The Poison Tree

by Henry I. Schvey

  I nod silently, trying to think of what to say.

  “Yes, he was an honorable man in business.”

  At that moment, my mother and Uncle Lee walk into Riverside Chapel holding hands. Almost gratefully, I offer my respects to the old Chassid, explaining that I must attend to my mother. Her hair is a combination of platinum blonde and pink, and she is wearing Gramsie’s floor-length white mink coat. Her skin is pasty and white, which makes the contrast with the Cunnatural tint of her hair even more unearthly. But she is pleased to see me, and seems in good health. I kiss her and tell her how well she looks, and kiss Uncle Leon. He kisses me back feelingly on the cheek, and tells me how broad my shoulders are, how tall I am. I want to tell him that I am forty-five, and am not that tall or especially well built. But he is already weeping softly, recalling how beautiful I was as a child. I wonder if he remembers the time I called him Fairy at the magic shop. I want to tell him how sorry I am for that now, that I never meant it. I want to beg his forgiveness, but I don’t have the courage. Oddly, Uncle Lee looks almost exactly as he used to, although he must be eighty now. His toupee is still the same coffee-bean color it was when I watched him drape it over the phrenology head in his bedroom before we went to sleep in his room at Gramsie’s house. Lee thought I was asleep, but I secretly opened one eye and saw him without it. It made me terribly sad. His skin is still alabaster, like it always was.

  My mother really is looking well. The floor-length mink, however inappropriate, offers a convincing narrative: it alludes to “Papa’s factories in Philipsburg,” maids, and summer cottages, Gramps as King of the Jews in a town full of goyim. It says that, no matter how she looks, she was married at The Pierre and is easily the match of any of the blonde shiksas prancing around Riverside Chapel pretending to mourn. She is still her Papa’s daughter, his baby. She is also Norman I. Schvey’s widow with the prestige that accompanies it. She has trouble walking, and beneath the mink, I see the orthopedic shoes with holes cut into the sides to accommodate her oversized bunions. But she carries herself with the same confidence as the beautiful prodigy who learned to shoot a pistol and earned a pilot’s license, who graduated high school at fourteen and college at eighteen. Later, long after her divorce, she even went back to graduate school at City College and completed all the necessary course work towards a PhD in Accounting. She’s ABD—All But Dissertation—and still is hoping to complete her doctorate.

  I wonder what she is thinking. Does she feel a sense of triumph at having outlived her antagonist? I doubt it. Over the past few years, they’ve grown cordial, and she even betrayed a strange, lingering affection toward her nemesis. She asked his advice on unusual fluctuations in the stock market, and he always told her calmly, “Don’t sell, just ride it out.” I overheard one such conversation, and was stunned to hear her call him “Normie” again. There was even a hint of little-girl flirtation in her voice, as though speaking to him brought out—just for a second—the innocent she was before being crushed by life, and him. Grandma’s perpetual “You can bring them back together—it depends on you!” sprang to mind. Could she have been right? However mismatched and miserable, should they have somehow stayed together? Neither ever remarried, or even had a lasting relationship since, so perhaps there was something else I could have done. It’s a ridiculous fantasy, but I can’t help thinking it.

  My mother is still in contact with Uncle Malcolm about things medical, and calls him frequently about this and that. Right now they are whispering intimately in a corner about some new product, which is absolutely guaranteed to dissolve earwax. I hear her thank him profusely, and proclaim to a handful of mourners what a brilliant doctor Malcolm is. I turn to find Uncle Lee, and see him standing next to Shloime, silently heaping food on his plate. The two don’t converse. Each is aware of the other’s presence, but no one makes the first move to explain who they are, or how they might be connected to the deceased. They just stand there eating.

  Bobby strolls in with his wife and two boys. The boys, aged four and six, are dressed in matching suits with matching bow ties. They look like little yellow robots. Bobby wears a gray overcoat with a blue velvet trim. He also wears a homburg, which might have belonged to Uncle Lee in the mid-1950s, and makes him appear twice his thirty-eight years. His wife is wearing chunky open-toed heels and a dress that is far too tight across the bust. She scowls; they must be quarreling again. She brushes past me without saying hello.

  I hear a child crying in an adjacent room. I know that sound and rush into the room where the coffin sits. The casket is closed, not like in my dream. Charlotte James is there, her black dress setting off her toned arms and blonde hair. Natasha, my youngest child, is there as well, her tiny fingers splayed out on the sides of the coffin. Charlotte, thinking she is the only adult left in the room, attempts to comfort her.

