The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness

by Joel ben Izzy

  “You know,” she said, “I’m not afraid of dying. I’m really not. I think it will be like the opening scene in The Sound of Music. Do you remember? With Julie Andrews climbing over the hill?”

  I nodded again, and she went on. “I think it will be wonderful over there, on the other side. I’ll see your father again, but he’ll be able to stand up, tall and healthy. And I’ll see Grandma Yetta and your Grandpa Izzy, Aunt Dinah and Uncle Sam—everyone will be there, and they’ll all be healthy, waiting for me to join them. And they’ll call out to me and say—‘Welcome, Glady!’—and I’ll be able to hear them.”

  I squeezed her hand and could feel hers squeezing mine back. Then a dark look came over her face, and I could see tears.

  “But I don’t know how to get there,” she said. “The hill is too steep and my suitcase is too heavy to carry . . .” Her voice trailed off, as though in a question, one that she couldn’t ask, and I couldn’t answer. She was asking me how to die.

  We stayed there, silent, for a long time. I thought about that suitcase and what might be inside it. I’d always carried things for my mother—luggage, furniture, groceries. But this was different. I could not carry it for her, nor could she carry it. All she could do was unpack it. And there was only one way to do it—by speaking the truth.

  That’s when it hit me. I suddenly saw a bicycle, and a basket filled with sand. I could hear Lenny’s words. “God is sending you a message . . . something so obvious you can’t even see it. . . . It comes down to a single word.” Listen.

  I reached into the plastic bag at my side and pulled out the magic-erase board. Taking the purple stick from its holder, I wrote: “Tell me your story.”

  STORY ORIGIN: ZEN BUDDHIST, JAPAN

  The Strawberry

  A Zen master had traveled to a distant village. As he was running late for his return train, he decided to take what he thought was a shortcut.

  He found himself walking along a steep path at sunset, staring off into the distance. So taken was he by the beauty of the view that he did not notice where he was walking. At that instant he kicked a small stone and, a moment later, realized that he did not hear it land.

  He stopped, only to discover that he stood atop a huge cliff. Another step and he would have walked right off, to a hundred-foot drop below.

  As he stood there, gazing out at the mountains in the distance, he was suddenly shaken by a loud roar. He turned around to see a huge tiger slowly approaching. He took a step to the side, only to have the ground crumble beneath his feet. Falling off the edge of the cliff, heels over head, his hands reached out to grab whatever might save him. An instant later, he found himself clinging with one hand to a thorny vine, growing out of a crack in the rock. He looked up to the top of the cliff, where he saw the tiger, licking his lips.

  His eyes searched far below him, to the bottom of the cliff. There, looking up at him, waited a second tiger.

  With one tiger above and another below, he looked again at the vine, its sharp thorns cutting into his hand. Near the vine he saw a tiny hole. Turning his gaze to the hole, he saw a small black-and-white mouse crawl out. It scampered along a tiny ledge to the vine, looked at him for a moment, then looked at the tiger, and finally began to gnaw at the vine.

  The monk searched for anything else he might grab, but there was nothing. Then, far off to his side, he spotted a tiny plant. Surely it was too small to hold his weight, but he reached for it just the same. It had green leaves, and as he parted them, he glimpsed something small and red. It was a wild strawberry plant, with one perfectly ripe strawberry.

  He plucked it from the plant and ate it. And as he did so he thought, “Isn’t life sweet?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Strawberry

  MY MOTHER READ THE WORDS on the magic-erase board.

  “My story?” she sounded incredulous. “You want to hear my story?”

  I nodded.

  “But I’m not the storyteller.” I shook my head. “I wouldn’t know where to begin . . .”

  “Wherever you start,” I wrote, “that’s the beginning.”

  She read my words and nodded. “Anywhere at all?”

  I nodded again. She gazed off in the distance for a time, her eyelids slowly closing. When she looked back at me, she was smiling. “I was just thinking about your Grandpa Izzy,” she said, “and how much he loved catsup.”

