Too Many Men

by Lily Brett

  Kmart stocked irons and ironing boards in the middle of a city where very few people, Ruth was sure, ever ironed their clothes. Ruth’s neighbor, an advertising executive, bought a fresh pack of white sports socks every week. “It’s not worth washing them,” he said to Ruth. “They only cost five dollars a pack.” Clothes were disposable or dry-cleanable. There were dry cleaners on every block in New York. Early in the morning and early in the evening, in the streets of New York City, men and women walked purposefully, holding dry-cleaned clothes aloft, in the air. Nobody ever said that they had to leave a meeting, or a meal, because they had to do their ironing.

  Americans did seem obsessed with dry cleaning, to Ruth. Americans living abroad who feared the local Parisian or Italian or Turkish dry cleaners could airmail their clothes via Federal Express to Maurice Dry Cleaners in New York City. Maurice cleaned the clothes and Federal Expressed them right back to the customer. It cost $150 to clean and ship a suede jacket.

  Maurice had customers in other parts of America and other parts of the world.

  But then, Americans were strange. You could buy Mint Balls in Amer-T O O M A N Y M E N

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  ica. “No More Doggie Breath,” it said on the packet. The manufacturer was not referring to human breath. These Mint Balls were breath freshen-ers for dogs. Two Mint Balls cost $3.99. On the front of the packet of Mint Balls was a drawing of a brown dog with a large green Mint Ball in his mouth. Ruth thought the idea must be to fool your dog into thinking this was a game of catch. The Mint Balls were not available in Kmart.

  Ruth loved the cafeteria in Kmart, too. The cafeteria had the most wonderful view of the city. From its enormous arched windows you could see all the way along Lafayette Street and across to the East Village. The food in the cafeteria was not bad at all.

  The world of Kmart was a world so removed from her own daily life of composing letters for other people. Composing congratulations-on-your-promotion letters for someone she didn’t know, to send to someone else she didn’t know. Composing letters for people who no longer knew what to say to each other. No wonder she needed to be soothed by the car jacks and the racks of rubber gloves in Kmart.

  She had been thinking, recently, about opening a branch of Rothwax Correspondence in Los Angeles. She already had clients in California. She had quite a few clients in L.A. In L.A., they appeared even more in need of her services. Most of their brainpower seemed to be expended on their appearance. This applied equally to men and to women. “I can recommend a great plastic surgeon,” one of her clients had said to her. Ruth had flown to L.A. to check out office space, and she was having lunch with the client.

  She liked this client. He was a thirty-three-year-old scriptwriter. When he had first phoned Rothwax Correspondence she had said to him she was sure he could write his own letters. “I can’t,” he had said. “I can write two-and-a-half-minute cop scenes. I do those really well. I can write cops in cars, cops on the street, cops taking calls, cops speeding, and cops in the office. I don’t do cops at home or cops under suspicion.” Ruth had written several personal letters for him.

  “I can recommend a great plastic surgeon,” he had said to her again, at the end of the lunch. Ruth thought she must have looked very tired.

  “You look great,” the scriptwriter had said, “but we can all use some help. I’ve just had lipo on my chin.”

  “You’ve had what?” Ruth said.

  “Lipo on my chin,” he said. “Liposuction.”

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  “Really?” she said.

  “Doesn’t it look wonderful?” he said. Ruth looked at his chin. It looked exactly the same as the chin she remembered him having. She had looked again. She couldn’t see any difference. But then she had only seen him, in person, twice. Most of their communication had been over the phone. “It looks great,” she had said.

  “I couldn’t sleep for a few nights,” he said, “but otherwise there was no pain. I’m going to go back to Dr. Rosen and get my cheeks done.”

  Ruth had been bewildered by this predisposition to reposition one’s physical features. Why were people doing this to themselves? And more and more often. People you knew suddenly changed in appearance.

  Looked strange, overnight. One week they looked like themselves, two weeks later they looked like their own distant relative. People you had known as acquaintances or neighbors, without any warning, appeared weird. Slightly altered.

  Plastic surgery was being performed in epidemic proportions across America. Scalpel knives were slicing their way through people’s thighs, chins, abdomens, buttocks, upper arms, breasts, eyes, and noses. It frightened Ruth. The alteration and the mutilation terrified her. Not everyone felt this way. Celebrities and other wealthy Americans wined and dined their plastic surgeons. They took them, along with their stylists and their personal trainers, to the opera, to openings, and to first nights. Grown people groveled to their hairdresser and their exercise instructor. Grown people couldn’t make a move without asking someone else what they should wear or where they should place a chair. People no longer combed their own hair or trusted themselves to make a decision about doing an extra push-up. It was a very strange culture, indeed, when a team of personal assistants was essential to your existence.

  Edek had turned into Widzewska Street. Ruth followed him. He stopped outside a large five-story building.

  “My father used to own this building,” Edek said.

  “I didn’t know he owned a building on Widzewska Street,” Ruth said.

  “He did own many buildings,” Edek said. Edek stepped back and looked at the building. “In this building was thirty apartments.” An elderly T O O M A N Y M E N

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  man was scraping some rotten wood from the bottom of one of the window frames on the ground floor. Edek walked over to the man. “I am Edek Rothwax,” he said to the man.

