Dying Unfinished

by Espinosa, Maria

  Jesse was more intense, more daring, angrier than his older brother. From the beginning, he loved music. When he heard nursery songs like The Farmer in the Dell, his face lit up. He would stop whatever he was doing to listen. One day someone put on a recording of Mozart’s Magic Flute. Jesse listened, entranced. When it stopped, he frantically toddled over to the phonograph, and he howled for more.

  His motor movements were still clumsy, and he would draw huge squiggles across a page with Crayolas, impatiently breaking the crayons at times with his force. Howard, on the other hand, cautiously drew thin red lines across expanses of white paper. Then he would stop, looking with wonder at what he had created. Tentatively he might add a tiny red square or triangle.

  Miss Bridges was concerned about this, and she held a conference with Eleanor. What was bothering the child? “Howard’s drawings reveal fear. I wonder what he is afraid of,” said the teacher. She had spread out his drawings across a round children’s table.

  She and Eleanor were sitting on uncomfortable wooden folding chairs. In her lap, warm against her flesh, Howard sighed sleepily. It was past his nap time. Her protectiveness was aroused. He was a plump little Buddha, Eleanor thought, but his cheerful ways might indeed mask an enormous fear of something. What could it be? He was somehow vulnerable in a way that her two other children weren’t.

  Jesse was sleeping on a little cot nearby, curled up beneath his blue blanket.

  Miss Bridges went on to explain in her husky voice that infants could be traumatized, even in the womb. She habitually wore a man’s sweater and trousers. Her face revealed never a trace of lipstick, and her graying hair was cut short and straight. Eleanor wondered if Miss Bridges preferred women sexually to men. The phrase “lesbian temptations” ran through her mind.

  Long ago at Eleanor’s boarding school, the head mistress had used this phrase when she warned the girls in a hushed voice of the dangers of forming friendships that were too close. At the time, Eleanor, whose interest was directed toward the opposite sex, had innocently wondered what the head mistress meant.

  “I can’t imagine what Howard is afraid of,” said Eleanor. But she felt a pang of axiety. The months before Howard’s birth had been difficult. Aaron was off at sea in the Merchant Marines, somewhere between New York City and Murmansk, during the most dangerous period of Nazi submarine attacks. All her brothers, whom she loved dearly, were in the Armed Forces, and Frank, her favorite, was missing in action. Perhaps her anxieties had affected Howard, even in the womb.

  Nonetheless, Miss Bridge’s words aroused Eleanor’s anger. How glib this woman was in her analysis! “Perhaps he’s not afraid at all,” said Eleanor, bridling with indignation. “Perhaps his mind simply works in its own way, and Howard is what my husband would call a minimalist. Perhaps drawing doesn’t interest Howard very much. There are other means of expression.”

  Miss Bridges twisted a pen nervously between her fingers. “Of course there are.”

  Jesse stirred, sat up on the cot, and rubbed his eyes. “Thirsty,” he murmured.

  Eleanor set Howard down and went into the kitchen to get the two boys glasses of orange juice. They began to play with Lincoln Logs, while Miss Bridges talked on about the effects of infant trauma and of environment. Eleanor, on the verge of tears, could not think of a suitable response. “We must go now,” she finally said in an icy voice. She gathered up the boys, helped them put on their snowsuits and mittens, and holding their hands tightly, she strode with them out the door.

  When she told Aaron of the incident, to her surprise he sighed with something like relief and said, “Howard will never be an artist.”

  CHAPTER 9

  PARTIES

  Well-fortified with whiskey, Eleanor stamped her feet to a Hungarian folk dance as she whirled about the room, her skirts billowing. She was dancing with one of the Nursery School Fathers. Out of the corner of her eye, she noted that the full-breasted Dorothea had wedged herself up against Aaron, and she was clutching his hand as they talked. Sometimes at these parties—which had grown progressively wilder—non-matching spouses would disappear for a time, returning with slightly changed expressions.