  I nodded.

  “He would put it on everything—eggs, brisket, toast—he said it was his favorite American food.” She stopped to laugh, and when she laughed, she coughed, and coughed more, then went on. I heard about his catsup collection, in the basement of the house on Hyde Park, and how he once opened a bottle that had fermented, the catsup shooting straight up to the ceiling. “Forever after, there was a stain on the ceiling. When people would come to the house, we would show it to them . . .”

  As she spoke, the room around us faded away—the ugly curtains, the medical instruments, the rolling table, the tray—all of it gone. And what took its place was Cleveland in the days before the Second World War. I heard about the first time she took the streetcar downtown for a chocolate phosphate and what a magical place her cousin Leonard’s junkyard was, about her father’s mattress factory and the Sunday afternoon trips she would take with him to deliver mattresses in the country.

  “Did I ever tell you about the house on Hyde Park?” I shook my head. Of course she’d told me about it, many times, always in passing, as though I must have already known about it. Now I heard about every room and the hallways, the smells of the almond cookies her mother baked, the sycamore trees in the front yard, and the basement. “That’s where the cousins club met,” she said. “It was me, Norma, Nortie, Morrie, Leonard, Cousin Manny—right under the catsup stain.”

  I heard about my Uncle Sam, a tiny, gentle, soft-spoken man who had been married to my Aunt Dinah for seventy-five years. “We were all surprised once, at a party, when he bragged that he was strong enough to tear a phone book in half. He was so small—and it was so unlike him to boast. Everything stopped as the host brought him the Cleveland Yellow Pages and said ‘Go ahead!’ And he did it—one page at a time!”

  They were simple stories, these tales she’d never told me. Even now, she seemed surprised that I wanted to hear them. “I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

  But I was. As she spoke, I was transported—back to a world of delicatessens, and to Uncle Louie, who loved pickles and would take them home in his pocket; back to the pressroom of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and her first day as a reporter; and back to summers at Camp Wise, by the lake, where she had been a counselor.

  “And one year there was a new counselor, the most handsome young man I’d ever seen. He was tall and dashing, always telling jokes and stories. All the kids loved him. He gave a concert one night, playing his violin—it was beautiful. He said he was going to travel to Palestine to live on a kibbutz . . .”

  I had never heard my father described this way. Nor had I ever heard the story of how they’d met, bundled their dreams together, and traveled to California—and what a wonderful place it was. Her stories were peppered with names of the people they’d met, names like Langholz and Schleimer, people I had known all my life. Yet now, in her telling of the years before my brothers and I were born, they became almost mythic. Southern California itself took on a beauty I had never known; I could smell the orange blossoms.

  And then it stopped. She simply sighed, coughed some more, and shrugged.

  “What else can I say?” she asked.

  I thought of Taly’s words of advice, about not leaving things unsaid. I thought of the look on Lenny’s face when he said, “I think you’re stuck in Chelm.” I took out the Little Mermaid, pulled off the magic pencil, and wrote “What’s in the suitcase?”.

  She looked at my question, then down by the side of her bed, as though the suitcase were right there, on the floor. She looked back up at me, silently. I could see her eyes pleading Don’t go there.
>
  But there was nowhere else to go. We had looked under the streetlight and not found it. I waited, and when she still didn’t respond, I pulled up the plastic, erasing the words, and wrote “The Truth.”

  “But it is true—” she protested.

  There was no turning back. This time, on the magic-erase board, I wrote “Grandma A.”

  A look of shock came over her, as though I’d written a dirty word on the board. “But why bring that up now? Why relive that?”

  Why indeed? I wondered. And then, once again, I wrote “Suitcase?”.

  She understood. “Well, she had problems of her own . . .” my mother managed. That had been the line for years.

  I nodded for her to go on, though I could see she did not want to. I waited.

  “Your father made sure I didn’t meet her until the wedding. If I had, I don’t think I would have married him. I begged him to stand up to her. He tried, but he couldn’t.”

