Last Bender

8.5

I didn’t have grandparents. My father’s father disappeared in Poland in 1939. He was a Rabbi and a Zionist and a Bolshevik as well I’m sure, who was bringing money he had raised in the states to Poland for Jews to escape to Palestine or America. He had been discovered and murdered by Nazi agents in Warsaw. His mother I remember as a white haired old lady living in a high-rise in Queens. We went there sometimes and she fed us sweets. After the divorce my mother didn’t keep up with them and my father was distracted at best. I was 13 when she died, 8th grade. We went to the funeral out in Queens. It was hard to imagine that she was married to an underground fighter. But that would be the accurate description.

My mother was an orphan at 25. Her father died of cirrhosis at age 49. Later that same year her mother died of pneumonia. She was 40 and looked old.

I followed them into the living room, which looked out over a field. Nearby was a thick, gnarled, lichen covered apple tree. At the edge of the field the forsythia was in bloom. The sky was overcast.

There were bookshelves and Japanese prints on the walls and low threadbare furniture. On a side table was a brass Siva and a bowl of peanuts. There was a bar set up at one end of the room, by the sliding doors, and Isaiah was busy pouring Simone and himself a glass of red wine while Lee poured gin into the pitcher. He said to Simone, “I told her I didn’t rent a car so it could sit getting vandalized in a driveway in Fort Lee, New Jersey.”

“Oh stop, just the one time. You didn’t pay for it,” Simone said.

“It’s embarrassing. You have something to explain. You’re at the airport. That right there is aggravating enough. Even when you fly first class, it feels like a bus. Any minute, I’m waiting for the thing to come down. If I could sell just ten more rocks next year, we could take the QE2.”

“All I’m saying is I could have driven you so you wouldn’t have to drive home in the dark. They do have hotels here.”

“I live in a hotel!” he laughed. “Darling, we’ll spend the night here and go in the morning.”

Simone said, “You’d better see if she has room. They have all these other guests.”

“What? They don’t have room for us? Come on. I can sleep on a board in the basement. Just give me a pillow.”

“Bea,” Lea said loudly over them, “I’m taking onions.”

“Just olives for me,” Bea said.

“Cynthia always gets the onions for me. Every year she remembers,” he said. Lea had a lush, silver beard and a sharp nose that perched over his tweed suit. He was born in 1906 to Russian Communists who brought him to America as a baby. He was CPA and an Emeritus professor at City College, Modern Literature. Every day at 5 sharp he drank two healthy Gibsons.

With Lea I already knew what I was getting into. The first time we met he trapped me with one of his favorite opening gambits, the making of a concise statement and then waiting for your reply with a grin. He always had the advantage of a prop, like the bowl of peanuts I watched him pick up and carry with him in one hand, the Gibson in the other. He set them down beside me on top of a bookcase, next to a wooden Buddha, the gold leaf rubbed black on his feet and legs and said, “Did I ever tell you about the time the Communists at City College organized a strike against racism in the admissions process?” It was hard to know how to respond. “We managed to halt classes for several days and forced the administration down. It demonstrates that when people of conscience band together to accomplish something they can. This was the thirties, we were the only ones! The only ones speaking out, striking, marching with the blacks for equal rights. People don’t remember.”

“Maybe if we didn’t have a jackass in the White House–”

“The man in the White House is like the Wizard of Oz. It’s make believe. Powerful men don’t write history. History writes powerful men.” He chuckled. After two beats during which he smiled good naturedly, giving time to absorb the information he had just imparted, he carried on. Sally stepped away and soon I was alone with Lea. “I’ve just completed an article for a sociology journal out in California, Vanguard. I discuss the difference between Hegel’s and Marx’s conception of history, and how Marx’s can serve as the basis for revolutionary change in society, whereas Hegel inspires reactionary thinking at best. Of course, Hegel wasn’t all wrong, Marx’s dialectic comes directly from him and Marx was himself a revolutionary Hegelian. Without Hegel, there would be no Marxist theory.” He chuckled some more. “Lenin said, ‘Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.’” Bea stepped up to us.

“Is there any left in the pitcher?” he asked Bea.

“How should I know? Hi,” she said to me. “Sally says you are going to be a librarian.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Marx sat in the British Museum,” Lea said.

