My grandfather had called Mrs. Gertzen’s house before leaving for Delaware, alright. He’d learned about Mrs. Gertzen’s heart attack. Then he’d weighed his shattering second marriage, his straining relationships with his children, his scant remaining healthy days, maybe even his own mother’s misery.
And then he’d made his decision. Taken care of his own, and no mistake. And in the end—the way they always do, whether you take care of them or no—his own had come back for him.
Semaphore
Alex Irvine
I am thinking of my Uncle Mike because he died recently, at the ripe old age of 97, and because after his death I had the belated realization that I had at some point come to believe him immortal because of all the people I ever knew, Uncle Mike was the most able to joke about death. I wonder if he lost his sense of humor and died of the loss.
Every boy at some point worships his father. I had twin idols: my brother Daniel and my uncle Mike. Because I worshipped the ground Uncle Mike walked on, I tried to joke about death, too; but because I acquired the habit during World War II, while the world stood around watching the extinction of our extended family and the rest of European Jewry, I found that my early efforts at emulating Uncle Mike were a little tone-deaf. Like many eleven- or twelve-year-olds, I figured out how to be callous before I learned anything about reflection. This tendency, like a number of others more or less salutary, I absorbed from Daniel . . . but he has been gone long enough that I can no longer mourn him, and Uncle Mike’s passing is fresh in my mind.
I’m an old man now, or at least the approach of my seventieth birthday makes me feel old, and like many old men I am trying to figure out why I was the kind of young man that I was. Trying to put in order my understanding of my previous self, the way you put your worldly affairs in order when you realize that you’re closer to death than birth. The answer has to do with Uncle Mike, but more importantly with my brother Daniel, who in February of 1942 shocked the entire family by not only entering the PS 319 spelling bee but winning it—and this as a fifteen-year-old eighth grader of no academic distinction whatsoever. Because he hadn’t turned sixteen or started high school, he was going to be eligible for the national tournament if he got through the regional that spring. The mystification of the Rosenthal family of 327 South Fifth, Williamsburg, was complete. None of us even knew Daniel could spell. His grades had sure never given any sign, and I don’t think I’d ever seen him read a book in his life. God is mysterious that way.
Daniel, I think, was just as surprised and discombobulated as the rest of us, and as it turned out, he had his own plan for avoiding the frightening possibility that he might be exposed as something other than a garden-variety South Williamsburg truant. He got someone to sign his papers, none of us ever figured out who, and he enlisted in the Army three days before regionals. His best friend Howard Klinkowitz, who was a year older, joined with him. The Klinkowitzes had gotten out of Leipzig in 1936; Howard, who was born there, got the nickname Klinkojoke after telling Daniel that Witz meant joke in German, but the one time I called him that he hit me on the arm so hard I had a knot for a week. After basic, Daniel was assigned to the Signal Corps. Five months later, and a month after the remaining Rosenthal clan turned out to watch the battleship Iowa launch from the Navy Yard, he drowned when a U-boat sunk his troop transport at the approach to the Straits of Gibraltar.
The word that won the spelling bee that summer was sacrilegious.
God is mysterious that way.
I was four years younger than Daniel, and two years behind him in school. He was my only brother. The only way I can describe the effect of his death on my four sisters is by comparing it to what happens when you take a crayon and color something as rich and as deep as the paper will hold; then you take your fingernail and scratch away the thickness of the color. My sisters were thinned out somehow. They seemed less real. Same with my father, and all I can say about my mother is that she was always strong enough to keep herself together no matter what life threw at her. The Germans got him, she muttered under her breath. The Germans got him.
