Drawing to an inside straight: the legacy of an absent father

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     

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      to an inside straight

the legacy of an absent father

J o d i Va r o n

University of Missouri Press

Columbia and London

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Copyright © 2006 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 10 09 08 07 06 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Varon, Jodi, 1953– Drawing to an inside straight : the legacy of an absent father / Jodi Varon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. Summary: “Varon interweaves recollections of growing up in Vietnam-era Denver with stories of her gambler father, son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants, and offers an introduction to Sephardic culture contrasted with Ashkenazic culture, examines the forging of identity within the potentially destructive American “melting pot,” and challenges stereotypes of the American West”--Provided by publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-1646-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Varon, Jodi, 1953– —Family. 2. Varon, Jodi, 1953– —Childhood and youth. 3. Jews—Colorado—Denver—Social life and customs. 4. Sephardim— Colorado—Social life and customs. 5. Ashkenazim—Colorado—Social life and customs. I. Title. F785.J5V37 2006 978.8'83004924—dc22 2005036573 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: foleydesign Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typeface: Minion

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For my family and for Tina

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Contents

Chapter One Bennie—Benji—Benjamin Chapter Two The Tongue’s Delight Chapter Three When Quizzac Was Cherry Chapter Four Rubes in New York Chapter Five In the Vale Chapter Six The Second Ace Chapter Seven Levitation Chapter Eight Paella and Yellow Cabs Chapter Nine Ben–Anna Split Chapter Ten Spinoza’s Trade Chapter Eleven I’d Give My Life for a Drink of Raki Chapter Twelve Doppelgangers, Daughters Chapter Thirteen In Amsterdam Chapter Fourteen Along the Route of the Caliphate Chapter Fifteen The Man in the Porkpie Hat Note on Sources

1 16 28 35 47 63 71 86 91 106 119 133 137 146 155 173

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Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the Western Humanities Review, New Millennium Writing, and New Letters, in which parts of this book first appeared, sometimes in different form. I’d also like to thank Literary Arts of Oregon for the William Stafford Fellowship in Nonfiction, New Millennium Writing for its first-place award in nonfiction, Eastern Oregon University for support through its Faculty Scholars Program, and the Fishtrap Foundation for its awards through the Imnaha Writer’s Fellowship Program, all of which provided support and allowed me to complete this work. Special thanks go to my extended family, especially Beatrice Brodsky (BB), and to my husband, David Axelrod, and sons, Joshua and Ezra Axelrod. Deepest gratitude goes to the family of Tina Weeding and to my mentors and friends, especially George Venn, Thomas Madden, Susan Crowl, Daniel Keyes, Gladys Swan, William Kittridge, Henry Harrington, Earl Ganz, Robert Stubblefield, Ben Mitchell, and Eden Kruger.

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La boca que dize no, dize sí. Ladino proverb

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Chapter One Bennie—Benji—Benjamin

My father was a cattleman, though he never rode a horse, and he preferred cattle slaughtered and hanging in a cooler. He was a man whose waxing and waning fortunes familiarized him in an all too personal way with the Ladino proverb he was so fond of, “Partimos kon kavayo, tornimos kon azno: We left on a horse. We came back on a donkey.” As the proverb implies, he did not escape the caprices of fortune. Like the proverb’s quixotic dreamer, my father transformed himself—Bennie, Benji, Benjamin—from New York scrapper to GI tough to suave ballroom don, jousting not with windmills, but with cattle on the hoof. Before I went to school or learned to read, I went to ball games with my father and shivered in the old Bears’ Stadium end zone many years before the Denver Broncos had their own football field and the Colorado Rockies baseball team eclipsed the Bears, a farm team for the New York Yankees. My attention seldom strayed farther than the silver thermos cup, from which a sweet mist of chocolate vapor wafted up to bathe my face, or the blue plaid stadium blanket wrapped around my shivering legs. When my father laughed at the other team’s fumble on the field, I laughed. When he looked up at the scoreboard and pushed his glasses close to the bridge of his nose to check the time remaining

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in a down, I did the same, though I wore no glasses. If he took his hanky out to wipe his nose, I wadded up a Kleenex in my hand. If he jumped up to shout and wave a fist in the snow-filled November air, I popped up by his side. His early stories to me, his middle daughter, were filled with references to feta and kalamata olives, but when I was old enough to distinguish English from Castilian Spanish, and Castilian from his Ladino dialect, my father spun stories of the Sephardim in Spain that became urgent records of one identity he refused to relinquish. He spoke the words Spain, Sephardim, and Sephardic Jews as though they were talismans to protect us. Through his relentless recitations, he taught me that the most important, distinguishing characteristic of his past was that his ancestors had walked the hot and dusty streets of medieval southern Spain, a Muslim then a Catholic kingdom once referred to as the land of Al Andalus. What could this mean for an American man who had cut his teeth on highballs and raki; snuck onto the Ninth Avenue El and waited at the centerfield fence at New York’s Yankee Stadium for Jacob Rupert to open the gate and let him and all the other kids in for free; for a man who Lindy Hopped at the Savoy in Manhattan; for an American man who, rather than throw off the mantle of the European past, rewove it in the cattle-country West? My father likened people without a sense of history to husks who filled and emptied daily. The ones with history, he said, ones with a sense of cycles and cynicism as well as dates to anchor them, had a shield, albeit tarnished, to fend off demons like the ones my father tried to vanquish. While he shook most of his New York accent to blend into the western cattle culture, my father insisted on asserting his Spanish-Sephardic heritage among his Ashkenazi in-laws, who disparaged its meaning. Their ancestors, the Ashkenazim, had adopted the customs and languages of eastern Europe and shtetl life after their migration from Judea when the Second Temple in Jerusalem fell in 70 A.D. The Sephardis, Sephardic Jews, whose name echoes the Hebrew word for Spain, Separad, turned their footsteps elsewhere, and they settled in countries along the rim of Africa such as Morocco and Egypt, or closer to Judea in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, as well as in Spain and Portugal.

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Though my father never distinguished between zenith and decline, the tenth and eleventh centuries were the height of the Sephardim’s Golden Age, when philosophers, rabbis, artists, and men of science, politics, and court intrigue integrated Spanish and Iberian cultures. Varóns, my father said, counseled Spinoza and ben Maimon, edited Cervantes’s Don Quixote. We were poets and astronomers, and our cousin, Abrahm Zacuto, perfected the thirteenth-century Toledan Tables, the astronomical charts used by Vasco da Gama and Columbus to sail for India and the Caribbean. Varóns rode high in silver-studded saddles, the original vaqueros, horse-culture cowboys who brought western livestock—cattle and horses—to the New World. Even Torquemada, the grand inquisitor of Isabella’s Inquisition, and Alvaro de Luna, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, who, in 1451, persuaded Pope Nicholas V to set up Spain’s last Inquisition in the kingdom of Castile—my father claimed them all, with irony and not a little overarching pride, as his Sephardic brothers. Both the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim held the teaching of the Torah paramount. All continued to worship in Hebrew and Aramaic. Both Yiddish, a common language among the various Jewish denizens of eastern Europe, and Ladino, the dialect of Spanish Jews, were written with the Hebrew alphabet. All shared a desire to reestablish a homeland in the ancient land of Judea, but the interpretation of Torah law, locale, and local customs helped to form within each group, in addition to suspicion of the other, a unique identity, part religious, part national. My father’s allegiances were complicated further. In addition to his adoration of the Golden Age of Spain—the seven-century interlude of relative social, religious, and cultural harmony among Muslims, Jews, and Christians begun in 711 with the Muslim conquest of what is now southern Spain—his cultural traits—language, food, attitude—also reflected the second diaspora of the Jews away from Spain, after the last Spanish Inquisition in 1492. In his ancestors’ case, families fled to Turkey and to Greece. In simpler terms, all this jostling for patriotic space explained why my maternal, Ashkenazi grandfather wore a fedora, while my paternal, Sephardic grandfather wore a fez, why my mother breakfasted on bagels with a schmear of cream cheese, rather than my father’s borekas de espinaka, pita stuffed with chopped spinach and feta cheese. ♠♦♣♥

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Born in Manhattan, the son of immigrants, my father had selling food in his blood. His grandmother, Rachel Selanikio, was a dry goods merchant in Salonica (Thessaloníki), Greece. She made a small fortune on the black market, selling saccharine during the sugar shortages of the First World War, and after surviving the devastating Jewish quarter fire in 1917, used her savings to send herself and all the relatives of three families, the Selanikios, the Varons, and the Samarels to the New World. In 1918, my grandmother, Sarah, and my grandfather, Elihu (Louis), arrived in New York, ahead of everyone else in the family. She was already pregnant with my father, Benjamin, the first Varon born in America. Like his nona, his maternal grandmother, my father started his selling early, and also in sweets. The family lived above a grocery in Little Italy, four blocks from Mulberry Street, and one sultry autumn day in 1923, Sarah tripped on the hem of her long skirt and fell from the top of the dark, narrow staircase that led from their second-floor apartment down to the street. She had been in America four years by then, traded one crowded tenement in Salonica for another in New York, in the hope that her children could lead a better life in the New World than the one they would have led in the old. She had given birth to her third child, Solomon, three days earlier. She was the first Varon to die here. My father took to the streets then, at age five, waking up early when vendors were just pushing their carts into the neighborhood. He would buy a big stalk of sugarcane in Chinatown for ten cents, bring it home, peel and slice it with a stolen bolo knife, then sell the slices for a nickel apiece to all the other street kids. His father soon remarried, and his nona took care of him when his stepmother turned all her attention to her own tubercular daughter and, soon, to my father’s half-sister, Rose. He’d spent a year in the streets by then, bartering in Ladino and street Spanish, and he’d grown to fear the gnawing hunger that was his childhood bedfellow. That fear was something my father carried with him always, a knowledge he did not want but could not let himself forget. By the time he was nine, his buying and selling had become more sophisticated, always with food as part of the wage. He delivered fish—twelve cents per delivery—which would buy him a salami sandwich with two pennies to spare; every Friday night he earned a nickel lighting the gas stoves of observant Jews, then for a penny he’d buy a huge tomato, his favorite fruit, douse it with salt, and eat it on the way home. His stint

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at his Uncle Marco’s fruit stand taught him the value of discarded things—after closing time he would collect grapefruit peel, take it home to his nona, and she would make him dulces de alegría, crystallized sugar-coated citrus rinds, a treat he loved more than chocolate. Even in those hard times, not everything was scammed food and despair. He left the city during the Great Depression and went upstate to work at a dairy in the Catskills. In February 1942, he joined the Army Air Corps at Camp Upton, New York; he was separated from the service in November 1945 at Mitchell Air Force Base, Long Island, New York. He was proud of those years in the Army Air Corps. If he held any legitimate claims over my mother’s family, including his cattle baron brother-in-law, the man who had staked him a loan to start his business in 1960, it was that time he worked for his country while his brotherin-law worked at home, making money. Men could have fortunes that would come and go, but my father would always have the remembered thrill of taking off from and landing on hundreds of different airstrips in South America, North Africa, India, and China, mapping, in photographs, the movement of enemy troops. In 1944, my father married my mother, Lucky-Life, her Yiddish name coming over into English as Irene. He met her at a USO dance at Beth Hamidrash Hagadol Synagogue in Denver, while he was stationed at nearby Buckley Field. They courted for three months; he gave her his Army Air Corps sergeant’s pin; they sat on the park lawn together, surrounded by other soldiers and their dates, all sharing cigarettes and furtive kisses in front of the gold-domed capitol building in downtown Denver. On September 10, the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5704, my father, with a three-day pass in hand, borrowed a buddy’s car and picked my mother up. He laughed as she crouched on the passenger-side floor, hiding, so that the observant Jews who walked down Colfax Avenue on their way to High Holy Day services wouldn’t be witness to her blatant trespasses—riding rather than walking on the holy day, unchaperoned in a car, and with a stranger—soldier, Jew, or God knew what. The couple drove wildly and recklessly to Reno, the Nevada desert town of quick civil marriages and divorces, big bands, and small-casino gambling. Reno was a twenty-hour drive from Denver, 445 miles closer and cheaper than the Las Vegas my father would come to prefer, my mother green in the passenger seat, clutching at her knees as she tried

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not to peer at the world she knew falling away below her as they drove over the Rocky Mountains. A guardrail of thin timber and steel cable was the only thing that protected her from oblivion as my father flew over 11,900-foot Loveland Pass. At their wedding, instead of a white satin-and-lace gown, my mother wore a simple, tailored suit and a wheat-straw hat trimmed in red velvet ribbon. They foreswore religious customs when they eloped, as they exchanged vows not under a flower-laden arch, a chuppah, but in a judge’s chamber. Her groom did not offer her a sip of wine from a sanctified silver cup, nor did she circle him seven times before a rabbi pronounced them man and wife. There was no rabbi present. My father did not crush a small goblet beneath his foot to acknowledge the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the beginning of the long Diaspora of the Jewish People, nor did they sign their names to a Jewish wedding contract, a katubah. They did not clap their hands and dance the hora, form a conga line, or limbo with maracas, and no male cousins tried to outstrip one another, crouched down, arms crossed over chests, in the Russian celebratory dance, the kazachoc. My parents were never carried, seated on their wedding thrones, on the burly shoulders of their male relatives, she his queen and he her king. The photograph taken shortly after they wed in Reno revealed my mother as a shapely, buxom, blue-eyed blonde, and her sultry pout and cold, heavy-lidded eyes portended the discord that haunted both of them throughout their lives. My father stood cocky and defiant, his left hip canted, one arm around my mother’s shoulders, the other hanging slack, a lit cigarette held between his fingers. He wore his collar opened, no tie; his slacks seemed uncharacteristically to fit him, cinched in a flattering way around his natural waist rather than puckered tight and high in the fashion of the day. His face, from his thick and wavy black hair edging his heavy brow, prominent nose, and wide, full mouth, held the dashing beauty of a hopeful, young man, cavalier in his choice of life-mate. It was clear from his Rudolph Valentino posture why one of my aunties sometimes referred to my father, when she strained to be polite, as my mother’s Sheik of Araby. My father was a lucky man with cards, but impatient with work, and he drifted from job to job until he started driving for Yellow Cab when my sister Renée was born in 1955. While my sister was an infant and a

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toddler, on summer afternoons he picked me up toward the end of his shift to give my mother respite, and I sat in the front seat of the cab, watching the red meter flag, the fare and mileage numbers frozen. I listened to the radio crackle, pressed down the black button on the intercom to ask the dispatcher, “Whatya got for my pop, Mack?” in my fiveyear-old false baritone that sounded too much like Shirley Temple’s. Too young to understand what it might mean to have a cabbie for a father, I felt regal being chauffeured by my arm-waving father as he professed our bloodline. “Moses,” he boasted, maneuvering us among the modest skyscrapers in downtown Denver and up Colfax Avenue past the capitol, dazzling light glinting off its gold-leaf dome, “also shared our Sephardic name, Varón de Dios, Man of God.” Postwar prosperity seemed to elude him, so, like many men of his, or any, generation, my father gambled on the side. He gambled because gambling was a skill he had acquired young, when Ladino was still his only tongue. He bet on anything that would show a good return—greyhounds, quarter horses, numbers, dice, cards, sports, and every game Las Vegas had to offer. He gambled the way a natural athlete will move from sport to sport as the body ages, and he calculated recklessness and risk with magician flashes of his exquisite hands. Those hands built one set of shelves in the garage that he had to shim with chunks of wood before things wouldn’t topple when the garage door was slammed shut. He did no yard work; he built no models; he hated getting his hands dirty under the hood of his truck. His hands were very big and swift; he had boxed in high school and he knew how to hold his own in a fight, especially when he was protecting his little brother, Solomon. My father’s fingers were long and thick. But with a pair of dice, he had a safecracker’s touch—his hands became light and delicate, his fingers like a sly caress across the square surface of the white-and-black-speckled dice. When he gathered a pair to roll them, he held them as lightly as one would hold hummingbirds’ eggs. Luxurious items appeared in our house: diamond cocktail rings for my mother, for him a gold-and-red silk smoking jacket rumored to be like the one Hugh Hefner wore, a silver candelabra, a stock portfolio. He bought himself a dozen suits and took my mother dancing. He felt so lucky he moved the family from our little brick house on Winona Court

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on the west side of town, where Denver’s first Jewish immigrants had settled, to the east side of town, and he borrowed money from his brotherin-law to go into the cattle business. With my mother urging him on, my young and dashing father, the rake my mother’s family had nicknamed Bennie-get-a-job, even courted the Brown Palace Hotel as a customer. The Brown Palace Hotel would have been my father’s best customer had he ever landed that account. I mean that in both a literal and a figurative sense. The chefs would have preferred the fine cuts of beef my father could have sold them, but for the few years his cattle business flourished, the kitchen in the San Marco Room remained polite but elusive, resisting his solicitations, though always willing to sample his beef. Many people rhapsodize about the Brown Palace Hotel, and my father was no exception, though his rhapsody was tempered by his peculiar, idiosyncratic take on the West. The Brown Palace is, after all, a famous landmark, an example of solid architecture and the calculated, entrepreneurial recklessness that characterizes Denver. Its massive, turn-of-the-century opulence and studied gentility signify much about the promise of western privilege in the waning days of the once-open range. The old sandstone part of the Brown Palace, the original hotel, was built in 1892 on a triangular piece of land at Seventeenth, Broadway, and Tremont Streets. It has so much rock in it, its exterior is virtually fireproof. Its foundation is adorned with Colorado red granite and Arizona sandstone, and inside, the lobby, the grand salon, and the eighth-floor ballroom (now suites) are paneled with onyx slabs mined in Torreón, Mexico. When Denver was young and most of its unpaved downtown streets turned into a quagmire in nasty weather, someone described the hotel as looking like the prow of a solid stone steamship afloat the Sargasso Sea. Even so, its dining rooms were appointed with the finest accoutrements—Irish linen, Limoges and Daulton china, Reed and Barton silver, and chairs and tables of mahogany, oak, and cherry. Heavy, paneled doors shut out the dust devils and thunderheads that gathered every summer afternoon on the prairie east of town; windows and filtration systems stopped the more indelicate odors from the feedlots and rendering plants that blessed the town with Denver’s particular fragrance of commercial success on still summer days.

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While my father was still young with a straight, strong back, exuberant in his hope of making a good life for himself and his family, he courted the Brown Palace Hotel almost like a paramour. My mother helped my father work, the two of them wrapping white butcher-paper packages of his sample cuts as though presenting gifts. He used a special knot to tie the string around the packages, a slip knot with an extralarge bight. My mother would place two fingers in the center of my father’s knots, a delicate touch on each package, the two of them wrapping his best sirloin tips for the Brown Palace Hotel’s renowned beef tenderloin à la presidente (a dish created for President Eisenhower), the T-bones, rib eyes, and filet mignons with the same white butcher paper and string that he used to wrap the lesser cuts, the strip and flank steaks he sold to the Tally Ho Lounge and the Pillar of Fire and the Sky Chef Restaurant at the old Stapleton Airport. The two of them would pack up the brown, waxed, fifty-pound meat boxes and stack them in my father’s new green Chevrolet panel truck. They never tossed those boxes lightly; there was a kind of grim determination in the mechanics of their loading. My mother hated the cold cutting room where they worked, the shadows of beef carcasses hanging from sharp steel hooks suspended from the ceiling, the whine of the buzz saws, the slightly oily, bloody smell of cold muscle and fat. Her fingers would stiffen, and her calves, only half-covered with pedal-pushers, would prickle over with goose bumps. In her fantasies and dreams she dined with my father in the San Marco Room at the Brown Palace Hotel, bejeweled and wrapped in her fine mouton jacket, the wedding gift my father had won for her with a poker hand played behind an airplane hangar at Buckley Field. Had they been delivering meat to my father’s best fictional customer, she would have waited in his truck, not wanting to be seen downtown in her work clothes or at the service entrance of Denver’s finest old hotel. She might even have ducked down in the seat, the way she had when she eloped with my father during Rosh Hashanah. My father had laughed at the antics of his superstitious bride as he whisked her off to Reno, but he would not have liked her ducking down in the seat when he pulled up alongside the Brown Palace Hotel. He was making an honest living, and though he gambled on the side, his business was painfully legitimate, cash customers only, no cooked books with my

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mother as his bookkeeper. He was able to build a brick house in a new subdivision from his earnings, send his oldest daughter to college, take the family to his birthplace in New York, spend a few weekends in Las Vegas every year, so why should his wife think to slink down along the front seat of his green Chevy truck? Because he had grown up in New York, my father claimed to be oblivious to the intricacies of the western class system, or at least that system as represented by the splendor of the Brown Palace Hotel and interpreted by my mother. He had chosen to leave New York in part to escape the eastern pecking order, to reinvent himself in yet another New World, the New World of the American frontier, in a landscape—the Colorado high plateau—that, minus castles, windmills, fallen knights, olive groves, and vineyards, resembles the dry, high plain, complete with reservoirs, of central and southern Spain. To him, everything in the West was secondhand, simple, imitation, even the Boettcher family silver compared with Roosevelt gold. He chose the new role of Ladino-speaking New York cowboy, rather than a street-tough GI with a high school education. In his New York, pretension existed in brownstones outside of his imagination—everyone was poor. Every boy did sneak onto the Ninth Avenue El; every boy stood at the centerfield fence at Yankee Stadium to wait for Jacob Rupert to open the gate and let all the kids in for free. My father never missed a game, he would add, when Grey Speed Chandler was pitching. He was proud of the scrambling and scraping he’d done, proud of having lived by his wits, surrounded by everyone else doing the same. In my father’s world, scams, especially elaborate, theatrical ones, were measures of a person’s mettle, the antithesis of a western handshake and a man’s word. The world of revolving charge accounts arranged for the sons of old western families at the Brown Palace bar or anywhere else was a world too easily won, and therefore, in my father’s mind, not worth acknowledging, let alone emulating. My mother did not share my father’s egalitarian nonchalance, nor did she find role-playing easy. She lived on a more schizophrenic edge, not only of Denver’s booms and busts, but also balancing the dualities and mores of shtetl life transplanted to a western American city one mile high, of her grandparents’ Hasidism and her mother’s orthodoxy pushed up against Denver cocky in its ability to have ridden out the crests of boom after boom—in gold, silver, water, in transportation,

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cattle, military contracts, oil, tourism. Denver had always been, as I saw it through my mother’s eyes, a town of sections, a city of ghettos, a place divided by the railroad tracks and the viaducts that transported people and products over them. Denver was a town cut in half by the South Platte River—immigrants west of the river (Italians, Jews, Irish, Japanese, Scandinavians, and later Hispanics, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians) almost to the red rock foothills; Anglos from downtown east into Capitol Hill; blacks who worked on the railroad and in the rendering plants in Brighton shoved up above City Park in Five Points. The spine of the Rockies jutted in the clear blue distance like jagged wolves’ teeth, and had they not loomed there in their magnificent fixity, Denver might have been any dusty, divided, high plateau town, sweltering in the summer then huddling against the wind, hail, and storms of winter. What my mother knew was immigrant West Denver, but a world much different from the immigrant New York my father had grown up in. The walls in her imaginary ghetto were much thicker. Jewish girls from the west side could ride the streetcar down West Colfax and cross the river to window shop downtown; they could even sightsee in the fine gentile neighborhoods of Capitol Hill, but they could not linger. Even if they’d wanted to, they did not venture into the grove of dadoed columns in the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel, because one could climb from one’s station only in small increments then. My mother’s sense of propriety required more than avoiding the Brown Palace Hotel. Her world, the world of an observant Ashkenazic Jew, was governed by sunset and sunrise, by the classification of kosher and treyf, Jew and Gentile, wellborn and riffraff, categories that covered every aspect of life from the holiest of holies to the finest gradations of filth. My father was not impressed with dadoed groves, and what he said he enjoyed about the Brown Palace Hotel was its checkered list of guests. Denver, he said, was a town “always trying to figure out what it was,” and the Brown Palace was no exception. Headquarters to President Eisenhower during his early presidential campaign, the hotel was also the favorite watering hole of the cowboy star Monte Montana, who rode his horse, Rex, into the lobby. In 1982 the hotel hosted a Black Angus cattle auction for charity (also in the lobby), and in 1985 one of its suites was graced by Marathon Hound, the greyhound equivalent of the racehorse Man-of-War, who did not stay at the hotel. My father

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used to say that the hotel had a unique ambiance peculiar to Denver. He refused to acknowledge prestige and privilege based only on dollars and inheritance and carried in his mind’s eye, along with the massive bulwark of the Brown Palace Hotel, an attitude that conveyed the certainty of material folly, though he longed for it. Even while he muttered Ladino curses under his breath when restaurant owners or my mother’s family upbraided him, said he didn’t care about pretension, and spent his life trying to figure out who he was, he shot craps and played the greyhounds to win my mother a diamond-studded pinkie ring and fill his closet with tailored, pin-striped suits. My father believed in the meritocracy spiced with dice, and he fancied his commandments read like a manifesto of human dignity, a Bill of Rights for the recognition of all labor. At home he said he practiced an earnest attempt not to be swayed or demeaned by the careless power and disdain of the moneyed, working the farthest end of the West’s grand ranching lifestyle. All the while, he kept sight of the Sephardim’s Golden Age. Involved in the most practical aspect of the cattle business, my father sold beef, beef transformed from snorting, mangy, fly-ridden cattle to cuts of palatable elegance that would grace both the finest western tables and the chuck wagons of the humble. His New York relatives called him Bennie the vaquero, New York cowboy in the wild West. In the flush days when my father worked with cattle, his brother-inlaw gave him complimentary tickets to the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo, the mother of all western rodeos. He took us, my little sister and me, one of the many years the Brown Palace Hotel bought the grand champion steer to serve up as choice cuts of beef in the San Marco Room. We paid homage to the grand champion in his cleanedout stall, fresh hay all around him. The heavy, sharp odors of manure and urine made us dizzy, and my father recounted, with uncharacteristic bitterness, his work at a Catskill dairy during the depression, mucking out the ditch in the milking parlor. Being removed from the barnyard end of the cattle business suited him much better. My father did not make us linger long in the stock area; we ran our hands along the lanolin backs of ewes and marveled at the close-up look at the underside of male animals. Among men wearing pointy-toed cowboy boots and Stetsons, my father wore a plaid sport coat, a Mason pin on

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his lapel, still a little of the New York flair in the way he sauntered with his hands in his pockets, sidestepping the manure piles with his very shiny loafers. He shook hands and offered men cigarettes everywhere we went; he showed us how to eat cotton candy without getting any in our hair. Much more than mere geography separated him from the pushcarts near his New York home on Rivington Avenue. I’d overheard him say to his brother, Solomon, that he’d never go back to New York, explained how, during the war, being stationed all over the country before he shipped out to China, North Africa, and South America had showed him other ways to live, in sprawling western towns, where the sky, at least then, was still clean. The arid edge of the high Colorado desert plateau was so full of sun. “Like Cádiz,” he’d said, “the home of our ancestors.” My Uncle Solomon laughed, because my father always looked so New York, not like a cowboy at all, always dapper in his sport coats and slacks, the cotton shirts my mother pressed, his swarthy skin and features—that Jimmy Durante nose—unlike anything anyone had seen galloping west on a horse from the high prairie. My father was unmoored, neither New Yorker nor denizen of one of the little boxes people put you in in Denver—he lived outside of both societies—in the gray area where he could step across the myriad lines people draw around themselves. Before the rodeo started, the house lights in the coliseum dimmed to starlike specks, and the spotlight trained on a young woman dressed in blue satin with sequins on her blouse and chaps. Her palomino tried to dance sideways in the arena, but she held it straight with the reins in one hand, the American flag on a long pole in the other. She circled the arena at a canter, dust kicking up from the beat of her horse’s hooves, the flag whipping and snapping, the stripes folded over into an insignificant smear behind her. The dust gave off a cool, musky odor that drifted up into the highest seats near the ceiling of the coliseum. The woman came back to the center and stopped, her sequins ricocheting the rainbow spectrum of light all through the crowd as we stood to say the Pledge of Allegiance. We were all in shadow, the entire coliseum illuminated by that one narrow column of light shining on the woman and her horse, even the American flag a little out of the spotlight. I looked up at my father to see if he was transfixed by the splendor of her

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horsemanship or the magnificent snap of the flag as she whipped it around the arena, her big bosom quivering slightly as she breathed heavily, her strong, round thighs gripping the horse. My father stood there cracking his knuckles one by one and chewing a few sticks of Doublemint gum. He was waiting for the formality of presenting the colors to end. He acknowledged the moment; he stood straight and at attention, even mumbled the Pledge of Allegiance along with everyone else, then he wanted to sit down and watch the show. He was not bedazzled. He was not even impressed, though afterward he bought my sister and me china replicas of palominos like the one the woman was riding, because, he said, he wanted his “little western girls to have horses too.” It was snowing when we left the rodeo, as it always does in January in Denver when the rodeo comes to town, the flakes so big you could see the individual crystal formations. There was a string of Yellow Cabs lined up at the curb waiting to take out-of-town guests to the Brown Palace Hotel, and he looked in each one until he found his friend Adrian so they could shoot the breeze for a few minutes before he took us home. I remember thinking how long ago it seemed my father had driven one of those things, how easily he seemed to have shifted into his new role, though this Bennie, Bennie the vaquero, was only two years old. We ate at almost all of the places my father sold his beef—char-burgers at the Tally Ho Lounge, where the waitresses all wore red fox-hunting blazers with white crepe ascots underneath and very short black skirts with fishnet stockings. We memorized the menu at the Sky Chef Restaurant when Stapleton Airport had only a few runways. The restaurant had big windows that looked out onto the tumbleweed airfield, jackrabbits and antelope straying onto the runways a problem in those days. The restaurant had tried to be elegant, though nothing like the San Marco Room at the Brown Palace Hotel. There was a grand piano, and the pianist sent around little white cards on a black tray for patrons to write in song requests he would play during the dinner hour. We were in the Sky Chef Restaurant the evening Ernest Hemingway shot himself, July 2, 1961. The pianist was playing “Mack the Knife,” my father’s request, when the receptionist walked over to the piano and whispered in the man’s ear. He stopped playing in the middle of the piece, lowered the lid over the keys, turned to us and said, “I have just learned that

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Ernest Hemingway shot himself today.” Then he left the room. His action shocked us. My father thought the man, “a tickler of ivories,” was being overly dramatic. He said public space had its own rules of behavior, though he didn’t use those words. Hemingway had been one of the few contemporary writers my father read, because several of his novels were set in Spain. My older sister lost her temper at my father’s attempt to lecture and got up from the table, but the rest of us just sat there, our good beef dinners, my father’s livelihood and ours, growing cold and leathery, while outside the window a pitiful little prop-plane taxied in. On the way home, my father wondered aloud about the desperation of such an act, though he had known men who had taken their own lives. His own life was still so full of promise; his back was straight, lungs clear. He didn’t condone suicide, he said. He couldn’t understand how a man could think one turn of fortune would be his last. We ate only once at the Brown Palace Hotel, during the summer of 1964 while my mother was in the hospital. We had just returned from a visit with his family in New York. That early evening it was very sunny in the San Marco Room, the table linen very white; we sat dead center in the room. Everything on the menu was à la carte, and everything was expensive. Men came from everywhere to shake my father’s hand: the maître d’, the manager, even the chef himself in his immaculate white uniform and toque. We’d had a very serious discussion on the way downtown about what we were going to order: lamb chops, not beef at all, not the family’s lifeblood. It was the season for lamb, the Basque shepherds had just brought their flocks down out of the Medicine Bow Mountains in Wyoming. Lamb had been the staple of celebration in his nona’s kitchen. We were not celebrating—my mother was in the hospital after all—but my mother hated lamb, especially the smell of it. When she cooked lamb chops for my father and us she would turn a grassy shade of green and have to lie down on the couch afterward, with a cool washcloth over her eyes and a heating pad on her stomach. She always burned the chops. So we all ordered lamb because she was not there to be offended by the smell and because we all loved it. It was succulent. Everything was succulent, the small new potatoes, the fresh parsley, the baby carrots, the French pastries with strawberries glistening like rubies, which the maître d’ carried to our table on a solid silver tray. Even the water in the heavy, cut-glass goblets was sweet and clear.

