Michael Ginsberg (jewsinspace) wrote in spaceodyssey, @ 2016-08-01 00:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | 1972, 1972.07, } 60s |
TIKKUN OLAM
July, 1972
Leah doesn’t live that far from the Lower East Side, it’s nearly in her backyard, but she’s only here intermittently. Usually to stop by a bakery or a deli or something, and then she leaves. Most of her friends live in the East Village, or in the Village, or in Chelsea still. And then Michael works in Midtown, so sometimes she makes the voyage all the way there to see him at work. But she’s here now, feeling acutely out of place. People stare at her anywhere she goes, she’s over six feet tall for God’s sake, but it doesn’t help that she looks like a hippie. Like people expect her to pay for things with pocket change. Or not pay at all. She’d thought about dressing up, but then she realised that she’s married. She doesn’t have to please him. So she’s wearing a dress that’s too short and her legs are too bare and she has her long hair loose and unstyled like Janis wore it. She’s already had two strange men try to sit across from her. ‘I’m married’ never works. ‘I’m waiting for someone’ only sometimes does.
She’s watching the door, so she sees him come in, though she doesn’t recognise him immediately. She only really met him once and then they never spoke again. He didn’t even come to the wedding. Should she stand up? Probably, but she came of age in a time when all the social rules started to change. So she doesn’t. She waits for him to sit down before she puts out the stub of her cigarette in the ash tray, then immediately lights a new one. She needs something to do with her hands. She doesn’t know why she’s nervous. Why does she care about this man’s opinion. He certainly doesn’t care about hers.
“I wasn’t really expecting you to come,” she says.Morris sinks into the booth across from her like he’s had a long, arduous journey. In a way, he has. It’s been a handful of years since that night in the apartment when he met Leah; Michael did a good job of keeping her away from him. He looks her up and down now, taking in her cheap clothing and unkempt hair and bizarre wedding ring and flat chest. Everything about her is strange to him, far stranger than it was the first time. He sighs.
“Life is full of surprises,” he reflects, mostly to himself.
He glances around the shop. Many people know him in this neighborhood and he’d rather not be seen here by any of them at the moment. What happened between him and Michael is largely considered a mystery, even among Morris’ friends. He’s not looking to enlighten anyone, and he knows that he and Leah are, at least, of one mind there if nowhere else.
“Does my son know about this?” he asks.
“There was a discussion,” she says evasively.
She puts both of her hands on the table, palms facing each other, cigarette smoldering in one hand. Michael is a mess, emotionally. She’s trying not to be defensive, but it’s hard to sit there and feel judged and not explain yourself. She realises she has no obligation to love this man, or even like him. He hurt someone she cares about; she remembers, she was there when he wasn’t. She’s unused to disliking people.
Finally she brings her cigarette to her mouth and inhales, blowing smoke out to her side.
“I would not be here if I didn’t know you were talking again. What changed, by the way?”
Morris shifts uncomfortably. Speaking with Michael is hard enough. Talking to someone else about the matter in such frank terms—being asked such forward questions by someone who is both a near-stranger and technically family—is something else entirely. But he knew what he was signing up for here.
“I’m not a young man, as you can see,” he says. “Michael is all I have in this world. I have already lost enough. I cannot lose more time with him.”
“And it took two years to decide that.” Her voice is flat. She’s not really being fair but she’s honestly struggling to understand. On some level she does, she thinks; she went through something like this with her own parents. They loved her, just not enough of her, until it got to a point where it was better for everyone that she leave. But she struggles to empathize with the desire to abandon your family all the same, especially when they were the one who wanted a relationship.
“I do not want him to get hurt again. I need a promise from you that that will not happen. You owe me that.” She pins him there with her eyes, her gaze frank and unyielding. Her eyes are dark blue, but the roots of her blonde hair are a dark brown. The Magen David she’s wearing is half-hidden by her blouse.
Morris stares right back at her, tired and unamused. Her words are patronizing, they chafe him in multiple directions. It makes him want to get up and leave.
“It has never been my intention to hurt him,” he says, frowning, as though this should be obvious. “Why should I want for him to be unhappy? You ask me to make this promise to you. You don’t imagine that on the day he became mine I promised this same thing to myself?”
She knows Michael is adopted. He was not an accident or an obligation. Someone had to go and find him and decide, yes, I want to make this commitment. It doesn’t make sense to her that the same person would abandon him twenty years later.
“You weren’t there. You didn’t see it. I did. I was scared. I kept thinking, is he going to hurt himself, is he going to do something, am I going to come home and —“ Abruptly she turns her head and looks out the window, her hand over her mouth and her elbow aggressively on the table. She doesn’t say anything for a long time. “I don’t understand how you can do that to someone you love.”
Morris’ frown remains, though it changes from one of umbrage to one of disturbance. He looks away as he shares her long silence, both taken aback and disbelieving.
“Michael would not do such things,” he says. He could easily be saying it to himself. The words feel familiar, like a prayer, though he doesn’t remember ever saying them out loud.
Her head turns and she stares at him. There’s something startled and hurt and angry on her face. She wants to snap, you don’t know him at all, do you?, but she’s really trying not to get mad. She’s trying not to make this a contest, who loves him more, who loves him better. She’s not going to make him choose between his wife and his father.
