Butcher

28

Kansas City

It was an ominous-looking day. Sharon Kamen picked up the phone in her apartment and dialed the weather number. A male announcer's voice told her in computerized neospeak that she should “ask Kansas City Federal Savings about a money-saving IRA account. Time ... seven nineteen. The forecast is ... cloudy with thundershowers likely. Turning colder tonight.” She hung up and put the small, collapsible umbrella in her briefcase.

An invisible photographer, snapping a shot of Sharon as she walked across the room with her cute little foot-long maroon-and-silver umbrella in hand, could have captured one of those fantasy poses one used to see on the calendars in gas stations. A beautiful, near-nude woman with long, lovely legs and a traffic-stopping pair of high, firm breasts saluting, tiny parasol covering the essentials, a cutesy caption beneath the artwork.

Or catch her with the phone in her hand and wrap the cord around that showgirl body and call it Telephone Trouble. No man could walk past such a pose without doing another take. The ideal female sex symbol, posing coquettishly from all the Vargas, Petty, and Moran paintings; forty years of centerfolds, going back to the era of Mutoscope arcade cards. The eternal cheesecake shot.

Post-feminist-era Sharon stood with bumbershoot, pantyhose, black high heels, and a whole lot of Sharon, surveying the choices in her closet. She began to dress, stepping into her underpants and pulling a bra over the chest that made otherwise mature men turn goofy.

But gorgeously coiffed, marvelously stacked, model-lovely Sharon was many people, as real people are, and none of them was the big-boobed bimbo on the calendars. What you saw, with Sharon Kamen, was most assuredly not what you got.

At that moment her mind was as far from her own sexuality as it could take her, dressing for her job at the Kansas City Emergency Shelter, and thinking about the night before at her father's apartment. Missing her mother, taken by cancer, missing their cozy rural home outside Kansas City, which her dad now professed to loathe.

To others, her dad was inevitably the Nazi hunter, but to her he was the wise, good, and fearless man who represented so many positive things in her life. Others compared him to a Midwest version of Simon Wiesenthal or Elie Wiesel, because their names were known, but he was nowhere near the level of the top luminaries in the field. Aaron Kamen had achieved a degree of notoriety in the heartland by helping to find two low-level war criminals who'd been at the death camps half a century ago. People could not see beyond his notoriety so they often couldn't see the real man, just as they couldn't see the real Sharon for her physical package.

Her dad had enriched her life, to be sure, with his shared philosophy of serving others, with his caring, his genuine belief in man's goodness, and with his deep, challenging desire to help others, which he and her mother had instilled in her. Not only did she love him as a daughter loves her father, she revered him. The latter emotion was not without emotional baggage. It carried a funny ambivalence that swung back and forth between awe and irritation.

There were times she'd give anything to disassociate herself from the overpowering Judaism and Zionist zeal that had shaped such a great part of her life. On the threshold of turning thirty, still unmarried but desired by men since her adolescence, she was torn and confused inside.

This woman, who was so flattered by eye, camera, and mirror, was smart enough to know that mirrors showed nothing. The skin and teeth and hair were wrapping paper. Inside, Sharon was a woman at war with herself,

She worshipped her father but was viscerally antagonized by his unrelenting Jewishness. She knew she believed in God but sometimes she'd watch her father lighting candles and saying the Kaddish, and question why she didn't feel what he obviously felt. Sometimes he behaved as if he personally carried the weight of millions of souls. What gave him the right to impose the dictates of his moral compass or his conscience on her? Also, she found his blind orthodoxy numbing, intolerant, illogical, and judgmental. Temple, she felt, was a guilty irrelevance, and she ignored it. “Israel's rightness,” and the basic implicit wrongness of the Palestinians, was one more piece of dogma that stuck in her craw.

Inside her secret heart this caring, complex, enigmatic woman was troubled by a dark, persistent fear: the daughter of one of America's most prominent Holocaust survivors was afraid she'd become a closet anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew.

Her father had called her at work and asked her to pick up something of hers he'd found in a storage box. His own belongings had remained unpacked when he'd moved following her mother's death. He'd taken the first apartment he'd looked at, and thrown some clothing in the closet and a few utensils and bare necessities into drawers and cabinets, but the rest of the household goods still sat in unopened moving company cartons.

The exception had been his files, which were meticulously arranged and cross-indexed and kept in steel drawers. When she'd dropped by his place after work he'd said he was on the track of “another one,” gesturing at the files and documents that filled the apartment. He was quite animated and in one of his most Jewish moods.

“Hypothesis,” he'd said loftily, sitting her down in the only available chair. “A space vessel lands and aliens disembark. Sentient beings who profess to be extraterrestrial evangelists from a planet beyond our solar system.

“They prove to the satisfaction of the scientific community that theirs is a civilization technologically superior to any dreamed of before.” Her dad's accent became thicker as his excitement grew. “They espouse a religion parallel to Judaism that completely negates the precepts of all other religious beliefs. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, they all go out the window, you see? Their version of the Talmud proves that there is but one religion, let's hypothesize. The question is this: precisely what does that discovery do to the nature of man's faith?"

“I don't know,” she said, shaking her pretty head and shrugging.

“It does ... absolutely ... nothing!” He lit up as if he'd just won the lottery.

“I don't get it."

“Of course you don't. But it wouldn't hurt you to think about it some, eh?” They talked some more and she left him in the opening stages of his latest rat hunt. He'd given her a box of her old 45-rpm records. For this she'd driven across town.

As she dressed for work she thought about the seventies oldies that had now migrated from his closet to hers. Billy Paul's “Me and Mrs. Jones,” which she'd played until the grooves had worn flat. Joni Mitchell. Steely Dan. For some reason the records depressed her even more than her father had.

Her dad's elevator stunk of urine and he didn't even have the sense to move a sofa from the house. Why couldn't he simply retire like everybody else's father? Why did he have to be the big Nazi hunter?

Then she pictured him taking her to shul and her heart was instantly so full of love for him she almost wept. Sharon realized once again that among the conflicting emotions she felt for her very special father was a core-deep, abiding, undiminished pride. So the calendar girl finished dressing, repaired her makeup, and went to work, the lyrics of old tunes in her head—"A Free Man In Paris."