The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  “You’re exhausted,” she murmurs when Alma appears for lunch.

  “No, I’m not,” Alma says.

  They take a trail up above the canyon, and riding slowly they can feel the sky burning against the red hills. The clouds evaporate above them. “I can almost understand Liz out here,” Alma tells her mother.

  “She’s really marrying him!” Nan says wonderingly. “I can’t imagine what sort of children they’ll have.”

  “They won’t have any.”

  “You never know.” Nan smiles.

  Alma bends over her horse. “I know.”

  “Are you still seeing—”

  “Yes,” says Alma. “We’re sifting data.”

  “And then what?” Nan asks.

  “Oh, God, I don’t know.” They stand at the edge of the canyon where the red walls break away to the bottom. “Maybe we’ll break up.” She looks at Nan slyly. “Maybe we’ll get married. Mommy, I was teasing! I didn’t mean anything. Besides, we’re never going to finish the project, so you don’t have to worry about what’ll happen afterward.”

  “I do worry,” says Nan. “I worry about the way you throw yourself into these projects without an end in sight. You don’t consider what they cost you in time or—”

  “Oh, say what you mean,” Alma says. “It’s not the project you’re upset about.”

  “Don’t finish my sentences. You work yourself into the ground with these interviews just the way you did with your thesis. And I don’t care what kind of feminist Marxism they taught you at Berkeley; you’re acting compulsive. Just tell me honestly if you think this history project is going anywhere.”

  Alma blinks, but counters, “First, you tell me if you’re talking about the project or about Ron. You can’t seem to separate the two.”

  “No, it’s you who can’t separate them,” says Nan.

  —

  “Rose called while you were gone,” Ron tells her.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she says.

  “Giving up on her?”

  Alma flings her backpack down. “Look, I don’t have to transcribe every goddamn phone message. I don’t have to be on call every waking hour. And that does not mean I’m giving up!”

  “Welcome home,” he says. “Glad to see you had such a good weekend.”

  She turns away. Sliding out one of her filing cabinets, she begins sorting the new batch of transcripts the typist delivered.

  He picks up the paper. “Did she ask about me?” he asks.

  “Sort of.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing much. How am I supposed to remember blow by blow?”

  “You’re supposed to be an oral historian,” he points out.

  “Well, she’s my mother, for God’s sake. People don’t listen to their mother.” She brushes the hair out of her eyes. “I’m getting central air-conditioning. We can’t work like this.”

  “Don’t do me any favors with her money,” mutters Ron.

  “Who said it was for you?” she challenges, hurt. “I’m worried about Flush. Look at him. He’s suffering in this house. Look at those eyes!” She tosses one of Eileen Meeker’s files on the floor. “What do you make of this stuff?”

  “I listened to some of it,” he says.

  “Here’s what I’ve been thinking about Eileen,” Alma says. “The key is, she doesn’t go back to the farm. It’s just after the war began. The Depression is over; she joins the Women’s Army Corps. Now what do you make of that? The resources of the farm are depleted.”

  “If you want my opinion,” Ron says, “what she’s describing is how to revive dying ferns. And then she remembers the farm. Stop pushing it. Stop pushing all the time.”

  She slams the file drawer. “If you don’t want to think about the analysis, then leave me alone and don’t interfere with my work.”

  “Terrific. You wrap up the inquisition and I’ll finish my book.”

  “Oh, your book,” she snaps. “As if I’m the one dragging you away from that! It was your idea, remember. You wanted to help me.”

  “That’s right,” says Ron, “and now I want to stop. I have perfect confidence in you. You know exactly what these women should say, and I’m sure single-handedly you can lead them to the truth about their lives.”

  She forces open a window. “You never wanted to help me. Only criticize my work. You just want to control what I say. You don’t want me to be independent.”

  “Oh, I don’t!” says Ron. “Why don’t you try that little speech on Mom. I know it works better on men, but I think if we’re talking about control—”

  “She does not control me.”

  “Prove it,” he says. “If she didn’t—if you ever had the courage of your convictions—you would have married me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she says.

  He looks at her. “You’re right,” he says. “She doesn’t control you. You’re already just like her.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “But I do,” he says. “Your mother wants us to break up.”

  “Of course she does,” Alma says. “I’m her daughter!”

  “So,” Ron says, “does she object to me on principle or does she also object to Jews?”

  “You don’t even know her,” says Alma. “And I hate you and the way you twist what I say. Do you have to call my mother a racist to understand that she doesn’t want me to marry you? Can’t you comprehend this on any other level? It would destroy my relationship with her—”

  “You mean she’d disinherit you. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “No! I don’t care about the money.”

  “Oh, Alma,” he says, “you’re such a hypocrite.”

  —

  “A girdle,” Rose tells her. “I’d never wear anything else. Some women over here wear whalebone. These old ladies promenading at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in their whalebone and gold lamé. Oof! They are so antiquated. I did see one whale, however. During the war, they took all the children to the Isle of Sandwich before they transported us to England. The Isle of Sandwich—and there was a whale on the beach; I still remember it. I was so small and frail they had to carry me everywhere. But after a few months at the convent I blossomed out. How I blossomed out!”