“Did you ever talk to him? About anything? At all?” She’s trying, really trying, to understand how this happened. How did he manage to hide it from someone he lived in a closet-sized tenement with?
A moment ago, a question like that would have had Morris hotly giving up this conversation as a lost cause, but he’s been arrested by Leah’s bold declaration of her fears. It seems like an ill omen to put such things into words. He wants to spit them away—puh puh puh—like his mother used to do. He wants to believe Leah is mistaken, exaggerating, overly concerned.
“Yes, of course I talked to him,” he says, trying to sound defensive. Trying to convince himself that he should feel that way, that it’s warranted. His front is a confused one, his voice taking on a note of regret as he continues. “Though I must tell you, he is often not easy to talk to. Easier now than when he was a child, perhaps, but...” He sighs.
Leah takes a long, deep breath because she is trying very hard to rein in her temper. Which is the first time it’s ever happened. Her fuse is so long. She’s not surprised this is the thing that brings it out in her; if she ever had any doubts, they would be dispelled now. She wants to scream in his face about the fact that either he didn’t notice or ignored it, but that wouldn’t help anything.
She pinches between her eyes, the space above the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are closed and she’s counting to ten. She stubs out what’s left of her mostly unsmoked cigarette and tries to think about what it’s like to be the father to a little boy and then a teenager who would rather be a Martian than a human being. “Look, I don’t. I don’t know what you think, or you thought, or saw and didn’t believe. I love that man more than anything else on this Earth and I am telling you he is hurting. And it’s bad. Or I would not be here.”
Morris is silent for a very, very long time. The quiet background noise of the lives of others fills the space between them. No one is paying them any attention. No employee has even asked them if they need anything; it’s not that kind of place. Leah waits for some answer from him, similarly unspeaking. He is effectively alone with his thoughts. They mostly consist of memories of his son’s face: the frequently tense jaw and perpetually sad eyes and the rarity of his heartfelt smiles.
“If this is true,” he finally says, quietly enough that only Leah will be able to hear him, “then I have done a terrible thing.”
That’s what she wanted to hear. It diffuses some of her anger. Some, not all of it, because admitting it won’t have made that not have happened. She won’t get back those days when she was really afraid for the one person in her life that she is certain she loves completely, days where they could have been happy instead. But why doesn’t she feel any better now? Why isn’t there any relief? She just feels crappy. She feels sad and drained and anxious.
“Yes,” she says, tone flat and ungiving, “you have.”
She was drinking coffee but it’s gone lukewarm when she cups her hands around the mug. She drinks it anyway. It’s keeping her awake and it’s something to keep her hands busy so she doesn’t clench them so hard her nails draw blood. She won’t look at him, her gaze is still out the window. “I don’t understand how this happened. I don’t understand what he did that was so bad.”
Morris purses his lips, rests his forearms on the table. He’s not looking at her, either. The scalding inflection of her voice is more than enough for him at the moment.
“The world is changing very fast now,” he says after some more thought, sighing. “Here in America, things are changing. You kids, you are a part of it. You expect it, you demand it. But sometimes it seems to me so shocking, how one thing and another happens, things my zeyde would not have dreamed of. Are they good, are they bad? What does God think? It is hard to find the answers quickly enough.”
“I don’t believe HaShem thinks any love that is real is wrong. It is real, and it is complete. He’s —”
She puts her hands in her lap and slumps, eyes on the table. It makes her look younger and a little ridiculous; she’s so tall you can even tell when she’s seated.
“You know, there are a lot of worse things he could have done. He did not hurt anyone. He did not hurt himself.”
When she says Michael hadn’t done anything to himself, Morris wants to relax—but she’d phrased it in the past tense, and so he remains anxious, though not yet prepared to question her about his son’s health directly.
“I know that,” he says, this anxiety flavoring his voice with impatience. “And maybe HaShem doesn’t think this is wrong, but does He offer His protection to...” He gestures at her with an open palm, lacking an accurate descriptor. “...children like you and Michael? What am I to think when a man can be jailed for this? When maybe someone will find out and then beat him to death in an alley somewhere?”
He leans on his elbow then, running a hand over his face. “That is not the life he should have, a dangerous and painful life.”
Her brows press together and she looks up. “And… you thought he would be safer alone? With nowhere to go?”
It’s not sarcastic, she is genuinely trying to understand.
“It was not a choice. It never is. If it wasn’t me, maybe then it’s a man, or maybe it’s not, I don’t know. But nobody ever wakes up one day and says, I want everyone to hate me.”
She wants another cigarette. She probably shouldn’t. Michael doesn’t like how much she smokes. She keeps touching her mug and then letting go of it.
“In the eyes of New York state, I am a woman.”
It’s difficult to listen to her, because the points she makes are the same things Morris has been trying to avert his gaze from for years, long before he and Michael had stopped speaking, long before Leah had ever come to New York. He’s harbored many suspicions about Michael—his sanity, his sexuality—even voiced some of them aloud now and then. But he could never manage to go beyond that: to ask himself, ‘if so, then what?’ It would become too real.
Finally, he looks at her. That, too, is difficult. She looks wounded and angry and worried. Accusatory. Tired. Like someone visiting at a hospital where the doctors are not doing their jobs.
“What will happen if the state finds you out?” he asks. “What will happen to him?”
“Then I suppose it will be annulled.” She loses the battle and lights another cigarette from a book of matches. “Or maybe we will be married for fifty years and be happy. Who can say?”
