World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  But now Dov has come downstairs, having just visited his father, and as he walks into the kitchen he announces, “Abba’s eye is black and blue.”

  “Abba’s eye’s not black and blue,” Akiva says. “It’s going to be black and blue, but it’s not black and blue yet.”

  “Bruises take time,” Yoni agrees.

  “Don’t you know how the human body works?” Akiva says to Dov.

  Apropos of nothing, Calder says, “My daddy’s dead. They buried him yesterday. I was there.”

  “Actually,” Thisbe says, crouching beside him, “they buried him last year. Yesterday was just the memorial.”

  “They buried him again,” Calder says.

  David brings out the Monopoly set and tries to explain to the boys how you amass as many hotels as you can, the fact of which the older cousins already know and the younger cousins aren’t interested in.

  “Eema broke Abba’s face,” Ari says, and he starts to cry.

  “I didn’t break Abba’s face,” Noelle says. She takes him in a hug, but then she says, “That’s enough.” Because it is enough. But when he persists, wanting to know what went wrong, she’s forced to address the issue once more. “It happens in sports,” she says. “People get injured, and eventually they heal.” Then she says the words the blessing of the skinned knee, a phrase that’s always being uttered by the Anglo-Saxons in her Jerusalem neighborhood, coming from a book she hasn’t read and doesn’t care to—she hates parenting advice books—knowing as she says this that the analogy is imprecise, that when people say the blessing of the skinned knee they don’t have in mind hitting your husband in the face with a tennis ball. But she’s said it, and now, she makes clear, the discussion is over. She goes into the living room and sits down in the rocking chair and, finding nothing else with which to occupy herself, she picks up one of her mother’s medical journals and pretends to read it.

  When her mother calls everyone in for breakfast, she reluctantly joins them. She’d rather not eat, rather not be here at all, but she doesn’t want to be upstairs with Amram either, his eye slowly turning colors, so she deposits herself in the dining room and takes out the last of their kosher food.

  She realizes she forgot to introduce the boys to Gretchen. Gretchen has met them before, of course, but she hasn’t seen them in a year. “This is Akiva,” she says. “Amram’s and my eldest.”

  “Nice to see you again, Akiva.”

  She introduces the other boys, too, but it’s Akiva Gretchen is most interested in. “Are you in school?” she asks him.

  “It’s summer vacation,” he says.

  “I mean in general.”

  This perplexes Akiva. He’s eight years old. Is there anyone who’s eight who isn’t in school?

  “What do you study?”

  But his answers either bore Gretchen (math, reading, social studies) or confuse her (chumash, navi, dikduk), and so she moves on to other topics, such as the weather, which, rainy as it is in July, confounds her.

  Noelle goes upstairs to check on Amram, but he remains asleep. She inches the food closer to him—cream cheese on a bagel, whitefish, some orange juice—thinking the smell of it might wake him. She recalls that concussion victims need to be kept awake. Though what is she thinking? Amram doesn’t have a concussion; he didn’t injure his head.. In a week people will look at him and they won’t even know anything happened.

  “How’s he doing?” Marilyn asks when she comes downstairs.

  “He’s fine,” she says, her voice clipped again, feeling her family’s stares on her, the stain of their collective accusation. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “What would you like to talk about?” Clarissa says.

  “How’s Israel?” asks Gretchen.

  “It’s fine,” Noelle says, not wanting to talk about that either, not wanting to talk about anything at all.

  “I read about Israel in the Times,” Gretchen says. “For a little country, you make a lot of news.”

  “I know,” Noelle says ruefully. She could give Gretchen an earful about the Western press. All the distortions and falsehoods.

