LAKE MORIAH by Howard Luxenberg
“Hunting? You want to go off into the woods and shoot bunny rabbits?” Abe had decided long ago that the easiest way to deny his son something was to ridicule it. Renee, his wife, preferred to simply say “no.” They were seated on three sides of a yellow Formica table, worn pale as parchment at the edges. Renee chose to sit facing the lake. On either side they could see the sides of their neighbors’ cottages, year- round places, one with a large gray cylinder of propane, the other with a snowmobile crouched under a bright blue tarp.
But Zak persisted: “I would eat whatever I killed.”
“And skin it? And gut it?” Abe looked to his wife for support, but Renee declined to comment. Abe watched as she toyed with the squat, candle-filled glass, the yortzeit. Every year Renee lit it in honor of Abe’s father. Renee was a convert, and for the most part she practiced her Judaism like an anthropologist, but with the yortzeit she seemed at home. For the memory of her own folks she did nothing. Abe felt enveloped in a bubble of tenderness with her.
Zak broke it. “I would skin it and gut it and cook it and eat it. And clean up afterwards.”
Abe looked at the yortzeit, but he asked Zak if he remembered Maury, who was still alive.
“Mr. Klein?” Zak was being treated, now that he was thirteen, to the first names of his father’s friends.
Abe nodded. “He got this bug to go hunting. Just when gun control, endangered species, vegetarianism became fashionable.”
“Because they became fashionable,” Renee amended. Abe knew that what he found pleasantly ironic in Maury, Renee found annoying and immature.
Zak shot his mother an annoyed look. “So?”
“So.” Abe shifted forward in his chair, leaning his shoulders into the story, really an anecdote he’d read somewhere that had nothing to do with Maury. “It’s deer season. He drives his Lincoln up to the Catskills. The Catskills, for Chrissake. He’ll come back with Shecky Green tied to his fender. There haven’t been any deer in the Catskills since who knows when. He trudges around in the woods all day long and he doesn’t even see a deer. He gets lost. So now he doesn’t care about deer at all, he just wants to find his way back to the Lincoln. And then, like a miracle, there it is: a little cottage, and on its lawn, a deer. Maury can’t believe it. He tries to remember what he’s supposed to do. Squeeze the trigger. That’s the ticket – don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it.” Abe mimics a trigger slowly being squeezed. “He’s like the guy in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ he raises the rifle so slowly, afraid to make a sound. But when he’s ready to shoot, there are these bright mournful eyes.” Abe deliberately stopped here, sawed a piece of steak, and started chewing.
“And?”
“He couldn’t do it.”
Zak made a disgusted stab at his steak. “I could have done it.”
“Sure, and you’d have blown the brains out of a plastic lawn ornament.” Abe went back to his steak, a sign that this conversation was over.
“If Jews had been hunters, the Nazis wouldn’t have had such an easy time killing us.” Zak spoke to his plate.
“They fought in Warsaw. Guns aren’t much against tanks.”
Zak said nothing. He went outside, to the edge of the lake, where he threw stones at an inner tube.
Abe rinsed the dishes. He felt Renee circle her arms around him and rest her cheek against his back. Renee said, “I think what Zak really wants to hunt are Nazis.”
* * *
In spite of himself, Abe thought about going hunting with Zak, or if not hunting, then white water rafting. Some adventure, with just a hint of danger, to help usher Zak into manhood. Abe thought of Zak as young for his age. Abe was further troubled by the sense he had that other fathers were closer to their sons, spent more time with them, time in which they passed along vast stores of male knowledge pertaining to cars and sports and outdoor life. These of course, but something more essential, something of the essential loneliness of manhood and self-reliance.
He had mentioned this to Renee once, in the lazy aftermath of their lovemaking. She said, “Teach him to respect women, and he can spend his weekends like you just did, while his buddies are out slapping horseflies in the woods.” Renee was a self-described fan of “civilization and its contentments.”
Abe often thought of his own father. At thirteen, Max had come to America alone from Russia. Abe had tried to imagine that voyage – the first time when he was a homesick boy of nine at his first overnight camp. Because no details of the crossing were ever provided, Abe supplied his own. A black, four-stack ship, as big as the Titanic, that somehow only sailed at night. In steerage, a word he did not understand but associated with a rat infested cargo hold. A thin boy in tattered knickers and a cap, a Jewish Huck Finn, elated with the adventure of it.
The thought of that voyage dwarfed Abe to this day. Max had a confidence uncluttered by second thoughts. He had decided to come to America at thirteen – thirteen! – and he had done it. Anything was possible for such a man. But his material ambitions had been simple and straightforward. A house, a car, a nice suit. And gadgets: every electronic device had sung its siren song to Abe’s father. He had the first TV on the block. He had a CB when only truckers had them. He had a car phone before his stockbroker did. He could not pass a video arcade without stopping to play, a short thick water buffalo among a herd of adolescent giraffes. (He would, Abe joked, have traded his stout heart for an infirm one, just to have a pacemaker installed.) It was cancer, a disease without a gadget, that had killed him.
* * *
Zak was still throwing stones at the inner tube when Abe walked past him, headed for the water. Every day after dinner, when the lake stopped buzzing with water skiers, Abe took his exercise by swimming across. The lake, a reservoir really, was beyond the Catskills, filling a basin between the upstate drumlins. An earth and stone dam pinched off the lake at the south end. Here and there the forest came all the way to the water’s edge, obscuring the shoreline.
