by Jan Cherubin
But first, I’d have to turn around and go back East again and sort through the homemade birthday cards, mine to my father and his to me: How come you’re twenty-five, and I’m still alive? When you are fifty, will I still be nifty? He was supposed to be a writer, that was his promise, unfulfilled, and I felt sure that besides birthday rhymes there had to be a manuscript hidden somewhere. I was excited at the prospect of what I might find, but I stalled because of an irrational obsessive fear that the amount of stuff in the house was literally infinite. I was convinced if I started sorting through things I would never finish. It was a sorcerer’s apprentice job—the boxes would fill up as soon as I emptied them, while Brenda stood over me clicking her tongue, disgusted by my sentimentality.
He was a saver like me. The Eisenhower jacket from his army uniform still hung in the front hall closet. A felt hat lay above it on the top shelf and whenever I saw the hat, I thought how strange that men in the nineteen-fifties and even the early sixties regularly wore fedoras. No man left the house without his hat, as I remembered it. My father palmed his, thumb fitting into the right dent, fingers into the left dent, a ship’s prow above the black band. He placed it on his head and went out into the world. I watched with solemn eyes, aware I could not go out into the world like him, since I was a girl and could not wear that sort of hat.
To be fair, sometimes he took Susan and me with him, usually to the Forest Park Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The library, for us, was like church must have been for other people. The smell was heady—paper, ink, wood, and glue. I sat in the children’s section on a low mahogany bench worn down like a sucked candy. “You borrowed that book last week,” Susan said.
“So what?” I said. “I like it.”
My father disappeared into the stacks, a flash of crew cut and black glasses.
“Put it back!” Susan said.
“No!”
He reappeared studying a book gray with type and no pictures. The book was so thick if it were a sandwich I wouldn’t be able to put my mouth around it. “Children,” he said in his mock schoolmarm voice. “Quiet. You’re in a library.” He smiled to himself.
Outside, I climbed a mountain of broken pavement in front of the Forest Park Branch and stood on the precipice. In Baltimore, people said payment for pavement. We said balling for boiling. If you were Jewish, ants were called pussy ants. Your mother killed the pussy ants on the payment with a chynik of balling water. We got into the car and drove away from downtown, over the railroad tracks toward the suburbs, until we came to our street of ranch houses cut out of a swath in the woods. Our new block was as bland and bright as only the future can be.
“Did you get anything for your wife?” my mother said, waiting at the kitchen door.
“Doctor Zhivago,” my father said. “Should be good, my darling.”
CHAPTER 3
In early June I finally got up the courage to face Brenda and I flew to Baltimore, rented a car, and drove to Cedar Drive. The weather was brutally hot and humid, and to top it off, cicadas were falling out of the sky. Red-eyed insects the size of dinner rolls rained down on the neighborhood like one of the plagues in the story of Passover. If I hadn’t known it was the return of the seventeen-year locust, right on schedule in the spring of 1987, I might have believed the scourge of prehistoric bugs was an omen warning me to stay away from the house.
I drove on heedless, down the hill past the elementary school to the stop sign, then left onto Cedar Drive. When I was a kid, my father liked to ride the bike to his friend Leon’s house around the corner to smoke and talk, and I would ride with him, straddling the blue bicycle’s back rack. Pedaling along at a leisurely pace, my father told me how great our block was. Baltimore was a second-rate town, New York was it, but our particular street in Baltimore was paradise. “It’s like a postcard,” he said, gazing up at the treetops. He took one hand off the handlebars, wobbling the bike, and swept the panorama. “Look at it! If you didn’t know where it was, you would come here for a vacation.”
He was always reinventing the world so we were at its center, and that made him irresistible. I bought everything he said. I believed Cedar Drive was the best place on earth and my father was the smartest man in the world. He tacked up a sign in the den advertising an Alfred Kazin book in block letters: NEW YORK JEW. That’s who he thought he was. He was a schoolteacher in Maryland, but to his family, friends, and students, he was as gutsy as Norman Mailer or Philip Roth. As smart as Albert Einstein. He even had Einstein’s bushy hair and mustache.
