Two summers ago, a relieved airline stewardess handed over a wheelchair containing my mother-in-law. Her nightgown peeped from under her skirt. Her wig sat too far back on her bald head. Below her bare knees, two identical onion-shaped knots kept her mended nylon stockings from sliding down her useless legs. Her eyes lit up when she saw me.
“My sister!” she exclaimed, and covered my face with wet kisses.
Behind her, my father-in-law looked dignified in his ancient striped suit, one of the three miraculously found still in his closet upon his return from Auschwitz. He advanced carefully, leaning on a polished dark brown walking stick, cautious not to antagonize his damaged heart. In his free hand he carried his wife’s black leather purse, the one with the silver handle. The purse was empty — his wife had no use for it — but in his code of behavior no woman should travel without one. He held me tight, his eyes shut in silent prayer. Then he puckered his dry lips and aimed them straight at mine.
We were driving them to their new home, my husband and I explained, a cozy place close to ours, just redecorated. But my father-in-law wouldn’t hear of it. Thank you, he said politely, but the extra expense was not necessary at all. He really wanted to spend his time with us — what were families for? I waited for my husband to argue, but he simply spread his arms in helplessness. I did a rapid mental shifting of the children’s sleeping arrangements: My younger son could move into my daughter’s room. My older son was abroad in school for another four months. It was possible. For a while, anyway. I nodded and said, Of course, stay with us. The pleasure was ours.
As the days go by, I watch with amusement tinged with wonder the little rituals that make up their lives: His hat always perched on the left handlebar of the bicycle in my son’s room. Her chamber pot installed under the illuminated globe. The old prayer book set on her lap every morning. Her finger following the lines — the picture of concentration — even though it’s been years since her eyes could actually read. The paper-thin peelings of tomatoes from breakfast, rolled into tight little roses. “You can use these for dinner,” he says.
Endearing, harmless little gestures? Yes. But, oh, the repetitiveness of it all. Daily, without the slightest deviation.
Those two pairs of false teeth placed in separate glasses of water every evening in the same spot on the kitchen table, only to be found there the next morning hidden under loose greenish strands of food floating on the surface. Or the rancid odor that trails in my father-in-law’s wake on Thursdays because “a bath is something to honor the Sabbath with.” The nail clippings on Tuesdays: her hard, deformed brownish toenail lying on a tissue next to his fragile, calcium-deficient one. He carefully pleats the tissue into eight equal folds and then burns it in a deep ashtray to which she sometimes holds the candle.
Her devotion to her husband is total, even at those times when there seems to be a woolen sock pulled over her brain. She has called him “Tatika” (“Father”) ever since she gave him his one-and-only son. “Tatika,” she whimpers if he stays a bit late at the synagogue. Her bulky figure cowers on her stool like an inanimate lump — until he returns and warms his hands in hers. They sit there together, hand in hand, his rain-drenched hat still on his head. A tiny puddle beneath her stool reveals her loss of muscle control. It’s from fear, he apologizes. Huddled and dripping, in the midst of my gleaming, modern-furnished living room, they look like survivors of some awful shipwreck from another time.
“Please, God,” I find myself praying, “please do not take him even half an hour before you take her.”
This is how I see my father-in-law day after day: sitting in a corner of our kitchen, in front of an open, densely lettered book containing his congealed past. For long hours he frowns, tugs at his beard, and sways. Sometimes he remains motionless, his eyes rolled up toward the ceiling, his thin beard thrust forward, like an ancient monument. Often I catch myself tiptoeing around in my own kitchen, afraid of intruding on his private audience with God.
There is no mystical aura about my mother-in-law. Yet it is she who carries a special mark — a memorial — on top of her head: A domelike lump the size of a man’s thumb. A two-inch text written by an SS guard in Auschwitz who smashed her on the skull for stealing potato peels. He hit her with the heavy lid of a pot she was scrubbing.
“I didn’t mind the scrubbing,” she told me once, long ago. “I was used to hard work at home, and I could easily make the pots shine like the ‘mirror’ they wanted to see. Besides, it felt good to be near potatoes again.”
But the worst, she said, was having to climb into those huge pots. Each day, she had to confront her face reflected in the shiny surface: The shorn hair growing back in patches. The cracked lips and the empty eyes with the missing lashes. Unlike the other women in camp, she was robbed of the image of herself that she carried around, from the time she had last seen herself in an ordinary mirror, with full hair and young eyes and a smile that men would notice.
“But I don’t regret it. I kept my younger sisters alive with those potato peels. Nor did I ever complain. Not like the Stein sisters.” A special scorn came into her voice whenever she mentioned these childhood acquaintances. “Instead of trying to figure out how to survive, they constantly whined.
“ ‘If only I had my green cashmere shawl,’ ” she said, imitating one of the Stein girls, sniveling in the camp during a harsh, cold winter night, “ ‘how warm I would be.’
“They were weak, up here.” My mother-in-law pointed a flour-covered finger at her head. “And none of them survived.”
This conversation took place in her kitchen. I can still see her pounding at the bread dough with her rolling pin, like a judge lowering her gavel at the pronouncement of a sentence: for the Stein sisters it could not be otherwise.
