The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  “Get me out of here,” Ed whispers under his breath.

  “What did you say, Ed?” Rich Mather asks. “Did you want to respond? Share your own statement?”

  “No,” Ed says.

  “But it’s your turn,” says Sister Elaine.

  “I believe you’re the last one,” Brother Marcus points out.

  “Pass,” Ed says. “I pass.”

  “Oh, Ed,” Mather chides him. “I think we’ve built up enough trust—I think there’s enough warmth in this room—”

  “Okay,” Ed stems the flow of Mather’s assurances. “You want a statement from me? You want to know what I think? I think this is the most disorganized, disjointed conference I have ever seen, and as a professional, a historian, and an academic, I feel sick—sick!—listening to this. I have never seen anything like this. I have never seen navel-picking on this scale! Self-congratulation, self-flagellation! What are we doing here? This is surreal! What am I doing here listening—you should excuse the expression—to these bubbe-mayses? And what are these little scenes played out here, which are supposed to be so terribly moving, where Marthe begs forgiveness for crimes she did not commit and Mauricio pardons her for suffering he did not feel? That’s not moving. That’s sick. Since when were you appointed to speak for the Germans and the Jews? When did you assume the mantle? I’d love to know. And Avner, I’m sorry your son was killed. What kind of license does that give you to write off historical techniques and scholarly analysis? How can you possibly sit here and—”

  “You have completely misunderstood what I was saying,” Avner breaks in. “I was making a critique of my profession, the scriptural discipline—the academics, like you—which looks only at minutiae.”

  “I am a scholar!” Ed bellows. “That means every once in a while I stop picking my nose and focus on something outside myself and my own pain. I work on achieving some distance. I work on some objectivity. I take a decongestant for my ego! That’s what a discipline is!” he shouts. “It’s about discipline! You’re sitting here massaging each other with Cheez Whiz, and I’m sick of watching!”

  The silence is different this time. Bigger, not solemn or full of energy. The only sound comes from Marthe, flipping frantically through the pages of her dictionary.

  It is a terrible quiet, and no one is willing to break it. Rich Mather stares down at the table, something closed and tight about his face. “Well,” Mauricio says at last. “Suppose we take a break.”

  “No,” Sister Elaine says. “If there is a problem here, we certainly shouldn’t run away from it. I’m not going to take a break.”

  “So you agree there’s a problem here!” Ed says. “You agree we have a bullshit problem here!”

  “Ed, Ed.” Mauricio tsks. “That kind of language—”

  “That is the appropriate language!” says Ed. “That is the correct term!” He’s starting to feel good in his mutiny. Starting to feel like himself again. He is sitting at the conference table and he has a bit of a paunch, but figuratively he stands on the deck of a ship, Captain Blood, saber drawn, challenging all comers.

  “I’d like to ask our leader how to proceed,” says Sister Elaine.

  “Look, I speak as a member of the group,” Mather says at last, “and I can only say, as a group member, that I sense a lot of anger here. But I’ve found in situations like this that sometimes, when we’re at the lowest point of confusion, we’re really on the verge of something.”

  “I am not confused,” Ed says. “I am rejecting this project!”

  “You are rejecting ecumenical dialogue?” Mauricio asks.

  “No, I’m rejecting therapeutic back-rubbing! Interfaith tick-pulling.”

  “Ed,” Mather says. “Don’t underestimate the opportunity we have here. I’ve sat in this room and seen the Nobel Prize winner in physics connect with process theology. I’ve watched a new generation of astronomers talk about God and find him in themselves. I’ve seen Protestants, Jews, and Catholics come to terms with anti-Semitism, poverty, and the environmental crisis, and I’ve watched great scholars break through—break free from academic jargon. Don’t underestimate the process.”

  Ed leans forward in his chair. “Look, am I asking too much when I say I want to process as a professional—as an adult? I’d be happy to hear about Rabbi Lehrer’s work. Why do I have to hear about his mother? Avner, I’d be delighted to discuss Scripture in the Third World. I don’t want to hear about the dark night of the soul, okay?”

  Avner glares at Ed. “I do not want to hear this abuse at the conference. This is an insult! Unprofessional!”

  “You’re lecturing me about unprofessional?” Ed bursts out.

