The Laws of our Fathers (44 page)

    'Christ,' says Seth and glumly asks how his father is doing.

    'Etzi-ketzi,' she answers. ‘I got groceries. And I put the bills together.'

    'You're great. This child is a saint,' Seth tells me. 'He doesn't deserve you.'

    'Why do you always say that?'

    'Truth is a defense. Isn't that right?' he asks me. 'That's what they say in the newsroom.'

    'It depends on the charges,' I answer.

    Sarah's narrow mouth purses. 'He's an old man.' She kisses her father. 'Be nice,' Sarah warns him, and is gone, with a backward flick of her long hair over the shoulder of her parka. When the thought strikes me, I can't contain a smile.

    'What?' he asks. I shake my head, but Seth persists until I answer.

    'She has your hair,' I say.

    'Whoa! Talk about "Be nice." '

    We're still laughing when the front clapper knocks. Sarah has returned to say that a police car just pulled up. Seth asks Sarah to keep me company. I urge her to go on, but Sarah is a first kid, at ease with the gestures of adulthood, and seems happy to remain. As Seth heads out, she asks about our plans.

    'Plans?' I explain how I ended up on this roundabout path to the grocery store.

    'Oh.' She bites her lip cutely. ‘I think I got the wrong idea. I think I misunderstood something my Uncle Hobie said the other night.' Sarah circles a finger in the dark air of the old house. 'You guys aren't an item, right?'

    'Your father and I?' I laugh out loud, but see how the confusion arose. 'We dated,' I put it demurely, 'years and years ago, before your parents got together.'

    'Oh,' says Sarah once more, a faint smile this time. 'I think I'm just basically stressed-out about my parents. It's way weird,' says Sarah, 'when you have to think of your parents like your friends.'

    I assume at first she means that Seth and Lucy are somehow too familiar with her. Nikki is only six, but I worry already that I'll be like many of my contemporaries, Peter Pans, so fully defined, in the generational mode, as opponents of authority that they have been utterly unable to play a firm role with their kids. I grew up with that. Even when I was eight or nine, Zora treated me like a pal. I thought it was wonderful - to call her by her first name, to hear about her troubles. Yet in my twenties, I began to feel cheated. There was a turn in the road others were making that I couldn't manage. But it dawns on me eventually that Sarah is speaking of something different: Seth and Lucy regretfully face the same indeterminacy as people in their twenties.

    'Do you know my mom?' she asks.

    Years ago, I explain.

    ‘I bet she was the same. She's very earnest, you know, incredibly sincere. And my dad's always there saying funny things under his breath. They're very cool together. It's so, so strange to think of them apart.' She looks off to a middling distance, trying to measure her own confusion about these facts, the ripples of misery and dislocation that have imponderably followed her brother's death.

    When Seth returns, he says the police are guessing it's some joyriding kid and the car will turn up. Sarah hugs her father and, on the strength of a moment's intimacies, hugs me, too, before departing. After disappearing briefly, Seth leads me to a small room right off the living room, where old Mr Weissman is seated before an immense rolltop of antique vintage, covered with teetering ramparts of yellowed papers. He appears to have summoned himself to the task of greeting a stranger, his old face raised alertly. His age-hoared hair is sparse and his eyes are dulled and somewhat out of focus, but he has maintained the same rigid, judgmental look I recollect. He is dressed in clothing forty years old if a day, a thin-lapeled grey worsted suit snowed at the shoulders with dandruff, worn over a yellow cardigan. A skinny old tie is knotted askew and his shirt has grown far too large for him at the collar.

    'Do you remember Sonny, Pa?' Seth tries. California. Long ago. The old man cannot sort through it. He thinks Seth is referring to a recent trip and, in any event, I clearly made too little impact to be recalled.

    'And where is Hobie?' the old man asks. It is a strong Viennese accent: Und vere is Hobie?

    'He'll come again, Pa. He was here the other day, remember? He's got his hands full. He's trying a case. Sarah's set the bills

    out here for you. You can look through them, pay them if you like. I wanted to talk to you about the car. The police are looking for it.'

    'The police? You spoke with the police?' 'They were just here. I talked to the cop. Very nice guy. He's got it under control.'

    'You talked? Why didn't I talk?' ‘I took care of it.'

    'No, no. This is my automobile. I should be speaking with the police.' Wiss ze police. 'I took care of it.'