  The man put down his tools. He shook Edek’s hand. Edek patted the man on the back and said he didn’t want to interrupt his work. The man looked pleased to be interrupted. “It’s not a bad day for winter, is it?” he said to Edek. The two men chatted. Ruth understood snatches of the conversation. They talked about Poland and what hard times the country had been through. “Things are better now that the Communists have gone, aren’t they?” Edek said to the man. “Better for some people,” the man said,

  “but not better for everybody.” He told Edek that there was much more crime in the country since the collapse of Communism.

  “Be careful of your car,” he said. “People steal cars every day. Not even a locked car is safe.”

  “I do not have a car,” Edek said.

  “Just as well,” said the man.

  The man moved on from car thieves to the subject of vandals, a subject both men seemed gripped by. Edek looked so comfortable with the man.

  He was nodding and agreeing. They had now progressed on to the subject of the current government but Ruth wasn’t sure what was being said. She felt tense. Why was Edek speaking so enthusiastically to this old Pole?

  Finally, Edek shook the man’s hand. They shook hands several times and exchanged good-byes. Edek hadn’t mentioned to the man that his father was the former owner of this building.

  “Why didn’t you say anything about your father owning the building?”

  Ruth said to Edek.

  “What for?” he said.

  “He was old enough to have been living there at the time,” Ruth said.

  “Old enough to have been one of your father’s tenants.”

  “This man did not give the orders for all the Jews to leave their homes and move into the ghetto,” Edek said. “Why should I tell him? What difference would it make?”

  “I don’t know what difference it would make,” Ruth said.

  “No difference,” said Edek.

  Ruth pushed some hair away from her eyes. Her hair felt dirty despite the fact that she had washed it last night. She had
washed it in a shower

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  that was barely functioning. It had taken her twenty minutes. Yet, it didn’t feel clean. She hoped it didn’t look dirty. She hated the look of dirty hair.

  Dirty hair suggested other dirty body parts. Maybe that was what the blond woman at breakfast was staring at. Her dirty hair. That was stupid, she thought. Her hair couldn’t be that dirty, and who would stare at dirty hair?

  Ruth’s mother had screamed when she had first seen herself without any hair. She had caught sight of herself, in a reflection, when she was being marched to the latrines in Auschwitz. “I screamed when I saw myself,” her mother had said to her. “I thought I saw my brother. How could I know that with my head shaved I would look like my brother?” Ruth’s scalp felt itchy. She tried not to scratch it.

  “Are we far from Kamedulska Street?” she said to her father.

  “Not far,” Edek replied. They walked side by side. Where was Kamedulska Street? Despite the fact that she had been there before, Ruth had no idea where it was. Every part of her parents’ past was confusing to her. Even a simple matter like recognizing a street was full of confusion.

  Their past, the good parts and the bad parts, was delivered to Ruth in fits and starts. And always in fragments. It was never whole. It always had to be pieced together. And the missing parts had to be imagined.

  Ruth had asked her parents many times for the names of their siblings.

  She had almost begged her parents for the names. Yet the names of Edek and Rooshka’s brothers and sisters came out one or two at a time. Both Edek and Rooshka seemed unable to mention all of their siblings in the one sentence. As though even in words the family could not appear intact. Ruth felt she had so few names from the past. And no faces. No faces to the known names and the unknown names. The photographs which would have revealed the faces that belonged to her mother and father were destroyed. Destroyed in Auschwitz. Those that were left behind in Lódz were thrown out by the Poles who moved into the homes the Jews had hurriedly vacated.

  Who were the brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and nephews and nieces she had missed out on? What did they look like?

  She had felt their importance all of her life. She had felt their presence. It was a nameless, faceless, invisible presence. Parts of these brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts were in her. But which parts were they? There was no answer to that question.

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  Most children of survivors had very little idea of their parents’ pasts.

  Their pasts before the war and during the war. They had to guess at what had happened. The simplest information was never simply offered.

  Everything was painful. Everything was pungent. Charged. Children of survivors were surrounded by secrets. The holes in their parents’ pasts punctured and perforated the children of survivors. It left them with fis-sures and rifts and fractures. It left them with large hollows and cavities of their own.

  Ruth had so many gaps and vacancies. The disability with geography and direction that her first analyst had pointed out still hampered her. No matter how many times she studied the map of Europe, she couldn’t remember which country was where. It had taken her a year to locate New York and Los Angeles on a map of America.

  Edek’s and Rooshka’s pasts came out of them in bits and pieces. Sometimes they unmasked unasked-for snippets. Sometimes wisps flew inadvertently out of their mouths. Sometimes crucial facts had to be excavated and extricated, a task as awkward and difficult as any dental procedure. The information that was revealed was never orderly. Each of the factual fragments seemed independent and unrelated to anything else. They were com-pact and self-contained. They stood alone and never illuminated other missing links in their orbit.

