That Said Read online

  Years later came rumors that, although

  he was sunny in public, in private

  he was ice. He threatened to disinherit Dena

  if she ever wrote a word about him.

  “Not our Danny,” my family said.

  We knew him before he was famous,

  right after he changed his name from

  David Daniel Kaminski to Danny Kaye,

  Duvideleh to his parents, double-talker,

  before he was Walter Mitty, Red Nichols,

  Hans Christian Andersen, the Court

  Jester, Pied Piper, Inspector General,

  Anatole of Paris, the Kid from Brooklyn,

  we knew him before he stood in front

  of a symphony orchestra and conducted

  “The Flight of the Bumblebee” using

  a fly swatter as his baton—when there

  was still time for him to become

  my uncle Danny—who kissed my left

  cheek, the last and first time we met.

  My Father’s Shoe Trees

  After giving away his Italian suits,

  I couldn’t find a taker for the pair

  of wooden shoe trees he slipped

  inside his custom-made dress shoes

  imported from England. Themselves

  a luxury protecting his investment,

  the cedar shoe-trees kept those shoes

  in shape, kept the chestnut leather

  from shrinking, so you could say

  they prolonged the pampered life

  of his shoes, though not his own.

  Every so often he would lightly sand

  the wood burnished from years

  of wear and oil from his fingertips,

  and the lovely cedar scent returned.

  Since his death, I’ve displayed them

  on my coffee table like objets d’art,

  keeping their provenance secret.

  Is it any stranger than casting baby

  shoes in bronze? When I ask a man

  his size—the size of his feet, that is—

  they’re either too long or too wide.

  My father’s shirts fit most slender

  medium-sized men; they were easy

  to dispose of. But his shoe trees

  continue to be a problem.

  Straight out of a classic fairy tale,

  like the infamous glass slippers,

  they’ll only fit inside the shoes

  that only fit the one pair of feet

  of the future prince they’re fated for.

  Last Words

  Once the patient stops drinking liquids, he’s got up to fourteen days to live. If he takes even a sip of water, you reset the clock.

  Eleven days without a drop. The rabbi

  made his rounds. They stopped her

  IV and her oxygen. I asked them

  to please turn off the TV’s live feed

  to the empty hospital chapel, lens

  focused on the altar and crucifix—

  it seemed like the wrong God watching

  over her, up there, near the ceiling.

  And because hearing is the last

  sense to go, the nice doctor spoke

  to me in a separate room. He said

  it’s time to say goodbye. Next day,

  he returned her to her nursing home

  to die. Her nurses said just talk

  to her; let her hear a familiar voice.

  I jabbered to the body in the bed.

  I kept repeating myself, as I’d done

  on visits before, as if mirroring

  her dementia. I rubbed her hand,

  black as charcoal from the needles.

  I talked the way a coach spurs on

  a losing team. Suddenly she opened

  her eyes, smiled her famous smile,

  she knew me, and for the first time

  in a year of babbling, she spoke

  my name, then, in her clearest voice

  said, “I love you. You look beautiful.

  This is wonderful.” I urged her

  to sip water through a straw. Then

  two cold cans of cranberry juice,

  she was that thirsty. Her fingertips

  pinked up like a newborn’s.

  I wanted the nurses to acknowledge

  my miracle, to witness my devotion

  although I’d been absent all spring.

  They reset the clock, resumed her oxygen.

  I was like God, I’d revived her. Now

  I’d have to keep talking to keep her alive.

  Pickwick

  That dog never barked, not a whimper,

  so it was heaven living next door

  to Pickwick and his mistress, Elzbieta,

  the Polish novelist on Brattle Street,

  my first apartment, my first year

  out of grad school. Elzbieta had escaped

  the Warsaw ghetto, then worked

  for the Resistance during the War.

  What had I accomplished at twenty-four?

  At her holiday party, tongue-tied and

  outclassed, stuck in a clot of Harvard

  literati, I bonded with a fellow poet

  (dressed in Marimekko) who excused

  herself (she needed to pee) and set

  her sloshing cocktail glass on the floor.

  And before anyone could stop him,

  Pickwick was lapping up her martini

  like water, the olive too. Then that

  scruffy knee-high mutt, who’d breezed

  through puppyhood without a whine,

  barked—a loud rusty hinge of a bark—

  which shocked us into silence, mainly

  Pickwick, who, recoiling from the report,

  ricocheted around the room, frantic

  to see where the noise had come from.

  In the short weeks that followed,

  Pickwick was a regular bar mitzvah boy

  belting out his Torah portion. He barked

  at what normal dogs all bark at:

  doorbells, strangers, sirens, thunder,

  his bowl of kibble twice a day. He growled

  if you took his bowl away, howled

  when other dogs within earshot howled,

  igniting the poodle on the second floor.

  By Easter, Pickwick was barking in long,

  rhythmic stanzas that kept me awake

  at night. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t write.

  But excited dogs love to bark, and if

  you yell at them to stop, they think

  that you’re barking right back at them,

  and they only bark harder and louder,

  so I didn’t shout or pound on the wall,

  or bother asking Elzbieta to shush him,

  but suffered with earplugs until another

  apartment on a different floor was free.

  Like a poet finding his voice,

  once Pickwick started barking,

  nothing could make him stop.

  Gratitude

  After Mom died we all worried about him,

  alone in the apartment above the store.

  But every day he took a three-mile walk.

