fauxklore

Chapter 8

(Chapters 1-7 are here.)

Other kids? They went on trips to the zoo or the museum with their fathers. My daddy took me on tours of boiler rooms. I was six years old the first time he chaperoned me on an inspection of some properties he owned in Washington Heights. It was a long drive from our neat little bungalow in Montclair with its postage-stamp lawn and snowball hydrangeas.

He'd grown up in post-war Germany, where bombed-out buildings were a literal thing. In New York City, he specialized in the metaphorical kind.

He'd bought his first ruined walk‑up on a block no cab driver would go down after dark. “They told me I was crazy,” he would say, beaming. “They weren’t wrong. But it was a profitable kind of crazy.”

We would clatter up stairwells that smelled like boiled cabbage and piss. He would point out architectural details the way other fathers pointed out lions and monkeys at the zoo: egg‑and‑dart molding, original hex tile, a bit of stained glass miraculously unbroken above a mail slot.

“These were going for nothing when I bought them,” he liked to tell me. “Fifty bucks down and a prayer. No one else wanted them. Too old, too far gone.”

He had no interest in razing old buildings to erect shiny new ones. He only trusted masonry that already knew how to stand, and he built up quite the portfolio—in Washington Heights, on the Lower East Side, in Williamsburg, and in Crown Heights before Brooklyn became fashionable.

When he was 72, he sat me down at the dining room table with two glasses of tea and a thick folder filled with legal documents. Several days earlier, a cancer doc had reviewed a list of treatment options with him. He'd decided to skip them all.

“These are the trusts,” he said. “The buildings will be in LLCs. I’ve arranged it so that whatever happens, you’ll be comfortable. More than comfortable. You won’t ever have to take a job you hate.”

I was 21 and snippy. “But I don’t want to be comfortable, Papa,” I told him. “I want to work. I want to fix things, make them beautiful and affordable. Not just collect rent.”

He beamed at me as if I were still six and had just said something precocious and adorable. "You can do both."

###

Could I, though?

By then I was already in my second year at Pratt, and a history of architecture professor, lecturing on Robert Moses and the great clearance schemes, had finally convinced me, using black‑and‑white slides, that my father had not single‑handedly rescued the entire prewar housing stock of Manhattan from the wrecking ball.

The slides didn’t show how quickly altruistic intentions could be value‑engineered out of a building. They didn't have to. I was an eyewitness to that one. At Pratt, most projects that started with passionate debates about daylight and community gardens quickly devolved into clinical analyses of parking ratios, stair details, and premium corner units.

We called Pratt’s dedicated workspace "studio." We didn’t go to class; we went to studio. Studio was the long, overlit room where we presented our concepts, built physical and digital models, got project prompts from our professors—and slowly realized the profession we loved didn’t necessarily love us back.

My classmates were terrified. Pratt was one of the top five art and design universities in the U.S., one of the top ten in the world. My classmates had taken out loans equivalent to a 15-year mortgage on a three-bedroom house in Scranton to pay their tuition, and they were looking at a five‑year gauntlet of unpaid internships once they graduated. Pratt bonding rituals involved one-upmanship over who had the smallest room, the worst landlord, the most overdrawn checking account. Every time a professor joked, “You’ll be lucky to get a job drawing bathroom details,” you could feel the room flinch.

I flinched, too, but for a different reason: I was only going to have to draft ADA-compliant sink/shower stall combos if I wanted to, and I didn't think I would ever want to. Though if I didn't, in all likelihood, I would never get the chance to design anything else.

I didn't confide this in any of my classmates, of course. I pretended to be one of them. I bitched about internships and fees. I sighed and shook my head when people talked about the terror of graduating into a recession. Money was my dirty secret. I was terrified my classmates would hate me if they found out I had it. And who knows? Maybe they'd be right.

###

There’s one in every year. Bastard child of Frank Lloyd Wright and Maya Lin. Self-taught genius. Former prodigy who, at five, was building Lego cities complete with zoning laws and bus routes and, at twelve, was pulling in two hundred bucks a week selling prefab villages on the Minecraft Marketplace. In my year, this wunderkind was Leo Decker. With his shoulder length brown hair, scruffy beard, and Birkenstocks, he looked dumb, like some farm belt fantasy of Jesus.

How oblivious did you have to be to wear sandals in a city full of puddles, dog shit, and broken glass? I disliked Leo Decker on principle, so naturally our Urban Design professor partnered us for the whole term, making us collaborate on a range of projects that would start with a diagram of a single intersection and build toward a whole city block anchored by a new public library.