  “Stop! Stop!” Marthe wails. “I feel here too many tenses—”

  “Tensions,” Elaine amends.

  “And they make me too painful!” Marthe says. “We cannot go on like a garden, everything growing into each other. We must have a leader to make prunes—and—and—cuttings, so,” she illustrates with her hands. “If Rich will not, we must choose another and a new idea. This one is finished, and can do no more.”

  “I think,” Elaine says, “the personal statements had a certain limited value. But they can carry us only so far. Maybe it’s a good thing Ed provided that critical perspective for us. We may actually owe Ed a vote of thanks.”

  “Well—” Ed begins.

  “No, don’t answer me, Ed.” Elaine holds up her hand to scattered laughter.

  “I do think it’s time for something new,” says old Brother Marcus. “Everyone has spoken, anyway.”

  “Actually, I haven’t yet,” Bob Hemmings mentions shyly, “but I guess that’s not important.” He puts aside his notes with a slight gesture of regret. “I’d like to offer a suggestion, though, because we’ve had some hard feelings. I know most of us, being Biblical people, turn to the Bible for guidance. I know I do. I even listen to it on tape—in the car, on my Walkman—and I always hear new things. And I thought maybe we could turn to some passage now, and read or listen together. I was thinking about something like Isaiah 40.”

  “Oh, yes, excellent, Isaiah 40,” Elaine says. “It’s so—”

  “Comforting,” Mauricio finishes.

  “No,” Elaine says witheringly, “that’s not what I was thinking of at all.”

  “I don’t have my Bible, I’m afraid,” Brother Marcus says.

  “Neither do I,” admits Bob.

  “I have not brought it with me,” Marthe says, blushing into her sunburn.

  “All right, wait a minute here,” Bob says, laughing. “Can it be that not a single person at the table has a Bible?”

  “I do,” Rabbi Lehrer tells them. “Of course, it’s all in Hebrew.”

  “I could run to the college library and get some Bibles,” Brother Matthew offers.

  “But which edition?” Bob asks.

  “Each translation mangles worse and worse,” rumbles Avner.

  “I’ll recite,” Elaine breaks in, with a clarity that comes, Ed imagines, from her years of teaching primary school. “Isaiah 40,” she announces, “King James version: ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.’ ” Elaine is an unfulfilled actress. This much is clear. She recites with passion. She looks her listeners in the eye and declaims ferociously, as if she were the rebuking prophet: “ ‘Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure?’ ” Her memory finally fails her at “ ‘Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance.’ ” They all applaud her, and Rabbi Lehrer, who has been following in his own book, picks up where she leaves off, chanting in Hebrew in a surprisingly deep bass-baritone.

  “Let us hold hands!” Marthe whispers.

  “Let’s not and say we
did,” mutters Ed. Nevertheless, he is amazed by the old rabbi’s performance, his beautiful phrasing.

  Brother Matthew shakes the rabbi’s hand afterward. “The traditional chanting!” he says.

  “You read it so faithfully,” Elaine tells him.

  “Well,” says Mauricio, “may I propose we break for dinner? The main dining hall will close, you see, and for the kosher meals—”

  “But we should make plans for the morning,” Elaine says. “Rich, what should we do? It’s our last day.”

  “Small groups, I think.” Rich looks exhausted. “I think we’ll have to move into small groups.”

  They get up for dinner, but Brother Matthew calls them back. He has a little camera. “Let me get a picture of everyone,” he says. “Over there by the wall. Rich, Ed, could you kneel down in front? Mauricio, you stand between Elaine and Marthe.”

  “Ah! Like the Latin lover!” says Mauricio, with his arms around the two women in the group.

  “Bob, can you lean in a little? Now, everyone, say celibacy!”

  —

  At dinner, Ed takes a table with Mauricio and Bob. Then he gets up and steps outside. He needs to cool down. Standing on the dining-hall steps with his bagel-dog, he looks out at the magnificent late-afternoon sky. The birds are gathering in the trees, and he listens to their rippling voices. He breathes deeply. It is only his imagination, he tells himself—his own paranoia: that tiny sound gathering force in the grass by the lake. That maddening, delicate whine, the rising voices of mosquitoes.