  On a platter beside the coffee cake, Marilyn has arranged little square sandwiches with the crusts cut off, toothpicks piercing them, the red tassels at the top like tufts of hair. Cucumber and cream cheese. Egg salad. Smoked salmon. Gretchen helps herself to a sandwich, and as she does so, she lets the bracelets around her wrist clank against each other, as if she’s ringing for a dog. She holds a teacup to the light, examining it for blemishes. Gretchen’s famous hands, Noelle thinks. They’ve grown spotted over the years, but beneath the mottled hues they’re as lovely as ever. Once, taking Amtrak down to Baltimore with her fiancé, the man who if he’d lived would have become Noelle’s grandfather, Gretchen was approached by someone in their train berth who told her he was in advertising. A modeling agent, he called himself, and he told Gretchen she had the loveliest hands he’d ever seen; he wanted to make her into a hand model. A hand model! She was almost offended. What was a hand model, anyway? They put you on billboards advertising bracelets and wedding rings? They took photos of you pouring milk? They wanted your body parts, Gretchen told her grandchildren, took your limbs and did what they wished with them. Not that she was suited for modeling of any kind. All that preening and primping: she wasn’t good at sitting still. Though she kept the man’s address. For all Noelle knows she still has it somewhere; she’s never been one to discard a compliment.

  Gretchen excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and when Marilyn asks if she needs help, she refuses it. She ferries herself past the refrigerator and into the other room.

  When she returns, she looks down at the boys clustered around the table.

  “Those are your great-grandchildren, Grandma,” Clarissa says.

  “I know who they are.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Then why did you say it?”

  “I was just reminding you,” Clarissa says. “Sometimes you step back and take note.”

  “I don’t need reminders,” Gretchen says.

  The scrambled eggs get passed around, moving from plate to plate until they’re finished, and now Nathaniel rises to get some more, but at the sight of this Gretchen says, “Please sit down.”

  Nathaniel looks at her quizzically.

  “Grandma thinks the women should serve,” Clarissa says. Years ago, she explains, when Gretchen had the grandchildren over for dinner, it was always the girls she made clear the table and place the dishes in the sink. “Leo can clear the table, too,” Clarissa said. “You’re being sexist, Grandma.” But Gretchen looked nothing so much as amused. The very word sexist, if it meant anything to her, she took as a compliment. She had read about women’s lib., and she’d learned all she wanted to know about it. She had three husbands, and not one of them ever washed a dish, ever boiled an egg, ever folded laundry, ever touched an iron. It was for the help to do, and when the help wasn’t available, it was her job. The world may have been embarking on a time when men would do women’s work and women would do men’s, but she wasn’t coming along on that expedition.

  Nathaniel, smiling, promises Gretchen he won’t assist in her kitchen, but in his mother-in-law’s kitchen he’d like to help. Soon he’s back with the plate of eggs, and it seems Gretchen has capitulated because now she’s letting him serve her.

  “How are you, Mom?” David asks.

  “I’m just fine,” Gretchen says, and she proceeds to tell a story about one of the workers in her building who came in to replace a lightbulb and dragged the ladder clear across the floor. “I had to put down a rug to hide the scuff marks. Compassion alone prevented me from saddling him with the bill.”

  Noelle smiles. Compassion, she thinks, isn’t the first word she associates with Gretchen, but then she will surprise you. She can be extraordinarily kindhearted, except for when she’s not being kindhearted. And she’s loyal to her family. In her worldview, there’s her family and there’s everyone else. I
n this regard, at least, she’s like President Bush: you’re either with the Frankels or you’re against them. David, in particular, can do no wrong. Gretchen was similarly devoted to Leo. She favored him unabashedly, and when this was pointed out to her she simply shrugged. She’s never made any bones about it: she prefers boys.

  “I’m not hungry,” Calder says, and soon he and his cousins have gotten up from the table and gone into the other room. Akiva, ever the dutiful eldest child, passes out decks of cards and sets everyone up to play solitaire. He seats himself next to Calder and Ari, who are too young to know how to play solitaire, and so he tries, vainly, to explain the rules to them.

  Back in the dining room, everyone is silent. Finally, Lily says, “We’re so glad you came here, Grandma. It’s hard to imagine having done this without you.”

  “You did do this without me,” Gretchen says. “The memorial was yesterday, and I wasn’t there.”

  “Leo forgives you,” Lily says. But the words, intended lightly, come out wrong, and Gretchen remains silent.