I watched Leo Decker sketch little circles for pedestrian counts in the margins of the intersection trace. Then he frowned. “Wait. What are you seeing here? Cars, buses, people?”

“You tell me,” I said.

He shook his head, still looking at the page. “You tell me. I already know what I think. I want to see what I’m missing.”

First surprise: Leo Decker was not a showboater.

Second surprise: Leo Decker cared how space worked. He got passionate about setback lines. He thought about where the sun would be at four p.m. in February, when kids walked home from school, and little old ladies shuffled out for groceries. He was the first person I’d met at Pratt who cared more about where the trash cans went and how the elevator smelled than how a building would photograph on the real estate listing.

After the first week we worked together, it became impossible to tell who had drawn what in the massive piles of trace paper our projects generated. He'd lay down arrows showing how people would move through our planned space while I'd sketch walls in the exact places his circulation lines flowed. We anticipated each other's ideas, almost as if we were drafting with the same pair of eyes.

Not all the time, of course. When we were working on the library stairwells, for example, I lobbied hard for a straight run; he argued for a switchback with a landing. "You don't sprint through a library," he informed me, idly sketching a tiny figure halfway up with an open book in its hands.

I found myself staring at his hands.

Third surprise: Leo Decker was hot.

Cliche, right?

He wasn’t my type at all. I liked older men—by which I meant men in their thirties. I suppose that was my daddy complex. Men who wore real shoes and good watches, who knew their way around restaurant wine lists, who had a five‑year plan. I’d just started sleeping with one, in fact. He was good with his hands, but I still had to fake the big, cinematic orgasms he was so sure he was giving me.

Leo Decker never talked about his personal life. I couldn't be sure he even had a personal life. I made big inferences from the smallest details: the national park stickers on the dented water bottle he carted around everywhere (wholesome homelife growing up, I decided), the cracked screen on his ancient Android phone (a loner who despised social media). When he ordered a bean and vegetable burrito in the Pratt cafeteria for the third day in a row, I asked, "So, how long have you been a vegan?"

"What? I'm not a vegan. I had a pepperoni Hot Pocket for breakfast."

I raised an eyebrow at the burrito. "Then why...?"

He stared at me. "It's the shortest cafeteria line. We can get back to the circulation diagrams faster. So, what do you want to do about the bus stop placement?"

###

Way off in another corner of my life, my father was fading. I never exactly forgot he was dying, but when I was in studio, I often forgot I had a father. Pratt was a truly immersive universe.

Then my mother would call to remind me.

I'd never thought of my mother and father as being particularly close—I suppose because my mother and I weren't—but of course they must have been. It was a second marriage, and she was a lot younger than he was. He'd been married once already in Germany, ditched that wife to come over here and pursue his plans of getting rich. There'd been children, two boys. When he showed me their photographs, what I saw were pictures of two grown men in suits and ties. These couldn't possibly be my brothers, I thought. Brothers, I'd always assumed, are people your own age.

"He wants to ask you something," my mother told me over the phone.

"What?"

"He's afraid you'll say no," she replied.

"That doesn't answer my question," I pointed out.

"Then come home and ask him yourself," she snapped.

So I did.

Nobody was there to pick me up from the Montclair train station. Which was odd: My father always picked me up from the Montclair train station, and on the way home, he'd take me by a retro fifties ice cream parlor called the Soda Pop Shop, where he'd force feed me enormous chocolate milkshakes.

The Uber I hailed went right by the Soda Pop Shop, only it wasn't there anymore; in its place was a store promising cheap computer repairs.

And my parents' house no longer looked like the place where my happy childhood had been staged. The hydrangeas lining the front pathway had been hacked down to stumps, and my father's crocuses and daffodils were a bald strip of dirt. Garbage cans cluttered the driveway.

I still had my keys.

Inside the house, tightly drawn window drapes made the living room look like a funeral parlor. All the lights were on, though it was only the middle of the afternoon. The room smelled funny. An enormous plastic pill organizer sat on the coffee table next to a stack of unopened mail. A wheelchair was shoved behind one of the easy chairs.

At the top of the stairs, my mother appeared. Grey roots showed under her black salon dye job.

"Oh, it's you," she said.

"And it's great to see you, too," I said.

She ignored this. "He's awake," she said, "but it's going to take me a few minutes to get him ready."

Get him ready?

When my father finally hobbled down the stairs, I saw what she meant. His suit hung on his wasted frame, and his abdomen was as swollen as a pregnant woman's. He winced slightly when I hugged him, and I caught the scent of antiseptic mouthwash overlaying something acrid and sour when he kissed my cheek.

"My girl!" he said. "My smart, smart girl. And you're doing so well in school. But you have a little break now, yes? For Easter?"