The metal dock gave a shudder when Abe’s first step hit it. There was a fishy smell just at the shoreline. The deck plates were still warm. Abe scratched an itchy instep on the abrasive metal. The end of the dock smelled of tanning oil.
The stone throwing stopped. Renee was coming.
“Abe.” He braced himself for the inevitable. “Let me row across with you.” The request was too nonchalant.
“No thanks.”
“I’ll stay out of your way, dear.”
“No thank you.”
“Then do you mind if I just go for a row? If I see some motorboat heading your way I promise I won’t even yell to them.”
Zak threw a handful of stones at the tube. Abe walked back to where Renee was standing. He gripped her shoulders in a way that was meant to transmit confidence, but which he quickly realized seemed patronizing. “Allow me this one foolish habit.”
“It makes me nervous to watch. They let their kids drive the boats, they get drunk and go for rides.”
“Don’t watch. Besides they’re still at dinner.”
Renee creased her brow into a plea. Abe shook his head and walked back to the dock. He heard the cottage door slam.
Zak moved to the dock, testing the water with his feet. “You gonna swim across?”
“Yes.”
“Can I come?”
“You’re out of shape.” This was not strictly true. What was true was that Zak wasn’t much of a swimmer. Abe had tried to teach him several times, starting when Zak was six. He no longer had the patience to try.
“I can make it.”
“What if you can’t?”
“I can make it. If I don’t you can save me.”
Well, he could. He’d been a lifeguard in high school and college. And they had had this conversation before. “If you get tired we’ll head back.”
“I won’t get tired.”
Zak jumped in and started thrashing toward the opposite shore. Abe gave him a head start, then watched, annoyed. He paused to look a moment at the far shore. There was a strip of shadow that would grow thicker as the sun set. When he swam across, Abe was always aware of exactly when he entered the shadow, and when he crossed back out of it on the return lap.
In his college days he had been a distance swimmer, mostly 1500’s. He had come to enjoy the trance that came with swimming endless laps. At Zak’s age he had already been a strong fluid swimmer, confident in the water. Tonight he went out harder and faster than usual. He wanted to pass Zak up quickly, intimidate him a little, get this charade over. He was 25 yards past Zak when his first burst of energy subsided. He treaded water and waited for Zak to catch up. Then he swam off again, stopped and waited for Zak to catch up. Soon they were halfway across.
“I can’t swim anymore.” Zak’s tone was matter of fact, as if they were out for a job, and stopping was a simple matter of plopping down on the curb. Abe had been waiting for this. He swam back to where his son was struggling.
“Face me. Put your hands on my shoulders. Arms straight. That’s right. Keep them straight. Head back. Head back. Legs apart. I’ll swim you back.” The tired swimmer’s carry.
Abe begins a constrained breaststroke, pushing Zak ahead of him. He aims for the opposite shore, judging it to be closer. His stroke is ragged at first. He pulls and kicks harder. It straightens out. Abe wants to speak to Zak, to reassure him – that’s part of the process as they teach it in lifesaving classes – but he can think of nothing to say, and soon he is breathing too hard from the exertion to speak. Tired, he looks across the darkening water to gauge their progress. He sees how far the shore still is, kicks and strokes harder. He monitors his stroke for some flaw, for some reason they have not made greater progress. He concentrates on his hands, presses his fingers into a self conscious cup, pushes the water back rigidly, with an exaggerated precision, as if he were teaching the stroke. Then he bends his legs in perfect symmetry, gathering them for the kick. And then he kicks. But there is not enough momentum to glide. He strokes again quickly, to keep them above water. He strokes again, desperately, working for the momentary glide in which he will catch his breath. There is no glide and no rest. He strokes again and again, gulping air when he can. The dark water is thicker now, the laws of propulsion are changed. He pulls at the water and it crumbles in his hands. His legs kick in a pile of oily marbles, each kick serves only to rearrange them. He is doing the stroke correctly, with an exaggerated perfection, but there is no movement. He does not dare exhale properly for fear of sinking. The water is cheating him. It has changed. The books all lie, he knows the truth now: people drown because the water changes on them. He has seen a river in winter, a black vein of anthracite coal, a million times more solid than the snow around it. Abe feels a chill spread through him. He gathers strength for one final stroke that will change the water back. He pulls hard with his arms, his skin tensed for signs of betrayal. He whips hard with his legs. He waits for the reassuring sensation of motion, for proof that the water’s spell has broken. He waits to glide. But the water slips on the water beneath it and no glide comes. They are drowning.
As a child Abe would pose himself a child’s question: If you had a choice and could save yourself or your father, whom would you save? In the full bloom of his innocence he could imagine no harder question. But now they could both drown, or he could save himself. The books all lie: the tragedy is not in the choice, but in the choosing.
“I can swim now.” Zak lets go and splashes off as heartily and as awkwardly as at the beginning. Abe turns on his back and floats, forcing his breath into a rhythm. He turns over and takes a few tentative strokes and is pleased to feel the water obey him. He does a slow sidestroke, keeping an eye on Zak. Zak reaches the far shore first and begins to walk back around the lake to their cottage. Abe follows, glad for the distance between them, glad for his rear guard position, glad for the silence, glad even for the penance the mosquitoes exact as he and Zak straggle back through the woods and the yards of strangers.
Howard Luxenberg’s stories have been published in Tin House, Other Voices, Gettysburg Review, and The Iowa Review. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.