Once Upon a Time. Barbara Fradkin
he thanked the super and followed his father inside. The apartment was barely fifteen feet square and lit with a single yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling. Clothes were scattered everywhere, and open food cans were piled haphazardly by the sink. Green had only been there once before, but he remembered it as scrupulously clean. Like Sid, Mendelsohn had been widowed for nearly twenty years and had his set routines.
“I didn’t hear the phone,” Mendelsohn was saying. “I’m sorry, I was asleep.” He sat down on the edge of his bed, and Sid took the rickety white kitchen chair. As there was no other place to sit, Green leaned against the wall and waited. Both men were frail, but his father, even with his heart condition, looked far healthier. Mendelsohn’s skin had a yellowish cast and hung on his frame in folds. A quick glance around the room revealed a collection of prescription bottles by the bed. While the two friends bickered, Green went over for a closer look.
“You think I don’t have eyes?” Sid demanded. “I can’t see you look bad?”
“I’m eighty-four years old. You think you look so good?”
“Bernie—” Green interrupted, holding up a vial. “These are pretty strong painkillers.”
Mendelsohn snatched the vial away with trembling hands. He shoved it into his pyjama pocket and took a deep breath. “Michael, I have a few aches and pains. Tell your father to leave an old man in peace.”
Sid rose and came across the dimly lit room to peer at Mendelsohn. His wheezing was erratic in the stillness. “Aches and pains nothing. You think I don’t recognize cancer? My Hannah took ten years to die, Bernie. And near the end, when it was in her liver and bones, she looked like you.”
“Well,” replied Mendelsohn quietly, “I won’t be that long. Not ten years. Not even one.”
Green stepped instinctively forward to take his father’s arm, but Sid did not waver. He flinched but kept his gaze on his friend.
“When did you learn?”
“Three weeks ago. The painkillers are strong, and they make me sleep a lot. But it won’t be so long. Thank God it won’t be long.”
“So…” Sid murmured. “Bernie. Don’t you think it’s time to call Irving?”
“Irving? Why should I call Irving?”
“Because he’s your son.”
“Son! Sure. What do you think, Sid? That everyone has a son like Mishka here?” Mendelsohn wet his lips and drew a palsied hand across his chin. For a moment his eyes misted. “I should be so lucky. Mishka would not have left an old man to die alone. But not Irving Bigshot Mendelsohn. He had to go to the United States, no law firms good enough for him here in Canada. I know his kind. Only what they want matters, and the hell with the weak old father who just gets in the way.”
So great was his bitterness that even Sid was alarmed. He looked pale when they left the apartment some minutes later. As he buckled his father into the car, Green picked his words carefully.
“I didn’t know Irving very well because he was a couple of years ahead of me in school, but I seem to remember he was always a putz.”
Sid sighed. “Yes, Irving had a big head, but it was not easy always to be Bernie’s son.”
Green glanced at him, wondering whether he should even stir up the memories. The two elderly men had more in common than widowhood; both had been in the camps, both had lost children there. “You mean Bernie’s second son.”
Green held his breath until his father replied. “Bernie doesn’t talk about it, but they are there, always in his memory.”
“They must have been very little when they died.”
“And that makes them easier to forget?”
“No,” Green soothed hastily. “What I meant was—how does he know how they would have turned out?”
“You have dreams for your child. You will see. You see in the baby the man he will become. Bernie has always loved you, Mishka. He sees you like the little boy he lost.”
“What exactly did happen to his kids?”
As he asked, Green kept his eyes casually on the road, but he heard his father’s breath catch in his throat. For a moment, Green thought he was actually going to answer, but then his father waved a peevish hand. “Watch the puddle. I don’t want to step out in a puddle.”
Skirting the slush, Green drew the car to a stop outside his father’s apartment and got out to help him. The senior citizens’ building was a bulky low-rise conveniently placed between a bakery and a drugstore. Sid had moved there under protest eight years earlier when he could no longer manage the stairs, but his heart still lay with the little brick tenement in Lowertown where his son had grown up and his wife had slowly slipped away. Sid scowled now at the squat, ugly cube as if it were an alien thing.
“Are you going to be okay, Dad?”
“Sure, sure. Eighty-three years old. All my friends are dying. I can’t walk even one block. My hands shake, I can’t open a door. A man should thank God for such a life.”
* * *
Green was surprised how unnerved he was by his father’s words. Both his parents were Holocaust survivors who had lost all their family in the war, but as an only child Green had seen nothing bizarre about the strange hours of silence and the lonely isolation of the home in which he’d been raised. He’d seen their fatalism and their protective paranoia as an irritating restriction on his youthful urge for adventure, and it was only when he’d started reading about the Holocaust as an adult that he’d begun to wonder about the depths of their pain. But all his parents had ever afforded him, as now, was a distant glimpse.
Later that evening, once their son had been securely tucked into his crib, Green fixed Sharon and himself a cup of Earl Grey tea. With a grateful sigh he sank down beside her on the sofa and drew her into his arms. Slowly, between soothing sips of tea, he told her about the visit to Mendelsohn’s apartment and his father’s reaction.
“He almost talked about it, honey,” he said. “It’s the closest he’s ever come to telling me anything, to saying he never forgets.”
She snuggled against his chest and cradled her cup of tea. Her eyes were half shut with fatigue, but her black curls bounced vigorously as she shook her head. “I’m sure he doesn’t. I couldn’t imagine losing Tony. I’d lose my mind. But your father, he’s had loss after loss after loss.”
The thought unsettled him, and he sipped his tea a moment to ponder. He remembered his father’s reaction to the long months of his mother’s dying. His mother had talked non-stop, even refusing morphine in order to stay alert, so desperate was she to cram twenty years of motherly advice into nine months. But his father had spent long, unnecessary hours at the factory and ceased to talk almost entirely. It was from his mother that Green had received his first glimpse into his father’s past.
“Don’t stop him from working,” she said. “That’s how he was in the camp after the war. Busy, busy, everything had to be just so. You stop, you think.”
After her death, his father had sunk into a deep apathy from which he’d been roused only briefly by the birth of Green’s daughter by his first marriage, who was named Hannah in her grandmother’s memory. When Green’s self-absorption torpedoed that marriage, Hannah had been yanked from both their lives by Green’s irate first wife before either man had much chance to know her. Green winced now as he thought how he himself had been responsible for that loss.
Bit by bit, Green, with the help of the hopeful widows in the Jewish seniors’ club, had coaxed his father back into a meagre social existence and into the companionship of his card-playing friends. And now even that was proving a mixed blessing.
Green sighed. “I hope Dad can bounce back. It must be hard watching everyone dying around you.”
“And