What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (13 page)

56. Bean takes out a key. Behind a metal door is a factory floor with no trace of the business that was. The cavernous space is now a warren of rooms, individual structures, like a shantytown
sprouting up inside a box. “I’ve got a lot of roommates,” she says. And then: “I only just finished building. The guys helped me put the ceiling on last night.” Toward the back, behind a mountain of bicycle parts, is a grouping of tiny rooms with a ladder (which we climb) leading to a sort of cube on top. She’s bracketed together scavenged frames of all shapes and sizes to make four window walls under a window ceiling through which one may stare at the rough beams above. It’s a miracle of a room, a puzzle complete. “I guess I’ll need curtains now,” she says as we sit on her bed. And I say, “You live in a house made of windows, but”—and I motion—“you can’t see outside.” She takes it well, and takes my hand.

57. I mention him to my grandfather just once. Visiting from college, drinking whiskeys, playing gin. I mention his dead brother Bennie—the army brother—who I’d just found out existed. I say something awkward about the only guy at school called up for the first Iraq war—the good one. I say something about younger brothers, being a younger brother myself.

58. My grandfather picks a card, arranges his hand—making sets. “For a while we owned a building. Two stories. We were landlords to a deli on the ground floor and a pair of tiny apartments upstairs. More than once,” he says, “I found a body. I’d head over to check on things before work, and I’d find them. One time in the stairwell, and another, a stiff in the alley, still wearing his hat. These weren’t crimes of passion, either. These were deals settled, people done in.” He lays his cards facedown on the table. I look at their backs. “Gin,” he says. And he goes out to the porch to smoke a cigar.

59. I use the Freedom of Information Act to get at it. We don’t have such a law in my family, but the government, the government will tell you things about a missing brother. The government will sometimes share secrets if you ask.

60. Where is my Bean when I need her? Where is Bean when I’m having a feeling I can’t face? It’s not that I want to share it. It’s the exact opposite—the old me in play. What I want is to turn pale for her, saying nothing. I want to go anxious and ask her—should anyone call—to come find me under the bed.

Where she is right then is out dancing on tables. That’s what I see in my head. And that’s our standard joke during the rare times we speak. Me saying, “I picture you out dancing on tables whenever I wonder what you’re up to.” “Oh, yeah,” she says, “that’s me. Out dancing every night.”

61. The letter is real—in both realms real. There is an envelope from the government, a pack of papers, forms typed uneven, faded reproductions, large spaces for the clipped explanation. In it is a letter written in my grandfather’s hand. It’s a beautiful, intelligent, confident (but not cocky) script. It’s a polite letter to the government, a crisp, clean letter. He is writing on behalf of his mother, about her son—his brother, killed in (after) the war. They’d filled out the forms, and they’d still not received—he was wondering when they might get—his dead brother’s things.

His effects.

Bennie’s worldly effects.

62. Here is me, fictionalized, sitting on the couch with a letter, written in my grandfather’s hand. I am weeping. I don’t
know if I’ve ever seen his handwriting before. I think to call my mother, to tell her what I’m holding. I think to call my brother, or maybe Cousin Jack. But really, more than anyone, I think to call that missing love—that missing lover. Because it’s her I wish were with me; it’s her I want to share it with right now. And more so, to find myself weeping from a real sadness—not anxious, not disappointed, not frustrated or confused—just weeping from the truth of it, and the heartbreak of it, and recognizing it as the purest emotion I’ve ever had. It’s this I want to tell her, that I’m feeling a pure feeling, maybe my first true feeling, and for this—I admit it—I am proud.

63. I am sad for my grandfather, ten years passed, and his mother, dead forty, and his brother, sixty years gone from this world. I am on the couch alone, and I am weeping. It is the purity of the letter, the simplicity of it: Your last brother dead, and you’re asking for his things.

I
want I should talk to Rabbi Himmelman.”

This from Agnes Brown, seventy-six years old, standing behind Josh’s chair in the dining hall and addressing the back of his head.

