Spoiler! :
Monday, April 26, 1999
Dear Hannah,
Your father sent me pictures of you from the Passover Seder, and I can not believe how much you have grown! You are a beautiful girl, my dear, and I miss you very much. I think of you every day, but I will especially be thinking of you this Thursday. You are going to be ten years old already? Incredible! I still remember my tenth birthday—
Here the pen stopped. The old man's gaze abandoned the paper and wandered up to gaze out the small window next to his writing desk. Glassy eyes scanned the swarming, bustling New York City laid out below him. He brought one hand up to his cheek, letting the ballpoint pen rest against his dry lips.
...because it was the first time I knew what it was to be poor.
Papa hated poor people. Not people like us, who hardly had any money or food and lived in a one-room flat that was too small to hold us—but people who were poor on the inside. People who had pawned their souls when we pawned our furniture. You could see them sleeping on Bowery, or begging for nickels from the people in the dosshouses. No matter how much our bellies ached from hunger, no matter how cold we were in our meager flat, watching snow collect like dust against the broken windows—no matter how poor we were on the outside, we were not poor on the inside.
“We are a family of kings,” he said, when he came home after another day of looking for work, so late that it was morning. The morning of March 14, 1933. The morning of my tenth birthday—though birthdays didn't carry much importance to us in those years. Mama and I were on the mattress, shivering with hunger and weak with cold, awake long after my brothers had fallen asleep next to us. Papa had been gone since before dawn and had nothing to show for it but shoe-soles that were wearing ever thinner and eyes tired enough for a thousand years of looking. But his shoulders, thin as they were, did not hunch, and his face was hard.
Weathered hands removed his hat from his head. It was one of the few things of value that we had left. Papa never spoke of it, but his silence cradled it, caressing the battered brim and stroking the dome that showed unwarranted wounds of age. It was a noble crown, but also a war helmet, which he had worn in many battles.
He placed the hat on the table.
“Kings.” He spoke quietly but his words seethed. “All of us.”
“Even Mama?” As the words left my lips, my eyes were trained on his, waiting for a smile.
For a heartbeat, he just looked at me with terrible eyes—eyes that looked, but didn't see. Then he turned away and leaned down over the washbowl to splash the day off of his face.
I let myself fall onto my side and curled up on the hard mattress, with my back towards Mama and her round belly. No matter how late he stayed out, and no matter how tired I was, I never let myself fall asleep until Papa came home. Before, that simple act had guaranteed me a smile—every night, when he saw me, his filthy face would come alive with happiness. But that night, I was just another of his burdens. I was nothing. I squeezed my eyes shut against hot tears and hugged my throbbing stomach.
The fist of hunger is nothing compared to the jaws of defeat.
I didn't want to sleep that night. The sharp, empty pain in my gut told me I couldn't sleep. I didn't deserve it. The chill air of our flat stung my tear-stained face, and the sounds of my family's heavy breathing drowned me. And I decided, sometime during the night, that I would go with Papa in the morning and together, we would find work. Ten years old, I decided, was old enough to help Papa.
When I woke up, the sun was hardly risen but Papa had already gone. Panic boomed inside me—how had I fallen asleep? How had I missed Papa leaving? How had I slept through my first real responsibility? I clambered off of the mattress as quickly as I could without waking Mama or my brothers. Frustrated tears threatened my eyes as I pulled on my coat (which was Papa's old jacket and reached below my knees) and left the flat.
Outside, everything was coated in gray pre-dawn light, as though the city had been forgotten overnight and collected a thin layer of dust. I stood there on the stoop for a moment, watching the parade of men trudge past me, hat-brims low over sallow, shadowy faces, washed with determination. So many faces—and they were all the same.
As I stepped off the stoop, the men turned from faces to legs. Worn leather shoes shuffling along a dusty 2nd Avenue. A flood of legs, all in the same grays and blacks and browns—any one of them could have been Papa.
Not knowing what else to do, I started wandering through the street, gazing up at the faces. I realized then how poorly I knew my own father. I convinced myself that I could have walked right in front of him without knowing it. On the street, he would just be another jobless Jew in the Lower East Side. Just another king.
And I wondered: would he recognize me?
I was a small boy—barely taller than most men's waists and skinnier than I should have been—but the emptiness inside me then was big enough for a giant. Big enough to devour me. Big enough to cloud my eyes and numb my feet and dull my brain. The world around me touched my eyes and ears but left no fingerprints. I walked on blindly, unfeeling, not knowing where I was going. All I knew was that I didn't care.
And then I saw something. A glimmering oasis of color amid the eternal grays of the city. I walked towards it, forcing my eyes to focus. What I saw made the emptiness inside me swell so huge that I was sure I wouldn't be able to contain it all.
It was a fruit stand. Oranges, grapes, apples, bananas, pears—the wooden crates displayed such fantastic colors that my eyes watered. I had seen fruit stands before, but I knew I had never seen such a glorious eruption of color in my life.
