The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  “Because he didn’t teach me any Hebrew,” Henry had muttered. But of course they made him do it their way. He told Susan how he sat smothered in the long, stifling service at the temple, where the cantor sang out of the right side of his mouth and the congregation droned in answer. How he rose and recited the name of each relative who had come to witness this milestone. How, naturally, all his research on human sacrifice was excised from the speech. In summer he had hay fever and sneezed in the dusty, airless rooms of the house, with its polished tables and tall, fringed, shantung lampshades, its twin beds with pale-blue candlewick bedspreads, its overstuffed chairs, heavy curtains, heavy meals. Rose took him and Ed shopping and tried to force Henry to buy jackets and shoes that never quite fit. In the shoe store he would stand on the fluoroscope and stare at the X-ray image of his feet. The green outline of his bones. Books and the museums beckoned to the other world.

  He hadn’t thought of it in years, when he met Susan. It was years since he’d left home, years since he’d bothered to remember it all—his childhood or even his first plans to escape the city and the department stores, the temple, the gum-cracking girls. Talking to Susan he remembered his first sightings of the Old World, completely new to him. He told her how he found it in Mr. Birnbaum’s German and French classes at Tilden High School and how he started to read Flaubert and trail his fingers in streams of adjectives. How he discovered the Pre-Raphaelites and saw a reproduction of Millais’s Ophelia, the figure floating downstream, her hair floating with the flowers, and how he wanted that painting, or rather wanted to drift downstream himself into that painting, to submerge himself in those colors, surrender to that shining water. Meanwhile, Ed was taking Spanish in Mr. Levinson’s class so that he could become an ambassador to South America and then an official in the State Department. Henry hadn’t thought of this in years, and perhaps that was why, when Henry began talking to Susan, he fell in love so quickly. They sat down together at Les Quatre Saisons, and he found himself telling her about Mr. Hurov and the shoe stores, the corridors of Tilden High School, his aborted bar-mitzvah speech. All of it tumbled out; she nodded sagely, without the slightest comprehension. That moved him deeply, to see her fascination with his childhood, the endless rituals he remembered, the embarrassments, the aesthetic violations—the maroon-flocked wallpaper in the temple’s basement social hall, the mirrors, and the modern brass chandelier spreading across the ceiling like an arthritic hand, palm up. His cloying aunts. She had never heard of such things. He unburdened his heart there in the restaurant until the last crumbs of their strawberry tarts had vanished and she sat looking into his eyes, mesmerized. Dare he make the comparison? He felt like Othello, come from foreign parts. He could never say it—it would sound ridiculous—but it was true: “She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d, and I lov’d her that she did pity them.” There were aspects of his past they didn’t discuss, but, then, those things belonged to a part of his life which he had rarely if ever spoken about, even within himself—a part of his life that had narrowed over time, hemmed in by a lack of direct speech. With Susan it was all talk. He poured words into her ear, filled her open hands with his stories. The other kind of passion was not something he and Susan associated strongly with each other. This is not to say they never touched each other; only that it was talk the two of them loved best, and that Henry had wanted a listener, thirsted for one. From the time of this first dinner he was overwhelmed with gratitude, tenderness, relief. He had told her his whole childhood, down to the last bourgeois pretension, told her everything.

  “I’m going to no wedding with priests in it,” Rose is telling Ed, and her voice startles Henry, returning him to the dinner at hand.

  “Mother,” Henry says, “please don’t upset yourself.”

  “She’s tired,” Ed advises Henry softly. “None of us got any sleep on the plane. She said she was taking a nap this afternoon, but—”

  “Why are they whispering about me in the third person?” Rose asks. “I can tell you what I was doing this afternoon. I was writing seven postcards. I’m not tired,” she informs Ed. “I’m upset, because I was told one thing and then another, and I don’t like to be manipulated. If it was going to be a priest you should have told me the truth.”

  “Here,” Sarah says to Rose, “try to eat some of your chicken; it costs a fortune.” She puts Rose’s dish on the table and pulls off the cover with a flourish.