Josh turns to her. She is not alone. She is never alone—Arnie Levine, seventy-eight, is at her side. “You both know,” Josh says, “Rabbi Himmelman is gone. I am the director—I’ve been the director all summer.”

“You’re too young to be the director,” Arnie says, her defender.

“And you, Arnie, are too old to be at camp.”

“It’s Elderhostel,” Agnes says.

“Is there instructional swim?”

“We can,” Agnes says, “have a swim lesson in the lake.”

“Any place with instructional swim,” Josh says, definitive, “is camp.”

He holds her gaze, staring eye to eye, though he sits and she stands. She is shrinking, his Agnes. Every summer, the old people grow smaller as the children grow big. Josh has decided that there is only so much height in the world and the inches must change hands.

He turns back to his lunch in time to see it carried off by one of the girls brought in from Poland to do the kitchen
work. They are good workers, the Polish girls. And they are paid a fair wage. Though it is, Josh feels, a woeful way to see America—or not see it—these young women ferried straight to the Berkshires to care for Jews too young or too old to care for themselves.

By the time Josh is finished thinking this thought, his lunch, and the Polish girl, have disappeared into the kitchen. He grabs hold of his coffee mug and clasps it tight. He can sense the pair still hovering at his back.

It is always like this with the campers from this side of the lake. They are very old, some of them. They are very slow. Sometimes very sick. And yet, wherever Josh goes, however fast, however far, he can feel them right behind.

Arnie’s stiff, speckled hand is at his shoulder, tapping, Agnes talking.

“
Boychik
,” she says, “Squirt. What has happened to Himmelman? Always he takes care.”

“Why do you talk like that?” Josh says.

“Like what?”

“Like ‘Always he takes care.’ Like you haven’t been in Livingston, New Jersey, for the last fifty years. Like it’s not now 1999, the cusp of a new millennium. Honestly, where does it come from, the ‘I want I should talk to the rabbi’ and all that?”

“Rude boy!” she says. “Still, you are a nice rude.” This part she tells to Arnie. “In this way, the emotional ones are disrespectful, because they are afraid to have feelings.” Here she turns back to Josh and winks. “My granddaughter, she is rude, too.”

“The vegan?” Josh says. “The born-again Hassidic vegan with four kids?”

“Yes,” Agnes says. “Maybe you’ll meet her. At your point, a bald head”—Josh reaches up to rub what’s left of his hair—“and this job—a sad job, you’ll admit? For us, a treat, but for
you, well, this? Three months a year living in a pressboard house smells like raccoons … I’d say, for you a nice divorcée maybe is good. On visiting day, maybe have a stroll, the two of you. Steal a kiss. Maybe let her walk ahead and have yourself a stare at the center of a nice solid tush and ignore in the end how wide.”

“ ‘Tunnel vision,’ they call that now,” Arnie says, always adding his “now,” as if all the others are trapped in the past and only he has access to the present.

“Visiting day,” says Josh, holding up a finger to Arnie, another point. “Did you hear her? She said, ‘on visiting day’. If it has visiting day, it’s camp.”

“The lady,” Arnie says, “she asked for Himmelman. He was the one who worried on us. Tanglewood, Himmelman always got us a place. And bug spray, always, for free—a can in his pocket. A
schpritz
when you needed. My fifth summer here, and after the first, I never got malaria again.”

“You didn’t get malaria,” Josh says. “We don’t have malaria. We have Lyme disease—and you didn’t get that. You were just tired.”

“Yes, it was the Lyme,” he tells Agnes. “That’s what I had. They nearly killed me, here.” And to Josh: “You still haven’t said why a rabbi just disappears—”

“Because it’s not your concern, is why. A problem,” says Josh. “A problem on the children’s side of the camp. All you need to know is, I’m here now, and Himmelman is gone.”

“What problem?” Agnes says. “I saw no little boys facedown in the lake. Is it the turtles?”

“No, it’s not turtles. Kids—I’ll have you know—do not complain about turtles. They love them. They can outrun them. Only old people complain about turtles. And because of that, I’ve had their habitat moved, poor things. I’ve had them fished from the lake and moved far, far away.”

