Tío Memo, during a business trip to New York from Guatemala, had come to Massachusetts by Greyhound to visit, and so Bert had taken us all on that weekend road trip up to Fort Ticonderoga, then across Lake Champlain on the car ferry and into Vermont, a state my uncle had never visited before. I sat in the back seat between Tío Memo and Feli, my mother and sister were up front, and Bert at the wheel, driving us to our motel through winter twilight and long rows of gray, white, and evergreen trees, past the occasional roadside farm stand selling maple syrup and cheddar cheese. Some of the souvenir shops we passed had teepees or big statues of moose out front that made my father shout, Look at that, a moose! the same way he shouted, Look at that, cows! whenever we passed milk cows grazing in a mountainside pasture. Meanwhile my uncle and Feli cheerfully bantered with Mamita, who sat partly turned around with her arm hooked around my sister, their jokes and laughter, ala que alegre, and púchica, and ala gran chucha, vos, Tío Memo regularly remembering to switch to English for the sake of my father, a rare memory of snug well-being, of happy pride in family. The way Tío Memo, at the start of every sentence he addressed to my father, said, “Bert,” in his deep, resounding voice, sounding so manly and respectful. And my father would say, Well, Memo, to be honest with you . . . Or, Frankly, Memo, let me tell you how I see it. They spoke to each other the way leaders at the United Nations spoke to each other, I imagined, men who understood power and how things really were, their conversations meant to deepen mutual understanding and to clarify complex matters for the rest of us. That’s why Mamita always chirped along with utterances like: No me digás, or Así es, or Oh no, they can’t do that, or, Memo, is that true? Guatemala’s improving but precarious economic and political position in the world, always threatened by powerful subversive enemies from without and within, always needing to maneuver such treacherous geopolitical currents, gave Tío Memo an urgent-sounding global outlook. My father was a serious Democrat with thoughtfully calibrated positions on world affairs and how these were complicated by US political pressures and rivalries, also from within and without, subjects that he only ever got to talk about in such a seemingly consequential way when he was with Tío Memo. In reality, considering that my uncle was a fanatical right-wing anti-Communist, and my father was just as fanatically against the Vietnam War and all right-wing warmongers, it’s amazing they never even came close to screaming at each other, the way my father and Uncle Lenny, vociferously in favor of the Vietnam War, used to scream at each other, even at one Passover dinner hurling plates of food across the table. The one thing Tío Memo and my father agreed on was that they both hated Russia.
Memo, who’d taken over and enlarged our family toy store business in Guatemala City, was a vigorous man who laughed a lot. Mamita was always quick to laugh too. She had a wonderfully jolly, occasionally silly laugh, but my father laughed less. Instead he sometimes hooted and howled as if he were faking, imitating happy barnyard animals. I’m trying to recall if he ever really genuinely laughed. Well, okay, yes, sometimes he did, though not much at home, not with us; that afternoon in the car driving into Vermont, he sort of did, with those hoots and howls it feels so melancholy to conjure back now.
Lexi once told me about a memory she said still haunted her from another of those family road trips. This was more than twenty years ago, when I’d come for a visit during one of those periods when she was living at home again on Wooded Hollow Road. It was just our parents, Lexi, and me on this road trip, and we’d stopped for a picnic lunch at a highway rest stop somewhere in Cape Cod. I was, as usual, off playing in the woods, said Lexi, and she was sitting with our parents at a picnic table. They ate their sandwiches in complete silence, she said. You could hear every bite. Their chewing was the only sound except for some cars swooshing by and a little breeze that came and went in the pine trees. I remember that breeze because it was loud compared to our silence, said Lexi. It was the most silent silence, Frank. It really started to scare me. Why don’t you say something? I thought. Mommy, Daddy, say something. Talk to each other just a little. I tried to think of something to say just to break the silence, said Lexi, but I couldn’t get a sound out. It was like they were never going to say anything again, and you were never going to come back from the woods, and I was going to be trapped in their silence forever.
Because Aunt Hannah used to fill Lexi in and tell her stories when she came to give her violin lessons, Lexi knew things about our father that I didn’t. Aunt Hannah would tell her about the family history, which is how Lexi knew about our grandmother Rose, who’d died when my father was a boy and whom he never talked about, just as he never told any stories about his own growing-up years. Aunt Hannah, and Aunt Milly too, were the keepers and upholders of the legend of the thwarted genius of Bert, which supposedly explained why he was how he was. Once upon a time, of course, some of the most prestigious universities and colleges of the Northeast had had very restrictive Jewish quotas, and Harvard, locally aspired to by Jewish immigrant children like no other school, was one of the worst, accepting a secretly designated small number of Jews while otherwise keeping qualified Jewish students out, especially those who came from the Russian and Eastern European shtetl families of Boston’s most abhorred immigrant neighborhoods. Maybe Bert didn’t even know about the quotas, or if he did, had a faith that if it was indeed harder for a Jewish student to be accepted into Harvard than it was for a Christian, it must be by some small degree necessitated by the competitiveness of the process and the unsurprising preference of Christian administrators for Christians over Jews when having to choose, say, between two equally qualified students for a last available place in the incoming class. But Bert, gung ho Americanized as could be, one of the top students at Boston English, a football and baseball star, too, determined to become a surgeon, had expected to be accepted into Harvard because everyone else around him, teachers and coaches, were sure he was going to be too. The ruthless Crimson quota crushed that dream. A year later, he was accepted into Johns Hopkins in faraway Baltimore to study medicine, but it was the Depression, and Grandpa Moe made him stay home and go to work as a locksmith so that he could help support the family. That’s why Bert had to enroll in Boston University part-time, where he studied chemical engineering, eventually leading to his long career in false teeth. I only knew those stories from Lexi.
Aunt Hannah told Lexi that Bert had a boss at Potashnik Tooth Company whom he hated, who’d been “picking on him” for years, Leslie Potashnik, one of the sons of the company founder, Dr. Simon Potashnik. According to Aunt Hannah, whenever Bert would invent a new kind of false tooth, Leslie Potashnik would put his name on the patent. That jerk took credit for all the work Daddy did, Lexi told me. There are patents for false teeth? I asked. Back then I didn’t know anything about it. Whenever you invent anything for any business, said Lexi, of course there are patents. Because of Leslie Potashnik, my father hated going to work. That’s why, my sister said, so often when he got home in the evenings, she could hear him through the thin door of the downstairs bathroom in the shower cursing: You son of a bitch, you goddamned bastard