World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  Lily steps to the podium to introduce the speakers, but Noelle can’t hear her. She tells herself it’s her hearing loss. That’s part of it, certainly; she has trouble making out voices in large rooms, has trouble placing voices, too. At home, one of the boys will call to her from downstairs and she’ll think he’s calling her from upstairs; she’ll be in the supermarket and a friend will scream out, and she’ll turn the wrong way. She has a hearing aid, but it’s back at the house, in her suitcase. As a teenager, she would trumpet her hearing loss; now she doesn’t tell anyone. She carries her hearing aid wherever she goes, the way she used to carry her diaphragm, but when it came time to use it, she would forget to, or wouldn’t bother—it’s a miracle she didn’t get pregnant all those years—and it would stay nestled like an egg in her purse, the way her hearing aid does now. And though it’s true the acoustics in the hall aren’t good, that’s only part of the problem. She can’t concentrate on what Lily’s saying. And now it’s Clarissa’s turn to speak and she can’t concentrate on what she’s saying, either.

  Clarissa looks out at the audience. “How to start?” she says, arranging her papers on the podium. She could begin, she tells the crowd, by listing her brother’s attributes, but she hates to reduce people to attributes. “And Leo was less reducible than most.” So she describes a trip she and Nathaniel took to Wesleyan when Leo was a student there. Nathaniel came down with a cold, so she and Leo left him in the dorm with a bowl of instant chicken soup and went into town to pick up sandwiches. “It was December, and cold out, and a homeless man came over to Leo and said, ‘Hey, Tom, how have you been?’ and Leo said, ‘I’m fine, Frank, how are you?’ And I whisper to Leo, ‘Do you know him?’ and Leo says, ‘I’ve never seen him in my life.’ ‘Then why did you call him Frank?’ I ask, and Leo says, ‘Why did he call me Tom?’ So Leo and this guy he’s calling Frank get to talking, and Frank says, ‘You know what I could use, Tom? Ten dollars.’ And Leo says, ‘Why do you want ten dollars?’ ‘I want to see a movie,’ Frank says. ‘I haven’t seen a movie in years.’ ‘Look at you, Frank,’ Leo says. ‘You’re emaciated. You don’t want to see a movie. You want to eat.’ And Frank admits this is true. So Leo hands him his sandwich.

  “A couple other homeless men approach us now. They want to know what’s going on. ‘Tom’s feeding the pigeons,’ Frank says. But Leo takes offense on Frank’s behalf. ‘You’re not a pigeon,’ he tells him. ‘You’re not a damn pigeon.’

  “Soon the other guys want in on the deal. Leo’s standing on the steps of the sub shop, saying, ‘Okay, who’d like a sandwich?’ and they all raise their hands. One wants turkey, one wants roast beef, one wants meatballs. Leo takes down their orders and comes back with three subs, and when he’s done passing them out he hands Frank a ten-dollar bill. ‘For dessert,’ he says. ‘Go catch yourself the last screening of Rocky Horror.’

  “It wouldn’t have surprised me,” Clarissa says, “if Leo had returned to his dorm and brought back Nathaniel’s chicken soup too. He wasn’t a do-gooder. He hated that phrase. He was just someone who got an idea into his head. He did everything in excess, but it was a good kind of excess.”

  A few people are nodding in back. A man removes his jacket and slings it over his chair. Leo’s boyhood friends are clustered in a couple of rows, the men in blue blazers and khakis, the women in sundresses, as if they all got together to decide what to wear.

  Clarissa says, “When I told a friend about today’s memorial, she asked me why we’d decided to do it. I think she meant ‘Why go through it again?’ What could I tell her? That I’m always going through it, that my whole family will be going through it for the rest of our lives? But then my friend said, ‘I understand, you want closure,’ and I thought I could kill her. To me, closure is the most detestable word in the English language. It’s what other people say to you when they think it’s time to move on.

  “My brother’s funeral was so public we decided we wanted to do something different this time. To own the event is the only way I can think to put it. But I’m realizing now that I was hoping it would be easier. A year has passed, so in a way it is easier, but in the ways that count it feels the same to me.