  Eleanor stamped her feet harder. Her partner wiped sweat from his brow. Another song began, and Eleanor whirled away from him, dancing alone now, and people began to clap in applause.

  Later she danced with Aaron to the strains of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and throaty voice. They danced well together, and they made a handsome couple, she in violet chiffon and pearls—the jewelry a gift from her mother long ago—and he with tousled hair, in tweed trousers and rolled-up shirt sleeves. His mysterious work as an Artist added to his attraction.

  “El and Aaron are such fun to have at parties!”

  “Oh El, you’re too much! What would we do without you?” Melanie liked to say. Tall and elegant, she spoke with a trace of her native Virginia. She had become Eleanor’s closest friend among the Mothers.

  As she moved in rhythm with Aaron, twirling toward him and then away, Eleanor felt as if she were a warrior engaged in battle, echoing the feats of distant Magyar ancestors. She was slashing out with a sword, slashing off opponents’ heads in battle. Slash Dorothea. Slash nameless women. Slash the dull days of her life.

  Her chief opponent … No, not Aaron. Her opponent was something she could not name. It had to do with loss of self.

  Who was she? What was real was her body, its softness, its sturdy peasant bones, her high cheekbones, what people called her “strong” face—she had always despaired over her large hooked nose—and her fine dark hair, where gray strands had begun to appear.

  She dreamed of being hollow like a carved out tree trunk.

  Who was she? Above all, she wanted to be loved.

  “My white dress, my pink sash, and my coral beads!” as a child of four, she begged the fireman to save these when their house on Lake Erie caught fire. They rushed past her, ignoring her cries.

  “You love surfaces,” Heinrich said to her years later. This was true. She loved conviviality, the tinkling of ice in glasses, dance rhythms, flirtatious exchanges, beautiful gowns. But beneath it, she felt a kind of despair.

  As a child, she had learned to distrust her impulses. One day she had awakened with an overpowering wish to give a party, perhaps in imitation of her mother’s afternoon teas. She cheerily knocked on neighbors’ doors and invited them over for a party that very afternoon.

  When her mother, Ruth, learned of this, she made Eleanor accompany her to each house, apologize, and cancel the invitation. In a gracious way, Ruth explained the child had acted without her approval. Eleanor tearfully accepted her punishment of bed without any supper. In her eyes, her mother had the status of a goddess.

  Her parents raised her to be a lady. To bear suffering without complaint. A governess told her the story of a Spartan boy who kept quiet while a fox devoured his entrails. She was raised to be as quiet as the Spartan in the face of suffering.

  When she danced she did not have to be a Spartan. At these times the bonds loosened. With all the tipsy dancing she did at these Nursery School Parties, she was trying desperately to save herself somehow as a person. She was also trying to save their marriage, for Aaron had grown restive.

  CHAPTER 10

  JESSE’S POLIO, 1950

  One cold windy day in September, Aaron took the children to Jones Beach. No one noticed that five-year old Jesse, who loved battling the waves, was shivering and blue with cold by the time they left. It was a time of polio epidemics. Eleanor realized later that she should never have allowed Aaron to take the children there.

  The next day Jesse was feverish.

  “Drink some soup,” she said. She was sitting by his bed.

  He could not lift his arm.

  “Polio,” said the doctor. The little boy was shivering, although his skin was burning hot. Through the window Eleanor could see brown leaves drift down from the oak tree. The doctor picked up his bag from the floor. “He must go to the hos
pital.”

  Jesse moaned, half-conscious, as Aaron carried him into the car.

  This was a turning point in their lives.

  Every day for more than a year, Eleanor exercised with Jesse to keep the muscles in his arm and shoulder from atrophying and to develop new paths of movement. Although it seemed in vain, there was gradual progress.

  Three times a week she took him to a physical therapy center where he waited in a barren room along with other children in wheelchairs and steel braces. At times, the nurses’ coaching filled her with frustration because they gave up too soon. She continued to exercise with Jesse, even when they said it wouldn’t help. She spent more time with her youngest child than she ever had before, and her love for him deepened.

