64
I)AIl..TISAN REVIEW
focus is on the life we shared.
In
the depths of his own imagination, he
believes that I stil l threaten the integrity of his past, that I may yet steal it
from him as I stole his childhood and ado lescence. That is the way broth–
ers sometimes face each other, the past a possession to be fought over and
struggled for, even as it anchors memory and accusation. Yet that is not
what the past was supposed
to
do. The past was supposed to harbor our tri–
umphs and tragedies, to shape what we would make of ourselves through
a personal geography in which 206th Street's smal l apartment buildings and
two-family "private" houses would stand to the end of consciousness like
traps on a Monopoly board. Over there, an empty lot planted as a Victory
Garden during the early days of the war; across R.ochambeau Avenue, the
three schoolyards of
P.
S.
SO
in which we played ball; up the avenue and
around the corner, a cel lar with lamps and an old couch that had been
made into a "clubhouse," a dungeon to which one might bring a girl and
one's hun gers. Memory invites each of us to a sti ll -passionate romance
with al l those urban places of the heart that can feed
;1
man belief in his
own value.
Only what anchors my brother and me even more firmly to our past
is that father whom we each recall so vividly, that man whose hold on us,
twenty years after his death, sti ll reinforces the awkward simplicity of all
that we seek . For the dead father belongs to both my brother and me. He
is Abe's father and mine,
0111'
f:1ther. And as his sons, we are even closer than
we are as brothers, a truth we battle over as we speak across the thousand
miles that separate us. What is it we speak of? About facing that narrow
coi l of memory where sons struggle wi th the desire to rearrange their li ves
and defy the lessollS of time. Abe and I both recognize that truth between
us must be limited to what each of us can make his peace with . There are
immigrant fathers, there are American sons-and there are the memories
of those immigrant fathers that the American sons are condemned to live
with. Scores of immigrant fathers who brought into this world scores of
American
SOIlS.
Yet neither of us can take solace fi'om the knowledge that
the cond iti on is not ours alone.
We have our memories of the cost of the love that dead fat her com–
manded. But those melllories are not the way it was supposed
to
be.
In
the
movies, pipe-smoking Judge Hardy was our image of an American father.
Of course, we knew that the judge would have been out of place in so
cramped an apartment as ours.
In
a New York tenement, his gentle advice
wou ld have been much more difficult to follow. And neither Abe nor I
could ever compete with the American charm of a Mickey R.ooney. We
knew that, too. Finally, we knew that an immigrant father did not give
advice to his American sons. Our job was to interpret the nation's ways for
him. As for love, he had no choice but to assume that we would give to
