The Late, Lamented Molly Marx

by Sally Koslow

  I take a gander under the drape, hoping Barry might have exhibited a trace of originality with the stone’s inscription. While I haven’t decided if I’m more Bette Davis (“She did it the hard way”), Karen Carpenter (“A star on earth, a star in heaven”), or Dean Martin (“Everybody loves somebody sometime”), surely Barry could have done better than Molly Divine Marx, beloved daughter, wife, and mother. Simple and dignified, yes, but where’s my mystery? My élan? My cheeky noir-ish humor? I might have liked Molly, biker chick. Or even something in shockingly bad taste: My grandparents went through the Holocaust and all I got was this? I did, after all, die at only thirty-five.

  My Divines arrived last night, two days ahead of Sunday’s noon service. Annabel will be joining Grammy and Grandpa at the Children’s Museum later this morning, but Lucy’s begged off. I trail her as she leaves a coffee shop on Broadway and begins to walk north. She appears immune to the December air as she tramps briskly past colossal produce markets, Barnes & Noble, and a bank whose unique selling feature seems to be its handy branches in Auckland and Kuala Lumpur. Never looking up, she trudges by glassy condos piercing the gray sky. She all but race-walks, staring ahead.

  Not even the somber majesty of Columbia University makes Lucy blink, but on 120th Street she hangs a left and pauses to admire the Gothic splendor of Riverside Church, which makes Temple Emanuel-El, the snazziest synagogue in North America, look as drab as a drugstore. Lucy doesn’t, however, linger. She heads over to Grant’s Tomb.

  Now there’s a final resting place. Ever since the Parks Department was shamed into spiffing it up—this happened at the moment when Times Square did a 180 from working girls, porn, and peep shows to tourists, Oreo Overload sundaes, and Disney blockbusters—I used to drop in on my friends Ulysses and Julia, parking my bike at the rack outside. “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” was Papa Louie’s idea of a riddle, which he delivered with his Groucho brows wiggling. By kindergarten Lucy and I could spit back, “No one!” The general and the missus are entombed in twin Beaux Arts sarcophagi.

  Lucy skips the inside of the monument, although she glances at the engraving above its entrance: Let us have peace, which I always thought was an ironic epitaph for one of American history’s most hell-bent hawks. Lucy stuffs her hands deep in the pockets of her purple down coat and turns toward the woods skirting one of the designated nature preserves. FOREVER WILD, the sign says.

  When Manhattan people think park it’s Central, with its showy lakes and gondolas, the kelly green Sheep Meadow, and a zoo that’s home to neurotic polar bears. Even if they live nearby, few locals venture into Riverside, the anorexic four-mile stepchild also designed by the grand master, Frederick Law Olmsted. Despite the fact that Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks met cute by its flowerbeds in You’ve Got Mail, Riverside is low-key, as befits this side of the city. Bikers, runners, and dog walkers take care of business here, but it remains a park for a quick hit, not a holiday.

  Lucy winds down an overgrown path to the level above the lonesome Hudson, where the wind whips off the water, chilling her face and reddening her cheeks. It feels fifteen degrees colder than on Broadway. Whoever is around at this hour moves at a quick clip, whether on two feet or four. As she strides forward, the tassels of her knit hat bob like Heidi’s braids.

  Two golden retrievers zoom past. Their master soon follows and stops to check his watch. It’s past nine, the witching hour when dogs must return to the leash, lest their owners get slapped with a fine big enough to buy a decent dinner for two. “Sigmund,” the owner shouts, “Hamlet, come here.” But the dogs ignore him, perhaps embarrassed by their names. They run to Lucy, who bends down to stroke their furry heads and give them a welcome behind-the-ears scratch.

  “There you boys are,” the man says, reaching them as the larger of the dogs jumps up to lick Lucy’s face and the other tries to bite one of her tassels.

  She decides that a pet lover is safe for conversation. “Can you tell me how to get down to the river, please?” She points in the direction of the George Washington Bridge, which dangles in the distance like a strand of gray Majorca pearls.

