Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  The lake has a leaden cast to it, ambiguous cirrus clouds refracting a gray piercing light that makes Ruth wish she’d brought her sunglasses. She pushes the stroller along the path that winds alongside the rock wall that separates it from the water, eyes on the young couple a few yards ahead of her, hands in each other’s hip pockets. He’s got a shaved head and a tattoo of the astrological sign Libra on the back of his neck; she’s got a purple ponytail and what she’s heard is called a sleeve, a complex web of tattoos that completely cover her bare arm from shoulder to wrist: mostly Ruth is fascinated by the spiderweb tattoo on the girl’s elbow, on which the spider, with the face of Betty Boop, is only visible on the downswing of the girl’s arm. Ruth pushes the stroller in which Lucy sits silently swinging her feet and wonders, rolling her eyes a little at herself, if she was ever that young. The occasional cyclist passes, runners, a small gray woman wearing a headband and sweats chuffs along in a kind of shuffle-run. Almost everyone has earphones on, though not the tattooed couple, who are conversing in a desultory way about their plans for the weekend. He says something to her and she pulls away and hits him in the upper arm, in a playful way; he pulls her back to him (she’s a whole head shorter) and they stop dead in the path to kiss. Ruth should just pass them on the grass but instead she stops dead and waits for them to finish. The girl opens one eye and sees her there, and she gives her boyfriend a push. They get out of the way and the girls says “Sorry!” in a brightly scrubbed voice that belies her punkish exterior: a nice Jewish girl from the western ‘burbs, after all, and he’s probably not much different (though judging from the Asian cast of his eyes not Jewish, or at least not wholly so). It’s a bad habit of Ruth’s to always identify people by their Jewishness or lack of Jewishness: she knows Ben doesn’t think that way, and anyway a lot of the Jewish people they meet here don’t actually set off her Jewdar: it’s not just facial features or curly hair she looks for, and it’s certainly not the religion itself, it’s mostly the voice, its grain texture and speed, an East Coast voice she’s homesick for and rarely hears here, a voice with toughness and mockery to it, a voice that shrugs, that pushes and pulls its listener; the opposite of the broad and bland voice that almost everyone she meets in Evanston, even people she calls friends, people who go to shul and light candles on Friday night, speaks with, a voice that carries heavy boredom into even the most interesting things someone might say. The voice or voices that she now hears ringing ahead of her, having left the young lovers behind to approach the playground at a bend in the water up ahead, where women mostly ten years younger than Ruth are sitting or standing while their children riot adorably on swings and slides and play structures—what used to be called jungle gyms but aren’t, somehow, anymore. Lucy says “Whee! Whee!” which is her word for the swing, and Ruth obliges, unbuckling her and lifting her up and depositing her in the baby swing seat and giving a push. As she does this her eyes scan the faces of the other women, recognizing most but only putting names to a few—there’s Katherine and there’s Yasmin, each talking to other women that Ruth only knows by sight. The tattooed couple she can see are standing not far off watching the children play, or at least the girl is; the guy’s face is in his cellphone, texting away. The girl’s face has a simple open longing look to it which makes Ruth smile to herself: as she envied her so does the girl seem to envy Ruth and the other women, the mother-women. It must be so, she’s far too young to envy the children, as Ruth only occasionally does, she’s too close to their world now to be sentimental about it; she knows that children are fierce desiring machines moving constantly from anticipation to anxiety so that you can hardly tell the difference, and babies Lucy’s age are devoid of empathy, looking blankly at others that cry or have hurt themselves (though there are exceptions: Ruth has an acquaintance whose child Thomas bursts into tears whenever he sees another child crying, tears that greatly exceed in volume and intensity those of the template, so that the original crier generally stops and stares; the parents are worried enough to take the boy to a psychologist though he’s not even fifteen months yet; standard deviations are to be expected, Dr. Einmann says, but who makes the standard? Ruth she knows errs in the opposite direction, assuming all of Lucy’s freaks to be normal, leaving her husband to worry that she shows incipient signs of this disorder or that, ADD or autism: let him do it, she has enough to carry just getting through the ordinary day). Ruth watches the punk rock girl as she pushes Lucy on the swing, unable for the moment to remember what she herself was doing and whom she might have been with when she was the girl’s age—no older than twenty-two, surely. Ruth had been more goth than punk, really: she had favored black clothing, which she still did, come to think of it, except her blouses and skirts were now fashionably cut and generally accented with a single color, generally red or purple: she had loved, still loved, The Cure and Morrissey, Sleater-Kinney and Hole, and had gone to industrial parties and raves trailing a string of boyfriends as well-kitted out with piercings and tats as the tall Libran boy, always in search of aliveness, that feeling of intense and physical presence; and yet hanging back too, never as wild as her other girlfriends, clinging to lucidity, wanting to think and talk her way even through Ecstasy trips, and the boys hadn’t been much different, she still kept up with a few of them and Ricardo with the safetypin in his left nipple was now a labor lawyer and Kenneth the bass player worked in public television in Atlanta and Louis her last boyfriend before law school, with his thrillingly nasal and sardonic voice, a drawer of underground and filthily funny comics, had also become a lawyer but was no longer practicing, he’d had some kind of breakdown and was living with his parents in Sun City. Ruth’s boys had cleaned themselves up, cut or grown out their hair, and the few tattoos visible were simple generational markers scarcely worthy of censure or comment once paired with a business suit or polo shirt. Ruth herself had no tattoos, though she’d always been drawn to men and boys who had them (and Ben, in fact, had a single simple tattoo on his right upper back of a DNA strand, a relic of his days as a pre-med student at Brandeis, and she had once loved to touch it, in bed but also just out in the world, a secret sexual touch to an assuming shoulderblade rendered permanently erogenous to her fingers), but she’d been brought up with the Jewish prohibition against so marking the body and although she’d broken almost every other law she’d been raised with, often deliberately, this one had somehow maintained its hold, and her skin was unblemished by ink, though blemished in other ways by moles and wrinkles and cellulite, motherfucker and alas. If I had a tattoo what would it be? A Star of David, maybe. Cretan paradox irradiant with irony.