"Spring break," I babbled. "But I have so much work to do! I'm designing a library. But it's going to be so much more than a library! It's going to be a community center and a performance venue, and I'm working with a really talented guy. I brought my portfolio! Sit down, I'll show you—"

"I want you to come to the old country with me, mayn bubeleh," he interrupted, leaning heavily against my mother's arm. My mother rolled her eyes.

"But Daddy! I can't! I have so much work to do. I mean, I'd love to, but I don't see how—"

"Short trip," said my father. "I want to show you where I come from. And your brothers. You can bring your work with you, yes? You should meet your brothers."

Say yes, I told myself. It will make him feel good. And anyway, they won't let him fly, they'll say he's way too sick—

But it turns out they'll let you fly anywhere if you pay for first class.

###

We flew into the Metz–Nancy Lorraine airport. The town my father came from was called Metz, near the German and Luxembourg borders.

"But I thought you said you were brought up in Germany," I accused my father as we left the airport terminal. Though he leaned heavily against my shoulder, he was having trouble walking. "This is France."

"It was German enough once," my father gasped.

My high school civics class had glossed over World War II, and the only thing you heard about at Pratt was Dresden’s post‑reunification push to reconstruct the Neumarkt and the Frauenkirche. (Thomas Gottschlich had come to lecture before our first‑year Introduction to Urban Form studio.) I had some vague notion that every city east of Paris had been decimated in the war, so Metz’s intactness—narrow streets, stone buildings, cobblestones—came as a shock.

Our hotel, in the heart of the Old Town, had once been a citadel back in the time of the 16th‑century wars of religion. I could hardly wait to tell Leo Decker how they'd shoved the reception desk and the fire exits into the old barracks corridors.

"Est-ce qu'il y a des messages pour moi?" my father asked the concierge. I'd never heard him speak French before.

There was one: My brothers would meet us at the hotel restaurant at precisely 10 a.m. the following morning.

I'd been traveling for twelve hours. I wanted to get out and stretch my legs. Maybe snap some photos of arcaded medieval houses clustered round the ancient town squares or the Gothic spires of the Metz Cathedral. I'd text them to Leo Decker with a note: Guess what? I'm in France! Metz update: I'm gonna need a bigger diagram—

Except when we reached our suite, my father beckoned me into his bedroom and perched on the bed expectantly until I helped him off with his shirt and tie.

Once I’d stripped him down to his undershirt, I could clearly see the venous access port just below his collarbone, the small raised disc under the skin, the discolored scar above it. The white taped dressing over it was coming loose. My mother had shown me how to change it, but I’d never really thought I’d have to, so I hadn’t paid attention.

My father rummaged in his travel satchel for a bottle of pills. “Whiskey!” he rasped, nodding at the minibar.

I handed him a mini‑bottle of Jameson’s. He swallowed two pills with a single gulp, then drained the bottle.

“More.”

I brought him another.

He emptied it and sighed. “Traveling with a beautiful woman,” he said flirtatiously. “I feel young again. You know, the first time I came into this building, it wasn't a fancy hotel. There were boards over the doors. Half the roof and all the windows were missing. We used to sneak in here. We were just boys. That was right after the war."

"Is this where they hid you?" I asked nervously. I knew my father was a Jew; I knew the only reason he had survived was because a Catholic family had taken him in.

"Here? No," my father said. "They hid me in the cellar beneath the bakery. And then in a loft in a barn beyond town. And then in a shed near the tracks outside Gare de Metz‑Ville. For a while, I even stayed in the rectory's attic. That was the worst. Every night, the priest would creep up the stairs and harangue me about killing Christ, Why did you do it? He seemed to think all Jews shared one collective mind like insects, like ants or bees. That we could communicate with each other across time." He laughed.

"What happened to your mother and father?" I asked carefully.

"I think you can guess," said my father. "I was ten, which is old enough to remember their faces. Except I don't. I remember my brother's face, though. And my sister's. She looked like you."

"How did you...?"

"Luck," said my father. "They came for us one morning with their lists and their trucks. All they cared about were the names and the ages on that list. They shouted our names and my parents, and my brother and my sister stepped forward like they were going to earn a prize for obedience. Not me, though. If they wanted me, they were going to have to track me down and drag me out—which they were perfectly willing and able to do, of course.

"At the transit point, near the bakery, there was a knot of people. Gossips who liked to watch the roundups, children sent out to buy bread. The gendarme called out my name again, and the neighbor boy who lived next door to us moved in closer to watch. We were the same height, had the same bad haircut. The gendarme grabbed him." My father looked at something very far away. "The gendarme shoved him in the truck. Nobody understood what was going on. And by the time they did, the truck was gone."

