The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  The Guardian of Life Orphanage for Girls was perhaps the most appreciative. It sent along a small pistachio-green book, complete with a calendar and a list of all the benedictions the children would be immediately conferring upon us. “You will be rewarded with bountiful blessings for good health,” the green book vowed.

  As I flipped through the calendar, I noticed that Dad had made small notations next to certain days and months of the year. They were the dates marking the passing of his mother and his father and six of his nine siblings, all carefully circled. There was my aunt Leila, in July. My grandfather Ezra was remembered a week later, with only a one-word notation, “Papa.” I found it strangely jarring that as he turned eighty, my dad still called his own father “Papa,” like a little boy. My grandmother Zarifa, “Mama,” appeared one week after that, next to a note about his sister, Tante Rebekah. My tragic aunt Ensol, killed along with her husband, had an entry in November, as did Oncle Joseph, the oldest of the ten children. In one cruel month straddling January and February, my dad noted the passing of his two favorite siblings, Oncle Raphael and Oncle Shalom of the clubfoot and the humble demeanor and the gentle heart.

  Two siblings were absent from Dad’s ledger of memory: Bahia, who had perished at Auschwitz and whose date of death had never been learned, and Salomon, the priest and convert who had indicated on his résumé, on file with the monastery at Ratisbon, that he’d wanted my father, along with Oncle Raphael, to be notified in the event of his passing.

  There had once been ten, and now only he and his little sister Marie were left, and he hadn’t seen her since 1956. Yet he continued to remember and pray for all of them and to memorialize them in the little green book of the dead. He seemed content simply making out the small checks. It became a full-time job. The checks were for the same amounts that he had written month after month over sixteen years to pay back the debt for the Queen Mary—mostly $10 increments, occasionally a little more, occasionally less. The sums were deceptively small; he wrote so many checks, day after day, that he was actually giving away a significant share of his impossibly small income.

  César, who worked as an accountant, worried like a wife whose husband gambles with the grocery money. My father reassured him, but kept on as before. It was his calling, now, every bit as important as selling ties had once been, or brokering the sale of yards of brocade or trading stocks at la bourse. In a culture of ambition and greed, my father was, as always, resolutely against the grain. He had become the Dispenser of Kindness, the self-appointed guardian of the orphans of Jerusalem.

  Officially diagnosed with Parkinson’s, his hands trembled more than ever, so that the amounts he made out and the names of the objects of his largesse were almost illegible.

  I felt so much better, I didn’t even stop to consider how he was faring. Nor did I give him and his otherworldly approach much credit for my miraculous recovery, the fact that in the course of my continued checkups with Dr. Lee, my physician marveled at how well I seemed.

  In my father’s case, Charles Duvall’s dreamy mantra, “From the shores of Lake Success,” sounded increasingly distant and remote, as if Dad were a passenger on a boat floating farther and farther away from those desired shores.

  He was not well. He was descending into a physical and mental purgatory. But he was so used to keeping silent, to being stoic about his travails, that now that he needed us, needed us to mount an intervention to rescue him in the way he had summoned the orphans of Jerusalem to save me, he didn’t know how to request it—demand it—of us, his children.

  One morning, he called me at work. It was unusual—he never phoned at the office, and it was as if, years later, he still hadn’t made his peace with my decision to find a job and support myself instead of heeding his counsel to find a man, a rich and powerful man—un banquier—to look after me. Who ever heard of a woman working?

  “Loulou, je ne me sens pas bien,” he said; I don’t feel well. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. I listened, a tad impatiently. I had so much work to do.

  “Loulou,” he repeated, “je me sens très mal.” I feel very bad.

  I’d try to look in on him later, I promised, and hung up. It was the dawn of the Me Decade, and by focusing obsessively on work and my own needs, I was acting out its distorted values, values that had nothing to do with the far more compassionate underpinnings of my Cairo girlhood.

