Here I Am (52 page)

HOW TO PLAY LATE MEMORIES

My earliest memory is of my father handling a dead squirrel.

My last memory of the old house is leaving the key in the mailbox in an envelope with a stamp and no destination or return address.

My last memory of my mother is spoon-feeding her yogurt. I reflexively made the airplane sound, though I hadn't done that for fifteen years. I was too embarrassed to acknowledge it with an apology. She winked, I was sure.

My last memory of Argus is hearing his breathing deepen, and feeling his pulse slow, and then watching myself reflected in his eyes as they rolled back.

Despite the texts and e-mails that we have continued to send back and forth, my last memory of Tamir is from Islip. I told him, “Stay.” He asked, “Then who would go?” And I said, “No one.” And he asked, “Then what would save it?” And I said, “Nothing.” “Just let it go?” he asked.

My last memory of my family before the earthquake is by the front door, my parents about to take Benjy for the night, Sam and Julia about to leave for Model UN. Benjy asked, “What if I don't miss you?” Of course he didn't know what was about to happen, but how could I remember it any way other than as prophetic?

My last memory of my father is dropping him and his girlfriend at Dulles for his bucket-list trip to the Warsaw Ghetto—his Cooperstown—and my saying, “Who'd have thought it? Taking a shiksa to the Reverse Diaspora Prom?” I always felt that he withheld his laughter from me, but that got a good one. He patted my cheek and said, “Life amazes.” Of course he didn't know he wouldn't make it onto the plane, but how could I remember it any way other than as ironic?

My last memory of being married to Julia: the burnished handle of the snack drawer; the seam where the slabs of soapstone met; the Special Award for Bravery sticker on the underside of the island's overhang, given to Max for what no one knew was his last pulled tooth, a sticker Argus saw many times every day, and only Argus ever saw. Julia said: “It's way too late in the conversation for that.”

HOW TO PLAY “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”

Max asked to have a bar mitzvah. Even if it was the expression of something subterranean, even if it was some kind of hypersophisticated act
of aggression, it still pleased Julia and me. The year of study went off without a hitch or complaint, the service was beautiful (Julia and I stood together at the ark, which felt good and right), the party was themeless and genuinely fun, and he banked enough savings bonds to buy something pretty great just as soon as they matured to their face value in twenty years, at which point twice as much would seem like half as much.

Max's portion was Vayishlach, in which Jacob—the last of the patriarchs—is assaulted by an unknown assailant in the middle of the night. Jacob wrestles him down and refuses to let go, demanding a blessing of him. The assailant—an angel, or God himself—asks, “What is your name?” As Jacob holds on to the man with all his strength, he answers, “Jacob.” (
Jacob
means “heel-grabber”—he grabbed the heel of his older brother, Esau, as he was being born, wanting to be the first out.) Then the angel says, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel—which means ‘wrestles God.' ”

From the bimah, with a poise far beyond his years or mine, Max said, “Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with Isaac for the blessing, with Laban for the blessing, and in each case he eventually prevailed. He wrestled because he recognized that the blessings were worth the struggle. He knew that you only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.

“
Israel
, the historical Jewish homeland, literally means ‘wrestles God.' Not ‘praises God,' or ‘reveres God,' or ‘loves God,' not even ‘obeys God.' In fact, it is the
opposite
of ‘obeys God.' Wrestling is not only our condition, it is our identity, our name.”

That last sentence sounded a lot like Julia.

“But what
is
wrestling?”

That sounded like Dr. Silvers.

“There is Greco-Roman wrestling, WWF wrestling, arm wrestling, sumo wrestling, lucha libre wrestling, wrestling with ideas, wrestling with faith…They all have one thing in common: closeness.”

And there I was, the intended recipient of his speech, sitting so close to my ex-wife that the fabric of our clothing touched, on a pew with children half of whose lives I was missing.

“You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of,” Max said.

“A Jewish fist can do more than masturbate and hold a pen,” my dad once said.

