Weekend Read: “I’ll dance at your wedding.”

[Archive]

LEONARD MICHAELS

Fiction

Jealousy

March 1997

After a Fight, from Sylvia

December 1992

Essays

The Action of Metaphor

January 1987

Literary Talk

December 1987

Diary of an Ex

December 1989



WYATT MASON

The Irresponsibility of Feelings, on Leonard Michaels

A followup interview

My Father

By Leonard Michaels

Six days a week he rose early, dressed, ate breakfast alone, put on his hat, and walked to his barbershop at 207 Henry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, about half a mile from our apartment. He returned after dark. The family ate dinner together on Sundays and Jewish holidays. Mainly he ate alone. I don’t remember him staying home from work because of illness or bad weather. He took few vacations. Once we spent a week in Miami and he tried to enjoy himself, wading into the ocean, being brave, stepping inch by inch into the warm blue unpredictable immensity. Then he slipped. In water no higher than his pupik, he came up thrashing, struggling back up the beach on skinny white legs. “I nearly drowned,” he said, very exhilarated. He never went into the water again. He preferred his barbershop to the natural world; retiring, after thirty-five years, only when his hands trembled too much for scissors and razors, and angina made it impossible for him to stand for hours at a time. Then he took walks in the neighborhood, carrying a vial of whiskey in his shirt pocket. When pain stopped him in the street, he’d stand very still and sip his whiskey. A few times I stood beside him, as still as he, waiting for the pain to end, both of us speechless and frightened.

He was vice-president of his synagogue, keeping records, attending to the maintenance of the building. He spoke Yiddish, Polish, maybe some Russian, and had the Hebrew necessary for prayers. He spoke to me in Yiddish until, at about the age of six, I began speaking to him mainly in English. When he switched from one language to the other, I’d rarely notice. He could play the violin and mandolin. As a youth in Poland, he’d been in a band. When old friends visited our apartment, he’d drink a shnaps with them. He smoked cigars and pipes. He read the Yiddish newspaper, the Forward, and the Daily News. He voted Democratic but had no faith in politicians, political systems, or “the people.” Aside from family, work, and synagogue, his passion was friends. My mother reminded me, when I behaved badly, of his friends. She’d say, “Nobody will like you.” Everybody liked Leon Michaels.

He was slightly more than five feet tall. My mother is barely five feet. Because I’m five nine, she thinks I’m a giant. My father came from Drohiczyn (Dro-hee-chin), a town on the river Bug near the Russian border. When I visited Poland in 1979, I asked my hosts about Drohiczyn. They said, “You’ll see new buildings and Russian troops. No reason to go there.” I didn’t go there. It would have been a sentimental experience, essentially empty. My father never talked about the town, rarely said anything about his past. We also never had deep talks of the father-and-son kind, but when I was fifteen I fell in love and he said a memorable thing to me.

The girl had many qualities–tall, blond, talented musician–but mainly she wasn’t Jewish. My father learned about her when we were seen together watching a basketball game at Madison Square Garden, among eighteen thousand people. I’d been foolish to suppose I could go to the Garden with a blonde and not be spotted. My father had many friends. You saw them in his barbershop, “the boys,” snazzy dressers jingling coins in their pockets or poor Jews from the neighborhood who came just to sit, to rest in their passage between miseries. Always a crowd in the barbershop–cabdrivers, bookies, waiters, salesmen. One of them spotted me and phoned my father. When I returned that night, he was waiting up with the fact. He said we would discuss it in the morning.

I lay awake in anguish. No way to deny the girl I loved. I’d been seeing her secretly for months. Her parents knew about the secrecy. I was so ashamed of it that when I called for her I’d ring the bell and then wait in the street. She urged me to come upstairs, meet her parents. After a while, I did. They understood. Her previous boyfriend was the son of a rabbi.

In the morning my father said, “Let’s take a walk.” We walked around the block, then around the block again, in silence. It took a long time, but the silence was so dense it felt like one infinitely heavy immobilized minute. Then, as if he’d rehearsed a speech and dismissed it, he sighed. “I’ll dance at your wedding.”

Thus we spent a minute together, father and son, and he said a memorable thing. It is concise, its burden huge. If witty, it’s in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, making a picture of demonic gaiety. My wedding takes place in the middle of the night. My father is a small figure among dancing Jews, frenzied with joy.

