Glass Eyes
Linda Heller
My father was born into a level of poverty that shocks me to this day. His grandfather fled the depravations of Minsk, pilfered his way across Europe, snuck onto a German ship and without knowing a word of English found work digging sewers in lower Manhattan. Eventually he and three brothers managed to buy a newsstand—a triumph for men who if they’d stayed in Czarist Russia would have been used as fodder. Still, the effort of becoming property owners took every cent they had. At night after they shuttered their business they slept inside it, one atop the other, bone jammed against bone, their nostrils stuffed with scraps of paper to dull the stench.
A generation later my father’s father, in an attempt to reach solvency, bought out his cousins to become the sole owner of Barbakoff’s Newsstand on the corner of Clinton and Division Street. This endeavor raised a flag over his household that said, “Imminent Eviction Followed by Starvation and Death.” My father was only ten at the time but he made it clear that he would not take the helm when his father dropped dead.
Instead, he put himself through college and then Columbia Law, graduating first in his class in 1971. The desire for social change was strong in those days. Many of his classmates set up shop in inner city storefronts to defend the poor but my father had a different goal. He personally delivered his resume to Leonard A. Weicker, a criminal court judge, going as far as to shove the envelope into judge’s hand. Weicker applauded his nerve. He saw himself in the younger man. “We come from the same bolt of fabric,” he said. “I can be open around you. Walk around naked so to speak.” In exchange for discretion, Weicker taught him tactics the Columbia law professors had been too above-board to mention, ploys my father had sought as intensely as Jonas Salk had pursued an end to polio.
My parents met at a singles dance. My mother’s life hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped. No longer a fresh face on the scene, she was a teacher who hated teaching and couldn’t figure out how to scale the walls that boxed her in.
“You look familiar,” my father said. “Did you happen to grow up in Flushing?”
“And if I did? If I said I used to live near Kissena Park?” There was no lightness in her voice, no giddy hope that brings a blush to the skin. Her tone was pure business.
She was four foot eleven in heels. He bested her by an inch. They were the shortest people in the room, another reason aside from their childhoods in Queens to give it a try. He drove her home. She was pretty in a doll-like way if you ignored the hard set of her mouth. He was chunky and oddly proportioned but his law degree gave him appeal as did his flagrant ambition. She let him into her bedroom. He deemed her sufficient. “OK,” he said and allowed her to hold on to him for dear life while he barreled toward the top.
Weicker’s right ear was the size of a dinner plate. To his credit, the abnormality didn’t lessen his confidence. He was big and powerful--rumor said bulletproof and majestic in the way he strode about. Lawyers who came before his bench knew he was quote unquote open minded and they were generous with their thank yous. This enabled him to buy a collection of large Tudor houses along the Long Island Sound. He kept a mistress in each mansion and on weekends traveled from one to next in a thirty foot cabin cruiser he’d named, “Blame It on My Youth.”
He and his wife Nelva lived on Sutton Place. Left alone, she played bridge at the Cavendish Club where she pretended that Weicker was home reading whatever it was a judge read to stay current. The club served lunch. She refused it. Len liked her slim. “He worships me,” she told her friends. “And I like to please him.”
One of these friends saw Weicker with a woman at a dockside restaurant in Bay Shore. He was flaunting her, the friend told Nelva. “Introducing her to one and all. He’s thumbing his nose at you. You’ve got to protect yourself, insure your future if you know what I’m saying? I’ll be your witness. Take him for everything he has.”
“Leave Len? We’ve been together my entire life.”
They’d met at Rockaway Beach while she was still in high school. “Walk with me,” he’d said and held out his hand. His voice had been surprisingly high for a man his size. He was much older than she was with gray in his hair. She didn’t mind his age or his soprano’s voice or his massive ear or as she found out later that he’d had mumps and was sterile. He was the main event, the guy she’d been waiting for and she quit school and modeled coats for a Seventh Avenue manufacturer to put him through law school. Modeling gave her poise. It turned her into a queen. And now that her reign was in jeopardy? Make a fuss? Risk being shunted into a tiny apartment where she’d be as reduced as an amputee?
“Cheater,” she said, finally after a second sighting, this time in Stamford. “I can’t show my face at the Cavendish. Or here in this building.”
He’d dabbled in acting in high school. “What are you talking about? I play golf and afterwards I sleep at the club.” His tone mimicked a hypnotist’s. He might as well have been holding a pendulum that swung on a chain. “I need to wind down. You know the kind of cases I try, the scum that crawls into my courtroom. You won’t like me if I can’t let off steam on the course.”
“Then come home early on Sundays. Take me for spare ribs.”
“Sure, Doll. Anything. Your wish is my command.”
Days later Nelva was summoned to the phone during a bridge game. Less steady then she’d been in the past, she put one wobbly foot directly in front of the other the way she’d been taught when she’d modeled. Her high heels were clear plastic. Len had once said the naked foot was sexy,
“Sugar Plum?”
“What?” She pushed the phone against her ear, would have climbed into it if she could, squeezed through the wires, and fallen through his receiver onto his lap.
“Don’t believe what you hear.”
Someone had spotted him with a redhead. “She’s his cousin,” Nelva told her friends. “A down on her luck divorcee.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling, a gesture that drew attention to what people who curried her favor called her swan’s neck. “Personally I feel sorry for the woman. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be her.”
By then, this was in 1974, my father had struck out on his own. He’d cultivated a number of bailiffs who referred repeaters to him, men who’d been beaten since infancy and had dents in their foreheads and twitched as though they were already strapped to the electric chair. They’d robbed gas stations and liquor stores, had shot the owners and left finger prints. My father got them off. Word spread and clients came a-calling, an occasion he’d dreamt of and planned for since he’d been a young boy. Came a-calling and then some.
My sisters and I grew up in a Fifth Avenue penthouse with a big enough lawn to permit a junior badminton court. We rarely played the game but when we did we used shuttlecocks embossed with our initials. And no matter if one sailed over the wall like a stiffened, battered bird. We had boxes more. We had an overabundance of everything and got these items as soon as they hit the stores. We deserved to. We were Howard Barbakoff’s daughters. The Howard Barbakoff, the highest paid attorney in New York City. Abraham Lincoln had been a lawyer, the father in To Kill a Mockingbird was a lawyer but our father surpassed them and we clung to his neck on the nights he came home.
When I was twelve I overheard a woman in our lobby tell another neighbor that my mother looked like she’d just seen the devil.
“I’m sure Howard beats her,” the woman said. “You know the kind of lawyer he is, the kind of man.”
I got up my nerve and asked my mother if she loved my father. She was sitting on the couch, cracking walnuts, a habit of hers. “Why wouldn’t I love him?” she snapped. “He’s a damn good husband and father. The best there is. You ought to know that.” She threw a nut at me. It grazed my eye. She hurled another. I caught it along with her unspoken message—this is how we Barbakoffs show love.
Nelva’s husband announced that he had to go to Las Vegas on business. She pleaded with him to take her.
“When was the last time we traveled together?” she asked. “I don’t like to say so but I get edgy when you’re gone. I can’t help myself. I keep checking the locks.”
