The Poison Tree (2 page)

I stumble into an oversized walk-in closet enveloped by a cornucopia of suits, shirts, and ties. Everything is in pristine condition. Everything hangs neatly. Even suits and sport coats he hasn't worn in twenty years look new. The array of suits and jackets, arranged on hangers according to season and coordinated by color, remind me of a row of obedient dogs, panting, waiting for their master's return. I see, too, he has cut out all the sizes from the inside of his jackets and suit pants. Why? Is he vain about his weight?

Even living alone, my father wanted, and was in “need of more space,” as he said. So he recently acquired the neighboring apartment and smashed through the adjoining wall. The apartment previously belonged to a group of four British Airways stewardesses, and over gin and tonics, he managed to get the women to divulge their plans to move. He snapped up the place and tore down the adjoining wall before the superintendent could stop it. His apartment is now twice as large as before, but the floor is uneven in the kitchen where the two floors have been patched together.

In the bathroom, I pick up a 100% boar-bristle hairbrush. The brush is
immaculate—not a single gray hair. I unscrew the tiny green cap of Pinaud aftershave and sniff. I pour the aftershave into my palms, rub them together, and slap my cheeks with his scent. I slide open the medicine cabinet: Preparation H, Bayer Aspirin, traditional Colgate toothpaste, an old-fashioned glass eye cup. There is also a burgundy leather travel kit. Everything so clean and tidy that by the time I enter the bedroom and inspect his dresser, it doesn't surprise me to find that his socks are color-coded—crew-length divided from calf-length—and that his jewelry chest is divided into a collection of tiny velvet compartments, all perfectly organized with shirt stays, tie clips, tuxedo studs, and cuff links. Beside the lavish chest rests a smaller leather chest I brought back from Florence from one of my lecture tours. I gave it to him for his birthday twenty years earlier. Plainly, it has never been used.

The phone rings, but I don't answer. After several rings, the machine finally snaps on. “This is Norman Schvey speaking,” it shouts; the volume is set way too high. “If you wish to leave a message, do so after the beep. Speak properly and distinctly. I will try to call you back as soon as possible. Thank you.”

The message is unexceptional and one I have heard many times before when I've called from abroad and left a message, but the tone: “Speak properly and distinctly!” can be no one else's. There is the suggestion that he may not return the caller's message, even if it is distinct; he will merely “try” to do so. I note for the first time, the absence of a discernible pause between “possible” and “thank you,” making the courtesy sound perfunctory in a way I'd never noticed.

Sifting through papers and account books stacked neatly on his desk, I notice something odd: a cream-colored invitation to my parents' wedding in 1946, printed on thick vellum. The invitation is perfectly preserved, and does not smell like a musty, antique document. Why has he saved it after all these years? I wonder. On the cover of the invitation are two entwined hearts with my parents' initials, RL and NS. Inside, a pair of silver embossed doves are perched on the exact midpoint of a leafy branch, the doves so close together that their breasts touch, the twin points of their beaks kiss. The larger dove spreads its wings, protecting the smaller. The invitation has a braided tassel knotted along its spine.

Mr. and Mrs. Jay Lerner

request the pleasure of your company

at the marriage of their daughter

Rita Kay

to

Mr. Norman Irwin Schvey

Sunday, the thirtieth of June

Nineteen hundred and forty-six

at six o'clock

Hotel Pierre

New York

I've never seen this before and am stunned by its elegance. I'm also amazed it has been saved in such pristine condition, considering my parents' divorce. I find the menu for their wedding dinner, and each dish reads more elegant than the one before: Canapes Favorite, Compote of Melon Tricolor, Paillette d'Orre, and Asparagus Mimosa. I wonder what they tasted like, and what it must have been like to be present at the Pierre for the union of two of New York's most prosperous Jewish families; both so successful, each patriarch had an office in the Empire State Building.

My mother told me the man she married was different than the person I knew as my father. She said he had been an accomplished dancer with perfect manners until their wedding night when, she said, everything changed. In the photo on his desk, both dressed in their wedding finery, they are on the brink of it. In a few short hours, they will have spent their first night together in the sumptuous bridal suite of the Hotel Pierre. One thing I did learn, much later, is that whatever happened that night set the tone for everything to come—including me. In my imagination, and in my gut, I know one thing to be true. That was the night I was conceived!

