Vanishing and Other Stories (35 page)

 

DURING OUR MORNING WALKS TO WORK
, my father either whistled or told me his life story. If he whistled, it was a tuneless sound that had all the improvisation of jazz and none of the melody. If he talked, he told me about when he had learned to sew from his father, in the same shop where we now worked.

“And I hated it,” he said. “I hated the shmattes. I hated the smell. I hated all the men who were just like my father.” He had a quick, elegant stride, and he kept his hands casually in his pockets. “There was no way I was going to spend my life in that dank little shop, hunched over a machine. I decided that, when my father died, I'd sell the place and never walk down Spadina again.”

I could have asked questions—“Why?” or “What changed?”—but my father told his story the way he might tell a joke, in the practised tone of someone who doesn't want interruptions. So I trampled people's lawns and listened to his history. After his initial reluctance to learn, he discovered he was good at tailoring. He was precise and calm and developed a love for the perfect fit, the timeless cut. He altered his young man's pride and recklessness and turned those qualities into a charming, understated masculinity. Around this time, he met my mother. He seemed to consider her something that had happened to him. He spoke of marriage and fatherhood as things that had taken him by surprise, the way a change in the weather might. “You wake up one morning,” he said, “and you don't recognize your own life.”

But despite this boyish astonishment at the way things turned out, I think he became what he always wanted to be: a family man,
a flirt, a nine-to-five gent. For most of his life, he fit seamlessly into Spadina's noise and neighbourly business.

Now was a different story. The men and women he knew when he'd started—my grandfather's friends, people who most often did business in Yiddish—had left Spadina. They'd moved uptown, or to the suburbs, and were replaced by people from China, Portugal, and the Caribbean. People who opened restaurants, imported clothes instead of making them, and played music my father hated out their shop windows. Neon signs in Asian script were put up, along with paper lanterns, sculpted monkeys, and carved dragons. There were other newcomers too, Americans who sat in cafés and talked politics.

Jack Holtzman, my father, was the last stubborn Jew, the only person on Spadina who still wore a suit and polished shoes to work. He never discussed this, but he seemed split between the present world and some idealized past he reinvented and relived each day. Even with Simone, he was divided. He never took her to work with him, or anywhere else someone might see them together. No one would have really cared—by then we'd all heard the rumours of
free love
—but he wanted to maintain some kind of image, a style his father would have approved of.

 

 

SIMONE GAVE THE HOUSE
a feeling of ease, of languidness. She opened all the windows and left her magazines, her clothes, her empty packs of Juicy Fruit lying around. Suddenly our place was nothing like the tidy, airtight home Mom had kept. The house had been her idea—my father would have been happy to live above the
shop—and Mom had been obsessive about its upkeep. When she was still well enough, she dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed and waxed the floors nearly every day.

But that summer, no one vacuumed or wiped water stains from the bathroom tiles. Simone spent most of her time on the kitchen floor with the phone to her ear, telling her sisters about the ice-cream parlour, or whispering things she and my father did. Sam built complex forts in the living room. He used pillows and chairs for walls, and draped my father's clothes for roofs. My father was so happy, so distracted, that he didn't get angry when he found his pressed shirts strewn around the living room. He spent his time cooking festive, complicated things: lamb shanks, brisket, squash stuffed with rice and hazelnuts. As though every day were a holiday. The house got even hotter with the oven on, but he didn't seem to notice.

After dinner, no one asked me to help with the dishes. Those sat in the sink while Simone and my father drank gin and danced to the blues in the kitchen. I'd go to my room, get into bed with the lights out, and use a flashlight to read a series of books I'd been given as a child. They were hardcovers about ancient civilizations. Pompeii, Babylon, Troy, Petra.