    'Uh-huh,' says the old man unpleasantly. He spins a bit in an old oak swivel chair and looks about for something. In a corner, on a metal card table, a black-and-white TV with rabbit ears blinks with shadowy figures. The room, with curtains drawn, is unaired, vaguely unpleasant. There are lingering stale scents, boiled foods, the kind of Middle European odors I smelled in my aunt's Polish home. A frail, spotted hand has risen and the old man smiles bitterly. 'You think I am so stupid?'

    'Stupid?'

    'You think I don't understand? I want the car.' 'They're looking, Pa.'

    'Oh yes, looking.' He snorts. A single elderly finger remains cocked at his son. ‘I want the car.' I vont ze car.

    The light of some recognition suddenly pales Seth. 'You think I have the car?' He turns briefly, helplessly, to me. He's still bent at the waist, addressing his father.

    'Ahhhhh. Very innocent. It was you, no, saying I shouldn't drife?'

    'Pa. That's everyone. I said it. Lucy said it. Sarah said it. Christ, Pa, the cops have said it. Ninety-three-year-old people are a hazard behind the wheel'

    'No, no,' he says, 'this is you who took the car. There was no policeman. This is you.'

    'Pa, I wish I were that clever.'

    'Oh yes. This is a trick. You are always playing tricks. You want my things.' 'Oh, Pa.'

    'Always you want my things. You think I don't know? You think I am stupid. I am not stupid. I want this car.' The old man pivots away, his mouth and hands move in aimless, elderly agitation.

    'Pa.'

    'Go.'

    'Pa.'

    'Go vay, go.' His papery hand flutters. 'Right now, I want the car. Right now! Right now!' His cracked voice mounts, and Seth finds my sleeve and pulls me through the house. At the end of the front walk, he stands in the sharp air, wobbling his head in disbelief. Huge elderly trees, bare in winter, rise in the parkway above the line of cars at the curb.

    'It's funny, right?' he asks. 'It's like a sitcom.'

    'Not quite.'

    He lifts his face to the sky, eternity, and breathes. 'God,' he says. ‘I never stay more than ten minutes. It's always something.'

    I rest a hand lightly on his back. 'Your daughter is lovely.' It is, as I hoped, the right note, the proper salve.

    'The greatest,' he answers. 'I'm weak with pride whenever I'm with her. It's sinful.'

    'That's hardly a sin.'

    'She's the best. She's perfect.' When he glances up, a broken look still rides across his eyes. ‘I get no credit. Everything sane and decent in her comes from Lucy.'

    'I'm sure that's not the case.'

    'Right, she has my hair.'

    'Oh, come on.'

    'Maybe. Mother's compassion, father's intensity. Child as the crucible of each parent's neuroses. Did you read that book?'
'Pathways to Madness?
She hardly seems crazy.' 'I probably have the wrong book. Isaac was crazy. He was
my
child.' Seth shakes his head miserably and, only now feeling the chill, closes his coat. Heaving a final sigh, he mentions the store.

    We drive a block or two in silence. On University, the neighborhood's main artery, the Saturday traffic is clotted. Seth swings wide to avoid a man in a yellow tie, who is frantically waving at a taxi. With Christmas nearing, the streets teem with shoppers -students, teachers, the neighborhood denizens - all feeling buoyed by U. Park's cosmopolitan air and the upbeat atmosphere of the onrushing holidays. They are visiting the small, bright stores which are adorned with green fringes of Christmas frippery or blinking lights. Behind the wheel, Seth, in his broad hat, studies the road pensively. Eventually, he apologizes again for making me witness that scene.

    'Oh come on, Seth. Who better than an old friend?' I try to sound lighthearted, but I'm shaken myself. Parents and children. It never ends.

    'Did you lose friends when you got sick?' he asks.

    'Some. I probably had fewer to start than I'd have liked. But there were a couple of people who made me wonder if they thought cancer was contagious.'

    'Yeah,' he says and ponders. 'That's how it is. It turns out there's only so much of your shit some of your friends can take. Damaged, you're no use to them. I can name six guys who never were the same with me again because I cried in front of them after Isaac' He glances my way. 'What happens to us as we get older?'

    I can't answer that.

    'I'm sorry I wasn't around,' he says. 'When you got sick? I'm loyal.'

    I recognize this as a substantial truth, part of what has pulled on me. Seth is loyal. Reliable. No question of that.