  He was skinny, as dark-haired as Rosa, the most energetic of her children, and he loved to play the piano. Despite not being able to use all his muscles, he practiced valiantly. When he learned to read, he acquired a passion for it, too, and he began to write science fiction tales.

  Eleanor was exhausted. She had nursed not only Jesse but Howard and Rosa through childhood injuries and illnesses, had tended to Aaron’s health, and had kept up his spirits through the years. Was she only a nurse, a sexual mate, a housekeeper, a glorified servant?

  Sometimes late at night when everyone was asleep, she tried to write. Fragments of stories emerged, a few poems—one quite bitter—and a story about a woman, not unlike herself, that she abandoned because it turned into a tangle of thoughts and emotions that were too dangerous to pursue. She buried the writings beneath a heap of papers in her desk.

  When Jesse had recovered as much as he ever would, she took an administrative job with the drama department at Hofstra University, a rival to Aaron’s college. Her days became busier than ever. At work, something in her snapped into focus. She enjoyed her job. Max, the fat, nervous, cigar-smoking department head grew to depend on her skills. She arranged for visiting performers, she hosted receptions, she wrote publicity blurbs, and she made new friends.

  However, all was not smooth at home. Aaron had begun coming home very late, presumably from meetings. One night in bed he asked, “Why don’t you ever grab my cock?”

  Eleanor felt faint. He had never used this word before, although he had sometimes guided her hand to his genitals.

  “Aaron,” she asked, “Are you seeing another woman?”

  There was a terrible moment of silence as they lay skin against skin in the dark. “No,” he said at last. She knew he was lying, but she remained silent.

  He proceeded to make love to her fiercely. Although she did not resist, something in her recoiled. She felt filled with venom, ready to strike. Her body froze. Afterwards, she determined that she would give him his privacy, but she would claim her own. She would carve out a life for herself.

  The following week, for the first time in their marriage she was unfaithful.

  A furtive embrace in a darkened hallway with one of the Nursery School Fathers at a party, an afternoon rendezvous at a motel. There were other men in the City—artist friends, even total strangers whom she met at upscale places like the Menemsha Bar—when she could arrange time off from work. To pass afternoons in unfamiliar rooms with a stranger’s hands on her body gave her pleasure and a sense of freedom. The stranger’s touch was proof she existed; the stranger’s fluids fertilized her with life; the stranger’s kisses made her rich. Her body was her own, one thing she could salvage from the ruins.

  “Had we but world enough and time, this coyness lady were no crime. … The grave’s a fine and quiet place, but none I think do there embrace.” Marvell’s seventeenth century lines rang through her mind.

  She told herself that sex was simply a form of communication, as casual as shaking hands. But at times she wept without knowing why as she wandered through the Manhattan streets at dusk.

  CHAPTER 11

  RAISING CHILDREN

  Darling white and pink mottled babies cry and cry and suck the life out of you.

  Jesse, the youngest, was practicing Czerny scales on the piano in the dining room.

  Howard, her middle child, was playing softball with children down the block. Of her three children, he was the most responsible. Rosa and Jesse tended to be absent-minded, but Howard was thoughtful in small ways. He was the one she relied on to do things like put out empty milk bottles on the back porch. He remembered Mother’s Day and her birthday with flowers. Between them was a deep affection that needed no words.

  Rosa was doing homework in her room. At thirteen, she was a lonely girl who had grown too excitable. There was something off-center, shrill, too intense about her. Her giggle and her carelessness, as well as other qualities all aggravated Eleanor. At times she hated her daughter, for Rosa was blooming, while she wasn’t. Her soul’s blood had gone into feeding Rosa, who seemed to be thriving through the sacrifice of Eleanor’s own life, just as parasitic plants nourish themselves through sap from the host.

  Where had her own life gone?

