So Long, Babe

It is a hard thing to remember, but I call tell you it was a Sunday. Even after forty years, I’m sure it was a Sunday, because you could have charted the unsteady course of my family’s history by remembering our Sundays. During the other six days, my father worked for his parents, Nana and Poppa Kishler, at their modest string of grocery stores in Newark, Jersey City and Elizabeth. My grandfather did the buying and selling for the stores; my father was his assistant; and my grandmother kept the books.

My mother repeatedly asked my father why he had to spend his day off with his parents, but he never had an answer, and so Nana and Poppa would drive up Springfield Avenue from their apartment in Newark and stop at our house in South Orange, and Poppa would honk the horn until all of us piled into his yellow Fleetwood Cadillac.

On these Sundays, we often went into New York—to Ratner’s for brunch or to the Bronx Zoo, and once, on a hot summer afternoon, because I insisted, to a Yankee game.

We had great seats along the first-base line, but still, this was one of the bad Sundays. My mother, Nana Essie and my older sister, Susan—everyone called her Suzle— were bored by baseball and my father and grandfather had a fight.

Roger Maris was chasing Babe Ruth's single-season home-run record of sixty and Poppa, who when he had first come to America had gone out to watch the Yankees, found the somber farm boy Maris a poor substitute for the jolly, wise-cracking Babe. Poppa hated the fact that by July Maris was ahead of Ruth’s pace, while my father and I loved the idea of seeing the record vanish. The fight began when Maris hit number thirty-eight off Don Larsen.

“What a shot,” Father said.

Poppa stood, hands thrust in his pockets, jingling coins. He took off his gold wire-rims and glanced away from the rightfield stands, where the fans were still scrambling for the ball.

“Ruth hit seventeen in September,” Poppa said, scowling. “I seen half a them. Maris, he's a bum. He ain’t gonna match it. Mantle ain’t neither. Not in a hundred fifty-four games.”

“It's a hundred-and-sixty-two-game season now,” my father said. “A season’s a season.”

“You’re stupid and you don’t know what you’re talkin’,” Poppa said. “It’s no good no more. It don't count. They’re gonna put an ast’rik. Ya hear? There'll be an ast’rik with the record.”

“I’m not stupid,” my father said. “Don't you call me stupid.”

“You’re stupid,” Poppa said. “I had your brother Buck with me I’d be bigger than A & P.” Then, turning to my grandmother, he said, “Essie, let’s go.”

Nana, raising her steel-gray turret of hair from her brown paper bag of S & H Green Stamps and the books she was pasting them into, stood up and started to file down the aisle behind him.

“Dad,” Father said. “Where you going? It's only the fifth inning. I want to stay.”

“So stay,” Poppa replied. “I seen enough.”

“You got the car,” said my father.

“Ask Roger Maris for a ride,” Poppa answered.

“Honey,” my mother said to my father. “We can stay. We'll take the bus.”

My father, perspiring heavily in his blue-and-white seersucker suit, looked at us. Suzle wanted to go; my mother, despite her offer, wanted to go; I wanted to stay, but, as I remember, no one asked my opinion. Finally, my father just shrugged and we left.

* * *

Now that fall, on another Sunday, Nana and Poppa Kishler took us on a boat ride up the East River. I remember that it was on the morning after my father had come home from the hospital. It was cold and windy, and the ship dropped us at the Statue of Liberty. We climbed the winding iron staircase and walked around inside her head, stopping to take in the view from her eyes.

After we re-boarded, I stood on the top deck between Poppa and Mother, trying to open the penknife Poppa had bought me as a souvenir. Father stood behind us, under the awning, where Nana Essie and my sister, Suzle, sat on a bench trying to paste Green Stamps into books, which was difficult because of the wind, the spray and the waves.

“Don’t cut yourself,” Mother warned me.