I drove the rental car around the curve in our street past identical shingled shoeboxes, one after another with their carports, white gravel roofs, and redbrick trim, and I started getting excited. It was probably a depressing sight to most people—such small houses and all the same—but I shared my father’s rosy view and noticed the generous lawns and mature trees left standing in the backyards by a developer who had some sense of decency, saving the street from complete suburban tackiness. Also, the houses across the street from ours were built on a creek with red clay banks and willow trees, and the low ranch houses seemed sunk into the ground like mud houses on a riverbank, towered over by hundred-foot pin oaks.
I turned into the driveway and parked behind Brenda’s Mazda. There was nothing to be afraid of, I told myself. The worst had already happened, my father had already died, and Brenda had to be glad I was coming to help, although I didn’t know how we were going to clean out all that stuff in a weekend. I wondered if the old suitcase with the yellow Bakelite handle was still buried in the back of the den closet. Maybe I’d find a clue of some kind. In spite of my father’s big personality, he was maddeningly difficult to know, and I needed clues, there had to be clues. When I tamped down my terror at the enormity of the task, I started to feel genuine excitement. I’d get to the bottom of all those papers, and then I would be granted access to what I had been barred from. The things he shared with his students and not with me—his writing, his thoughts.
Brenda was in the carport laughing, watching me get out of the car clawing at my clothes like a B-movie actress in a horror film. “You’re scared of the cicadas,” she said.
“I’m not really,” I said and (rather fearlessly, I thought) plucked off an armor-backed insect clinging to my hair like a barrette. The dog barked behind the side gate. He was pacing frantically, his tail swishing the mesh part of the fence. “Hoffman!” I called. He put his paws on the fence rail and I went over and hugged his shaggy neck. He wasn’t named after Dustin Hoffman as my sister sometimes said, but for a friend of my father’s from the Home. Brenda held the screen door open impatiently, so I let Hoffman lick my face and then I went in. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I was sorry I had come alone. This was the kitchen where my father’s vegetable soup used to simmer on the stove, where my mother made pancakes on Sunday mornings, where Susan and I stamped snow off our boots in winter and in summer stood dripping in our bathing suits. And where, once we were grown, my father greeted us when we came home, his arms open, a cigarette in his hand, and where (and everywhere) he would never greet us again.
The house was alive with him. His carpentry, his paintings, his garden. He loved our little place. He had wanted land, and he got land, a fraction of an acre. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he was able to own a house. He was a realist who knew in order to survive he had to be a fabulist. He pretended he had a vast estate. He pretended money didn’t matter. He planted trees and flowers. He grew vegetables like he did on the orphanage farm gang. They had twenty acres at the H, he said. The H was short for the Home.
“Some estate that was,” my mother would say. They’d laugh.
He’d put his hand inside a burlap bag from the nursery. “Horse manure,” he said, pulling out a clump. He held it under my nose. “Smell that. I love it. Cleanest shit there is.” He liked to say shit in front of Susan and me, it made my mother laugh. They were communists. Now they were landowners. They didn’t believe in God.
“C’mon,
step lively. Help me out here.”
I drew a gun out of my Lone Ranger double holster and pointed it at him. “Stick ‘em up,” I said.
“Very funny,” he said. “Put that away.” He handed over a trowel. “You know what happened to us in the orphanage when we didn’t step lively?”
“The belt?” Susan said. She sat in a lawn chair swinging her feet in Mary Janes, her dress spread around her like petals. My father went over and touched Susan’s golden hair. He was holding a cigarette, which made the gesture especially tender, the delicate care he had to take. He bent and kissed her head.
“Not the belt,” said my mother. “The cane.”
“Tell the other one to put a shirt on,” my father said.
“She refuses,” said my mother. “She wants to be like you.”