  Tattooed. Her mind drifts to the forearm of her grandfather Istvan, a series of numbers, an inscription as cold to the touch, she imagines, as Ben’s strand is hot. The last time she saw her mother’s father was in a decrepit nursing home in Queens with the grimly ironic name of Hopeview Manor. Among the half-alive hulks in wheelchairs he had been bright and alive with his flashes of humor and bitterness, the crumpled suit he carefully dressed himself in each morning, and the liver cancer he saw as a black joke (I was never a drinker, darling, that’s the shame of it. I should have drunk! I should have drunk a martini every day with the life I had). She had been able to extract a scant minimum of stories from him, halting and halted narratives of that life-in-death, the fragment of history his body was: the extra food he obtained from a Polish guard in exchange for the string of pearls that had belonged to his wife, her grandmother, and which he’d concealed somehow and given away one by one, just often enough to maintain strength, cunning, life; how he’d gotten a job in the camp barbershop—he’d been a trained hairdresser in Budapest as well as, she’d gathered from other sources, a gambler and rakehell, perhaps even a thief or fence—and the single indelible image he’d painted for her of him standing erect behind a barber’s chair with the commandant seated in it, stropping his straight razor to administer the cleanest possible shave. How did you do that? she asked him. How did you not cut him, kill him, draw y
our razor across his jugular, take your revenge? And the answer, simple and true and unsatisfying: I wanted to live. And he did live, had lived, had survived the camp and survived the death march from Poland to Germany and survived the chaos of the war’s end and made his way back to the city where his daughter, her mother, was waiting for him, along with his own parents, who’d escaped deportation thanks to false papers and a neighbor who’d acted from a mixture of benevolence and greed, a mixture she’s all too familiar with from the hours and days she’d spent reading the grim unilluminating details of testimony that had been at the crux of her thesis, her exploration of the role of women in the Warsaw Ghetto. But the Budapest Ghetto, which had no similar history of resistance, and she’d had no call to interview her grandfather for her work, and as for her grandmother she’d died long ago—“She died before she died” had been M’s enigmatic phrase. How Ruth wished she could talk to her, ask her questions, hear her story—her grandfather had never wanted to talk about it, had shrugged her most persistent inquiries away—”It was luck, pure and simple,” he’d said, referring only to the fact that her grandmother had happened to get into a cab driven by one of Istvan’s cousins, who’d gotten him similar work upon his arrival in the previous year—she couldn’t have guessed that he’d changed his name to Freeman from Freitag, the name her mother had reclaimed for herself and for her daughter, who’d kept it into her marriage. Luck, pure and simple—but that only explained (it explained nothing) Istvan’s New York reunion with his wife, it said nothing about her own wildly improbable survival, given what everyone always said about her frailty and nervous disposition. Klara, that had been her given name: Grandmother Klara to distinguish her from Grandmother Marta, her grandfather’s second wife, whom he’d married just eight months after Klara’s death from a perforated ulcer in 1967, less a woman in Ruth’s memory than a red wig, an accent, and a cloud of cigarette smoke. She’d divorced Istvan when he was in his seventies and moved to Florida, and he’d stayed on in the basement apartment of the building on Kissena Boulevard in Flushing where for twenty years he’d kept watch over a tetchy boiler and carried older tenants’ groceries for them, until finally he got too sick to stay and wound up in the Hopeview, sharing a room with an elderly black diabetic double amputee (the legs) named Raymond who watched soaps all day and never said a word, a room with a view of the Unisphere over which jets thundered at all hours of the day and night.