Me, I had never felt more real in my life. It sounds ghoulish now, but it didn’t feel that way then. Something inside me was born, or came into itself, when Daniel died. And something else fell away, which in retrospect I can identify as belief. If before I had been religious in a diffuse, osmotic kind of way, after Daniel’s death I balanced my psychological scales by telling God that if he was going to take my brother away from me, I was going to take myself away from him. Not that I could have articulated any of it at the time, and in the course of events I would partially reverse this decision, reopening a space in my mind for the idea of God without giving myself any responsibility for worship or real belief. Belief—real belief—came later, with the ability to reflect. Reflection: from the Latin for “bending back.” I indulge in puns once in a while, now that I’m too old for anyone to complain about it, and I can say without the least irony that I bent over backwards to avoid reflection through the awful years of the war.
I told my sister Miriam once—she was closest to me in age, so became my sibling confidante after Daniel died—about how strangely alive I felt even though I spent most of my days with my mind split on parallel tracks of grief and anger. This would have been just before Halloween in 1942, while we were all still stumbling around in shock. Miriam looked at me and said, “It’s a dybbuk. It’s Daniel’s dybbuk.”
Which it wasn’t, but that was the kind of superficial explanation we were all grasping for. Miriam perhaps more than most; a dreamy girl, she reeled away from the news of Daniel’s death, beginning a long descent into loony mysticism which culminated in her turning into a kind of den mother for a group of beatnik poets and jazz musicians holed up on Minetta Lane in the Village, and then dying of drugs and cancer and heartbreak in 1960. The world was full of dybbuks to her, with all of these boys leaving New York, and so many of them returning as names spoken in regretful voices, wails that riffled the laundry strung out the back windows of Williamsburg.
The conversation spooked me, even though I didn’t believe in dybbuks. Or God, really. Especially once I started to dream about Daniel. There’s no such thing as dybbuks, you dumb shit, he said.
Well, I thought to myself in the dream, you would know.
Yeah, he said. I would. Then he said, Yoo-Hoo will help.
What?
I woke up. The hordes in the basement were already crashing around. Children hollered, adults hollered back. I think they were speaking Polish, but I heard words I recognized as Yiddish too. It was barely dawn. I cursed all immigrants, especially those that crammed into the basement below our garden-level apartment. It was a cave down there, and now it was a cave bursting with haunted-looking people who didn’t speak English and served for my parents as object lessons in why my sisters and I should feel fortunate. Occasionally this worked for a minute, but not when it was the crack of dawn and I’d just been rousted from uneasy sleep. Bad enough that my brother was dead and Hitler was taking over the world; why should I have to be woken up by screaming foreigners?
Simplicity, like I said. In retrospect it seems glib to the point of sacrilege, but in the midst of heavy emotional aftershocks, you (by which I mean me) boil things down into primary colors and the most selfish emotions. So I got out of bed, even before my father and mother had stirred in the big front bedroom and long before any of my sisters had cracked an eye in the little back room next to the kitchen, where they were compensated for the cramped arrangement by at least leaving a view of the garden. I slept in the room between, on the couch. It had been Daniel’s bed; before he left, I was relegated to a pile of blankets on the floor. I thought of him every morning when I woke up, because the broken-down couch cushions seemed molded to his long, rawboned frame; I began every day conscious of the ways in which he was larger than I was, and of the way in which I had begun to struggle with the size and shape of his absence.
Grasping at the fading memory of t
he dream, I thought: Yoo-Hoo?
That afternoon—it was a Wednesday, I remember, I think sometime in November—I scraped up a nickel and bought myself a Yoo-Hoo. Daniel was right. It did help. I was cutting school that day, rationalizing the act as a small homage to my brother, and with my bottle of Yoo-Hoo I walked brazenly up Keap within a block of PS 319 and jumped the turnstile onto the Fourteenth Street-Canarsie Line, headed for Manhattan. In the tunnel under the river, I became suddenly conscious of the water over my head, and I started to think of Daniel. Full fathom five my brother lies, those are pearls that were his eyes . . . I started to cry, and just like that the Yoo-Hoo wasn’t helping anymore. I got up and shoved my way out of the car to stand on the coupling until the train clacked into Union Square and I’d gotten myself under control again.