  “I thought of myself as Leo’s second mother. In a lot of ways, I thought of myself as his first mother. I remember being a teenager and wanting you to die, Mom, for all the reasons any teenager wants her mother to die, but also because I thought I’d do a better job with Leo. I mean, you did a great job, of course …”

  Marilyn, smiling, raises her hand in front of her as if to say she understands.

  But now Clarissa doesn’t know how to go on. In the front row, Ari tugs on the edge of his bow tie, and now Dov is tugging on it, too. “Stop it, boys,” Noelle whispers. A car horn honks out on Walker Street.

  Clarissa looks up at her father. He didn’t speak at Leo’s funeral, but he left open the possibility that he might speak today. Now, though, he shakes his head. A year has passed, but he still can’t do it. Clarissa steps down from the podium and returns to her seat.

  The heat is smothering, so Marilyn gets up to turn on the ceiling fan. But it’s a rickety contraption that emits more noise than air, and now, as the hall starts to vibrate with the sound of it, she switches the fan off. She opens all three doors to the balcony. Leaning out, she can still see that helicopter suspended above the building. She wants to scream. Someone’s cell phone goes off and people turn around. It’s an elderly man’s and he’s having trouble finding it; his wife searches through his bag.

  Now it’s Noelle’s turn to speak. She considered writing something out, but she doesn’t do well with prepared texts. She suffers from performance anxiety, but that’s because she thinks of things as a performance, and so she has resolved not to regard her speech this way. If she stands at the podium and says nothing, that will be all right, too; it will be its own sort of testament. And she will say something. Even if it’s simply “I’m Noelle, the youngest of Leo’s three sisters. My brother died, and I miss him.” The words aren’t eloquent, but they’re true, and the truth, she thinks, has its own eloquence.

  She rests her arms on the podium. Her hands flutter like birds. “My name is Noelle Glucksman. I’m the youngest of Leo’s three sisters, and I was the last person in my family to see Leo alive. As many of you know, I’m an Orthodox Jew, and Leo spent Shabbat in Jerusalem with Amram and me and our four sons before he was captured. He stayed up late talking to us. He asked a lot of questions. About God and theology, about our lives. ‘Such structure,’ he said. ‘That’s amazing.’

  “I have this image of my brother from when he was four. He’s up here in Lenox, running around naked in our front yard. My parents told him to put on his clothes, but he wouldn’t listen to them. He never would. He always did what he wanted. But there was another side to Leo—a thoughtful, contemplative side. It’s not a coincidence that he studied philosophy in college. He was always interested in the truth. I saw that side of him when he visited Jerusalem. I told him he was welcome to sleep in on Saturday, but he wanted to come with us to synagogue. He couldn’t read Hebrew, but he insisted on following along in the transliterated English. The service was close to three hours, but he stayed there the whole time.

  “After he died, people said to me, ‘How can you believe when something like that happened?’ But I know Leo wouldn’t have said that. If he were alive to reflect on his own death, he wouldn’t have said you shouldn’t believe. And he wasn’t a believer himself. That Shabbat in Jerusalem, I thought I could see my brother as an Orthodox Jew. I’m not saying he would have become one, only that he was interested in everything and he was up for anything. That’s one of the reasons he ended up in Iraq. Leo was the most open, most curious person I’ve ever known.

  “When the sun went down that day, Amram recited the havdalah service, which is the prayer Jews say to mark the end of the Sabbath. It separates the holy from the profane. There’s a tradition that when a girl holds the havdalah candle she should hold it at
the height she wants her future husband to be. Leo was the one holding the havdalah candle that night, and I must have told him about that tradition, because I noticed he was measuring the height of the candle, holding it just so. ‘That’s how tall Thisbe is,’ he said.

  “‘But you’re already married to her,’ I told him.

  “‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I’d marry her again. I’m thinking about her. The next time you talk to her, please tell her that.’

  “An hour later, he packed and left. It was the last time I ever saw him.” Noelle wants to go on, but she doesn’t have anything else to say. She steps down from the podium and walks back to her seat.