  Like my siblings, I too had drifted. Even holidays like Passover, once so sacred, a time of waiting for Elijah, were now an afterthought. I observed them only in the most careless and minimal fashion. There were no more candlelit expeditions through the house in search of crumbs, and no sifting of the rice. I barely cleaned my apartment and usually celebrated the Seder meal itself in someone else’s home, not my own, or in a restaurant.

  Except that once in a while, I’d find myself yearning for those little Cairo spoons, and the musical sound they made as Dad tapped them against his wineglass. I had lost track of the steel box where they were stored, had long stopped wondering what had become of it, and the little spoons, and all the other treasures within it.

  Only by chance did I learn of its fate, when it finally occurred to me to ask what had become of the box that housed so many of my childhood illusions.

  A mysterious fire had raged one night through the basement and claimed the twenty-six suitcases, and all that had been so carefully arranged inside them—the handmade clothes, the brocade, the women’s lingerie, two dozen pairs of a child’s flannel pajamas, and saddest of all, the dark silvery box belonging to my two grandmothers, Alexandra of Alexandria and Zarifa of Aleppo. The delicate teacups and saucers, the glasses wrapped in tissue paper, the silverware, the spoons—all of the fragments and mementos of our former life were gone.

  The blaze had occurred when I was living away from home, and my siblings had long since left, and no one was around to help my parents cope. Leon and Edith had never mentioned their loss. What did it matter, anyway? they must have thought in their loneliness and despair. A lot of old fineries that meant nothing to anybody anymore, and certainly nothing to their distant, assimilated, self-absorbed, and thoroughly Americanized children.

  CHAPTER 24

  Psalms for My Father

  “Loulou.”

  I could hear my father the moment I stepped off the elevator. He was all the way down the hall, yet he’d already spotted me.

  By the late 1980s, Dad was said to have dementia and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, yet I always doubted the diagnoses and the doctors who rendered them, especially at moments like these, when I saw how alert and clear-minded he was—his green eyes shining, his mind as vivid and intense as ever. Nor did he have any trouble recognizing me—on the contrary, he seemed to live for the times he saw me coming.

  He had been stripped of any identity by then—no longer the man in the white sharkskin suit, the boulevardier, the Captain, or even the exile. He was only a patient, one of several hundreds, at the Jewish Home and Hospital, a place that was neither a home nor a hospital nor especially Jewish.

  Situated on New York’s Upper West Side, it was an institution similar to thousands of others: vast, cold, modern, and, to my father in his final days, unspeakably cruel. Bewildered, confused, desperate, he still nourished the hope that someone would come to rescue him. That is why whenever he saw me, he would begin to cry, “Loulou, Loulou.”

  Hearing him shout my name, I would start running, running down the long corridor past the other old men and women in wheelchairs until I saw him.

  I would find him by the last room, a thin, lonely figure in a light cotton gown, his red prayer book in his hands. He found comfort and safety in the red book and the chants and incantations it contained, and he would mutter them to himself again and again.

  I tried to embrace him, reaching for his thin, skeletal frame barely covered by the blue nightgown, but more often than not, he was too agitated. “Loulou, où je suis?” he’d ask; Loulou, where am I? And then, as some nurse pa
ssed by, he’d try to catch her eye and say with that tony British accent he still maintained after all these years, “I want to go home, please take me home.” More often than not, the nurse would simply keep walking.

  He had survived exile from three different countries, but it would take the fourth, America, and its quintessentially American institutions to defeat him.

  The Jewish Home sparkled with modernity. It was possible to be tricked at first by its sleek appearance, to be taken in by its elegant lobby and well-heeled staff, to trust its glowing reputation and revel in the spacious visitors’ rooms and gift shop and large, showy fish tank.

  How I came to despise that fish tank. When I saw my father become painfully emaciated, develop ulcerous sores and countless other infections, afflictions, and maladies, I wondered why on earth an institution would lavish better care on its fish than on its patients.

