Father

Father

1.

My life began normally enough.  There was a Daddy in my household.  His last name was the same as mine— Towers.  After the big snowstorm I lay on his back, gripping his coat as he urged our sled downhill.  He smelled of straw, smoke, and other worlds.

His odd presence in different shades of brown suits and beat-up felt hats, lit up a cigarette and chanted in Hebrew or sang, “Old Man River, that Old Man River….” One of my oldest memories is of breaking loose from my Nanny, running down the hall, and throwing my arms around him at the front door.  It was the longest I had stayed on my feet without toppling, and I tumbled into him.  In jubilant surprise he hoisted me in the air.

Mommy was a perfume demon with jet black hair, pearls, dark piercing eyes.  I pulled back from her Noxzema kisses, but she grabbed me, forcing affection, red nails sharp on my arms till I made a small kiss back.  When I visited her in her chamber I saw the haggard but adorned ruler of a kingdom at war.

In his green Mercury, Daddy rescued me from summer camp where they beat us.  When I told him I was the only kid at group who couldn’t play baseball, he drove me and my brother Jonny downtown to an account of his called Miller’s where he bought us gloves, hardballs, and a yellow Joe Dimaggio bat.  He took us into Central Park.  We found a big open area.  There he swung my arms with the bat to demonstrate correct form, then lobbed pitches to me.  After a while I smacked the ball sharper and farther.  Jon ran after my hits and brought them back.  Following my brother’s turn at bat, Daddy set both of us at a distance and floated the ball high in the air to us.  When he called out my name, to my surprise I caught it.  “You’re a natural!” he shouted.  Almost as he said it, I developed new abilities.  I played with abandon, grabbing the ball in the tip of my glove while tumbling, clutching it as I was reaching over my head.

At P.S. 6, I lived in a dream world, neither paying attention to the lessons on the board nor opening the reader.  I peed in my pants so that a puddle formed under my seat.  This behavior led to a taxi downtown with my mother.  We entered a hospital-like structure where a doctor, instead of examining me, asked questions about pictures and set puzzles before me.  Later I lay on a cot with wires attached to my head.

On my eighth birthday, Mommy took me on the subway to the brownstone flat of a tall doctor named Abraham Fabian who looked like Abraham Lincoln.  He asked me about school, group, and my family.  After the visit I was to be picked up by Uncle Paul, who was taking me out for a birthday dinner.   When I exited the office, sure enough there he was, large as life, reading a magazine.  He got up, threw out his arms, and greeted me with a big hug, exclaiming, “Richard my boy.”

Outside, we hailed a cab to a restaurant; it turned out to be a baseball house, railings made of bats and balls and the choices on the menu puns on players’ names like Dizzy Trout, Corn on the Cobb, and Yogi Berries.  Just as we were ordering, two men in suits joined us, and Uncle Paul acted as though I should know who they were.  When I insisted I didn’t, he said, “But I thought you knew all the New York Yankees.  Here’s their first baseman Joe Collins and their catcher Charlie Silvera.”  My heart skipped, and I stared again.  They were the faces from my baseball cards.

During those years I saw Uncle Paul so infrequently that I almost forgot him between visits.  Jonny never came with us because, my mother explained, he was too young.  This was good because, aside from the fact that I didn’t like Jonny, I got to have Uncle Paul to myself.  At the Newark Airport as we watched airplanes take off, he ordered coconut ice cream with sparklers.  At the Penny Arcade we bowled skeeballs and pinballs.  With cork rifles we knocked down prizes and collected our booty in his giant pockets.  Then we sat in a booth and made records that fell down a slot.  At the end of our time together he bought me boxes of candy and books or toys.  Sometimes we even went to the grandest of toystores, F.A.O. Schwartz; I picked out boats, cars, games, and even a rubber fish with a battery.  I dreaded when Jonny would be old enough to join us.

College students hired by mother picked me up at school once a week to take me to Dr. Fabian.  During a visit early on, he asked a question about my father.  When I answered, he startled me by saying, “No, I mean your real father.”

I grinned playfully and said, “Don’t you know, Bob Towers?”

“Not Bob Towers. Bob Towers isn’t your father?”

As the inquiry continued, I experienced it as a game of riddles in which he rejected “Bob” as the answer, no matter how many different ways I said it.   So I finally offered the only other person: “Is it my Uncle Paul?”

Dr. Fabian was delighted.  “See,” he declared.  “You knew all along.”

“I just guessed.”

“Unconsciously, you knew it,” he insisted.  “Bob is Jonny’s father.  Uncle Paul is the reason you see me.  He found me and pays my bills.”

Mommy was furious that I knew the truth.  After she told Jonny of my new status, he scowled at me as if I had been exposed at last.  Not only was I a poor student, bed-wetter, and ingrate, but an outsider as well.

From then on, Uncle Paul planned an evening together once every several months.  His phone call out of the blue announcing the occasion was more glorious than a birthday.  “Richard,” he might say in his big voice, as if he had just discovered me, “how’d you like to get together?”

I found it hard to conceal my delight.

We went to the Silver Skates at Madison Square Garden (because his hotel sponsored one of the racers).  Ray Blum, wearing a blue and white jersey with the name “Grossinger” diagonally across it, dropped behind and stayed in last, even as the contestants entered the final laps.  “You watch,” Uncle Paul said.  “Ray always saves his run.”  We cheered together as he ate up ground in great strides, streaking past the leaders as if they were standing still.

We ate in a restaurant overlooking the Park.  While my father talked to the succession of important men who came by to greet him, I gazed down at bug-like taxis and skaters, sticks against glistening ice.  He didn’t have to pay attention to me.  Just the wonder and excitement of being in his world were enough.  As we walked along with bags of cookies, he put his arm around me and intoned, “Richard the brave!  Richard the great!”

When we got box seats Yankee Stadium he took me down to the dugout and called players over to meet me—Billy Martin, Vic Raschi, Eddie Lopat…and then my favorite, Gil McDougald.  Arc lights bathed the field with an importance that made my squabbles at home seem frivilous.  My life no longer drifted.  There was someone worth giving my heart to.

Yet my father was an enigma.  While he was grand and important, smelling of cologne and outfitted in fancy suits (his initials everywhere), he moved so awkwardly people bumped into him and he was often tongue-tied.  When he did speak, he tended to address me in baby language.  In fact, with his huge belly and soft, round face, he resembled Babe Ruth.

Yet I idolized his very presence—this Santa who wanted mainly to have fun.  The Towers family were all dour, lean and wiry like me, and they practiced a humor I might now call wry.  Uncle Paul made puns and told corny jokes about elephants and mice.  It took me a while to learn to smile at his silliness.

The strangeness of having a new father took hold gradually and left me oddly fatherless.  I could never call Bob “Daddy” anymore, and Uncle Paul remained forever “Uncle Paul.

My mother claimed that Uncle Paul was a fraud.  “He took you to the ballpark just to show off.  The players can’t stand him.  Anyway it was Bob Towers who brought Yankees to Grossinger’s in the first place.”

Daddy said Uncle Paul was a lazy bum who was going to wreck his hotel.  “The man is the lowest form of schemer and crook.  He does shame even to the idle rich.”

I sobbed and shouted denials, bringing only more wrath.

Once upon a time, I learned, Daddy had been Uncle Paul’s best friend and had worked for him.  A ritual of my later childhood was to sit by my mother’s shelves and re-read a book hidden from us kids (but not very well), Harold Taub’s history of Grossinger’s entitled Waldorf in the Catskills:

<When Paul returned from the service, his wife Martha told him, hesitantly and tearfully, that she no longer loved him.  She had been alone too long and had fallen in love with Bob Towers.  They were both tormented, she said, and felt that they were being terribly unfair, but there didn’t seem to be anything they could do about it.  They were irresistibly in love.

Paul went to his mother’s room and, alone with her, he cried like a baby.

“I don’t ever want to see her face again,” he stormed.  “I don’t want to see either one of them as long as I live.”

His mother ran her fingers through his hair, soothing him as if he were a child.  “You know all the good work Bob has done for us these past four years.  He’s earned his place.  I can’t discharge him,” she said.

Paul stared at her in astonishment.  “Who said anything about firing him?  Since when do we fire people?  But we could transfer him to New York or Miami, couldn’t we?”>

The year that Uncle Paul was identified as my father, I was sent to summer camp near his hotel.  At the end of August the other campers left in a bus, but a large black Caddy came for me.  I sat quietly in the back as my grandfather’s driver Joe took us along farm roads, past small lakes and farms.  We glided up a hill into a cluster of gingerbread buildings.  GROSSINGER’S HAS EVERYTHING! proclaimed a large notched sign.  Huge gardens exploded into view, and people were gathered in groups everywhere, plaza after plaza.  I thought of the color plates in my books—the kingdoms of the Brothers Grimm, the chessboards of Alice in Wonderland.

From then on, Grossinger’s became a fact of my life.  I went there every summer before and after camp and for every major holiday from school.  I met my stepmother, Aunt Bunny, and my two half-brothers, Michael and James.  Compared to New York life, this was heaven.  My brothers and I had an entire resort to roam and explore: a skating rink, an outdoor pool, kitchens filled with chefs stirring metal pots and desserts on racks, baseball fields, tennis courts, and a canteen run by a giant named Milty Stackel, spewing milk shakes, games, comics, and toys.  There were also aunts and uncles and friends everywhere, the staff of the hotel.

When I told Uncle Paul about what my mother and Bob said, he seemed unperturbed.  He said they were jealous.  He was particularly amused by the idea that Bob had made Grossinger’s and could do a better job running it.  “You tell my old buddy Bob Towers,” he laughed, “that any time he wants to set up his own hotel and go into competition with us, I’ll be glad to meet him on even terms.  Sour grapes.  That’s all it is.  You’re a Grossinger, and that’s something he can never be.”  As he savored that, I stared at his gold PG cuff links.  “Your mother never wanted to leave.  Me, yes!  The Hotel, no!”

I had an image of little blue barrels of candy, and I sensed that Uncle Paul didn’t appreciate the degree of oppression I was under at home.  I pleaded to live at his house, but he told me that wasn’t possible.  “Of course, I want you to, but the law says otherwise, and you and I have to obey the law.”

The split between Grossinger’s and New York was the central event of my middle and later childhood.  I lost Bob as a father, for he came came to see me as his enemy and the tormentor of Jonny.  “He’s always out to punish his kid brother,” my mother told him.  “But that’s because he can’t do half the things your son can.”

My stepfather turned to me, as though his eyes had suddenly been opened: “You silent needler, you no-good piece of slime, you…!”

In the Towers household, I was the Prince of Darkness, the representative of an evil country.  “The devil,” Jonny said in retrospect after we were both grown up.  You were the devil.  Everything you did was wrong because you were, like from hell.  You had to go to that doctor all the time.  Only it wasn’t a real doctor; it was like learning to be more evil.  You were always undermining Mom and Dad’s authority, because you knew all this stuff from the outside.  And you had this other family of rich bad guys.”

But I was a member of the Towers clan, in spirit and heart—our meals at Daddy’s accounts, the treks through Central Park, the dinners at Grandma Sally’s where Jon’s and my lack of manners were an embarrassment to our mother.  In 1952 with the birth of our sister Debby came the arrival of nurse Bridget, an émigré from Belfast.  Policeman boyfriends picked her up for dates, and she received aerograms and gift boxes from Ireland. Our world included Seders on the Lower East Side with Daddy’s sisters and their children (at which my mother would be as much an outsider as us, flashing Jonny and me snickers of contempt for such carrying on).  In subsequent years I held make-believe carnivals with Debby, culminating in good-natured three-person chases…treasure hunts I prepared for her and Jon, successive clues scribbled on pieces of paper and stuffed into hiding places (the metal rim of a lamp shade, a keyhole, a table leg, the elbow of a statue), each providing a hint to the next, and so on, until the grand prize (a present I bought) at the end.

Bridey knew Finian’s Rainbow had my favorite songs.  Suddenly, from the kitchen (where she was making dinner) would come the lilting soprano of Bridget McCann: “It’s that old devil moon/That you stole from the skies./It’s that old devil moon in your eyes.”

That “old debbil moon” was everything we were and everything we weren’t and, although Bridey couldn’t have known, a Gaelic leprechaun inside her told us what was happening: “Does that laddie with a twinkling eye/Come whistling by./And does he walk away,/Sad and dreamy there/Not to see me there…,” her brogue putting the pauses right where they belonged, where the shadow was, where light creeped through.  Rhyming outside, then in.  Impossible hopes leaping from an abyss.  Beauty and darkness.  Wedding song and dirge.

Sometimes Daddy and I regained our old camaraderie and drove around together, visiting his accounts while he told me stories and heard mine.  He shared with me his secret bookie at the garage where he parked his car; in fact, took me with him to help bet on games.  He respected my view not only on pitching matchups but world affairs and, when I wrote an anti-war piece about the movie On the Beach in high school, he carried around a copy of it and showed it proudly to colleagues.  Sometimes he’d bring Jonny and me to the Lower East Side apartment where his mother and father still dwelled, tiny brittle creatures like the spiders Coyote found spinning cloth when he climbed the topless tree into the land of the ancestors.  “You see where I came from,” he would tell us in the car.  “You see what I made of myself.”

When I first knew Uncle Paul in the City, he was my permissive savior, but at the Hotel he was a different person., routinely checking to see if my brothers and I were violating rules.  He made us tear down a miniature golf course that we spent weeks building in the backyard.  His frightening voice boomed out if he caught any of us in the Hotel kitchen: “You are never never to go in there again.  We could lose our insurance.”  As I got older, I realized he spoke in sentimentalities, clichés, crimes and punishments, but especially orders (“Richard, fix me a Coke on ice.  Go to the service desk and pick up the evening papers and my crossword puzzles.”).  These directives and his pompous truisms replaced any intimacy and ultimately filled the years so that we never talked about anything.  We certainly never discussed world affairs; Uncle Paul lectured—and he was an unrepentant Republican.

