The Poison Tree

by Henry I. Schvey

  ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR THE POISON TREE

  “Like watching a great stage drama enacted on a meticulously designed set in which all of the principal players surprise us with the deep register of their flaws and fortitude.”

  —Kathleen Finneran, author of The Tender Land

  “A testament to the power of art, literature, and ideas.”

  —Rabbi Susan Talve, Central Reform Congregation

  “This ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ is neither ‘sweet’ nor ‘silent,’ and I cite that sonnet because Henry Schvey’s mother quotes Shakespeare frequently and his father is a character straight out of one of the tragicomedies: tempestuous, driven, hateful and hate-filled yet kind. Their son’s memoir is closely watched and keenly heard: a riveting account of childhood and young manhood from the wounded adult who survives.”

  —Nicholas Delbanco is the author, most recently, of The Years

  “With chilling accuracy, Henry Schvey reveals the cruelty that simmered beneath the seemingly placid surface of 1950s America. With artistry and skill, wisdom and compassion, Schvey exposes not only his complicated relationship to his highly successful but sadistic father, but also the ways in which literature, art, and love can save a young man’s soul.”

  —Eileen Pollack, Professor, MFA Program in

  Creative Writing, University of Michigan

  “Wickedly funny and heartbreaking in turn, this incisive and ironic sweep of his family’s foibles and the America of the 60’s 70’s and 80’s makes for compulsive reading. This is writing from a master of the genre which deserves a wide readership. Hugely enjoyable and compelling.”

  —Jane Lapotaire, Royal Shakespeare Company Hon Associate

  Artist, Tony Award, Helen Hayes and Olivier Award winner

  THE POISON TREE

  a memoir

  HENRY I. SCHVEY

  Copyright © 2016 by Henry I. Schvey

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Walrus Publishing

  St. Louis, MO

  Walrus Publishing is an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC.

  4168 Hartford Street

  Saint Louis, MO 63116

  The material in this book reflects the author’s recollection of events. Some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted.

  Dialogue has been re-created from memory.

  Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission from the publisher. For information, contact us through our webpage at www.amphoraepublishing.com.

  Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights.

  Cover by Kristina Blank Makansi

  Cover art from Shutterstock

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938148

  ISBN: 9781940442167

  This book is dedicated with love to my wife Patty, my children

  Aram, Jerusha and Natasha, and to my grandchildren Evan, Julian

  and Livia. Each day they remind me of what a loving family can be.

  THE POISON TREE

  a memoir

  Demand me nothing, what you know, you know.

  From this time forth I never will speak word.

  —Shakespeare, Othello

  So we beat on, boats against the current,

  borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  —Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  1.

  Christmas morning, and my father and I are camped underneath a lavishly decorated Christmas tree. Dozens of opened presents lie strewn all over the floor, and they’re all for me. Scraps of blue paper and silver ribbons fly through the room. I have just opened an amazing gift: a Joe Palooka punching figure—it’s huge! Taller than I am. The rubber base is filled with sand, so I can stand and punch him and he pops right back up, smiling, daring me to punch him again. I am five years old. I sit on the floor with my legs crossed Indian style, dressed in Superman pajamas. My father wears a green flannel bathrobe, the color of Gerber’s peas. I love that bathrobe and find it strangely comforting.

  I dump a small wooden box of toy figures on the floor, and Dad and I divide them up into Good Guys and Bad Guys. We call the game Cowboys and Indians, but the “cowboys” are really a motley assemblage of G.I.s and cavalry officers; the Indians are mixed with some metal German soldiers left over from my father’s own childhood. As they face across one another waiting for the signal to attack, the two armies shimmer and glow green and red from the lights on the Christmas tree. Dad and I pepper one another’s forces with marbles. First I shoot—then Dad—then I again. The marbles, too, are divided up like the Cowboys and Indians. A ragtag bunch of cat's-eyes and onionskins; even the occasional chippie, big as a walnut. Our duel lasts for hours, and only ends when one of the two of us has defeated the other’s men by knocking them all over on their sides. I’m happy to have cavalry soldiers and cowboys on my side, since men on horseback are almost impossible to knock down. Germans fire at cowboys from the prone position and offer miniscule targets. What I have to do is hit a Kraut at just the right angle with one of the smaller marbles, in the crease between his cocked left elbow and the rifle. Only then can I kill him by successfully turning him over on his side. Indians are easier to kill, but there are so many they wear you down. Germans and G.I.s are made of cast iron, so that even a perfectly placed shot sometimes bounces off and does no damage. You need a really big marble fired at maximum velocity—and a lot of luck.

  In this memory, my mother is absent. She floats in and out at odd intervals, a woman in a Chagall painting, wearing a snowflake apron. She appears, serves her men hot chocolate, and floats away.

  For hours, my father and I are transported into another world. At some point, we agree to a ceasefire while he toasts Aunt Jemima frozen waffles. I drown my buttered waffle with maple syrup—but he says nothing. Not one word. Later, we break for Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, Swanson TV dinners, and The Lone Ranger on television. The day flashes by in seconds.

