My brother died last week, and driving across the valley to his funeral I spoke to the sky as if it was listening.
I had been reading Sarah Rudin’s new translation of Augustine’s Confessions that she turned it into a kind of novel in which his narrator speaks to a “You” that she translates as his “master,” and it reminded me of my own novels and my own master.
I was around five when my mother slipped a nickel in my palm to light a candle for my father who had been crippled by a stroke, and it was my brother who led me to the little Armenian church around the corner where he taught me how to drop the nickel in the brass box under the flames; then for the next five years I would pray as only a child can for a father I needed so desperately.
But who or what was I praying to as I stared over the candles at a little painting of a Jesus at the side of the altar, and what was the mystery behind the altar?
I was learning to read by then, but English was still new to me, and I would lip read in tasting each word instead of gobbling whole pages like my precocious friends.
Yet I loved my comic books, though more for their pictures than the words in the balloons, until there appeared in one of them a center section with only small print, and unable to read it, I followed the lines as if I could see a story it was supposed be telling.
And it was soon after that my mother brought my father and me to a relative’s chicken farm in Freehold to escape the summer heat in the city, and it was like a happy dream with the chickens strutting like royalty even on the porch, and the tomato fields burst across the road with tomatoes as delicious as garden tomatoes when New Jersey was called “The Garden State” before agribusiness took the taste away.
There were no other kids around, but I was in a magical realm where there was no loneliness, and one evening when my mother was chatting in the parlor with old Dickran and Astkhig, the radio didn’t work when I sat in the kitchen, and to entertain myself I wrote a story in the same way I imagined one in the center of the comics, though I couldn’t write any better than I could read. Like all kids I loved stories, but I also needed to tell one, as if someone or something was listening.
My father died a year later, and though I didn’t have to pray for him anymore, I continued to speak to what had vanished from beyond the candles to behind the sky and was maybe inside me as well?
The Korean War had started, and when my brother was sent abroad my illiterate mother made me write him letters, and it was in those letters that I first became the writer I am today. I had learned to read well enough by then that I could read the stories of Jack London in my cousin Archie’s Armed Services Edition, and after reading Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on The Flying Trapeze in Archie’s anthology by Somerset Maugham, I wanted to write just like it.
And so, I had become a writer and later went to college where one evening in Rutgers I started a story about my father that included Hemingway who was one of my father figures, and I would be writing this same story for the rest of my life: to be a man like who I had wanted my father to be, and now the question of who or what I was writing to became more urgent than ever.
I discovered poetry in Rutgers, thanks to my freshman class with Paul Fussell who assigned a paperback called Sound and Sense, and I was brought back to when I was first learning English and found that the music of words was tied to their sense, and the sense would resound in me as in the chant of AUM where what had gone from the candles to beyond the sky was inside me as well, and I would keep needing to find it.
Augustine had the same need, and Sarah Rudin as well. He loved the music of Latin, and she loved turning it into English.
“O Master, Master,” he wrote in her English, “Who bent the sky downward and descended and touched the mountains and they smoked….” which came, said Rudin’s footnote, from Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
He constantly quotes Paul and the Psalms while speaking to the same You as his Master, but who or what was that You?
Was it the same as in Whitman’s Song of Myself and Blake’s Prophecies and Prospero’s Epilogue and what Emily Dickinson couldn’t “see to see”?
And was it the same as death, like the death of my brother as I drove across the valley with his ghost?
I didn’t really get to know my brother until the last few years before he died. My first memory of him was when I was around three and he was teasing me by rubbing the new whiskers of his teens like sandpaper on my cheek as if he loved me.
But it was around the time of my father’s stroke, and overwhelmed by the stroke, my mother would use him to discipline me, and I became afraid of him.
We lived in a small apartment of railroad rooms, and he would order me to stay away from his secretary desk, or carry the garbage pail to the cans in the cellar, or go buy the Sunday Mirror with Joe Palooka on the way to the bread from the Italian baker around the corner.
One day as I was playing I scraped my knee so deeply he slapped my face to hold still while I squirmed away from the iodine, and his slap was telling me who was really boss in our home. We both looked like my mother and I never thought of him as my half-brother, but I would wonder if he felt the same about me.
