He had other problems to think about in any case. A few months before this, his name had appeared in a newspaper story along with the name of a longtime partner of his — an antiques dealer in London — who had been accused of fraud. The dealer in London had sold a consignment of English furniture to a dealer in Switzerland. My father had negotiated with this Swiss dealer to sell some of the English furniture to clients in New York. The consignment of furniture, falsely valued at over three million dollars, turned out to contain several forgeries. My father has claimed repeatedly that he had no idea about this. He “flatly denies” knowing anything about it, as the newspaper put it.
He showed me an elegant piece of furniture that afternoon — it was the massive desk in his study. It had belonged to his best friend, Harry Klein, he told me, the friend whose boat we used to go on when I was young. After Klein’s death, his wife, Deborah, had found herself in financial trouble, their assets worth far less than she’d believed. The desk, my father pointed out, had ebony marquetry and fleur-de-lis spandrels flanked by pilasters carved like acanthus leaves. It was called a partners desk, he told me. There were kneeholes on all four sides of its mahogany bulk so that four bankers could sit together in the sepia light and go over accounts. He didn’t know where the Kleins had found it. He asked me how much I thought it was worth, and I told him I had no idea. He said that Deborah Klein had lived with the desk for almost twenty years. It had made her feel a certain way about herself, about her life with Harry. They’d had a set of Hepplewhite chairs, a French commode from the eighteenth century, this partners desk from a famous workshop in England, Marsh & Tatham. After Harry’s death, the finances unraveled. Deborah had had to sell the house in Southampton, the house I’d visited as a girl. When she asked my father for his help with the antiques, he’d had to tell her, after she’d already lost so much, that the desk too wasn’t worth anything like what she’d thought. There were faded spots in the wood in places light would never have hit it. It was a fake — it had been cobbled together from scraps of other old pieces of furniture. My father gave her seventy-five thousand dollars for it, more than it was worth. She hadn’t spoken to him since. She’d thought the desk was worth four times that. In Deborah Klein’s mind, the desk was worth more than their friendship.
“You don’t talk about yourself very much,” I said.
“No. Not really.”
“You think it’s tasteless?”
“Something like that.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m curious. Because of the tastelessness.”
“I don’t think about the past very much. I try not to.”
“Why?”
“My parents never talked about the past. My grandparents didn’t. The past was what you were trying to get away from. You understand why.”
“No.”
“Because we came from nowhere. Because we were no one. That’s why. Part of becoming someone is not having to talk about your past. I couldn’t talk about it now if I wanted to. I don’t know anything about it.”
He had something else he wanted to share with me that afternoon, a kind of family heirloom, which he presented to me there in the study. His brother Jacob had recently passed on some recordings made by their father — my grandfather — who died before I really knew him. My grandfather had built up a chain of jewelry stores which were then fought over after his death by his two eldest sons, my uncles. They turned the chain of stores into rival boutiques that have since become famous. My father won’t set foot in either of them. He feels judged by his brothers, I think, because they have made even more money than he has. I say all this, and yet after a lifetime in his company, I don’t really know him. He is probably unknowable. When he says he has no information about the past, I believe him. It would have been not just personal shame his family felt, but also the greater shame of having left behind an impoverished world that eventually was exterminated. It wasn’t something people talked about. Very likely, it wasn’t even possible to talk about it.
He wanted to play me these recordings. He explained that his father would sometimes amuse his sons by hosting a mock radio show which he would capture on an old-fashioned gramophone that cut actual records, small shellac discs that could then be played back. My uncle had kept hundreds of these discs in storage and finally had them preserved on CDs. My father is in his midseventies now. He bent over the stereo with a scowl that looked angry but was really only reflexive, the face he wears when concentrating. He wore what he almost always wears in summer, a dress shirt with French cuffs, linen trousers, polished shoes. His hands shook a little. He stood there stooped over the CD player as the recordings began.
The first track was a kind of clownish singing, slightly embarrassing to hear. It was an old Broadway tune I didn’t know, the lyrics adjusted into puns about my grandfather’s jewelry store. My uncle — I assume it was my uncle singing — added a few bars of “The Tennessee Waltz” for some reason, letting his voice break like a yodeling cowpoke’s. Then my grandfather asked some questions of another little boy in the style of a journalist:
Who is the best singer in the world?
I don’t know.
Caruso?
I don’t know.
My father turned and looked at me, his hand pressed against his lower back. His new wife has a house in Connecticut, an old family house, and she spends most of the weekends there. I don’t think he would have been playing me these recordings if she was around. She’s been around less and less since the accusations appeared in the newspaper.
“It’s you,” I said, meaning the voice of the little boy.
“Nineteen forty. Nineteen forty-one. Sometime before the war, I’m pretty sure.”
“You sound happy.”
He shrugged. I think he sensed already that I was going to write him into this book. He knew it before I did, as if my disloyalty was never in doubt. His shrug was like his resigned way of urging me not to. He had come as far a distance as Gila Konig had, I think he was telling me with that shrug. Not as a victim but as a self-invention. Not as a yored, but as one of the olim—no one was more ascended than my father in his Upper East Side town house, a world away from the Brownsville slum of his own father’s youth. He had no interest in the yordim. I’m sure he wondered why I did.
3.
Gila sent me an e-mail after two weeks. I didn’t open it at first, and when I did open it I didn’t open the attachment, the photograph of us at lunch. I could see it in miniature beneath Gila’s brief note. The note thanked me for having lunch with her and then extended an invitation to visit her sometime in Sag Harbor. I saw myself in the tiny photo, ghostlike, trying to hide my discomfort — I thought I would have hidden it better. The fact that Gila could have looked at that picture and still sent it to me was a poignant indicator of her aloneness. I’m lucky I know Hugh. I don’t have many people in my life. She had waited two weeks to thank me for a lunch she had treated me to, a lunch I had never thanked her for.
The e-mail sat unanswered, shadowing me at odd times over the next few days. I don’t know why I didn’t want to face it. I wasn’t even particularly busy. When I look back over my inbox now, I see that it took me almost three weeks to respond. I have the response here in all its vapid, agreeable insincerity:
Dear Gila,
Yes, it would be great to see you again. I have given your story and its connection to my piece about David Bellen a lot of thought. I get to the Hamptons fairly often, so I’ll drop you a line the next time I’m out. Thank you for lunch, by the way.