A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  The girls nodded, their faces tilted toward their teacups, for there was blame in Rose’s words, as though Lil’s death was the result of her poor judgment all those years ago. And, yet, somehow, it was, wasn’t it?

  “But wasn’t it all a question of timing?” asked Beth suddenly. Emma swiveled her neck and looked at her mother questioningly. “If he’d sold his book earlier—”

  “And turned it in on time,” muttered Sadie.

  “And turned it in on time,” conceded Beth, “before the bubble burst. Then it might have been really big. And they would have had more money and there wouldn’t have been such a strain on their marriage.”

  “Maybe,” said Rose Peregrine. “Maybe not. Nobody ever has enough money.”

  “If they’d met now,” said Beth, ignoring her, “everything would have been different.” The girls nodded uneasily. Tuck had finally made a name for himself by breaking a big story about forced labor in the South—something he’d uncovered while, irony of ironies, attending Rob Green-Gold’s second wedding in remotest Georgia. He was writing a book on the subject, for a good deal more money than he had the first.

  Or maybe he’s just an asshole, Sadie thought, but said, instead, “We should talk about the service.”

  “Yes,” said Rose. She was anxious, Sadie knew, to get down to the cool labor of planning, the ticking off of items on her list. Sadie hadn’t asked for her help, but she was grateful for it. “I’ve called Emanu-El and we can do it there, if you girls want. In the chapel.”

  “Okay,” said Sadie. “Thanks.”

  “That’s perfect,” said Beth.

  “I think, first, we need to make a list of everyone who should know about this and then, from that, who might want to speak. I assume you girls. And Dave. Maybe one of her professors?”

  “George Wadsworth,” said Beth. “If he can fly in.”

  “Whoever,” said Rose. “Just keep it short. And then we need to think about food.” This was what really interested Rose. “We’ll lay it out in the library. Do you want to do lox and bagels? Or you can just have cold cuts. And people can make sandwiches. And do you want to have wine?”

  “Isn’t it kind of strange to have food?” asked Sadie. “Are people really going to want to eat?”

  “Sadie, it’s just what’s done,” sighed Rose. “Grief makes people hungry.”

  “Lox and bagels,” said Emily, putting her hand on top of Sadie’s. “Let’s do that.”

  “All right.” Rose smiled. “I’ll call Russ & Daughters and order platters. You girls start on your list.”

  But there were children to attend to, children getting bored and fussy and tired and wanting to be taken to the park or home for dinner and a bath and bed, and so they wrestled them into sweaters and jackets and strapped them into strollers and carriers, and kissed Rose good-bye, promising they would return tomorrow, list in hand, and start making phone calls. Rose’s housekeeper, Olga, could watch the kids.

  “I would really think about making those calls tonight,” Rose said as the girls maneuvered their charges down the front steps.

  “Okay, okay, Mom, we’ll make them tonight,” said Sadie, over Mina’s rising wail. “I’ve got to walk,” she told the others crossly, the minute the door clicked shut. “This child is exhausted.”

  “Let’s walk,” agreed Emily. “We can go down to Sixty-third and get the F.”

  Slowly, they made their way across Ninety-second Street, three women and four children, past the narrow wooden houses that Sadie had loved so as a child—the only such in Manhattan—and around the streams of other young mothers, their blonde heads arced over thin cell phones, and diminutive matrons walking small, fluffy dogs, and children, flocks of children, gray and blue and scarlet uniforms visible beneath their open coats. It was four o’clock, but it felt, Beth said, much later, for the sky had grown dark and thick with clouds, just as it had six years earlier, when Lil had married. On Sadie’s chest, Mina had fallen asleep, her dark head lolling onto her small shoulder. “The autopsy should be done by now, right?” Sadie asked quietly, turning her head toward Emily.

  “Should be,” Emily agreed. “They’ll call the Roths.”

  “Not you? Because you were there with her?”

  Emily shook her head. “Next of kin.”

