A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘How do I know? What does it feel like?’

  ‘You’re Jewish enough,’ Jean said. ‘You can be as Jewish as you want to be.’

  ‘But, of course, I gave up something, too,’ Liesel went on. ‘I gave up my culture, too. By living in America.’

  When Nathan was born, their parents met for the first time. Bill had a teaching gig at the LSE, and they were living in London for the year, in a two-bed flat on Denning Road in Hampstead. Liesel still remembered the argument she expected to have when they got home from the hospital, about who would sleep where when both sets of parents came to stay. It surprised Bill that his folks wanted to make the trip. My mother never flies anywhere, he said, this will knock her out, we have to offer them the guest room. But in fact she preferred to stay at a hotel. Liesel, underslept, anxious, in the first few weeks of motherhood, indulged in all kinds of crazy fantasies about what Essie was going to do, or what she would say. I feel like Rosemary in that movie, she told their friends. Only partly joking. At the very least there’s going to be a scene, and accusations.

  But in fact what happened was somehow even worse. Mutti had arrived the afternoon before and was already changing diapers, helping with the bottle and cooking meals. When Bill’s parents came around, for tea and cake, they were extremely friendly and sociable, in what Essie considered to be a polite society kind of way, making conversation and complimenting everything – the cake (which Mutti had baked, an apple tart), the apartment and the furniture and the neighborhood, as if it were an ordinary social occasion. And Liesel could feel her mother’s judgment against them. Especially against poor Essie, who came across as phony and insecure: with her heavily madeup face (it was Bill’s face underneath), in her best dress. She wouldn’t let go of her purse and kept it on her lap, and then placed it carefully against her feet when the food arrived. They stayed for an hour. Essie kept telling her husband, ‘We should go.’ Mutti found the whole performance incomprehensible … after they’ve come all this way. For much of their weeklong visit, they saw the sights, Buckingham Palace, the Changing of the Guard. ‘This is my chance to make him take me to London,’ Essie said. (She thought she was being charming, in a wife-to-wife way.) ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Maybe they spent four hours in the presence of their grandson. But Liesel wasn’t willing to join in Mutti’s judgment – she was bound to them, too. Sometimes, in company, Bill had a tendency of going into details, at some length, when people asked him a question. Like his mother, describing their hotel. How quickly these relations start to tear you apart. It was a relief when everybody left.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Julie said. ‘What’s wrong with saying nice things about the cake? Especially if your mother made it.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

  ‘And if they’ve never been to London … of course, they should go to Buckingham Palace.’

  ‘When your father was small, we took him to see it, too.’

  ‘It’s just snobbery,’ Julie said. And then, when nobody spoke: ‘What does this have to do with calling him Nathan?’

  ‘I can try to explain, but only if you want to hear.’

  ‘Of course, that’s what I want. I just asked.’

  But this turned out to be difficult, too. There’s a parable in the play about a magic ring, which makes you pleasing to God and man: vor Gott und den Menschen angenehm. A rather vague kind of magic, Liesel felt, even as she tried to explain it. Jean’s translation, ‘It makes you popular,’ was clearer but also not quite right. And Julie anyway had a thing about popular kids; she disliked them. She wouldn’t want a ring like that.

  Her mood had changed – it was like walking through stiff high grass. Liesel brought back the idea of God, but that didn’t help either. Julie said she was an atheist. The problem with religion is that it makes you believe in things like magic. And so on. Meanwhile, a couple of late summer bees started buzzing around the sticky candy wrapper, which Margot was still playing with – peeling and unpeeling it, for the sound. ‘Just throw it away,’ Julie told her. ‘You’re being disgusting.’ But Margot stood up instead and tried to run from them. They followed her with lazy persistence; she almost ran into the road. Jean pulled her back. And then they walked to the corner together, where Jean persuaded her to throw the candy away. The trashcan was overflowing; she had to balance the wrapper in the mouth of a Diet Coke. All of which took time.