He pretended he didn’t mind not having a son. He had surrogate sons instead, his students at Baltimore City College High School. Like the orphanage, City was all boys. Hundreds of boys, plenty to choose from. His favorites were the ones who worked on the Collegian newspaper. He was the faculty adviser. He pretended, but he couldn’t pull it off. He wanted a real son like the boy he once was, the boy who had lost his father. I would have been happy if he got his wish. I saw right away boys were the main people. At the toy store, I asked for cap guns and race cars, not to please my father, but as the logical choice. Who didn’t like the pop sound and burnt smell of gunpowder? Or a miniature car that moved by itself? I roamed the neighborhood bare-chested, my holster slung over my shorts. “Go ahead, walk around like that,” my sister said. “You have nothing to hide.”
My mother lounged in a black strapless bathing suit like a Modigliani by our inflated baby pool and dreamed of Greenwich Village. She hadn’t wanted kids and waited impatiently for us to mature into adults alongside the scrawny saplings my father planted, roped to two-by-fours. We were a job for which my mother felt overqualified merely by being an adult, and we didn’t interest her much. She drank coffee and smoked Chesterfields with the other mothers in the neighborhood, pushed her carpet sweeper dreamily, or at times with enthusiasm while she listened to “Oklahoma!” on the hi-fi, and drove the sloping ‘49 Chevy she named Betsy to the Food Fair with us standing up in the back. She talked to us because she had no one else. There were things she couldn’t tell the women in the neighborhood. Her life used to have meaning. She said during the war (how she missed the war years!) she was in the leadership at the local Communist Party headquarters. We weren’t supposed to tell anyone. It was important work, she said, it was exciting, they were fighting fascism. She was going to change the world by making sure poor people got more money. It was a secret. Something stopped her, though. Something happened, and she never did change the world.
Sometimes we’d get into the Chevy and she would drive us backward into her history, past the Forest Park Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the old row house where we lived when I was born, and farther downtown until Liberty Heights became Pennsylvania Avenue. Black girls in pink curlers sat on the marble steps. My mother turned right and stopped in front of 1837 North Avenue. “This is where I lived when your father walked into my life,” she said. “Your grandma took in boarders.” The third-floor windows on the row house were broken. The first-floor windows were covered with plywood. It looked as if no girl ever lay on her bed reading poetry there, not a white girl or a black girl. My mother started the car and drove east a few blocks to the Young Communist League at No. 1019. It was just a house with a stone foundation and a sagging porch.
At bedtime she brought down the storybook from the shelf, but we begged her to tell us a true story instead, about hearing Paul Robeson sing in person, and how she cried when Franklin Roosevelt died. She told about the iceman and candy stores and streetcars for a nickel, and playing in Druid Hill Park, a place as mysterious as its name. My mother felt sorry for us growing up in the suburbs with no parks and nothing to walk to.
Didn’t she know we had the creek? At least I did. Susan was an inside child. I spent the summer with Tom from next door, squatting on flat rocks in the white water, poking under stones with sticks. We caught minnows, crayfish, and eels, and came running up the red clay bank to burst between the houses onto the hot asphalt when we heard the dinga-linga-ling of the Good Humor truck. How could my mother not know what it meant to me, the silver handle like a crank popping open that back freezer door?
My father never read to us or told stories at bedtime. “I didn’t have a father to read to me,” he said. So we didn’t get one. He told his stories around the kitchen table at suppertime instead and made it seem like regular conversation. “Every one of us at the Home had a number,” he said. “We had to line up for clean underwear. My number was 271.”
I was bewildered. It was impossible. I didn’t believe him. My father couldn’t be 271. He was number one, numero uno.
“‘Line up!’ the supervisor said, and he threw us our clean underwear, and you better be in the right order or you’d get the wrong pair.”
“The Colonel made sure you were in the right order,” my mother said.
“Yeah, the Colonel,” my father said. He held a cigarette between his fingers and flicked the filter end with his thumb. Susan and I had a word for it. Pep your cigarette, we’d say irritably, when we noticed the ash getting long. “Forget about the Colonel,” my father said. “You wanna know something?”
“Yeah, I wanna know something,” Susan said.
“I’ll tell you something. We didn’t have it so bad. We had twenty acres to play on. Friends, did we have friends! And horses. My favorite was Playboy.”
