How could she explain all the painful feelings that being Jewish aroused. It was something better left under wraps. She had nothing in common with those families who had fled the darkness of Eastern Europe at the turn of the century and who recreated the shetls here in America.
“What’s wrong about Jesse going to a Seder?” asked Heinrich when she called him the next day. “I think it’s fine.”
“You don’t understand!”
That Saturday, in a daze she wandered among the crowd at Lord & Taylor’s through fragrant aisles of cosmetics, handbags, jewelry, and up the escalator to the Men’s Section where she searched for trousers. Jesse was Jewish! No, Jesse. We’re different. She couldn’t remember his size, and so she bought two pairs of dark gabardine in different sizes, hoping that one would fit. Then she bought socks for Aaron. A charcoal flannel jacket for Howard who had been invited to a country club dance by a girl in his class. For herself, an ounce of Fleurs de Rocaille. Then Rosa … ah, Rosa. So difficult. A silk scarf with a leopard pattern? Lime-colored lounging pajamas? A beige cardigan? She could never be sure what Rosa would like.
Exhausted, she sank down afterwards in a chair at a nearby restaurant. The waitress brought her a pot of tea and an English muffin. At the table in front of her sat an elderly woman wearing a hat trimmed with flowers. It reminded her of a hat she had once worn for what seemed an eternity. She had acquired it on a fall shopping expedition with her mother. The trees were still green, and Eleanor remembered how the light filtered through the leaves. Ruth selected a hat of durable navy felt but six-year old Eleanor’s heart was set on ivory velvet adorned with deep pink roses. “All right, my dear,” said her mother at last. “You may have that hat, but it must last until spring.” All that school year, Eleanor wore the hat. In rain and snow the roses wilted, trickling a trail of dye over velvet. By March the hat resembled a bedraggled bird.
“Don’t your mama have no money to buy you new clothes?” asked a little girl in her class. The other children at the public school, which she attended only briefly, thought her family was poor, although, in truth, they were far wealthier than most. How could Eleanor have explained her mother’s belief in what she called “plain living and high thinking.”
Eleanor stirred a lump of sugar in her tea. Had Ruth intended to be cruel? Eleanor did not think so. Rather it was an attempt to teach Eleanor the value of practicality. Evidently, the plan had backfired!
Fortune and fate. Fortune and fate. My face is my fate. My sweet lass, your fortune is your face and your fate.
One’s fortune could change in the blink of an eyelash. All during their marriage, she had felt a sense of scarcity when she compared herself to their more affluent friends. Recently Aaron’s father had died, leaving them ample funds. The money came just in time to pay for Rosa’s hospital.
“Mom, this material isn’t right!” cried Rosa
She had spent hours searching for fabric for Rosa who wanted to make a dress in Occupational Therapy. When Eleanor timorously presented her with samples—tiny blue roses on a white background, a red flowered print, and a rough-hued olive cotton—Rosa screamed, “You’re trying to make me look ridiculous!”
Eleanor talked about the incident later with Miss Bliss.
“It’s a question of identity.”
Identity? Eleanor pondered the word, while her eyes roamed the office. It was crowded with plants and photos of Miss Bliss’ poodle, of smiling friends, of Miss Bliss with a bearded older man, their arms around each other.
One fateful weekend in March, Rosa went out with Aaron and Eleanor to dinner. Patients were encouraged to go home on short visits, in order to ease their return to the outer world. Something in the conversation very much disturbed Rosa, although afterwards Eleanor couldn’t remember what it was. Rosa, her hair pulled tightly back, glared at them both. “You’re so fake!”
“Lower your voice,” said Eleanor.
“All you care about is what other people think. I’m not a doll. I’m a living breathing human being. I don’t give a damn what these people in the restaurant think!”
“Aaron, will you please get the check.”
“FUCK YOU!” roared Rosa at the top of her lungs.