On another day when I was sailing a raft of popsicle sticks in a gutter puddle, he walked by without saying a word as if he didn’t know me. He worked in an ice-cream parlor in the afternoon, and when I bought a cone he took my nickel as if I were just another customer.
Yet he was so friendly with his Italian and Irish gang in their clubhouse and his Armenian gang in back of the church, and it was my fear of him that had turned him off. He didn’t know how to relate to me and my fearful nature was opposite his, which my mother even pointed out.
Even when he was a baby she could take him anywhere and he would always be okay, but I would vomit from someone else’s food. And when she took him to the barber for his first haircut, he sat happily on the board on the chair as if he were a prince; yet when she took me, she said, I was so frightened of the electric razor hanging from the ceiling that the barber couldn’t control me and she had to take me to the barber across the street to finish the job.
He was good natured and never complained after she divorced his father when he was only four, yet there was something inside him he never talked about.
“Tommy feels everything,” she said, “but he always holds it inside.”
Nor did he ever talk with me except to tell me not to eat with my mouth open or not play with his records, and when he came home for dinner he would switch my Lone Ranger to his Make Believe Ballroom without asking.
Yet one day around the time he taught me how to light a candle, he took me to the big fancy movie theater in Journal Square to see a western with Gary Cooper, and though he probably took me because my mother asked him to, it was one of the highlights of my childhood.
And when he wasn’t home I would study the photographs of him with his gang as if he were my idol, and I wanted to be just like him. He was my big brother and I loved him like I loved my father, who also never talked with me since his lips were twisted by the stroke.
Like my father, who had been a jeweler, he was good with his hands and could write with either one, and when he and Archie came for a weekend at the chicken farm in his ’36 Ford, I watched as they painted in the fields where he painted a beautiful landscape though he had never painted before.
He had a great eye and it was he who snapped the beautiful black and white photos in my book about my mother when he was only twelve. He scored high in the Army I.Q. test, and they sent him to Germany instead of Korea and made him a photographer.
He was smart and talented, yet he didn’t care. He didn’t want to go college but just be part of the gang and get a good job and have a family and be happy.
I was thirteen when he returned from the army, and having grown as tall as he I wasn’t afraid of him anymore, and after he went back to his job as an apprentice in photoengraving, we would watch our new television in the evenings and go to the movies together. We still didn’t talk, but I was happy being with him now, and one night we saw the new movie Shane, and it was like when he took me to see Gary Cooper in Journal Square.
But our new togetherness lasted only a year before he married and moved out, and I never saw him except with my mother when we visited, and if not for my mother I wouldn’t have seen him again after I left for Rutgers.
He had banked on photoengraving when he finally got his union card, but photoengraving went extinct in the Sixties when he needed it the most to raise his kids, and after he moved to Fresno to start a new life my mother followed since they had always been inseparable.
Unlike me he had an optimistic nature and opened an Armenian delicatessen as if he could be part of an Armenian community like the one in Jersey, but Fresno was not like Jersey, and when the delicatessen went bust he had to start all over again, which was hard in his middle age.
“Your brother’s not a business man,” my mother said, “he’s a worker like me.”
Yet he persevered with one sales job after another until he could finally retire, and he was retired for about three years when we had to take our mother to a nursing home and his wife got cancer and his kids moved away, and he had a heart attack from all the stress.
But he recovered quickly, and after our mother and his wife and kids were gone, he lived alone, and I would drive down from Berkeley and stay the night, just as I had done with my mother.
He had a sharp memory and I would love interviewing him about the old days as if I were researching his biography. He knew my father better than I and had lived with him for ten years before the stroke. My father was actually more a father to him than he was to me, and I loved listening to his memories like the one when my father took him to the World’s Fair in New York in 1939.
Then this past summer I made a special trip to see him after worrying about how many years he had left. My friends were dying one by one and I was thinking about death more than ever, and as I drove across the valley it was more beautiful than ever.
It was a wonderful visit and we went to A.J.’s Armenian restaurant on Maroa Street where the food was just like what our mother used to cook, and once again I interviewed him about the old days, and when we stood by my car as I was leaving I wanted to hug him.
But I didn’t. No one hugged in our family except our mother.
“I’ll come again,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll drive up to Berkeley,” he said. “I like Berkeley.”
