Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

would help me to understand Bert better should I ever want to write about him, I came across a few technical publications in which Leslie Potashnik and the Potashnik lab were cited in footnotes and knew that was the lab my father had run. Finally I did find what I’d hoped against hope to find, a mention of my father by name. In a prosthetic dentistry journal article titled “Sourceless Illumination and Color Measurement,” by Dr. Rishi Kamble of the University of Connecticut School of Dental Medicine, there were several sentences dedicated to Bert Goldberg’s work and expertise. I wrote to Dr. Kamble, and he invited me to Storrs. It turned out Rishi had been one of Bert’s five apprentices during those five years when he was kept on by Potashnik’s new management to train his own replacements; he was only a few years older than me. Introducing me to the grad students in his lab, Rishi said, This is Bert Goldberg’s son. Bert made the porcelains at Potashnik, remember? Your father’s teeth, Francisco, had a very recognizable style.

We were having lunch later in an Italian restaurant not far from the dental school campus when Rishi said, Bert Goldberg was a scientist, but he was an artist too. He compared the techniques pioneered by my father and a handful of his contemporaries around the world to those used to produce the famous glass flowers at Harvard, though, of course, within a much narrower range of colors. Between the brownest feasible tooth and the pearly whitest, Rishi explained, exists an infinity of hues and shadings, and that’s where Bert worked his mastery.

I said, You mean a bound in a nutshell but king of infinite space kind of thing. And Rishi said, Exactly, and we laughed nerdily.

But, gotta say, Daddy-O, not really buying that whole artist thing.

Sure, Bert suffered, but he always had the consolations of his art. No, it was his fate to suffer on account of who he was, and though he got away with a lot, it was never art that provided his escapes.

Is it true that the son is the father and the father is the son? People like to say that, but is it true? People say that daughters turn into their mothers, but is that true? I don’t think any of that is true. Not necessarily true.

I was eighteen when I got out of that house and out of that town, so don’t feel sorry for me, I tell myself, sitting here in this Starbucks on a corner by the Common. But my mother and her devoted daughter never did escape, or whenever either did it was never for long enough or far enough away.

Walking over here from the hotel, I crossed the Common. Frozen crunchy grass, hard scraps of snow, a late-winter cold deadness in the air, everything tired of being dead. A squirrel hopping across the frozen ground with a scrap of snow in her mouth; no, it’s a piece of plastic spoon. I remember coming here once when I was about six with my mother to feed peanuts to the squirrels. It was one of those weekend afternoons when she would bring me into the city to see a Cantinflas movie in the basement of an old Boston church, Lexi, still a toddler, left at home with Feli. Mamita had been summoned into our elementary school and told to speak only English with me at home, and once a week I was taken out of the classroom for pronunciation tutoring in order to rid me of my stubbornly persistent un-American accent. Maybe the Cantinflas movies had something to do with it, but we spoke Spanish on those Sunday afternoons in Boston, and I loved how that made me feel so close to Mamita, like we were alone in a foreign city. Near us on the Common, an old woman in a long, dark fur coat, with a pale, round face was feeding walnuts to squirrels, walnuts as large as the squirrels’ heads. The woman smiled at me and said, Well, young fellow, you don’t think a squirrel can eat a whole walnut? She spoke in what I thought of as a public television voice, like that woman in The French Chef. Her underhanded toss made it look like the walnut was as heavy as a bowling ball, but it rolled into the proximity of a fat squirrel. Spanish for squirrel is ardilla, a feminine noun. The squirrel plucked the walnut up in her front claws, transferred it to her mouth, and ran with it up a tree trunk where she hung upside down, hind talons sunk like iron hooks into the bark, splayed legs elastically stretched, and turned the walnut over and over in her hands, gnawing on it. When her teeth broke through the hard shell, we heard it. The old woman smiled at us and said, Isn’t that marvelous? Oh yes, it is, said Mamita. We were all smiling at each other.

In a little while I’ll take the subway to East Boston to see María Xum in her laundromat. She has something urgent she wants to tell me. Not expecting any Feli-like revelations about my parents from María, though. She wasn’t with us that long, for one thing, and didn’t have nearly that degree of emotional closeness with us.

At Bert’s funeral, held at graveside in a cemetery in a town near ours, with an officiating rabbi who despite his benign huff and prattle clearly didn’t know anything about my father—a member of the Greatest Generation, the rabbi called him, that’s a good one—I read the eulogy I’d written in a notebook on the flight up from Mexico. It was a story about visiting Bert in Florida. We’d gone to one of those offtrack horse-betting places where mostly retired people sat in a room at tables and folding chairs watching the Hialeah or Gulfstream races on a closed-circuit television screen. At a counter in an adjoining room, you placed your