  The first and only time she had visited him there he showed her the room with a sweep of his arm, then, grinning faintly, opened the blinds so she could see the big dumb steel softball coruscating in the afternoon sunshine. It was hot and the ancient air conditioner under the window labored to cool the sticky air with its tang of rot. She sat on the bed, he sat in the oversized chair, holding the one cigar per day he permitted himself to carry but not to light, at least not until after he’d taken his dinner in the dreary basement cafeteria with the bare fluorescents and stained acoustic tiles that crouched claustrophobically over the diners’ nigh-moribund heads. This in spite of the rasp in his voice, in spite of the portable oxygen tank perched next his chair, a clear tube running up to meet the piece on his nose, where it blended weirdly with the white hairs of his walrus mustache. The awfulness of the place had stunned her into silence and banalities for the first hour of her visit, as he showed her what little there was to see, a tour of green hallways and gray carpets, human hulks slumped in chairs with wheels and without, the upsetting and unforgettable vision of a sunken-chested gray-faced man slouching slowly through the hall in a hospital gown, his full colostomy bag dangling from a hook on his walker, gown parted to reveal the shagged slumping flesh of his buttocks. Now, in the room, the small talk about her studies had ground to a halt. He seemed to read her mind.

  It’s all about money, darling, he said, with a kind of a K poking its head out of the G. This place takes the Medicare, which is all I’ve got.

  She couldn’t help herself. But Mom….

  He waved the cigar dismissively. Let her lead her life.

  You haven’t told her? She doesn’t know?

  Of course she knows. Darling, it’s not so bad. It’s not so far from the old place that I can’t still see some friends. Your Uncle Jozsef has been taking me to breakfast almost every Sunday: he comes in the car and takes me to the diner, and after that we walk around the neighborhood a little bit and talk. Well, we used to walk: now I mostly sit on the bench. And I say we talk but it’s me, you know Jozsef, it’s like talking to a wall, like he never learned English and yet forgot all his Hungarian too. Maybe I should try German on him, who knows.

  Has she visited you here? When he shrugged in reply, she flared: Then she doesn’t know what this place is like!

  I tell you darling, it’s all right. Wait until you meet my girlfriend Charisse—a looker! And she looks after me better than either of my wives ever did. No disrespect, sweetheart, on your grandmother, but she was never the same you know. After the war.

  Ruth at that moment felt sunk in guilt, knowing and wishing to say what seemed the obvious thing: if Mom won’t rescue you than I will. But she was only a student and had no money that wasn’t borrowed and spoken for. And she lived in a small apartment in a cold upstate town that was all hills, miles from any place that could provide proper care; she didn’t even have a car. She pushed the guilt and excuses both out of the way with the help of the opening he offered. Tell me about her.

  Charisse?

  No, Grandma.

  What’s to tell? I met her during a football match, on Margaret Island in Budapest. We were down one goal to zero when I spotted her watching from the sidelines, a small simple girl with a kerchief over her head looking all the world like a frummer except for the lipstick she was wearing. What a beautiful face, I’ll never forget it. That’s when I knew we had to win the game and I had to win it. The very next time the whistle blew I just went charging down the field and sidestepped the guy with the ball, he was slow, and I got inside his guard and then the ball and I were both moving down. I could have gone for it but my pal Almos was open and I could somehow already tell, just from that face, that she’d appreciate an assist from me more than me shooting it in. So I passed it to Almos and we tied it up, and when we came running back to defend our own goal I could see she was watching me. It came down to the last few minutes and everyone thought it would go into overtime, but the evening was coming on and I was afraid she’d leave. So when the ball went again to the same guy, who was not a small guy, by the way, I went after him again, and this time when he saw me he just lowered his head and stepped right, I stepped left, boom! Down I go with this shmuck on top of me, knocked all my wind out and bruised my ribs, I can tell you. Well nobody calls a foul—it’s a rough game, we’re all kids, even the umpire—and play resumes after a minute and this time the situation’s reversed, it’s Almos who sends the ball my way, and I can hardly run my ribs hurt so, but I run, and I do a header—this is a long time before they were doing headers, let me tell you, I was ahead of my time, heh, you like that? And the ball goes in and we win the game and I won it. And afterwards I look and this girl is gone, but I hang around a while with the chaps and then, this is right before curfew, I see her all alone by the fence waiting. And I go up and I say my name is Istvan and she says my name is Klara, bold as that lipstick. And that was it.