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Chapter Two The Tongue’s Delight

Neither of my parents liked to admit that their lives revolved around food. Though my mother scorned cooking as the bane of a housemaid, she relished her mother’s dishes and all of the festival pastries that became part of the shapely padding she wore around her hips—the honey cakes and pireshkes glazed in honey and dipped in poppy seeds served during Rosh Hashannah. On Sukkoth, my grandmother made a special tray of rolled cronson for my mother, her pampered, youngest daughter, the pastry filled with walnuts and cinnamon served in the sukkah, a clapboard lean-to built in my grandmother’s backyard commemorating the shacks ancient Jews erected while they wandered in the desert near Mount Sinai after Moses delivered the Ten Commandments. On Purim, my grandmother folded triangular hamantashen to replicate the shape of the hat the villain Haman wore, the pastry filled with pie-cherry jam. Even the flour sacks whose contents became my grandmother’s challah, kichel, and apple strudel my mother wore around her hips as a depression-era child, the sacks washed, bleached, washed again, then reconfigured as petticoats and bloomers. Both my mother’s paternal and maternal relatives had family and friends from the same eastern European shtetls transplanted through-

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out West Denver and into the foothills west of town, and my mother was the last beloved child of six. My great-grandfather had helped to found the first synagogue in Denver underneath the Fourteenth Street viaduct near the Platte River. By the time my mother was born, though the dairy her grandfather ran west of town was foundering, her family had established itself on the west side, and even though her father had done stints in the city jail for making gin during Prohibition, her family was stable, devoted, devout, determined that the children of my mother’s generation become American. There was always an abundance of food on their table, and the importance of that necessity and the recognition of luxury that abundant food represented was never undermined. If you were to walk by my mother’s childhood home on Newton Street on a Friday afternoon, where my grandmother lived until all her married children moved to a more fashionable part of town, you would smell chicken broth simmering on the stove and potato bubka, an unraised potato cake, browning in the oven for the Sabbath dinner, the bubka stored in the stove’s pie safe next to the pilot light so the family would have something warm to eat after shuel on Saturday, when the stove’s flames could not be kindled. My father’s childhood was not so gastronomically varied as my mother’s. Some days my father sat on the curb on Rivington Avenue, outside the tenement where my grandmother had died, and wolfed a pumpernickel bagel snatched from one of the pushcart vendors near his house. Some days he stole fruit. Some days he ate air salted with tears. I learned from watching my father pile his plate high with food, even when he wasn’t hungry, that it is impossible to sate the memory of childhood hunger. I’m not talking about the hunger of privilege, the anorexic urge for a Diet Coke to slake a self-imposed privation, an afternoon without a latte and biscotti, a missed bag of salted peanuts with the local microbrew. My father had stubs for lower teeth until he was forty-one years old and had enough money to cap them, legs that bowed as if he’d grown up on a horse, from an early childhood of stolen fruit, sugar cane, and scarlet fever. The curative fragrance of chicken broth had not wafted from his stepmother’s kitchen window on the Sabbath. There was no Sabbath observance in his house, only endless days of the kind of hunger orphans know. By the time my father was finally scooped up by his nona, who cared

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for him until he finished high school, he had learned to steal food, and for the rest of his life, his most important rituals, in addition to gambling, smoking, and reading the Rocky Mountain News, revolved around the very serious orchestration of ordering, buying, selling, serving, and eating food. The cattle business suited him just fine. How ironic that he had married a woman who hated to cook. For a few years in the early 1960s my father was a heavy man, a 250pound offensive guard enveloping the slender high school quarterback he had been, living in a precision grid of ranch-style homes in a Denver subdivision called Virginia Vale. When he floated in the club pool, his cloth swimming trunks billowed around him; a rhinoceros couldn’t have expressed more cool, weightless pleasure. He ate French strawberry tarts with lemon custard for dessert many nights a week, fried chicken from Denver Drumstick, lemon crème cake from Vollmer’s Bakery, strawberry milkshakes from McDonald’s, a novelty in those days. The schmear of cream cheese on his lox, tomato, and bagel sandwiches, with a slice of Spanish onion, was a quarter of an inch thick. His salami and eggs swam in ketchup. My father longed to be full and no food filled him. He had an ulcerous stomach and several surgeries to freeze the constant burn that plagued him. Even during this period of gluttonous plenty when he was young and customers ate beef without worries of cholesterol or mad cow disease, he felt the same emptiness in the pit of his stomach that had been his companion in early childhood, the same burn of acid where flour and yeast should have quelled that fire. Every time he sat down to eat, food-related memories accompanied him—a stolen egg he cracked and ate raw in an alley behind the pushcarts in New York; a nickel spent on fig bars instead of his subway ride home from school; a celebration evening of salted peanuts and beer drunk after his Army Air Corps transport plane flew through a hurricane between Puerto Rico and Trinidad as they made their way to wartime Georgetown, British Guiana. Even when he wasn’t eating, he created fantasies that did not quell his hunger from the meals his own father described, a waiter at New York’s Swing Club on 52nd Street in the 1920s. Between sets by Sarah Vaughn and Jimmy Lundsford, Jumpin’ Joe Williams, Billy Eckstein, my grandfather watched others eat London broil and chicken cordon bleu. After he cleared his patrons’ plates away, he emptied their unfinished glasses of bootlegged Napoleon

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brandy into his own bottle to imbibe later. He told my father recycled hooch made it easier to stretch the dollar per night he got in tips and the alcohol killed the patrons’ germs. My father practiced many of his food rituals away from home. Breakfast and lunch he ate with friends after briefly suffering my mother’s Cream of Wheat; he gladly traded her lumpy cereal for a chocolatecovered doughnut. Hot Italian sausage or pastrami on rye, neither on his “diet,” were his favorite lunchtime choices, or fresh tamales, sold from the back of a green Chevy hatchback, delivered to Platt Packing while he was wrapping and boxing his meat orders for the day. He chased lunch with a midafternoon sweet of spumoni in a double-dip cone, or a cherry Coke at Walgreen’s. My father did not indulge his Sephardic palate among my mother’s family. To be a Sephardi among my mother’s clan meant to be Latin, odd, dark, irreligious, sensuous, and lazy, all the traits that initially attracted my mother to my father. To be a Sephardi also meant to know languages other than Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, or Hebrew, to have known the movement of intense sun and to long for it during Denver’s sometimes-bitter winters, to know an entirely different staple and cuisine. It is no little thing to erode your mother tongue and sacrifice the tongue’s delight. What foods could you give up? Potato chips, Necco wafers, fudgecicles? Blood oranges, lychee nuts, kielbasa? Or how about the food that vanishes during Lent: licorice whips, mustard, kale, yellow squash, polenta? There was no gradual winnowing of my father’s native foods. All changes were as sudden as the flare-ups of my mother’s temper, maelstroms in her kitchen. Olive and sesame oil were too expensive, she claimed; they tasted heavy, rich, and earthy. She replaced them definitively with Mazola oil. Pita was not so common as to be sold at fastfood restaurants in 1961, and since my mother did not bake and my father was a passive man, the borekas de espinaka that had nourished him for breakfast in his nona’s kitchen—fresh pita bread, chopped spinach from Uncle Marco’s vegetable stand, eggs, feta, a pinch of salt— washed down with Turkish coffee thick as melted chocolate, all this was replaced first by Cream of Wheat, then by a chocolate doughnut and cup of Sanka. My mother had an aversion to all milk products after my sisters and I were weaned, but especially to the odor of sour milk, so

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feta—whether of cow, sheep, or goat, fresh in slabs and floating in brine or crumbled and dry as popcorn—was not allowed in her kitchen. Kraft American, in singles, individually wrapped, orange like no color in nature, was one of the three cheeses possible among cream and cottage cheese. Of the albondegas de prasa, which my father called keftikas, my mother distrusted leeks, so his nona’s slightly sharp and pungent meatballs browned in olive or sunflower oil were bound instead with Mazola oil and matzo meal and tasted just like cafeteria meatloaf. My mother’s family suspected that my father was a Catholic, or worse, a pagan. He was not bar mitzvahed; he couldn’t read Hebrew; he didn’t believe in God. My grandmother gave him not one, but two tallit, thinking that the sympathetic magic in the prayer shawls might rub off on my father. Neither did he believe in the evil eye or knocking on wood, though when he was older he often uttered Dio que te guadre, God protect, when we passed traffic accidents or when a child was playing alone in a park, or when he read war news in the paper. The in-laws’ primary evidence centered around the palate, because his palate didn’t resemble the palate of a child with ancestors from eastern Europe. He hated beets and parsnips. He had an aversion to chopped liver. He thought gefilte fish an abomination of nature. Challah left him cold, and he fled the house when my mother cooked up fees, boiled calves feet in its own brown aspic with a little pepper and chopped onions. Even so, he was happy to be fed, and with these exceptions, whatever my mother put in front of him, he ate. A few times my father tried to educate his family about the culinary customs associated with his heritage. He tried his gastronomic luck in my mother’s kitchen, once as she was preparing a batch of charoseth, a sweet conserve on the Passover Seder plate that represents mortar from the Pharaoh’s pyramids, mortar that hod-carrying Jewish slaves mixed during their ancient captivity in Egypt. Charoseth is prepared as a symbolic representative of the time of Jewish captivity, eaten during the Seder service. My grandmother’s charoseth, grated apples (with what my father called “a little knuckle meat” from my grandmother’s handheld grater), chopped walnuts, cinnamon, Mogen David wine, was gray and pulpy, mild-tasting, and runny—she used her childhood shtetl’s recipe. She was not renowned for her charoseth, but rather for the horseradish that accompanied it on the Seder plate, horseradish root wrested from

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the fires of Gehenna, mixed with grated beets, vinegar, and salt. Even looking at a bowl jar of horseradish, fresh from her garden, could bring tears to the eyes and beads of sweat to the temples. My father had never waxed sentimental about the Passover celebration before. But on this eve of Passover 1961, with his business blossoming, he felt he’d arrived at the moment he had dreamed of: American-born, veteran of World War II, self-employed, ranch-style house, blonde wife, three children. He described his nona’s charoseth, listed the ingredients, and convinced my mother to try to duplicate it. He said it was time to teach the family a few things about the folkways of the Sephardim. Rachael Crespi Selanikio’s charoseth was rich as sweetmeat. It was a distillation of the market in Salonica from the baskets of spice sellers, a gift of the wise grandmothers. All ingredients were chopped rather than grated, and they resembled gems, he said, pears, dates, yellow raisins, prunes, almonds, walnuts, pine nuts, flavored with cinnamon, cloves, fresh ginger root. My mother had cinnamon in her cupboard, and of course Mogen David wine, but for the ginger root, she called grocers all over Denver until Mrs. Yakamoto, the gardener’s wife, brought her some. My father tasted and tasted as the fragrance of his grandmother’s charoseth, the surrogate mortar from the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs, filled our kitchen with its sweet, spicy aroma. Its texture of uncut gems caught the light like facets, all the while he uttered “no, not yet,” and “yes, more!” as his childhood taste buds, sleeping all the years since his nona’s death, came briefly alive in my mother’s kitchen. No one except my father tasted that charoseth. After he left the house for Jerry’s Newsstand to buy a greyhound race form, my mother fretted about the charoseth, the foreign ginger, the coarse texture, the amber essence, the fragrance a little too much like an open-air market in a Mediterranean village on a summer day. She worried that there wouldn’t be enough for all my grandmother’s Passover guests, and so while he was out she added cup after cup of peeled and grated golden delicious apples until the dark, coarse, and mellifluous mix was more bland, pulpy, and runny than her mother’s. At the Seder table, there was a big show of my father’s Sephardic customs. During Yachatz, when the middle ceremonial matzo is broken into two pieces, my father described how, at his grandmother’s Seder, the middle matzo, called the afikomen, was put in a sack, thrown over the

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shoulder of the oldest son present at the table, and walked around the table of assembled guests, a symbol of Jews’ burden as slaves in Egypt. My uncles nodded indulgently but secretly passed the afikomen from hand to hand under the table in case my father had any crazy ideas about repeating the custom in my grandmother’s house. My father walked up behind my cousin, who sat with the thin cracker of dry and crumbling wheat, the afikomen, in his lap, and snatched it up. “Bennie . . . ,” my mother cautioned. “Bennie nothing,” my father said. He took the afikomen in his hand and walked to my grandmother’s spare bedroom to strip a pillowcase off a pillow. An auntie clicked her long, red lacquered nails on a water glass, tipped back in her chair to watch for his return. Standing in the hallway to the dining room, my father shoved the afikomen deep inside the case and gathered up the open end in his fist, puckering the white fabric. When he twirled the case above his head, he stood as if entranced, the sack spinning around and around, over the radio, whose dial was always tuned to Lawrence Welk. He spun it out over the dining room buffet that had all my grandmother’s charity fund tins for planting trees in Israel, spun it like a lasso over the aunties’ red and blonde dyed, teased-up hair. The afikomen sailed, up and up, over the China cabinet and the cut crystal punch bowl that all the daughters fought over even before my grandmother was cold and in the ground. Each pass of the afikomen above my father’s head signified the purity of the house and marked the week of Passover. The action wasn’t so outrageous as the aunties made it seem, for into my grandmother’s generation, live chickens had been caught and twirled around the house to sanctify the holiday and chase all the chomitz, leavened bread, from the corners of the kitchen. Then the chickens were slaughtered and boiled in a soup. “Este el pan de la afrisyon ke comyeron,” he read in Ladino. I closed my eyes and listened closely to the beautiful, soft, elided vowels and trills of my father’s mother tongue. I imagined aqueducts and vineyards, olive groves, the wind blowing through cypress trees, the scent of apricots and carobs, figs and nesperas, the heat of Africa creeping up the coast. “He sounds like the spics who wash the dishes in Bubbie’s kitchen,” my cousin said while he kicked my shins underneath the table. “He’s so stupid, he can’t even read Hebrew.”

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My father removed his glasses and wiped them, regarded my cousin, in silence. He put his hands on my cousin’s small shoulders and began to knead, seeking out the boy’s joints, using just enough pressure to cause discomfort without obvious pain. “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt,” he translated. “Let all who are hungry come and eat; let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover with us. Everyone knows,” he said, ad-libbing, patting my cousin too hard on his bony shoulder until the boy turned red, “the generosity of Jews toward one another.” My mother made a little peak in the white linen napkin in her lap. “Bennie,” she whispered, blushing to the roots of her hair, “What are you doing? Where’d you get this stuff?” “My sister Rosie sent me a Sephardic Haggadah last week.” He smiled. My mother didn’t. My uncle droned on to complete the service, reading quickly through the Hebrew until it was time, during the ritual for Moror, or eating bitter herbs, to take a shred of horseradish root and dip it into the charoseth, symbolically mixing history’s bitter past with the sweet, sweet present. “We’ve all been wai . . . ting,” my auntie sang, accenting the first part of the word, as though she were speaking to a table of deaf-mutes, “for this veeeery special recipe from our own Beeenji.” Everyone regarded the charoseth my mother had placed upon the table. My uncle sniffed it without tasting, the way he sniffed a raw cut of beef to see if it were fresh. One cousin said, “The color’s wrong,” and one auntie dabbed her finger into the bowl of runny apples that diluted all the almonds and raisins in the recipe. She touched her finger, daintily, to her tongue. “Mmm,” she said, “not bad.” She took another sample. “I taste the dates.” “Who knew from dates, in Russia,” my uncle said. “Dates were . . .” “Foreign,” my auntie said, shaking her finger, “a food for goyim.” She hesitated and tasted again. “But there’s still a little apple here. I can tell.” Her tongue flicked to the tip of her finger. “Even in this recipe, you’ve got to add an apple. Everyone knows it. Charoseth isn’t charoseth without an apple.” My father sighed. His new and exotic mortar was made to satisfy, even with its infinity of desert fruits and nuts, the very taste and texture of their anticipation. ♠♦♣♥

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My mother found the Greek recipes of my father’s nona incomprehensible or filled with the lamb she found intolerable. In consequence, he only ate his native foods and drank raki when he visited his sister Bettie in New York, or his brother, Solomon, in Las Vegas, and later, once or twice from my kitchen, where my husband cooked for him. My mother’s kitchen was not a place for culinary experimentation, but she did try one more time to please him. She asked what she could cook for him to make him happy. When he pronounced his ritual menu—avas and dolmas—my mother looked at him suspiciously, then with resolve, determined to claim her kitchen. When he explained what avas and dolmas were, beans and stuffed grape leaves, she said, “Oh, like cholnt and prakas,” the first mistake. Knowledge is a kind of approximation. Plato explained the paucity of proxy with his allegory of the cave and its chained denizens, but one can only branch out incrementally from experience, slowly, tentatively, cautiously. My mother held on to her few customs because she was stubborn, but also because whole governments, chancellors, kings, queens, tribes, cultures, and next-door neighbors had tried for more than two millennia to eradicate the very customs she clung to. In addition to being stubborn and parochial, she was not well traveled. She had no interest in the varieties of experience and food that she might enjoy outside her mental ghetto, aside from pizza, tacos, and crispy chow mein noodles. She did not understand that the culinary relationships between cholnt and avas are only generic. Cholnt and avas are both stews, both made with beans and fatty meat, both traditionally served warm on the Sabbath after a slow simmer the day before. My mother rarely served cholnt in our house because we did not like the canned Heinz vegetarian beans she substituted for my grandmother’s soaked limas, and we had enough fatty brisket throughout the week to clog a storm culvert let alone the arteries of our hearts. My mother did not like to keep the oven on for the requisite fourteen hours at the 250 degrees it required for the flavor and moisture of the brisket to slowly permeate the beans, so she baked it hotter, which turned the cubed potatoes in the mixture to paste and the entire contents of the cholnt pot to a mass of bubbled bronze more suitable for paving streets. Aside from her impatience to duplicate my grandmother’s slowly simmered, tender cholnt, my mother’s failed because she did not want to

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be reminded of, let alone replicate, the Sabbath gut bomb. My mother was provincial, but modern. We did not observe the strict Sabbath rules about not turning on stoves and lights, not traveling by car, though the rules might have kept us trimmer. We weren’t obliged to eat hot cholnt on Friday night, then leftover warm bean casseroles for lunch on Saturday. My nona’s avas were also served on Friday night, over rice, not Uncle Ben’s converted. My father had no recipe save the memory of his taste buds, but in retrospect, what he recalled was amazingly accurate for one who did not cook. When his nona left Salonica she said goodbye to all the right ingredients, including haricot beans; in her New York tenement she soaked fava beans instead since she could buy them cheaper in Little Italy. They were bigger. They took up more space in the stomach. His nona’s avas had olive oil and lamb, three garlic cloves per person, the green tinge in my mother’s face rising to the surface when my father called out the ingredients—olive oil, garlic, lamb. Of course, she used Heinz vegetarian beans and a slab of fatty brisket instead of lamb, baked it in a hot oven rather than simmered it for fourteen hours, and after my father scooped into that bubbly bronze brick on his melmac plate, he never asked for avas again. The trick of dolmas, his second request for a ritual feast, was using the right grape leaves and allowing for the preparation time. As far as my mother was concerned, eating well or with exotic range took too much time, and she left that responsibility to my grandmother or to chefs at all the little restaurants where she liked to dine. She kept my father’s books and looked after all of the old people in our family. She was militant about keeping her twenty-three-inch waist. She had no patience for prakas or dolmas or anything that couldn’t be removed from a can and heated to boiling on a stovetop. She has purchased every design of microwave since their invention. Even her salads were hasty, nasty affairs, head lettuce quickly rinsed and quartered like potatoes, served with a scoop of Miracle Whip next to it on the plate. Perhaps she delighted in the challenge of dolmas. She was trying then to save her marriage. My father patiently explained the ingredients for dolmas—browned ground meat (he’d given up on asking her to cook lamb), rice, pine nuts, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pepper, rolled inside grape leaves, and my mother went immediately to my grandmother to ask about making prakas. She didn’t take the intermediate step of explaining

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to my grandmother that she was going to make something like prakas, sweet and sour stuffed cabbage rolls, and my grandmother didn’t ask. My grandmother was relieved that my mother seemed finally to be taking an interest in cooking—according to my grandmother, one of the two true binding elements in a marriage, the other being frequent sex, especially on Shabbas eve, presumably with one’s marriage partner. My grandmother was not a believer in written recipes and cookbooks, and my mother inherited her distrust in the written equivalents for dishes she would never have been able to duplicate. My mother had no experience in how fundamental ingredients can be. Prakas are a labor-intensive, time-consuming dish as well, and the best rolls are made with fresh cabbage leaves that have been lightly brined, soaked in salt water overnight. The leaves are then well rinsed and steamed to soften them enough to roll, which is what my mother did with the pickled grape leaves because she couldn’t get them to unroll when she took them out of the jar. As I said, she hadn’t told my grandmother she’d be working with small, brittle grape leaves rather than broad, supple cabbage leaves, but even if she had, the ingredient and its tricky properties might have tested the culinary skills of even my veteran grandmother. Preserved grape leaves do not hold up well to steam. Within a minute, the leaves had transformed to pulp; within five minutes, they were stuck to the steamer plate like wet leaves to a sewer grate. There were six leaves left in the jar that my mother had not tried to steam, and the deli where my mother purchased them was in the Mayfair Shopping Center twenty minutes from our house. It closed at 5:30 p.m., and it was 5:15. My father was due home within the hour. Who could blame my mother for not loving the kitchen? Who could blame her for wanting to be out with my father on deliveries, holding down a job of her own, or gossiping with the aunties in Yiddish in my grandmother’s kitchen, rather than trying to roll pickled grape leaves in her kitchen? Who could blame her for not knowing roasted peanuts couldn’t be substituted for pine nuts? Who could blame her for preferring bowling or shopping or doing my father’s books, anything rather than working up messy disasters in her kitchen? She did try to use the six remaining leaves, but in her chagrin and haste, she did not rinse the brine from them, and because they were a little brittle, she had to use toothpicks to keep the leaves rolled. She was

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a veteran of browned beef hamburger, but the dolmas she made boasted little else—she was out of rice that day and so used matzo meal to bind the meat; cinnamon’s only role in her opinion was support for sweet noodle kugel, so she used ketchup for the seasoning. My father had forgotten about the beef stock with which his nona basted the dolmas to keep them moist, so when my mother baked them unbasted, with the toothpicks and the unrinsed brine on the leaves, the result resembled a badly rolled cigar that had been fired in a kiln and tasted faintly similar.

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Chapter Three When Quizzac Was Cherry

When you are driving east along the edge of the world, the high plains loom in all directions, filled with dust and occasional swathes of corn, timothy, and wheat, waterwheels wavy behind vectors of heat bouncing off the pavement. My father liked to drive here, in eastern Colorado, to the quarter horse track in Brush, where he watched all the new horses run before their owners brought them to race at the Centennial track in Denver. He believed in the flash and strength of horses’ flanks, in the skill of the small jockeys who guided them to victory. The slogans on Burma Shave signs broke the eighty-three-mile monotony along the highway outside of Fort Morgan with abbreviated fictions about characters called Ben and Anna, the unwelcome stubble of Ben’s beard spelled out mile by mile on signs with one, two, or three words per sign, “Ben / met Anna / made a hit / neglected beard / Ben-Anna split / Burma Shave.” The corny puns kept my father in good humor and my younger sister Renée and me diverted in the backseat until the more serious signs arrived on the dangerous, monotonous straightaway outside of Brush, where the white letters on squat signs became something bigger than diversion—eerie reminders of our mortality, our dependence on my father and his driving skills.

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The signs doled out warnings about high speeds, reminding us that the “Angels / who guard you / when you drive / usually / retire at 65 / Burma Shave.” After the last sign, all of the mirage water on the highway would be sucked up to heaven in a horrible rush of wings, even the silly Burma Shave refrain not enough to chase away the grim hazards of the highway. Whatever tension, fear, or misgiving was in the car because of those signs, it was replaced by the sight of the bleached-out town of Brush, looming in the distance like the Hollywood set of an old western. On many of those junkets, my parents sat silent in the front seat, no radio, no air-conditioning, just hostility between them. Though my mother is Irene, not Anna, my father was Benjamin, and so the “BenAnna split” sign had unnerving resonance as my sister and I watched our parents’ discord from the backseat. To keep my younger sister and me from interrupting the silence that coated the front seat like black ice, we had a game called Quizzac that my mother had purchased with books full of S & H Green Stamps dutifully pasted onto the pages after each of her visits to the grocery store. Quizzac was a compendium of facts presented as questions: What is the name of the earth’s tallest underwater mountain? Where do giant sea turtles lay their eggs? To what species do marsupials belong? A list of short answers, A through E, accompanied each question. The questions and answers were organized all around magnetized cardboard disks with a hole cut in the center of each disk. The disk was placed on a magnetic spindle the shape of a triangle with the pinnacle shorn. Once we read a question aloud and chose a response, the disk slid on a cardboard platform into the maw of Quizzac’s black face, which mysteriously spewed the correct answer out in a little red box recessed along the top edge of the game. Quizzac did not tell me the answers to the questions I longed to ask, like why my mother was not happy with Bennie the vaquero, or why my father, usually a pacific man, began a rant against Red-baiting every time we drove east out of town toward Brush. Each time we passed the sublime gilded image of Gautama Buddha, floating, it seemed, atop an emerald green velvet cushion in the window of Sarkisian’s Imports on Speer Boulevard, my father took up the torch for another maligned citizen he did not know. The store had been closed, and Sarkisian himself was in jail, my father said, for trading with the Red Chinese in

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violation of the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act. I was interested in the store only because of the gilded Buddha in the window, an icon more tangible than the holy, dark void inside the Arc of the Covenant that housed the Torah in our synagogue. The Buddha was a graven image of peace, beauty, and tranquility, the most exotic thing I had ever seen, growing up in a Denver still a few years away from its cataclysmic population boom. What Sarkisian had done wrong I could not tell, but the tone of my father’s invective said that whatever Sarkisian had done in order to vend the serenity of the Buddha and the mysterious teak and lacquered luxuries of the East, his crime did not merit his punishment, at least according to the system of justice my father had delineated, and which, I thought, he practiced. Why my father cared about that particular injustice was unclear to me then—he was not a Buddhist, nor did he traffic in exotic objects from any culture. The exchange set a dangerous precedent for all of us in the car, especially my father and me. Both of us were compelled by some secret Sarkisian and his business represented to assume roles—my father in another role as the chest-beating moralist, champion of imagined underdogs, and me as his docile audience—each role complete with postures, dialogue, and gratuitous silence, each role surrounded with the rightness of historical moment as backdrop. Even in 1961, or especially then, I adored my father, and his opinions and politics became my own, not because I could possibly know at age eight what was right or just, but because I took from him all the cues of his indignation, still unable to distinguish history from histrionics, unable to guess all the things he might be hiding, all the stories whose plots he alone arranged to heighten their dramatic impact. Sarkisian’s Imports, its Buddhas dusty, its rattan furniture dulled and cracked by the sun beating through uncovered windows, seemed pathetic and shabby rather than dangerous. The showroom’s empty driveway and the small, innocuous black sign in the corner of the window near the Buddha’s long, slender, meditative fingers explained Sarkisian’s absence with a simple, Burma Shave monosyllable: “Closed.” Like the elliptical fiction of Ben and Anna, there was nothing in the showroom window to belie the evidence of Sarkisian’s treachery, nothing in the surroundings particularly “Red.” Sarkisian’s exterior was wedged between Watson’s Memorial Stones and Purity Creamery. The

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former had a gaudy marble statue of the winged angel Gabriel lunging from a massive headstone out over Speer Boulevard, his muscular angel arms almost touching the row of Dutch elms along the banks of Cherry Creek. The latter was an old dairy outlet whose sign spelled “Purity” in black neon script that looked like ribbon. Buddha graced the angel, Gabriel, and “Purity” and all the traffic that sped by in perfect synchrony, though the Buddha’s serenity did not rub off on my father while he ranted in the car. The sight of the “Closed” sign in Sarkisian’s window was a catalyst for my father’s ire at Joseph McCarthy, who was bent, my father explained, on redefining and identifying all our enemies, real and imagined, into two neat camps: Communist and Free. The sign sparked my father’s recitation, this time not of the Golden Age of the Sephardim in Spain, but of the frenzied paranoia that absorbed the country in the years around the date of my birth in the early 1950s. Though I could not then fathom the meaning or impact of McCarthyism or how it had affected my father’s life, I could see the dust motes gathering in the nap on the emerald velvet cushion of the Buddha in Sarkisian’s window. How wrong it was, I thought, that Sarkisian should be absented from his family merely for wanting to vend Buddhas like the one in the window of his store. How honorable my father seemed for wanting to defend another family man. Quizzac did not ask questions about Joseph McCarthy, but the Sarkisian rant inevitably brought forth McCarthy’s name, “McCarthy” hissed the way Haman’s name was defamed in the Megillah during the celebration of Purim, with my father adding an odd caveat at the end of his recitation. He would shake his head, flick a long stream of sagging ash off the end of his Camel cigarette, and curl the upper left side of his lip when he reminded us that McCarthy “died of a broken heart, drowned,” he added, “in a gutter filled with his own bile.” We understood my father’s drama to mean McCarthy’s end was his just desert, rather than an epitaph my father tacked on to evoke our sympathy. In those days of early childhood, language was a delicious, undulating sea with literal and figurative islands, filled with the soft vowels of Ladino and the more gutteral tones of my mother’s Yiddish, and so Reds (what a Red Chinese might possibly be), gutters, and broken hearts formed a triad of complexity the solution to which Quizzac did not deliver. No matter how I combed each disk, Quizzac did not offer

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up an explanation for Reds, though that was what my mother called me (in the singular) in the summertime, and what strange, rude men called my sisters and me (in the plural—“Hey, Reds!”) when we walked down Sixteenth Street on summer afternoons with our unbraided hair blowing in the breeze. Quizzac did not offer up antonyms for Reds, pinkos, or communist sympathizers, nor did it define democracy or say if democracy meant that everyone would buy their red pedal pushers at Sell-O, as my mother did. I spent countless hours in the car on the way to Brush asking Quizzac to divulge answers, and more hours alone in the basement with Quizzac, hiding my ubiquitous summer sunburn from the milehigh sun: What is the capital of Rhodesia? Who was the Prime Minister of England during World War II? For what purpose was the Eiffel Tower erected? So many hours, in fact, that Quizzac’s magnetic core began to go awry. By the time I was eleven, in 1964, the Red Scare in the U.S. military, in the media, and in the performing arts—with all the accompanying dirges like “Who Promoted Peress” and the refrain “Who was his Secret Master?”—were replaced by the Red Scare in Southeast Asia. I thought my father fixated on all of Roy Cohn’s so-called facts gathered for Senator McCarthy, especially the facts on Irving Peress, the “Pink Dentist,” because Irving Peress, my father had assumed, was a Sephardic Jew like him. The assumptions and accusations about Peress’s loyalties and allegiance reminded my father of all the other accusations and inquisitions meted out against the Jews, one recent, in the Holocaust, one with a false climax over five hundred years old, at the end of the Spanish Inquisition. Both were fed by fear and frenzy, fictions transformed into the grim facts of history. Quizzac could not explain how my father made a psychological connection between Sarkisian, Peress, and McCarthy. It could not explain why my mother, who had loved to go out dancing with my father, began to file her nails on Saturday evenings in the basement office where she kept my father’s business records. Even worse, Quizzac began to give me wrong answers. I knew the answers were wrong because I had memorized all the right ones, so that when my sister Renée and I played the game, I would always win. What was it that led me to believe the first set of answers, when Quizzac was cherry, were the correct answers?

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I had no reason to doubt the veracity of Quizzac. The family (except for my father), believed in the omnipotence of God and Quizzac. We had faith. We knew God—we kept kosher. Certainty was our birthright, even as conspiracy theories built like the summer thunderheads east of town, words and worries like the massive clouds that whirled from the Rockies out over Denver and on to the plains farther east than Brush even, then spun back in close to the mountains to gather force and explode. Quizzac did not ask why Salisbury (Harare) was the capitol of Rhodesia or why Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was ruled by whites. Quizzac did not ask who had been a Red in the thirties, because, as far as it was concerned, red was only a primary color used to highlight the right answer in Quizzac’s maw. Besides, geography and idealism were neatly delineated on its disks like the thick lines on a political map. Quizzac did not acknowledge the existence of the Soviet Union. It was not interested in nationalism, patriotism, or imperialism, or so it claimed. But the overt questions on Quizzac’s innocent disks belied ideas about “important” facts, “real” facts, in the same way a book I loved as a child, The Epic of Man, was really only the epic of skin-clad Europeans, neither Sephardim nor Ashkenazim, who “evolved” to build resplendent cities of quarried stone, magnificent cathedrals with domes covered in gold leaf, great meeting halls with dadoed pillars— all of it achieved with the labor and servitude of lesser individuals whose tribal histories were not chronicled in The Epic of Man’s large, glossy pages. Despite these flaws of omission, I loved Quizzac. I loved the way the yellow arrow that pointed to the correct answer would equivocate, slip between letters, fooling my sister and me into the veracity of our random responses for all the delicious seconds we could have been right. The box was black with gold-and-red lettering, a cardboard version of the lacquerware Sarkisian sold, and the utilitarian lid to Quizzac once crushed a very large wild bee I had mistaken for one of Barbie’s wigs during one of our trips to Brush. My father had no interest in Quizzac. Even though my sister and I thought Quizzac was teaching us to understand the world we were inheriting from our parents, my father thought the questions random and superficial. Though he was a master of numbers and of dates, he preferred data about quarter horses and baseball and confirmation

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from the indisputable stopwatch. Fuller than any scrapbook of my childhood, his race forms from Brush carried annotations in two colors of ink: black and blue, real times in blue ink, notes on each horse’s form, start, gait, and its performance on a wet or dry track; black ink for a horse’s endurance and burst of speed to the finish. He printed his letters in a neat hand, e’s like backward threes, a notation he had used in radio school during the war. On the inside cover to the race form he recorded the track conditions and wind velocity, but the “science” of all the factual records my father kept was offset by my mother’s always betting the birth dates, ages, anniversaries, and yortzeits of the family, so that his science of numbers overlapped kabbalisticly with faith. Each of them tried to keep in check the random possibility of event and hope and dream. Each acknowledged that fact and chaos exist simultaneously, that Burma Shave signs were only advertisements, knock on wood, that their marriage and their family amounted to more than just the posturing of dreamers, and needed tending, daily.

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Chapter Four Rubes in New York

In addition to the cultural education he thought to give my mother, me, and my two sisters about our heritage as Sephardim, my father took us to New York in 1964, the place of his birth, to see the spectacle of the World’s Fair. We met the New York family and attended a wedding. More important, we proved to his skeptical New York family that Bennie the vaquero really did have a life, a “fortune,” and a family in the Wild West—in that wasteland far beyond the Hudson River—beyond the Mississippi and Missouri, just a little south of the wide, shallow, and sometimes treacherous South Platte River. My sisters and I were not accustomed to the rhythms of the tourist, connoisseurs not of marble sculpture but of plaster art, of Tom (a cat) and Jerry (a mouse), cartoon characters colored with tempera paint on plaster-of-Paris forms we purchased at arts and craft camps in the summer. The curio shelf in the living room displayed our porcelain palomino stallions from the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo, the sum total of our livestock, and the busts of two Nubian women, also plaster casts, sat on the coffee table near my mother’s split-leaf philodendron. A plaster-cast rococo fountain painted by an auntie graced the wall above the toilet in the basement, green-hued nudes frolicking

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in a flowered glen on the fluted base, like a Grecian urn decorated during an LSD excursion. Catholic religious art was outside our sphere, and before the family’s trip to New York, we had no understanding of what any kind of pilgrimage, either to New York, or Spain, might conjure or teach us about our father. Just as we were not connoisseurs of religious art, neither did we understand travel’s metaphor for a journey of the spirit. The farthest my parents had previously ventured with us was eighty-three miles due east from Denver, to Brush; sixty-seven miles south to Colorado Springs, for my arthritic grandmother to drink the sulfurous mineral water from Manitou; and once, as a family, to Las Vegas, when my father’s luck with blackjack and roulette was hot. For an understanding of our American sense of short-lived antiquity, my mother led us through the maze of gravestones and monoliths in Rose Hill Cemetery on the edge of Denver, where the oldest Jewish stones dated from the early 1890s. None of these excursions produced revelations, epiphanies, or responses out of character. My mother was mostly silent or fretted over money, gossip, or the infinity of imagined slights against her, while my father was mostly eager to stretch his legs and eat. We did not declaim our faith on these excursions—my mother kissed the mezuzah in the doorway before we left the house as a gesture for protection from the Divine. We drove; ate lunch at drive-ins that weren’t kosher; walked around until the gnats, flies, and mosquitoes drove my father crazy; and then we turned around and drove back home again. So we were out of our depth as we stood in the hot summer sun at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, waiting with hundreds of others to see Michelangelo’s Pietà. Standing in the long, serpentine line that snaked to the door was itself an education, for we were rubes from Denver, where the longest lines formed waiting for the roller coaster rides at Elich Gardens. We were denizens of a city a little smaller than early medieval Córdoba, where the great philosopher and rabbi Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides, had lived, with a few tall buildings downtown, libraries, public fountains and pools to celebrate, as Córdoba did, the miracle of water in the desert. Our city had no lines, no crowds, but it did have occasional cattle auctions in the downtown lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel, sometimes even a stray cowboy on a horse clopping up West Colfax near the capitol. My father had a joke with his New

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York relatives that Denver rolled its sidewalks up at ten p.m. (their time), to which he would always reply, “Ten p.m.! Dio guadre! Make that six!” The world of my childhood was not one of convivencia, convergence, a term used to describe the relative harmony between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain before the last Inquisition. “Worldly,” interpreted by my mother, meant sometimes we were allowed to play with other Jewish children not our cousins. As for mingling with Gentiles, it wasn’t done, except in passing in the market. We could not look on crucifixes directly, lest, my mother feared, our eyeballs peel, our eardrums pop, or our tongues roll back in our throats to strangle us. Just as a necklace with a crucifix was out of bounds, so were the icons of the Church sprinkled more casually throughout the neighborhood. The garden statues of Saint Francis, Mary blessing daisies or offering outstretched palms filled with water in them to entice the hummingbirds, the neon Cross of the Rockies visible in the foothills due west from our patio—all required our averted eyes. How then, had my father maneuvered my mother into viewing the Pietà in the World’s Fair Vatican Pavilion? The Pietà was displayed in a dim chamber, surrounded by velvet drapes the deep blue color of sapphires. The shadows bleeding from the velvet cast a pale blue hue onto the marble statue, Mary’s garment color in religious art. The folds of her marble robes absorbed the color from the drapes and lent the stone an almost translucent quality, like that of delicate skin over bluish veins. We shuffled our feet and tried to ignore our mother’s gasp, her gulp of horror, then her kineahora, keinahora, keinahora, as she spit discreetly over her shoulders in an effort to ward off the evil eye seeking her out, she was certain, for looking at a graven image of Jesus, cut down from the Cross, outstretched in the arms of his grieving mother. Here she was, Lucky-Life Irene, voluntarily gazing on an idol. Not only gazing, but she had stood in line with scores of Gentiles, and in New York, the hub of the secular universe, while she tried to act the part of obedient wife, tried to act eager to understand the interests and folkways of her spouse. But, oy, a statue of Mary holding Jesus! At home, it was all my mother could do to summon up the gumption to visit sick relatives lodged at St. Joseph’s Hospital, because, she said, the looming statue of Jesus in the lobby, clasping his bleeding heart to the outside of his chest cavity gave her

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the creeps, not to mention the crucifix affixed to the wall above every bed in the hospital. Had my father meant to undermine my mother’s superstitions? Pit his will against hers as he had when he asked her to try to cook his ritual feasts? Could he? I glanced over at my father to see if he had been struck blind or covered in leprous sores. His hand rested lightly on the silver rail erected to keep viewers well beyond the reach of the sculpture. He was smiling. When I caught his eye, he bent his elbow, raised his right hand halfway to his shoulder, and shook his outstretched hand, the same gesture he made when my mother walked into the living room in her formfitting, low-cut gold lamé gown, ready to go out dancing with him. Convinced Catholicism was not the handiwork of dybbuks, neither did my father sentimentalize the anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical of 1964, after the Second Vatican Council earlier that year, exonerating the Jews for killing Christ, made my father livid in its centuries-old presumption of Jewish guilt. That rage was not present as he viewed the sculpture. He had wanted to see the Pietà. It was a famous piece of art. “The most famous,” he said. “Some people talk through art.” He knew it was not likely that he would get to Rome to see the Pietà, even though in 1964 the world seemed to be his. My father took his hanky from his pocket, removed his glasses, and wiped the lenses clean of oil and dust. He looked through them to inspect his work, glanced at my mother with her red, pursed lips, her kineahoras still trying to block the evil eye: kineahora, please don’t crash the plane; kineahora, I’m just looking at this graven image; kineahora, I don’t mean it; kineahora, keep my family safe; kineahora, please don’t let the tumors grow. My father went back to wiping his clean lenses cleaner. He did this twice more, buying time. He looked at the sculpture again. He ran his hand over the already dark stubble on his jaw. He squinted at my mother but made no comment. Arms folded across her chest, she clenched her fists. All she needed in them were damascene stilettos. Her body language made it clear that Catholic themes in art were not the proper subjects for her Jewish daughters. Any emotion my father had absorbed from viewing the sculpture, his secular, human connections to another parent’s outpouring of grief, he kept to himself. The exchange added heft to their building turmoil, as the day before my father had taken us to Rivington Avenue to stand in the molecular