  “I don’t want it,” Rose says. “I want to go home.”

  “Absolutely not,” Ed says, mortified for Henry, who has provided such an exquisite dinner, such delicate wines.

  “I’ll run you back,” Susan offers, to Ed’s surprise. “Why don’t I drive her back to the hotel? It’s just ten minutes.” She takes out her car keys.

  It’s almost dark as Susan drives Rose back to the Old Parsonage. “You must understand,” Rose declares, “I love everything English. My family sent me to London when the Great War started. When the English Jewish societies provided the opportunity, my parents sent me. I was just seven years old, but there was no food in Vienna. It was hardly better than Bukovina. When my English family took me in I was so weak and frail they had to carry me. But after the first month I blossomed out! We took tea, we had the theater, and at the seaside we played with our governess, who had an operatic voice and used to sing on the balcony—” She pauses, searching her memory. “In any case, he gets it from me,” she says.

  “Gets what?” asks Susan.

  “England. He loves England, and it’s because of me. I brought him up that way. I bought him books when he was a little child. King Arthur and the English poetry. Ed was never interested in England, but I would tell Henry about the countryside. The green meadows and fields of poppies. I learned all my English here in England, you know, when I was a child. My English family provided me with an education and even a tutor in Hebrew twice a week. They didn’t forget that. They were a very wealthy family and they took us every year to a cottage by the sea, and our governess used to go out on the balcony and sing like a golden flute. That was how she would sing—” She loses the thought when the man at the hotel opens the door and helps her out of the car.

  After Susan leaves, and Rose is alone in her hotel room, she takes two Percodans and lies down. Then she remembers what she was about to say.

  —

  The day before the wedding, Susan takes off from work, and Henry finally has a chance to drive his family out to Wantage to see the cottage. They have to coax Rose out of the hotel, and she tells them all again that she won’t be coming to the wedding. She would rather sit in the hotel dining room alone. But when she sees Henry’s cottage she sighs. It has a gray thatched roof and white walls. “The garden is still rough, but we’re planting,” Henry says. “Doesn’t it look just like David Copperfield’s Rookery? It doesn’t have rooks, of course.” The thatch is covered with chicken wire to keep the birds away.

  Susan unlocks the door, and they all stand in the little front room and look at the gleaming pewter pitchers on the mantel and Henry’s china cabinet, his Persian carpets. “Oh, it’s a doll’s house,” Rose murmurs, and she sinks down on the love seat, ready to stay.

  “I almost sold it,” Susan says. “It was such trouble. I had it listed before I met Henry.”

  “How did you meet?” Ed asks.

  “Oh, didn’t Henry say? Dick Frankel introduced us at the Wantage Center. He thought Henry might buy the house.”

  Ed looks over at Henry and imagines the meeting at one of the center teas. Dick Frankel bustling around as center founder, fund-raiser—proprietor of the manor house he has acquired for his center for Middle East peace. A fixer-up manor house on the outer fringes of academic Oxford. Henry’s cottage, Ed thinks, is a similar project on a smaller scale. Yes, Frankel would have introduced Henry and Susan at one of his garden parties. Long tables in the sunken garden at the back of the manor house. Israeli historians in short-sleeved white shirts, Henry in a lemon-yellow linen jacket and silk ti
e, a babble of Hebrew and the slight stammer of Oxford English under the trees, and Susan standing in the middle in a great straw hat and a billowy skirt—not at all impressionistic, quite substantial.

  Henry is ushering Sarah upstairs to show her the bedroom. “Watch your head,” he says as they sit down in a pair of chairs tucked under the eaves. “I wanted to talk to you about Mother,” he whispers. “Do you really think she’ll refuse to come to the chapel tomorrow?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sarah begins.

  “Do you think she’d do that to me?” Henry asks.

  “You know her better than I do,” Sarah says. “She’s capable of just about anything.”

  “But you’ve got to talk to her.”

