A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘That’s just not true,’ Jean said. ‘It’s over-priced but perfectly acceptable – they’ve got a whole food truck thing going on. Most of the street food you get these days is better than what you eat in restaurants.’

  ‘Well, what we don’t eat, I can take home.’

  Already lines were forming for the next train. Nathan, in his suit, with a briefcase in hand (he planned to do a little work, if he could, during the lulls) maneuvered his kids near one of the entry points, and when the double doors opened, he pushed them on. Jean, taking charge of Bill and Liesel, forced her way on, too, while Susie and Ben found the same carriage by another door. But there was nowhere to sit; the benches were quickly taken up, and you had to bump people along just to stand in the aisles. Ben said to his mother, in an undertone, ‘Maybe if you tell them …’ but Susie shook her head: ‘I’m fine.’ At the other end, a handsome young man, a foreigner – he had a goatee and a slight accent, maybe he was Czech or Polish – offered his seat, smilingly, to Liesel. She ended up sitting down in front of Julie, who was tall enough to hold onto the overhead bar. Margot clung to Nathan’s legs.

  Jean said to Bill, ‘Let me take the bag,’ but he refused. ‘If it’s this busy,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t carry it on your shoulder. That’s not the etiquette. You keep banging people.’ So he stationed it dutifully between his feet.

  Liesel offered, ‘Margot can sit on my lap if she wants to.’ But the girl was happy, she liked her father’s legs. The train pulled out; Julie swayed a little, against a stranger, a fat man with his shirt tucked in, who didn’t look at her or say anything but kept staring ahead out the window as if there was something to see. Mostly his own reflection in the dark tunnel, under the bright lights.

  ‘When I was Margot’s age,’ Liesel told Julie, ‘or a little older, we caught the last train out of Gotenhafen before the Russians came. Gdynia now, a part of Poland. It was so full my father had to push us in through one of the windows.’ She was sitting comfortably but the memory was still strong, seventy years afterwards. ‘He had to stay behind, we didn’t see him until much later. My mother had to do everything, with five kids – four, I forget, because Suze was a baby and they had already sent her ahead. Your aunt Susie is named after her. It was twenty hours to Berlin and Mutti stood the whole time. By the end, she couldn’t walk. Her legs had swelled up like sausages. My uncle had to carry her from the station in a handcart.’

  ‘Why didn’t your father come?’ Julie said.

  ‘He had to work, he had a job to do. He was an engineer, building ships. But he knew the war wasn’t going well and wanted to send his family as far from the front as possible.’

  Julie’s accent always sounded to her grandmother peculiarly American – East Coast educated. The only thing still childish about her voice was its clarity. ‘Did he want Germany to win?’

  ‘That’s not an easy question. He was a German, but he didn’t like Hitler.’

  Bill thought: Right now, he’s probably knocking a few balls around, I don’t know what the practice courts are like. It’s a little cool today, you don’t want to get stiff. He should take a shower before going out, to keep warm.

  Nathan had promised to read something for Sandy in the next couple of weeks, and already regretted it. One of her students was going on the job market and needed help getting an article published – it was in his field, and she had sent it to him on her phone, over the coffee and muffins. Exchange of favors; you do these kinds of things out of a conscientiousness that has a flavor of complicity. But he was also listening to Liesel’s story. When he was younger, a teenager with passionate political opinions, he used to argue with Liesel about what her father could have done differently. He built ships for the Nazis, that was his job. And for some reason it seemed very important for him to make his mother admit, there was culpability there. Part of an ongoing battle between them, about other things as well. The German side of the family always treated him like a kid. And Liesel herself took a pragmatic view of legal argument. There are principles at stake, but there are also ends in sight, sometimes conflicting ends, and you have to have sympathy for the fact that people are limited, there are things they can’t do – maybe even things they don’t want to do.

  Most of the workers at the dockyard in Gotenhafen were prisoners of war; it was practically slave labor. And her father petitioned to get them better rations, successfully, as it happens. ‘Only so they could work harder,’ Nathan, fifteen years old, angry and not quite sure why he was angry, pointed out.

