The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (35 page)

In September, days after my last treatment, I went away to college. I left my father behind in his chair with his cat and his prayer books and his Levantine eating habits and rarely came back—a few days here and there, weekends, major holidays. Only every once in a while, I'd feel sad, and I couldn't understand why. I went home when the terrible sadness came over me, the feeling I'd first experienced Sunday night in the hospital, a sense that I was trapped and had to run, run, but where,
where?

Off I'd go home to Brooklyn. Then, within days, or hours, I'd return to Vassar. I kept to myself. I no longer had many friends, and no boyfriends and no red dresses. Illness had made me wary: I had decided to take life's gifts sparingly, like olives, one at a time.

My family rarely mentioned my malady. As I got better, my father seemed to get worse. He rarely left his chair. I had a difficult time accepting his decline, though illness was what had always bound us together.

Dr. Lee's edict against listening to my father had long since expired, yet I was still in its grip. It was only Dr. Lee that I listened to now. I lived for my checkups with him—once a month at first, then every couple of months. It was the only time I felt safe, as if I were out of danger only there, inside that little examining room, with him at my side. He did nothing much except talk. There were no medicines to prescribe, no injections, and few tests. As long as I looked well—and he insisted he knew the moment I walked in—that was the proof the disease was under control, and we could move on to other more important subjects.

We chatted for hours, and it was as if his other patients, duties, responsibilities, were put on hold while we huddled in the small room that hadn't changed from the day I'd first climbed on the gurney, a frightened teenager in baggy jeans and a frayed light blue shirt and no hope at all.

One day, a couple of years after the treatment, I asked whether I was cured.

I had read about five-year marks and ten-year marks, yet I noticed that Dr. Lee never spoke in those terms, or even of remission. I was either well or I wasn't.

He frowned at the word
cured.
Hodgkin's, he declared in that imperious tone he'd occasionally adopt, wasn't curable.

“It will return,” he warned. “It will come back.”

I went home so panic-stricken I couldn't sleep or eat. And of course I wouldn't confide my fear to Mom or Dad: it was their nightmare, too. It was the nightmare that had usurped my teenage years and made it impossible for me to enjoy that most essential element of being a young girl—the sense of feeling carefree.

The next day, without bothering to make an appointment, I returned to Memorial and demanded to see Dr. Lee.

I wanted to know when “it” would be coming back. He looked at me, somewhat startled. He was an impetuous man, not always careful with his words. I could tell he was in a more pensive mood, and I had learned over the years that there was no kinder or more caring human being on earth than this tall, autocratic WASP.

He gently took my arm. “Some of us have this much to live,” Dr. Lee told me, indicating the space from my fingertips to my wrist, “and some of us have this much to live,” showing me the longer expanse from my wrist to my elbow, “and you don't know, and I don't know, so forget about it.”

And that was the closest Dr. Lee and I ever came to discussing my “prognosis.”

I never even asked him how people with my stage of Hodgkin's fared. I don't think he would have told me. Besides, from what I'd observed at Memorial, luck seemed to be the key determining factor in which patients got better.

Doctors over the years would insist that I was cured, but I would shake my head, because I knew better.

Since the summer of my sixteenth year, my life had hung in the balance, and I knew it always would. I watched enviously as my peers, young women my age, planned their futures—weddings, careers, families, vacations. I could never plan so much as a dinner a day or two in advance without the nagging sense of fear that it would never come to be. The voice that I'd first heard at the time of my illness would whisper: There will be some terrible calamity, and it won't happen, and all will be lost.

One day, when I came home, my father surprised me by starting a conversation with me, which he seldom did. He seemed oddly agitated.

He put down his careworn red prayer book to tell me about a dream he'd had about us. In the dream, he was giving me two almonds, two perfect white Jordan almonds, the kind that they'd give out on joyous occasions once in Cairo—at engagement parties, births, weddings. He used the French word for the delicious sugar-coated almonds:
dragées.

Neither of us spoke about what the dream of the almonds meant, and I didn't think much about it at the time. But I have never stopped thinking about it, and of what my silent, noncommunicative father was trying to say to me.

What took place on that long-ago afternoon between my father and Dr. Lee? I would finally inquire years later; by then, Leon was dead, and Dr. Lee had become a friend and mentor, someone I cherished deeply and communicated with regularly. Why did my father break down that day, I wanted to know—what was said inside that office?

Dr. Lee had treated hundreds of patients since the encounter, had spoken with thousands of anxious parents or spouses, either to reassure them or to deliver a grim verdict about their loved one, yet he seemed to vividly remember his lone exchange with my father that day in the spring of 1973.

