The Last of the Wise Lovers (25 page)

   How could I find him?  How could
I possibly guess who belonged to whom in a world where opposites like K. and
his wife attracted?  I studied some of the faces nearby.  It couldn't
have been any of them - and it
could
have been any of them.
 "You'll see me," she had told him over the phone.  I
descended a row.  There, too, everyone was riveted to the altar; no one
turned around to look at the pink shirt with the black stripe.  I'd almost
decided that nothing was going to go wrong, that Mom had just worn that shirt
because she had already laid it out.  Nevertheless, I went back up two
stairs and checked the row above hers.  The first two seats were fine: an
old man and his wife occupied them.  Next to them sat a kid about my age.
 Next to him were three women sharing a prayer book.  Next to them
sat someone who pressed himself back in line with the other heads.  It was
a very slight movement, and under normal circumstances I never would've thought
he was trying to hide; but in my current state, every twitch made me
suspicious.  I moved aside in order to see better.  He was wearing a
dark suit, like most of the men there, but it was impossible to miss the blond
curls, the pleasant face, and the pale eyes.

   That meant that everything was going
to happen
here, now
.

   I imagine I must have flinched
somehow, because he gave up trying to conceal himself and turned a direct,
piercing glare on me.  This was the first time we had ever looked each
other in the eye.

"Ok, wise guy," his eyes said.
 "What are you gonna do now?"

 What was I supposed to do?  What would
you
have done in my place?

   The mayor and the vice presidential
candidate had reached the altar and were standing beside you.  You had
asked several other important types to join you: members of the board, big
givers, guys like that.  I watched Mom out of the corner of my eye without
taking my eyes off
him
.  He cast a few
quick, sidelong glances.  It seemed he was weighing his options.
 He fingered something under his jacket and leaned forward as if he were
about to run.  Someone who was hurrying up to the altar tapped my shoulder
and asked to get by.  I descended a row and mumbled, "Excuse
me."  When I went back to where I'd been standing, the guy was no
longer sitting in his seat.

   He was a few chairs away, halfway to
Mom.  The people who were sitting in his way shrank back and pulled in
their knees.  He didn't even apologize; he just pressed forward, his hand
inside his jacket as if he had a stomach ache.  I think that was when I
spoke to him for the first time.

"Hey," I called out in a coarse whisper.
 Several people sitting nearby turned their heads.  He kept going.

"Hey," I called again.  He bent his
back and took his hand out from under his jacket.

   He didn't have a gun, or a knife, or
anything else scary - just a rather wide manila envelope that was stuffed full.
 He stretched out his other, empty hand and lightly tapped the back of
Mom's chair.  She turned around.  He held the envelope out to her.
 She nodded sadly, as if the envelope and what was in it symbolized a hard
but inescapable fate.  The look on her face was just awful.  Actually,
her face looked awful, as if the mask she had constructed to hide her age - the
makeup, the facials, the optimistic expression - had crumbled all at once,
leaving only the truth: a network of deep, bitter lines, hard shadows under the
eyes, and a look of utter hopelessness.

   The guy's hand was still in mid-air,
clasping the envelope.  Mom hung back.  My confusion and curiosity
turned to dread.  I could no longer console myself that it was Dad who was
involved and that the chances of his doing anything to hurt Mom were slim.
 On the contrary; quickly I ran through all the things that could be
hidden in a fat manila envelope: a bomb?  A bottle of acid?  Poison?
 Mom was thinking, too.  Suddenly her eyes went blank, as if she were
about to cry.  The guy moved his hand in an arc, building speed to hurl
the envelope into her lap.  My terror took on a life of its own - I
couldn't control it.  

I heard myself scream, "No!"

   Just then the last of the notables
had arrived at the altar.  No one was speaking into the microphone, and
the last of the applause had died down.  My cry echoed in the sanctuary
loud and clear.  The guy threw me another glance and turned back to Mom.
 I shouted again, this time in Hebrew.

"Leave her alone!"

   It might have all ended there.
 The guy could have realized it was a lost cause, continued to the end of
the row, and run out.  I would have apologized or fled and Mom would have
been left there, in her embarrassment, to explain.  But Aunt Ida tried to
help.  She grabbed the envelope and pulled.  Overcome by surprise,
the guy pulled back. Mom watched it all from the side, as if none of it had
anything to do with her.  Aunt Ida mumbled something.  The guy pursed
his lips.  He tugged harder and more violently.  His free hand went
for his pocket, perhaps to take out a weapon.

   I remembered the gun.  It was
pressing against my ankle, as if it had awakened to remind me it was there.
 I bent over, undid the buckle and threw off the boot.  The gun fell
by my side on the floor.  I picked it up and pushed my way forward,
stepping on the toes of the old man and his wife, the kid, and the three
praying ladies.

