The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  —

  The suite in the Old Parsonage Hotel has dark-green curtains, and Ed draws them closed and sinks down on the bed beside his wife. “Where’s Mother?” he asks.

  “End of the hall. Taking a hot bath.” Sarah closes her eyes again. “How is he?” she asks him.

  “Same as ever.”

  “And what about her?”

  “Who?”

  “The bride. Ed?”

  “I don’t know, she’s fine. She wasn’t there; she was working.”

  Sarah rolls over and looks at him. “What did you talk about?”

  “We talked about him, of course. And his things.”

  “Did you ask him when we’re supposed to come tonight?”

  “No. Wasn’t it eight o’clock?”

  “Why didn’t you ask him?”

  Ed sighs. “Because he amazes me. Because I walk into his apartment and he’s still doing Brideshead Revisited, with those brocades and those clocks! Those rotting leather bindings. His eighteenth-century peklach!”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “And that ridiculous table. I’m not going to make it, Sarah.” Ed swings his laptop onto the bed and unzips the case.

  Sarah says, “I think it’s sad that you can’t just—”

  “Have a normal conversation with him?”

  “No, I meant just lighten up. This is your only brother getting married.”

  “So to speak.” Ed fiddles with the keyboard, as if he were typing up the book review that was due a month ago.

  “What do you mean?” Sarah asks.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Oh, come out and say it,” she says. “You’ve got such an attitude, Ed. It’s unbelievable.”

  “Well, it’s so obvious,” he exclaims. “You thought so, too. For years.”

  “Not necessarily,” says Sarah, who is a writer of fiction and believes in change, secrets, and revelations.

  The last time they were in Oxford was ten years ago, when Ed lectured at the Wantage Center—the Oxford Center for Peace in the Middle East. Henry had them over for dinner and cooked everything with heavy cream. The kids were sick, Ed turned green trying to make conversation, Ed and Henry’s mother, Rose, took a glass of Drambuie and fell asleep. And there they all were. They’ve seen Henry since then, in Washington; and he’s had his turn feeling ill, looking up with mournful eyes from their clamorous dinner table all sprawled over with teenagers. He wrote them letters, as well. “There is a pale gold in the walls,” he would write, “and toward evening a kind of glow in the stone—the kind of color one glimpses in the last flicker of sun on the river—the last lingering warmth of the day, such a poignance, and the tracery so frail, the stained glass in Corpus Christi like the last glowing embers of a fire, the last opalescent, bluest flame.” And Sarah would write back, speaking for the family, “Ben is at band camp and Ed may now have the grant application in on time.” They kept up the correspondence, as the two letter writers of the family. It was a strange match. The lyrical, if sometimes muddled, estuaries of Henry’s fountain pen and the updates from Sarah’s Uni-Ball. Ed rolled his eyes at Henry’s letters, and the kids groaned when they heard them, but Sarah kept some of them. The truth was she liked them. She’d had all that kind of writing beaten out of her in workshops, but she secretly liked it. Once when she went to pick up Ed at Georgetown she stopped and watched for the last light on the tracery. It was too early in the evening, however.

  “I’m not up for a four-hour dinner,” Ed tells her.

  “It starts at eight?”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  “I said you have to call him and ask,” Sarah says.

  “I’m taking a nap.”

  There is a knock at the door as Ed takes off his pants.

  “It’s your mother,” Sarah says.

  “I am aware of that,” Ed says, and he puts his pants back on again.

  Rose appears at the door in jet-black wraparound sunglasses because of her recent cataract operation. “Where is Henry?” she asks, her voice surprisingly strong for her eighty-six years.

  “We’re meeting him for dinner,” Ed says.

  “But you were picking him up and bringing him to the hotel.”

  “He has errands today. Last-minute—”

  “Why are we here at the last minute?” Rose sighs.

  “I’m already missing a week of school,” Ed says. “We discussed this, Ma; remember? And you wouldn’t travel by yourself.”

  “I would have,” Rose says.

  “Well, that’s not what you said before.”

  “I would have if it meant I could see Henry. If I could have spent time with him.”

  Ed looks at her. “Well, we discussed this before, and that was not what you said.”

  “But that’s what I was thinking,” Rose says. “How can we meet the family three days before? Where is the bride?”

