What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (12 page)

29. Right before the end of things, Bean and I walk to Green-point to buy chocolates at one of the Polish stores. We pass a Ukrainian grocery, which reminds Bean of her Ukie parts. She tells me of a great-uncle, a butcher, who slipped and fell into a vat of boiling hams. He was dead in an instant, leaving eight children behind. “Even your bad stories are good,” I tell her. “A very bad story,” she agrees. And I add, upon consideration, “That’s possibly the least Jewish way to die.” “Yes,” she says. “Not the traditional recipe for Jews.” And looking around at all the Polish stores, I agree. “Traditionally, yes, correct. Jews go in the oven. Pagans, burned at the stake. And Ukranian uncles …” “Boiled,” she says. “Boiled alive.”

30. Theo tells me this: When he was three, he was left alone in his family’s little bungalow in Far Rockaway. “Still standing,” he says. “They’ve torn down practically all of them, but that one still stands.” In his parents’ bedroom, under his father’s pillow, he found a loaded gun. Theo took the gun. He aimed at the window, at the clock, and then took aim at the family dog, a sweet, dumb old beagle asleep next to the bed. He pulled the trigger; Theo shot that dog through his floppy ear. The bullet lodged in the floor. “You killed him?” I ask. “No, no, the dog was fine as fine can be—fine but for a perfect circle through that ear.”

Sammy (the dog) just opened his sad, milky eyes, looked at Theo, and went back to sleep.

31. Cousin Jack stands with me while Theo tells that story. Jack doesn’t believe it. “What about kickback?” he says. “You were all of three. Should have shot you across the room. You’d have a doorknob in your ass until this day.”

“A .22,” Theo says. “There doesn’t have to be much kick. A .22 short wouldn’t have to knock over a flea.”

“Still,” Jack says. “A little boy. Hard to believe it.”

“I guess I handled it,” Theo says, and looks off. And to me, there is nothing in that look but honesty. “I must have handled it,” Theo says, “because I still remember the feel of that shot.”

32. It is “the feel of that shot” that does it. It is “the feel of that shot” that undoes another sixty years for Jack. Because out of nowhere, he is talking again, Jack, who does not keep secrets—or keeps them for half a century, until suddenly the truth appears. “Terrible,” Jack says. “It was a terrible phone call to get. I can still remember. I was the one who picked up the phone.”

33. “What phone?” I say. “What call? What terrible?” I rush things out, desperate for any history to put things in place. I’m sure that I’ve already scared the story off with my eagerness, my panic. I’m sure it’s about Abner, about the little boy dying.

“The call about your grandfather’s brother.”

“About Abner?” I say, because I can’t keep my mouth shut, can’t wait.

“No,” he says. “About Bennie. The call from your grandfather to tell me Bennie had died.”

34. Margot is now standing there, her arm hooked through Theo’s, her face full of concern. “You got the call about Bennie being killed in the war?”

“Yes,” Jack says. Then: “No.”

“You didn’t get it?” she says.

“I did. I got the call. But it wasn’t the war.”

“He was killed in the war,” Margot says. “In Holland.”

“He was buried in Holland,” Jack says. “Not killed there. And he wasn’t killed in the war. It was after.”

“After.”

“After the fighting. After the end of the war. His gun went off on guard duty.”

“You always said,” Margot says incredulously, “everyone always said: ‘Killed in Holland during the war.’ ”

35. Jack puts a hand on my shoulder, hearing Margot but talking to me. “ ‘Guard duty’ is what your grandfather told me that day. ‘An accident.’ Then, a few months later, we’re out in my garage—I remember this perfect. I’m holding a carburetor, and he takes it, and he’s looking at it like it’s a kidney or something, weighing it in his hand. ‘It was a truck,’ he says. ‘Bennie asleep in the back, coming off guard duty. Something joggled, something fired, and Bennie shot through the head.’ ”

It’s Theo who speaks: “That’s one in a million, that kind of accident. Spent my life around guns.”

“It is,” Jack says. “One in a million. Maybe more.”