“Lea! Tell me Alex, where were you thinking of going?”

“Oh, Columbia maybe, or near where Sally goes. We’ll see.”

Bea kicked in now and then to get Lea off of whatever he was on, if he had gotten stuck. Few people will put up with Hegel willingly for a long time and Bea was no nonsense. She taught political theory at Rutgers and they lived out in Jersey. Bea was Lea’s third wife. Bea was only 8 years older than Raph. She and Lea had a son who lived in Israel.

There wasn’t much left of the peanuts and their drinks were done. We drifted over to the other side to say hello to Sally, who was by the bar with Bubbe and Isaiah. They too were born in Russia before the revolution, but their families had stayed to fight on the White Russian side in the civil war. Lea learned the diamond trade from his grandfather, a Turkish Jew who traveled the East and Russia, buying and selling gems. They fled through Siberia and into China and came to America from Shanghai in 1930. Cynthia was born in Newark the next year. He was tall and bald with a raspberry beret and a salt and pepper Van Dyke beard, stoop shouldered, with long earlobes, folded, wrinkled eyes and a relaxed face and an easy laugh. Bubbe had fat cheeks covered with rouge and grandmother shoes and a grandmother dress. She kissed Sally on both cheeks and said, “So, what are you reading now?”

“Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare, still? I don’t suppose there’s any end to Shakespeare. What play?”

“Merchant of Venice.”

Lea perked up. “Shylock, hm? A Jew takes the blame for capitalism. Then later, they blame him for communism.”

“I think I’m going to write about the castration of the father, and the anality of hoarding.”

“I can see the anality, but where do you get the castration?” Lea asked.

“Well, there’s the pound of flesh of course. That too could be circumcision. If you read closely it’s everywhere. Jessica, disguised as a boy, a torchbearer, steals two bags of gold and two stones from her father. It is a woman stealing the rights and prerogatives of The Father, a tyrannical patriarch. Just as Jesus, Christianity, is meant to be a transcendence of the vengeful patriarch and the law and yet Christianity reinscribes the Law of the Father as the Law of Kings, so does the play reinscribe the Law of the Father when the Phallus passes temporarily to a woman disguised as a man, a Judge.”

“Why can’t stones be stones?” Lea asked. “Wealth is being converted into capital, the emergent bourgeoisie gains status through marriage and gives birth to capitalism.”

“Stones are my business,” Isaiah said.

Bea said, “Of course, there was a Queen of England, negotiating, or resisting the negotiations of, her actual marriage.”

“That’s true,” Sally said. She licked her lips and took a sip of wine. The grey sky scalloped with cloud and speckled with crows framed her face and off to the side, behind the tangle of hair that just barely touched her shoulder were the apple tree and forsythia. “And no doubt her authority created anxiety and fears of castration among noble courtiers. But I resist the historicization of the text as a manoevre to stabilize its discourses into a single intended utterance.”

It was warm out. We took our drinks through the sliding doors. There was a stone patio surrounded by dormant rose bushes, a weathered picnic table they had bought in Maine and rented a truck to bring down. Raph helped the old man over the threshold. They had put in a narrow strip of bulbs along the side of the house and in a circle around the apple tree. Daffodils glowed against the wet ground and the air smelled of rain in grass and newly thawed earth. We set our drinks on the picnic table and stood looking out at the field.

“Used to grow potatoes out there,” Raph said. “Hard to imagine.”

The old man rasped. “I–” we fell silent. He smiled and looked at us. “Pain in the ass. Potatoes are a bad business. Back home, anyone who dug potatoes wanted to get the hell out of there. Ha ha ha haaah.” He eyed me and crooked his finger. His hair was long and spread out on his shoulders, totally white, and he was bald on top. “Young man.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Who’re you?”

“Sally’s boyfriend, Alex.”

“Who’s that?” I pointed to her. He nodded. “That’s my cousin. Met her once when she was a little girl. Uh…have lots of children. They’re a pain in the ass but it’s better than nothing. My friends are all dead. When I hear somebody dies I think, good, at least it’s not me. When I was your age, I used to think, why couldn’t that be me. What the fuck do I want to live for anyway. It’s a hell of a business. A lot of people believe in God. My wife, of Blessed Memory, did. But I look around at all this–” he shook his head slowly. “Nah. God’s not responsible for all this, and Satan would have done a better job. Whatever God made he must have destroyed it in disgust, and then, some other kind of thing, more like a man, came along and made this world out of the pieces. That would explain a lot.”