“Show some independence,” he barked. “I’m not your father.”
Her right eye hemorrhaged an hour after his plane took off. She went to the emergency room alone, was alone in her hospital bed when the doctor announced that he’d found a large intraocular melanoma adjacent to her optic nerve.
My mother hurried to her side. Weicker was still in Las Vegas unaware of his wife’s illness. “Why didn’t you tell him?” my mother asked. “He would have taken the next plane. Commandeered one if he had to.”
“And if he didn’t?”
Half of Nelva’s head was bandaged. Her remaining eye released a heavy stream of tears. The tears, she said, meant nothing. They were a side effect of the anesthesia.
She came to our apartment after her surgery clinging to her husband’s arm. I knew it was rude but I couldn’t stop staring. Her new eye had an exquisite azure iris and minuscule veins. And while it sat further inside the socket than her real one did and didn’t move when her real one moved, it conveyed a sense of utter calm and resignation as though the fight had ended and the treaty was fair.
“He’s been so good to me,” Nelva said. She wore a new bangle bracelet. “He wanted to get me diamonds, but I said, ‘Len, I’m no show-off.’”
Weicker’s youngest mistress, a heretofore ordinary if grasping woman, massaged his dormant testicles and by knowing just where and how hard to press, conjured a sperm into being and cheered it on as it flopped and sputtered toward her beckoning fallopian tubes. More likely she gave birth to another man’s child. Weicker was over seventy and the fear of his approaching demise--a single swipe and he’d be wiped off the blackboard of life--led him to believe he was potent and that, halleluiah, his essence would live on.
His lawyer withheld this information when he phoned Nelva. What he did say was that Weicker was filing for a divorce and she had to vacate the apartment by the end of the month.
We helped her pack, or rather we kept her company while our housekeeper put some thirty odd years’ worth of high heels into cartons and along with slacks and silk blouses that were ripe with the scent of Shalimar. These things were her remains. The funeral was over but Nelva’s corpse had escaped its confines and could still move and speak. Or so it seemed. Her husband’s reach encompassed every sitting judge and she couldn’t find a lawyer suicidal enough to take her case.
She ambushed my father in his favorite steakhouse and begged him to represent her. Without stopping to swallow, he shook his head no. “Please,” she said, weeping. Weicker had frozen her bank account. He’d taken away her credit cards. My mother was secretly paying her food bills at various markets. “I’m not a well woman,” she said. She clutched the table to keep from falling. “Please.”
“Nell, you know better than to put me on the spot.”
“Please.” People were staring. Some of these patrons were my father’s friends.
“Give me some time.”
A week later his secretary relayed his answer. Nelva and Leonard were his virtual parents. He could not take sides. He wished them both well. The law tended to favor the wife. She had nothing to worry about. Leonard was as decent and as loving as was she.
She moved to an efficiency apartment near the East River. My sisters and I were put off by the meager room with its doll sized kitchen stuck into a wall. Where were the other walls, we asked, the walls that separate a couch from a bed and make more and more rooms like she’d had before? Why was the furniture shoddy? Where was Nelva’s famous good taste? Even Nelva wasn’t the Nelva we’d known. Her dentures had broken and she covered her mouth when she spoke. Her blond hair was a dull gray. Most of her expensively applied false eyelashes were missing. Only her glass eye was still beautiful to behold.
My mother saw how upset my sisters and I were and she invited us to lounge on her bed while she furthered our education. It had been hard for my father to say no to Nelva. He’d had to fight his sentimental side to avoid being suckered in. Nelva was her dearest friend but that didn’t change that fact that she’d mistakenly married a man who’d long had a foot out the door. “Marriage is a transaction,” my mother said. “If over once you don’t have the goods.” I wondered what goods my mother used to keep my father in line. And what I’d have to offer when my time came.
I met my husband at a sidewalk art show. He was eating an oversized pretzel. Unasked, without knowing anything about him, I removed a dab of mustard that had fallen onto his shirt. “Gosh, there’s no holding you back,” he said and asked for my number. Ron was tall and thin. He stood in an S curve with his shoulders hunched and his small belly protruding. Other women would have declined his request. But I was used to men like my father who were so physically dense nothing could penetrate them. Ron let me in. He listened when I talked and when he spoke he used phrases like kind of, or sort of to lessen his impact.
“He’s not for you,” my mother said.
I thought he was. He seemed like the safest, most reliable man in creation.
Why did he marry me? Not for my money. He’d grown up to the tune of “waste not, want not,” and still adhered to that philosophy, calculating the cost of wear and tear on his shoes versus walking the half a mile to save a quarter on a carton of milk. A native Missourian, his life in Belle Prairie had become rote and he’d moved here to explore a more diverse reality. I was the opposite of a sweet predictable Midwestern girl. My family was even brasher.
Like all new couples Ron and I discussed our future ad nauseam. We were both in our thirties and had been around the block, different blocks surely, but ‘Viva la difference,” Ron crowed. We’d raise outstanding children, revel in other’s company, respect each other, bolster each other, be creative but not wanton during our lovemaking and never go to bed angry. In short we’d be the kind of couple that only appear in TV movies.
During our sixth date Ron told me he was a crime reporter. “You live in a golden tower and I prowl the gutter,” he said. We’d been kissing on my couch, approximating the urgent hunger we hoped would develop. “I’d call us a damn interesting pair. The peacock and the mole.”
His metaphor depressed me as did the thought of furry creatures with tiny immature eyes.
“Save your pity,” he said. “They’re perfectly adapted to their environment.”
Belle Prairie had one of the lowest crime rates in the nation and rather than hurrying to scenes of barking dogs, Ron had sold ads at the Belle Prairie Dispatch. Yet he was surprised when The New York Times turned him down and selected one of their own to write their recently launched Crime Scene Column. I treated him to dinner that night hoping a good meal would cheer him. His food went untouched.
“That jerk said a real reporter has too much drive and curiosity to sit at a desk for twelve years. A real reporter would have gone mad in my circumstance whereas it suited me because, in his words, I’m nothing more than a clerk. Well, excuse my French but I have the balls to take down the meanest sons of a bitch. And I damn well will.”
A local freebee offered him the use of a desk and five cents a word for any story they deemed publishable. His career was up and running, to use his words, and he was ready to take our relationship further. We saw ourselves as private people, another reason we’d bonded, and we decided to tell no one and marry in City Hall where we had a cold little ceremony. I’d had haircuts that had felt more transformational.
We moved into a small apartment in a modest building on an inconvenient street. To please Ron further, I entered an imaginary time machine and exited it as the nineteen fifties wife he wanted, replete with an apron, a mixing bowl and the intention of completely subjugating myself to my hubby, just like my mother subjugated herself to hers, albeit without receiving her lucrative perks. I was glad to make do with less. I’d begun to feel uneasy about my luxurious life—underserving, a target of envy. For a while I’d given dollar bills to the homeless with the thought of sharing a bit of my luck. But what can you buy for a dollar? I increased my gifts to five, ten, twenty, a hundred and then to hundreds of dollars and was excessively casual as I handed out these bills. I hadn’t done anything to earn this money, why should they? But the gifts alarmed the recipients. One man who was mountainous and sat on the steps of a Madison Avenue church wrapped in a flattened carton, roared “Get the hell away from me, you she-devil.” I ran for my life even though he had no shoes and the soles of his feet were covered with sores.