  ‘Who knows why people do what they do. It isn’t always possible to say. In his own way, your grandfather was an honorable man. He had a strong sense of duty.’

  ‘That was the problem, this is what I’m saying. His duty the way he saw it was to the state.’

  Liesel, unhappily, but also looking at her son with a certain admiration (this is the child I have made), said, ‘It is a very rare privilege not to feel any obligation, of any kind, to your country or the institutions that employ you.’

  ‘A privilege is exactly what it’s not. It’s your first duty, as a human being, to work these things out for yourself.’

  ‘Later, after the war, which you know perfectly well, he lost his job – basically for being a whistleblower, for pointing out financial irregularities at the engineering firm where he worked. And they fired him.’

  ‘Everything you say just convinces me more and more that he was at heart a company man. The only mistake he made was being surprised, that this is how a company treats its employees.’

  ‘You say that as if it’s such a terrible thing to be.’ But now she said, to Nathan’s daughter, ‘The carriage we were standing in had the toilet compartment. There was a soldier who sat on the pot the whole time, just for somewhere to sit. But my mother insisted …’

  Hearing these stories reminded Nathan of the battles they used to fight. Somehow he still wanted to fight them. You don’t outgrow that. But now that he was a father himself, he had a different insight into the position, as a child, his family had put him in. The argument with Jean at that lousy Italian restaurant was in his thoughts, too. A fight-picker, this is what they made him out to be – while Paul was the peace-maker. Because he didn’t care about anything, much, beyond himself. Everybody gave him an easy ride, Bill especially. Because Paul was good at sports. Susie always cried to get her way. And Jean … Jean was like a kind of sheepdog, rounding everyone up. The youngest child has her peculiar burdens, too. She sees the family breaking apart, kids leaving for college, while she stays helplessly behind. As a father you have to be aware of these roles, you have to compensate, even if that means arbitrating sometimes against the interests of your own past self. Which isn’t easy. Because nothing in his childhood had prepared him for the depth of his identification with Julie, his first-born.

  And nothing had changed much either, even in the old relations. Here they were again, twenty-odd years later, trooping off to watch Paul. There was a taste in his mouth, from that and other things. The meeting with Sandy Franks. The extent to which he was willing to involve himself with … what? Someone he considered beneath him. Asking her advice. Because what Jean had accused him of wasn’t picking fights, it was chasing his own advantage. At the expense of his principles. Which is an argument you can make if you refuse to have anything to do with actual power and the decisions it requires of the people who exercise it. You can make your documentaries, about the immigrants at Calais, about funding elderly care on the NHS, about all the avoidable tragedies that can only be avoided at the expense of some other tragedy. Which doesn’t matter, because you never have to choose between them. But being serious at some point means being serious about power. If that’s not the game you want to play, then you might as well stick to the junior circuit.

  Yet sometimes it seemed to Nathan that the junior circuit is exactly what he was stuck in. In spite of the Harvard chair and the offers to speak (which he received regularly) at conferences in São Paulo and To
kyo and Oxford. Some of his colleagues, not much older than himself, had been invited to Downing Street to explain their views. Others had given a keynote at Davos or sold a book for a million bucks or appeared on the cover of the New York Review. Paul’s complaint, that you realize after a while that people see you in a certain light, as a certain kind of person, a hanger-on, had made a deep impression on Nathan. Because this was their inheritance, what they had learned from Bill, another fight-picker, an eccentric, who had let himself (and there’s always some collusion) get elbowed to the side professionally. Year after year. Nathan, thinking these thoughts, watched his father in his fraying sports coat, with his uncut beard, hanging onto the subway bar and clutching between his knees a Zabar’s shopping bag.

  Sometimes he thought that Jean was basically right: there are conversations you can have inside the family at a deeper depth or a truer height than any you can have outside it. Because of the affinities and the stakes and the shared history and private language. Nathan’s friends were extremely able, educated and ambitious people, who were also capable of expressing unusually intelligent sympathy – but none of them could make possible the train of self-reflection a weekend with his family in New York had set in motion. First, the conversation with Paul, and later that stupid fight with Jean. Just listening to Liesel rehearse the old war-stories for his daughter’s sake, which he had heard a hundred times before, brought home to him the fact that it isn’t always easy to tell whether the views you hold now represent the natural evolution of the views you used to hold, as a kid, fighting these fights with your mother – or their opposite. Because it occurred to him that what Jean was saying last night, another way of putting whatever it was that she was accusing him of, is that he was in danger of turning like his grandfather into a company man.