“Maybe there’s no predetermined order at all. Maybe all this is just what happened when one little thing happened. And that was unplanned, it just happened.”

He nodded, shook his head, drank some wine and coughed. “That’s far too optimistic. But you’re young. The young are supposed to be that way. I think we’re a lot worse off than that. What was it that fellow in England said, oh what was his name…”

“Darwin?”

“Wrong century! You know, what’s that name now, Churchill. Any man who isn’t a socialist at 20 has no heart; and any man who’s still a socialist at 50 is fool. Imperialist. Keep away from his books. Even the style is overrated. Listen, would you get me a glass of wine? I need a little before I try to walk on the lawn. You think there’s mud in there? I can’t see too well.”

“Sure, there’s mud. I’ll get you the wine.”

“There you go son, that’s good, thank you.”

Cynthia came out. “Everything is ready.”

While we were talking all the women in the house finished preparing and laying out the meal. I had not noticed the winnowing of the sexes, or the genders, or the whatevers.

In the kitchen bowls were stacked for matzo ball soup, the gefilte fish was plated and the roasts were resting out, the lamb on top of the stove to keep the fat from congealing. The dinner service was set, two forks out on beet red napkins, a knife and two spoons alongside the gilt edged plates. Up the center of the table, on a lace runner, were the candlesticks and three evenly spaced Seder Plates with the shanks and roasted eggs, and the haroseth and maror Sally had made and the karpas we had cut and rinsed. On a plate in the middle was the matzo, slightly charred at the edges, toasty and arid. There was a full water glass at each place and a glass of wine. There were 14 places set, with Elijah’s. The family gravitated to what I guessed were their customary spots and once we were all settled in we were elbow to elbow, with 2 on each end and five crammed-in to a side. Everyone picked up their Haggada and started to talk all at once. Down at one end was Moishe, who was asleep in his chair already. Lea was seated next to him and to his left was Bubbe.

I had not been to a Seder in at least 10 years. Probably the one organized by my mother at the psychiatrist’s had been the last. When my father lived with us we would go to Riverdale where his sister lived. His mother came and I saw my cousins. His sister didn’t approve of him. It was always very formal. We had to wear those little suits and clip-on ties. We only saw them once a year. Nobody in that family got along. And we didn’t like them anymore than they liked us. It was my mother and my aunt. They pissed each other off. That’s what kind of people they both were. The last time we had dinner with them was their new house in Scarsdale, the mansion we called it. I’ll never forget driving out to Westchester from the city with my parents together (I guess on their final leg) in front, pulling into the long driveway shaded by towering oak trees, and under a portico. There was a pool and the house had 25 rooms. I only saw things like that on television.

Cynthia may have had the table settings right too, but any similarity between the two ended there. There was a festive feel when Raph started to read aloud and at a brisk pace. He read the blessing of the wine and we grew quiet and drank some down.

Simone said, “This doesn’t taste like Mogen David. It doesn’t taste like grape juice.”

“Nobody said we had to suffer in the wine too,” Isaiah said.

Lea said, “Chesterton wrote, Said Noah to his wife/ When he sat down to dine/ I don’t care where there water goes/ If it doesn’t get in to the wine.”

Slowly the table stopped laughing. We dipped the parsley into the salt water and ate it. We broke matzo and Cynthia hid the afi komen in a napkin.

It was time to tell of the Exodus, how Moses against his better judgment undertook to free his people from their bondage to Pharaoh.

“At least it’s not that feminist Haggada,” Simone said, when it was her turn to read.

“That was years ago,” Sally said, blushing slightly. “No one forgets a thing!”

“If I had to hear one more time about our sisters Miriam and Sarah.”

“Shsh.”

“Sorry.”

 Bea hissed. “I thought that was a good Haggada. The meal is supposed to be about justice–”

We had to do the four questions. I was the foolish one.

“The whole point here is what? Obedience rules the pack?” Lea said.

Raph said, “How should I know. You have some idea already, you say it. I don’t say it for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“All I’m saying is if you have a point to make make it yourself, don’t engage me in some Socratic–”

“Just read, please,” Cynthia said.