"Get away from her!" I yelled, aiming
the gun at him.  "Get away from her or I'll shoot!"  The
trigger was lighter than I'd anticipated - or maybe in my confusion I pulled it
by accident.  I heard a small `pop' and the tinkle of glass as the bullet
hit one of the giant windows.

   Then came the screams.  The
congregation dove under the pews. Something in the tug of war between the guy
and Aunt Ida had gone awry.  The envelope tore, and out fluttered a wad of
papers covered in scrawl.  Mom covered her face with her hands.  Aunt
Ida stared in astonishment at the remains of the envelope in her hand.
 The guy didn't wait a second.  Again he performed one of his
fantastic feats: he sprinted to the end of the row, hurled himself on the
floor, rolled down the main aisle - and vanished.  The guys in the suits
came rushing in from all sides.  A few of them raced up to the altar and
positioned themselves as a protective wall around the mayor and the vice
presidential candidate.  Others took up positions near me and aimed their
guns.

"Drop the gun," someone yelled.
 "Don't bend over, don't move, just let it drop."  I did
what he said with a deep sense of humiliation and pain - not because I had to
obey, but because I longed to give Mom a hug.  She was sobbing bitterly
and, for the first time since all this had started, she seemed real, and human.

   You already know what happened next:
they held me in a small room that's usually reserved for the cantor.  Two
of the guys in suits guarded the door.  You used your connections to
persuade the mayor and the vice presidential candidate to keep me under house
arrest until the matter had been investigated, rather than send me to jail.
 The mayor agreed on condition that two of the guys in the suits accompany
us here to make sure I wouldn't escape.  With equal ease you arranged for
Mom to go to a sanatorium you were associated with. (For some strange reason no
one examined the papers that had been in the envelope.  As she was taken
away she clasped them, wrapped in a new plastic bag, to her chest.)  You
undoubtedly also convinced the mayor's publicity men to spare the press - so
anti-Semitic, anyway - the ridiculous story of your brother's crazy grandson
shooting into a crowd of Rosh Hashanah worshippers at your Temple yesterday
evening.

   That's it.  That's what
happened.

   All I have to do now is wait for you
to come.

  
It's already 9:47.  You're almost an hour late.  Is that a good sign,
or a bad sign?

  
There's a really old movie on TV with Mae West and Cary Grant.  I think
I'll turn it on and watch until you get here.

I don't have a clue how this envelope will get
to you, and I don't know what address it will bear or whether it will contain
everything I've stuffed into it: this letter and the eight notebooks. The
people taking care of us tried to persuade me that it would be healthier for me
not to write to you; but my psychologist, Dr. Lifshitz - he's a pretty smart
guy (though, come to think of it, maybe he's an officer in the Mossad, not a
psychologist) - took care of everything by telling them I needed to, "tie
up loose ends".

   So, let's tie up those loose ends.

   I'll pick up where I left off:
September 8th, 9:47 p.m., the day after your service and 47 minutes after you
were supposed to have arrived, but hadn't.  The guys you'd left to guard
me were watching television.  I could tell by the voices.  I turned
on my TV, too.  Like I said, they were showing a movie with Mae West and
Cary Grant.  When it got to the famous part where Mae West looks at the
bulge in Cary Grant's pants and says, "You got a gun in your pocket, or
you just glad to see me?" a light went off in my head.

   You know the feeling, like when
something suddenly becomes crystal clear - and then disappears before you have
a chance to really grasp it.  That's exactly what happened: suddenly I
understood everything - but then it slipped away, either because I was
exhausted or because, as Dr. Lifshitz says, "I wasn't yet psychologically
ready to face the truth."

   Again I tried to make sense out of
everything I knew.  There were two "teams" playing this game,
weren't there?  One comprised Dad and the Mossad; the other was made up of
Mom and the man she loved.  And there was a third, complicating factor:
the guy from the Lincoln Tunnel.  It wasn't clear whether he was on the
first team, or whether he was working in the service of a third, mysterious
player.  But what Mae West had said (the bulge in Cary Grant's pants could
express one of two entirely different things: either a deadly weapon, or sexual
excitement - this, too, was Dr. Lifshitz's assessment) revealed another
possibility, one that no one had thought of: what if the man Mom loved was also
the man who was somehow behind all the bullying and harassment?

   Of course this was all speculation, a
wild hunch.  But after all, it was
you
who taught me never to
ignore my hunches.  Again I scanned the notebooks.  I made a list of
everything I knew about the man Mom loved.  It was a very short list: he
was Jewish, he worked in the administration of The Society for Proper Nutrition
and Care of the Body, and his secretary's name was Miss Fletcher... what else?
 Wasn't there anything else I could surmise from the way in which they
met, from the things she'd written to him, from the way the offices of that
society in Nyack were set up?

