I spent a year, during law school, in the romantic embrace of a deeply damaged soul I think of affectionately as The Nazi Doctor.  She was tormented by a sense of her inadequacy that could never be lessened by any of her many accomplishments.  She was a surgeon, a pilot, a wine expert, fluent in German (her father had been German, a very unGerman German, according to her, kind of a free spirit– free enough to have two children with a black woman, anyway), she also spoke Spanish and Arabic and could understand French, she was a gourmet cook, an expert skier, on and on. Nothing she ever did, no matter how brilliantly, convinced her she was anything but inadequate.  That someone so hard on herself could also be so tender always surprised me, and touched me greatly.

“So, are you two thinking about getting married?” my mother asked me over the phone, toward the end of that year.  

“I don’t think so, mom,” I told her, “you know, she has a lot of great qualities, and I love her, but it would be like marrying my father with tits.”

“Oops, I guess I wasn’t supposed to hear that,” said my father, who at some point had silently picked up an extension down there in Florida.  

“It’s not the way it sounds,” I hastened to reassure him, though, of course, it was exactly the way it sounded.  In making my peace with the good doctor I had also been trying to resolve things with her psychological doppelganger, my father.   My relationship with the doctor featured some tremendous consolations, unthinkable, even disgusting, in connection with my father, but even those, in the end, weighed little.  A life intimately connected with someone like that as a partner was unthinkable, to anyone who gave it more than a passing, purely emotional, thought.

My father had his own version of the doctor’s tender touch.  The doctor touched me with infinitely delicate, butterfly lightness, the way she touched her beloved cat, Nachtl, who died while I knew her.  The gentleness of her skilled hands I can still feel, and the way it made me momentarily forget how damaged her soul was.  My father was not a toucher, but he could be similarly disarmingly gentle.  It did not happen all the time, or even often, but it happened enough over the years to show that he was capable of it.  His was at his best in an emergency, when, always calm, he could be very comforting.  That is part of what makes him such a tragic figure in my eyes.

He had all the qualities to make a great friend:  intelligence, sensitivity, honesty, humor, understanding, loyalty.   These are the qualities that make a great father too.  It was beyond him, most of the time, overwhelmed as he was, to exhibit the totality of these qualities to his children, or even to his wife, the love of his life.  

My mind suddenly flashes on that black and white photo of my young father, before he met my mother, locked in that whacky wrestling embrace with the blond haired Christian woman in Connecticut.  I’ve never seen him looking happier, more mischievous and full of life, than in that photo.  The shot must have been snapped some time before Eli was dispatched to break up that relationship in no uncertain terms.  Eli, not a man to trifle with, went on behalf of his beloved aunt, Tante Chava, my father’s mother.

Tante Chava, for her part, had never recovered from her older brother’s life shattering betrayal under similar circumstances.  She was being courted by a Jewish postman, with red hair like hers, and had no doubt never been happier than with the prospect of a life in America with this cute young man who loved her.  

“Well, that ape, my father’s second wife, wasn’t going to lose her little slave, you know what I mean?  If she’d got married to him she’d move out and there would go the full-time housekeeper.  So they busted that up right away, and, of course, it broke Tanta Chavah’s heart.  They eventually arranged the marriage to your grandfather, but, of course, there was no romance there.”

My mother, during her college years and intermittently afterwards, was a poet.  She saw the world through a poet’s eyes, with a natural talent for exaggeration she kept until the end.  On her tombstone I had them carve the Hebrew words for “heart of a poet.”  When she died I looked in vain for the blue journal I remember seeing as a kid, the book that contained her handwritten poems.  I eventually found a very small packet of poems, including an extremely passionate one to a lover.  I sent it to my sister.  

“Oh, my God,” she said after she read it, “that was hard to read.  That definitely wasn’t written to the D.U.”   It occurred to me then that it must have been written to Art Metesis, the flamboyant bon vivant who swept my mother off her feet, and stole her heart, and possibly also her maidenhead, before her strong-willed mother stepped in to put an end to that intoxicating romance.  She would not have this headstrong, dashing young man as a son-in-law.

This dizzying set of interlocking tragic thwartings of love and lust is only known to me because I paid close attention.  As much as anything else, I have had to become a sleuth, the only way to make sense out of perplexing circumstances otherwise so hard to understand.  I needed clues, and whenever I found an important one I filed it away in the permanent collection where I keep my most important memories.  

When my father told me, at the very end of his life, that he didn’t know how to express love because he’d never seen it done at home, I understood more than I could explain to him in that moment.  He did his best, which is what I told him, seeking to give him a little comfort as he tried to make his way from this world with a bit of grace.  I assured him that everybody was here, those he tried to love were all around him.  By this I suggested that we’d all got the message of how much he loved us.   

“Well,” he said weakly, and hopefully, “when you guys needed something, I like to think I was always there for you.”  A long silence follows this remark on the recording.  I wasn’t going to lie to the man, and was at a loss for another comforting thing to say about that particular point.  After an extended moment he says, wait, let me go to the primary source.

“…you can’t be sure about that,” he said, philosophically, pausing to catch what was left of his failing breath before going on to other matters.