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MEMORY BOY

Long before I taught myself to hold them at a safe distance, my parents called me “the memory boy.” If once I knew what they meant by that, the memory boy has long since forgotten, shedding memories and the stories behind pet phrases as so much extra baggage. The tag may have had something to do with my inability to forget the lyric of any song I heard as a child. But what I think it really described was a knack for recalling names and the order in which things happened: where we went on those rare occasions we went anywhere as a family, who we saw, who came to see us, what they said, and our verdicts later on, for as a family we were judgmental to a very considerable fault.

Shedding was an acquired skill, a way of getting on with life, which was what you had to do, I later told myself, once you closed your mind to the possibilities of therapy. “Getting on with life” became a slogan of my inner monologues; a catchword or, as I’d now say, admitting to wordplay, a catch cry. Even then, the knack for recalling names and the order of things survived, so long as they had little to do with me. It came in handy on college exams. It came in handy telling the stories of others, which is what I eventually did for a living. I could recall obscure facts, make intuitive connections, ask the right questions. And I could always move on to the next assignment, the next story, as journalists do. Moving on became my particular way of getting on with life, and even if I now acknowledge it as a form of psychic flight, it seemed a liberating, sometimes thrilling, way to live.

So I wasn’t touched or curious or anyway receptive when, three decades after my parents’ divorce, my octogenarian father sent me a packet of love letters between him and my mother that he’d hidden away. He thought his posterity might be interested in preserving them. Not me, his eldest son. I knew instantly that I didn’t want to handle them or own them, let alone read them. So I disposed of them and then, characteristically, disposed of the memory of how I’d disposed of them. Maybe I gave them to my mother; it might have seemed the honorable thing to do. I mention this close brush with family history now only to describe a reflex and to show how unlike me it was, several years later, to go scavenging in the basement of a Cleveland synagogue while my dad, its emeritus rabbi of great eminence, lay helpless in a nearby hospice, his speech and understanding already extinguished by a brain tumor, leaving only his sweetness to mark him as the man we knew while he faded out.

The foray in the basement wasn’t my idea. I’d been sitting quietly with my dad in his hospice room on a Saturday morning; as quietly as you could given the TV din pouring from the surrounding rooms, a universal anodyne for the dying even more than the living in our land. There was no look of recognition in his eyes, but when I held his hand I felt the comforting pressure of his grip. More for my sake than his, since the words didn’t register, I’d tell him I loved him, but that still left plenty of time for sour-sweet reflection on the paradox of this unfailingly loving father who was almost as consistently beyond reach. In the thirty-one years of his second marriage, which had now lasted slightly longer than the one that produced me and my two brothers, I’d found myself alone with him, talking directly, on only a few occasions at best (in truth, only one I could now clearly recall) before he started to die and I began making my visits to the hospice room.

Geography was partly to blame—for many of these years we were thousands of miles apart—but there was also the inevitable balancing he had to do between his two families. Understandably, he was protective of his wife, a vivacious but easily offended person, so conversation that tended to exclude her, especially conversation that dwelled on memories she didn’t share, had to be avoided. Our meetings became performances; if they came off reasonably well, without hurt feelings, as they almost always did, I could expect a good review. But then in the previous twenty-seven years, the years since my birth, he had often been unavailable for reasons that were not dissimilar: my mother, a more complicated person than my dad, sometimes needed to be protected from her children.

Excerpt from Omaha Blues by Joseph Lelyveld. Copyright © 2005 by Joseph Lelyveld. To be published in April, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.