  Rosa possessed an awkward candor, a warmth, a flashing smile that Heinrich said could set the entire room aglow. If someone remarked that her daughter was attractive, a voice inside Eleanor would whisper plaintively, “But I’m attractive too. I have more than Rosa does to give a man.”

  Two years ago, Rosa’s public school teacher had told them the class was far too slow for their daughter. Furthermore, Eleanor was distressed because Rosa was picking up what seemed to her a dreadful Long Island accent and an equally dreadful way of shuffling her feet when she walked. “She must go to a good school,” said Ruth, who meant well. “We will pay the tuition.” They enrolled Rosa at a private academy on the North Shore. She declared she hated it there because she had few friends. But Aaron said that he and Eleanor must be firm because Rosa was melodramatic and exaggerated things.

  “I want to see a psychiatrist,” said Rosa, after reading a book on psychoanalysis.

  “Ridiculous!” said Aaron.

  Eleanor went into Rosa’s room to say goodnight, as was her custom. An almost full moon lit the bedroom. Rosa was already half asleep, but the sound of her mother’s footsteps aroused her. She needed to talk to her.

  “Good night, my dear.” Eleanor leaned over and gave her daughter a kiss.

  “Mom, when you were my age did you have a boyfriend?” Rosa asked. Her eyes shone large and probing in the moonlight that came through the white dimity curtains.

  Eleanor sat down on the edge of the bed. “I was at an awkward age.”

  I am, too.

  “You’re not nearly as awkward as I was, my dear. In fact, you’re quite beautiful.”

  “I don’t feel beautiful.”

  “But you are.”

  “I wish I had a boyfriend.”

  “In time, I’m sure you will.”

  “Were you popular in high school?

  “I had a few good friends. But it was difficult for me at first.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Rosa’s silence drew out Eleanor’s memories, as she gazed at the silvery moonlit branches of the elm tree outside the window. “I was the first Jew in my boarding school. Later I learned the principal had held a special assembly before I arrived to inform the other girls, and she told them to treat me kindly. Of course they didn’t.”

  “Her last name is Gold,” they said. “That’s a Jewish name. Look at her big Jewish nose.”

  “Your family wasn’t religious. They never went near a synagogue.”

  “We are Jewish only by origin,” said Eleanor, perturbed.

  “Still, they considered you Jewish.”

  “It was a very closed society, my dear. Things are different now.”

  During that first year at boarding school, Eleanor would weep silently in bed at night. Spartans didn’t show their tears. She couldn’t tell her parents what was happening. They had sent her as an ambassador. Her parents rarely discussed the fact that they were Jews. Eleanor understood it to be a difficult heritage they were honor-bound no
t to renounce.

  During the summer break, Eleanor buried herself in novels and poetry underneath the shade of a tree at home. She dreaded the coming of fall.

  Clickety clack went the train wheels, drilling into her brain. Trees and houses glided past, and at night in her narrow berth, the comforting sounds of the train with its occasional whistle mingled with her sorrow as she traveled east. She would rather die than go back, but here she was on the train. The Spartan boy had not cried out while the fox was devouring him beneath his tunic.

  Somewhat to her surprise, she began to make friends. Her roommate, Margaret, who came from an old New England family, became her champion. Eleanor was clever and could write well. Her classmates chose her to edit the school paper. She acted in plays. Gradually she learned to hide her feelings beneath a mask of composure, and she developed a talent for mockery.

  “Oh, Mom, I’m so miserable. I don’t fit in,” said Rosa. Tears glistened on her face. At that moment, Eleanor felt an enormous sympathy for her.

  “Can I change schools?”

  “I expect you’ll make friends, too, just as I did,” Eleanor said softly.

  “It was different for you. None of the other girls live near me. They all live near school, or else they’re boarders.”

  “Well, we will see. Good night, my dear.” She kissed Rosa gently on the cheek and left.

  Where was Rosa’s pride? She herself had passed through a rite of initiation, and Rosa should have the strength to do the same.