  My mother shook her head, and I could see the anger surface, only to be forced back down. “She made the best blintzes. Remember?”

  I did, and I nodded.

  “She gave them to your father, told him not to eat my cooking, said that I was trying to poison him.” The anger was back. “She was horrible. She made our lives miserable. She haunted us. She broke into our house. She tortured us. That bitch . . .”

  She stopped herself, a look of shock on her face. But it had been done. It was as though she had said a magic word. My mother, who had spent a lifetime never saying anything bad about anyone, had broken the spell. She waited a moment, the sound of “bitch” echoing in the room. She looked a little surprised that lightning didn’t strike her. She went on. “She was a bitch. She hated me. I don’t know why. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t good enough for her son—she thought that I was the cause of the world’s problems. She said I was a Hitler. She spit in my face . . .”

  The floodgates had opened. I heard all about my evil grandmother and how she had chased my mother and father to California. About what it was like to live with my father, to watch his dreams crumble as one business after another failed, our family’s finances went to pieces, his body fell apart, and the manic depression began to show. He would hatch schemes that she knew would fail, pipe dreams, that would pull us down deeper into debt—“It was like watching the house burn down, slowly, over many years. And I couldn’t stop him . . .”

  She told me about things that had happened before I was born, things I’d never known. She had been pregnant five times. The other two babies had been girls. One was stillborn and the other, who had been named Mary, died after only one hour. I thought of Michaela, and how my mother’s eyes had lit up when she had first held her.

  Grief knows no bounds, and hers stretched back through time. Now, she told again of those same idyllic times of her youth, of the house on Hyde Park, but this time I heard of the uncle who had killed himself, the bitter fights, her father’s depression and the look on his face when he came back from the electric shock treatments.

  I could tell she was exhausted. Her breath was labored and she was coughing. Yet she was exhilarated as well. She had a glow to her, a lightness, that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. I thought it was time to finish and let her rest, but she couldn’t stop. She told me how horrible it had been to watch her own father—my Grandpa Izzy—die of lung cancer. “I had flown back to Cleveland. Nat King Cole was there at the same time, in the same hospital. He was also dying of lung cancer. I remember they set up a microphone in Nat King Cole’s room, so he could sing to everyone in the hospital. He sang ‘Mona Lisa.’”

  She turned away, as though looking back through time, and I could see her listening to Nat King Cole’s voice. “We all stopped—me, your Grandpa Izzy, your Grandma Yetta, the nurses—it was completely silent. And we all looked up at a speaker. His voice was so smooth, so soft. Even over the hospital’s crackly PA system, it sounded like silk.”

  And there she stopped, with the sound of his voice. She had opened another door, and I knew it would be hard to go through. My mother had spent the past twenty-five years making the best of her hearing loss. Of all those things she had spent a lifetime not complaining about, this was the most painful. I had imagined what it must have been like for her over the years as the volume slipped away. And in all that time, she had not uttered a single word of self-pity. She neither cursed God nor her fate.

  I took a deep breath and braced myself for this part of the story. Yet when I looked up to her, she was smiling. I had no idea why.

  “I was thinking of Blanche,” she explained, “and a concert she took me to last year for my birthday. Actually, I took her—well, I drove.” One of my mother’s closest friends, Blanche is almost completely blind. “It was at Ambassador Auditorium—they played Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Pastoral.” Her eyes had a dreamy look.

  This puzzled me. “Could you hear?” I wrote.

  She shook her head. “A little. It all sounded far away. But there are other ways to listen to a concert. I could see it in the way the conductor moved his baton, and the way the instruments followed. I watched Blanche, and I could feel the music coming through her. And then I closed my eyes and I felt it in the arms of my seat. The music was so rich—like whipped cream.”

  After a time she said, “Isn’t it funny, what God takes away from us? And what we get in exchange? When I was young and had my hearing, I always liked music. Hearing your father play the violin, records, dancing. But I’ve never enjoyed music like I did at that concert.”

