When Shirley got back to Beth Israel, prepared to convey the Rabbi's advice to my father, there was Dorothy, sitting on my father's bed, holding his hand, looking incandescent in a coral colored dress that set off her dark hair, and a black velvet hat. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shone. "Shirl, can you imagine? I was trying on my wedding veil when I heard Paul was in the hospital!" My father was ashen, propped up in bed, still weak from his surgery. His head was bowed, and he was stroking the inside of Dorothy's wrist, tracing the map of pale-blue veins. Later, when Dorothy left, Shirley told my father about Schneerson's advice. "I can't do that to Dorothy," he said.
After the wedding, Dorothy said she wanted to start a family as soon as she felt better, but late that summer she was hospitalized. She had a lymph node removed from under her arm, and she was treated with mustard gas. When she came home, she had weakened considerably. She was no longer able to get up in the morning on Shabbos to set the table, so she did it with Susie's help the night before. She never complained, but my father told Susie to be especially gentle with Dorothy. She wasn't feeling well. Just before the High Holidays, my father and Dorothy moved into an apartment at 50 Plaza Street, on the same floor as Dorothy's parents. It was an apartment big enough for a family, and it had views of Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Museum. For Dorothy, it was an exciting new beginning. She began to furnish the apartment lovingly, ordering curtains, sofas, rolls of wall-to wall carpeting. But, for my father, being near Dorothy's parents probably meant that he'd have more help with Dorothy when the time came.
On Rosh Hashanah morning, Dorothy and her sister, Grace, were dressing for shul in their old girlhood bedroom. Dorothy was wearing an ivory silk blouse with silk-covered buttons. Suddenly she sat down on the bed, her face white, the black circles appearing. "I'm too sick to go to shul," she whispered. Then she unbuttoned her blouse with shaking fingers. "Grace, will you wear this to shul for me? That way, at least a part of me will be there." As Grace was putting on Dorothy's blouse, Susie came bouncing into the room in a new dress, excited about going to temple, wanting to see what was taking so long. "Susie, I can't go to shul," Dorothy told her. "But will you say a prayer for me?” "You can't say a prayer for another person," Susie replied. "You have to pray for yourself."
In October, on Sukkoth, the holiday that celebrates the autumn harvest, Dorothy was in bed reading a magazine when she began to have trouble breathing. My father sent Susie outside to roller-skate. He called an ambulance, and Dorothv was taken into Manhattan, to Memorial Hospital. My grandfather came up from Virginia when he heard the news. He stood in the doorway of the waiting room and looked at Shirley through his pince-nez. He was an imposing man, portly and bald, and most people's first reaction to him was fear. "What's wrong with Dorothy?" he asked. Shirley looked up at him, shaking her head slightly. The word "cancer" was never uttered. "She's very, very sick, Dad." My father led my grandfather into Dorothy's room. She was propped up in bcd, and there were tubes and wires everywhere. Finally, she looked every bit as sick as she was. She was drawn and terribly thin, and her eyes were sunken. “I wanted to say this in front of you, Dad," she said to my grandfather. “I wanted to thank Paul for giving me the happiest six months of my life."
Afterward, when it was all over, my father returned to the apartment, stepped over the still rolled-up carpeting Dorothy had ordered only weeks before, and headed down the long corridor into their bedroom. There on the
bed was the magazine she had been reading just before she was taken to the hospital. It was open to an article about Hodgkin's lymphoma.
"After the ambulance came and took Dorothy away, I didn't see Dad for two weeks," Susie says, as we sit in her East Village apartment. “He called me every night, and every night I'd ask him where he was. And he'd say, 'Where do you think I am?' And I'd say, 'The hospital.' And then I'd ask how Dorothy was, and he'd tell me she was resting. "He picked me up on a Wednesday night after those two weeks had gone by. He looked like hell, and he was quieter than usual. We were in a taxi going through Central Park on our way to Grammy and Grampy's when I asked him how Dorothy was. And he told me that Dorothy had died. She had died a week before. They had the funeral, buried her, sat shivah-all without telling me."
My parents kept secrets. Dorothy was only one of them. My mother's first marriage, an aunt's nervous breakdown, an uncle's attempted suicide--all were kept secret. On the surface, everything seemed perfect, but why was my father so unhappy all the time? Why did my mother seem so constantly on edge? Some of the friction between my parents had to do with my father's strict religious beliefs. My mother was funloving and glamorous, the head of her own small advertising agency when she met my father. She had no idea that becoming Orthodox meant more than keeping a kosher home and going to shul on holidays. Orthodoxy was its own universe-a universe as suspicious of her as she was of it. As the years went by, we rarely saw my father's family, and when we did they seemed foreign to me, with their yarmulkes and thick glasses. They were pale and wan with something called "yeshiva pallor." On our way home from visiting, my mother would make fun of them, and my father would become even quieter than usual.