  After Hunters Point, the train ran elevated into Court Square. The ordinary light of day flooded the carriage. It was like drawing down a pale blind across the hot strip lighting. Until your eyes adjusted, people looked washed out, faded, but also dirty around the edges, like newspaper photographs. They swayed on the irregularities of the tracks. Residential streets, at odd angles, passed by – laid out like kids’ blocks, and looking no bigger or better built. Then a shopping district, where the traffic stops and starts, appeared under the stanchions and continued on the far side before disappearing into a warehouse wall. Someone had spray-painted cartoon flames against the bricks. Gray skies and blue skies alternated overhead; a firm wind pushed the cloudscape along. While the train hurried the other way, retreating from the skylines of Manhattan, into the suburbs.

  Jean, feeling the overhead bar warming up under her hand, went over her conversation with Henrik in her head. She had called him after the second time she woke up, around six a.m. in New York. The first time it was still pitch dark; she got up to pee and went back to bed. But at six a little light had started to come in, like something spilled and spreading slowly. ‘Can you talk?’ she said, and then, after a half-second pause, a satellite delay, he answered: ‘Of course I can talk. It is nice to hear you’ – a phrase he had picked up in England.

  She wanted to say, everyone’s driving me crazy, a little offering to him. But it wasn’t quite true and would have felt like a betrayal anyway. So she said: ‘I can’t get over the jet lag. I miss you.’ She had to speak quietly, cupping the phone against her neck, because of the time. Liesel and Bill were sleeping next door. Ben and Susie were out cold, too. And she could almost hear, on the other end of the line, the lunchtime sunshine inflecting his voice – it was just another day at the seaside. He was in public mode.

  ‘Not now,’ he said, to someone else. In the room, or outside, approaching him – she couldn’t tell. ‘In a minute.’ And then, to Jean: ‘Our neighbors have gone away for a few days and left a dog behind. For the children to look after. A cause of great excitement.’ Tinker, their German shepherd, had died the year before and not been replaced.

  ‘That sounds exciting.’ Jean, subtly, found herself entering into the spirit of his conversation. But also heard her bored kid voice.

  ‘He is a Weimaraner.’ Henrik, like most Danes, spoke German almost fluently but always with a slightly mocking, very deliberate accent. ‘Or maybe it is a she. I don’t look.’

  ‘Are you going for a walk?’

  ‘The children can do what they like. I don’t go anywhere.’

  ‘I miss you,’ she said again.

  ‘Yes. I heard you the first time.’ She couldn’t tell if the delay was technical or had some other cause. But then he said, ‘My sentiments exactly.’

  ‘Everybody here is picking fights with me.’ She shifted around in bed, because her legs were cold – she had sat up to reach her phone, which was on the bedside table, and the covers had partly fallen off. Now she pulled them back and lay down. As if, by making herself comfortable like this, something intimate had happened. ‘I told them about you and keep getting defensive.’

  ‘You told me this in an email.’ But maybe his own voice sounded harsh to himself, or too formal, because he went on: ‘It is not what I would want either. For my daughter.’

  ‘Not my parents. My brother. But everybody tells everybody everything, it doesn’t matter. I keep on trying to work out how guilty I feel.’

  ‘And?’

  Sometimes, even now, he spoke to her like one of his assistants. In the flesh, this mattered less – partly because it was easier to give in to him. He had a strong self-contained physical assurance. Making films was also a physical activity, shooting on location sometimes required courage, he was good with his hands, practical, and trusted his own sense of reasonable danger. All of this came across, in his presence: he was six feet tall and built like a rower or a sailor. You could see the muscles in his forearms. But over the phone, she had to make allowances.

  ‘Where are you? What are you doing? I can’t talk to you like this.’

