the palm of her hand, we feel that we are looking at time itself, time speeding ahead as the train speeds ahead, pushing us forward into life and then more life, but also time as the past, the dead mother-in-law’s past, Noriko’s past, the past that lives on in the present, the past we carry with us into the future.
The shriek of a train whistle resounds in our ears, a cruel and piercing noise. Life is disappointing, isn’t it?
I want you to be happy.
And then the scene abruptly ends.
Widows. Women living alone. An image of the sobbing Noriko in my head. Impossible not to think of my sister now—and the luckless hand she was dealt by marrying a man who died young. It’s been brewing in me ever since I started thinking about my civil war: the fact that in my own life I’ve been spared from all things military. An accident of birth, the fluke of entering the world in 1935, which made me too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, and then the further good fortune to have been rejected by the army when I was drafted in 1957. They said I had a heart murmur, which turned out not to be true, and classified me as 4-F. No wars, then, but the time I came closest to something that resembled one, I happened to be with Betty and her second husband, Gilbert Ross. It was 1967, exactly forty years ago this summer, and the three of us were having dinner together on the Upper East Side, Lexington Avenue I think it was, Sixty-sixth or Sixty-seventh Street, in a long-gone Chinese restaurant called Sun Luck. Sonia had gone off to France to visit her parents outside Lyon with the seven-year-old Miriam. I was supposed to join them later, but for the time being I was holed up in our shoe box of an apartment off Riverside Drive, sweating out a long piece for Harper’s on recent American poetry and fiction inspired by the Vietnam war—with no air conditioner, just a cheap plastic fan, scribbling and typing in my underwear as my pores gushed through another New York heat wave. Money was tight for us back then, but Betty was seven years older than I was and living comfortably, as they say, and therefore she was in a position to invite her kid brother out for a free dinner every now and then. After a bad first marriage that had lasted too long, she had married Gil about three years earlier. A wise choice, I felt—or at least it looked that way at the time. Gil earned his money as a labor lawyer and strike mediator, but he had also joined the Newark city government as corporation counsel in the early sixties, and when he and my sister came to New York that night forty years ago, he was driving a city car, which was equipped with a two-way radio. I can’t remember a thing about the dinner itself, but when we walked back to the car and Gil started up the engine to drive me home, frantic voices came pouring through the radio—police calls, I presume, reporting that the Central Ward of Newark was in chaos. Without bothering to go uptown to drop me at my apartment, Gil headed straight for the Lincoln Tunnel, and that was how I came to witness one of the worst race riots in American history. More than twenty people killed, more than seven hundred people injured, more than fifteen hundred people arrested, more than ten million dollars in property damage. I remember these numbers because when Katya was in high school a few years ago, she wrote a paper on racism for her American history class, and she interviewed me about the riot. Odd that those figures should have stuck, but with so many other things slipping away from me now, I cling to them as proof that I’m not quite finished.
Driving into Newark that night was like entering one of the lower circles of hell. Buildings in flames, hordes of men running wildly through the streets, the noise of shattering glass as one store window after another was broken, the noise of sirens, the noise of gunshots. Gil drove to City Hall, and once the three of us were inside the building, we went directly to
The shriek of a train whistle resounds in our ears, a cruel and piercing noise. Life is disappointing, isn’t it?
I want you to be happy.
And then the scene abruptly ends.
Widows. Women living alone. An image of the sobbing Noriko in my head. Impossible not to think of my sister now—and the luckless hand she was dealt by marrying a man who died young. It’s been brewing in me ever since I started thinking about my civil war: the fact that in my own life I’ve been spared from all things military. An accident of birth, the fluke of entering the world in 1935, which made me too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, and then the further good fortune to have been rejected by the army when I was drafted in 1957. They said I had a heart murmur, which turned out not to be true, and classified me as 4-F. No wars, then, but the time I came closest to something that resembled one, I happened to be with Betty and her second husband, Gilbert Ross. It was 1967, exactly forty years ago this summer, and the three of us were having dinner together on the Upper East Side, Lexington Avenue I think it was, Sixty-sixth or Sixty-seventh Street, in a long-gone Chinese restaurant called Sun Luck. Sonia had gone off to France to visit her parents outside Lyon with the seven-year-old Miriam. I was supposed to join them later, but for the time being I was holed up in our shoe box of an apartment off Riverside Drive, sweating out a long piece for Harper’s on recent American poetry and fiction inspired by the Vietnam war—with no air conditioner, just a cheap plastic fan, scribbling and typing in my underwear as my pores gushed through another New York heat wave. Money was tight for us back then, but Betty was seven years older than I was and living comfortably, as they say, and therefore she was in a position to invite her kid brother out for a free dinner every now and then. After a bad first marriage that had lasted too long, she had married Gil about three years earlier. A wise choice, I felt—or at least it looked that way at the time. Gil earned his money as a labor lawyer and strike mediator, but he had also joined the Newark city government as corporation counsel in the early sixties, and when he and my sister came to New York that night forty years ago, he was driving a city car, which was equipped with a two-way radio. I can’t remember a thing about the dinner itself, but when we walked back to the car and Gil started up the engine to drive me home, frantic voices came pouring through the radio—police calls, I presume, reporting that the Central Ward of Newark was in chaos. Without bothering to go uptown to drop me at my apartment, Gil headed straight for the Lincoln Tunnel, and that was how I came to witness one of the worst race riots in American history. More than twenty people killed, more than seven hundred people injured, more than fifteen hundred people arrested, more than ten million dollars in property damage. I remember these numbers because when Katya was in high school a few years ago, she wrote a paper on racism for her American history class, and she interviewed me about the riot. Odd that those figures should have stuck, but with so many other things slipping away from me now, I cling to them as proof that I’m not quite finished.
Driving into Newark that night was like entering one of the lower circles of hell. Buildings in flames, hordes of men running wildly through the streets, the noise of shattering glass as one store window after another was broken, the noise of sirens, the noise of gunshots. Gil drove to City Hall, and once the three of us were inside the building, we went directly to
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