Flight from Ein Sof. W. E. Gutman
child-sized shirt because her memory of me was that of a lad twenty years younger, boiled a bushel of apples in a big copper vat. Helen’s apple marmalade was legend. As was her crude sense of humor. A gifted blasphemer equipped with a rich lexicon of profanities, Helen thought nothing of lifting her skirts, showing her behind and spewing a barrage of obscenities at anyone who disagreed with her oracular opinions.
Sam, my father’s uncle, the one who denied visiting relatives so much as a glass of water but invited vagabonds to his dinner table, quarreled with his wife, the acrimonious Meema, over some minor peccadillo. The old couple, mismatched from the start, shared a lifetime of rancor and antagonism, Meema the casualty of latent schizophrenia, her husband Sam -- Schmiel to the family -- given to anti-social eccentricities that alienated all but the most tolerant kin. How the two managed to produce two sons was, for many years, the source of scabrous banter.
Those who did not know Meema admired what they perceived to be a kind of heroic stoicism in her rigidity. But her pinched lips, furtive glances and calculated irascibility betrayed meanness beyond pathology. My father, who would be neither fooled by the sham solemnity of her demeanor nor tolerant of her frequent outbursts, had once told me that “Meema” was a bitter, ill-tempered shrew even as a young woman.
“She alienated everyone she met and devoured her husband from the moment they tied the knot. No one could stand her. Efforts to dissuade Sam from marrying her fell on deaf ears. We’ve all been wondering what he could possibly have seen in this fire-breathing monster.”
My father would express the same qualms when I married my first wife.
Wearing a pince-nez, a bushy mustache adorning his upper lip, my maternal grandfather, a noted poet, journalist, jurist and Teddy Roosevelt look-alike, cleaned his pistol, the very one he had used to kill the man who had challenged him to a duel. The duel, the culmination of months of invectives and counteroffensives dutifully reported in the press, earned my grandfather, who had never held a gun, let alone fired one, what many considered a slap on the wrist. Reluctantly prosecuted by a sympathetic magistrate -- his challenger was unpopular, a seasoned duelist and a marksman -- my grandfather was sentenced to six-months in jail. He spent less than thirty days in a comfortable room, next to the warden’s office where he continued to write, entertained family and friends, and ate catered gourmet meals. The remainder of his sentence was reduced to time served and he was released on good behavior. In his day, as in this, men of means and distinction, however reprehensible their crime, rarely faced long prison terms.
I wouldn’t have recognized Uncle Yanosh, one of my father’s cousins, had I not spotted him peeling grapes with a pocket knife and picking bread crumbs from the table cloth with a wet finger -- mannerisms that, I now remembered, I had watched, transfixed, the way one stares at a tic, a protruding nose hair or an unzipped fly. Yanosh’s features seemed frozen in a perpetual grimace, his upper lip curled menacingly, his nostrils flaring as if some foul odor inhabited his space, a scowl conveying both hostility and exasperation etched upon his face. Never far from his reach rose in a neat pile a stack of paper towels. Next to them was a tall glass of water which he fed with maniacal regularity from a carafe his wife was duty-bound to refill. An empty carafe elicited a litany of half-muttered expletives in her direction. Every ten minutes or so, he ripped a few sheets, crumpled them into a ball and dunked them in the glass. He then scrubbed the palm and back of his hands with a vehemence suggesting self-loathing. I called him Lady Macbeth. The skin on his hands had acquired the sickly whiteness and texture of boiled chicken. I imagined him as a boy, engaged in furious masturbation, and conjured scenes of maternal wrath for having “spilt his seed and polluted his hands in the presence of God.” The man had a wretched temper. He invited these unkind fantasies and I found myself disliking him more than the obsessive-compulsive disorder from which he suffered.
Seated across Yanosh, Aunt Mary, cradling two antique dolls in her arms, hummed a wistful lullaby, the same lullaby she had sung every night as she put her baby girls to sleep.
