Bernard Sass

I never met my grandfather Bernard, but he maintains a heavy presence in my consciousness, due in large part (I realize now) to the enigmatic way in which he was treated by my own father, but also the large, dark, portrait of Bernard that hung above the bar in my childhood home. When my mom made dry vodka martinis she would stand behind the bar and play “Sunny Side of the Street” by Keely Smith, her thick stack of silver bangles rattling in time with the ice in the shaker while I sat beside her on one of the crimson barstools, staring up at the portrait and into the shadowed face of my grandfather; whose features so closely resembled my father’s — the startling blue eyes, the thin, prominent nose — but exuded a strange solemnity that I found unsettling. The vague circumstances of Bernard’s death were described to me by my mother, who had exchanged a number of letters with him in the late ‘80s, and in which he expressed his distress over my father’s immediate flight from the East Coast to the “flat, antisemitic” Midwest after he graduated from college. It was all those lab chemicals that they used in the ‘60s and ‘70s, my mother told me once after a second martini, pulling the lemon twist out of the bottom of her glass. Bernie — everyone called him that — was a veterinarian, you know, and god, was he funny. In his last letter to me he wrote about performing surgery on a neighbor’s dog, a golden retriever, right on their dining room table! And I guess he ran out of suturing whatever you call it, the stuff you use to sew people up, and had Geoff — your father, who must have been about your age at the time — run out and get fishing line so he could finish the job, and darling, don’t flip the record, my mother said abruptly, rather than concluding the story. I want to hear that song just one more time, she said, leaving me only slightly less bewildered about the man in the portrait than I had been before. My father rarely talked about his family or childhood and when he did it was always the same story over and over again, and he always prefaced it by saying, did I ever tell you that story about being three years old and falling off of the pony? My father had this great idea, said my own father, to do a photo shoot with Shari and I riding bareback on a pony named Jimmy that he had treated once for equine distemper, in the middle of this big green field in New Jersey, so that he would have something to send to the relatives who were always asking for pictures of the kids. I remember the pony’s hot breath on my hand when I pet his muzzle, said my father, his long eyelashes, my father hoisting me up onto him like, okay Geoffrey! Smile for me, he said in that thick German accent of his.

Pony fur is very slippery, my own father made sure to mention whenever he told the story. Toddlers don’t have very good balance, either, so I slid off almost instantly and fell to the ground, and Jimmy stepped on my arm and there was this awful crunching sound, and I remember so vividly looking at my arm and seeing little white bits of bone poking through the flesh. I didn’t cry or anything so my dad put me right back up on Jimmy and took two or three more photos before rushing me to the Emergency Room. I think I have a copy of one of the photos somewhere, my father always said, wiping the tears from his eyes. He told stories in a way that resembled a kettle set to boil; slow and steady at first, then gradually gaining more and more steam until he was laughing so hard that tears gathered in the bottom of his eyes and occasionally spilled over. My grandmother, Bernard’s wife, talked in the same way, putting her face so close to mine that I could smell the Chanel №5 that she dabbed behind her ears, and ending every story in a sort of hysterical shrieking fit of laughter; it was a bad habit(she told me once after a number of glasses of wine)that she’d picked up from her childhood in the Jewish ghettoes of Philadelphia, where everyone was always yelling in Yiddish and pinching the cheeks of children; weeping and laughing openly on the cracked concrete steps of the tenements. Bernard remained a complete mystery to me until the summer I turned sixteen, when the same grandmother called my parents and begged them to send her granddaughter to her, as it had been a number of years since she had laid eyes upon any of us, and was worried that I may have forgotten what she looked like. My parents consented, as she was footing the bill, and on a humid, rainy day in August, I flew into the Philadelphia International Airport on a plane so tiny that it was able to land on the tarmac; my grandmother waiting for me as I came down the narrow steps, carrying a plaid umbrella and covered in an oversized purple Land’s End raincoat, her glasses fogging up when she kissed me heartily on the cheek. She had moved to a retirement community right on the Delaware border, she told me as we drove along the Pennsylvanian countryside, the faint evening light shining greenly through the trees and through the haze of rain; it was an alright spot, very quiet, she said, if you could get used to the smell of mushroom fertilizer. The house itself was identical to all those surrounding it, except that it sat directly at the edge of a sprawling golf course, and as we pulled into the driveway I could see a number of silver-haired men teeing off in the rain.

My grandmother had made strawberry ice cream for me; it was pink and smooth and cold and she served it in a glass saucer with a coaster underneath. She sat at the kitchen table with me and urged me to help myself whilst she ate nothing, as old women often do when they cook for a younger relative who has come to visit. She was watching her figure, she told me, adjusting the waistband of her jeans, and wasn’t I lucky that I had my mother’s long legs and quick metabolism, and could eat all of the strawberry ice cream that I wanted — Shari, your father’s sister, was always dieting when she was your age, my grandmother said, she was so self-conscious, poor thing. I really looked nothing like anyone in the family, my grandmother decided as she leaned in across the table to study my face. Except for maybe the fleshy bit at the tip of my nose, and did I want to see a picture of Thea, my namesake?