  No matter how hard Ruth tried to order them, the facts about her parents’ pasts shifted and switched with an alarming disharmony. She knew that her mother had lived on Pomorska Street in Lódz, and attended a school around the corner. But one day when her mother was talking to a friend, a school had appeared in the house, on Pomorska Street. And a Jewish school, and a Polish school. How many schools did her mother go to? Or was Ruth confusing her mother’s schools with her father’s schools?

  Ruth had tried to write all of the information down. Written down, it made more sense. When she looked at the sentences the information seemed more tangible. But as soon as she looked up from the page everything left her again. She had tried to memorize a list of her mother’s and father’s brothers and sisters. She had always had a good memory. She could remember whole tracts of what relatively unimportant people had said to her. She could remember phone numbers and addresses going back years.

  She remembered dates. Important dates and useless dates. She could mem-

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  orize whole pages of books she had read and poems she loved. But for years she kept forgetting the names of her mother’s and father’s dead brothers and sisters. Just when she felt more sure of them, sure that Felek and Abramek and Jacob and Edek were her mother’s brothers, new names appeared.

  Who were they? Who were Israel and Luba? Were they her father’s parents? How could she have forgotten the names of her father’s parents? She had asked her father so many times. She couldn’t ask him again. She would have to wait until she got home and could look it up in her notebooks. She thought about other names she had heard. Who were Maryla and Yatchka and Fela? And was there a Shmulek or a Shoolek, or were Shoolek and Shmulek variations on the same name?

  Why was all of this so difficult for her to grasp? She had always done well academically. And at work, at Rothwax Correspondence, she put together people’s lives with no effort. She never got lost in the details she took from strangers. Facts from clients went into her head in a well-ordered and concise manner. Her parents’ pasts were given to her in unsorted and ill-fitting increments. No matter how hard Ruth tried, the information remained disjointed. Maybe a past that had been so butchered could never be pieced together again.

  Maybe too much was missing. Missing mothers. Missing fathers. Missing brothers. Ruth realized, with a start, that the two babies her mother had lost, had been her brothers. She had never thought about them that way. She had always thought of herself as an only child. The missing boys were her mother’s sons. It was quite a shock to think of them as her own brothers.

  Ruth looked around for her father. He was so far ahead of her, she could hardly see him. She sped up.

  When she was fifteen, she had asked her mother about the children she had lost. They had been sitting in Rooshka’s kitchen. At the white kitchen table with gold legs. Rooshka had seemed to disappear when the question came out of Ruth. “He was born with the cord around his neck,” she said, after about ten minutes. Which baby was that? Ruth had wondered. The baby born in the first year in the ghetto, or the baby born later? “It was your father’s fault,” Rooshka said. “I bent down to pick up your father’s shoe. That’s when it happened.” Ruth didn’t say anything. How could an T O O M A N Y M E N

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  umbilical cord slip and knot just like that? How could it have been her father’s fault? The baby would have died anyway. Most babies didn’t survive in the ghetto. Why did Rooshka have to blame Edek?

  Ruth had waited another ten years to ask about the second baby. All Rooshka would say about him was “he died.” Ruth wondered if this baby boy was the baby who had been thrown, alive, onto the excrement cart by a Gestapo officer. Her mother had told Ruth about that incident once. It was her sister’s baby, her mother had said. The story had been so difficult to take in that all Ruth could say was, “Which sister?” Rooshka hadn’t answered her.

  Rooshka also told Ruth about a baby who was thrown out of the window of the hospital in the ghetto, when they were emptying the hospital.

  Was that her mother’s other baby? And then there were stories of children
.

  Children with holes in their cheeks. Did her mother’s baby grow up into one of those children? Did he die with holes in his cheeks? Ruth knew she would never know. She couldn’t ask Edek. Edek was as reluctant to talk about it as Rooshka. It was no use asking him. He seemed to have trouble remembering the names of his cousins and uncles and aunts. His information was as erratic as anything else she was told about that time. Edek was calling her. She ran up to him.

  “We did have a factory in this building,” Edek said. They were standing outside a red brick rectangular building.

  “Really?” Ruth said.

  “My father bought cotton and did weave the cotton in a factory outside Lódz,” Edek said. “Then they did bring the material, the fabric, into this factory. This factory was a warehouse for the material.” Ruth was thrilled to hear this. She had never heard this aspect of the business.

  “You had machines and looms and workers?” she said.

  “Of course,” Edek said.

  “So you bought the cotton?” she said.

  “I just did tell you that we did buy the cotton,” said Edek.

  “Did you work here?” Ruth said.

  “No,” he said. Ruth looked through the windows of the factory. She couldn’t see anything. The glass was too cracked and grubby.

  “Should we see if it’s possible to look through the factory while we’re here?” Ruth said.

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  “What for?” said Edek.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “There is nothing there,” he said.

  Ruth felt a reluctance to leave the factory, but Edek had already moved on. She followed him. How amazing, she thought to herself. They made fabric out of cotton. She had never even seen raw cotton. She had seen photographs of the fluffy white balls attached to their dark stems and branches. The cotton looked as decorative as any flower. Where did the Rothwaxes buy the cotton? She decided not to ask now. She felt she had used up her quota of questions for the moment.