The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  “Go to sleep,” she replies distantly, like an echo.

  “Sarah.”

  After a moment she speaks to him in a rapid, clear voice. “Don’t be ridiculous. She is not going to move in; she just needs to feel wanted. She’ll have a big fight with you tomorrow and refuse to live here. So calm down and go back to sleep.” She turns toward the wall with most of the quilt wrapped around her, and Ed lies alone under the white sheets, listening to the slight creak of the stairs.

  —

  His lectures go badly that week. It’s only the second week of the semester, and he sees that students are dropping out. He blames his poor performance for the dwindling enrollment. It was always a popular class in the past—Terrorism and Conflict Resolution—and he’s known at Georgetown as something of a showman. “Energetic and full of insight,” the student guide summed up in its evaluation. “Markowitz spices his lectures with lurid details of covert operations all over the Middle East. The slide lecture on the World’s Most Wanted is a must-see, and the open discussion ‘Friend or Foe?’ also rates high marks.” But Ed is flat this week. He comes in to school worn out from lack of sleep, from listening to Rose as she walks around the house at night, from watching her as she nods off during the day in the living room. When Ed comes home she doesn’t bring up her idea about moving in. She looks up at him and talks in a lazy, druggy voice. She is taking her pills. She’s got the orange bottles stashed away in Miriam’s room and she is taking them every few hours. An opium eater among the stuffed animals.

  Sarah was wrong that he and Rose would fight. They haven’t fought at all. It’s Ed and Sarah who have been fighting all week. “How am I supposed to get any work done?” Sarah demands. “I work at home. This is my office. How can I write when she comes in and talks my ear off about herself and her symptoms—”

  “It was your idea to have her visit,” Ed says.

  “Because it was the right thing to do! Because she was bereft of her friend!”

  “Bereft?”

  “Bereft!”

  They face each other over the kitchen table.

  “I said this was a bad time,” Ed tells Sarah. “You insisted—”

  “It’s not a question of timing. You are leaving me to bear the entire responsibility. You stay in your office until six while I am here making dinner with her watching me! Then you keep me up at night.”

  “Sarah, I can’t sleep because I’m tense! My head is pounding. You don’t understand what I’m going through. You have no idea how nervous I am—”

  “You sound just like her.” Sarah storms out, nearly running down Rose in the hall.

  Rose seems to take more pills each day. Either she is taking more or Ed is watching more closely. He hears her rattling in the bathroom at night. He watches her steal off to her room to take them. They send her spinning into reveries and long family stories in which she scrambles generations. In her accounts she is always the child or the niece, younger than everyone else. Always, strangely, an only child. She can’t seem to remember herself as a sister or a cousin. In memory she stands alone as the only member of her generation, just as she stands alone now. It alarms Ed. He corrects her sharply, and Sarah hisses at him later over the dinner dishes. “Let it go! What’s the difference?”

  “The difference? She’s taking drugs!”

  “What are you going to do? She’s eighty-seven.”

  “This is not eighty-seven speaking. This is enforced feeblemindedness. Synthetic senility!” He lowers his voice. “And she’s doing it to get back at me. Because I didn’t invite her to move in with us.”

  “Oh, she is not, Ed. She is not getting back at you. You’ve always got a conspiracy theory. Why don’t you just work on being a better sport?”

  —

  On Sunday they go to see a movie in Georgetown. It’s a rambling film about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The kind of film that glides from one old country house to the next and hovers over fields in the South of France, lingering on the remains of picnics. It’s the kind of film Ed hates because it doesn’t go anywhere. Just stews in its own juices. The vintage cars are more interesting than the characters.

  Sarah is enjoying herself, though, and Ed is glad, because she deserves something for putting up with him—and with Rose—all week. Late-afternoon sun, and then moonlight, suffuses the movie screen. Gertrude and Alice sit in silence looking at each other. “What is the answer?” Alice asks at last. There is a long pause. Ed glances at his watch and looks up just in time to see Rose slumping in her seat. “Ma?” he whispers. “Ma? Sarah? What happened?”