When I told my grandmother about a dishwasher who had shoes with holes in them and she bought him another pair, my father was furious: “I can’t have you coming here if you’re going to tell Grandma about every employee who needs shoes.  Because if you do we’re going to go bankrupt.  She’ll reclothe the whole hotel and send everyone to the doctor.”  He laughed.  “That’s mother for you.”

Despite this lack of generosity, he was the main transformative force in my life.  He had given me Dr. Fabian, Grossinger’s, my stepmother Bunny (who became my closest friend), baseball players, summer camp, expensive toys, and, later, private school.  He also held the key to my destiny, for Grossinger’s represented a fortune I would inherit as well as an eventual profession.

Once, Dr. Fabian asked me, “Would it matter if your father was Paul Grossinger of Grossinger’s or Paul Garfinger the ditch-digger?”

“No,” I fibbed.

I became a teenager at Grossinger’s, learning to speed-skate, taking dancing and tennis lessons, meeting girls, confiding in friends on the staff.  When it was time to come “home” from Amherst College the first summer, there was little doubt in my mind where I would go.  I was planning to work on my novel alongside Paddy Chayefsky and fellow writers at the outdoor-pool cabanas.  My Freshman English teacher had put me in touch with a woman at Viking Press, and she was helping to turn my work into a publishable novel.  I was sure my father would be impressed.  Saul Bellow’s editor, she even prepared a letter to show to my family.  It said that I had a lot of talent and they should make it possible for me to write during all summer.

My father dismissed that notion within the first thirty seconds: “You’re living in my house; you work for me.”  He had always looked down on my intellectual and artistic pursuits, but I assumed my new-found stature would transcend such objections.  “You can’t just study,” he said.  “You’ve got to prepare for life.”

“But writing is a job.  It isn’t school.”

“Then let her pay you.”

I had waited all my life for him, and now…who was he?  Expecting me to begin hotel training at once, he put me in his own first job: assistant dead-letter clerk.

For a few days I logged hundreds of undeliverable letters in a ledger.  Soon it became clear to me that all I had to do was re-address mail to those who had left forwarding addresses.  The rest I threw in the garbage.  Then I slipped back home to write.  Emma, the maid, would keep a lookout and, if my father showed up unexpectedly, she would shout a code word, and I left by the fire escape.

A neophyte with girls, I was pleased to have a friendship with a rock ‘n’ roll singer on the staff who was reigning Miss Teenage Miami Beach.  It was a Platonic relationship; she had a boyfriend back in Florida named Spike.  Yet my father constantly probed me as to whether I had slept with her.  I said that we were just friends.

“Let me tell you something, Richard; maybe she thinks you’ll get her a break in show business; maybe she thinks she’ll marry into this hotel.  You know you’re not going to marry her.  So why not get some experience.  Just don’t get her pregnant.  And if you do, tell me, and I’ll pay for an abortion.”

He regaled me with stories of his own escapades in college.  Then he invited me to go with him to see a prostitute.

“How could you think I’d want that?” I said.

“What are you—different from everyone else?”

When I was a child, we simply enjoyed each other’s company.  Now he wanted my soul.

One afternoon when Aunt Bunny was away, I came home to what appeared to be an empty house and was startled when my father shouted to me from the back porch, a place used mostly for storage.  I opened the door to see his substantial bulk draped over a woman.  As she raised herself I saw she was short, busty, too young, and very made up.  He had a broad guilty smile.  “I just wanted you to know where I was,” he said disingenuously.

When Aunt Bunny returned, the thing I vowed never to speak came tumbling out.  “What’s one more tramp with him!” she sniffed.  “It’s my kids I care about.  I won’t permit him to destroy my children.”

A day later, as I walked into my father’s room, out of nowhere he slapped me across the face, knocking me to the floor.  Then he took a belt and began lashing me with it.  I lay there, protecting my head.  The pain was incredible, but the shock of it hurt me even more.  I didn’t believe this was happening—not Uncle Paul from the Penny Arcade.  He stood there, breathing heavily, glaring at me with a venom I had never seen.  He was a brute of a man, barely in control.  It seemed he could kill me without even noticing.  “You don’t ever go to Aunt Bunny again with stories of me.”

As I left the room he shouted after me: “I won’t make that offer again, you fag.”

We never discussed what happened.  By evening he was telling jokes about hens and eggs, inviting me into the den for the Mets’ game.  Yet that was the end between us.  In later years, even when he approached me with a facsimile of intimacy, I never let down my guard.  The last year of his life, when he placed my teenage daughter on his knee and said how he’d love to show off with her in public, I cringed at his naive debauchery.

The summer after sophomore year I refused to work at the Hotel, choosing instead to look for my own job.  My father gave me a week to find one or, he said, he’d make me a dishwasher.  On the last day of that deadline I got hired by the one liberal paper in the county, the Sullivan County Democrat in Callicoon.  I wrote photo captions, features, literary pieces, and anti-industry articles.

One of my features was about a remotely situated boarding school called Summer Lane.  It was modeled after the radical Summer Hill schools of England; its director was George von Hillshimer, a Civil Rights activist who had been on the recent marches in the South.  An elegant pedagogue, well over six feet and looking like a frontier priest or charismatic gang leader, he was even more dangerous than the kids.  I would drive down backroads at lunchtime to sit with him and discuss politics and philosophy, James Baldwin and D. H. Lawrence.

My parents were looking for a new boarding school for my brother Michael and, despite the unlikelihood of their choosing a place as far-out as Summer Lane, they had already run through their options and were intrigued that another one had arisen so close to home.  They had me extend George an invitation to dinner.

I had trepidation about bringing him onto grounds of the Hotel, but both parties wanted the meeting.  In fact, George had gotten his hopes too high.  He thought that having a kid from our family might generate some income and get the county off his back.

His wreck rumbled up the main drag, and he parked beside a row of Lincolns, patting each of them on the fins, and then bowing before me.  I grabbed his hand in delight.

During our meal he didn’t get out one full sentence.  My father lectured about his years at Peekskill Military Academy, the place of discipline in education, and the rights of parents.  He silenced George by talking over him a number of times, then closed with a joke about his experience with “men of the cloth.”

I was mortified.  No matter how angry I had been at my father in the past I had always thought of him as a basically decent person.  Now I saw a willful, spoiled child, ordering around a black maid and, under the thinnest sham of dignity, boasting and brandishing his wealth.

After dessert I accompanied George down the path through the garden.  My mind raced for something to say.  “This place is a menace, my friend,” he suddenly offered.  “Leave quietly, or it will cannibalize you.”  Then he crouched low and collapsed on the lawn.  I didn’t know what was happening.  I thought he was sick, so when I saw him rolling there laughing I was relieved.

He pulled his body up to its full height slowly like a giant cricket.  “You’ll have to pardon me,” he said.  “I was holding all of that in.  Richard, at my father’s house in Germany your father wouldn’t have been permitted to eat with the hogs.”

I heard him say it, shook his hand, and waved to him as he drove off.  Then it sunk in.  He knew, as I did, that he spoke as a German less than a generation after Hitler.  He had reduced my father to a piece of meat.  I felt the coldness of his glance.  Would I have been fed (or even denied service) with George’s father’s hogs?

I stood there, looking out over the glowing glass cupolas of the indoor pool, the luxurious facades of new guest buildings.  For virtually my whole life, I had considered this place a paradise.  I may have mocked it, or decried its elitism and lack of social conscience, but I considered it an important locale in the universe—a haven, almost a shrine.

Now I realized it was nothing.  It was the cheap passing vanity of Jewish peasants, graceless in their fortune, oblivious to the Wheel of Fate whose turning brought them to this perch and would crush them in a flicker, even as it had crushed dynasties and nations.

Then just before I left to go back to college—when I was most alienated from him—my father called me into his office and said he had a surprise for me.  “Go to the front of the Main Building,” he grinned.  As he watched from his window the head of Traffic handed me the keys to a small yellow car parked there, a brand-new Ford Mustang.

Following junior year I used that car to flee Grossinger’s.  After stopping there briefly, I took the first long drive of my life, only my second trip out West.  I met my girlfriend Lindy in Aspen and spent that summer as a busboy and janitor at Sunnie’s Rendez Vous.

My father’s fury over my flight persisted into the fall.  He blamed me for his problems with Aunt Bunny and forbade me to talk to her.  “She’s incommunicado.  Indefinitely,” he added.  When I tried to tell him my troubles at the time, he interrupted to berate me for my new mentors, the poet Robert Kelly and film-maker Stan Brakhage, calling Brakhage “Borkage” and labeling both of them “phony father figures.”  When I didn’t show up at his fiftieth birthday and instead wrote a heart-felt letter about our relationship, he dismissed the offering entirely, choosing to emphasize that Roger Maris had somehow found the time to come.  When I told him two months later that Lindy and I had decided to get married, he said: “What the fuck does that mean?  Are you using your asshole for brains?”

I didn’t expect approval, but his lack of empathy shocked me.

“Not on my money,” he continued.  “You don’t get a penny from me.”

I then made matters worse by joining a walkout at my Amherst graduation.  We were protesting the awarding of an honorary degree to Robert McNamara as the Vietnam War escalated.  Speechless with rage, my father said grimly that he had paid to see me graduate and that he intended to boycott my marriage as his right to protest.

I had plenty of other opponents.  Lindy’s family did not approve of a bearded Jewish guy from New York, especially one with little career potential.  My mother and Bob, once they got past the amazement that anyone would marry me without an ulterior motive, choose (like my father) to object to a Protestant girl from Denver.

Yet they all came—one of the few times in my life I saw them together.  Jon, my best man, confided that my father and his father had “conspired against the heathen,” concealing yarmulkes in their pockets to don if anyone showed up in a collar.

I had gotten a graduate fellowship in anthropology to the University of Michigan, and Lindy found a teaching fellowship at Eastern Michigan—so despite the lack of support from either family, we managed to make a life in Ann Arbor.  When our son Robin was born three years later, attitudes mellowed.

My father flew out to Ann Arbor right after the birth.  Lindy was still in the hospital, so we made dinner together and listened to a Met game through static on the radio.  It was 1969, their best season ever, but on that evening Nolan Ryan failed to hold a five-run lead.  Afterwards my father began an old ritual of pretending I had asked him about his marriage to my mother: “When did you know you had made a mistake?”

“The first night,” he answered himself.  He loved to savor that he had stuck it out six years even after this discovery.  “Your mother was a beautiful woman,” he continued, “but you ask Bob sometime what sort of wife she is.”

He wanted to know what religion Robin would be and was unsatisfied with my vague notions of teaching him spiritual and moral values.  “That’s philosophy, not religion,” he complained.

As the conversation wound about, he asked me if I believed in life after death.

“I think we get reborn,” I said, “but it’s something deeper, not the personality that returns.”

“But that’s like not getting reborn at all,” he objected.  “What good would it be if I couldn’t remember Babe Ruth or find out what happened to you, or what Robin became?”

I was embarked on a long, probably pretentious response when I realized he was snoring in his chair.

That single exchange from the heart marked our meeting as men.

Lindy and I spent eight years in Maine and Vermont, the first of them doing anthropology fieldwork, the rest teaching at the University of Maine in Portland and Goddard College in Vermont (where our daughter was Miranda born).  During that time we made many trips to Grossinger’s as a family and were always welcomed.  Our kids came to cherish both the Hotel and their grandparents.  For the most part my father and I had arrived at a safae stasis.

An incident from the year of the fieldwork stands out.  Just before his death, the poet Charles Olson had discovered my experimental writing and begun an avid correspondence.  In January he somehow found and phoned me at Grossinger’s.  The switchboard tracked me to my father’s bedroom to receive a call from a “Mr. Olson.”  It was like hearing from Franklin Roosevelt or Ezra Pound or Casey Stengel.  Astonished, I stood there listening to Olson’s praise of the “Cranberry Islands” text I had sent him, the TV blasting, straining to make out the poet’s words, while a jealous PG kept insisting, “Who are you talking to?”—probably because my smile seemed so subversive.

“Who’s that?” Olson snapped at the audible interference.

I had to admit that it was my father and that he was both curious and impatient, a comment which aroused the attention of the men on either side of the line.

“Then put him on!” Olson bellowed.

I handed PG the phone.  Baffled, holding it to his ear—“Paul Grossinger!” he announced.  He didn’t say another word, but he listened obediently.  Half a minute later he gave it back, shut off the set with the clicker, and lay there silently on his pillow.

“I told him who the hell he was dealing with,” Olson growled.  “Not me.  But you.  You, for Chrissakes, his son.”

After I left New York City for college, my brother Jonny began to act out.  Before that, he was a model citizen: A student, quarterback, tennis star, track captain, but his grades plummeted, and he became sullen and uncommunicative.  He got into fist fights at school, shot a teacher with a water gun filled with ink, and threw a rock through an auditorium window.  He could provide no explanations.  To test his courage he would jump on and off the tracks when a subway train was coming, a feat he related to horrified parents.

My mother blamed this change in him on my influence, and Bob bought her version.

The old distrust and venom magnified with the years as Jon’s behavior became more and more erratic.  Not only was my brother unable to attend an Ivy League college, as his father had dreamed; he later dropped out of Wisconsin and got involved in drugs; he was one of the first hippies, then one of the first homeless people.

I well understood the impact of my mother’s regime on all our madnesses, but to tell Bob that explicitly—the most forbidden oracle of childhood—was a sacrilege of an almost unimaginable order.  Yet I did  that one evening in Ann Arbor when he called me from a phone booth on the street in Manhattan and expressed his desperation and secretly sought my guidance.  He asked me to put my answer in a letter.  I did.  After that I heard nothing.  A year passed before I learned that he had gone dutifully to my mother, holding my epistle like some sort of random criminal act he had stumbled upon.  She also stopped calling, even on my birthday, and didn’t take any of my calls for almost two years.  Only when Lindy was pregnant did she invite us to her beach cottage and explain the cause of my excommunication.  For some reason it had never occurred to me that my letter was the agency. “You believed him?” she shouted incredulously when I insisted on my good intentions, even toward her, in asking Bob to take a role with his son.  “You thought he would do something?  You thought he ever did anything?”  After that, she lapsed back into pouting, not even wanting to see her grandchild when he was born.

