Good Bread

Good Bread
H.M. Cooper

When my father was a little boy, hunger hung tenaciously around his neck like a wraith. To an undiscerning Jewish child, it was a persistent, hapless angel he could not hope to shake. His sister said they didn’t know bread existed that wasn’t soaked in water before it could be eaten. Their small bare feet were swathed in rags to keep them warm in winter snow. She told of their random missions to the outskirts of the village to steal tomatoes from the frozen fields, her childish form spread across his back like a hammock. Their tired Polish town was near the German border when the cursed fighting started in 1914. It was sacked and pillaged by each army as they advanced and retreated, each time playing havoc with the resources of the tiny pool. Teddy was 7 when it began. He was brutally self-sufficient when it ended. He didn’t tell me any of this. I heard it second hand.

After the war it was not much better.  His mother and father abandoned the older children to the indifferent custody of various relatives when they boarded the steerage of an ocean going ship for a cheap passage to Canada. Teddy was left to care for his younger brother. Neither of them knew very much about the irrelevant concept of love, and when the two of them were finally sent for 5 years later they were anything but close. They never spoke to each other in adulthood and no mention of Poland was ever heard to pass from their lips. Their childhood, if such a wealthy word could be used to describe their early years, was an anguished nation criss-crossed like a roadmap by pain. 

I can only lay down each word like a stencil and suggest in clumsy block letters what I imagine to be true about my father’s life in Europe. By comparison, my childhood was idyllic. It was measured by sprawling family picnics and plush TV shows for children; a reality made almost pastel by Bugs Bunny and The Cisco Kid.  I have only known the kind of starvation that a chocolate bar can fix and it is no great secret that I eat good bread. No one ever asks me about Teddy, he is an all but forgotten figure, but in the reeling documentary that is sometimes my imagination, I always say to an anonymous inquisitor, (I imagine he’s the angel asking questions at heaven’s gate) “I have nothing bad to say about my father.” That’s not because he was perfect. It’s because I choose to approach our relationship that way.

In my memory, Teddy was not a difficult man. He was not given to complex emotions or torturous mood swings. Much of my own knowledge of him was based on occasional Sundays when the extended family would gather at our small, semi-detached house. The women buzzed noisily in the living room like a blue and red haired coven of hags, while the men gathered around the kitchen table in a tight pack, howling like a crowd of wild bears over hands of cards. Reckless kids ran helter skelter through the heaving chain of human characters, mindful of nothing except the play of ragged but energetic games.

Teddy worked two jobs. In the day he was a sewing machine operator at a suit factory and at night he was the manager of a small local movie theatre that boasted a red neon sign flashing its name ‘The Garden’ in blues and greens. I rarely saw him, since he left before I awoke in the morning and returned after I had gone to sleep at night. This was thought to be a good thing for everyone because my mother, my grandfather and my aunt, who also lived in the tiny world of our boxy domicile, were happy with his absence. There was constant shouting in our house, only made more raucous when Teddy was there. I wasn’t exempt from this phenomenon, which seemed to be as much a fact of nature as thunderstorms to me, but I was rather under the radar of it. The chaos was above me, and never seemed to touch me directly. I was a little wayfarer in a desert of noise.

I think the main aspect of my relationship with my father was that although he was at all times my parent and an authority figure, I never remember him patronizing me. This wasn’t a matter of any obvious policy, nor was it a factor of weakness or oversight. Perhaps it was because I didn’t see him every day that he remained a companion as much as a role model and the truth is that I don’t have an enormous collection of stories about him. When I sort over what I do remember one thing stands out almost every time. In the creases that these memories create he was mostly laughing. Not a guffaw, not a howl but, consistently, at least a quiet chuckle.

Once, and I say ‘once’ advisedly, my father won at cards. He called me quietly out from play with my cousins and said we were going to the variety store owned by a family friend close by. We had a four block walk ahead of us, and I remember walking swiftly beside him while talking on wildly, as children do, with my arms flying like soft missiles around my chest. Before I realized it was about to happen I walked at full speed directly into a lamppost. It was an absolutely sudden jolt that really hurt. I was stunned and just about to burst into tears when I looked at my dad. He was laughing. Not a mean laugh. A good hearted, robust, conspiratorial laugh.

Teddy’s humour was not sophisticated, but it was not selfish either. On another occasion he took my cousin Miriam and I on another walk. Teddy loved to go for walks and we loved going with him. This specific time I took my tricycle with me, and we walked several miles away to a large wooded park. Somehow we ended up on a dirt cliff high above the ground. My tricycle was awkward and the path was narrow; my dad, who always wore dress pants and hard shoes, slipped and fell over the side of the path but not to the bottom. He was clinging, instead to the side of the slope, covered in mud. He was laughing. His self-deprecating humour made us laugh, too even though we were a little scared. He climbed back on the path quickly and we went on.