Had Daniel died quickly? My imagination boomed with the impact of the torpedo, the rolling wall of fire engulfing the passages belowdecks. I saw pieces of steel curling and tumbling through the gradations of light below the surface, finally lost in the pelagic darkness—and wondered if pieces of my brother Daniel might have danced among those fragments of his ship, until they came to rest together on the sea floor. Epipelagic, mesopelagic, bathypelagic, abyssopelagic, hadopelagic. Already I was absorbing words, letting them pour into me as if Daniel’s death had ruptured me and a sea of language was drawing me into its depths. Walking through the pitiful last farmer’s market of the year, I knew what I would do.
Or had he survived the initial impact, and felt the ship tilt, spilling him out of his bunk onto the angled steel floor? When the lights went out, had he known how to get out? After fire, water—had Daniel spent his last moments clawing at the ceiling of the ship’s hold, looking for the hatch he knew must be there while around him the transport groaned and boomed its way down? I closed my eyes, to feel the darkness of drowning. I imagined that Daniel had somehow survived until the ship had come to rest on the ocean floor, and that he had had time to write a letter in the blackness, with the water slowly leaking past the stressed rivets to rise icily over his feet. At last the room, filled with water, would have been completely silent, with the letter he had written drifting loosely away from his lifeless fingers, the slow action of the water loosing graphite from paper until his last thoughts were diffused into the cold and dark.
Dear Josh, Daniel is reading in my dream. The paper crinkles in his hands, and I don’t look at his face. Stop being such a shithead. I am dead. It doesn’t matter how.
Drip, drip, drip, of seawater from the paper. It crinkles anyway. I smell mud.
Danny, I start to say.
Cut it out, he says. Listen. You want to do something? Fine. Quit with the torpedo and the ship and fire and smoke. How many times are you gonna play that little movie in your head? Enough already. So you got an imagination, that’s great, but use it. Or don’t, but anyway quit.
What do you want me to do?
You’re already doing it, he says. I mean, abyssopelagic?
And I woke to the uproar of the refugees in the basement. Refugee: from the French refugier, to take shelter or protect, first used in reference to the Huguenots; all the way back to the Latin refugium, and all the way back before that to that long-lost moment when all of the little phonemes and graphemes came gasping and creeping up onto the beach of language, leaving behind them the undifferentiated ocean of sound. This is what you did to me, Danny, I thought.
At breakfast I started spelling words out loud. My sisters got into it. They collected newspapers and hit me with whatever they could find, and then it turned into a game they played among themselves. Each of them focused on words that began with the same letter as their first names: Miriam, Eva, Ruth, Deborah. After a month of this I was convinced that I knew every word in the language that began with those four letters. Mnemonic, elegiac, rotisserie, diverticulitis. Malevolent, esoterica, rubicon, demesne. And I think I knew every word in the language that began with a combination of those letters. Dermatology? Forget it. I give you dermanyssidae, which is a family of mites that infest birds and lizards and whatever else. I think my favorite of all of them was merdivorous, which means exactly what you think it might. Synonym coprophagous. A merdivorous grin.
My sisters knew what I was doing. So did my parents. None of them stopped me. I think they figured this was my way of working out Danny’s death, and they liked the way I was serious about something. Before this I’d been flighty, accidentally good at school but never dedicated to it—or to anything else, for that matter. Like a lot of children of immigrants, I reacted to their resolve and perseverance by becoming indifferent to everything except the Dodgers . . . and, in my case, spelling.
So they quietly encouraged my newfound interest in spelling, recognizing it for the homage it was. Mom did have a tendency to stiffen and get quiet when I started spouting off Anglo-Saxon roots during one of my etymology binges. They sounded too much like German to her. She saw the effect the whole game had on my sisters, though, who started to seem more substantial again, their colors more vibrant, as they came home from the library with new words to challenge me. They asked doctors and lawyers, people whose lives revolved around jargon, for new ones. I soaked them all up, a glutton for words to fill the space left by Danny’s loss.