And she has a feeling, a very good feeling. Even though no one knows the danger like she does.
“I never lied to him. He always knew.”
She blows a cloud of smoke to the side, taps her cigarette on the side of the ashtray.
“I was born in Israel before it was Israel. Everyone around me was Jewish. We were German, you know. Before. When I left, I went through Lebanon, Turkey, Hungary, France… I don’t need to tell you what that was like. People look at me and they say ‘you don’t look Jewish’ like it’s a compliment, like I am supposed to say thank you. It was easier not to be, to be safe. But it was toxic to my soul.”
“To hide what you are...” Morris looks away again, leans back in the booth. He understands the parallel she’s drawing, must concede to its logic even if there is so much about her he can’t understand. “Yes. It is a torture. Our people endure it again and again. ...You, eh. You are saying you don’t have to... hide around my son, I realize this would have... meaning for you.” He pauses. “Really, I am surprised he can keep such a secret for so long. He is a very, eh, honest boy.”
“Oh, he’s terrible at it, he can only keep one at a time, everything else he tells everyone, all of my business.” She’s kvetching but she says it with such affection. They both do that. There is no annoying habit about him that she doesn’t at least secretly like.
This coffee is not doing it for her. She needs a glass of wine as big as her head.
“My point is that he should not have to hide either. I know it is — unavoidable sometimes. I don’t want him to lose his job or worse. But I want him to be happy. Sometimes there is risk.”
The familiarity and comfort with which Leah complains about Michael strikes Morris like the back of a hand. It’s as bad as having her spell out his own cruelties. Distance has allowed his son’s relationship to remain only a concept; this new proximity is bringing with it a dangerously relatable humanity.
“I know I have made mistakes,” he says, after thinking a moment on what Leah has told him, “and so maybe you won’t understand me now when I say this, but I worry for him. Every day I worry, every day I pray. Since the day I was his father. No one deserves to be happy more than him, but I am afraid maybe he doesn’t know how.” He looks Leah in the eye. “You have married him. Do you know where he comes from?”
“Dachau. I know.”
There is a lot she hasn’t been able to get out of Michael. She knows the overview; that he was born in a camp, that he was adopted when he was five. She’s heard some more intimate details, ones that scare her, keep her up at night, because as much as she tries to understand, thinks she might understand - she was born after the war. Her parents were refugees, but they never went to the camps. Any family that did died there. She probably doesn’t understand.
She smokes quietly for a bit, deep in thought.
He nods. It’s not too surprising that Michael would manage to tell her by now, though the specificity is noteworthy; Morris can’t remember the last time he’d heard his son say the name of his own birthplace. It’s been ages since the subject has come up at all between them, though it always lingers thickly in the air.
“In many ways I was not sure how to raise him. He was not like—“ He stops, presses his lips into a hard line for a second. “Not like other children I’d known. When I first saw him, he looked terrible. Like something Death forgot. I remember it often when I see his face. That kind of thing, it’s hard to forget.”
It hurts her to hear; her brows press together and she stares hard at the table. She doesn’t want to hear this. She shouldn’t be hearing this. She should wait to hear it from Michael, but he never talks; for someone who spends so much of his life yelling at people, who makes a living by coming up with words, for the most part he is without words for this.
“Why did you take him?” She’s always wondered why there was never a mother. Besides the one who died.
Morris is surprised by this question. He’s certain plenty of people have wondered over the years why a single man would take in a little boy and raise him alone, but most aren’t forward enough to ask. On the occasions when someone has been, Morris has given them vague, overly-general answers. This isn’t going to work that way, though. Leah isn’t just an acquaintance, nor a friend who will let it slide for privacy’s sake. And she’s not someone he can ignore, not anymore.
He sighs once again, a heavy one. He hasn’t spoken about this in so long.
“I will tell you,” he says, “as long as you do not tell Michael.”
She has to really think about this. Her instinct is to tell Michael everything. She rarely lies to him, though she’s been on the fence about whether or not to tell him about this meeting. She certainly brought it up but she didn’t mention it was happening or that it would be today. She hates keeping things from him but sometimes it’s necessary, like when it’s something she doesn’t want everyone else to know, because he really can only keep one secret at a time. But it’s about him, she feels like he has a right to know this.
But maybe it’s not her place to tell him. Maybe it’s his right to hear it from his father directly, if he wants to know.
“All right,” she says finally.
Part of Morris had been hoping she’d refuse, that she’d unwittingly give him an out, but no such luck. He clasps his hands together loosely on the table, takes a moment for himself.
“Before the war, I had a family. A wife and a little girl. We hid, tried to escape the country, but we became separated and they were taken away. I don’t know if he understood, but when he was small, I told Michael about my wife. I cannot ever tell him about my daughter. I hope the reason is clear to you.”
Leah lets out a long breath, puts her elbows on the table and her head between her hands. “Yes,” she says. He’d feel like a replacement. She couldn’t do that to him. She can see why he doesn’t want to do that to him either.
“But you need to talk to him,” she says, head up and looking at him again. “I can barely get anything out of him. He tries, and maybe he says one thing and then he goes away somewhere I can’t follow. I don’t know how much he knows and I don’t know anything. Only what he has told me.”