I was right in front of it now. My nose was mere inches from the glistening red apples. The tips of my fingers tingled.
My arm raised. My fingers stretched out wide and grasped one of the apples tight to my palm. It was hard and heavy and smooth.
“Apples are a dozen for a dime or a penny for one.”
I clutched the fruit tight against my chest.
And ran.
Papa hated thieves. Thieves were people who were poor on the inside. Every New Yorker in those days was poor on the outside—none of us had enough food to eat or enough clothes to wear. None of us had enough of anything, except hunger and holes and shattered pride. To steal from someone who was struggling was the poorest thing you could do, Papa said. And since we were all struggling, stealing from anyone was despicable.
I knew this. I knew Papa would hate me if he found out. But I kept running, clutching the apple in my hand. When it is quiet, I can still hear the echoes of “stop thief!” engraved on the inside of my ears. My legs ached, the paving stung the soles of my feet through the bottoms of my shoes. The cold air burnt my lungs.
But still, I kept running.
I don't remember how the apple tasted. All I remember is that I ate it as fast as I could. I was destroying evidence. Mama used to tell me never to eat apple-seeds, or “applebeans,” as she liked to call them. She said they brought bad luck. I carefully picked out all of the seeds before shoving the core into my mouth.
I didn't tell anyone about what I'd done. I thought Mama would have scolded, my brothers would have been jealous, and I didn't think I could stand Papa's disappointment. Not yet.
That night, when Papa came home, he still hadn't found work. I could see the humiliation in every part of him. It dripped from his hair, clung to the wrinkles in his face, tangled itself into his beard. I turned away from him and pretended I hadn't noticed that he was home. Pretended to be asleep.
“Daniel, my boy,” he said, tossing his hat onto the table. His warm words churned the cold air.
I sat up and forced myself to look at him.
And then something miraculous happened.
First, little folds rippled out from his lips, as though his face was a puddle and his mouth was someone's finger, tickling the water. The surface of the water was nubbly with dark specks of dirt, and as the ripples got bigger it was like the specks fell into them, making them look as though they had been drawn in charcoal. His lips stretched tight over his big, crooked teeth, sending ripples down into his beard and up to his eyes.
For the seconds that his face held the smile, I was the happiest boy in all of Manhattan. The whole city (the whole world) was in that smile, traced in those creases and glistening in those eyes that were too tired to see it. And it was all mine.
“Happy birthday,” he said, and then turned away to wash the day off of his face.
The next morning, I planted the applebeans in a tin bowl I found in the street after one of the breadlines had cleared. Over the next few weeks, that tin bowl full of earth became my one focus. I kept it behind the crate that our washbowl was on and watered it every day. Every morning, after Papa left and before Mama woke up, I would take the bowl outside and sit on the stoop with it on my lap so it could get first dibs at the day's sunlight. I promised myself that once the tree sprouted, I would tell Papa about the apple I stole.
All my hunger, all my guilt, all my emptiness was channeled into willing the seeds to grow.
On the morning of April 8, 1933, there was a small green sprout in my bowl. My heart leaped. I had never seen something so beautiful in all my life. The tiny green leaves were already infinitely complex and unique, like a newborn baby's fingerprint. All day my eyes explored them. My thoughts were filled with apple trees, looming over the city and dropping apples into the hands of all the people who were poor on the outside. Nobody would ever again be so poor on the inside as to steal apples, because you can't steal something if it is falling to you from the sky.
And my thoughts were also filled with Papa. Knowing that it soon wouldn't be a secret anymore, my memory of being a thief stopped aching. I knew he would smile when he saw the sprout. And when Papa smiled, it made me so rich on the inside that I was a king of kings.
I was the only one who sat awake all night, because my brothers always slept like stones and Mama she said she needed her rest because of the baby. I sat on one of the crates that we used instead of chairs, with the tin bowl on my lap and my eyes fastened tight on the door. Waiting.
I sat that way all night.
A few hours after sunrise, there was a knock on the door. I must have answered (though I don't remember what I said), because soon the door swung open and a man walked in.
It wasn't Papa.
It was a policeman, coming to tell us that Papa's body had been found in the street, run over by an automobile. His hat had been stolen.
The old man's dark, wet eyes blinked, as though in an effort to clear something that was clouding them. Slowly, they scanned the city before him—taking in the shoppers flitting in and out of storefronts, the bright billboards, the new, colorful buildings. His eyes shifted to the balcony, where a crab-apple tree was growing in a large clay pot. New, bright green leaves glowed in the early spring light. Slowly, minutely, he shook his head. He took his right hand away from his cheek, bringing his pen away from his lips and back to the piece of paper on his desk.
—and it feels as though it were only yesterday. How time flies! Before I know it, you will be diving yourself all the way to New York to visit me. Here's a big happy birthday wish to a very special girl.
So so much love,
Grandpa Daniel
)
right now.)
It's not that this doesn't work as a letter, not at all! It's just that... I don't know, I guess it just seems weird that he's writing it to his ten year old granddaughter... for her birthday.
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