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space where he was born. I had hopped out of the taxi with him, expecting to see a corner grocery like Mildred’s Kosher Deli on the corner of Newton Street, where my bubba lived in Denver, sniffed the air for the scent of bismarks and éclairs wafting from the opened doorway. My father threw his arms wide open to embrace his kin, but when I looked again, all I saw was rebar and broken concrete in an empty lot. He didn’t seem to see the rubble or smell the gassy fumes. In his ears, the deafening sound of jackhammers pounding concrete everywhere sounded like children playing. He blew a kiss to his beautiful, invisible young mother in her high-button shoes, his little sister Belisa in a cart pulled by a goat, trying to sit still to have her picture taken. He tapped on the window of the cab, but my mother sat rigid in the backseat, shielding her face from the hot sun with her hand cupped like a visor, and refused to move. I looked from my father to my mother, each of them asking for a demonstration of allegiance, but what kind? And to whom? Or what? Did my mother really think her preeminent homeland, Denver, was being challenged by looking at an empty lot flanked by tall buildings, with one phone booth, inoperative, as the only adorning fixture? Was her faith being challenged by viewing the Pietà? And was my father’s interest in Italian religious art what my mother meant when she called him “so Continental?” I was at a loss, too old to have a tantrum to change the tense dynamic of the outing, too young to have perfected the womanly art of pouting for attention, but clearly aware that something different was being required of me, by both my parents. My father put his hanky back in his pocket and offered us sticks of gum. My mother held her palm out and said, “no.” The man behind us grew restive and wanted us to move. “So,” he said, “this is it? The world’s most famous statue? For all that waiting in the heat?” and we walked back outside into the sun. My mother was about to speak, chide, maybe even scold, but my father turned his back on her and walked over to a vending machine. For a minute, the bright light made him, and everything around him, disappear. When he solidified again, he was plugging the vending machine with quarters. He bought my little sister and me packets of coins and currency in small denominations from Belgium, Chad, and Costa Rica. ♠♦♣♥

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My cousin Jackie’s wedding was something different from the standard Ashkenazic fare, a Sephardic wedding with customs we had never seen, had never considered, and therefore did not regard as really “Jewish.” The wedding was in the mythic homeland of my father, not Cádiz in the Old World, but New York in the New, a place of rude people, hustlers, and tall buildings, where everyone lived in too tight spaces and moved in a frenzy, heedless of the rising sun or the darkened sky. Jackie was Aunt Bettie’s oldest son, my father’s first nephew to wed. We were my cowboy father’s redheaded and blonde, fair, and freckled children, my mother’s Ashkenazic brood. At Jackie’s wedding there were cousins and tantes, aunts we did not know we had, great-uncles who could Twist and pinched every woman’s bottom as though it were his pillow to fluff and shape, a whole synagogue of people who talked and gestured with their hands and looked just like my father—dark and wavy-haired. The Denver cousins didn’t attend the bride, and the groom was likewise served by foreign ushers. We didn’t learn—or care—how much the bridesmaids’ dresses cost. At cousin Jackie’s wedding, the women weren’t cloistered in the synagogue in a little room behind a curtain and a pane of glass. At this wedding, there were bare arms and décolletage, a smiling, clean-shaven rabbi with wire-rim glasses like John Lennon’s. And there was Lenny, our dark Apollo in tuxedo, our cousin a dead ringer for Sal Mineo, the actor who had led brave kibbutzniks across the Negev to help Israel become a nation in Exodus, Hollywood’s rendition of one chapter of our tribal history. How that usher Lenny moved his hips, Diamante’s arm in his, our great-auntie seated first in the synagogue filling up with guests. The music was not the light strains of Mendelssohn or a klezmer clarinet. And when Lenny unhooked Diamante’s arm from his, she grabbed his head and kissed him, left temple, right temple, then a frank smack on his lips, a round of “Dio! Oy!” and, “Querido mío!” spilling from her round, red-painted mouth. Lenny waved his arms above his head and snapped his fingers as Diamante clipped a gardenia from her wrist corsage, pinching it with her long, red nails, and placed it behind Lenny’s ear, white petals with their veins of pink against his skin. He stopped her hand and brought the flower back to gnash the stem between his teeth, then he bowed and spun away, going up and down the aisle until

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all the guests were seated. Lenny climbed the bimah, stood still on the platform, and Jackie marched in, enter bride Elaine. Diamante, in a stage whisper loud enough for all to hear, said that Lenny’s body fit better in that tuxedo “than a mold of melted wax.” Was this sensual display of Lenny’s the heritage my father wanted us to embrace, this lavish alegría de vivir, this joy, along with the Muslim conquest of Visigoths in medieval, southern Spain? There was Hebrew and a chuppa at cousin Jackie’s wedding, the heavy scent of lilies and gardenias into the fifth row, where we sat. Like my father, Jackie married an Ashkenazic woman, but in this next generation, the families of the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim had learned how to integrate their customs to honor both branches of the faith. Jackie stomped and broke a glass that had been draped in his best man’s hanky, symbol of the destruction of the Second Temple and the long Diaspora of the Jewish people, a ritual my own parents had done without in Reno. The couple exchanged their rings, and the ushers’ yelps followed the wedding kiss, Lenny’s loudest. At the wedding feast, keftikas and espinaga graced the banquet tables alongside cabbage rolls and brisket; moussaka, avgolemono—chicken soup with . . . lemon!? There was pita cut in semicircles on platters near the challah, and when the wedding cake was cut, there was Lenny, licking frosting from his girlfriend’s fingers. The band began to play, and Lenny leapt onto the table. He cast the plates aside, and a clarinetist took up my cousin’s cue. Between each sweet and high-pitched note, Lenny bumped his hips against thin air and rocked his pelvis back and forth. My father and his brother, Sol, began to clap, my father happy, swaying, with ready handshakes, and he cupped my mother’s elbow in his palm, as he had done when he escorted her out the door to dance with friends downtown. She pushed his hand away. He looked around quickly to see if anyone had witnessed my mother’s dismissal, and I looked away, but not before I caught a glimpse of my father, gazing at Lenny the way a much older man looks at youth, with longing for a sensual life he still considered his. Lenny unhooked the black elastic band of his bow tie and twirled it like a lasso above his head, cowboy style for us, his western cousins, then tossed it toward the champagne glass his girlfriend held up for him to reach. The bow tie missed its mark. My mother frowned, but

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my father licked his lips and toasted everyone, “Salud! L’chiam!” the wedding couple, his sister, his brother, all the relatives, my mother, his little girls, the brittle tinder of his youth coming back alive with flesh and blood. “Salud!” my father shouted once again, “Salud, salud!” louder than he had ever yelled at my mother to stop berating Bennie-get-ajob. He stretched his glass toward Lenny and all his cousins in the hall. “Salud!” Lenny yelled, with the fervor of a war cry. He linked arms with his girlfriend, poured champagne into her palm, and to applause, licked the bubbles from her hand. Before anyone could see, his cummerbund was on the ground, his shirt undone, his clothes crumbled in a ball. Lenny’s chest gleamed like the stripe of black satin on the seam of his tuxedo trousers. Uncle Isaac shouted, “Lenny, that’s enough!” and Lenny, obedient, barely, jumped down from the table, grabbed my Auntie Jess around the waist, who grabbed her cousin Al, who grabbed his cousin Esther, and so on, as the conga line was formed. My father reached out again to my mother, but she brushed his hands away from her waist and then her shoulders and stepped back from everyone. He paused, considering whether to stay with her or join the line, but Lenny’s urging, “Benji! This is home!” turned him toward the dancers. The clarinetist joined his fellow on the trumpet, Lenny’s striptease bump and grind smoothed over with fuller strains. Esther grabbed Allegra, and she grabbed Marco, Marco grabbed my older sister, Sheila, and at the end of the conga line, Renée, I, and all the little cousins in blue taffeta and black patent leather were jostled like a string of children playing crack-the-whip. Those women who didn’t join it clapped the conga forward, each reveler reaching for the sweaty outline of Lenny’s rounded shoulders or wishing she could catch the beads of moisture from his brow in the shallow cup made by her outstretched palm. The conga snake looked bloated, like a python sated on veal, but moved more deftly. It circled around the bride and groom, and when it was about to leave the hall to pick up revelers at the Puerto Rican wedding in the banquet hall next door, my mother snatched Renée and me back inside. Our room grew quiet, after the aunties voiced their mock disgust for Lenny’s dance behind hands that muffled laughs. My mother fiddled with her pearl necklace, winding it tighter and tighter around her neck. Then the band struck “Twist and Shout,” and Uncle Isaac took my little sister by the hand to “show that Lenny who was who.”

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The conga line returned, drenched with rain and covered with confetti, each segment of the snake attached one-handed—the other held a full glass of champagne. The tantes tried to take the booze away from children at the tail, but the snake lunged and circled around the bride and groom; dancers drained their goblets and shattered all the glasses. The snake’s head broke away, first Lenny, then Jackie’s middle brother, Elliott, joined him, hoisted the bride in her chair high up on their shoulders, the wedding queen. Sol and my father, Bennie, hoisted Jackie, their oldest nephew, in his chair, taunted Lenny with their sudden burst of prowess until tante Diamante shouted “Dios mío! You’ll bust a gasket,” and so the groom was passed to younger shoulders. The younger wedding guests danced around the newlyweds in the circle; the old ones leaned on the banquet tables or clapped with their knuckles on the tables. The bride and groom were lowered, and the band picked up notes from the klezmer saxophone, the musical cue for the bride to join the ring of spectators while her new husband, Jackie, squatted, crossed his arms and held them straight in front to dance the Slavic kazachoc, to honor his in-laws’ customs and his Ashkenazic bride. All the young men joined him in the dancing contest, veterans of these weddings, but my father stood, dejected, and pointed to his knees, which meant that in the dance’s demanding, crouched position, if he stuck out one leg and tried to bounce his torso while balancing on the other bent leg—there’d be a crumpled Bennie on the floor. When Lenny took his kazachoc turn, which my mother’s people called kazatzkah, he was still bare-chested, and his crouch was low and springy like a predatory cat’s. Arms folded and held perpendicular from his chest, he kicked each leg in turn, leapt high into the air, landed in a crouch again, then balanced sideways on one palm and the outside of one foot. The guests increased the tempo of their clapping, and Lenny balanced on one arm, bent and thrust his legs, then quickly rolled to test the other arm. Our last view of Lenny before we said goodbye to all those New York cousins was of him half-nude, running in a circle, tante Diamante’s stolen mink around him like a loincloth, her cane held high above his head, while she squealed at him to give her back her mink. The band switched back to rhythm, and two cousins held the ends of Diamante’s cane so Lenny could limbo underneath it. Uncle Isaac found a longer

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stick, Auntie Jessie screamed, “God! I love that boy!” and the tired guests got into line to compete against Lenny’s fluid limbs, bent backward, his long hair brushing the ballroom floor behind him as he crabwalked underneath a stick held eleven inches off the ground. When my mother told her sisters about Lenny and the New York wedding, all of them sitting around the table, noshing on kichels and sipping glasses of seltzer on the Sabbath afternoon, all that flesh and dancing had impressed her. I knew this because the juicy particulars— Lenny’s glistening, bare torso, his firm and springy thighs, his striptease—were described in the Yiddish phrases she switched to when the topics of the aunties’ conversations turned to carnal matters. I knew this because the hollow at the base of her throat turned red, the indicator of aunties’ randy topics. She began her disquisition in a happy mood, but by the time she finished, her lips were puckered and she pulled, distracted, at the fine, penciled line of her brows. Their sentences reduced to whispered monosyllables, gutturals and dirty slurs, then my mother pushed her chair back from the kitchen table, looked wildly around the room she had seen ten thousand times, and said she had to go. Lenny reminded her of what she had loved about my younger, tawny father, though after we returned to Denver from New York, she would barely speak to him. She grew so cold their customary greeting kiss on his return from work disappeared, then embraces, replaced by her maniacal scrubbing of walls and ceilings. All her passion was channeled into moving the refrigerator weekly in order to mop behind it, seeking out dust and dirt as though they were the source of all pollution, all confusion, the seeds of all the withered blooms of tolerance and love. Though it was summer, and she had liked to drive out into the country with my father, my younger sister, and me, she now turned down the excursions to the sweet, alfalfa-scented night and sat in her basement office, pulling and pulling the manual arm of the old adding machine on her office desk, long after all the sums in the columns of neat numbers were tallied. She threw away my father’s embraces with the daily papers, turned and pushed my father’s hands away, his lips, his awkward, tender words, and in their place ironed the wrinkles even from their sheets, hummed while he spoke to her, as if she were trying to exorcize any molecules of Lenny, New York, the Sephardic family of my father.

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That summer, 1964, is when my father began his slow, deliberate, deceptive exit from our lives, when he began, in earnest, to embrace mirages made so famous by Cervantes, while he pursued what he thought he had lost by trying, all the years he did try, to placate my mother, to play her husband, her helpmate, her fool. Our photos of cousin Jackie’s wedding developed scratched and grainy. We never put them in a photo album. In one, my little sister, Renée, Twists with Uncle Isaac, but she looks like an arthritic elf, and his legs are bandy as an ape’s. We can’t hear the mock-serious inflection in his “Lenny, that’s enough!” There are photos of the wedding party and one of Jackie and Elaine as they are carried in their “thrones,” the wedding king and queen, atop the shoulders of the male members of the wedding. We got a shot of Lenny’s back as he led the conga line out of our banquet hall and into the street, but he’s just a smudge of caramel-colored flesh. If you did not know that Lenny was in the background near the door, you’d think someone took a photo of an empty bottle of champagne, with cake crumbs in the foreground. My father kept the doings of his New York family private after that trip to New York. He spoke to them in Spanish and Ladino, and after Jackie’s wedding, visited them without us. We heard no news of Lenny after Jackie’s wedding. Jackie’s youngest brother, Norman, came to visit us the next June, in Colorado, but when we took Norman to the foothills of the Rockies, he was terrified of cliffs, and when we didn’t, he slept all day. We worried that the mile-high air was suffocating him, and the arid wind dried him like a Cheeto. We took him to ride horses along the bridal path above Central City, but the horse he chose reared up when Norman settled himself in the saddle, tried to bite his foot before he put it through the stirrup. When that didn’t deter Norman from his cowboy outing, the horse took a few lazy steps out of the corral then reared and cantered back, leaving everyone in stitches except for cousin Norman, who broke his glasses and cried that we were trying to kill him with our western ways. The smells from the Denver stockyards and rendering plants made him vomit. He told my father he had never liked the taste of beef and considered those who did barbaric. We heard him tell his mother on the phone, just as my father joked, that in Denver the sidewalks rolled up at six p.m., not ten, as she

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had promised. No other New York cousins came to visit after Norman. What the cousins were up to we seldom heard until fighting began to escalate in Vietnam.

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There are reasons for a child’s fitful slumber other than the random apparition. The silhouette of a tall, thin man passed in front of my bedroom window like clockwork after midnight and again at dawn throughout my childhood, its punctuality so stunning I was unable to say anything to my mother or my father about the shadow or its imagined menace. Menace was everywhere during those ’60s shadow years— in the abattoir a butcher lost his mind and killed his fellows instead of cows; in the stockyards a horse threw a cowboy, and he was trampled; the woman who kept my uncle’s books hanged herself; someone was shot on Sixteenth Street downtown. Random burglaries were on the rise; yellow Helping Hands pasted in the windows informed little girls and boys where they could seek refuge from pedophiles, though we didn’t know what, exactly, pedophiles were. My father showed my older sister how to wield a billy club he had made her from a lead pipe with a duct tape grip, as she worked the late shift on weekends at a Safeway grocery store near Happy Canyon Road. Menace, I thought, was external, even if the aunties sometimes shrieked about it at my grandmother’s kitchen table. They shrieked after their Yiddish expletives, after narrations about the defilement of x or y, shrieked after weighing

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the devotion of their daughters-in-law against their own perfection. They shrieked out the various names of women, revealing who was hooked on diet pills or barbiturates, or whose nose job looked the most porcine. Because I did not fully understand the nature or the scope of menace, I fantasized about making our house burglar-proof, bombproof, sunproof, windproof, time-proof, and cold-resistant. We had cupboards filled with canned vegetables and cream of mushroom soup in the basement to save us. We had shelves of Heinz vegetarian beans and a freezer full of kosher brisket. With this useless surplus, I imagined shoring up the family against external disasters perpetrated by the wicked, or by the caprice of weather wreaked upon the innocent at the base of the Rocky Mountains, or by diabolical machinations as a result of the supposed ire of Castro, Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, or Brezhnev. External disasters were governed by global politics and megalomaniacs uninterested in me, and therefore impending disasters like war, famine, and nuclear annihilation were terrifying, but survivable; though why I believed this, I have no idea. The Holocaust was a constant subject in my Hebrew school class, and I knew that simply not “looking” Jewish or not knowing how to read Hebrew, or even not gazing at Christian icons or the Pietà had not saved Jews throughout Europe. The superficial tally of hairstyles and colors my aunties kept at my grandmother’s kitchen table would not have been of interest to the German, Lithuanian, Polish, or Ukrainian soldiers who annihilated my grandmothers’ towns of Rovno in the Ukraine and Salonica in Greece. Both of my parents were children of immigrants who had escaped the pogroms of eastern Europe and the militarization of Asia Minor, and the childish right to invincibility was a suburban value both my parents scorned. The State Department had not yet produced infomercials about nuclear winter, but even if I’d seen them, I believed, fantastically, that with enough caulking and weather stripping, maybe a special kind of insulated storm window and a stockpile of coal I’d burn on a hibachi in the garage, I’d be able to survive. In 1965, my classmates and I were practicing duck-and-cover drills and crouching underneath our desks in case of earthquakes, while comedians were doing their own televised versions of our grade-school exercises with the final instruction after all the contorted bending to

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“kiss your sweet ass goodbye.” Instead of laughing at their fatalistic humor, I willed myself the temerity of a western pioneer, ready to stride out over the char of civilization, without a thought as to why I would want to. My imagining never turned completely to the rough beast that might rise up from the ash pits or to the specific external disasters whose outcomes I was incapable of conjuring. Instead, trying to disguise the shrill squeak in my voice, I called the sand and gravel company for the cost of sand bags to pad the basement window wells, drew sketches of a crude ventilation system after one I had seen in a National Geographic that explained how to filter radioactive fallout particles through little carbon pebbles. I looked in Mother Earth News for distributors of composting toilets and designed a canvas cover with metal grommets to fit over the utility sink in the laundry room. I reasoned that when I filled the sink with water, after we had received the news that atomic bombs were going to fall, but before they did, and all the water in the world became contaminated with fallout particles, none of our drinking water would evaporate while we were waiting patiently for radiation to degrade. On a less catastrophic scale, I lived in a neighborhood where crime seldom happened; once there was a collision on the corner of Hudson and Louisiana one long block away; once a hit-and-run driver knocked Lynn Baginski off her bike and caused a concussion as she cracked her skull when she fell on the pavement. Vera Cromie’s mother, newly arrived from the revolution in Czechoslovakia, had her purse stolen from the passenger-side front seat of her beat-up car while she waited at the red light on Holly Street and Leetsdale Drive. Mothers with trampolines in their backyards had all the children sign insurance waivers before they could jump, and all around us there were precautions about burglars, stalkers, dope pushers, and rapists, scenarios describing the lures and ploys of the wicked and depraved, who strolled along the reedy shore of Lollipop Lake by McMeen Elementary School, the square placards of helping hands in all the neighborhood windows working almost as well as the Arabic filigreed palm, a charm that wards off the evil eye and keeps harm from snatching us away. On our patio, my father barbecued range-fed beef, and my friends and I danced to records without thought of high cholesterol or the eventual deterioration of our hearing, but under this patina of calm,

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there was relative unease, as many mothers in our neighborhood were addicted to Valium, Librium, diet pills, phenobarbital, and the occasional prescription for belladonna and lithium. Of course, their husbands were weekend alcoholics, calmed by putrid Rocky Mountain brews, Manhattans and gimlets, too sophisticated to drink their liquor neat. Monaco Lanes formed bowling leagues, and happily married couples like my parents and their friends Yetta and Ben had their evenings out, while their children heard hyperbolic tales of petting and French kissing while eavesdropping on the babysitters’ phone conversations. After I was wed and both my children born, my mother identified this time, the decade of the 1960s, as “Wife-Swapping in the Vale,” describing not a sylvan glen like something from Wordsworth’s Preludes, but Virginia Vale, ten blocks of bi- and tri-level brick and ranch-style homes, with street names like Grape, Cherry, Locust, Ash, and Exposition Avenue. The wives were our mothers, and swapping them didn’t mean trading blouses in the locker room. The metal cabinet in the basement that figured prominently in my bomb shelter design would also become the family’s bomb shelter reinforcement when slid against the door, but mostly it housed bowling trophies, mothballs, and my mother’s mouton jacket that had been her wedding present from my father. Hidden at the very back of the top shelf there was some evidence of sexual chicanery, though at the time its enactment remained as mute as bathetic actors in charades. The evidence took the form of party gags, plastic ice cube tray molds made to shape the cubes like breasts with elongated, erect ice-nipples, and ballpoint pens with bathing beauties who lost their swimsuits the longer the pen tips pressed against paper. Small pink sponges wrapped in cellophane had directions inked in cardboard at the top, explaining the miracle of these birth control “pills,” which were not to be swallowed on a daily basis but were instead to be squeezed between a woman’s knees for the duration of a date. There were a dozen unopened poker decks because my father loved the slick and rigid feel of a new deck of cards. He stripped off the cellophane wrapper with the same pleasure he took in opening a fresh pack of cigarettes. Underneath the new decks, there was a frayed old one, with all the royals female nudes in cheesecake poses, including the king, an easily detected pretender to the throne, even with her crown and scepter. There were joke books

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I studied on more than one occasion, whose punch lines I pretended to understand. It was difficult to imagine wife-swapping in the Vale, to imagine my mother wanting my father to trade places with Gabe, Arkie, or Mr. Ruple, other fathers in the Vale, and just what wife-swapping meant, as far as she was concerned, remains between us only a reference to an era. The only query she would answer, when pressed, concerned the party favors, which she claimed my father won when he was playing poker “clean,” for gags instead of money. When there were card games at our house, the only party favors visible were chocolate bridge mix morsels and salted cashews, and my parents never drank at home. When I peered into their glasses, all the beverages had ice cubes shaped like rectangles. I held the illusion that very little happened in the neighborhood— Fran walked through a plate-glass window at the new Red Owl grocery store a few blocks away, and Eugene B fell at the Jewish Community Center and cut open his chin, which required stitches. The boys in the neighborhood, in their cave that was really the excavation of the next set of basements, in the next set of tract houses near the historic Four Mile House Stagecoach Stop, practiced a ritual of eating mud, worms, and green crayons that gave them gastritis and required a brief stay in the hospital. Karen C on Grape Street lost her eyesight. My grandmother heard menacing voices in her little apartment on Holly Street, where the aunties had moved her when the sounds on her west-side street became more Spanish than Yiddish. But when my father rushed up to her door with a claw hammer in his fist to find what she’d heard, all he discovered was the television set turned on so softly you could barely make out language, while my grandmother sat idly in an uncomfortable Queen Anne chair, staring out into a courtyard patch of yellow grass that badly needed water. The peripheral circle of this trumped-up calm imploded from larger rings of chaos—the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the early, determined, and failed escalation of the Vietnam War. As the tall, thin shadow moved back and forth past my bedroom window late at night, I could not name its source, but there were more and more pops of gunfire and thick columns of gray smoke clouds behind the mangroves on the TV news. The walls in our house on Exposition Avenue began to moan and

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crackle as the newly seasoned two-by-fours that framed it dried out, and cracks appeared in the ceiling all around my light fixture. Outside my bedroom door, the floor joists creaked every night after my parents quarreled, and caged spirits exuded from my body the stench of early adolescent dreams and nightmares in a world trying very hard, both inside the house and out, to pretend everything was fine. Things began to go awry in Virginia Vale: mortgages went unpaid and houses were lost, though our mothers figured out a way to tan all year long with a lamp that was even more powerful, at close range, than the sun. Wife-swapping began to take its toll. The family to our west split up, and the husband moved to Texas. The daughter, who twirled a baton in the backyard, stayed behind with her mother and liked to cut herself in the bathtub. My mother said one afternoon, as she was ironing sheets in the laundry room and I was reading close by, that if she were to kill herself, she’d use pills. In 1965, there was no place, really, it was safe. The first U.S. combat troops arrived in Vietnam that year, and marines landed in the Dominican Republic to quell fighting between rebels and the Dominican Army. Rhodesia declared its independence from Great Britain. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Selma, Alabama; Malcolm X was murdered in Harlem; and rioters set Watts afire in L.A. We watched the smoke and fires from the Watts riots on TV in August, the same month my older sister, Sheila, asked permission to date Cecil, a black teenaged boy from the summer camp where they both worked as counselors. My father told her no, without discussion. That was when her grievances against his summary justice took on heft, but in Virginia Vale, life continued calm. My father refused to enter a dialogue about race, though his own dark skin had caused a rift to grow between my mother and the aunties that never mended. Judicious, saintly Benji was suddenly as flawed as all the aunties, who were careful, to their credit, not to call him schwartzer within his earshot. Even when the Metzlers moved in next door to us, both of them concentration camp survivors, their horrors weren’t conversation that was passed across the fence. They went to a different synagogue than we did, unfathomable, and we mocked their heavy Eastern European accents. Mrs. Metzler wore a wig, because her hair never grew back after her release from the camp, and we made fun of the tight and dainty flip

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and the way the wig would slip forward almost to her eyebrows on windy days. My friends and I mocked her clothing, knee-length rayon dresses and nylon stockings, when our mothers were prancing in their yards in halter-tops and short-shorts, and we mocked the bad dental work visible when Mrs. Metzler smiled. When we were caught staring at the blue numbers tattooed on Mrs. Metzler’s wrist while she hung out her laundry on summer mornings, we felt lucky and ashamed— ashamed, though only slightly, for our rudeness, but lucky to be so, so safe in Virginia Vale, unwilling and unable to imagine the caprice of mobs. We knew what menace was, but we believed that menace would always pass us by. When Mr. Metzler cut off his right big toe mowing the lawn in his sandals, that was news, and it was news that Rocky Flats and its manufacture of plutonium triggers for atomic bombs had already polluted the groundwater along the front range of the Rocky Mountains as far east as Brighton, which sits next to Denver. That same water rinsed the beef my father sold and the rest of the country ate. We happily believed ourselves protected with Lowry Air Force Base and Buckley Field at the periphery of our growing city, NORAD and its nexus of antimissile tracking devices in caves under Colorado Springs’ Cheyenne Mountain to keep whatever bombs at bay. We didn’t know yet what to think about the army’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal pumping its stockpile of mustard and phosgene gases, Lewisite and Sarin, into a well twelve hundred feet underground, a stone’s throw from the state capitol building in downtown Denver. In 1965 there were thirty-seven underground nuclear tests in the United States, fourteen in the Soviet Union, one in the United Kingdom, and four in France, and one above-ground test in China. In 1965 my father still worked in the cattle business and my parents still pretended they could be happy, if only the other one would change. A group of girlfriends and I formed a club that same year, called the Crispy Critters, after a breakfast cereal that had so much sugar, corn syrup, and molasses it was too sweet to eat. The Crispy Critters held court at slumber parties. We made packaged cakes and ate cheap peppermint ice cream that, always left unrefrigerated, thawed to a pale green puddle with red specks the consistency of Silly Putty watered down with glue. The Crispy Critters combed one another’s hair. We whispered and giggled, still strangers to real literature and the art of

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conversation. Unbeknownst to us, Sylvia Plath published Ariel that year, and Ralph Nader his Unsafe at Any Speed. The world of transport was left to older siblings, safe or not, and as for undervalued poets— we had not acquired the taste. We couldn’t have imagined then that the despair the young mother Sylvia Plath felt was a despair our mothers shared, or that we ourselves might experience, and if someone would have suggested it to us, just as they tried to suggest in Hebrew school that our fate and the Metzlers’ were intertwined, we would have laughed, the same way we laughed when we first heard how a human ovum is really fertilized. To entertain ourselves, the Crispy Critters practiced levitation on each other’s bodies. We darkened the basement bomb shelter, where we were always exiled, turned off the record player, and began our methodical rubbing of a volunteer’s arms, face, and legs until we had rubbed all the “gravity” out of her limbs; then we lifted her with three fingertips each—index, middle, ring—several inches off the ground. Once the girl was lifted, shrieks of awe and excitement brought all the “gravity” rushing back to her arms and legs, and she plopped indecorously back onto the floor. Because I had reached my adult height by the end of sixth grade, I never volunteered to be levitated, and no one volunteered to levitate me. The small girls always volunteered. At our last slumber party before junior high began, a new girl was in our midst. She lived next door to our club member, Missy, and she and her brother often played outside long after dark, when the children in Virginia Vale went inside to bathe or practice the piano or clean the food particles from between the wires on their braces. The new girl and her brother were small and thin and had bad teeth. The new girl’s father had abandoned the family earlier in the summer, which I knew even though she lived several blocks from me. Fathers did not run away in our neighborhood in 1965. The girl’s name was Kathy and she sucked on semisweet chocolate chips all through the evening so that her teeth were brown. In Virginia Vale, we were taught to smile by elongating our lips then parting them slightly and rolling them back, like the parody of smiling one uses when teaching a dog how to smile, the same smile a horse uses to show its pleasure when offered an apple or a carrot. We opened our mouths and flashed our good, white, straightened teeth like wanton

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girls that night, unaware that in other places in the world not so calm as Virginia Vale, only idiots and madmen smile. Kathy’s nose was sharp and her face was hollow, her lips thin, chewed-on, like an urchin’s. She was dirty, though we hadn’t played outside. When I was very young, the public health nurse came to school and took us, one at a time, into the closet where our teacher hung her coat and stored the extra crayons, and shined a violet light on our heads to check for lice. The children with lice who got sent home had the kind of dust and grime that Kathy had on her skin and clothes. Her neck had mottled dirt spots too large for freckles, and early in the evening, she decided she wanted to set her hair in rollers, an activity de rigueur with the Crispies, so we wrapped her unclean hair around threeinch pink-foam tubes. The levitation of Kathy began at two a.m., after the TV station signed off for the evening by playing a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while showing the image of an American flag rippling in the breeze. We made candleholders from a roll of tinfoil and placed four lighted candles in each corner of the room—one on each of the two sills that would be concealed by sandbags in case of a nuclear attack, and one eight inches from the crown of Kathy’s curler-covered head. She had changed into a white rayon nightgown, and when she lay down on the picnic blanket we had spread over the cold, hard, linoleum floor, her rib cage, pelvic bone, and kneecaps defined the fabric as though she had no skin. Missy sprinkled droplets of my mother’s Jean Naté in the hollow of Kathy’s throat and over her collarbones, and the air grew so still we could hear the rush of the flames burning the candlewicks and a pernicious drip from the peppermint ice cream melting on the table. Missy stood to light a stick of incense, and when she did, she stepped on the hem of her own long gown and tore it. The jarring sound of the long rip as fabric unraveled made Kathy clench her little muscles, so we had to start again to set the somber mood for Kathy’s levitation. Upstairs, my father’s heavy steps made the floorboards creak, and his urine splashing in the toilet made us geomancers titter. We waited several minutes for the pipes to empty and the tank to fill after he flushed the toilet, more creaking as he walked to the kitchen for his roll of Tums, which he kept in the junk drawer by the stove. Missy sprinkled

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a few more drops of Jean Naté on Kathy’s face, this time by her nostrils so she sneezed. We commenced our rubbing anyway, as the fight against gravity, blood, and relaxation is long in the game of levitation. Kathy’s breath labored as she lay there trying to think of nothing as she had been instructed, and we five—Missy, Eva, Rhonda, Angie, and I rubbed counterclockwise spirals up then down her body, always touching along her sides, from her ankles to her calves to the scant flesh in her upper arms. Only her face did we touch full on, and its rubbing was my task, counterclockwise circles on her chin. I used my pinkie for her dimple, then a few strokes back and forth across her thin and papery lips, her breath exuding chocolate, peppermint, and sugar that the bacteria in her mouth was already breaking down. Her cheeks were so sunken when I rubbed beneath the bones, I couldn’t do so smoothly, without pressing on her molars. Missy gestured for me to break the concentric pattern and stroke the cheeks from bone to jaw in one direction only. Her eyelids I rubbed lightly with my index fingers, around the blue-veined edges, her lids sticky, translucent, almost oily. By the time I finished at her hairline we would try to lift her, so I lingered at her brows, plucked thin as straight pins, and then at her temples, casting my circles in time with her breathing, which grew slow and shallow. The other girls took their fingers from her small, round shoulders and placed their index, middle, and ring fingers where Missy had showed us—Rhonda and I on the arms a finger-width above the elbows, Missy and Eva touching just above the creases behind her knees, Angie with her fingers under each of Kathy’s heels. When Missy raised her head and fluttered her lashes it was time to lift, and the small body rose up from the floor. Kathy’s levitation lasted seven seconds, a record, and her body hovered higher than anyone’s had, a good eight inches off the floor. In her relaxed, levitated posture, we could have tied her in a knot. My father coughed upstairs, and my little sister sneezed. Down the street, the Purity Creamery truck had begun its morning milk delivery to homes with children in Virginia Vale. The blood we’d rubbed in patterns beneath Kathy’s skin rushed back into its proper channels, and she grew heavier than our fingers could support. She fell with a thud on the blanket, and remained quiet with her eyes closed, until she began to laugh. Laughter! No Crispy Critter had ever laughed at levitation,

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and no one laughed the way Kathy laughed—instead of exhaling sound, she took air in, so the laugh was more a wheeze like someone trying to draw breath into asthmatic lungs while being gut-punched. I thought it was a sound of pleasure, a delight in the sensation of weightlessness with which we had gifted her. Kathy’s brother, two years older, played with sticks and twigs he gathered from the excavation a block from Kathy’s house, where the new power lines were going in. He liked to beat things with the sticks— the ground, the skinny maple sapling in their front yard, the skinny calves of Kathy’s legs. Many houses in our subdivision had a kind of brick finish work that left big mounds of mortar extruding from the joints and cracks of stacked bricks—big oozings of gray mortar; the walls were then sprayed with white paint in an attempt to make the houses resemble New England beach cottages. Kathy’s brother liked to hit the mortar extrusions with his sticks, and when they broke off, he would peel the paint and suck on them, especially after his father left. Sometimes his teeth would break because of this, and his mother would give him bourbon to rub his gums with, then he would take his sticks to Kathy’s back and arms. I never saw Kathy’s mother or the inside of Kathy’s house. On her front lawn there was a lime green hula hoop, a broken stingray bicycle whose black plastic banana seat had been dried out and cracked by the sun, and two other bikes, one of which had a Jack of Spades fastened with a clothespin to the frame so that the card would flap against the wheel spokes to imitate the sound of a large, powerful motor. The lawn was burned out and dead, not dead like the promise of golden wheat stubble, not dormant as grass grows in arid summer climates like Denver’s, but useless, brown-yellow dead. Kathy’s mother parked their station wagon along the curb in front of their house some days, and Kathy’s brother used the car’s shadow for shade and cover—he liked to light matches there to see if he could catch the dead, dry grass on fire. Charred lines rayed out in the grass from the sidewalk where he stood, but they always ended a good enough distance from the house so that the game was one less thing for his mother to yell about. Not long after Kathy’s levitation, her brother coaxed us into the station wagon one evening with the promise of a song that was sure to

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be on “our” channel, 95 KIMN, if we would only stop and listen. He’d taken his mother’s keys. His allure was his age—two years older—and he had his driving permit. Once we climbed in he locked the doors and turned on the radio, and sure enough, “Mr. Tambourine Man” came up quickly, Roger McGuinn’s voice smoothing over Bob Dylan’s lyrics. We made motions to leave the car, but Kathy’s brother had another plan in mind for the members of our club, as if the song’s allusion to branded feet gave him his cue, some mark to identify our sisterhood, like the marks he had already made on Kathy’s hands. We knew even then that it wasn’t our solidarity that made us submit to being nicked and cut and burned on our knuckles, with the song’s mocking lyrics to allegiance. Each of us sat, waiting in the car, like Kathy and her mother, to inherit a kind of feminine helplessness that it took me, at least, more than a decade to cast off. Eva’s father was a doctor, and Eva began to repeat things he said about Kathy and her brother, mostly about their bones and why the boy was sucking mortar. He had said something about Kathy’s mother too, regarding barbiturates, which our mothers sometimes used to counter mood swings and boredom, early change-of-life symptoms, and insomnia, but Kathy’s mother, it seemed, slept even when the sun was high. Other people in the neighborhood were not so kind as Eva’s father when they spoke about the activities in that family, and I wonder now if someone else’s father were swapping Kathy’s mother, she with no one to exchange. One night at the end of August, just before we were to return to school, there were sirens east of Holly Street. The long, thin shadow had drifted across my window a few minutes before and had rustled in the juniper bushes, and I thought the police had finally caught the shadow’s source, though I had not been the one to summon them. By the next morning, I had learned it was not the shadow they were pursuing after all. Kathy, her mother, and her brother were all dead. Missy’s mother had smelled exhaust fumes and heard the car engine running in the garage at Kathy’s house, and when no one responded to her knocks or shouts, Missy’s mother called the police. By the time they came and broke down the door so that they could get to the garage and pull the hose off the exhaust pipe of the car, the three of them were spirits locked inside the car.

