Heart of Stone (13 page)

Once the chief had gone, and the older folks had retired, we all sat under the stag's head and reviewed the sad development. Ruth and Rachel wept, as did David. Isaac was white. Simon paced the floor, stroking his beard, looking more angry than anything else. Miriam sat impassive, her face a blank. They expressed their disbelief, their bafflement, and sorrow.

“What was he doing here?” asked Simon, not expecting an answer. “He must have been up to something. Showing up secretly like that.”

“Come on, Si,” said David. “Leave it alone. Poor Karl is dead. Can't we remember the good times?”

“I can't,” said Simon. “And now he comes back here to die, just to open up old wounds and ruin our last . . .”

“That's enough, Si,” said Ruth. “He didn't kill himself. It was an accident. Surely he was on his way over here, maybe to try to patch things up.”

Simon said nothing. He just seethed.

“What did he do, after all?” asked David. “He moved on to a new life. People change. He fell in love and got married.”

“He changed his name to Charles Morton, for God's sake,” said Simon. “Married a
shiksa
, threw away his Jewish name, and got baptized.”

“He was our friend, Simon,” said Isaac softly.

“Turned away from his people. People who have been chased and persecuted for millennia. Isaac, your own family was kicked out of their home, lost their business, lost everything. Your father was thrown into Buchenwald. How can you forgive Karl?”

“I forgive him because he never hurt my family or my people. Or yours.”

Simon stiffened. His mouth twisted into a grimace, and his lips trembled as he spoke. “Karl did indeed hurt my family. For his own selfishness. I'm glad he's dead.”

“Si, you can't mean that,” pleaded Rachel. “You loved him like a brother.”

“I do mean it,” he said, turning on his heel to leave. “I'm glad he's dead precisely because once I loved him.”

There was silence after Simon had stormed out. Then Miriam rose and said she was going to bed. Isaac reached out and took her hand. He looked into her eyes, and they exchanged a sad nod. The others stayed, sharing thoughts on their old friend. They wept, held each other, and wondered. No one could explain Karl's mysterious reappearance on the lake. At length grief and confusion succumbed to fatigue, and Ruth, Rachel, and David excused themselves, leaving Isaac and me in the cool lodge. I wanted to curl up in my bed and sleep, forget about everything. The beautiful evening that had turned so tragic.

I was about to announce my intentions when I remembered the woods. It was after midnight, and I had no car. The prospect of crossing the dark forest alone, terrifying under normal circumstances, was even more menacing now. I felt like a coward for wanting to stay with Isaac, to comfort him and feel his warm arms around me, because some part of my motivation was selfish. He was staring at the floor, lost in thought, mourning his lost friend. I touched his cold hand, and he sighed. He caressed my cheek, gazing into my eyes.

“Come, Ellie,” he said. “Let's get some sleep.”

“I should go,” I said, hating the taste of the words as they left my mouth. What if he agreed?

His eyes, sparkling with unshed tears, pleaded with me. He said nothing, but I understood, and I had to wrestle my heart into submission before I blurted out a stupid declaration I might regret later. This was too powerful, too quick. I had to tread with care for my own sake. At the same time, I couldn't deny what I felt: danger and exhilaration all at once.

“Come,” I said, rising to my feet. “I won't leave you.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

W
e lay awake for hours. Isaac whispered the story of Karl Merkleson to me in the darkened room. His parents, Hiram and Esther Merkleson, immigrants from the Ukraine, had made their way in America writing and producing plays for Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side. They acquired a hall on Second Avenue in the early twenties and staged original dramas and musicals. Some of the productions qualified as artistic works with far-reaching influence, while others were lighter fare, roundly criticized as
schund
by aesthetes. But the Merklesons believed the theater needed both tragedy and comedy in order to flourish and have a lasting impact on the community's life. In 1926 the Merklesons co-wrote and staged their most enduring hit:
Chaim Yankel
, a musical comedy about an idiot who manages to succeed despite his feeble-mindedness. The lead character, Chaim, a fool reviled by serious critics, nevertheless delighted thousands of theatergoers for six years and made the Merklesons wealthy. They were never able to reproduce the success of
Chaim Yankel
, and their subsequent serious efforts were never given the credit they deserved, this according to Isaac. I had certainly heard of Hiram and Esther Merkleson, and my father had a framed theater bill of one of their acclaimed dramas,
Di Chasseneh
(
The Wedding
), from 1922, in his study. But I had never seen or read any of their work.