   Then I remembered there
was
something else, and I
had
noticed it at The Society for Proper Nutrition
and Care of the Body- when I had wandered into the office with the large desk
and a map of the world on the wall.  Then I remembered there was one other
time when I had noticed the same something: it was at your house - and then,
too, the thought had flashed through my mind and disappeared.  What was
it? Something I'd heard?  Seen?  Smelled?

   I sat on the bed and tried to
concentrate.  My thoughts kept returning to your housekeeper Dorothy, for
some reason.  Had I been looking at
her
when the thought had
crossed my mind?  And if so, why?  Was it something she'd done?
 Something she'd said?  Something she'd been wearing?  After
several minutes of this I gave up.  I went to the window and looked
outside, intensely annoyed.  I knew I'd remember this detail long after it
had ceased to be important to me.

   For ten minutes or more I stared out
at the darkness, my mind wandering aimlessly; and then, without even trying, as
if some great processor in my brain had finished chewing up all the data and
finally spit out the answer, I remembered: the carpet.

   It was a completely insane
hypothesis.  Was there really some connection between the golf balls I'd
seen strewn on the carpet in that office at The Society for Proper Nutrition
and Care of the Body and Dorothy's complaining to me, when I was at your place,
about your carpets getting wrecked by your nightly golf games?  I ran to
my desk and thumbed through the notebooks again, trying to fit this new detail
in any place I could.  It wasn't a perfect fit, but for the most part it
worked pretty well, and that was enough to give me an idea who had been behind
it all: who had threatened Mom, who had controlled her, who had been her `wise
lover', and who had employed the guy in the blue Chevrolet.  I still
couldn't explain why - or how - the man had done what he had, but I had a fair
idea who he was.

   It was such a far-reaching
conclusion, and so hard to digest, that I just threw myself on the bed and
stared at the ceiling, stunned.  A little while later, for no apparent
reason, my eyes welled up with tears and I felt betrayed, cheated - and
pitiable.  But not for long.  All of a sudden I was overcome with an
earthshaking sense of release.  After all that had happened, after my
unjustified suspicion of Dad, my anger at Mom, and especially my fumbling for
days in a tunnel of darkness, I finally, finally knew who it was all about.
 I didn't know
what
it was all about, but I knew
who
. 
 I hadn't guessed; I
knew
!  I was so excited I got up and
started to pace the room.  I walked briskly back and forth, literally
bouncing off the walls.  Things - significant and insignificant - seemed
clearer and simpler with each passing minute.  The night Mom had gotten
out of a car at the end of the street, the pills, the conversations with you,
with Mom, the way she'd been sitting in Temple, oblivious to everything around
her...

    My next thought was that I had
to get out of there.  Not to waste a minute.  I stripped the pillow
of its case and stuffed the notebooks in it.  Then I tried the door.
 It was locked.  The only other option was the window.  I opened
it.  The ground was about five feet under me, which explained why none of
the guards thought I'd try to escape through the window.  Clenching the
pillowcase between my teeth, I stuck one foot out the window and onto the drain
pipe.  Then I pulled out my other leg and pressed myself against the wall
of the house.

   I had often climbed into my room this
way when I'd come home late or forgotten my key.  Now I discovered that it
was harder to climb down than up.  I slid most of the way down - it seemed
like the whole house shook.  I could see one of the guards through a
first-floor window.  He looked unperturbed.  Apparently they couldn't
hear the noise from inside.  Carefully I crawled around the house.  

I'd gotten to the front - almost to the garage
door - when someone right next to me said, "Where do you think you're
going?"

   It was the second guard.  For
the umpteenth time I discovered just how careful you have to be when you're
dealing with professionals.  I broke into a run.  I made it to the
middle of the front lawn before he caught up to me and whacked me on the back.

   I whirled around and pounded my fists
into his face, his chest, his balls.  I had the advantage.  His
prowess had been learned in a course for gorillas, but mine was the result of
two weeks of pent-up anger, fear, and tension - plus being a pretty good
athlete.  We rolled on the grass and tried to hurt each other as much as
possible.  Finally, he grabbed a fistful of dirt from one of the flower
beds and tossed it in my face.  Half blind, I staggered to my feet and
shoved him backwards into the basement window - which shattered and caved in
with him.  The other guard must have figured out that something was going
on.

  He came out on the kitchen porch and
shouted, "Jack? Hey, Jack!" I dug a piece of slate out of the path
and hurled it at him.  It hit him square in the stomach, and he doubled
over.  I grabbed the pillowcase, notebooks and all, and ran toward the
street.