Half a year has passed since my in-laws moved in. I am more or less used to them by now, even my father-in-law’s constant presence in my kitchen — always at the same edge of the table, near the wall, a clean kitchen towel spread under his long, dark book. A destitute patriarch re-creating his old world in a corner. Still, I’m constantly having to reach or walk around him to get the things I need.
“I am disturbing you,” he says one day, breaking his usual silence. His eyes bore into mine, keenly scrutinizing my expression as I struggle to answer.
“No,” I say. “You are no trouble at all.” On the contrary, I tell him; he is the reason my business is thriving these days. “You pray for me. That is why things are going so well.”
He laps this up avidly, like a stray cat given a saucer of fresh milk.
In truth, my business is not thriving at all. Neither is my husband’s. And with my in-laws’ doctor bills accumulating and the full-time help we’ve had to bring in, we’re finding it hard to make ends meet.
But I have given my father-in-law a big idea. And he has shifted his location. Now he sits right across from me at the living-room table, where I have installed my business headquarters. He sways back and forth in a frenzy, reciting the Psalms over and over again. He has a new mission in life, and I have a new personal cheerleader.
But my mother-in-law is less happy. When I enter their room the next morning, she is sitting upright in her bed.
“She stole my teeth,” she says, pointing at me. Her mouth is dribbling, her voice shrill. This is not the sweet, docile woman I know. There is hatred in her eyes.
I knock several times on my teeth to prove they are my own, that I don’t need hers. I bring her teeth from the kitchen. She pushes them away. “Not mine,” she says. All day long, she follows me with a glare of distrust. With my husband, however, she is her old pliant self.
“My teeth,” she says vehemently whenever I pass through her field of vision. “Give me back my teeth.”
I cover her hand with mine so we can knock together on my teeth. She hits my cheek with a strong, swift blow. I am hurt.
“Her brain is like Swiss cheese,” her doctor informs us. “The older she gets, the more holes and the less cheese.
“However —” and he casts a meaningful sideways glance in my direction — “she can continue to live like this for a long time.”
That night, I can’t fall asleep. Is she sensing, through the veil of her senility, that I don’t love her as much as her son does? Of course I don’t. I feel I have reached my limit. I have no more left in me to give.
I toss and turn in bed. The kitchen clock strikes one. In the room on my left — my son’s room — I hear my father-in-law stir. In my mind, I follow his hands as they palpate the wrinkled apples he has placed in a circle around my son’s computer, realigning them in order of ripeness. My ear follows the slow shuffle of his leather slippers in the hallway: one hand holding a heavy, leather-bound psalmbook with yellowing pages, the other gripping the fly of his too-short pajama trousers, which he never bothers to keep closed.
I hear the water trickle as he purifies his hands in the ritual way: three long streams on each hand. And then the dragging of the chair across the tiled floor. The incantation of the ancient midnight prayer filters through the open bedroom window, accompanied by the sucking sound of his tongue landing on his bare gum.
As his sobs grow louder and louder, a recurrent anxiety scrapes again at the back of my mind, a familiar niggling question: Am I doing this right?
A story I once learned in school resurfaces in my mind: The Talmud gives the example of two sons — one rich, one poor. Both deferred to the Bible’s fifth commandment: “Honor your father and mother.” The rich son took his old parents into his luxurious home and gave them the best that money could buy. Daily, he served them freshly slaughtered chicken, and ordered his servants to indulge their slightest whims. This son went to hell.
The other son — the poor one — squeezed his parents into his crowded dwelling and begged his father to shoulder part of the labor. Each day, the son took his father with him to the fields and let his father work alongside him. This son went to paradise.
Why?
Because he made his father feel needed.
Is my care for my in-laws limited to their bodily needs? That kind of care I dispense proficiently. But the warmth and attention they crave — that I give out in meager doses, often grudgingly, and with guilt.
Guilt over what? I ask myself.
Deep down, I know the answer. I have substituted them for the parents I don’t have. This is my chance to be a daughter — a chance I cannot turn down.
But how to dissociate myself from the decay of age? From the scents that assail our flat: a stale, musty, sour smell, like the interior of a dingy old closet, blended with the odor of mothballs and accidental beads of urine?
And how do I confront the inescapable comparison of my own deteriorating, middle-aged body with the finished product that taunts me daily?
And their offspring, snoring beside me: how to stop regarding him as their extension? And sometimes, when my eyes are closed, confusing him with the original mold — his father?
A thud makes me jump out of bed. I throw on a robe and rush into their room. My mother-in-law is sitting up in bed, her useless legs dangling over the edge.
“What is it?” I ask.
She fixes her film-covered blue eyes on mine, willing me not to look down at the sodden bed. I pull a clean nightgown over her head while lowering the soiled one, so as not to expose the shame of the heavy, empty breasts nodding on the round belly. I clean the wrinkled hide, uttering soothing noises. I cannot recall feeling such tenderness for my babies when they woke me in the middle of the night.
My mother-in-law takes my hand and places it on her cheek. I let it rest there and shed a tear for my own mother, who died young and beautiful, never having a chance to become this used up.