Eleanor flushed with rage and shame. She and Aaron hustled their daughter into the station wagon. Wedged between them in the front seat, she sobbed uncontrollably. Then suddenly she lunged at Eleanor and squeezed her hands around her mother’s throat in an attempt to strangle her. Aaron’s arm shot out, knocking Rosa to the floor, while he jammed on the brakes. All the way home her tears continued to flow. Aaron drove fast, ignoring her.
At home Rosa continued her tirade. “I hate you both!” she screamed. “The two of you are rotten! Always hiding the truth! I hate this house! It’s full of lies!” She picked up a vase filled with blood red chrysanthemums and hurled it to the floor.
Upstairs, Howard had shut the door of his room in order to block out the sound, while Jesse listened in horrified fascination at the top of the stairs. He had always felt an affinity with Rosa, but now she had gone beyond all bounds.
“STOP IT!” Aaron slapped her hard across the face.
She ran sobbing past Jesse to the attic bathroom, bolted the door, and spent the night curled up rigidly on the linoleum.
“She may need electroshock.”
“No!” Eleanor thought of the ruined souls in the hospital who had received countless shock treatments. In her bones, Eleanor knew it would make her daughter worse.
“Wait, if you possibly can,” she said to the doctor. “Please wait.”
Eleanor left her suede purse on the chair. An attendant ran after her with it. Eleanor was shaking, her knees like water. When Aaron put his arm around her shoulders, she drew away. “Not now!” she snapped.
They went home in silence, the black sorrow knot of Rosa invading them.
“Those treatments might help,” said Aaron as he drove along the crowded parkway. It was rush hour.
“Aaron, you don’t understand. I don’t think they would help. Not at all.”
Sometimes Eleanor went out to the studio while Aaron was at work. She watched his deft movements when he was welding metal or shaping clay. In the summer he liked to work outside in the courtyard. Although his hair was grayer, he had only grown more attractive with age, she thought. He was so filled with energy and so absorbed in his work. Often when she talked to him, there was a distant look in his eyes as if his mind were far away, and she knew that indeed it was.
CHAPTER 19
HEINRICH IN LIMBO
In me are mixed
Animal and something more.
God—spirit—soul.
I do not know
Nor does it matter what
We call this prison.
All, all return to earth
Are mingled with the
Sweet rich crumbling stuff
Some little bit of me
Will grow again
Feel
Hear hum of bees
Beauty.
—MSC
Eleanor turned increasingly to Heinrich for support.
He and Erica had bought a cabin in Vermont. It was far out in the country on a gentle slope, with mountains in the distance. Eleanor loved this land. One weekend she and Heinrich managed to stay there alone while Erica was visiting relatives.
“I have to get away,” she told Aaron. She was tired of covering up. Let the marriage crumble, if it were meant to. Such was the depth of her despair.
A look of anguish came over her husband’s face that she had rarely seen before. “Whatever is going on with you and Heinrich, don’t leave me,” he said. She realized then that he had known about them for a long time. They did not speak about this, but the knowledge was a dark current that ran underneath the surface.
Heinrich and she spent an enchanted weekend. The concerns of their normal lives seemed remote. Much of the time they huddled in the cabin under blankets. On the second day a light powdery snow be
gan to fall as they were walking to the crystal clear brook to fill up plastic buckets with water. After breakfast of coffee and pancakes cooked on a camp stove, they put on their boots again and took a long walk through the forest.
As they trudged along, they held hands when the path was wide enough to walk abreast. Snowflakes swirled around them, cold against their faces. The sky was white with snow. As it fell, it softened the stark outlines of trees and earth. She hadn’t been so happy since she was a young girl in Switzerland, where she lived for a year with her family before going to college.
Skiing … sliding over gleaming new-fallen snow in the Alps with Fritz, her Swiss lover. They were going cross-country with another couple. Dazzling sun. Cold air had hit her face, giving her a rosy glow, just as it did now. The rest of her had been packed inside layers of warm ski clothing. The immense mountain peaks were more dramatic than this Vermont landscape. The sky had been an incredible azure, with just a few clouds.
