Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember posting this fourteen years ago.   I remember finding out more since, from my father about the death of his brother, two days before his birthday, which was D-Day, when he would have turned 19.  My father got home from school.  He was twelve.  The elevator operator in his building was horsing around with the kids there.  His hand had been mangled somehow, and he and the kids would play games: maybe he'd pretend to scare them, or they'd pretend to be scared.  My grandparents and their children (but Willy was off in the Pacific) lived on the ground floor, near the lobby (in an apartment I knew as a young child) so they didn't have occasion to use the elevator: they'd walk by it and up three stairs into a hallway where the mailboxes were.  The elevator operator flagged my father down to say that they'd received a telegram.  Everyone knew what that meant, but both my father and the elevator man pretended they didn't, and he went back to scaring the screaming children.  My father went to get my grandfather who was doing something a few blocks away -- I am not sure why he wasn't at work, down at the Empire State Building.  My grandfather came home, opened the telegram, and then took my father downtown and to the East Side, to the doctor's office where my grandmother had an appointment on East 81st street I think.  He said to her, "Willy je pao," Willy has fallen.  That's where the story ends, or maybe it isn't, since my grandmother mourned ferociously the rest of her life.  In his old age, my father thought more and more of his brother, who was I think the last person he thought still loved him completely, the last person who represented his memory of a hope for the future.  Not the future he lived and died in, where he was close to his grandsons and loved the rest of us still, even if not as much as when he could boss us around, a bossiness that was his way of presenting the world to us as a gift, a universe to enjoy while the enjoying was good.  But a future that was what the US must have meant to all of the when they escaped Europe and started a new life free from the murders then devouring the rest of their friends and family.  His brother was that older, new-world teenager, the good and protective big brother, and then he died and the latest born and first dead of the family that had escaped to America.  But his photo and his memory helped my father through his own last years and months, helped him sustain a tenderness which had disappeared everywhere else.

posted by William 4:13 PM
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