36. What I’m thinking—and maybe it’s the way my head works, maybe it’s just the way my synapses fire—but in this Pat Tillman, quagmire-of-Iraq world, I’m thinking, I don’t like the sound of it. And maybe I’m being truly paranoid. It is, as
I said, sixty years later. The idea that it already sounds funny, and already is the cut hand turned brain tumor, is not for me to think. And then Jack says, “I never did like the sound of it. That story never sat right.”

37. Margot says, “I don’t know why your grandfather never visited.”

“There was talk,” Jack says. “Right after. But then, like everything else in this family”—and no one has ever said such a thing before, no one ever acknowledged the not acknowledging—“it just got put away and then it was gone.”

38. I am in Holland on book tour. I am at the Ambassade Hotel in Amsterdam, eating copious amounts of Dutch cheese and making the rounds. There is one day off. One day free if I want to see
The Night Watch
or the red lights or to go walk the canals and get high. My publisher, he offers me all these things. “No thank you,” I say. “I’m going to Maastricht to visit a grave.”

39. When you tell the Americans you are coming, the caretaker goes out and does something special. He rubs sand into the marker of your dead. The markers are white marble, and the names, engraved, do not show—white on white, a striking field of nameless stones. But with the sand rubbed, the names and the dates, they stand out. So you walk the field of crosses, looking for Jewish stars. When you find your star and see the toasted-sand warmness of the name, you feel, in the strangest way, as if you’re being received as much as you’re there to pay tribute. It’s a very nice touch—a touch that will last until the first rain.

40. Do you want to know what I felt? Do you want to know if I cried? We don’t share such things in my family—we don’t tell this much even. Already I’ve gone too far. And put being a man on top of it; compound the standard secretiveness and shut-downness of my family with manhood. It makes for another kind of close-to-the-vest, another type of emotional distance, so that my Bosnian never knew what was really going on inside.

41. This happened at the bridge club, back in ’84 or ’85. My grandparents are playing against Cousin Theo and Joe Gorback. (Margot never plays cards.) Right when it’s old Joe’s turn to be the dummy, he keels over and dies. The whole club waits for the paramedics and the gurney, and then the players play on—all but for my grandparents’ table, short one man.

They wait on the director. Wait for instruction.

And Theo looks at my grandparents, and looks at his partner’s cards laid out, and over at the dead man’s tuna sandwich, half-eaten. Theo reaches across for the untouched half. He picks it up and eats it. “Jesus, Theo” is what my grandfather says. And Theo says, “It’s not like it’s going to do Joe any good.”

“Still, Theo. A dead man’s sandwich.”

“No one’s forcing you,” he says. “You’re welcome to sit quiet, or you can help yourself to a fry.”

42. My grandfather wasn’t superstitious. But it’s that half sandwich, he’s convinced, that brings it on Theo—a curse. That’s what he says when Theo parks his car at the top of the hill over by the Pie Plate and forgets to put his emergency brake on. He’s heading on down to the restaurant when he looks back up and sees his car lurch and start rolling. And he still claims it’s the
fastest he ever ran in his life. Theo gets run over by his own Volvo. He breaks his back, though you’d never tell to look at him today.

43. My couch is ninety-two inches; it’s a deep green three-cushion. It seats hundreds. But that’s not why I got it. I got it because, lying down the long way, in the spooning-in-front-of-a-movie way, in the head-to-toe lying with a pair of lamps burning and a pair of people reading, it fits me and it fits another—it fits her—really well.

44. She is gone. She is gone, and she will be surprised that I am alive to write this—because she, and everyone who knows me, didn’t think I’d survive it. That I can’t be alone for a minute. That I can’t manage a second of silence. A second of peace. That to breathe, I need a second set of lungs by my side. And to have a feeling? An emotion? No one in my family will show one. Love, yes. Oh, we’re Jews, after all. There’s tons of loving and complimenting, tons of kissing and hugging. But I mean any of us, any of my blood, to sit and face reality, to sit alone on a couch without a partner and to think the truth and feel the truth, it cannot be done. I sure can’t do it. And she knew I couldn’t do it. And that’s why it ended.