  FANTASY ROSE

  Rose is making herself at home. She pads around in bedroom slippers and enjoys the soft, dusty-rose carpet in her granddaughter Miriam’s old room. It’s her favorite color, and her favorite room in the house.

  “We cleared out the top two drawers,” Sarah tells her mother-in-law.

  “I don’t need much space,” Rose says, neatly stacking her nightgowns in a corner of the top drawer. “It’s such a big bureau.”

  “It’s been through a lot.” Sarah looks at the dresser. It had been hers as a child and it’s still in good shape, except for the top, where the kids used to keep their fish tank and their fish supplies: purple gravel, glass wool and carbon for the filter, toothbrushes stained algae-green. The fish had been quite a production—especially since they never lasted. The little blue neons would die off in weeks and the angelfish would bite each other and swim around with notches in their fins. When Yehudit went off to college, there was just one fish left—a great, morose plecostomus that slunk around the bottom of the tank or hung for hours onto the glass with its suction mouth. Miriam’s brothers had named it Hoover. Sarah ended up feeding it. “We have to get the top refinished,” she says now, looking at the water-damaged wood.

  “We should get the whole room redone,” Ed puts in from the doorway. “Look at these curtains.”

  “Faded,” Sarah says. The pink curtains are almost white now.

  “Faded! They’ve shrunk.” Ed tugs at one of them and laughs. “They’re getting smaller and smaller. They’re absurd. Where did we get these—Woolworth’s?”

  “No—it was that place, Wigwam.”

  “Right!” Ed snaps his fingers. “Wigwam. That was before they became Cost-Less.” He turns to his mother. “We’re going to redo this whole room.”

  “Why?” Rose asks. “It doesn’t need anything but new curtains. I could sew you a pair of curtains.”

  “No, no. No, thanks, Ma.” Rose hasn’t sewn since she was seventy-five, and when she did sew, her shortcuts were legendary. She made dresses with asymmetrical necklines and blouses with one sleeve longer than the other. She whipped up a pair of pants without a fly for one grandson, and for the girls she made doll clothes that didn’t come off. She just sewed the clothes onto the dolls.

  “It’s my favorite room in the house,” Rose says. She sinks down on the bed.

  “We call it the shrine.” Sarah gestures at the paraphernalia that her daughter Miriam has left behind. There are the stuffed animals lined up neatly on top of the bookcase. There is the mineral collection and the rusting music stand—a purple rabbit’s-foot key chain hangs from it. There are the dolls representing different countries. They are all actually from China. The souvenir collection from the family’s summer at Oxford—a series of English and Scottish guard dolls, some headless, some with heads toppling. They all have weak necks. “We were going to redo it when she went to college.”

  “Then she went to medical school,” Ed says.

  “And then she got engaged,” adds Sarah.

  “It’s time.”

  “It’s time,” Sarah agrees.

  Rose shakes her head. “You were never a sentimentalist, Ed.” She smooths down the tulle skirt of the Madame Alexander bride doll.

  —

  Rose is staying with them for ten days. She flew in from Venice, California, after her dear friend Eileen Meeker passed on. The shock was terrible. Eileen was supposed to come over for brunch on Sunday at eleven o’clock. Eleven came and Eileen did not. Rose walked over to 7-B. She stood on the landing and pounded on the door. “Meeker!” she screamed, because Eileen was hard of hearing, although too stubborn to admit it. “Meeker!” Not a sound. It was up to Rose to alert the staff. Then Rose watched Eileen’s nephew sell off all her possessions. Just one week later they moved in poor Juliet Frazier with her companion, and now Rose is left to watch them wheel her up and down, poor thing. Frazier doesn’t know whether she is coming or going. Rose is very, very happy to be in Foggy Bottom with Ed and Sarah. She cried when they met her at the airport. “I’ve been so miserable!” she told them. “I’ve been so ill.”

  “We’ll take you to Dr. Maltzman,” Sarah said.

  “No, no, it’s my stomach.”

  Ed looked at Sarah. “It’s those pills. You know they’re bad for your digestion. You have to cut back on the pills.”

  “I have been cutting back,” Rose told them, “except when the pain is too much for me. The pain is what I can’t take, and only the pills will do for the pain.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve been through that before,” Ed said.