  Those early images of joy on Christmas morning, however precisely remembered, feel fraudulent, surreal—too good to be true. I angrily part the curtain which separates me from my past, and peer into that glowing room where, on my RCA Victrola, Burl Ives is always singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” I watch the turntable slowly meander around in circles. The forty-five rpm record skips a bit, then continues on its way. For a moment, time has stopped.

  Four decades later, I am standing outside my father’s apartment, a key in the palm of my hand. My father’s initials—NIS—are cut deep into the metal. I wonder how it must have sounded when the letters were forcibly etched into the brass. I have returned home from the Netherlands where I have been teaching English literature for several years now. My father is in the hospital being treated for lymphoma, and I have come back to New York to visit him. I don’t know if he will survive. After our brief visit, he sent me to his apartment at 405 East 56th Street to pick up an address book from his desk.

  Just who is he, I wonder? A combination of steely resolve and intense charisma, Dad was the personification of 1950s suave. He was Don Draper decades before Don Draper existed: manicured, handsome, powerful. That’s how he appeared to me as a boy, and how he appears to me today. He could also be cruel and vindictive. And even now, I was, and still am, desperate for his love. Decades after leaving New York, years after leaving the United States, I am still confused. I still want to know, who is he? I am a child at a crosswalk, waiting for a signal, a nod that it is safe to cross the street alone.

  I unlock the d
oor and enter his apartment. Immediately, his cologne rushes at me. Not Old Spice. Something much more expensive. It is on everything. Musky, masculine, intoxicating. Even the furnishings—a large yellow kimono hanging on one wall; two black, lacquer Chinese chests, one decorated with jade green birds, the other with flowers—radiate his scent.

  As I stand there revisiting the phantasmagoria of his things, I feel strange. Instinctively, even after all these years, his posessions evoke a sense of danger. I want to walk away, no—run. Forget the elevator; just race down the ten flights of stairs, not look back. Never look back. Panic overtakes me. My heartbeat escalates; my palms sweat. But, really, it’s hardly appropriate for me, a grown man in my forties—an adult myself, married with children and a mortgage—to turn and run. I’m a reasonably successful professor teaching in the Netherlands and lecturing all over Europe. I am not only a son, I’m a husband and father, with three young children of my own. But, here, in this room again, my other identities melt. I’m his son—Norman Schvey’s son. I breathe in deeply, shut my eyes, and wait for this wave of irrational panic to subside. I know it will. It always does. Besides, what could I possibly say to the doorman if I ran into him in the lobby? That I was standing in the entryway of my hospitalized father’s apartment, took a look around, and concluded that I was too afraid to stay up there alone? I smile at this feeble joke at my own expense. Anyway, I’m here for a purpose—I’ll find his address book and return to the hospital.

  My eyes open again, and there I see an eighteenth-century English grandfather clock across from a lithograph of a bare-breasted Indian girl, a cheap work he picked up at a flea market in the Village for a hundred bucks after flirting with the artist. A brilliantly colored, hand-woven Turkish carpet lies beneath a seven-foot-tall tennis racket he didn’t knew what to do with, so he leaned it against the wall. Permanently.

  The things around me have nothing to do with him, or his taste, but I recall that furnishings don’t, or least didn’t, really matter to him. Unlike his wardrobe, they don’t have to be precisely coordinated. Upon his desk is a bag of colored balloons with his face on them. I blow up a green one and watch my father’s head expand to grotesque proportions, then shrivel to nothing. Beside the balloons is a carved mahogany Merrill Lynch bull with its “We’re Bullish on America” inscription. Beside the bull is a rough-hewn, marble paperweight I have never seen before. Inscribed with Gothic lettering, it reads:

  “I Don't Hold a Grudge—I Get Even.”

  However ill-matched, each object is in its proper place. The only thing not in perfect order is a single, white coffee cup and saucer resting on the rubber rack beside the sink. They’ve been washed and rinsed, and are ready to be wiped and placed on the shelf when he returns.

  There is a vast collection of overcoats in the front hall closet. I try on a bowler hat. When did my head grow bigger than his? I draw my fingers along a green Loden coat from Austria; its fur prickles like the pelt of a wolf. Nothing fits. His coats are all way too wide on me; his hats too small. I watch myself twirl an antique English walking stick with a silver head in the hall mirror. I swing the stick and the handle comes loose. There is a dagger hidden within.

  I stumble into an oversized walk-in closet enveloped by a cornucopia of suits, shirts, and ties. Everything is in pristine condition. Everything hangs neatly. Even suits and sport coats he hasn’t worn in twenty years look new. The array of suits and jackets, arranged on hangers according to season and coordinated by color, remind me of a row of obedient dogs, panting, waiting for their master’s return. I see, too, he has cut out all the sizes from the inside of his jackets and suit pants. Why? Is he vain about his weight?

  Even living alone, my father wanted, and was in “need of more space,” as he said. So he recently acquired the neighboring apartment and smashed through the adjoining wall. The apartment previously belonged to a group of four British Airways stewardesses, and over gin and tonics, he managed to get the women to divulge their plans to move. He snapped up the place and tore down the adjoining wall before the superintendent could stop it. His apartment is now twice as large as before, but the floor is uneven in the kitchen where the two floors have been patched together.