I asked her to read the poem in the pamphlet, the one on the Statue’s dress. As she started to read, I turned to my grandfather and asked him about the buildings on the island off in the distance.

“That’s Rikers Island,” he replied. “A place for criminals.”

I recall asking him why there were walls around the buildings.

He said, “So’s the criminals don’t try’n get out.”

“Is it bad to try and get out?” I asked.

“Jonathan, Jonathan,” Poppa said, leaning over and kissing my cheek. I smelled the clean, sweet odor of his Pinaud Clubman aftershave. “You have so many questions. A little boy shouldn’t have so many questions.”

I said that the buildings resembled my father’s hospital and asked him if Father was a criminal.

“Jonathan,” my mother interrupted gently. “Don’t you want me to read?”

I nodded.

She glanced at Poppa, the pamphlet folding and unfolding in her hands, and began to read about the tired and poor. Before she finished the first verse, I asked her to close my penknife, explaining that I was scared of the blade.

“Go ask your father,” she said, exasperated, tucking the pamphlet into the side pocket of her reddish-brown fox jacket.

I told her that I couldn't ask my father, that he had gone off toward the bow of the ship.

Mother stiffened, her eyes darting anxiously in the direction of the bow. “Essie,” she called to my grandmother. “Where’d Saulie go?”

“Who knows?” Nana answered, her head bent to her S & H books, her tongue flicking out across a sheet of Green Stamps. “Saulie always going.”

“Sam,” Mother said, turning to my grandfather, “Saulie’s gone.”

“So?” Poppa said. He was wiping the lenses of his wire-rims with a tissue and squinting toward the skyline along the shore.

From the look on Mother's face I knew that she might cry, scream, slap or any combination of the three. I was frightened. It reminded me of the night my father had his accident and didn’t come home for dinner.

“Sam,” she said, her voice rising now against the wind. “Help me find him.”

Poppa hunched his broad shoulders, adjusted his glasses on his nose.

“Sam!” Mother repeated.

“Okay, okay,” Poppa said.

As they hurried off, weaving between passengers and disappearing around the swerve of the deck, I heard the tap-tap-tapping of Mother's high heels blow by me and dissolve in the pounding of the waves.

The rest is unclear—no, not unclear, ordered oddly. I remember telling Suzle Father was leaving again, and Suzle, sitting under the awning wrapped in the new velvet-collared coat Nana had bought her at Bamberger’s, inviting me to paste stamps. I remember running toward the bow, saying excuse me to grownups, who smiled down at me and patted my head. Then I was sprinting, out of breath, and when I had broken clear of one crowd, I ran into another fur- and-gabardine wall and had to climb onto a chair because I couldn't see over everyone on deck, and inside the glass-enclosed cabin people with Styrofoam coffee cups and plastic beer mugs were watching, waiting.

Then I saw him, my father, perched on the edge of the ship, balancing himself by stretching his arms out and grasping the rail on either side. His red tie was blowing back like a telltale streamer and his hounds-tooth sports jacket was flapping in the wind—his lucky jacket, he always called it, the one he wore in the hospital with his baggy white pajamas and those canvas slippers that scraped against the linoleum like sandpaper as he shuffled, back bent, down the dimly lit ward.

His jacket was snapping like a sail in a high wind. For a moment that was all I could hear, and I noticed—and this filled me with a strange pride—that my father’s back wasn't bent now. He stood straight, shoulders as square as those old pictures of him in his Army uniform. He peered into the water, his eyes narrowed at the leaden, white-capped waves, his hair wet with the spray and plastered to his brow, and the strong handsome features of his face set stiff, like the godhead of an ancient ship.

I recall a young policeman inching along the rail as warily as a trainer closing in on an uncaged animal, extending a black-gloved hand up to my father, and saying kindly, “Sir, nothing’s that bad. Come down, let’s talk,” and the voices from the decks below blending into a single sound, and my mother and my grandfather watching, waiting.