  I was so wrapped up in her description that I didn’t notice a nurse had come into the room. She started fiddling with the bags on the IV.

  “Oh, how nice,” said the nurse, a large woman with big, blonde hair. “You have a visitor.”

  “My son,” explained my mother. “The youngest. He’s from Berkeley—he’s a professional storyteller.”

  “A storyteller,” she repeated. “Isn’t that nice?”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “And he has a beautiful wife and two beautiful children,” my mom added, turning to the side and pretending to spit: ptew, ptew, ptew. It was at once comical and endearing to see her spitting to keep away the evil eye, even as she lay dying of cancer. Mercifully, the nurse didn’t feel like talking, but went about her business, then left the room.

  “And you?” she asked. “What about you? I’ve done all the talking. How are you, Joel? I’ve never seen you so quiet.” I could see her looking at me, examining my face. “Something’s wrong with you, isn’t it? You’re not well.”

  I nodded. She had told me her truth, and now I would have to tell her mine.

  “Why so quiet?” she asked again. “You haven’t said a thing since you got here.” Again, I took out the erase board and wrote, “I lost my voice.”

  A puzzled look appeared on her face. “You have laryngitis?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Cancer,” I wrote.

  As she read the word, then read it again, her look of puzzlement gave way to a look of horror. “Cancer?” she read. “I don’t understand. When? How?”.

  Then came the questions. A dozen of them. I did my best to answer, writing, erasing, then writing again, until finally she motioned for me to stop and pointed to a small black box at the side of the bed. I brought it over and opened it up. Inside was the tiny microphone with the long wire, the same one we had used in times past, with so little success, when we tried to have conversations in restaurants.

  I shook my head. How was this to work?

  She plugged one end into another box, which ran up to her hearing aid. “If you whisper very quietly, and enunciate your words, maybe I can hear something.”

  I tried it. Her face remained expectant, registering nothing, as I whispered, “testing, one, two, three . . .” Then her eyes lit up, as though she had a sudden idea, and she reached over and turned it on. Her hearing aid made a loud squealing sound, and she fiddled with it until it stopped.

  “Now try
.”

  I whispered, hyper-enunciating each word. This time she nodded.

  “It sounds like you’re on top of a mountain, far away. But if you speak very slowly, I can hear you.”

  I took a deep breath and began my story. After each phrase, I waited for the look of recognition that said she’d understood the words. When she didn’t, I would repeat them, stretching my lips around them. Each time she finally heard them, I could see their effect. They tore at her heart. Her face grew darker and darker as she listened. It was painful to watch, made all the harder to do because each time I stopped for another breath, I could hear a voice in my head cry, What the hell are you doing? It’s not enough that your mother is dying—she has to hear all this?

  But I couldn’t stop. We had broken the “good-news rule.” My life, in her eyes, was like a picture burning. It was the picture of me she had carried in her mind for so many years. I knew it well since I had painted it, carefully, painstakingly, ever since my childhood. It was made of my grades, my performances, my achievements—“Portrait of a Successful Son.” Now it was in flames.

  When I finished I did something I had not done, had not let myself do, since that morning I’d woken up with no voice. I cried. And my mother did something she had not done for as long as I could remember—she held me. Sick and dying of cancer, she held me, and cared for me, in a way she had not done since I was a child.

  We stayed like that a long time. I didn’t want to leave. I had found my mother. We didn’t say a word, or try. We didn’t need to. We had come to one of those times in life when words are not necessary.

  Outside it was getting dark. I could tell that my mom was exhausted. She needed to sleep. I let go of her and kissed her forehead. She nodded, understanding that it was time to let go. Yet she sat there, with a look on her face I had never seen before. She looked like a new mother.

  I went out the door. As it closed, I looked back at her one more time, through the little window. That’s my mother, I said to myself. My mother. I liked the sound of the words. And as I looked at her, I could hear her voice again, from years ago, saying what she had said so many times before—“a door closes, a window opens.”