Conspiracy

Beth Bosworth

ESTHER ran away from home again today. This time she got as far as Kmart, which is closed now, for good. A lot of the old stores on Main Street are closed now; people shop on the highway, at the malls, or they go to Cedar Lane if they're really Jewish, as in kosher. I live in the city; I come here only to visit; I try to understand the boarded storefronts, the dusty windows. Times have changed.

My grandmother, however, is still a free-thinker. All those Orthodox are driving her crazy; she says it's like the stetl all over again.

"Grandma," I say, "you have to come home."

"Don't condescend," she says, blue eyes flashing. "Once I heard Einstein play his violin. I talked for many long hours with Alfred Kazin, a real brain. I was the first in the audience to stand up and clap for Samuel Beckett on the night of his opening, you know, the play where they said, but nothing happens. Nothing happens! Ha!"

"My father is very angry with you," I say.

She looks around. She is five-foot-two and conspiratorial.

"He robs from me," she says. Triumph throbs in her voice. She sees how I hear it, register it; she shakes her head, makes as if to spit, turns heavily away. She uses a walker now. She is eighty-five years old and she smells even in the open air of urine. She leans on her walker and pulls back her lips, wrinkled like figs or some other fruit from the beginning of the world.

"It's Passover," I say. Am I begging? Instigating? Something in me loves her struggle against what my father insists on calling "the modern era."

"And I am the prophet Elijah," she says.

She hobbles off. I watch until she reaches the corner, only a few feet away. It takes her a long time.

"Watch out for bears!" she says, looking back. Her figs are parted in laughter: but for a long time the meaning of the joke escapes her granddaughter, no longer a child to be devoured.

My mother is on the phone to the police. "Yes," she says. "We think she can't have got very far, but I would check the railroad station if I were you. Also the bus station and the taxi stands."

Esther, my grandmother from Sokolov, one of many towns named Sokolov where Jews used to live in Poland, won't take airplanes. She flew only once, to Israel . My parents got a telephone call from Haifa in the middle of one night. This was years ago, before the tragedy of the Palestinians. There were guerillas then too, and people longing so for freedom it made them berserk, and yet no one knew what to do with Esther. "She leaves the house, we find her walking in the streets, once in the desert-she will dehydrate someday. She accuses us of stealing her passport, her traveler's checks. Please. Some Jews are not made for this place."

That time, Joseph, Esther's son, my father, refused; instead he sent money for her airplane flight home. She arrived breathless with excitement. She had seen the Holy Land and it was a terrible, parochial, stifling place; nothing, she insisted, but religious Jews everywhere; and a hospital ward reserved especially for the ones who came down with the revelation (like you come down with the flu, she said gleefully) that they were the Messiah. Each, convinced that he was the Chosen One, safely confined to a hospital bed and babbling on about Mount Sinai . "You see what becomes of your Zionism!" she said to my father, who stalked out.

"I brought you something," she whispered to me, because I'm the one who loves her, the one she can trust.

It was an armadillo purse with red glass beads for eyes and a real armadillo's head that snapped open and closed.

Or: Esther, storyteller, raises her arm. I'm five years old; my father's conversion will take place next spring. For now, we two, she and I, do battle with tamer beasts: the lure of the past, the anonymity of suburbs. The sun shines lazily, and the whole afternoon is waiting for her to go on: but a bird darts out of a bush. "I will tell you the story of Esther and how her intelligence saved the Jews from a terrible, what is the word? A terrible plan to kill them all."

Her hands lifted, her voice lilting, she focuses on some other horizon. Some grandmothers are cute; there is nothing cute about this woman. Occasionally she bursts into wild Yiddish song. For me she sings, so that I will understand the meaning of freedom. Throughout my childhood, I pray that none of my friends will hear.

Or again: Esther, storyteller, beckons. A black man has spoken to me on the way home. How does she know? She waits outside, each afternoon, for me to arrive from elementary school. I'm ten years old and diffident. "Who is that black man?" she demands. There are lots of black people in town, I tell her. We're an integrated community. She says nothing until we're inside where my cousin Janet is lacing up her ballet slippers. "Once," Esther whispers. We have to lean close to hear. "I was living in my apartment. I look up and a black man is staring at me. He is just on the other side of the window. I was so frightened!"