Heinrich moved on ahead as the path narrowed beneath a thick growth of trees. His large body contrasted with her memory of the youthful, lean Fritz.
The four of them had been in high spirits as they made their way up the mountain. All day they climbed, until shadows lengthened and they realized soon it would be dark. Although they made their way back as rapidly as they could—what exhilaration to ski down over those slopes—they had delayed too long. The sun became a red globe at the edge of the sky, spreading soft light over the snow. When it sank beneath the horizon, they were still high above the valley, where houses looked very small in the distance.
In the encroaching darkness they continued their long trek downwards, skiing more slowly out of caution. Stars began to glitter in the sky and an almost full moon rose, casting brilliant light over the landscape. Once they heard the sounds of a distant avalanche, like muted thunder. The snow-covered trees and rocks and earth emanated a beautiful glow. She stood very still on her skis, and for a moment she felt part of a force larger than herself that would never die.
“Ellie, come on!” Heinrich was far ahead. When she caught up, he gestured for her to be quiet. A spotted doe was drinking from a mountain rivulet. They watched until the animal had drunk its fill. Then the doe raised its head and looked directly at Eleanor with its velvety eyes. They gazed at each other for several minutes until Heinrich took a step, and the deer sprang off into the bush.
“I want to live with you,” he said that night as they held each other tightly for warmth.
“Someday … someday perhaps.” She drowsed off to sleep in the comfort of his arms.
After that weekend they met with more urgency. When Erica was away, they would meet at his apartment. When Erica was home, they met in “their” hotel. Thank God, she reflected, for the small trust fund, for which she need account to no one. Her father had given it to her many years ago at the time of her marriage. “A woman should always have a private source of income,” he said. How kind he was! She could picture him, jaunty and sporting, tipping his golfing cap to them from wherever one went after dying. When she was a child, he had taken her off on secret journeys for ice cream. “Don’t tell your mother,” he would say with a mischievous wink. He might have understood about Heinrich.
He had understood about Lotte, her friend at finishing school in Switzerland. She was a fresh-faced girl from Copenhagen. Eleanor remembered her peals of laughter. Soft blonde tendrils curled around her face, and she had pure blue eyes. Chafing at the restrictions of the school, she and Lotte would slip out at night through their bedroom window on the ground floor. They would walk softly across the overgrown garden to the bordering forest where they had hidden clothes behind their secret rock. They would change out of their nightgowns into diaphanous dance dresses, slender kid shoes and silk stockings. Then they would take a trolley into the city, where they picked up various young men at nightspots. All the while they were supposed to be sleeping in their room, but no one ever checked.
One afternoon Lotte had asked El’s father to drive her to a quiet park where she was to rendezvous with one of her young men. When it became apparent that the suitor would not appear, her father had not uttered a word of censure, but treated them to ice cream sundaes.
However, he had not approved of Eleanor’s Swiss suitor. “Fritz lacks your intelligence. He’s nothing more than a playboy. You would soon grow tired of him.” At the time, she bridled with anger, but her father was right. When the family left Switzerland, Fritz simply faded from her life. There were times she thought of him with regret. With Fritz she might have given birth to simple, happy, fair-haired skiers! She herself might have remained in good health, spared the effects of her abortion.
One day Heinrich telephoned at five in the afternoon when she had just come home from work. Fortunately he caught her before she went out on errands. How busy her days were! Although she now worked part-time, juggling the demands of her job at the college along with Heinrich and the household was no easy matter.
“I want to kill myself,” he said. “In front of me is a bottle with twenty-five phenobarbitals.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Why are we born? Why do we live? We die when the organism has fulfilled its function.”
“Heinrich, what happened?”
“I resigned.”
She should have known! This was not the first time. His jobs followed a pattern: With great fanfare, he would be hired as director of a museum. He was brilliant, innovative, kind to his subordinates. Then would come increasing conflict with authorities.