  Sarah smiles wryly at her brother-in-law. “Look, we’re going to try, but you can’t let her ruin the wedding. You knew she’d make a scene. She’s been practicing for months.”

  “Years,” says Henry.

  “No, not years. The truth is, she’s in shock. She wasn’t expecting it. Well, none of us— So tell me, anyway.” Sarah leans closer. “How did it all happen? When did you decide—uh, propose?”

  Henry brightens a little. “Well, I was in the market, looking for a little cottage just like this, and after Dick gave me Susan’s number we drove out here one Sunday and I saw this place—a wreck—and I said, ‘Absolutely not,’ and she said, ‘How would you like to come round for a slummy lunch?’ And we went up to her flat and talked books, and we talked about decorating. She was reupholstering and so was I, and we talked about the cottage, and I said she should redo it and then sell it. She could get estimates. And I took her to the store and showed her our new fabrics. She started buying, and we went in on it together.”

  “Quite a project,” says Sarah.

  “Oh, yes, an investment. We were going to sell it to a couple from London as a retreat. But we were both such perfectionists; we were spending weeks looking for period doorknobs; we were restoring a 1923 stove—”

  “Henry,” Rose calls from downstairs.

  “Aaagh!” he screams, as, standing up, he slams his head into the sloped ceiling.

  “My God, what is the matter?” Susan cries out as she races up the stairs.

  “No, no, don’t, don’t touch me,” Henry cries, clutching his head, and he stands smarting, face flushed red, in the center of the room. “Don’t crowd me,” he says.

  “Let me have a look at it,” Susan says.

  “Just get me some ice,” he moans, and sinks down on one of the white twin beds.

  “I thought those chairs were too big for that spot,” Susan says when she returns with the ice. “Oh, Henry, that’s a nasty bump. What will they think tomorrow? Just take this pillow here and hold the ice.”

  “Henry,” Rose calls from the stairwell, “what did you do to yourself?”

  On the drive back to the hotel, Rose dozes off and Ed listens intently to BBC 3. Sarah imagines Henry and Susan spreading out fabric swatches over the furniture in the cottage. She thinks of them putting so much of themselves into the house that they belonged to it and to each other. Marriage was the only way to finish up such a project, such a detailed, intricate design—reproduction William Morris vines twining the kitchen walls. Sleepily, Sarah thinks of those poets and Oxonians who became Higher and Higher Church, seeking spire after spire until they were Catholic and their churches were cathedrals. Was Henry like that, marrying? Moving—she imagines—from young men to gardening, then to orchards, and finally to a cottage and a wife? A courtship more and more ornate. Sarah had thought Henry lived beautifully before; she had been a little disappointed to hear of his marrying. It seemed like a capitulation to the everyday world. But Henry hasn’t given in at all. He has retreated into the more decorated nineteenth century.

  —

  When the gong sounds for breakfast at the Old Parsonage, Ed and Sarah dress quickly and march over to Rose’s door. “Rose,” Sarah calls through the door, “we’ll be in the dining room.” Then they go down to their porridge and their thin, triangle-cut toast. They don’t wait for Rose to answer the door; they have a battle plan.

  But Rose doesn’t join them at breakfast, and she isn’t waiting for them when they return. Ed runs out for the Guardian. Sarah lays out her pressed linen suit on the bed and listens for Rose in the hall. Henry expects them at eleven for pictures. They read the Guardian in great detail. Henry phones twice.

  “I can’t take this,” Ed bursts out at ten-thirty. He abandons the plan and pounds on Rose’s door. “Come out, Ma—you’re coming to the wedding!” he shouts.

  “I am certainly not,” Rose calls back.

  “You’re going to sit in bed all day? Is that what you came to England for?”

  “I did not come to be bulldozed at my age,” Rose says.

  Ed stamps back into his room. “I thought she wasn’t getting any attention for that kind of behavior,” Sarah says. She is loading her camera, slotting extra rolls of film into the loops in the strap.