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It was odd how little gossip there was about the deaths in such a gossip-ridden neighborhood. Some secrets mothers kept, like wifeswapping in the Vale. My mother refused to let me speak about Kathy’s death or ask questions of anyone, though she often talked of suicide herself, mostly when my father wasn’t winning at the dog track or when he was gone, alone, on “business trips” to Las Vegas. She would begin, “I’d be better off dead,” as she stared out the living room window at the corridor of brick ranch-style houses set in a row, with the thick, black street between them. She always ended by saying she was “too afraid of God” to kill herself, but her prescriptions were being written for fewer and fewer quantities of pills. Missy knew the most, but after Kathy’s death, she took solace from her cello and would not speak to us. Eva’s father explained what happens when carbon monoxide takes the place of air, and it sounded a little better than drowning or dying in a car wreck. He couldn’t tell us about dying more slowly from shame or lack of hope, or what went on inside their house that made Kathy’s brother beat her until her skin turned black and blue. The Virginia Vale party line said Kathy’s mother drugged her children, carried them sleeping to the car, got in, locked the doors, and turned on the ignition. The U-turn in the tube that led from the exhaust pipe to the backseat window was taped in place, an old blue parka stuffed in the remaining space to block the fumes from escaping the car. There was nothing about the double-murder–suicide in the paper. There were still vacant lots for sale in Virginia Vale, a subdivision along Cherry Creek where nothing ever happened. That was the Vale’s chief appeal, and sales needed to be made. The clerk at the hardware store next to Red Owl grocery remembered Kathy’s mother buying flexible tubing with a bag of dimes and quarters. If people talked at all, they mentioned Kathy’s mother and the boy. They said Kathy’s mother was stacked and smelled like glue. They said the boy looked like trouble. They started rumors about how Kathy’s mother might have paid her rent after her husband disappeared. As time went by, they forgot about Kathy altogether. No one mentioned wife-swapping in the Vale. Our mothers didn’t want that secret shared. We didn’t mention that when we levitated Kathy, the flutter in her white gown above her heart reminded us of little birds that fly so fast and low, their presence is

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suggested not by their bodies but by a little breeze created by their wings once they have passed away. We were wary of our mothers after Kathy’s murdered her. My mother hated my hair, which was long and always tangled, and its red color attracted attention from men that made her uncomfortable, as she was not easy with the developing sexuality of her three girls. She often said she’d cut my hair while I was sleeping. Once, when we were fighting, I said, “How! How would you cut it?” and she said, “A scissors. No, a knife.” After that, I couldn’t sleep. I knew she wasn’t strong enough to carry me to our station wagon or even lift me from my bed, but Kathy’s mother wasn’t strong enough to carry her brother, either. The Crispy Critters had proved that a body could be rubbed weightless, though barbiturates might do well enough to help drag someone sleeping across a rug. My mother stopped talking about my hair when a woman began to call the house, asking for my father, and refused to give her name. That gave her something new to speculate about. And the shadow that had moved across my bedroom window? It went away when my older sister married Peter, her high school suitor from across the street, the next December, 1966. The Crispy Critters disbanded when we entered seventh grade. The specter of Kathy’s levitated body hovered over every meeting we tried to have. Her teeth were always slick and brown with melted chocolate. She never took those pink foam curlers from her hair. When we tried to talk about her or her older brother, little prickles of sweat appeared along our hairlines and on our upper lips. The scabs on our knuckles where her brother had branded us dried up and fell away, and the skin only puckers slightly now with the scars. Missy joined youth orchestra at the beginning of seventh grade and had to practice cello even more. The rest of us had a quarrel one afternoon, when we missed the school bus and had to walk the three miles home, about the color of Kathy’s brother’s eyes. Two years after Kathy’s death, on April 10, 1967, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake shook the desks in Señorita R’s Spanish class. My friends and I were caught off guard, anticipating not an earthquake but another autumn change when we would go to high school. The world seemed

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much less safe. Menace was a word everyone could spell. Denver had had over 190 quakes by 1967, all of them caused, we later learned, by the nerve gases the army was pumping underground. In Boulder, thirty miles away, children were dismissed from school because their school walls cracked. In the state capitol rotunda in downtown Denver, legislators looked up to see the chandeliers swaying and deftly moved out from under the potentially lethal glass. In our classroom, we closed our books and crouched down under our desks as we had been instructed to do during duck-and-cover drills in case of earthquakes, tornadoes, violent storms, or nuclear explosions. The lurching ground made us forget we were trying to be calm and brave. The tremors caused the bells to ring off-time, the lights to flicker, and the minute hands on all the clocks to spin around. Señorita R’s maps of all the Spanish-speaking countries in the world fell from their mountings onto the floor, Spain on top, as did the chalk that fell from Señorita’s hand. The second tremor was followed by a third, all of them accompanied by a sound like a huge paper bag filled with air suddenly popping from someone’s angry fist. I wanted the earth to stop shaking more than I wanted the shadow that moved across my bedroom window late at night to go away, more than I wanted my parents to suddenly fall in love and embrace again, but the line I kept hearing in my head was “. . . then kiss your sweet ass goodbye.” Señorita R was not rehired the next year to teach the schoolchildren of Denver, because during the first earthquake tremor, she had run out the door of her classroom and into the school parking lot to save herself, had it come to that. Her shrieks were unambiguous: “To hell with them!” We were left alone inside the classroom, our knees rubbing against the dirty floor, our hearts pounding, the desks above us dancing as books tumbled and papers fluttered to the floor. It seemed like a good idea to hide under a desk, but ours was a two-story school, and if the second story fell, our little desks couldn’t likely withstand the weight of concrete that would be piled on top of them. I saw an image of myself as a piece of rubble in a bulldozed city. I wanted Señorita to tell us something soothing, like “it will stop,” or “this building was built to code,” or “no te preocupes,” just like I wanted my mother to say after Kathy’s death, “mothers don’t often kill their children.” ♠♦♣♥

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Two years later, springtime bustled with activity in 1967. On May 11, National Guardsmen took over the Jackson State College campus in Jackson, Mississippi, after days of student riots. China and the USSR rattled their sabers over the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, yet on May 23 there was a twenty-four-hour cease-fire in Vietnam to celebrate the birth of Buddha. I didn’t notice any of these events or mark them on my calendar. In May, in our redbrick Spanish-style ranch house in Virginia Vale, my father went missing. My mother hadn’t swapped him for someone else’s father. My father just vanished. He had disappeared, just like Kathy’s.

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My father vanished a month before my fifteenth birthday. He disappeared on a weekday, already gone hours by the time Renée and I were looking out the living room window, watching for his return. I remember the musty smell of those drapes as I held them in my arms, the coarse slubs of linen woven in between the finer golden threads, the cold, slippery cotton liner underneath, all those yards of fabric I wished to disappear in. I thought that surely he would arrive back home at any time, and I assumed that my sister thought likewise. We did not know where he disappeared to, or even that he had disappeared. We only knew that he was late for dinner. I used to think each of us, my sister, my mother, and I, had constructed our own elaborate, private scenario about where my father went. When the hours of his absence turned to days, then to weeks, I believed that he had gone to Madrid or somewhere in Andalucía, that he was smoking at a curbside cervesería, drinking weak Spanish beer from a small, brown bottle, and eating cold tapas of skewered green melon and strips of ham. I heard him conversing in what I thought was flawless Spanish (really the gutter Ladino he had grown up speaking), the Spanish setting I superimposed on his flight indicative of

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fantasies I had learned to create under his tutelage. My mother thought at first that he was dead, for what other reason could there be for his tardiness? Renée, it turns out, fabricated nothing at all—his disappearance all but scarred over by her own version of childhood. Collectively, we tried other, more practical destinations: calling around to his brother’s house in California, the Sands in Las Vegas, where my father liked to stay, his sister’s in New York, but nothing answered us so definitively as his silence. He had gone away before, of course, on solitary sprees to Las Vegas, and for those trips I would carry his small suitcase into the lobby of Stapleton Airport and stand near him while he filled out traveler’s insurance forms laid out on round, white tables provided by the Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company. He folded the forms and put them into a long, narrow white envelope with red letters that, once sealed, was inserted into a slot in the round table, shaped like the discs of Quizzac. Each time my father went away I wondered if anyone ever retrieved those envelopes, or if they sat in a sealed heap in the narrow chute under the table, the only unanswerable question, “Will he survive?” The silence in the house during his previous gambling sprees had not been nearly so unbearable as it became when he disappeared. The residual hostility between my parents from his going to Las Vegas and my mother’s staying home with us was palpable in the sound of slamming objects—doors slamming, her hot iron slamming down on the ironing board, the hard bristles of her brush slamming down on her pink scalp. The first night the driveway remained empty, the strong May light began to dim in the thin cracks between the concrete driveway slabs. It was replaced by the yellow porch light that mingled with the streetlight on the corner, casting its cheerless beam onto all that emptiness. There were no rituals that night—no scent of Dial soap coming from the bathroom sink as my father washed his hands for dinner. We could not wince at his “Mama Mia, apple pie and coffee,” the punch line of a joke about the utilitarian English immigrants learn, a joke on him and all our relatives, really, that he told every evening as he sat down for dinner. There was no clap of his slippers on the steps to the basement as he descended after dinner with the sports section from the Denver Post and his soft pack of Camels, no Mission Impossible on TV.

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It was not easy to hide the fact of a disappeared father in our neighborhood. While they hired Japanese gardeners to mow their lawns, and older children tended their barbecues, all fathers were present and accounted for in 1967, except for Kathy’s. No father in the neighborhood was young enough to be drafted to serve in Vietnam, and no one enlisted. No traveling salesmen lined our middle-class streets. Even Mr. Atkins, the United Airline pilot two doors east, had arrival times anticipated by the whole neighborhood. My father’s longest trips to Las Vegas three times a year never spilled over to the workweek. His truck had never been in the shop for longer than a few days. So, after a week, with his truck still gone, our house was marked as one only partially full. My mother tried on the veil of widow. Like a novice actor in a costume room, she reached for the most devastating black, and cast herself in the most difficult role. Because there were no facts to hold on to—no police reports, nothing from the state patrol, no letters on the kitchen table or on the bedroom dresser, nothing from any of his friends—she had to make do with what her mind conjured up, and so she became a character in her own unwitting fiction. My mother was forty-six, seething, beautiful, unfulfilled, unexpressed, with unknowable ambition, torn between the demands of constricting modernity, restlessness, motherhood, and religious orthodoxy. Two of her daughters were still at home, and Sheila, the oldest, was a young bride gone off to law school at UC Berkeley. Right before his disappearance, my mother had refused, finally, and without equivocation, to acknowledge my father’s beliefs and customs. She had told him she didn’t want to go on living with him, but just the same, she was devastated by his absence. She considered most seriously the possibility of his death, and early during his disappearance replaced her daily afternoon visits to her ailing mother’s cramped apartment on Holly Street with visits to the county morgue. The men who ran the morgue were puzzled by the derivation of our surname, and so every afternoon she would uncover the stiff, grim toes of black men or Hispanics or gaze at the stiffened, fine-boned cheeks of the few French men unclaimed by family or unidentifiable because of unspeakable mutilations. The morgue became part of her new routine, a destination, a route

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integrated into the grid of Denver streets around which she piloted her white Chevy station wagon, but even she, a woman skilled, even gifted, in self-loathing and punishment, could not endure the ritual of visits to the morgue. As abruptly as my father disappeared, her visits to the morgue ended. She replaced them with incessant pacing from the kitchen to the living room window, stopping often to run her right hand across the dust-free surface of the blonde sideboard. Each day my father was gone continued like the one before: waking to the reminder of his absence, eating breakfast, catching the school bus, staring listlessly out the window at the flat light on the asphalt playground. My GI tract shut down, and Renée accidentally left a baggie full of marijuana on top of the toilet paper roll in the master bathroom, but my mother did not have the energy to care for me or reprimand my sister. I tried to concoct some right action to make my father reappear, some set of incantations or a number of right steps, a kabbalistic equation, a Spanish poem or recitation of the achievements of the Sephardim during the Golden Age in Spain, but nothing I did worked. When dust devils spit gravel on the playground, I thought those were a sign of his return. I thought the same of thunderheads, or hot afternoon winds, purple violets in the lawn, the number of runs in my nylon stockings, a broken bra strap, or the reappearance of the green worms that began to eat our privet hedge on the side of the house. I looked for anything, really, that might portend my father’s reappearance, besides my mother’s pursed lips as she sat leafing through the phone book. Unable to read signs, I continued as the docile audience, now witness to my mother’s drama rather than my absent father’s, unable to articulate or accept my own place in it. Night after night, no phone calls came for or from my father. Dinners were disastrous. Meatloaf appeared almost magically in the middle of the table as an amorphous pile of brown flesh and gristle because my mother forgot to add the matzo meal that bound it all together. The beans had a thin scum of black scraped from the bottom of the pot; my mother’s forearm sported a burn the size of a silver dollar she had gotten when she leaned against the stove element, forgetting it was turned on. Each day my father was missing brought a promise, a lie, and the mockery of spring. The privet hedge on the side of the house leafed

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out; the junipers in front begged to be trimmed. John Yakamoto and his lawn-mowing crew arrived punctually every Thursday at 7:00 a.m., pulling into the empty driveway as they did every week, assuming my father had already left for work, as he had every week since they began mowing the yard in 1960. All of those late spring and summer mornings filled with the sound of their motors and the cool precision of their handiwork. We tried to hide my father’s absence around the hollow but necessary rituals of our week: school, Hebrew school, afterschool softball, all the hired help still arriving, the Yakamotos on Thursday, Mary Geitling, the cleaning lady, every Wednesday morning, Sabbath services on Saturday morning. When mourners stood to say the Kaddish late during the Sabbath service, I looked at the pale, bent forms of the men and women scattered throughout the sanctuary rows and wondered if I would soon be standing among them, praying for my father. Two weeks into my father’s disappearance, the bill-paying ritual began without him. All of the orange-and-tan molded plastic tepees from the St. Labre Indian School that he collected in the bill drawer were scooped unceremoniously into the trash, nestled on top of a white glob of top deckle, the haute of our cuisine. My mother sat at the table looking at neat stacks of bills, her fists pressed to her forehead so hard that when she removed them, her knuckles left red ridges. It was not a time when women of my mother’s education and class were applauded for launching careers outside of the home. It was not a time when the deed to the house, the titles to the car and truck, stocks or mutual funds, were in both partners’ names. Partner, in the larger world of financial parlance, was a misnomer. My mother discovered, when she went to pay the bills, that there was no bank account. There was nothing. My father left us with nothing when he disappeared. That evening, as I lay in the dark listening to the walls in my room crack and settle, I saw my father in a crowd of happy people. I recognized his customary swagger as he rearranged the drape of his slacks, his image reflected in the beautiful pools of the sultan at the Alhambra palace in Granada, the familiar smoke-and-wet-leaves smell from his cigarette overpowering the fragrance of orange blossoms in the groves around the medieval Muslim fortress. A veiled, dark woman slipped

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her arm through my father’s, and the two of them walked through an archway of trellised roses, and as she stopped to lift the white gauze covering from her face, a lightning bolt of pain zigzagged through my gut. Just as I was about to fall asleep, the closet doors banged open in my parents’ bedroom. Open, shut, open, shut, the accordion doors slid back and forth, guided by the slender, plastic runners that kept them from wobbling out of kilter. Hangers screeched along the metal closet rod, and fabric rustled and shirred. Cloth tore, ripped against the bias. My mother came to stand in my bedroom doorway, and I tried to slow my breathing, turned on my side away from her, pretended to be asleep. I don’t think I fooled her. When her foot hit the last rung of the stairway into the basement, where she had begun to sleep on the cold, plastic-covered couch in the den, I tiptoed into my parents’ room. My father’s suits still fluttered slightly in the closet, still ordered by my mother according to their weight and color, the gray and serge ones toward the back, winter wool, all-season wool, pinstripes, seersuckers. The white linen one he had worn to his nephew Jackie’s wedding in New York headed the row, still with the long hatpin that had held his red-and-white carnation boutonniere in the lapel. Bennie—Benji—Benjamin—he’d always taken the biggest of risks—hadn’t my father risked his bloodline by marrying a smalltown Ashkenazi girl, by siring only girls, by borrowing money from his cattle baron brother-in-law to make a go of it in the cattle business, by courting the Brown Palace Hotel as his best customer? It was only natural for him, rocked forward in a metal folding chair at a makeshift poker table in a storm culvert beneath downtown Denver, with three kings showing and an ace in his hand, to reach for that second ace, to wager his business on the regal grins he assuredly held. The second ace never materialized, and the stakes to cover a run of kings turned out to be larger than my father could muster without offering up all his cash and business assets. In less than five minutes, his cattle empire turned to dust. He was not playing with men who looked kindly on losers or bums. He did not go to Madrid or to the Alhambra in Granada, or even to Cádiz, the root of our ancestral bloodline. He went on a wild, reckless, hope-filled spree to all of the

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tracks—early-season greyhound tracks—in eastern Colorado and Nebraska, hoping to win back his lost fortune. Bennie the vaquero was a lucky man. He had parlayed early General Mills stock into enough capital to repay his business stake, and his touch with quarter horses was superb, with greyhounds sublime. He had paid for several semesters of my older sister’s college tuition with hits from the Twin Quin, a two-race win-place quinella pick in the last two races of the evening at the Cloverleaf Dog Track, and kept her quartered in a sorority house in the most elegant part of Boulder. Not a few of the mortgage payments came from the Twin Quin, and our synagogue membership, Hebrew school tuition, and High Holy Days tickets were paid in full, thanks to the spring in a greyhound’s sprint. Had luck been with him then, he might have earned back some of the capital from his business. Of all the sprees and junkets he took throughout his life, this was the only month-long period where he lost, and lost, and lost. My mother finally heard news of him almost four weeks after his disappearance. Her sister in Chicago had kept our family from crumbling like Kathy’s. Sammy K, my father’s closest friend, not another woman, called my mother from the greyhound track in Council Bluffs, Iowa. That was as far east as the two of them could go. He told my mother they were broke, and they were coming home. My father did not allow himself permanent bitterness. He came home and filed for bankruptcy. “Corporate vipers file for bankruptcy,” he’d said to my mother, who sat hunched at the kitchen table, her hands pressed over her face, “so why not Ben Varon Meats?” He threw up his own hands, scooted back in his chair, stood, and stepped sideways, as if to block her punch. Even Henry C. Brown, the first owner of Denver’s elegant Brown Palace Hotel, had felt the effect of fortune’s caprice when, one year after his hotel opened, the 1893 Silver Panic eroded the value of his investments. That was a bad year for the West, but the hotel itself seemed to mock misfortune with its steel beams and blocks of fireproof terra cotta, its rooms whose gilded brilliance reflected the movement of sun across the sky, its lobby tiers, stacking up and up, like a princess’s birthday cake.

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Nineteen sixty-seven was a bad year for Ben Varon Meats. My father said goodbye to all those mangy cattle, left the stockyards, abattoir, and cutting room, visited all his old accounts and made sure they were settled in with a new meat distributor, then he went back to his cattle baron brother-in-law to ask for another loan to buy a liquor store just off of Sixth Avenue and Kipling. The humiliation of admitting defeat almost killed him, and certainly, it helped to kill my parents’ marriage. The store was in a good neighborhood, my father said; it supplied beverages for Sunday barbecues and closet dypsos, but his brother-inlaw said no, a package store was too risky. This might be the West with its image of hard-drinking, hard-living cowboys, the West with its infinite reinventions of a man’s life and fortunes, but my uncle, a practical man, would venture only with cattle. My father didn’t want to do anything else, because selling was in his blood. He was fifty-five years old by then, with a high school education, and the business world was making room for veterans returning from Vietnam. He decided that if he couldn’t sell beef to the Brown Palace Hotel or liquor in the suburbs, he would sell rides, again. When he drove for Yellow Cab, he was no longer welcome at his beloved poker games in the storm culverts beneath the city. The stakes were much higher than a humble cabbie could cover. A former card partner said my father turned out to be “a nickel-and-dime man.”

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The promise of flight seduced us. Renée and I watched sparrows flitting in the yard, the robins, jays, and mourning doves, the bombers that ripped holes in clouds above us practicing the Agent Orange strafing of the jungles of Vietnam. We wondered when my father would fly away again. Missiles flew and orbited the planet, Superman flew, and before them jinns on magic carpets, dybbuks in the bubbies’ shtetls. In dreams, with a thrust of the chin a little forward, our bodies paralleled the ground and hovered. Waking, our father let us accompany him to the airport. At home, we had loved to fly with him too, his big hands clasping our hands, his big stockinged feet pressed to our middles, lifting us from the ground the length of his long legs. He provided what we imagined to be the infinite possibility of weightless flight, his little Mary Martins, sexless Peter Pans without green leotards or jaunty, coneshaped hats perched rakishly on our foreheads. In those few moments, we were free of our bodies, yet still able to breathe easily, floating without the complication of gravity and water, the burn of chlorine, salt, or other pool detritus forced unexpectedly down our throats. He let go of our hands, and we stretched our arms out perpendicular and

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stiff in Superman’s staged posture of flight, free of wind and draft, hail or rain, free from the danger of kryptonite or a sudden plunge, free from the vengeance wreaked on children for defying the laws of nature. Our levitations were modest in comparison to boys’. Boys insisted on costumes and regalia. They had rayon flying capes embossed with S’s or at least beach towels fastened with exotic clips to help them leap from one-story ranch-style rooftops, off the roofs of moving cars, from flatbeds and hayracks. They leapt from bicycle seats, imitating bareback riders or the festival in Pamplona, where youths ran down narrow, cobbled streets to escape the horns and hooves of raging bulls. Boys leapt from speedboats and sprang like swans from high-dives, while we preferred to hover, really savor the dreamy flotation on a bed of air. However daring these little boys, in their underpants and towelcapes pinned with diaper pins borrowed from their younger siblings, or even their older brothers, who wore plaster casts on their arms and legs from aborted leaps, they could not outshine my father, Bennie, who really flew away. They could not outshine their uncles either, who jumped with parachutes into Asian jungles. My father’s New York family adored their Bennie the vaquero almost as much as they adored my cousin Lenny. To them, Bennie the vaquero could do no wrong, because they understood the risks a gambling man must take. He was adventurous and brave, striding out along the new frontier, the family’s Josephus, historian of our clan. They had no idea he’d disappeared for so long, and he never told them. Like my father, Lenny was a veteran. Three years after Jackie and Elaine’s wedding in New York, where the bridal couple had been levitated on their bridal thrones and carried on the shoulders of their guests, Lenny responded to the country’s patriotic call by enlisting in the air force. He went to flight school, and early in 1967, he was deployed to Vietnam. At home, Renée and I often watched a TV commentator in battle fatigues with big circles of sweat underneath his arms crooning the day’s war casualties, against a background of hazy trees barely distinguishable from the darker foliage of the jungle. Some days, we watched game shows instead. When a helicopter was hit by mortar, there was a flash of light in the broadcast on TV, a puff of smoke, then nothing. The edited effect was tragicomic, more cartoonlike than real. Nothing fell out of the

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sky; no debris fell in balls of fire along the tree line; no colossal flames shot from the intake lines along the fuselage; there were no charred human remains blackened beyond recognition. In news footage, usually jerking from a handheld camera, a dot would appear on the rim of the haze, then a smudge, the dot growing larger until the camera’s mike picked up the thwucka-thwucka of the helicopter’s blades. Sometimes flashes from sniper fire sparkled without source from the foliage of eucalyptus or bamboo. Occasionally, the flash would streak, meteorlike, to the black smudge, and there would be another flash, this one more intense, but still a blurry image, nothing more than a pinprick on the screen. The series of flashes was neither exciting nor disturbing, just bits of fuzz like cottonwood “snow” thick in the air all around Denver in the middle of the summer. Some helicopters, when they were hit, belched out clouds of smoke. Some left a curlicue trail so elaborate there was a game Renée and I would play trying to read the message on the TV screen, just as a stunt pilot writes a message for a crowd—“Stu xxxooo Ingrid,” “. . . the champagne of bottled beeerrrr.” “WINnnnn. . . .” A flash and pop hit Lenny Selanikio’s helicopter broadside over an undisclosed location in Vietnam on September 6, 1968. The footage was not shown on the six o’clock news. The image of his plunge to Earth was censored. As for the flight, his destination, or the reason for it, all that remains a military secret. President Johnson had ordered more bombing along the DMZ in March of 1968, but no one was pinning the blame for Lenny’s death on him. Something was in the body bag that was returned to Lenny’s parents in New York, but it wasn’t heavy. Lenny’s remains were buried September 16, 1968, in the U.S. National Cemetery at Pinelawn, New York. My father received the news of Lenny’s death on the white wall phone in the laundry room downstairs, in the entryway to what would have been the bomb shelter I had designed to keep our family safe. I was in the den across the hall, sprinkling green glitter on a mosaic of an elf. I felt my father’s eyes on me, just as my mother’s eyes had bored into me the night she rummaged through my father’s suits, but as then, I kept my head down. I had never heard my father cry, not when he got the news of his father’s death in 1966, not when he had to beg my mother to take him back when he returned in June of 1967.

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My father didn’t go to Lenny’s funeral. Because he was not a religious man, neither did he go to the synagogue to say Kaddish for his rakish, reckless cousin. I wanted to console my father, but I couldn’t. I had no models of consolation.

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My grandparents, Louis and Sarah Varon, upon their arrival in New York, 1918. My grandmother is a month from giving birth to my father.

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Benjamin, age four, and his sister, Bettie, age two, dressed in the photography studio’s finest rental costumes, 1923.

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My mother, Irene B. Varon, twenty-five, in my grandmother’s kitchen on Newton Street. She is emulating an idol from the silver screen, 1947.

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Family portrait, taken before our pilgrimage to New York, 1964 (left to right): my father, my younger sister, Renée, my mother, myself, my older sister, Sheila.

Top left—My father, my older sister, Sheila, and me, mugging for my mother at our house on Winona Court, 1954.

Bottom left—My father with his three girls (left to right): Sheila, Renée, and me. You can see our first television had replaced furniture in the house on Winona Court, 1958.

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My father, the evening before my wedding, at Bear Creek Ranch, near Missoula, Montana, 1982.

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My father and Tina Weeding, toasting my husband and me at our wedding in the pines outside of Missoula, Montana, 1982.

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My father with my sons, Joshua (left) and Ezra (right), in La Grande, Oregon, 1989.

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Segundo Huerta Ramos, from the vantage of El Castillo del Águila (Castle of the Eagle), Gaucín, 1998.

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Segundo Huerta Ramos, guiding us to the village “nice spots,” near Gaucín’s aviary, 1999.

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The author, photo by David Axelrod.

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Chapter Eight Paella and Yellow Cabs

Ours was not a family assuaged by therapy and confrontation. When my mother was angry, she hummed. When my father was angry, he pursed his lips so tightly white bubbles of saliva formed in the corners of his mouth. Renée swam harder and approached the high-dive blindfolded. I forgot to eat. When I started high school, the Brown Palace Hotel was my father’s favorite place to park his cab. If he waited there at the Tremont Street entrance, along with a string of Yellow Cabs, he’d get a good fare to the airport. Before I got my driver’s license, if I wanted to check up on my father to make sure he was still in town, all I had to do was ride my bicycle along the Speer Boulevard bike path to Tremont Street and I’d find him, his cab idling somewhere in the line of Yellow cabs, his brown left arm resting on the rolled-down window. He would be reading the race form or the Rocky Mountain News, and sometimes I’d get almost even with his cab before he’d see me. If he were with a customer, I’d hold back, watching him climb slowly from the seat of his cab, his back crooked, his belly resting softly over his black leather belt. He’d lugged boxes and boxes of beef all over Denver as a straightbacked man, but when he drove the cab again, he limped and struggled

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with his customers’ heavy suitcases. “Once I was a fullback,” he used to joke, shrugging his shoulders and throwing up his hands, “but now I am a quarterback.” I wanted to pretend that my father didn’t drive a cab, that what he did was joyride around Denver, railing against Johnson or Nixon, later Ford, Carter, or Reagan, talking baseball or the Denver Broncos, Wall Street news, whatever his patron wanted to hear at Bennie-BenjiBenjamin’s yellow, rolling soiree. I didn’t want to see my father carrying some worsted wool’s luggage, or some cowboy’s, though if I ever dared to insinuate anything like disdain for a servile job, my father grew surly and defiant. Likewise, I figured little ways to thwart him. Each autumn throughout high school, we began to joust. He would hold his Shaffer ballpoint pen with “Ben Varon Meats,” all caps, inscribed along the barrel, his hand hovering over his nearly empty checkbook. He would hold back from writing a check for the rental of my textbooks. “Josefa,” he would say, though I told him to stop calling me by my Spanish name, “Josefa, what about the poor kids, the ones who can’t pay, what do they do for books?” and I would look at him, wondering where he gleaned his ethics. He knew I was embarrassed to ride in his cab, so he countered with disinterest in the zeal with which I attacked the study of his mother tongue. He refused to sell his suits, or to wear them, and he grew coarser, expectorated out the rolled-down window of his cab and the family station wagon, and stopped shaving twice a day. When my closest friend, Tina, talked about finding an afterschool job and saving up for a trip to Spain, my father told me work was good for me, but Franco was a bum, and I should wait until his dictatorship toppled before I spent a dime in the Sephardim’s “second homeland.” I tried once to make flan, the Spanish custard, but in my halfhearted attempt to please my father, I forgot to add the sugar. By the time I was a senior and counting the days until I could move out of my parents’ house and go to college, it was too late for many things, including trying to marry an Ashkenazic palate with a Sephardic one. For my eighteenth birthday, I asked for dinner at Denver’s one Spanish restaurant, so that we could have paella, Spain’s traditional, national dish. I knew that the Sephardim in Spain would not have eaten such a mixture of nonkosher items—shellfish, sausage, shrimp— mixed in with chicken, saffron, and rice, but I still clung to the false

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hope that some combination of right gestures and behavior could save my parents’ marriage and our family. My parents took time out from their squabbles to register my profound disappointment. They grudgingly acquiesced to my request, because Tina had gone on to Spain, to travel with her sister, while I was stuck in Denver, at my parents’ house, and after school behind the counter at a dry cleaners, sewing buttons and fixing torn seams on other people’s garments. Twice, my father passed by the restaurant without finding it; odd, because all the years he drove a cab he knew how to find every cul-desac, court, and dead end in the city. Perhaps his dread of the evening, based on earlier culinary forays into his requests for Sephardic cuisine, left his navigation skills in disarray. When we finally parked the station wagon on a steep hill on Federal Boulevard, from the way everyone slumped and dragged their feet as we exited the car, it seemed we were going to a funeral, rather than my birthday feast. Dining out, my mother was not observant of the rules for keeping kosher in the home. She, like many modern Jews, loved a crispy slice of bacon from the Village Inn Pancake House. To contradict, or confound, the letter of the kosher laws she followed in our home, at least once a month we ate boiled prawns in cocktail sauce, served by her with rubber gloves, on paper plates, with plastic forks, a plastic picnic tablecloth thrown over the kitchen table, so as not to contaminate her kitchen with the trafe, nonkosher, fumes coming off the forbidden shellfish, shrimp. Even so, my mother ordered several modifications to my paella birthday dinner without the family’s consultation. “What kind of shellfish is it?” she asked, speaking more to the ceiling, or perhaps the Deity, than to the waiter standing, white cloth folded over his arm, beside her. “Mussels, very fresh,” the waiter said. “Flown in. From Oregon.” “Mussels,” my mother repeated, “Oregon,” her tone incredulous as she tried to contemplate a cuisine, under any circumstance, that could include fishy, gray-rubber mussels. “We don’t want those.” She paused and looked at the waiter. “What are they, anyway? No. Never mind,” she added, before he had a chance to answer. “I don’t need to know. Just the shrimp.” The waiter bowed his head and looked at my father. My father shrugged.

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“And the meat?” my mother asked. “Chicken, small bits of sausage, very fresh. A little spicy.” The waiter looked at my father again, who was studying the way the ice cubes floated and collided in his water glass. My mother pointed to my father. “He can’t tolerate hot or spicy food. Leave the sausage out.” “Paella is not paella without . . .” My father delicately shook his index finger, indicating to the waiter the uselessness of his explanation. If anything, at that stage of their marriage, my father practiced conciliation, preferring, in my mother’s presence, to acquiesce rather than to challenge her. He picked up the salt shaker and regarded the silver tip. I imagined Tina, her arms held high above her head, back arched, head thrown back as she held a rose between her teeth and danced the flamenco. I considered telling my parents and Renée that I had tried out an abridged version of my father’s disquisition about the Sephardim’s Golden Age in Spain, in my senior Spanish class. My father would be pleased to know I had noted, though not, of course, with his eloquence, the conjecture that Columbus had been a converso, that Cervantes’s family had, historians speculated, likewise converted. Even the gorgeous idiom we were trying so hard to replicate, minus the lisp of Castilian Spanish, in our Spanish class, was likewise the contribution of Sephardic Jews. I had explained that throughout the thirteenth-century reign of Alfonso X, “the Wise,” Sephardic linguists and court ambassadors brought new forms of expression to Castilian, Romance, and Catalán, translating texts of Arabic, ancient Greek, and Latin philosophy and astronomy that forged the thinking and exploration of the Middle Ages. When I was done, my classmates looked aghast, as I was usually silent. My Spanish teacher turned her pinched and red-rimmed eyes to me and said, “Sephardim? I’ve never heard the word.” We ate the paella minus the mussels and the savory sausage, which left the dish comprising a few chunks of dried-out chicken and a handful of overcooked, grilled shrimp on a bed of glutinous rice, canned corn, mushy peas, and slimy red pimento strips for color. It was very like something my mother would serve as a leftover meal after a dinner of boiled chicken fished from a pot of soup, minus the

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pimentos. Saffron, she said, was also not essential to the meal. She said she suspected it as a source of the flare-ups of my father’s ulcers, along with those outlaws garlic, cumin, pepper, fennel, salt, turmeric, kalamata olives, and pistachios. She attributed almost everything Sephardic—everything she had once loved about my father—his husky build and wavy black hair, his interest in “strange” food, the “strange” order of the Four Questions at the Passover Seder, his attitudes about work and play, family and charity, the oily, fumy raki he sometimes drank, the way he joked with the Mexicans in my grandmother’s neighborhood—to the foul, stale, suspect, spoiled, lazy, nonJewish behavior she would rather live without.

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Chapter Nine Ben-Anna Split

Benjamin and Irene, not the Burma Shave characters Ben and Anna, divorced in March of 1974. Earlier that school year, in October of 1973, I awoke at two a.m. to the smell of smoke spewing from the heating vent into the bedroom of my rented, white stucco bungalow near the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder. It was the first chilly evening of the autumn, and my roommates had turned on the furnace before they went to bed. Before I could swing my legs out of bed to touch the hot floor, my two roommates, who had bedrooms in the basement, were up the stairs past a wall and ceiling of flames, screaming “Fire! Wake up! Get out!” It’s astonishing how quickly a house fills up with smoke. Smoke bellowed from the vents and floorboard cracks, roared up the basement stairwell. My roommates had exited the house, and I moved to the living room, clutching a hand towel, thinking I could rush to the basement and pat out the flames with my little rectangle of cotton cloth, ever my father’s quixotic daughter. Instead, a wall of smoke bombarded me, constricted my throat, collapsed my chest, knocked me to the ground, and stole my breath. I crawled on all fours to the door, where a fireman picked me up and offered oxygen.

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My roommates, tearful, clung to one another, then called their parents for consolation. I sat away from them, listening to crackles and dispatcher news coming from the fire engine radio. It was a moonless night, and things seemed so peaceful around our burning house. Whom would I call for consolation? My boyfriend and I had just split up for the umpteenth time, and Benjamin and Irene might as well have been in another galaxy, the final dissolution of their marriage more suffocating than the wall of smoke. I told myself I had my life as consolation and tried to buck up strong and brave. We slept on my ex-boyfriend’s living room floor for the remainder of the night, though our landlady appeared, anxious and solicitous, offering her guest room. I didn’t call my parents in those early morning hours because my mother had complained for years that I, a light sleeper and sleepwalker since the shadow had begun to drift across my bedroom window, was the source of her insomnia, and my father at that time was nearly mute. The fire department saved the rental house for the next set of student tenants. A piece of dusty drywall, not an up-to-building-code firewall, had been placed in front of the old, unserviced furnace, and uncoated wires had sparked and arced each time the furnace came on in the night. Finally, one of the sparks had caught the drywall on fire. My roommates were lucky to have escaped early enough during the fire to run up the basement stairs, as the stairs, next to the flameengulfed furnace wall, were their only escape. I was grateful that their screams reached me in time. The Legal Aid Society of Colorado helped my roommates recover all their losses, as all their possessions were destroyed. My things reeked of smoke, but the smell of smoke, with many washings, disappears. In May of 1974, still disjointed by the fire and angry over my parents’ March divorce, I began to plot my own exit from the family, first by quitting the study of my father’s mother tongue. Like many students of my generation, the exotic wisdom of Eastern culture fascinated me, and after watching a philosophy professor draw elaborate Chinese characters to express action and passivity, I declared Asian studies my field of interest, with an emphasis on Chinese. My father heard this news without comment, for he knew the damage done to a tongue deprived of its ancestral sounds. At the end of May, I arranged

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to travel to Alaska to work for the summer. My mother kept the house, but where my father would live, I did not know. I did not see him again until he asked to see me before I left for Alaska. We met at the Blue Parrot Café in Longmont, Colorado, an Italian diner my father chose because it was close to Boulder, and he liked the Italian sausage sandwiches they served, though the garlic and chili peppers in the sausage made his ulcers flare. Already seated when my boyfriend and I arrived, my father held his glasses in his left hand as he peered closely at the menu. He and my mother had been divorced for a little over two months, and he’d dropped at least thirty pounds. He was wearing too much hair cream, so the waves in his black hair looked more like the ancient waves in a piece of black basalt. His cheeks along his jawline sagged, and the stubble of his beard was dark. He wore a blue knit polo shirt and yellow plaid, bell-bottom pants ten years out of style. He put the menu down and stood to shake Steven’s hand, as he had shaken the hands of the other young men my sisters and I had dated, this one for the first and only time. Steven and I had no real interest in each other; we were using each other: I, for a ticket away from my parents’ new divorce, he, for a sexual experiment. After a few meaningless questions, my father learned that Steven was a Quaker, a carpenter, and a student of English literature, information that did not seem to interest him and to which he offered no response. In a few weeks, Steven and I would travel to southeastern Alaska, where Steven had a friend who took photographs for National Geographic. I stayed to work all summer at a salmon cannery in Petersberg, while he left after a week to work in a logging camp, deciding, finally, after our brief interlude, that he was gay. My father was agitated, not electrified, as he was not reciting a lecture on Spanish history, his common banter. When the antipasto platter arrived, my father forked the sliced tomatoes and put them on his bread dish. As I’d seen him do a thousand times before, he turned his left palm up to sprinkle a teaspoon of salt into the shallow bowl made by his palm. He stared intently into the white grains in his hand, then cast the salt back and forth across the red slices of tomato on his plate using slow, wavy passes. Where the salt soaked into the juicy flesh, it turned a deeper red.

