II
It was as if everything had risen up to impede him in the last week or fortnight, ever since Easter Sunday. Ira turned the wire-bound pages of his small green plastic-covered log, pages on which his scrawl had become well-nigh illegible, almost out of control. He was no longer able to enter more than the merest tags of things, and then with the aid of his word processor to elaborate his reflections further.
He studied his notes, scribbling jotted down on May 4, 1987, Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, when M, shielded M, was still alive. He had decided on Easter Sunday, 4-19-’87, as a suitable time to begin an account of his tribulations — or to convert his scrawled mnemonics into a semblance of prose: overcast A.M. Cooler. On my walk along Manhattan Avenue yesterday afternoon (and he still wrote in first person then), all the foliage on all the trees in the messy mobile home court across the street — and they are blessed with many trees — say enviously — every trailer with a full-grown tree over it, cottonwoods, aspen, elm (which have doggedly survived the inroads of the pestilential beetle), are all quite laden with fresh verdure. Each is a green burgeoning parasol — often shading some of the most slovenly yards in creation — an arboreal parasol over abandoned bedsprings, doghouses, warped plywood kitchen chairs, and auto parts — as if by the design of a slob virtuoso. The woodbine with its five-six fingers is already spreading its green quilt over the six-foot-high woven-wire fence of the square, well-built white-painted adobe house on the corner of Marble Avenue. The place is well-kept and spacious, has a guest house, a two-car garage, and occupies a large corner lot, and yet during the five years we have lived here, it has changed hands at least four times — and is presently advertised for sale. Why? Is it because of the proximity of the “mobiloon” courts, as I call them, ours and our seedy neighbors’? I don’t know.
In our own court next door, in front of toothless, garrulous, ultra-God-fearing, widowed Mrs. Hurst’s trailer, and also diagonally across the pavement, at stocky, muscular, health-spa-frequenting Mr. Nolsten’s place, rows of tulips stand guard like gaudy pickets. Incredibly, this is my eighty-first spring, I reflect — with rampant solipsism: 81. Nine 9’s. In answer to a request from the Jewish Publication Society for a better Xerox copy of a memoir I published some years ago in Midstream, I hunted through the cartons where my writings are packed helter-skelter — as usual. I found the Zionist magazine with the article in it, but I also found something else which intrigued me greatly. I had forgotten I owned it: it was the restaurant workers’ union house organ, the Hotel and Club Voice, and in it a published account of an interview in April 1966. Pop was born twenty-eight years before me, in 1878; he was eighty-three when interviewed: eighty-three, and still occasionally waiting at table. He is categorized as a Roll Call waiter: “I make three lunches a week,” he is quoted as saying. “I can’t stop working.”
It was because of the “runaway” best-seller status that my novel had achieved a little more than a year before the interview that Pop had been sought out for this signal honor. “Are you the father of Ira Stigman?” Pop reported his patrons everywhere asking. “Are you the father of the man who wrote the best-seller?” (How had Pop replied to those who asked whether his insensate rage as portrayed by his author son had been exaggerated?) The magazine was already packed away in its carton, and in too awkward a place for an old arthritic to get at conveniently. Pop had said something to the effect that he was a little stern, but not like the book. He had been “a little sore” at first, at his son’s portrayal of his father, but he figured that was fiction. (Still, I recall Mom telling me that Pop remarked after he first perused the book: “I’m sorry I beat him so much.”) Of Mom he said “She would give her neck for him.” Meaning me. And how much she loved to have me kiss her brow. Curious: M prompts me to an identical show of endearment.
Most of the interview could be characterized as typically Pop: a matrix of confusions, confabulations, inventions, contradictions. He had me Bar Mitzvah’d on the Lower East Side instead of in East Harlem. Some of it, his errors of omission and commission, might have been due to advanced age and failing memory, but the bulk of it was due to his incurable evasions, his inability to face himself, or simply to admit the truth. It was the trait that drove Mom crazy, literally — she had to be committed — his ineffable glosses on his own erratic, impetuous, infantile behavior, glosses that presented him as a feiner mensh, generous, cogent, steady — all the things he wasn’t, poor guy. Infant — Mom baited him with the word, and it was the word that infuriated him most, because it struck nearest home: infant. And when he was forced to face his own senselessness, face his own puerile self-deceptions, beyond all equivocating, beyond all denial, he either struck out at the one who had the temerity to show him his error — or he wept. Pop wept. Poor unfortunate. What a martyr he made of his wife. The juvenile who pleaded with his father to apprentice him to a fiddler, so that he could play in a kletchmer at weddings and merry-makings, that he might contribute to jollity, to joy. What a difference that might have made in the man, all the difference in the world.
But. . but the thing that attracted me most, the feature I pored over the longest time, although I must have seen it many, many times years and years ago, was Pop in a photo, a vintage 1913 photo, leaning against one of the fills or shafts of his milk wagon, a milk wagon painted dark. (It was a dark shade of brown — as well as a seven-year-old remembers it seventy-four years later.) Beside Pop stood one who Pop had told me was the inspector, a man even shorter than Pop, although stocky — Pop was slight, but wiry. The former wore the street clothes of the time, high, starched collar, tie, overcoat, and fedora hat, as befitted a company inspector. Pop wore his milkman’s pea jacket and visored cap. On the side of the wagon were printed the words that I still remember. I had already learned them at age seven, not only learned to read them, but to chant them: Sheffield Farms, Slawson Decker Company. And the horse, Billy — the centerpiece, the most charismatic creature in the picture — a big brown horse whom I saw urinate blood the first day Pop drove him, when I accompanied Pop in the milk wagon: Billy was just at that moment looking around and facing the camera, his ears pricked up, his long, equine visage contemplative and uncomprehending. Gentle beast. The caption under the photo, in Pop’s handwriting, read: “My horse Billy.”
Pop told me once that he tried to organize his fellow milk wagon drivers when he worked for a company named Levi Dairy — and was fired for his union activities. And he described a restaurateur “shooing” him out of his restaurant with a table napkin for attempting to organize the waiters there. Poor feckless man. Undoubtedly he was telling the truth when he told me of his “union man” activities. But as my son Jess cannily observed: “Pop meant well, but his judgment was atrocious.” Ditto his son. .
Of late, my work has been delayed by severe hindrances and obstacles, trolls on the bridge. In addition to some mental confusion, I have been quite unsteady. Especially, so it seemed to me, after first taking massive doses of cortisone just prescribed for me. Before I knew it, I had three times come close to falling. Once I saved myself by grabbing the handle on the freezer compartment in the kitchen, another time landing on the bathroom stool, a third time against the wall, scraping the skin off my elbow. Allowing myself even two or three degrees variance from the vertical when I stand or walk, I now realize, is a precarious deviation. I perambulate with a cane, and I would use two canes if it weren’t such an infernal nuisance, didn’t hamper me in my other movements — not to mention rendering me more tottering and conspicuous than I already am.