“What could there be to know?” Morris replies, something sad and haunted coloring every part of him, from the slump of his shoulders to the gravel in his voice. “What could asking do but hurt him? He was a child in a camp, for five years. Who can understand him but God?”
“He needs. People.” She’s emphatic about this. Her temper is rising again. “He can’t be alone in this. Not talking about it, letting him wallow in it, to think that he is totally alone, and unknown, and unwanted - that’s hurting him. I know. I see it all the time. He has no one else. No one should live like that.”
“All he says to me is these stories about aliens,” Morris protests. “I don’t know what to do when he tells me such things. Maybe it is not me he wants to talk to. Maybe the rabbi would be better. He loves the rabbi.”
“You’re his father!” She’s raised her voice; other people are pausing and glancing over. She doesn’t notice. She’s burning holes in his head with her eyes, gesturing emphatically. “He needs you! Where do you get off, trying to pawn this off to someone else? The rabbi? Are you serious? The one you took in the divorce? Why do you think he should know more about your son than you do?”
Leah’s outburst shocks him. He can feel the eyes of others on the both of them, hopes they don’t belong to anyone he knows. He’s irate at her disrespect; Morris is not a man who is used to being yelled at, especially not in public and by someone less than half his age. The embarrassment burns. What she’s actually yelling burns even more. He’d rather address the former than the latter.
“Quiet down!” he hisses fiercely, red in the face. “I did not come here to have the whole neighborhood involved in this—!”
“I will not be quiet! I have been, for years I have done nothing, I say to myself, it’s not your business, let it alone, and it only gets worse. I cannot believe you. Any of you. You don’t even try to understand. It’s hard, so you give up, you make it someone else’s problem. You throw us away and expect us to forgive you when you change your mind. Well, some of us don’t get to give up when it gets hard, we’ve got to live with it. If you cared about that man you would make an effort. Try harder.”
She crushes her cigarette in an ashtray angrily, reaching for her purse. “This is stupid, I don’t know why I am doing this. It was a bad idea.”
Morris is speechless; his lips are pressed tightly together, entire face pinched in frustration, breath huffing hotly and impatiently through his nostrils. He feels more thoroughly chastised than he may ever have as a child. His embarrassment is trying doggedly to transform into an overwhelming amount of shame, held back only by his pride and denial.
Everyone in the café is staring now, of course, and he can’t stay here, but he’s not going to let the conversation end at that. Leah stands and leaves, and he follows her out onto the sidewalk: a place both more public and less observed.
“Listen to me,” he calls after her, demanding. “I did mistakes, I know this. Maybe I have been a terrible father to him always. But you should know this: no one tells you how to do these things. No one can tell you what it’s like to spend thirty years shaping a life! There are no words for it. And when your own family is dead, and his family is dead, there is no one to help you. Say whatever else you want, but now you want to mock me because it is hard? Because I did not try hard enough? You raise a boy to a man and then show me how you did nothing wrong.”
“Well, I can’t,” she snaps, turning around with her face awash in anger and guilt. “And you know that.”
It’s a mitzvah she will never be able to fulfill. There’s not a day that goes by where she doesn’t think about that. It doesn’t matter that Michael was adopted, that’s not what they were commanded to do, and it’s not fair.
“What do you mean?” Morris replies, frowning, impatient. He genuinely doesn’t know what she’s getting at. “Is this also something about Michael?”
Leah shakes her head incredulously and turns back around, digging into her purse and pulling out yet another cigarette which she lights, dipping her head behind her cupped hands to shield the flame from the wind. This one smells funny. She and Michael have had this conversation and it only hurt both of them.
“—ah, that,” Morris mumbles to himself.
Just after he’d opened his mouth to ask, Morris had realized what she’d meant. He fumbles around with the in-between moment, trying to decide whether to feel stupid or not, asking himself what it means that her first thought hadn’t been his own. As clumsy as he might feel, though, he finds he still doesn’t truly understand Leah’s reaction.
“But no, no, what do you mean? You act as though I am saying something cruel to you. How do you think I am Michael’s father? Magic?“
“We can’t.”
It’s not just about her not being able to carry a child, even though that hurts her the most most of the time — it’s a lot of things. It’s everything. Children are out of the question. She’s too sick, and Michael — well, Michael freaked out.
And say the state does figure out their situation. It’s fine if it’s just the two of them, they made a conscious decision to take that risk, but if a child were involved?
She has her arms tightly crossed over her chest, her head turned away, eyes on the ground. She’s not explaining this to him. She has no obligation to.
With no explanation, Morris has no ability to understand. He doesn’t know about her illness. She’s just told him Michael has nothing to do with it. The tenuous legality of their marriage, yes, that’s on his mind, but if it were only that, surely she’d just say so.
The subject is thoroughly blocked off, and he hadn’t even meant to ask about it. The rest of what he said has gone ignored. Stubbornly, he backtracks and pursues it.
“So what I try to tell you before, is this all it means to you?” He sounds disheartened.
She pinches the bridge of her nose again. She wanted to end this conversation because it’s obvious it’s not going anywhere.
“Nobody ever expected you to be perfect. All parents make mistakes. God knows mine were not perfect, and I do not hate them for making mistakes. But you cannot say that you tried your best from one side of your mouth and from the other, that it is too hard to listen to him, that someone else should do it.”