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My father did not look at Steven, asked only about Steven’s draft status—4F—and rather than respond, my father picked up the cannister of dried chili peppers and shook the red seeds around. His eyes silently disapproved of Steven’s long, brown braid. I wanted to talk more about my change in study, from Spanish to Chinese, but it didn’t seem important at the time. Instead, my father told me, brusquely, gracelessly, and publicly, so Steven and anyone sitting near to us could also hear, about a ten-year-long affair he had been having with a woman he called Jean. He wiped his glasses with his handkerchief as he spoke. “A shiksa,” he said as he finished, “pardon my French.” I did not explain to Steven that a shiksa, when inflected near the glottis, is a derisive, Yiddish word for a non-Jewish woman, not French, and my father was making what he considered a joke. It was 1974, and Yiddish was not yet peppered liberally through the general American English parlance. Steven, who would have been termed, in similar parlance, a shagitz, a non-Jewish man, was a Yankee from rural Massachusetts, not particularly versed, or interested, he later told me, in the folkways of Jewish people. Steven was completely blind without his wire-rimmed glasses, and he took them off and smiled thinly at my father. I think it was a smile—he pursed his lips. I have no idea what Steven thought of this information, nor did I ever learn. We were never frank with each other, except when I said that I wanted to go to Alaska for the summer, whether we remained lovers or not. My father did not return Steven’s tepid smile; no matter, because Steven could not see my father’s face. I didn’t respond either, as my throat felt like I’d just been served a large, hot stone that I had been forced to swallow. Ten years was half my life. My father added a few more tidbits—that he’d met Jean at the Cloverleaf greyhound track when we got back from my cousin Jackie’s wedding in New York, in 1964. He said Jean had seemed so “helpless,” had needed “pointers” on how to choose her bets. Jean was twenty-six years old the year he met her, six years older than my sister Sheila. “Oh,” he said, as if adding a casual afterthought. He waved his right hand grandly in the air. “And she threatened to call and tell your mother about all this if I didn’t marry her.” He took a swig of Coke and raised his voice. “I told her, `Go ahead.’ I’m not going to marry

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another crazy broad.’” He cleared his throat and tried to pat my hand, but I removed it from the table so that I could dig my nails into my thigh. “Your mother didn’t know.” His tried to keep his features even, but an angry twitch raised the left corner of his upper lip. “To hell with her,” he said, but I wasn’t certain which woman he was cursing. Saliva collected in the corner of his mouth. He jabbed at it with his napkin then wadded the napkin up and threw it on the table. I had thought I understood how long a minute can last while I was standing at the window with the living room drapes held in my arms, waiting for my father’s green Chevy truck to reappear in front of our house, but I had been wrong. Was my father angry because he’d finally have to face a confrontation with my mother, or merely angry that his life was growing more complicated by the minute? Certainly, by the delivery of the news, his false, confiding tone, he expected nothing negative from me. “The broad,” he added, meaning Jean, “is nuts.” He looked at me, but I looked down into my spaghetti, which reminded me of the bloody entrails of a dog run over by a car. My father held his sausage sandwich midway between the plate and his mouth and forced a laugh, communicating what? I couldn’t say. Ten years. Did he think it ludicrous to contemplate another marriage after the disaster of his first? Was he shoring up bravado against my mother’s anger, which would follow Jean’s phone call to her? Ten years?! Was he trying to make light of a decade-long deception? Was I suddenly privy to this information because I was going to Alaska with a man I had no intention of seeing very long? Was this the beginning of some new phase in our relationship, my father suddenly transformed into a swinging, bell-bottomed hipster? The father I had adored suddenly revealed his shaky underpinnings as a flawed and feckless man, pushing at the pedestal upon which he stood from my little-girl vantage, pushing to see just how much force, how much information, it would take to topple it. My father chewed his food and tried to laugh again, but the sound came out a strangled breath. His eyes narrowed. I didn’t want to hear the revelations of this human and fallen Benji. Where was he, really, all those years during our performances he never came to, the games

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and contests, the sick days we stayed at home, when he said he was going out to talk to a crony about cattle or court the chefs in the San Marco Room of the Brown Palace Hotel? If I had to choose between this version of my father and the others, the business huckster, Bennie the vaquero, the New York cowboy, I preferred his quixotic recitations about the Golden Age of the Sephardim in Spain, so safe, so static, so antiseptic, from the distance of five hundred years. “There’s a boy,” he’d said, lowering his voice, after Steven had excused himself to use the restroom. “Jean’s boy. But I don’t think he’s mine.” He didn’t elaborate, except to say the boy was seven. He didn’t mention wife-swapping in Virginia Vale. Jean had never lived there, but a quick calculation put the start of their affair at roughly that same rollicking, good time, when families like mine tormented themselves with the idea of “open” marriage. My father had said my mother suspected nothing those ten years, but he was wrong. Her favorite mantra whenever he came home late or went on a gambling spree to Las Vegas, whenever he went to New York to visit family, was “I wish that I were dead.” For the rest of that summer, I was alone, and in Alaska. Steven left after the end of our first week together. Slogging through the marshy Alaskan muskeg or packing salmon in four pound, institutional-sized tin cans, watching brown bears scavenging through garbage at the Petersburg dump, cooking for the packing crew at the cannery, lying on a mattress on the floor of a room no wider that my outspread arms, in my mind’s eye, while the midnight sun refused to set, I saw two images of my father. One was the clown in the Blue Parrot Café, costumed in polo shirt, bell-bottomed pants, berating his shiksa girlfriend, the other my favorite snapshot of my father. He stands jaunty in a soldier’s pose, tall, heroic, strong, and dewy-eyed. It is 1942, and he has just finished basic training in Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, so he has not yet been in Europe, Africa, China, or South America, though he already affects the cocky swagger of a soldier. He is in a hilly landscape, near a levee of the Mississippi River, poplar trees precise and leafless along the horizon. Arms crossed over his chest, shoulders back, chin thrust forward, right leg canted, a cigarette dangles from his right hand. He affects a posture I never saw him strike except in pictures taken during his tours of military duty. His clothes, here a

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light-colored jacket and pleated military slacks, as in his wedding picture, fit him as though a tailor took his every measure. In the background, there is mist coming off the river, and like an apparition, another figure stands behind my father, looking at something undefined behind the camera’s eye. When I was little, my mother sometimes told me the apparition was a glimmer my father cast that would become my sisters and myself, my shadow in his shadow. But when I pressed my mother, “How?” she would say, “Oh, never mind, stop looking at that picture,” and the picture and the fragrances released from the drawer that held it—rose petals, little pine cones from the woods, the waxy scent of old lipsticks in their metal tubes—would seal over in darkness until the next time I slipped into their bedroom to see the photo. What could the apparition see that I could not? It was not until I went to Spain many years later to look for traces of the Sephardim, a mother of two teenaged children and a woman in my forties, that I began to piece together the various overlapping chronologies of my father’s life, the family’s life, and mine. When I was eight or nine, I watched my mother push my father away from her, like the Ben and Anna turning from each other in the Burma Shave signs, turning her face away when he tried to kiss her, throwing up her arms to block his embraces, creeping into their bedroom many hours after he had been asleep. Suddenly, inexplicably, it seemed to me then, the heavy stubble of his beard scratched her face; his throaty, phlegmy laugh annoyed her; his heavy, musky odor after sleep made her crank the windows wide. Her verbal rebukes had started sooner, that my father never had that all-consuming, American drive that kept her sisters, but not her, in minks. Her icy manner began before the year he took up with Jean, but for what set of reasons besides these physical symptoms of disregard, I do not know. She was unhappy as a mother of three children, and the weepy, bloody discharges of womanhood repulsed her. After my younger sister was born, a tubal ligation ended her anxiety about more pregnancies, but not her anxiety about raising girls and living with my father. My parents had loved to dance together, my mother in her gold lamé gowns, and my father in his suits. They had liked to dine by candlelight alone, he sipping a Manhattan and she a vodka gimlet, until

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their conversation turned to whispers. In the years before her beauty parlor afternoons, he had liked to rinse her fine, straight blonde hair with lemon juice when she stood over the kitchen sink to wash it. His favorite spot was by the side of the tub while she sat soaking in a hot, hot bath, her pale skin blotched and flushed, as bubbles like Damascene silk clung to her full breasts. He had liked to soap her back. Suddenly, the dancing ceased. The back scrubs stopped. My mother sought the council of her sisters at my grandmother’s kitchen table, but what they said remained to me a jumble of shrieking with Yiddish words. My mother began to take her baths alone. Soon after we had levitated Kathy’s body in our girlish ceremony, holding our breaths while my father walked heavily above us, my mother began to prefer sleeping on the tan plastic couch wrapped in one thin, yellow, cotton blanket in the basement den. Until the day at the Blue Parrot Café in Longmont, I held my mother responsible for turning my father sour, for pushing him away, but I realized that just as she doled, he doled in like measure. He was looking out for Bennie—Benji—Benjamin. He stayed with her, with us, my sisters and me, as a way to keep the trappings of American midcentury respect he had built around himself. When she hurled words at him, he answered her with silence. Whatever cupboard doors she slammed, he clicked doors lightly. While she cleaned and scrubbed, he smoked and read the race forms, so patient, our saintly Benji. In addition to whatever affection he felt for all his daughters, as long as he kept his relationship with Jean as static as his shtick on Spain, he could have his blonde wife and his three girls and the patina of his neighborhood life, with whatever else he ordered on the side. He could appear to shoulder all my mother’s ridicule; he could be her “whipping boy,” he liked to say, but he used my mother as his cover. As long as he stayed married to my mother, Jean could not assail him to marry her. Jean had nothing to offer, except her youth. She lived in a ramshackle duplex somewhere west of town near Golden, drawing on her dead husband’s small VA benefits. As long as he stayed married to my mother, my father could continue to live in our Spanish-style redbrick ranch house in the middle-class neighborhood of Virginia Vale. As long as he stayed married to my mother, she could beg for charity and loans from her sisters and their

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husbands, and he could spend it. She could rage over piled-up bills, at clerks over poor service, and she could rage as she rummaged through bins of bargain clothing in drafty job-lot warehouses. She could rage at us, our father’s children, grab our wavy hair, and beat us with a shellacked wooden paddle until the handle cracked. My father, in the meantime, could come home and wipe our tears. He never yelled, or raged, or beat us. He could relax and smoke his Camels in the basement john, pacific, kind, misunderstood, henpecked, and detached. What did my father betray, besides the vows of fidelity in marriage? What did he break, besides the seventh commandment not to commit adultery? He broke everything, and all the pieces had to be glued imperfectly back together. I tried many times to escape the tawdry mess of my parents’ separation and divorce. I rejected my dutiful study of Spanish and the folkways of the Sephardim; I went to teach English in Taiwan, where my father never wrote me. When I returned, I went to visit him only once in the dingy basement apartment near Lowry Air Force Base where he had moved. Sitting in his kitchenette on a torn plastic chair, watching him heat water in a cracked enamel saucepan made me want to jump up and box his ears, made me want to ask him where he had hidden my young father. I moved away from Denver, away from all my family, in 1977, ten years after my father had disappeared, first to Seattle, then across Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island, where I lived in an arrangement of convenience with another long-haired man, this one a chemist. When that relationship, not surprisingly, ended, I moved into an old farmhouse that had been the Bainbridge Dairy, and one icy morning, upset, distracted, and thinking about the mess of relationships I had recently been in, I hit a patch of black ice on my way to the car ferry that shuttled island inhabitants to Seattle. I hit the brakes instead of pumping them, as black ice is invisible, and my car spun twice around. It jumped the eight-inch-high cement barrier between the road asphalt and a narrow walkway one hundred feet from the playground of the Captain Bainbridge Elementary School. Between the walkway and the playground, there were electric poles evenly spaced, and at the far edge of the walkway between it and the swing set on the playground,

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a six-foot drop to a ditch full of blackberry brambles and brackish water, that day crusted with ice. The front end of the car stopped spinning when the left front wheel ripped away, leaving the axle free to drag across the high cement barrier until the car slid into an electric pole. The impact flipped the car over onto its roof, and the slope of the hill rocked it to the driver’s side. The car slid, driver’s side down, into the ditch. Not fastened into my seat with a seatbelt, and without health insurance, I closed my eyes, and, for the first time in a long, long, time, prayed that I would be able to open them again, and walk. I climbed out of the car on the passenger side, with Hollywood visions of the car bursting into flames, and tore my jeans on the blackberry canes before I could crawl up the hill to the road. I sat on the curb until another motorist came by and called the state patrol, and the patrolman took me to the clinic in Winslow after his car skidded off the road on that same black-ice patch. My back only hurt a little bit, and the shock only lasted a few days. All of this happened between 7:00 and 7:05 a.m. Had I been an hour late, I would have hit a schoolchild as well as destroyed my car. Without a car, and living in the middle of an island with one taxi and a bus that stopped, infrequently, a quarter of a mile from the farmhouse, winter was miserable. I was miserable. I often wept in public and wiped my eyes with paper towels that made them red and bloody in the corners. I rode my bicycle everywhere in the pouring rain and once got so drenched on my way to the ferry that links Bainbridge Island with Seattle, even riding in my rain gear, I had to stand in the bathroom in my underpants and wring out my pants, my blouse, my socks in the sink, to the horror of the women applying their eyeliner and lipstick in the mirrors all around me. My father had promised to visit me in February, and he bought his ticket right before the crash. It took a long time for the insurance claim to clear, and before his trip, I called and in a shaky voice told him he should think about changing the date because I still had no car. He must have heard some cue in the tone of my voice, some deep need I did not know how to convey in words, because he said, with unusual candor, “Don’t you want me to come?” I couldn’t answer, for fear that my shaky voice would betray the need I was trying so hard not to feel. “We’ll have to walk,” I finally said.

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“How far?” he said. He hated to walk. “To the highway from my house, to catch the bus to the ferry.” “They got no taxis there?” “One.” “Judas Priest,” he said. “Josefa.” I let my name bounce along the phone lines, then the szzz of a match being struck, the pull of air through the filter of his cigarette. “What kind of place only has one taxi? Even in Denver, they have two fleets.” He paused. I said nothing. “I’ll be honest with you. I wouldn’t miss this trip for the world.” To be honest, my father had missed many things, by then, for the world—my younger sister’s and my graduation from junior high, high school, college, all my sister’s swim and diving meets, my older sister’s investiture as a lawyer, not to mention family weddings and bar mitzvahs and all the little hallmarks of childhood. I wanted to believe him. I did believe him. He came. He was miserable, and he told me so, repeatedly. The farmhouse was cold, and I had no extra money to heat it. I had no wood for the fireplace. He shivered. He complained. He rubbed his hands together and turned up the collar on his jacket as though he were a hobo in the train yard. The farmhouse was “a dump.” The mildew in the guest room “stank.” He was cold. I didn’t have extra blankets. My dog’s barking annoyed him. I didn’t have a TV, and I always lost at cards. He didn’t like my taste in music. I lived outside of town, in “chayatzville,” he said. All the extra money he had he had used to buy his plane ticket, so we couldn’t “live it up,” his words. He couldn’t walk far because his heart was starting to go bad, but I had no idea. I thought he was being stubborn to annoy me. I thought exercise would do him good. We quarreled about riding in the taxi, and when the taxi was twenty minutes late, we quarreled about the “hellhole” I had moved to. We quarreled because I wouldn’t serve him red meat, and we quarreled because he wanted to eat hot dogs in Seattle. “I’ll eat a god damned hot dog if I want to!” he had bellowed near the fish stalls in the Pike Place Market. We quarreled because he told me that he’d been in Seattle late in the ’60s with his brother, Sol, and Sol had had a heart attack right in their hotel room. Uncle Sol fell into my father’s arms, he said. He rushed Sol to Harborview Hospital, he said. When I questioned my

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father about the date and the particulars because they didn’t coincide with particulars of Denver family doings on that date, he got so mad his face turned red, then gray as ash. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I never spoke Jean’s name aloud to him, but he knew what I was implying. After that, we quarreled because he didn’t want to go to a Norwegian village with a John Birch Society welcome sign, look at souvenirs, or visit Chief Seattle’s grave. We quarreled because he refused to taste clam chowder, and we quarreled because he didn’t want to look at modern art. We quarreled because we never had—my pacific father and his pacific middle daughter—and we quarreled because, as the Ladino proverb says, “La boka ke dize ‘no,’ dize ‘sí,’” the mouth that says “no,” says “yes.” I tried cooking for him once, stir-fried vegetables and rice. With tofu, though he said soybeans fed pigs and fattened cows. While I began to prepare dinner, my dog got tangled in its chain and I had to set it free, so I went outside while I was heating oil in my wok. My father read the paper on the couch I had borrowed from a friend for his visit, and when I returned to the kitchen, the wok was a pot of shooting orange flames. Flames licked the pressboard behind the stove, and I threw the wok lid on. The flames went out, but it was amazing how much black smoke a little stovetop fire could generate. The kitchen filled with smoke, the living room, I had to open all the doors and windows, which made the farmhouse colder. The smoke clung to the veil of spider webs I had unknowingly been living underneath for months. We had toast and scrambled eggs for dinner, but my father couldn’t eat the eggs, because I didn’t have any ketchup to douse them with. His face was long as we sat in a booth near the cafeteria concession on the car ferry we rode across Puget Sound to reach Seattle and his bus connection to the airport. The water was choppy, and the boat’s rocking made my stomach hurt. I had wanted my father to approve of this new facet of my life, to commend me for striking out on my own, for surrounding myself with this new, watery world. I wanted him to commend me for growing up. He thrummed his fingers against the window and watched the rain streak diagonal across the glass. “You could come home,” he said, “at least to have someone look at your back.” “There are doctors here,” I said.

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“You know that’s not what I mean.” He put his hand on my forearm. It was unpleasantly hot. “Dad,” I said, “I won’t come home.” I pushed his hand away. “You don’t know what that means,” he said, “you won’t come home. You don’t know what you’re saying. You need to give it a chance; you’ve got to move on.” “What about you,” I said. “Are you trying to move on?” He pressed his lips together. I thought I’d angered him, that I’d ruined the trip with my implied sarcasm. I know he heard my tone, but he pretended to ignore it. “The past is over,” he said. “It’s one thing you can’t change.” He hesitated. “And death. And taxes.” He took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with a white hankie he took from his pocket, pleased with his old joke. I thought he was going to apologize. He didn’t. He put his glasses back on and folded his hankie a little too precisely before he put it back into his pocket. He checked the dial on his watch, his right hand twitching, his right wrist and hand rotating while he dealt an invisible hand of cards, a sure sign he was about to deliver one of his life lessons. Instead, he shook his head and shrugged. I bit the knuckles on my left fist until my father gently lowered my hand. The ferry cut its engines so that it wouldn’t plough into the pier. “Hey,” he said, “Josefa.” He cuffed me on the tip of my chin. “Cheer up. It’s been a good trip.” After he was settled on the bus, I stood at the curb and waved goodbye like an idiot while he watched me from his seat. When the bus made its turn, south toward the airport, I sat on an empty, bus-stop bench, thinking about our family of five isolated strangers. I’d just learned to write a Chinese idiom, yi bu, yi bu, step by step. It had taken almost five years, but my father and I had made this first gesture of reconciliation. More than time, my parents’ divorce, and the knowledge about his paramour, had separated us. His distance was compounded by mine— my running, moving, constantly looking over my shoulder, keeping my own secrets so close they began to fester in my chest. In April of my senior year of college, 1975, my roommates and I were stalked and assaulted by a drifter, a madman with several digits missing from his right hand. Renée shared a room with me at the time, but she had an asthma attack and so was home in Denver the night the man broke in through our kitchen window.

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I was awakened by my roommates’ screams; then the man pushed them into my room, pressed a knife to my throat and bound my hands. In the humiliating, terrifying moments that followed, I worked at my bonds to free myself, and when I heard his knife drop to the floor near my head, I lunged up and butted him with my broad, swimmer’s shoulders, more successful this time than when I had tried to put out a wall of flames with a cotton hand towel. “Run!” I shouted to my roommates, who lay in a heap on the floor in my bedroom, “I’ve got him!” They did run. Rather than pummeling the man, they ran out of the room. I had hoped they would bite or scratch, scream, anything, but they left me alone with him. How many minutes was it? One? Two? One thousand? What had happened to the duct-taped pipe, the billy club my father had made for my older sister? Where was the lesson in boxing my father had once promised? How long could the surprise of my grip on his forearms keep the assailant from picking up the knife? The assailant wasn’t thinking or calculating seconds, and he fled. The police caught him later that night, after another assault was called in, against another set of roommates, where the assailant bound their hands with electric cord, raped them, then burned off all their hair. It wasn’t the same man—this one had all his fingers. There was an inquest, and a trial, a long sentence. Each woman dealt with the attack alone—with the shame of having to repeat the incident to law enforcement and people in the courtroom, the revulsion, the hospital checkup for physical evidence, the trauma of a magnitude I had not dreamed. I turned first to my mother, but she told me the reason for the attack was the “way I gallivanted,” which meant I rode my bike because I had no car. “And, you know,” she added, “your hair. I told you men are animals.” My hair was in a braid, and it was dark, so the assailant couldn’t see the color, and I was in my bed, sleeping, not out gallivanting. I did not blame myself for my assault. Astonished by her response, exhausted by it, enraged, I rejected the guilt my mother offered. Asking for solace from my father, then, to risk being heaped in like measure with his brand of medieval superstitions or mid-twentiethcentury misogyny, to be blamed by him too for carrying the curse of womanhood was a risk I refused to take. I asked my mother not to tell

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my father, never to tell my father, and she complied, though she misunderstood my reasons. For fourteen days, I did not close my eyes. Frightened by a man who stood outside my bedroom window waiting for his friend who also lived in my apartment, I pounded on the wall that separated my room from the apartment next door, but no one came to check on me. No one came to help. If I’d been armed, I would have shot the man, though he was guilty only of waiting for his friend on the curb outside my window. I lived like this for two more years, pounding walls, chasing sleep, changed my phone number and my address fifteen times. I kept busy by building adobe walls, studying classical Chinese; I felt safer in a California earthquake zone, ventured even to Taiwan to be far enough away. I wished I could turn to my father. I wanted him to assure me that all men were not animals. I needed more than his stories of the Sephardim and our Golden Age in Spain. I wanted to be that adoring five-year-old watching football, shivering in the end zone with my father. More than anything, I was certain that my father’s inability to console would crush me.

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Chapter Ten Spinoza’s Trade

For comfort and direction, my father evoked the wisdom of Benedictus de Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, the way his former Italian gambling buddies evoked the Virgin and her Son, calling on the philosopher and his reason just as my mother would preface each of her scant compliments with kineahora to ward off the evil eye. Spinoza represented the possibility of right action and right choices, even when many actions and choices had gone awry. When Lenny Selanikio’s helicopter crashed in Vietnam, my father turned to Spinoza’s faith in the perfectibility of man to assuage his grief. Was there something in Spinoza for me as well? From the wrong class to fancy himself an intellectual, nevertheless, my father had been schooled in a depression-era curriculum that valued everyman’s classicism. He read the Latin poets and Cicero, grudgingly as any restless high school boy, but he was of a generation who believed that public access to libraries and culture was essential, part of the distinction of being American. My father delivered Spinoza’s ideal of a borderless humanity of infinite charity with the same flick of his hand he used to tap the ash from his cigarette, the same flick he used to signify the close of a hand of cards, the same flick he used to

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berate presidents or their corrupt minions, his new audience his fellow cabbies in line downtown outside the Brown Palace Hotel, waiting for a good fare to chauffeur to the airport. Spinoza did not draw clear distinctions between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim, though he suffered from the judgment of both groups. Expelled from the synagogue by the Amsterdam rabbinate in 1656 for disdaining the interpretation of a strictly Hebrew God of wrath and miracles, Spinoza saw this view of God as an obstacle blocking the possibility of myriad relationships between God and man. Spinoza changed his Hebrew first name, Baruch, to the Latin, Benedictus. In spite of this cosmetic change, most introductions of Spinoza identify him as a Sephardic Jew born in Amsterdam, of Portuguese ancestry, son of a merchant whose family resettled in the Low Countries. Spinoza could not accept Judaism, as the rabbis would have liked, because his thinking about the divine began to run counter to contemporary interpretations of a Judaism whose evolution was stalled by ritual and antiquity. He was regarded as a curious and difficult renegade; but neither could he escape, had he wanted to, the label of being a Jew. In Spinoza’s Europe, people for centuries from a variety of religious backgrounds had changed religious alliance for marriage, business, politics, and occasionally from conviction, but the label of Jew continued to stick. Dr. Roderigo Lopez likewise held my father’s fascination, always introduced as a marrano Jew, a convert to Christianity. A true Spinozan, my father did not compare the good philosopher with the rakish Dr. Lopez, for to do so, to court contradictions, would be to encourage Spinoza’s censor for artificial limitations established in comparisons. Lopez had practiced medicine and his own form of the state’s highchurch religion in London. Physician to Elizabeth I, he was executed for treason in 1594 for plotting to poison the queen. Lopez is remembered, thanks to Thomas Dekker in The Whore of Babylon and Christopher Marlowe in Doctor Faustus, as a most nefarious Jew. Rather than Lopez’s treachery, it was his high position in Elizabeth’s court, regardless of his country of origin, that intrigued my father most, that, and a ring of rubies and diamonds Elizabeth stole from Lopez’s widow and wore at her waist, because she liked the colors. My father never mentioned

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that it was partly because of Lopez and his relationship with Philip II of Spain, that Cádiz, the root of the Varón family line, was sacked and burned, with Elizabeth’s nod, by Lord Howard of Effington in 1596. My father was likewise marked, though infamous only for the month that he was missing in 1967. In the role of our Josephus, he identified himself as a Spanish Jew whose family resettled in the border region between Turkey and Greece. He tried to practice charity toward others; he tried to be forgiving. He embraced life and claimed Spinoza as his kinsman. History and his own folly tested him. My father spoke Spinoza’s language of numbers. Where Spinoza, trained in geometric theorems, the shorthand of algebra, and the numerical mysteries of the Kabbalah, looked to a literature of divine position and numerical repetition as a way to know God and represent his understanding of phenomena, my father looked at the spirit of numbers to win money. Probability, percentages, and performance, race times, batting averages, RBI’s, he was drawn to anything that could be represented by whole numbers or their fractional parts. The sports he followed relied on the incremental breakdown of a stopwatch; the performance of a horse or a dog demarcated, save for the problematic photo finish, with a clear win, place, or show. The geometer’s language in Spinoza’s proofs, the curious notation in Spinoza’s personal letters to describe God, man, and thought, or the depiction of essence was as sublime as my father’s notation—neat letters and symbols my father picked up in the Army Air Corps radio school during World War II. He used them to record the truth of the stopwatch and observations about a horse’s performance on a wet or dusty track. If any New York cowboy labeled so ordinary as the purveyor of Ben Varon Meats could benefit from Spinoza’s perfectibility of man, that person was my father. The mind, Ben Varon’s mind, was, as Spinoza said, “a part of the infinite intellect of God.” That is very generous, magnanimous even, because my father did not believe in God, and he was not a perfect man. Even so, Spinoza’s generosity let my father identify with Spinoza or any grandee. Generosity allowed Bennie—Benji—Benjamin the evolution all those names imply, that a street urchin from the barrios of New York could have a life of the mind even while he carried a card deck and a race form in his pocket, that he could raise a family even

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while he was destroying it, that he could be a father even when he little understood what a fantastic architecture he had toppled. Before I put Spinoza’s generosity to test as it applies to my father’s life and mine, my new family and I are stopped on the grounds of the Jesuit Church in St. Ignatius, Montana, not far from Flathead Lake. It is 1983. My father is the union rep for Yellow Cab, has just moved from a pay-by-week motel on Federal Boulevard to the Holy Family Retirement Village in North Denver. I have just finished my master’s degree, married, and given birth to my first son. My father had nothing to say about my move to Montana, which was one of its chief attractions to me, that, its distance from home, and the poet Richard Hugo, whom my father might have resembled had he listened to the muses rather than the happy click of dice. That afternoon in St. Ignacius, my husband of ten months, David, and I were escorting a poet from Macedonia who had landed in Missoula to study writing with Richard Hugo. She had won a poetry contest with a poem about apples. Unknown to her, Hugo had died the previous autumn, before her traveling papers were secured. Crushed, but resilient, Lydia had stayed on to observe the strange folkways, mating habits, and drinking rituals of landed gentry and graduate students in the American West. We had had one other encounter with her, the previous Christmas, when she arrived, escorted by others, at our little cabin at the Bear Creek Ranch to celebrate the winter solstice and the Christmas season. Lydia had brought special grounds to make Turkish coffee for all our guests after dinner, doling out the syrup she prepared by the dropper. I remarked that the coffee was just as my Turkish grandfather had served it. Startled, she gave me a wan and troubled look, and I said nothing more to her that night. I was not drawn to her, nor she to me. I declined a cup of her special coffee because I was pregnant. Before she left, I gave all our guests, including Lydia, quart jars of the Bing cherries I had canned from the orchards near Flathead Lake the summer before. She regarded her gift with surprise and disdain, as there was nothing particularly exotic to her about a jar of canned cherries, except of course their dusky port color and the flavor of summer. My husband and I had been among the class of Hugo’s last students,

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and, after two years in an MFA program, we were not famous, and therefore, in Lydia’s mind, not worth knowing. She regarded us as illbred rustics living in a shack with an old woodstove that belched smoke every time its door opened. The cabin was little more than a shack; my father had called it “a hovel with French doors” when he came to Montana for our wedding. Lydia made her condescension clear; someone had offered to drive her from cosmopolitan Missoula, Montana, to a quaint cabin near the Blackfoot River, and she didn’t have anything else to do. Before she made a show of her special coffee, she had spent most of the evening outside, shivering on our deck so that she could smoke, blowing smoke rings into the frigid night air on the other side of the French doors that separated warm from cold. When Lydia showed up with a friend of ours later that summer to go with us on our outing to St. Ignacius, the cherry orchards near Big Fork, and Flathead Lake, I was chagrined, but too polite to tell my husband I didn’t want her near me. It was my first long outing away from the cabin since the birth of our first son, Joshua, and I was eager to get out. Lydia scoffed at the murals inside the church at St. Ignatius, Brother Carignano’s renditions purely amateurish in her view. To others, the miracle of the Jesuit handyman’s paintings were well documented, and though my husband and I were not aficionados of Catholic religious art, we wanted to see the murals in the church. To Lydia, everything was quaint and rustic, too new, the confessional boxes too small and musty, the altar with its gold leaf garish. Mary had been refigured as a Salish maiden, her long, black hair in braids, her garments of fringed, tanned deerhide, with Jesus in a cradleboard hoisted on her back. These images made Lydia laugh. It was a warm July day, the yellow ditch iris blossomed along the irrigation canals, and I nursed my son while sitting on the lawn in front of the church. Lydia sat by us on the grass, but she tried not to regard us; rather than the baby envy that engulfs some women before they are thirty-five, she enacted the antithesis—baby dread, as if I, or perhaps my son, or perhaps the two of us thus engaged were cursed, dirty, and vulgar. To counter the spell of motherhood I was casting, the poet told us, as I was trying to relax, about the old wooden churches in Skopje, and how she and her friends liked to profane them by

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entering in miniskirts and halter-tops, their boyfriends strewing condoms like rose petals between the pews, laughing as the old nuns chased them out. When she smiled, her teeth looked as though they had been filed. My son must have sensed my anxiety because he spit up his entire feeding all over the right leg of my slacks. The odor of sour milk permeated the car that hot summer afternoon as we drove through northwestern Montana. The odor had the properties of an aphrodisiac, evidently, and Lydia and our friend busied themselves petting and pinching arms, sucking black-purple hickeys on each other’s necks, while my son gurgled in his car seat, strapped in next to them. The Mission Mountains hung along the eastern edge of the valley, and the humidity rising off the lake sent waves of bent light, deep blue, into the air, but they did not notice. Lydia was further mystified when we reached our cherry orchard destination on the east shore of Flathead Lake, because we had to pick our own fruit. She was soft, whiny, and regal in her assumptions about the relative status of individuals compared to her. She had never been on a ladder, didn’t know of anyone who had, or even of anyone who owned one, and it surprised her to think that people somewhat like herself might actually engage in an agricultural practice formerly reserved for serfs. Was she pretending a status she did not enjoy at home? Clearly, she did not share the American romantics’ ethic of self-sufficiency some people in Montana were then enacting. To her, dirt was filth and not a growing medium. She did reach up and pull a cherry off the tree and pop it into her mouth, but there was a residue of white pesticide powder close to the well of the stem, and its slightly bitter, chemical taste made her mouth pucker. My husband and our friend arranged the fruit ladders, while Lydia watched and alternately rubbed her hands on her jeans and looked out toward the lake. My son was in a green corduroy infant pack slung across my chest, and his weight at ten weeks made it difficult for me to balance on a ladder, cradle his head in one hand and pick cherries with the other. Picking sweet cherries is not such a sticky, watery mess as picking sour pie cherries, but you do need two hands to do it, one to bend the branch you’re picking from and the other to clasp the fruit. My son became restless so I climbed down from my perch and rocked him underneath one of the cherry trees. Lydia stepped away.

