The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ Page 7

  My first mother—my real mother—was an enigmatic figure. I find, when I try to describe her, pale adjectives replace the living presence. Restrained. Self-protective. Gracious with strangers; they loved her. With her family . . . not cold, no. But aloof. Purposely insubstantial, somehow. Emotionally invisible. Even in my memories, the light seems to pass right through her, making her difficult to see. I can get at nothing solid about her but her fears and foibles and unfulfilled desires. She was afraid of authority figures. She yearned for a more glittery and urban life. She was afraid of testing herself and her talents. She was afraid to fail. I remember one or two titanic and terrifying rages from her, one or two shockingly icy and cruel remarks. But those were rare moments when she flashed into relief, a ghost revealed by lightning. Mostly, she was atmosphere.

  Mina, on the other hand, was nothing if not a vivid personality. She only stood about five feet tall, if that, but they were five feet of gruff peasant cheer and practical energy. A Yugoslavian immigrant with a thick accent, she was lavishly affectionate, comically quaint, and down to earth. She never learned to speak good English and I sometimes had to help her read hard words. But she knew what she was about, all right.

  I remember her making beds and cleaning rooms with curt, blunt, almost military efficiency. Chasing my brothers and me around here and there. Laughing, scolding, tickling, threatening to spank but never actually doing it. Driving us with elaborate care in her galumphing jalopy of a car. Always cooking something or baking something, sometimes both at once. I don’t remember ever seeing her sit still to look at a book or magazine. Even when she’d watch TV with us, she’d get so involved in the story she would shout at the hero—“Look out!”—to warn him that the villain was sneaking up behind him. It used to drive us crazy. We tried again and again to explain to her that the characters on screen couldn’t hear her. She’d just laugh at her own silliness and go right on.

  She lived with her family in a tidy little clapboard house in the nearby town of Port Washington. It was a working-class enclave at the time, distinctly lower on the social and economic scale than Great Neck. Her family, as I understood it, was a collection of refugees, chased out of southeastern Europe by the Nazis or the Communists, I was never sure which. There was her older sister, the widow of a German Luftwaffe pilot who’d been shot down in the war. She was gaunt and tart and rather Germanic herself, but kindly for all that. Then there was their brother, a carpenter, who had come to America in time to serve in Korea. He’d been badly injured there when his jeep overturned. He’d had a metal plate installed in his head and was never quite right afterward. A sweet-natured, jolly enough fellow most of the time, he was given to sudden bouts of obsessive agitation, flashbacks to combat, and depressive drinking binges.

  Finally there was Mina’s niece, the daughter of her sister and the dead Luftwaffe guy. She was in her teens then, about ten years older than me. She used to babysit us sometimes. She was a gentle, dreamy girl of truly astounding beauty, blond and slender and delicate as a porcelain figurine. Her ethereal personality turned out to be the forewarning of a mental illness that blighted her adulthood—schizophrenia, I think. But back then, she was always just very kind and soft and patient with me, and I . . .? I fell so deeply in love with her that she left a permanent impression on my soul. Her face became my standard of beauty. Her name became my favorite female name. Sweet, gentle, mentally ill women turn up with alarming regularity as characters in my novels. The psychiatrist’s patient in Don’t Say a Word, the mother in Empire of Lies, the hero’s friend in the young adult story Crazy Dangerous. I’m sure there are more of them. They’re all she. Conjuring her this very moment, I can feel again the pang of my childish devotion. I never got over her.

  I’m not sure how much of Mina’s family history I’ve gotten right here. I’m not sure how much of what I’ve gotten right is true. This is just what I knew about them, or thought I knew, when I was little. My parents used to hint that the sister and the Luftwaffe pilot had never really gotten married, that it was a wartime fling and the beautiful niece whom I loved was illegitimate. In later years, I myself sometimes wondered if the whole family wasn’t actually German, if they hadn’t pretended to be Yugoslavian to avoid the anger that Americans, and especially Jews, still felt toward Germans after the war.

