PASSOVER STORIES / American families and an ancient dinner : Fiction : Lord God, King of Universe and President of the Motion Picture Academy

My mother and father arrived in Los Angeles one afternoon in early September, 1968. They got off the plane, and it was just as I imagined: My father came out the front door--my mother, the rear. As if they were not related. Then, like two lines converging to a center point, they moved toward us.

At the age of 65, after a lifetime of uncompromising and dedicated service in the world of hardware, my father had sold out. The news of his defection spread through the Jewish community of Rushmore Rapids, S.D. Max Weiss, the traitor, was moving to Los Angeles.

“I need sunshine,” he explained, as though he were a plant that had been living in darkness all these years, reaching out at last for a little light.

My mother begged and pleaded for him to stay put. A person should think twice before making such a drastic change.

So my father thought twice and then said it was final. He was leaving Rushmore Rapids. He was going to retire to California. Then, shyly, and careful not to overdo it, he said my mother could come along if she wanted.

*

We waited for my parents behind the wire fence: My sister Phyllis, her husband (whose father was president of a small but flourishing movie company), their child and I, Harold Weiss. We hugged and kissed and told my mother and father that it was wonderful they had come. Then we stood back and looked them over and did not admit even to ourselves that they were smaller than we had remembered. Small and gray and alien in the bright Southern California day.

Then my brother-in-law, Mark Berle, Jr., put little Mark Berle III into the Mark II Continental with its Mark IV air-conditioner, and soon we were out of the airport and onto the freeway, shivering a little in the artificial comfort of the big car.

Fade in, as my brother-in-law would say when he tells me the plots of those Grade-Z movies that he and his father produce. Fade in, pan your camera and know that it is eight months later and already April. I have been in Berkeley all this time trying to turn 10,000 index cards full of anthropological observations into a dissertation that goes by the catchy title of “Derivation of Personality Variables in a Rice-Growing Village in Northern Thailand.”

But how can I pursue this when I see in my supermarket that the Easter Bunny is holding a giant-sized box of Passover matzo? That the exotic-food section now displays a Mother Feldman’s Frozen Seder that features three pieces of chicken, two matzo-balls-with-soup-in-a-plastic-bag, half a shank bone, a sprig of pre-salted parsley, and a mimeographed prayer book?

A wave of sentiment rolls up and breaks into foam within me. With a silent apology to Mrs. Feldman and a promise to take a rain check, I put the frozen package back and decide that it is time to come home.

*

I think I am in the wrong apartment. But the lady in the bare feet and purple muumuu--frying a taco shell at the kitchen stove--assures me that she is my mother. I can’t believe it. I drop my suitcase and kiss her anyway.

“How is the novel going?” she says, giving me a big hug.

This is no time to educate her about what I have been doing for the past eight months. She is too primitive in her flowing garment and silver-painted toenails. She is all sunshine and summer. Two months early. Even her hair is now a remarkable shade of gold.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of winter. There at the kitchen table my father sits in a sweater buttoned up to the neck. Otherwise, he seems to be wearing pajamas. It is 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Either he is ready for bed or has just gotten up. One way or the other he must be sick. Or is it only that he has taken on the 10 years that my mother seems to have shed?

He is surrounded by newspapers. All from Rushmore Rapids. They are two weeks, three weeks, a month old. He is reading them aloud and hardly stops to greet me.

*

“Don’t let me interrupt,” I say, pulling up a chair to join him.

He grunts, finds his place on the page and continues:

“Arlo Swenson, age 73, passed away February 10, please omit flowers . . . La Verne Hanson, 69, mother of Gracie, Shirley, Warren, Sigmund, sister of Twilah, Earl . . . .”

My mother is listening to him with one ear. With the other, she is tuned to “The Dating Game” on a small portable television set that sits on top of the kitchen counter along with the sugar, flour and other staples. As my father approaches the end of the alphabet of the dead, she moves back to the stove and transfers the television to the warming shelf along with the salt and pepper.

It takes me only 24 hours to discover the derivation of personality variables in an efficiency apartment in Hollywood.

*

My father can be summed up on a single index card. Max Weiss: once-in-hardware-now-retired- pusher-of-market-basket-reader-of-old-newspapers.

My mother is a longer story: Within eight months of her arrival in Los Angeles, she is on a first-name basis with all of the important figures of show business. For how can one live in the same place, breathe the same air, tan under the same sun, and continue to call them Mister Lancaster or Miss Day, Mister Peck or Miss Garland? And especially when she steps on their star-shaped faces as she does her errands on Hollywood Boulevard day after day.