  “Sure,” the man says with an open smile. He looks like the kind of guy Lucy might like—shaggy-haired and broad-shouldered, not a label in sight, discounting the Yankees cap. He carries the Times sports section under his arm. Columbia professor or shrink, I guess. This neighborhood is well stocked with both. “Let’s see. There are a few twists and turns.” He strokes his beard as he looks into Lucy’s eyes. His eyes are green, his accent Australian, and his tone cheery. “I could lead the way.”

  I decide that he’s divorced. His kids are with Mommy this weekend and he has a day stretching ahead of him in which he’s going to braise short ribs with blood-orange juice and herbes de Provence while he drinks a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, listens to the Saturday afternoon opera, and reads a sturdy biography of Winston Churchill. Lucy, buy this lottery ticket. I worry about you being alone, and this dog owner has good guy written all over him.

  I wish I knew how to flirt, runs through Lucy’s head. Other women meet men everywhere. Me? Never. And I could do worse. This man’s eyes are intelligent. I like his taste in animals and reading material.

  But does my sister let him lead the way? “Oh, that won’t be necessary” is her knee-jerk response.

  “Chicago,” the stranger says, and smiles again, wider this time. There is a small, dear space between his front teeth. He knows he’s crazy, but what if this woman would join him for a cup of coffee? He likes her face, devoid of makeup or a visible attitude. They’d get to talk, maybe do a movie, browse a bookstore and then, who knows?

  “Chi-caw-go, yes. How can you tell?” Lucy, like every midwesterner, believes everyone has an accent but her.

  “Actually, I got my degree at the university there,” he says, and waits for Lucy to banter. A man would have to sky-write “I am trying to pick you up” before she might notice that someone found her appealing.

  “Great school,” she says finally. Should I tell him I live two miles from Hyde Park? she thinks. Nah. Why would he care? “So, if you could point the way for me?”

  He does, and curses himself—why didn’t he ask for her number?—as he watches Lucy walk north until she is the size of his fingernail, her purple coat small as a berry.

  Finally, my sister reaches the water. She stares at New Jersey as if it will reveal the answer: how did Molly die? Barry, she’s convinced, has pushed for tomorrow’s unveiling to put a lid on the wrack and ruin of was-she-pushed-or-did-she-jump? The unspoken, preposterous assumption wafting toward Chicago seems to be that I must have engineered my own death. “Molly would never do something so idiotic,” she screams at the river. Her eyes follow a barge that makes its sluggish way on the choppy water. “Molly’s been goddamn Swift-boated.” Lucy shakes her head and makes a sound, a laugh mated with a moan.

  Lucy spoke to Hicks yesterday. What does he know? Nothing, it seems, at least nothing he’s going to tell Lucy. She’s been fishing for weeks, debating. Should she show him the photo? She wishes like hell she’d never found my adulterous ephemera, evidence—but of what?

  If Mystery Man was involved in my death, Lucy keeps wondering, wouldn’t an NYPD detective have sniffed him out on his own by now and hung him by his thumbs until he confessed? She speculates that Hicks has gotten to this guy and that Hicks doesn’t think he did it. In that case, why sully my reputation? The person she wants most to protect is Annabel. Why should her niece ever have to think of her parents as anything less than deliriously happy? Why not keep that fiction going?

  From her pocket, Lucy withdraws the photograph of Luke and me. At least you look happy, sister, she thinks. I hope you adored this man—and he adored you back. Wherever and whoever this fool is, I hope he still does.

  Lucy turns back to the park and gazes in both directions. Molly, this is where you took your last breath—I wish I knew where, exactly. She walks to the water’s edge, presses her lips to the image of my smiling f
ace. She thinks about tearing the picture in two and keeping the half with me. “No, you two should be together,” she concludes, and tosses the photograph into the Hudson.

  “Let there be peace,” she murmurs. “Let there be peace.” She bends over, puts her crossed arms on her knees, and hangs her head, weeping.

  The picture bobs in the waves and floats rapidly downstream in the murky water. Lucy turns away from the Hudson, but I watch the photo as if it were flesh and blood—Luke terrified, running for his life, a man escaping.

  Forty-one

  SAM I AM

  s the photo sinks in the Hudson, I ring with emptiness that falls short of an emotion, because a feeling would be alive, even if—especially if—it smolders with heartbreak and anger. I am a shadow, a dried leaf, a shriveled stalk, a hollow gourd. I am a lost hope, a broken promise, a memory, an unspoken phrase. Mother Nature has cleared her throat and I am … gone.