Summer drifts by, and the High Holidays approach — a particularly heart-wrenching period for my father-in-law, who knows that on the holiest of days, Yom Kippur, the Almighty fetches the holiest of men. In his mind, this leaves him with very few days on earth.
A week before the holidays begin, he deposits a crumpled hundred-dollar bill on the kitchen counter. His voice is tearful.
“My dearest,” he says, “you have been a devoted daughter-in-law. God will repay you for your deeds. But I want to leave you my own token of gratitude. Go out and purchase yourself the most exquisite pair of silver candlesticks you can find.”
From last year’s scene with the silver tray, I have learned it is a waste of time to protest. So I thank him and say I am touched. But a familiar flutter in my stomach begins: the sinking feeling that I have before taking on the burden of a large expense.
“Now what?” I ask my husband.
“Nothing,” he says. “Just go out and buy them.”
I buy them. They cost $950. My father-in-law’s eyes light up when he sees them.
With a straight face I give him the change: one dollar.
“Ninety-nine dollars,” he says. “Expensive, but well spent. Never scrimp on quality, I always say.”
Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, arrives. I haul my mother-in-law to the synagogue at the local old-age home, the only synagogue in town with an elevator. She loves the service of the High Holidays and used to croon along with the cantor. Now she sits there as a spectator, in her new black dress with the white satin collar and her new black suede shoes. Her eyes shine with excitement. Her cheeks are rosy. She looks like a child at a birthday party.
As Yom Kippur draws near, my father-in-law sighs louder during his meditations, and sobs longer into the night.
On Yom Kippur Eve, he sits at the head of the dining-room table. His smooth skull — freshly shaven in honor of the holiday — gleams like a billiard ball. He is garbed in his ritual white cotton kittel, the one he will be buried in.
“Approach, my children,” he says in a trembling voice.
We approach. He puts his hands on the crown of my head. His lips move to say a blessing, but he bursts out crying.
“Dear children,” he hiccups, “pardon me if I ever offended you. I will always be there to solicit God’s protection over you. Even from heaven.”
My husband joins in the crying. I tiptoe out of the room: I have been to this movie last year.
The holiday of Sukkot arrives. Again we are united around a table set with porcelain and crystal. The discourse soon turns to food. The main orator is my father-in-law: How his mother would never have brought to the table a bird without stuffing. The poulet au naturel I have served, his tone implies, is nothing but a naked chicken. How the taste of the tschoulent — a traditional bean casserole — could be improved if I used chicken fat instead of bottled oil. And how could I possibly rob these mushrooms of the exquisite taste of an egg stirred into them?
He doesn’t mean to criticize me, I know. It is his aspiration to perfection that prods him to be fastidious.
The day after, my father-in-law is weak. We try to rest his heart as much as possible. At the end of the evening meal, my husband extends an arm to help him out of his chair. My father-in-law leans heavily on my husband, his eyes shut in weariness.
The doorbell rings. My friend Blanca — a truly beautiful woman — breezes in. Within seconds, as if injected with a magical drug, my father-in-law sheds ten years. He slips out of my husband’s arm and straightens his back. His eyes open wide. He takes Blanca’s hand in his, bows low over it, and, in the clearest, most melodious voice I’ve ever heard come out of his throat, says, “Welcome, welcome,” as if she were the Messiah.
I do not have the generosity in my heart to be relieved by his miraculous recovery. Nor am I amused. I am just plain irritated.
“It is time they moved into their own apartment,” I insist to my husband that night.
“It will upset my father. You know how bad his heart is.”
I snort. “I’ll take responsibility for his health,” I say. “He’ll be just fine.”
In the morning I have no change of heart. I am out the door hunting for an apartment right after breakfast. Luckily, something turns up almost right away. There is one located just across the boulevard from our building. It is beautifully outfitted with crystal chandeliers and old Hungarian rosewood furniture. It has high ceilings, tall windows, lots of light.
A week later, after lunch, I ceremoniously put into my father-in-law’s hand a key.
“From now on, you shall be able to welcome us into your home,” I say.
I expect him to object, but he says nothing. For several days he follows me around with dejected eyes. On the appointed morning, he puts on his best navy suit and selects the walking stick with the silver lion on the handle — the one he uses only on the Sabbath. He then takes his wife’s hand and stands patiently next to her wheelchair in front of the door. Her fingers immediately clasp his, her blue eyes trusting. He looks like an aged man burdened with an old baby and ordered into exile for some ill-defined crime.
I do not see him shed one tear. Rather, I am the one who cries. Standing at my high window, watching my husband lead them away, I cry. I know my children are standing somewhere behind me, looking at me with expressions I do not care to see. I feel my parents looking, too.
I cry as they cross the street, as the wheelchair is hoisted up over the curb. I cry when I catch a last glimpse of the billowing green silk-and-cashmere scarf I purchased and tied around my mother-in-law’s neck for the trip. It waves at me in the wind before falling on her shoulder and vanishing into the house.
“Damaged Hearts” is reprinted from Tikkun magazine, a bimonthly Jewish critique of politics, culture, and society, P.O. Box 460926, Escondido, CA 92046, (800) 395-7753.
— Ed.