    'That's me and Hobie,' he says. 'That's one thing we've finally mastered. Loyalty. Hanging in. I've seen him through three divorces and fourteen religions, and he's seen me through Isaac. All my shit.'

    'You're lucky,' I say, and he is quick to agree. 'Crazy as he is, I'm lucky to have him.' 'Is he still as big a lunatic in private?' 'Holy smokes,' answers Seth and lets his head reel at the notion. 'He doesn't bring it to court. I'll bet he's got a marvelous practice.'

    ‘I guess. But you look at his ability, his education - he should be on track to become Chief Justice of the United States. And instead, he's just bumping along. He's literally been through six law partnerships. Large, small. There's always somebody big-time who's pissed and blackballing him from some honor. You know,' he says, 'I look around, at this age, I keep seeing the same thing. There were all these brilliant, talented people I knew in my twenties and thirties who were going to do amazing things in the world when they got the right break. And thank God, a lot of them have. But there are other people who got the chance but couldn't get over themselves. You know what I mean? They can't project whatever they've got into the world, because they're forty-eight years old and still dealing with their own shit.'

    'That's me,' I say. My frankness for a moment startles us both. 'It is,' I repeat.

    'How's that you? You're a judge. You're a big
macher.'

    'Not in the law world. I'm a public employee. I'm an upper-middle-level bureaucrat. I'm not making $300,000 a year. I'm not a factor to deal with politically. I'm not even sure the powers that be won't maneuver me out of this job. There are lawyers who'd tell you I've dead-ended, that I've settled for less.'

    ‘I don't believe that,' he says.

    Nonetheless, that's my view of myself: not a power, not a star, no more than halfway to what might have been my destiny if I didn't need to spend so much time coping with myself. When I was younger, I believed that the middle ground was a deadly morass. That you had to reach. Not to the greatest heights. But to some slight elevation, beyond the doomed grey middle. Maybe Zora inspired that. But I quit believing that somewhere, probably in the midst of illness, and surely with motherhood, when I made a commitment to the female sector of the yin and the yang. I point Seth toward the store, a block away, and try to remind myself that once we've parted, I'll be harrowed by doubt if I continue these candid reflections on my judicial career.

    'And why's Hobie so crazy?' I ask. 'Was it his family?'

    'Hobie? It's DSM 3.004.'

    'What's that?'

    'A shitty personality.' As always, he absorbs my laughter appreciatively. 'No, I thought his family was great. His father, man - I'd lie in bed at night and just die wishing his father could have been mine.'

    'What about all the dope he took? Is that part of it?'

    'I think I wouldn't be so quick to use the past tense. And I think in Hobie's case, it's a symptom, not a cause. No, whenever I ask myself what gives with him, I come back to the obvious: being a black man in America. I think Hobie feels like a person without a country. He doesn't fully belong to anybody. I think he's honest enough to see himself as elite. Super education. Big income. But there's still the black thing of not being fully accepted, and dealing with how vulnerable that makes you.

    ‘I always remember the same incident. When we were in eighth grade, we played touch football with some big jerk named Kirk Truhane, who, one day, sort of out of the blue, called Hobie a nigger. You know, Hobie was big, he was rough, and he knocked Truhane down on the gravel. And Truhane gets up and comes out with this
word.
And I mean, I remember thinking, God, this can't have happened, what do I do now? He was my best friend by then. At first I kept playing, even after Hobie left, but finally my conscience got to me, and I walked off too, and I found him around the school building bawling his eyes out. And he just kept repeating the same thing: 'It hurts my feelings.' In any other circumstance, Hobie probably would have beat the snot out of Kirk Truhane. But that one word sapped his strength. It destroyed him - to know he couldn't get beyond that label.

    'And I really think that's how it is. Family? Sure. First and foremost. But history changes people, too. Doesn't it? I mean historical forces - your place, your society, its rules, its institutions. That's what politics is about, isn't it? Trying to get the foot of history off the throat of people? Let them be what they can. I know, as a concept, it can be a crutch. That's why so many people want to be victims today. So they don't have to accept the burden of being raised without historical calamity -without war or famine. They want an excuse for the fact they're still not happy. But there's a reality, too. Your time and its circumstances can thwart you. They can make you crazy -subtly, the way they've crazed Hobie. Or big-time, the way history crazed my father. Maybe Zora, too. I mean, I've always thought,' he says, as he slides the car into a space in the grocery lot and faces me with a look of measured daring, 'I've always thought history was one of the things that came between us.'