In giving birth to a son, they were holding up their end of the They were trying to have it both ways, and their guests knew it. With such a name, and finale, what were the parents hoping for?ĭespite their best efforts, Mila and Yankee hadn't really fooled anyone. The girl was right: Duncan was the name of a Scottish king, the recipient This ancient ritual of Jewish tribal commitment had suddenly taken on less importance than the mystery behind the infant's name. "Where? In Glasgow?" The man with the whitefish rejoined the conversation, having just returned with more provisions-potato salad, some tongue, a smear of mustard on two slices of naked rye. Maybe they have great things planned for him." "No, I mean Duncan and David," she spoke up proudly, offering an insight that-for the moment, at least-justified her tuition at Miami-Dade Community College. "Yankee and Mila? Of what kingdom? Auschwitz?" Until now she had been sitting demurely on a soft, velvet, floral clubĬhair in the Katz apartment, all the while wishing to be elsewhere, her mind not so much wandering as in a dull state of perpetual park. "They were both kings," a young college coed interjected. You mean to tell me a man of such learningĬouldn't tell the difference between a David and a Duncan? Listen to me," he urged as the nibblers of nosh inched forward, "one thing is for sure: the boy's name isn't a mistake. Agitated, he said, "Yankee graduated from Heidelberg. To have the work done on his genitals, while the golfer was forcibly delayed from the tsuris with his own clubs. He was late for a foursome at Normandy Isle Golf Course, and had hoped that Duncan's rite of passage would have begun by now. An outfit equally suitable for bothĪfternoon tee-offs and the severing of Jewish foreskin. He was wearing a pair of all-occasion green polyester slacks and a white shirt with a golf emblem. "What's the matter with you?" another old man joined in. Maybe they wanted David but got it wrong when they looked it up in the baby-naming book. "Maybe they can't spell," a younger women, armed with a more upstream appetizer-a carp or sable-whispered. The old man speared the air, making his point, beating back any rebuttal. "What kind of a name is that for a Jewish boy?" an old man remarked, bits of whitefish precarious at the end of a long fork. That was the name in 1953 that Mila and Yankee Katz had given their first and only child on the day of his bris. The name Duncan, however, revealed the first sign of disguise. The camouflage was both convincing and inviolable.
No smiles, but no apparent signs of deformity, either. Sitting beside one another, tight-lipped, stone-faced the father standing behind, as though a referee in waiting. The Katzes aged better than the images around them. Through the window of their high-rise apartment and faded the photograph, reducing the assorted hues to a blunt, burnt yellow. Framed and suspended on a stark white wall. Portrait hung in the living room of their apartment, taken in 1964 by that German photographer used by everyone on Miami Beach's Arthur Godfrey Road. There wasn't anything particularly hideous about them. But the Katzes weren't visibly disfigured. They were experts in survival, and yet at the same time they were rank amateurs in recognizing the languid, solitary, untroubledįor them, the scarring ran deep and, in fact, had traded places with the surrounding skin. There would have little difficulty tracking them down. And there were no defenses or cures for this condition. A state of mind in civil war with itself. It was the way they functioned or, as psychologists now call it, dysfunctioned.
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That way, without manuals or operating instructions or reassuring warranties.
The Katz family of Miami Beach came assembled It wasn't so much that as a family they were strange, or that from the very beginning they had been estranged-although each in its own way was true.
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