My parents had come in together, he said, and both had sat by his desk. What was striking was how silent my mother had been, how she hadn't said a word during the entire meeting, Dr. Lee recalled. She'd simply sat there nodding, a frightened look in her large brown eyes, while my father took the lead. Though always a man of few words, who had retreated into a shell of silence in the last few years, Dr. Lee remembered him talking animatedly and without pause.

His daughter was in grave danger. She needed care, the best care. If not, she would be lost. He wanted to know if Dr. Lee could take over my case.

That is what he kept asking over and over again, would Dr. Lee become my personal physician, would he take over my case?

Dr. Lee was used to fielding appeals from patients and families from all walks of life. Some years later, men close to the shah of Iran would
bring him to New York and ask Dr. Lee to examine him and weigh in on his care. Later still, he would be appointed as the physician to President George H. W. Bush. He came from the noblesse oblige school of medicine—that the well-to-do have an obligation to take care of the less privileged—and that was the part of medicine that he liked most.

What he didn't like—what he minded, perhaps inordinately—was the imploring tone of this elderly man. My dad was like no one he had ever met, not simply from a foreign culture but almost from another planet. He was obsequious to a degree that made him cringe. Dr. Lee, who had made it a point in his career to treat rich and poor alike, who liked to think he cared for patients without regard to their wealth or social status, was taken aback and perhaps offended.

There was also the desperation in my father's voice. “This man has no cards left to play,” Dr. Lee remembered thinking.

He couldn't have known how close to the truth he had come. My dad was reduced to begging because there was nothing else he could do. Faced with the prospect that his youngest child was dying, that her only hope for survival lay with a patrician American doctor he couldn't afford—with whom he couldn't even communicate—the boulevardier of Cairo had nothing left to trade: no money, no position, no social status, no white sharkskin suit.

Looking back, Dr. Lee would have to concede that he had been abrupt and possibly harsh. By ushering my dad out of his office that day, he had seemingly dashed his last great hope—that this distinguished American doctor would rescue the child of his old age, the teenager that he insisted on calling incongruously by her childish nickname, Loulou. Of course, Dr. Lee had proceeded to do precisely what Dad had asked—he had taken over my case, he had become my private physician, he had saved me—leaving me to wonder years later whether by breaking down and pleading his case like a mendicant and invoking me again and again, my father had in fact found one last card he could play.

I
t was his last apartment, though I didn't know it at the time, of course.

After the tumult of Sixty-sixth Street and the bitter taste of
l'affaire Cagno,
the enveloping sorrow of the House of Prayer left us with no choice but to move again, and again only a few doors down, because by now we felt defeated and exhausted, convinced no world beyond Sixty-fifth Street would have us, and even our existence there, as my illness had shown, was tenuous.

For once, it was the proper size—not too big, not too small, fine for the three of us.

My mother, for one, was relieved simply to be out of what she called our “bad-luck” apartment.

“Pauvre Loulou—cette maison lui a porté malheur,” she kept saying; Poor Loulou, this house was unlucky.

It was as if some element of those shabby little rooms had been responsible for my getting sick every bit as much as Pouspous Jaune. No one dared to question her logic. Desperate to explain the
unexplainable—why I had contracted cancer at sixteen—we insisted on pinning the blame for my illness first on a cat and then on a cramped apartment whose windows all faced a dusty courtyard in the back.

César surprised us by moving back home, and we were almost a family again. He had tired of the single life, and missed the comforts of home and the room he had shared with my dad all those years. My father was delighted to welcome him back, so there they were, roommates all over again, as they'd been when we first came to America.

I had my own room once more, small, at the front of the house, though my father didn't speak of the pleasures of watching the street life anymore. He didn't speak at all. What he did was position his green-and-white beach chair—which hadn't seen the beach since my illness—close to the window facing Sixty-fifth Street.

The chair was lined with pillows to soothe his aching back and waist and hips, and he put his prayer books one on top of the other on the small tray table my mom had purchased specially for him from Woolworth's. In the corner, within view at all times, was the suitcase he had purchased for the day he was going back to Cairo.

That became his entire world—the beach chair, the prayer books, the tray table, the window, and the small vinyl suitcase.

And the radio.

Home all day long, he was glued to the radio as he had been as a young man in Cairo, when he'd sat for hours listening to Om Kalsoum's laments.

The soothing sounds filled the living room, and instead of the Cairo Diva, I heard the mellifluous voice of “Your host, Charles Duvall, broadcasting from the shores of Lake Success.”

“Where is Lake Success?” I found myself wondering. It seemed so alluring, as charmed and seductive as Duvall's radio persona. Somewhere in this world, I thought, sits a handsome man with a debonair French accent inside a studio overlooking a magnificent lake, and he is so filled with confidence and serenity simply gazing at that body of water that it seeps into his voice and his words. He proceeds to calm us all, infuse us all with his confidence and serenity.