  Alma doesn’t have the energy to find a chronology in this. The Isle of Sandwich must be the Isle of Man. But she doesn’t ask about it. Rose spins out her own chronology, and she knows the places she has been.

  “I still remember the day Caruso died,” she continues seamlessly. “I was playing by the sea. Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The place is ordinary now, but in the twenties the resort was chic. Our governess had an operatic voice. She spent evenings at the piano and it was not unusual for a crowd to gather at the window. She was a lovely girl, but married quite beneath her.” She frowns searchingly. “He was in the chicken business, I believe. When I came here from England, other girls my age were dating, and I was just a child, size seventeen, incidentally. How my cousins stared at me! Shainey called me the Grina Cusina—she got the name from the song, you know. But I had something they didn’t. My complexion was like perfect makeup. It was peaches, it was pink, people turned around in the street. For my first date—do you know how old I was?” Alma looks up startled. “I was twenty-three,” Rose says.

  On their first date, Ron and Alma had gone to the opening of The Birds at UCLA. Swinging on trapezes above the audience, the actors merged Aristophanes with lampoons of Reaganomics. Alma got a crick in her neck watching, but somehow they made it to intermission. “Dive Bomb!” headlined the review in the Daily Bruin. Then they went to a recital series by a cellist friend who looked so exalted when he played, Ron used to moan, “If only they could turn off the sound!”

  “There was a young man I was sweet on,” Rose says. “And Shainey said to his real young lady: You have black eyebrows and yellow hair! That was unheard of. In those days it was unheard of to—to dissect people like that. Bu
t he wasn’t the one, you know. When I first got engaged, my brother and my parents said they would never speak to me again. Alma! You’re not listening.”

  Alma shakes herself. “Yes, I am.”

  “But you look terrible! What is it, dear? You haven’t said a word. What was that?”

  “Nothing,” Alma whispers. “My boyfriend left.”

  “Oh yes,” Rose says, with perfect cognizance. “That’s just what I was saying. My brother swore never to speak to me again or even utter my name in his house. He did it, too!”

  “He was Jewish,” says Alma.

  “Of course he was. All my fiancés were Jewish.”

  “No, Ron.” She wants overwhelmingly to run away, to break away from Rose and the long, cryptic history of Rose’s life.

  Rose considers Alma’s case a moment. “Well,” she concludes, “if he was Jewish, it was a good thing you parted. If you had married, it would have broken his mother’s heart! Anyway, they all thought he was no good. It turned out they were right, too. So I broke it off. Can you imagine? Don’t cry, dear. It was only my first engagement. It was very sad; but you know, somehow I lived through it! Don’t feel bad.”

  THE WEDDING OF HENRY MARKOWITZ

  Henry sits at the oval claw-foot table, expandable to seat twelve—his find at a Wantage estate sale, a jewel of Victoriana, refinished down to its griffin feet. It’s big, but it’s the table he always wanted, and that’s why he bought it. He simply hired piano movers. The flat is full of his discoveries, his rare books, and his antique decanters. There is a special case for his maps, his charts of the heavens. He designed it and had it built by a cabinetmaker. Everything fits; the colors are warm library hues, deep green and cinnabar.

  “Describe the expression on her face,” Henry says to his younger brother, Ed.

  “Flabbergasted,” Ed says. “Ma was completely taken aback. Well, we were all so surprised. I mean, to hear you were engaged! Ma was in shock! But we were so pleased.” He looks at Henry. “Well, I mean, what do you want to know?”

  “I just wondered how she looked,” Henry says, fidgeting with the place cards on the table.

  “Oh,” Ed says. “Well.”

  “Tell me about your work. How is the book coming?”

  “What, the anthology?”

  “No, no—your history of the Arabic-speaking peoples.”

  “That was fifteen years ago, Henry!” Ed says with some annoyance. “I haven’t worked on that for fifteen years.”

  “That long?” Henry says. “What a shame. I was thinking about it just the other day. There was an exhibit of Persian miniatures at the Ashmolean, and I was thinking about your book, your idea about the art and politics—the art especially. It’s so rich—the compression, the landscape, and the men with their swords, and a waterfall like a thread into an oasis, all in one little frame. They were like jewels. You’ve got to go back to it; you could just do the art, you know. Even if you just did the art—”

  “Well, I’m not an art historian,” Ed says. “And I’m not Albert Hourani, either. I just do the best I can.”

  Henry looks at him and feels flustered. “What do you think of these?” he asks, holding up the place cards. “We had the calligrapher who did the addresses for the invitations. The printing was a nightmare, of course. There are scarcely any engravers left. Would you believe invitations these days are nearly all done thermally? Run your finger over the verso and you can feel the difference.”

  “Huh.” Ed stares at him, head propped up on his fist. He has been flying most of the night and isn’t acclimated to Oxford in June—the birds singing at four-thirty in the morning and the searing blue sky.

  “Won’t you have some coffee?” Henry asks him. “Some tea? Earl Grey? Black currant? How was Yehudit’s graduation?”

