Broken Sleep

Broken Sleep Read Free Page B

Book: Broken Sleep Read Free
Author: Bruce Bauman
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hazel eyes. Despite the perfection of her hair, the shine of her gown, the delicacy of her makeup, his mom looked sad in that photo. Beautiful, but irredeemably sad.
    He put the box away, hurriedly trying to reproduce the order of the closet; his grandmother would be back from the store any minute. A few days later he again sought the photo, and only one half remained. His father was, once again, gone.
    No sound. No smell. No taste. No touch. No image. No words. His father’s physical legacy: empty space and a name. He was Moses, son of Hannah and Malcolm, the father who had died in his heart in 1961. His struggle, before he consciously knew it, was to find expression for the inexpressible, the pain of a mother’s tears, and the blunted scream of loss that an abandoned child with no words
feels
when grasping for answers.
    Over time, Moses compiled these few facts from vague memories and overheard conversations: Hannah was forced to leave the Yorkville apartment and they caravanned with relatives for over a year until settling into a serviceable, boxlike, and minimally furnished apartment in Stuyvesant Town on 20th Street. Moses’s widowed grandmother came to live with them. Soon after Teumer’s abandonment, Bickley & Schuster rehired Hannah. Suddenly, or so it seemed, this small-statured woman, who moved with the cautious gait of a shtetl Jew, acted with a fierceness and determination contradictory to all previous behavior. She began her career ascent, an obsession that excluded all except caring for her son.
    William Bickley Sr. acted as a cross between guardian angel and parental watchdog while she worked part time and attended City College, where she excelled. She went on to Fordham Law School. After graduating, B&S hired her full time and she became a top-notch estate attorney. Moses was given love and whatever material offerings she could afford.
    Yet there hovered, like the unseen particles of nuclear fallout, one unspoken condition: The name of Malcolm and the years they were together became unmentionable. Hannah directly informed her young son of only this one fact: “Your father’s experiences in the death camps made him unstable.” And with that, the young (and even now the older) Moses had asked no more questions. The language of silences and pauses and wordless expressions became Moses’s idea of hell.
    Sitting at his desk, Moses’s upper back burned with stress; his head throbbed with the surging thunderclaps of a migraine,as a single thought pummeled: I have this schmuck’s genes and now I need him to save my life.
    Drawing on the commanding component of his voice, which was as assuring as the crackling embers of a Christmas fireplace yet tinged with a Wellesian eminence (a formidable tool in the classroom), Moses yelled out from “his” room into the backyard where Jay had her office. “Hey, Jay, come on in.” He watched as she walked from her office and came down the hallway, admiring how she moved with the same fluidity and focus as she had in water, a former high school swim team captain. Her midback-length auburn hair swayed behind her. Their connection so strong, she felt his distress before he uttered a word. He recited Cherry’s news. She rubbed his back and cradled his head against her body. “What’re you going to do?”
    Jay and Moses had met six years before at a fund-raiser for SCCAM at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Jay, then twenty-nine, after a decade of unfulfilling sexual serenades gone off-key, was simultaneously wary and hopeful that she could meet someone who could offer her the security she craved and stimulation she desired. Moses, at thirty-seven, was a scarred veteran of two failed long-term relationships, separated by years of aloneness, questioning whether he possessed the emotional wherewithal to make the final leap to lifelong commitment. They were equally astonished by the compatibility of their desires and lifestyle choices and how quickly they developed a

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