  Never mind, though. None of that bothered me when I was a child. None of it bothers me now. Mina and her family simply became part of my family. And Mina gave me a substantial portion of what mothering I had.

  My own mother resented motherhood. “Even a cat can have kittens,” she once told me bitterly. She loved her children, but she had no use for the day-to-day job of us. She didn’t like to cook, for instance. I think Mina taught her every recipe she knew. I don’t remember Mom ever going to a PTA meeting or volunteering to participate in a school event. She did show up for all the mom necessities. She nursed us through our illnesses. She dispelled our nightmares. She dried our tears and bandaged our bruises after our Western-movie-sized brawls. But she generally performed these tasks with a brusque air of impatience and distraction. She was not like other moms we knew who seemed to mother with their whole selves and as if by nature.

  Mina, though, who had no husband or babies of her own, nurtured children as she nurtured everyone else around her. She just took care of people, that’s all. She took care of her own family—she ended up supporting the lot of them as they declined into disability and old age. She took care of babies as an obstetrics aide at a local hospital. She was a nanny to other families as well as ours. She even won awards for the charity work and church work she did all around her town.

  Much of what she was expressed itself in the kitchen, her dominion. She was an incredible country cook, and her baking was beyond the power of praise. For us children, of course, this was the best thing about her. The Weiner schnitzels she sometimes made us, the steaks, the enormous but nonetheless crispy french fries—incomparable delights of my childhood. And next to the taste of the pastries and cookies she created, all other physical sensations of pleasure paled! It was she who baked our birthday cakes every year. (It was considered bad luck if she spelled your name right in the icing, which thankfully she never did.) But her Christmas cookies, or Mina Cookies as we called them, these were her unbelievably delicious masterpieces.

  The impression those cookies made on me was deep, very deep. When I was forty, I went to Germany for the first time, to Munich. It was right around Christmas. I stepped into the famous Christkindl Markt in Marienplatz: a huge seasonal market in the city’s main square. I took one whiff of the baked goods on sale in the stalls and I was thunderstruck by a visceral, Proustian sense of having stepped into my own memories. It was the smell of Mina Cookies. It was the smell of home.

  We did not celebrate Christmas at my house. Or that is, we did for a while, and then we didn’t. It was never a big event, even when we celebrated it. Hanukkah with its nightly candle-lighting ceremony, its eight days of one present after another—that was really the main attraction. But when I was very little, my father’s radio partner, Dee Finch, a churchgoing Protestant of some sort, would send over a few gifts. We would find them hidden behind a chair on Christmas morning.

  Then, one afternoon, as I was playing in the dining room, I overheard my mother talking on the phone in the kitchen. She was speaking to Finch’s wife. She was asking her not to send us Christmas presents anymore. It was “too much” for my brothers and me to have Christmas and Hanukkah both, she said. Looking back, I’ve come to feel that she was acting on a directive from my father. I think he was moving to protect our Jewish heritage from the seductions of the Christmas festivities all around us. In fact, I have a sweet memory, dating from about this time, of Dad trying to fill the role of Santa Claus in our lives with a character named Hanukkah Harry.1 He played the right Jewish old elf himself, of course. I remember giggling uncontrollably as he took my brothers and me on his knee one after another and listened to our present requests while resp
onding in one of his funny voices.

  At that moment, though—the moment when I overheard my mother on the phone—I was in no way concerned with matters religious. I remember my reaction very clearly. I didn’t care about the loss of Christmas at all. But the presents! The loss of the presents! That, madam, was an outrage! I felt as if I had stumbled on a misguided, not to say evil, parental plot, a conspiracy to cause us to receive fewer gifts. Fewer gifts, I tell you! And the Finches gave good gifts too! Electric football games and those jumbo dump trucks that actually dumped. Really nice stuff. This was no small catastrophe.