  “Better late than never,” Clarissa says.

  “It doesn’t matter when you came,” Lily says. “Just as long as you’re here.”

  But Gretchen won’t be toadied to. She nods in the direction of Malcolm. “I’d like the chef to make me some French toast.”

  “The chef’s off duty,” Lily says. “There are labor laws, Grandma. Malcolm’s on break.”

  “That’s okay,” Malcolm says, rising from his seat. “I can make an exception for Gretchen.”

  “Do you prepare it with vanilla?” Gretchen asks.

  “If you’d like.”

  “I wouldn’t,” she says.

  In that case, Malcolm says, he won’t prepare it with vanilla.

  “I bet if you ask nicely,” Clarissa says, “Malcolm will even put horseradish cheddar in it.”

  Malcolm raises a single eyebrow, the closest he’s come to registering a complaint.

  “That’s your favorite cheese, Grandma, isn’t it?” Lily says.

  But Gretchen doesn’t respond. She raises a tissue to her face and dabs fastidiously at her mouth, careful not to disturb her lipstick. “You say better late than never, but I didn’t want to come here at all.”

  “Well, we’re glad you did, Mom.”

  “The only reason I came was because of Amram. He drove down to the city to get me.”

  “And we’re thrilled he did,” Lily says.

  Hearing this, especially from Lily, sets Noelle’s teeth on edge. Amram drove down to the city to ask Gretchen for money. She has no evidence of this, but she also has no doubt. Yet even as she’s thinking this, she’s wondering who she is to be accusing him, thinking that if he in fact managed to secure a gift from Gretchen she would be grateful. She tries to imagine how much money her grandmother has, and all she can think of are those dead CEOs. She recalls that old joke: “How do you make a small fortune in Israel? You bring a large one from abroad.”

  “You told me you didn’t want to come here,” David says. “That you’d already been through too much.”

  “I have been through too much,” Gretchen says. She’s sitting up straight, her napkin folded primly in her lap, but there’s a vacancy to her gaze, as if she’s looking through them.

  Lily says, “Malcolm made French toast for you, Grandma. Normally that would cost you fourteen dollars.”

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  “Now you’ve offended him.”

  Malcolm, complying, playing along, has his hands pressed to his heart; he’s looking at Gretchen in supplication.

  “You haven’t even tried it,” Marilyn says.

  Gretchen takes a compulsory bite of French toast, then stirs the eggs around her plate. “I’ve always hated this town.”

  “I know you have, Mom. You said there was nowhere to get a decent cup of coffee, much less a good bagel.”

  Gretchen looks at him distantly, as if being reminded of someone she’s forgotten, a former version of herself.

  “You’ll be going home in a few hours,” David says. “You won’t have to come back here for a long time.”

  “I’m never coming back here.”

  David looks at her as if to say, Come on.

  Gretchen deposits her fork on her plate, her napkin in a ball beside her cutlery, and asks to be excused. She traffics into the hallway, where everyone can see her straightening the art on the walls. In the living room, she nudges a pile of books on the coffee table so they’re not too close to the edge.

  “What’s she doing?” David asks.

  “Making sure the picture frames aren’t off-center,” Lily says.

  “She just needs to get back to the city,” Marilyn says. “She was forty-nine when I first met her, and even then she hated to leave New York.”

  “I’d like a cup of tea,” Gretchen says when she returns.

  David jumps up; Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle do the same. Soon Nathaniel and Malcolm join them, too, and this time Gretchen doesn’t object. The cupboard is open, and they’re all reaching for a glass.

  “You see, Gretchen?” Nathaniel says. “You ask for a cup of tea and you get six.”

  “You still rule the roost, Grandma,” Lily says.

  “One cup is sufficient,” Gretchen says. “And a biscuit, please, if you would.”

  “One biscuit, coming up,” David says. He brings his mother a plate of cookies.

  “How are they?” Lily asks.

  “They’re not entirely disgusting,” Gretchen says.

