I could choose;

  this is what is possible …

  But the mind

  of the woman imagining all this the mind

  that allows all this to be possible ….

  does not so easily

  work free form remorse

  —Adrienne Rich

  When we belong to the

  world we become what we are.

  —Anne Stevenson

  Seventeen

  June 1993. After months of prying open new spaces between mothering for my reading and writing, I am standing over my father in the dementia unit of Golden Acres nursing home in Dallas. Younger sister Amy called me here—Amy, sober now, and the only one of us still in town to deal with Daddy. The room has white vinyl curtains and blank white walls, a bank of empty drawers that somehow spell out both efficiency and impermanence, and a single bedside lamp with a weak bulb that has little purpose—all as cold and generic as a roadside motel. The bed is empty, blanket drawn smooth. After having twice fallen out of bed, Daddy’s on a mattress on the floor. They don’t believe in bed rails here. It is policy. People get hurt.

  Daddy is seventy-one and looks ninety, snoring through one of the short spurts of unconsciousness that seem to fall over him. There is a purple-and-green bruise on his face and another on his arm and, in spots over the bruises, blood black and crusted. His skin looks like wet tissue paper that has been stretched over him and dried, mottled yellow-gray, impossibly delicate and finely wrinkled. Splitting. He has bedsores. The blanket over him is barely mounded. His feet stick out like an accusation. They are yellowed and bare, swollen beyond what any sock can cover. It seems his feet are dying before him. Daddy is dying in pieces.

  In the bag that I dumped on a chair is a volume by Maxine Kumin. I would be surprised to hear Kumin’s poetry labeled as political, and know nothing about her feminist politics—what I have read I have found to be deeply personal. I sit down to wait while Daddy sleeps, and read, until I come to I am tired of this history of loss.

  Fatigue comes over me. I sit and watch his sleeping form, with a vague, languid anger, but the father that I would have thrown those lines at like an accusation is gone. I read on: What drum can I beat to reach you?

  Daddy wakes with a start and begins to mumble in a low, steady hum not unlike the sound of grinding teeth. I stand, bend over him, and put my ear near his mouth, to find he’s pouring out nonsense phrases from childhood images, as if he’s downloading a lifetime, offloading, really, readying himself. “You thief,” I mutter, just as a wave of pity and old love comes over me. “Thief” because inside him he hoards the father he could have been, that he stole from us. You stole my innocence, my childhood, my air. When you’re gone, will the sound of grinding teeth finally go away? And yet I’ve come to sleep over in the unit to be near him for the Sabbath, which they have told me will be his last. I lay my palm gently on his forehead.

  A woman screams from one of the rooms on the other side of the nurses’ station, high-pitched and bloodcurdling. A few minutes later, she does it again. And again. The periodic screams blend into the landscape of this place, along with the blaring television in the lobby and an aide down the hall talking to a patient at a near shout. I prepare candles at Daddy’s bedside, then light them with the Sabbath blessing. Daddy is in and out, so I settle into the one chair at his bedside to read and think in the candlelight. The flames quiver and spark.

  A nurse looks in. She is small-boned and middle-aged, her round brown face bearing both patience and disapproval. “Oh, honey!” she says, and swoops into the room, blows out the flames. “You can’t do that,” she says. “Rules.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I know about rules.”

  “Herb!” she says, and leans close to my father’s face. “Time to eat!”

  An aide comes in behind her with a kind of rolling chaise, and the two hoist his bones into it. We make a strange procession, my father in his recliner throne; the nurse; I in my Sabbath best, even the wig, like armor; and the hovering aide, who is as cheerful as a nursery school teacher. We pass the nurses’ station with its hospital fluorescence, more efficient false cheer, the lobby visiting area with its two red vinyl sofas and television, and the locked double steel doors no longer needed to keep my father in but instead serving to keep the world away. We go to the back of the unit, an open area with a refrigerator where other patients have been assembled. Two more staffers are there, and a woman who speaks softly in Russian to her thin, bent charge. She says “Mama” and spoons puree into the woman’s mouth, which she does with great tenderness, as if this is her grateful, voluntary penance, her daily pittance repayment to her mother. Compared with that woman, I am an utter impostor. So why am I desperate to get you to eat when you won’t, Daddy, as if I need to keep you alive? He tongues the puree, turns his face away. No hope.

