The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (31 page)

I went home with my purchase in hand, but with a heavy heart. Would it really tempt Elijah? I ran over to my father to show him our new acquisition. He looked up from his prayer book, glanced at the cup, and nodded.

Without explicitly saying so, he seemed to suggest we had indeed boosted our chances of having Elijah join us and need only await his arrival.

 

ON THE SEDER NIGHT,
I helped my mom set the table using silverware from the ancient steel box. I made sure we each had our own silver spoon, and poured the wine into the new cup myself.

My father came from the synagogue and went straightaway to the dining room table. He wanted to make sure every item used in the ritual dinner—a hard-boiled egg, to symbolize the cycle of life, a bowl of salty water, to remind us of the tears we'd shed in Egypt, a bowl of red jam to conjure the mortar we used as slaves—was in its proper place. He made sure Elijah's cup overflowed with red, sweet wine, and nodded his approval.

At last, having determined all was where it should be, he sat down and began to lead the Seder. I sat at his side, as always, his prayer companion, trying to keep up with him even when he read at such a fast clip it was hard for me to get the words out.

My mother and both my brothers were there, but Suzette, who had
by now moved to Miami, almost never came. Year after year I waited for her, too, like Elijah.

On that night when we asked ourselves why it was different from all other nights, Dad didn't retreat into his impenetrable shell. Instead, he chanted with gusto. My favorite moment was when he took the silver spoon and clinked it against his wineglass to punctuate the text. It made such a lovely tinkling sound, almost like music, as if on that night Alexandra, the gifted piano player, had joined us and was accompanying our hymns.

Still, no matter how loudly we sang, our holiday had become not a celebration of the Exodus from Egypt but the inverse—a longing to return to the place we were supposedly glad to have left.

At midnight, when we were still only halfway through—my father insisted on reading every single passage of the service—I ran to the door.

I stepped out a few feet to the stoop, my eyes straining to see through the April darkness. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of Elijah as he made his rounds. I imagined him drifting up and down Sixty-sixth Street, having a sip of wine here, enjoying a bite there. I wanted to be the one to welcome him, to usher him inside our modest apartment.

Elijah, I had been told, was the good-luck angel, the one who could make wishes come true. He was said to be among us, at times, though only animals and people with the most finely honed instincts were aware of his presence. When a dog cried, I learned, it meant that he had seen the Angel of Death approaching, but when he smiled and barked joyfully, Elijah was on hand. The days before the holiday I peered closely at the German shepherds my Italian neighbors favored, wondering if they had spotted Elijah.

I was prepared with a laundry list of requests. I wanted to ask him for a closet overflowing with Milgor clothes and a sofa with a plastic cover, as opposed to the twin bed that doubled as a couch when guests came. I wanted my mother to worry less about money and my father to walk tall again and sell a thousand ties.

But the street was empty, devoid of passersby and the usual contingent of neighborhood children hanging out on stoops. I returned to the table.

The Seder was punctuated by an enormous meal; afterward, it was hard to summon the energy to continue praying. One by one, members of my family went to bed. Only my father lingered, oblivious to his dwindling audience, dutifully going through every leftover hymn. He clinked his glass with his little silver spoon and kept on chanting by himself. My mom urged me to go to bed, but I resisted.

I was waiting for Elijah, I said.

By 2 a.m., we were completely done. We had left Egypt three years earlier, and had left it all over again tonight.

I wanted to stay up and watch the prophet arrive, to see him at our table, sipping from the goblet I had chosen with such care. I pleaded to stay awake, but my father only smiled and urged me to go to sleep. Before going to bed, I looked out my second-floor window, toward the heavens and the roofs of the other two-family houses, hoping to catch a glimpse of the prophet in motion.

Come morning, I dashed into the dining room to check the wineglass. I peered at it closely, lifting it toward the light.

The cup was as I'd left it. There was no sign that Elijah had stopped by. It hadn't been touched, not even a drop.

O
n her first morning in America, Stella Ragusa woke up at dawn and ran to her bedroom window, which faced Sixty-sixth Street. She noticed a tall elderly man in a white skullcap walking slowly down the block. His shoulders were hunched, and he used a wooden cane to navigate. From her perch on the upper floor of a two-family house, she thought, he looks exactly like the pope. She wondered if John Paul VI happened to be in New York.

Dazed and slightly feverish from the jet lag and the excitement of finding herself in a new home in a new country, Stella decided that in some way she couldn't explain, the pope had made the same voyage that she and her family had undertaken, from Italy to Brooklyn.

Her family was sound asleep, or Stella would happily have roused them and had them join her at the window.

To eleven-year-old Stella, who had never seen a Jew, my father was the Holy Father, miraculously transported to our neighborhood.

Stella and I met a couple of days later, when she darted across the street to introduce herself, and we became instant friends.

She decided impulsively that she loved my father. She was persuaded he was a holy man even after both her parents and I had patiently explained why he covered his head exactly like the pope, and she had learned all about his faith and mine.