I stuffed a pillow under my dress to announce my pregnancy. Ron whooped, a sound that seemed too spirited for a man like him. “Thank you,” he said. “And so soon.” He carried me to bed and we nestled with our hands on my stomach dreaming of the marvel we’d created who would soon dominate, if not the entire world, then surely ours.
The editor at the time had been right about Ron. His method of sleuthing was to sit at his Kips Bay desk and half-heartedly search the Internet. On a rainy Monday he chanced upon a website that gave him access to almost every past and present court case in the state of New York.
He phoned me, panting. “I’m coming home. We have to talk.”
“About what? What happened?”
“The Pig, the Whale. The blood bath at Pomodoro’s.”
“You’re not making sense.”
He ran the fifty blocks from his office to our apartment clutching the copies he’d made of the documents. The Southern District of the United States District Court versus … He was barely inside when he started to read twenty years’ worth of documents aloud.
“Al, ‘the midget,’ Amuso represented by Howard Barbakoff. Kidnapping, grand larceny, tax evasion. Found innocent. Presiding judge, Leonard A. Weicker. Tony, ‘the gimp’, Leonetti represented by Howard Barbakoff. Racketeering, murder, perjury, witness tampering. Found innocent. Presiding judge, Leonard A. Weicker. ”
I put my hands over my ears.
“Louie the G, represented by Howard Barbakoff. Perjury, extortion, racketeering, assault with a dangerous weapon. Found innocent. Presiding judge, Leonard A. Weicker. Joey Dove, represented by Howard Barbakoff. Protection schemes, murder, loan sharking, money laundering. Found innocent. Presiding judge, Leonard A. Weicker. ‘No Nose’ Drucci, represented by Howard Barbakoff. Counterfeiting, bribery, tax evasion. Sido Profaci, represented by Howard Barbakoff. Drug trafficking, pornography, human trafficking, grand larceny, extortion.”
I fled him and his news, hailed a cab and sped downtown to my father’s office where I pushed past his secretary. My father glanced up from his work, surprised. I ran to him, sat on his lap, a thing I hadn’t done in a very long time. I was so much taller now, so much bigger than he was. I scrunched down. And even then I felt like an adult perching on a child. He stroked my hair less gently than he meant to.
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he said. “Self-anointed saints shouldn’t come down from their clouds. A little soot blows against them and they think they’re in hell. Didn’t he ever hear of equal justice under the law? I’m your father, for Christ’s sake. Who wrapped you in a blanket and ran with you to Lenox Hill Hospital when you came down with the whooping cough? Have I ever raised a hand against you or your sisters? If there’s a villain, it’s him. Let’s see those papers. We’ll go through them together.
I was on the verge of sucking my thumb. “We don’t have to.”
“Fine. Let’s go eat.”
We went to Chinatown and talked about baseball. Or he did while I struggled to keep down my food.
I went home and told Ron he was wrong about my father.
“I’m not wrong. The facts back me up. Your father destroys what’s fair and good in our country.”
“Stop it. This inquest is over.”
“Is it? You’re not single anymore and free to inhabit fairy tale realms. You’ve involved a child in this, my child who at the moment is still pure.”
“We’re all pure.”
“Is that what he said? Face the truth. Your father wins a case and a psychopath continues to kill. How many deaths is your father responsible for? A hundred, two hundred, maybe more, counting the junkies who died from the drugs his clients sold? And what about the guys whose businesses were trashed just so your father could cram more money into his safe deposit box? He and his crony Weicker.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I? I read you the proof. You got your first taste of evil when you drank your mother’s milk. Do you want that to flow from your breasts too? If we’re going to have a family you have got to wipe yourself clean. Repent. Make reparations.”
He’d said his piece and he regained his composure as abruptly as if he’d been an impressionist who’d merely imitated a vicious husband, not actually been one, and who might in the next instant squawk like a duck.
But I was hysterical and in my frenzy I grabbed an aerosol can and sprayed myself with air freshener.
“There,” I said, as the mist thickened and seeped into my pores. “Are you happy? Is my stench gone?”
“No,” he said and left.
I escaped into sleep, woke up alone in our bed and realized in a rare moment of clarity that in order to save our marriage, Ron would have to see things from my side as thoroughly as if I’d swallowed him whole. And only after he experienced the unbearable, mind-ravaging confusion he’d caused, the loss and the horror he’d inflicted so eagerly, would he earn the right to talk about my parents. To achieve this, I’d abort the baby—a thought made under duress. I wouldn’t carry it through. But trickery? Demolish him with a vindictive game of peekaboo? Not the toddler’s version where the child is abandoned and reassured until she becomes tough. Mine would induce real grief before I retracted my story. He deserved worse but we Barbakoffs were not what he said we were.
I left a note claiming I’d gone for an abortion. I knew he’d read it. A man like him doesn’t abandon a pregnant wife until he’s promised to do whatever is needed short of being decent.
I spent the day wandering through the Museum of Natural History hoping to find something uplifting, a scientific display of humankind’s progress from chest thumping apes into saints who nursed lepers. Instead I found displays of animals that had been shot, stuffed and placed inside painted replicas of the landscapes where they’d been captured.
It was all too much and I hurried home to confess that I hadn’t scrapped our child.
His sobs penetrated the door to our apartment. “I should have known,” he shouted when he saw me. “Murder runs in your family.” He clutched a small stuffed elephant he’d bought for our baby. It was laced with snot. “You killed Puddin’. You flushed him down the toilet like a piece of shit.” No longer a parent-to-be, his eyes were nearly swollen shut. “I’m sure you laughed during your game of tit for tat. Well, the carnage stops here. I warned the world. It’s over for you Barbakoffs.”
“What?”
“You didn’t expect me to keep quiet?”
He’d packed his things and while he shouted that he should have left Sodom the instant he realized where he was, he stormed out the door.
Few people read the Kips Bay Press on its best of days and as though we were characters in the sort of noir books Ron favored, I threatened to sue the paper for libel. The publisher had been more shocked by Ron’s vindictiveness than by the tale of another Mafia lawyer and he deleted Ron’s article before it went to press. This allowed my parents and sisters to continue to hold their heads high.
I was tainted material but my baby didn’t have to be. I secretly fled New York and moved, without acknowledging the irony, the wistfulness of my choice to the epicenter of America’s flower industry in northern Washington State. I was still pregnant when I was hired to freshen tulips at a farm store for seven dollars an hour.
Once my parents realized I’d vanished, my father shut the door to his office, consulted his mental rolodex and asked his top clients to send their “boys” to find me. When the search failed, my mother dragged herself from the couch where she’d lain immobile and blamed my father for my disappearance--instinctively, by process of elimination--she’d done nothing wrong. Ron wasn’t worth chasing. “What did you say to her?” she screamed, only to withdraw her accusation in the next breath. She’d have eaten a live scorpion to preserve her marriage. My sisters thought I’d jumped off a roof.