  Back in the room, my father back on the floor mattress, baby food smeared on his pajama collar, I pour red sweet wine into a paper cup, raise the cup before me, face him, and sing the Sabbath kiddush prayer. When he hears, he slips back into childhood. Consciousness and memory have melded into one, back and forth, present and past, although both are fading, near gone. Behind me, the unlit candles become his mother’s silver candlesticks, my paper cup his father’s gleaming goblet on the Sabbath table. He mumbles the Sabbath words with me from that memory. On the sixth day He completed his work, resting on the seventh from all that He had done. From all that he had done.

  After midnight. The dim room is strangely quiet in this hospital-like place, no beeping monitors or late-night interruptions for medication or to take his temperature, no efforts here to sustain him. I wander to the nurses’ station. There’s another shift on. “I’m Herb’s daughter,” I say to the night nurse. She has large, efficient hands, her hair in short yellow waves stiff as a field of corn. “Sleeping over.”

  “Oh, Herb,” she says. “I shave him up nice before I get off. Did you notice?”

  “Um, yes. Thanks,” I say. “He hasn’t been this far gone for long, has he?”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “Seems like this dementia happened all of a sudden. We’ve had good talks.”

  “I think I waited too long to come,” I say. Maybe on purpose. “Did he ever tell you, well, stories?”

  This moment will stay with me: we are eyeing each other, the raw knowledge between us that he is soon going to die. “I might as well tell you,” she says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, one night a couple of weeks ago, he wouldn’t sleep,” she says, “so I rolled him out here, where I could keep an eye on him, and he said to me, he says, ‘Dara?’ ‘What?’ I says. ‘You got kids?’ he says. ‘Sure, Herb,’ I says, ‘I got two. How about yourself?’ And he says, ‘God gave me three beautiful girls, and I hurt ’em. I hurt ’em bad. Don’t you ever hurt your children.’” She stops and purses her lips. She adds, “Now, wasn’t that a curious thing?”

  TO BE REASONABLE, the poet Kumin says, is to put out the light. “You see, Daddy,” I tell his sleeping form back in the room, “I erased you a long time ago, and now I can’t cry for a nothing.” But the truth is, I’ve tried pu
tting out the light so many times, but his image just glows on in the dark. To be reasonable is to let go, she says. I wonder, How much of the love I have worked to muster for the Rebbe and God and even for Levi was really meant for you, Daddy? As if I got left with a package of love I couldn’t bear to hold and went looking for somewhere to put it. How much of my image of God is made up of what I wish you had been? But no contrived faith, no substitute father, can replace what you were, or could have been. Love for your father, I think. What a queer-shaped burden.

  But I can’t say that. I can’t say I “love” this swollen, insane man with baby food on his collar, smelling of sour breath, head lolling off a neck gone slack, his mouth hanging open. “Look at you,” I say to him. A deflated sack.

  He wakes up. “Lisa!” he says. “Lisa!”

  And instantly, I am Lisa again. Hopeful child. I start up out of my chair toward him. “Daddy?” I say with a whimper.

  He jerks weak old legs and tries to wave his arms. “I have to go!” he says. “Have to make the two o’clock!”

  I reach to pull him back from the waves. But I can’t stop them. Or him. I will have to look. No hope.

  Instead, I fall back into the waiting arms of ritual. I put my hand on his arm in a Hasidic model of compassion and sing out, “Shemaaaa, yisrael,” the prayer he once sang with me before I slept, the one that is also a confession before dying. I lean in and smell his fading and sing into his dying ear this last confession—mine, instead of his.