Janet, skinny, smart, the real dancer, rises, her spine a rod, her head jerking. "That's so racist!" she crows.

"You don't know!" Esther cries. Once again, my grandmother is wrong, terribly wrong, and I know it and cannot seem to abandon her to American judgment. I don't excuse her, but in my mind I let her go. She doesn't fit in here: let her go.

Esther, conspiratorial; Esther, racist; Esther, vainglorious; Esther singling me out because, my mother said flatly, I looked like her. And I did, with my blue eyes and my cheekbones and the fleshiness of my nose in the middle of my sallow face. I wasn't of my mother's kind but of the blue-eyed Jews like my father and his mother before him. So. Esther, bringing me "something" she bought, a dollar a bag at the thrift shop, or schlepped across a continent on her interminable bus rides: once a red tutu, another time the armadillo-hide purse, and still another time, the magnificent onyx lamp down whose insides you could run your hands, feel the nubble there.

Esther, already slow of movement, watching me dance across the living room floor-"Yes!" she shouts to my mother, who has come to watch and stands, noncommittally wiping her hands, "Yes! Movement, gesture, movement, gesture! Just like Isadora Duncan!"

Esther, taking me aside and whispering how they ganged up on her, how my mother and her friend hated her, talked about her, laughed about her. How she was leaving soon, how she couldn't stay another minute. As a child I would wake to find her elephantine limbs gone from my bed. How can you miss someone who never says good-bye? I wished her the peacefulness, at least, of an open road. She wrote letters in a spiky European script. Your mother has a sickness in the womb, it is so sad, she has slept with too many men, she wrote. When I was there I watched carefully. I would send a lot of money but I know now your father would take it. Later, when you're older, I will let you know where to look. A secret place, a sign. You won't forget, my darling.

"Don't condescend! You think I have gone crazy!" she cries, turning on her walker, shaking her fist as cars whiz past us. She doesn't mean crazy, she means "old," "unconscious," "senile."

Once in Kmart, I came upon my grandmother trying to barter with the young woman behind the counter. I was twelve years old, soon to be a bat mitzvah; a ritual I resented terribly, and only agreed to on the grounds that I would never again, not if my life depended on it, set foot in a synagogue. The check-out girl had a superior American look on her face. Esther had a superior European look on hers. "What? What's that you say?" My grandmother refused to believe that the price was unwavering. I have seen Arabs, the Syrians and the Palestinians my father invites into our home, with the same looks on their faces. It isn't disbelief, it isn't quite concupiscence; it's a homesickness for shekeling. Time really is made of sand and so much gets erased.

"I'm worried this time," my mother says. My father is preparing for the seder. He means to involve me in it, I can tell; he is already passing back and forth with papers, a clutch of papers in his hands. His blue eyes glance my way. He thinks to incite my intellectual curiosity in questions which have plagued philosophers and theologians since the beginning of written time. What is justice? Which comes first, action or essence? How can we recall the creation without performing, first, a mitzvah? I tell him to add more questions to the list: How dare a bunch of misogynistic patriarchs dictate the terms of my life? How dare they tell me that I am unclean, that my mother and sisters are unclean? "Every day I thank God that I wasn't born a Jew," I tell my father, who smiles unpleasantly beneath his beard, which grows wirier, whiter with each visit. I think each time an Arab kills a Jew, my father grows another white hair; each time a Jew kills an Arab, he grows two. Then, ashamed to think so lightly of the dead, I accept the papers he proffers. I am never at ease in my father's presence and even now wish he would go downstairs. My parents' house is full of light and wood and open spaces; at the seder this evening at least twenty of their friends will join us, and my father, whose Zionism leads him to Israel whenever Israel needs him, will take on the burden of domestic joy: singing, drinking, blessing.