The text was simple, the maps and pictures faded, but I reread these books all summer. I had nothing else. I hadn't gone to the library in months, because it would have reminded me too much of Mom. When she was alive, we went every week. I picked out historical mysteries and she took home books about musicians, artists, politicians. In another life, I think she would have made a great biographer. Sam has a lot of my father in him: the wild hair, the vintage sparkle in his eye, and a tendency to view history as a
series of styles that can be imitated. Mom saw the world as a tangle of stories, mostly painful ones. I've always been my mother's son.

 

 

EACH MORNING
, I'd wake to the smell of the coffee my father had on the stove. “Eggs and toast, boys,” he'd say. There was even something cheerful about the way he flipped pancakes or seasoned hash browns.

Eventually, Simone wandered in, her blond hair greasy and tangled. She wore my father's plaid pyjamas, and had to roll the waist of the pants to keep them from sliding off her hips. She'd usually announce her presence by executing a long, sleepy stretch. Then we'd all sit on the porch for the hour before the city was too hot to bear, and watch the neighbourhood wake up. My father served boiled eggs in glass egg cups and we ate them slowly, dipping our toast in the bright yolks. Even Sam sat still while he slurped his juice.

Then Simone went upstairs to change into the uniform she wore to work. She liked to do her makeup in front of the hall mirror, and we—my father, Sam, and I—would sit on the couch and watch her comb her hair or choose a colour of eyeshadow. She'd talk, her eyes catching ours in the mirror.

“If I have to work the late shift again, I'm going to shit,” she'd say. Or, “Don't you think? My own sister? I can't believe—”

I doubt any of us listened. We just sat there—male and ignorant and entranced—and watched what she did with eye pencils.

 

 

DURING THE FIRST WEEKS
of my internship, my father was proud and patient. “This is my son,” he'd tell customers, and they'd smile at me like I was a newborn. But as July wore on, it became clear that I had no talent as a tailor. I was inaccurate and sloppy. After two weeks of bad measurements and crooked cuts, I was put in charge of filling out order cards and counting change.

“I'll deal with scissors,” my father said. “You deal with people.”

I wasn't very good at that either. Since Mom, I'd become even quieter. I'd taken to crawling into the very back of my brain and staying there. It probably gave me a strange, blank look. I think it frightened the customers.

After a month of this kind of failure, working with my father began to scare me. Some mornings I couldn't get any food down. Once at the shop I was exhausted, and sometimes fell asleep in my chair instead of observing his quick, talented fingers. He blamed it on the heat, and bought another fan for the shop. It buzzed like an insect and hardly moved the store's soupy air. I watched it all day, counted time by the spooky rotation of its head.

“Alex, wake up.” My father waved an order card in front of my face. “This is a big one. Five wool suits.”

“Wool?” I scratched my arms.

“Yes, sir.” His voice and the movement of his lips made me dizzy. “In this weather. Must be a funeral.”

Maybe it was the fan's noise or the heat or the word
funeral
, or all of it at once, but I fainted. Swooned like a girl and fell to the floor.

 

 

WHAT I REMEMBER MOST
about my mother is the way she sat at the kitchen table, listening to a record or to the radio. Also her deep-set eyes and her silence. She could be quiet in a threatening way, and this could last for days. When it got really bad, she wouldn't read or listen to music or help us with our school work. She'd just sit in the kitchen and hold a smouldering cigarette in her hand. The table would be littered with long curls of ash.

During these times, my father would joke with her, tease her, kiss her roughly on the cheek, and say things like, “Hiya, sunshine.” Even as a child I couldn't understand his strategy. It seemed obvious that it was best to leave her alone, wait her out. Eventually, she'd burst from this darkness on her own. At some unexpected, illogical moment she might turn on her record player or announce, “Who's up for a game of rummy?” But still my father persisted. He cooked her favourite food—chicken soup with
kneidlach
—and brought her bright, smelly freesias from the florist down the street.

Even when she was sick, my father maintained this cheery demeanour. He took her hand and squeezed too hard. He brought chocolates to the hospital even though she couldn't keep them down. He told jokes.

“How many doctors does it take to change a light bulb?”

She smiled faintly. “You've already told me this one, Jacky.”