My wife read me a section from the diary of Timothy Edward, one of the first in her family to immigrate to America. In his diary he describes how he stood on the deck of the ship in the port of Amsterdam on his way to America. On the deck of a nearby ship stood a Jew and prayed. They started talking. The Jew was on his way to Jerusalem to prepare the "dust of the Land of Canaan." Timothy Edward was on his way to prepare the "dust of the Land of Canaan" in the new world. They talked all night. The grandson of that Jew was that Rabbi Kriegel who came from Hebron to our city two hundred years ago. We talked about him, remember?
And with that story that connects Licinda, Melissa and Sam, I came to Lionel's house. Those were embarrassing moments. Sam looked at me in amazement, and Lionel, Lionel is old but hasn't changed. The same aristocratic look, wounded and stubborn, the same perplexed imposing figure, the same force. At the sight of him, some anger that had been burning in me for many years vanished. All of us loved Melissa. That was the most ridiculous and sublime thing that had ever happened to me.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, two men became friends on the decks of two ships on their way to prepare the same kingdom in different places and now, on Melissa's grave, they meet again, I said, not without an overdramatic expression so foreign to my nature.
We talked all night. Sam began. He spoke a long time about Melissa's eternal beauty. And I, I was silent and drank whiskey.
I Joined Sam on his trip to Northampton to see the students act parts of the play he had produced about a year ago. We flew in the Ford company plane. The idea that Ford was flying us there amused him quite a bit. Licinda didn't talk and we looked at the view below and tried to understand how our paths had crossed so many years after Melissa died. Below we saw snowcovered fields.
I told Sam what I told you about the Catholic church next to the chemistry lab. We were guests in the Gillette House. It was built about a hundred years ago with a contribution by Mr. Gillette, inventor of the razor blade. The girls of Gillette sang "Greensleeves" in thin, scary voices. Sam claimed that they looked like Melissa. He also told them: You who will marry the gods of industry, the leaders of this state, are acting in a drama about burned curtains of the Ark of the Covenant! They giggled nervously, and Sam said to Licinda: They're open to indecent suggestions like Melissa, and she-to her creditdidn't even answer. Sam, who drank a lot that night, lectured to the students about what there no longer is in Northampton (and I quote): Samrein or Samuelrein. You're acting in a drama about my naked mother! They turned their heads in amazingly delicate embarrassment and one even wept silently. He asked: Why should you act in a play about a diamond in a rectum? You know that the man who lay there and thought he was my father wasn't my father?
Joanna, the granddaughter of Priscilla and Bud, told me: I feel as if I were chewing my mother's head, blood is flowing between my legs and I'm laughing. And I, who never heard such things, especially not from somebody in my family, stroked her head with a gentleness which, if it had been in me years ago, would have saved a beloved person from death. I walked with Sam to the frozen lake. He went with a local rabbi to a meeting of young Jews. When the rabbi started chatting and talking with him about the meaning he found in his drama, he grabbed the rabbi by the ear and bent it. The rabbi couldn't get away from him and started twisting and shrieking, he bent over and yelled: Why? Why? Why? And Sam lifted him up, cleaned the snow off him, and said: I don't know why, sorry, but the rabbi was insulted and his ear burned and a few girls were gliding over the ice in charming tights, and the view that was so Ukrainian in Sam's eyes reminded me of my mother and my grandmother, and I felt I was stumbling again, but I wasn't sorry. Then they sang Jewish songs in a big house full of young people, and Sam spoke, and Licinda said to me: I love that Jewish Jesse James, and I told her I understood because Melissa loved him too.
Sam stood up surprisingly and informed them that he missed the girls of Gillette. They aren't seeking a messiah in the plains of Connecticut, he said, they simply belonged, he yelled. We went to the theater. He said something had to be fixed in the sections that were performed for him, and the girls gave him a gift of a green cotton shirt that said "Smith College-a hundred years of superior girls." They played coins like those my mother played when she was a student here. It was late at night, and the sound was clear and terrifying. People came from the television station in Hartford to interview him, but he refused to be interviewed. Licinda bent her thumb hard until it broke, and Sam bandaged it and said: Tell her how much I love her. Licinda wept, but maybe she wept because of the pain. When we came back to New York, there was a storm and we landed in a cloud of snow. We went to their house and Sam told Lionel that the gentile girls stood naked in a church and sang his La- mentsfor the Death of the Jews holding candles and were amazingly beautiful. Licinda went to the doctor and returned with a cast on her thumb. At night she lay with a thermometer in her mouth. Sam kept asking her what her temperature was, and she showed him her temperature with her fingers, but she didn't take the thermometer out of her mouth. They stole the destruction from me, said Sam, they made a play devoid of any risk or dread for the terrific girls of Gillette, that's how you get rich in America.
When he went to the Delmonico Hotel, I went with him. People were sitting around tables with bottles of wine and soda on them and turkeys and plates of pastry and vegetables and sweets. At the head table sat about ten dignitaries, and one of them said: Here's Sam Lipp, who has at long last deigned to honor us with his presence. And Sam, the focus of all eyes, stopped for a moment and asked in a loud voice: Where do I go? And the man said to him: To the table marked "Children of the Camp." I stayed at the end of the hall next to the journalists and in the distance I could understand how uneasy he was. Later he told me that when he sat there, he saw those people as they had been in April 'fortyfive. With Ebenezer's eyes he saw them, and they were all dead, he added. When they applauded him, he stood up and applauded them. People at the head table talked, one after another. Behind them hung a sign: "Twenty-five Years of Liberation," and a gigantic picture of a concentration camp hung there. And then Sam got up went to the stage, whispered with one of the dignitaries, and the man smiled and there was a hush and Sam picked up the microphone, started walking back and forth, eyes fixed on the hundreds of people sitting around turkey and bottles of wine, and said: I was born in the wrong place, because they put me at the wrong table. I wasn't born in a camp but in my mother's house. Why are the tables arranged like that? Why not by professions: tooth extractors, gravediggers, experts in diamonds, in gold teeth?
The murmuring in the hall started right from the start. You're the only family I've got, he said, not paying attention to what was going on, except for Mr. Brooks, the father of my beloved Melissa, but she didn't wait for me either. What nerve is it to assemble every year like this? We should have devastated Europe and not be eating turkey, but we didn't. We should have destroyed America, who threw us to the dogs, but we're getting rich and living off her. We had Einstein and Oppenheimer and Teller, why didn't we ask them to devastate the Western world instead of Hiroshima? SS Kramer was more reliable. Until the last minute, he knew who the enemy was and what he had to do. Ebenezer knew too and as far as he's concerned, you're all dead.
He looked at them. After a few minutes, he started singing and they joined in, one by one, and sang a song called "Nieder- landisches Dankgebet" as if he had hypnotized them. The head table sang too. They stood like slaughtered peacocks who had remained alive a few seconds, their eyes shut and sang innocently and devotedly, and the hall shook and the microphone whistled and screeched, and only the man sitting next to Sam looked pale and waved his hands, his name (I know because I saw him on television) was Eliahu Wiggs. He pushed Sam and slapped his face and the hubbub prevailed and Sam went on singing and everybody went on singing and then they assaulted the tables like a routed army and we left there.