Finally when Robin was one, she asked us to visit, though insisting that I call beforehand so that Bob could leave the apartment.  She scoffed at my notion that he would want to see the child too, implying that it was some sort of half-breed.  “No, Bob won’t want to be seeing it,” she laughed harshly.

Five years later, after she took a bottle of sleeping pills, my stepfather and I met again.  During the intervening time she had left Bob for his best friend from CCNY, Moe Kornhauser, even as she had once left my father for his best friend.  Though she was still married to Moe and living in the apartment he had bought for them, she had recently thrown him out and Bob had moved in with her.  Jonny was in his second year in a mental hospital in Maryland.  Admitted after—among other violent acts—slapping around his mother and threatening her with a knife, he was getting heavy doses of stellazine and thorazine.

I drove from Vermont to New York and, with my stepfather and sister, visited my mother at Mount Sinai Hospital.  She said I was the only one who understood, but I still could barely hug her.  Three months later she jumped onto Park Avenue from her apartment window.

Jonny was sprung from the mental hospital for the funeral and never went back.

That spring Lindy and I were having a hard time, and she took our kids to visit her family in Denver.  During my period alone in an old farmhouse in Vermont my stepfather called.  He wondered if I would invite Jon for a few days: “Try to talk some sense into him, Richard, or he’ll be the death of this old man.”

I drove to Albany and met my brother at the train station.  En route to my house, he commandeered the front seat, jabbering cargo-cult prophecy, laying the tarot laced with childhood photos beside me and calling up compulsively consecutive fortunes as we drove.  After dinner I got out a contemporary version of the toy hockey game that we had played as children, and we took up what was meant to be a friendly match—but the old rivalry could not be suppressed.  We engaged in a series of intense forays.  It was my home court, and I was more familiar with the model, so I won each time.  I should have just let him beat me once, but it wasn’t in me.  Finally he slammed his rods into the board, pulled himself up, and stomped away, embarrassed at how much he cared.

I hauled the machine back to the attic before any more damage could be done.

When I returned, I found him at the window sill, whispering and moving his hands.  He told me he was resurrecting moths.

I could find nothing in me except disapproval, though I hated the stiff edge of my affronted pride.  I searched for some sort of clever or pseudo-friendly comment: “C’mon, Jon, we both know better than this.”

Breathing heavily, he approached me: “Richard, infidel, brother of little faith.  Get out of the way, and let the gods in.”

“You’re just showing off!”

He jerked as though slapped.  Eyes gleamed.  “I have a secret about you, Richard.”

I felt an unguarded shudder.  I couldn’t tell if it was the present threat of him or an intuition of something else.  He was so worked up he had to pause and gulp.  “It’s a terrible secret.  A secret I was never supposed to reveal.  But now that she’s dead it doesn’t matter.”

I looked at him and knew in my heart that, despite everything, this would be crucial, this would be true.  I felt a flutter of archaic fear, as though he was going to say I was born with a fatal disease and everyone knew but me.  No, that wasn’t it.  Deep in a lost memory I knew what he was going to say.  I didn’t know exactly, but I knew its feeling.  I experienced the specter of a landscape so primal I had overlooked it entirely.  From long ago I sensed the shadow it had cast over my life, a qualm beyond birth.  He was right.  There was a secret, a terrible secret.

Dead moths took on a new meaning.  At last I bowed to their priority.

“I tried to tell you once in a letter, Jesse James.”

I didn’t remember, so I waited while he nursed the moment.  “Well, what?” I finally stammered, no longer the rational older brother entertaining his mad sibling.

“You know nothing.  You don’t even know who your father is.”  He took a step closer; his face was radiant.  “Paul isn’t your father.  Mom had you by another man.”

A moment passed between worlds, perhaps like the esoteric moment between lifetimes.  His sentences materialized in sequence and I heard them on one level, then another.

At first the disclosure was trivial.  I had considered such a rumor many times—that Jon’s father was my father and we were full brothers.  I knew it wasn’t true—not only didn’t I look like Bob, but he had never treated me like a son.  Furthermore, it made no sense for Paul to reclaim a child from a man his ex-wife had married.

Jon heard that out, contemptuous, impatient, then said: “Not my father.  Some other man.  Some dark knight of pentacles.  Someone never spoken of in our lifetime.  That is why you have such power.  You are the offspring of a stranger.”

This time I believed him.  Our mother dead, us two alone in a hollow place—I felt a ripple go from that moment, back through everything, and by the time it touched my earliest memories, it had shattered and rewritten my history and changed me forever.

At last the pieces fit:  That’s why Paul took so long to show up in my life.  That’s who I was in my mother’s eyes those embattled years as she tried to negate my existence, in my father’s as he beat me to the ground: not their firstborn son but their bastard.

‘I know this!’  I thought.  ‘I have always known this!’  Because nothing—nothing ever back felt the way it was supposed to…nothing even now.

“It’s true,” Jon insisted.  “Debby and I talked about it the times you were at Grossinger’s.”

I remembered how when I was taking genetics at Michigan and Lindy was pregnant with Robin I had inquired into my mother’s and father’s blood types.  I was O negative, something the offspring of Paul and Martha could not be.  When I told my mother (without suspicion) she remarked huffily that Paul didn’t know his own blood type.  I accepted that without a second thought.

For the rest of the night my brother and I reviewed family legend, imagining how it must have happened, a clandestine tryst, after my father and before his. In the process, we brought our mother back to life, young and infatuating, unharmed.

Brushing my teeth that night I stared at my face in the mirror.  Her imprinting in me was obvious, features that were also Jon’s: deep hazel eyes, dark curly hair, large nose (she had shortened on herself), raised cheekbones.  Pudgy, cherubic Paul certainly wasn’t there.  I didn’t remotely resemble him.

In truth, I had never really looked for Paul in my face.  I took for granted his paternity as the central revelation of my childhood.  Why else would they have orchestrated its divulgence so powerfully?  When Fabian asked and I answered, I did so without believing and without knowing why.  I made it true by my answer.  But did the wise doctor intuit the deeper masquerade—or did he collude too?

Probably not, I thought, or he wouldn’t have been so delighted at my guess.  They must not have told him either.

Lies within lies.  Or truths within deeper truths.

So if neither Paul nor Bob was my father, why didn’t Harold Taub mention someone else?

Who was he?  Did he cast even a shadow in the book?

Jon certainly didn’t know.  He sat on the bunk in Miranda’s room, casting the tarot around the Knight of Pentacles, filling the air with shaman’s smoke.  “I am looking for him.  I am looking.”

I laughed with the wizard’s power he had given me: “You won’t find him there.  He’s not in the cards.  He’s in me.”

“That’s right,” Jon acknowledged.  “But we want to find out if he’s still alive.  And…” (he set down the last card, the Hierophant) …”he is!”

Awake in bed that night I continued to review almost limitless implications: That’s why my father was equally hard on all of us; in truth, he had three adopted kids, no blood ones.  The old rumor of his being sterile (as the offspring of first-cousin marriage) now took on new credibility.

No wonder he showed up right away when Robin was born.  My son restored a thread of legitimacy.

I understood anew the danger of being Aunt Bunny’s confidante: I was the cuckolder’s son in league with his wife.

In recesses of oblivion beyond mind I intuited my unknown father: a masked warrior, an uncle on the fringes of crime.  I recalled strangers in dreams, men moving briskly across the background, who led me into their houses and then disappeared, wives who were surprised to find me and told me to leave.

I thought of Great Expectations, Pip wondering who his benefactor was.  I had once imagined Uncle Paul the source of my destiny—but just as Pip had guessed wrong with Miss Havisham, now I too was forced to recall something older, something more like a convict in a graveyard.

A son of Paul and Martha would have been another half-brother, like Jon.  My true sibling lay in an another, unknown lineage.

There was this almond-tasting chiaroscuro flitting rapidly into and out of my mind.  I could recall it only as passing through an alcove in the apartment of a childhood friend into a kingdom far older than Grossinger’s.  I was looking for him, and he walked right past me.  I went toward him, a shaman clad in Jewish middle-age.  If I went deeper in myself, there would be others, forms behind forms, shadows beneath shadows, ancestors within ancestors, figures costumed in birds’ heads and antlers.

For the next year and a half I searched for who my father was.

2.

My earliest memories are of 96th Street and Park Avenue.  My name was Richard Towers.  My father was Bob Towers.  I learned later that he had changed it from Turetsky.

My brother Jonathan was brought from the hospital swiftly down the hall and placed in a crib across my room.  He became my childhood companion and playmate but also a dogged opponent.  He liked to bump and trip me—a sly rambunctious feint, an elbow or knee in my path, then deadpan.  Later he became the best athlete in our group.

His favorite player was Mickey Mantle whose yellow-haired monolithic face soon became not so much that of a man as my brother’s secret talisman in my mind.  Jonathan/Mickey was the king of home runs, the star.

My favorite was a fairytale character, Gil McDougald, the versatile sub, whose wide-eyed face on baseball cards was a leprechaun.  When Daddy bought us pinstripes, we wore them proudly, Mantle and McDougald, Numbers 7 and 12, marching down 96th.

Paul Grossinger came to our apartment infrequently during those years.  Identified as our uncle, he was a well-dressed, clownlike man who took me by myself to cartoons, restaurants, and, once, to a neighborhood store where he bought me a stack of Little Golden Books.

At school I preferred daydreaming to letters and numbers and gave the blackboard only a cursory glance.  For this reason, on my eighth birthday my mother brought me to the office of Abraham Fabian.  Thereafter college students hired by her shepherded me back once a week.  Dr. Fabian told me something of truly major importance.  He didn’t actually tell me; he quizzed me until I guessed it myself.  Then he took my correct guess as an indication I knew all along.  The question was: “Who is your father?”

Dr. Fabian explained how, after psychological tests showed I needed to go to a doctor, my mother decided to get my real father, Uncle Paul, involved.  “Before she learned you were sick, she was very jealous of him.  She wanted you for herself.  But once you were damaged goods she didn’t mind if he shared you.  By then she told herself she had two wonderful children, Jonathan and Deborah, who were being ruined by this kid left over from a past marriage.  She feared initially that you were brain-damaged and—if it was going to cost money—she wanted someone else to pay.  Your father is a wealthy man.  He runs the largest resort hotel in the country.”

My first trip to Uncle Paul’s hotel, Grossinger’s, was after summer camp the next year.  I was let out at a huge white house.  I stood uncertainly in the hallway when my new brother Michael, a cute blonde kid, tore down the stairs to greet me (he had been waiting).  Uncle Paul’s wife, Aunt Bunny, came in from the kitchen, holding my baby brother James.  The next day she make a picnic and took Michael and me fishing in a rowboat, and it was the happiest time of my life.

In the days that followed I explored the territory.  As I wandered through lobbies, I found Scrabble games in progress, mysterious passageways to investigate, elevators leading to floor after floor of rooms, movie stars and even ballplayers strolling about or signing autographs, projectors in darkened rooms showing movies.  So many of the adults seemed to know me and wanted me to repeat their names and shake their hands.

The rest of my childhood I went back and forth between the two households, spending vacations from school at Grossinger’s and the rest of the time in New York.

Then on a September morn in 1962 (so yellow and blue it could have been in another universe) my life in the Towers family came to an end.  I helped Bob load my stuff into his car.  He drove me along New England parkways to Amherst College for my freshman orientation.

During my college years my relationships with both fathers deteriorated.  My father Paul tried unsuccessfully to enlist me in his world of hotel business and prostitutes and, after I told my stepmother, he summoned me into his room and knocked me to the carpet.  As I threw my arms over my head, he took off his belt and began striking, again and again. The incident lasted maybe ten seconds, but its echo filled my whole life.

My conflict with my stepfather arose initially from my association with Grossinger’s, a place where he was Master of Ceremonies (and my father Paul’s best friend) until he had an affair with my mother and was forced to leave.  After that he concluded that the Grossingers were no-good ingrates, that he was the genius and driving force of their hotel and never should have been exiled.  He took out his frustration on me.  Years later, when his son, who had been president of his class and junior-high quarterback, became an early hippie, he blamed it on me, believing my mother’s claim that it was from my influence.  The rage he felt toward Jon for dashing his dreams (Princeton football, Harvard Law, the first Jewish president) were projected onto me as my brother’s corrupter, and he stopped talking to me altogether.

I met my wife, Lindy, midway through college, and we got married after graduation.  Our son Robin was born three years later while I was doing anthropology graduate work in Michigan.  My father, who had been out of touch since the wedding, flew out immediately.  I had never expected him to be so pleased by a grandchild, especially one who wasn’t Jewish.

Following fishing ethnography in Maine, I taught college in Maine and Vermont for seven years (four-and-a-half years after our son, our daughter, Miranda, was born in Vermont).

Our family went to Grossinger’s often during that time, as the Hotel disintegrated toward bankruptcy.  But I didn’t need it to be more than the place that I came with my wife and child, where Robin could roam the grounds with some of the wonder of my early years there.  Lindy and I would stroll from Uncle Paul’s house to early breakfast, set Robin in the high chair, and order from among hot cereal and waffles as we orchestrated the fuss over him.  In the afternoon we made a snowman, putting Paul’s hat atop, and Grandpa suitably played the fool on returning home, demanding to know who was standing in front of the house.

Meanwhile Jon dropped out of Madison, Wisconsin; lived on the Lower East Side among his tarot cards and marijuana; then went West with a girlfriend, seeking the remnants of Don Juan Matus as well as his own imagined Apache destiny.  For all his vision quests and shamanic fantasies, in the end, when the smoke faded on a 1973 morning in Boulder, Colorado, there was only a kid who had once thrown a football.   He wandered in a feelingless stupor, unable to sleep, unable to bear being awake.  He picked up a kitchen knife and ran it along his wrists because he wanted to feel something.  He ended up in a mental hospital in Maryland.  He had lost political freedom.

One night a year and a half later, I was back in Ann Arbor, preparing for my Ph.D. thesis defense, when my advisor Skip put his arm around my back, turned me around, and led me down a flight of stairs to the room where I was staying.  He had me sit on the bed, then said:  “Richard, Lindy phoned.  Something happened today.”  My body froze.  “Your mother died.”