45. It ended because another person wants you to need to be with them, with her, specific—not because you’re afraid to be alone.

46. My grandmother had one job in her life. She worked as a bookkeeper at a furniture store for a month before my grandfather proposed. The owner proposed first. She turned the owner down.

47. She had another job. I thought it was her job, and I put it here because I put this scene into every story I write. I lay it into every setting, attribute it to every character. It’s a moment that I add to every life I draw, and then cut—for it contains no meaning beyond its meaning to me. It comes from my grandmother and her Mr. Lincoln roses, my grandmother collecting Japanese beetles in the yard. She’d pick the beetles off the leaves and put them in a mason jar to die. And I’d help her. And I’d get a penny for every beetle, because, she told me, she got a penny for every beetle from my grandfather. I believed, until I was an adult, that this was her job. A penny a beetle during rose-growing season.

48. About sacks of corn and the one time I felt like a man: My grandfather and I drive out to the farm stand. It’s open, but no one’s in it. There’s a coffee tin filled with money, under a sign that says self-serve. Folks are supposed to weigh things themselves and leave money themselves and, when needed, make change. This is how the owner runs it when she’s short-staffed. We’ve come out for corn, and the pickings are slim, and that’s when the lady pulls up in her truck. She gets out, makes her greetings, and drops the gate on the back. And in the way industrious folks function, she’s hauling out burlap sacks before a full minute has passed. My grandfather says to me, “Get up there. Give a hand.”

49. I hop up into the bed of the truck and I toss those sacks of corn down. It’s just the thing an able young man is supposed to do—and I’d never, ever have known. But I don’t hesitate. I empty the whole thing with her, feeling quiet and strong.

50. They are sacks of Silver Queen and Butter & Sugar, the sweetest corn in the world. She tells us to take what we want, but my grandfather will have no such thing. We fill a paper sack to overflowing and pay our money. At my grandparents’, I shuck corn on the back steps, the empty beetle jar tucked in the bushes beside me and music from the transistor coming through the screen of the porch. And—suburban boy, Jewish boy—I’ve never felt like I had greater purpose, never so much felt like an American man.

51. The woman I love, the Bosnian, she is not Jewish. All the years I am with her, to my family, it’s as if she is not. My family so good at it now. My family so masterful. It’s not only the past that can be altered and forgotten and lost to the world. It’s real time now. It’s streaming. The present can be undone, too.

52. And I still love her.
I love you, Bean. (And even now, I don’t say it straight. Let me try one more time:
I love you, Bean.
I say it
.) And I place this in the middle of a short story in the midst of our modern YouTube, iTunes, plugged-in lives. I might as well tell her right here. No one’s looking; no one’s listening. There can’t be any place better to hide in plain sight.

53. On Thanksgiving, this very one, I am hunting for a gravy boat in the attic. I find the gravy boat and my karate uniform (green belt, brown stripe) and a shoe box marked dresser. Lifting the lid, I understand: It’s the remains of my grandfather’s towering chest of drawers—a life compacted, sifted down. Inside, folded up, is a child’s drawing. It’s of a man on a chair, a hat, two arms, two legs—but one of those legs sticks straight out to the side, as if the man were trying to salute with it. The leg at a ridiculous and impossible angle. It’s my mother’s drawing. She hasn’t seen it in years. She doesn’t remember filling that box.

54. The drawing is of Great-Grandpa Paul. “Hit by a train,” she says. And already—in a loving, not-at-all-angry, Jewish son’s way, I’m absolutely furious. She knows I’m writing this story, knows I want to know everything, and here, Great-Grandpa Paul, a lifetime at the railroad and killed by a train. I can’t believe it—cannot believe her.

“Oh, no, no,” she says, “not killed, not at all. Eighteen when it happened. He survived it just fine. Only, the leg. He could never bend that leg again.”

55. The first time Bean brings me home, we walk to the river in Williamsburg. We stand next to a decrepit old factory on an industrial block and stare at Manhattan hanging low across the water, a moon of a city at its fullest and brightest.