“So you’re saying she flew away?” my father asked. “Because if there was a…” he paused, to spare my mother.
“Body?” she said.
“Exactly. They’d notify us.”
I took on a phony identity and even at work kept to myself. It was exhausting to pretend to be an easy going, down to earth woman from Eatonville, Ohio when I was a fugitive, a failed wife, a callous daughter and completely unprepared to function as a single mother. Fear surged through my womb causing my son to thrash in liquid terror. Other things also went wrong. When I’d overdramatically sprayed myself with air freshener, I hadn’t known it contained an ingredient that was harmful to fetuses. One mad, momentary act geared to rile his father and everything about my poor little fellow was forever askew.
I named him Justin, another wishful attempt to fix the unfixable. To lessen the burden of righteousness, I nicknamed him Jelly Bean. Later, I called him Bop-bop and he called me Mop-bop, labels that referred to his early habit of slapping the crown of my head, playfully, it was a toddler’s game, while he shrieked, “I bopped you, Mop-bop.” When he grew old enough to hate the source of his aberrations, he intensified those slaps to the point where if I didn’t dodge him, I’d be covered with welts.
He was not a popular child. Like his grandfather, whom he knew nothing about, he was the shortest boy in his class. Like his father, who didn’t know he existed, he was bone thin. And then there the unconscionable gifts I’d given him, his poor motor skills, his constant anxiety and his difficulties with the written word.
My parents and sisters were prominent in certain circles. Late at night I searched for their photos on the Internet. I’d see my mother looking frail at a dinner dance or my sisters standing off kilter, champagne glasses in hand, their smiles failing to cover their fury. I read about my sister’s divorce, the lawsuits against my father, the mob hits that left men sprawled face up on restaurant floors. Nauseous, I’d leave those sites and scour the ones that sold prosthetic eyes.
An antique pair came up for sale. Without ever intending to, or even knowing why I was drawn to these sites aside my childhood memory of being dazzled by Nelva’s blind eye, I bought them. They arrived in a brass tin with a little red applicator. Shaped like breasts rather than spheres they stared at me with an urgency I couldn’t bear.
I hid them as though I was hiding a weapon or a sex toy or the key to my psyche. Hidden or not, they became my obsession, a flashing sign in my brain that claimed my attention at inopportune times, although no time would have been healthy. I’d become equally obsessed with the story of Oedipus Rex, who crazed by guilt, had gouged out his eyes.
I’d imagine the deed done, and see myself stumble downhill through a black porous landscape, brushing against bushes, plowing into trees, tripping, righting myself, limping, careening, while my son watched and the antique eyes shone.
When it got to the point that I had to throw out our knives and sit on my hands, I told Justin we were going home.
“We are home,” he said. I saw fear. He had so little to cling to. “Do you mean Ohio? You said there was nothing in Ohio.”
“To New York, to my parents and sisters.”
He was as shaken as if I’d exposed antennae and tentacles. Gone was the mother he’d known, the subdued Ohioan who’d been happiest during the four days she’d spent as a child at a Girls’ Scout Camp and who, after her husband died in a nine car pileup during the third month she was pregnant, had packed her things and moved west. In her stead was a stranger claiming she’d grown up in a rooftop mansion.
“I understand what you’re going through,” I said. “I found out things about my father that destroyed my sense of reality. My father’s a top lawyer…”
“I thought he was a dead electrician.”
“He’s the highest paid lawyer in New York City, or was, I don’t know. He was my hero until I found out, in a very cruel way, that he defended questionable characters.”
“What, like drunks and nose pickers? You faked our lives because…”
“He got them off.”
“The nose pickers. This is nuts. You’re nuts. Someone should lock you up.”
“Justin, don’t judge me before you hear the facts.” Facts I didn’t dare share.
Hou rs later he handed me a list of things my lies had deprived him of--private school, vacations, top level video games, a house that wasn’t an embarrassment, a car that wasn’t an embarrassment, decent clothes, a feeling of safety, a mother he could trust. And in capital letters, MY FATHER.
When I confessed that I’d tried but failed to track down his father, he asked how I’d been careless enough to misplace a grown man.
We barely spoke on the drive east.
“You didn’t tell them we’re coming, did you?” he said, at the sight of the Lincoln Tunnel. “Coward.”
I wasn’t up to greeting the doormen, dressed as I was in thrift shop clothes with a five dollar haircut from Hair Today. We snuck into the building through the service entrance and climbed twenty-three flights of stairs.
I stood behind my son while I rang the bell, used him as a shield, I was that frightened of the man who’d rushed me to the hospital when I was four years old.
He opened the door. The lines in his face had deepened. His hair was white.
“Nan,” he called.
“What?” my mother asked, from somewhere deep in the apartment.
“Get in here.” His tone repealed her right to choose.
She stumbled out, wrapped in towels.
“Who’s this?” He meant my son. “Is he yours? Where’s his father?”
“Dad, this is Justin, Dad, meet Justin. Can we come in?” I held out a box.
My mother looked wary. “What’s in it?”
I opened it for her and took out a graceless sketch of a cupboard-like contraption. “It’s a machine that retrieves the years I stole from this family.”
“Ron’s the father, isn’t he?” My father said. “Well, here’s a story for you.” We’d moved into the foyer but were still on our feet. “I heard on good authority he was so afraid I’d come after him that he changed his name, erased his prints, faked a passport and left the country for good. Someone else said, but this seems far-fetched, that he went back to work at the Belle Prairie Dispatch, was sent to report on a barking dog and it mauled him to death.”
“Howard,” my mother said. “Watch what you’re saying.”
What constitutes a worthy person? Empathy, generosity, kindness, warmth? Are some people born good? Are their brains made of marzipan instead of a mash up of combatant materials? Murderers roam the streets. Children snatch their friends’ toys. People marry the wrong person and attempt to destroy them. At present I lead a support group for women who gave birth to an impaired child or who beat their child or watched while her husband terrorized him. We sit in a circle talk about people we want to but cannot forgive—ex-husbands, siblings, parents, employers--people who, as it happens, are even angrier at us. What we really want is to stop chastising ourselves.
I say, “If you could see into your enemy’s heart, you’d sob at his pain. The bludgeon Punch hits Judy with? His father used it on him.” My father was once a half-starved, undersized boy whose world was made up of bruisers and losers. He chose to side with the survivers.
At five o’clock my son comes home from a school geared to teens who have special issues. Admit you go there and you slide down a notch.
He bops me on the head.
“Hey Mop-bop.”
“Hey Bop-bop.”
“How was your day?”
“Same-same.”
“Ditto.” This passes for a joke.
At dinnertime we take the elevator to the apartment directly above ours. The table is set. The dinnerware is gold-edged, the flatware is sterling and the napkins were lavishly embroidered in Portugal. My father sits at the head of the table. His portions are twice the size of ours. He licks the butter off his knife and dares us to stop him.
He asks my son when he’s going to transfer to a real school instead of one for the mentally impaired.
When we bristle, he says “I’m toughening him up. A kid needs that, especially this one. Where did you find him? At the pound?” He chuckles at his wit, relieved that our family is safely inside the walls he worked so hard to build for us.