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It takes time to pick thirty pounds of cherries, even when the boughs are full and bent, the limbs well-pruned and low. Lydia moved closer to our friend and tried to rub his thigh, but by then the aphrodisiac, regurgitated mother’s milk in close quarters, had worn off, and he, no stranger to ladders or the accidental hazards associated with them, shooed her away. She was forced, alas, to make small talk with me. My husband and our friend had just finished picking their first buckets of cherries. With two more buckets yet to fill, I resigned myself to the task of congeniality, tried talking about poets, mentioned Vasko Popa, her kinsman, but she didn’t know his work. She brought up my Turkish grandfather, and I remembered the thick black coffee she had proudly served at our Christmas dinner party and the sour look she had given me when I turned her proffered cup away. “Yes, a Turk, from Edirne,” I’d said, but that seemed not to be what she was after. “How is it, your red hair,” she said, “those eyes?” My maternal grandfather had red hair, and he was Russian, and my maternal grandmother and great grandmother had red hair, and they were Greek by way of southern Spain. They all had blue eyes that glowed so cold they could freeze a room in hell. Visigoths, Celts, and Slavs might have passed their genes along to me. “Greek,” I said. She shook her head. “Greeks look as I look.” Her skin was the texture and hue of a geisha’s, and her hair was black, thin, kinky, and windblown. Her teeth were brown from too much coffee and smoking, like my father’s before he had them capped, off-color stubs with all the enamel eaten away after a childhood bout with scarlet fever. “Greek and Turkish,” I said. But like a bloodhound, she must have smelled the foetor judaicus, the Jew-odor Thomas Dekker made famous in his play. “How can that be?” she said. “The Greeks hate the Turks.” “Not all Greeks,” I said. “Not all Turks.” “True Greeks,” she said. “Real Turks.” Perhaps I should have tried to imitate my father’s elegant voice, explain, as he had, a thousand years of Diaspora, five hundred years since the last Inquisition in Spain, all the pockets of Sephardic communities along the southern tip of Europe, the northern rim and southern tip of Africa, the eastern edge of Asia, pockets all over South America. My father was practiced, eloquent, clearly distinguishing

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between the Sephardim and their inferior cousins, the Ashkenazim. Maybe it’s a question of geography, I wanted to say, remembering the clean political distinctions from my childhood Quizzac game. “Jewish.” She paused. “Too bad.” She crumbled a green cherry leaf in her hands and tore the stem in two. She continued on, without attempting to hide her inherited contempt for Jews. “I had formed the wrong opinion of you.” I said nothing, that younger version of myself. “You know, my father talked about the Jews.” She rocked slowly on the balls of her feet. I did not encourage her to continue. She continued anyway. “He was a boy when they were rounded up in Skopje. Everyone knew they were hiding their jewels from us, those Jews. So crafty. As they boarded the trains that took them away, the children shouted up at them from the station platform to give up their jewels for some crusts of stale bread. Where are my gems,” she hissed to demonstrate. “See what my father got.” She held open her palm. It was empty. She snapped it shut. “This is what our Jews gave back.” She regarded me again, my red hair and blue eyes, my son’s relaxed and sleeping body covering my milky breasts, my stained slacks, my husband off picking the second bucket of cherries for next year’s Christmas guests. “You know,” she said, “you Jews! Even Spinoza had a trade.” Even Spinoza had a trade. It is true. Even Spinoza had a trade. He ground lenses. He was known first as an optician, and he wrote a short treatise on the rainbow. Because of his expulsion from the Amsterdam synagogue, his support for Cartesian theories, and the initial ill reception of A Treatise on Religion and Political Philosophy, neither Christians nor Jews were enamored with his ideas. His sisters had stolen his inheritance. He accepted only a small pension, provided in part after the death of Simon de Vries, his patron. Spinoza was not an idle, wealthy man. He moved from place to place and lived in small apartments. He worried that a large pension might corrupt his ascetic life. He declined a position at Heidelberg because he considered teaching “irksome.” He was schooled in a trade while young, as the Talmud mandates work as well as study for true believers. He ground lenses for optical instruments and for his own

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experiments in optics in all his lodgings—Amsterdam, Rijnsburg, The Hague. He wrote about optics, studied the effect of curvature and spectrum, and inhaled so much dust and lead in the process of making lenses that his “trade” accelerated the tuberculosis he died from in 1677, at the age of forty-five. What did Lydia, that daughter of socialism, see when she said “trade.” Did she see a displaced peasant, a street sweeper in an urban ghetto, a rickety man behind a pushcart; a rag vendor stinking of herring, onions, and sweat; a Chassid with side-curls and a long, untrimmed beard bent over a sewing machine in a dimly lit warehouse in the Bronx? A wood peddler? An accountant fixing numbers? A cattle man like my father? A cabbie waiting for a fare in front of the Brown Palace Hotel? Even Spinoza, my father’s king, counted his florins and made his way like any tradesman, biting into coins to make sure that they were real. I was a fool to expect that two thousand years of anti-Semitism would replace whatever claim to place and its corresponding national identity I might have been trying to assert with her, that my father had asserted with his coda about “special” Jews, the mythic descendants of the House of David, the Sephardim, and their Golden Age in Spain. The ride home was silent. I claimed the fatigue of a new mother and pretended to sleep from the cherry orchard all the way back to Missoula, mindful that I was missing all the mountains I had longed to see for the several weeks we were awaiting the birth of our son in early May. I did not exchange another word with the Macedonian poet. Later that evening my husband chided me for my unfriendliness until I burst into tears when I delivered her punch line about the philosopher my father held in awe, “Even Spinoza had a trade.” Even Spinoza had a trade. Lydia had persisted, dug out my family’s Jew-root like a splinter. She had told another little anecdote in the cherry orchard, the setting still the Skopje train station, still the patriotic Macedonian children watching as those stingy Jews were shoved into the transport trains bound for a string of concentration camps in Loslau or Birkenau, or perhaps to a more desolate grave, if corpses were even buried, in all the countries more than willing to give up “their Jews.” Her father is such a little boy as he waits at the train station with others. He is wearing wool knickers and a gray tweed cap. He

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sees the mother of one of his school friends, who used to give him warm milk and bread in the afternoons, and he shouts up to her as all the children are doing, “Jewels, jewels, give us your jewels!” The first cold wind of autumn drowns his high voice, and dried leaves, straw, and paper debris from the station platform swirl in the air. Tiny bits of gravel bombard the train and a dust devil whips at his thin, bare calves and pricks his skin with little needles of glass that pass through his body as though he were a ghost. “Your jewels for some bread,” he cries wildly, joyously, driven almost to ecstasy along with everyone else, though in his sweaty, dirty hands, as with the other boys, he has only the random stones he picked up like pulled teeth from between the train’s steel tracks. Lydia is talking about the Jewish families on 248th Street, Number 3—Rachel, Biti, Sonja, Anitza, Salomon, Raschela; and on 82nd Street, Number 18—Isak, Bukitza, Klara, Joheva, Bella. All of them were killed by a Nazi-incited mob in Skopje. All of them were Varons. It had promised to be such a lovely day when we drove to St. Ignatius and the lake, a perfect afternoon when just a few clouds cut the sky’s flat blueness. I was undercut, not by her anti-Semitism per se, but by her attempt to negate my claim to a national identity not defined by religion, by my effort to blur ethnic distinctions. Naively, I had assumed that the pride my father felt for the wanderings of his family, for their dispersal from Spain to Turkey and to Greece, would be something a Macedonian could understand. I had assumed that the reverence my father felt for Spinoza was a reverence any educated person would feel. What a simpleton I was to offer a view of fellowship when the acquiescence to mobs is so much more familiar. Lydia and I were alive in the same historical moment. That was all, an accident, like our meeting. That was all she would allow. She did not know about my father’s admiration for Spinoza before she delivered her contemptuous remarks. She did not know the family surnames of those killed in Skopje. Why would her father have bothered to tell her? He was a child himself at the time. What attachments to history do children have? Lydia finished her little tale and smiled. The sun was playing through the canopy of cherry branches. A heron flew. It was hard to imagine war. The poet asked with sudden, mincing enunciation if I

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knew where the bathroom was, and I pointed to an upright freezer the owners of the orchard had on their back porch. It vaguely resembled an outhouse. She walked over slowly, opened the door to white packages of wrapped meat, and I turned and walked toward my husband to help steady the ladder as he came down. My purposeful lie was meant to humiliate her, as she had humiliated me with her contempt, but I felt my pettiness even then. Spinoza’s blessed humans have a capacity for infinite charity, and in his Ethics he says they could love anyone. I forgave my father for his misdeeds, all of them, though the sting still hurts. I had to forgive him in order to allow myself to grow. I could not hate the man I had loved so absolutely. I had to let go of childhood to become an adult, enough to be a real friend, enough to be a real mother to my children, enough to be a real wife, enough to let my mind become something other than that defined by my father and his passions. I had to let go of the violence that pursued me through my early twenties, or try. Even if admiration of Spinoza’s philosophy was just part of my father’s shtick, I needed to believe in the capacity of infinite charity. After my children were born, Benjamin played the role of grandpa to perfection. He aged; he changed. He earned a new family of friends at the Holy Family Village. They didn’t know him as a cad. Even with Spinoza’s idea of infinite charity, I could not make my father love my mother, nor could I win back his business had I wanted to. After that day in the Blue Parrot Café in Longmont, Colorado, he never mentioned Jean again. He kept on with her for eight more years. I rarely saw him, except for the visit he had made to see me at the cold farmhouse on Bainbridge Island. Right before he came to my wedding in Missoula in 1982, Jean had killed herself. My little sister told me as dinner was served at the barbecue following my wedding. While she spoke, my father was sitting alone at a picnic table several yards away, dressed simply in a shortsleeved white shirt and black slacks. He’d hocked all his suits. He leaned against the table, his arms splayed to catch the breeze blowing down the slopes of the Bitterroot Mountains southwest of Missoula. He was gazing up at the few clouds forming in the sky. I brought him a plate of chicken and potato salad. He tried to smile, and he patted

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my hand in gratitude. I thought the things that had happened between him and Jean were his alone. I thought my sympathy would embarrass him, or make me too much his confidante. I was shaky in my hours-old role as David’s wife and too young to understand or accept that, like it or not, secular or religious, Sephardic, Ashkenazic, or other, we are all inextricably linked. As for Lydia, she is fixed in time, always standing with the bitter taste of pesticide rather than sweet cherries in her mouth. She returned to Macedonia, I suppose. She has likewise aged, and perhaps she has also changed. Perhaps she has been victimized by war. Spinoza knew that his template for infinite charity and his axioms for blessedness also contained a paradox, as the capacity for a human being to extend infinite charity does not ensure love, nor does it ensure that someone will be loved in return. Reciprocal love, according to Spinoza, cannot be demanded, not even from God. I can make no claim on Lydia’s goodwill. She can make no claim on mine. My father could make no claim for love once he revealed duplicitousness. Love is thus distilled. But there are finer points. All the perished ones, including Anitza, age ten, Salomon, age seven, and Raschela, age two, were not allowed to grow older, nor were they allowed to change. They were murdered. Their deaths were celebrated by a ragtag mob of children calling out for jewels. The children’s zeal for shiny stones might somehow be dismissed, as they were children, after all. Perhaps Lydia’s father was being more ironic than his daughter understood. Perhaps he was a cynic. Perhaps he was like my father, reciting a history that somehow made him bigger than his life had become. Spinoza’s ideals were relevant to those children, for his template of mercy is used to judge the mob. Would Spinoza have suggested forgiveness for brutality? Shame and pride test the boundaries of charity, though “infinity” implies there are no boundaries. Perhaps Lydia wouldn’t share her father’s story so freely now or with such apparent pleasure. Perhaps her cruelty was only momentary, merely petty. And what of assailants and their crimes? Is madness good defense? Incarceration just punishment? Spinoza said we shouldn’t waste our time deploring criminals but rather pity them for their paltry lives. And of what merit are all the cruelties of fathers, family, history, weighed against the death of children?

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Would my father have turned the other cheek if Lydia had scorned Spinoza to his face? I don’t know. We make what we will of charity, reciprocal or not. We fashion it as best we can, because, without it, we are lost.

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Chapter Eleven I’d Give My Life for a Drink of Raki

A cappella, my father’s voice sang out, “Mi vida doy para el raki, I’d give my life for a drink of raki. Benerlo, no puedo decharlo. Hand it over; I can’t do without it.” We drove through the stretch of scrub-covered hills between the bend in the Snake River, with its willowly sandbars and white sand beach, as it curves towards Weiser, Idaho, and on to the rest stop in the shallow, rocky canyon along the Burnt River, fifteen miles north in Weatherby. It was May, the month of both his grandsons’ births, 1993, and I had just picked him up at the airport in Boise, Idaho for the 150-mile drive north to our home in Oregon. The dry hills had a faint burst of green and the soft purple of lupine and yellow wild pea. It was my father’s second visit since my husband and I had moved our family to Oregon in 1988 to teach at a rural university in the northeastern corner of the state. “Panther piss” is what he called raki, homemade grain alcohol, also the nomenclature he used to describe the bootleg brandy my grandfather stole from unfinished bottles on the tables of patrons he served during Prohibition. His son, my father, was now mostly a teetotaler, but the raki ditty my father sang in my car filled him with wicked delight—for the thought of bad-boy, swaggering drunks, for his own

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wild nights in Harlem, for the patched-up memory of his father secreting a bottle of raki under his coat to swig in the cold dead of tenement nights. Properly speaking, raki is a distillate spirit from eastern Europe, originally from Turkey, and it was in Turkey that my grandfather first developed a taste for the dry fire that chased the beverage down his throat and crossed his eyes. According to my father, raki could also be used as an antiseptic on deep cuts, to cauterize burns, to chase away bedbugs, lice, and cockroaches, to take the wax off linoleum floors, and as lamp oil with just a tiny lead of wick. During the early 1920s, when my grandfather was learning English, he referred to any alcoholic beverage without malt or hops as raki, but it was the oily, amber distillate of grain somewhere between bourbon, whiskey, rye, and Everclear that made his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth and his depth perception disappear. Anathema to the lighthearted tone of the ditty inside the car, we came upon an overturned station wagon, outside of it, dazed people pressed their hands to their foreheads, milled around the overturned car on the median strip just north of the Snake River near the truck stop at Huntington. The wreck was total, but all the passengers were standing up and hugging one another, safe. No sooner was Dio mos guadre, God protect us all, out of his mouth and rescue sirens out of earshot, than his snappy, raki drinking song wove between the strands of the radio’s weak reception and my father’s efforts to reveal more particulars of his life to me. He laughed, removed his thick, blackframed glasses, and wiped a few tears from the corners of his eyes. To divert the embarrassment of nostalgia for his father’s drinking song revealed in the car after a fifty-year hiatus, he patted my right hand gripping the steering wheel, as he had taught me, at two o’clock, then checked himself for the intimate display, not sure how I’d receive it. He looked out at the overgrazed cheatgrass hills framing the car accident and said, “Jesus, Josefa, all this nothing.” Like many transitions parents make between unknown events that trigger the delicious memories we think we want to hear, it was impossible to read his gestures. Was he happy, melancholy, just passing time? I tried pursuing the raki line, but he grew restive with more scrutiny about my grandfather and his drinking habits, for scrutiny

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would lead to tales of my grandfather’s drunkenness and loss of work, or to neglect, or to his random slaps, or to the job that cost my grandfather his sanity while he tried to do without raki, packing lead into batteries with unprotected hands. Was it possible for the ditty to be just a song and not a cover for childhood’s deeper sorrows? To break the silence in the car, I recalled the visit my grandfather had made to Colorado when he baked biscoches for his granddaughters in my mother’s kitchen. I described the biscoches’ sweet, buttery, golden hue, their serpentine cookie shapes so exotic compared to the uniform flesh-colored rounds my mother sliced then baked from a tube of premixed, refrigerated cookie dough. My rhapsody led my father too far back, to a childhood filled with hunger, and later, to my mother’s poached-egg-and-grapefruit diets, the empty cans of Metrical, her spotless Westinghouse-appointed kitchen. As we ticked off distance on the mileposts, we agreed that food and drink were complicated links that bound us to our childhoods. Distracted by a thunderstorm and bolts of lightning that struck the mountains in the distance, and afterward, a rainbow, we made a stop at a gas station in Baker City to buy five dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, “just in case” the rainbow’s pot of gold landed inside our car. Like his trip to Bainbridge Island when I had needed him, he had come to Oregon when the boys most needed a grandfather in their lives. He met with Ezra’s second-grade class and pointed on the wall map to all the airstrips where he’d landed in South America during World War II, sent there because of his Spanish and smattering of Portuguese to “take pictures,” he’d told the class, squinting one eye and pressing the shutter button on an imaginary camera. Cali and Bogota, Colombia; Caracas and Maracaibo, Venezuela; Lima, Peru; Recife, Belem, Manaus, and Rio de Janero, Brazil—he ticked off all the names. He went on to countries on other continents in 1944: Alexandria, Egypt; Italian Somaliland; New Delhi and Karachi, India (Karachi, Pakistan now); Chungking, China; then back to the United States in May of 1944. After his long recitation of foreign places, one of Ezra’s schoolmates asked my father if he had any souvenirs from the war, and he said “yes,” without skipping a beat in his recitation, a cigarillo box full of coins from all the places he’d been. I looked at him, at his neutral gaze taking in the construction paper and Styrofoam

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galaxies hanging from the schoolroom ceiling. I knew that box of foreign coins—they were from a vending machine at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. I hung back to use the restroom before walking to the playground, thought about calling my father on his white lie, but it was such a small one. When I returned to the hallway, a little boy burst through the classroom door at the other end of the long hall, where first and second graders had their classes, a heavyset, bug-eyed teacher close behind. She shoved him, slammed him against the wall, wadded the thin cotton of his shirt into a tiny ball in her fist. I wondered what he’d done when I hear her shout, “Never, never, never speak Spanish to me again!” Her blow momentarily made him mute, his eyes glazed over, his small head, covered with close-cropped brown hair, still against the green-and-yellow construction-paper leaves and butterflies pasted by his classmates on the murals in the hall. The teacher looked in my direction and pretended to smooth down the wrinkles on the boy’s shirt. She told the boy to go back into the classroom and stop making so much noise, then she looked at me again, to see if I had heard her reprimand. Perhaps she was assessing my own mother tongue. An orange butterfly had come unglued from the mural and lay on the ground, and she bent to pick it up and pressed it to the paper with a dab of spittle, but it didn’t stick. My father had been that boy, his siblings, my mother and her five siblings—our ancestors’ tongues slapped and shamed away. At lunch, my father swaggered, happy and energetic after his recitation of wartime exploits, until an unsuspecting lunchroom worker served him a hotdog doused in ketchup. It wasn’t the plump and juicy Nathan’s Coney Island dog he had anticipated, but a skinny, pink, undercooked generic brand. “Judas Priest!” he shouted to the unsuspecting diners at the long, metal table, in a lunchroom where the children seldom raised their voices. “What’s this bloody pizzle on my plate?” His hotdog glistened with grease, the red streak of ketchup bold from tip to tip. “They never heard of mustard in this place? Relish?! Onions?! Ketchup!?” His grandsons were dumbfounded. The school counselor rushed over to calm my father. “It’s a local custom,” she explained, taking an anthropological approach to placate him. He puckered his lips and considered going without lunch. His

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agitation, difficult to subdue when the subject was food, alarmed me. I remembered the fragrant jasmine rice I had prepared for him when I returned from Taiwan, which he doused with ketchup. I let the memory go, more concerned about his health, his heart, his racing pulse. At the dinner table later, rather than begin a new recitation about the Sephardim’s Golden Age, he told more current stories. He’d even scoffed at the mention of Spain’s previous year’s 1992 quincentennial celebration—the five-hundred-year centennial of Columbus’s exploration of the New World, and Spain’s formal declaration inviting the Sephardim back to Spain. I attributed his, “First, they kicked us out of Spain; now, they want our dough,” to his impatience to eat dinner. While my husband and I served him keftikas de prasa and avas a friend had brought back from a gourmet market in Portland, suddenly, with his narration, we were all in Salonica surrounded by a tempest. It was February 1943. Thunder boomed and lightning split the sky as Nazis were about to enter the Jewish quarter to round up all of Greece’s suddenly stateless Jews, 55,000 people in Salonica. They had sent Gestapo agents ahead, to comb the Jewish cemetery perched high on a cliff overlooking a deep inlet of the Aegean Sea. Pouring rain turned to torrents, rending the heavens. The agents, pens and paper held tightly to their chests as rain pelted at their backs and unprotected necks, roamed from headstone to headstone, copying out the Greek surnames—Crespi, Selanikio, Sedaka—of all the Jews they would round up to deport. A blast of thunder boomed and boomed again, shook the ground like an earthquake, echoed off the rocks until the lip of the cemetery that jutted out high above the water split, cracked, the fissure zigzagging around the most ancient graves of families who settled in Greece after the Sephardic diaspora of Spain. Boulders flew down the cliff, as if hurled by angry gods. The agents lost their footing and fell, clung to the shaking earth until their bodies slid, made slick with rain and clay, over the cliff edge, where they were dashed to pieces on the rocky coast below. The earth continued to tremble and shake, toppling first one headstone, then another, until all the stones fell and slid over the edge of the cliff, where the tide took them. They bobbed once in the water, floated briefly on the sea, and then they sank. Ezra had crawled into his grandpa’s lap while he told the story, Ezra’s eyes transfixed by the lightning from the imagined storm, the booms as my

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father’s palm hit the table. “All the Jews of Salonica were saved,” my father concluded, “because the Germans didn’t recognize Greek surnames, and the evidence on Jewish headstones was buried at the bottom of the Aegean Sea.” My father looked at me. I looked at the meatballs on my plate. “My Uncle Norman wasn’t so lucky.” He continued without prompting. “When my father, Louis, immigrated first to Greece, then to the United States, his brother, Norman, had immigrated to Bulgaria. “The Bulgarians were beasts,” my father said. My husband tried to interrupt, but I tapped his thigh underneath the table, signaling for him to let my father continue with his story for the boys. “Norman and his family disappeared during the Holocaust. Everyone.” I had heard this story often as a girl, especially after the Metzlers moved in next door, vivified in my imagination since then with the addition of Lydia’s story about the children of Skopje calling out for jewels in exchange for crusts of bread as Jews were shoved into transport trains destined for concentration camps. He let the words sink in before he continued. “Everyone except his daughter, Mary. Somehow, Mary escaped. She fled to Argentina. Even though there were Nazis there, too.” He took a sip of wine, chased it with water, patted his left breast pocket, looking for his pack of cigarettes. “She became a doctor,” he said. “My sister, Bettie, wrote to her.” I exiled him to the front porch to smoke. The boys ran to the backyard to climb the branches of the buckeye tree, and my husband and I cleared the dishes from the table. David questioned the accuracy of my father’s stories in a whisper. He had just read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and of special interest were the stories about the fate of the Jews of Salonica and those of Bulgaria during World War II. The stories my father told my sons were the very ones I had grown up hearing, how the Jews of Salonica were spared during the Holocaust, how Uncle Norman and his family had perished at the hands of Nazi troops. I’d always thought he told those tales to illustrate the duality of hope and fate, luck and disaster. He had meant to shield us from the devastation of giving up everything to come to America landless, stateless, penniless, just as he’d told stories of the glorious centuries of the Sephardim in Spain to help us counter the slurs of being called filthy Jews to our faces or behind our backs.

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Though my father had portrayed the Jews of Salonica as urbanites enlightened as their ancestors in Spain, historians had painted the Jews there as degraded and superstitious until the renaissance of Salonica began in the nineteenth century, when Jewish citizens finally threw off the mystic pall of the false messiah, Sabbetai Zevi and the havoc he had wreaked on the intellectual and spiritual life of the community in the seventeenth century. In 1917, the year before my father’s maternal family emigrated, the Jewish quarter, built entirely of wood, burned to the ground. If anything could have saved Salonica’s Jews from the ravages of Nazis twenty-six years later, it was the incineration of all the Jewish archives during the great 1917 fire. There was no saving of the Jews of Salonica during the Holocaust, as they, along with their community brethren from Rhodes and Crete, were all deported. According to Hannah Arendt, many of the Greek Jews in Auschwitz became the “death commandoes,” operating the gas chambers and crematoria, and when they revolted in 1944 amid rumors that the gas chambers were to be dismantled and all evidence of them destroyed, one man was left alive. Arendt tells a different kind of story about Bulgarian Jews as well. Though Bulgarian anti-Semitism before the Germans’ “final solution” was common, Bulgarian implementation of anti-Jewish acts ran counter to the desired effect of “ridding” the country of Jewish people. A series of events diluted deportation of Jews, from 1941 forward, when anti-Jewish legislation encouraged by the Third Reich began. Rather than deportation, mass baptism of Jewish workers, physicians, and businessmen occurred. Eichmann intervened in 1942, but in response to the plan of introducing the yellow Jewish “badge” to identify, ostracize, and humiliate Jews, the stars were too small to achieve their desired effect, and many Jews did not wear them. The stars elicited sympathy from Bulgarians in general, and in 1942, when told by the Reich to rid Sofia of Jews, the Bulgarian government deigned to disperse Sofia’s Jewish population to the countryside rather than concentrate them in a ghetto just outside Sophia for easier deportation. There were counterdemonstrations in Sofia in front of the king’s palace on behalf of the country’s Jewish citizens. Even when King Boris of Bulgaria was murdered later in 1942, in part, Arendt supposes, for supporting his Jewish citizens, solidarity with Bulgaria’s

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Jews did not wane. Bulgaria’s treatment of its ethnic populations became, throughout the war, one of the most ethically sound, a model, not “barbaric,” as my father had claimed. The chief rabbi of Sophia was secreted away rather than executed, and public declarations by prominent citizens condemned the torture and persecution of Jews. What then of Uncle Norman and his family? My father made several trips to New York to visit with his family once he retired. On one of them, at my request, he recorded my tantes, my maternal grandmother’s sisters, talking about their girlhoods in New York where they worked rolling Cuban cigars in a factory until they grew “too old” and the men who worked there started “making eyes at them.” Tante Diamante recalled that rolling cigars was best, for afterward the girls were sequestered in their mother’s home until they married. They shelled walnuts, cracking them opened with their teeth so as not to damage the meats they sold to pushcart vendors. On the last tape, my father talks about Uncle Norman, after his history shtick about the conquest of Visigoths that began the family’s halcyon days in Spain. Contrary to the story he had always told at home, Uncle Norman and his family survived the Holocaust, as did most of the Jews of Sophia. They did send one of their daughters, Mary, to study medicine in Argentina. After the war, Bulgaria fell “behind the Iron Curtain,” a satellite state of the new, powerful, and politically reconfigured Soviet Union. My Uncle Norman and his family tried to leave, my father said, tried to immigrate to the United States, and in the late 1940s, they began writing urgent letters to my grandfather, asking for his help. The letters continued, but once the Cold War and the nuclear arms race escalated, parts of Norman’s letters were scrutinized and censored. During the McCarthy years in the early 1950s, my grandfather grew fearful about receiving these letters from his brother behind the Iron Curtain. He had no understanding of the law or of what protections he enjoyed as a naturalized citizen. He feared he would be deported to a world he no longer knew. According to my father, my grandfather “lost contact” with Uncle Norman. Though there are many places on the tape where my cousins interrupt my father, laugh, or ask him questions, there is dead silence after my father’s phrase, “lost contact.” My father clears his voice and

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tries to explain again. “Pa was afraid,” he said. “He thought he might be hauled in, accused of being a Communist or of aiding and abetting the enemy. He let too much time elapse between letters, and finally, no more letters came.” Aiding and abetting the enemy. What a familiar phrase. I’d heard it before, when my father ranted about Sarkisian the Denver import dealer, who had “aided and abetted the enemy” by buying Buddha statues crafted in the People’s Republic of China. Suddenly, my father’s interest in Irving Peress, the “Pink Dentist,” made some kind of sense in relation to my Uncle Norman’s fate. Suddenly, my father’s vehement hatred of Joseph McCarthy and McCarthy’s “witch hunts,” his outbursts, so unlike the usually calm demeanor of my pacific father, made sense. Joseph McCarthy was responsible, in part, for my grandfather’s confusion, for his fear, for the fear of any American with relatives in a Communist country—Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, the Ukraine, Cuba, the People’s Republic of China; the list is long. One has only to look at the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II or read the rhetoric surrounding Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for Japanese evacuation of their West Coast communities, to understand, in part, my grandfather’s real fear. What didn’t jibe, then, were the stories of the survival of Salonican Jews and the destruction of Bulgarian Jews that my father continued to tell, even to my children, even though he’d given me the tape that told a different story. Why didn’t he simply switch the tales to make them accurate? My grandfather was not an educated man. He brutalized my father with many beatings. Poisoned with lead from batteries he packed barehanded, he slowly lost his mind. The story of Uncle Norman and the help his brother, my grandfather, did not give him was a burden my father sought to divest himself of toward the end of my father’s life. He could correct the record to his cousins in New York, and he could make the taped record a gift to me, but he could not retell the story of Uncle Norman aloud, at least as far as I or my own family was concerned. “Maybe he’s testing you,” my husband said when I finished my explanation. “He knows you could check his facts.” We turned to look out the window to check on the boys, who were deep in the middle of the buckeye tree, fifteen feet off the ground. “He

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knows I’d never challenge him. I’m Josefa, his best audience. Our roles won’t change. Now, there are just more players. You, the boys.” The day before, I’d asked my father if he’d like to take a ride to John Day, a small ranching community watered by the middle fork of the John Day River, about 120 miles southwest of La Grande. It was full of buttes and hazy vistas, sandstone rim rock, juniper, and piñon pine, and I’d spent many hours in John Day, inside the squat, quarried stone and canted pagoda-style roofed Kam Wah Chung Mercantile Company, now a state museum, once the living quarters and mercantile store of the Chinese herbal doctor, Ing Hay, and his business partner, Lung On. Ing Hay was a local legend, the “Chinee Doctor” of John Day, with patients who would journey from as far away as Oklahoma “to get a sack of weeds” as they called the medicinal herbs he prescribed. I reviewed documents, prescriptions, examined memorabilia, and at home, with the help of Monica Chen, one of my students from Taiwan, translated the personal letters of the doctor and his partner for an anthology of Oregon letters and diaries soon to be published. I liked to sit in a fragile wooden chair inside the dark and shadowy Kam Wah Chung, facing the front door with its screen and plate of bulletriddled iron, placed there to stop the missiles of cowboys bent on their terrifying fun at the expense of Ing Hay and his partner. I took in all the Chinese kineahoras on the walls, placards to ward off the evil eye, all the little altars with the “three precious things”: incense, wine, fruit. I drank the fragrances and odors of the place, the sharp medicinal herbs from Ing Hay’s apothecary shelves, which still hung, redolent, in the air. The jasmine incense next to the ornate altar in the main room of the Kam Wah Chung sweetened and intruded upon the mouse droppings behind the bunk beds covered with handmade quilts, where Chinese miners from nearby Prairie City would come to relax, gamble, mend their tools, and “ride the back of the dragon,” an idiom for the effect of smoking opium, while opium was legal. The thick blocks of quarried rattlesnake tuff used to build the store in the 1860s kept it cool all seasons of the year. Lung On had been a gambler like my father, and, missing my father, I’d merged his history, his ethnicity, the family’s longing, with Lung On’s, making Lung On my father’s surrogate raconteur. For a decade, I traveled all over the state for the Oregon Council for the Humanities,

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sharing with my audience the words of Lung On’s wife as she waited for his return to Kwangdung Province. She guessed that her husband didn’t want to return, that his heart, as far as she was concerned, was strange. In one letter, dated early in the twentieth century, Ing Hay confides to his cousin, a gold miner in eastern Washington, that Lung On had taken all the money from the Kam Wah Chung to buy groceries for the store in Portland. Lung On never got to Portland to stock up on dry goods for the store, as he gambled his stake away in Baker City, less than a hundred miles distant and in the opposite direction from Portland. Relatives in China fantasized about the fate of Ing Hay and Lung On, making fictions and small dramas without the help of Burma Shave signs along the highway, even as they sent letters in which they pleaded with the two men to gather up their “riches” and return to China. Both men’s parents, relatives claimed, were blind, supping on “broth without salt,” an idiom for “common fare,” up to their eyebrows in debt, and divining the date of Lung On and Ing Hay’s return by watching the flight of geese migrating across the sky. Lung On’s wife waited in China for him to come home and choose a husband for his daughter, but he never returned. Unlike my father, Lung On remained among the missing, created a new identity, complete with jeans, cowboy hat, and chambray shirts, in the turn-of-thecentury American West, first as Lung On, the cardsharp rake, eventually transformed himself into “Leon,” the beloved, Owyhee Kisses—peanut butter saltwater taffy–offering grandfather of John Day. Lung On made a home for himself in an Oregon frontier town and ran a string of quarter horses at the track along the Columbia River near the Dalles. He acquired a magnificent Peking Opera gramophone collection, rather than a closet full of suits, and eastern Oregon’s first car dealership. His daughter told him in her last plea for his return, in characters that painted his name with large, thick brushstrokes, that seeing her father again would be “like sweet rain after drought,” a Chinese idiom for “joy.” Lung On’s father told him a life outside of China, and without sons, would amount to nothing. “The Kam Wah Chung? I’ve seen it already,” my father had said, unfazed. “When I was stationed at the Army Air Corps base in Pendleton. It was opened. I bought some taffy.” What would have been the point of making his life a competition with my own?

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My father tapped on the living room window and waved to me. I waved back. He’d turned the collar of his jacket up against the chill, though it was seventy-five degrees and sunny on the porch. He peeled the silver foil from a stick of gum, stuck the gum in his mouth, and rubbed his hands together, by his gesture demonstrating the trouble he was having keeping warm. “Maybe he’s told so many stories,” I said, closing the white cupboard door my husband had painted with yellow lightning bolts, “he can’t keep them all straight.” “Maybe there’s no need to keep them straight. He’s not a character in a novel. He’s not trying to be consistent. He’s Ben Varon.” The next spring, my father traveled to Oregon once more, this time by train. I didn’t hear him sing the raki drinking ditty, nor did I have all of those delicious hours alone with him in the car as we drove from Boise to La Grande and back. It was raining when the train pulled into the Amtrak station in La Grande, and in my excitement to greet him at the train, I’d left the house without my umbrella. As my father descended the metal steps from the train, he looked out at Joshua, Ezra, and me waiting for him. We waved, but rather than waving back, he turned his collar up and clasped it tightly around his throat, and I worried that the brief exposure to the cold rain would give him pneumonia. The boys were more active this year than the last, and they couldn’t sit still to listen to grandpa’s stories. He seemed less eager to talk, and instead, he went into the empty lot next to our house and played baseball with his grandsons. At Ezra’s birthday party, when it was grandpa’s turn to take a blindfolded swing at the piñata hanging from the swing set, he busted it open, and he laughed so hard when chocolate and hard candy came tumbling to the ground that he had to sit down on a swing to catch his breath. My father called us the morning of July 18, 1994, to wish my husband, David, a belated happy birthday. When the phone rang later that afternoon, I thought he was calling again. The call was from Renée. My father had taken to his favorite, overstuffed blue chair in the lobby of the Holy Family Retirement Village for his customary after-lunch nap. His cronies in the lobby sitting near him became alarmed when my father’s hue turned from deep gold-brown to gray. By the time the

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paramedics put the defibrillator paddles to his chest, his heart had stopped for good. My father had made a new family for himself at the Holy Family Retirement Village in North Denver, a few blocks north of the old Elich Gardens Amusement Park. He crossed the invisible but distinct ethnic lines drawn all around the city when he went to live in the Italian part of town. “He’s so far away,” my mother and his former inlaws said, though they measured the distance in psychic miles. He surrounded himself with surrogate family, though my sisters and I only met them when they came out to his graveside service at the Fort Logan National Cemetery, in a white van driven by one of the Sisters who coordinated the seniors’ activities. His new friends from the center held back from joining us underneath the white mourners’ tarpaulin at his memorial service, so they didn’t hear me recite the raki song he had loved or listen to me call my father by all his names in his mother tongue—brother, friend, husband, father, lover, didn’t hear me add a Buddhist koan I had learned in school. No one from his New York family came to the funeral—both his brother, Sol, and sister Bettie were gravely ill themselves. All three siblings suffered from heart disease, and they died within a year of one another. We asked no rabbi to lead the service; instead, my older sister, Sheila, said the Kaddish. She eulogized him best by talking about his love of numbers and baseball stats. It was a medieval Sephardic custom to put a small pyramid of sand beneath the head of the deceased in his coffin, a symbol of the ancient Jewish longing to return to Israel, and more recently, to Spain, but I had forgotten to request it. In addition to my mother’s family and my father’s oldest friends, a cavalcade of Yellow Cabs arrived to salute my father, just as my mother was handed a folded American flag for my father’s years of military service. She held the flag briefly in her arms, pressed it to her chest, kissed it in the manner of the devout kiss given the velvet cover of the Torah as the holy scroll is paraded through the synagogue, with the pointer and middle fingers of her right hand touching lips, then cloth, then lips. She hesitated, her fingers hovering near her lips, then passed the flag along to my nephew, as she was no longer my father’s wife. Rather than ride in the hearse to his gravesite, I asked if I might ride

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in the front seat of the lead cab, as I had loved to do when I was a girl. Before I got in, a black cormorant dove into the rushes of the pond near my father’s plot. This cab didn’t have the smoke-smell of my father, his Old Spice aftershave, the mint gum on his breath, nor did the driver have a white hanky rolled around his neck to catch his sweat before it stained his collar. This cab was air-conditioned, though the dispatch radio still crackled. When my sisters and I went through his few possessions, I found one of the shirts my father always wore when he came to see my family and me in Oregon. He traveled by way of Boise, by way of his cashed-in pension from the Yellow Cab Company, another gamble he made—that he wouldn’t live long after the cash ran out. I suppose that was a kind of luck, too. The shirt I found was cream-colored, printed with brown figures, worn very thin. I’d not looked at it closely before and thought the figures were handcuffs, and wondered why he would wear such a shirt with such an odd design to Oregon. In the intimate violation of going through the possessions of the dead, I saw that they weren’t handcuffs at all, they were stirrups, floating, detached among woven threads of cotton. It was his version, his Denver-by-way-ofNew-York idea of a western shirt. It wasn’t cabled, or colorful. It had no western yoke or pearl snap buttons down the front. It was anything but flamboyant. It was not a rodeo shirt. It was not a shirt one would have worn in the San Marco Room at the Brown Palace Hotel, but my father would have worn it there, with a jacket and tie. He also would have worn it later, the left sleeve rolled a few inches above his elbow so he could rest his bare, swarthy arm on the window of his cab, waiting his turn in line on Tremont Street in front of the Brown Palace Hotel for a cowboy to taxi to the airport. The shirt was his idea of the West, something as peculiar as what he had made of his life in a western town, riding out the twists and turns of fortune in his own willful, elaborate way. In the top drawer of his dresser, he still had a folded, yellowed page of Big Chief tablet paper, the blue lines on it almost invisible now. I’d drawn on the page when I was in the second grade, after my father had visited my class to talk about the cattle business. At the top, a bowlegged cowboy with woolly looking chaps sat atop a piebald horse, and underneath, it said, “Daddy, Thank you for the beef we eat.”

