Who, Me? Read online

  She turned around, wiped her steamed-up glasses.

  “My god, Mary! How are you?” Giving my grandmother a heavy, pythonish embrace, my grandmother embracing her back.

  “This is my little grandson, Hughie!”

  “Hi!”

  She embraced me, too, not quite as vigorously as she’d embraced my grandmother. But I still came away all wet and steamy.

  “What a nice grandson.”

  Her taking my hat off and ruffling my hair, which I didn’t like at all. I was Mr. Carefully-Combed Hair. My keeping my hair carefully combed was like a religion for my mother.

  “Howyadoin’?”

  “And he talks, too!”

  Both of them laughing.

  Another embrace and we were gone as the kitchen supervisor came by, not saying anything but looking at us with a smile that said, “Get the fuck outta here!” Once back in the cafeteria my grandmother confided in me, “That was my sister, Annie.”

  “Your sister?”

  “That’s right.”

  And that was it. Back out on to the street. You know the Chicago wind off of Lake Michigan: wind, snow and eternally grey skies.

  “How come you never see her . . . I mean all the time?”

  “You know how it is.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you will.”

  And that was that. Down to Carson’s, more shoes and slips and bras and shirts and caps and shirts waiting for us, Don’t forget us, don’t forget us...

  Only, how could you have a sister you never saw? And she didn’t look like my grandmother at all. My grandmother had dark hair and a sparrow beak; Annie was all blonde and round-nosed, very Czech-ish, a totally different genotype.

  When my grandmother was dying out in Arizona, living with Jake and Gertrude—my cousin Judy out there for my grandmother’s death (I wasn’t told/invited)— my grandmother made some last-minute confessions, not complete, no totally emptying out of the barrel, but just a few things that made some sense out of the big mystery that had been her entire life.

  “You remember that story about her being an orphan?” Judy told me a couple of months after my grandmother’s death on one of my visits to Chicago, “Well, there’s a lot more to it than that. Her mother was deaf. They were living somewhere on the southwest side of Chicago, and the kids sick and the mother had gone out at night to find a doctor, no phone, nothing like that, and she was crossing this railroad track, didn’t hear the train, it hit and killed her. Then the father married the mother’s sister and Gram didn’t get along with her aunt, so she left home when she was about twelve, out into the world on her own, making her living cleaning houses, met Mrs. Seidel and Mrs. Seidel took her in. The Seidels had a bar and when she was a little older, fifteen, sixteen, Gram started working in the bar, started going out with the customers, and this one guy one time tried to rape her in his car. She broke loose, she was pretty tough, you know, remember those big thick arms of hers, and ran away from the guy. There was this streetcar coming along down the street, she flagged it down, it stopped, she got on all tears and desperation, and that streetcar conductor became our grandfather, James Patrick Mangan.”

  Ahhhhhhhh . . .

  So Annie must have been one of the girls who worked for Mrs. Seidel, too. Not sisters, but like sisters.

  And when she married James Patrick Mangan, in the Catholic Church, of course, she must have been baptized a Catholic; an Irishman back then wouldn’t have married outside the Church. You know, the usual pledges to put everything else behind you; once you’re a Catholic your entire pre-Catholic past vanishes. She must have gone through something like that.

  Only what about her real brothers and sisters?

  There was one family we visited a couple of times, out by Cicero: the Smutneys. Joey Smutney and Violet.

  Never quite clear what they were to my grandmother, cousins or something, one of her real sisters’ kids?

  What I think my grandmother had done was to totally cut herself off from her father and his second wife, her aunt, all her brothers and sisters, the whole family (except for the Smutneys). And I think that Jake had made contact with them, and that he used to work with them on Sundays; they were an intimate part of his life.

  Crazy, nicht wahr?

  I’m getting all crazy just writing about it, this whole boogey-man family out there that I never had any contact with, the whole Jewish “gang,” the thousands of years of language and tradition, closeness, love, hate, whatever . . . and one person (Jake) keeping the links open, making the links the center of his emotional and economic life. Mr. Wholesaler.