For some reason, as I stare at the wedding photograph, Longchamps, that long-departed restaurant on 34th Street which used to be a fixture on the ground floor of the Empire State Building, invades my memory. I have no idea why I am there or why that image insists on infecting my thoughts.
I am a little boy, and we are about to order lunch. My grandmother, looking beautiful and far more youthful than I can remember, wears a pale blue suit with velvet trim and gray, calfskin gloves. I wear a navy sailor suit with shorts and matching blue cap.

She turns away from me, and I am immediately slapped hard across the face by my father for not saying “Thank you” to the white-gloved waiter who has just laid a cloth napkin across my lap. Before I can begin to comprehend this, I am whisked from my chair and told to smile by a photographer who, for some reason, takes my picture as a souvenir. I do as I'm told. I smile as hard as I can, which actually, is a horrible grimace, and looks nothing like a smile. I hold this pose until I am told to stop. My jaw hurts. My cheeks burn.

After this sudden reflection, I pick up everything I have touched and place it all carefully back in its proper place. Then I remember exactly why I am there—to run an errand, to retrieve his address book, not lose myself in the past. Yet I cannot move. I sit down on my father's bed.

My father's bed is a huge California King elevated two feet off the ground. The bed of an emperor. My feet do not touch the floor. First, slowly, then faster, I kick my legs against the wooden slats, an unruly child knocking his feet underneath his movie seat. I am that child. I don't want to walk through the streets of Manhattan or turn on the news, or look for his damn address book. I don't want to investigate anything or look through his things anymore. I just sit there narcotized, banging my legs against the slats of his bed as hard as I can.

I want to remember another time when I was happy, and it comes back.

Uncle Leon. Uncle Lee. He treated me like his special pal … his only pal. We spent nearly every Saturday morning together. He stuttered around grownups, but never with me—except for that one time I would rather forget, even now, nearly forty years later. Uncle Lee taught me to drive, bought me chocolate frozen custard, and he taught me “prestidigitation.” Each Saturday we drove to Nedicks for hot dogs and orange drinks. I drank too fast and accidentally burped one time, so Uncle Lee burped, too. After that, a burping contest was a regular feature of our Saturday mornings.

We drove through Central Park in his shiny black 1956 Cadillac, and went to Central Park to ride the huge carrousel decorated with monkeys wielding sticks of dynamite, threatening to blow up the merry-go-round,
and everything else. Those laughing monkeys almost took even my child's sense of anarchy a bit too far; their crazed expressions both drew me in, and frightened me. But Uncle Lee was there when I got scared, sitting on a park bench nearby, watching. He had his own charmed, black-mane horse called Lucky, and Lucky seemed to smile every time I passed him and stretched up for a brass ring. Uncle Lee tipped his grey homburg towards us.

Afterward, we drove to Gramsie Lerner's on Central Park West, and I played with Gramps. We played Pisha Pasha, and watched
Charlie Chan
and
Bulldog Drummond
movies. Then, after Gramsie made me a snack, I spent the night in Uncle Lee's room on the twin bed right next to his, and the next morning, we watched the sun rise together. I saw him hang his toupee on the phrenology head beside his bed, and remove his truss. We showered together the next morning in the steaming glass stall, which felt like a space capsule, and we sang “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” together as loud as we could. In the steamy shower stall, I felt safe, and completely invisible to the rest of the world. Our screaming voices reverberated like thunder against the glass as the song built to its inevitable, but wonderful conclusion:

Oh, the bear went over the mountain …

To see what he could see
.

On Thanksgiving morning, I got up at 5:00 a.m. to watch the Parks Department men set up wooden horses to control the crowds along Central Park West during the Macy's Day Parade. Watching from Gramsie's second floor window as they set up in the dark was almost more fun than the parade, although nothing beat the time Woody Woodpecker slammed right up against Gramsie's window. Around five-thirty or six, Gramsie made breakfast: a tuna fish sandwich stuffed with O&C Potato Stix on white bread, sliced into quarters with the crusts cut off. I drank my milk out of a shot glass and zoomed around the living room in a special red car with pedals. No rules.