  I can’t stay and watch Lucy as she walks away from the river. Why didn’t she show some good sense, abort today’s mission, and have coffee with Sigmund and Hamlet’s owner, then go home with him for sex, short ribs, and the rest of her life? They’d join a food coop, pop out twins—little brown-haired boys, one named Louie for our grandfather and the other Jake, because it’s Lucy’s favorite name—and live happily ever after, going off to Australia each winter and Italy in August. Lucy would coach Louie and Jake’s soccer team, start her own nursery school, and be a very good and beloved wife and mother.

  I turn. Bob is in my face. I gasp, scream, and pound his chest. “Dammit, people are imbeciles, aren’t they? Life makes no sense.”

  “It’s time,” he says quietly, grabbing my wrists to restrain me.

  “Time for what?” Was there an obligation I’d missed?

  “Time to move on,” Bob whispers.

  “What are you talking about?” I plead. Just yesterday I watched Annabel learn to write her first shaky A, tilting like a crooked chalet. I was there when Brie and Hicks rented a car to drive to a country inn. They plan to snowshoe—that is, if they get out of bed. I checked on my father after his physical—he has to go on Lipitor, but his blood pressure’s fine. Oh, and the doctor wants him to drop twenty pounds. I watched my mother plant a quince branch in potting soil covered with velvety moss—she’s coaxing spring into arriving early this year, and hopes to be rewarded soon with delicate white buds. I even sat next to Barry and Stephanie and a thousand other screaming sports maniacs at a Knicks game, until I decided that if I was in the mood for torture, there’s C-SPAN.

  “You have to ask what good your powers are doing you, Molly,” Bob says. “Longing for a life that’s over, seeing other people making love and chocolate chip cookies and mistakes … Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “But I’m not ready to end this. You told me my powers would last until—until they’re terminated. Why should I be the terminator?”

  I hear my own fear. My plan was to wait it out and pray that my abilities would continue—not forever (who’d want that?), but at least until the mystery of my death is solved and, far more importantly, until Annabel grows up. But when does that happen these days? After she gets into college or turns twenty-one or graduates or starts to work or lives in her own apartment or is married or has a child? I don’t want to go AWOL now.

  “Having powers doesn’t mean you need to use them,” Bob says in the voice of the pediatrician he’d hoped to become.

  Perhaps we can negotiate. “Okay, let’s say I take a break.” Not giving up completely, a hiatus. “Then what?”

  “I’d say it’s a deal, and that it’s time for you to meet someone,” he says. “I’ve been watching you—”

  No kidding. Does he think he’s invisible? Bob’s on every corner, Brother Starbucks of the wild blue yonder. “Who’s this someone?”

  “Don’t be so suspicious. You’ll see soon enough.” Bob, always preaching patience.

  As I wait, the days unroll into a long ribbon of nothing. I skip the trip to Serenity Haven. Thou shalt unveil without me. Mostly I obsess about Annabel. How did the school carnival go? Has she progressed to B? Did Delfina take her for a haircut? Not bangs, I’m hoping. Not with her curls.

  My mind drifts. Will Stephanie convince Barry to go to Venice, hoping he’ll propose? Will Brie like Hicks’ mother’s Sunday dinner? Will Mama Hicks like Brie or be appalled that her son is with a white woman? Will Isadora try to get Brie back? The trip to Japan my parents cancelled—will they reschedule? Might Lucy replace her futon with a grown-up couch? Adopt a cat? Will Kitty switch dermatologists?

  Who’s Luke with now—the blonde he met who resembles me more than my own twin or the skinny, surprisingly smart model with the curly black hair and breathy lisp? Will Hicks solve my case, with or without Detective Gonzalez’s intuition? My old life is the world’s best soap opera, viewing audience of one.

  I try to manufacture some willpower that would prevent me from dropping in below. A deeply embedded vein of superstition helps me not to cheat, and as interesting as Down There is, Bob has not just tantalized my imagination, he’s gotten me worried. What if the person he says I’ll be meeting is from within my own circle? Let’s say Kitty topples during a headstand in yoga class, breaks her neck, and we have to be roommates. Or even worse, what if Lucy or Brie or my parents or—don’t go there, Molly—Annabel arrives? I freeze-dry myself so I do not have to consider any of these unspeakable options.