  A hush descends on the room. For a second Thisbe thinks everyone is staring at her. She looks down at her lap, and when she glance up she sees Jules, Leo’s best friend from childhood, and she smiles at him. She catches the eye of her college roommate sitting in back.

  Then Ari calls out, “I miss Uncle Leo!” though he’s only three and doesn’t remember him. But he remembers his father, and when he says, “I want Abba to come back,” his voice is loud and plaintive. He starts to cry, and now Calder has started to cry, too.

  A blond woman in a crinoline skirt offers to take Calder and Ari downstairs to the game room. But the other boys wish to remain in the hall, and now, as Lily steps to the podium to deliver her speech, Akiva starts to cry as well.

  “It’s contagious, isn’t it?” Lily steps down from the podium and gives Akiva a tissue.

  A cough rings out; soon another one echoes it. Lily looks up at the crowd. She has, in fact, discarded her prepared speech and chosen to speak off the cuff. “Leo would have been uneasy watching us here today. He’d have told us to lighten up. I was five years older than Leo. I used to sit on him to get him to be quiet. But in a lot of ways he seemed older than me. Or if not older, then more sage.

  “Dad, you and I took up running this past year, and for months we didn’t even know the other was doing it. It was like we were in silent communion. Sweating out our grief, is how I think of it.

  “When Leo was a boy, he used to cry when he watched the evening news. Terrible things were happening around the world, and it tormented him. He was touched by strangers. It made sense that he chose journalism, and it made sense that he wound up overseas. Yes, he liked danger, but there was something big-hearted about him. Nothing for him was abstract or far away.

  “Okay,” Lily says. “This is what I really want to say. Noelle, there’s this Hebrew phrase you sometimes quote whose meaning is ‘Those who understand will understand.’”

  “Ha’mevin yavin,” Noelle whispers from the front row.

  “The idea being,” Lily says, “that those who understand will understand, and those who don’t understand, it’s probably better that way. When Leo was twelve we adopted a stray dog he’d found in the park. Mom, you used to say the dog had a special affinity for Leo, and I suppose that’s true, if by ‘special affinity’ you meant Kingman ignored Leo slightly less than she ignored the rest of us. Kingman was wonderful and we all loved her, but if she could have found a way to pour her own food, she wouldn’t have missed any of us. There was only one way you could get Kingman to pay attention to you. If, for example, Clarissa and I were walking her and Clarissa had to leave, Kingman would strain after Clarissa. But then if I was the one who had to leave, Kingman would strain after me. She didn’t want us to separate. Leo called her the Togetherness Dog. And he was like that, too. He was the Togetherness Person. He was also—and I don’t think a lot of you know this—the family mediator. Noelle, you’re right when you say Leo did what he wanted, but he was always keeping an eye on us, and there were certain things he couldn’t abide. One of those was conflict. Dad, I remember you saying they should have made Leo the Middle East envoy. Dennis Ross couldn’t hold a candle to my brother. Put Leo in a room with the Palestinians and the Israelis, and he wouldn’t have let them leave until they’d reached an accord. And maybe, I like to think, that’s what he set out to do in going to the Middle East, and he simply got derailed.

  “There are things happening in our family that I’m not free to discuss, so I’ll just invoke Noelle and say that those of you who understand will understand, and those of you who don’t understand, it’s probably better that way. I’m not sure of a lot when it comes to Leo, but I’m sure that if he were alive, he wouldn’t allow this to be happening. He would sit the parties down and refuse to let them leave. He’d have pulled on you both just like Kingman did, because that was the kind of person he was.” As she speaks, Lily’s not even looking at her parents. She’s staring out at the audience, where a hush has settled again, and now someone in back has blown her nose and deposited the tissue into her pocketbook. “That’s all,” Lily says. “I have nothing else to say.”

  As Lily steps down from the podium, Clarissa and Noelle glance up at their parents, but Marilyn and David are simply staring straight ahead. They don’t look at Lily either when she tries to catch their glance.

  The security guard has come upstairs and is standing now outside the doorway. Clarissa’s cello, which is leaning against the wall, wobbles briefly, and a man in suspenders and a paisley tie goes over to right it. Thisbe stares down at the folder in her lap. “Well,” she whispers to Lily, “I guess it’s my turn.”