"But that's horrible," I said.

My father shrugged. "Luck frequently is. It's a zero-sum game. Good for one person. Horrible for everyone else."

"Your poor neighbors!"

"They got a consolation prize," he said. "Me. The Resistance hid me during the war. But after the war, I was promised to those neighbors. I slept in their barn, I ate their scraps, I shoveled the shit from their cows and their pigs. And I married their daughter. Though first I had to knock her up. Get me another whiskey, liebchen."

"Should you... ?"

"Just get it," he snapped. He swallowed the contents of the mini-bottle in a single gulp. "For a wedding gift, they gave us a house that had belonged to one of the Jews who'd been sent to the camps. It was falling down around our ears. I fixed it up. That's how I learned what to look for in a good building. And when I'd learned enough, I found someone in Paris who wanted to buy a vacation home and sold it. Grabbed the money. Didn't give them any of it. Left for America. Never looked back."

So, my father's money—which someday soon would be my money—was dirty money.

I didn't know what to think about that. The money still worked. It paid tuition, bought first-class airplane tickets, paid for the buildings in my father's portfolio. The people who took it didn't know it was dirty. But I knew. And I cared.

My father was now looking at me expectantly. Of course, I thought. He wants me to help him put on his pajamas. The thought of getting him out of his clothes, of touching his body, made my gut clench. For the first time in a long while, I understood why my mother was so tired. And so sullen.

###

We arrived late to meet my brothers the next morning. My father had had a bad night. He woke up every two hours to use the bathroom, and he fell the first time because he hadn’t wanted to bother me.

“Well, you bother me even more when you fall,” I told him, and was shocked to hear how much my voice reminded me of my mother’s.

When we finally got to the café, it was twenty past ten.

Two tall, fair‑haired men were seated at a corner table, nursing demitasses of strong black coffee and sharing a copy of Le Républicain Lorrain. They looked enough alike to be twins, but neither of them looked like my father—or me.

My brothers.

The shorter one raised an inquisitive eyebrow at the taller one as we approached. Some subverbal communication passed between them. Then both of them stood.

“Isaac! Reuven!” my father boomed.

Isaac? Reuven?

“Bonjour, Papa,” said the taller of the two—Reuven. “Vous avez fait bon voyage ?” They politely air‑kissed his cheeks.

“Voici ta sœur, Flavia,” said my father. “Elle ne parle ni français ni allemand. So we will talk in English.”

The shorter of the two men—Isaac—regarded me with twinkling, malicious eyes. “Flavia? But the color is not right.”

“Color?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“They do not teach Latin in American schools?” He smiled. “Pity. How can you understand science without Latin?”

“Tut tut,” said Reuven. “Americans don’t study science. They are too busy watching Netflix.” He stretched “Netflix” into three syllables. He smiled, too.

“Flavus means ‘blond’ in Latin,” my father explained. “How is my grandson?” he asked Reuven.

“He is very well,” Reuven said.

“I was hoping I would get the chance to meet him on this trip.”

“That will not be possible, I’m afraid. He sleeps a great deal, and when he is awake, he is focused on les nichons de sa mère,” Reuven said. He lowered his voice confidentially to me. “Sorry, I do not know how to say in English. I mean—” With the edge of his hand, he pantomimed a ledge on his chest.

“He would send his regards if he knew how,” Reuven added.

“He’ll learn,” said my father. “Children… they learn.”

Isaac snorted softly. “Some do,” he said. “Some even learn Latin.”

So what if American schools don’t teach a dead language nobody’s spoken for two thousand years? If Isaac was trying to embarrass me, it didn’t work. I had no intention of giving up my status as a beloved and indulged only child for these two boring men’s approval. Why had my father forced me to come with him on this trip? Dying or not, for a moment, I was furious.

Isaac held up his hand, and the waiter returned to the table. I ordered an espresso and a croissant. My father ordered nothing.

“My appetite is not good,” my father was telling the two brothers. “In fact, my health is not good.”

They made clucking noises.

“I’m told I’m dying,” my father said. “I’ve made some financial provisions for the two of you, but there are tax consequences I needed to take into consideration and—Flavia! Do you mind if I speak to your brothers in French?”

“Not at all,” I said, glancing away from the table. I lost myself in the heavy, sideways light pouring in the café window, the way it lit up the bar’s chrome edges and illuminated the black‑and‑white checkerboard tiles on the floor. How would I change this place if I were given that assignment, I wondered.

