We Had It So Good (32 page)

High in the air, he pointed out to his father the sights of London. “This is the Parliament, this is Canary Wharf, which is offices, this is what they call the Gherkin, this is the South Bank where they have theaters and films and concerts.” The two men stood together, the younger with his arm round the shoulder of the older one.

“I'm glad you thought up this plan,” Stephen said. “It turned out well.”

“I always wanted to travel,” said his father. “It never happened.”

“But you traveled from New York to California, at least you had that.”

“Yes, of course, I forgot.”

A few hours later, when Stephen suggested that they take a taxi home, Si said definitely not. It was now time to take the famous London underground train. The bombs the previous week seemed not to faze him, “That was
last
week,” he said. “They are all dead now, the terrorists, they can't come back to hurt me.”

They were at Pimlico. Stephen took him through the gates with his ticket and they stepped onto the escalator.

“This has been a wonderful day, Son,” Si said. “What a city London is. What a place! Warsaw was
nothing
compared to this. If I live for another ninety years I don't think I'll have another day like this one.”

The moving stairs went down and down. As they reached the final stage of their journey, Si's plastic shoe caught in the side of
the machinery and, unable to extricate himself, he fell on his face, smashing his nose against the metal staircase, which dragged him along until it came to the final step. The screams of the passengers brought someone running who turned off the motor and Stephen's father lay there, blood all over his face, and either, Stephen thought, dead or unconscious.

I
n the hospital, shocked, sedated, Si thought, Is this my time? Does it end in this place? He shared a room with three others but he could not see them, he was partitioned off behind screens. The doctors and nurses came and went and he heard his son talking to them in a high, quick, angry voice. I wanted to be buried next to my beloved, he thought. Our bones belong together. I'd like to be in a soil which has the sun warming it. I don't want to be in a place that is damp.

“You're not going to die, Dad,” Stephen said. “You're going to be fine. Everything is going to be okay. Tell me if there is pain, I don't want you to feel a thing. Are you thirsty, do you want me to give you a drink? I have a beaker here, I can hold it to your mouth. We're going to get you out of here in a few days and your schnozz will heal in time. Everything is going to be okay.”

Not that Stephen believed this. He had interrogated the doctors about brain damage, internal injuries and anything else he could think of from the school of hypochondriac medicine. They had assured him they had run the usual tests. The
usual
tests? He had watched enough medical dramas to know that the usual tests were never enough, there was always a medical genius who had a brain wave and ran the test that no one else had thought of, which revealed the rare condition that was moving through the patient's
body like a death ray, aiming at the most vulnerable organs. Stephen thought of illnesses as comic book villains, you were Superman, your illness was Lex Luthor. In the comics, Superman always won, in life Lex Luthor always did, in the end.

But it was only a broken nose, gashes to the face and legs and bad bruising that ailed his father. The plastic clogs were in orange shreds, lodged in the machinery of the escalator. Stephen brought in new shoes, Nikes identical to his own, soft on his father's feet. He sat by the bed holding his hand, thinking back to his childhood in Los Angeles, and how, if he had never left America, if he had never applied for that Rhodes Scholarship, had risked the draft, or gone to Canada like everyone else he knew, and returned a few years later, he would have had his whole life with his parents instead of abandoning them for this country which had nothing to do with them or their histories.

Si was thinking about how it was possible to live an entire life based on a falsification and wondering whether the accident on the escalator was a punishment to him for telling such lies to his wife and children. This idea was expressed in his mind more woozily, an inchoate floating thought, a slight nausea in the stomach, a sense of guilt and dread. It manifested itself, in a postmorphine hallucination, as a small animal with a snout that pushed its way through the fabric of the screens around his bed. The first shot had given him a sense of overwhelming peace and happiness, not just being free from pain but a release from all suffering into a woolly realm of bliss.

The second shot was not quite so good, the third was just a painkiller. And now he felt confused and occasionally frightened, burdened with an anxiety that the truth would fall out of his mouth by accident. This trip had been a terrible mistake. He had unleashed bad things into the world, not just to himself but the poor people on the subway trains who had died a couple of days before he arrived. You can never go back. He had said that to his wife many
times, when she wept for Havana. That's all gone, he said, and she said, “But it's okay for you, you have nothing to go back
to
.” He said nothing. Lies on lies.

He had lived for so long with his secret and now it exhausted him. There were people who built their lives on fabricated foundations and came to believe in them, forgetting the truth, they could look back on memories of what had never taken place. The stories they told themselves became their reality, but it was a trick that Si had never learned. He
did
recollect the past, and it had informed everything he had done, all his decisions had been based on what had been.

He resolved that it was time to tell someone. He could not face his son. You want your children to look up to you, you do not want to see contempt in their faces. But the wife, she was a good soul, an understanding woman, she had a kind face and a kind heart. I'll tell her, he thought, and she can tell my boy. He'll take it better coming from her.

With this decision, he felt a weight lift from his chest, the iron box that lay inside it unlocked and its burden emptied. The box folded up to the size of a dime. He could throw that dime across the room. The little animals with their snouts departed back into the screens, their curled tails twirling as they went until there was nothing left of them but a tip, then
pfff,
they were gone.

He could hear the voices of the nurses, the moaning of someone in pain and the smell of half-eaten meals on trays.

“Dad,” Stephen said, “they're going to do another couple of tests, just to make sure everything is completely fine.”

Si did not need more tests. He began to feel well, he could sense his blood circulating strongly and his breathing grow more peaceful. He touched his face, the skin was warm but not overheated. His little pulses were beating in all the normal places. He looked at his hand. I need a manicure, he thought, his nails looked to him like horns.

