And the Song We Would Sing

They were living in a fourth-floor walk-up in a late 1890s Brooklyn brownstone near the park. He was feeding breakfast to his son when, Sonja, his older sister with whom he spoke sporadically, called. He held his son in the crook of one arm and with the other hand he held the phone to his ear along with the oatmeal spoon he’d been using to feeding his son.

“Your father,” she said slowly, “died this morning.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and put the child in his high chair. They spoke for a few minutes after which he told his wife, Bess, what had happened.

A graveside service was planned for the next afternoon upstate and he called to rent a car and arrange for a hotel room near the cemetery. It was the same cemetery in which his mother had been buried several years earlier.

That April evening, they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and up the East River Drive, passing the lights of Wall Street, Chinatown, the three other East River bridges. They were, he thought, spectacular and so familiar. He was sad to leave, if only for a day or two.

At the grave side, Sonja brought him around to say hello to family. The resemblance among his father’s relatives was unmistakable. People he’d not seen in ten years and more, some not since he was young. Familiar faces. Names. Their familial off-center smiles. Others he had never seen nor heard of before.

He had moved to the city for college and stayed. And, he thought, without cell phones and email, he’d simply lost track of them. No arguments or disputes. They just went along on separate branching paths.

“You remember Aunt Minnie and Uncle Fred?” Sonja said.

“Yes, the dentist?”

“Well, this is Janice, their great granddaughter.”

“And you remember Ruthie? Ethel’s, granddaughter?”

“Yes.”

“This is Rebecca, her daughter’s youngest child.”

“Hello,” he said, “this is Bess and these are our two children.”

On it went. New people, children of children of aunts and uncles he knew. Cousins of cousins. Generations of births and birthdays and illnesses, passings, and new jobs. Filling gaps in his memory and creating others.

Before the mourners took turns tossing soil into the open grave, holding his son, he spoke of his father. “He was a good man. He worked hard every day, and life for him was not easy, especially in the last years. He was hard to know … hard for me to know.”

They drove back home the next day. The kids were asleep in the back.

“What happened?” Bess asked.

“What?” he said.

“How did you lose track of all those people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ever think about them? Ask about them?”

“Sonja would tell me things once in a while, but I never thought more about it. For a while, without contact, all the names had faces but then they became only names.”

“Doesn’t it make you sad?”

“It does. I feel terrible. I let it happen. Not once really thinking or caring about them. As if when I left, they somehow disappeared.”

“But, it was you who disappeared. Not them.”

“But my parents never…”

“Never what?”

“Never let me know what was happening.”

“And you never asked them?”

“No. I don’t think they were close with anyone beyond their own parents. They weren’t even close with their siblings. My parents and I didn’t talk much and then they were in nursing homes. And with their dementia it became impossible.”

“That’s not really an excuse, and you know it.”

“No. Not an excuse really. An explanation. Maybe.”

“Maybe, but let’s never do that to our children, please,” Bess said. “Let’s keep them connected. Show them how important family is. What it is to be part of a family. Making family the most important thing.”

“I agree, I do. I didn’t grow up with that and it was a loss I won’t let it happen to them.”

Back home, he returned the car and stopped at the market on Eighth Avenue and 12th Street to pick up milk and bread. When he came in, Bess was putting the kids to bed, playing the CD with soft lullabies.

He boiled water for tea, becoming mesmerized by the bubbles twisting and breaking upward, roiling the surface. Its warmth on his face. He drifted into another space.

Once, when he was young, when he was still close to his cousins, his father would drive them to visit in Flatbush or Brighton Beach on a Sunday afternoon and drive home in the evening.

The kettle must have been boiling for a while. Bess came up behind him. She lay her hand on his shoulder, and turned off the burner.

“How are you doing?” she said.

“I’m okay,”

“You sure? Will you tell me what you’re thinking?”

“I was somewhere else, watching water boiling, drifting along to yesterday, and from there to the past, in the car ride home from a trip to see my cousins on my father’s side.

“The windows were down, my father was smoking a pipe, his arm resting out of the open window. My mother on the front seat. And, then she begins to sing. ‘Merrily we roll along’ and Sonja and I joined in and we would sing it a few times until we tired of it, and she started to sing her favorite one. The one I loved. ‘You are my… sunshine’ … my only sunshine…,’ and we sang the whole song, over, and over again, ‘You make me happy when skies are gray,’ until our cheeks hurt from smiling. And then my mother nodded to me and slowed the tempo down and we’d both deepen our voices, for this last time, the last line, ‘Please … don’t … take …… my … sunshine … away.’”

Bess had finished making the tea and she set the cups down on the kitchen table.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too, Bess.”