The Poison Tree (4 page)

My lies would be exposed and the chase would begin—terrifying, but oddly exhilarating. I ran in circles around a dining room table large enough to seat ten, barely eluding the gold buckle on his belt until I could escape! I became an expert at beating my father, racing just ahead of the tongue of his belt as he chased me like a panting dog. Dashing down the hall, I slammed the door and twisted the bathroom lock in a single, precisely timed flick. Then I sat on the tiled floor in the tub, my heart pumping a mile-a-minute as the combination of danger, flight, and (usually) narrow escape flooded through me. Safe in my porcelain cave with the shower curtain drawn around me, I sometimes sat for hours, alert to any possible sound outside. Then suddenly it was over. Tired out from the chase, he lay on his bed in the next room, and I'd hear the flick and click of his Dunhill lighter and smell his Kent. The signal for all clear.

But these visits back to my friends' apartment buildings were simply a way of avoiding the inevitable—going back to our old apartment at 25 East 86th.

Slowly, I approach the squat, white 1920s building with the familiar black iron bars on the second floor windows. The bars are decorative, but their graceful arabesques suggest the possibilities of keeping strangers out, people locked within. I approach the doorman, and ask him if I can visit my old apartment, knowing full well he won't let me inside. I make up an outrageous lie about researching a book about Art Nouveau architecture in New York. I'm pretty sure the doorman realizes I'm not telling the truth, but politely he says he is not permitted to let strangers in. That's the job of the doorman, he says with a smile. I understand, grateful to be denied access. But before I happily scurry away, having at least tried to revisit my past, he invites me to enter the lobby if I wish. Which I do. And which is more than enough.

Entering the dimly lit parlor on the way down along the cavernous corridor, past the first bank of elevators and countless sconces, each emitting their peculiar, weird orange glow, I am home again. I am fourteen, and my parents are now separated. But there I am, standing between the two adults screaming at one another in the middle of the lobby on a beautiful crisp spring morning. My father has come to pick me up. His silver Lincoln Town Car is double-parked right outside with the motor running.

Mom shrieks at me, “If you take one step outside—to him and his red-headed shiksa whore—I swear to God you'll find me lying here dead when you come home!”

I believe this threat and spin around to face her.

Drivers outside honk. “Move your goddamn car, you sonofabitch!”

My father is completely indifferent to the chaos and yelling outside, which makes me tremble. He turns calmly to my mother, and says, “Get in the car, Henry.” Then to her, “I'll see you dead, you and your entire family of Lerner scum.”

“You bastard! You're not paying any alimony, so what do you expect? I have custody of him!” Standing and refereeing this blood sport is George, the pliant, good-natured doorman, who, I think, must be a distant ancestor of the current doorman. George wears a starched uniform with a stiff hat perched on his head like a pale blue wedding cake with white frosting. He bites helplessly on a silver whistle as my parents hurl invectives back and forth. All I see is a funhouse mirror of disconnected objects and sounds: grotesquely distorted mouths, horns honking, a black moustache suspended
in air above me, blonde hair puffed up in a cotton candy bouffant, the sound of an ambulance, strange echoing laughter.

At this point, two different memories appear. Both are true.

One has me racing out of the lobby and up the back stairway. Since we are on the second floor, I never use the elevator. At the bottom of this back stairway is a small, dark area used by the doormen for smoking, and inhabited only by a collection of sad, broken umbrellas huddled together in an empty Crisco can. The umbrellas, stacked together, remind me of a klatch of broken-down senior citizens. I run upstairs into my room, not forgetting to chase my brother out, and punch him in the biceps just for good measure; he runs away screaming. I slam the door to our room and lie face down on my bed, and cry. A few minutes later, my mother softly enters the room. She hands me a five dollar bill for my good deed in refusing to go with my father; I tear the money into bits, throw the pieces at her, and slam the door after her.

The second memory has me climbing into my father's Lincoln, and being whisked away in tears to my Grandma Schvey's house. My father circles, for what seems like hours, looking for a parking place near The Eldorado at 300 Central Park West. When he finally finds one, it is too small. So, he slams the back end of the massive Lincoln against the car behind us, then accelerates and smashes into the car in front of him, and wedges us into the space. We are parked.