“To see your lifeline you have to let go,” I pulled from a fortune cookie one Christmas.

Max kept getting smarter and smarter. Julia and I had always assumed that Sam was the brains of the bunch—that Max was the artist and Benjy would be perpetually adorable—but it was Max who took chess seriously (he placed third in the D.C.-area sixteen-and-unders), Max who elected to have a Mandarin tutor twice a week (while his brain was still “supple”), and Max who was accepted to Harvard after his junior year of high school. (Not until he chose to apply a year early did I realize that all that extra credit—those supplemental courses, that summer school—was a way to be away more, and get away sooner.)

“Closeness,” he said, surveying the congregation. “It's easy to
be
close, but almost impossible to
stay
close. Think about friends. Think about hobbies. Even ideas. They're close to us—sometimes so close we think they are part of us—and then, at some point, they aren't close anymore. They go away. Only one thing can keep something close over time: holding it there. Grappling with it. Wrestling it to the ground, as Jacob did with the angel, and refusing to let go. What we don't wrestle we let go of. Love isn't the absence of struggle. Love
is
struggle.”

That sounded like the person I wanted to be, but couldn't be. It sounded like Max.

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

I heard the shutter before I saw the photographer. It was the first and only shot of my war.

“Hey,” I said, stomping toward him. “What the hell are you doing?”

Why the hell was I so upset?

“I'm here for the
Times,”
he said, showing me the press pass hanging from his neck.

“You're supposed to be here?”

“The consulate gave me authorization, if that's what you're asking.”

“Well, I didn't give you authorization to take a picture of me.”

“You want me to delete the photo?” he asked, neither assertive nor conciliatory.

“It's fine,” I said, “but don't take any more.”

“I don't want a problem. I'm happy to delete it.”

“Keep it,” I said. “But no more.”

He walked off to take pictures of other groups. Some of them posed. Some were either unaware of his presence or unwilling to recognize it. My knee-jerk anger—if that's even what it was—surprised me. But harder to explain was my insistence that he keep the photo he'd taken but not take any more. What two ways was I trying to have it?

My mind wandered to all those years of school portraits: the licked palms wrestling cowlicks under the pretense of a loving stroke; letting the boys watch a cartoon while sliding them into handsome, uncomfortable clothes; clumsy efforts to subliminally communicate the value of a “natural” smile. The pictures always came out the same: a forced grin with unparted lips, eyes vacantly gazing into the haze—something from the Diane Arbus scrap pile. But I loved them. I loved the truth they conveyed: that kids aren't yet able to fake it. Or they aren't yet able to conceal their disingenuousness. They're wonderful smilers, the best; but they're the very worst fake smilers. The inability to fake a smile defines childhood. When Sam thanked me for his room in my new house, he became a man.

One year Benjy was genuinely disturbed by his school portrait, unwilling to believe that the child in the picture was either him or not him. Max took it upon himself to prod Benjy's distress, explaining to him that everyone has a living self and a dead self existing in parallel—“kind of like your own ghost”—and that the only time we ever get to see our dead selves is in school portraits. Soon enough, Benjy was crying. In an effort to calm him, I took out my bar mitzvah album. We'd already looked through several dozen photos when Benjy said, “But I thought Sam's bar mitzvah was in the future.”

At my bar mitzvah party, relatives, friends of my parents, and complete strangers handed me envelopes with savings bonds. When my suit's jacket pockets started to strain, I'd give the envelopes to my mother, who put them in the purse under her chair. My father and I tabulated the “righteous plunder” at the kitchen table that night. I can't remember the figure, but I remember that it was evenly divisible by eighteen.

I remember the albumin archipelago on the salmon. I remember how the singer smudged
ve-nismecha
in “Hava Nagila,” like a kid singing the alphabet, believing that
l-m-n-o
is one letter. I remember being lifted in the chair, high above the Jewish masses, the coronation of the One-Eyed
Man. Back on the parquet, my father told me to go spend a few minutes with my grandfather. I venerated him, as I was taught to, but it was never not a chore.