Karl Marx Merkleson was born in 1925, grew up on East Seventh Street, near Tomkins Square Park, in Alphabet City. His little sister, Rosa, was born five years later. I asked Isaac if, by chance, her middle name was Luxemburg, and, smiling, he confirmed that it was. Then his mien darkened again, and he told me Rosa had been born with Canavan disease and died before her third birthday.

The Merklesons and Simon's father met through some political organizations they belonged to and became close friends. When a group of families including Isaac's found the Arcadia Lodge for sale in 1931, they formed a cooperative, complete with a charter emphasizing social and artistic goals, and purchased it. At the time, most Jews preferred the open doors of the Catskill resorts in the Borscht Belt and their proximity to the City. Few Jews vacationed in the Adirondacks, which had remained a white Christian retreat. There were, nevertheless, notable exceptions. The fantastically wealthy banker Otto Kahn and the mining magnate Daniel Guggenheim, not exactly bohemian intellectuals like the Arcadians, had bucked the anti-Semitism of the super rich and built their own magnificent Great Camps, Jewish outposts in the white-bread Adirondacks.

Isaac explained that Arcadia Lodge wouldn't pass muster even as the servants' quarters for the Kahns or Guggenheims, but it was a beautiful property all the same, one worth a fortune in 1960s' dollars. The member families had bought shares when they first acquired the property and had since paid dues for decades. That built up an endowment of sorts that covered maintenance costs and even some of the social activities, including the Bacchanalia Sundays. The original group of owners included seven families: Eisenstadt, Abramowitz, Levine, Berg, Merkleson, Leonard, and Hirsch.

When Karl Merkleson's father passed away in the late forties, his mother decided to move to a smaller place near Hudson in Columbia County, and the cooperative agreed to buy her out. By that time, Karl was in his third year at City College. He shared an apartment on 106th and Amsterdam Avenue with Simon Abramowitz for four years while they were in school.

“It sounds as if they were once very close,” I said.

“Like Damon and Pythias.”

“What happened between them? It can't have been that Karl changed his name and married a gentile.”

Isaac shrugged. “It's sad but true. A beautiful friendship ended.”

“When was the last time Karl spent time here at Arcadia?” I asked.

Isaac didn't have to search his memory; he had the date ready. “End of August 1954. He left for California for some business opportunity. He was supposed to return by October. We had a weekend planned to close up the camp for the winter. A big party with most of the families. We do it most years, sometimes in September, but there's always an autumn farewell.” Isaac shook his head. “He never came back. And he never said why.”

“You mean in all those years, he never contacted any of you? None of you tried to reach him?”

“I tried. Simon did, too. I think we all wrote to the address he'd left us. But after a month, the letters came back, ‘return to sender.' He simply disappeared. Went to ground.”

“How did you have his address to give to Terwilliger?”

“About four years ago, Miriam was in Los Angeles for a Hadassah fund­raiser. She ran into him in a restaurant.”

“That's quite a coincidence,” I said.

“He was with a strawberry blonde and an older couple. Karl seemed put out, uncomfortable, embarrassed. Miriam said he did everything he could to avoid introducing her to the people he was with, but finally he had to. It was his wife and in-laws.”

“Awkward,” I said.

Isaac nodded. “Their name was Pierce. Doesn't get any more
goyishe
than that, does it?”

“So Miriam got his address?” I asked.

“Not exactly. She got his new name. Later she looked up the address.”

“That must have come as a shock to her,” I said. “Did her face actually move?”