  I remember that story. I love that story. I wish I could have heard her tell it.

  She would have told you everything the same as I told you. Because you can only tell the truth one way.

  But what she was like, really? Bold you say?

  Bold, yes, but sneaky. I mean she always looked like a good girl—she was a good girl. But if she wanted something, even something her parents or her friends told her she shouldn’t want, well, that was it: she would go after it. She wanted to wear that lipstick even though nice girls didn’t do that. And she wanted me, who knows why. So that was it.

  There was a photograph Ruth saw only after her grandfather�
��s death, in the moldy album that had been among his few effects, of himself and Klara on their wedding day. It had been a simple civil wedding and he was wearing a striped suit and she wore what looked like a gray dress and a cloche hat and held a small bouquet in which daisies figured prominently. He seemed much sharper and nattier than she did with his zoot suit and the mustache (thinner, trimmer, blacker) and the gleam of pomade in his hair. Of course what drew the eye immediately, before taking in the slyness of his smile or Klara’s curiously neutral expression, were the Stars of David affixed to their clothes. It was 1943 when they got married and they had less than a single year of together to look forward to before their violent separation, unimaginable ordeals, and dramatic reunion in America. Back in the Hopeview, voice straining from talking over the wheeze of the air conditioner, she wants to ask an even more impossible question: What was it like? What was it like to be singled out for a part of yourself that may or may not have been important to you, to be prohibited from working or from eating where you liked or from living anywhere but in a tiny island crammed to bursting with others whose affinity with you was being imposed from outside, by the state? And what was it like not to know, as she did: always she’d read the endless hopeless stories of European Jews who’d refused to believe in what for her coming after was the simple factual abyss of murder; who’d said fearfully to one another as the latest outrage came down the pike, Well, let’s see, things could be worse, and were probably still saying that to each other in the cattle cars carrying them to their deaths. But the question goes unanswered, and anyway her grandfather had moved on to more general conversation and the question of dinner: of course she desperately wanted to do something for him and dinner at least she can do, but he wouldn’t go anywhere but his usual diner, a grimy coffee shop that’s kind of a long walk for a man with emphysema but they did it, stopping frequently in a way that marked them as other even in the churning oddball streets of Queens where a crowd of Puerto Rican men were camped out listening to a boombox in front of a bodega, where they must dodge two men carrying a very large sheet of glass down the sidewalk with no frame, not even so much as a bit of cardboard to absorb impact; where a dark-skinned woman in white moon boots and a flamboyant pink weave was stepping into the traffic on 111th Street talking on a cell phone and looking neither to the right nor left as cars screeched to a halt and drivers shouted curses at her. In all that noise she still felt conspicuous, a girl in a gray felted dress and glasses shuffling alongside an old man with tubes in his nose, pulling a green oxygen tank behind him with difficulty but refusing absolutely all offers of help. It was even worse in the diner, a place the color of a cracked saucer, with cigarette burns in the Formica tabletop and a sullen bottom-heavy waitress with no name badge who resisted all of her grandfather’s charming if automatic efforts at flirtation. She felt sad for him, but he didn’t seem to notice, even when the woman forgot or deliberately omitted the ice cream he’d asked for on the gelid slice of apple pie he had for dessert. She pushed some food around and drank awful coffee and tried to fix him in her mind. How handsome he still was, in spite of the thin greasy grayness of his skin that showed too much of the skull: he still had a full head of white wavy hair but this had the effect of making his actual head seem smaller, bobbing atop what had never been a big body but was now assuredly a wasted one, with his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down behind his tie like an elevator without a building. He was winded from the walk so there wasn’t much conversation until the food was all gone and he was staring down into his own coffee cup, into which he’d poured what seemed like six tablespoons worth of sugar and no cream or milk.