Endless Blind Passions - Chapter 9
Fleeing poverty and pogroms in the Ukrainian village where they lived, Beatrice and Leo’s parents, like Monty’s maternal grandparents, immigrated to America around 1905. More immediately they feared their clandestine revolutionary activities were about to be discovered. Purportedly, Leo’s family had printed political pamphlets on a primitive press hidden in the basement. His father was determined as well to avoid being drafted to fight in the czarist war with Japan, in which Jewish boys were treated as cannon fodder and routinely sent to the front lines.The family brought their politics with them to America. After settling in Ohio, Leo’s father got a job at a steel mill, a setting ripe for organizing unions and proselytizing converts to Marxism. “I remember going to the mill to help my dad distribute leaflets,” recalls Leo. “To get around I had to jump over rivulets of red-hot molten metal running along the factory floor. The air there was burning hot—like hell.”
Caught and fired at several mills, Leo’s father eventually set up a cubbyhole-size shoe repair shop. But he spent much of his time attending secret meetings, standing outside workplace exits handing out flyers, and organizing strikes. A few years after Beatrice was born, their father died from peritonitis contracted during an appendectomy, rumors circulating that the surgery had been purposely botched.
“Dad was rarely home,” says Leo, “except when he was hosting famous leftists passing through town. When he did come home, like for dinner, he had an awful temper. He’d often explode with rage, striking me or Mom.” Evidently social justice was easier to preach standing atop a soapbox than sitting around the table with one’s family.
The paternal anger streak passed down from father to son, Monty’s father and brother both having anger issues. Only Monty seems immune, cultivating from an early age other ways to express his emotions, and more devious and effective means to get his way.
Monty and his brother are polar opposites—Monty the towhead, Dave with curly chestnut-colored hair and the gaunt look of a morose rock star, which he longs to be. Dave avoids being seen with his younger brother when their time in elementary school overlaps. The five years’ difference sets up a barrier neither will breach until years later. That and their discordant personalities: Monty always appearing cheerful and the brightest in his class; Dave struggling to pass from one grade level to the next, brooding about the latest afront to his independence, often locking himself in his bedroom for hours.
“No, you can’t sleep over at Stew’s,” says Sarah, disapproving of Dave’s best friend’s single mother, a divorcée being an outlier in the Jewish community. Dodgier yet, she lives in a shabby wood-frame apartment building in otherwise middle-class West LA.
“No, we can’t afford to get you a drum set,” says Sarah, staving off Dave’s desire to join Stew’s high school rock band.
Then there’s Leo’s precious 1950 white Mercury sedan. “No, I’m not letting you use my Merc until I’m convinced you drive safely,” declares his father after Dave gets his license.
“Damn it,” screams Dave. “What do I have to do to prove every damn thing to you. You never trust me. I’ll kill you the next time we wrestle.”
“Go ahead and try,” says Leo, snickering.
Father and son spread out a blanket in the backyard between the fig tree and the lemon tree and go at it, sweating profusely, inches away from busting their heads open against the tree trunks. Monty watches from his bedroom window, trembling at the violence but also mesmerized, curious to see if either one gets hurt, if blood will flow. He’d never challenge his dad to a match, not in a million years. I’m not that stupid, he thinks to himself.
Just when Dave figures he has his father in a tight hold, Leo plants his left foot on the ground, twists his torso, and bridges his body, flipping his son onto his back and pinning down his shoulders, Dave flailing hopelessly. Monty’s happy to see his brother lose, but he’d like to see him beat their father at least once, beat him bad so Monty could make fun of him.
“Hah,” shouts Leo in triumph when father and son stand back up. “You’re getting stronger, but not strong enough to beat your old man.”
Leo had done well in amateur wrestling at college, representing his team at meets all over Ohio. It doesn’t occur to him that his victories humiliate his older son, further alienating and embittering him. “I hate you,” shouts Dave, turning red and glaring at his father. He runs inside to his room and slams the door shut.
Leo takes out his own angst on his wife, like when she pesters him to fix one thing or another around the house. “The kitchen drawers are all stuck,” she tells her husband one Sunday while they’re dressing.
“So why don’t you rub the edges with a candle?” he suggests.
“I don’t know how to do it,” she answers.
“It’s so simple,” he says, his voice rising. “Anyone can do it.”
“But you know how to do it. Can’t you take care of it before you go out for tennis?”
“I’m late already,” he shouts.
“But I need to work in the kitchen this morning.”
“Stop nudniking me,” says Leo between clenched teeth.
“But—”
“I’ve had enough,” cries Leo, slapping his wife and stomping off.
Monty heard his father’s anger and is furtively watching from the side of his parents’ open door. As soon as his father leaves the house, he runs in and lies down next to Sarah on the king-size bed. He wraps his arm around her in a comforting embrace, and they cry together. He’s lain there with her before and breathes in the familiar scent of her rosewater cologne, the same brand as his grandmother’s lotion. He can smell, too, the residue of his father’s nervous sweat. It disgusts him.
“Why did Dad hit you?” Monty says between his sobs.
“I don’t know,” she answers.
“I hate him,” he cries, slamming the pillow with his fists.
“Don’t say that, Monty,” she says, cuddling up to him.
But he stops speaking to his father for weeks, until Sarah tells him, “You should talk to him. You’re hurting his feelings.”
“I don’t care,” says Monty, tearing up. It’s exactly what he wants to do, hurt his father. Hurt him bad in the only way he can, with words or, better yet, with no words.
Eventually he gives in, and he and his father resume their habitual frosty relationship, Leo uneasy with his younger son’s sensitive, vaguely girlish nature. Monty grows up dodging physical challenges altogether, trusting in his brain and sharp tongue to get him through life, deflecting threats to his spirit or body.
Not like Dave, who’s right up there on the roof of their house, helping his dad replace a layer of tar paper. The two of them look down at Monty, coaxing him, more like teasing him, into climbing up the ladder.
“Come on up,” Leo says, adding grudgingly, “I’ll help you.”
Monty painstakingly climbs up, step by step, pausing to wipe away his tears.
“Don’t be such a damn sissy,” says Dave.
Monty teeters over the top ledge and, struggling to keep his balance, carefully stands up, glowing with accomplishment, as if he’s ascended Mount Baldy, the highest peak in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, where LA families go to see fresh fallen snow. From the roof of his house Monty looks out at a view infinitely greater than he’s ever seen from home before. Despite the haze, he can see much of the LA basin and the pale outlines of the successive mountain ranges to the north and east. The world feels far grander from higher up. He’d like to get away from his bullying brother, from his parents, too, and go over those mountains. Get away from LA, with its glaring summer heat; from death, from ladders, from everything that frightens him.
Climbing down from the roof proves even more formidable, until Leo goes first and supports his younger son as he warily makes his way down step by step. “What a wimp,” says Dave from above.
One time when the two are playing catch in the driveway and Monty keeps dropping the softball, Dave, exasperated, throws one extra hard, and it hits his brother in the crotch. Hearing Monty wailing, Leo runs out of the house, slamming the door.
“Goddamn it,” he shouts at Dave. “Be more careful. And why don’t you make a greater effort?” he adds, turning to Monty.
“He’s such a klutz,” Dave says.
“Shut up,” Leo shouts. “And stop whimpering, Monty,” he adds, looking askance at his younger son, stumped how he can toughen him up to face a world infinitely more cruel than his brother’s taunts.