a putz.”
Sid sighed. “Yes, Irving had a big head, but it was not easy always to be Bernie’s son.”
Green glanced at him, wondering whether he should even stir up the memories. The two elderly men had more in common than widowhood; both had been in the camps, both had lost children there. “You mean Bernie’s second son.”
Green held his breath until his father replied. “Bernie doesn’t talk about it, but they are there, always in his memory.”
“They must have been very little when they died.”
“And that makes them easier to forget?”
“No,” Green soothed hastily. “What I meant was—how does he know how they would have turned out?”
“You have dreams for your child. You will see. You see in the baby the man he will become. Bernie has always loved you, Mishka. He sees you like the little boy he lost.”
“What exactly did happen to his kids?”
As he asked, Green kept his eyes casually on the road, but he heard his father’s breath catch in his throat. For a moment, Green thought he was actually going to answer, but then his father waved a peevish hand. “Watch the puddle. I don’t want to step out in a puddle.”
Skirting the slush, Green drew the car to a stop outside his father’s apartment and got out to help him. The senior citizens’ building was a bulky low-rise conveniently placed between a bakery and a drugstore. Sid had moved there under protest eight years earlier when he could no longer manage the stairs, but his heart still lay with the little brick tenement in Lowertown where his son had grown up and his wife had slowly slipped away. Sid scowled now at the squat, ugly cube as if it were an alien thing.
“Are you going to be okay, Dad?”
“Sure, sure. Eighty-three years old. All my friends are dying. I can’t walk even one block. My hands shake, I can’t open a door. A man should thank God for such a life.”
* * *
Green was surprised how unnerved he was by his father’s words. Both his parents were Holocaust survivors who had lost all their family in the war, but as an only child Green had seen nothing bizarre about the strange hours of silence and the lonely isolation of the home in which he’d been raised. He’d seen their fatalism and their protective paranoia as an irritating restriction on his youthful urge for adventure, and it was only when he’d started reading about the Holocaust as an adult that he’d begun to wonder about the depths of their pain. But all his parents had ever afforded him, as now, was a distant glimpse.
Later that evening, once their son had been securely tucked into his crib, Green fixed Sharon and himself a cup of Earl Grey tea. With a grateful sigh he sank down beside her on the sofa and drew her into his arms. Slowly, between soothing sips of tea, he told her about the visit to Mendelsohn’s apartment and his father’s reaction.
“He almost talked about it, honey,” he said. “It’s the closest he’s ever come to telling me anything, to saying he never forgets.”
She snuggled against his chest and cradled her cup of tea. Her eyes were half shut with fatigue, but her black curls bounced vigorously as she shook her head. “I’m sure he doesn’t. I couldn’t imagine losing Tony. I’d lose my mind. But your father, he’s had loss after loss after loss.”
The thought unsettled him, and he sipped his tea a moment to ponder. He remembered his father’s reaction to the long months of his mother’s dying. His mother had talked non-stop, even refusing morphine in order to stay alert, so desperate was she to cram twenty years of motherly advice into nine months. But his father had spent long, unnecessary hours at the factory and ceased to talk almost entirely. It was from his mother that Green had received his first glimpse into his father’s past.
“Don’t stop him from working,” she said. “That’s how he was in the camp after the war. Busy, busy, everything had to be just so. You stop, you think.”
After her death, his father had sunk into a deep apathy from which he’d been roused only briefly by the birth of Green’s daughter by his first marriage, who was named Hannah in her grandmother’s memory. When Green’s self-absorption torpedoed that marriage, Hannah had been yanked from both their lives by Green’s irate first wife before either man had much chance to know her. Green winced now as he thought how he himself had been responsible for that loss.
Bit by bit, Green, with the help of the hopeful widows in the Jewish seniors’ club, had coaxed his father back into a meagre social existence and into the companionship of his card-playing friends. And now even that was proving a mixed blessing.
Green sighed. “I hope Dad can bounce back. It must be hard watching everyone dying around you.”
“And poor Bernie. He’s had such a life too, and what a way to end it. With a crummy apartment, a handful of grumpy cronies and a son who doesn’t care.”
“I don’t know that Irving doesn’t care. He’s got his own life, and Bernie’s not the most approachable guy in the world. His motto was always ‘You think God cares?’ I know he’s gone through a lot, but as a father I’m not sure he was the best.”
“Was yours?” she countered. “For that matter, are you? Even without the scars of the Holocaust, we fail each other in so many ways. Because of our pride and our hurts. Bernie fails his son, his son fails him. Even me—am I everything I should be to my poor parents? They want to come up for Tony’s birthday, and I put them off till Chanukah, because I don’t have the energy to deal with them. We all have needs that no one can fill. People get busy with their own lives, so in the end, one way or another, the old all face death alone.”
That thought stayed with him, reminding him of Eugene Walker, who had faced death alone at one o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of a busy hospital parking lot. Sullivan had dismissed him as just another old drunk, Donald Reid had called it a quick and painless heart attack, MacPhail a simple “natural causes.” It was true it wasn’t top priority on the major crimes docket, but there was still that niggling mystery of the head wound, and surely the end of a man’s life—and the cause of that end—should be worth at least asking a few questions.
November 7nd, 1939
Winter is young, just gathering strength.
It hurls through the flimsy walls
into the shed where we huddle at the end of the day.
Six strangers, made brothers by the whims of war.
We rouse the reluctant fire, and by its flame
I see my thoughts and fears in the strangers’ eyes.
We are not safe, even here.
Rumours fly eastward on the wind,
of hangings, houses burning and young men,
Poles and Jews alike, kidnapped off the streets,
to stoke the Aryan madness.
She droops against my chest, too weary for words.