Lake Success. It was where I wanted to be; here in America nothing else mattered.

My father would sit for hours hunched over his prayer books, usually the little red book I had given him back when I came out of the hospital. As the 1970s—a horrible, wretched decade, as far as I was concerned—came to a close, it became impossibly torn. I didn't think the book would survive another day without disintegrating in his trembling hands, the pages falling out or crumbling into dust. He had long stopped trying to repair it, so that even the Scotch tape and duct tape and masking tape and surgical tape that had held it miraculously together all these many years were all dried out, and the red jacket had turned into a somber maroon brown. The book, I realized, had
become
my father. The two even looked alike, all bandaged up, small pieces breaking all the time, both trying to hold on, both in danger of disappearing.

Sometimes I'd walk in and find the prayer book mercifully closed. What was propped open was my father's sky-blue checkbook, and he was patiently, meticulously signing checks. Around him were pieces of the morning's mail. Other than his stock statements, which continued to stream in—shareholders' notices from Zambian copper mines, or the Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa, or Sperry-Rand, the quixotic investments of his years in America that had failed to make him rich—almost all the mail was from far-flung charities.

The orphanages and schools to which he donated money, daily and compulsively, kept in close touch. Brown packages with odd-sounding names arrived from Israel; inside, there'd be handsome brochures featuring images of large cinder-block or stone buildings, alongside photographs of young children looking anxious and troubled and filled with yearning.

The Great Orphan Home of Jerusalem for Boys, the Dispenser of Kindness Orphanage for Girls, the Institute to Uplift the Souls of the Holy, the Light of Life Girl's Academy, Girl's Town of Jerusalem Academic and Vocational School, the Trade Institute of the Voice of Jacob Our Patriarch, the Maker of Great Miracles Charity Box. There were dozens and dozens of charities, as if my father were hedging his bets, contributing bits of his meager savings to each of them, on virtually a daily basis. There were occupational schools affiliated with the orphanages that sent pictures of their vulnerable charges bent over sewing
machines or learning how to make tools, there were orphan medical clinics and orphan dental clinics and orphan residence halls.

An entire universe dedicated to the care of motherless and fatherless children looked to my dad for their salvation.

My favorite was the Orphan Bride's Aid Fund. I imagined a young girl, weary of years of institutional life and with no one but other orphans for company, using my dad's slender savings from brokering bolts of white lace to purchase a white lace gown of her own, or a veil.

Pay to the order of “The Institute to Uplift the Souls of the Holy,” $5; pay to the order of “The Orphans of Jerusalem,” my father would write in his tremulous hand, $10. Pay to the order of “The Light of Life Girls' College,” $15. Pay to the order of “The Maker of Great Miracles Charity Box,” $20.

I didn't immediately grasp the purpose behind the flow of donations, whose receipts and expressions of gratitude cluttered up our mailbox.

They were for my benefit. My father had asked orphanages and charities to pray for my recovery. The checks kept flowing—to this girls' institute, this boys' vocational school—all with the explicit request that recipients effect my cure with their prayers.

They seemed delighted to comply. We were deluged with offers of bountiful blessings—special prayers by orphans who enjoyed God's ear.

“Loulou, Dieu est grand,” my father exclaimed when he received a note confirming prayers had been recited.

The Maker of Great Miracles, which seemed to bear a mysterious relation to the shrine of my Cairo childhood, offered my father an amulet. Behind a large, square blue-trimmed receipt that looked a bit like a stock certificate or a high school diploma was a special prayer with instructions that it be read out loud three times: “I give this donation for my poor brethren, I give this donation for my poor brethren, I give this donation for my poor brethren, God of the Maker of Great Miracles,” went the amulet. “Answer me, answer me, answer me.”

My father, having seen me through my treatment, was now watching over my recovery in the only way he knew how: by pursuing a miraculous cure.

Over the years, the orphanages and hospitals, old-age homes and youth towns and vocational schools and rabbinical schools were very diligent about keeping in touch, and that was the mail that he shuffled to the small metal box in the hallway each morning to collect. He was completely homebound as the decade came to a close; that was the extent of his travels—the five yards or so from the door to the mailbox in our building's lobby.

Our house became overwhelmed with tokens of gratitude—calendars, greeting cards, certificates of appreciation, more amulets. They came in a cavalcade of colors—orange, blue, purple, sea green. I began to imagine Israel as a country of orphans, all of whom depended on my father to get by. I would go to sleep at night and dream of the wide-eyed little girls in the brochures, appealing to him to rescue them.

As if the Captain were capable of rescuing anyone.