  “We’re meeting her for dinner,” Sarah says.

  Rose takes off her sunglasses and snaps them shut with disgust. “What kind of dinner could that be? Without any introductions. What kind of thing is that? You go to a wedding to be with the family. You go to meet the community. You had a beautiful wedding,” she says to Sarah and looks at her so yearningly that Sarah feels she weighs one hundred and twenty-five pounds again. “Everyone was there except for the Feldmans and the Richters and Natalie, may she rest in peace, and the Yarchevers.” There had been a band that was not to be believed and they all danced so long that Sarah’s father, Sol, paid the men for two extra hours. Sarah just floated on Ed’s arm, layers and layers of tulle in her gown. She was so slender—and Ed, too; they were twenty-two years old, Ed just three months older. “Apart from that, everyone was there,” Rose tells them now, “and they still talk about it. Who is going to remember this wedding?”

  “Well, he invited two hundred fifty people,” Sarah says.

  “But who that we know?” murmurs Rose. “Who? How many? No one.”

  “I’m going to take a nap now,” Ed says.

  After Rose goes back to her room and they lie down, the phone rings. Ed realizes he has a splitting headache.

  “Hello?” Sarah answers.

  “Hello, it’s Rose. Tell me her name again.”

  “Susan McPhearson.”

  “I know that; I mean the spelling.”

  Sarah spells it for her.

  “That’s not a Jewish name,” Rose says.

  “It’s not a Jewish person, Ma,” Ed calls out. He can hear Rose’s voice over the receiver.

  “You tell Ed,” Rose says to Sarah on the phone, “that there are a lot of women and gentlemen in this world pretending they are what they are not.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s pretending,” Sarah ventures.

  “Fine,” Rose says. “Remember, I told you about the Winston couple on the Alaska cruise. At the Chopin concert I met the couple, last name Winston. I looked at this old gentleman. Winston? Never. A Weinstein. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Tenafly, New Jersey.’ ‘But where were you from before that?’ He admits originally he was from Vienna; he’ll only go so far, you know. So during the intermission I speak to him with my good Hochdeutsch. We all spoke very good German, growing up. He and I and Mrs. Winston become friendly. We sit down again, and this young pianist, this young boy, begins banging the Chopin—it went right through my head, because he had no feeling for the music, not the slightest understanding. So I lean over to this old gentleman—Winston, as he calls himself—and I whisper in Yiddish, referring to the pianist: ‘Vos veist a chazer fun lukshen?’ What does a pig know about egg noodles? He nods his head. Weinstein! That’s how I caught him and his Hochdeutsch. He understood Yiddish perfectly.”

  Ed grabs the receiver from Sarah. “Susan McPhearson doesn’t know Yiddish, Ma.”

  “Neither do you,” Rose points out. “Let me tell you—”

  “She’s not pretending,” Ed says.

  “I wasn’t just thinking of her,” Rose says. “There’s al
so Henry.”

  —

  “What do you think she meant by that?” Ed asks Sarah after he hangs up the phone. “That Henry is pretending?”

  Sarah looks up at the ceiling. They are lying together on the bed. “That he’s pretending he’s English, I guess.”

  “Oh, he’s been doing that for years,” Ed says. “I really think she’s wondering what he’s doing taking up with a woman after all this time.”

  “All this time? You don’t have the slightest idea how he’s been living. You barely looked at his letters.”

  “He never said anything in his letters.”

  “Yes, he did,” Sarah says. “Just because they were all about bridges over the river—”

  “The wind in the willows and the antiquarian book sales at Fyfield Manor. I think basically this is going to be a companionate marriage.”

  “Oh, no, it won’t be,” says Sarah. “They’ll go to Stratford, and they’ll go punting—”

  “Yeah, I can really picture Henry standing up in a punt.”

  —

  Henry is at his Laura Ashley office, on the phone with Unwin’s about the champagne. He has shopped for the wedding in the European way, at little specialty shops all through town, and he would have done without a caterer altogether if he could; catering seems to him so much like the supermarket approach. As it is, he has the crusty rolls ordered from his own bakery, Mrs. Thomson’s Victorian Bakery. He drives there every afternoon for the day’s bread, because it is simply the best there is. Mrs. T. uses a brick oven in the wall, with its cast-iron door embossed “Bendick & Peterson, 1932” above a sheaf of wheat. How many times has he asked to watch as Mrs. T. opens that door and slips the loaves out with her paddle? The cake is being decorated by a specialist. Henry designed it himself. Six tiers in ivory with sprays of lilacs pouring down, all done in royal icing and tinted buttercream. There is a filigree skirt to it, like antique lace traced in sugar. He wouldn’t tell Susan how much it cost. “We’ll only have a wedding cake once in our lives,” he said.