I grew up in a house full of fear. We were protected by three different kinds of alarm systems: pads on the floors under the rugs, a motion detector, and panic buttons that could be pressed in an emergency. I wasn't allowed to run barefoot on the lawn; I was slathered with sun lotion year-round; if a bee buzzed near me, my mother would swoop down and rush me into the house. I never had chicken pox, measles, or mumps-any of the childhood diseases. I wasn't around children enough to have them. But the real dangers were inside our house. What I remember is the silence. Most of the time it was as quiet as a wax museum, and my parents spoke to each other, at least in front of me, with brittle politeness. And then every once in a while there would be the booming sound of my father's voice, or the loud slam of the back door as my mother went outside to sit on the cold aluminum of the milk can and smoke a cigarette. These fights didn't seem to have beginnings or ends. But I knew my parents would never divorce. I couldn't have articulated it back then, but my parents seemed to be holding their fragile world together with some sort of tacit agreement that their histories and secrets--the whole of their past lives--could be kept from each other, and from me. Once I knew about Dorothy, from time to time I would ask my mother about her. "They tricked your father into marrying her," she'd say. "It was a terrible thing they did." For my mother, it was as if my father's second wife had barely existed. But Dorothy was very real for my father. The one time I asked him about her, I glimpsed pain in his eyes so intense I never asked again.
Grace Gribetz Glasser, Dorothy's younger sister, wasn't easy for me to track down. She's married to I. Leo Glasser, the federal judge who presided over the John Gotti trial, and they lead a quiet, private life in a prosperous, protected section of Rockaway Park, facing the ocean. But when I visited her, almost a year into my new marriage, she seemed entirely unfazed that her late sister's husband's daughter would have come looking for her. "Hello, dear," she said, as if she had been expecting me. I recognized her face from wedding photos, a wide-eyed young woman holding her sister's bouquet. She is now sixty-nine, with silver hair. "You look like your father," she said, ushering me in. It was a few days before Purim. Between us, on her kitchen table, was a shoebox full of photographs of Dorothy. Grace was twenty-five when Dorothy died. She has four children and nine grandchildren. Her oldest daughter is named Dorothy. Together we shuffled through the photographs. Dorothy on a picnic blanket with one boyfriend, on the beach with another. Dorothy and my father at their wedding. Grace handed me a photo of my father in a navy-blue suit, white shirt, and silver tie, his hands resting on the back of a chair as he turns to the camera, laughing. I had never seen this expression of pure, unadulterated joy on my father's face. "I used to meet your father for lunch every once in a while," Grace said. "I remember he called me when you were getting married. When was that?" I knew she was referring to my first marriage--the only one for which my father was alive. "He was worried," she continued. "He wasn't happy about it at all." I wondered if my mother knew that my father stayed in touch with Dorothy's sister. I doubt it.
Now I followed her down a hall and into her bedroom. The life she has: the children, the grandchildren, the hamantaschen in the oven--that was the life my father was supposed to have had with Dorothy. Dorothy and my father would have lived in Brooklyn, or on Central Park West, or on the beach at Rockaway Park. They would have been active in their local synagogue, had a bunch of children, and lived an observant life. Grace opened a walk-in closet, and I heard the scrape and rattle of hangers. She emerged from'the closet carrying a blouse. It was once ivory silk, with ivory silk-covered buttons. Now it was yellow and stained, and much too big for her small frame. "I've worn it to shul every Rosh Hashanah for forty-four years," she said. Her voice was sweet and sorrowful. "It's so stained now I can't even take off my jacket. "I wish my sister were here to meet you," she said. "But, if she were here, you wouldn't be."
After Dorothy died, my father looked for a new apartment. There was a building going up on East Ninth Street near Broadway, and he went with his sister to see it. They were sitting in the rental office when an impeccably dressed dark-haired woman in her early thirties walked in the door. Shirley noticed that she wasn't wearing a wedding ring, and nudged my father. A few months later, after my father had moved into that building, he saw the dark-haired woman on the street. It was Shabbos, and she was carrying a hammer, modern girl that she was, on her way home to install bookcases. Obviously, she wasn't observant--a hammer? on Shabbos?--but he was pretty sure she was Jewish. They stopped and chatted, and he caught her first name, Irene. He knew she lived on the block, and the next day he spent his morning poring through the Manhattan phone book looking for Irenes on East Ninth Street. During my parents' courtship, my father continued to spend weekends at Grossinger's and the Concord, in search of an Orthodox woman. It was unheard of to marry outside Orthodoxy--it was almost like marrying out of the faith. But on September 4, 1957, he and Irene were married, at Young Israel on Sixteenth Street. A photograph of my parents at their wedding hangs over the desk where I write. They are walking up the aisle, and my mother is smiling triumphantly. My father's hand is balled into a fist. Within a year, he had injured his back and became addicted to painkillers and tranquillizers. For all the years of my childhood, my father walked gingerly, as if constantly aware that collapse was possible, and as the tension in our home grew he became quieter and quieter. Sometimes I would try to catch his eye, to wink at him, to let him know I understood. But I didn't understand. And he continued sliding away.