My bond with Stella and her charming Neapolitan family couldn't shield me from the growing feud between my family and our new Sicilian landlords.

Our former landlord, gentle Basil Cohen, tired of his widowhood and anxious to join the rest of the Syrian community on Ocean Parkway, had found himself a new bride and decided to sell the house; the buyers were our Italian next-door neighbors, the Valerios. Up and down our block, Syrian Jews like Mr. Cohen were putting their homes up for sale, and clannish Italian families were snapping them up as fast as they came on the market. Suddenly, we were among the only Jewish families left.

While Mr. Cohen couldn't guarantee we'd be able to keep our apartment, we were still hopeful. We had always enjoyed cordial relations with our neighbors, and I was fond of Mr. Valerio, who hauled garbage for New York City yet insisted on calling himself a “sanitation engineer.” His daughter, JoJo, was a few years older than me, but she had been especially welcoming when we'd first arrived in January 1964, introducing me to the Beatles and showing me her “I Love Ringo” and “I Love Paul” buttons—my first lesson in American popular culture.

But it quickly became clear we had to move. The Valerios told us they wanted the entire house, our apartment included, for the benefit of their elderly relatives from Sicily. Nothing could dissuade them—not even my mother's attempts at charming them into changing their minds or my father's efforts to settle the dispute “a L'amiable.”

We were being forced to leave our home in the same way we'd had to abandon Malaka Nazli: under duress.

Except that this time, Dad wasn't going along with it.

My father was in full battle regalia, prepared to fight this eviction as he hadn't fought the other. He was standing firm, making it clear that he wasn't going to be intimidated or harassed into leaving his home—or in this case, his four-room apartment. He was, after all, the Captain—determined not to let anyone push him around.

One by one, all the other Levantine Jews had left. Our favorite gro
cer, Khasky's, was looking to open a new shop close to Ocean Parkway, taking his savory black olives and zesty feta cheese with him. Mansoura, the baker, was already ensconced in a small storefront on Kings Highway, the shopping street in the shadow of Ocean Parkway, preparing his famous platters of Oriental pastries for the families who were flocking to the area, the way he had back in Cairo, when Farouk liked to stop by his café in Heliopolis.

By the dawn of the 1970s, even the Congregation of Love and Friendship was poised to move again. In the same way it had transposed itself from Cairo to New York two decades earlier, it was now planning to abandon its cozy two-family house and follow its members. The departures meant the death knell for Sixty-sixth Street. Bereft as we were of so much we had loved when we left Egypt, our day-to-day lives in America had come to depend on access to Khasky, the grocer, and his intoxicating products, which were imported from Cairo and Aleppo and Damascus and Beirut. It was as if life would lose its sweetness absent his little bottles of
maward,
the fragrant rose water our mothers tossed into all their cooking, and we couldn't get by even one day without reaching into his large wooden bins filled with a dozen varieties of olives or sampling his feta cheese.

The solution should have been simple: move.

We should have moved because our world was disappearing, and we risked being left behind again, with nobody left to help us survive the rigors of American life. We should have moved because, with the exception of Stella and her parents, we didn't fit in with anyone on our block. We should have moved because there was nothing to keep us there.

Because of the dispute, a street that had been a haven for us turned into a war zone. Neighbors we had liked suddenly turned harsh and abusive when the news spread that we didn't want to leave. The Italian families sided with our landlord, and we were outcasts.

When I left the house in the morning, Vincent Valerio and his in-laws glared at me, and if I was with my parents, they tried to intercept us or block our way. Our landlords demanded to know when we were planning to vacate the apartment. They were absolutely adamant: they wanted the house, and they wanted it now.

My father would pointedly ignore them, and if they made any untoward remarks, he'd wave his cane and threaten to call the police and have them arrested.

Mom resigned herself to the idea of moving. She began discreetly scouring the area for apartments. It was all done in a fit of despair, in defiance of my father. She had a job now and she was busy. She worked at the Brooklyn Public Library's stately main branch. She was only a clerk, but it was as if she had been handed the key to the Pasha's library once again. Anxious for us to feel settled, she narrowed her hunt to a few blocks around our house, eliminating Ocean Parkway as an option, though it should have been the first area to search.

Finding an apartment that met all of our specifications was a tall order. It had to be inexpensive. It had to be on the ground floor. It had to be near a subway, both for my father, who couldn't walk very far, and for César, so he could commute to work. Gas and utilities needed to be included in the rent. And, of course, it should be within walking distance of the synagogue, although it was unclear which synagogue: one by one, they were all shutting down.

Any apartment that failed to meet even one of these conditions—on the second floor rather than the first, or four blocks from the subway instead of two, where electric bills were covered but not gas—was instantly ruled out. Mom's search turned out to be fruitless.

My father was refusing to budge. Nobody would ever take his home away from him again.

I sensed the hostility each time I walked down the street. Girls I'd played with since childhood wouldn't even say hello anymore. Occasionally someone called out, “It is not your house, you know,” and I'd shoot back in whatever Brooklyn-girl tough talk I could muster, “It is too my house.”