  Once again, Hebrew words bubble out of him from childhood. “Adonoi,” he rumbles. “Echad.”

  But I’m back at my wedding. The music is swelling, and Levi the groom is approaching to lower my veil, our two young fathers on either side of him. “Daddy? The words?” I beg, and I’m looking up to my father and not to my groom, begging for my father’s last blessing before I bury us both. Daddy leans over close in his handsome suit and familiar cologne and I have a surge of need and hope. But he’s afraid. He can’t remember the magic words. Instead, he kisses my forehead, leaves it damp. Then Levi reaches over and covers the wound of my father’s kiss with the veil. This final kiss from my father that shames me and seals me will be the last time that I look at the wound that is Daddy. Until now. Until this letting go, singing to my dying father. Listen, O Israel, I sing. The Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Blessed is the name of the glory of His kingdom forever and ever.

  HOUSTON, JUNE 21, 1993. I waited for him to go, but I had to get home to the children. Now, three days later, the phone rings to a cool report of the impossible, the obvious, coupled with a programmed offer of comfort, and Daddy’s dead. I walk through this sudden complication in my life as if it were unexpected. Leibl is home on summer vacation from yeshiva. The other six are swirling through the house. There are meals, cleanup, directing traffic. But my father is dead. I have to get to him. He needs me. I have to get back to Dallas to my father.

  I hurry to the jewelry box in my bathroom—the same gold filigree over glass that once sat on my grandmother’s vanity as my mother fit the wedding veil onto my head. I rummage in it for a certain strand of varied polished stones, shiny, indeterminate little things, that my father sent me years after the wedding, after lithium seemed to be giving him another chance. At the time, I tossed it here in disdain. Now I pull the strand out and finger the first of the stones, grayish-pink, shining and hopeful, and the next, white but streaked with impurities, and the next. Each is cold, smooth, each with its special asymmetry. I drop the whole strand onto my palm, the cold stone weight of unspoken stories, then grip them in my fist in a flash of unambiguous grief. I sob. For one single moment, engulfed in his love for me, I finally don’t warn the grief away. Shaking, wanting him, I put on the necklace and fit the clasp together behind my neck.

  Then I’m choking. I fumble the clasp open and can’t get the necklace off fast enough.

  What have I lost, if he’s been gone since my childhood? I don’t know how to grieve him. He’s a hole in my life. You can’t bury a hole.

  If only my religion gave me a place to put grief he didn’t earn, instead of asserting that he didn’t really die, that the Messiah will come and my father will return. If only I could turn to God and say, You take responsibility for his death, and for his life, so that I can try to understand this helpless anger. This terrible love. Then I’ll believe You’ll take responsibility for my death, too. Maybe then I won’t need to cling to every bit of life with such fear. Maybe then I will be able to move on. But we pray in ancient words written for us—I don’t know how to use my own words to speak to our Hasidic God.

  If only I could see the coming mourning rituals as eloquent expression of my silent wailing, and as a way to know my grief. Instead, the community will soon surround me with death-denying food and murmured assurances: We will bring the Messiah through devotion. Death is not final. Do not grieve.

  If only I had the courage to accept that I miss my father the criminal.

  I put the necklace back into the box, but this time, I don’t bury it. I lay the strand on top so that I can see it through the glass.

  Then I’m rushing through chores and to the grocery store, where I fill three carts to overflowing, all while a dong like an old cymbal, like some priestly call to prayer, reverberates on and on, making everything seem distant: I have to get to Dallas. I’m in the kitchen, unpacking the bags, storing boxes of Cheerios and cans of tuna fish, corn, and beans in the cabinet. Apples, bananas, lettuce, tomatoes, scallions, cheese, eggs, yogurt, and milk in the refrigerator. Words from Sylvia Plath flit in and out: Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before your time.

  I’ve always shielded the children from my father. I won’t expose them now. I can create their world with my words: Eat kosher food and say your blessings and you will be protected from harm. Serve God with joy. Mommy is fine. Your grandfather was a good man.