Lea bellowed out some Hebrew and it moved to the plagues. When we got to the killing of the first-born Sally burst out, “This is just dripping in blood!”

The old man woke up and looked at her and said, “What do you think? It’s history.”

“It’s all magic mumbo jumbo to me,” Lea said.

“Well, at least there aren’t any young children at the table anymore when you say that,” Cynthia said. “Raph, where are we?”

“The second cup of wine.” He smiled.

“Thank god. Well, let’s move on, shall we? Joseph, say the blessing over the wine.”

“I don’t have any,” Simone said.

“Neither do I,” Joseph said.

“Nor I,” said Bubbe. “It was just so good.”

They passed two bottles of Chateauneuf du Pape around and when everyone’s glass was full Joseph read the second blessing of the wine in Hebrew and then in English and we drank.

At some point during the blessing of the bread, or maybe it was the maror, there was an abrupt interruption brought about when Isaiah read lines in the Haggada to the effect, “On this day we remember Jews living in the Soviet Union who are slaves and cannot celebrate Passover.”

Bea ahemmed loudly. Her forehead tightened and the short silver hair on her head actually bristled.

“You don’t expect me to let that stand, do you?” Lea said.

Sally took a deep breath and looked at her wine glass.

“Why not? You got a problem with it? Jews in the Soviet Union, Lea. I don’t think it’s so controversial for us to pray that they might be able to practice our religion,” Isaiah said.

Cynthia looked down table at Raph and flared her nostrils.

“I am a Jew but I do NOT believe in God. It’s a fairy tale for children.”

Joseph laughed out loud and drained his glass in one gulp.

“What’s that got to do with anything? The pact with Hitler–”

Lydia yawned and started to lick her lips. She gulped down water and made fists on the tabletop.

“Stalin,” Bea declared, “made terrible mistakes. It’s a matter of historical record.”

Maureen was following the conversation with bulging eyes and a still smile.

“Who ever said it started with Stalin,” said Isaiah. “The trouble started with Lenin, read Solzhenitsyn.”

Bea snapped-to with indignation and glared out of her narrow glasses at Lea, who had put down his Haggada and was gesticulating with his hands. He yelled, “That Czarist anti-Semite? We were under attack! It was war! First the World War and then the Civil War. America, Britain, France, all our former allies, all against us.”

“We were not Czarists! We supported Kerensky. Reform, not Bolsheviks.”

“Kerensky was weak! History was on our side.”

Bubbe stared at Cynthia but Cynthia avoided her mother’s eye and concentrated instead on Raph.

“What do you know about that? You were here! We were there! And before, what I said, I take it back, the trouble didn’t start with Lenin, it started with Marx!”

Raph started to cough loudly and wave the Haggada in the air.

Lea sputtered, “We were too poor to go back. My father had to make a living. You know what he had to do. And I lived in East Germany ten years. Don’t tell me I don’t know what life under state socialism is ‘really’ like.”

“And why did you come back?” Bubbe asked.

“My son wasn’t happy, and Bea got work here, the Rutgers job.”

“So you did the right thing for your son,” Bubbe said. “No one said you weren’t a decent man. What are you teaching this semester?”

“Dostoyevsky. I try to stick to the early works, or I get migraines.”

“Tolstoi was the greater writer.”

That seemed to settle it. We said some more prayers and made a maror sandwich, and then they cleared the plates. I went into the kitchen with Joseph and Lydia and we carried out bowls of soup and plates of gefilte fish with carrot, dill and horseradish. We were famished. Isaiah went into the kitchen to carve the meat with Bubbe. They came out and passed the platters of lamb and capon around. The lamb was fanned out in thin, pink slices and garnished with parsley and lemon flowers. The white meat of the capon was mounded up in the middle surrounded by its separated legs and wings, garnished with hard-boiled eggs, romaine lettuce and parsley. We all fell to, eating roasted red potatoes, rice pilaf, capon and lamb. There was a salad in a giant wooden bowl, asparagus, and roasted leaks. Towards the end of the meal when everyone was reclining in their seats and we were preparing to finish the Seder, with that last little bit, Lydia said, “I have an announcement to make.” She was seated between Mo and Joseph in the middle, across from me and Sally. No one really heard her. Lea and Isaiah were arguing about Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Lydia said a little louder, “It’s not a bad thing I have to say. It’s a good thing.”