  In the bathroom, I pick up a 100% boar-bristle hairbrush. The brush is immaculate—not a single gray hair. I unscrew the tiny green cap of Pinaud aftershave and sniff. I pour the aftershave into my palms, rub them together, and slap my cheeks with his scent. I slide open the medicine cabinet: Preparation H, Bayer Aspirin, traditional Colgate toothpaste, an old-fashioned glass eye cup. There is also a burgundy leather travel kit. Everything so clean and tidy that by the time I enter the bedroom and inspect his dresser, it doesn’t surprise me to find that his socks are color-coded—crew-length divided from calf-length—and that his jewelry chest is divided into a collection of tiny velvet compartments, all perfectly organized with shirt stays, tie clips, tuxedo studs, and cuff links. Beside the lavish chest rests a smaller leather chest I brought back from Florence from one of my lecture tours. I gave it to him for his birthday twenty years earlier. Plainly, it has never been used.

  The phone rings, but I don’t answer. After several rings, the machine finally snaps on. “This is Norman Schvey speaking,” it shouts; the volume is set way too high. “If you wish to leave a message, do so after the beep. Speak properly and distinctly. I will try to call you back as soon as possible. Thank you.”

  The message is unexceptional and one I have heard many times before when I’ve called from abroad and left a message, but the tone: “Speak properly and distinctly!” can be no one else’s. There is the suggestion that he may not return the caller’s message, even if it is distinct; he will merely “try” to do so. I note for the first time, the absence of a discernible pause between “possible” and “thank you,” making the courtesy sound perfunctory in a way I’d never noticed.

  Sifting through papers and account books stacked neatly on his desk, I notice something odd: a cream-colored invitation to my parents’ wedding in 1946, printed on thick vellum. The invitation is perfectly preserved, and does not smell like a musty, antique document. Why has he saved it after all these years? I wonder. On the cover of the invitation are two entwined hearts with my parents’ initials, RL and NS. Inside, a pair of silver embossed doves are perched on the exact midpoint of a leafy branch, the doves so close together that their breasts touch, the twin points of their beaks kiss. The larger dove spreads its wings, protecting the smaller. The invitation has a braided tassel knotted along its spine.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jay Lerner

  request the pleasure of your company

  at the marriage of their daughter

  Rita Kay

  to

  Mr. Norman Irwin Schvey

  Sunday, the thirtieth of June

  Nineteen hundred and forty-six

  at six o’clock

  Hotel Pierre

  New York

  I’ve never seen this before and am stunned by its elegance. I’m also amazed it has been saved in such pristine condition, considering my parents’ divorce. I find the menu for their wedding dinner, and each dish reads more elegant than the one before: Canapes Favorite, Compote of Melon Tricolor, Paillette d’Orre, and Asparagus Mimosa. I wonder what they tasted like, and what it must have been like to be present at the Pierre for the union of two of New York’s most prosperous Jewish families; both so successful, each patriarch had an office in the Empire State Building.

  My mother told me the man she married was different than the person I knew as my father. She said he had been an accomplished dancer with perfect manners until their wedding night when, she said, everything changed. In the photo on his desk, both dressed in their wedding finery, they are on the brink of it. In a few short hours, they will have spent their first night together in the sumptuous bridal suite of the Hotel Pierre. One thing I did learn, much later, is that whatever happened that night set the tone for everything to come—including me. In my imagination, and in my gut, I kno
w one thing to be true. That was the night I was conceived!

  For some reason, as I stare at the wedding photograph, Longchamps, that long-departed restaurant on 34th Street which used to be a fixture on the ground floor of the Empire State Building, invades my memory. I have no idea why I am there or why that image insists on infecting my thoughts. I am a little boy, and we are about to order lunch. My grandmother, looking beautiful and far more youthful than I can remember, wears a pale blue suit with velvet trim and gray, calfskin gloves. I wear a navy sailor suit with shorts and matching blue cap.

  She turns away from me, and I am immediately slapped hard across the face by my father for not saying “Thank you” to the white-gloved waiter who has just laid a cloth napkin across my lap. Before I can begin to comprehend this, I am whisked from my chair and told to smile by a photographer who, for some reason, takes my picture as a souvenir. I do as I’m told. I smile as hard as I can, which actually, is a horrible grimace, and looks nothing like a smile. I hold this pose until I am told to stop. My jaw hurts. My cheeks burn.

  After this sudden reflection, I pick up everything I have touched and place it all carefully back in its proper place. Then I remember exactly why I am there—to run an errand, to retrieve his address book, not lose myself in the past. Yet I cannot move. I sit down on my father’s bed.

  My father’s bed is a huge California King elevated two feet off the ground. The bed of an emperor. My feet do not touch the floor. First, slowly, then faster, I kick my legs against the wooden slats, an unruly child knocking his feet underneath his movie seat. I am that child. I don’t want to walk through the streets of Manhattan or turn on the news, or look for his damn address book. I don’t want to investigate anything or look through his things anymore. I just sit there narcotized, banging my legs against the slats of his bed as hard as I can.