Linda Heller
My father was born into a level of poverty that shocks me to this day. His grandfather fled the depravations of Minsk, pilfered his way across Europe, snuck onto a German ship and without knowing a word of English found work digging sewers in lower Manhattan. Eventually he and three brothers managed to buy a newsstand—a triumph for men who if they’d stayed in Czarist Russia would have been used as fodder. Still, the effort of becoming property owners took every cent they had. At night after they shuttered their business they slept inside it, one atop the other, bone jammed against bone, their nostrils stuffed with scraps of paper to dull the stench.
A generation later my father’s father, in an attempt to reach solvency, bought out his cousins to become the sole owner of Barbakoff’s Newsstand on the corner of Clinton and Division Street. This endeavor raised a flag over his household that said, “Imminent Eviction Followed by Starvation and Death.” My father was only ten at the time but he made it clear that he would not take the helm when his father dropped dead.
Instead, he put himself through college and then Columbia Law, graduating first in his class in 1971. The desire for social change was strong in those days. Many of his classmates set up shop in inner city storefronts to defend the poor but my father had a different goal. He personally delivered his resume to Leonard A. Weicker, a criminal court judge, going as far as to shove the envelope into judge’s hand. Weicker applauded his nerve. He saw himself in the younger man. “We come from the same bolt of fabric,” he said. “I can be open around you. Walk around naked so to speak.” In exchange for discretion, Weicker taught him tactics the Columbia law professors had been too above-board to mention, ploys my father had sought as intensely as Jonas Salk had pursued an end to polio.
My parents met at a singles dance. My mother’s life hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped. No longer a fresh face on the scene, she was a teacher who hated teaching and couldn’t figure out how to scale the walls that boxed her in.
“You look familiar,” my father said. “Did you happen to grow up in Flushing?”
“And if I did? If I said I used to live near Kissena Park?” There was no lightness in her voice, no giddy hope that brings a blush to the skin. Her tone was pure business.
She was four foot eleven in heels. He bested her by an inch. They were the shortest people in the room, another reason aside from their childhoods in Queens to give it a try. He drove her home. She was pretty in a doll-like way if you ignored the hard set of her mouth. He was chunky and oddly proportioned but his law degree gave him appeal as did his flagrant ambition. She let him into her bedroom. He deemed her sufficient. “OK,” he said and allowed her to hold on to him for dear life while he barreled toward the top.
Weicker’s right ear was the size of a dinner plate. To his credit, the abnormality didn’t lessen his confidence. He was big and powerful--rumor said bulletproof and majestic in the way he strode about. Lawyers who came before his bench knew he was quote unquote open minded and they were generous with their thank yous. This enabled him to buy a collection of large Tudor houses along the Long Island Sound. He kept a mistress in each mansion and on weekends traveled from one to next in a thirty foot cabin cruiser he’d named, “Blame It on My Youth.”
He and his wife Nelva lived on Sutton Place. Left alone, she played bridge at the Cavendish Club where she pretended that Weicker was home reading whatever it was a judge read to stay current. The club served lunch. She refused it. Len liked her slim. “He worships me,” she told her friends. “And I like to please him.”
One of these friends saw Weicker with a woman at a dockside restaurant in Bay Shore. He was flaunting her, the friend told Nelva. “Introducing her to one and all. He’s thumbing his nose at you. You’ve got to protect yourself, insure your future if you know what I’m saying? I’ll be your witness. Take him for everything he has.”
“Leave Len? We’ve been together my entire life.”
They’d met at Rockaway Beach while she was still in high school. “Walk with me,” he’d said and held out his hand. His voice had been surprisingly high for a man his size. He was much older than she was with gray in his hair. She didn’t mind his age or his soprano’s voice or his massive ear or as she found out later that he’d had mumps and was sterile. He was the main event, the guy she’d been waiting for and she quit school and modeled coats for a Seventh Avenue manufacturer to put him through law school. Modeling gave her poise. It turned her into a queen. And now that her reign was in jeopardy? Make a fuss? Risk being shunted into a tiny apartment where she’d be as reduced as an amputee?
“Cheater,” she said, finally after a second sighting, this time in Stamford. “I can’t show my face at the Cavendish. Or here in this building.”
He’d dabbled in acting in high school. “What are you talking about? I play golf and afterwards I sleep at the club.” His tone mimicked a hypnotist’s. He might as well have been holding a pendulum that swung on a chain. “I need to wind down. You know the kind of cases I try, the scum that crawls into my courtroom. You won’t like me if I can’t let off steam on the course.”
“Then come home early on Sundays. Take me for spare ribs.”
“Sure, Doll. Anything. Your wish is my command.”
Days later Nelva was summoned to the phone during a bridge game. Less steady then she’d been in the past, she put one wobbly foot directly in front of the other the way she’d been taught when she’d modeled. Her high heels were clear plastic. Len had once said the naked foot was sexy,
“Sugar Plum?”
“What?” She pushed the phone against her ear, would have climbed into it if she could, squeezed through the wires, and fallen through his receiver onto his lap.
“Don’t believe what you hear.”
Someone had spotted him with a redhead. “She’s his cousin,” Nelva told her friends. “A down on her luck divorcee.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling, a gesture that drew attention to what people who curried her favor called her swan’s neck. “Personally I feel sorry for the woman. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be her.”
By then, this was in 1974, my father had struck out on his own. He’d cultivated a number of bailiffs who referred repeaters to him, men who’d been beaten since infancy and had dents in their foreheads and twitched as though they were already strapped to the electric chair. They’d robbed gas stations and liquor stores, had shot the owners and left finger prints. My father got them off. Word spread and clients came a-calling, an occasion he’d dreamt of and planned for since he’d been a young boy. Came a-calling and then some.
My sisters and I grew up in a Fifth Avenue penthouse with a big enough lawn to permit a junior badminton court. We rarely played the game but when we did we used shuttlecocks embossed with our initials. And no matter if one sailed over the wall like a stiffened, battered bird. We had boxes more. We had an overabundance of everything and got these items as soon as they hit the stores. We deserved to. We were Howard Barbakoff’s daughters. The Howard Barbakoff, the highest paid attorney in New York City. Abraham Lincoln had been a lawyer, the father in To Kill a Mockingbird was a lawyer but our father surpassed them and we clung to his neck on the nights he came home.
When I was twelve I overheard a woman in our lobby tell another neighbor that my mother looked like she’d just seen the devil.
“I’m sure Howard beats her,” the woman said. “You know the kind of lawyer he is, the kind of man.”
I got up my nerve and asked my mother if she loved my father. She was sitting on the couch, cracking walnuts, a habit of hers. “Why wouldn’t I love him?” she snapped. “He’s a damn good husband and father. The best there is. You ought to know that.” She threw a nut at me. It grazed my eye. She hurled another. I caught it along with her unspoken message—this is how we Barbakoffs show love.
Nelva’s husband announced that he had to go to Las Vegas on business. She pleaded with him to take her.
“When was the last time we traveled together?” she asked. “I don’t like to say so but I get edgy when you’re gone. I can’t help myself. I keep checking the locks.”