  —

  “Of course I can’t live there any longer,” Rose tells them at dinner that night. “Not after what happened.”

  “You’ll feel better in a few days,” Ed says.

  Rose stares at him. She puts down her fork. Sometimes she thinks her son has no heart.

  Sarah changes the subject. “There is a movie I wanted to see. The writing workshop at school is showing Waiting for the Moon. I thought we could all go on Sunday.”

  “Sure. Fine,” Ed says. “You want to go, Ma?”

  “If I can, I’ll go,” Rose says.

  Ed gives Sarah a look. Sarah frowns back in warning.

  “It was a terrible thing the way they treated her,” Rose says. “They came in and they liquidated her apartment. I watched them. In and out, in and out they carried her things. Her most precious possessions. For years she dusted. In the end, what was the difference? She had no roots there. They just wheeled in Juliet Frazier. I said to them before I left that they could look for another tenant for number 3-C.”

  “What?” Ed says.

  “I gave them notice. I said, Look around for someone new, because what happened to Meeker isn’t going to happen to me. But be sure to tell your prospective tenant about the thermostat in the oven and the TV reception. Warn her she’d better be prepared to fork up for an exterior antenna. I said, My son Henry brought me here when he was working for the gallery, but he’s gone now, in England, and has been living there for years. Now he’s settled and married in Oxford. My younger son lives in Washington. My grandchildren are in the East. I don’t need to stay in Venice—in dr’erd auffn deck on the West Coast. This is not where I’m going to finish my eighties, where my dearest friend is left alone to drop dead in front of the television.”

  “Oh, Ma,” Ed says. “Don’t cry. It’s late, and you’re exhausted. You’ve been through a long, long
flight and you need to rest.”

  Rose puts her hand in his. “In the winter I’ll stay with you, and in the summer I’ll visit Henry. I love Oxford in the summer. It isn’t humid there like Washington. It isn’t unbearably hot like it is here.”

  “What are you saying?” gasps Ed. “You’re completely settled in Venice. You have all your furniture there just the way you like it! You have your friends at the center!”

  “How would you like it if you had to spend all your time with old, sick people?” Rose asks. Her voice is stern, her gray eyes plaintive.

  “No, we’re not doing this now,” Ed says. “We’re not going to discuss this.”

  “I want to call Henry,” Rose tells Sarah.

  “He’s asleep. It’s the middle of the night there.”

  “I’ll call him later tonight, when it’s morning in England. I’ll be up in the night. I’ll call from downstairs.”

  “Why don’t we call him on the weekend?” Sarah suggests. “We’ll have more time—and you’ll feel better. Don’t you want to finish your dinner?” Rose is standing up from the table.

  “No. Thank you, dear. It was very good.”

  “Do you want some coffee? Decaffeinated?”

  “No, thank you. I might come down for some later. I haven’t been sleeping at night.”

  —

  Ed can’t sleep, either. He never sleeps well when his mother is staying with them, and now he lies in bed thinking about her plans to leave Venice and come East. “Sarah,” he whispers.

  She sighs and turns over.

  “Sarah, she’s going to move in with us.”

  Sarah doesn’t answer.

  “She’s not going to move in with us, is she? Sarah?”

  “No,” Sarah answers suddenly. “Go back to sleep.”

  He lies there and looks out into the dark room. He stares at the dim crack of light between the bottom of the shade and the windowsill. Tomorrow he has to teach, but he’s thinking about his mother, feeling that she is now going to stay with them in their house—that she is going to live with them. He knows she is lonely and bored. He wants to give her some companionship. To take care of her. It’s the thought of doing all this that fills him with panic. It has nothing to do with her age. It’s that she makes him nervous. At long stretches she drives him crazy. She has too much power over him. He hears her now as she pads down the hall to the bathroom. It’s three-twelve in the morning. She is taking a hot shower. He listens as the water pours on and on. He hears her shaking her medicine bottles. She is taking her pills. She took some after dinner, of course, because he upset her. That isn’t completely true. She would have taken them anyway. He feels guilty all the same. He imagines she’ll go down to the kitchen and try to call Henry. Does she have his office number? Ed nudges Sarah’s shoulder. “I can’t sleep.”