“So what the hell does it mean to be a Presbyterian or a Baptist? Eh, Lizzie? Instead of…”
Then beautiful summer. Even though Jake went away after the winter and spring we had spent together. He made new friends and took school excursions and went fishing and swimming in the pond …
“Polio, Mr. Jonas. It is polio.”
… and made trips to the ocean, to a fishing town that still remembered the great days of whaling and the houses were gay, painted in vivid colors, and everyone was happy, at home with the sea …
“It’s a punishment upon us! A punishment! Let me hold you in my arms, Jake, my little Jake! Oh, it’s a punishment upon us.”
But the ocean wasn’t for girls. Dressed in muslin you ran and skipped as you walked alone all the long hot summer, discovering an entire world of creatures that during the rest of the year were in hiding: squirrels and lizards, crickets, spiders, owls, deer, caterpillars and butterflies, robins and larks in the woods where you spent your days beneath the song-filled almond trees and the great sycamores …
“Jake! Lizzie! Come quick! The truck that sprinkles the streets is here. Hurry, quick, take off your clothes, quick before it goes away!”
… with their soft green bark that you pulled off in strips to make little boats with newspaper sails on pine-twig masts. You sailed them on the little lake, in a favorite corner far from the shouts of the diving boys …
“Liz is a kike! Liz is a kike! Liz is a kike!”
Cool hours beside the cool water. The voices of the birds that had come home from winter in the south. The low voice of the robin, the imitative song of the thrush, the agile notes of the blackbird, the crazy chirruping of a magpie. You could tell them by their songs and you were grateful for their lack of fear as they came near you. Robin with his red breast, as if he were a soldier or a musician in a royal band. The thrush’s round eye and black-striped shirt. The star on the forehead of the blackbird. The slanted eyes and soft roundness of the magpie.
“Let me go on, Javier. Let me have my dream. I am willing to play your game. Now you let me play mine.”
You touch the canary when you open its cage and put in the seeds and water. Rebecca moans and asks that you draw the curtains.
“Do you have a headache, Mama?”
“Ach, it’s the heat, the heat. It will go away.”
All afternoon beside the almost motionless surface of the pond. You looked at the water and thought of a palace beneath the ice of winter where summer’s birds and creatures could live protected and warm.
“And Israel Baal Shem Τοv taught us that true salvation lies not in Talmudic wisdom but in full devotion to God, in the simplest faith, the most sincere prayer. A simple man who prays with all his heart is closer to God and more loved by God than the Talmudic scholar.”
Bengal lights and candied apples; carousels with white horses; noisy organ-grinders; mirrors that made you look larger and fatter or smaller, like a dwarf (Jake, where is Jake?); the magician whose summer tour brings him to town in July with a top hat and a menagerie of hungry rabbits, trained crows, and blind mice that appear from the folds of his red and black cape, like Mandrake. Pitchers of lemonade and strawberry water; shavings of chocolate and orange peel. The porch with its rocking coaster covered with blue and white striped canvas. The farmers sowing again under the sun: straw hats, blue denim shirts. Oh, say can you see, you have fought all wars, Mama loshon, Na-Aseh V’Nishma, we will do and we will obey, let us go to America said a Jew from Kiev to his wife after he had lost his fortune in a pogrom. Let us leave this hellish place where men are beasts and let us go to America where there is no ghetto and no pale, where there are no pogroms, where even Jews are men.
And afterward, when it was all over, your father looked for you and you told him you had only a minute at a corner, the corner of Forty-fifth and Madison or any other downtown corner, and the old man in the double-breasted suit and the gray hat walked toward you and gave you his card with the name and address of a hotel on Central Park North and told you that was where he lived now and he would never again live as part of a family or a community; he told you, rapidly, without looking up, that at a hotel you can go and come as you please, you eat alone, whenever you want to eat, you don’t have to talk to anyone, not even the waitresses, and in the evening you can go alone to a movie and maybe eventually you make a friend and even play golf; if you wanted to see him, ask for Johnson, Gershon Johnson, they would know at the desk of the hotel. Without kissing you, he disappeared whistling down Madison Avenue.
“Jake! Beth! Come out, stop scaring me! Do you hear me? Listen, come on out, I feel scared and they’re waiting us already, for dinner, children, we shouldn’t be late.”
* * *
Δ Outside Cuautla beside the highway was a posterlike sign made of silver foil shaken by the wind and shining in the sun. “Restaurant Corinto.” “It’s the place I was telling you about,” said Franz. The front glass, and behind it a dozen tables with red-and-white checked tablecloths, wicker chairs, the wall showing a long shelf on which stood porcelain plates with German, Swiss, and Austrian scenes: you know the sort, the Lorelei, the Matterhorn, Salzburg. The four of you entered and were received by a red-faced type who rubbed his hands on his apron and when he saw Franz shouted: “Señor! Señor! It’s been a long time!” Franz smiled and the fat owner of the restaurant invited you to a table by spreading his arms.
“Today there is sauerkraut or good barbecue. And beer, of course, beer…”
You all took seats and Franz ordered sauerkraut and mustard and mugs of beer. The beer immediately: driving had tired him. He did not ask the rest of you if that was what you wanted. Javier rubbed his stomach with his hand and said nothing.
“The sausage will upset your stomach,” Isabel said to him.
“You aren’t my doctor.” He picked up a toothpick and did not look toward her.
“Oh, excuse me,” said Isabel.
You looked at them, Dragoness. First at your husband, then at Isabel.
“A chronic colitis can never be cured,” said Javier slowly. “It’s part of your personality. I would have to change my whole psychology.”
“It must be like dying of thirst at sea,” Franz smiled. “Not to be able to enjoy so many good things.”
“Oh, you get used to it,” said Javier. “It’s like living during wartime. Constant rationing.”
He looked up and smiled at Franz and Franz smiled dryly back. “There’s a little difference,” he said. “During war you can feel heroic when you go hungry. With colitis, you can only feel ridiculous.”
“Touché, Franz,” you sighed.
“Who asked for your comment?” said Javier. “And besides, there is more than one way to be ridiculous.”
An Indian waiter bowed and placed the mugs on the table. Franz drank rapidly, with gusto. The rest of you sipped slowly.
“Look, we’re talking too seriously,” Franz laughed. “We’re supposed to be having fun, aren’t we? Let’s drink to Mackie. You know, the Threepenny Opera is running again. I first saw it thirty years ago. Thirty years!” He began to sing: “Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne…”
You smiled, Dragoness. Franz pounded his mug on the table to the beat of the song. At the end of each line, he drank. His cheeks were becoming red. You tried to match his gaiety and make it your mood too, humming and smiling. Javier and Isabel silently observed you and Franz, the two foreigners who seemed so sure of the immediate merriment of a song sung with energy and good will. The fat owner of the restaurant stuck his head through the kitchen door and beamed and wagged his head to the rhythm. He sent another round of beer. Again Franz drank quickly. He looked at Javier’s and Isabel’s full mugs and reached over and took them, one in the right hand, one in the left, and tried to drink from both at the same time. Beer gushed down his chin and he burst into laughter and you laughed with him while Javier and Isabel looked on.