  I thought it stank and I didn’t mind saying so. I lodged an eloquent protest, stomping back and forth in front of my mother across the kitchen floor as I declaimed on the injustice of it all. Maybe it was to mollify me—or maybe it was just an excuse to get rid of an annoying child for an evening—but in any case my mother arranged for me to stay overnight at Mina’s house that Christmas Eve.

  I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that Mina was a Christian. I don’t think I would have had any very clear conception of what that actually meant. She was, though. She was a true Christian. Religious, I mean, even devout. She went to church on Sunday. She said her prayers at night. She believed in supernatural presences and events with the faith of a child. She did the sort of charitable work in her community that my parents never did in ours. I don’t think she ever mentioned Jesus to me, but he was alive and real to her. He was—as I see now—the reason she was the way she was, the reason she did the things she did.

  Christmas at Mina’s was an elaborate occasion. The little clapboard house in Port Washington was transformed into what, to me, was a wonderland. There was a towering fir tree scraping the ceiling in one corner of the small front parlor. Mina’s brother climbed a ladder to string the colored lights on the branches while I stood below, craning my neck to watch him. Then I got to help hang the ornaments. And when the lights went on, reflected in the shining red and silver glass of the decorations, my mouth opened in an o.

  Under the parlor windows—the windows that looked out onto the winter streets—there was a long table with a white cloth on it. The cloth was sprinkled with Styrofoam bits like snow. In the midst of the snow, a miniature village of porcelain country houses had been set up. Each house was lit from within by a tiny bulb. Tiny people—the policeman, the businessman with his briefcase, the mom with her carriage—stood on the lawns and sidewalks and streets. A train track encircled the town with a small electric train clacketing round and round on it. You could even put a white pellet in the locomotive’s smokestack so it would send up white smoke and give a whistle: whoo-whoo.

  To decorate the windows themselves, the real windows above the porcelain village, I was given a pack of paper stencils and an aerosol spray can of synthetic frost. I would spray each stencil with the frost and the white powdery shape of it would appear on the glass: Santa Claus or a star or a winged angel. I cannot properly describe how much this delighted me or how beautiful I thought these frost shapes were.

  In the corner opposite the tree, there sat the television set, an old black-and-white one in a wooden cabinet. On top of the cabinet was a record player, a turntable with a spindle at the center of it. A stack of records was held in place at the top of the spindle, and as each album finished, a new one dropped into place and began to play. The songs were sung by the then-still-living singers of an already-passing age: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Ella Fitzgerald. There were carols of strangely elevated loveliness, like “Silent Night,” “Adeste Fideles,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” And there were more contemporary numbers—“Sleigh Ride,” “Silver Bells,” “White Christmas”—that had a rollicking but wistful charm of their own.

  It was Christmas, in other words; a typical American Christmas. And maybe you’ll say I’m describing what needs no description, what every American child has seen and heard for himself, in the movies if not in his own life. But I had not seen or heard it, not anywhere. It was all new to me.

  And then, of course, there was the cooking. There was the warm, succulent smell of the cooking. There were Mina and her sister expertly weaving around each other in the kitchen, bickering as they cooked. Which was another thing about Mina’s family, by the way. They bickered constantly. They were always nattering at one another over something or nothing, on and on in their cartoonish Old World accents. You’ve turned the stove too high now. You’re mixing too much sugar in the batter. If you don’t put the oven mittens back where they belong, I can’t find them when I need them. I don’t know why, but I found this delightful—vital and loving.

  The adults at my house were far more decorous. My parents never squabbled like that at all. There was a sense that hostility was too dangerous, too combustible, to be discharged in playful sparks like that. My mother used to say that if she and my father ever fought—really fought—he would leave her, assuming the marriage was over. My father admitted that this was true. He said that, whenever he saw a couple quarreling, he simply assumed they were going to divorce. Mom and Dad were not cool or controlled with each other—not at all. They were very affectionate. But there was nothing like the unchecked badinage I heard in the kitchen at Mina’s house. The meaningless spats dissipating into cackling laughter. Now lookwhat you’ve done, you’ll burn the whole house down. To me, it sounded like the chuck and crackle of logs on a hearthfire.