  “I never liked sweets,” she said, “but I suppose we must eat some gateau.” That shocked him; not that Susan didn’t like sweets but the idea that their cake would be eaten. He hadn’t thought of that at all.

  “All right, then,” Unwin’s assistant says on the phone. “Never fear. We’ve got all the champagne here in the store, and we’ll wheel the bottles in on our hand trucks.”

  “Around the back?” Henry asks.

  “Round the back, sir.”

  When he gets off the phone he locks the office and finds his assistant, Mary. “Where is Susan’s gown?” he asks her.

  “She picked it up yesterday,” Mary says.

  “So she did. I’m a little distracted,” he confides. “Just between us.” He runs out to the car.

  —

  Susan is filing papers at her desk. She is assistant registrar at Merton College and knows where everything is. In forest green and an antique shawl, her graying hair pinned up loosely, she flicks off the lights in her office, closes the door, and goes out to meet Henry. They are a tall couple, and complement each other. Where Henry’s ears and nose are knobby, Susan’s face is fine and rather flat. Henry rubs at the last curls on his head and Susan walks on sensibly without fidgeting at all.

  “I asked him about his book,” Henry says, “and he’s given up on it altogether. The good book, the one he was going to write on Arabic thought and art. He’s just given up on it, does the political thing now. It’s so sad, Susan, so terribly sad, what he’s become.”

  “He may like it,” Susan points out.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Henry says. “How could he? Giving it all up to be some sort of apologist to the media for the P.L.O. or the Arab League. When there was such beauty to uncover, such a history there. And he’s just a pardoner—selling indulgences on TV.”

  “It can’t be as bad as all that,” Susan says.

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up with him,” Henry sighs, “but that’s the problem, you know, there’s nothing we can’t fight about. We’re going to sit there tonight at dinner, and I’ll spend three hundred pounds, and what will we say?”

  “At Elizabeth? We can talk about the wines. The wines alone…Besides, the others will be there—Sarah.” She looks at him encouragingly.

  “And Mother,” Henry says.

  —

  He has booked the private room upstairs at Elizabeth, and it’s terribly expensive, but Henry couldn’t face cooking on such an occasion. He is a perfectionist about his cooking; he exhausts himself worrying. The room is dark with rich paneling, and there are candles set in antique sconces. When he opens the door, Susan steps in and sees his family for the first time, pale and a little startled in the dim light, blinking to see her, like cave dwellers. Then Ed jumps up and clasps her hand. Sarah is kissing Henry on the cheek. “Hello, dear,” Rose says to Susan. “Henry, we thought you would never get here. I was sure it was the wrong restaurant and I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to see you.”

  “Mother,” he says, “this is Susan McPhearson.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Rose says to Susan. “Tell me, how do you spell your name?”

  When the terrine arrives, Sarah takes the conversation into her own hands. “Where will you be living?” she asks Susan and Henry.

  “In Henry’s flat,” Susan says, “until we find something bigger. I’ve still got my books up in mine, and—”

  “And we’ve got a cottage in Wantage,” Henry tells them. “I’ll drive you out there tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Out in the country?” Rose asks. “I’ve always wanted a sweet cottage in the country,” she tells Susan, “ever since I was a little girl; a thatched cottage with roses. I grew up in London, you know. I was evacuated…”

  “Really?” Susan exclaims, but they are interrupted.

  “Ma,” Ed says, leaning over, “they don’t have any plain chicken.”

  “You know I can’t have sauces,” Rose says. “Not with my digestion.”

  “It doesn’t come without sauce,” Henry says.

  “In the beginning it all comes without sauce,” Rose says.

  “Have a little fish,” Sarah suggests.

  “Where is your family, dear?” Rose asks Susan.

  “My sisters are coming up Saturday for the wedding. Dad is here now, but he doesn’t go out at night.”