  Learned to meditate. Watched what he ate.

  Phoned every Sunday to report the usual.

  One Sunday in March, he called, excited,

  as if Perrier was running through his veins.

  On his walk in the park that day a squirrel

  was blocking the path right in front of him.

  It had somehow gotten one of those plastic

  thingamajig rings that holds a six-pack

  together stuck around its neck like a yoke.

  The squirrel looked as if it was asking for

  help, so my father bent down and flipped

  that whatchamacallit over its head

  and freed it. The squirrel stood a minute

  as if studying him, then scampered across

 
the busy traffic circle into the woods.

  The next night, Monday, he called again.

  Not an emergency, he was quick to say.

  Today in the park he saw that cockamamie

  squirrel standing directly in his path,

  waiting to thank him! Was he deranged?

  Maybe solitude was finally getting to him

  or he needed a medication changed.

  What a story, I said, but really,

  how could the squirrel tell my father

  from all the other walkers on the path?

  By his scarf? His mustache? His smell?

  And how did my father know it was

  that same squirrel? Don’t get too close,

  I said. Next time, you could get rabies!

  He was a harrowing five-hour drive away.

  I could just see him on his rounds that day,

  telling Kenny at the deli his new best story

  and Jack the bank teller and Henry and

  people at the ShopRite waiting in line

  beside National Enquirers and TV Guides—

  perfect strangers, nodding, agreeing

  with him about the strangeness of life.

  It’s like that Aesop’s fable where a slave

  named Androcles removes a thorn

  from a lion’s paw. The moral?

  “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls,

  be they human or animal.” That winter,

  my father died. Along with everything

  else about him, I miss his Sunday calls.

  Gratitude’s reciprocal: my father saves

  a squirrel and the squirrel gives my father

  a story to tell.

  A Reminder

  My husband gets a forwarded postcard in the mail

  from Temple Beth Israel: it asks him

  to light a Yahrzeit memorial candle

  for his (beloved father Larry)

  on the evening of (January 14)—

  the blanks for name and date, in parentheses,

  filled in with blue ballpoint ink.

  I don’t want to see my husband’s face

  when he reads it.

  I never met my father-in-law.

  He never met our daughter,

  his granddaughter.

  A year ago my husband flew to the funeral in Ohio.

  He sat shiva at his uncle’s house,

  with strangers—his father’s friends and business associates,

  and buddies his father played poker with

  every Friday night for the last twenty years.

  Tomorrow’s the 14th.

  There’s not a candle in the house.

  My husband’s working, out of town.

  I’ll have to go to the Grand Union’s Jewish shelf,

  where they keep the matzoh meal and kasha,

  to buy a Yahrzeit candle.

  His father walked out on his wife

  of thirty years, stole the family savings, cleaned out

  the safe-deposit box, disappeared

  to another state for two decades,

  his whereabouts a blank. Apparently

  he found a girlfriend, a house, a job, another life.

  Every morning for the last ten years,

  he ate breakfast at McDonald’s

  with his best friend, Sol.

  Sol told my husband,

  “You could have knocked me over with a feather.

  In the whole time I knew him,

  your father never once mentioned

  that he had a son.”

  Four sons. My husband’s brothers

  all written out of their father’s will.

  The obituary arrived a week after the funeral:

  The deceased has no immediate survivors.

  My husband will be home in plenty of time

  to light the candle at sundown.

  But he’s ambivalent.

  Guilty if he lights it.

  Guilty if he doesn’t.

  American Girls

  The first of the dolls she asked for

  was Addy, a Negro slave escaped from the Civil War.

  Addy arrived at Emma’s sixth birthday party

  wearing her historically accurate dress,

  drawers, stockings, cap-toed boots,

  and carrying a paperback copy of Meet Addy.

  But Addy’s kerchief, her “half-dime

  from Uncle Solomon,” her cowry shell,

  her authentic Underground Railroad maps

  and what the catalogue calls “the traditional

  family recipe for sweet potato pudding,”

  and the hardcover book—they cost extra.

  Our daughter didn’t get them, and she didn’t get

  the wooden hobnailed trunk to store them in.

  Catalogues were coming every month now.

  We didn’t want to spoil her,

  but on Emma’s seventh birthday

  a Victorian orphan joined the family:

  Samantha, who’d lived in a mansion and slept

  in an easy-to-assemble brass-plated four-poster bed.

  Samantha let Emma remove her checked

  taffeta dress, and slip her into her pink, lace-

  ruffled nightgown and matching bloomers,

  and tuck her into her bed—

  on the floor at the foot of Emma’s bed—

  beside Addy’s authentic rope bed,

  which cost more than any actual Addy’s actual bed

  would have cost, if Addy’d actually had one.

  The next morning, poring over the catalogue,

  Addy and Samantha started fighting

  just as real sisters do.

  Fought over who should wear the Kwanzaa outfit,

  who would wear the genuine sterling silver

  Star-of-David necklace,

  tearing each other’s hair out over

  the red silk Chinese pajamas, and who’d get to keep

  the brass gong and pretend firecrackers

  after the Chinese New Year’s celebration was over.

  They fought over the ballerina tutu,

  hula skirt, Girl Scout uniform,

  items introduced to the catalogue

  when the “American Girl of Today” was born.

  For her eighth birthday, Emma’s father and I

  custom-made ourselves a “Girl of Today.”

  We chose from (blonde, red, brunette, black)