That was in August. I had wanted to drive down again but the weeks passed, and when he flew to Milwaukee to be with his son Tory for Thanksgiving, I worried after Tory’s Facebook mentioned he wasn’t feeling well.
But he called me as soon as he returned to Fresno. “I’m okay,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”
He had caught pneumonia on the plane to Milwaukee and was in the hospital there until he was well enough to fly back, and I stopped worrying when he sounded okay on the phone.
But a few days later Tory called from Milwaukee to say he was in the Fresno Kaiser Hospital. Tory flew there the following day, and after driving across the valley I met him in my brother’s room in the intensive care unit.
The doctor had told Tory that the aneurysm was like “a ticking time bomb,” and no one knew when it would explode. “It could be any minute or it could take a week or even two.”
The aneurysm was in his chest and had spread to his kidney, and it may have begun years earlier when he had the heart attack. It had bothered him about four years ago when he was offered a surgery with a fifty-fifty chance of survival that he declined with his usual optimism, but now it had caught up with him.
His mind was blurry and he was too weak to carry on a conversation, yet he was my same brother and even joked with the nurse’s aide. Tory and I sat with him until evening and then went back to his house to sleep.
Tory would stay in Fresno and investigate a hospice if it was needed, but I didn’t know what to do. I had nothing urgent in Berkeley, but I couldn’t stay for weeks, so I decided to drive home in the morning and return in a few days.
He was still too weak to talk when Tory and I came in the morning, and I sat silent at his side while Tory was with the nurse at her desk. He looked just like my mother when she lay dying, but she was a hundred and he was only turning eighty-eight.
Then I stood up to leave, and I said,
“I have to go back to Berkeley now, Tom, but I’ll come again in a few days.”
But he knew his time was up, and he nodded for me to come closer to his face, and when I hunched to his face he pulled me to his cheek with tears in his eyes, and his whiskers were like when he cuddled me when I was a toddler, and I choked to keep from crying until I could make it to the elevator where I sobbed and fell apart.
He was still alive the next day, and Tory said over the phone that one of his fellow Shriners had come, and he even joked with him. But later he was in bad pain and needed morphine, and he died on his birthday the next morning, unconscious from the morphine.
The funeral wasn’t until last week, and Tory did the service since he’s a pastor in the Metropolitan Church for the L.G.B.T. community that is a Protestant Christian denomination, so he quoted from the Bible like Augustine.
My brother wasn’t a believer, but he had gone along with it to be part of the gang, and even my mother had gone along with it, though she wasn’t a believer either. Once when we talked about what she really believed in, he said:
“The world was her cathedral.”
But the only Bible I knew was from Blake and Rembrandt and Bach et al, a book of stories and poems in different forms and versions.
One day around forty years ago I was walking in the neighborhood of Cannaregio in Venice, and I stepped from the crowd into the little church of San Giovanni Grisostomo whose Greek Orthodox interior was like the little Armenian Orthodox church where I once lit a candle for my father, and as I looked at the Bellini painting of Saint Christopher, a middle aged woman came in from the street and dropped a coin in the box next to mine, and after lighting a candle she prayed to a painting of a Madonna as we each looked up with our separate faiths, mine in art and hers in her God.
It was late afternoon and she seemed as if coming from work she wanted to pray before going home to cook for her family, and her devotion was as if she were teaching me a gratitude for what gives us life.
Then in the Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro, a young priest showed me the room where Byron read Armenian manuscripts, and in the room were a Buddhist text in Pali and an Egyptian mummy whose skin was like black leather, and the young priest had blond hair and blue eyes and said in Armenian that he was born in Hungary and his mother was Hungarian.
Then the next morning in the little flat where I was staying with young Tito and Antonio, their little radio reported the death of Sartre, who was an atheist.
And here now I am back in the farmhouse in Freehold while my mother is chatting in the parlor with Dickran and Astkhig and my father is sitting silent beside them, and I am in the kitchen writing my first story with the window open to the warm night and the rhythm of the crickets is weaving my lines like the hum of AUM resounding beyond the candle I once lit for my father to be well again.
Who are you to whom all writers write, O life, O death?
Here is a sketch of mine from a few years ago of my brother watching TV and wearing his wig.