*

Each morning, while my father stirs his oatmeal into boiling water, my mother has been walking down that great street, planting the soles of her straw clogs smack on those golden names. Clop! Julie Andrews. She stood next to her at the cash register at the Farmer’s Market last Thursday. Clop! Clop! Natalie Wood. That was who was eating a hamburger at the next table the Saturday before. Clop! Clop! Clop! Clark Gable, who is dead but his wife is a lovely person. My mother knows this because the real estate man who uses the same accountant as Mrs. Gable’s lawyer’s stockbroker plays tennis with a friend of Mark’s. His ears were not so big as my mother thought. Mark’s ears? No, Clark’s ears. He feels like a son to her. Clark? No, Mark. And speaking of Mark, he is the soul of generosity. Thanks to him and his father, she has seen practically everything that is being taped, shot, previewed or sneaked. There is nothing like seeing life firsthand. She never realized it all those years in Rushmore Rapids.

She wishes my father would be more interested in these things.

But my father does not hear. He is already asleep and dreaming. In ordinary black and white. On a grainy screen. The way it used to be at the Dakota Theater, 35 cents and the kids for a dime.

My mother is sorry but she cannot make dinner for us tonight. Would we mind if she opened a can of chow mein or a carton of cottage cheese? She has to make it to a 6 o’clock taping of a show at Channel 11. The master of ceremonies is a friend of Mark’s. He’s very nice but his wife is in a mental hospital. She feels very sorry for him.

“I have just five minutes,” she urges. “Shall I open the chow mein or the cottage cheese? I recommend the chow mein.”

Her hat is already on. Her pocketbook waits by the automatic can opener.

“Cottage cheese,” says my father without hesitation.

*

The chow mein is tempting me. But somehow, in some way, I feel I must join forces with my father. “Cottage cheese,” I declare at last.

I remind myself that tomorrow is Passover. The reason I came home. Things will be in order again for a little while. Tomorrow night my father will not be only Weiss-once-in-hardware. But man of the house, head of the table, blesser of wine, hider of matzo, donor of the dollar. The way I remember. The way I want it to be.

You see, I am right. My father is up already this morning and dressed for the evening ahead. His navy-blue gabardine suit is a little shiny. And his neck does not quite fill out the collar of his starched white shirt.

But his perforated shoes are shined to perfection and he bounces into the kitchen humming a rather current tune. He envelops us in a marvelous vapor of shaving lotion, pine scent, talcum powder and Merthiolate. All of which combine now with the steam of the soup, the scent of the chicken livers, the traces of everything that my mother has mashed, mixed, grated and chopped. In this one moment, in this two-by-four kitchen of their exile, my mother and father have come home.

But it is a fleeting impression. It fades in the time it takes my father to pick up the morning paper, and my mother to switch on the radio news.

“Tonight . . .,” reads my father with great pride.

“Tonight . . .,” says the announcer.

” . . . all Southland Jewry will gather at sundown . . .”

” . . . all Hollywood will convene . . .”

” . . . for the traditional ceremony . . .”

” . . . for the traditional ceremony . . .”

” . . . of the Passover Seder . . .”

” . . . of the Academy Awards.”

*

“My God!” cries my mother. She claps one hand to her heart as if it had been split in two. One part Southland Jewry, one part All Hollywood.

“What’s the matter?” says my father, who looks up, startled.

“Nothing,” says my mother, already picking up the phone and dialing what I know is Phyllis’ number.

“Whom are you calling’?” says my father.

“Nobody,” she answers.

“Go on reading,” I urge my father.

“Phyllis!” gasps my mother, cupping her hand over the telephone like a secret agent.

” . . . which recalls the flight of the Hebrews from the bondage of the Pharaoh . . .,” continues my father, oblivious, as my mother slowly moves with the phone out of the kitchen, down the hallways, and into the bedroom, leaving behind her the plastic length of extension cord that connects her like an umbilical cord to my sister in Beverly Hills.

*

And so it finally came to pass that the Academy Awards fell on the same night as the first Seder.

Or, to put it another way, the Seder falls on the same night as the Academy Awards. It all depends on where one sits, and the way one looks at it. As it turns out, we are going to sit in both places and look at it both ways.

Mark and his parents are going to the Academy Awards since it is a tradition in their family. Phyllis and her 4-year-old are coming to the Seder out of deference to my father.

My mother says that this could happen only once in a 100 years. Phyllis says that somebody up there should have prevented it. I have no heart to tell my father the truth.

“How come Mark is not coming?” he asks for the third time.

*

“I told you,” says my mother, as she removes three place settings from the table. “He had to go somewhere with his parents.”

“And where did Mr. and Mrs. Berle have to go?” he presses.

“They had to go somewhere with Mark,” explains Phyllis.