Morris clenches his jaw. It stings because it’s true. It was a cowardly thought to have, the thought that Michael might be better off talking to someone else. Even if he’s already made a mess of things with his son, even if trying to bring up something so painful makes it all even worse, Morris is the only father Michael has. Neither of them can escape that.
“…You are right about that,” he admits after a few tense, unhappy moments. He holds his hands out, palms up—a put-out surrender. “Okay? About that you are right. I will talk to him. I don’t know how, I—” He sighs, shifting from a mixture of annoyance and shame to concern. “I will have to think back a long time. But I will do it.”
She wipes her eyes on the back if her wrist. She can’t believe she’s getting this emotional, not about this. She never gets mad, she’d rather die than make a scene, and yet here she is.
“That’s all I wanted.” For someone other than her to care, to do something. She’s trying her best but she can’t bear this alone. She can’t be his only support, not when she’s sick, too. He deserves more.
Leah’s tears cool Morris’ lingering irritation with surprising speed. His hands go from palms-up to palms facing her, a hesitant gesture of calming, before dropping to his sides. His shame is complete. In this moment, it’s hard not to feel despicable.
“Eh, look now...” he begins to say, awkward in his new honesty, “I am sorry about this. It should not be like this anymore.”
“No. It should not.” She puts her forehead in her hand, still visibly upset, but trying to pull it together. Now she hates that this conversation is happening outside, not that anyone cares, or is listening. “I just — do not want him to be hurt again.”
“I don’t want it either.” Morris folds his arms, feeling exposed. He, too, wishes he could sit down inside again now that things aren’t so heated.
“Perhaps I should make the promise to you, then.” He shrugs and frowns, looking away. “I made it to myself and it wasn’t enough.”
She crosses her arms over her chest, sniffs, tries to stop her stupid eyes from watering. At least now she knows what she’s like when she gets angry, really angry, about something deeply personal. It’s different from getting angry at the government or the police.
“I will hold you accountable. I will not let this happen again.” She doesn’t know what, exactly, she’d do in the event that it does. Just that she’d do something.
A few minutes ago, Morris would have tried to turn it back around on her. He would have wanted her to admit she was responsible too, told her she wasn’t allowed to hurt Michael either, been defensive and incredulous. But he realizes now, after seeing Leah cry with worry, that this isn’t the time—and that in fact, there is no time. There isn’t any time left to waste lingering in the shadow of his own fear.
“Alright,” he says, looking at her. “Then it will not.
“I can’t say I really understand it,” he continues after some hesitation, “the two of you... But I know where I stand now. You are his future. It would be easy for me to turn into his past. Maybe you can explain to me, so I can talk to him better.”
Leah looks down at her feet, arms still crossed tightly over her chest, brows furrowed. How does anyone explain their relationship? How is theirs different from anyone else’s? It is, obviously, but not, she’s ever thought, in ways that matter. And Michael, though he is sometimes hard to understand, has never been hard to love.
“It feels complete,” she says after a moment. “It’s what God wants. He is my bashert.”
Morris takes a deep breath, looks at the person standing in front of him: young, sad, a couple inches taller than him, long hair dyed blonde, willowy-thin with bare skin showing everywhere. This is the person he’d once blamed for taking his son away from him and away from God. But Michael is, and was, a grown man—however lost and confused he might seem sometimes—and it was his own decision to go with Leah. Once Morris had accepted that, he wondered if Michael had also, then, decided to forsake God.
But if this is truly what HaShem wants, if it is bashert (and, Morris supposes, wouldn’t someone with sense avoid all this trouble if it weren’t?), then he has only gotten closer. It’s not the kind of blessed union Morris was raised to recognize, but God has protected Michael in many strange ways.
“Maybe we can go back inside,” he says. “I want to hear about it.”
She kind of doesn’t want to, she wants to go home and crawl towards the bottom of a bottle of wine, but it would be rude to leave now. So she heads back inside and sits down again with a new cup of coffee. She’s looking slightly off to the side, her face drawn and tired.
“We were friends first,” she says. “He was the first person in this country who listened to me speak and wasn’t just watching my lips move.”
Morris has a coffee of his own this time. It makes the thing feel less forced. It had been tempting to get a bagel as well, he’s hungry, but he can’t relax enough to be that casual yet.
“He never had friends before,” he says. “I was very surprised when he told me he went to some parties to see someone he knew. Even when he was in school he would not do things like this. Maybe a few times he would visit some other boy’s house, but... it would not go so well.”
Truth is, she’s been dying to hear about his childhood and adolescence, and he’s not been very forthcoming. She can see why but she still wants to know things. She hadn’t thought it would happen because Morris hates her.
“I got that impression. He was always kind to me. I never understood why no one seemed to like him. He is a good man.”
“Yes. He is.” Morris looks at Leah thoughtfully. “He has always been a very sensitive boy. Most of us, we are numb to all the evil in the world, but it seems to hurt him very much. Perhaps this is why people get so uneasy with him. He makes you think about everything you have done.”
“He is sensitive. And he gets angry, so I think people don’t understand that this comes from a place of hurting. I worry.”
She puts her elbow on the table and rests her chin in her hand, her brows pushed together.
“We talk a lot but I think there are some things he can’t tell me. Not because I would not try to understand, but…”
Morris takes a sip of his drink, then nods to himself. This is something he needs to do, needs to offer, for Michael’s sake. “What do you want to know?” he asks.