“They will come back,” Arnie says. “Like elephants—that’s how the turtles remember.”

“And Himmelman?” Agnes says.

For once, Arnie helps Josh out. “When they say, ‘a problem’? Today, that means what we used to call a pervert before there were lawyers like squirrels, hundreds waiting in every tree. Back in my day, every church in Brooklyn kept in its icebox, like beer, a six-pack of altar boys. To get enough kids together for a stickball game, my son would have to sit on the stoop and wait for them to thaw—”

“What are you saying?” Agnes says, drawing him back.

“Himmelman—he is a fondler. He fondles. Our friend who got us always tickets.” Arnie shakes his head, disappointed. “Terrible to learn. He seemed so nice and always the hands where you could see them, waving while he talked.”

“What are you saying?” Agnes says. “Is that Yiddish,
fondul
? I don’t understand.”

“No, no,” Arnie says. “Fondle—
fondle
is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung …”

“Farflung
is
Yiddish.”

“No,” Arnie says, “it’s not. Anyway, the boy is saying, this one—too good for your granddaughter because she wears now a wig and eats the snafu hot dogs.”

“Tofu,” Josh says.

“What he is trying to tell us is that he got a promotion because of a fondle. He’s a pervert’s replacement. Big shot!”

“Thank you,” Josh says. “Anyway, anyone who signed up for tickets to Tanglewood will get tickets. … Did you sign up on the sheet?”

“We signed,” Arnie says.

“Then it’s done,” Josh says. “Then you can go hear music.”

“Okay,” Agnes says.

“Good. Now, if I turn back to the table, if I scooch around
and reach for ‘a nice piece of honey cake,’ as you’d say, my dear Agnes, will you still be back there?”

“There is one more thing,” Agnes says.

“That’s what I wanted to know. Tell me, is it the same ‘one more thing’ as the last two days? Is it the same topic that we promised never to address out loud, and if we really do need to address it, then not in the dining hall, where the subject of said ‘one more thing’ might hear and might be wounded and might have a really, really rotten time here at … at Elderhostel?”

“If you know,” Agnes says, “if you want to ask with a long sentence being a teaser and an ironic maker, then why don’t you do something?”

It is then that he passes. The big man, Doley Falk—quiet-looking and sweet as sugar. He is not one of the troublemakers who complain all day to Josh, morning to night, for whom life has turned into one unbroken disappointment. He’s just a serious old bridge player, come from Toledo, Ohio, who wants nothing more than to eat kosher food and play cards, and to scream “Two no trump!” when he feels the Alzheimer’s sneaking his way.

He is one of the campers who offers Josh his moments—the caught moments that make Josh come back every year, that get him through the winters of planning and recruiting, that, in fact, make it not a sad job for a man to have, but make it plain beautiful.

The first year, it was Rita Desberg, staring off at the lake. Josh spotted her standing stock-still as a mist rose and the sun dropped—a moment so peaceful that even her body for an instant forgot the tremor built in. The second summer it was Charlie Kornblum, his life only tragedy, stories too sad to repeat, and there, Josh saw it, so simple. It was Charlie stepping aside and smiling as a tumble of junior campers rolled by, kicking up behind them a wall of dust.

They are few and far between, these precious instants. And big Doley, a new camper here for the last two weeks of summer, is one to offer them. Josh has already seen.

Doley Falk does not smile at children. He does not stare at the lake. He takes no joy in eating, and snaps his paper when the widows take the chair by his side. But when that hulk of a man sits down at a bridge table, when he hears the first ruffle of the deck, he nods to his partner and looks, positively, like he’s eighteen again, a sparkle in his eye.

He’s a joy to watch. A pure affirmation of why Josh does what he does. He is one of Josh’s specials, and he won’t have the man’s time here besmirched. But Agnes, she won’t leave off him. She and Arnie won’t let the man be.