Isaac chuckled. “That's mean, Ellie. I didn't know you had it in you. But don't be so hard on Miriam. She's really quite a remarkable person.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean anything by it. She's quite impressive. She played so beautifully tonight. Why didn't she pursue the piano more seriously?”

Isaac didn't know but thought she wasn't cut out for that kind of life. “She had other interests, I suppose.”

“So what happened in Los Angeles?”

“The wife, Gayle—her name was—kept calling Karl ‘Charles.' Naturally Miriam was curious about that. Karl told her he'd changed his name to Charles. Said it was for business purposes, but who would believe that? A good Jewish name in Hollywood can take you far. You can imagine how awkward it was when he told her his last name was Morton.”

“What exactly did Karl do in Los Angeles?” I asked.

“He started out as a script assistant for one of the studios. He worked on one of those biblical pictures.
The Robe
or something like that. Then he made some connections. He was a good-looking man, which doesn't hurt out there. He met the daughter of a producer, Owen Pierce, and fell for her. The next thing you know, they're engaged.”

“And that's when he changed his name?”

Isaac nodded. “A few years later, actually. In fifty-six or fifty-seven. Karl became Charles.”

“I'm guessing he dropped the Marx along with the Karl.”

“Like a hot latke,” said Isaac, chuckling. “My understanding is that he changed his name in order to please his future father-in-law, who asked his daughter if Charles was ‘one of those good-looking Jew boys.'”

“And of course he was, or she wouldn't have chosen rye over white.”

“Exactly,” said Isaac.

“But where did you get all this information?” I asked. “Surely not from Miriam. Karl wouldn't have told her all that.”

“You're right,” he said. “I managed to get in touch with him a few times about a year later. It was awkward at first, but then he seemed to want to talk to me. We continued communicating every week or so for a while. I tried to reason with him. Bring him back into the fold. We didn't really care that he'd married a
shiksa
. But he was wary.”

“Still, he told you all that dirt.”

“I sensed he was lonely,” said Isaac, staring off into the distance. “He may have been in love or infatuated with Gayle, but he missed his old life too. I could tell.”

“How did you leave it with him?” I asked.

Isaac turned his focus to me and said he'd left the door open for reconciliation. “I invited him to join us on the lake the next summer. That was fifty-nine.”

“But he gave it a miss?”

Isaac nodded and said nothing.

We lay there in the dark until past two. I wanted another drink, but the bottle was across the compound in the Great Lodge. Why hadn't I brought it with me? I knew I had to steal away again before dawn, but for now, I was happy to be lost in Isaac's arms, even with the awareness that daybreak was approaching. My head resting on his chest, I breathed in his scent. All people have a smell. It's part of what attracts us to and repels us from one another. On the one extreme, there was Isaac. On the other, Terwilliger. What draws two people to each other sexually? A multitude of elements, of course, but it is sensual: beauty in the eye, melody of voice, touch of a finger, taste on the lips, and fragrance of the nape of the neck. The hedonic intoxication of the senses that defies logic and explanation. It's little wonder so many children disappoint their parents with their choice of spouse. They see an irresistible mate, while their parents see a sex maniac. Attraction is visceral. It's an animalistic reaction that has nothing to do with the faculties of the mind. It's in the nose and mouth and skin. It's what drives lovers to madness and extravagance. Makes them lose sight of the practical and opt for the headfirst dive over a cliff.

I knew the feeling well enough from the missteps of my youth. And still my rationality was powerless to dampen or temper my emotions. In Isaac's company, in his arms, I felt rudderless in a wild sea. He could make me do anything he desired, if I didn't ease the ship.

“I can't quite accept the fact that he's gone,” said Isaac, stroking my hair.

“I'm very sorry,” I offered. “It's hard to lose a loved one. And to find out in such a way . . .”

“He was part of us. Not my best friend by any means, but a friend. An Arcadian. Like a brother.”

I looked him in the eyes and, in the low light, saw the sparkle of tears. He smiled and pinched my nose.

“But your evening must have been worse,” he said.

“How can you say that?”

“You had to put up with that old satyr, Nelson Blanchard.”