“Every year, Yehudah!” he continued. Yuval’s neck was so thick it could have been shoulders. His voice boomed through the mouth-hole in his wide, spongey beard, and the frayed lapels of his black robe-jacket seemed to ripple, the wales of cordurory bending and swelling. “Every year, your Gurion and my daughters would search out the afikomen together,” he said. “Every day they would play together. We’d spend Shabbos together, build the suka together, have barbecues. You are a brother to me, and I love you and have missed you. And you, Tamar — you bring this brother of mine such joy. He used to be so spooky! With the studying… all the books… you can’t possibly know how weird he was. He knew everything. He’d study and smoke and study and smoke, and only after ten o’clock at night would he ever relax a little…We’d go for a walk, usually for a soda over at…what was this place, Yehudah, this late-night deli where we’d go for the sodas? What was it called?”
My father, cross-hatching a half-eaten new-potato with his fork, said, “Asner’s.”
“Asner’s!” said Yuval. “Asner’s exactly! Every night, nearly — it’s ten, ten-thirty, your husband says to me, ‘Yuvy, I’m going blind here! Want a walk?’ and of course I would agree, and Asner’s we’d go to, and sometimes, if feeling particularly charitable, we’d invite Rolly Bar-Sheshet, and sometimes, if Rolly was feeling particularly less like a snivelling little shmendrick than usual, he’d come along with us — what ever happened to Rolly?”
My father made his lips fat and waved away the question with all his fingers.
I knew what happened to Rolly, though. Rolly Bar-Sheshet was the cantor at the Fairfield Street Synagogue, which is where I go because my parents won’t attend shul and it’s close enough to our house that I can walk there by myself. Rolly trilled a lot during the mourner’s Kadish, and I did not like it so much, but his son Amit was nice. Still, I didn’t want Yuval to stop telling stories, so I stayed quiet.
“Rolly-olly, Rolly-polly,” said Yuval. “What I was saying is that after Asner’s, we’d walk some more, usually through the cemetery, drinking our sodas, talking about everything boys will talk about. We’d talk about you, Tamar, what your name would be and what Yehudah hoped you’d be like when he met you, and you, too, Gurion — he knew his firstborn would be a son. Sometimes the time would slip away, and it would be midnight, twelve-thirty in the morning, and you know what we’d do then? If it was midnight, twelve-thirty in the morning?”
“Litberg’s!” shouted his eldest daughter. She’d heard it before.
“Litberg’s, my Sara! It’s true,” said Yuval. “We’d walk up Devon to Litberg’s bagel factory. All night long they were making bagels inside, taking them from ovens, dunking dough in vats. We’d wait near the backdoor, and this man — Morris Nussberg was his name, you see what I can remember? — Morris Nussberg would eventually come outside for a cigarette, a cardboard boat on his head to guard against the falling-out of hairs, and we’d offer him a light, and we’d chat a little about this or that, about bagels, making them, the necessity of the boiling process and so on. He’d tell us, ‘Buy stock in garlic. It’s the new poppyseed,’ or ‘Litberg’s nagging again about the egg bagels are too orange for the goyim — says to lower the yolk content or Lenders will bury us by ’87.’ Soon enough, this Morris Nussberg finishes smoking, takes his leave, and returns with what? The freshest bagels ever. For Yehuda and I. The freshest. Ever. Delicious! And there we’d be, under the moonlight, thinking about you, and you, and you and you and you,” Yuval said, gesturing with two hands at all the children around the table, knocking over an empty glass, shrugging at it, leaving it, “and you and you. Except you, as I recall, were going to be called Dovid,” he said to me. Then, to my father: “Whatever happened to calling him Dovid?”
“You’re asking the wrong person,” said my father.
“This has always been your husband’s second-favorite answer,” Yuval said to my mom, “tied with ‘It’s not something I’d like to talk about, Yuvy,’ both of which, as you probably know, run all too distant behind the number-one favorite answer: the half-bored/half-murderous glare on the shrugged-up shoulders which at school we’d call ‘The Morton’ for the way it transformed into man-size salt pillars whomsoever would dare to look directly upon it.”
I didn’t yet know if I liked Yuval. He was crazy and funny, but my father acted different around him. His laugh had more edges than it usually did, and when he laughed it there, at the Seder, his head went side-to-side, like to say, “Here we go again” instead of the up-and-down nod that I was used to, which always looked like, “Go on, please, go on.” The laugh he laughed at the stories of Yuval seemed angry, and although my father is often angry, his usual anger is wild and unmuddled; it looks like nothing other than anger. He’ll yell or slam the door, and sometimes he’ll grit his teeth and go to his office. I’d never before then seen him laugh with anger, though, only with joy or sadness. So when Yuval first started describing how my father had been when they were young, what he said seemed false, except once I noticed the new way my father was laughing, it seemed not only like it had been true when my father was younger, but that it still was true — it seemed like my father had become the person you’d have expected if all you knew of him were the stories of his boyhood as told by Yuval. It seemed, in short, like he’d become a “father.” And it is true that I write “father” a lot to refer to him, but I usually think of my father as “Dad” or “Aba.” And that is why I didn’t know if I liked Yuval, because of how he was making my dad seem like someone I should think of as “father.”
But then Yuval said, “Tell us, Judah. Tell us how David becomes lioncub all of a sudden.”
And my father, who had been holding my mom’s hand under the table, did a very Dad thing: he raised her hand high and kissed it loudly on the wrist, on the side where the blood pulses.
“David was not an option,” said my mother. “My parents had passed away before I became pregnant, and we were going to name the baby Beth, after Bathsheba, my mother; or Michael, after Malchizedek, who was my father.
“As you know,” she said, “Judah had, a few years earlier, stopped practicing. No more shul and no more tefilin in the morning. Saturday became his day to read briefs. And all of this was fine with me — I had stopped practicing a few years before him, and my observance had never been so extensive to begin with, so it was irrelevant to me — he was a Jew either way and I loved him. What you might not know, however, is that my husband, in the absence of the many daily rituals he had for so long been accustomed to performing, became wildly superstitious. Constitutional Law, though it might have satisfied his Gemmaric leanings, failed to challenge him in the way that the more mystical aspects of—“
“Okay, Jung,” said my father, “why not just tell the story?”
“I am telling the story,” my mother said.
“This is a woman,” said my father to Yuval, “who out one side of her mouth whispers hoarsely about mysticism and the meaning to be found within the shapes of birthmarks, and out the other calls herself a behaviorist.”
My mother said, “Easy as a child breathes a wish at a dandelion, my love, is exactly how hard it would be for me to tear your limbs from their sockets.”