  “So what exactly happened?” asked Beth, in a thin, strangled voice. She did not, Sadie thought, really want to know the answer. Typical Beth.

  “I don’t know,” Emily told her. “She had the flu—you know, fever, chills, bad cough. And it didn’t go away. She called me and asked if we knew a clinic she could go to—you know, she didn’t have insurance. And we gave her a couple of names, doctors who have a sliding scale. But we weren’t worried. People always get sick when the seasons change, and there’s a really bad flu going around this year. They’re saying everyone should get vaccinated.”

  “Yeah, I already did,” said Beth.

  “Yeah, so, I guess she decided to ask a neighbor of hers, who’s, I think, a doctor at a homeless shelter, for advice—”

  “Oh, no,” groaned Sadie.

  “And she told Lil that she just had the flu, that she didn’t need antibiotics. She should take echinacea and vitamin C and rest. And then she started having trouble breathing and she got scared. She called us and we took her to the hospital. They said it was pneumonia—”

  “Of course!” said Sadie furiously.

  “—and they started giving her antibiotics and fluid, but she still just looked awful, and a few hours later—” Her voice, all of a sudden, became something akin to a choke and she stopped dead, in front of an optician’s shop, the window filled with glittering frames. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t understand. They’re saying maybe the hantavirus. She’s been sick so much this year. But I just—” She began, quietly, to cry. “How could she have died? She had the flu.” Beth grabbed her sobbing friend and began sobbing herself, her tears forming a dark spot on Emily’s blue coat. Bewildered, their daughters stared at them, eyes wide, then, as one, burst into tears themselves. Sadie quickly put the brake on Jack’s stroller, thinking, We’re blocking the sidewalk, and knelt before the two little girls, Mina’s head bobbing against her chest, and kissed their soft, rosy cheeks and held their small, cold hands and stroked their silky heads, until Jack called, “Mama, Mama,” and she turned him to face the girls, arranging the strollers in a little huddle. “It’s okay,” she told the children. “Everything is fine. We’re just a little sad. But it’s nothing for you to worry about.” They looked at her silently, their eyes huge as only children’s eyes can be. “It’s nothing to do with you,” she told them, wishing she could tell herself the same thing.

  In the chapel, they decided, they would have seasonal bouquets with blush roses, which were Lil’s favorite, and large daisies and hydrangeas. Nothing funereal, like calla lilies, which Lil had hated. As a child, she’d been a flower girl in a stylish Los Angeles wedding, in which all the attendants wore black and carried a single stem of the white, waxy flower. “Very eighties,” she’d told them in college, when they’d talked about the awful weddings they’d attended—and what their own weddings might be like, if they ever married, which Lil insisted she would not. They’d spoken of funerals, too, after reading The Loved One in their British Modernism class. They’d all agreed that the American way of death—to use Jessica Mitford’s term, for they’d all read that book, too, and loved it—was appalling: pumping the body full of embalming fluid and caking the face with makeup. Being Jewish, they had a particular dread of wakes, which none except Sadie had ever actually attended. “It’s creepy,” Lil had said. “Why would you want to look at a dead body. The person is gone.”

  “It’s a primitive ritual.” Sadie had shrugged. “Kind of barbarian. But it gives people a sense of closure. That’s why they do it. They feel like they’ve had the chance to say good-bye.” Lil had rejected this notion as thoroughly bourgeois, based on a misguided attachment to th
e material. She was all for cremation.

  “I’d want my ashes scattered, too,” she said.

  “Where?” asked Tal.

  She considered. “I’m not sure. Someplace that had some sort of significance in my life. But I don’t know where.”

  “Not going to happen,” Tal had said. “You’re Jewish. You have to be buried intact, wrapped in a cotton shroud, in a plain pine box.”

