1001 Nights Cast

Moishe feels solemn at dinner, more so for the three women carrying on as if nothing were happening, as if they couldn’t see yet another giant knife falling from the sky to cut something else, his Lusie, away from his body and worse, from himself. He clenches his own dinner knife and doesn’t let go all through dinner, just in case he might have to do battle with whomever is coming to take Lusie away. He plans what he might do to defend her against this as-yet-unknown adversary, not knowing it is only the train to Boston. At dessert Lusie, Mina and Miriam take coffee, Lusie smokes and her sister and mother take brandy and cake. They discuss the relative merits of New York and Cambridge, Mina preferring to remain where fashions are up to date. Lusie jokes she’ll spend so much time in the Radcliffe libraries that she’ll have no idea it’s time to change into winter clothing until January. Mina and Miriam laugh, but when Moishe forces a smile he feels like he has a prosthetic mouth, and he’s sure his family is looking at it as if it hadn’t been stitched on properly. To find his real self again, he reaches into his pocket, fingering the chamois bag with the talismanic contents that Lusie gave him. He wants to sit on her lap at dinner, but he also wants to be a grown-up, and the grown-ups are all so cheerful in spite of the cataclysm coming the following morning.

Moishe curls up against Lusie for what might be the last time. She says he’s going to have to be brave, that she will be home in December and they will curl up again as they are now. She has to go away to learn what she needs to know to use knives for constructive purposes. Moishe asks her to tell the story again of the Nazi officer she cut to ribbons and threw into the sea. Lusie refuses. ‘Once was enough, Moishele, and whatever you remember is enough to remember. Now that we are here, I’m going to make people better with knives.’

This makes no sense to Moishe. How can she make anyone better by slashing his face, heaving him into the harbour and burning his clothes? For that matter, what good was it to have had that mohel hack away at his penis? He didn’t feel any more like his father’s son. He still felt like he had two mothers, Miriam and Lusie, and a lovely sister, Mina, who’d dance with him any time he wanted.

Lusie lights a cigarette in the dark. The ember glows, a tiny campfire, around which the two sleepy mountaineers gather for a nightcap of whispered conversation. Lusie explains that she is going to be a surgeon one day, like Mama Miriam, but legal. As she describes a number of basic surgeries to Moishe, he watches the smoke curling over their heads. Occasionally he reaches out his finger to poke through a smoke ring. He sees that spending all day with him won’t make Lusie a surgeon, and he resolves to let her go, even if it means his life is ruined. He does not want her to stay if she doesn’t want to. Lusie holds him close and tells him she has incommensurate desires, and that life is like that. She promises to come back and take him to see the Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Center.

When he is much older he remembers the year it was painted silver. Lusie wasn’t there then. She was at Harvard Medical School, and he saw less of her. He was old enough to have some pocket money by 1952, and he took his mother to the Rainbow Room for brunch that day. While Miriam gazed out the window, marveling that the snow was snowing up, Moishe could only think that Lusie would someday be able to save someone only slightly more bereft than Moishe was for missing Lusie on the annual tree visit, if that someone would jump from the Rainbow Room terrace onto the pavement below, after having passed all their money on to the Salvation Army volunteer on the way into the building.

Moishe cannot sleep at night. The silence is too loud to bear. When Lusie was home he could snuggle up next to her and listen to his father’s watch tick-tocking him to sleep. Now he tries to let the traffic noises do the work of slumber, but they are too restive, and they only remind him of people going somewhere, like Lusie going. For the rest of his life his real sleep comes from daytime naps, ten minutes at a time. Kennedy naps, he will call them when he explains them to his daughter. At night he will always feel slightly anxious. Only when he sleeps curled around his young daughter as he and Lusie used to does he sleep well. As he drifts away he looks at the back of her head, her dark hair already mussed and slightly sweaty, and he remembers the day she was born. His wife labored for hours, the baby would not turn, things looked bleak. Lusitania insisted that they deliver her at hospital, and she performed the c-section that saved his wife and daughter. They hadn’t even contemplated a name until the moment they saw the wet and purple little creature, screaming exuberantly. For the first time ever, Moishe uttered aloud the name Lusitania was born with. Jews do not name their children after living people—it is not wise for either party. After a brief discussion among Lusitania, Moishe and his wife, it was understood that the name belonged to someone who’d died long ago, and was a suitable name for his daughter. As he held her in his arms, he was glad not to have to worry about circumcising her.