Groceryman

II

Twenty years later as I was graduating from law school, I took myself to see the resident psychiatrist at the University of Michigan health service, Dr. Kimbrough, a big man in his thirties with groomed premature white hair. Don't want to get into the family business, I told him. Went to law school to avoid it but now I'm graduating.

"Why come to me?" he asked. "That's not a psychiatric problem."

The business wasn't. But Dad was. I had a conflict. Dad's life, his happiness, depended on me. If I rejected the business I'd hurt him. That's what I believed. He was vulnerable. I'd always felt sorry for him, because of his needs, because of his life. Grandfather left for America when Dad was three months old. Eleven years later Grandfather returned, divorced Dad's mother and brought Dad and his brother Louie to America. And Grandfather forbid them from writing to their mother. It would be fifteen years before Dad saw her again. Louie never would. Then, when Grandfather went bankrupt in 1923 he pulled Dad and Louie out of school in the tenth grade and put them to work rebuilding the business. They had to work hard. From all accounts Grandfather was an unforgiving man. In 1928 Louie killed himself with a shotgun. Dad swore it was an accident. But was it? Dad had survived but he suffered. And I became his protector.

"Are you still?" the psychiatrist asked.

I was. Love is care, Dad liked to say. I cared for Dad. But it was the business he cared for. Hamady Bros. was his favored child. Grandfather had an offer-a good offer-to sell the business in 1957. Dad begged him not to. "What if you died?" Grandfather asked, because Dad was running it then, still as a one-man business. Dad offered to insure his own life for $10,000,000 and make Grandfather the beneficiary. Grandfather didn't sell. Thereafter, whenever there was a rumor that the business was for sale, Dad would hunt down the source and threaten him with litigation, or worse.

I knew Dad's grief when he had been severed from his mother. I imagined that Dad saw himself as the business and that he became his mother to it. Then, fearing his father might again separate them Dad had to convince him that the two grandsons were dying to come in to perpetuate the business. My role became clear. I dressed in a suit or in my military school uniform so Dad could parade me around in the stores. I gave everyone a smart handshake and a confident smile, and I spoke to Grandfather and his courtiers like a future groceryman-though I'd never be one-while looking them squarely in the eye. I knew that if I did gravitate into the business I'd be made a vice president and director and be where any twenty-five year old would "give his eyeteeth to be." But at what price? I'd continue life as Dad's packaging with no real product inside.

"I don't know who I am."

"Talk about your family," the doctor said.

My family? Well, America may be the land of the individual but I saw myself as a member of a family, the Hamadys, an extended family of 50 or 60 members at its peak in 1945, a nation unto itself with its own canon, culture and alliances. The men all came from the same Druze village in the hills of central Lebanon and settled in Flint by way of the sugar beet fields in the thumb of Michigan. Uncle Abraham came first in 1888, and Dad and his brother Louie came last in 1920. In between came three Yousifs who became Uncle Joes, as well as Uncles Selem, Ralph, Kay, Jack, Albert, Frank, Sol, Jim. .

There were others who returned to the old country or died before I was born. One, a Charlie Hamady, was murdered in a store holdup in 1919. When his murderer was captured and the whereabouts of his detention became known, Charlie's closest relatives went for their guns. Grandfather alerted the police who put Charlie's relatives in jail for a night to cool off. Otherwise, they'd have killed the man. Blood revenge was a family canon.

RULE. YOU PUNISH HIM OR WE WILL.

The family men returned to Lebanon for Druze wives who then married into the family. The weekly get-together at one house or another and the annual Fourth of July outing in Flushing Park were family gatherings. In the center of the family, binding everyone closer and illuminating our existence was Hamady Bros., the family business. Grandfather founded it with his cousin Kay, but he was the power. Because of Grandfather there was a Hamady School and Hamady House for the Stepping Stone Girls and Hamady Medical Library. He was the man around whom everyone grouped themselves in the family photographs. He was Mike Hamady, the family patriarch.