  And this was exactly how she would be buried, on Monday afternoon, following the service. The body had arrived that morning and was sitting in a funeral parlor in Roslyn. The funeral would not, Mrs. Roth had explained, take place within the two days specified by Jewish law, because of the autopsy and because of the large number of family and friends traveling in for the service and funeral. Sadie, who had somehow become the Roths’ contact, had refrained from mentioning that Lil would have preferred cremation. “What does it matter, right?” Emily said. “It’s horrible, but the funeral, all this, it’s for the living, isn’t it?”

  Monday morning came quickly, as gray as the days that preceded it. The group rose early, dressing carefully in their most sober garments—“navy, gray, dark brown,” Rose had instructed them tersely, “black is just for the family”—and hurrying up to the synagogue to get things ready. Emily and Beth brought their little girls over to Sadie’s this time, where the neighbor’s nanny would tend to them, for a king’s ransom. Jack would go home with a friend after school. “Can we get coffee?” Emily asked, as they rode the long escalator up from the Sixty-third Street subway stop. “I feel like I’m about to fall apart.” And so they stopped at a bakery and bought tall cups of coffee and oversized, sticky Danish, which they ate in big, greedy bites in the synagogue’s downstairs function room, while they waited for the platters of fish and bagels to arrive. Rose was right, grief made them hungry. When the trays arrived, at nine forty-five—after the florist had installed her bouquets in the chapel, and the wine and beer and soda had been arranged to Rose’s liking, the bartender Rose had insisted on hiring installed at his perch—they gazed at them longingly. “It’s okay to pick,” said Rose, folding a piece of sable into her mouth. “But we need to slice the bagels.” Like sleepwalkers, the girls obeyed, wondering where Dave might be—he had promised to arrive at nine—and why, it seemed, men were excused from all the nasty bits of life. Their husbands, all three, had gone to work, promising to meet them at the service.

  At ten thirty Dave materialized, in a rumpled gray suit, at the back of the chapel as Emily tested the microphone. “My God,” she boomed. “Where have you been?” He walked toward her. “What can I do?” he asked. “Nothing,” she said, with, she was surprised to find, a laugh. “It’s all done.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to run outside then,” which meant, she knew, that he was going to have a cigarette; he was the only one who still smoked, though Lil had taken the habit up again after she separated from Tuck. “Is Tal here?” She shook her head. “I’ll come with you,” she said. In the foyer, they found Beth and Sadie, hopping from foot to foot on their black heels.

  “We’re trying to figure out if we’re supposed to greet everyone as they arrive,” said Sadie, by way of a greeting. “Or just let them come in and find their seats.”

  “That sounds like a problem for Mrs. Rose Peregrine,” said Dave.

  “It might be better,” came a voice behind them, “to just let everyone sit down.”

  And there, lit from behind by the pale sun that leaked in through the synagogue’s glass doors, stood Tal, though it took them all a moment before they recognized him. He’d grown a beard, long and full, and his hair fell to his shoulders, curling around and over his collar. He was dressed, to use Rose’s term, like a Bible salesman, in black wool trousers and a white dress shirt, his jacket flung over his arm. “Someone from the shul can stand out here and direct people. You guys—we all—can just go in and sit down.”

  His friends looked at one another.

  “Hey, man,” Dave called, grabbing his arm as if they’d seen each other three days and not three years earlier.

  “Oh my God,” said Emily, running over and embracing him. “Tal, you freak. Oh my God. I can’t believe it’s you. The famous Tal Morgenthal. When did you get in?”

  But before he could answer—before he could say hello to Dave or Beth or Sadie, who could barely bring herself to look at him—the door opened again, and a cadre of low voices interrupted them. “I guess we should get in there,” said Dave. Sadie nodded. She had, the girls saw, gone almost green. “I don’t want to talk to anyone until after,” she said, almost, they thought, hysterically. “I just don’t.”