My father, on his own first flight out to the Holy Land, sends us the first of an endless series of postcards, jokes, each depicting not some scenic Israeli vista but that of Teaneck, New Jersey, my hometown. From the Negev he writes, I saw a camel walking down the street today, everyone was quite surprised. The bad joke goes on. Later the cards make no sense at all to me, although my mother clutches them-I would stab a knife right through her fleshy heart, if that would stop her clutching those cards. When he finally returns, everything changes because Mr. Patriarch believes in God. Everything, nothing: I won't pray, won't listen, won't sit when "we" sit or stand when "we" stand, and meanwhile other Jews like him crop up like desert cacti, overnight. The synagogues appeared overnight too, I swear; and the Orthodox (we are Conservative, now, leaning toward Orthodox; only my mother's refusal to sit apart from the men saves us that last indignity) walk past our house each Saturday morning, their fifties garb and their piety propelling me up, out, down the block. By the time I'm fifteen I'm known as the girl who lolls on the hoods of cars (my friends, older, less educated, laughing and tapping the roof) as we drive slowly through those Orthodox streets....

Last year my father tried to ply me with Abraham Heschel; this year, he is more devious. He hands me an essay by Walter Benjamin. I am, admittedly, captivated by something I can't quite identify in Benjamin's prose. Does it have to do (yes) with his collections of books? Then there is the story of his life, his love affairs with cities and eras, how in the end he ran away to Spain, how he killed himself believing that his visa, reissued the next day, had been permanently revoked. To kill oneself thinking to escape Nazis-and to have been wrong! "If only it were a funny story," I tell my father. "If only it had a punch line," but he walks off, finally insulted. He thinks I make light once again of the suffering of others.

In the essay Walter Benjamin distinguishes between the storyteller who comes from afar to tell of wonders seen, and the other, the storyteller who asserts a quiet presence, that of a person sitting in the kitchen, shelling peas.

What about the storyteller who takes off her apron, stands up and walks out?

All right then: my father Joseph, accompanying his mother to a resort in the Catskills. A beautiful blue-eyed boy, he stares out at the camera, like me an only child surrounded by doting adults. Esther must be the buxom woman in the brief shorts. Her terror even then mars her face, scars it, but in the photograph some intensity, some joy-yes, joy-makes you want to see more. I always want to see more, hear more, even if it is the tale of her recklessness, the fact of his suffering at her hands: how she lied, how bullied, how loved; how she lied and bullied and loved and fled, and how she wrote letters finally from Mexico City, letters he hid from his grocer father who refused to talk about her for ten years, and who, Joseph having met and married my mother, traveled across a continent and a decade of loneliness to live with Esther again.

"Why me?" my father asks.

"She has no one else," my mother says.

"You go," he begs. "She makes me do things, say things. I can't be a good person with her."

"She won't come with anyone else," she says, which isn't true: she'll come with me.

"The police came to my office today," my father admits.

He is ashamed to share this with us; we are setting the table, my mother and I, and we freeze, knives and glasses and centerpieces static in our hands. My father, following his return from the Negev , left his business firm where he left his old life; now he teaches English and Hebrew at a nearby day school, where he was recently made Head of the English Department. This is an advancement of which he is very proud. For this and other reasons he thinks of me as his heir, but I mean to outdo him. Already I am a scholar. My thesis advisor, to whom I owe a first draft of my thesis on Isaac Babel and with whom I have discussed this guilt, likens it incorrectly (I think) to the guilt of the survivors. What have I survived that my father hasn't survived ten times more of? "Then, once you have it," my advisor insists, "there's the fear that someone will take it away. I know a poet who never cleans his house, never invites anyone, because they'll know he has a little money. He dresses like a pauper, he sleeps from time to time at homeless shelters, to help out, yes, but also, toward dawn, when the supervisor comes and mistakes my friend for another homeless person, that soothes him."

"They were very sorry, but they had received a call from my mother," he tells us tensely. "They wanted to know if I had recently removed money from her bank account."

"What did you tell them?" my mother asks.

My father doesn't answer. I think the question, somehow, was all wrong.

"Come with me," he begs.