  ‘Like what? I am sitting in the garden. What I am supposed to be doing is another question. Monica has gone off to the shop, to buy bread. Something, I don’t remember what, is supposed to have happened by the time she comes back.’ After a moment, he added: ‘It is not your problem.’

  So, just to keep talking, she said: ‘Paul is playing today.’

  ‘Who is he playing?’

  ‘A Bulgarian named Borisov.’

  ‘Oh, a Bulgarian …’

  ‘He’s ten years younger.’

  ‘So he is inexperienced.’

  ‘And ranked around twenty points higher. Paul said, this is it. If he loses today, he’s retiring.’

  So she had made her little offering after all, of intimacy or betrayal, laid at his feet. This is what it felt like to her. And Henrik seemed to feel it, too, because he said, ‘That is something … to be reckoned with.’

  In the distance, in the very far distance, she could hear a dog bark – not loudly, and a child laugh, probably a girl, and say (but it might have been a different kid) no no no no – not unhappily, but as if she were pulling on a leash. Jean realized that she was imagining the garden at her mother’s childhood home, in northern Germany, which sloped down to a path running along the beach. But Henrik’s house in Vranjic might look nothing like this. He called it only ‘my wife’s beach house.’ In most ways, Jean didn’t know him well.

  There were more noises in the background, and Henrik said, ‘Listen, I can see her coming with the shopping bags. I should go. I will check his results on my phone.’ And that was it, and she was lying alone again, in a strange bed on the Upper West Side, waiting for her parents to wake up. Her ear felt hot from the pressure of the phone against it and her heart was racing. But she was annoyed at herself now, standing on the train next to Bill, that some part of her reaction to her brother’s match, whether he won or lost, would be made up of the thought that Henrik, an ocean and six hours away, might be checking the score before he went to bed.

  *

  Julie asked, ‘Did you put that story in the book?’ and Liesel told her, �
�I put it in. I put them all in. None of them feels true anymore. If you talk too much, it’s like you made everything up.’

  ‘Sometimes when I write a story I don’t remember what I made up and what I didn’t.’

  ‘Your mother sends me your stories.’

  ‘I have your book in my bedroom. But I haven’t read it yet.’

  Over the windows, the subway map spelled out the journey – dots of light appeared as you passed a station. You forget how big the city is. None of these places meant much to Bill: Bliss Street, Woodside, Elmhurst Avenue. Their family roots were Lower East Side, that’s where his uncles opened their first Essinger Brothers store, on the corner of Essex and Stanton. They sold Astor Coffee and Comet Rice and Pillsbury Cake and Pancake Flour – Paul once gave him a framed advertisement from the Jewish Morning Journal in 1921, which he had picked up on eBay. It was hanging now in the bathroom in Austin under the stairs. Bill’s father was a Dodgers fan; sometimes he drove them down to Ebbets Field to watch a game – a little over two hours in the car. He never forgave them for moving to LA, but Bill still followed the box scores in the morning. Koufax was Jewish, this meant something to him as a kid. And his career only really took off in LA, by which point Bill was already at Stanford – in the same time zone. He even played hooky on a Monday afternoon in October (skipping his Macro lecture) and saw Koufax pitch against Billy Pierce at Candlestick Park. Koufax lasted an inning, gave up three runs and the Dodgers lost eight nothing. Around this time the Mets also came along, but it was too late by that point to switch allegiances. Queens was never really his New York.

  Who knows where the love of baseball comes from. His kids didn’t have it, not even Paul. But most days after school Bill used to head over to the baseball diamond at the corner of Ferry and Union. There were two diamonds, facing each other, but sometimes if it was busy – a church league used the grounds – you wandered over to City Park across the road. There was no backstop there, and the rule was, if you hit it into the river, you were out. They lost a lot of balls and got wet looking for them: Eddie Kaiser, Bill Panofski (Big Bill), Steve Tauchman, Mike Schultz. But the river-rule never bothered Bill, he was a contact hitter. His high school coach once said to him, Essinger, you may be slow, but you sure are weak. He had quick hands, though, and played catcher for two years, when he was still a fat kid and before he started concentrating on golf.