   At first every bone in my body ached.
 Then I must have broken through what athletes call the "wall of
pain" because all I felt was more and more power surging up from inside,
bolstered by the knowledge I had longed for: who was on which side, who to be
wary of and why. When I got to the deli I stopped in the middle of the parking
lot, gasping for air.  Suddenly, I felt weak.  I didn't collapse, I
just sat down on the asphalt and breathed the way you should after a great
strain: two breaths in, one long breath out.

   A car that had been parked, half
hidden behind a billboard, turned on its lights and came toward me at
considerable speed.  I got up and started to run again, but of course the
car was faster.  It passed me and cut off my path so that my next step
landed me on the hood.  The driver got out, ran quickly around to the
front of the car and opened the passenger door.  I tried to get up and
break away, but he grabbed my arms and pushed me into the back seat.  

Before closing the door he said, "It's a good
thing you showed up - we'd planned a major operation to get you out of
there."  His voice was familiar and reassuring.  From the back
window I could see two other cars move out of the side streets and flash their
headlights.

"What about Mom?" I asked.

   "Don't worry.  Everything's
been taken care of.  We've got quite a few hours of driving ahead of us.
 It's best you get some sleep."

   Suddenly I felt an overwhelming
desire to give in to my exhaustion and to the sense of security, like I had
years ago as a kid.  

   "Ok, Dad," I mumbled,
escaping into sleep.

   *

   The next morning I awoke in a bed,
with only a vague recollection of a very long ride.  I examined the room
inch by inch.  It was almost empty except for two beds, a night table, and
a TV set.  In the bed next to mine Dad was asleep; he was fully clothed
and a newspaper was folded over his face.  Quite a lot of light filtered
in from behind a curtain that covered one wall.  I got up and pulled the
curtain aside a bit.  The sun was shining right in my eyes, above a wide
plain and a straight road that stretched as far as I could see.  Dad's car
was nowhere to be seen.  Instead, a small Japanese car stood in the
parking lot.

   "This is Pennsylvania," Dad
said in back of me.  "This is where we have to wait."

   I turned around.  He lifted
himself up on the bed and sat leaning against the wall.  The notebooks
were on the night table beside him.  The pillowcase had been tossed onto
the floor.  

When I looked at it he said, "We can't go
back there ever again."

   If that was the case, then this was
the only memento I had from the house.  I picked the pillowcase up off the
floor.

Dad said, "Leave it.  Our guys'll clean
up after us and get rid of all the traces."  He opened the night
table drawer, took out a very worn-looking Israeli passport and threw it to me.
 My picture was in it, and my name was listed as Eli Nahmias, age 21, from
Jerusalem.

"What about you?" I asked.
 "Are you a Nahmias, too?"

   "I'm a Holtz.  Moshe
Holtz."

   I screwed up my face.

   "You preferred Jenkins...”

   I threw a glance at the notebooks.

   "I read them," he said.
 "All of them."

   My ears were burning.  There was
a medicinal taste in my mouth.  I thought of all the things I'd written
about him, about Mom, about the others.

"They weren't meant for you."

   "A pity.  Much pain could
have been prevented."

   I was silent.

   "But I don't blame you.  I
know how hard it is."

   I looked at the rug.

   "I wonder whether you know the
truth."

   "I think so," I said,
uncertain.

   "Let's hear it," he said
commandingly.

   In that room, with his feet up on the
bed, he wasn't at all the guy I'd known at home.  There was something
authoritative and energetic about him that I liked better with each passing
minute, though he seemed like a stranger - and perhaps even a little dangerous.
 Suddenly I felt a twinge of my former suspicion.  This time it
seemed like he was trying to back me into a corner.  

Apparently he sensed what I was feeling, for he
smiled and said, "I'll write it down on a piece of paper.  You do the
same.  After you read what I've written you can decide whether or not to
show me what you've written...”

   We tore out the first page of the
Gideon's Bible that had been lying on the night table and rent it in two.
 Dad wrote something on his half and folded it over.  I did the same.
 Dad sailed his folded piece of paper over to me.  All that was on it
was a name.

   Your name.

   I threw my note over to him.  He
didn't even bother to open it.

   "When did you find out?" I
asked.

   "Yesterday," he pursed his
lips, "but I had no illusions before that, either.  It's been quite a
while since your mother and I were a loving couple; but I didn't think it was
Harry."

   I was silent.  I'd never had
such an open conversation with him before.  I didn't know what to say.

   "He even managed to fool
you," he said empathetically.  "It was a clever bit of work for
him to ask you to write down everything you knew at one shot so he could decide
how to extricate himself, who to blame and with whom to side...”

   "Do you hate him?"

   He took a deep breath and said
simply, "Yes."

   I tried to decide what
I
thought of you.

   "Especially," Dad added,
"because all this time, the whole time all of this was going on, he was so
flawless, so very wonderful and ...” he pursed his lips again, perhaps to hold
back a wave of emotion.