We are lined up on the living-room couch, waiting for the sun to sink--like the enemy of old--into the red sea of the horizon. But the sun refuses. My sister chain-smokes and looks poignantly remote. As if she is at the wrong place, at the wrong time. My mother keeps looking at her wristwatch and complains that the sun sets much earlier in Rushmore Rapids.

My father informs her that it is the same sun. Also, that there is no hurry since we have all night for the Seder. He does not seem to notice that RCA Victor is sitting at the table in the place usually reserved for Elijah. That the remote-control switch waits on Phyllis’ napkin along with the dinner fork. Or that the TV Guide lies open on my mother’s plate like a supplementary haggadah.

Finally, the sun sets, and we take our places at the table. In the dark of the unlit dining area my father draws himself up to full size and begins the prayers. As he does, a pinpoint of white begins to grow in the eye of the television. My father raises his arms. He prays in that voice that brings me back to my childhood when I was suspended between fear and laughter.

*

‘ Boruch atto adonoy elohenu . . . praised be Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe . . .”

” . . . and president of the Motion Picture Academy . . .,” says Bob Hope.

“My mistake,” says my mother. “I didn’t mean to have the sound turned on yet. Only the picture.”

My father raises his glass of wine. “ Boruch atto adonoy elohenu . . .,” he begins, as the president of the Motion Picture Academy moves his lips in perfect synchronization.

“A little louder?” asks Phyllis.

“ Bore p’ri ha-gofen . . .,” booms my father.

“Not you,” says my mother. Click! Up goes the remote control.

“Praised be Thou, O Lord our God . . . who gives us . . .”

Debbie Reynolds!” says Bob Hope.

” . . . the fruit of the vine . . .,” says my father.

“Still can’t hear,” complains my mother.

“ Boruch atto adonoy elohenu . . . bore p’ri ho-adomo ,” continues my father, dipping parsley into salt water and passing it on.

*

“It’s only the preliminaries,” says Phyllis, speeding the parsley to my mother.

” . . . who creates the fruit of the earth,” says my father.

“The technical stuff,” agrees my mother. “Start the horseradish, Harold.”

Down the table go the technicalities. The parsley, the salt water, the bitter herbs. The tears and bricks of 6,000 years that we are going to dispose of in three minutes. In order to honor Charlton Heston.

It is my turn to sing. “ Ma nish-ta-no, ha-lai-lo ha-ze . . .” as Joan Crawford nominates the first song from a motion picture of the same name.

“It won’t win,” predicts my mother.

“Joan Crawford has aged,” observes Phyllis.

Don’t look, I tell myself. My heart is pumping painfully. The vein at the side of my head is popping. My father and Bob Hope are swapping stories now and I can’t tune out. Or stop looking. I am peeking with the eyes in back of my head. I am listening with the extra pair of ears I have just sprouted.

The golden idols are irresistible and I am struck by the childish feeling that God knows it. He will come down through the antenna, send holy sparks flying, explode the television. Strike us dead! What is the matter with my father? I am furious to see how he bends over the table singing and reading and talking only to himself. His voice is no more than the static from a competing station.

*

“Max . . .,” I say, leaning forward to let him know that I, for one, am listening to him. That for me, he should speak louder. Take a stand. But his eyes are shut tight against me. They are locked, like double doors closing me out. Behind them, he is running. He abandons us all. He is not in Los Angeles. Not even in Rushmore Rapids. He is across some ocean. Sixty-five years away. He is his own father, and father before him. He knows nothing of television, of my mother, of Phyllis. Or Harold. He denies us all.

I want to kick him. It would bring him back. Furious, I slap down the napkin, shove back my chair, reach for the television plug. I am God’s emissary on earth!

When suddenly I feel my father’s hand on my arm. Without a word or a glance in my direction, he grips my arm and holds it in place. I know what he is saying with his hand. He needs no help, no Harold-to-the-rescue. He knows everything that I know.

And maybe more. His blunt, hairy fingers are humorous on my own hand. They telegraph that the world is a funny place, so smile. His thumb is a botch of his 40 years at the knife-sharpener. His index finger wags--for shame--at my own presumptions. The ring finger curls under, squeezed in its circle of old gold.

It allows my mother to reach for her crazy stars another day. As long as it takes her. He will survive. She will be all right. Phyllis is not so bad. And you, Harold, are not so great. Sit at the head of your own table and do what you have to do some day. Don’t ask me. Don’t need me. Find your own answers. Take a wife, produce a child. Then laugh.

I relax, and after a while my father’s head begins to nod and droops toward the table. If I don’t remove his plate, he will be face down in the salad course. I remove the plate, smooth the cloth, wad up the napkin for a pillow.

His face is turned sideways on the table, his hand has fallen away from mine. He smiles to himself at the thought that at least we are sitting at the same table. Maybe he is right. At least he is not wrong.