“I’m telling you with respect,” Josh says. “The camplike structure, for good and for bad, it revives certain adolescent elements of human nature. You come every year, you two. You stay the whole summer. And you cannot help it. When it comes to the two-weekers, the newbies, the last-session bridge players—toward them, you are, inevitably, cruel.” He raises a hand, not rudely, just to stop them from speaking. “
I’m sorry, but it’s true
. You always cold-shoulder them—I see what you do. And forgive me for saying it, but you treat them like the new kids in high school bused in for ninth grade.”

Arnie brings out the big guns. He rolls up a sleeve and flashes the number on his arm.

“I wouldn’t know from ninth grade. Never went. But camp? My share of camps. A different camp than this one, yes? You want camps? I know camps. I know from human nature. And I have seen before. I know—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Josh says too loudly. “What can I say to numbers? My apologies. On the matter of camps, I defer.”

Arnie comes in close. “You don’t see what we see,” he says.
“Maybe at the cash machine, the code to get money is gone from my head. Maybe sometimes my own grandchildren, I admit it—their names can’t be found. But the faces from back then, from that place,” Arnie says.

And Agnes, with vigor: “These, we do not forget.”

“Leave him be!” Josh says. He is almost yelling, which he never does. They are old. They talk a lot. They push buttons. They have lost the sense, or the will, to self-edit. They enjoy the privileges of old age. He does not get frustrated, but this, this accusation—it is more than mean, and more than confused; it is beyond the glimmers of dementia that make themselves constantly known.

“Don’t tell me you can’t see it,” Agnes says. “When he sits down at that bridge table, that face, it turns to what it was. It turns back into the face of—”

“Beautiful!” Josh yells. “
Beautiful!
The man looks beautiful when he plays!”

And now it’s not just Doley Falk who turns to look at Josh. It’s the whole room that’s staring. Because somehow Josh is standing, and somehow he is screaming, and somehow tiny, sweet, maddening Agnes is holding up a shaky hand in front of her, as if, as if … His Agnes looks afraid. She steps back, teetering as if she might fall. And Josh steps forward, reaching. When she is steadied, he says, “Enough. It’s time to leave that nice man alone.”

“Go shit in a lake,” Arnie says to him, and walks off holding Agnes’s hand.

· · ·

Josh rushes out into the heat, out of the air-conditioned meat locker that the old folks like for a dining hall. He rushes
out, shaking, into the sun. Seven years at the camp, six as assistant director, and never has he raised his voice, not once. Not to the aged.

He heads for the path to the kids’ side of the lake. A little fresh air, a little youthful energy. He needs it to calm down. But he simply cannot—he cannot have them saying it. It is madness. He cannot let Agnes and Arnie infect the whole place.

Doley Falk, they think, was there with them—back in those other camps. They are convinced Doley Falk is a murderer. Agnes remembers him positioned at a fence. She remembers him, a Nazi camp guard. A Demjanjuk.

Now Josh is not saying forget. But this idea … Doley Falk, a Nazi. An old Nazi hiding in the Berkshires under the guise of a blue-toed low-sodium bridge-playing Jew. It is madness. It is too much to take.

Josh stays by the lake on the kids’ side until he is feeling nearly copacetic, at the edge of true peace. That is precisely when he finds himself—with all that open space—cornered by Lou Lebovick, head of Youth Sports.

“We got issues here, too,” Lou says. “It’s like you only come over when one of the old folks needs a spare part. Is that what you’re after? A fresh kidney? A nice free-range, kosher-fed, Horace Mann–educated heart? I tell you, they pump like the dickens inside the little ones. It’s a wonder their heads don’t pop off from the pressure.”

Josh steps back to study Lou. And he can’t help it. He hears Agnes talking inside his head.
A thirty-six-year-old man who unwinds tetherballs for a living—this is a life?
It fills Josh with pity, and he hooks arms with Lou and walks him to the very edge of the water so that their sneakers take root in the mud. Josh points across the lake to a structure, and Lou’s eyes follow in a squint. “That is my office over there, and my cabin behind it, both of which you know. The doors are forever open
to you, Lou, as they always have been. Canoes, paddles, fresh T-balls and tees—honestly, when have you ever wanted for something?”