“I know only an outline. That he was… born there, and adopted when he was five. That it was hard, obviously. He does not say much beyond that. He does not talk about himself very much.”
“Well,” he says, shifting in his seat as though preparing himself for something, “after the war I was... very sad. Very lonely. I did not know what to do. My home was gone, my people were gone. Like your parents, I could not go back to the Old Country. I did not trust all these armies coming in, even though they were setting everyone free—what does it mean, after all, to be saved by the Russians?—but I then I heard that the Red Cross from Sweden was rescuing many women from camps and treating their wounds. I thought, maybe this is a good place to go. They had let hundreds of us into the country during the war. Maybe friends would be there. Things seemed so hopeless, I thought... It’s strange, you know, I knew my wife and my little girl were gone, but I thought maybe somehow they could have ended up there. Maybe the Swedes had found them.
“So I went, and I asked around, and found one of these places where many women were staying. None of them was my wife, of course. I found an orphanage, and none of the children was my daughter, but one of them was Michael. I hadn’t gone there thinking I was going to make myself a father again, but...” He sighs, gaze unfocused, mind far away. “I could not leave him there. He was not going to survive like that, anyone could see it. The nurses said he would hardly eat. They didn’t know what to do with him.”
Leah leans back in her seat, her arms resting on the table in front of her, staring at her hands. She’s listening, but she’s thinking, too, trying to imagine this. She was born less than a year after the war ended but that small span of time might as well be an unbridgeable gap between her and the people from Before it. And Michael is so firmly rooted in the Before, sometimes it feels like there’s too much space between them, a space she can’t reach across.
She thinks sometimes, what would happen if they did have kids. Would she know, immediately, that they were hers? Or would her worst fears come true and she would still think of them as someone else’s child? She doesn’t know.
Morris takes another drink of his coffee, clearing his throat a bit. “There was not much of a process for taking him with me. He had no papers, after all. He did not even have a name he could tell anyone. The nurses said a woman who’d been with him had known a woman who had known his mother, but that his mother and her friend were dead and she was not sure what he was called. I thought surely he had to know his own name, he was old enough for that, but he would not say. So I thought about it on the way to America.
“I decided to come here because Europe had too many memories, and it felt too dangerous. Even Sweden was not good, we did not stay there for long. Michael was very scared while we traveled, I had to be very careful with him. He did not talk very much and he was very weak. Much of the time I would just pick him up and carry him. He weighed nothing. I remember he was so ill on the boat I worried he would die before we got here.
“Finally, though, in New York, he started eating. Ice cream, he loved that.” The corner of his mouth pulls upward, just a bit.
It hurts her to think about him like that, fragile, sick, hanging on to life by a thread. Of course she had known it must have been like that, but she had never let her mind go to that particular dark place.
“I can’t get him to leave New York,” she says. Her hands are cupped around her mug. “We went once, to California. He hated it, I think. He thinks something terrible will happen if he leaves.”
“Mmm. He is very attached to this city. I am too—it is an important place for our people—but I don’t think that is why he feels that way.” Morris frowns, thinking for a moment. “In this city... well, honestly, it worries me, but he feels safe enough to walk around the streets in the middle of the night. The only other place he has lived, they tried to kill him. It was a relief to both of us to be here, but I imagine especially to him.”
He leans forward, digging around in the pocket of his pants, and then settles back, wallet now in his hands. “Here,” he says, opening it and flipping through its contents until he finds what he’s looking for: a small collection of four photos, all in black and white, quite well-worn. Two are of a very young boy, small and thin, with an unruly mop of black curls and big, dark, frightened eyes. His clothes are much too big for him, and on another child the effect would be comical or cute, but in one of the photos he looks slightly too unhealthy for it to be funny, and in both there’s something about his expression that wards off the usual reaction one might have to a photo of a little kid.
In the third picture he’s older, maybe twelve or thirteen, looking awkward and shy and slightly grumpy, like he’s been interrupted. He’s at shul, wearing a yarmulke. A text is in front of him. The final picture is a high school portrait. Michael has grown into his looks, his hair is somewhat tamed, and he has a formal shirt on that maybe isn’t even wrinkled. He still can’t manage to smile, though. He seems disquieted and sad, and maybe a little afraid of the camera. He’s impossible to get a decent picture of.
She puts her hand over her mouth. It’s one thing to know it, another to see it, to make it concrete. Of course he’s cute, she knew that would be the case. It’s just strange to see this and know that there’s no way to reach him there. She doesn’t want to think about gaps between them. She could recognise him by the eyes alone, they never changed.
It makes them hard to look at. But she doesn’t want to look away, because what if it goes away forever? What if she never gets him to speak to her about this?
She takes a deep breath that comes out as a sad sigh. She can speak to him now, she can look at him, touch him, but she can never reach back there and make it hurt any less.
She wasn’t going to show him this because she’s still furious that he never came to their wedding, never even spoke to Michael for three years, but. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a small photograph, holding it between her fingers for a moment, hesitant. Then she slides it across the table and says nothing.
It’s her favourite picture from their wedding. Most of her friends are artists, a good chunk of those are photographers, and she let them all have free reign the whole night because it saved them money on hiring someone and she wanted pictures. It also meant candids, like this - the picture is cropped and slightly blown up so that Michael is looking at something out of frame, his face lit up with a smile. It’s the only picture she has of him smiling completely un-self-consciously, as he’s not aware he’s being observed. He’s wearing the world’s most rumpled tuxedo (the tie is missing). Even in black and white you can tell his face is flushed and bright.