“I
t never happened like I said. Nobody got left behind in Europe. No one died. I mean they must all be dead now, maybe my sister, Gittel—she called herself Gertrude when she came over and had her hair shingled like the movie stars—she could be alive still, ninety-five she would be, but the rest all gone. Gittel was a good girl, even with the movie-star hair, and I was the wild one, the wayward boy.

“We never came to America, we never went to Ellis Island, if anyone is left they're in Canada. We went to Montreal first and then my father found work through one of his landsmen in Manitoba, what a terrible place, oh, awful. The cold. The horrible cold. Your eyes froze over, I don't mean the lashes, I mean the water on your eyes. You couldn't shut them, you couldn't blink. When the blizzards came and you weren't safe indoors you'd die, you could die a dozen feet from your own front door because you couldn't
see
your front door. It got cold in Poland but this wasn't cold, it was razor blades in your face. The weather was everything. And the summer, flies. That's all I remember about the summer, and the other bugs that bite.

“My father told me we were going to Warsaw because I always wanted to see that place. But what a journey! I never knew it took a train and a ship and another train and another ship to get
to Warsaw. It was a month. And then we got there and it was no Warsaw, it was a country called Canada and I had been kidded. When are we going home to Łomża? I asked him. Well, he says, we are never going home. We lived in a slum with all the other Jews, you never saw such a slum, with everyone on top of each other and the women who couldn't talk the language and we kids having to learn and do the talking for them. I knew French once, I forgot it all. It was hard times, 1925. There was no work my father could do in a city, he was a farm man, a man who looked after horses. He smelt of horse shit. Even before the Depression we were poor and my father hated the city life, he only liked the fresh air, so he hears he can get a job out in Manitoba and that's where we went. On another damned train.

“It was a little place in the middle of nowhere and all the company you had was the sky. The stars out there were tremendous. But I never learned the names of them, I was too busy being made into a laboring boy, like my father.
Clean the yard. Go fetch the oats
. I wanted something better. I didn't know what exactly, but I hated the life. Wolves came into the outskirts of town, you heard them howling, horrible, horrible beasts, I used to dream of killing them. This is why I was so happy when I got a job with the furs. It was my revenge on all those animals that tormented me, the dogs that barked and the wild things like the raccoons. I was happy to tear their skin off. The wilderness is no place for men, we don't belong there. Maybe some men do, not me.

“I don't know if I said that I hated my father. Nothing to do with the horses or lying to me about going to Warsaw. I couldn't stand him, not because he was coarse but because he was a very big man and I was hardly growing, I was going to be short, everyone could see that, and every month he'd put me against the wall where he'd made a mark from the last time, and he would measure me, and every month he would say,
Not grown. Still a rat
. This is what he called me, the rat. The rat doesn't need to eat, he only has the
stomach of a rat. A rat doesn't mind going hungry. And he would laugh. My mother said nothing. Many years later I realized what was underneath it all. He was saying I was someone else's, I wasn't his boy. My mother pulled down her pants for another man. I don't know if that's true, it could be. Gittel was his, she looked like him, a big girl. You know Marianne to me looks a lot like Gittel. I never saw it at first but when she came of age, then I saw. I mean when she started to grow in the chest.

“So I was seventeen, it was 1932, and one day… I had enough. I don't remember it very clearly, all the things that happened afterward rushed toward me and the incident I have trouble recalling. My father said something, I picked up an iron bar and hit him across the head. He looked like I looked when I fell down the moving stair and they took me to the hospital—blood all over his face and in his hair.

“What did he say that provoked me? One day we went into town to the movies. It was very rare that this happened, but Cagney had just released a picture called
Taxi!
and it was a big deal because in it he spoke Yiddish, so all the Jews wanted to see this movie. To hear an Irishman talk our language. His father was a boxer, you know, and he grew up above a saloon. I saw him many times on the street in Los Angeles.

“In this movie he says, ‘Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I'll give it to you through the door!' This is where it comes from, that line they always associate with him,
You dirty rat
. He never said that, he said,
You dirty, yellow-bellied rat
. And that is what my father called me. And he was laughing. And I hit him around the head with an iron bar. No, I don't know where it came from. It was just there.

“And I ran. I ran out and down the street. I hid for a day and a night, which is hard to do in the prairies because there is no forest, not where we were, anyway. Just land, flat land. I hid out in a barn. And then I ran to the railroad track and waited for the freight train.
I jumped the train and went on riding it until I reached the ocean and then I crossed the border and that is how I came to America. My name was never Newman, by the way, it was Wollman, I was Motty Wollman. In those days it was easy to get papers, things were more lax, so all of my life I have been an illegal immigrant, a wetback, just like Stephen here in England. Yet they still gave me a passport. They never caught me. I have always tried to be a good citizen, to pay my taxes and vote, because I never wanted anyone snooping around in my affairs.

“I headed south and found myself in Los Angeles, and I looked around and I loved it. It was warm, it was beautiful. You had the ocean and the beach and the palm trees. But the thing that impressed me very much was the idea that a man could get on a ship and sail away if he was in trouble. When I met my wife, her family had big connections with the sea, with the maritime union, and this is why I wanted Stephen to join the merchant marine, because then he would always have a lifeline. You need to be able to escape, like I did. In time you couldn't ride the rails anymore. But the sea is always the sea.

“I don't know what happened to my father. Maybe I am a murderer. It's a long time ago and everyone is gone. Unless Gittel is still alive, but how would I find her? Get a private detective? What for? I had a long and happy life. My wife never cared that I was a small man. My children grew up tall, I never passed my stature on to them. I loved my wife, she was beautiful, and I had a job where I worked with beautiful things worn by beautiful women.