“Hi, Grandpa,” I said, offering the top of my head for his kiss.

“I put some money into your college account,” he said, patting the empty chair beside him.

“Thank you.”

“Did Dad tell you how much?”

“No.”

He looked to both sides, beckoned my ear to his lips, and whispered, “One thousand four hundred forty dollars.”

“Wow,” I said, reestablishing a comfortable distance. I had no idea if that many dollars justified that presentation, but I knew what was expected of me: “That's so incredibly generous. Thank you.”

“But also this,” he said, straining to get a grocery bag from the ground. He placed it on the table and removed something wrapped in a napkin. I assumed it was a roll—he often stashed rolls in napkins in bags—but then I felt its weight. “Go on,” he said. Inside was a camera, a Leica.

“Thank you,” I said, thinking the gift was a camera.

“Benny and I went back after the war, in 1946. We thought maybe our family had found a way to survive. At least someone. But there was no one. A neighbor, one of my father's friends, saw us and brought us to his house. He had kept some of our things, in case we ever came back. He told us that even though the war was over, it wasn't safe, and that we had to go. So we went. I only took a few things, and this was one of them.”

“Thank you.”

“I sewed money and photographs into the lining of the jacket I wore on the boat. I was so worried that someone would try to steal my things. I promised myself I wouldn't take it off, but it was so hot, too hot. I slept with it in my arms, and one morning when I woke up, my suitcase was still at my side, but the jacket was gone. That's why I don't blame the person who took it. If he'd been a thief, he would have taken the suitcase. He was just cold.”

“But you said it was hot.”

“It was hot for me.” He rested his finger on the shutter release as if it were the trigger of a land mine. “I have only one picture from Europe. It's of me. It was marking my place in my diary in my suitcase. The pictures of my brothers and parents were sewn into that jacket. Gone. But this is the camera that took them.”

“Where's your diary?”

“I let it go.”

What would I have seen in those lost pictures? What would I have seen in the diary? Benjy didn't recognize himself in his school portrait, but what did I see when I looked at it? And what did I see when I looked at the sonogram of Sam? An idea? A human?
My
human? Myself? An idea of myself? I had to believe in him, and I did. I never stopped believing in him, only in myself.

In his bar mitzvah speech, Sam said, “We didn't ask for a nuclear weapon, and didn't want a nuclear weapon, and nuclear weapons are, in pretty much every way, horrible. But there's a reason people have them, and it's to never have to use them.”

Billie shouted something I didn't understand, but I understood the flicker of happiness in Sam's eyes. The tension in the room redistributed itself across paper plates and plastic cups; Sam's speech divided and re-divided into small talk. I brought him some food and told him, “You're so much better than I was at your age. Or am now.”

“It's not a competition,” he said.

“No, it's progress. Come with me for a second.”

“Where?”

“What do you mean, where? Mount Moriah, of course.”

I led him upstairs, to my dresser, and took the Leica from the bottom drawer.

“This was your great-grandpa's. He brought it over from Europe. He gave it to me on my bar mitzvah and told me that he had no pictures of his brothers or parents, but that this camera had taken pictures of them. I know he wanted you to have it.”

“He told you that?”

“No. But I know that—”

“So
you're
the one who wants me to have it.”

Who was leading whom?

“I am,” I said.

He held it in his hands, turned it around a few times. “Does it work?”

“Gosh, I don't know. I'm not sure that's the point.”

He said, “Shouldn't it be?”

Sam had the Leica refurbished; he brought it into the world and it brought him out of Other Life.

He studied philosophy in college, but only in college.

He left the Leica on a train in Peru on his honeymoon with his first wife.

At thirty-eight, he became the youngest judge ever appointed to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit.

The boys took me to Great Wall Szechuan House for my sixty-fifth birthday. Sam raised his bottle of Tsingtao and gave a beautiful toast, ending with “Dad, you're always looking.” I didn't know whether he meant
searching
or
seeing
.