I heard the words, but they had no meaning. I had trouble orienting myself, as though this event were familiar in a nursery rhyme.  I had to jar myself to realize this was new.  My mother died.  This was her death.

My voice spoke automatically, “She must have killed herself.  She wasn’t that old.”

“Yes, she killed herself.  She jumped out the window.”

Soon after, my brother, sprung from the hospital came to see me in Vermont, bearing a family secret.  Our mother had pledged him to secrecy, but now he could tell: Paul wasn’t my father; she had had me by an affair.  He had no idea who my real father was.

The next morning, Mantle and McDougald were reunited.  Eighteen months of stellazine and thorazine had taken away none of the Mick’s power; he smashed shots to the edge of the bog.  I ran unbounded, tracking down most of what he hit  Unknown ancestors, human and animal, ran with me.

Afterwards he told me he was leaving on another vision quest.  If I failed to hear from him, I should trust in the spirits that guided him.

In fact, years would pass before I saw him again.

On our second day at Grossinger’s the next fall, Aunt Bunny and I met for lunch at the outdoor buffet.

“So you found out,” she remarked wistfully.  “I’m surprised only that it took you this long.”

“Why didn’t you tell me.”

“I knew you’d ask—that you’d blame me.   But I am loyal to your father.  As long as you didn’t know, I couldn’t be the source of your finding out.”

“Does he know?”

“He’d like to believe you’re his son.  He figures it will never be proven one way or the other.  I remember the day your mother told him.  We were staying at the Waldorf.  He went right out, not a word.  Didn’t come back all night.  It turned out he walked the streets crying, then slept at his friend Ham Fisher’s.”  In that time he had decided you were his son.”

“Do you think I am?”

She shook her head.

“But you won’t tell me who my father is?”

“I won’t be the one.”

Several months later I called my stepfather at his office.  He had a routine of pretending to be too busy to see me but, in the aftermath of tragedy, he agreed to lunch.

In the morning I drove to the City.  He was finishing a phone call with one hand, grabbing his hat with the other.  We caught a cab to The Friar’s Club.  The maître d’ led us to a table off the bar.

Legendarily attentive to every nuance of dining, Bob Towers made sure I had an imported beer and called for a selection of rolls before conducting conversation.  Amid smoke and clatter, I experienced a sudden lapse of nerve.  I was daunted not only by my unknown father but the world of power and money all my fathers came from.

When Bob heard what I wanted to discuss (plus Jon’s role in its genesis), his face hardened and he was abrupt in dismissal.  “C’mon, Richard.  Are you going to believe that lunatic?  Let your mother rest in peace.”  He looked around as though for help from the waiter.          I dropped it.  We talked instead about the Mets’ pitching staff.  He told me about my brother’s most recent misadventures.  Then he said, “Richard, it breaks my heart to see what they’re doing at the G.  There could have been one place in the Catskills.  It should have been the singlemost resort in the nation.  Who’s in charge? The competition is beating them blind.”

“Don’t look at me,” I shrugged.  “I can’t do anything about it.”

“If they had employed Robert Towers Advertising, there never would have been a Nevele or a Concord.  If you had read The New York Times you might have noticed I just accompanied someone name of Jimmie Connors to the Concord, along with Tom Seaver of the ball club we were just discussing.  Did you see who Grossinger’s brought back for Labor Day?  Eddie Fisher for godsakes!  Richard, did they ever hear of a guy named Sinatra, a pretty fair talent named Streisand?”

“Guess not.”

With the mood lightened and after two beers, I tried the topic again, aware that our relationship was underwritten by years of suspicion.  He regarded me thoughtfully.  “Richard, you may not believe me, but I am going to tell you the truth.  There was no other man.  Paul is your father.”  He tightened his lips and shook his head.  “People used to say you were my child.  Do you think I would have given you up to Paul Grossinger?”

One night that winter my father Paul interrupted a rare personal conversation between us to ask me to drive him to his card game in town.  He threw on an overcoat and swung open the door.  When he had trouble with his bulk on the ice I guided him by his arm and then helped him into my car.  As I turned the ignition and looked over my shoulder he wondered, “Did your mother leave you anything?”

“No.  What would make you think that she did?”

I guess maybe he thought she would be fair, but then that wouldn’t have been the woman who jumped out the window.  Her estate was made up of his collective alimony and child support for me that she had banked over the years while, at the same time, charging my expenses (and some of my brother’s and sister’s) directly to him; yet in the end she divided the accumulated million or so between them.

“Have you reconciled yourself to her death?”

“Except for one thing.”  He turned his head with interest as I made a U-turn and headed out the front gate. Then he remarked calmly, “I know what you’re going to say.”

“Is it true?”

“Richard, I have no idea.  You’re my son legally, and that’s all that matters.”

“Did she think it was true, or did she just make it up?”

“With your mother I never knew.  I think she thought it was true.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“I know who she claimed it was.”

“Was he someone you liked?”

“He was a creep!”

“Then why did you accept me?”

He looked at me in astonishment.  “Paternity is more than blood.  You were mine.  I wasn’t going to let her get away with it.”

Even without a cloud over my origin, there would have been sound reasons to let my mother and Bob adopt me.  What would she have been getting away with?  I tried to communicate this incongruity, so he told a familiar story but with a new twist:  “My lawyer told me, ‘You have a perfect excuse, Paul.  You could save yourself a lot of money.’  But I wanted you,” he added, “not the money.”

It still made no sense.  True, he had been my champion; he had rescued me from the house of devastation, but then he had been neither an attentive nor a gracious father.

What was he thinking that day he smashed me to the ground?

These were all notions beyond present reckoning.  By now we had a lifelong relationship, with grandchildren.  There was no turning back.

“Thanks for talking about it,” I said, pulling up the driveway he pointed to.

“Remember, you’re a Grossinger!” he said, edging himself out the door.  I watched him tread across the snow at a snail’s pace toward the ranch house.

It was a declaration of ownership not love.

It was another full year before I went to see my mother’s best friend from childhood.  Aunt Barbara sat on her bed against a carved headboard under a Renaissance landscape, hair streaked gray, her regality brittled by age.  Three poodles gamboled about, leaping onto and off the coverlet.  She inhaled through a long piece of jewelry that exuded smoke rings.

“Of course your mother had you by an affair.  You were her love-child.”  She slapped the dogs away while petting them, then blew another ring.  “You’re looking at the gal who covered for her.  All the time she was supposed to be staying with me she was with her lover at the Waldorf Astoria—which is where you were conceived.”

“Why do you suppose she didn’t she tell me?”

“I asked her that myself many times.  ‘Martha, he would be proud to be the child of the man you loved.’”  She threw up arms dramatically.  “I could never understand why she treated you so badly.  The love-child should get the best.”

“You know who the man was?”

“Of course I know.  It was the financier, Bingo Brandt.  A regular bon vivant.  Benjamin Brandt. He was mortified he had gotten her pregnant… wouldn’t even talk to her after that.”

A name!

“Is he still alive?”  My heart was pounding.

“Bingo?  Of course.  Look in the Manhattan phone book for the Brandt corporate offices.”

I felt utterly reckless.  I imagined going straight to his address.

Then I remembered how many decades had passed since 1944 and reconsidered.  Instead I wrote two pages, concluding:

“I think there is a primordial meaning in sharing flesh and blood.  When I contact you, it’s my own wish to know who I am.  But I assume too that there’s a chance in it for you to know more who you are.  We have had no contact in our lifetimes, but ostensibly we share something basic.  In facing each other, there is the possibility to experience what that is.”

There never any answer.

Eight months later, on our last trip through New York City before moving out West, I took nine-year-old Robin on an escapade to the office of one of Bingo’s four legitimate sons.  By a ruse involving a high-school classmate of this person, I had scheduled an appointment.

Michael was seated at a desk, a young man my age.  He could have been anyone.  Hair was about the right color, lighter than mine; similiar build; a vague resemblance of eyebrows, nose, and mouth.

At his invitation Robin and I took chairs.

“I hardly knew Roger,” he said.

I indicated that that was unimportant.  “I need to tell you what I am here for.”

He looked us over—man and child—and reassessed our motives.  “Will I be shocked?” he teased.

“I think so.”

He flashed a feint at invulnerability that was also an invitation to take my best shot.

“My mother died a couple of years ago,” I began.  “Actually she committed suicide.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“She was married to Paul Grossinger when I was born.”

“Right, the Catskills, Grossinger’s, great place.  My family used to go there.”

“She left my father right after I was born, and I grew up in my stepfather’s family.  In fact, I even had his last name until I was twelve or so—Towers.  But then I learned about my father and went to high school and college as Richard Grossinger.  That’s the name I have now.  Anyhow, when my mother died a few years ago, it came out in the aftermath that she didn’t actually have me by Paul Grossinger.  She had an affair when she was married to him—while he was in the Army during World War II—and it took me a while to find out who the person was, but when I did, it turned out to be a man named Bingo Brandt.”

If Michael was shocked he didn’t show it.  He raised an eyebrow disapprovingly, then laughed out loud.  “Can you prove that?”

“Of course not.  But I believe it’s true.”

He shook his head.

“I wanted to meet someone in the family,” I continued.  “I wrote your father, but he never answered—”

“I don’t imagine he would.”

“This is my last day in New York.  We’re moving to California tomorrow.  The college I was teaching at in Vermont went out of business.”

There was all too much to say and no time really.  I wanted everything—sympathy, recognition, resolution.  “I feel silly about this. I don’t want anything from your family.  I just want to meet them.”

He smiled with a knowing look which said not only did he not buy my unsolicited renunciation, but none of them would ever buy it.  I searched my mind for something else, but this was checkmate, and I had barely made a move.  After all, how sure was I of my innocence?  I was out of a job.  I had two young kids.  Would I turn down an offer of help from them?

This wasn’t playtime anymore.  My mother had jumped out a window in perplexity and despair.  Bingo Brandt was mixed up in that somewhere, and whoever I was began as Bingo.  This was heavy-duty corporate America and, if there was a chink in its armor, it wasn’t visible.

Michael was talking.  “When you came in, I didn’t think, ‘Now that’s a brother of mine.’  But you never know.  They say Dad had an active social life before he married.  Who knows how many more of you there are running around?”

My heart sank as he went on.  He promised to send a picture of his father after I had an address in California, but I never heard from him again.

My mother’s oldest brother, Paul Rothkrug, had retired to San Francisco, arriving in the Bay Area a few months after us.  One weekend he and my aunt threw a party for a glamorous relative passing through town.  Cousin Radley Metzger, a Hebrew Paul Newman, bore the ambiance not only of an independent movie-director but an international producer of erotica.  The son of my grandmother’s younger sister, he had been close to my mother.  Many an afternoon during high school I took the subway to his office; from there we would hike to the Stage Deli for a tongue-and-turkey cinema discussion.  I had not seen him in over ten years, so I drew him aside and asked if we could talk.

“Richard, I always knew we would have this conversation, though I didn’t necessarily know that it would be San Francisco, 1977.  Let’s politely excuse ourselves.”

We took a stroll along the Marina, kites whipping like hell overhead.  “I knew Bingo well at one time, at least in the sense that anyone could claim to know him.  We’re both in the fuckfilm business.  I had the product; he had the network.  I remember one time traveling in France with a couple of his sons—this was maybe fifteen years ago when you were teenagers.

“Bingo himself, well, I don’t know what to tell you.  Let me put it this way:  He won’t ever get in touch with you because it might, say, cost him a dime for the call.  You know what I mean?”  He shrugged gallantly.  “I’m sorry, Richard, but you were better off not knowing him.”

We continued to walk in respectful silence before he picked up his own conversation.  “How can I explain it?  It’s that—if you owed him money and you were on your deathbed—he’d find you.  I don’t know how much credence to give it, but there were rumors the Brandts were Jewish mafia once upon a time.  I can’t say whether that went beyond the porn business.  But during the Depression they cleaned everything up that maybe needed cleaning, went above ground, and bought a good chunk of Manhattan when it was cheap.”

I wrote Bingo three more times during next eight years, closing one letter: “You had the chance to respond in the beginning and tell me either that you didn’t believe it was true or that you didn’t know but wanted it dropped.  I guess since you believe you have nothing to gain from this you will continue to ignore it.  I cannot take that prerogative from you.  If you choose not to meet, or even answer me, then my only option is to write you in silence.”

As the years passed, sometimes the whole Brandt affair seemed inflated and narcissistic (after all, it was just genes and cells; any chromosome I had from Bingo also existed in millions of other people).  At other times, it seemed inexplicably crucial that I meet him.

My mother’s brother, who knew Bingo at the time of his relationship with my mother, offered to call.

“I’ll try,” he said, “but I doubt I can overcome his almost certain objection.  What do you want from him anyway, Richard?”

I scanned my presumptions one by one, thinking to pick out the most legitimate.  They all rang false.  I didn’t want his love, his friendship, or his financial support.

I couldn’t articulate the hole in me his very existence left.

Then I passed a beggar on Telegraph—a toothless man, hat sliding off, sad, irrefutable face.  As I dropped coins in his cup, I saw that the borders of the city were visible, the rain was real, the light glittering on the pavement an actual light.  His smile and thank you for so little gave me the answer.

“Just his blessing” I said to my uncle.  “Tell him I want his blessing—upon me, my children, and the generations that will follow us.”

<June 5, 1985

Dear Richard,

I spoke with Bingo, Monday, May 13, and have been pondering my message to you ever since.

The response was negative—well, more unconcerned than negative, like “Don’t bother me with something that has never really been a part of my life.”

Richard, you have missed nothing by not knowing Bingo.  He has nothing to offer you—believe me!!!  My own reaction to the brief conversation was anger, but then why should I be angry with a total stranger who displayed no interest in meeting my nephew.

Your parents were and are Paul and Martha, regardless of speculation about certain biological questions.  Bingo Brandt has never been a part of your life—and in truth was never really a part of your mother’s life.

Put this thing to bed as you have so many other problems you have faced and overcome.