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Chapter Twelve Doppelgangers, Daughters

The better part of my pubescent dreams were filled with a spliced life of Eurail passes, backpacks, and mantillas. Outside the continenthopping my father had done in the Army Air Corps during World War II, his junkets to Las Vegas, and the occasional trip to New York to see his family, travel for the family meant a quick trip to “the Springs,” Colorado Springs, to have a picnic at the Garden of the Gods and a sulfuric glass of mineral water from the springs at Manitou. It also meant a ride east to the high, flat prairie around Brush, to watch the new quarter horses run, or to a desolate picnic table underneath a cottonwood tree along Parker Road between Franktown and Castle Rock, where my mother liked to stop for a lunch of whitefish atop crisp, onion-sprinkled pletzel. When I became a teen, my parents let me fly alone to stay with my mother’s sister BB in Chicago, or to Berkeley to see my older sister, but I might as well have asked for a flight to Mars as one alone to Spain. The first among my friends to test her travel skills, Tina sought the clarity of travel and accidental pilgrimage. Each time she returned from Spain, Tina told fantastic tales, about jumping trains and being roused from her sleeping bag in the vega, the vast, agricultural plain

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outside Granada, by Spanish Civil Guards who prodded her with rifle tips and told her she was free, as an American, as a woman, in ways she would never understand. I had met Tina the year I started high school, the year after my father’s disappearance, when I could no longer say he worked with cattle. As the two of us practiced a water ballet routine we performed in gym class, she spoke about her plans to visit Spain, and I answered only with my eyes staring straight at the girders in the building roof, my hands sculling in little circles near my hips, trying to keep my body afloat. With her father, who didn’t hide his private life, we hiked in the Rockies and backcountry skied, and without him, Tina and I stood at the periphery of war protests near the capitol, always ready to run to the safety of the capitol park lawn, where my parents had briefly courted, when men in pickups charged the crowd. When she took a position at the Netherlands F.O.M. Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in 1983, she began agitating for a visit from me, my husband, and our growing family, one that we did not realize for many years. Tina’s trip to Spain had emboldened me to ask for our disastrous family paella dinner for my eighteenth birthday. The birthday greeting she sent from southern Spain that year was her brand of consolation. She recounted, in her fat and loopy script, how she had been standing one day in the Chamartín train station in Madrid on her way to France. Ticket in hand and the weight of her full backpack bending her forward, she balanced uncomfortably on the train platform, too hot, squinting in the relentless sun. The pack straps cut underneath her arms, pulled the cotton of her T-shirt tight across her breasts. A young woman her age rushed up to Tina, embraced her awkwardly, and began to speak a rapid-fire Catalán. The woman petted Tina’s arms and stroked her hair, kissed her lightly on both cheeks, having mistaken Tina for her twin. When Tina blinked, the woman blinked, and when Tina pulled down on her bangs then fluffed them by fanning her fingers underneath, as she did when she was nervous, the woman did the same. Jerky hops, the shifting of weight from one leg to the other, canting her left hip, opening her eyes too wide, twirling a jasper ring surrounded by silver around the ring finger on her left hand—gesture for gesture the other woman matched Tina’s motions as though each were a mirror for the other, though Tina wore no crucifix around her

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neck. Try as she might, Tina could not convince the woman, who grew louder and more agitated with every protest and denial from Tina, that she was not the Spanish woman’s sister. Tina had never considered doppelgangers seriously, she wrote, especially a Spanish double. Tina was buxom and ash-blonde, and with her hazel eyes, small, fine-tipped nose and fleshy lips, looked Swedish to an American eye. She had refused to wear a dress since the day we were first permitted, as juniors in high school, to wear pants to school, preferred torn T-shirts and faded brown corduroy boot-cut jeans she had always considered her signature. The other woman had a different logo on her T-shirt. In Spanish. That was all. The woman’s insistence and her shrill cries drew stares from curious travelers who waited for their trains on the metal benches near the tracks. Though Tina didn’t usually ruffle easily, the woman’s shrieking began to grate on her. Tina asked the woman to go away. “Ei, prou de prendre’m el pèl!” the woman said, “Hey, don’t joke with me!” Exasperated, Tina climbed out of the heavy black straps of her backpack, fumbled in the front pocket, and produced her dark blue American passport. The woman’s hazel eyes grew large. Tina let her hold the passport. The woman took it, ran her fingers over the seal of the United States with the bald eagle on the cover. She looked at the picture and the data, closed the passport, chewed on the left corner of her lower lip. Tina did the same. The woman held on to the passport, considered its weight, then opened it again, read the name and address once more. “Tina?! Weeding? U.S.A.!?” came out sounding like a curse. The woman thrust the passport back into Tina’s hand, made a wide sign of the cross between her breasts, and ran away. When I asked her several years later at her home in Amsterdam why she’d told me about the incident, she said from the time she’d landed in Madrid, she had felt that she could let parts of her childhood recede to the more distant past. She said travel was like gaining vantage—as we had looked down on Denver from Buffalo Bill Cody’s shrine in the foothills west of town, at all those anonymous, small buildings, streets, and trees spreading east and west from the curving river. She felt that by adding skill and knowledge, and subtracting hurt, by learning Spanish and later Dutch, she could leave her home, or at least she

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could tuck childhood away. She could pick and choose her stories. She realized, she said, that she could never be the son her father mourned for when her younger brother ran away. She could never be the dainty woman who wore the Vogue patterns her mother sewed. She could never publicly accuse her boss of raping her. She could never heal her former boyfriend, a depressive, who had blown his genitals away with a shotgun. By traveling abroad, she could learn the lilt of Spanish girls, and by becoming a chemist, she could write her ticket away from family troubles. She was suggesting I wasn’t stuck in Denver, that I could perhaps learn to see my father in many different lights. I could turn my adult life in a different, better, direction, even without an exotic, fantastic other. Even from as close as the foothills west of town. For many years, I did not heed my friend. I tried illness as a way to rekindle love in my parents, thinking that I could distract them from their bickering. When that didn’t work, I turned with vengeance to books and ridiculous liaisons. Calamity seemed to stalk me. Rather than journey to Spain, I traveled to Taiwan, where I blended in as well as ink on paper. Ironically, I spoke a lot of Spanish in Taiwan, as a woman who befriended me could not understand my Chinese nor I her English. Spanish was our common language. Finally, I was lucky in my marriage. And my children gave me purpose, direction, grace, their happiness and awe my humility. They seemed content with the childhood my husband and I had fashioned for them. And they loved both of my parents unconditionally. Four years after my father died, in 1998, and again in 1999, my family and I went abroad, first to visit with Tina, whom I had not seen for six years, in Amsterdam. As my now-teenaged sons and I looked at maps of Spain, I wondered what traces I’d find of the Sephardim’s Golden age, what traces of my father.

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Chapter Thirteen In Amsterdam

Mutual friends came and went from Amsterdam, bringing news of Tina. They said she and her Dutch partner, Gooitzen, doted on each other. Her articles on mass spectrometry appeared in scientific journals; she presented papers and posters at international conferences; she studied lignin and worked with a team of other scientists to develop a retardation process that would prevent the yellowish deterioration of paper, especially in fine art applications. Tina was a maid of honor at my wedding in 1982, where she deigned to wear a dress, and she moved spryly at our postwedding barbecue. The next time I saw her, in 1989, she dragged her left leg when she walked and carried a canvas museum chair with her everywhere for when her legs gave way. During that visit to my home in Oregon, I took a photograph of her, but the film did not advance, so the image of Tina is superimposed with the lace from my living room curtains and the broad, white, spread wings of trumpeter swans taking off from the tules in Ladd Marsh. In spite of her progressing and debilitating illness, multiple sclerosis, Tina still insisted in 1998 on showing up at the physics lab, and Gooitzen acquiesced to her will for self-sufficiency by pointing her

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mechanized wheelchair in the direction of the lab once he helped her over the threshold of their flat on Herschelstratt. He left her for his own commute, a bicycle ride to a bus stop a few kilometers from their flat, where he locked his bike and caught a bus to work, as a computer analyst, at the university hospital. Tina was almost blind by then, and what she saw was deepening fields of gray with figures in triplicate she knew were people and vehicles, because she had memorized the landscape from her sighted past. Were she not buckled into her chair she would have fallen out of it, incapable of picking herself up. She wore a pager around her neck in case of mishap, but when she needed it, she couldn’t see sharply enough to press the delicate buttons on her own to summon help. Her colleagues replaced the pager with a simple black button the size of a quarter wired directly to the lab. Tina made her way alone, down streets and walkways ringed by heavy traffic, gunned the motor on her wheelchair to gather the momentum necessary to jump the curbs on sidewalks. The only large structure she could see with any clarity was the fail-safe dike near the underpass to the lab that would keep her neighborhood and the lab safe from flood were the circle of dikes around the city to be breached. While Tina and Gooitzen worked, my family and I ogled Rembrandts and Van Goghs with all the other tourists, Franz Marc’s blue horses, Picasso’s Seated Woman with Fish Hat, adorned with a fish skeleton on the bonnet rim. Methodically, we viewed paintings we knew only from glossy images in books, then made our way first to the grand Sephardic synagogue of Amsterdam, the Portuguese Synagogue, its long, narrow sanctuary with massive, stately columns and handsome woodwork left untouched during the German occupation of the Netherlands. The Jewish Historical Museum was next, on our list at Tina’s insistence, built around the bombed-out shell of the Amsterdam Ashkenazic synagogue razed by Nazis in 1943. Joshua and Ezra were weary, but polite, strangers to synagogues in the Old World or New, as we live in a western town with only thirty other Jews. We celebrate Shabbas and the holidays in one another’s homes. They understood, without my urging or lectures, the important records there—the display of Hanukkah menorahs near the intact synagogue altar—sacred and ritual objects gathered back after the war ended.

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My husband moved to another part of the museum to read the placards in the display explaining how the occupying German government used law to systematically destroy the Jewish community in Amsterdam, once dubbed “the Jerusalem of Europe,” from the first Jewish neighborhood captains appointed to record the names of Jewish families, to curfews, bans, and lockouts. The concentration of Dutch citizens at Westerbork was displayed in text and photos, and deportation to concentration camps outside of the Netherlands was signified in photos of trains with stock cars being loaded with people, all waiting their turn in tidy queues. The remnants of the Holocaust were silent under glass, methodically streamlined, linear, definitive. Rather than read the placards alongside my husband or look at dreidels with my sons, I was distracted by the other visitors to the museum—a garrulous couple who argued with the guard about checking their packages; a Japanese man, casual and well groomed, who approached the exhibit with his hands clasped behind his back. I wondered how the presentation struck him as he lingered at each placard and photo and yellow cloth Star of David recovered from the outer garments of deported children. Why my father clung so fastidiously to a Europe that tried twice, on a grand scale, to destroy his heritage, our heritage, first in Spain, then 450 years later all over Europe in Greece, Italy, France, Germany, and the countries of Eastern Europe is the question that nagged at me on these trips. This museum was the first I’d toured in Europe to address the impact of the Holocaust on its community. I wandered listlessly to the museum library in the basement, where I looked through holdings on Spinoza. In a secluded, dimly lit hallway on the main floor, a lithograph of the philosopher gazing blandly in my direction seemed to mock me. My family was weary and went back to the hotel. I was sullen but wanted to stay longer, as Tina had mentioned a presentation she thought I might find interesting of the art of Charlotte Salomon, a German painter active in the late 1930s and early 1940s. There were less than thirty gouaches, mixed oil and watercolors on paper, moody images in deep blues, reds, and ochers mounted on three temporary walls from Charlotte Salomon’s masterwork, Leben? oder Theatre? (Life? or Theater?) a two-dimensional gouache Singspiel (song-play). The Singspiel was a form of light opera admired in

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Germany in the eighteenth century. In her work, Salomon adapted the components of Singspiel—stage sets, characters, language, and music—to the page by using tracing-paper overlays secured to several of the pages to depict the dimensions of language and music. Later in the work, Salomon dispensed with the overlays and filled the page itself with these components. The artist, also called Charlotte in the song-play, was developed chronologically, early as a child beside the hospital bed of her mother, who had just attempted suicide, again. A series of solitary, ghostly figures ascended from the mother’s bed to a landing, suggesting St. Peter’s judgment on the mother’s soul, though the family was Jewish. Next was a slightly older Charlotte at her mother’s grave, the fact of the mother’s suicide hidden from young Charlotte with the family’s lie of her mother’s death by drowning. All the characters of Salomon’s song-play were gradually introduced, Charlotte’s distant father, a surgeon, cast as Dr. Kann, her diva stepmother, Paulinka Bimbam, and the music teacher, Amadeus Daberlohn. In a series of talking-head monologues reminiscent of cartoons, Amadeus Daberlohn instructed the young Charlotte in the artist’s responsibility to choose life and creation over the allure of death by suicide, though two generations of women in Salomon’s family—her grandmother, namesake aunt, and mother—succumbed to a depression resulting in suicide, a common act among Jewish women in Weimar Germany. Later in the song-play, Daberlohn guided Charlotte in the art of love and heartbreak, depicted with Charlotte and Daberlohn in a canoe, Charlotte reaching with outstretched arm and pointed finger toward her New Adam, Daberlohn, clothed in spotted animal skins. Charlotte points toward Daberlohn as God points to Adam in Michelangelo’s fresco, and Salomon referenced the allusion with a sloppy, painted note on the image in a schoolgirl’s hand. In successive gouaches, figures elongate, recline, and blur into a depiction of sexual passion between Daberlohn and Charlotte. In another gouache, Charlotte sat downcast on an unmade bed in the familiar posture of dejection, her hands covering her mouth after Daberlohn announced his engagement to another woman. Salomon’s characters splashed up against the white walls of the Jewish Historical Museum, as she recorded the rise of the National

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Socialist Party in 1933, her father’s being banned from the Berlin hospital where he taught and operated, the ghettoization of Jewish people in Berlin, the formation of the Kulturbund deutscher Juden, a Jewish performance guild to which Daberlohn and Paulinka BimBam belonged once they were forbidden to teach and perform outside the Jewish community. Frantic, whispered café conversations were painted navy and blood-red. Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938, the Night of Broken Glass, when Austrians and Germans rioted against Jewish people, killing, destroying property, was depicted in olive hues, with more and more red Nazi armbands on brownshirts in the streets. So on to Salomon’s exile to the south of France, where she hid until agents of the Gestapo arrested her in 1943 and deported her to Auschwitz. Recently married and pregnant, Salomon was killed upon arrival at the Polish concentration camp, on October 10, 1943. When Salomon painted the last gouache in her song-play, Leben? oder Theatre?, she might not have guessed her fate, but the bronzed woman in the olive-drab bathing suit gazing out at the blue and beckoning Mediterranean with an empty frame on her lap has Leben? oder Theatre? blazed across the flesh on her back like a tattoo. The character Charlotte, a girl whose artistic talents were acknowledged only weakly, persisted in drawing and painting, in spite of being repressed by anti-Semitic teachers from the Gymnasium to the Vereinigten Staatsschulen für Freie under Angewandte Kunst, a Berlin institute of arts, handicrafts, and architecture. Salomon was the only Jewish student enrolled after the Nazi boycott of Jewish people in public life had begun. Her father’s service during World War I afforded her the position, yet Charlotte’s development as an artist was stymied by history and her teachers’ narrow vision. Charlotte was scolded in one gouache for not depicting an accurate number of cactus spines in a drawing she had presented to her teacher for scrutiny, and the notation on the gouache demands the scene be accompanied by the tune “Jesus our Lord, we bow our heads to thee.” The teacher, microscope on her desk rather than brushes and paints, commented on Charlotte’s “nice, modest talent,” her sting the reward for the artist’s developing curiosity. It was only when Charlotte left the institute and began to paint what was in her imagination rather than what was on her student desk—a shriveled, potted cactus—that lush images

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in shades of lapis lazuli bombarded with light appeared in the gouaches. They depicted a young and earnest Charlotte, sketch pad on her lap, in a landscape of swaying sunflowers and ripe plums, blue roses bending toward the light. On the first page of the epilogue, in an ascending swirl shaped like an “s,” multiple Charlottes appeared as the child Charlotte became the women painter sketching the ghostly shades of childhood while the text asked, “What makes you shape and reshape yourself from so much pain and suffering? Who gave you the right? Dream, speak to me—whose lackey are you? Why are you rescuing me?” Back outside, startled by the light and the fresh air, I passed the boarded-up pink exterior of the Gay Gang-Bangers Bar on the way back to the hotel, and then on toward a beer garden. A mime wearing whiteface and dressed in a white-and-red polka-dot shirt, black bow tie, and black pants several sizes too large held up by pink suspenders clowned for all the tipsy tourists. He embraced me and tried to waltz me all the way down to the broad square of the Leidesplein. I had spotted him too late to avoid him while I was walking, too late to cross over to the other side of the street and thus be spared a role in his comedy. He was squirting water from a squirt gun at passersby for the amusement of patrons seated in the beer garden, and my rear made an easy target. He held me so closely I could see the drops of sweat beaded in his hairline along the edge of his whiteface paint. His sweat stank. His grip was angry, firm. I could not break free from him. His leer was not a clown’s smile. Surprised by his strength, the sickening thickness of his biceps, and his hot breath, I felt an old panic I thought I had vanquished. I froze, a statue, a shell. A skim of sweat exuded from my scalp, my throat, the small of my back, the creases behind my knees. The patrons at the beer garden, idle and lightheaded, laughed. I became two women, one anonymous female clutched by the clown, one woman wrestling an assailant. My stomach flipped over. I ran down the cobbled street to the Leidesplein when the clown pushed me away. When I returned to the hotel, my husband was reading at the desk in our room. I joined him, trying to calm down. I couldn’t. The racing pulse was back. I couldn’t explain my terror. I wasn’t a vulnerable young woman anymore, or in Colorado, and the man was just a clown. I picked up the book I had been reading: The Unbearable

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Lightness of Being. I’d left off where Kundera’s narrator interpreted the character Teresa’s dream of the nude women singing as Tomas shot them one by one when they marched out of step or sang a false note— he commented on the humiliation of the individual when nude. I found no comfort in reading. Kundera went on to talk about what, to him, was the curious construct of the individual and the individual’s soul, all of this in the historical context of the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Alexander Dubcek’s arrest and public humiliation. It is certain that others humiliate our bodies to poke fun, to break our spirits, or to end our lives. Illness, as with Tina’s, also plays a role. Some humiliation is profound and sinister, as Kundera’s dream sequence is a metaphor for the violence waiting on the periphery of our lives. From our window, we had a view of the living room of a large flat across from our hotel. Through the parted curtains, I watched a young father and his daughter relaxing in their living room. The father had begun his piano practice with long and rapid sets of scales, and his daughter tugged lightly at his sleeve for him to stop and play with her. Fingers hovering over the white keys on the keyboard, the father hesitated, considered, looked first at the sheet music opened on the music stand, then down at the dressed-up doll in his daughter’s hand. He stopped his practice, tied a rectangle of blue cloth like a sari to adorn the doll, crouched down on a sunny spot on their carpet for the doll’s imagined pageant. We went back out with our boys to look for sheet music for piano and clarinet and passed a store that sold pianos. While my husband and older son ate jelly beans on a metal bench in the park on the boulevard, Ezra and I went into the store. The clerk was curt and took our measure quickly, told us not to disturb him or play any of the pianos. Rudeness never translates well, but Ezra spotted a Yamaha baby grand that boasted a sound-proof practicing system with a set of earphones one attached to a metal plug on the soundboard for isolated sound. Ezra put the earphones on his head, and I stood sentinel to watch for the clerk, who had ascended the stairs to help a patron on the second level of the store. Ezra attached the earphones and turned the switch that theoretically rendered the piano audible only to the player. The switch did nothing to mute the sound, but Ezra would not

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have stopped playing even if he’d realized it. He was too engrossed in his piece, “Le Petit Negre” by Debussy, to notice my bemused waves, which became more urgent when the irate clerk appeared at the second-level balcony. He leaned over the railing but failed to get Ezra’s attention. He threw up his hands, bowed politely to his patron, who was considering the Bechsteins displayed on the upper level of the shop, and came running down the stairs, arms outstretched, hands ready to take us by the scruffs and throw us out. Before he got to us, I grabbed Ezra, and we ran from the store like petty thieves. My husband and older son sprang from the park bench and ran interference around us, alert and excited by the thought of a challenge. I was made as safe as I could possibly feel, surrounded by my wall of sons and husband, almost joyous as the mincing yelps of the clerk receded far behind us. Ezra found the sheet-music store across from the Concertgebouw auditorium and bought Iberia y España by Albéniz, in honor of his ancestors and our upcoming trip to Spain. Tina presided over the graduation of her last doctoral student less than a year later, at the decorous Oude Lutherse Kerk, Old Lutheran Church, in downtown Amsterdam. The black robe and satin hood of her regalia looked heavy on her frail body. Tina’s physical degeneration had accelerated her early retirement. Though it had been only eleven months since our last visit, her eyes were sunken, and her neck looked like a small bundle of translucent cords. She spoke slowly, with too much time between each word, and her thoughts slipped away. She forgot the Dutch she had once mastered. Before the dissertation defense began, Tina had told an anecdote about volunteering for an experiment in the neuron mapping of the brain. Her presiding physician neglected to control his excitement over all the blank spots on his map of Tina’s brain, which he likened to a Monet impression of the painter’s garden in Giverny. The blank spots were all the places neurons had been destroyed, and as she explained that, Tina’s voice caught, her only display of self-pity throughout our visit. Her student, Janine de Maaijer-Gielbert, fielded most of Tina’s questions with aplomb, tiptoeing on stiletto heels on the uneven cobbles of the church floor, very un-scientistlike in a white, skintight satin

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dress that accentuated the fullness of her breasts and little belly. De Maaijer-Gielbert had chosen for the cover of her dissertation on mass spectrometry a print of Edward Hopper’s Compartment C, Car 193, an image of a woman in a blue-black dress. The woman is round, fullbreasted, and softly shaded in navy blue all around, sitting alone on a train sometime before the war tore Europe apart. She is leafing, carelessly and idly, through a book or magazine. Tina had once been as lovely and supple as Janine de Maaijer-Gielbert, lovely as Hopper’s model, as full and round, though never careless or idle, but her illness had wasted her muscles and aged her prematurely. While she was trying to drink champagne at the reception, her head lolled sideways, then back, like a newborn’s, and her partner, Gooitzen, rushed her out before concern and pity from her assembled colleagues and guests could wash over her. My childhood mentor, Tina, was showing the way, again, toward the last transformation before death. We met Gooitzen outside our hotel at twilight for a Fourth of July celebration, after he had tucked Tina into bed. The next morning, we would leave for Spain. I did not share the photo of Tina I had brought from home to give him. I thought it cruel to remind him of betrayal— how the body can betray, how time and illness betray, how fragile even good love is. In the photo, Tina is stirring a vat of barbecue sauce for my wedding feast in the tiny kitchen of our cabin on the Bear Creek Ranch outside Missoula, Montana. It is the same cabin where we entertained our Christmas guests and Lydia, the poet from Macedonia, just four months after our wedding. Tina is glancing back over her shoulder in the fetching pose young women often affect in photographs, her leotard and cutoff jeans both indigo as the soft dress in Hopper’s painting of the young, idealized woman. Gooitzen helped us spread a picnic blanket on the grass in front of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra as many others were doing for the Fourth of July concert in the Vondelpark. The evening was cool, and I wore Tina’s jacket. Lovers nuzzled near us. The concert program was American music conducted by Leonard Slatkin: Gershwin, Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and, of course, the march king, Sousa. Just when we thought the concert was over, a few modest bursts of fireworks, Dutch-style, exploded silver against the dark sky.

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The cynic in my father knew that the Golden Age of the Sephardim in Spain had ended with the last Inquisition almost five hundred years before, and Varóns did not give counsel to Spinoza. Varón is also a simple, common noun, and in synagogue record-keeping among the Sephardim in the early Middle Ages, it marked the birth of a male child: Solomon varón, Elian varón, like writing “male child, Bob.” Late Latin refers to a male as varo, thus the contemporary Spanish use of varón for man, manly. Varonile also shares this root, “virile,” which may explain why family patriarchs love the moniker of “stud.” My father used to like to drive by our old house on Winona Court, on the west side of the city, where Denver’s Jews had first settled. He drove by at least twice a year, “checking it,” he said. Right before he died, he’d driven by. He reported on what had changed, but very little had. Someone had taken out the juniper bushes near the front porch. The maple tree was huge. One owner had put a three-car garage in the back, near where the Pearlmutters had erected their sukkah every Shavuoth. My mother’s prize garden was paved over, and the bed where she grew tomatoes the size of baseballs along the back fence had little bits of white landscaping gravel in it. Their house on Winona Court

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was the last place my parents had been happy, and I was touched to learn he had gone back there. He said the screen over the front door still had a “V” in the grillwork. It was the screen he had bought for the house when they moved in. I knew I wouldn’t find a grillwork “V” in an entryway in Cádiz, twenty-five generations after our ancestors had been exiled. Antiquity in Cádiz now dates from the late eighteenth century. Medieval Cádiz was destroyed in 1596 by armies of the Anglo-Dutch alliance, who burned the city to the ground. The wall to the old city dates from the Napoleonic age, and most of the government buildings were built in the eighteenth century, long after my ancestors had fled to the mountains above Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara. The Cádiz where my family probably lived, in the old section near the port, burned as recently as 1947, when a naval torpedo and a mine factory exploded. To my father, Spain was like rolling a seven in a crapshoot, like a full house of royals grinning back at him in a hand of cards. His fantasy, not the real country, Spain, was Bennie—Benji—Benjamin’s ticket away from the drudgery and stink of cows, away from wrapping meat and delivering it to the service entrances of Denver’s fine hotels, away from the pink and fleshy jowls of his successful brothers-in-law, away from all the fares he chauffeured to the airport. What did I look for in Spain? Fifteen Varóns in the Madrid phonebook, three in Malaga, broken windmills, grapes in vineyards trailing on the ground, Madrid’s leaning office towers of the Puerta de Europa built after Franco’s repressive regime ended. We spent a month in southern Spain, walking through synagogues that are now museums, El Tránsito and la Sinagoga de Santa María la Blanca in Toledo. The sight of sand and hectares of olive groves on rolling hills began to remind us of the Palouse landscape near our home, the high, rolling, dry hills irrigated by water from the Columbia River now full of vineyards, orchards, and a vast grove of cloned poplars that stretches almost to the horizon. Once we returned home, we’d say how much the Palouse reminded us of Spain. Inside the medieval fortress walls of Córdoba, we looked for the Jewish Quarter, the Judería, and the synagogue next to the quarters where the revered twelfth-century rabbi Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, had studied and lived. I walked right by the synagogue,

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twice, my family close behind. The narrow street and high, close, white stucco walls reflected heat and brilliant, searing light. Heat muffled all the sounds, repressed them. All at once, the languid air slammed into my head, when a car horn blared and someone shouted, when the volume from a hidden TV surged and struck. Though I was wearing the darkest lenses I could find, my eyes felt dry and leathery like the exposed white pith of an orange. I was stricken with irrational misgivings, suddenly as superstitious as my Ashkenazic mother, certain that whatever I had hoped to find in Spain or in this synagogue would be diminished by my own elaborate fantasy and the tales of my father. I reminded myself, again, that my father was an agnostic. He hated synagogues. He said unkind and vulgar things about most rabbis. I could count the number of times he had been in a synagogue, discounting weddings and bar mitzvahs, on one hand, with fingers left to spare. Through an open door, I could smell frying potatoes, the usually savory scent now nauseating, mixed with exhaust fumes and yellow smog forming in the heat. In another narrow corridor, the start-stop of a heavy truck announced the garbage pickup, and on Cairuan Street, the main arterial through the old quarter of the city, car horns and motorcycles drowned out all subtle forms of speech. The twisting street, boxed in by continuous, high white walls, revealed no vantage, just little sections of brown cobbles chipped free of mortar, a few street lamps mounted on curlicue black wrought iron supports, simple doorways and a grille-covered balcony. The midday heat excited all the molecules of stink—the urine from pet dogs, the garbage in loosely tied white plastic bags set out on stoops for pickup, the sour wine bottles, rank sewer lines, a lone nespera tree with fruit like slightly rotten apricots filled with little seeds. On the third pass along the street, a twinge of panic seized me, as each trip back and forth shouted to the scrappy, barefoot man watching me from his doorway that I was lost, and I was leading my little family nowhere. I took out my guidebook. The synagogue was on Calle Judíos—Jew Street— nothing ambiguous about that. I was on it. I evidently wasn’t the first traveler to become lost while looking for the synagogue, for on my fourth pass along the street he stopped picking his teeth with a pocket knife and pointed through a pair of iron gates that opened into a little, cobbled courtyard and one small, solitary

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chamber: the great Jewish synagogue of Córdoba. This? This dank, white, little room? The entryway, with its staircase leading to the women’s section upstairs, gave way to a tiny prayer hall whose sanctuary was smaller than a Quonset hut. No trumpets heralded our arrival, no Gabriels, no fanfare or processional welcoming the Varóns home to Spain. My father’s voice did not boom its approval from an undisclosed place in the ether. An older synagogue, I learned later, the first Great Synagogue of Córdoba, had been built in the Jewish Quarter nearby in 1250, several years after Maimonides’ death, but since its size exceeded that of the local cathedrals, outstripping Christians with the synagogue’s presumption of grandeur, Pope Innocent IV wrote, he commanded his Spanish bishops to order a lopping down of the synagogue’s walls. The smaller, more “modest” synagogue, the one we were standing in, was completed in 1315. Maimonides hadn’t worshipped there. His living quarters had been in the adjacent square, thus linking him by proximity with the spot. We ignored the abandoned freezer in the courtyard near the quarters of the groundskeeper. The Muslim structure, style, and decoration of the synagogue were still preserved in the brick and stuccoed walls, in the archways, columns, and alcoves of the synagogue. Intricate, geometric patterns of vines, leaves, birds, flowers, and a galaxy of stars adorned the walls. The arid desert air was unusually cool inside the twenty-one by twenty-three foot sanctuary. I looked toward the ceiling to scan the intricate carvings in the plaster, and my husband misunderstood my gesture, worried that I was hoping for a séance with my father’s ghost. I wasn’t. I was gazing at the shell-shaped openings, called lambrequins, along the edges of all the arches that opened into the sanctuary, and at all the intricate design work, stems and veins representing succulence, carved into the plaster like rounded diamonds of Belgian lace. As we gazed at the slightly recessed archway designs in the walls, trying to feel the holiness of this place or what it might have meant for our ancestors to worship there, a tour bus threw open its door inches from the courtyard gate. A busload of Italians on an architecture tour clambered into the sanctuary, shattering the silence with the clank and clatter of all their photography equipment. We moved to the back of

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the little space as all thirty of their cameras flashed on the solitary object of adornment in the otherwise empty room—a tarnished, eight-inch brass Hanukkah menorah perched on a white pedestal. The menorah sat in front of the vacant niche where the Ark of the Covenant and the Torah scrolls it held once were housed. Just behind the pedestal, a white, enamel-coated pan in the corner collected drops of water seeping from the roof. The Italian guide was eloquent in his explanation of what he called this “Jewish artifact,” this small synagogue whose outline of newer crucifixes were still visible on the stuccoed walls from the days when the synagogue had been reconsecrated as a church. Artifact stung like the words near extinction, used to describe endangered flora, fauna, and the Jewish People. I remembered my mother’s fear of gazing on Christian icons, and I checked these tour participants for signs of squeamishness, standing, as they were, in a space where Judaism once had been practiced. They displayed none, seemingly comfortable amid the harmless remnants of exiles long removed. Had I better understood Italian, I might have learned that the roof was simple, timbered, hipped, that brick walls covered with stucco supported it. Wooden grid work supported the flat portion of the ceiling and all the interior, wooden beams supported the roof and the women’s-section balcony. My father used to joke about such segregated, cloistered women’s sections, though every orthodox synagogue, Ashkenazic and Sephardic alike, seats men and women separately. My mother referred to the women’s sections in the synagogues she attended as pish mit oigen rooms, crying rooms. Those segregated sections were hot and close with the curtains pulled and women gossiping in Yiddish; and to a child, horrible with smells of perfume mixed with sweat, plus all the mysterious, woman smells of dank and fishy blood. The women’s section in the synagogue in Córdoba would have been no less hot and close, with the Iberian light beating in through the clerestory windows, white cotton curtains pulled closed across the balcony arches. An Italian couple from the architecture tour stepped to the back of the synagogue, each of them with a hand in the other’s back jean pocket. His hand concealed, the man stroked his beloved’s backside, his fingers hidden in her jeans. The two stood shoulder to shoulder,

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and with their free outside hands behind them, each scraped at the stucco coating on the walls. Both were using small, key-ring–sized Swiss army knives. They’d come prepared, but for what? “Can they do that?” Ezra whispered, pointing to the stucco thieves. “What do you think?” Joshua said, smelling controversy, immediately more interested in our excursion. Each scrape felt like a penknife across my lips. I stared them down. Their knives closed with a concerted snap! When they moved off, they left two small circles of bare wall, each the circumference of a quarter. They’d written no graffiti nor had they splashed pigs’ blood on the walls. I didn’t think the act was one of malicious defacement, because they were so careful about their work. They didn’t gouge or chisel. They scraped, their handiwork meticulous. But they were not professional antiquarians or archeologists with camel’s hair brushes carefully dislodging dust. They were stucco thieves, peeling the walls in one of the three remaining synagogues from Spain’s antiquity. Perhaps they were going to carbon-date the pigment in the eggshell-colored paint or analyze the limestone in the stucco. I imagined jars of stucco from sacred places labeled like the body parts of saints, on a curio shelf in their living room in Rome. A synagogue is full of empty space, scraped a bit emptier now by the stucco thieves. It needs only an eastern wall against which to place the Ark of the Covenant, which houses the Torah; an elevated stage, a bimah, for the rabbi and cantor to stand above the assembly of at least ten bar-mitzvahed men, and a lamp or light to symbolize the eternal flame of God. Synagogues have portable objects: chairs, seats (or pews), prayer books, and candelabra; technical support like vaulted ceilings, speakers, and portable lights; and congregants who gather at prescribed times to sing, recite, and listen to the language of instruction, castigation, and praise for the Divine. A sense of permanence in the house of Jewish worship is counterbalanced by the turbulence of Jewish history and a shepherd’s need to continually move his flock. “Arise, O God, haste to rebuild Jerusalem” is the last line in the Hebrew inscription inset in the wall to the right of where the ark would have been in the synagogue of Córdoba. In 1315, when Isaac Mehab and his masons finished the inscription, he noted, by the inclusion of this phrase, the Sephardim’s wish to return to its Judean

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lands, settled as the Sephardim were in Spain. He could not foresee that Jewish people soon would be hunted, killed, expelled from Spain, once again dispersed throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. My family walked into the synagogue courtyard, and everyone asked when we might eat lunch. I kissed the mezuzah before we left the synagogue, a ritual I rarely performed at home. I waited for the other tourists to leave. How could a dot of spittle on the fingertips pressed to a small, metal cylinder on the doorjamb signify devotion? I was such a stranger to the comfort of established ritual. Our round table was crowded together with many others; flies feasted in the open-air restaurant without any Mediterranean breeze to mitigate the stillness. No one laughed when I shouted “Judas Priest!” to imitate my father’s disappointment with his school cafeteria hotdog. Everyone looked down at his plate. The sopa del campo we had ordered turned out to be not hearty vegetable soup, as I had imagined from its name, soup of the field, but a thin, brown broth the color of rotting oak leaves, with floating globs of tripe. Around the table, everyone was dribbling soup into all the honeycombed sections in the fatty tripe. No one spoke, and no one ate his soup. The couple at the table next to ours was served thick, creamy-looking gazpacho. It glistened in the bowls. The woman tasted hers and smiled with satisfaction, but the man cupped his left palm, filled it halfway with salt, which he tapped down with his right index finger before adding a little more. With slow and wavy passes, like the ones I’d seen my father make throughout my childhood, he sent the salt curving around his bowl, white grains on darker red, until the acid and liquid in the tomatoes dissolved the grains and blessed his gazpacho with added flavor. What a common, necessary gesture, to salt the foodstuffs of the arid world. Salt is also holy, a ritual ingredient, used to kosher meat before it is prepared, and salted and pickled vegetables and macerated lemons are a mainstay of Sephardic cuisine. I tried to ignore the boys’ long faces as we walked back out into the Córdoban sun and heat. Joshua put his sunglasses back on top of his head, where he customarily wore them, rather than on his face. Crowds of tourists formed all along the narrow streets of Córdoba,

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though it was still midafternoon and siesta had not officially ended. The artisan shops, which occupied several tiers all around the plaza, opened their doors early to sell jewelry, sculpture, glass, and ironware to tourists, and in the plaza courtyard, a juggler balanced on a ball while keeping five other balls circling hand to hand. A clown sold balloons tied to resemble circus animals, and my children winced to think that I believed them young enough to still enjoy such childish pleasures. I browsed too long in a bookshop with Ladino titles, and my family hinted, loudly, that it was time to go. We made one more pass to view the statue of Maimonides in the courtyard outside the building where he had lived, adjacent to the synagogue. The statue had been erected by the Spanish government in 1935 to commemorate Maimonides’ birth eight hundred years before. The quarters all around the statue had tenants, and next to our family and other tourists communing with the bronze image of the sage, a young man sounded his melodious moped horn to summon his beloved. She appeared at an opened window and shouted out “Joder!” and “Coño!” the vulgar words dripping off her tongue. He didn’t stop blasting until she tossed the flat’s front door keys down to him. Cairuan Street was thick with people when we exited the Jewish Quarter and walked into the steady stream of traffic. Pedestrians strolled five abreast, and the small Renault trucks many Spanish workers drove had trouble pushing through. Only moped riders, able to zigzag through the foot traffic, moved with any speed. It was hot, everyone was cross, and I bit back a reminder to my son that his sunglasses would do better service covering his eyes than perched on the crown of his head like a Nike beacon. A moped driver sounded his horn right behind me and made me jump. Joshua was walking beside me, the last pedestrian in a wave of pedestrians walking all abreast to clog the street. There was a narrow strip of roadway between him and the curb. As the moped driver sped past us along this strip of roadway, he grabbed the Nike glasses from my tall son’s head, raking his nails across Joshua’s forehead. Joshua sprinted forward to pursue the thief, but the moped putted faster, escaping through the gate and disappearing into city traffic. “Sunglasses!” I shouted in confused distress, “Sunglasses! Help! Help! Sunglasses!” unable to recall the Spanish word, ladrón, for thief.