  I complained, of course, but to no avail. I, too, had lost my identity: I was now simply “the daughter,” which meant that my objections or appeals didn’t have to be taken seriously, that they could be safely ignored. And what could I say about the food, which didn’t even adhere to Jewish dietary laws? For the first time in his life, my father was being forced to eat food that wasn’t kosher—an abnegation of all he believed.

  There was no one to whom either of us could turn.

  Edith was also grievously sick by then, the victim of multiple strokes that rendered her mute and immobile and, if possible, even more helpless than my father. She, too, lived in the nursing home. Felled by a massive brain hemorrhage one spring day in 1988, she had never fully recovered. The woman with the luminous mind who had captured the heart—and the key—of Madame Cattaoui Pasha was now confined to a wheelchair, her memory and wondrous intellect all but erased.

  As for their children, we were at war, incapable of agreeing about their care, incapable even of communicating.

  The battle lines had been fiercely, brutally drawn. On one side was Isaac, the most Americanized of us all, who hired lawyers and doctors to have my father declared incompetent, appointed himself his legal guardian, and institutionalized him. In the process, he had displaced César, Dad’s natural guardian, the son who had shared a room with him all those many years.

  On the other were César and I, trying to pick our way across the nightmarish landscape of hospitals and nursing homes and offer our father some relief. Suzette was living in London—her most recent stop in the restless journey that had begun with the flight from Sixty-sixth Street. She was both removed from the fray and oddly involved, making her views known from across the ocean, the way she had inserted herself from far away in my illness.

  Occasionally my father’s problems seemed too urgent even for the nursing home to ignore, and off he’d go by ambulance to Mount Sinai, a large, equally impersonal medical center situated across the park, on Fifth Avenue. He was desperately ill by then, but the repeated trips to the hospital did little to make him well. Lost in a sea of beds, he barely survived treatments that were in some ways worse than his maladies, mostly because health care in America in the late 1980s and early 1990s had become so dehumanized. I would arrive in the morning and find him in one hospital room, and return in the afternoon to find him in another. By the following morning, he’d been moved to another, and to another after that.

  “Where is my father?” I’d ask the clerks at the Mount Sinai nursing station. They’d check their records and coolly inform me that he’d been “transferred.”

  Why? I’d ask. There was never a clear answer.

  I never saw him without his tattered red prayer book in hand. He would be praying even when the deck was stacked against him, he prayed even when doctors had either given up or didn’t care, and his family wasn’t able to do much, and there was no hope left at all.

  He was praying for a miracle, of course; he never ceased believing in the possibility of one.

  One day, both my parents were admitted to Mount Sinai. They arrived separately—hadn’t they always?—and ended up in different rooms, in different wings, on different floors. I arranged a reunion at a patient lounge, located in one of those airy atriums that look so appealing to the outside eye. There was my father in his large rolling faux-leather E-Z Boy chair and my mother in hers.

  The two looked at each other and then looked away. They said not a word, unable even to acknowledge the other’s presence. It would have meant acknowledging the horror of their condition, their absolute inability to help each other. I have never felt so sad, and I suspect, neither did they.

  I am sure that in these times, my father wished he were anywhere but here, in these scrubbed, soulless rooms where few people ever came to check on him simply to see if he was comfortable or in pain, hungry or thirsty, to give him some modicum of human solace. I am certain that Dad would gladly have traded Mount Sinai and the Jewish Home even for shabby little Demerdash, the public hospital for Cairo’s poor—anywhere but these gleaming New York palaces of pain.

  At the Demerdash, at least kindly, engaged Dr. Khatab, his surgeon, had come by every day to check on him and offer reassurance and support.

  When my father was admitted to Sinai late in 1992 for an operation that should never have been permitted given his advanced age and frail state, there was no Dr. Khatab to offer comfort. I called the surgeon to beg him not to perform the operation; he didn’t take my call. Afterward, if he stopped by, I never saw him. Instead, each day I would encounter a procession of earnest, pale-faced surgical residents who seemed completely removed from the patients they were treating. My father was simply a “case,” one of many on their lengthy rounds.