Love, Paul

Dismissing its significance was what they always came back to—”Downplay it,” they warned, “because nothing can be done, because it leaves you at a disadvantage, because it opens old wounds.”  But I continued to believe that unconsciousness was an even greater danger, to Bingo and his kin as well.

Then, in November, Bunny sent me the obituary from the Times. It began:

<Benjamin J. Brandt, a co-founder and president of Brandt Global Enterprises, died of a heart attack Monday in New York City.  He was 78 years old and lived in Great Neck, Long Island.

In 1929, Mr. Brandt, along with his brothers James, Morris, Samuel, and Joseph, founded Brandt Global Enterprises, now an international corporation, specializing in real estate and entertainment.>

I told Aunt Barbara how I tried but never got it done.

“I didn’t expect any different,” she said.  “He ran, just like the first time, his tail between his legs.”

It was my daughter who provided the postscript almost fifteen years later.  A film-maker and performance artist, she was searching on the internet for something about her genetic grandfather and came across “a pinky-ringed piranha named Bingo Brandt who owned 42nd Street’s Rialto Theatre, a skin-flick money machine.  He was described as “the black sheep of the Brandt family…short, bald, and perpetually tanned…popular with the ladies…always on the phone making a deal….”  One associate said, “Every time you’d make a a lot of money, they’d raise the house nut….  He got greedy….  Bingo demanded you pay homage to him, help him out—‘I’m in trouble with the theater.’  He was in trouble with the theaters for two hundred years.”

The account went on: “If you were green and wandered into Bingo’s lair, you were lucky to escape alive.”  Another associate said, “He used to take a young filmmaker who opened up his pocketbook, spent a lot of money on his first film trying to make a reputation for himself, and fuck him.  That’s not a man.  That’s an animal.”

The mystery here wasn’t consigned to our lifetime.  It was a work of karma, the chain of lives and souls beyond termination.  Whatever it would take to resolve it would be done, but Bingo Brandt himself, the father who never came to the party, was heading at light speed toward whatever destiny brought him in the first place.  At last, it was in the hands of the gods.

In 1987 I go to my twenty-fifth high-school reunion.  An evening dinner at the school itself in New York is followed by a Saturday family get-together at a classmates home in New Jersey.  After reading about our high-school years from my memoir New Moon, I am walking back to the living room when Fred grabs me.  I remember him as the guy who invited me to his house Freshman year for what he advertised as a sleep-over party…but there was no party…and then he copped the Latin assignment from me by having me translate while he turned on a tape-recorder hidden under my bed.

What I had written in New Moon was how strangely attractive he was: a sassy colt with freckles, an effortless outfielder.  When I chased fly balls with him on a dandelion meadow near his house that April of 1959, I had the intimation that it “would take me half a lifetime to get back there.”

Any warmth had long dissipated by the time we graduated.  Fred became more and more a wise guy each year.  I didn’t remember speaking to him once after the Latin incident.

“Rich, how’re you doing?” he exults, lining up what is going to be a dramatic handshake. “I went to the same school you did; why didn’t I learn to write like that.  Seriously.  You’re a Faulkner, a Hemingway.  Why is it I feel I have to invite you to my house?”

I am disturbed by his backhanded offer.  I tell myself that after all these years he still wants to be my friend.  But I also know that from the time we were children he and I have sought each other in some unrequitable way.

I propose dropping by on some future trip.  “It’s already six, and we have to get back to the City.  We’re flying out tomorrow.”

“But I want you to see my place,” he pleads.  “Can’t you make it for dinner?”

I still don’t understand the insistence of his demand, and I’m hardly comfortable exploring our dubious rapport.  He has both a pandering and crackpot air about him.  Behind the handshake and patter he could be anyone.

I stall.  Conversation drifts.  He is babbling about the magnificence and great wealth of Grossinger’s.  So that’s his target!

“Fred,” I interrupt, “once and for all: I was never wealthy.  I never got any money from Grossinger’s.  For chrissake I never even lived there.  It’s bankrupt, defunct.   And furthermore, twelve years ago my mother committed suicide and I found out she had me by an affair—I’m not even related to them.”

He looks almost offended, then recovers with remarkably prompt sincerity:

“You know, I had you wrong all those years.  I thought of you as big bucks, a guy to get to know.  But when you read tonight, I realized my error.  I was mistaken about why I wanted to be friends with you.  But I still do.”

For his apology I thank him.  Our eyes meet.  He asks, “Did you ever find out who your father was?”

“Not immediately.  It took some doing.  My mother had an affair with this guy named Brandt.”

“Not Bingo Brandt?”

Astonished, I nod.

“Are you serious?  Do you know who the Brandts are?”

“Not really.  I’ve been told everything from ex-mafia to socially prominent Jewish.  I hear they’re good guys and I’ve heard they’re bad guys.  But I’ve never met them.”

He is grinning, waiting for me to go on.

“Once, I went to see the oldest son Mike.  He was pleasant but evasive.  After ten minutes he told me this wouldn’t lead to anything.  He promised to send a picture of his father, but that was ten years ago, so it’s probably still in the mail.”  I am quipping to no point, so I let him proceed.

“The Brandt family lived next door to us when we were growing up.  They were our goddamn neighbors.  They moved away, but I’ve become friends again with Joey—that’s Bingo’s youngest son.”

The Brandts are wealthy as God.  They socialize with who they want.  That’s not very many people.  I’m not surprised you didn’t meet the old man.  He died, you know, a couple of years ago.”

“I know.”  I tell Fred about writing him letters.  “All I can imagine is that he was afraid I wanted money from him”

“I don’t think it’s that at all.  You’re an intellectual.  These people are not intellectuals. If anything, they’re afraid of intellectuals.  I can imagine what kind of letters you wrote—very complicated and from the heart.”

“Yep.”

” He wouldn’t have wanted to meet you; he wouldn’t have wanted to hear the things you would were going to say to him.  Don’t you see—even if you tried to be unthreatening, you couldn’t.  It’s not in your nature.  Hey!” he exclaims, grabbing my arm.  “I’ll make you a deal: If you come back with me tonight, we’ll find Joey.”

Suddenly this hustler has my full attention.  “How?”

“There are lots of ways.  Maybe we’ll go to his house and you’ll be my business partner from out of town.  I don’t know.  Let me worry about that.”

I had to convince Lindy to embark on what became a two-hour drive through Sunday afternoon traffic to get to Fred’s house in Westchester.  It took another three hours for us to have a pizza with his family, for Fred to find Joey (he had been in Florida all day and just flown back), and then for him to convince him and his wife to meet us after midnight.  No restaurants were opened, so Joey selected a place where he knew the owner would let us talk.  We were sitting in the parking lot, Fred insisting that I let him take charge, when they drove up.

They get out of their car and walk toward us.  Joey is wearing a silver jacket with felt athletic awards sewn on.  About thirty, he is blond with curly hair.  Rachel is darker, has the fresh good looks of an aerobics instructor.  At Fred’s lead I greet them.

The restaurant is empty; in fact, it is closed.  I feel almost balmy as the manager unlocks the door and we follow them to a table.  Chairs are unstacked for us.  They order dinners.  Fred and I settle for sparkly water.

The best moments in life are not necessarily when “it’s happening” because by then you are into it and it’s going by so fast it is already ending.  The best moments are when you are sitting just outside your life, watching it unfold.  You know it’s inevitable; you know nothing can stop it.  All you have to do is ride it in.

Joey sits across the table with Rachel.  He is the doppelgänger I have waited half a lifetime, most of it unknowingly, to see: curls, high cheekbones, lithe build—all Rothkrug features too.  But there is something else: a vulnerability, a goofiness, a wise-guy grace, an air of conceit.  He may be the child of nightclubs, real-estate empires, and easy wealth, but I know this guy.  He is my brother.

I imagine my mother coming to the realm of this kid’s father, seeking her Other.

Conversation is light at first.  Fred leads with stories of the Reunion, throwing in how he and I just met again after twenty-five years.   “Richard has a very strange history,” Fred continues.  “I would venture to say that no one else in our circle has had as unusual a past.”  He puts an arm around my shoulders.  “His mother Martha was married to Paul Grossinger—you know, the resort—”  They nod.  “She wasn’t really in love with Paul, but it was a fortunate marriage.  She was a striking woman, and he was an eligible man.”

“A good catch,” Joey cracks.

“This marriage didn’t produce any children because, as it turned out, Paul was sterile.  He couldn’t have children.  Martha didn’t know this at first, but she found out soon enough.  During the war, while Paul was in the army, his mother Jennie, who was the head of the clan, came to Martha and said, ‘I know you and Paul aren’t getting along and won’t stay together.  I know he can’t have children.  But I think the world of you and would like you to be the mother of my grandson.  So, go out and find a man who’s bright, good-looking’—you know, good genes—’have your child, and he’ll be a Grossinger.’”

As Joey and Rachel acknowledge the shift, they turn to me.  I explain how my mother married Bob Towers and set up in New York.  “I was raised as his kid, Richard Towers, with a half-brother and half-sister.  When I was eight, I found out Paul was my father.”  I condense subsequent years into a few sentences.

They ask questions to make sure they get it straight.  After all, there are three rapidfire fathers, and only two of them have been identified.  We have to be clear, for instance, that Bob Towers was not the man Martha chose to have her child by.

Fred is finishing again up to when I learned that my father wasn’t Paul.  “So,” Joey demands impatiently, “did you ever find out?”

“It took a while,” I stall.  “I spent about a year asking my immediate family.  Everyone had their own reasons for not telling me.  My stepmother was protecting my father.  My father still held my mother’s infidelity against her.  My stepfather thought I was betraying my mother’s memory.  Then I went to see her best friend of the time and—speaking of movies—it was just like Hollywood: penthouse on Park Avenue, long cigarette holder, three poodles on the bed beside her….”

“What did she say?” Joey snaps.

I’m not going to be the one to tell him.

“You have to realize that what she said I didn’t believe at first.  And so I tried to contact the guy, but he didn’t respond.  Then I checked with a number of other people and, when everyone came up with the same guy, I assumed it was the truth.  Later he confirmed it himself, though not to me.  In fact, I never met him.”

“You see, Joey,” interrupts Fred, “there was a reason why I asked you to come here tonight.  I told you that you would not regret it.”  I glide from face to face.  “That handsome, eligible man that Richard’s mother chose…was your father.”

We are no longer flying.

Joey turns to Rachel with half a smile; his head whirls back and forth.  “What!  I mean, this is a joke, right?”  [Pause.]  “I barely know you….  I don’t know him.  This is a set-up, right?  You’re putting me on.”

“Joey, I’d have no reason.  Richard already went to see your brother Michael, but that was ten years ago, and Mike said something like, ‘Well, Dad liked to play around before he was married, but let’s drop it for the sake of the family.’”

“That’s right!  The family.  Who knows this?  Does my mother know?”

Fred shakes his head.

“She mustn’t find out.”

“It’s no big deal,” I finally intervene.  “I’m not going around broadcasting this.  It’s too late to mend the past.  I would just like it to be acknowledged for the future, so I could live, you could live, my children and your children could live with the truth.  Because that’s all it was, two young people in over their heads….”  But even as I talk, I am changing.  I want to awaken “Brandt” and set him free.  I’ve got all too much narcissistic intellect and suicidal energy of Rothkrugs and Turetskys.  I want the other half now.

I want permission not to be a Grossinger anymore.

New Age psychologists talk about healing with images, obscure mythological ikons, as when Navahos internalize snakes and lightning from sandpaintings.

I feel as though I am being redeemed by Joey’s simple presence.  Nothing else is required, but nothing else would effect it either.

To have a secret brother is to have a spirit guide, a lost twin.  And I know it is not Joey himself but his refraction in me.  His sheer existence supersedes any sacred visualization or homeopathic microdose.  It is the most deep-acting medicine of all.

“You have to give me time to consider this,” my half-brother reflects.  “It makes you realize how in The Big Chill where the woman just wants someone to have her child…it doesn’t stop there, it goes on years into the future.  It’s not a simple disposable thing.”

He stands up.  “I don’t know what I think, but the least I can do—” and he reaches across the table for my hand.  I stand startled.  We clasp each other.  Whatever else happens, for that one moment it is clear, okay, forever.  I have found my mirror, albeit a faint recoil of another mirror—like the moon of Pluto whose separation from the planet is barely discernible—through which I see a faint replica of my lost self, the life I dreamed but never lived.

My mother embodied avarice and cheap seduction.  She was petty and melodramatic.  I hate being her picture image, the broodling of a witch.  She was never a woman, so how was it possible for her sons to become men?  (Certainly my brother couldn’t figure that out.  He became a shaman creature, a spirit animal, but not a man.)

I don’t know what inside me intuits this, or if I have a right to claim it, but, sitting before Joey and Rachel, I feel as though my manhood, the part that chose originally to enter the world, that courted Lindy, found rapport with fishermen in Maine, made North Atlantic Books—that part is Bingo, a man I never met.

I am Bingo exiled in Martha, the ransom not only of their affair but of the forces gathering over Grossinger’s then.  And that event lies behind the melancholia that sang, “Oh My Papa” and “…gone are the days…” with Eddie Fisher, because the part of me which transcends life saw in The Tibetan Book of the Dead the couples mating, and knew that a mistake had been made.

Four days later I am driving the Richmond Bridge over San Francisco Bay.  Fog is clumped on the water.  Sun sparkles.  Light and shadow flicker lyrically, almost conscious of their dance.

I am lifted to an energy almost beyond this world.  I know it will end, in fact almost immediately, and I want some gesture to put it to rest.

All I can think of is how Keith Hernandez points to a Met infielder who has just made a good play—that single finger of acknowledgment.

I point at the sky where symbolically both Bingo and my mother are.  I aim my finger and drop it at a stack of cumulus clouds.  I laugh and say, “You guys!  The trouble you caused.  But don’t worry.  I’ll set it straight for a million million lifetimes to come.”

Pure melodrama, but I love it.

Joey had promised that we would get together on his next trip to California, “but the thing about my father can’t exist.  You and I can be friends, but that can never be part of it.”