  Liesel by this point had almost had enough. Her knee hurt but it wasn’t just that. The grandchildren asked for a lot of attention. She knew that her own grown-up children (Susie, too, but Nathan especially) didn’t consider her particularly doting. They placed her on the ‘other end of the spectrum,’ as Nathan once put it. What’s at that end, she asked. Nobody answered, but Liesel sometimes tried to work out what the opposite of doting was. Indifferent or cold? No, she wasn’t either of those things. Just the idea that her kids could think she was …

  It’s also true that Julie reminded Liesel of the way she used to argue with Nathan when he was younger. She tried starting again. ‘The ring gets passed down from father to favorite son.’

  ‘Why just the son?’ Julie asked. ‘Why not daughter?’

  She had her father’s broad forehead and was growing into the Essinger nose. Our half-Jewish nose, Jean called it. Straight and prominent, between deep eye-sockets, where the color of Julie’s skin paled – an effect that made her look serious and slightly sleep-deprived. Especially with her prison haircut, a kind of continuously broadcast public announcement: I don’t care what you think. (Bill said to Liesel later, ‘Who lets a girl cut her hair like that?’ Some of his views were surprisingly conservative.) Her complexion was generally olive-toned; she was likely to be tall and slim. If she turned out pretty, it would be pretty in an interesting way.

  ‘In the old days,’ Liesel said, ‘to help the family stay important, people gave most of their property to the oldest son. Otherwise, if they had several kids, nobody got much of anything.’

  ‘But they could give it to the oldest girl.’

  ‘Well, if a girl got married, her husband took over her property, and the family lost control of it.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Julie said.

  ‘It isn’t fair, but it’s not what I want to talk about.’

  So she tried again. It was like remembering the names of rivers or the succession of kings – something you once studied for a test. One day a father has three sons, and he loves them all the same. At different moments he promises the ring to each of them. What can he do? He makes copies, but after his death, the three brothers realize what has happened and begin to argue. They want to find out which of them has the true ring. So they go to a judge, but he can’t help either; he doesn’t know. Still, the judge gives them some advice. The magic of the ring, he says, is to make you beloved by all men. ‘This is the point,’ Liesel said. ‘That you should live your life as if the ring you have is the true one.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that you should … make yourself beloved.’

  ‘But you don’t need a magic ring for that,’ Julie said.

  ‘Really it’s just a symbol, for the three main religions. For Christianity and Judaism and …’

  ‘There are way more than three religions.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how many. The point is, nobody knows which is the true one, but so long as you believe in your religion and live well, the play argues, you will be pleasing to God and man.’

  ‘But the whole point of a magic ring is that it’s magic. You want it to work even if you aren’t … pleasing. That’s the point.’

  ‘There are problems with this story, but what it teaches is basically a good thing. That we should be tolerant of each other.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s what it says. It says we should all just believe that we’re right even when we’re not.’

  Liesel was almost moved – by Julie’s stubbornness and self-certainty, her talent for arguing. Moved because it seemed t
o Liesel like an inheritance you couldn’t get out of, that you were stuck with. You have to learn to live with it. Nathan had gotten it from Bill and now Julie had it from Nathan. Some things at least are passed down. For much of her marriage, she had watched Bill paint himself into corners, winning arguments but also making himself difficult to agree with. Fighting fights. Nathan at least seemed to be better at getting his way; but maybe she sometimes resented him for that, too.

  Jean had taken Margot onto her lap, even though the girl was probably too big. ‘I never get any cuddles,’ Jean said, which Liesel overheard and paid attention to. Margot had been trying to wriggle away, but then she turned around and put her arms around her aunt’s neck.

  ‘I can squeeze you,’ she said. Her fingers were plump and small; it was hard to imagine, almost, how they all fit on her hand.

  ‘Okay, squeeze me.’

  Julie looked on with a patient smile; she felt happy again. ‘She’s really very good at squeezing. It kind of hurts.’