  I remember one very mysterious visit that Jake and I made on my tenth birthday, a visit that spun around in my head for years until finally, just a few years ago, I think I figured out what it was all about.

  My tenth birthday.

  Jake took me out with him, just him, to a toy store on west Twelfth Street. Even that in itself is weird, right? Just me and my Uncle Jake.

  And a very special toy store it was, everything you could ever dream of in terms of toys, but at the same time cold, something wrong with the heater, the owner this old Jew who had a little charcoal burner going to generate a little heat, but wearing his overcoat.

  “So, Sol, how you doing? Here’s the boy.”

  “So this is him,” says Sol and comes over and looks at me, looks, looks, looks, “A nice boy . . . yeah, I like him,” then addressing himself more directly to me, “So listen, take a look around, whatever you see it’s yours. What especially do you like?”

  “Well, I like trains.”

  “Trains. OK. That’s a good thing to like. Come on over here.”

  And he takes me into the back, this whole wall covered with trains, train-sets, train-landscapes—you know, trees and rivers and lakes that the train runs through. Years later, when I was in medical school, I’d meet this guy, Don Meller, who had a whole basement filled with this vast model landscape full of train tracks. Now there was a guy who had had a childhood! A house with a basement; a luxury I never had until I got married.

  I was thrilled.

  “Let me just look around, OK?”

  “No problem.”

  Sol going out of earshot with Jake, the two of them getting very involved with some sort of intense discussion about who-knows-what. What did I care? All

  I was interested in was the trains.

  Still, I had to be “reasonable,” didn’t I? Under control, conservative. Little Irish Catholic boys were always conservative, the Irish were conservative, there was Jesus up on His cross looking down at me, judging everything I did, for good or for foul. All the masses and communions, the time before Easter when we’d sit in huge, gothic, massive-stone St. Francis de Paulo church where I went to grammar school, for hours and hours, taking Jesus through the Stations of the Cross . . .

  Easy, easy, easy, easy-going . . .

  Finally reached out and chose a nice sleek Lionel passenger train with four cars and a caboose, track included, controller, all the plugs and connections needed, took it over to Jake and Sol.

  “How about this one? Is it too much?”

  “Not at all,” said Sol, blocking whatever Jake was about to say, the first time I’d ever seen anyone block Jake from talking, “you take what you want, my friend.”

  More intense looking from Sol, passing his hand over my head.

  “Nice hair. And the blue eyes . . . what are you going to be when you grow up?”

  “My father’s a doctor. Who knows? I like to draw . . . and write—”

  “Write? At ten? Write?”

  “Just little things. Sketches. Impressions—”

  “Sketches. Impressions . . .”

  “Helen has turned him into a complete bookworm,” explained Jake, “the Art Institute, plays, movies, you name it. They had the first television on the block, and the school itself . . .”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Catholic school,” feeling Sol was defending me.
/>   “Who said there was?”

  Going over toward the cash register, Jake taking out his checkbook.

  “So how much do we owe you, Sol?”

  “Owe me? Are you kidding? Later, later.” Sol ringing the whole thing up, explaining to me, “Just for the records, reordering,” laughing, “not that we’re that busy. Although it wasn’t too bad for Chanukah/Christmas. Chanukah used to be a nothing, minor day on the Jewish calendar, but the Jews are getting the message from the Christians, buy, buy, buy, buy . . . great for me, for us all . . .”

  Jake still fingering his checkbook.

  “Put it away!” Sol almost getting stern.

  Jake put it away.

  We started to leave, but Sol holding us back just a little longer.

  “Let me look at the boy a little, little more. So, you want to be a writer?”

  “Well, my parents want me to be a doctor like my father. Who knows?”

  “Maybe you can do both. But why worry about it. The main thing is to be, to be or not to be: no not-to-bes, just bes, OK?”

  “OK?”

  Then suddenly we were “released” and out we went, Sol still standing in the door and studying us as we got in Jake’s old black Chevy and off we went back home.

