2012 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize Winner - Christine Benvenuto
"Death in Brooklyn"
Some years ago, when he was to
undergo triple bypass surgery, I imagined my father's death. But imagine isn't the right word because I
constructed no fantasies, saw no images.
When I thought of him dying I was simply confronted with a terrible
sense of exertion, the idea of an immense weight mustering the strength to lift
itself out of existence. Oddly enough, I
was right. When my father did die, three
years later, cancer-ridden and with a healthy heart, that's exactly the way it was.
#
When
I was growing up, scarcity was an axiom in all things. Scarcity of stories and words. To have was to create imbalance. I felt burdened by the food on my plate, by
having more than one friend at a time.
Our walls held a single picture, a carving of the Last Supper. There were no decorative objects except the
one or two received as gifts and set scornfully down on the otherwise unused
coffeetable. My parents, my father
especially, liked getting rid of things.
When he emptied the little mailbox downstairs from our apartment in East
Flatbush, he threw away as much as he could at once, including envelopes
addressed to my mother. When we moved
from East Flatbush to Bay Ridge - I was fifteen - he left behind a cookie tin
containing nearly all the photographs that had been taken of me since birth.
I
know very little about my father. He
avoided interaction, direct gaze. We
never had a conversation. In my mind, I
organize his life as a closet of old clothes he would never have saved:
There
are the young man's uniforms, baseball and World War II, of the old black and
white photographs from before I was born, the dark suit of the wedding
portrait. For the middle-aged man of my
childhood there's the bus driver's uniform or the baggy pants with the shirt
hanging out, sleeveless undershirts, pajamas at any time of day. The same, minus the bus driver's uniform and
with the occasional addition of a flat-brimmed cap, for the old man of my
adulthood. Also from my adulthood
there's the tweed jacket worn by the father of an alternate universe who sat at
a desk in a book-lined room, laughing. I
glimpsed him one night while I was falling asleep and felt, if this was him,
then I could be who I wanted to be. Of
course, this wasn't him.
Instead,
he ended up the man in the liver-colored hospital pajamas with a cigarette hole
he hadn't made himself in the sleeve, a few weeks before his death, not looking
especially ill. I hadn't seen him in a long
time; it was the last time I saw him conscious.
It was mid-June, time for summer plans.
For the first time, he talked about coming to New England to visit us,
the look in his eyes saying he knew this was a trip he would never make. We - my husband, our one-year-old son and I -
had taken the three-hour drive to Brooklyn so that I could see him; I stayed
only a few minutes because he couldn't wait for me to leave.
#
I
came back a couple of weeks later, arrived at the hospital on a Wednesday
evening and waited there for him to die through the night, the next day and
night, the following morning. All this
time he lay there wasted, body curled in on itself. Not conscious but in pain, suffering. Terrified.
In
his subliminal state he frequently became agitated, twisted about in his bed,
moaned, cried out. He scratched at
himself, something my mother had been told to expect. He called for his older brother, using a
childish nickname, and for his mother in the Italian dialect in which he had
spoken his first words.
My
mother responded to his agitation with some of her own, and he became more
distressed. So long as she was there I
did nothing. When I was alone with him I
did two things automatically, without thinking the first time she left the room
and then deliberately whenever she was gone.
I hushed him, employing a skill I had acquired only in the past year,
since giving birth to my son, as if I had somehow become the mother he was
crying out for. And I sang.
Sh'ma
Yisrael adonay eloheynu adonay ehad.
Listen,
Israel: Adonay is our God, Adonay is
one.
Jews
are supposed to die with this prayer on their lips, but my father was not
Jewish, though our family name is a common one among Italian Jews, and my own
conversion was still six months in the future.
Each time someone heard my name and asked if I was Jewish, I wondered
whether there was something in our family's past that we didn't know about,
something my father would die not even suspecting. Presumably he’d never heard the Sh'ma. I began singing it without thought or plan
and went on singing it because whenever I did he grew calm and because it was
the only thing I had to offer. These
moments, with him unconscious, were the most intimate I ever had with my
father.
#
The
last morning he looked utterly ravaged.
My mother and I stood side by side and watched him breathe. With his lips pulled back in anguish he drew
breath slowly and at long intervals, deep painful rattling heaves, laboring as
if his lungs were a heavy freight, as if commanded, breathe!, breathing
himself to death, and I thought, I still think, that I have never witnessed
anything so effortful.
At
one point my mother decided it was over and tried to force his parted lips
together with her hand.
"Wait," I told her and, sure enough, another breath, two. When we saw the final breath, we knew
it. My mother said I had to go and tell
a nurse that my father was dead. I could
see that this was something I had to do but I didn't move. Finally, she went herself. I can't remember that moment alone in the
room. In an instant she was back with
the nurse, who looked at my father, told my mother, "Yes," and held
her while she began to wail. They both
ignored me. I wondered whether the nurse
realized that I was the dead man’s daughter – my father was “the dead man”
now. Then my three uncles, my father's
brothers, who without my knowing it had gathered in the hall, entered and took
up positions around the room like security guards, saying nothing.
#
As
soon as he was dead my mother talked about how she would have to clear out my
father's things. I watched her sort
through his papers. I wanted a photograph, an old one in uniform, baseball or
army. I wanted the army release papers
that described him as some sort of military garbage man, "picking up
sensitive army debris," in Belgium, France, the Ardennes. I didn't ask.It's senseless to keep mementos
of someone, now dead, who was a stranger in life.
#
At
the funeral parlor, what appeared to be a wax mannequin of my father lay in the
coffin, a face that bore some resemblance to his but was not his, in life or
death. My mother didn't notice. She was pleased with what the funeral parlor
had done, having told them that they had better make him look good. "You see," she said, pointing to
features I had never noticed, "he always had small lips and long
eyelashes."