  ‘It does kind of hurt,’ Jean said, a little breathlessly.

  ‘Should I stop?’ Margot asked.

  ‘Don’t stop. It’s what I deserve.’

  *

  Nathan had said to Bill, ‘Let’s walk to the end of the block. I spend all day in my office these days.’

  So his father went with him. He couldn’t sit still either or stand in one place. And he liked seeing the city. At the corner, if you looked towards New Jersey, you could almost make out the trees of Riverside Park – just an impression of greenness and space, the street opening out.

  On either side, apartment buildings loomed, and trees and parked cars narrowed the perspective. The truth is, he preferred this neighborhood to the other. He liked the quiet, and the proximity of the water. But it was probably a little dead for Liesel’s taste. There were no shops.

  ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to discuss with you,’ Nathan said. ‘I’ve had an offer.’

  ‘What kind of offer?’

  So Nathan started to explain. After ten years of teaching, he was well aware, you develop a kind of classroom manner, which is hard to shake. Even if you’re talking to your father. So there was something about his own tone that he didn’t like. And not just the tone, a kind of thoroughness. Last year he was asked to contribute to a collection on the law of war. He said yes at first but didn’t have time. There was a conference in Israel he ended up organizing, just because nobody else could get it done. It required a certain amount of delicate negotiation; they wanted to bring different parties together. Anyway, the publishers kept bugging him, and eventually he agreed to write a response to one of the pieces. On the illegality of drone strikes. The response he wrote was much more equivocal, he challenged many of the legal objections.

  Well, a few weeks ago, someone from the Department of Justice contacted him out of the blue and asked him to lunch. A guy named Michael Labro – they used to clerk together for Judge Schuyler but hadn’t kept in touch. Lunch was nothing fancy, by the way, just a brasserie in Penn Quarter, where you could go upmarket or order the burger. Nathan had the burger, which he asked for rare and they slightly overcooked. Anyway, he said again, hearing himself repeating the word, the offer on the table was for Acting Assistant Attorney General. But Michael also made it clear that they (whoever ‘they’ was) considered it a stepping-stone to a judgeship. Probably in the First Circuit, after Mannheim retired, if they could get all their ducks in a row.

  ‘What does that make you,’ Bill said. ‘One of the ducks?’

  ‘It’s an expression. It means …’

  ‘I know what it means. I’m just being stupid.’ He added, ‘Well, it’s nice to be thought of.’

  ‘It’s nice to be thought of.’

  Nathan felt the awkwardness of this kind of confession. Often when you ask for advice there’s an element of boasting. He wasn’t really asking for advice anyway; he wanted to inform. Or rather, he wanted to talk through his thinking process in his father’s presence, which can be a revealing exercise. One of the things it revealed, unfortunately, is that he took pleasure from saying in front of his father, Look, I have this opportunity, people with real power in the world want to get me involved. Not just to brag about it, but for Bill’s sake, too. Because, like immigrants (even after all this time), the Essingers still felt or believed that any kind of advance or inroad you make, any kind of success, advances the whole family, brings everyone along.

  ‘I’m not stupid either,’ he went on. ‘One of the reasons they want me at the DoJ is that any legal opinions I write for them will be protected by client privilege. They want me pissing inside the tent.’

  ‘I don’t think they want you to piss.’

  ‘No,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s probably not what they want me to do.’

  ‘Are you tempted?’

  ‘We wouldn’t be having this conversation if I weren’t.’

  ‘Do you want my blessing or do you want me to talk you out of it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. That’s what I’m trying to work out.’

  They couldn’t see the others by this point – they were halfway to Riverside Park, shady and full of trees, with the river behind it, and New Jersey behind the river. A weather front seemed to be coming down the Hudson, there was a lot of movement in the air, sunshine auras, dark vague clouds and pockets of real heat in bright light.

  ‘Shouldn’t we get back?’ Bill said.

  He sweated in his jacket and kept pinching his nose. The close air was full of city dust and leaf pollen. He suffered from hay fever, and even when he had a stinking cold dismissed it as allergies.