She pushed her chair back from the table, the metal legs screeching across the white tile floors and echoing loudly into the heavy silence of the house; the smell of Chanel №5 trailing behind her as she scurried into the next room and returned a few minutes later with a thick leather photo album. Here’s a great one of Thea, she said as she sat down next to me and opened up the album, taken in 1938, and if I remember correctly, on the day that her and Alfred and Bernie — who was only four at the time — went to Berlin for the last time, to say good-bye to Thea’s mother before they left the country. Bernie told me this one story about that day over and over and over again, she said, it was his first memory, I think; but the three of them were out runnings errands, and Bernie told me he remembers holding on to Thea’s hand as they crossed the street, and that he accidentally dropped the stuffed dog that he’d had tucked under his left arm, and I guess the traffic light was just turning red as Alfred sprinted back across the street to pick up the dog, so a policeman, a Nazi, my grandmother said, her voice dropping to almost a whisper, grabbed Alfred by the arm when he got back across the street, and started shouting about how he would have to arrest Alfred and take him into the station; that it was illegal for Jews to cross the street when the light was red. Bernie told me he remembered looking up at the stuffed dog in his father’s arms, seeing tears leap into his mother’s eyes, and knowing quite instantly that something awful might happen. My grandmother took off her glasses and stared out the window. Now that it’s stopped raining the rabbits are going to come and eat all the tomatoes I’ve been growing, she sighed. It’s either them or the damned golf balls, but I haven’t been able to eat a single tomato since I’ve moved here. Bernie used to grow the reddest, plumpest, juiciest tomatoes I’ve ever eaten, she said, but no one has a green thumb like he did. Anyway, my grandmother continued, I guess Alfred had their passports with the American visas, since they were sailing out of Hamburg in a manner of days, and the policeman mistook them for American citizens and let them go. Bernie always told this part of the story the best, my grandmother said, and with a sort of gravity that was unusual for him — he was quite the comedian, Bernie — but as they walked away, having narrowly escaped imprisonment, the concentration camps, and presumably death, Alfred gave his son back the stuffed dog that almost cost them their lives, and said, even under the Third Reich the name America has a certain magic — don’t forget it. And I guess he never did, my grandmother said as she wiped her eyes, which had been steadily filling with tears. The phone rang from the next room. That’ll be your parents, my grandmother said, rising from her chair; excuse me just a moment, dear.

While we had been talking the sun had set and the room had become quite dark; the vague hum of cicadas seeped in through the closed windows, and from my seat at the kitchen table I could see brief, tiny, flashes of light from fireflies hovering over the golf course; and despite the dimness of the room I picked up the photo album and absentmindedly turned to the last page, where a yellowed piece of typewritten paper had been pasted in next to a photo of a young man who looked so much like my father that for a brief, startling moment I thought that it was him. As I looked more closely at the photo, I noticed the caption: Bernie Sass @1950 Citizenship photo? that looked to have been typed in on a computer, and realized that this was the same man whose portrait had haunted me in childhood, the same man that had sewn up the neighbor’s dog on the dining room table; the man who had once been a boy that had dropped his stuffed dog in the street; the same man who had put my three- year old father back up on the pony. The piece of paper glued to the opposite side of the page appeared to have been written on a typewriter that was about to run out of ink; the text faint and in some places almost impossible to read, with a date — July 1st 1990 — scribbled at the top. ANNEX TO A FAMILY HISTORY CONTINUA- TION OF A FAMILY STORY BY ALFRED SASS.

My son Bernard “Bernie” died (it said) on October 13, 1989 after a very short illness. A Memorial Service was held in his honor on Oct. 15 in Rutgers, New Jersey. He was praised by those present as a father, husband, and son and for his professional achievements. It is a terrible thing to outlive one’s child, and painful to reflect upon, but I write this annex to my memoirs for my grandchildren, Geoffrey and Shari. The last thing I want to tell Bernie’s surviving children about their late father (he continued) is a memory I have of when we were called to the consulate of Berlin in 1937, where we would have to ask for permission to leave the country. This was after my fortune had already been confiscated, and after we realized that we needed to leave Europe as quickly as possible. As we stood before the Consul, he asked Thea and me some questions. Bernie was sitting very quiet like we told him too and playing with pens and pencils in a container. The Consul took one pencil, gave it Bernie and said to him in German: take this pencil to America and start your life there successfully. Bernie looked up at him with his big blue eyes and said: Thank you!

Thea, honey, what are you doing sitting here in the dark? My grandmother’s voice startled me; as the room flooded with light from the overhead I closed the photo album, feeling suddenly self-conscious that I had continued to look through it without my grandmother present; as if I had peered into her memories or my father’s memories without either of their knowledge or permission and stumbled upon some deep sadness that had for a long time been carefully concealed; that now I knew of this secret mourning that neither wife nor son has chosen to reveal to me. Your father’s still on the phone, my grandmother said, placing her hand on my shoulder, he wants to speak to you for a minute. How’s the East Coast treating you, my father said as soon as I put my ear to the receiver. I told him well, and he paused for a moment before saying, I guess you’ve been hearing some old family history. Just a little, I started to say, and my father said quickly, I love you, be nice to your grandmother, before hanging up. I handed the phone back to my grandmother, who said, let’s just sit for a while, it’s so hot in here. We both sat at the kitchen table, my pink ice cream left melting in the dish, and looked out over the golf course; the fireflies flickered in the distance and my grandmother said, aren’t they just beautiful, and it was so silent in the house, and in the heavy stillness of the air all I could hear was the buzzing of cicadas, and my grandmother held the photo album in her lap as we sat in the heat and watched the yellow flashing of the fireflies.