  It’s funny how this whole encounter has stayed with me over the years.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  First of all, Jake never went anywhere with just me. We were always “family,” Gertrude and Judy and Jackie and Ma (my grandmother), my mother and father. Never alone. This was the first and last time the two of us ever went anywhere together just us.

  And how come Sol was so interested in me, kept looking at me, practically “studying” me, my hair, my eyes, everything about me?

  How come Jake didn’t pay for the train? Who ever heard of an old Jewish toy store owner telling someone not to worry about it later?

  I have a theory. That Jake never lost contact with my grandmother’s family. Her father had married her mother’s sister when her mother had been killed by a train, right? OK. My grandmother left home, cut all ties with her father and aunt/stepmother. But Jake kept contact with his grandfather, and my great-grandfather was curious, curious, curious about me, so Jake finally took me to his store so he could see me. That’s what I think, that Sol was my great-great grandfather.

  My grandmother was about fifty, Sol about seventy. It works mathematically (and emotionally).

  I think that all the Jews Jake worked with on Sundays were all relatives, cousins, uncles . . . who knows.

  I think there was a whole world out there that I was cut off from, denied access to. And I’m pissed about it. The only people we ever visited were related to either my grandma’s husband, James Patrick Mangan, or my father’s sister’s families.

  A total cut with the Jewish side of the family. The renunciation was complete, except (perhaps) for that one visit to the mysterious toy store on west Twelfth Street.

  So how did I ever, ever, ever find out that my grandmother was Jewish?

  The first hint came from Menke Katz.

  Menke Katz?

  We have to jump ahead a few decades. From age ten to age thirty-six.

  I get a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois, get a job teaching at Loyola University (now Loyola-Marymount) in Los Angeles. In 1968, after ten years at Loyola, I go to a small press get-together in Berkeley and meet everyone who is anyone in the literary underground, make friends with a guy from New York named Harry Smith, a great big burly guy with lots of hair and beard and millions in the bank.

  I start visiting him in New York maybe three times a year.

  He lives in Brooklyn Heights, this huge million dollar mansion just a couple of blocks from the East River, across from Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.

  He’s married to Marion Pechek whose parents were these super-wealthy Jews in Hungary (in mining) who escaped from Europe before Hitler took over, got all their money out. They were so wealthy, in fact, that their former town house is now the U.S. Embassy.

  She’s tiny, black-haired, totally simpatica with me. We hit it off beautifully. So much so, in fact, that after a few years of visits three or four times a year (maybe a week per visit) she finally tells their three kids, Tristam, Lisa and Rebecca, “This is your Uncle Hugh from now on. He’s family.”

  Three or four visits a year like Christmas break. Between semesters. Spring break. Maybe early in the summer, just before classes, sometimes in early fall just before classes began.

  I really did become just like family.

  I had my own little place down in the basement just above the subway—it ran right under the house, even a little door in the basement that you opened and there was a stairway going right down to the subway tracks. Weird.

  I’d leave my shaving stuff and toothbrush and toothpaste in the downstairs bathroom. An extra pair of shoes and a couple of cuts in the downstairs closet. My territory.

  I’d go with Harry to his office down on Beekman Street in Manhattan, down by City Hall, would work on the mag for some hours, then we’d all go out to lunch at Suerkin’s restaurant a couple of blocks away from the office.

  Harry was a millionaire and didn’t mind sharing it. I mean, holy cow, Sidney Bernard would be there, this aging hippy poet-critic, one of the editors of Harry’s mag, Pulpsmith, his grey ponytail hanging down his back, maybe mad-poet Richard Nason (author of The New Dunciad, a scathing overview of poetry in contemporary America), artist Jim Kay, the guy who did most of Pulpsmith’s covers might be there, mystery writer Tom Tolney, another editor of Pulpsmith . . . and me.

  Harry always picked up the tab. And always paid me for my work time on the mag.

  Afternoons I might work a little more. Harry would put down a stack of twenty-five or thirty books and magazines next to me on desk and say, “I want one-liners on all of these by the end of the afternoon.”

  “OK.”