  “We need an ambulance,” Sarah says, as the three other audience members turn around. “Pull her up. We have to get to a phone.”

  “No, don’t move her!” Ed cries.

  “Okay, wait with her while I call.”

  He looks down at his mother collapsed in her seat, breathing ever so slightly in the flickering moonlight of the movie.

  They follow the ambulance in their car, and at the emergency room Ed tells his story at least four times.

  “She just fell forward in the theater,” he tells the triage nurse. They are wheeling Rose in on a gurney.

  Sarah is carrying Rose’s purse, a massive black wedge of a bag with short, round handles. “I think this has something to do with it.” She hands the nurse two of Rose’s orange prescription bottles.

  —

  That night Ed lies in bed imagining tiny sounds, tricking himself into hearing the stairs creak and the cabinets close—as if the house could twitch by itself, and the floorboards could have pins and needles. Rose is in the hospital for tests, and the doctor is concerned.

  “She overdosed on the Percodan,” Dr. Ing explained. “She must have lost count.”

  “She’s been taking it for years,” Ed said.

  “Oh, yes, she’s addicted to it.”

  Ed hated Ing for saying that. He felt his face burning there in the office.

  “I have to call Henry,” Ed says now to Sarah, who lies awake beside him.

  “I thought you were going to call him in the morning.”

  “No, no,” Ed groans. “I’m going to worry about it all night.” It has to be done. He has to call his brother, who is hard enough to talk to under normal circumstances. His Anglophile brother, the collector and obsessive chef, the Laura Ashley manager in Oxford. The publisher of bleak poetry books in tiny editions.

  “So call him.” Sarah takes the phone from the nightstand and lays it on his chest.

  “I don’t have his number up here. I’ve got to go down to the kitchen and get the Rolodex.” Ed heaves himself out of bed and thumps down the stairs. After a moment Sarah struggles up, puts on Ed’s bathrobe, and goes after him.

  They sit at the kitchen table, which is strewn with the remains of the Times, and one of Ed’s yellow legal pads with a list of things to do, and a cluster of blackening bananas. Sarah has been meaning to make banana bread. “Hello, Henry?” Ed calls into the receiver. “Hello? We’ve got a terrible connection. It’s Ed.”

  “Good God, what’s the matter?” Henry cries on the other end. Ed’s jaw tightens. It’s true that he almost never calls his brother, but it offends him that Henry should assume some disaster has occurred the minute he hears Ed’s voice. And, of course, assume it with that surreal British accent. All Henry’s Briticisms seem to come out of books, and now, as Ed speaks, Henry’s gasps of horror have a Dickensian quality—with subtle Brooklyn harmonics. “Gracious heavens,” Henry exclaims. “Oh, poor Mother! Poor Mother. What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Ed says grimly. “There isn’t much we can do.”

  “Oh, God,” Henry says.

  “Look, can you get Susan?” Ed glares at the bananas on the table as he waits for Henry’s wife to come on the line. Then he picks them up and throws them into the kitchen garbage. They land with a satisfying thump.

  “Hello, Ed? Susan here.” Her clipped voice soothes him.

  “You heard wh
at I said? I think you’d better send Henry out here.”

  “Yes, of course,” Susan says. “We’ll book him a flight today, and I’ll ring you with his arrival information.”

  Ed feels much better when he hangs up. “She’s one in a million,” he tells Sarah.

  —

  By the time Henry arrives, Rose is home from the hospital. She was there for three days—unconscious part of the time. But then she came to, and she left the hospital, frail but radiant, a bunch of helium balloons from the grandchildren tied to the back of her wheelchair. “She has an amazing constitution for a woman her age,” the doctor told Ed. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with her—except that she’s taking massive doses of Percodan.”

  “So let’s get her off it,” Ed said.