“Was his shit clean?” I asked.
“You bet,” my father said. “Playboy’s shit was the cleanest of all the clean shit there is. Every other Sunday my mother came to visit.”
“Uncle Archie pushed Walnettos through the fence,” my mother said.
“But there were kids who didn’t have anybody come,” said my father. “Sundays were sad for them.” He leaned forward and pepped his cigarette again. “There was this one kid, Shmuel Hefter, shy kid. He’d pack his suitcase every Sunday because you know, these single parents were always telling their sons one day they’ll get enough money or a bigger apartment and bring them home. His little Yiddishe mama, she says to him: ‘Shmuel. . . .’ What are you laughing about?” my father said. “This is sad.”
“It’s the name, Daddy. Shmuel,” Susan said. We doubled over giggling.
“Actually,” my father said, “we called him Shmecky. That was his nickname.”
“Shmecky! That’s even worse.” We laughed and laughed.
“Anyway, the mama says to him before she puts him in, ‘soon as I get enough money, I’ll take you home.’ So every Sunday the poor kid packs his suitcase and sits out on the steps. All day he sits there and no one comes. Cries himself to sleep every Sunday night for years. Then one Sunday, lo and behold, Shmecky’s mother comes to get him. We can’t believe it. Off they go, Shmecky walking down Tuckahoe Road with his suitcase, holding onto his mother’s hand.”
“That’s a nice story,” Susan said.
“It’s not over yet, kid.”
“Aw Clyde, don’t tell them the rest. They’re too little,” my mother said.
“Tell us! Tell us!”
“Forget it,” said my father. “Who wants to go for a ride?”
It was summer and through the open windows dishes clacked and silverware clinked in kitchens up and down the block as mothers cleaned up from dinner. Screen doors slammed and children ran into the street calling to each other.
“C’mon, Jo,” he said. “Finish your dessert. Anybody else? You wanna go for a ride? Susan? Evie?”
“Maybe later,” Susan said.
“I’ve got this mess to clean up,” my mother said.
My father took hold of the handlebars on Susan’s blue bicycle leaning against the rose trellis. He kicked up the kickstand, and got on. I straddled the back rack and we coasted down the driveway. The
summer sky was radiant and the evening sun cast a golden glow over the lawns and sidewalks. The bike bumped into the gutter with a clatter and glided onto the smooth asphalt of Cedar Drive. I held onto my metal seat with both hands.
“We have a great block,” my father said as he pedaled along. He waved at some neighbors on the sidewalk. “Hi ya, Lefty,” he said to one of the men as we rode past.
“It’s Lucky,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” my father said. “Lucky.” We rode around the bend where we could see willow trees leaning over the creek between the houses. My father gazed up at the taller treetops. “Look at it. It’s like a postcard,” he said.
“I think so, too,” I said. I let go of the seat and put my arms around him and pressed my cheek against his back.
CHAPTER 4
I was lost in thought sitting across the table from Brenda when a cicada smacked against the dining-room window and fell onto the outside sill. Its lacy wings buzzed frantically.
“Guess what?” Brenda said. She was unusually perky and girlish. She speared a chunk of chicken and diced celery with her fork. My father would have complained that chicken salad was not a proper meal for someone coming all the way from California, but I thought the cold supper was perfect in the blistering heat.
“I can’t guess. What?”
“I’ve been dating.” She popped the forkful of chicken into her mouth and chewed close-lipped and smiling.
“That’s nice.”
“James,” she said. “Not Jim, and never Jimmy. I met him at the singles group where I met your dad.”
“OK. James.” I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t very well take the moral high ground about her dating so soon after her husband died. Certainly not on my father’s behalf. In the first place, there was a twenty-five-year age difference between my father and Brenda, which already made him suspect. And in the second place, he’d played by his own rules so why couldn’t she? When Brenda moved in, he was still seeing Darleen, his favorite, on the sly. Not much moral ground there. I didn’t want to hear about Brenda’s dating life, though.
