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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393320503 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2000 |
| Pages: | 290 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
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Chapter One
In the last two years of his life, I came to look after my father. We had been estranged for many years, though "estranged" isn't quite right for we were mostly strangers to each other by my eighteenth year, and yet remained tensely connected across the long silences of the four decades that followed. He was in New Jersey and I in Manhattan, half an hour away, but we could have been at opposite ends of the continent, seeing each other at a family event every year or two, as guarded and aware as two successful people might be who had once been master and servant.
He was living in Livingston, a well-to-do community at the pastoral end of Essex County, to which he had come thirty years ago with a new wife, his fourth, to take his climactic place as a self-made man. Self-made and self-unmade. For the unregenerate "peasant" (the term that he often used about his mother, whom he despised) had gone there with the successful glass distributor, shrewd investor, versatile talker, and quondam bon vivant whose motto was "The best is good enough for me." For ten years or so the better-behaved Ben Solotaroff seemed to prevail, mainly because, as my mother said, he had finally married a woman he couldn't walk over. The widow of the county bailiff and a summons server herself, Debby was the reality principle in a designer dress. From what we could tell, she managed him by a shrewd mix of creature comforts and strict expectations, which had even produced the sight of him docilely grilling chicken and hamburgers at a barbecue for both families. But then he had gotten into one of his "spots" at The Shop, the office and warehouse in Elizabeth where he had never been able to keep office help, except for my mother and me. His latest "girl" had walked out; he had no one to answer the phone so that he could get out to do business. Unlike his other wives, Debby refused to help him out, "even for a few days." Their respective lines were drawn, suddenly but for good, each of them having a rock-bottom principle at stake--business-is-business versus marriage-is-not.
In the marital cold war that ensued, one of my father's main weapons was the peasant in him. After he sold the Standard Plate Glass Co., he loaded up the basement with desktops, mirrors, and other items that were left over and parked in his driveway a big side-paneled glass truck. It remained unsold for the next two years, a daily affront to the house pride of Debby and to her relationship with their neighbors.
The truck had been the beginning of the end, which was still going on twenty years later. Here was an estrangement with zero ambiguity. Debby spent seven months in Florida and the rest in the Livingston area, where she occupied a bedroom in their house and cooked and put up a week of his meals so that he couldn't divorce her for desertion, and conducted her life entirely elsewhere. It was as though the gods of marriage, in retribution for his previous derelictions, had put him in an unbreakable, miserable wedlock, Debby being as determined to outlast him as he was her, for the sake of his million-dollar estate. I doubted that he had run into any woman as tough and determined as Debby since his mother.
But the struggle over whose way of life would prevail in their home he had finally won decisively, and he had driven her from the field. Over the years, the spacious brick-and-cedar split-level house took on an unkempt, vacant look, like a well-to-do drunk who has given up appearances. By mid-June, the lawn of the two-acre corner lot would be knee-high in grass and weeds. It would continue to grow until his neighbors once again prevailed on the Board of Health to make him cut it.
My brother-in-law Hy, the family mensch, was our main contact with Ben, as my sister, brother, and I referred to him, since he was more a character to us, our own old Karamazov, than a father. A B-25 pilot in World War II, Hy was about halfway in age between Ben and me, his oldest child, and had brought him partway back into the family. In recompense Ben had made Hy the trustee of his estate and loaned him twenty thousand dollars to make the down payment on a house, one of the bursts of largesse that would come over him like rain in Death Valley. Around the time he turned eighty, his strong body finally began to act its age. After Ben had a hip replacement, Hy visited him every two weeks or so to do whatever chores and cleaning he would permit and to give him a massage. But Hy lived halfway out on Long Island, two hours from Livingston, and also had lost some of his phenomenal goodwill when, after making the final payment of the loan, he received a note from his father-in-law demanding the nine percent interest on it. Though Ben eventually backed off from his demand, it left a fair amount of scar tissue on the relationship.
One day in the spring of 1990, Hy called to let me know that I could be of use in helping Ben finally accept the fact that he needed a housekeeper or, preferably, a retirement facility. Hobbled by poor circulation and arthritis and often mired in depression, he was less and less able to look after himself. Also he seemed to be driving his Cadillac from one body shop to the next; always a recklessly aggressive driver, he was now a recklessly uncertain one.
I didn't think that he'd listen to me for a minute, but he had become enamored of Virginia (my fourth wife), a beautiful, gracious woman who had a way with him, played the market as successfully as he did, and, as he said, "drove like a man." With her influence I might get somewhere. Also Hy's tone reminded me that I, not he, was the firstborn son.
And so I phoned Ben and said I'd like to come out.
"You don't say," he replied.