I agreed, but apparently he thought better because he never called.  When he also didn’t respond to my invitation to meet in New York the following year, I left a message on his machine.  He called that night to say he still hadn’t made up his mind.  “How about if I ring you from the office in the morning?”

10:30 A.M. in Berkeley—lunchtime in the Big Apple—I stood in the backyard, pacing with a portable phone.  Joey got right to the point.  “I don’t believe my father is your father.”  When I countered, he was primed to fight: “Prove it.  I’m listening.”

I kept my tone light as I ran through the people who verified the story independently (including an aunt of his who spoke to).  I mentioned physical resemblances.  “All circumstantial evidence!” he scoffed.  “It’s the same kind of wishful thinking that makes people see UFOs and faces on mars.  For all you know your many sources may just be a rumor from a single source.  Probably your mother.  It doesn’t sound as though she was very stable.  She may have had a fantasy about a relationship with my father.  I can assure you she didn’t have a relationship.”

“But your father acknowledged it.”

“And of course you know your uncle told the truth?”

“Debating it isn’t going to solve anything.  If you really want to know, you could check it out with your own family.  We could do a blood test.  This doesn’t exactly strike me as a mystery in search of a resolution.  What’s more important is how we choose to act and what we do with it.”

“If this kind of thing happened now,” he snapped, “you wouldn’t have been allowed to be born.”

“You keep acting as though I’m making this up to be perverse or that it’s somehow aimed against you and your family.  But I didn’t set the rules.  This is how the dice came up.  I mean, if you think I have a hidden agenda, call me on it.”  I turned, picked and smelled a sage leaf, and switched the phone to my other hand.  From Manhattan, Joey responded:

“I’m a happy guy.  I know that probably sounds superficial to you.  I love my wife and family.  Until you came along, there wasn’t a cloud in my sky.  Now I can’t even sleep nights.”  He let that sink in.  “There’s no way this can continue.”

Not a cloud in the sky?  I couldn’t decide whether to be more shocked he would tell another human being he didn’t deserve to exist—or that nuclear bombs, homelessness, and rainforest devastation went right past him.

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t invent the shadows in the world.  If you have escaped them so entirely, then you’re one of the blessed.  But why assume that I’m part of ‘them’ come to beleaguer you rather than part of ‘us’ exiled through circumstance?”

“I don’t want to talk anymore, and I certainly don’t want to meet.”

“The power’s in your hands, Joey, so you get to choose the outcome.  But I’d think that would carry a responsibility to be fair.  Anyone can win when they hold the weapons.”

“You just want the ultimate resolution.”

“Yes.”

“Well, have a good life.”

Joey and I had played a longer game, but this was checkmate again.

My brother Jon had spoken the epitaph for all our fathers:

“They are so corrupt it takes almost everything we have to defeat them.  Of course, we can never defeat them in their world.  We have to defeat them in ourselves, in vision-quests and dreams.”

And then there is a repeating dream I have of Grossinger’s:

I am walking through scaffolding, rooms that crumble (vines grow in); sunlight spills over radiator steam and peeling paint.

This is a land unchanged between visits.  I enter always by the same route, cross the same forgotten vistas, to find it.  The pool is drained, its bottom covered with yellowed leaves.  The upper lobby, lined with jewelry shops and cosmetic bars, leads down a carpeted staircase to the old New York office at 221 West 57th Street, ninety miles and thirteen years away, where hundreds of brochures lie stacked and faded in dusty corners.

I am coming upstairs through rows of towel hampers and dead juke boxes to the last door.  It opens to the synagogue.

No.  This is where the synagogue used to be—it is now a library filled with Qabala.  Massive tarot cards adorn the stucco.

My great-grandfather Selig stands on the widow’s walk, eyes cast beyond his lifetime.  Try to locate him today and he is nowhere—a clock maybe, a portrait of a pipe-smoking immigrant on the lobby wall—or my middle name.

At the apotheosis of my dream is something I don’t understand and have never understood.  It comes from the pale forgotten morning I most fear.  Sunlight is too lemony.

They are too large.  They are not really appletrees.  They are something unknowable that appletrees stand for in a dream.

I don’t belong here.

I slip past the mansions of “Uncle Paul” and his sister.  I come to where Michael and James should be playing, but there are other people gathering in a Medieval ceremony, whole families, strangers who welcome me, costumed kids who draw me into an applefight.

In the distance my father and his are approaching in old-fashioned coats like characters in a Dickens novel.

I haven’t even been born.  This may not even be the Earth.

What strange fruit, almost luminous!  Such a dense winey smell!

But I will never know it outside this dream.

The feeling is so strange, so horrible, and yet true to something.  Beautiful if only I didn’t feel its hollow draining away my life.

I know this place.  It is why I was homesick also at Grossinger’s.  It lies in my heart, a bitter drop of Moon.  But I keep telling myself it must be a memory, either from when I first came here…or of another universe somewhere else and long ago.

3.

I had two fathers during childhood.  The first was Bob Towers.  I started life as his son Richard Towers.  Daddy taught me and my brother Jon how to play baseball, organizing Sunday games in Central Park with himself as the pitcher.  He had many accounts, one of which was a kosher delicatessen.  We were served the pinkest, softest slices of roast beef layered in the world’s largest Kaiser rolls (“Do they make a sandwich here, Richard…?”); fat, crispy French fries; bottles of Dr. Brown’s orange, while Abe Gellis, the owner, would reach into pockets for stacks of flat cardboard which, when dropped in water, turned into colored sponges with ads for his meats.  Daddy led us in prayers as we lit Hanukah candles and then joined us in betting which one would go out first.  He was a singer; he liked to walk around the house crooning, “Swanee, how I love you…” and“…looking for a bluebird and listening for its song…” —or soulfully in Hebrew— “Anakhnu modim…” and “Shama Yisrael….”

My other father was Paul Grossinger.  At first he was a fun-loving uncle who came to our apartment to take me out with him.  We went to the Penny Arcade, fancy restaurants, Yankee Stadium, F.A.O. Schwartz—wonderful places.  He bought me toys, books, ice cream, candy.  My brother Jon didn’t come because he was too young.

When I was eight, I learned that Uncle Paul was really my father.  I took his last name when I went to private school at age twelve.  Later I heard the whole story: Bob Towers was once Paul’s best friend, a key member of the staff at his resort hotel in the Catskills (Grossinger’s).  My mother took up with Bob when Paul was in the service during World War II.  I was born soon after my father came back, but my parents divorced when I was one.  My mother continued to go out with Bob and, against his plans, became pregnant with Jonny.  She refused to have an abortion, so Towers became a father and had to leave Grossinger’s.  With my mother’s help he started his own ad agency in the City.  He always thought of it as banishment.

He was born Reuben Turetsky in 1911, the first American child of Russian immigrants who ran a grocery at 125 Avenue D.  Tall and blue-eyed, suave and pretty as they come, he played wide receiver, shooting guard, and first base and led his friends in improvisational theater, politics, and Zionist oratory.  Then to his parents’ horror he decided to attend NYU instead of the Yeshiva (despite his cantorial voice).  He later worked his way up from resort to resort in the Catskills as Director of Activities until he arrived at Grossinger’s, the top of the line in those days.  There this playboy Yiddish philosopher and city dandy became a star.  Pompous and braggadocio, he was the Howard Cosell, Larry King, and Johnny Carson of his era or, more properly, Cosell and King became pale corporate imitations of Towers.

After I learned that Paul Grossinger was my father, I began going to his hotel during vacations from school.  My original family was made up of my mother, Bob, Jon, and my sister Debby; my second contained Uncle Paul, Aunt Bunny, and my brothers Michael and James.  That became my favorite during childhood and teenage years.  Not only was there a whole hotel filled with happenings and celebrities, but Aunt Bunny was my best parent and closest confidante and Michael and James were slaphappy, adventuring companions.

Grossinger’s itself was paradise.  The first day of a visit there, strolling past tennis courts en route to lunch at the pool, I felt as though the Earth had changed utterly to Shangri-La.  I had a different body, so much denser, crammed with joyful, excited feelings, each one different and strange, rolling inside like oceans off a far horizon.  It was amazing, beautiful, tropical, not just because of luxuries and gala events all around but because I could feel myself floating up into blue sky across cloud armadas that tinged the horizon far beyond Grossinger’s.

My mother was a one-woman totalitarian regime, and we were all terrified of her, Bob included.  Jon and I, when we weren’t tormenting and trying to smash each other, went from one beating and punishment of hers to another.  We relied on Daddy to get us out of the house.

My stepfather hated Grossinger’s, the place from which he had been exiled, and he took on its main competitors for his accounts.  He spoke disdainfully of my father, referring to him as a bum and a criminal.  Egged on by my mother, he blamed me for the altercations with Jonny.

The subtext of my New York household was that Jon was good and I was evil.  Jon was one of them; I was an outsider in our midst.  Jon was a star; I was a criminal.  Jon was loving; I was conniving.  If my brother was how to be in the world, I was a permanent “bad example.”  For all of childhood I called what I heard in my head “envy,” “selfishness,” “acting like a moron.”  “The joyless son of a bitch,” Bob would say as I stood by sullenly while Jon entertained.

The party line was that Daddy hated me but, on his own, he seemed to like me and enjoy our conversations (and even seek me out for solo journeys to his accounts).  He drove me to Amherst for freshman orientation.  On the way, we had had our best heart-to-heart about life—politics, women, art.  That fall during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he consoled me and promised that we would survive.  Later during college, when I brought home communist friends, he welcomed them for conversation—whereas my father was appalled and threw them off the grounds.

My reputation with my stepfather was sealed, however, when my brother became an early hippie, dropped out of college, and got involved in the counterculture and drugs.  Though I was an Aquarian innocent compared to Jon (and at best an intellectual mystic), it was assumed as a matter of course that my brother had been ruined by me out of jealousy— because he was a better student and athlete and more handsome (and perhaps because he was our mother’s favorite).  When, soon after college, I married Lindy, a woman who wasn’t Jewish, Bob had a new, public excuse to abandon and disown me; he virtually stopped talking to me.  He refused to see my newborn son.

When I began going to Grossinger’s as a child, my father Paul proved not to be the beneficent uncle he had seemed.  He often acted acted graciously, but at other times was mindlessly cruel, bossing around bellhops and drivers and mocking my brother Michael for his eccentricities and poor grades.  Over the years most of my favorite staff members were fired, and my father always had the same explanation—they were crooks.  The list grew to include Irving the famous ice pro, Abe the original athletic director, Eddie the comic-strip house detective, and even my favorite, Milkshake Milty.  Almost without my notice (because their departures occurred between my visits) the old characters disappeared—delightfully ornery waiters and daredevil chauffeurs, flamboyant chefs, exotic social directors, regal Old World managers—all replaced by hulks, drones, and bland functionaries.

PG had set speeches for all occasions—about how he was outsmarting the unions…the precise context of his hole-in-one…his horses at Monticello Raceway…that the Democratic Party was made up of communists, and “my three sons.”  James, he reported, was a nasty little trouble-maker, Michael a full-fledged rabblerouser.  In that company I came off quite well, though he continued to tell people how he had gotten me into Amherst.  My writing and prep-school grades meant nothing; the Grossinger’s network was the only power he respected.

After my Freshman year, when I tried to work at Grossinger’s, I came into conflict with my father.  We had totally different values, and he was determined to convert me.  When I told Aunt Bunny about his playing around with women, he beat me with a belt.  We never had much of a relationship after that though, after my son Robin and daughter Miranda were born, we went often to Grossinger’s and created a new sense of family atop the wreckage.

When I was thirty, my mother committed suicide by jumping from her apartment window.  Soon after that, my brother Jon, who was kept in a mental hospital by our mother, was sprung by his father.  He came to Vermont where I was teaching college and told me that my mother had had me by an affair.  Paul was not my father. I learned a year and a half later who my genetic father was—a lawyer involved in the 42nd Street pornography industry.  He rebuffed all my attempts to contact him before he died ten years later.

My mother had always known who my real father was, and her attitude toward me reflected, no doubt, her guilt for the affair and also that the guy with whom she had had an illegitimate child was “a pinky-ringed piranha…not a man but an animal,” as a book described him.  Her will excluded me even though most of the money she split between my brother and sister came from my legal father’s alimony and child support.

My father, likewise, knew the truth.  That perhaps explained his remoteness.  He had always liked the idea of me, but he had no use for my actual life.  At the time of my mother’s death, his legendary hotel was failing.  Buildings were no longer kept up, and the place had a strangely shabby look.  Many of the rooms were empty and, in place of the cosmopolitan crowd, came orthodox families with yarmulkes. It would be another decade before Grossinger’s actually went bankrupt, leaving my father broke and identityless.

Meanwhile in 1977 the college I was teaching at in Vermont was also going out of business; it had just laid off half the faculty.  My wife and I moved abruptly to Oakland, California— with two young kids and no job.  We rented a house there, not an ideal neighborhood.  One afternoon Robin intended to ride his bike home from a party.  He called us before leaving.  Then he didn’t arrive.  “You go,” Lindy said.

On the other side of the highway overpass—people milling about—our son stood in tears by his totalled bike.  At least he was alive.  Chased by a gang, he had ridden into the street, right into a pick-up truck.  I hoisted him up and comforted him.  The driver, following us home, handed the twisted metal to Lindy.

The next morning I sent my stepfather an ill-advised letter, citing the injustice of my mother’s will and asking for his help.  After all (I pointed out) it was mostly money from my father.  My goal was only the safety and well-being of my kids.  I was invoking our oldest family value, playing my one card in the Towers family for something that mattered at last.

I called my father Paul the next day.  He said: “Richard, I have no extra cash.”

Bob never answered.  Five years would pass in total silence. He refused all my calls, and he didn’t answer my letters.  During my brother’s many fugues and crises, he let intermediaries speak for him.  Meanwhile Lindy and I made our way in Berkeley, finding odd jobs and turning our small literary publishing company into a business.