  “Look, Grandma,” Clarissa says, pointing at what’s left of Gretchen’s cookie. “It’s in the shape of Pennsylvania. Remember how we used to do that? Play ‘United States of Confectionaries’?”

  Gretchen gazes back at her distantly.

  “We’d chant ‘United States of Confectionaries,’” Lily says. “That was your signal to bring out the cake and cookies. Then the four of us would bite into them in the shapes of the states.”

  “One time,” Clarissa says, “Leo made you buy him five packages of Oreos. He claimed he needed to complete all fifty states. He said it was for his geography homework.”

  “Leo was the champion, wasn’t he?” Gretchen says.

  “Yes, Grandma,” Lily says. “He was.”

  For an instant it seems as if there are tears in her eyes. She lays her head on the table, her hands on either side of her.

  “Do you want to lie down?” Nathaniel asks.

  “I’m just resting,” Gretchen murmurs.

  “You can rest on the sofa,” Marilyn says. “You’ll be more comfortable there.”

  “I’d rather rest here.”

  Gretchen stays with her eyes closed. Her breathing has gotten slower; it seems she might have fallen asleep. A minute passes, and she looks up. “I’m sorry,” she says, dabbing her eyes with a napkin. “I must have been exhausted.”

  “Mom, you don’t need to apologize.”

  Gretchen presses her hands against the table, and now she’s standing up. She never was tall, and she has shrunk considerably over the years, but she has a way of staring down at people from below. Poised before her chair, looking out at her family, she looms above them all. “My only grandson died last year. I said I didn’t want to go through this again, and I meant it.”

  Everyone nods. From the living room come shouts. Somebody has won at solitaire.

  “Then Amram came to fetch me, and I’m not someone who’s easily fetched.”

  “We know you’re not, Grandma,” Clarissa says.

  “I don’t do things I don’t want to do.”

  “We understand, Mom.”

  “But then Amram told me what’s happening in this family, and I marched straight to the car.”

  “Mom—”

  “Please, David, let me finish. I’m not about to be party to this—the breaking up of my family.”

  “Gretchen.” It’s Marilyn who’s speaking now, but Gretchen won’t let her interrupt either.

  “I
didn’t want to come here,” Gretchen says, “but I’m here now, and you’re going to listen to me.” She’s looking at her son, at her daughter-in-law, at both of them together, and they’re looking back at her, and now they’re looking away. “There’s no excuse for this. Don’t talk to me about love, and don’t talk to me about grief. Do you think I don’t know about grief? My grandson died a year ago. I’m ninety-four years old. Almost everyone I know is dead, starting with my first husband, your father, David, whom I loved.”

  “I know you did, Mom.”

  “I loved all three of my husbands. I won’t talk about my private life, but if you want to know whether we ever had problems, the answer is we did.”

  Everyone stares back at her.

  “But I never thought of leaving them, and none of them ever thought of leaving me. I know something about integrity, and I know something about love. And I know something about loyalty, which is the most important quality of all. You,” she says, and she’s pointing at Thisbe, who’s so startled she shoots up in her chair. “You’ve been quiet the whole meal.”

  “I …”

  “It’s okay,” Gretchen says. “Your actions are more important.”

  “What actions?” Thisbe says, feeling as if she’s been caught at something, she has no idea what.

  “How old were you when Leo died?”

  “Thirty-two,” she says. “I’m thirty-three now.”

  “I wasn’t much older when David’s father died. I know what that’s like, to be a young widow.”

  The porch door is open and a breeze comes in, sending the chandelier spinning so that the bulbs shine on Thisbe. She can feel herself breaking out in a sweat.

  “No one understands something like that,” Gretchen says, “until they’ve gone through it themselves.”

  Thisbe agrees. No one really knows what she’s endured: not her family, not her closest friends.

  “You could teach your in-laws a lesson about loyalty.”

  A piece of scrambled eggs is impaled on Thisbe’s fork, which she’s holding in front of her, not sure whether to raise it to her mouth or lower it to her plate, so it just hovers in midair, like a bird. “What do you mean?”