I steeled myself to be warm and calm. "Hy said you might like some company, so I thought I'd spend Saturday with you."
"When's he coming?"
"He can't for a couple of weeks. I'm the relief pitcher. I'll see you on Saturday, okay?"
"Suit yourself. But if you're coming, come on Friday so that I can get to the bank. I've been laid up."
I pointed out that I worked on Friday, and said that I'd come early enough on Saturday morning for him to get to the bank.
"I don't get up early. I don't sleep at night." He added an exclamation mark by hanging up.
I took Friday afternoon off, which I almost never did, even in summer when in New York publishing the weekend begins after lunch. As I drove out to Livingston, the strangeness of being away from my desk on the day I got the most done there connected up with that of the situation itself, of being a son again, which I hadn't been since my mother's death almost twenty years before and the intense period of mourning that had followed. And not only a son but his son, a role that fitted me like a glove I had long outgrown.
He was still in his bathrobe when he opened the door. I hadn't seen him in eighteen months and was startled by the change. The robe was bunched around his formerly burly body. He had lost maybe thirty pounds and seemingly a couple of inches; his face, which had still been ruddy and handsome, was wizened now, its color bad; he was literally so down in the mouth that his cheeks seemed caved in. Ben Solotaroff abruptly reduced to a bent, weak old man with a shuffling walk. Also the well-appointed spacious living room I'd last visited -- Debby was in residence and had brought in a cleaning woman -- was now like a trope of his condition, a reclining armchair with a week's newspapers scattered around it facing a big new TV set, the blinds still drawn on the bright spring afternoon, the rest of the room and its furnishings receding into dustiness and disuse.
We hardly spoke as I drove him in my car to the post office and bank, he giving me instructions for the turns as though I were taking my first driving lesson. Then I trailed after him while he slowly shopped for bargains at a Pathmark, choosing a loaf of bread, a pound of tomatoes, a brand of soup like someone on food stamps instead of the investor who had just deposited four or five dividend checks. After we got back he showed me step by step how to use the washing machine and dryer and let me do a little cleaning in the kitchen and bathroom.
I stayed calm and collected throughout, preserving the mature adult I'd need to come across as when I delivered my little speech about his changed situation and the plans Hy and I felt he needed to begin to make. I wanted to take him to a nice local restaurant for the occasion, but he chose a diner five miles away, where he listened to my carefully chosen words as he usually did -- barely. He said he had no interest in making any change. As I was driving him home, I hesitated at an intersection and was about to make the wrong turn when he corrected me. "You really were going to turn right, weren't you?" he said with a smile, as though I had finally done something that gave him pleasure. At that moment my rage broke free and I wanted him dead. Still simmering, I drove back to New York, wondering what I could accomplish besides putting myself, after all these years, back under his thumb to remind me how it had felt growing up there.
However, like him, I prided myself on getting things done, so I phoned his doctor, who agreed that the time had come and gave me the names of several good retirement communities and senior citizen residences. Over several Sundays, Virginia and I managed to get Ben to look them over, he lagging along behind us at each visit like a teenager shopping with his parents. This one, in a converted mansion, was too confining; that one, which offered him his own apartment, was too spread out. One was too Jewish and another too Gentile ("I like kosher-style food"). When he dismissed a seemingly enlightened and congenial place by saying, "It's full of old people," we gave up.
Next, Hy and I arranged for a private geriatric agency to provide the help he needed to continue living at home. I drove out to attend the consultation, and ended up answering most of the social worker's questions, while Ben, slumped inside his bathrobe, glared at both of us. After she'd left he said, "Neither of you understand a goddam thing about my situation."
I phoned Hy and said, "He's going to have to get even worse before anything happens." I was glad to throw up my hands and let him stew in his weakness and stubbornness. But a few weeks later he called to say in a feeble voice that he felt terrible, that he couldn't get out, that he had hardly eaten in three days.
I called his doctor and drove out the next day to take him to his office. After examining him, Dr. Zauber said, "Your main problem isn't physical, Ben. There are two million people in Essex County but you have to be alone. It's bad for you in every way."
Bending to doctor's orders, he said he'd look around on his own and quickly found a brand-new residence -- "out in the sticks but pretty nice." The Sunday afternoon that Virginia and I were to go with him to dine there and meet with the management, he called to say that he wasn't feeling well, couldn't get moving, would I come a little earlier and give him a massage.
A massage? The thought was like a quarter falling from my pocket into the middle of a lake, a small thing but it went down and down and settled in the muck at the bottom of my mind.
Normally I like to give a massage. My hands, which are clumsy with a wrench and ignorant with a spark plug gapper, become deft and intuitive with muscles, tendons, and joints. But my father had never asked this of me before. Hy had given him a number of massages. But that was different: Hy wasn't his son.