Bob’s and my relationship had always been on two levels.  He was my original baseball companion—he always knew exactly what I could and couldn’t do.  He noted each slight improvement at bat or in the field.  By contrast, my father Paul never once saw me play, not a single fly ball or swing, even when I was the third-baseman on the Grossinger’s team the summer I supposedly worked in his mail room…despite the fact his executives pleaded with him to come.  To have watched me would have broken a mysterious taboo between us.  All through my childhood, even after my name became Grossinger, Bob was my father.  He taught me my bedtime prayers, entertained me when I was sick, helped me with my homework, proofread my school papers, let me compose advertising jingles for him, and showed my early writings to his clients and friends.

He was the father who drove me to Amherst and carried half my things to the top of James Hall to start freshman year.  When I spent college summers at Grossinger’s, he visited me after his ritual stop at the rival Nevele.

He was the worried father of Jonathan who called me in Michigan for help.

There was no reason for him to hate me.

Yet at another level I was his enemy, someone an unwritten law required him to hate.

I thought of how angry he got the time the son of his first wife, Gwen, phoned.  “It’s Buddy, asking for money, the creep!”

But Bob was married to Gwen barely a year, and from what I knew, Buddy was pretty old by the time Turetsky showed up.  I was an infant in his house; I bore the name Towers for twelve years.  Plus, I never asked him for money, except maybe the last time.  Maybe….

So what else was there?

Years earlier when he wasn’t talking to me, my mother blamed it on Lindy’s not being Jewish.  “He can’t tolerate that,” she said.  “He’s boycotting you.”

But he had great rapport with Lindy the few times we got together.  He even singled her out for his “straight man” role because he admired her playful retorts.

Then there was the fact that Jonny’s old girlfriend Mara was Catholic.  That never seemed to bother him.

So was it ancient jealousy over Grossinger’s?  Blame for Jon’s fate, for my going to Amherst when my touted brother only went to Wisconsin?

Guilt over the letter he asked me to write?  Ambivalence toward my mother?  Zionist rage against the infidel who married out of the tribe?  Or something unnameable, the same kind of thing that precluded my father from watching me play ball, because even to look was intolerable…was taboo even to wonder what it was he wasn’t allowed to look at?

When Jon told me his father was attending the bas mitzvah of his niece Gail’s daughter in San Mateo, I decided to go too.  Jon volunteered to get me Gail’s number.  When I phoned, her husband was gracious in extending us all invitations.

Bob either didn’t see me or didn’t intend to acknowledge me, though his sisters cast stares throughout the service, then shunned me afterwards.  (“He told them you’re after his money,” Jon had confided, “which puts you in competition with them.”)

“You don’t belong here,” Aunt Et snapped.  Aunt Gus strode away from my attempted greeting.  These women had once been my family.  I had sat at their seders; I had sung: “Manishtanor halila hazeh” for them. They disbursed chocolate coins in gold foil to me among the cousins at Hanukah.

I hung tough, walking up to Bob, a hopeful smile on my face.  Startled, he yanked his attention from me to shout a greeting to someone on the other side of the room.  Then he strode toward that person as fast as he could, shoving two teenagers roughly out of his way.  The enmity Bob felt toward me was so deep and unmotivated it was all but primeval. (“Remember,” Jon warned, “when my father thinks of you he imagines some black creature out of the dark lagoon.”)

<Dear Bob,

The idea that I try to get close to you because I want your money is an embarrassment to us both.  Please don’t demean or slander me by such a thought.  You know who I am.  I’m a kid who grew up in your household.  You tell your sisters I’m trying to make you into a father as though it’s a hustle and a crime.  Who was the real father of my childhood?  Who sat with me when I was sick?  Who sang me ‘Billy Boy’?  Who pitched to me and applauded my first catches?  Who bought me roast beef and orange soda at Isaac Gellis?  Who kept you company on trips to the Goldman?  Who drove me to college?  You’re as much of a father to me as you are to Jonny and Debby.  Anyway the role of father in my life is not a simple thing: there’s the father who raised me (you), my legal father (who never stood by me), and my genetic father I never knew.  I don’t have to propose a relationship.  We already have one.

Love,

Richard>

“You make interesting points,” he wrote back.  “I’ll think about them.”

I knew it would take years to undo the damage, but I might have enough time.

I began to send him chatty letters about the kids and our publishing, and he answered them with brief congratulatory notes on office letterhead:

“Robin seems to be quite unusual and Miranda certainly has got to be in the “top 10″ also.”

“For a solo entrepreneur you’ve accomplished a Herculean assignment.  Stay with it!”

He ended ritually with a Todah Rabba! or Kol Tov! He was even inspired to send Robin a baseball glove from his sporting goods account—fresh in its square box with crumpled paper.  This was an auspicious totem, not only for its timeliness and extravagance but because it was a prayerstick from an ancestor.  It proved his essential generosity and good will.

In what seemed the last possible moment to salvage something from Grossinger’s the three people in the family with the least credibility  (to my father’s mind)—myself, Bunny, and Michael— trapped him in the den by sitting down and requesting his attention.  Bunny began by presenting her argument: “Paul, not only is your hotel in trouble but members of your own family are stealing from you.”

“Go on,” he sneered.

“I heard you sold your life insurance.  Is that true?  Are you the only one who had to put up your assets as collateral?”

“Go on!”  But she was finished and it was my turn.  I told him I was on his side, that all we wanted was to help salvage the situation any way we could.

He seemed totally in control as he asked in amazement if we believed he was stupid enough to let himself be cheated.  Then he enumerated the ones he considered his real enemies—managers long ago fired or retired, Uncle Abe, now (after a lobotomy) trudging down the path each night to his basement room.  “That toothless bastard cut to size!” he roared with sadistic delight.  He sat there victorious, restraining his growling dog, asking us contemptuously if we had any further questions.

“I want you to tell the truth, Pop,” my brother Michael finally insisted.  “I don’t care if I get something or not, but I want to know what’s happening.  I think Mom deserves to know too.”

“What do you think I’m hiding?” he said with the most exasperation I had ever seen in him.

“What’s really happening,” I offered.

“Business has never been better,” he announced after a long pause, arms folded over his chest.  ” When there’s something to know, you’ll be the first to hear.”

The end came suddenly at Grossinger’s.  Bunny called with the details.  She hoped the deal wasn’t as bad as it looked.  “In truth, we get nothing.  At least your father gets nothing.  But then no one else had to put up all their assets as collateral.  You’ll be disgusted to hear that some so-called long-time loyal executives are part of the sale—on the other side.”

<The news that everyone had been dreading was confirmed in 1985 [wrote Stefan Kanfer in his book A Summer World.] Grossinger’s was to be sold to developers.  Hidden details began to emerge.  The centerpiece of the Jewish resorts had been losing money—a projected $1.8 million in 1985.  Occupancy had fallen below 50 percent.>

My father’s secret was that there was no secret.  All of Grossinger’s had crumbled into a set of my grandfather Harry’s cuff links (Bunny enshrined them in a plastic cube with two old dimes to remind herself that was what Harry Grossinger left his son—by mistake in the back of a drawer).

I was prepared for the end of Grossinger’s, but I was shocked by the swift curtain with which the myth was dispensed.  For Bunny it was even worse.  There was no money, no savings, no insurance policy, not even any furniture.  Paul Grossinger had left his wife in a position of having to go back to work full-time in her sixties just to support herself and him.

He thought I didn’t visit him his last year on the grounds because I was angry I wasn’t going to inherit anything.  He didn’t understand that I couldn’t look at the Hotel in demolition.  He didn’t remember he had lied—lied so consistently and impudently that he left no role for me.

“But you were,” Bunny appealed, “the one noble thing he did.”

“Yeah, but I’m not even clear why he did it.  Was it love?  Or did he just want to possess me the way he wanted to possess Grossinger’s…or you, or my mother?”

“I think your father loves you, Richard.”

I knew she believed this; yet I suspected he had spent his whole life making sure he kept us grateful and waiting, in the end wanting only to compel our pity.  He had gone down with the ship because he didn’t want to give anything to anyone (even as he pretended not to want anything for himself).  In his final hurt guise, he seemed very much the picture of false martyrdom.

Reemployed as a travel consultant, Bunny brought my father to a convention in San Francisco.  I crossed the Bay Bridge and saw him for the first time in two years, standing in the hotel lobby between the florist and men’s shop.  I felt waves of sympathy for this man who had once been my hero.  “What’s your grievance with me?” he asked as I led him onto the street.  I offered to tell him in exchange for his help in resolving it:

“My grievance is simply that you never trusted me enough to confide in me, nor ask my advice, nor give it a second’s thought when I gave it anyway.  You pretended to be an expert when you weren’t.”  He stopped and stood before me, his mouth open.  “Even that’s not the problem.  I will always be sad because you deprived us of any real intimacy.”

“I?” he asked incredulously.

I nodded.  “You guarded yourself from me; our relationship can be no better than that now.”

“You think I was the reason for the Hotel?”

Yes, I thought that too.  I knew he wasn’t the sole cause, but he had dozens of chances to preserve something.  He had rudely rebuffed suitors and then let envious relatives, greedy accountants, and corrupt lawyers steal the little bit left.  And out of pure sloth!  All he ever wanted was to wallow and be left alone.  “Yep,” I said.

“Richard, don’t you know?  It was the yarmulkes that killed us!”

After the fall of Grossinger’s, my father moved into Aunt Bunny’s apartment in New York.  He no longer had a job or a role in the world.  I was 42 years old, and our family was on a trip from California to New York when my stepfather invited us (my wife and kids) plus his old buddy Bob Towers to a meal on him at the Russian Tea Room.  I was late, having rushed uptown from a meeting:

Inside the Russian Tea Room I wend through a gridlocked line and see my family at a table along the wall.  I experience a sudden awe at these people beginning their lunch together, their lives joined at me.  Squeezing past Bob to get to the one empty chair, I put my hand on his back and whisper: “I just did 42nd to 57th in a new record time”—the kind of line he loves.  With a big grin he pulls out his chair and shakes my hand.

“Joshua,” he says to the waiter, “get this man caught up.”

My father and stepfather are at opposite ends of the table.  I have viewed them together maybe four times.  The last time was twenty years ago, and the wheel of fortune has turned one full notch in the interim:  Bob is the wealthy one, Paul the fallen king.

They are talking about mafia guys who hung out at the Grossinger pool.  Paul remarks how no one knew, except they tipped big, “until you saw one of them in the paper, shot down alongside Dutch Schultz.

A gentleman comes by our table, is introduced by Bob as Mike Hall.  “My mentor,” says Mike Hall, fondly putting a hand on Bob’s shoulder.  “Paul, what’s happening there?  Are they ever going to open again?”

He shakes his head.  “I don’t know.  I’m out of the business.”

“Is anything standing?”

“They left the Jennie G., the Harry G., the new pool wing, and part of the dining room.”

“What a shame,” Mike comments.  “What a crying shame.”

“Mentor?” Lindy asks after he moves on.

“Lindy— that was Meyer Holtzman.  He was a busboy in the dining room; his whole career then was being a busboy.  One day he walked over to me and said, ‘Mr. Towers—’ he never used Bob until later years—’I want to do some writing.’  So, I said, ‘Let’s see if you’ve got any talent.’  The man knew how he had to write for Blackstone: ‘Jennie, gorgeous in her organdy gown last night,’ and so on.  He caught on, boom! like that.  Went to New York to be a rover boy for Walter Winchell.  Became Mike Hall, one of the top column men in this town.  If I want to put Robin or Miranda’s marriage notice in every paper in the nation, I call Mike Hall.  This is his account too: the Russian Tea Room.”

“I didn’t know that,” my father remarks.

“Paul, Grossinger’s didn’t die.  It’s everywhere you look.  Every other bigshot in this town got his start there.  Do you know what Grossinger’s was?  It wasn’t just a hotel.  You never went to the Catskills; you went to Grossinger’s—or you didn’t say where you went.  The Brickman, Paul’s, Morningside, the other places; they never achieved that.  Grossinger’s was a fraternity.  We wore its emblem on jackets and tee shirts.  It was the Jewish Yale and Harvard combined.  No one from the Ivy League ever had any more loyalty to a college than the alumni of Grossinger’s.  Am I right, Paul?”

“I won’t argue.”

“Here in New York you had the Dr. Leo Michel Golf Club, and they met all winter.  You had the Eli Epstein Tennis Club, and they also met all winter.  And you had Blackstone—a visionary, a man of imagination.  If anyone wrote a true history of the resort, Milton Blackstone would have to be preeminent.  I was the principal eulogist at his funeral.”

“Bob,” interrupts my father, “you know Milton and I had our differences.”

“I know you and Milton had your differences.  I hated the son of a gun.  But what Blackstone could do that no one else—he founded a newspaper, The Grossinger Tattler; he created a post office, changed the name to Grossinger, New York.  Do you say the Broadmoor; Broadmoor, Colorado?  No.  You say Colorado Springs.  The Arizona Biltmore is in Tucson.  Grossinger’s is in Grossinger, New York.  What it took, to have a town named after a resort; there’s been nothing since to rival it, either in the Catskills or anywhere else.”

He looks around at us as though he isn’t getting enough of a response.  “C’mon, Lindy, we’re talking about a recreational playground, an inn for relaxation, a cabaret, a legitimate theater, a spread of hundreds of acres beckoning to rolling hills, to sun, to sky…to a sort of euphoria.  It was all things to all people.”  He stops suddenly to appreciate his copy.  “The old man can still do it, can’t he?  Paul, if you so-and-so hadn’t gotten rid of me, we’d still be in business together…and kicking ass, as they say these days.”

My father loves it.  He doesn’t mind playing second fiddle.  I have never seen him laugh like this.  Not for Joey Adams.  Not for Morty Gunty.  It is the laughter of a happier time, the ransom of a daredevil friend who gave him a hundred thrills and pratfalls before he took his wife.

“We could do anything we wanted then.  I brought a young Milton Berle from Lindy’s in Manhattan—a famous restaurant, Miranda, with the same name as your lovely mother.  We had Barney Ross.  We had Goofy Gomez, the old Yankee pitcher; a natural wit, he’d get up on stage and kibbitz with me.  I got Eddie Cantor.  We were doing a thing for charity.  I had him up on stage and I said, ‘Folks…if you knew Suzie like—‘ and before you knew it—Eddie Andreani was at the piano.  Boom, Cantor said, ‘Eddie, you know my key.’  Oh Jesus, the things we did at Grossinger’s spontaneously nobody could orchestrate and devise.