  I’d turn my reading-speed up to super-sonic, get to the essences of the books and mags, get the whole stack done in a couple of hours. I was the guy for the job.

  Then maybe I’d take the rest of the afternoon off, go down to Times Square, a couple of porn-parlor visits, porn-videos, you know, those places where you put quarters in while you watch the porns.

  Maybe go to the Metropolitan and look at Greek and Sumerian vases, do a little shopping at Sax’s or Macy’s, be back in time for dinner at Junior’s in Brooklyn, the best little Jewish delicatessen-restaurant in the world.

  I mean Harry was known.

  Like after dinner we’d be out walking Rinky Tink, Harry’s hound, and this little guy would come up to Harry.

  “Hey, Harry, did you get a chance to read my stuff?”

  “Not yet, Harvey, another week, huh?”

  “OK, Harry. It means a lot to me, you know that.”

  “I know it, pal. Don’t worry. Another week.”

  “OK, Harry, thanks.”

  The guy would disappear into the mists and I’d ask Harry “Who the hell was that twitch?”

  “Harvey Shapiro, editor of the New York Times Book Review.”

  The New York Times Book Review?!?!?!

  Holy shit! I mean, what the hell?

  Or we’d be at some book fair, just bumming around, and some guy would come up and shake hands with Harry. Deference. Respect.

  “Howyadoin’, pal?”

  “OK, OK.”

  “Good to see you.”

  Me, as always, with the same question.

  “Who was that?”

  “Oh, that was just Plimpton. Editor of the Paris Review.”

  The Paris Review?

  Was I in or was I in?

  Every visit, say four times a year, we’d always go up into the Catskills and visit Menke Katz.

  Katz lived out in the country right in the middle of this endless forest. His wife had been a teacher, was retired. Katz himself was a Holy Man and had worked as a watchmaker for a while, sold stockings from
door to door for a while when he was living in Brooklyn, but mainly he was “holy.”

  He had a rabbinical degree from Yeshiva in New York, a Ph.D. in English from Columbia. Although, you’d never guess he had any degree in English, his accent was that strong.

  Jewish. Yiddish.

  Originally from Lithuania. One of those fanatically Jewish villages in the Lithuanian countryside—before Hitler.

  “I never read a page from right to left in my life until I came here.” (In case you don’t know, you read Hebrew (Yiddish) from right to left.)

  He was a kabbalist, the Jewish version of God the Mother, instead of just God the Father. Jewish mysticism at its most mystical.

  And he knew the Talmud by heart. Jewish commentary on scripture. Endless volumes.

  I don’t care what topic I’d bring up.

  We’d be out for a little walk after dinner, out in the forests that surrounded his house, and I’d bring up something like “I’m living with these two women, my wife, from Kansas, and this Brazilian M.D., and . . .”

  Menke stops. It’s late fall, all the leaves down except the yellow Maple and red Oaks. I don’t feel like I’m in upstate New York at all, but back in Hebron or the Galilee hills, 2,000 B.C.E.

  “Talmud says . . .” and Katz begins to quote Talmud first in Hebrew, then in translation.

  The first time he did it I thought it was all fake. How could anyone take a random topic and throw it Katz’s way, and he could encyclopedically go to specific quotes that he had memorized verbatim? But after twenty times, OK, I was convinced.

  When we’d get back to the house he’d go into his library and pull down a couple of volumes of Talmud, open them up to the pages he’d been quoting.., and there were the passages themselves. Conclusion? He knew the volumes and volumes and volumes of the Talmud by heart.

  When we’d visit we’d always stay for dinner.

  Rivka, Menke’s wife, would always come up with new things, always lots of sour cream and unleavened bread, matzahs, everything vegetarian, the easiest way to be kosher out in the country where there were no kosher stores around anywhere.

  Menke would always do all sorts of blessings, before, after, during the meals. Hebrew, Hebrew, Hebrew. Always sang Shalom alechem, which he’d always explain to me, “This is when the angels come, now they’re leaving,” go into the Hebrew which he spoke. He’d spent some years in Safed in Israel, where kaballah had originated, where all the kaballists had lived.