I don't know how to refuse; I look to my mother, who says she doesn't need me anymore. All that's left, after all, is the basting of the chicken, the setting out of name cards, the brief but all-important napping before dinner. My father and I won't get to nap, but then, we weren't cooking all day and all yesterday. My mother, since "the return" to Judaism, has never done so much cooking in her life. She does this in conjunction with her busy job as a biochemist's assistant. That is, she is semi-retired now, but she and a former boss are still trying to get rich through their discovery of an enzyme which battles certain acute forms of cancer, apparently with fewer side-effects than drugs now on the market. They have been trying to perfect this medicine and to perform the necessary tests and to get the drug through the FDA and onto drugstore shelves for ten years now, and they still hope for quick riches. Her boss and his wife are coming tonight.

My father and I climb into the car. It's the same car that he has always driven. It smells like him. I look at him across the welcome barrier of the armrest. It's the sort of armrest that goes up, down; he glances as I nervously manipulate it, let it fall.

"How is Glen?" he asks.

Glen is my lover, who won't be joining us for Passover.

"What do you expect?" my father shrugs. He means that Glen isn't Jewish.

"He can always convert, Dad," I say, teasing. My father shrugs again. In his line of work, teaching, he encounters many different kinds of families. At home my parents laugh tenderly about the converts, more and more converts from Christianity, who show up with their intense attention to ritual and their bizarre crush on the Jewish culture.

I don't tell him that there is something frozen in me, something that can't love from too close up, that Glen, who will never feel like flesh of my flesh, who will always be a stranger, is just right for such a woman.

We round the corner.

"You are too much in your head," my father says, as if continuing the same conversation. "A young woman needs to have some fun."

He waves his hand at the stores, bars, restaurants that we're passing. Has he forgotten? I was, I still have the potential to be (he shouldn't forget this), a wanton, even a prodigal child. Has he forgotten? The nights he came for me, found me (at the skating rink, in the darkness of park benches, on street corners where police cars flashed slow red warnings), dragged me outraged into the backseat and pulled away from the curb only to pull over again in time for me to puke, then weep or taunt him? The fights we had, the way he would not give up, would not let up on me-has he forgotten? My father and I are the same, I think bitterly, but his religion has drawn a veil between him and the past. I start calling out the names of stores as I must have at some point in childhood. Just this morning, my Christian boyfriend brought me to orgasm with his tongue: why, then, do I still feel like a child? "Teaneck Bagels, Butterflake Bakery, Camille's.... Was there always a Camille's?" I ask him. "Fegelson's, McVickers, Bagel Junction. Bagel Junction?" He is tugging on the tufts of his beard.

"If you see her, duck," he says.

We can laugh about Esther together, I remember. We can because only we two, who look like her, who have moments of panic, of believing our loved ones capable of anything ("I don't want you to come, I don't want to see you seeing them," I told Glen just this morning) love her enough to be able to laugh. If I could erase all sentimentality from these words, if I could write down only what is true, find the real music, not the ersatz music that comes only stiffly through my choice of words-Esther would still be Esther, hobbling up the entrance ramp to Route Four. Her sparse hair is blowing wildly.

"Jesus Christ," says my father. He glances at me.

"Don't blaspheme," I say, which might be funny if she weren't already halfway up the ramp. What does she mean to do?

"I'll get her," I say, and my hair is already blowing in my face as I slam the car door. My father's eyes gleam from inside my window; he's leaned over to watch. I climb the hill. It's not sundown but it's not early either.

"Grandma," I call. My voice sounds puny in the wind. No wonder she doesn't turn. "Esther," I call, louder. I stalk up the ramp. She is only a few hundred feet, then a hundred feet, then a few feet ahead of me; she hears her name finally, turns her head, and either feels or mimes terror. "No!" she shouts. I elect to believe that she is miming, and laughingly I call her name, "Esther, Esther." I reach her at the edge of the highway. Grass is growing between the cracks in the asphalt. At the base of a cement divider are inscribed the number, 1957, and the name, Bergen County . By the Jewish calendar, it is a lot later than that. "Please, Grandma, we need you to come home now," I tell her.

"You!" she cries. "Not here! Not now! You don't belong. Go away from this terrible place."