  I run into our back bedroom and lock the door, clinging to ritual, my only sight of solid ground: “Yes,” the funeral director says over the phone, his voice cultured to just the right mix of appeasement and false sympathy. “We’re familiar with Orthodox burial. A shomer is available; the body will not be left alone.” A hired faceless man will whisper psalms through the night near my father’s body out of respect for his holy life.

  “Plain pine casket?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Unfinished. Lined in straw. The body will be in a white cotton shroud, no embalming, the Orthodox way. Of course, the casket will remain closed.”

  From dust thou art.

  “Sir,” I say, and my voice is furtive. “One more favor?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Drill holes in the bottom of the casket.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Orthodox procedure,” I say. “For quick decay.”

  “This can be done,” the man says.

  “And,” I say, “don’t tell my sisters.”

  To dust return.

  THE VIEW INTO AN OPEN grave three days later in Dallas’ old Temple EmanuEl cemetery. Newly cut black clay, rich with possibility, heavy from recent rain, lines the hole. But that hole is a summary of our losses. And now I know what we have lost: that hope we could never relinquish for a Daddy we could know or trust or understand. That’s what we three bury today.

  Levi is a statue at my right, my sisters at my left, Debbie’s husband, Robert, beside her. Old neighbors and friends are here, my mother somewhere out there among them. I incline my head toward Levi until I am just an inch away from the forbidden public touch. I want to lean on him. He takes a step away. I straighten up, corrected.

  The sparse crowd is quiet as the rabbi hands Debbie and Amy in turn a pair of scissors so that each can cut the black ribbon pinned to their dresses—a polite, sanitized version of the Law. “We’re doing this for you,” Debbie whispers. When the rabbi hands the scissors to me, I ignore the ribbon and cut a slash right into the shawl over my dress; then I grab the two sides and rip the cloth wide open in the fierce Orthodox ges
ture, symbol of a torn heart. The tearing resounds through the hushed tent. I hear a gasp. The cloth hangs. Before me, the hole in the earth he tore into us. The rich smell of wet earth. I think of verdant growth. I think of worms.

  BACK AT HOME IN HOUSTON, our front door remains unlocked seven days and I remain in the dress with the torn shawl. Levi and the kids cover the mirrored wall in the dining room and the large mirror in the den with bed sheets that hang in folds. I light a tall candle in a glass cylinder, the insistent, fragile flicker a symbol of my father’s soul living on beyond this earth. Before the candle burns down, I will light another, and another, intending for the flame to continue through the year of mourning. Levi cautions the children away from the stereo. There will be no Uncle Moishy and his Mitzvah Men, no Avraham Fried or Lubavitch Boys’ Choir, no music at all in our home for the coming year.

  Visitors arrive, and the Hasidic dance of comforting the mourner begins. They let themselves in without knocking, bringing covered dishes and murmured condolences. They sit down and don’t start a conversation, waiting for my lead, even if it means we don’t speak. When I finally say something, they ask about my father.

  But this choreographed, comfortably predictable scene is what I wanted—reliably tender offerings, presence, food I didn’t cook, quiet words, my children nearby, if somewhat awed. Besides, following the Law for the mourner like a ritual means Daddy didn’t have to earn my grief in order for me to grieve, that it doesn’t matter who or what he was. The community comes, no matter what, because here, I’m not his Lisa, I’m just a Jewish Woman in Mourning, my loss generalized and sanitized. They offer comfort, following the Law. But they ask about my father.

  I sit on the mourner’s low stool and wave at my guests a picture of Daddy as a young, handsome man, the beloved father of their expectations. “He taught me the shema,” I say. “He used to talk about my grandparents and their old Jewish ways.” I hold the picture out to them. But I cover the child rapist with my thumb. I cover his years in a mental institution, brain damage from electroshock, the final days of diapers and mumbling madness. My thumb hides all but his lopsided smile.