“Then one day I decided to get the Turnesa Brothers, all seven.  I said, ‘Willie, you guys have never played under one roof together.’  Willie Turnesa—Richard, he was Holy Cross, the only one who never turned pro.  He got me my first invitation to the New York Athletic Club.  I said, ‘Willie, what’s a nice Jewish boy doing in this crowd?’  He said, ‘Bob, we’ll come around.’  I said, ‘No tokenism.’  A wonderful guy.  The seven Turnesas played Grossinger’s.  That was news.”

As my father smiles almost beatifically, I realize these men are recalling their early twenties when they found themselves together in paradise with a sense of invincibility, barely a generation out of the shtetl.

The woman they fought over is dead.  The son Bob had by her sleeps in the Park.  The Hotel is rubble.  Paul is penniless.

Neither man will acknowledge any of this; neither shows any remorse or humility.  They act as though they are still running the world, these two beguiling petty tyrants.  Neither man will even address my existence.  But they will perform for us, always.

We order desserts from Joshua’s tray, Bob extolling each in turn.  After we finish our selections he recommends a second dessert, a pudding for each of the kids.  “Miranda, they make an egg cream here, I’m telling you, like a cloud, and the taste….”   Almost the exact cadence of lines from the movie The In-Laws, spoken by Peter Falk to Alan Arkin in the car as they are chased through the streets of some fictional South American country by gun-wielding revolutionaries from central casting.

Then I realize this was never my father and stepfather at the Russian Tea Room.  It is Jackie Gleason playing my father, Peter Falk playing my stepfather.

I keep flashing my kids smiles—’This is how it was, you see.’  I want them to note the nuances, to understand what I have come from, because I want to understand it myself through their eyes.

I was born into Grossinger’s of the ’40s.  I mark its very end.

Out on the street I feel a bottomless grief.  It is the frosty wind against my face and the sorrows that stretch from the acts of these fathers to the crimes of the hardcore wealthy in their penthouses.  It is my two fictive fathers and my lost mother, an era when things were real, when you had to drive a bumpy, winding road to reach the Catskills, and shiny acorns lay in the grass, when the seven Turnesas played Grossinger’s for free, before megabucks and superstars, before everything became hype and apocalypse?

“You know,” Paul says to Lindy in the cab, “when he ran off with Richard’s mother, it was good riddance to her, it was him I missed.”

Two years later Bunny and Paul were on the New Jersey Turnpike when they took the wrong exit and tried to back up.  Their car was hit, and Paul slipped into a coma.  He was brought by helicopter to a hospital in Manhattan.  My stepfather met us for lunch the next day at the Hampshire House.  He strode down 57th Street carrying his briefcase, extending a hand of welcome.  The mood was somber as he asked, “What’s this I hear about Paul Grossinger?”

I told him what I knew.

He shook his head many times.  “The end of Grossinger’s was something we all foresaw a long time ago, but no one expected it would be like this.  Tragedy upon tragedy, almost Shakespearean.”

Gradually, as Robin and Miranda improvised a conversation, Bob’s spirit picked up.  He asked Robin if he had ever heard the name Turetsky.

“That was your real name,” Miranda announced.  “But you couldn’t do business with it.”

Bob broke into an appreciative laugh.

The conversation drifted to my childhood, and I recalled our nurse Bridey, now home in Belfast.  “Do you remember how she sang Irish songs when she was cooking?”

“Those weren’t Irish songs, Richard.  Those were Hebrew songs.”

I looked at him, baffled.

“Yip Harburg, born Isidor Hochhberg, Eleventh Street and Avenue C.  He wrote the book for Finian’s Rainbow. For all the tragedy he witnessed—and his ancestors witnessed—the man loved a rainbow.  Gave Judy Garland one too.”

“My mother’s favorite song.”

“That it was.”

Then, in an aged cantorial voice, he sang:

“‘It’s only a paper moon,/Sailing over a cardboard sea….’ Harburg too.  Richard, the man grew up on Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish theater on the Bowery.  ‘But it wouldn’t be make-believe,/If you believed in me.’”

The innocence of those lyrics so deceptive, so heart-breaking…

Then I told my stepfather about Robin’s baseball exploits (with the glove he had given him)—how he had gone out for the team at Santa Cruz after not playing hardball since he was nine.  “He read Sadaharu Oh’s autobiography, then used his own high-school aikido training to drill in the batting cage.  He fixed the ball as a point and focused energy into the bat as a sword.”

“I only wish you had applied your perspicacity to tennis,” Bob said, “the consummate sport.”  Then he inquired about the record of the Santa Cruz team.

“Up to 2 and 7 this year,” Robin said.  “Last year the only team we beat was Haverford.”

“Well, they don’t count,” Bob teased.  “They couldn’t have much more of a sports program than Santa Cruz.  I mean, does your school play football or basketball?”

“Not quite ready for the Final Four,” Robin countered, “but we’re on the bubble.”

We maintained a cheerful mood as we marched down 57th to Fifth where Bob searched for a cab.  “I do enjoy these lunches,” he said.  “Remember me the next time.”

I didn’t return for Paul’s funeral.  I pretended to feel ambivalence, but I had none.  There was no way I could get back on a plane, cross the country, and feign the role of PG’s son at a public ceremony.

I thought of his body in the hospital, no more than an incubus in layers of flab.  I could forgive the soul inside that body, forgive his attempt to own me, but I could not forgive the trumped-up, self-important world he indulged around himself.  I once adored Uncle Paul, but I hated PG.  I had spent too many years listening to inflated testimonials and watching him be patronized by the lowest forms of ingratiators.

My father was gone.  And if I read him right, he would fly from Grossinger’s too, as swiftly across the plane of worlds as his spirit could take him.

The day he was buried I went to watch Robin play for Santa Cruz against Menlo College—the only time I saw him in a college game.  He lined a single over short, then grounded out.  In their final shot Santa Cruz was down five runs but had scored three and had two on and two out as Robin came to bat.  Against a hard-throwing relief pitcher he bounced a ground ball cleanly between third and short.  “Way to go Rob-bin!  Clutch hit, Grossinger!”

The next guy popped up to end the game.

I brought Paul to Menlo inside me—Paul the father who took me to Yankee Stadium but never watched me play.  It may have been disingenuously sentimental, but I pictured him beside me at the game, spurning the pomp of his funeral, rooting for his grandson.

Despite my positive encounters with Bob, he always seemed to return to the old hatred.  When there were new problems with Jonny, he’d remember, even though he knew better, that I was legendarily the cause of my brother’s downfall.  He’d revisit old grievances and refuse even to let his secretary put me on the phone.  We had one telling exchange by mail about how I treated him on a 1950s night after he drove me to a dance at Horace Mann.

“It seemed you couldn’t wait to disaffiliate yourself from me,” he wrote.

He presumed my behavior was because I was embarrassed by him.  “You were quick to adopt the Grossingers,” he added.   “You couldn’t wait to lose us when you went to the Ivy League,” he said on another occasion, “though you hardly excelled there in the manner I would have expected.  And you made no bones about taking a bride out of your faith.  I attended your wedding.”

What misguided loyalty kept bringing us back to the nightmare like compliant sheep?  Was it guilt pretending to absolve us only by denying, again and again, the balm of penance?  Was it the fear that, if he let go of the myths that held us together, any justification for our family behavior (a mother scaring her children, ridiculous punishments, hysterical panics, the mental hospital, suicide) would vanish, leaving him with only a vacuum of unbearable loss, of unforgivable waste?

The problem was that, as Jews, we could always proclaim the execration of the holocaust, the persecution of the diaspora.  Even set aside Zionist propaganda, it was an inheritance of profound and justifiable suffering.  But it had to be decreed the worst of human perfidies, defended against all other claimants.  For those who didn’t live it, a sterile agony froze it in place, beyond the healing of time.

The sadism and meanness we routinely directed at one another (and ourselves) from a presentiment of tragedy and doom had less to do with the diaspora and more with a kind of obsessive madness that seized upon exile and genocide as an excuse for bottomless grief (when even Yahweh Himself pleaded for bottomless love and forgiveness).

All the years of my growing up they said to me (in countless ways), “How can you smile, you traitor?  Who gave you the right to let yourself off the hook?  What about anti-Semitism?  What about the Chosen People?  See what the Nazis did to us.  Are you going to defile the memory of six million Jews?”

Lamentation upon lamentation.  Bereavement drained of compassion.  Remorse without empathy.  But did the dead really require this of us?

Those in my parents’ generation weren’t really honoring or atoning the pain of their ancestors.  They were throwing a tantrum before the universe, accusing blind galaxies of Jew-hating.  They were taking on cover for child abuse, emotional terrorism, and other deeds of perverse and inexplicable cruelty.

A summer later was a good period with Bob.  Lindy and I met him for lunch at the Russian Tea Room.  As he signed the tab, he made an unprecedented gesture: he invited me to join him at the most sacred of occasions, his sister Gus’ Sabbath services in her apartment on Ninth Avenue.

“Would you be welcome too, Lindy?” Bob exclaimed upon her expressing interest.  “Gus would be delighted.”

On the Sabbath, Lindy and I dressed in good clothes and took a cab downtown to the East Side projects.  We rode the clanky elevator to the twelfth floor.

At the door Gus’ son Jimmy, a man our age, greeted us.  Then we hugged ancient Augusta Turetsky.

Bob motioned us to seats around a tiny table.  No one recalled that I was a heathen, in fact, the signature infidel.  No one noticed that Lindy wasn’t Jewish.

We sang Hebrew prayers, ate challah and soup, and lit the candles at sundown.  Then Bob and his eighty-eight-year-old sister argued over some minutiae of the closing of the ceremony.

“He’s always got to have the last word,” she remarked, putting her arm around my wife and leading us to the door.

“What was it all about?” Lindy asked me in the cab uptown.  “What did we fight about over all those years?  What did he hold against me?”

“I’m sure it was something,” I said.  “It must have been something.  Otherwise we wouldn’t have spent so much time on it.”

“But it wasn’t over my not being Jewish.”

“We fought among shadows in an illusion that we stood in light.”

A few years later, I met Bob at Patsy’s, an Italian restaurant in New York, one of his accounts.  We had our longest soul-searching conversation ever, ranging over many topics, including the conflict between  us.  When all seemed miraculously reconciled, I tried discussing my mother’s suicide and my brother’s madness.

“The worlds inside any of us are terrifying,” he interjected.  “It is best not to dwell on them.  There’s no room in life for nostalgia or sentiment.”

“Unless you have to fight ghosts all the time,” I said.  “Then you live for nostalgia, like Jon.”

We had talked so many times about my brother that by now the topic was exhausted between us.  At Patsy’s I settled for saying, “There was a thing loose in our house, and our mother didn’t protect us from it.  She never protected herself from it either.  In fact, she unleashed it on us before we were ready because it was unendurable to her.  I think it was a power thing, a good thing, but a child can’t face such a thing alone.”  He was staring right at me.  “Telling these stories now between us is special to me.  They bring back what we were and despite everything that went wrong, what we had.”

“What we could have had, Richard.  What we could have had.”

“I think we had it.  I don’t think the universe will ever let us forget.”

“You’re too mystical for me.”

“Call it a spook.  The same thing in me, in Jonny and Debby and my mother.”

“Not in you.  All I see is a capable man with a family.  I see someone who’s giving me more pleasure today than I could have imagined.  Richard, I hope these meetings mean as much to you as they do to me.”

Tears surged in me.  We had reached the climax, of everything.  “They do.  They definitely do.”

Now both the pitch and volume of his voice rose.  “If I were you I’d say, ‘Why don’t you get the hell off me, you sonofabitch spook!  Get the hell off me!’”  He waved his right arm in such a striking gesture that the tables around us grew momentarily silent.  And I realized, ‘This is it.  Profundity itself has come to its most profound moment.’

His words struck at my heart because he alone was the father and could speak such a thing, could threaten the profane spirit, could give me the reassurance not now, when I didn’t need it anymore, but back then when his voice echoed throughout our tiny flat, “Old man river, that old man river….” Such a message resounded in the remote dark and came flowing back through my whole life so that by his very voice again I felt released, if only for a moment.  He stood between me and my oppressor and, if it was too late to rescue the haunted child, it was not too late to meet in the world as men.  Suddenly I cared deeply for him, for all of us then, even young brash Jonathan.  I was no longer their enemy.

It had been a long struggle, to feel unquestioning love in his presence.  That was all I wanted, not paternity, not more words and explanations.

Yet I answered as Richard always answers.  I said, “The spook is me.”

He wouldn’t allow that.

“Richard, I come from an earthy, Russian, peasant stock.  I come from a people who waited four thousand years to reclaim their homeland.  Be a Sabra of the desert, for god’s sake.  The spook isn’t you.  Kick the bastard out and be done with it.”

I spoke to him the last time after his stroke three years later.  On being told who was calling, he forgot that we had reconciled and at first refused the phone.  When he finally got on, he was unclear who was on the other end, I inquired about my brother.

“He’s at the Pequot Motor Inn, Southport, Connecticut.  I’ll pass along your regards.”  I could barely make out his words.

“All things considered, how’s he doing?”

“All things considered, he’s not in jail.  The police arrested him three times.  In Southport they’re not used to vagrants.  Forget him.  He’s a waste.  A drug addict. How’re your kids?”

I told him about Robin’s biology research.

“Is he making lots of money?” he muttered.

“No, but he’s a wonderful person.”

“And your daughter?”

“She’s writing and casting her own plays in Berkeley.”

There was a silence; then he said, “Richard, you’re a star.”

It was like the scent from an old jar of lavender, immediate yet ineffable.

“You’re a star too, Bob.”

“No, I’m not a star.  I used to be a star, but I’m not a star anymore.”

“You’re still a star.”

“I love you.”  Or probably he didn’t say that.  Perhaps he just said, “luvvya.”  Likely he didn’t even say that.

“I love you too,” I said.  But he had already dropped the phone.