Few
people came. There were neighbors who inexplicably spoke only Italian, as if
the mass migration that had carried my grandparents across the ocean nearly a
hundred years before had gone underground, funneled to my parents’ section of
Brooklyn. There were women my mother
knew from church, all widows. “They used
to be jealous,” my mother commented bitterly.
“I was the only one with a husband.”
Another, mixed-sex collection of individuals offered my mother
perfunctory condolences or none at all and sat at the back with my uncles,
talking and laughing.
Between
attrition and estrangement, only a handful of visitors were relatives. My father's nephews and their wives sat
together and watched me, talking obsessively among themselves about their
knowledge of Jewish burial rituals. They
hushed each other with significant looks in our direction whenever my husband
or I inched awkwardly past, holding the hands of our tottering baby.
When
she saw her own niece, my mother announced, “I’ve lost my best friend! I’ve lost everything!”
A
buzz of platitudes rose from the people around.
“She
says she lost her best friend,” my cousin snapped, silencing the others.
#
A
couple who’d known my parents twenty years before had seen the obituary."Why
didn't the paper say he was The Hawk?" the woman asked me.
Some
years earlier I had discovered that my father had once had some chance of
becoming a professional baseball player.
"He was approached by the major leagues," was how his sister
described it. "But then the war got
him instead. We don't talk about it. He's still mad at the war."
"Why
didn't I ever hear about this before?" I asked.
My
father gave me a doleful look. "We
didn't think you were interested," my mother said, as if family consensus
had been reached on the subject.
"You knew he was called The Hawk," she said.
I
had known my father's nickname. But I
had never associated it - why would I? - with the professionally posed
photograph of him in a baseball uniform that I had seen as a small child and
not since. I hadn't known the origin of
the name: speed.
#
"You
won't see your friend again," my mother screamed at a soft-spoken,
seriously Christian man from some unnamed Eastern European country who could
not have appeared a less likely companion for my father.
"On
the contrary," the man told my mother.
"We're all going where he's gone."
My
mother had no reply. Later the man's
wife told me that when he met my father, in an Off Track Betting establishment,
her husband had been stumbling aimlessly through an early retirement. "He couldn't find himself until he met
your father," was this woman's baffling statement.
#
The
last evening at the funeral parlor, I went up to the casket with my son in my
arms. I stroked my father's white-gray
hair, and everyone in the room watched me do it. "You won't remember him," I told my
son, because this was the only thing about his grandfather that I could think
of to say to him.
That
same night, in a service evidently provided by the funeral parlor, a priest
visited. He mentioned to my mother that
our family name was his own mother's maiden name. "Did you ask him if his mother was
Jewish?" my husband said later.
#
The
next morning, before it was closed, my father's older brother slipped a dollar
bill inside the coffin, said, "Spend it," gave a hoarse laugh and
spun away on his heels. One of his
younger brothers put in a racing form.
My mother placed a picture of a Greek icon inside the coffin. She said a Greek Orthodox priest had blessed
the men in my father's hospital ward and handed out these images. Later, my mother said, she’d spied my father
kissing the picture. This was the most
shocking and pathetic detail I learned about my father in the course of the
week. I had nothing to put in the coffin
myself.No one had thought to inform me of the custom.
#
My
husband, who’d never been inside a church except as a tourist, had our restless
baby to keep him out now. He spent the
brief funeral service holding our son outside the open double doors and
chatting with the hearse driver. Inside,
I sat up front, with my mother. My
mother recited the responses to the prayers in an angry, grudging way as if she
was being tested to see if she knew them and resented it. I was the only person present who didn't
kneel and said none of the responses, a fact the priest could hardly fail to
notice. At the end he looked surprised
when, following my mother's example, I shook his hand and thanked him.
From
the church, the hearse, with the three or four cars following behind it, drove
to my parent's street and paused for a moment in front of the small brick house
where they rented the first floor. Then
the procession headed for the highway and the long drive to the veteran's
cemetery far out on suburban Long Island.
Many
funerals were taking place that Fourth of July weekend. At the cemetery we waited in long traffic
lines for our turn to be directed to a little pavilion where the coffin had
come temporarily to rest. The procedure
here was even briefer than at the church, and equally scripted. We were all handed rose buds. The National Anthem, canned, was played. A man removed the flag that draped the
coffin, folded it into a triangle with the precision of an origami master, and
presented it to my mother.
It
was over. We left the cemetery with a
complicated set of directions to a ferry that would take us across the Long
Island Sound to Connecticut, where we would pick up the road north, home. Almost immediately, we missed the entrance to
the highway and instead followed the slow, local road that edged the water,
finding the pier at last. We joined the
cars waiting to board for the next trip.
All
week it had been strangely cool but now it was finally summer, hot. We drove onto the ferry's lower level and sat
in the car sweating, bickering mindlessly, the baby fussing, while the other
passengers streamed past on their way to the stairs, fresh air, behind us. We waited until they were all gone. Then we peeled off our damp black clothes and
pulled on jeans and T shirts. We changed
our son into shorts and a shirt, the very last clean clothing with us, and
climbed the ladder to the deck in another world.
The
sky was a clear, deep, birdless blue. My
son's red-blonde curls blazed in the brilliant sunlight. He’d never been on water before. He was thrilled, stretching from our arms
over the edge of the ferry as if to catch the white foam we were leaving in our
wake, careening through the chairs scattered over the deck, making me anxious
that he would annoy the only two people sitting in them, an obviously affluent,
middle-aged woman and man relaxing behind us draped in casually expensive
clothes and an aura of impossible ease.
I held my breath as the woman started to speak to me.
"He's
all right," she said. "Let him go."
###
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