Gramps treated me like a young prince. (He used wonderful, old-fashioned words like, “dast” and “dassent.”) “You dassent touch that knife, Henry; it's much too sharp!” Even eating an apple with Gramps was magic. He
peeled an apple without ever breaking the skin—not once. I watched the skin of the apple curl like a snake sunning itself, slowly wrapping around into a circle in the ashtray alongside one of his big cigars. When finished, he folded his golden pocketknife with the initials JNL, and put it in his vest pocket. I wanted to peel my own apple, but Gramps said, “You dassent, Henry.” So, I listened. But, when Gramsie went out shopping, Gramps relented. He covered my hands with his huge peasant ones, and tried to teach me to peel an apple like he did. The operation had to be kept secret, he said, because Gramsie would be “mad as hell” if she found out. But no matter how hard I concentrated, my peel always broke, usually four or five times on a single apple. Even so, when he put the pieces of my skin in the ashtray alongside his, my failed attempts looked like baby snakes curled up beside their grandfather. Now, looking back, those times with Uncle Lee, Gramps, and Gramsie, they were my safe haven. There, I was loved and spoiled, like all grandchildren should be.

Gramps cheated at cards, too. When I caught him looking at my hand in the beveled edges of the mirrored card table, I started crying. But Gramps told me he only did it so that I would catch him! He did it to teach me an important lesson—that the world is full of shysters and cheats. “You dassent ever gamble,” he told me. We didn't use money; we used a special stash of red poker chips Gramps kept in an old cedar box that still smelled like his huge cigars.

After dealing the cards and playing poker, Gramps' fingers hurt, so he lit a candle and dripped molten wax on them. He said it helped his arthritis better than any medicine you could buy from the drugstore. I sat beside him, transfixed, as he dripped hot wax from a long, white candle onto his thick fingers. He never complained or cried the way I would have done when the wax dropped on his fingers. After the medicinal wax coated his fingers, he peeled it off slowly and then let me play with the remains. I rubbed it between my fingers until the wax was soft; and when Gramps wasn't looking, I popped it into my mouth and chewed it like Juicy Fruit gum.

I remember the exact moment I heard about Gramps' death. I was ten. It was on a Saturday night and I was sitting at home with Margaret, our maid, watching
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. The phone rang and Margaret screamed. So I raced to the phone ahead of her and answered it. Mrs. Lopez,
one of my parents' friends, wished me “Condolences” in her heavy Puerto Rican accent. I hung up and had no idea what she was talking about. To me, “Condolences” sounded like “Congratulations.” And strangely, both words reminded me of those big red delicious candy apples coated with hard, red candy I would eat while ice skating at Wollman's Rink in Rockefeller Center. So I thought it must be good news.

That night, my parents came home late, and they told me that Gramps had died of stomach cancer. Cancer! It was the first time I had even thought of death. My mother, although intelligent and with a Master's Degree from Columbia University, told me that her little boy should only think “happy thoughts.” I guess that's why she never said a word to me about Gramps' disease. Finally, I knew why I hadn't been allowed to stay over at Gramps and Gramsie's house for weeks! And why Uncle Lee had not come to pick me up that morning like he promised. I cried and thought of my little pieces of apple skin alongside his unbroken, perfect one.

As long as Gramps lived, it hadn't mattered what happened at home. But when Gramps died, he left a void that even Uncle Lee couldn't fill. For one thing, watching movies or playing cards with Uncle Lee wasn't the same. He couldn't stay awake during Humphrey Bogart films, and he wouldn't cheat me at poker, even when I begged him to. The best he could do was watch
Abbott and Costello
with me. And Gramps, he had thick fingers, smoked cigars, and wore double-breasted suits, which to me, made him look almost like Sidney Greenstreet, or George Raft. But Uncle Lee, his hands were pale and ivory white, and unlike my conversations with Gramps, talking to him was like talking to another boy my age. Or even younger.