  “You’d have to get her into a clinical detox program,” the doctor told him. “This is not something you should try at home.”

  Rose is recovering in Miriam’s room. No one has mentioned a detox program. No one has mentioned when she will be going home. She lies on the pink twin bed and reads Danielle Steel, Belva Plain, and Andrew Greeley. Henry, after his first transports, has collapsed, exhausted with jet lag and stress, in the boys’ room. He had laid out his silk pajamas on the bottom bunk and hung his clothes in the closet that Ben and Avi shared before they went off to college. Ed feels as though he is the last adult left in the world.

  When he comes home Friday evening, the kitchen is a disaster area. Rose sits at the table behind a pile of vegetables. Bags of them. Little yellow cherry tomatoes, radishes, curly red-fringed lettuce dripping in the colander. “Henry and Sarah are collaborating on dinner,” she tells Ed. She is positively glowing among those vegetables. She looks happier than she has in years. There are grocery bags all over the counters, flecks of carrot peel on the floor. Henry has worked himself into one of his cooking frenzies. Flushed with exertion, he stands over a tray of hollowed-out oranges. He is piping sweet potato into each one with a pastry tube. Rose is beaming, and Ed can’t help smiling to see it. “There’s nothing like sitting in the kitchen with the family,” she says. “If you had to cook in what they give us for kitchens at Venice Vista! It’s a disgrace.”

  “You never liked cooking,” Ed points out, kissing her on the cheek.

  “No, I never did like cooking, myself,” Rose admits. “But I like a kitchen with cooking going on in it. I like to be with the family. These kitchenettes at Venice Vista aren’t built for cooking. Not at all. And outdated! Decorated in green! The Frigidaire is green.”

  Henry looks up from his orange shells. “I think the gaskets are going on yours, Ed.” He points to Ed’s refrigerator.

  “Yeah, I know. The house needs work,” Ed says.

  “It’s a lovely house,” Henry rushes to add. “These row houses are charming. You could plant a little ivy by the door. Repaint. You could make it look like Georgetown.

  “Ed!” he bursts out, suddenly. “What’s the time? My challahs! Hold this.” He hands Ed the pastry tube and rushes to check on the bread. Sarah stands at the stove dropping matzo balls into the chicken soup. Steam rises in her face. “It’s such a pity you don’t have a double oven,” Henry sighs. “How will we get it all in? Susan says I’m terribly spoiled, and she won’t let me get a convection oven.” He wipes his hands on the ridiculous little checkered apron he has wrapped around his waist. “But the one implement I refuse to buy—absolutely refuse—is the microwave. I cannot reconcile cooking with radiation. It’s unnatural. They say it doesn’t brown the food. And, of course, you can’t bake in a contraption that won’t crisp. You don’t get a crust. That’s what I’ve been told, in any case. I won’t touch them.”

  Ed comes up behind Sarah. “How are you?” he asks her. He kisses the back of her head.

  “Stop that!” she snaps. She opens the oven door to check on her cake.

  “Oh dear,” Rose observes from the table. “Your cake has fallen.”

  “That’s true,” Sarah says, and she slams the oven door shut.

  Henry whirls around, startled by the noise. “What will we do?” he cries. “Oh, I know what we should do. Make a fruit compote and cover it. Make a trifle. What fruit do we have?” He rummages in the grocery bags.

  “I love trifle,” Rose says. “We had trifle in England. I grew on trifle. I was such a little thing when they brought me out. Such a weak little thing. But when they gave me the trifle I blossomed out. How I blossomed out! With the cream on top. That heavy cream—”

  “Oh,” Henry gasps. “We didn’t get cream. We’ll have to run out and buy—”

  “How I blossomed out,” Rose says again. “My girth and my English grew equally. We weren’t thin little things when we were Miriam’s age.”

  “Would you get some cream, Ed?” asks Henry.

  “No.” Ed sinks into a chair.

  “It’s just that I can’t leave the challahs,” Henry says.