“Show some independence,” he barked. “I’m not your father.”
Her right eye hemorrhaged an hour after his plane took off. She went to the emergency room alone, was alone in her hospital bed when the doctor announced that he’d found a large intraocular melanoma adjacent to her optic nerve.
My mother hurried to her side. Weicker was still in Las Vegas unaware of his wife’s illness. “Why didn’t you tell him?” my mother asked. “He would have taken the next plane. Commandeered one if he had to.”
“And if he didn’t?”
Half of Nelva’s head was bandaged. Her remaining eye released a heavy stream of tears. The tears, she said, meant nothing. They were a side effect of the anesthesia.
She came to our apartment after her surgery clinging to her husband’s arm. I knew it was rude but I couldn’t stop staring. Her new eye had an exquisite azure iris and minuscule veins. And while it sat further inside the socket than her real one did and didn’t move when her real one moved, it conveyed a sense of utter calm and resignation as though the fight had ended and the treaty was fair.
“He’s been so good to me,” Nelva said. She wore a new bangle bracelet. “He wanted to get me diamonds, but I said, ‘Len, I’m no show-off.’”
Weicker’s youngest mistress, a heretofore ordinary if grasping woman, massaged his dormant testicles and by knowing just where and how hard to press, conjured a sperm into being and cheered it on as it flopped and sputtered toward her beckoning fallopian tubes. More likely she gave birth to another man’s child. Weicker was over seventy and the fear of his approaching demise--a single swipe and he’d be wiped off the blackboard of life--led him to believe he was potent and that, halleluiah, his essence would live on.
His lawyer withheld this information when he phoned Nelva. What he did say was that Weicker was filing for a divorce and she had to vacate the apartment by the end of the month.
We helped her pack, or rather we kept her company while our housekeeper put some thirty odd years’ worth of high heels into cartons and along with slacks and silk blouses that were ripe with the scent of Shalimar. These things were her remains. The funeral was over but Nelva’s corpse had escaped its confines and could still move and speak. Or so it seemed. Her husband’s reach encompassed every sitting judge and she couldn’t find a lawyer suicidal enough to take her case.
She ambushed my father in his favorite steakhouse and begged him to represent her. Without stopping to swallow, he shook his head no. “Please,” she said, weeping. Weicker had frozen her bank account. He’d taken away her credit cards. My mother was secretly paying her food bills at various markets. “I’m not a well woman,” she said. She clutched the table to keep from falling. “Please.”
“Nell, you know better than to put me on the spot.”
“Please.” People were staring. Some of these patrons were my father’s friends.
“Give me some time.”
A week later his secretary relayed his answer. Nelva and Leonard were his virtual parents. He could not take sides. He wished them both well. The law tended to favor the wife. She had nothing to worry about. Leonard was as decent and as loving as was she.
She moved to an efficiency apartment near the East River. My sisters and I were put off by the meager room with its doll sized kitchen stuck into a wall. Where were the other walls, we asked, the walls that separate a couch from a bed and make more and more rooms like she’d had before? Why was the furniture shoddy? Where was Nelva’s famous good taste? Even Nelva wasn’t the Nelva we’d known. Her dentures had broken and she covered her mouth when she spoke. Her blond hair was a dull gray. Most of her expensively applied false eyelashes were missing. Only her glass eye was still beautiful to behold.
My mother saw how upset my sisters and I were and she invited us to lounge on her bed while she furthered our education. It had been hard for my father to say no to Nelva. He’d had to fight his sentimental side to avoid being suckered in. Nelva was her dearest friend but that didn’t change that fact that she’d mistakenly married a man who’d long had a foot out the door. “Marriage is a transaction,” my mother said. “If over once you don’t have the goods.” I wondered what goods my mother used to keep my father in line. And what I’d have to offer when my time came.
I met my husband at a sidewalk art show. He was eating an oversized pretzel. Unasked, without knowing anything about him, I removed a dab of mustard that had fallen onto his shirt. “Gosh, there’s no holding you back,” he said and asked for my number. Ron was tall and thin. He stood in an S curve with his shoulders hunched and his small belly protruding. Other women would have declined his request. But I was used to men like my father who were so physically dense nothing could penetrate them. Ron let me in. He listened when I talked and when he spoke he used phrases like kind of, or sort of to lessen his impact.
“He’s not for you,” my mother said.
I thought he was. He seemed like the safest, most reliable man in creation.
Why did he marry me? Not for my money. He’d grown up to the tune of “waste not, want not,” and still adhered to that philosophy, calculating the cost of wear and tear on his shoes versus walking the half a mile to save a quarter on a carton of milk. A native Missourian, his life in Belle Prairie had become rote and he’d moved here to explore a more diverse reality. I was the opposite of a sweet predictable Midwestern girl. My family was even brasher.
Like all new couples Ron and I discussed our future ad nauseam. We were both in our thirties and had been around the block, different blocks surely, but ‘Viva la difference,” Ron crowed. We’d raise outstanding children, revel in other’s company, respect each other, bolster each other, be creative but not wanton during our lovemaking and never go to bed angry. In short we’d be the kind of couple that only appear in TV movies.
During our sixth date Ron told me he was a crime reporter. “You live in a golden tower and I prowl the gutter,” he said. We’d been kissing on my couch, approximating the urgent hunger we hoped would develop. “I’d call us a damn interesting pair. The peacock and the mole.”
His metaphor depressed me as did the thought of furry creatures with tiny immature eyes.
“Save your pity,” he said. “They’re perfectly adapted to their environment.”
Belle Prairie had one of the lowest crime rates in the nation and rather than hurrying to scenes of barking dogs, Ron had sold ads at the Belle Prairie Dispatch. Yet he was surprised when The New York Times turned him down and selected one of their own to write their recently launched Crime Scene Column. I treated him to dinner that night hoping a good meal would cheer him. His food went untouched.
“That jerk said a real reporter has too much drive and curiosity to sit at a desk for twelve years. A real reporter would have gone mad in my circumstance whereas it suited me because, in his words, I’m nothing more than a clerk. Well, excuse my French but I have the balls to take down the meanest sons of a bitch. And I damn well will.”
A local freebee offered him the use of a desk and five cents a word for any story they deemed publishable. His career was up and running, to use his words, and he was ready to take our relationship further. We saw ourselves as private people, another reason we’d bonded, and we decided to tell no one and marry in City Hall where we had a cold little ceremony. I’d had haircuts that had felt more transformational.
We moved into a small apartment in a modest building on an inconvenient street. To please Ron further, I entered an imaginary time machine and exited it as the nineteen fifties wife he wanted, replete with an apron, a mixing bowl and the intention of completely subjugating myself to my hubby, just like my mother subjugated herself to hers, albeit without receiving her lucrative perks. I was glad to make do with less. I’d begun to feel uneasy about my luxurious life—underserving, a target of envy. For a while I’d given dollar bills to the homeless with the thought of sharing a bit of my luck. But what can you buy for a dollar? I increased my gifts to five, ten, twenty, a hundred and then to hundreds of dollars and was excessively casual as I handed out these bills. I hadn’t done anything to earn this money, why should they? But the gifts alarmed the recipients. One man who was mountainous and sat on the steps of a Madison Avenue church wrapped in a flattened carton, roared “Get the hell away from me, you she-devil.” I ran for my life even though he had no shoes and the soles of his feet were covered with sores.