  I was given a role to play in all this too: batter to mix, Mina Cookies to lay out on the pan. The mystery of how she made those chocolate and vanilla spirals was revealed to me at last. I got to lick the beater and scrape the batter bowl clean with a spoon, which may have been the single greatest thing that had ever happened to me up to that time. And the beautiful niece, who had been out with friends all evening, came home and petted me and fussed over me and I loved her so. And another record dropped down on the turntable.

  I have been re-creating that Christmas all my life. When we first moved in together, my wife was mystified by the way my normally lofty cultural tastes metamorphosed every December into the predilections of a working-class Yugoslavian immigrant.

  “You want to listen to Andy Williams music? Really?”

  “I like Andy Williams.”

  “Since when?”

  “And how come we don’t have those paper things that you spray and they make angel shapes on the window?”

  “Stencils? You want to stencil frost angels on my windows?”

  “Why not? I like them. They’re nice.”

  This is not to say that I came to believe in Christmas. I didn’t believe in it. The trip to Bethlehem, the virgin birth, the shepherds watching their flocks by night, the three kings, the child in the manger, the salvation of the world: nice stories, but I didn’t buy into any of it. It was a point of pride with me, in fact, that I didn’t. I liked to tease my wife that only a secular Jew like myself could really appreciate the holiday as it deserved. For us, I told her, it was all trees and cookies and colored lights without any of that tiresome religious stuff to worry about. We had no bad memories of childhood Christmases to haunt us. No flashbacks to that time when Dad got drunk and told Uncle Bob what he really thought of him. We came to the day with a clean Jewish slate. We opened our presents. We watched It’s a Wonderful Life on TV. Then we forgot the whole thing until next year.

  But when I came to struggle with the idea of being baptized, when I asked myself how Jesus had first entered my consciousness, it was Christmas I remembered, that first Christmas at Mina’s house.

  It happened at the end of the evening. The music was turned off. The lights on the tree went dark. Mina took me upstairs to what would be my bedroom—and that’s where Jesus was. It was a small and gloomy room, I remember. The bed, framed in dark-stained wood, nearly filled it corner to corner. On the wall, above the headboard, to my right as I was lying down looking up at it, there was a framed picture of Christ. It was a cheap print of some sentimental painting. It showed a long-haired goy gaz
ing soulfully into the middle distance, his coiffed honey-brown locks surrounded by a golden glow. As an adult, I’ve always disliked pictures like that. I’ve always disliked the effeminate piety of them. They have no weight, no tragedy. It’s a cotton-candy god to me: sugar and fluff. In the moment, though, the picture frightened me. To my child’s eyes, it seemed downright eerie. This Jesus whom people prayed to in their churches: he looked other-worldly, spectral, weird. What was he gazing at like that, off in the distance? And why was he glowing? It was spooky.

  I don’t know if I’d ever slept away from home alone before. I wasn’t scared about it exactly, but I was a little nervous. I was afraid of being afraid. I knew I wouldn’t want to call for Mina if I had bad dreams or got anxious in the watches of the night. I wouldn’t want to go sniveling for help in a strange household, especially with the pretty niece around to hear me. So then, how horrible it would be to have to lie alone and wide awake in the alien room with creaks and shadows all around me, and that creepy Jesus hanging over my head.

  Mina turned out the light and left me. I lay in the bed beneath the picture. I was afraid to look at it, but I couldn’t help myself. Every time I forced my eyes shut, I would sense that eerie presence up above me on the wall. From time to time, I would feel compelled to sneak a peek at him—just to make sure he hadn’t moved, to make sure he wasn’t suddenly staring down at me with a malevolent grin. I began to be afraid that the fear of him would keep me up all night.

  It didn’t, though. The Christmas Eve doings had exhausted me. Each time I shut my eyes, they remained closed a little longer. A few more minutes and I was fast asleep. An instant later, so it seemed, the first gray light of Christmas Day was at the window. I had made it to the end of the darkness. I was very relieved.