“What happened?”
“Remember my program for inner-city children?”
“Yes.”
“They cut it from the budget.” He paused for a moment to light a cigarette. “I told them if that program goes, so do I.”
“You certainly stuck yourself out on a limb.”
“The bastards!”
“What will you do now?”
There was silence. She could picture him inhaling his cigarette.
Finally he said, “El, my hands have swollen up so badly with arthritis I can barely hold a pencil or brush.”
“I’m sorry. You do beautiful work. I love those etchings you made of the bare trees.”
“I’ve been struggling too long. Fighting myself. Fighting those bastards.”
She glanced at the clock above the kitchen stove. In forty-five minutes Erica should be home from her job at the consulate.
“Tell me about the Board meeting.” Keep talking. Keep listening.
His voice grew louder, less anguished as he became involved in telling his story. It turned out he had demanded far more than the inner-city program, escalating his demands until they were financially impossible. He had insulted the Chairman of the Board.
“Maybe there’s something you can do. Tell them you’ve reconsidered. Perhaps some kind of compromise is possible.”
“Hell no!”
The second hand moved so slowly. Erica, come home soon. Come home, come home. He hates to be alone. He needs you. He needs someone around him almost all the time, despite his talk of needing solitude.
“You’re Aaron’s muse,” he said. “He plucks you bare. Then you seek out lovers to replenish yourself. I’d give back yourself, Ellie. I wouldn’t just take.”
“We’ve been through all this before.”
“For an intelligent woman, Eleanor, you’re very stupid. You understand nothing. You’re buried in your petty suburban life.”
Good! She was getting him angry. That at least was something. But then he said abruptly. “I’m swallowing the pills.”
“Don’t! Put them away! What would Erica do with such a mess on her hands?”
“I’m running out of museums.”
They both laughed.
Eleanor said, “Do you have any of that good bourbon left?”‘
“Half a bottle.”
“Pour yourself a drink.”
“With the bourbon, I won’t need as many pills.”
&nb
sp; “Don’t be absurd. Put those stupid pills away.”
Half flirtatious, half scolding, she held his attention while she watched the clock. The second hand crept along the dial. Five thirty-seven. Where was Erica? Not the day to do errands after work, Erica. Not the day to linger for a drink with a friend. Come home. Come home.
“What kind of a funeral do you want?” she asked.
“Funeral! You know I hate funerals. They’re pretentious.”
“Where do you want to be buried?”
“I want to be cremated. I want my ashes scattered on the land around my cabin.”
“Suicide is for cowards,” she said. Her hand was trembling as she held the phone to her ear.
Outside a sparrow flew from a bare branch that was just beginning to sprout hard little buds like a child’s nipples.
“Suicide would be the easy way out. I thought you had more courage. … Did I tell you about the time I nearly drowned?” Keep talking. Keep listening. Keep his mind occupied.
“No? … Well then, let me tell you. At the time I was fifteen, at a girls’ camp in the mountains. A stream ran beneath our cabin that was flooded with recent rains. They warned us not to go in, but I foolishly disobeyed. Early one morning before anyone else was up—what energy I had in those days—I ran down the embankment and plunged in naked. I was a good swimmer, and so I scoffed at their warnings. But the current was much stronger than I expected, and I couldn’t get free. Branches from underneath knocked against me as the current swept me along, and the water was icy. Finally I gave up struggling. My body grew numb. I no longer felt any pain. A great calmness came over me.”
“Were you afraid?”
“No, oddly enough. I wasn’t. Time seemed to move very slowly, and my mind was crystal clear. For a moment I felt myself one with the stream, the sky, the rocks. The idea of dying actually held a certain allure. Then something took over—an animal instinct I suppose you could call it—I managed finally to grab a ledge jutting out from shore, and with an enormous effort, I pulled myself out. During those moments when I thought I might die … I could understand why people let go. A hero is someone who struggles on.”
Dying Unfinished Page 9