For a fifteen-year-old in love, this sentence was a judgment, punishment, and release from brutal sanctions. He didn’t order me not to see her. I could do as I pleased. As it happened, she met someone else and broke up with me. I was very hurt. I was also relieved. My father danced at my wedding, twelve years later, when I married Sylvia. Black-haired. Dark-skinned. Jew. Because her parents were dead, the ceremony was held in our apartment. Her aunts and uncles sat along one wall, mine along another. The living room was small. Conversation, forced by closeness, was lively and nervous. The rabbi, delayed by traffic, arrived late, and the ceremony was hurried. Everyone seemed to shout instructions. Did she circle me or I her? My father was delighted. When Sylvia and I fought, which was every day, she’d sometimes threaten to tell my father the truth about me. “It will kill him,” she said.

I’d tried once to talk to him about our trouble. He wouldn’t hear it. “She’s an orphan. You cannot abandon her.”

If he ever hit me, I don’t remember it, but I remember being malicious. My brother, three years younger than I, was practicing scales on my father’s violin. When he finished, he started to carry the violin across the room. I put out my foot. He tripped, fell. We heard the violin hit the floor and crack. Quicker than instantly, I wanted to undo the act, not trip my brother. But it was done. I was stuck with myself. I think I smiled. My father looked at the violin and said, “I had it over twenty years.”

Maybe I tripped my brother because I’m tone-deaf. I can’t learn to play a musical instrument. Nothing forgives me. I wish my father had become enraged, knocked off my head, so I could forget the incident. I never felt insufficiently loved, and yet I think: When Abraham raised the knife to Isaac, the kid had it good.

In photos, however badly lit or ill-focused, my father looks like himself. I never look like myself. This isn’t me, I think. Like a baby, my father is inevitably himself.

My father never owned a car or flew in an airplane. He imagined no alternatives to being himself. He had his family, his friends, his neighborhood, synagogue, and the hectic variety of human traffic in the barbershop and the streets. Looking out my window above San Francisco Bay, I think how my father saw only Monroe Street, Madison Street, and Clinton Street. For thirty-five years, he walked to work.

I was in London, returning from three months in Paris, when he died. My flight to New York had been canceled. I was stranded, waiting for another flight. Nobody in New York knew where I was. I couldn’t be phoned. The day after the funeral, I arrived. My brother met me at the door of the apartment and told me the news. I went alone to my parents’ bedroom and sat on the bed. I didn’t want to be seen crying.

A great number of people visited the apartment to offer condolences and to reminisce. Then a rabbi came, a tiny, fragile man dressed in black, with a white beard twice the length of his face. It looked like the top of his shirt. He asked my mother to give him some of my father’s clothes, particularly things he’d worn next to his skin, because he was a good man, very rare. As the rabbi started to leave with a bundle of clothes in his arms, he noticed me sitting at the kitchen table. He said in Yiddish, “Sit lower.”

I didn’t know what he was getting at. Did he want me to crouch? I was somehow susceptible to criticism.

My mother interceded. “He feels,” she said. “He feels plenty.”

“I didn’t ask how he feels. Tell him to sit lower.”

I got up and left the kitchen, looking for a lower place to sit. I was very angry but not enough to start yelling at a fanatical midget. Besides, he was correct.

One Friday night, I was walking to the subway on Madison Street. My winter coat was open, flying with my stride. I wore a white shirt and a sharp red tie. I’d combed my hair in the style of the day, a glorious pompadour fixed and sealed with Vaseline. I was nineteen-years-old-terrific. The night was cold, but I was hot. The wind was strong. My hair was stronger. It gleamed like black, polished rock. As I entered the darkness below the Manhattan Bridge, where it strikes across Madison Street and makes a high, gloomy, mysterious vault, I met my father. He was returning from the barbershop, following his usual route. His coat was buttoned to the chin, his hat pulled down to protect his eyes. He stopped. As I approached, I saw him study me, his creation. We stood for a moment beneath the bridge, facing each other in the darkness and wind. An American giant, five feet nine inches tall. A short Polish Jew. He said, “Button your coat. Everybody doesn’t have to see your tie.”

I buttoned my coat.

“Why don’t you wear a hat?”

I sighed. “I’m all right.”

“You need a haircut. You look like a bum.”

“I’ll come to the barbershop tomorrow.”

He nodded, as if to say “Good night” and “What’s the use.” He was on his way home to dinner, to sleep. He’d worked all day. I was on my way to sexual adventure. Then he asked, “Do you need money?”

“No.”

“Here,” he said, pulling coins from his coat pocket. “For the subway. Take.”

He gave.

I took.