As we walk into the ornately mirrored Art Deco lobby of The Eldorado, I look for myself in one of the long Deco mirrors; however, I am distracted by my father's uncharacteristically pleasing smile at Stanley, the red-faced elevator man he has known since he was a boy growing up in this same building. Stanley, whose bald head is ringed in gray, is perpetually sour and apoplectic. This makes him look exactly like Grumpy in the Disney movie of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. My father presses the slightly tarnished enamel doorbell, and upon Grandma opening the door, he hands her his laundry. Without a word, he retires into Grandpa's dark bedroom and closes the door. I wonder, why did they close themselves off in his room? What are the two men whispering about? But I don't wonder long.

My grandmother takes one look at me and says, “You're so thin! Here, take my heart, my liver, anything you want! Just eat something!”

As I walk behind her into the kitchen, she picks up her coffee in a tall
glass, adds a drop of Sealtest, and gives it a quick stir with an ice teaspoon. I watch the dark brown liquid grow lighter and lighter as she stirs. I don't like coffee, but I want a taste. But I don't ask. Cold water is running over an uncooked chicken in the sink. The chicken is kosher and Grandma is making sure she drains all the blood out.

Then, out of the blue, she says, “Divorce is wrong. Wrong.”

“I know, Grandma.”

“So do something! They're your parents! No one else can do it for you.”

Next, I find myself walking back to the car with Dad. I'm holding a sack of kreplach in waxed paper with a rubber band around it. We stroll silently back to his car where he is required to smash into the cars again to extricate his. We return to his apartment on Sutton Place. After he has his J&B and soda, and I have a soda, and Fritos and French Onion dip, we join his younger brother, Malcolm, at one of the French bistros along 2nd Avenue. Malcolm is an ear, nose, and throat specialist, who chain-smokes unfiltered Pall Malls all during dinner. He has a habit of wrinkling his nose and sniffing before he speaks, and drinks glass after glass of Coca Cola in chipped ice. He complains about his wife, who he claims drinks too much and drives “with a heavy foot,” like a “real shiksa.” My father laughs and proceeds to flirt with the pretty young waitress who tells us she is an actress and has just moved to New York. My father asks for her phone number and offers to help her get settled. She writes it down. Malcolm smiles and orders another Coke.

My father's father, Grandpa Schvey, as opposed to Gramps, was an austere, self-made man, who grew up in Riga (now Latvia), and came to the United States with nothing. He began dressing windows at Macy's, and, despite frail health, managed to retire as a millionaire at the age of fifty. He brought his younger brother, Henry, over to the New World and paid for him to go to medical school. However, Henry enlisted in the army and died of typhoid fever treating soldiers during World War I. There was another brother who came over and became a rabbi in Philadelphia, but I never heard a word about him until long after Grandpa Schvey's death.

Like some Jews of his era, Grandpa Schvey hated anything that smacked of being too Jewish. The idea of being accepted at a country club or hotel that disallowed Jews delighted him. It was a source of special pride to him that his eldest son was such a huge success on Wall Street, in an industry where Jews had been fiercely discriminated against a mere half century earlier. Grandpa lived long enough to see his eldest son become Vice President and Managing Director of the Unit Investment Trust Division at Merrill Lynch. My father ultimately was more than a successful financier. During the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, he acquired true celebrity status, wielding enormous power as chairman of the most financially successful division of the most important brokerage firm in the world. And he did so with a unique combination of maverick individualism, generosity towards subordinates, and authoritarianism.

Grandpa spoke with a heavy Russian-Jewish accent, but there was nothing Old World about him. Quiet and precise, he dressed like a banker and bore himself modestly. Outside his El Dorado apartment building on Central Park West, I never once saw him without tie and jacket. Despite the accent, his words were always precise, grammatically correct, and he spoke in complete sentences. His office in the Empire State Building, too, was more than just an office; it was a statement of having made it as a successful businessman.

But in all his great success, he had a cruel streak and a mordant wit, which he wielded against my grandmother like a scalpel. Grandma Birdie was a native New Yorker, and in her youth, a great beauty. I still have a signed photograph of her around the time of her high school graduation, wearing only a fur coat and smiling coquettishly at the viewer. Why I wondered, was this glamorous picture taken and at whose behest?