  “It was fine,” Ed says. “It was beautiful. It rained. Here, I brought you pictures.” He takes out the snapshots of his daughter, of the family under umbrellas.

  “Oh, it looks like it was pouring,” Henry says. “Oh, the poor thing—she looks drenched. Those umbrellas! My God, what if it rains at the reception? We checked the almanacs, of course, for the chances. Oh, look at Sarah with that plastic bag over her hair!”

  Ed is gazing out at Henry’s living room, at his brocaded armchairs and his stacks of books. Leather-bound quartos, damp and a little ragged. The huge dark table stretches through the living room, grotesquely out of scale.

  “And these are the sibs!” Henry bursts out, holding a photo of Ed’s two oldest before him. “They’re huge!”

  “They’re—they’re nineteen and twenty-one years old,” Ed splutters.

  “Really! I had forgotten they were so old. The time just, just— Are you angry at me?”

  “What’s to be angry at? I’m jet-lagged, can’t you see that? I get on the plane at Dulles, and here you are in the same apartment with these little books and these chairs—these things of yours.”

  Henry flushes to the tip of his nose.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Ed says. “I thought by now you’d know the ages of my children.”

  “I did know,” Henry protests. “I used to know. I lost track!”

  “Well, we’re all supposed to keep track of you,” Ed snaps. “We just picked up and schlepped across the Atlantic on two months’ notice.”

  “Don’t be upset,” Henry says.

  “I’m not upset. I’m trying to tell you it wasn’t easy for us to get here, let alone bring Mother. Sarah and I have very complex schedules. I’m overextended, I’ve got papers promised, I’ve got a conference in July with half the funding gone, since the Institute went belly up. I’ve got graduate students covering my classes right now. Sarah is missing her conference completely.”

  “I’m sorry,” Henry says.

  “It’s okay,” says Ed. “I just want you to see. We don’t just pop over to Oxford—”

  “I know,” Henry says. “And I’m grateful, Edward.”

  “So don’t talk to me about paper!” Ed bursts out.

  “What paper?”

  “Just stop with the paper; that’s all I ask.”

  “I was talking about engraving,” Henry says. “I thought it would interest you.”

  “All right. Okay, look—” Ed stares at Henry’s grandfather clock. In the clock case a gold moon shines against a background of midnight blue.

  —

  Henry watches from the window as the rented Ford Fiesta lurches off, scattering gravel. He and his brother have not become close friends. Periodically they write letters, but there is always this barrier: Edward can never imagine him as a human being, not as he really is. He’s always insulting Henry’s collections, his passions for art and manuscripts and rare editions. Edward looks down on him for leaving America. But, of course, Edward is part of it all—what America has become. Those sprawling universities Henry left behind long ago. America, with its mass-produced undergraduates processed through seedy lecture halls where, under flickering lights, they slump with their knees up and take in lectures as they might see movies. Where the familiar passes into the wide pupils of their eyes and the rest dribbles down the aisles to collect with the dirt and candy wrappers at the professor’s feet. Has he not been a professor at Queens College and then NYU? And the graduate students. Hasn’t he seen them at Princeton clustering at the office doors? Young Calibans eager for praise. They can tear open the Italian Renaissance before lunch, strangle a Donne sonnet and crush its wings, battering away with blunt instruments. As for the older scholars—like students at a cooking school, they cook up Shakespeare, serve him up like roast goose, stuffed with their political-sexual agendas, carve and quarter him with long knives. For Henry, reading had always been a gentle thing, a thing as delicate as blowing eggs. Two pinpricks and the meaning came, whole, unbroken, into the bowl. Now reading is a boiling and a breaking, something to concoct. It’s a deviling of art, history, social theory, politics—all mixed and piped back in and served up on a platter. These are the scholars
in the journals now. They are at war with the beautiful; they are against God and metaphor. They deny, as Edward does, all of what Henry believes; in fact, all that he lives for: texture and artistry. And Edward is more than a part of it. He has become a shaper himself of the tawdry yellow thing they sell now as the humanities. The cheapening of craft and light, intuition and sensibility, into the social sciences. Edward had begun as a Near Eastern historian and now is nothing more than a political expert. Another cog in the grant-getting, TV-interview machine.

  Henry has left all of that—the academic mills, the illusion that scholarship can persist in those ugly industrial institutions. And this is the best America has to offer. The rest of it is so ugly, so corrupt, Henry can’t bear thinking about it. He took his business degree and left the country to live like a human being: manager of Laura Ashley by day, artistic impresario by night, amid the bells and turrets of a true university, with gentle old walls, lichen-covered and printed with season after season of lilacs and the thick, corded stems of roses. He walks in the deep silence of these courtyards, especially in the weeks in September, when the tourists have faded but the late flowers still bloom in their second and third ranks under the mullioned windows, and especially in March, before the students have returned from vacation and the willows begin to show pale green—those last weeks in September and March when Oxford is completely his own.

  But Edward can never see any of this. He’s caught in the American rituals. Food, kids, cars, commercials. How could one expect Edward to look up and enter into the wedding? Henry paces into the kitchen and mists his African violet. He counts to ten, simply because he can’t allow himself to get upset.