As Virginia drove us to Livingston, I tried to understand what was about to happen and why I felt so queasy about it. There was the sin of Ham, Noah's son, of seeing his father in his nakedness. Until now, I had thought of it as just another of the primitive taboos of the Bible. I had seen my father naked many times, without thinking twice about it. As a small boy I had followed him around the YMHA during his Sunday-morning workout and could still see the lurid brightness of the massage room as Doc, bulging and looming in his white T-shirt, pushed and pounded on Dad's ruddy body, getting the blood up. Those Sunday mornings were chief among the few occasions of male bonding I'd experienced with him. Why should I now be feeling the force of that injunction, for the breach of which Ham was punished so harshly through his own son?
The injunction, of course, was part of the patriarchal slant of the Old Testament: thou shalt honor the dignity of thy father even when, like Noah, he is in a drunken stupor. In this case, the father would not be drunk but aged: a shrunken, rusted version of the imposing man I'd known all these years. I didn't want to look upon, much less handle, that waxy skin, those pathetic loins. I wasn't touched by my father's loss of his force; in some ways I welcomed it, it made him less difficult for me to be with. But I didn't want to put my hands on his body.
When we reached his house, rang the chimes, and waited, I was hoping hard that the delay meant he had managed to get himself going. When he finally shuffled to the door and opened it, he was still in a bathrobe, a short one, his veiny, whittled thighs exposed. Whatever my compunctions, he had none.
He greeted Virginia with a vestige of his charmer's smile, and then turned to me. "Where you been?" he muttered. "I'm supposed to be there in an hour." As he often did these days, he looked both angry and forlorn.
Virginia used her gentling way with him. "Don't be upset, Ben. We'll get you there."
"I'm not upset, dear. I can hardly move. This one here was supposed to give me a massage."
"Well, stop grousing and let's get started," I said. Being able to talk back to him now was my main compensation for these trips and services.
I followed him into his bedroom. He removed his robe, slowly lowered himself across the unmade king-sized bed, and there was his nakedness.
"Start around the hip," he said. "I had an artificial one put in a year ago, so take it easy. There's some oil on the night table you can use."
It was Johnson's baby oil. I put some in my palm and began to slowly knead around the hip socket. "How's that?" I asked.
"A little gentler, for Chrissake," he said, but his voice was more good-natured, the complaint half in jest.
Like much that is significant in life, what I had anticipated so strongly was not what came to pass. As I carefully pressed my palms and fingers across the top of his buttocks to the base of his spine and upward along the column and then back, I did not see any wrinkles at all; the skin of the lower torso seemed as smooth and the flesh as tender as an infant's. I could hardly believe my eyes or hands. He was like a blown-up version of one of my sons when I would take him from the bath, then oil and caress that delicious skin.
"How're you doing?" I said. He made a little ooing sound of pleasure in his throat. He extended his arms, turned his head to one side, and closed his eyes. "Now a little higher, Ted," he said.
I straddled him to get a better purchase, then pressed my palms on up the vertebrae and into the soft muscles under the shelf of the shoulder blades. The oo sound became interspersed with a deep hum of contentment.
Inspired, I worked my way, now with fingers and now with palms, up and over the shoulder blades and into the deltoids of his once beefy shoulders. After kneading them, I moved down and away to the stringy biceps and then up to the tender neck. Cupping my hands, I eased the tendons. I concentrated on the task, fending off the memory of how broad this back had been, how these muscles had lifted his side of a plate glass window as though it were plywood and laid it on the cutting table. I did not want the anger and shame that came with the adjacent memories of the beatings these shoulders and arms had inflicted. I wanted this ooing and humming gratitude to continue, my fingers to go on gentling into his neck and his neck into my fingers the closeness that had finally, strangely come to us.
Chapter Two
Sunnyvale Manor was a bright, white two-story building with Colonial touches and a big parking area in back. The office looked like the front desk of an upscale motor inn and the lobby like one that was booked solid on this Sunday evening, because of the visiting families. The residents, mostly women, were well-dressed and alert-looking, and there was not a wheelchair in sight. The atmosphere among the couches and armchairs of the lobby had a settled feeling and a mild sense of mortality: all these comfortable guests whose reservation was for the rest of their lives.
The owner/manager, who looked like a retired contractor himself, took us in hand ("Just call me Vince. We don't stand on formality around here") and led us into the spacious restaurantlike dining room, complete with puffy linen napkins that matched the beige tablecloth, individual menus, and sweet-faced young waitresses and busboys. All and all, it looked like the best prospect yet.
