No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

The Best Cake

I talk to Arthur on the phone. He tells me he is lonely. His friends are dead. He is backup man at his temple in order to make a quorum for minyan, and he sees some people then. They are all retired. They look at their lives and examine what they’ve done with them. One man says he made a million dollars. Another says he made two. Someone else has a yacht and a place in Florida. Arthur claims none of these. He says that he is shrinking.

The cabinet doors of his kitchen no longer bang the top of his head. He spent years walking into the doors from his blind side, then getting angry at his wife for leaving the doors open. At last, he says, old age has made him safe from himself.

Yesterday at the bakery a women cut the line in front of him but he let it go. The next woman did the same, and he protested. The baker apologized. He hadn’t seen Arthur standing there. “Good thing,” Arthur says to me, “the baker didn’t say I was short.”

I laugh at his reference to once having knocked a young man to the floor of a bank for calling him short. The incident happened ten years ago. Arthur told the story with shame and humility, but secret pride. At age seventy he could still take care of himself. Now, at eighty, he cannot. The last time he tried to kneel he was unable to rise. He cannot run and he cannot punch. His bowels treat him unfairly. “Waugh,” he says, “it’s no fun, this getting old. No fun at all.”

The key to understanding Arthur is knowing something of myself. I can never be truly happy because I mourn everything in advance — the wilting of flowers before they bloom, children leaving home, the end of each season during its lovely apex. The same is true of food and sex. Every meal is the finest, which means there will never be another. The last time I made love was the best ever. All further sex will be downhill.

Arthur never thinks something is the best, but that it might be a little better. If he brings home the most delicious cake from the bakery, he worries that there was a tastier one he didn’t get. I, on the other hand, worry that there will never be a cake as good. The best cake in the house makes us both sad.

Quite simply, Arthur is adept at surviving rather than living. He knows how to get through a situation. He knows how to circumvent, withstand, compromise. He knows how to hope. He knows how to suffer. It’s the living he has trouble with, the same as me.

Arthur looks at the future and I at the past. Perhaps this is why we enjoy each other’s company — an unlikely match surely — an eighty-year-old Polish Jew and a forty-year-old Kentucky hillbilly. We recognize in each other what we crave for ourselves.

On the phone last night he was lonely and tired. He is becoming one of the last of his community of Holocaust survivors. He has not made a million dollars or designed great buildings, and doesn’t own a yacht. He’s not sure what he’s done with his life. After sixty years, he still misses his brother.

I get pissed — we are always getting pissed at each other — and I shout into the phone. “You have a successful marriage to one woman all your life. You have two daughters who love you. You have three grandsons who adore you. That is the definition of success, Arthur. Most people don’t have any of that. You have it all.”

There is a silence on the other end of the phone. He is sitting in his chair in a dim room in Queens, a man who never expected such an outcome to his life — living across the sea from home, listening to a gentile son-in-law shout praise in a foreign language.

“To hell with the yacht,” I say.

“What’s wrong with a yacht,” he says. “You don’t want a yacht? Take your family on the ocean. Hire a captain and a cook and lady to massage your neck.”

“Arthur,” I say, “you should look back on your life with satisfaction. You’ve done a lot. You’re an ethical man and your family loves you. All except one thing — you’re short.”

“You had to say it!” he yells. “You son of a bitch, you had to say it.”

But he is laughing and I know that is partly why he, called. I have done my duty. I have restored his dignity with a grave insult. He’s still alive, one of the gang, able to take a good joke.

“Good-bye, Sonny,” he says. “Good-bye.”

The conversation has saddened me. I wonder how I will look at my life when I am in my eighties. I walk through the house to find my sons and wait for them to make me laugh. No one speaks. I realize that they are waiting for me to do the same. This strikes me as funny. I smile. James asks if my face hurts and I tell him no.

“It’s killing me,” he says. “It’s killing me.”