  She approaches the podium and removes the papers from her folder. “Hello, everyone,” she says tentatively.

  People murmur back.

  At the center of the room, Leo’s friends straighten in their chairs. A couple of the men button their blazers. For an instant, Thisbe smells a whiff of perfume. They’re all staring at her, just as she’d be staring if she were sitting where they were. She wants to do well by them, to do well by herself, but she doesn’t know if she can, doesn’t even know what doing well by them would mean.

  Glance up, she thinks. Pause. Enunciate. She has written these words in the margins of her speech, and now she’s trying her best to listen to them. “I met Leo here in Lenox,” she says. “It was the summer before our senior year of college, and on our first date Leo and I and Leo’s best friend Jules played paintball together.” She looks up at Jules, and he nods. “I don’t know how many of you are familiar with paintball, but it’s a messier, more violent version of Capture the Flag. You’re standing in the middle of some abandoned field, shooting at each other with pellets. Jules, you and I ganged up on Leo, but the two of you also had this game of your own, trying to see who could hit the other more.”

  Jules laughs, and Thisbe feels her nerves untighten and her joints grow loose in their sockets. Briefly, she laughs, too. “I know there’s supposed to be a lesson here. Live by the sword, die by the sword. You meet your husband when people are shooting at him, and …” She takes a quick breath. “But that’s not the lesson I draw. What I think is that Jules was there on Leo’s and my first date. You have a crush on a girl, and you invite your best friend along! I’ve never known anyone who had as many friends as Leo, and the friends he cared about most were here in Lenox. This was his second home, but it was really his first home.”

  Several of Leo’s friends nod; one of the women dabs a handkerchief to her eyes.

  “The day he left for Iraq, Leo said to me, ‘I’m going back to the state of nature.’ He was talking about Thomas Hobbes, whom he studied in college. Leo liked to say that Hobbes’s description of life was really a description of him: nasty, brutish, and short. But he was none of those things, certainly not as I saw him.

  “Marilyn and David, Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle—I’m an only child, and growing up, I always felt that my family was insubstantial compared to yours. That’s one of the things that appealed to me about Leo—the tumult of you Frankels, as if in your presence I was being swallowed by a many-tentacled beast and made into a tentacle myself. Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle—you all were older by the time I came along, but I still felt that in marrying Leo I was getting you as sisters, and when he died I lost you, too. I know that losing a husband is different
from losing a sibling, and it’s especially different from losing a son. A lot has changed since Leo died, but I will always be part of your family.” Thisbe’s thinking of a phrase Noelle used to recite: “We shall do and we shall listen.” It’s what the Israelites declared at the foot of Mount Sinai. And why, Noelle asked, did the Torah say “We shall do and we shall listen” instead of “We shall listen and we shall do”? Don’t you listen to God’s commandments before you follow them? But that was the point, Noelle said. You did God’s bidding whether or not you understood it, and the very act of doing that bidding caused it to make sense.

  That’s what Thisbe thinks as she stands at the podium. Saying the words will make her feel them. And she does feel them, even if she’s not sure she wants to. She looks up at Leo’s parents, at her sisters-in-law. I will always be part of your family. Shoulders shaking, breaths coming out in sobs, she steps down from the podium and hugs Marilyn and David, hugs Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle, and now, back in her seat, she wraps her arms so hard around herself she fears she might unspool.

  Someone has extinguished the lights, and now slides are being shown on a screen above the stage. Photos of Leo and the rest of the Frankels, photos of Thisbe and Calder too. From her spot presiding, Lily watches herself move in and out of the light, as if a train is flashing past her in the darkness. She sees Malcolm reflected on the screen. He’s in photograph after photograph, only now she realizes it’s not him but his shadow, cast hundreds of miles up the East Coast. It’s not until she has stepped down from the podium and made her way to the back that she sees him pressed against the wall, standing beside the cooler of beer, looming quietly in the darkness. “Malcolm?”

  “I drove up here,” he says. “I hope that’s all right.”

  “All right?” She steps back from him as if to get a better look, to make sure he is who is and not some impostor boyfriend.