My father used to take me to a place that was full of mystery when I was very small. It was called “The Oak Leaf Steam Bath”. It carried that name because it contained large brushes made entirely of oak leaves bound together by the stems. These natural brushes were used to whip tiny bars of soap dumped in tin pails into lather. The brushes were so big and I was so small that one pass of the soapy leaves over my naked, tender body was enough to cover me from head to toe. Once soaped over, we would venture into the steam room which was a concrete bunker with hot bricks at one end and a series of wide steps at the other. The baggy older men used to wear felt hats which they would fill from a tap with cold water and tip over themselves.

When the steam bath was finished my father would wrap me in a clean white sheet and we would lie down in a large room filled with brightly coloured plastic couches at floor level. Closed doors, leading to private rooms, stretched along the upper balcony. These doors were a powerfully curious feature of the place to me, and I had no idea what was behind them or what they could possibly be for, but when I asked my father about them he said ‘It’s nothing” and dismissed the question. I realised, in retrospect, years later that the rooms were for male partners. Still, he was even and good-natured and didn’t condemn the question or betray the answer.

I was a good swimmer as a boy but my father never learned to swim. One time he took me to the local swimming pool which was only five feet deep. My father was about 5’5” tall. I was happily swimming about in the deep end when the lifeguard’s whistle blew an alarm. Everybody had to leave the pool. As I was swimming over to the side I noticed that the lifeguard was helping someone in trouble close by. It was my father. He was in over his head. I swan around the two of them saying “you ok, dad? He was laughing. That gave me a new perspective on the sliding scale of what was funny.

I think my father gave me confidence. I think he gave me humour. Perhaps that’s why I have nothing bad to say about him.

Summer camp was a world of wonder for me. I unabashedly enjoyed everything about it. One year, when visitor’s day arrived, my father and mother and other family members made the two hour drive to see me. Almost every camper had visitors and the grounds were as crowded as a company picnic might be. We were strolling along a small route near the perimeter when we ran into a family my mother knew. Among them was a boy, perhaps 12 years old, who was completely bald. He stood out like a smooth, polished stone in a collection of cut coloured glass. It was all any of us could do not to look, but to my father it was too much to let pass. He stammered out, with a giggle in his throat, “What is it? The boy’s bald?”

My mother turned a purplish shade of red. In my mind’s eye she hit him with the picnic hamper, but I don’t think she really did. Teddy’s humour was the basic brand you would find in the dirt paths of a Polish village. It would have been hard to pass by a perfectly obvious opportunity without making a comment. 

We were a poor family and couldn’t afford to go to synagogue on Yom Kippur, a sacred day in the Jewish New Year. One year there was an exception; I think someone may have given us a gift of tickets for the day. We went to a large congregation in the uptown area of the city, but halfway through the service, on a day that is supposed to be a fasting day, my father found me and said, “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

We strolled down the street for a while with me making my usual childlike chat, until we came to a restaurant. My father gestured that we should go in. We sat down at the counter. I was confused. My dad couldn’t be wrong, but wasn’t this a fasting day? He ordered a bacon and tomato sandwich. Not only was it food, but it was not kosher and it was forbidden. When it arrived, my father picked the dark triangle in his hands and put it to his mouth. He was laughing. It wasn’t an indulgent laugh and it wasn’t disrespectful.  It was, perhaps, knowing and mischievous .He wasn’t ignoring God or disobeying Him. He was slipping down that muddy slope and he was laughing all the way.

Before he turned 60 he came down with Parkinson’s disease. He slowly became unable to operate his machine and for a few months his buddies would give him a few of their piecework stubs so that he wouldn’t be let go. He did get let go, at the same time as the owner sold “The Garden”. This was a devastating double blow to Teddy, who had secretly planned to buy the tiny cinema but never planned on how to get the money for it. He was, in one stroke, sick, unemployed, broke and crippled. Within two years my mother couldn’t care for him at home and he became a full time resident of a nursing home. It wasn’t long before he was so frail I could carry him from the wheelchair to the bed even though I was not a strong boy.

He lingered for a long while it seemed, but there was one thing that happened that I will never forget. It was a dream I had not long before he died.

I was in our little bathroom at our little house, but it was full of people. They were all my friends. It was very chaotic, noisy and crowded and I wanted very badly to get out. By squeezing though the tiny throng I made my way out the door and found myself in a darkened, silent hallway. To my right there was a doorway leading to a large darkened room. In the centre of the room was a rectangular pedestal and there was a bright stream of sunlight shining directly on it from a long, tall arched window. Lying on the pedestal was a man wrapped in a white sheet. There was a mysterious force, perhaps curiosity, pulling me into the room.

I approached the pedestal slowly and tentatively, making out as I did the shape on top of it. It was my father and he looked to be dead. I stood by his side, looking down at him, and a terrible rush of emotion wracked my body as tears filled my eyes. I said, “Dad, o dad. Look what they’ve done to you.” He looked up at me then, with the most beautiful, angelic face I have ever seen. He said, “It’s all I ever wanted, sweetie. It’s all I ever wanted.”