  On the fourth day, Bob reappears. He is not alone. A tall man is at his side.

  “Sam, this is Molly,” he says. “Molly, Sam.”

  “But—but—but what are you doing here?” I’m jabbering. I’m also being rude.

  “I’m asking myself the same question,” this Sam says. “Who are you people?”

  “Molly’s going to be your guide,” Bob says. He gives Sam the same rigmarole he once spoke to me. Relocation, the Duration, powers, up, down, don’t cheat, blah, blah.

  “What happened to you, Sam?” I say, because I shouldn’t be thinking about myself now. This poor guy is in that first posttraumatic stage I remember well: shock, disbelief, and trying to figure out why he can’t find his pulse. “Try to remember.”

  Eventually he speaks. “I was thinking about this woman I’d just seen, lost in a long riff about what it would be like if we have coffee and I talked her into spending the day with me. There was something about her—the openness of her face, the kindness of her eyes … Then one of my dogs broke off his leash—we’d been walking in the park—and ran across Riverside Drive, and I started to chase him. Next I was under an SUV whose driver was on his cell phone.” It spills out in a rush. “That’s as much as I know.”

  “What was your dog’s name?”

  “Sigmund.”

  “Are you a professor?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, looking at me as if I forgot to switch on my brain.

  “A shrink?”

  Please don’t tell me I treated this woman, Sam thinks. Is there some special hell for Freudians where you have to listen to patients drone on for all of eternity, my mother this, my mother that? “I’m an analyst,” he says. He mentions the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

  I can tell I’m supposed to be impressed.

  “Why do you ask?” he adds.

  “You look like a shrink, that’s all, which might come in handy here.”

  “Where the hell is here?” Sam runs his hand through his full head of chestnut hair, which for a dead guy looks remarkably healthy.

  “Oh, I’ll explain everything, but first I have a few questions.” I check to see if Bob is lurking. He’s not, but to be safe I lower my voice. “Sam, the woman you were thinking about when your accident happened—what was she like?”

  His smile turns him handsome, gap between his front teeth and all. “Gorgeous,” he says, looking away, as if he’s seeing her this very minute. “And one thing that struck me was I’d guess she’s the kind of female who’d never think of herself that wa
y. Almost my height, brown eyes that drill into you, right past the lies. Magnificent eyes. The minute I looked into them I had this tingly sensation that we were supposed to be together. Fuck, I was dying to follow her.” He shifts his gaze to me and doesn’t speak for a few minutes. “You know, if a patient were telling me this story, I’d have told him he should have gone after the woman. When you meet someone and know she’s it, don’t stand there like a tree. All your happiness can depend on how you react to one fucking impulse. You have to pay attention.”

  Why did Bob think I’d be the right match for Sam? I have no idea of what to say next. I’d like to ask if his dogs survived, but he probably doesn’t know, and the image of Sigmund—or was it Hamlet?—writhing in the street is more than I can bear. “Relax, Sam,” is all I can think to say. “You’ll have plenty of time to sort this out. As we like to say in the Duration, keep breathing.”

  He laughs, and I know we’ll get along.

  “Love your accent, by the way. Australian?”

  “South African.”

  Damn.

  “You sound like her,” he adds. His voice is dreamy, like he’s just woken up, which in a way he has. “Are you from Chicago?”

  “We have to talk.”

  Forty-two

  CRAZY IN LOVE

  ucy was the athletic one. She left me in the Illinois dust as she kicked and served and swung like a boy, and she wasn’t just chosen first for every team but invariably anointed captain. Best all-around camper, Lucy Divine. Below a sad-eyed elk head, a plaque still hangs in the rec hall at Big Beaver Lake Girls’ Camp, which I permanently boycotted once I learned the boys’ camp’s anthem about the girl Beavers across the lake. The end of camp was no big loss, because while I liked the lanyards and weenie roasts well enough, team sports skinned my knees almost as much as my ego. Riding a bike, though, was different—a ticket to freedom that required swatting fewer mosquitoes, memorizing fewer rules. From the time my father liberated my red-hot Huffy from its training wheels, I made that sucker fly.