Morris picks it up and looks at it for a long, long time.
He leans forward on his elbows. One of his hands slides over his mouth. His eyebrows knit together.
Eventually he puts the photo down in front of him—gently, like he doesn’t want to hurt it—and covers his face. His eyes are hot. He is a grown man, an old man, a man who has been through a lot in his life, and he is not going to weep in public, in front of his son’s spouse for crying out loud. But seeing Michael like that, so full of joy, so alive in a way Morris thought would never be possible—he feels it like a physical grip on his heart, pulling and squeezing, nails digging in. The cruelty of the fact that he wasn’t there becomes momentarily unbearable.
“I consider myself a rational person,” she says. “Mostly. But I struggle with the thought that this is a coincidence. It seems to me like too many unlikely things had to happen. I can’t… believe in a God who would allow the Shoah to happen, but — there is a reason, I think, that I took the wrong bus one day, and he had an extra dollar. There is a reason I came to New York, and did not stay in Paris, or London. There is a reason I was not… wanted where I was. There is a reason a man walked into a random Swedish orphanage and walked out with a little boy.”
“It’s just… I don’t know. Some things just feel fated. …I know I am just cherry-picking, overlooking the bad things. It is just how I feel.”
She leans back, glances up briefly. “You can keep it.”
It’s a bit longer before Morris heaves his breath out and drags his hands back down his face. His gaze is right back on the picture again, like it never left, like he’d been staring at it right through his palms.
“I had just been thinking to myself,” he says, voice gravelly and subdued, “out there, when you said he was your basherter... I thought, God watches over him very carefully, doesn’t He? Sometimes it is hard to think this way, but... I think God must love Michael very much. He is a very special boy. It must mean something that he was given to you like this.”
“He is.” Obviously she thinks so or she wouldn’t have married him. His mere presence on this earth is a miracle. She doesn’t know what life would be like if it hadn’t happened. She supposes everyone who’s in love thinks that the universe conspired to make it happen, but this feels different. It feels more significant and she can’t divorce it from her belief in God.
“I only want for him to be happy. I think he is.”
Morris nods slowly. “I have never seen him look like this,” he says, picking up the photo again. “Not in twenty-five years. Seeing something like this, it doesn’t matter what I think anymore.”
He looks at her. There’s a great amount of sadness and exhaustion around his eyes. His age is more apparent than usual. “Thank you for showing it to me. It is a good gift. It wouldn’t be right just to take it from you, though, so you should have one of those.” He gestures toward the old photos he’d taken from his wallet. “One from when he was small.”
“I can’t,” she says, shaking her head. She wants to, of course, but she has a million pictures of Michael and she can’t imagine there are that many from his childhood. “You should keep it.”
“If you won’t take it, then borrow it,” he insists. “Go and use the photocopy at his work. I won’t take no for an answer.”
Well, he has a point there. So she takes one of the pictures and puts it in her purse. “Thank you.” And now she’s going to have to tell Michael about this meeting because chances are he’s going to find it. But it would be nice to have more pictures around, though she’s not sure how he’d feel about this one. He’s not exactly enamoured with his childhood, for obvious reasons.
Morris follows suit and puts the wedding photo in his wallet, along with the three remaining photos from Michael’s youth. He feels a bit bad accepting her gift, hopes she has other pictures of Michael’s smiling face to keep for herself, but he doesn’t have it in him to turn this offer down. It’s much too precious.
He finishes off his coffee in a few long swallows, then says, “Perhaps this is enough excitement for one day. I think we are both tired, nu? I will call him soon. Do not worry.”
It definitely did not go as catastrophically bad as she imagined it would. In fact she’s a little stunned that she might have actually fixed this. She knows enough about Michael to know that he would never say these things to his father, for many reasons, but they needed to be said nonetheless. And now maybe he understands. It won’t fix what’s already been done, but she has no intention on leaving anytime soon. They’re looking at maybe fifty years ahead of them. Three years in comparison is not much.••˚••
Still when she gets home the first thing she does is get trashed. They don’t keep much alcohol in the house because Michael doesn’t drink and she’s not really supposed to but she gets into the bottle of red they keep for shabbos and drinks the whole thing. By the time Michael returns she’s long since passed out on the bed, empty bottle on the floor, the record player playing Joplin on repeat.
Though it used to happen more frequently, it’s unusual to find Leah in this state nowadays. Michael lets his bag and jacket drop by the bedroom door and climbs into bed with her, shoes and all, immediately concerned. Though hesitant to disturb her, in the end he’s too worried to wait.
“Hey,” he says, hand going to her shoulder. “Leah. Hey. Wake up. Wake up.”
Leah moans and buries her head under a pillow. So she’s not dead, at least. Her hair is a tangled rat’s nest and she didn’t change out of her clothes, resulting in her being extremely rumpled.
“I’m sleeping,” she mumbles. It’s five thirty.
“No you’re not,” Michael argues. Sometimes she talks when she’s sleeping, but she doesn’t say that. “What’s wrong? Something bad happened, I can tell. My stomach is doing that thing.”
