Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok

Author:Chaim Potok [Potok, Chaim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-57549-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1984-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The next day my mother went out before breakfast and returned with the morning papers. One was the newspaper for which my father had worked; she had walked a long distance for that paper. My father’s picture was on the front page. Wavy hair, eyes full of light, jaunty smile. My mother and I sat at the kitchen table, staring at my father’s picture.

The headline read, in large letters, MICHAEL CHANDAL KILLED IN GUERNICA RAID. Beneath that, in smaller letters, I read, NOTED CORRESPONDENT DIES ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF WOUNDED NUN.

The story described my father as a well-known journalist devoted to workers’ causes, as a loyal comrade and a tireless worker. It mentioned his family origins—“New England stock, aristocrats, heads of a timber empire against whom Chandal had rebelled in his early years.” It talked of his writings, his travels, his journalistic style, his high reputation. Then it told how he had died—and it was the same story the man had told us the night before.

My mother turned the pages of The New York Times. Again there was my father’s picture and a headline: JOURNALIST MICHAEL CHANDAL, 36, DEAD IN GUERNICA RAID.

“What does obituary mean?” I asked.

My mother corrected my pronunciation and explained the word.

The article described my father’s New England origins. It said his family had pioneered the lumber industry in the United States. It mentioned the brother who had died in the last war and the change that had come over my father as a result of certain events he had witnessed during and after a riot against Wobblies on Armistice Day, 1919, in Centralia, Washington—“events described in Nineteen-Nineteen, the novel by John Dos Passos,” the article added. It told of my father’s journalistic career, his known association with Communists and Socialists, his “lean, nonrhetorical style,” and the “possible permanent value of what Mr. Chandal used to refer to as his special writing.’” The article closed with the statement that Mr. Chandal left behind, in his immediate family, a wife and daughter, as well as parents and a sister. And it announced the time, date, and place of a memorial service.

The other newspapers carried similar stories. One of them, writing about Centralia, used the words “grisly events.”

Once again the apartment filled with visitors. And once again Mr. Dinn appeared one night after I was supposed to be asleep and spent a long time in the kitchen, talking with my mother.

A few days later my mother and I took the subway into Manhattan. She wore a dark dress and a dark beret. She sat very straight and still in the train, gazing out the window into the tunnel through which we sped. Her lovely face was set in an expressionless ivory mask; her eyes were dark, shining. I had yet to see her cry over the death of my father. There was about her now a quality of grace, a regal poise; suffering seemed to have added to her reservoir of courage.

We came out of the subway and walked along a crowded downtown street in a warm rain.

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