  Not surprisingly, when Dad took a turn for the worse, no one noticed until it was too late. He was moved to intensive care, and there he stayed, attached to a respirator. His entire body was failing, and yet, to the end, he still fought, hanging on for days and weeks.

  Edith and Leon at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park.

  I was back at my office one Friday afternoon in January when the call came. The Captain had died. Seated at my small cubbyhole, in the newsroom of the Village Voice, I began to scream. I thought that I would never stop screaming. “You can have a little job,” he had told me once. “You can open up a flower shop.”

  I caught a taxi to Mount Sinai and arrived to find my father’s small cubbyhole in the ICU being cleared of its tubes and bedding and any trace of him.

  The funeral was held two days later. It was bitter cold, and I’d forgotten to wear a coat. Suzette, stranded in London, didn’t attend. My mother didn’t either; César and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Leon had died.

  I am not sure if she would have understood. She had come to live with me, but she couldn’t speak or swallow or move her arms or her legs. She was, at the end, only able to mouth a single word. Asked if she felt fine in the upstairs of my duplex where I’d set up her hospital bed and IV poles and small portable respirator, because she couldn’t even breathe on her own, my eloquent and literary mother managed only to reply: “Okay.”

  EXACTLY ONE YEAR LATER, I returned to Brooklyn for Leon’s memorial. It was being held at the Congregation of Love and Friendship—the brand-new one on Ocean Parkway—where each Saturday, a group of old men of Dad’s generation, and a handful of young ones, gathered to read out loud the psalms of King David.

  The building stood at a corner of the boulevard that had filled my mother with such longing. “Ah, une maison sur Ocean Parkway,” she’d say dreamily; a house on Ocean Parkway. The area was thriving—crammed with million-dollar homes and immigrants who had become blue-jean kings and discount-chain magnates and electronic-store czars.

  It was customary here, as it had been in Cairo and Aleppo, to honor the person who has died by chanting all 150 psalms in one marathon session. With each and every psalm that is recited out loud, the soul of a loved one is said to rise higher and higher, until it finally reaches its place in heaven next to God.

  On this cold January af
ternoon, a small group of mostly elderly men showed up in the synagogue’s basement to participate in the psalm reading. A couple had known my father in Egypt and continued to pray with him in America, where he could always be counted on to complete a minyan, the requisite quorum of ten men needed for a proper service under Judaic law. Elie Mosseri, who had worshipped with my father on Sixty-sixth Street in those early days in America, approached me. He had known me as a child, he said, and he had known my father. “He would come and stay eight, nine hours a day in the synagogue,” Elie told me sorrowfully.

  The reading had to begin, but there was no minyan, only half a dozen men who sat clustered together around a long table. I sat down next to them. They looked at each other with alarm: under Orthodox tradition, women are never allowed to sit or pray alongside men.

  Of course, this wasn’t a typical service. After a brief conference, they nodded and indicated I could stay. Seated with the men, I felt like a little girl again, accompanying my father to pray, permitted to sit with him in the men’s section. To me, it had been the ultimate privilege.

  A young woman suddenly materialized carrying platters piled high with fruit—strawberries, kiwi, melon, oranges. She set the table without a word, studiously ignoring me. She returned with more plates containing pistachios, walnuts, cashews, roasted hazelnuts. How my father would have loved the hazelnuts, I thought, reaching for some. A man seated at the head of the table began by chanting the first psalm and then another. His neighbor, an octogenarian with merry eyes, read the next psalm and one more after that. The men went around the table, each one reading a couple of the psalms.

  At first, I simply listened, not daring to join in. Finally, I asked: May I read a psalm for my father?

  The men turned to one another; they had already broken one rule by letting me sit with them. Would they now break another by having me chant out loud?