“Mmmdon’tyell,” she moans, pulling the pillow tighter over her head. He’s not yelling, she’s just hungover. She didn’t even drink that much. Maybe she bought extra-alcoholic wine. “I’m asleep. Good night.” It’s still five thirty. It’s not even dark out yet and won’t be for hours. Not that it’s unusual for her to take hours-long naps during the day.
“Hey!” He rocks her shoulder impatiently. “Come on! Leah. You’re gonna wear that record out. Don’t do this, it feels weird with Joplin playing.”
“Doooon’t,” she groans. One of her arms flops over the side of the bed, reaching for the bottle. It’s rolled out of her reach and it’s empty anyway. She thought long and hard about not telling him, but he would find out anyway, and anyway, they don’t keep secrets from each other. They just don’t. Maybe that’s why this marriage is working. “I yelled at your dad and then I got drunk.”
“You—what?” Michael’s eyes go wide and his brows pinch together in disbelief. “You yelled? You yelled at my father? Why? I—I mean, you mentioned about maybe... But not yelling, or—what? Shit. Did he say anything awful? He did, didn’t he? Shit. I’m sorry. This is why I told you it wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t want this to happen again. Fuck, I need to turn this off.”
He gets up, one hand knotted tightly in his hair, and takes the needle off the record. His heart is banging around beneath his ribs, Morris’ words from three years ago echoing off the sides of his skull. His other arm winds tightly around his middle, and he stands there, turned away from Leah, rocking slightly back and forth.
“Please don’t yell,” she pleads. Since there’s absolutely zero chance of her getting back to sleep she reluctantly struggles to sit up, a hand on her aching forehead. She really shouldn’t have drank all that wine. She’s a little dizzy, she probably should have had something to eat today. Oh, right. That probably explains it.
“It’s not what you think,” she says.
Leah doesn’t usually tell him to quiet down. It makes his stomach tighten up nervously. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” he repeats under his breath, self-conscious.
Then, “I don’t know what that means.”
Leah puts her elbows on her knees and hunches over, head in her hands. Her head is pounding. She’s starting to not be able to drink like she did when she was twenty.
She’s not sure exactly what to say. She had, she realises, given absolutely no thought as to what to tell him, or how. She’d thought she’d have more time, for one, and that she’d sleep for longer. But this had also been a little impulsive, and how does she even summarize that conversation anyway? It had gotten a little personal, even though he was the subject of it.
She looks at him without turning her head. “He said he loves you and he made a mistake.”
Michael stops shifting his weight, standing still and quiet as he waits for the meaning of her words to sink in fully. If this weren’t Leah, he’d be angry right now. He’d be furious and disappointed and hurt, having been told something he wanted to hear so much and knowing it could only be a lie. She would never do that, though, and that makes this hard in a different way. That means he has to believe it.
He turns back around slowly and meets her gaze. He feels lost in his shock. His fingers loosen distractedly, like he’s forgotten he has hands. “He said that to you?”
“Yes.” It seems like something he should hear directly from the source first, but they can’t have this conversation without her telling him what his father said. Anyway, maybe if he hears this now he’ll go into future conversations not feeling so defensive. And abandoned. And angry.
“He said you are the most important thing in his life. And that he regrets what he did.”
She rubs her hands over her face, tired. Still a little drunk. Hungover at the same time. Not fair. “Can I get some coffee?”
Michael’s throat tightens. His arms fall limply to his sides and he blinks a few times like he can’t see clearly. His focus shifts to a point just past Leah, or maybe through her—to an elsewhere and an elsewhen. Blood is trying to rush to his head, but his clothes are too constricting, he feels like he’s suffocating, he can’t think.
“Yeah,” he mumbles belatedly. “Yeah, I’ll just...”
Dazedly, he wanders out of the bedroom and into the main apartment. He takes his time on the way to the kitchen, stopping to toe his shoes and socks off, get rid of his belt, and shed his tie and shirt. Left only in his trousers and underclothes, he proceeds, breathing slightly easier but mind now buzzing much too loudly. It sounds like nothing, like static on the radio. It looks like that fuzzy ‘snow’ on the television.
He mechanically collects the parts required to brew coffee the way Leah likes it, goes through the motions distantly as he tries to process everything, and some time later returns to her with a mug. (He can’t have coffee in the evening. It only ends in misery for everyone.) Once she’s taken it, he settles by her side, lying on his back with his arms wrapped around himself again, staring at the ceiling.
“What happened?” he asks.
“I wanted to speak to him, to know that… what happened before would not happen again. Things got heated. I got mad… I told him — I said there are things he should talk to you about. You should talk to each other about… I don’t know. I don’t know.”
She cups the mug between her hands, seated on the edge of the bed with her feet pointed slightly inwards.
“I think maybe he understands now. I don’t know.”
Leah is being incredibly vague, and Michael’s not oblivious to it. Listening to her describe the conversation is like looking at a photo with the face cut out. You know it’s a person, you can see certain details in the background, but there’s no way of recognizing the subject. And it’s frightening, that hole in the paper. A nothing where you’re so used to a something.
His jaw clenches and relaxes, clenches and relaxes.
“Talk to each other…” His dismissive sadness is colored by confusion. “I dunno, Leah. Already he calls and I got no idea what to say. What am I supposed to do if he just—”
—apologizes and says he loves me? His throat closes on the words, teeth biting down like an extra protective measure. He hugs himself more tightly.