At the same time, I was spooked by my own obsession. Miriam’s dybbuk comment rang around in my head. If the dybbuk took over someone close to it to complete an unfinished task, didn’t it make a certain kind of sense that Danny would come for me? Was that why I was dreaming of him?
I told you there’s no such thing as dybbuks, he’s saying to me in a dream. We’re sitting next to each other, about to parachute out of a C-47 that’s bucking and shuddering from flak. I think my dreaming mind has borrowed the scene from a movie, but the thought is stripped away like the streaming silk canopies opening below the plane and then ripped away out of sight.
Maybe you’re just telling me that so I don’t know you’re one, I say.
It’s his turn to jump. He cracks a smile at me over his shoulder. You have weird hang-ups, he says. Then he’s gone.
Waking up, my first thought was that I’d never heard anyone say hang-up like that before.
It didn’t stop there. Didn’t stop anywhere, really, even though as the war dragged on and the news out of Europe mounted to a pitch of awful horror that penetrated even my self-obsession, I learned to stop talking about it all the time. The lesson came at the breakfast table late in 1943. The Fifth Army was in Italy, the U-boats that had murdered my brother were vanishing from the Atlantic, and Hitler was beginning to pay the price for his dream of conquering Russia. Guadalcanal and Midway had cut the Japanese down to size. The war was turning.
My father built pianos. Well, he did until Pearl Harbor. Then Steinway and Sons, like every other manufacturer in the country, tried to figure some way to make itself useful to the war effort. After backing-and-forthing with the War Production Board, Steinway settled on parts for the CG-4A glider, which was basically a vehicle for controlled crash landings. It didn’t have to fly; it just had to fall from a C-47 tow plane to Earth without killing the pilot and wrecking whatever it was carrying.
It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure. There’s a famous story about how Henry Ford tried to get into armaments production during the First World War, and found out that although he knew just about everything there was to know about making cars, that didn’t mean he had the first clue about how to make boats. By World War Two, Ford had the war-materiel game figured out—they turned out a pile of CG-4A’s—but Steinway sure didn’t. They cut and recut, jiggered processes around, held the Army’s blueprints at various angles . . . and still the glider wings came out wrong.
Until one day my dad lost his temper on the factory floor. I imagine him there, surrounded by jigsaws and racks of tools, ankle-deep in sawdust and hemmed in by the suits demanding to know why the company who made the greatest pianos in the world couldn’t make something as simple as a wing for a glider that was only desi
gned to crash.
“You leave me alone for a day,” my dad said—he said a lot of other things, but I’m giving you the story as I got it in its bowdlerized (from Thomas Bowdler, eighteenth-century English physician who published a kids’ version of Shakespeare without all of the dirty jokes and gore) version—”you leave me alone for a day, and I’ll figure it out.”
They did, and he did, and Steinway made glider wings. The company also turned a nice dime by painting a bunch of unsold uprights olive-drab and selling those to the Army as “Victory Verticals,” but my dad didn’t have anything to do with that, except indirectly, and that part of the story comes later.
The reason I bring up his job is that he used to come home from work and, with help from my Uncle Mike, read the letters we got from relatives in Europe. By 1943 we all knew what was going on. There had even been demonstrations in New York; that spring our whole family went and stood outside Madison Square Garden while inside various luminaries demanded that the government do something about what the newspapers were delicately calling the “plight of the European Jew.” Not that any of us thought the demonstration would do any good. The way my mordant Uncle Mike put it, “We demonstrated in 1933, when the Nazis were just burning books, and look where that got us. Now they’re burning us.”
In 1933 I was two years old. For some reason Uncle Mike’s comment got to me. I felt for weeks afterward that I was a creature of futility, doomed to witness but never act because it was impossible to act.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 37