  “Who would have thought,” Rose muses, “that cream, which just melts on the tongue, can instantly turn into pounds.”

  “I don’t think we can make trifle without cream,” says Henry.

  “Fine,” says Ed. “Don’t.”

  Rose looks over at Sarah. “I wasn’t thin when I was Miriam’s age. Is she still so thin? All my life I’ve had a passion for sweets. And for affection,” she adds thoughtfully.

  “Are you upset?” Henry asks Ed.

  “No,” Ed says. “I am not upset.”

  “Sarah,” Rose says. “I would like to do just one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Because I’ve really been at death’s door.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Go to the synagogue tomorrow. Together—with the whole family.”

  —

  “You didn’t tell me it was going to be Indian summer,” Henry moans in the backseat of the car. He is sweating in his new fall suit, wondering if he should mop his brow with the blue silk handkerchief so beautifully folded in his breast pocket. “I don’t think the air conditioner is reaching back here.” Sarah looks back at him and feels some sympathy. He’s gained weight since his wedding. His face is puffy in the heat, his brown eyes mournful. She and Ed haven’t been to Congregation Shaarei Tzedek in months. It surprised her that Ed agreed to go.

  “Why don’t we ever come anymore?” Ed asks Sarah as he puts on a white satin yarmulke and steps into the sanctuary. “I forget. What was our excuse?”

  During the service he remembers. Under the roar of the bellowing cantor comes a soft murmur of kibitzing. As the thin little rabbi delivers his sermon, the talking seems to grow louder. Ed tries to read some prayers to himself in the English. “How precious is your kindness, O God!” Ed reads. “The children of men and women take refuge in the shadow of your wings.”

  “New Haven,” he hears on his left. “They’re going to live in New Haven. I’m worried sick.”

  “The crime.”

  “It’s terrible.”

  “We are divided within ourselves,” the rabbi says from the bimah. “We are torn, and we should be torn. And yet—no, all the more—we love Israel.”

  “But that’s where Yale Law School is,” says the woman on Ed’s left.

  “The campus is beautiful.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “You give them drink of your stream of delights,” Ed reads.

  “Just eight-fifty a month,” the concerned mother says. “But parking is going to be a problem.” Ed shuts his book.

  He is in a terrible mood by the time they get home. Sarah climbs upstairs and lies down with the air conditioner on high, but Ed paces around the house in his T-shirt and slacks. He looks into Miriam’s room, where Rose lies on the bed, reading. Her short gray hair is brushed up from her forehead in a wave. He strides down to the living room, where Henry slouches on the couch.

  “Let’s go for a walk, Edward,” Henry suggests.

  “Too hot,” Ed grunts.

  “I was thinking this is an opportunity,” Henr
y says. “We hardly ever see each other. I’d like to walk around the university. I saw the most marvelous stand there yesterday—selling ices.”

  They walk the narrow streets below Georgetown. Henry wears sunglasses and one of Ed’s polo shirts pulled taut over his belly. He buys Ed a chocolate soda at the green Bella Italia wagon. He himself sips a wild strawberry, and they stride down the sidewalk together. Henry is appalled at the dearth of bookstores, intrigued by the cut-work parasols in a vintage-clothing store. “I wish Susan liked this sort of thing.” He casts a critical eye at the Laura Ashley window display. “Cluttered,” he decides. “I would never allow my staff to clutter like that.”

  “What did you think of Congregation S.T.?” Ed asks.

  “Not bad. Not bad at all. Except for that ghastly Holocaust sculpture. The air-conditioning was splendid.”

  “I meant—you know—spiritually,” Ed says.

  Henry looks at him, questioning.

  “I don’t know,” Ed says. “Every once in a while I go there sort of expecting something. I mean, sometimes I feel like I’m in a crisis. Sometimes I want to go and hear some words of wisdom from the rabbi. But I just end up sitting with those ladies with the jewelry.”

  “What do you mean, ‘crisis’?”

  “It’s not specific—”