Eager to curry favor was the Great Orphan Home of Jerusalem for Boys, which acknowledged every gift with a handsome hand-engraved certificate. “May the father of all orphans reward you with all kinds of prosperity,” it stated. On the back was a black-and-white photograph of the Orphan Home's bearded founder, the saintly Rabbi M. J. L. Diskin, smiling dolefully into the camera.

Below his picture, the long-dead rabbi promised to “intercede in heaven for all who support this Orphanage.”

There were different rates for these celestial interventions. A onetime contribution of $50 meant an orphan would recite the kaddish, the prayer for the dead, one time—immediately after the donor passed away. For $100, the orphan would say the memorial prayer repeatedly, every year. A thousand dollars would enable the donor's name to be engraved over the bed of an orphan. My dad chose the more modest $5 and $10 route to God, and that was fine, because Rabbi M. J. L. Diskin still smiled sadly from his heavenly photo studio, and promised to do what he could on our behalf.

The Guardian of Life Orphanage for Girls was perhaps the most appreciative. It sent along a small pistachio-green book, complete with a calendar and a list of all the benedictions the children would be immediately conferring upon us. “You will be rewarded with bountiful blessings for good health,” the green book vowed.

As I flipped through the calendar, I noticed that Dad had made small notations next to certain days and months of the year. They were the dates marking the passing of his mother and his father and six of his nine siblings, all carefully circled. There was my aunt Leila, in July. My grandfather Ezra was remembered a week later, with only a one-word notation, “Papa.” I found it strangely jarring that as he turned eighty, my dad still called his own father “Papa,” like a little boy. My grandmother Zarifa, “Mama,” appeared one week after that, next to a note about his sister, Tante Rebekah. My tragic aunt Ensol, killed along with her husband, had an entry in November, as did Oncle Joseph, the oldest of the ten children. In one cruel month straddling January and February, my dad noted the passing of his two favorite siblings, Oncle Raphael and Oncle Shalom of the clubfoot and the humble demeanor and the gentle heart.

Two siblings were absent from Dad's ledger of memory: Bahia, who had perished at Auschwitz and whose date of death had never been learned, and Salomon, the priest and convert who had indicated on his résumé, on file with the monastery at Ratisbon, that he'd wanted my father, along with Oncle Raphael, to be notified in the event of his passing.

There had once been ten, and now only he and his little sister Marie were left, and he hadn't seen her since 1956. Yet he continued to remember and pray for all of them and to memorialize them in the little green book of the dead. He seemed content simply making out the small checks. It became a full-time job. The checks were for the same amounts that he had written month after month over sixteen years to pay back the debt for the
Queen Mary
—mostly $10 increments, occasionally a little more, occasionally less. The sums were deceptively small; he wrote so many checks, day after day, that he was actually giving away a significant share of his impossibly small income.

César, who worked as an accountant, worried like a wife whose husband gambles with the grocery money. My father reassured him, but kept on as before. It was his calling, now, every bit as important as selling ties had once been, or brokering the sale of yards of brocade or trading stocks at
la bourse.
In a culture of ambition and greed, my father was, as always, resolutely against the grain. He had become the
Dispenser of Kindness, the self-appointed guardian of the orphans of Jerusalem.

Officially diagnosed with Parkinson's, his hands trembled more than ever, so that the amounts he made out and the names of the objects of his largesse were almost illegible.

I felt so much better, I didn't even stop to consider how he was faring. Nor did I give him and his otherworldly approach much credit for my miraculous recovery, the fact that in the course of my continued checkups with Dr. Lee, my physician marveled at how well I seemed.

In my father's case, Charles Duvall's dreamy mantra, “From the shores of Lake Success,” sounded increasingly distant and remote, as if Dad were a passenger on a boat floating farther and farther away from those desired shores.

He was not well. He was descending into a physical and mental purgatory. But he was so used to keeping silent, to being stoic about his travails, that now that he needed us, needed us to mount an intervention to rescue him in the way he had summoned the orphans of Jerusalem to save me, he didn't know how to request it—demand it—of us, his children.

One morning, he called me at work. It was unusual—he never phoned at the office, and it was as if, years later, he still hadn't made his peace with my decision to find a job and support myself instead of heeding his counsel to find a man, a rich and powerful man—
un banquier
—to look after me. Who ever heard of a woman working?

“Loulou, je ne me sens pas bien,” he said; I don't feel well. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. I listened, a tad impatiently. I had so much work to do.

“Loulou,” he repeated, “je me sens très mal.” I feel very bad.

I'd try to look in on him later, I promised, and hung up. It was the dawn of the Me Decade, and by focusing obsessively on work and my own needs, I was acting out its distorted values, values that had nothing to do with the far more compassionate underpinnings of my Cairo girlhood.