I stuffed a pillow under my dress to announce my pregnancy. Ron whooped, a sound that seemed too spirited for a man like him. “Thank you,” he said. “And so soon.” He carried me to bed and we nestled with our hands on my stomach dreaming of the marvel we’d created who would soon dominate, if not the entire world, then surely ours.
The editor at the time had been right about Ron. His method of sleuthing was to sit at his Kips Bay desk and half-heartedly search the Internet. On a rainy Monday he chanced upon a website that gave him access to almost every past and present court case in the state of New York.
He phoned me, panting. “I’m coming home. We have to talk.”
“About what? What happened?”
“The Pig, the Whale. The blood bath at Pomodoro’s.”
“You’re not making sense.”
He ran the fifty blocks from his office to our apartment clutching the copies he’d made of the documents. The Southern District of the United States District Court versus … He was barely inside when he started to read twenty years’ worth of documents aloud.
“Al, ‘the midget,’ Amuso represented by Howard Barbakoff. Kidnapping, grand larceny, tax evasion. Found innocent. Presiding judge, Leonard A. Weicker. Tony, ‘the gimp’, Leonetti represented by Howard Barbakoff. Racketeering, murder, perjury, witness tampering. Found innocent. Presiding judge, Leonard A. Weicker. ”
I put my hands over my ears.
“Louie the G, represented by Howard Barbakoff. Perjury, extortion, racketeering, assault with a dangerous weapon. Found innocent. Presiding judge, Leonard A. Weicker. Joey Dove, represented by Howard Barbakoff. Protection schemes, murder, loan sharking, money laundering. Found innocent. Presiding judge, Leonard A. Weicker. ‘No Nose’ Drucci, represented by Howard Barbakoff. Counterfeiting, bribery, tax evasion. Sido Profaci, represented by Howard Barbakoff. Drug trafficking, pornography, human trafficking, grand larceny, extortion.”
I fled him and his news, hailed a cab and sped downtown to my father’s office where I pushed past his secretary. My father glanced up from his work, surprised. I ran to him, sat on his lap, a thing I hadn’t done in a very long time. I was so much taller now, so much bigger than he was. I scrunched down. And even then I felt like an adult perching on a child. He stroked my hair less gently than he meant to.
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he said. “Self-anointed saints shouldn’t come down from their clouds. A little soot blows against them and they think they’re in hell. Didn’t he ever hear of equal justice under the law? I’m your father, for Christ’s sake. Who wrapped you in a blanket and ran with you to Lenox Hill Hospital when you came down with the whooping cough? Have I ever raised a hand against you or your sisters? If there’s a villain, it’s him. Let’s see those papers. We’ll go through them together.
I was on the verge of sucking my thumb. “We don’t have to.”
“Fine. Let’s go eat.”
We went to Chinatown and talked about baseball. Or he did while I struggled to keep down my food.
I went home and told Ron he was wrong about my father.
“I’m not wrong. The facts back me up. Your father destroys what’s fair and good in our country.”
“Stop it. This inquest is over.”
“Is it? You’re not single anymore and free to inhabit fairy tale realms. You’ve involved a child in this, my child who at the moment is still pure.”
“We’re all pure.”
“Is that what he said? Face the truth. Your father wins a case and a psychopath continues to kill. How many deaths is your father responsible for? A hundred, two hundred, maybe more, counting the junkies who died from the drugs his clients sold? And what about the guys whose businesses were trashed just so your father could cram more money into his safe deposit box? He and his crony Weicker.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I? I read you the proof. You got your first taste of evil when you drank your mother’s milk. Do you want that to flow from your breasts too? If we’re going to have a family you have got to wipe yourself clean. Repent. Make reparations.”
He’d said his piece and he regained his composure as abruptly as if he’d been an impressionist who’d merely imitated a vicious husband, not actually been one, and who might in the next instant squawk like a duck.
But I was hysterical and in my frenzy I grabbed an aerosol can and sprayed myself with air freshener.
“There,” I said, as the mist thickened and seeped into my pores. “Are you happy? Is my stench gone?”
“No,” he said and left.
I escaped into sleep, woke up alone in our bed and realized in a rare moment of clarity that in order to save our marriage, Ron would have to see things from my side as thoroughly as if I’d swallowed him whole. And only after he experienced the unbearable, mind-ravaging confusion he’d caused, the loss and the horror he’d inflicted so eagerly, would he earn the right to talk about my parents. To achieve this, I’d abort the baby—a thought made under duress. I wouldn’t carry it through. But trickery? Demolish him with a vindictive game of peekaboo? Not the toddler’s version where the child is abandoned and reassured until she becomes tough. Mine would induce real grief before I retracted my story. He deserved worse but we Barbakoffs were not what he said we were.
I left a note claiming I’d gone for an abortion. I knew he’d read it. A man like him doesn’t abandon a pregnant wife until he’s promised to do whatever is needed short of being decent.
I spent the day wandering through the Museum of Natural History hoping to find something uplifting, a scientific display of humankind’s progress from chest thumping apes into saints who nursed lepers. Instead I found displays of animals that had been shot, stuffed and placed inside painted replicas of the landscapes where they’d been captured.
It was all too much and I hurried home to confess that I hadn’t scrapped our child.
His sobs penetrated the door to our apartment. “I should have known,” he shouted when he saw me. “Murder runs in your family.” He clutched a small stuffed elephant he’d bought for our baby. It was laced with snot. “You killed Puddin’. You flushed him down the toilet like a piece of shit.” No longer a parent-to-be, his eyes were nearly swollen shut. “I’m sure you laughed during your game of tit for tat. Well, the carnage stops here. I warned the world. It’s over for you Barbakoffs.”
“What?”
“You didn’t expect me to keep quiet?”
He’d packed his things and while he shouted that he should have left Sodom the instant he realized where he was, he stormed out the door.
Few people read the Kips Bay Press on its best of days and as though we were characters in the sort of noir books Ron favored, I threatened to sue the paper for libel. The publisher had been more shocked by Ron’s vindictiveness than by the tale of another Mafia lawyer and he deleted Ron’s article before it went to press. This allowed my parents and sisters to continue to hold their heads high.
I was tainted material but my baby didn’t have to be. I secretly fled New York and moved, without acknowledging the irony, the wistfulness of my choice to the epicenter of America’s flower industry in northern Washington State. I was still pregnant when I was hired to freshen tulips at a farm store for seven dollars an hour.
Once my parents realized I’d vanished, my father shut the door to his office, consulted his mental rolodex and asked his top clients to send their “boys” to find me. When the search failed, my mother dragged herself from the couch where she’d lain immobile and blamed my father for my disappearance--instinctively, by process of elimination--she’d done nothing wrong. Ron wasn’t worth chasing. “What did you say to her?” she screamed, only to withdraw her accusation in the next breath. She’d have eaten a live scorpion to preserve her marriage. My sisters thought I’d jumped off a roof.