Yet Stella and I grew closer in the crisis. When she wangled invitations to a party her cousins were throwing, I eagerly—if nervously—accepted. My friend promised Italian food, Italian dancing, live Italian music, and, best of all, Italian boys.

I knew her cousins, who lived at the end of the block, only in passing. They also were new to this country and hadn't yet assumed the harsh demeanor that seemed almost a prerequisite of life in our
working-class Italian-American neighborhood. They were outsiders, too, and I liked them instinctively.

Since my friend was intent on wearing her seductive new flamingo pink dress with the zipper down the front, I took steps not to appear hopelessly prim. On a sales rack at a nearby boutique, I spotted a short red cotton dress with a lace-up neckline that could be tied or untied to be chaste or daring. Belted at the hips, it fit perfectly, and though I could scarcely afford it, I bought it anyway—stealthily, without asking my mother for money lest she grill me about a party I was certain she wouldn't want me to attend.

Come dusk, I slipped out of the house, wearing my new red dress. “I'm going to meet Stella,” I cried out as I left. My friend came down to meet me, resplendent in her pink dress, and we happily agreed we both looked fetching as we marched toward her cousin's house.

The party was nothing like the staid, all-girl affairs I was used to attending. In a cramped, wood-paneled basement, I could see clusters of handsome boys—or were they men?—in their late teens and even older, with smooth dark hair, dark eyes, and slender waists. Their tight, fitted shirts were left open almost to their belts, and they were smoking. They eyed us up and down as we entered. A small band was playing Italian music.

Stella's cousin came forward to introduce us. Almost everyone in the room was a recent arrival, and they seemed both more approachable and more vulnerable than the boys I knew. Most could barely speak a word of English. I found them intensely exotic, and decided I'd happily dance with any one of them. To my delight, they instantly dubbed me “L'Americana,” and that became my name for the evening.

It was the first time I had ever been mistaken for a “native”—the dreaded, exalted American girl—and I was beside myself with joy.

It seemed extraordinary to think that in a crowded basement in Brooklyn, I had finally arrived.

“Che carina, questa Americana,” a boy exclaimed as he walked toward me. He had ash-brown silky hair that fell over his eyes, an amiable smile, and a grown-up, confident manner. His arm around my shoulder, he led me confidently to the dance floor. Suddenly panic-stricken, I tried to catch Stella's eye, but she only nodded and smiled.

My partner couldn't speak a word of English, but that didn't seem to matter, not on this night, when the music was deliciously foreign, and I wore a daring red dress, and found myself close-dancing with someone who had movie-star good looks and could well have been in his twenties. I didn't know his name and he didn't know mine, and that didn't matter either. The only moniker I cared about on this particular night was “L'Americana.”

And perhaps one other.

“What does the word
carina
mean?” I asked Stella during a break, when my dance partner left me to get a beer. “What does it mean
exactly
?”

Stella frowned. “It is like sweet, cute,” she said, throwing out possible definitions.

I was thrilled at the compliment. I understood perfectly well that for the first time in my life, a man had found me pleasing.

I didn't leave my partner the entire evening. The louder and more frenetic the music became, the more other couples crowded around us, the more closely we danced. As we swayed to songs whose lyrics I didn't understand but whose tunes were enthralling, he tightened his grip, and I felt at last grown-up.

We left the party only when Stella, who didn't have as much luck finding a partner, insisted we had to go home or risk catching hell from our parents. It was well past midnight—the latest that I'd ever stayed out without telling my family where I was going.

“Ciao, carina,” my partner told me, and he leaned over and kissed me tenderly. Sometime in the course of the evening, I'd realized that I was far too young for him. He had grasped that long before I did, yet continued to dance with me. He hadn't so much as left my side—either out of gallantry, friendship, affection, or desire.

Upstairs, both my parents were waiting up for me, but it was my father who seemed especially agitated. “Où est-ce que tu étais?” he demanded to know. I replied as nonchalantly as I could that I'd gone to a party with Stella and her cousins, and had forgotten the time.

“Il y avait des garçons là-bas?” he asked, getting straight to the point; Were there boys there? He was absolutely livid.

“It was very crowded, and there were lots of people,” I answered evasively and in English. It seemed somehow the safer language.

Loulou as an American teenager.

“Tu vas ruiner ta réputation, tu vas gâcher ta vie,” he shouted; You will destroy your reputation. You are going to ruin your life. He employed the tone and words he had used only with my sister.

For Leon, watching the social transformation under way across America in the late 1960s and early 1970s was like observing the goings-on on a distant planet, not his own—and certainly not the one he wanted his youngest daughter to inhabit.

Now that I was catching the full brunt of his anger, I felt more resentful than contrite. What was this reputation I had to guard so zealously? Honor, standing, community—the notions that consumed my Levantine dad—seemed so quaint and irrelevant in my world. What did the values of Old Aleppo have to do with life in New York?