Read Online Fatherhood by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online Page A

villages and charred ghettos of a vanished Poland. But this latest of my father’s reversions to Yiddish seemed less natural than calculated, perhaps his way of mocking me.
    â€œI’ve always wondered if you did it,” I said. “If you rowed her out on that lake, into that storm, with nobody around, no other boats on the lake, just rowed her out into that storm and tossed her over the side.”
    My father jerked his head to the right in a way, it seemed to me, a guilty man would turn from his chief accuser.
    I waited briefly, thinking he might look back toward me, actually address the accusation I’d made, but he didn’t, and after a time I went back to Poe’s poem.
    From the sun that round me rolled
    In its autumn tint of gold ,
    My father released a long, weary breath. “Farblonschet.”
    It was an almost comic term for being confused, and again I wondered if he was mocking me.
    â€œSo, you’re confused?” I asked, now determined to speak to him only in English, as if Yiddish were my language, and could never be his, Yiddish and all that clung to it just another worthy thing he’d brutally renounced, a language that was like me, something he never visited or called, a Yid to this anti-Semite, a piece of dreck .
    My father twisted around and pointed to me with a shaky finger.
    â€œSo, I’m the one who’s confused?” I laughed. “About what?”
    My father began to squirm, so that I could see the effort he was making, the energy it took for him to say simply, “Sarah … never … never …” A jumble of sounds followed, none of them decipherable. Then, quite clearly, though with failing strength, he said, “Not mine.”
    He saw that I had no idea what he was talking about, and with a labored movement reached out for the book.
    I handed it to him, and watched as he thumbed through the pages until he found the one he wanted, then tapped the title of the poem.
    â€œLenore?” I asked. “Lenore wasn’t yours?”
    But that was absurd , I thought, for had not my mother discovered the whole sordid business, confronted him with it in the car on that stormy afternoon, heard his heartless dismissal of Lenore —She’s just a girl.
    â€œWhat about the baby?” I asked.
    He shook his head furiously, clearly and forcefully denying that Lenore’s baby was his.
    â€œNot mine,” he repeated. He twisted about, lips fluttering, so that it seemed to me that he was using up the last dwindling energy of his life in some final effort to communicate what I’d once hoped might be an apology, but which was clearly something else.
    I leaned forward. “Whose then?”
    Again my father seemed to take up a mighty struggle, hands jerking at the sheets, legs ceaselessly moving, lips twisting, his eyes darting about, until they settled on the window, emphatically settled, like a pointing finger.
    I looked out the window, the grounds empty save for the young workman in the distance pushing a lawnmower, and made a wild guess.
    â€œJoey?” I asked. “The kid who mowed our lawn?”
    My mother had always called him the Shabbas goy. He’d mowed the lawn and trimmed the shrubbery and done anything else that she required any time one of her girlhood friends from the old neighborhood visited, always frumpily dressed, these now middle-aged women with herring on their breath, and the old country in their voices and memories of their but recently slaughtered kindred still hanging like hooks in their hearts.
    â€œJoey?” I asked again.
    My father nodded fiercely.
    I recalled Joey O’Brian as tall and very skinny, with bad skin and bad teeth, a red-headed young man I’d once found staring quizzically at the little mezuzah my mother had tacked up at the front door of our house— Waz zat, guv ? When I’d answered, he’d chuckled and shaken his head, so distant from it all, not just