  Ed picks up the phone and calls Rose down the hall. “We’re leaving now, Ma,” he says softly. “You don’t want to make Henry miserable, do you?”

  “Don’t you browbeat me,” Rose snaps. “Can’t you see—I’m the one who’s miserable?”

  They wait a little longer, and then they leave for the wedding. After they have left, the man from room service wheels up a cart piled with covered dishes, a morning paper, coffeepot, and a vase with a rosebud. He stops at Rose’s door.

  —

  Looking down the aisle of the chapel, standing in a storm of organ music, Henry watches Susan as she comes forward to join him. She walks serenely and slowly in her heavy gown, matching her steps to those of her eighty-three-year-old father.

  Ed sits nervously in his high-backed pew and scans the faces of Henry’s guests. He guesses that they are nearly all Jewish. As Susan helps her father to a seat, Sarah examines the wedding gown, a patterned cotton damask, white on white, with a bell skirt and full sleeves. Susan’s hair shines silver in the jeweled chapel light. Ed fidgets and looks out at the Jewish community of Oxford, some twenty Israeli scholars among them, with dark-eyed children piping up in Hebrew and told to sit still, all of them sitting among banks of white lilies. But Sarah feels a particular joy watching Henry in his gray morning coat and Susan all in white. Surely Henry is living out a kind of fairy tale, or at least the sequel to one, marrying the fairy godmother. “Look, there’s Dick and Irene Frankel,” Ed whispers.

  Henry stands transfixed, with Susan at his side. Above them, far above, stand the seven points of the chapel window, and above that, the rose window, floating like a pendant in the dusty light. The chaplain’s voice and the green dusk of the place fill his mind. The dark carvings of leaves, the glint of gold, and rich sound. He has seen and heard but never lived the place as he does now. He forgets everything else and does not realize that his mother has actually arrived and is standing at the back of the chapel, putting the cab change into her wallet, snapping her pocketbook shut.

  —

  “The aspic is melting,” Henry tells Susan anxiously under the tent on the Wantage Center grounds. They couldn’t get the Merton College Fellows’ Garden for the reception.

  “They’ll eat it all, I’m sure,” Susan tells him.

  “But tell them to get more ice for the buffet,” Henry says.

  “All right.” Susan walks off purposefully. She has on a good pair of low-heeled shoes under her gown.

  It’s a stifling summer day. The guests drink cases of the chilled champagne. Henry bustles about; he kisses his mother. The string quartet plays on manfully, flushed with heat, and Henry sighs to find the cool shadows, the wood-glen shade of the carved chapel so soon replaced, and even the wedding cake sweating a little in the sun. Susan fans herself cheerfully and sets out a pair of lawn chairs for her father and Rose in the deep shade of an oak tree.

  “Oh dear, yes, it is hot,” Dick Frankel says, and Ed thinks that Dick hasn’t changed at all since the da
ys when Ed was lecturing here at his summer institute, and the kids were roughhousing on this very lawn. “Welcome just the same,” Dick tells him. “We must have you again for the West Bank conference next summer.” Sarah takes a picture of Ed and Dick standing there, Dick gesturing toward the manor which houses his institute. She gets a nice shot of Susan as well, as Susan whirls around in her bell skirt, pointing with her index finger toward the long white dessert table.

  “I love everything English,” Rose tells Susan’s father under the tree. “I grew up in London, you know, in an English family, and I did everything an English child can do. We had teas and holidays at the sea—our governess had an operatic voice, in fact, and she used to sing on the balcony by the sea. Passersby used to stop and listen. They were very kind to me—my English father particularly. But,” she concludes, “my real family was in New York—I was sent to England before they had the opportunity to emigrate, and my visa was delayed. All that time in England I was waiting to leave, you see. I only wanted to go home to my real family. Only, only wanted to go home.”

  “It’s time,” Susan says under the tent. “It’s got to be done.” She takes the knife and plunges it deep into the center tier of the cake.