I put it to him one afternoon, when the morphine drip held him still in the middle ground between composed and improvised, between evasion and vanishing. By then, he must have realized I would be the only one of his children to be with him here on this last stop.
“Da?” I sat by his bed in a molded-plastic chair, both of us inspecting the lime green cinder-block wall six feet away. “That night? The one when you and…my grandfather…”
He nodded — not to cut me off, but to spare me saying it out loud. His face screwed up into something worse than cancer. A lifetime of refusing to talk about it, and now his mouth pulled open and closed, like a trout in the well of a boat, gasping under this sudden sea of atmosphere. He worked so hard to find the first syllable, I almost told him to rest and forget. But the need was on us both now. Worse than the need to seal a last closeness. My father had lost me my mother’s family, and never said why. The effort he went through then, in his last bed, was worse than any salvage could justify. I sat there, an impassive jury, waiting to see how he’d hang himself.
“I…loved your grandfather. He was such an enormous man. No? Grosszügig. Noble. His mind wanted to take in everything. He would have been a perfect physicist.” For a beat, my father’s ravaged face found pleasure. “He cared for me, I think. More than just for the husband of his daughter. We spoke often, of many things, in New York, in Philadelphia. He was so fierce, always ready to fight for your mother’s right to be happy, anywhere in the world. When we first told him your brother was on the way, he groaned. ‘You are making me a grandfather before my time!’ We took you babies to Philadelphia, for holidays. Everything was welcome. Yes, of course, there were problems with — what? — Übersetzung.”
“Translation.”
“Yes. Of course. My English is going. Problems with translation. But he knew me. He recognized me.”
“And you recognized him?”
“What he didn’t know about me, I didn’t know, either! Maybe he was right. Yes. Maybe.” My father fell into a reverie. I thought he wanted to sleep. I should have made him, but I kept still. “He challenged my war work. You know, I solved problems during the war. I helped with those weapons.”
I nodded. We’d never talked about it. But I knew.
“He challenged. He said those bombings were as racial as Hitler. I said I didn’t work on the bombings. I did not have anything to do with those decisions. I said such use wasn’t about white and dark. He said everything — the whole world — was about white against dark. Only, the white didn’t know this. I said I wasn’t white; I was a Jew. He couldn’t understand this. I tried to tell him the hatred I got in this country, that I never talked about to anyone. We told him that you children would not be white against dark. Your grandfather was a huge mind. A powerful man. But he said we were doing wrong, raising you children. He said we were performing a… Sünde.”
“Sin. You were sinning.”
“Sin. Ein Zeitwort? ”
“Well, it’s a noun, too.”
“That we were sinning, bringing you boys up as if there would be no white versus dark. As if we were already there, present in our own future.”
I closed my eyes. My father’s was not a future the human race would ever stumble into. If my grandfather, if my own father… The words tore out of me before I thought them. “It didn’t have to be all or nothing, Da. You could have at least told us… We could at least have been…”
“You see. In this country, in this place? Everything is already all or nothing. One or the other. Nothing may be both. Of this, your mother and I, too, are guilty.”
“We could at least have talked about this. As a family. Our whole lives.”
“Yes, of course. But whose words? This is what your grandfather…what William wanted to know. We tried to talk about it, as a family, that night. But once those things were said, once we went to that place…”
He went to that place all over again. Pain that cancer had not succeeded in putting in his face, memory now did. I was a boy again, cowering in my open bedroom doorway, hearing my world, my father’s, my mother’s all cave in.
“He said there was a struggle. A struggle we were — what? ‘Turning our backs on.’ Your mother and I said no; we were that struggle. This: making you children free, free to define. Free of everything.”
“Your mother and I” no longer sounded like a whole. And “Free of everything,” a kind of death sentence.
My father lay propped in his bed, the kind of motorized bed that can be set to every position except comfortable. He spoke through narrowed mouth, his eyes closed, from a place I’d banished him to. “Horrible things, we said, that night. Terrible things. We played ‘Who owns pain?’ ‘Who has suffered the greater wrong?’ I told him the Negro had never been killed in the numbers of the Jews. He said they had. This I didn’t understand. He said no killing could be worse than slavery. Centuries of it. The Jews had never been enslaved, he said. In one heartbeat, I was a Zionist. They were, I said; they were enslaved. Too long ago to count, he said. How long ago counts? I asked. Yes, how long ago? When is the past over? Maybe never. But what did this have to do with the two of us — this man and me? Nothing. We were to live now, in the present. But we just couldn’t reach there.”
I touched his ravaged shoulder through his flimsy hospital gown. My palm said, You can stop. You don’t need to do this. Da felt the touch prodding him on.
“Your mother was silent. Watching everything break open. Her father and I were talking enough for all humanity. He…called me a member of the killer race. I…used my family. My parents and sister, in the ovens. I used them as proof. Of something. The hatred I took in, for being something I never was.”
“I understand, Da.” I would have said anything to close that box back up.
“When William left that night, he said we forced him. He said we didn’t want you two to know your Philadelphia family. ‘If they’re not going to be black, these boys, they can’t have their black family.’ This made your mother furious. She said unfortunate things. Everything her father had ever taught her, everything he believed… But this, we never said. We never said you would not be black. Only that you would be who you were: a process, first. More important than a thing. He called this idea ‘the lie of whiteness.’”
“A quarter of a century? You don’t cut off all contact because of a single night. Angry words. Every family has anger. Every family says things it wishes it hadn’t.”
“Your mother and I, the two of us, we knew what would come. Your future had already talked to us. Your future made us! And made us choose. We thought we knew what things would come to you. But your Papap…” He darkened. Messages missing, disappearing, unopened, unsent. “Your Papap did not see these.”
There was a thing stronger than family, wilder than love, worse than reason. Big enough to shred them all and leave them for dead. All my life, that thing had pinned me. Its nurses wouldn’t let me into this hospital room, couldn’t accept I was this dying man’s son. And still I didn’t know what this thing wanted from us, or how it had grown so real. “So that’s it, Da? One night’s craziness caused a permanent break? For this one night, we — Mama never saw her own family again?”
“Well, you know, it’s a funny thing. I didn’t see that night would be a break. Neither did William. For a long time, I thought he would come to us, that we were right and he would come to agree, in time. But he must have been waiting for us, too. Then, in that waiting, righteousness took us over.” He closed his eyes and thought. “And shame. It was ourselves we didn’t know how to find. Ourselves we didn’t have the heart to go meet again. This is the force of belonging. After that, after your mother died…” I put my hand on him again. But he’d already been convicted. “After your mother died, I couldn’t any longer. The last chance had closed up. I was too ashamed even to ask that big man’s forgiveness. I sent them the news, of course. But I thought… I was afraid she died because of me.”