The youngest of five daughters, Grandma was one of only two born in America. And she was smart. She not only graduated from high school, but was admitted to study law at N.Y.U. Instead, she left school to marry my grandfather. She loved him deeply even though Grandpa mocked her at every turn. He treated her as though she were the Greenhorn, not he, and imitated her taste (“Ah, she's heard about that from people who know …”), and love for strange
tchotchkes
at the thrift store, which were the only things she could afford with the tiny weekly allowance he provided. He hissed the words, “Bitch … bitch … bitch” under his breath incessantly as she ladled
out his chicken soup and Ritz crackers. She never showed that it bothered her.

Grandpa's bedroom was dark and austere. He ceded the rest of the house to Grandma. His coarse green bedspread literally hurt your fingers to the touch. His room was monastic and disciplined. A set of cast-iron bookends embossed with a likeness of Napoleon sat atop a single, glass bookcase. There was a biography of Lincoln, along with both the regular and large print editions of
The Reader's Digest
and
Esquire
. On Sundays he watched
Meet the Press
, and that program's dour, saturnine host, Lawrence Spivak, seemed a mirror image of Grandpa.

I still often wonder how much of my father's behavior was based on what he saw at home.

The day after my tenth birthday, I went to see Grandma Schvey. I knew she would have something to give me for my birthday—Grandma always gave disappointing presents like socks or handkerchiefs—so I wasn't expecting anything much. But that wasn't why I went to see her.

As soon as I arrived, she kissed me, and, before I could say anything about why I had come, she pressed a ten-dollar bill into my hands and disappeared down the long hallway to her bedroom. Ten dollars! My reasons for visiting fled from my mind as I stared at the bill, studying Alexander Hamilton's face. I followed Grandma to her room to tell her thank you. As I entered, I caught my reflection in the mirror and thought of Mickey Mantle and all his terrible injuries, and began to imitate Mantle's left-handed batting stance. I could do that better than all my friends, just like his home run trot.

“It's your tenth birthday,” Grandma said. “That's a big one, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Tell me all about it,” she said.

“I don't want to right now, Grandma.” I looked down at the ground, and tried to control a sudden impulse to cry. I wanted to tell her the real reason for my visit, but now that she asked me, I couldn't speak.

“Did you do anything special yesterday?”

“Mom took me bowling,” I answered sullenly.

“And then what?”

“Nothing.” I looked up at her. But before I said another word, she vanished.

“Where are you, Grandma?” I looked around, but didn't see her.

“I know it's here somewhere,” I heard her mumble, clearly to herself. “Just a minute.”

“But where are you!” Anxiety, out of proportion to the danger of the moment, bloomed in my chest.

“Keep your pants on, young man, I'm in here. In my closet.” Then I heard her say, “Is he crying? Goodness, silly boy. I'll be right out after I've found what I'm looking for.”

The door to her closet was closed, so I stood there stranded, with nothing to do but wait. I hated that. I knew nothing would happen, but I grew frightened nonetheless. What if she died in there? She was old, after all. What would I do? Unlike Gramsie Lerner's house, which smelled like chicken soup, roast turkey, and kasha, Grandma's house, and particularly her closet, smelled of mothballs and cedar. The closet was where she kept my father's old things: books like
Bomba the Jungle Boy
,
Tarzan
, and
Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates
. There were letters in a funny script Grandma said was the Russian language; there was an old, dented lemon wafers cookie tin which contained an assortment of things including jacks, marbles, an old passport, ration cards, a purse full of Indian Head pennies and buffalo nickels, a thank-you note from her nephew, Stanley (exactly my age, only smarter), whom I had never met, and a fountain pen with a golden tip that didn't work. I had never been inside the closet without Grandma, but I knew everything in there, because whenever I visited, Grandma came out with some bizarre curiosity or treasure. Once she brought out my father's elementary school class picture, which had a really tall kid in it who was completely bald! His name was Andrew, and he had contracted scarlet fever and lost all his hair. He sat there in the picture of sixth graders looking like a sad old grandpa among a group of smiling children. It always made me shiver with excitement and curiosity to see Andrew. Grandma thought I wanted to see it because my father, with his thick head of wavy hair was in the first row, and smiling, but it was really Andrew, the bald kid who never smiled, who I wanted to see.