  ‘We’ve still got a couple of minutes. And if they’re early, they can wait.’

  They crossed over Riverside Drive onto the wide pavement. A woman with a shopping bag sat on one of the benches. Or maybe not a shopping bag but some plastic bag full of belongings. Bill couldn’t understand why you’d sit there, on the road, even with your back towards it, when the park is just five feet away – just on the other side of a low masonry wall. But in fact, as he and Nathan found, you had to walk quite a ways along that wall before a gap opened up. First they walked uptown and then they turned around.

  ‘We really should go back,’ Bill said.

  ‘You need to look at this park if you want to make a reasonable decision about the apartment.’

  ‘I know Riverside Park. I’ve been to Riverside Park.’

  ‘When’s the last time?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Fifty years ago. My father had an aunt who lived not far away, Aunt Ethel. She smoked, which my father didn’t like, and had a small apartment, so he let me and Rose go out to the park by ourselves. We didn’t visit often.’

  ‘Well, it’s five minutes away from this place we’re looking at. Less than that.’

  ‘Nathan, we’re not going to buy this apartment.’

  ‘I want you to think seriously about it. This is a conversation you need to have with Liesel. She wants to retire soon—’

  ‘Nobody’s retiring.’

  ‘She wants to retire soon, and she thinks she’ll be happier in a big city.’

  ‘Austin is rapidly becoming a big city.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Somewhere you can walk to the museums. She wants to see people passing by.’

  ‘She walks to campus every day.’

  ‘I’m not going to argue with you, Dad. But the sense I have is that you’re not listening to her on this point. You’re not really paying attention.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  They entered the park, the path curved down; it was really just a stretch of grass with a few slopes. A doggy run, there were a lot of dog walkers. Bill could hear the traffic on the West Side Highway. Pleasant enough; many of the dog walkers seemed to know each other. People were having conversations. But you had to watch where you stepped. Old-fashioned streetlamps, black with a frosted globe on top, lined the walkways – a nice touch. And looking back over your shoulder you saw, ten or
fifteen stories tall, the apartment blocks on Riverside Drive, casting their shade. What a city. You could think of it in family terms. He had raised four kids and knew what it meant to give them somewhere to sleep and enough to eat and things to do. And here you had occupation and sustenance and shelter for almost two million. On a narrow island – you could feel it was an island so close to the river.

  ‘Okay, I’ve seen it. Let’s turn around,’ Bill said, and coming out of the park, he added, ‘It depends what your ambition is. If your ambition is to have an academic life. There are serious, smart people, you get to do your own work. You can come home in time to see the kids. These things mattered to me.’

  ‘There are some serious people at the DoJ. I’ve been talking to them.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Maybe you undervalue the kind of intelligence that gets things done.’

  ‘That’s me!’ And he grinned at his son, through his beard; happily enough, but it was also a smile he could smile when he wanted to.

  ‘You got things done,’ Nathan said. ‘Look at us.’ And then, as they turned the corner on to West End Avenue. ‘Think about this. Take this seriously. This is something Liesel wants.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see if she wants it.’

  Clouds were advancing rapidly overhead, and Nathan and Bill ended up running the last few steps to the awning. The rain came down like somebody pulled the plug. Somehow it put them all in a good mood, three generations huddled together while their feet got wet in the sidewalk currents. It felt colder, too. Julie put her arm around her father. Jean held Margot.

  A strong-man type, fat with muscles, in a too-tight black shirt and jacket, smoking a cigarette and carrying a very large umbrella, was crossing the street. He had to jump over the curbside stream; they could see his pink face now and his short whitish-yellowish grizzled hair. The umbrella advertised the realty agency (Corcoran) and he dropped his cigarette into the flowing drain. When he shook Nathan’s hand, everybody could smell him – the sweetness of his aftershave, and the gray nicotine smell, which even in the fresh wet air filled the awning.