We were soon joined by Hy and my sister, Sandra, who had come from Huntington to participate in what we called "the big push." After a few minutes at the table it no longer seemed to be that; it had become something else, something remarkable. Ben came out of his shell and took over the conversation, joining the affable Vince Stefano in explaining the place to us as well as asking most of the questions. It wasn't just a shift of mood. It was a physical thing, as though an invisible magic wand had touched him and turned him back into the man he'd been, who liked to say, "I know how to make an impression." His handsomeness had returned to his face; he even seemed to have taken on flesh inside his Hickey Freeman suit, a soft gray worsted, so that it fit him. His pale blue shirt, its French cuffs set off by small gold-and-onyx links, and his subtly checkered silver-and-gray tie gave him the quiet gleam of a retired banker. His voice was both firmer and warmer -- that of a man who chose his words, his comments and questions rounded by self-assurance. Before long, Vince was explaining to him how he'd financed and built the place.
It was a startling change but not a surprising one. I'd seen my father at The Shop, an important customer or supplier on the way, turn himself with a wash and a necktie from a coarse glazing contractor into a well-spoken businessman; or, in the course of a visit to my mother's family in Manhattan, from the grump behind the wheel to the center of the conversation at the dinner table. A few years ago he'd visited us in Amagansett. His arthritis had begun to get him down, and when we went off to a lawn party, he said he didn't feel up to it, which was a relief to me because of his tendency to hold forth and set everyone straight. But Virginia had coaxed him into going. We tried to stay close to him -- Virginia so he wouldn't be alone, I to minimize the embarrassment -- but we soon got separated in the heavy social surf, and when I located him he was talking to Shana Alexander. I walked over to cut in but saw that she was now doing the talking. They were still at it ten minutes later. When I subsequently thanked her for her feat of patience, she said, "That was the most interesting conversation I've had here. Where did you get such a charming father who knows so much about the market?"
After dinner, Vince showed us the room Ben would have. He said he'd want to come back to take some measurements since he'd be bringing in a desk and filing cabinet for his investment work. Also he'd want his own phone installed. "Anything you need, Ben," said Vince, who by now seemed ready to offer him a partnership.
The next week continued to be upbeat as Ben went about pricing furniture, moving his three bank accounts, even talked about putting the Livingston house on the market. The morning came when Hy and I were to help him move. We found him sitting inertly on his bed, staring at enough pairs of shoes fanned around him for a window display. "What am I supposed to do with all these shoes," he grumbled. "That place isn't right for me."
"Come on, Ben," said Hy in his unflappable way. "You've told me yourself you can't wear most of your shoes anymore. You just show us the ones you can use. We'll find a place for them and for all your clothes."
"What use would I have there for twenty suits and jackets?"
I was both exasperated and touched. He looked like Lear after his daughters had taken away his retinue. I knew what those shoes meant to him -- most of them no doubt Ballys that he'd gotten at a good price, emblems of both his status and shrewdness. Leaving behind his shoes would be like my leaving behind my books when my time came.
Hy's firm gentleness got him moving, and once he began to supervise us his mood improved. By the late afternoon he was off looking at office furniture and Hy and I had taken his clothes, files, and other effects to Sunnyvale Manor and put them away. Then, rubbing our hands at each other -- Ben, at last, off them -- we had a celebratory drink. As it happened, it was New Year's Eve; there would be a party at Sunnyvale -- what better way for Ben to ease in among all those widows?
But the next day when I called him he said the party had been "chintzy," his room was freezing at night, and his bed was hard as a rock. Less than a week later I received a phone call from Vince Stefano, who told me that my father's behavior was completely unacceptable and unless he stopped criticizing everything and humiliating one of the other male residents he would have to leave. Ben didn't return my call, and the following day, he had already moved out. I reached him at home. In a fury, he berated me and Hy for pushing him into that "half-assed joint," said that he'd lost most of his deposit, that Hy was no longer his executor, and that both of us should be ashamed of ourselves.
Furious myself, I said, "I'm ashamed all right. I'm ashamed of you. You've brought this on yourself by your obnoxious fucking behavior."
"What've you got to be ashamed of? You've never given a shit about me."
"What're you talking about...?" I began as he hung up. But if he'd waited five minutes I wouldn't have known how to handle the curve he'd thrown me.
Table of Contents
| Part 1 | What's in it for Me? | 15 |
| Part 2 | The Weiss Boy and Little Benny | 49 |
| Part 3 | Breakage and Salvage | 105 |
| Part 4 | Footsteps | 221 |
What People are Saying About This
The wound at the heart of Solotaroff's life -- a Dickensian boyhood spent struggling to survive the assaults of a brutish, all-encompassing father -- is revealed here with a brave directness that is not only a literary achievement but a considerable moral achievement as well.
A brilliant remembrance…a painfully beautiful addition to literature of fathers and sons.