The men spoke in French for half an hour or so. I sipped my espresso, nibbled my croissant, paid no attention. When the conversation was over, and the two men rose—courteously—to leave, my father said, a little desperately, “Perhaps you would like to exchange contact information with Flavia? She is your sister.”

“Certainly, Papa,” Reuven said. His eyes twinkled, and he smiled at me. “After all, I may need a kidney someday. And she may be a match.”

###

When my father first set up the trip, the plan was for us to stay in Metz for four nights. He'd been hoping, of course, for a rapprochement with my half-brothers, some sort of amnesty or at least a dinner invitation that would let him enter into their ordinary lives while he was visiting. That didn't happen.

When we got back to the hotel suite after meeting my brothers, he lay down on his bed, pale and panting. He didn't take off his shoes. He didn't unbuckle his belt. He simply collapsed. Whether this was part of the disease process or a bad reaction to the many medications he'd been washing down with whiskey, I didn’t know.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

My father didn't answer. His chest rose and fell in short, shallow bursts. The bedroom smelled like flop sweat with a disconcerting undernote of decay.

Finally, I called the concierge's desk and asked them to send a doctor. When the doctor arrived, he asked me questions about my father's medical condition. I couldn't answer them.

The doctor raised his eyebrows. "You travel with a critically ill patient, and you know nothing about his malady?"

"He has cancer," I said.

"And you do not know the type of his cancer? What is the stage now? If it has made metastasis?”

I was ashamed to admit I did not.

"You need to take him home," the doctor said. "Immediately."

We left the following morning. My father slept the entire flight, his mouth slack and drooling as if the effort of visiting his sons had exhausted the last of whatever future he’d imagined for himself.

My mother met us at the airport with the wheelchair. We watched the airline porters load my father's sagging body into it.

"I'm sorry," I offered.

"Don't be," my mother said. "You didn't know. He didn't let you know, and he wouldn't let me tell you. Will you be staying over at the house?"

"No," I said. "I have to get back to New York. I have so much work. I thought I'd have time to work on this trip, but..."

My mother laughed. "Excellent fallback," she said, but she didn't say it unkindly, and she kissed me before I caught the Uber that took me to the Montclair train station. I couldn't wait to get on that train. Before the rocking motion could put me asleep, I remembered to text Leo Decker: Long story, but I'm back.

He called thirty seconds later. "I need your stair studies."

"What?"

"Stair studies? I want to overlay structure before Thursday."

"I don't have them," I said.

"What do you mean you don't have them?"

"I didn't get a chance to work on them while I was gone. Too much other stuff was going on."

A couple of empty beats bounced across a network of towers, fiber optics, and satellites.

Then Leo's cheerful voice said, "O-kay, then you'll have to pull an all-nighter."

"I can't pull an all-nighter," I said. "I'm exhausted."

"What do you mean, you can't? You have to."

"I mean, I can't. I can barely keep my eyes open. You'll have your stair studies tomorrow."

Another pause.

"That won't work," Leo said. "What time is your train getting into Penn Station?"

He was standing there on the platform when I tottered off the train, hands shoved into his pockets, shoulders hunched. He was wearing a denim jacket, Jesus hair flattened by a beanie with ragged edges. I was absurdly glad to see him. Partners didn't meet trains, right? Partners texted, sent emails, called. Lovers met trains.

“Come on,” he said, without hello. He hooked two fingers through the strap of my bag and steered me toward the older part of the station, away from the bright Moynihan atrium, into a maze of low tunnels with dropped acoustic ceilings and hot metal stairwells with rust freckles on the railings.

Near a service door marked No Entry, he stopped. From the pocket of the denim jacket, he produced a glassine envelope half-filled with white powder and a tiny spoon that looked almost like a model detail.

“What's that?” I asked, though I knew.

“Your all‑nighter,” he said. “Snort.”

I did what he told me. The ceiling tiles snapped into too-sharp focus. Every crack in the grout declared itself. The walls around us hummed with trains.

On the subway ride back into Brooklyn, the car was a blur of chrome and plastic, but the lines on my notebook were knife‑sharp. We chattered about elevations and sections that felt more real than the fluorescent slices of strangers' faces surrounding us. He came back with me to my apartment and raised an eyebrow at the Park Slope address.

"Posh," he said.

###

We finished the library project four days ahead of schedule.

On that last night, Leo collapsed on my couch. I watched him sleep. Took in the details: the ink stains on his fingers, the stubble on his jaw, lips parted just enough to show a gleam of teeth.

I felt the urge to lean over and kiss him.

But instead, I went into the kitchen where the glassine envelope lay on a counter and did another two lines.

The envelope was nearly empty, but I trusted Leo. Knew he knew where we could get more.