Cynthia looked up from her plate. Her hair had come undone and fell in two tangled waves onto her shoulders. She was wearing a fancy dress with a big belt and layers of colorful silk. “I’m sorry, Lydia, did you say something?” It grew quiet. The faces were so close, and all lit by candlelight.

“I’m gonna quit taking drugs. I haven’t taken anything in days. That’s what I wanted to say.”

Everyone turned to look at Raph. He blinked a few times and then smiled. “Oh, that’s marvelous news. Yes. Ha ha.” He stood up awkwardly and reached over the table practically to touch her. He sat down. Everyone stared at Lydia.

“Oh Lydia,” Cynthia said, in a tone of voice impossible to read. She looked tired. There were rings around her eyes. Her shoulders were slumped. She sighed.

Lydia said, “Do you want to hear about it or not?”

Cynthia said, “I’m sure you’d rather not tell us about it now.”

Joseph caught my eye and nodded his head.

“No,” Lydia said in her big girl voice. “You are my family. I was very fucked up for a long time, since maybe I was thirteen. I guess you probably knew that. I saw my friend in the hospital and he was dying. I thought, That’s me. Why not, right? It could be him, it could be me, it could be you, so what does it matter what you do to yourself or anyone else. Also, I’m in love with Maureen. So from now on, I’m officially gay, whatever I might have said before one way or the other.”

Raph’s expression changed as she spoke till when she was done he looked more perplexed than anything. Then some new mood descended upon him and I could see it spread out from his heart through his limbs and finally into his face, which became so sad that everyone dropped their eyes to their plates. He exhaled loudly and rubbed his face and stretched his neck and coughed. Then he mumbled, “Your mother was like this.”

Cynthia’s eyes welled up with tears. “Is it really nec–”

Sally cut her off and jumped out of her chair. “What is wrong with you,” she shouted at her father. “Of all the barbaric Freudian reductions! She just told you she loves somebody.”

“Oh yeah, that,” Raph said. “Big surprise that one. I meant her real mother. You’re in the family, Alex,” he said to me, “you might as well know, unless of course Sally’s already told you.”

Cynthia got up and went into the other room, returning with a bottle of wine. “Go ahead, tell him,” she said after she had sat down and filled her glass.

Raph looked at Lydia and then at me and said, “Cynthier’s not her mother. Her mother was a crazy woman.”

“Oh,” I said. “What happened to her?”

“She used to carry on like this, create scenes. That’s all I meant by it. I’m sorry Lydia.”

Lydia nodded. “I don’t care about that. I never knew her, but I always figured I was like her, not like you ma.”

“What do you mean not like me? You want to be like her? She didn’t hold you as a baby, or bathe you every night or sit up with you when you had bad dreams, or the croup, or mumps, she didn’t wipe your tush, or take you to school. If I’m not your real mother, no one is. Why don’t you tell her?” Cynthia asked Raph.

“Tell her what?”

“Tell her what happened.”

“Yeah, you didn’t answer Alex’s question. What happened to her?” Sally asked.

He sat back in his chair. “It was awful. I don’t like to think about it. After you were born she became very depressed, and I had to go to work. We had no other money coming in. One day I came home from work, I wasn’t feeling well, I was worried. She was standing over your crib with a pillow in her hands. You were screaming, and she was screaming groggily–her voice slurred from sleeping pills—‘Shut up! Shut up!’ I grabbed her from behind. I drank in those days. I had stopped off in a bar on the way home and had two whiskeys. I said something like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And I shook her. She broke loose and ran out of the apartment and stepped into the street. She got hit by a car. It killed her, right there. When I married Cynthier, you were just a baby still and she raised you as her own.”

“You might have just told me that from the start,” she said.

We sat in silence for a moment and then Bubbe said, cheerfully, “Your great aunt was a lesbian. She lived in Moscow and dressed like a man. All the poet’s and painters came to her apartment, and they smoked opium and hashish and drank absinthe. And there was another lesbian in the family down in Texas. She got mixed up with that Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina.”

“He was a lunatic!” Isaiah said.

Lea nodded in agreement. “He had no ideology.”