“He’s still working on his book,” my mother said.
“His book? About that guy with the beard in Havana?”
My mother smiled. I did too. It was amusing to hear the great Fidel, a man who was spoken of by my father as the embodiment of strength and virtue — the bull whom all the women of Cuba wanted to, or had, slept with; the gourmand who ate a dozen eggs for breakfast; the military genius who had defeated a dictator’s army with a band of untrained peasants; the Cicero who could hold a nation rapt for three-hour speeches; the Cuban George Washington and Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson all wrapped into one — to hear him called (in a Yiddish accent) the guy with the beard was funny. “That’s the one,” she said. “Fidel Castro.”
“He likes cigars, too,” Papa said. His dull eyes were on me; the blank look of a blind man. “Like Groucho,” he added. “Think maybe Castro is Jewish? Sephardic? Could be. Now that would be something to write about. You know there are people in Spain—” He stopped. The punctured balloon whined again. His white color changed to green and he coughed.
“Relax, Papa,” my mother said nervously. She reached out to touch the plaid blanket covering her father’s chest. It trembled with each cough.
“Can’t—” he said. The green changed to a duskier color — purple. “Can’t—” he tried to say again. He looked as if he were being flooded with blood under the skin, drowning from the inside out.
“Get the nurse,” Ruth said to me. Then she changed her mind. “Wait,” she said, holding my arm. I don’t know if she saw fear on my face. Perhaps it wasn’t what she saw; she could have realized an eight-year-old was a poor emissary. Leaving me alone with the sick man wasn’t acceptable either. Both choices were bad. She decided not to spare me, but to find help for her father as quickly as possible. “I’ll get her. Stay with Papa,” she said and ran out before I had a chance to react.
I was alone with a dying man. Grandfather couldn’t produce any sound other than a gurgling struggle to speak. His eyes were wild with fear. He reached for his constricted throat and pulled at the invisible strangler’s grip.
His chest jerked as if he were being electrocuted. I put my hand on top of the plaid blanket, at the epicenter of his torsos earthquake. I didn’t look at his choked face. I stared at my hand and thought very hard: Get better, Papa. I wished for a healing bolt to flow through my arms and into my palm; I willed it to soothe Papa’s wounded chest. Get better, Papa, I thought, beaming the magic power, wishing with all my heart to heal him.
After a moment, Papa’s hands covered mine. The long bones of his fingers, although they looked fragile, pressed down hard on my palm.
Get better, I sung silently to his hand.
Papa pushed harder and harder on my little hand. I was horrified at what he was doing. I thought he was going to push it right through his chest. I pictured my fingers falling inside and touching his blood and heart and my vague idea of what else would be inside a human being. And then he released the pressure.
“Oh, that’s better,” he said in a clearer voice than I had yet heard from him.
The nurse, my mother, and Uncle Bernie appeared. I looked at my grandfather. His skin was back to normal. His eyes were no longer dead; they shined at me. And he continued to hold my hand against his chest; but now lightly, the way someone would caress a favorite object.
The adults fussed and questioned him.
“I was dying and the Little Gentleman saved me,” Papa said, but in a lilting, jocular intonation.
My mother, in fact, took Papa seriously. She hugged me, asked if I had been scared. I said no. She explained to me almost apologetically and fearfully, as if I were a stern boss, that she had gone instead of me because she could find the nurse faster.
“No, no, I’m fine,” Papa was saying to the nurse, who hadn’t accepted his reassurances. “I couldn’t get my breathing for a second. It was nothing. Forget it. Go away.” He waved energetically and struggled to lift himself higher on the bed.
“You want to sit, Mr. Rabinowitz?” the nurse asked. She arranged his pillows so they would prop up his head.
When she tried to rearrange his blanket, he held it down firmly and said, “Stop. I want that — leave me alone. Everybody but my grandson — go. Right, Bernie?”
Uncle agreed with a nod. He took my mother’s hand affectionately. She reacted with a startled look and then smiled. Uncle tugged her toward the door.
“Go,” Papa said to the nurse. “Have your coffee.” He encouraged my mother, “Go. I’ll send your boy out to you.”
“Okay?” my mother asked me softly.
“Yeah,” I answered honestly. My fear of the old man’s decay — and of the relentless presence waiting for him — was gone. Besides, I liked being called the Little Gentleman. I preferred to stay in the ordinary room (much more like the rooms in Washington Heights) with this relative who approved of me. Who had, moreover, some use for me other than as a hostage to his ideology. Or so I thought.
Papa waited until we were alone before speaking. He nodded at an untouched plate on a folding table by the foot of the bed. “There’s a piece of cake. You want?”
I went to see. It was plain pound cake. “No thank you.”
Papa smiled. “So polite.” He waved for me to come close. I obeyed. This time I noticed that my assumption he would smell bad was wrong. In fact he smelled of talcum powder. His eyes were still bright from the struggle he’d just won. “Do you know you’re Jewish?” he said. The Yiddish pronunciation made a whooshing sound out of “Jewish”; it was comical to me. I guess I didn’t react. “You may think you’re half-Jewish.” Again, the swishing sound he made saying “Jewish” tickled me. He nodded no. “According to Jewish law, you’re Jewish.” This rapid repetition of the word almost had me giggling out loud. I didn’t want to offend the old man so I kept a solemn face. “The reason is: your mother is Jewish. Now, if it was the other way round. If your father was Jewish and your mother a …” he hesitated. “A … well, not Jewish. Then you wouldn’t be considered Jewish unless you converted.”
Naturally, this seemed preposterous to me. I suspected he had made up this law to convert me into a whole Jew. (In fact, he was accurate.) Obviously, I reasoned, he was disappointed that I wasn’t completely Jewish (in the same way that it bothered my Latin relatives that I wasn’t completely Spanish) and he had concocted this sophistry to dispose of my Jewish deficit. But I admired him for his direct approach, for his honesty in admitting that he wanted me to belong entirely to him. And I was pleased. Why shouldn’t I have preferred being wanted? It was flattering.
“It’s true,” he insisted. I must have looked dubious. “Israel will take you just as you are under the Law of Return. But they wouldn’t if it was your father and not your mother who’s Jewish. It’s true. It’s in the Torah.”
All that, to my eight-year-old ears, was gibberish. I nodded yes to mollify him. I already knew how to behave in these situations: with Jews I was Jewish; with Latins I was Latin; with Americans I was a New Yorker.
“Come,” he beckoned. He squirmed to sit higher. “I’ll tell you something else.” I had reached the side of his bed. “Raise your hand. Your right hand.” I did. I felt as if I were at an assembly at P.S. 173 and I was about to Pledge Allegiance to the Flag. That is, I felt foolish and grave, embarrassed and awed. “I saw it while I was dying—” Papa lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m serious — I was about to go. And then I saw your hand on my chest. Do you know what you were doing?” Papa illustrated with his own hand. He raised it, palm out, fingers together. He gradually moved his pinky and ring fingers away from his middle and index fingers while keeping the separated pairs flush together. He was able to separate them quite a lot: he made a broad V in the air. “That’s what you were doing. Can you do it again?”