Book of Numbers

I also got a letter then—through the mail, through the fanmail, Cal—forwarded from Random House, October or November, 2001. I responded, and it led to a lunch. Which led to another. Retirees transited in from the Five Towns on the Island and from Main Line Philly to have lunch with me and then go gawk at the pit downtown.

They were readers, they were my only readers—if I didn’t snare the women I at least had a corner table with the only consolation demographic, geriatric Jews—but they didn’t want to talk about my book. They wanted to talk about my father.

You know, I’m sure you do, Cal, how you expend all this effort writing something and thinking through the detail of every decision (do I name the restaurants we met at? or just describe them? do I mention what was ordered? who took care of the bill?), but then you finish, or you delude yourself into finishing, and realize—too late, with the book already a classic of the bargain bin—that you’d missed something, a scene or even just a line that would’ve brought everything together, that would’ve resolved all the fogs—a gesture just as crucial to your life, but also as easily forgotten in daily life, as a person you’d loved who’s now dead.

My father. I’d hardly mentioned him in all my pages. Because Moms’s account of their meeting had demoted him into a handsome uniform that acted swiftly. My father was like a new character introduced at the end of a book, as the end of a book—a Daddy ex machina, maybe. And it’s been on my mind ever since, or—I’m trying for honesty—what’d then been a guilty notion I was in no psychological state to pursue is recurring only now, the notion that if there were to be any reissue or updated edition I would write an afterword to it, an afterword about him. And hey, a girl can dream, can’t she? a girl can flashback????

David Cohen, Private First Class, US First Army, had liberated Buchenwald, where the Yiddish competency he demonstrated so impressed the OSS officers he debriefed that they took him along to interrogations at Dachau, Mauthausen, and after V-E Day, here, to Vie

To be totally accurate, Cal, the guy who’d read my book and initially contacted me was this decorous epitomist Co

Cal, they were filling in a man I had never known. A man my mother, reciting the shameless sanitized version of this story, the Story, had never known either—or had forgotten with her arrival in Jersey, her renaming as Gloria, her infirmities (avitaminosis) (stomatitis), and lack of baby, her spats with my father’s parents, attempts to master cooking and English by reading Ladies’ Home Journal recipes and cooking through the irreconcilable fascinations of The Honeymooners and Bonanza.

Vie