“So you’re saying she flew away?” my father asked. “Because if there was a…” he paused, to spare my mother.
“Body?” she said.
“Exactly. They’d notify us.”
I took on a phony identity and even at work kept to myself. It was exhausting to pretend to be an easy going, down to earth woman from Eatonville, Ohio when I was a fugitive, a failed wife, a callous daughter and completely unprepared to function as a single mother. Fear surged through my womb causing my son to thrash in liquid terror. Other things also went wrong. When I’d overdramatically sprayed myself with air freshener, I hadn’t known it contained an ingredient that was harmful to fetuses. One mad, momentary act geared to rile his father and everything about my poor little fellow was forever askew.
I named him Justin, another wishful attempt to fix the unfixable. To lessen the burden of righteousness, I nicknamed him Jelly Bean. Later, I called him Bop-bop and he called me Mop-bop, labels that referred to his early habit of slapping the crown of my head, playfully, it was a toddler’s game, while he shrieked, “I bopped you, Mop-bop.” When he grew old enough to hate the source of his aberrations, he intensified those slaps to the point where if I didn’t dodge him, I’d be covered with welts.
He was not a popular child. Like his grandfather, whom he knew nothing about, he was the shortest boy in his class. Like his father, who didn’t know he existed, he was bone thin. And then there the unconscionable gifts I’d given him, his poor motor skills, his constant anxiety and his difficulties with the written word.
My parents and sisters were prominent in certain circles. Late at night I searched for their photos on the Internet. I’d see my mother looking frail at a dinner dance or my sisters standing off kilter, champagne glasses in hand, their smiles failing to cover their fury. I read about my sister’s divorce, the lawsuits against my father, the mob hits that left men sprawled face up on restaurant floors. Nauseous, I’d leave those sites and scour the ones that sold prosthetic eyes.
An antique pair came up for sale. Without ever intending to, or even knowing why I was drawn to these sites aside my childhood memory of being dazzled by Nelva’s blind eye, I bought them. They arrived in a brass tin with a little red applicator. Shaped like breasts rather than spheres they stared at me with an urgency I couldn’t bear.
I hid them as though I was hiding a weapon or a sex toy or the key to my psyche. Hidden or not, they became my obsession, a flashing sign in my brain that claimed my attention at inopportune times, although no time would have been healthy. I’d become equally obsessed with the story of Oedipus Rex, who crazed by guilt, had gouged out his eyes.
I’d imagine the deed done, and see myself stumble downhill through a black porous landscape, brushing against bushes, plowing into trees, tripping, righting myself, limping, careening, while my son watched and the antique eyes shone.
When it got to the point that I had to throw out our knives and sit on my hands, I told Justin we were going home.
“We are home,” he said. I saw fear. He had so little to cling to. “Do you mean Ohio? You said there was nothing in Ohio.”
“To New York, to my parents and sisters.”
He was as shaken as if I’d exposed antennae and tentacles. Gone was the mother he’d known, the subdued Ohioan who’d been happiest during the four days she’d spent as a child at a Girls’ Scout Camp and who, after her husband died in a nine car pileup during the third month she was pregnant, had packed her things and moved west. In her stead was a stranger claiming she’d grown up in a rooftop mansion.
“I understand what you’re going through,” I said. “I found out things about my father that destroyed my sense of reality. My father’s a top lawyer…”
“I thought he was a dead electrician.”
“He’s the highest paid lawyer in New York City, or was, I don’t know. He was my hero until I found out, in a very cruel way, that he defended questionable characters.”
“What, like drunks and nose pickers? You faked our lives because…”
“He got them off.”
“The nose pickers. This is nuts. You’re nuts. Someone should lock you up.”
“Justin, don’t judge me before you hear the facts.” Facts I didn’t dare share.
Hou rs later he handed me a list of things my lies had deprived him of--private school, vacations, top level video games, a house that wasn’t an embarrassment, a car that wasn’t an embarrassment, decent clothes, a feeling of safety, a mother he could trust. And in capital letters, MY FATHER.
When I confessed that I’d tried but failed to track down his father, he asked how I’d been careless enough to misplace a grown man.
We barely spoke on the drive east.
“You didn’t tell them we’re coming, did you?” he said, at the sight of the Lincoln Tunnel. “Coward.”
I wasn’t up to greeting the doormen, dressed as I was in thrift shop clothes with a five dollar haircut from Hair Today. We snuck into the building through the service entrance and climbed twenty-three flights of stairs.
I stood behind my son while I rang the bell, used him as a shield, I was that frightened of the man who’d rushed me to the hospital when I was four years old.
He opened the door. The lines in his face had deepened. His hair was white.
“Nan,” he called.
“What?” my mother asked, from somewhere deep in the apartment.
“Get in here.” His tone repealed her right to choose.
She stumbled out, wrapped in towels.
“Who’s this?” He meant my son. “Is he yours? Where’s his father?”
“Dad, this is Justin, Dad, meet Justin. Can we come in?” I held out a box.
My mother looked wary. “What’s in it?”
I opened it for her and took out a graceless sketch of a cupboard-like contraption. “It’s a machine that retrieves the years I stole from this family.”
“Ron’s the father, isn’t he?” My father said. “Well, here’s a story for you.” We’d moved into the foyer but were still on our feet. “I heard on good authority he was so afraid I’d come after him that he changed his name, erased his prints, faked a passport and left the country for good. Someone else said, but this seems far-fetched, that he went back to work at the Belle Prairie Dispatch, was sent to report on a barking dog and it mauled him to death.”
“Howard,” my mother said. “Watch what you’re saying.”
What constitutes a worthy person? Empathy, generosity, kindness, warmth? Are some people born good? Are their brains made of marzipan instead of a mash up of combatant materials? Murderers roam the streets. Children snatch their friends’ toys. People marry the wrong person and attempt to destroy them. At present I lead a support group for women who gave birth to an impaired child or who beat their child or watched while her husband terrorized him. We sit in a circle talk about people we want to but cannot forgive—ex-husbands, siblings, parents, employers--people who, as it happens, are even angrier at us. What we really want is to stop chastising ourselves.
I say, “If you could see into your enemy’s heart, you’d sob at his pain. The bludgeon Punch hits Judy with? His father used it on him.” My father was once a half-starved, undersized boy whose world was made up of bruisers and losers. He chose to side with the survivers.
At five o’clock my son comes home from a school geared to teens who have special issues. Admit you go there and you slide down a notch.
He bops me on the head.
“Hey Mop-bop.”
“Hey Bop-bop.”
“How was your day?”
“Same-same.”
“Ditto.” This passes for a joke.
At dinnertime we take the elevator to the apartment directly above ours. The table is set. The dinnerware is gold-edged, the flatware is sterling and the napkins were lavishly embroidered in Portugal. My father sits at the head of the table. His portions are twice the size of ours. He licks the butter off his knife and dares us to stop him.
He asks my son when he’s going to transfer to a real school instead of one for the mentally impaired.
When we bristle, he says “I’m toughening him up. A kid needs that, especially this one. Where did you find him? At the pound?” He chuckles at his wit, relieved that our family is safely inside the walls he worked so hard to build for us.