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It was not a good time to instruct my children about the Spanish Sephardim and their Grandpa Ben, but we’d come all this way. As we drove along the Route of the Caliphate in our exit from Córdoba, an ancient garbage dump stretched to the horizon in every direction. Most of the garbage had been covered over by bulldozed dirt, but the stench from the detritus of the ages exactly matched the mood inside our car. “Caliphate,” my father would have chimed in the mock-British accent he sometimes affected when he delivered chapters of clan history, “refers to all the successors of Mohammed who ruled the medieval, Islamic world. One of their centers was Córdoba. There were eighty libraries and paved streets in Córdoba by 900 A.D., while eastern Europeans were picking beets in mud.”

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Chapter Fifteen The Man in the Porkpie Hat

On our first approach, Gaucín looked like an articulated white tube balanced on a hillside ledge. The village perches just under the highest ridge of Mount Hacho, twenty kilometers due north of the Rock of Gibraltar on the southernmost tip of Spain. During the time of the Roman Empire, explorers observed this fertile valley floor and channeled the water from the Genal and Guadiaro rivers for their early occupation, and the Muslims who first settled Gaucín called it Gauzin, Caucin, or Garb-Caucin, depending on who was speaking. Late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantics like the American writer Washington Irving, who traveled to Spain and fell in love with the ruins of the Alhambra in Granada, wrote about Gaucín’s wonders, and inspired pen-and-ink depictions of the local landmark, the Muslim castle of Guzman el Bueno, renamed el Castillo del Águila, Castle of the Eagle, muting the Muslim origins of the castle. The cheap property and proximity to Gibraltar inspired sun-seeking British expatriates and ex-hippies to take up residence in Gaucín, where some Spanish families have lived since before the time the village Fountain of the Six Lions was built in 1628. The old sections of Gaucín are defined by twisting, whitewashed

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walls winding under the shadow of Mount Hacho. Homes are distinguished by blue doors and carved wooden brown ones, grillwork screens, barred windows, luscious potted flowers like geraniums, whose reds seem to flash and blaze, but from a distance, the habitations in Gaucín, discounting the new villas on the edges of town, all looked alike, the Spanish version of the undistinguished row house. To our boulevard sensibility, the streets seemed too narrow to drive through, so we parked our car and walked into the village. All the blinds were drawn against the midday sun. Light bounced up from the pavement and off the white stucco walls, wrapping our bodies in heat. Fake-bamboo screens covered the opened doorways, behind them whispers came from the depths of shaded rooms. The air in the narrow street was still and hot and smelled of nesperas and sun-baked oranges. Only tourists walk around during the hottest part of summer days in southern Spain, and so we were easily identified. A Roma boy whizzed past on a stingray bicycle too small for him, and a solitary old man sitting on a metal bench watched us pass near the town’s aviary, his arms splayed across the bench’s high back to better catch the faint breeze coming up out of the arroyo behind him. From behind shutters, plastic screens, and barred windows, eyes peeked between the wires of canary cages set out in the shade of north-facing balconies, but we could only sense them. Gaucín’s castle looms above the village, an imposing ruin, lit by halogen floodlights provided by the provincial tourist bureau for effect, a mosque in part of the main structure of the castle subdued and incorporated into the altar of the remodeled Catholic church. A September festival in Gaucín, which celebrates the 1536 apparition of Christ as an infant in the arroyo of the Genal on the valley floor, originates behind the castle’s church doors. A porcelain replica of the Christ Child, el Santo Niño, is dressed in garments of gold brocade and velvet, hoisted onto a palanquin, and carried into the village on the shoulders of devout men. Gaucín hosts a less reverent, but more raucous festival for witches at midsummer’s eve, the Romería de San Juan, though that festival is hybridized by the Church to celebrate Saint John in addition to the witches, who, dating from the time of the last Inquisition in 1492, were never chased completely out of Spain. Gaucín has good mountain spring water, fresh vegetables, and fish,

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palmeras and croissant delivered daily from a bakery in Estepona, a heliport, bus station, and two new hotels under construction. It also has a public swimming pool and tennis courts, a recording studio above the White Villages Travel Agency on Cañamaque Street, a resident British sculptor and several watercolorists. There are a sizable number of old men whose fathers were loyal to Franco, and several more who are happy Franco is dead. Franco’s troops massacred Loyalists in Gaucín in 1937, and the plaque to mark the spot, in a blind alley across from the fish market on Cañamaque Street, is barely visible now. The small marker, cracked and yellowed with age, is set into the stucco wall behind the executions. Spain’s membership in the European Union and British, German, and Russian money will change Gaucín more rapidly than it knows. I didn’t know any of this when I rented a house in the middle of the village through an agency I found on the Internet. I only knew that Gaucín was close to the larger town of Ronda, which had had a sizable Jewish population before the Inquisition. If I had found my urbane father, Bennie—Benji—Benjamin, sitting on a bench in Gaucín enjoying the shade of a late summer afternoon, we might have joked about the good one he had pulled on the family by pretending to be dead, but then he’d get serious and say he wanted something to eat. He wouldn’t want to talk about deception, and neither would I. I’d had enough. We’d look for saffron-seasoned rice and a small bottle of beer in amber glass to help him chase away the heat. Unlike Christianity, Judaism has no elaborate strata for the dead, no Purgatory, no circles in Hell, no Heaven, though there is, in folklore, Gehenna, a quasi holding cell for departed souls, and consolation for mourners speaks of everlasting life. For the Hassidim, there is the coming of the Messiah and the Final Judgment of the devoted, and in Ashkenazic folklore, rather than ghosts and minions of the devil, there are dybbuks, and unlike ghosts, they are always wicked. The closest my father and I had ever come to a conversation about his views on death or the afterlife, or how he felt about the fifty/fifty chance he’d survive his open-heart surgery, for that matter, was during an argument we had in 1994. He told me he was planning to drive to Las Vegas in the middle of the summer to visit his brother, Sol. My father could then stay awake without dozing or wishing that he still enjoyed smoking for one hour and forty-five minutes at a time, and the

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drive from Denver to Las Vegas takes seventeen concentrated, speeding hours over sometimes mountainous terrain. He was planning to drive at night because he hated the heat, and his champagne-colored Buick Skylark needed its air-conditioning serviced. He couldn’t afford to fix it. He was night-blind. I tried painting the morbid scenario of him falling asleep at the wheel, but he’d grown weary by then of all the morbid scenarios my mother and his doctors had painted through the years about his preference for salt, butter, salami, pastrami, sausage, and Camel cigarettes. He gave me one of his backhand waves and said if he died while driving, maybe somewhere in the Nevada desert, that would be okay with him. Instead, he died in his favorite chair in the lobby of the Holy Family Retirement Village one July afternoon just before his planned departure to Las Vegas. He wasn’t driving, and he didn’t drop dead at the blackjack table, another favorite fantasy. When we reached our rented row house with its blue doors on Cañamaque Street, siesta was over, and old people filled the whitewashed cement bench across the street. They stopped their conversation to stare at us. Their scrutiny was casual, but directed, and while no one looked exactly in our eyes, they took in every feature as if to check off a tally of parts that would reveal our national identity. The bench they sat on was less than twelve feet away. I could hear the labored breathing of the old men, and from the women, not breath, but an almost involuntary murmur from their lips, suppressed humming or words purposely muffled. I had difficulty throwing back the dead bolt with my house key and tried to make a joke about the key to a man in a porkpie hat, who suggested Spanish keys were more difficult to use than foreign ones. The benchmates continued to sit and stare as my husband pulled up in our rented car and our boys got out and took the luggage from the trunk. The neighbors watched as my husband drove off to park in a wider part of the street near the White Villages Travel Agency, and they nodded as I smiled and closed the blue doors behind me. When I opened the shutter over the kitchen window that looked out onto the street, the four benchmates—the man in the porkpie hat, a very thin man in a pressed white shirt and gray gabardine slacks, a heavyset woman with cat-eye glasses, and a disheveled woman with several buttons missing from her dusty blouse—had all turned their

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heads in unison to watch my husband approach the blue doors. As my husband entered our flat, a station wagon sped up to the elegant, wrought-iron gate in front of the door of the lawyer’s home across from ours. The benchmates turned their heads in unison again, transferring their attention to the lawyer’s tall and shapely teenage daughter, who was returning from a shopping expedition in Seville with a carload of packages and a backseat full of male cousins to escort her. As I opened the shutters over the dining room windows, the man in the porkpie hat knocked on the door, asked if I was pleased with the house, and offered to show me where the market and bakery were. He shuffled in front of me along the steep, winding streets, his arms by his sides, his right hand gesturing—all four fingers tapping at his thumb— conveying what, I did not know. He told the woman who ran the market that he’d brought her another customer, pointed out the bread at the panadería across the way, and left me to my shopping and inspection of the local breads while he shuffled back to his bench. I had no idea if he was being kind or merely stretching his legs with a late-afternoon walk. Perhaps he was a local busybody or a relative of the shopkeeper’s. At first, the people on the whitewashed cement bench were nothing more than an amalgamation of imagined local color, merged images from the dozens of photos of rural villagers I had seen in guidebooks. Such photos did not include the man in the porkpie hat, as he was coarse and dressed in tattered olive-drab khaki pants and a yellow shirt, but the well-dressed, frail man in gabardine, with his cap and cane, was recognizable as a kind of village icon, as was the heavy-hipped woman who dressed in black and wore cat-eye glasses. The woman with the buttons missing from her blouse was not represented in the guidebooks either, because everyone in guidebooks is healthy and clean and either performing folkloric dances in flounced skirts or sunbathing in the nude. Such crazy, dusty women, many of them widows, wander the streets of many villages, living on the charity of village people who knew them before they lost their minds. The heavyset woman in black seldom took a seat at the cement bench, so it was the three others—the man with the porkpie hat, the man in gabardine, the woman with the dusty blouse—who I watched, even as they watched us from their bench. They appeared outside after breakfast and stayed on the bench until siesta, when they would

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disappear into the shade to eat and rest and watch TV, only to reappear at four p.m. and sit until the sun went down or someone invited them out for a beer. When one of them was absent, the other two would sit still clustered together, except for the man in the porkpie hat, who, when his benchmates were absent, would splay his arms across the back part of the bench as if to catch what little breeze came up from the winding street below the bench. When the three of them were gone, I tested its perfect vantage; it looked around the bend in the street to the big wooden doors of the Church of Saint Sebastian; it looked beyond the church up the walkway to the castle gates; it afforded a partial view of the hod mixer in front of a flat that was being completely refurbished at the opposite end of Cañamaque Street. Most interesting of all, it looked right into our dining room and kitchen windows to the biscuits, cookies, and oranges we had piled on top of the refrigerator. It seemed that nothing could drive the benchmates from the bench in good weather, not Paco, the moped rider with his boom box blaring, not the cavalcade of garbage trucks, gas tank delivery trucks, other drunken men on scooters, a British girl who liked to pop wheelies on her bicycle in front of them—no one snuck past the three neighbors on the bench. Whatever was happening in the village on Cañamaque Street, they were part of it from this bench. Though not church-goers themselves, they watched the faithful come and go from church. When a village man married an African woman from Morocco, the benchmates watched her brothers roar up and down the street in their white Mustang convertible for days before the wedding, horn blasting, muffler missing, and though the man in the porkpie hat covered his ears, he did not budge. The benchmates watched the little flower girls strew white petals in the road, petals on the benchmates’ laps, in their hair, and on their sandaled feet as if the three were statues, all of this before the bride, wide, white-gowned, and laughing, rode past the benchmates, seated on the top edge of the convertible’s backseat like the queen of a bowl-game parade. The benchmates watched me and my family eat bread and peach jam in the morning, and they watched my children play cards. They counted the bags of lettuce, beans, onions, and fresh chili peppers we brought home from the market and the bags of trash we tied onto the

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grillwork covering our dining room window for daily garbage pickups. They sat amid the litter of strewn carnation petals from the first communion of village girls, ripe nesperas and oranges dropping to the street around them; they sat watching the tightly huddled groups of tourists—Spanish, German, British, American—making their way from Cañamaque Street to the steep road leading up to Castillo del Águila, cameras slung over the tourists’ shoulders. A day before Romería, the summer solstice celebration, a brigade of young Britons ready for a party stepped gingerly up the cobbled street past the cement bench, their purple platform shoes wobbling on the uneven surface. The benchmates’ gazes never wavered. They kept their lips in perfect lines, their eyes unblinking, appraising what my father used to call pants so tight you could tell what supper was. When the benchmates spoke, they did so in rapid, terse bursts, pronouncing everything with the dropped endings of Andalucían dialect. What they said escaped me. A TV interview with a Barcelona witch preparing for the Romería celebration revealed a blonde, athletic-looking woman gathering driftwood for a bonfire on the beach. I hadn’t considered a congregation of witches in Spain, or their ancient holidays, though in southern Spain villagers still spread rumors of towns overrun by covens, like Castellar de la Frontera, where a fly-covered, nude Barbie doll with ratty hair laid across the threshold to the castle gate convinced us not to enter. The man in the porkpie hat was our source of village information, and he assured us that the Romería de San Juan in Gaucín was no celebration for witches, after he laughed, politely, at my question. He talked about the music and the dancing, wiggled his arthritic hips while he sat on the bench, and pointed up the street to the British travel agency. Its owner, her hair died radish-red, had danced last year at the Romería until well past dawn, and stopped only because the heels fell off her shoes, he said. When he told me about her dancing, he clucked his tongue against his palate, fanned out his short, thick fingers, and shook them. Romería! Romería! Romería! Everyone laughed when saying that word, and shook their hands. The new Moroccan bride coaxed her male relatives to remain in Gaucín for the Romería after her wedding,

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and in anticipation, they drove up and down Cañamaque Street again in their white Mustang convertible, beating drums now in addition to blasting trumpets. The ice cream vendor shouted about the Romería, as did the man who watched the castle gate, the kids on the soccer field who stole my sons’ ball, the bakery owner, even a British man who tried out his rusting charm on me in the panadería as I waited to buy bread while my husband was taking a nap. Romería, Romería, Romería! We’d been in Spain searching through the bulldozed rubble of Cádiz for signs of my father’s family and found nothing. We had had our fortunes mangled by a Roma woman near the Alhambra gates, who handed us a sprig of rosemary while she frisked me for my hidden purse. My son had been robbed, artfully, in Córdoba. Clearly, I could see that there had been Sephardim in Spain—there were Star of David topiaries and Star of David designs in the stonework walkways in Ronda, an ancient mikva in Toledo; Ladino, Hebrew, and Arabic prayers chiseled into synagogue archways, a statue of Maimonides. Mezuzahs and porcelain Yeshiva boys graced selected tourist shops. In Seville, the cabbie had tilted his rearview mirror to look me in the eyes and say, “Everyone in Spain’s a little Jewish. You don’t have to go to a synagogue to see it. But if you want to pray, I’ll take you. Just come back on Saturday.” I’m not suggesting that the man in the porkpie hat became my father. My father hadn’t managed to pull off a good one by pretending to be dead. He was dead. I had dribbled black dirt on the cement box that encased his coffin. My father wasn’t the man in the porkpie hat. My father was American and Jewish, a New Yorker transplanted in the West, a huckster, a mover of beef cattle, a man whose story, when everything else in his life had failed him, was Spain and his family’s presence in it during the Sephardim’s Golden Age. Segundo Huertas Ramos was a Spanish Catholic farmer, and the only things he knew about Jews were that “they lived in Israel and liked to gamble.” As for the Sephardim in Spain, he said five hundred years was a long time ago. The first week we lived in the flat with the blue doors, we called Segundo Huertas Ramos “the old man on the bench.” Segundo tolerated my bad Spanish accent, but sometimes when I tried to string long sentences together, he’d cover his ears and shake

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his head in pain. Had we rented a flat elsewhere in Gaucín, we wouldn’t have known him, but the bench, idle time, curiosity, Segundo’s physical resemblance to my father, and my similarity in age to his daughter in Madrid made our encounter otherwise. The weeks we lived in the flat with blue doors, we conversed on every subject my vocabulary could muster—agriculture, the kinds of cheese in Spain, abortion, divorce, gun violence in the U.S., the monarchy, how many pressings one could get from an olive harvest, how to pile garlic in the sun to dry, the European Union, a winter in Gaucín once so cold, Segundo said, he “had to wear a pair of socks.” After our second long conversation, I stopped worrying about my conjugations of the perfect tenses. Segundo was the youngest child in a family of seven, the only surviving member. Born in 1929 in Benarabba, an ancient Muslim town just down the road from Gaucín, he owned a large finca at the bottom of the valley. He and his wife had moved from the family farm up the hillside to Gaucín in February of 1998, because his wife had had a knee operation and needed to be closer to village services. For four years in the early 1950s, Segundo had been a guest worker in Germany, where he earned enough money as a foundry worker to purchase the finca one of his sons now ran. He talked about how lonely he had been in Germany, how his three companions had quit their jobs and returned to Spain without him, how not knowing German had made him feel as though he understood “as much as a horse.” He understood our sense of isolation. Though I had introduced myself as Josefa Varón, my Spanish name, I knew he didn’t believe me, because the first evening we were in the village he had asked Ezra, who didn’t speak much Spanish then, if we were Germans. It might have been my hair (red), my eyes (blue), my hips (broad), that made him take his guess. The day before the two-day Romería festival began, I waited in the morning for Segundo to come and sit on the bench across from the blue doors of our flat and talk with me. He didn’t appear; nor was he there when I returned from the panadería with palmeras, croissant, and bread for our breakfast. When he walked with me to the market our first evening in Gaucín, Segundo had puffed along the street as my father had before his bypass surgery. Segundo’s complexion had that same oxygen-deprived grayish tinge. Work, age, smoking, and the relentless Spanish sun had turned Segundo’s skin to leather. He had

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been stocky once, but all that remained of his strength and heft was a modest paunch. He had stopped bending his knees when he walked some time ago, and he could only carry the weight of one or two small packages balanced in each hand. His doctor had told him to give up cigarettes, salt, and fatty meat, to “eat like an Italian,” and though I never saw him smoke, he had the same phlegm-filled cough my father had. I thought illness was the reason for his absence, and when he finally appeared on the bench after siesta later that day, I was surprised by my relief to find him well. Every time Segundo said “Romería,” he tapped his feet, his dusty toes beating out a tune. He sang out the word as if it were a charm. At first, he seemed shocked, then incredulous, then delighted when I asked him if he wanted to accompany us to the second night’s celebration. I repeated my invitation half a dozen times, trying every tense I thought appropriate, until he threw up his hands and covered his ears. I stopped. He looked baffled, shy. Had I done something inappropriate? My husband should have invited him rather than myself, a married woman, but my husband’s Spanish sounded like Italian mixed with French. When other village men passed us as we were sitting on the bench together, Segundo listening, me gesturing like a mad woman, Segundo hastily explained to his fellows about sitting with me alone, something about how my husband was right across the way. He pointed to the dining room window, where my husband often sat, writing in his journal. “He only speaks a little,” he said, and wiped his hand across his mouth. Then he pointed to my sons, playing blackjack on the stoop. “I live right there,” he added, as if his fellows didn’t know. His right hand flew in the air, gesturing to his front door two meters from the edge of ours; his wife, he said, was in the kitchen, making lunch. Segundo couldn’t walk to the Romería, as the dance was in an orchard a few kilometers from the edge of town. We had a car, and he clearly loved the Romería de San Juan. Whatever the villagers might have been dreaming or gossiping about, our invitation was a practical solution to a transportation problem. When we opened our blue doors to Segundo’s knocking the evening of the Romería, his olive-drab khaki pants, worn yellow windowpane shirt, and even his porkpie hat had been replaced by the heavy, corduroy pants and oxford-cloth shirt of a

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Spanish country gentleman, complete with cap, though he still wore his tire-tread sandals. The Romería de San Juan in Gaucín is like a western county fair and rodeo combined: loud, dusty, full of horses. The layout is compressed; there is none of the coliseum splendor of the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo in Denver, Colorado. The Gaucín Romería balances in a moderately flat clearing surrounded by algorroba and corcho, leafy carob and cork-oak trees. When we arrived, a makeshift bar at the end of the clearing was selling watered-down beer; a young man in tortoise-shell glasses, who drove the village garbage truck, fuel tank truck, and delivery truck, was serving as bartender. Anchoring the bar was the sound system: two enormous speakers with warped tweeters broadcasting high-pitched sounds loud enough to rupture the eardrums of God. Drinking and betting on the carrera de cinta filled the early part of the evening, the carrera de cinta a contest like a horse race, barrel course, javelin throw, and joust, performed on horseback or motorcycle in the narrow, spectator-lined corridor of the makeshift arena. When the sound of recorded trumpets blared from the speakers, the contestant brought his mount to a standstill, then commenced to gallop full speed toward a stretch of rope suspended high above the midway of the arena’s dirt straightaway. Rings with paper streamers were wrapped around the suspended rope, and the object of the competition was to skewer a ring with a riding crop. The crop was held in the teeth until the rider approached the rings, and the skewering had to be accomplished without tearing down the rope or dropping the ring in the dirt. The equestrians were older men and one young woman, all in black with silver-studded tack, stiff and striking on their restless mounts. The horses kicked up dense plumes of dust; the spectators all screamed at the contestants as a whirlwind of dirt fell into the beer, on clothing, on the frosty tops of ice cream bars. Riders maneuvered their mounts by pressing their thighs against them or by jerking on the horses’ reins, their concentration focused on the space inside each ring. The younger competitors rode motorcycles, and they had their own set of difficulties, trying to accelerate from zero to sixty within a tenfoot stretch, balancing their heavy, fast-moving machines with their

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thighs and one hand, then squeezing the motorcycle between their calves to keep the bikes upright as they stretched their torsos, reaching up to skewer a ring with an outstretched stick. They were all unsuccessful, and thankfully, none of them was killed. I couldn’t tell where the betting was done—the bar? near the speakers? behind the ice cream vendors?—but after the competitions there were a few men walking by with fans of money, others with their hands in their empty pockets. Segundo watched them all, shaking his head, pointing out the more stealthy gamblers, whom he acknowledged with a quick tilt of his cap. My father would have been right there with them placing bets, winning or losing, breathing too hard from all that dust. Segundo walked us the length and breadth of the Romería straightaway, drank two more paper cups of beer, hobbled gracefully to the trees beyond to piss. When he returned, he walked us the opposite direction, away from Romería lovers, leaned against a tree, and tapped his dusty sandals to the din. We were standing in one of his orchards, and when he asked my husband and me if we were capitalistas, I hardly knew how to answer, as my vegetable garden could fit in the corner of the orchard on his farm. Segundo could barely stand, let alone dance, and we found a folding chair for him. The music’s volume increased, unbelievably, and revelers appeared from the north and south ends of the arena. Lovers entered and exited the algorrobo grove; parents hoisted their children onto their shoulders; and the British men we had seen walking up Cañamaque Street a few days before showed up in their tight white pants, which were instantly covered with dust. The Moroccan bride was there with three of her children from a previous marriage, and her male cousins had their drums. I could feel the scrape of grit between my teeth, but Segundo seemed so happy. He closed his eyes, put his hands on his cheeks, and swayed to the steady “bam” from the speakers. Revelers crushed plastic cups under their heels, cameras flashed, and language dissolved to screams. A British man took off his shirt, then his male partner did, then another and another, and their fineboned chests turned brown with dust. The high heel of the platform shoe broke off, and it was sacrificed to the night, tossed high into the air and batted by the crowd until it disappeared. We danced until the throb of the bass line wormed into the convolutions of our brains, but

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Segundo was disappointed when we took him home, as dawn was still a long way off. It was at the Romería de San Juan that my father began his figurative afterlife in Gaucín. The carrera de cinta replaced the Saturday afternoons at the dusty quarter horse track in Brush, and the fecund Spanish girls blotting sweat from their foreheads as they danced replaced the girls from long ago when my father had Lindy Hopped at the Savoy Hotel in Harlem. Though my father was taller, he and Segundo both had stocky bodies that suggested they had done physical labor all their lives, and because both had bad eyes and selective hearing, they wore the same kind of thick, black-rimmed glasses and canted their left ears at just the same angle. It was so much easier to imagine Segundo in the surrogate role, the fantasy so clean without my mother or my childhood, without the knowledge of Jean or her longing for my father or her suicide and the forever-unanswered questions of her motivations or my father’s. We left Gaucín for a few days to travel to Toledo, and though I thought I had explained our itinerary to Segundo, he thought we had left Gaucín for good, without saying goodbye to him. When we drove back into Gaucín, Segundo was sitting alone at a little white plastic table in the courtyard of the Pajuelo Bar near the fish market. He was nursing a San Miguel beer. The evening was still hot, and beads of condensation covered his glass; in front of him was his favorite tapa, a small platter of potato salad served with two short bread sticks. He leaned back against the wall of the building, eyes unfocused behind his thick glasses. Younger men, partisans and fascists whose politics separated them from farmers like Segundo, stood in clusters at the bar, their backs turned to Segundo, their voices muffled by the beaded screen hanging over the doorway. Segundo looked vacant, dejected, a lonely nobody, just as I had once glimpsed my father before he spotted me, sitting alone, his blue polo shirt frayed, his white undershirt torn along the neckline, slumped in a Dairy Queen booth near his apartment at the Holy Family Village. He was chasing the last remnant of strawberry syrup from his sundae cup with a plastic spoon as he waited for my family and me to join him. I was ashamed of his poverty, but I was also ashamed for the shame I felt. I had survived

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those awful years of childhood. How could I help him? All I had to offer was the invitation to spend a little time with his grandsons. Unlike the meeting with my father, we did not stop to join Segundo or buy him a drink; we drove by knowing that he could not see us from that distance. I don’t know why we didn’t stop; we were embarrassed, I think, to see him sitting there, so lonely. We chattered instead about the avocet on the road to Toledo above Mazcaraque, about an egret we had seen riding on the back of a horse near a potato field being harvested on the way back from Arcos de la Frontera. Like the Greeks, we thought the birds an omen, but of what? Two evenings before we left Gaucín, my husband and I walked near the crossroad to Ronda. The breeze was cool, alpenglow on the mountain ridge brilliant. The Rock of Gibraltar was vivid against the sky, and beyond that, the Atlas Mountains protruded from a tier of clouds. Peacocks screamed in the aviary on the edge of Gaucín, and the new moon hung in a sky that did not darken until eleven p.m. When we returned from our walk, Segundo was absent from the bench, and my boys were playing cards on the blue doorway stoop of our flat. The evening seemed empty, haunted by Segundo’s absence. The young British girl rode up and down the narrow street trying to stand on the saddle of her mountain bike each time she passed the boys. They tried not to notice her. In the early evening after siesta the following day, Segundo took my husband and me for a walk around Gaucín to the aviary at the edge of town. He said he wanted to have taken us to all the “nice spots” in Gaucín, the Romería de San Juan, the castle, where he endured, for our sake, the insults of the groundskeeper, who did not share Segundo’s politics. Segundo took us to the new park, the aviary, his favorite bars. We lingered as long as we could looking at the peacocks displaying their feathers for the peahens, the guinea fowl, the doves, canaries, ducks, and other birds whose names I don’t know in any language. The dovecote was dirty, the geese unusually quiet, the hills surrounding Gaucín crushing in their silence. When I’d first seen the aviary I’d described it in my journal as a few caged geese and ducks in a small pool of stagnant water just behind the gazebo. We walked around the outer ring of Gaucín to the gorge carved by

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the Genal River, and Segundo pointed out a vineyard below, where, he said, “the grapes make the best wine in town.” They wouldn’t be crushed until long after we’d gone. The wine was only sold locally. He took us to the Pajuelo Bar, where we had seen Segundo drinking a beer and eating tapas alone a few nights before. He ordered us a round of beer and lupiños, cici beans so salty they were impossible to eat. A feral dog chewed on the hem of my dress then pissed on it. We talked about the digestibility of goat’s milk after a black goat stumbled up from the fields and ran into a woman’s house across from the courtyard. I tried to explain why one of our own goats never had milk, but I did not have the words in my vocabulary. Though I had told Segundo the hour of our departure, the last time we saw him, he was shuffling away from the blue doors of our row house, thinking again that we had gone without saying goodbye. We had just finished loading suitcases in the car, and we intended to knock at Segundo’s door to complete the sad ritual of our departure. When my husband shouted “Segundo!” and he turned toward us, the smile on his face could have awakened the dead. For a year after our first trip to Spain, each letter I began to Segundo ended in the trash. What if his kindness were merely courtesy? What if his affection were merely a projection of my own need as I grieved for my father. What if Segundo were dead? I didn’t think I could start again to grieve, even for a man I barely knew. What if there were nothing special about me in Segundo’s mind, or the visit we had made to Gaucín; what if his gestures of interest and kindness had merely been his villager’s politeness for a tourist or a guest? Near the time of our second trip, I was still thinking of him. One week before our departure for Spain, I mailed a letter to Segundo to say we would be in Spain again, but in Gaucín only for an afternoon. I gave him a date and a time, but I didn’t leave enough time for him to reply before we departed for our trip. I convinced myself that even if Segundo did not remember my family or me, I could hold on to the fantasy that my father is happy in his afterlife in Gaucín, finally surrounded by the rhythm of Spanish village life. He can rise whenever the sun makes the rooms too hot to sleep, and if he wishes, he can shuffle to the cement bench and sit with

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cronies or smoke one of the cigarettes that helped to kill him—no matter, he’s already dead. He doesn’t have to answer for anything he did in life. He can finally enjoy salt and drink as many beers as he pleases, for there are no policemen or my mother or the nosy nuns at the Holy Family to sniff his breath or make him walk a straight line. In my father’s afterlife, he can finally enjoy siesta after lunch without worrying about indigestion or a heart attack, and he will not be ridiculed by his in-laws for being lazy. No one calls him Bennie-get-ajob, and in Gaucín, he looks just like everyone else. When siesta is over he can shuffle from bar to bar all around Gaucín, a San Miguel beer here, a plate of potato salad there, a few cocktail meatballs in brown sauce, lupiños if he wants them, pantillitos if he’s feeling rakish. He can watch the sun set late in the evening, and on nights when the wind blows the haze off the Mediterranean, he can count the lights in Tangiers as they come on, one by one. Except for the one brief note I wrote right before my departure, I had no correspondence with Segundo. But for an entire year I heard the deep, unsure shout of “Josefa? Josefa Varón?!” as Segundo called to me from the crest of Cañamaque Street to tell me goodbye. Segundo was not waiting for us on the cement bench in front of the blue doors of the row house we had rented the summer before, nor were his cronies seated there. The cement bench was empty. It had changed. Now, it was ornamented with a wrought-iron back and wrought-iron armrests in the middle and on the sides of the bench, all in the curlicue manner of Spanish ironworks. The entire length of Cañamaque Street was deserted. The blue shutters were closed. We had seen the dusty madwoman Antonia throwing pebbles at a canary in a cage, and she did not recognize us. The Roma boy who stole my sons’ soccer ball rode past on his little stingray bike without so much as a glance. The British girl who had tried to balance on the saddle of her mountain bike to impress the boys had developed stunning breasts, and she rode a scooter. When she rode by, she did not wave. The woman in the market who had had such a good laugh at my expense when I had asked to buy a kilo of green beans one morning last summer looked past me as if I were invisible. I stood a long time staring at the plastic shade over Segundo’s door, afraid to knock. I had insisted we come back to Gaucín. We had

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argued about coming at all, after my husband observed that my presence might be a torment for Segundo’s wife. The implication of her jealousy opened an old and deep wound about my father’s affair with Jean. I almost left without knocking, afraid to face what might have been my silly fiction. Segundo was just inside the threshold, listening to me deliberate from the hidden vantage of the plastic shade unrolled across his door. He waited until I lifted the shade to rap my knuckles on his door. He had on his Romería dancing clothes. He said he’d been thinking about our return to Gaucín for a whole year, that he sat on the bench all day waiting for us until he got too hot. He knew, he said, just what he wanted to do. His wife shook our hands, served us mango juice, and we walked out without her into the late afternoon light. We climbed halfway up the walkway to the castle to look out at the tops of the trees in his orchards below, because that was as far as he could now walk. Even if his lungs had been stronger, Segundo said he had no desire to suffer the insults of the groundskeeper. Segundo did not wish to be humiliated again, not even for our sakes. Last summer the groundskeeper had bullied Segundo into trying to read a placard near the castle gate about the history of the castle, to illustrate to his fancy, foreign guests that Segundo couldn’t read, except for sounding out the letters in the words. Instead, we looked at fossils in the limestone paving stones in the new park and heliport below the castle walls. From that vantage, we could look down into the village cemetery, at the red, blue, and yellow paper flowers near the family crypts, at all the little crosses. I wanted to chase death out of there. Before my eyes, the uniform white stones stretched out for acres at the Fort Logan National Cemetery, my father’s stone among them. We watched the peacock display its feathers for the peahens in the aviary. The peacock strutted forward, then shook its body, the long and heavy tail feathers in a gaudy procession. The feathers filled the aviary and brushed up against the fence, and Segundo tried to reach for one that had fallen in the muck, but his hand was too big to pass between the triangle of the fence. White rabbits huddled in their hutch on the aviary’s edge, and when they wouldn’t budge, no matter our coaxing, we turned away to the Pajuelo Bar, where Segundo’s little white plastic table in the courtyard was full with the five of us.

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Note on Sources

Many books, articles, and monographs were important sources of information. The particulars of the Limoges and Doulton china and Reed and Barton silver used in the Brown Palace Hotel I gathered from Corinne Hunt’s The Brown Palace Story (Denver: Rocky Mountain Writer’s Guild, 1982). Other works important to the details include Ayse Gürsan-Salzmann’s Anyos Munchos i Buenos [Good Years and Many More]: Turkey’s Sephardim 1492-1992 (Philadelphia: Blue Flower/Photo Review, 1991), and Enrique Saporta y Beja’s Refranes de los judíos sefardíes: y otras locuciones típicas de los judíos sefardíes de Salónica y otros sitios de Oriente (Barcelona: Ameller Ediciones, 1978), for Ladino proverbs and sayings. Also useful were Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York (New York: Knopf, 1996), Frank Rowsome Jr.’s The Verse by the Side of the Road: The Story of the Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles (Brattleboro, VT: S. Greene Press, 1965), John G. Adams’s Without Precedent: The Story of the Death of McCarthyism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), Clarence R. Wyatt’s Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), and The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Directory of Names (Washington, D.C.: Vietnam Veterans Memorial,

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1991). I also consulted several Web sites, including those for the National Earthquake Information Center, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the 95 KIMN Hit Parade, the Federalist Society, and the Explorer. I would especially like to thank Benison Varon for the breadth and scope of his monograph, The Tale of a Name: “Varons” across Time and Place (Fairfax VA: privately published, 2000), for it helped me to understand my own Spanish pilgrimage, and Cees Nooteboom, for his exploration in Roads to Santiago: A Modern-Day Pilgrimage through Spain (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2000). Other important works include Francisco García Mota and Esteban García Mota’s Gaucín, Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, edited by Vivian B. Mann, Thomas E. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds (New York: G. Braziller in association with the Jewish Museum, 1992), Cultures of the Jews: A New History, edited by David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), Jane S. Gerber’s The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: Free Press, 1992), Don A. Halperin’s The Ancient Synagogues of the Iberian Peninsula (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1969), Francicso Cantera Burgos’s Sinagogas de Toledo, Segovia, y Córdoba (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Centificas, Instituto B. Arias Montano, 1973), and Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). Henry E. Allison’s Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), Sir Frederick Pollock’s Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (New York: American Scholar Publications, 1966), Spinoza’s The Ethics and Selected Letters, edited by Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), Spinoza: Selections, edited by John Wild (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1930), and The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters of Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, edited by Anne Wright (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1986), were all useful in understanding Spinoza’s thought and ethics. David S. Katz’s The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Cecil Roth’s A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), provided essential detail about the life of Dr. Roderigo Lopez, as did the Riverside Shakespeare.

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Also consulted were letters from the Kam Wah Chung Archive at the Oregon Historical Society, and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963).

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About the Author

Jodi Varon is Professor of English at Eastern Oregon University and the translator of The Rock’s Cold Breath: The Selected Poems of Li He. She lives in La Grande, Oregon.

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