"Please," I tell her. I can't help it; she gets to me. "Grandma, please, please just come home one more time," I tell her, and she stares at me until she ducks her head and then, with the grace that I have always known, with the hint of what life might have been for her, with her, she taps me lightly on the arm and says in an utterly sane voice, "So, you go to so much fuss for an old woman? I will come with you because you ask."

And we get into the car and I sit in back with her, because when she sees my father, she smiles but won't sit near him. I say the words we get into the car with rapid ease but it takes us a long time. It took a while also for us to walk down the ramp; she must be exhausted from her escapade, and the urine smell in the car is mixed with sweat, the kind of acrid sweat that means fear.

"You were a beautiful baby," she says, almost pleading, to my father. She turns to me. "Once, walking down the street, he drops all his pennies. The father was so angry!" she exclaims-in her stories, my grandfather, who seemed to us the gentlest of creatures, is always angry-"But I tell him, 'Let him! He gives his money to the poor!' After that, every week I give him a penny and so he learns to count. That is how I taught him to count. He was so intelligent, before all this," she says. She waves her hand. "All this," of course, is his finding religion.

"Stop now," says my father. He mutters something-a blessing or a curse.

"Stop now," Esther says. "Stop now," she says again.

"Please stop," I say.

"I will tell her now," Esther says. "I will explain to her."

She turns her face toward mine. I used to marvel at the cracks in her skin, used to wonder if they pained her, if that was why she covered them sometimes with shining Scotch tape. Her blue eyes are so tired, and yet it is a relief to see how the fever drains each time. "They are putting me in a home," she explains. "Next week. They are too ashamed to tell you. First they take all my money, money I was saving for you, my sweetheart, my darling."

She touches my cheek, which has no cracks yet, no Scotch tape-none of that.

"That's not true," I tell her.

"It is true," explodes my father. "We can't keep her anymore. She sent the police to my office again this morning. I can't have that. She runs all over town. She can't even use a toilet properly. Enough is enough."

There's silence in the car for a long while, long enough to pass Camille's and Butterflake Bakery and the Bagel Junction. A man at a street corner looks pressed for time. A shrub waves at us-the wind is still high, although nothing like it was up the highway ramp. If I hadn't stopped her? If this once I had let her go? There's salt in my mouth, something useless in my throat. I reach for her hand and make her let me take it.

That evening, the seder begins as usual: the guests arrive, first the Syrian family my father has invited, the mother and father dressed in bright western garb, the children hiding their faces in their hands-eventually they'll be racing up and down in this house of light and staircases. The doorbell rings again and again. My aunts and uncles and cousins pour into our home, comment upon how well I look, how beautiful, how much I resemble my grandmother Esther, who watches quietly from her chair in the corner. Her walker is upstairs; she would have to ask someone to get it for her, if she were to try again to escape.

The Danzigers, whose Holocaust experiences lend them a certain aura on this night of nights, arrive with my mother's boss and his wife. There's good news at work, her boss tells my mother; I used to imagine, in my angrier days, that those two were having an affair, and even now the affinity between them strikes me as odd. I'm my grandmother's granddaughter; I believe in conspiracies. Even Glen, who loves me with a quiet and faithful love, could tell you that. Suddenly I wish he were here to meet the Danzigers. They used to live in Argentina , and their accents are flavored with more than Yiddish. They are shy people, easily insulted but very talented-she has brought a remarkable kosher dessert, a cherry concoction we all comment upon, excepting Esther. She has promised not to try to run away tonight of all nights, and the promise is like a shiny new skin on her caving-in face.

"I'm sitting next to you," I whisper. She doesn't respond, and I realize as we take our places that I'm still waiting for something more to happen. If there are prophets who arrange for the tearing apart of children, why not prophets who arrive, Zorro-like, to rescue the elderly? All that does happen is that we recite the first blessing and the second and, eventually, after the third, we lift our wine glasses in praise of freedom, freedom for all peoples everywhere.

Even to my father, the irony must be searing.

Visit Beth Bosworth as Image Artist of the Month for August 2004

Issue #37• Winter 2002-2003