  “Hmm,” Rose says. “And who is performing the ceremony?”

  “The Junior Chaplain at the College. We got him because I’m staff.”

  Ed leans back in his chair. “So you get him free?” he asks lightly.

  “You’re having a priest?” Rose asks.

  “A very liberal one,” Susan says. “Very young. Vegan.”

  “You told me a justice of the peace,” Rose tells Henry. “I thought you said a justice of the peace.”

  “We were considering it,” Henry says.

  “That was when we were going to have a simpler wedding,” explains Susan.

  “But no one told me about this—”

  “Ma, we discussed this in Washington!” Ed exclaims. “We discussed this at the airport. I told you ten times about this wedding.”

  The door opens, and the waiter backs in with a tray of covered platters. In silence he serves the family. Sarah smiles wanly at him. When he comes to Rose she holds up her hand and says, “None for me, thank you.”

  “None at all, madam?” the waiter asks.

  “Mother,” Henry whispers. The waiter looks at him for direction. Henry gestures him to put the plate down on the table. Rose waves him away.

  “Look, put it there on the sideboard,” Sarah says. They all watch as the waiter covers it up and rushes about getting a stand for the dish, lighting the flame under it.

  “Ed, I want to go home,” Rose says after the waiter has gone.

  “We’re going to stay here and finish dinner,” Ed tells her doggedly, and he begins to eat.

  “Ed,” Rose
says, “call me a cab. I want to go back to Heathrow.”

  Sarah gulps down her wine the wrong way and starts to choke. Susan thumps her on the back.

  “No, we’re not doing that now,” Ed is telling Rose. “We can’t change the tickets. You’re not going, and that’s just it. I’ve had enough, Ma. We’ve come this far and we’re going through with this thing.”

  “Ed!” Sarah coughs.

  “This wedding,” Ed amends.

  Rose begins to cry. “What would your dear father say to this?” she asks. “Did I bring you up to give you away to a priest? Just tell me, Henry, what change has occurred in you to bring you to this?”

  Henry looks across the table to the antique sideboard with Rose’s covered dinner on it. What change indeed? It was an escape he’d planned his whole life, ever since he’d learned to read, when he uncovered Arabian caverns and climbed Scottish citadels and read Keats’s odes in the bathroom. He was scribing the Romantic poets into memory as he walked to school, big for his age—he was always tall, while Ed was little and mean and played basketball, all speed and elbows. Henry has told Susan about this. How he wore lace-up shoes and carried a leather briefcase stained burnt orange from the snow, the buckles working themselves loose. It was stuffed with Norse myths, crammed with Arthurian romances—and, of course, his science books, his Hebrew books. He has told Susan how he and Ed schlepped to Hebrew school after regular school and every week he sat in Mr. Hurov’s class and watched Mr. Hurov with his pointy teeth announce: “Hayom nilmad binyan kal.” “Today we will learn conjugation kal.” The first conjugation. The easy one. Every week and every year. The class moved up and up, into Intermediate and even Advanced Hebrew, and they never learned the other conjugations. There were girls sitting in back who made sure of that. Slender, cracking gum with little pointed tongues, like pubescent ladies of Avignon. They never listened, never let the class move on. And how Mr. Hurov sighed, how he fumed. He was a very cultured European man, and he wanted them to learn enough to read a certain poem by Bialik about a pool in the forest. The girls didn’t even know about the pool. They weren’t even listening when Mr. Hurov told the class about it. Henry knew about the poem, the pool in the forest, but of course he couldn’t read it. He didn’t know the other six conjugations. He didn’t have the vocabulary. He told Susan how they made him practice for his bar mitzvah and he had to memorize the Hebrew and pretend he understood it. How he took comfort in writing his bar-mitzvah speech. His portion was the attempted sacrifice of Isaac, and he spent weeks reading about human sacrifice. He read W. Robertson Smith’s book Lectures on the Religion of the Semites and typed up his speech on the ancient sacrificial cults, laboriously typed it—thirty-one pages—on his father’s manual typewriter. And then the rabbi met with him to review his speech, read two pages, and put it down on his desk and said—this was what crushed him—“Where do you thank your family and friends for coming? Your aunts from Philadelphia? Why didn’t you thank Mr. Hurov for preparing you and teaching you Hebrew?”