  “Stop it, sweetheart, please stop,” she says. It is unclear whether she is motivated by embarrassment or genuine sympathy. She tries to lead Natasha away from the room, and points at a huge blown-up photograph of my father, elegant and smiling, standing on an easel beside the coffin. “Look, Granddad’s happy in heaven—he doesn’t want to see you crying.”

  It is a fine portrait; my father speaking on the telephone in his sumptuous Merrill Lynch office, a giant Montecristo cigar clenched between gleaming, white teeth. Behind him, the East River floats by passively, as though it, too, has succumbed to his demands. But while he is joyfully giving orders over the phone, my father takes pleasure in the photographer’s attentions, and smiles broadly. It is a picture of a man in control of everything and everyone. Natasha, however, pays no attention and continues crying, her long hair delicately brushing against the casket.

  “There, there,” Charlotte says, “let’s come away from here. Cookies and punch are in the next room. Granddad knows how much you loved him.”

  But Natasha ferociously turns on her. “You think I’m crying because I love him—I’m not! I’m crying because he never said he loved me, and now—it’s too late.”

  The child’s words make my heart race. What she has said is true, and I’ve never even thought about it. The dead man has not once told his grandchildren—or children—that he loved them. And now it is too late. The deep sadness of that simple fact appalls me beyond words. For all of us. I wave Charlotte away and move toward Natasha. When I turn back around, I see the room is empty and the other mourners have fled the apparently hysterical child. Only Natasha stands beside me, looking up, a strange expression on her face. What is she thinking, I wonder? That I am her father and she knows I love her? Or is she still thinking about the dead man in the box who never said he did? Or something else I am not privy to.

  As the child grips my hand, her warm fingers send a thrill through my body.

  “I love you, Natasha.”

  “I love you too, Daddy.” So simple. So easy.

  With these words, she leads me out of the house of death.

  Alone in his apartment immediately after the funeral, I unearth the portfolio from its hidden place in my father’s desk and look through the photographs again. Yes, just as I suspected, it is Charlotte. She smiles a humiliated smile. I turn the picture over and read the date. It is of recent vintage. I put it down and realize that these pictures are whispering something important to me. Something about myself. And now I understand what that is.

  I walk down the hall and enter a room far smaller than my father’s clothes closet. The room smells of rotting fruit, garbage, and roses. Flies buzz around charcoal-gray trash bags leaning against one wall. Inhaling the rich scent of decay, I twist the latch, open the incinerator door, and toss the portfolio down the chute. It sails from floor to floor, then—silence. I return to my father’s empty apartment, and think of the time, decades earlier, when I accidentally incinerated my mother’s chandelier crystals.

  I know that it is time now for me to leave New York.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My foremost debt is to my wife Patty, who managed to kee
p me (relatively) sane during the painful, solitary process of digging up fossil remains from my distant past and dredging ancient memories up into the light of day.

  Additional thanks go to the many people (teachers, editors, students) who have patiently critiqued my work, and whether by instruction, example or support, helped me discover what this book was about:

  Brad Cook, Bernard Cooper, Judy Copeland, Julie Schafler Dale, Nicholas Delbanco, Donna Essner, Kathleen Finneran, Cynthia Florin, Emily Follman, Gabe Fried, Laura Gyawali, Kathryn Harrison, Robin Hirsch, A.E. Hotchner, Cindy Kahn, Jane Lapotaire, Carter Lewis, Kristina Blank Makansi, Lisa Miller, Eric Nuetzel, Jane Otto, Anna Pileggi, Eileen Pollack, Aram, Jerusha and Natasha Schvey, Richard Selzer, Penny Stein, Alison Stoltzfus, Adina Talve, Elizabeth Tucker, MaryEllen VanDerHeyden, Paul Wagman, Kerri Webster, Bill Whitaker, Kea Wilson, my gifted cohorts at the 2012 Yale Writers’ Conference.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HENRY SCHVEY was born in New York City and attended Hunter College Elementary School and the Horace Mann School for Boys. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he received an MA in Western European Studies and a PhD in Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He worked in the Netherlands for fourteen years, during which time he taught at Leiden University and founded the Leiden English Speaking Theatre (LEST). He, his wife, and three children returned to the U.S. in 1987, where he became chair of the Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He stepped down as chair in 2007, but has continued to teach, direct, and write as a professor of drama and comparative literature.