“Schloof, schloof, sheine meidele....”
Her husband (and first cousin) Louis, the elder of two sons Shmiel and Meema had managed to produce, tinkered with a Rube Goldberg-like contraption designed, he claimed, to “stretch time.” A veteran of New Guinea, the Philippines and Okinawa, Louis was intelligent but utterly lacking ambition. He had earned a living pressing ties in a sweatshop in New York’s garment district. He and Mary produced two daughters -- one who was eight, the other, still incubating in her mother’s belly when I first met them. Now in her fifties, my pretty, dreamy-eyed younger cousin had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was thirty or so. I called it “Meema’s revenge.”
Uncle Jan (everybody called him Néné Jan) smoked a Turkish cigarette from a short carved ivory holder, sending aromatic rings to the ceiling as he quoted from Baudelaire, Longfellow, Wilde and other poets. His wife, Tante Yetta, a once-pretty but vacuous woman who adored her husband, listened, her eyes closed, her mouth agape, in beatific amazement.
Abraham, staring in the void, his eyes still set heavenward in pious devotion, sought in mute prayer the atonement of sins that he knew could never be expunged. His son Fabian, reliving his life, wept in his hands as he had, years earlier on my father’s shoulder.
I looked at Fabian, replaying his now legendary history in my head. Thirty days after his mother’s death, having complied with tradition by engaging in histrionic displays of mourning, lamentations, breast-beatings and tearful one-way dialogues with God, his father Abraham remarried. His new spouse, a pretty, young woman he had been screwing when his wife wasn’t looking, produced three children. Fabian was just a teen when he was apprenticed to a soap and candle factory many kilometers from town. When he came home for brief visits he would be fed leftovers and forced to sleep in the attic in the stifling heat of summer and on bitter winter nights. His stepmother made him do degrading chores and took pleasure in humiliating him in front of her own children.
“Like his Biblical namesake,” Fabian kept repeating as he wept,” my father Abraham gave in to his new wife’s frivolity and malice. He never intervened. I was not cast out into the desert, like Ishmael; I was dumped in a barren field where love and tenderness did not grow. I was not offered in sacrifice to God; I was immolated at the altar of indifference.”
*
Stirring from his prayers like a man awakening from a trance, Abraham looked around the large communal room as if in search of a caring pair of eyes into which he could peer, perhaps a silenced voice he could rouse without fear of rejection. Finding me, hesitating at first, he asked, unaware of the incongruity of his question:
“Tell me about the weather back in the old country. Are poppies in bloom? Have the cicadas begun to chirp? Is the air filled with the sweet smell of lavender? Are young maidens dancing at the fair? Are they wearing new ribbons in their hair?”
Everyone froze as if immobilized by some invisible force. All eyes turned on me.
“I’m so sorry, Abraham,” I replied, a vague feeling of pity tugging at my insides. “Powerful storms ripped across the Yesod valley shortly before I left, killing a woman and sparking tornado and flood warnings. Winds snapped off trees as if they were toothpicks. Twelve homes were badly damaged, and several roads became impassable. Mudslides added to the devastation. Something to do with ‘global warming,’ you know....”
Grief and disbelief smoldered in Abraham’s eyes.
“But....”
I should have lied. I should have told him what he desperately needed to hear. It would have been a mitzvah, a good deed. Me and my big mouth.
“Enough,” Meema screeched, pointing a menacing finger at me. “You’re not to address Abraham. You hear? No one talks to Abraham. Not a word!”
“Why not?” A hundred pairs of scowling eyes turned on me. My father placed his arm around my shoulder, led me away and whispered, “let it go for now. I’ll tell you later.”
Abraham scanned the room, bitterness etched upon his craggy face. He stiffened, adjusted his prayer shawl, screwed the skullcap on his head and reentered the sacred realm as Rachmaninoff’s Elégie played