And I remember thinking about the Statue and her wide, iron eyes that made everyone seem awfully small when you looked through them.

“Saulie!” my mother was pleading. “What about the kids, Saulie? What about me, Saulie?”

The cold violet twilight was spreading uncontrollably across the sky when Poppa strutted out of the crowd like an actor stealing center stage, his blue three-piece suit neatly pressed, his wild white hair a crown around his bald spot. He removed his glasses, jabbed them at my father and said sternly in Yiddish, “ A sof, Saulie! A sof ! Let’s end it! Y’ain’t gonna do me like your brother Buck did. He was no war hero in my book. I don’t care what the Life magazine said.”

My father didn’t move, and I remembered the night in my grandparents’ kitchen when Poppa told me about my dead Uncle Buck. Father had just entered the hospital— Mother was visiting him—and Nana and Suzle were in the bedroom clipping coupons. Buck ran off, Poppa said, sipping black coffee from a yahrtzeit glass and rolling Nana’s rugolach in his callused fingers, crumbling the buttery raisin cookies into cinnamon dust. Buck didn't want nothin’ to do with supermarkets, said Poppa. He wanted to be his own man. But the Marines. To fight with the Japs. To die on his mother. Buck didn't care about nobody. A nar filt nit, Poppa said, a fool feels nothing. And he whisked his thumb and index finger under his glasses to wipe his eyes.

“Ya hear me, Saulie?” Poppa was shouting up at my father. “I ain’t permittin’ no more’a this no more. You got obligations. Come down here.”

Waves crashed against the hull, and at last my father turned away from the water, his face wet and chapped. Stepping slowly over the rail, he lowered himself to the deck and then stood and stared at Poppa’s feet. As the policeman and people moved away, a fat woman in a flowered coat, said, “Praise the Lord,” and a man holding a beer bottle and slouching in the cabin doorway, replied, “Whadda ya mean, ‘Praise the Lord?’ That chickenshit bastid shoulda jumped.”

A few people laughed.

“Dad,” my father said, “I’m sorry about Buck,” and he leaned against Poppa, seemed to expect Poppa to hold him, but Poppa’s hands were in his pockets jingling coins. Sliding his head down Poppa's chest, my father wrapped his arms around Poppa’s legs and knelt on all fours, neck bent at Poppa’s knees.

And then I knew it was coming. I heard the deep, dead choking back in my father’s throat, and the sound scared me more than the lights I saw around the shore that seemed to burn up the cold autumn twilight. My father gripped Poppa’s ankles while Poppa held his own head high and my mother screamed, “Saulie!” and tugged on my father’s lucky jacket, trying to lift him to his feet. But my father remained crouched like an exhausted runner, heaving his deep, dead sounds into the silence, his shoulders shaking as the wind picked up and the people watched and waited and listened to my father cry.

***

In the car, my father sat silently in the front seat wedged between Nana and Poppa, drying his hair with a dirty white towel. Poppa kept the towel in the trunk to clean up after work and it smelled of clams and cow blood. It was almost dark now and I asked my father to turn on the radio, but Poppa told me to leave everyone alone. My father turned on the radio anyway and we heard that during the Yankee-Red Sox game, Maris had hit his sixty-first homerun off Tracy Stallard.

“Big deal,” Poppa said, as he gunned the Cadillac across Canal Street. “What’s it matter? Maris is still a bum and they’ll have to put an ast’rik.”

My father started to say something, but his shoulders began to shake and Mother reached over the seat to stroke the back of his head and then he was quiet again. When we got home I showed my mother how I’d cut my finger closing my penknife. It was a tiny cut, but she slapped me and said if I ever hurt myself again she’d break my neck. Suzle came to my room, excited, her hands flying like pigeons let loose from a cage, and told me that Nana had promised to get her a Victrola with the Green Stamps she’d pasted. My father stood on the steps a long time before coming inside the house.

I remember watching him from the window.