My cousins and I, born in Flint, grew up hearing Arabic but speaking only English. Arabic was just a familiar noise, except when it was spoken in anger, as when Mother was looking at my report card after being informed of Cousin Lloyd's good grades.

RULE. SPEAK IN ENGLISH, INSULT IN ARABIC.

"Does your grandfather take a backseat to Uncle Albert? Does your father take a backseat to Uncle Jack? But when we come to you and Cousin Lloyd Ahmar! (Jackass!)."

The music Dad listened or sang along to was the Andrew Sisters or Muhammed Abdul Wahab. Breakfast could be bacon and eggs bidihin (with rendered lamb). But fluttering above us all was one flag only: the stars and stripes.

"You felt you were different," Dr. Kimbrough remarked.

"We were different. Here's this manufacturing town of a few hundred thousand where practically everyone works for or depends upon General Motors. The aristos making up the country club were local merchants who owed their livelihood to GM, or men with carriage works who'd merged into GM men with names like Mott, Dort and Stewart. That's all as it should be. But then you have this cabal of Lebanese Druzes named Hamady who eat raw lamb and speak with accents running the third largest corporation in town after GM and the power company. I had a birthday party where there was Syrian bread (pita) on the table and someone picked it up, examined it, then put his drink on it. When my family went to Lebanon in 1947 the kids in school knew only that we were Arabians returning to an Arabia somewhere."

He smiled.

"By the way," I began, "the Druze "

" Are the warriors of the Levant with a secret religion," he interjected.

I nodded. Dr. Kimbrough couldn't be too astute being a shrink in a university health service. So imagine him knowing that.

At the hour's end he suggested I go for an evaluation to a Dr. Jacobs who was his analyst and that of some other psychiatrists in Ann Arbor. I shrugged, wrote out a check for fifteen dollars and left.

Strange that I'd have a dream the night before Dr. Jacobs. Actually, it was more like a snapshot. We were on a hill, Steve Wolf and I-he was a friend from military school. And there were sheep around, so we must have been shepherds. That was it.

Dr. Jacobs, fiftyish with a cool, knowing presence, eyed me in silence. I was concerned that the sheep in the dream might denote something sexual, old country style ."Baa Daady"..

"What color are the sheep?" he finally asked.

I smiled. Yes, some were black. Probably because I didn't want to be a groceryman or I didn't measure up to be one.. Here was I, agonizing about rejecting the business because it would hurt Dad, but he'd willingly sacrifice me to perpetuate it: his memorial. Well, if HE wanted to be Ozymandius-fine!-but I wasn't devoting my life to toil on his works. And if I had to dream about black sheep because of it, so be it.

"How would you describe your friend?" Dr. Jacobs asked.

"Steve? Big. Popular. We were defensive tackles on Culver's football team. He said he was going to DePauw-on a football scholarship, he said-which surprised me. I didn't consider him that good."

"Could he have been making it up?"

"I thought so. But he did look the part-big, immovable seeming. He looked better than what he was, like those Marlboro men in the ads, those fairies with rugged faces, those phonies. I think Steve bought into his looks. I don't think he knew who he was ."

I broke off to consider what I'd just said, to marvel at the coincidence.

" You know, that's what I said about myself."

"You've been describing yourself," Dr. Jacobs said.

That had me backtracking, recalling my description of Steve.

"I'm not saying Steve was a fruitcake!"

"A fairy with rugged features," Dr. Jacobs read from his note pad.

I only meant that he appeared to be somebody he wasn't. But what did that make me? What lurked under this façade? What was the façade?

The session ended with my identity unresolved and my mind in turmoil. I left for Red's Rite Spot and a smoke. When my coffee came I lit up a Marlboro. I took a drag as Grandfather's living room played out in my mind-the long Kerman rug, the French doors, the fountain room, the grand piano-I'd forgotten-and above it, the large Victorian painting of a foppish boy with long black locks in red velvet and lace, leaning easily against an ebony stand.

"That's who I thought I was!" I...