The Book of Stone. Jonathan Papernick
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must cover your head.”
Stone realized now the man had placed a kippa onto his head, one of those satiny vinyl jobs old men tended to wear, propped high on the crowns of their heads like tents.
He didn’t want to, but this was no place to make a scene. The man, perhaps sensing Stone’s reticence, grabbed him by the shoulders and said, “You will wear the yarmulke and honor your father.”
He would honor his father whichever way he chose, and thought for a moment of tearing the thing off his head, but when he saw Pinky pulling faces behind the man, with his own kippa clipped to his gelled hair, he realized this was not a fight he needed to have. He placed the kippa back onto his head, looked the man in his empty eyes, and said, “Satisfied?”
“You are in mourning?”
“My father is dead,” Stone said.
“Then you will rend your garment as an expression of your grief for the loss of a loved one.” Before Stone had the chance to consider the man’s words and what they meant, the man had torn the pocket off Stone’s jacket with a swift yank, so the fabric flapped down below his heart. “Now, you are among the mourners of Zion,” the man said, stalking off into the crowd.
Stone was among no one. This was his only suit, and the man had ripped it with such arrogance and entitlement because of some meaningless tradition that did nothing to comfort Stone. Who were these people? And how could his father have tolerated them? Stone was not part of this world, and for that he was glad.
Stone scanned the crowd to distract himself from the unpleasantness at hand. He began to count in his head, by fives, how many people were in attendance. He doubted he knew half a dozen people who would care enough to pay their respects to him if it were all over now. The thought depressed him, and an immense empty space opened up around him. Somehow, in the blazing spotlight of the sun, he shivered in his suit. He had reached a hundred and fifty when he saw, standing on a small grassy hill beyond the last ragged group of mourners, a slim dark-haired man, face pressed to a camera, its enormous telephoto lens a giant eye out for a day at the circus. Why couldn’t the media just leave this one alone? His father was dead, nothing mattered anymore. The story was over, the funeral a final parenthesis on a complicated life that had ended too soon. He imagined the photograph the next day in one of the local tabloids, the ghoulish headline punning on their family name for the final time. But something caught Stone’s attention: the way the man tilted his head from side to side, as if trying to work out a crick from having slept badly. Among all the black-clad mourners chatting in a noisy mélange of English, Hebrew, and Yiddish, this man was different.
Stone failed to notice the casket arrive at the graveside. A rabbi was reciting prayers. The prayers meant nothing, repeated by rote in an ancient language that had no relevance at all to Stone. As the casket descended into the ground, he imagined his father wrapped in the white shroud and prayer shawl the Judge had told him he had received at his bar mitzvah over fifty years ago.
Stone had been so ill at ease at the funeral home that when Ehrenkranz asked him whether he had his father’s prayer shawl with him, he had taken the opportunity to leave at once to go find it. He had left his father’s apartment only a few hours earlier, but when he arrived he saw the lock had been jimmied and the door left ajar. Stone felt as if he had been dipped into a pool of freezing water as he called out, “Hello!” He heard no answer and entered the apartment, half expecting to see his father still in bed, reading. He called out again, heard nothing, and now, filled more with anger than with fear—who the hell would rob a dead man?—he slammed the door behind him and pulled the deadbolt.
The apartment was trashed. His father’s precious books, yanked from the shelves, lay scattered around the floor; his drawers were overturned; keepsakes and tchotchkes lay smashed on the ground. A panicked fist of anxiety gripped his throat and he fought to gain his breath. Something told him not to call the police, not to report the break-in. He was alone, had never been so alone before. But, gathering one of his father’s books from the floor, a yellowed paperback copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Stone realized no, he wasn’t entirely alone. He discovered, as he flipped through the pages, that his father had underlined pertinent passages and made marginal notes throughout the book. He paused for a moment at a passage his father must have marked years ago with a graphite pencil: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl had survived the Nazi death camps but had lost his parents, his brother, and his pregnant wife and had the strength to write those words. Stone was barely a quarter-century old and had suffered no such tragedies. And yet he was overcome by such loss and emptiness. In a blind fever he began to gather the books and stack them up in towering piles, nearly as tall as himself. The Judge collected rare books, from “In the beginning . . .” and his eighteenth-century reprint of the Gutenberg Bible through to the Spanish Inquisition and the Jewish mystics, from biographies of the American presidents to the voluminous writings of Churchill and Freud, to Carl von Clausewitz and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Each one was underlined, marked, or annotated to some degree, and, in this way, his father was still alive. The impenetrable mystery of his father lay in those books. The Judge was speaking to Stone, guiding him, as he discovered in book after book, in sentences as bright as gems meant to show him how to navigate his path forward. Stone continued stacking thirteen volumes of Rashi’s Torah commentary, smelled the pages and ran his fingers over the Hebrew words his father had read. More religious books: the Tanach, bound in green leather; the Gemarah; and the Shulchan Aruch, Joseph Caro’s code of Jewish law. The religious books were unmarked, but the soft pages had been read again and again.
Just yesterday, in the hours before his father had slipped away forever, the Judge had, with monumental effort, motioned to a thick book on his bedside table. Stone had propped it on the pillow for him and opened it. The Judge moaned. Wrong page. Stone flipped to another page and then another, until finally the Judge was calm. His father’s eyes moved across the page. Stone thought his father was reading out of habit now, barely registering the words. Soon he drifted in and out of consciousness, his voice destroyed by the cancer, muttering the words of the Shema and “God Bless America,” the languages mixing and blending. Stone went to move the heavy book from his father’s chest, but the Judge gripped it with surprising strength and Stone relented. And now the Judge, alert for the last time, recited the Aramaic words of the Kaddish, enunciating every syllable of the ancient recitation with crystalline clarity before slipping back into delirium.
Stone wanted to call someone, anyone, to fix what was happening to the Judge. A chill of panic rushed up and down his spine, but then he realized there was no cure for death, and it was making its appearance at last. As if scrolling through the major players of his life, the Judge called out the names Daddy, Bunny, Abi, and Matthew, three generations of his family. He also called out the name Henry, a name Stone did not recognize. When he asked the Judge, “Who is Henry?” the Judge did not answer.
Could it be that Walter Stone had had another son Stone did not know, a son who had not failed to disappoint? Stone figured anything was possible, but why the insistence, and why now, when he had never said the name Henry out loud before?
Soon Stone no longer understood what the Judge was trying to say, as if he had already passed over into the other world and was speaking its timeless language. He muttered “Seligman” in his sleep and awoke with fright in his eyes, repeating the name, “Seligman, Seligman,” and then in the same breath, “Henry.”
When Stone asked again, “Who is Henry?” the Judge mumbled some words, something about “the numbers.”
He asked, “What numbers?”
“Which, which,” the Judge said with difficulty, and Stone realized to his horror that even now, with communication so tenuous between them, the Judge was correcting his grammar. He dabbed water on his father’s lips for the last time, and the Judge said with difficulty, “Seligman. Seligman.”
Then the Judge was silent, and Matthew Stone was alone with the corpse of his father.
He