  Quickly, the pews began to fill. They had thought they would only need a few rows of the space, but it seemed now that they might fill it. Lil had been loved. There was Abe Housman and Maya Decker and Meredith Weiss and a whole band of Oberlin people. Curtis Lang arrived, with Amy, who looked like she’d been dragged along, and Marco LaRoue and his sister Paola, the men slapping Dave on the shoulder and kissing Emily’s cheek. “You look nice,” Curtis told her, sliding into the pew behind her. “Thanks,” she said tightly, worried that she was going to be stuck in conversation forever. But then the husbands arrived, all at once, as if they’d planned it: Josh, then Will, coattails flying, and Ed. Behind them trailed Dave’s parents and Beth’s parents, with her little brother, Jason, followed by a knot of older persons, with dark hair and wild brows, whom they vaguely recognized from Lil’s wedding as Roths. Lil’s boss from the poetry association—a short, barrel-chested man, with enormous eyebrows—strode in, dressed like an English gentleman about to embark on a hearty walk on the moors, with his minions: the pretty young women who staffed his office and had been Lil’s coworkers for years. The group had met them all, over the years, at Christmas parties and such.

  “Who’s that?” Emily whispered to Sadie, cocking her head toward a short, pear-shaped woman with spiky blonde hair and enormous earrings of oxidized metal. “Oh,” Sadie said. “Heidi Kass. She was Lil’s advisor at Columbia.” Professor Kass was followed by a troupe that could only be academics: A tall, white-haired man in a sweater vest and Wallabees. Two elderly women in shapeless dirndls, their thin hair pulled back in wispy buns. A young, angry-looking fellow—“Joyce scholar,” said Sadie impishly, “I’m sure of it”—accompanied by a short, bald man in red, round plastic spectacles and matching suede Hush Puppies, and a bone-thin creature, grayish hair falling past her waist, clad in a puff-sleeved blouse—a pirate shirt, Lil would have called it—and a tight velvet vest. “And who’s Stevie Nicks over there?” Emily asked. “Andrea Simmons Smith,” Sadie told her, raising her dark brows. “She’s a poet. Kind of famous. Her last book was a series of poems based on Dorothy Wordsworth’s letters. Sort of wonderful, but sort of cringy.”

  In the middle of the central aisle, then, appeared an old man in a baggy suit, with pale, thinning hair, who Emily abruptly realized was Sadie’s father. She hadn’t seen him in years, but she remembered him as tall, hale, athletic. Without Rose on his arm, he looked lost. “Dad,” Sadie called, in a voice that made Emily want to cry—would her brisk, efficient parents ever be this frail?—but the Roths came up behind him and he turned and embraced them. Sadie, overcome, turned away.

  In the back row, Rob Green-Gold—he’d kept the married name, even after his divorce, so as to avoid confusing his many followers—seated himself and his latest wife, a Johnson heiress who had parted with half her income under his tutelage, next to a group of tousle-headed young men: the Slikowskers of yore. And there was that cheerful Texan Lil dated in college—what was his name?—flanked by their professors, whom they hadn’t seen since graduation, all those years ago: George Wadsworth, tall and thin and severe; Joan Silver, clad, just as they remembered her, in a jumpsuit; Martin Donahue, white-haired and rabbity.

  A new wave of mourners rushed in, scanning the pews for blocks of seats. Beth recognized the band guys from Lil and Tuck’s wedding, and a tiny elderly person, es
corted by an attractive young man in a dark suit. “Who’s that?” Sadie asked Emily. “I think that’s Althea Gibbon.” Sadie blinked. “She started the poetry foundation?” Emily nodded. “She loved Lil.” She was followed by a clump of underdressed young people. “Poets,” Sadie suggested. Emily nodded. “Interns.”

  The mourners kept coming. Lil’s friends from Columbia. Dave’s neighbors Katherine and Matt. Lil’s childhood friend Daniel, who was now a reconstructionist rabbi in Philadelphia, and his pleasant-faced wife. A tall, bald man, accompanied by a stout woman, her face set in a frown. “Emily, oh my God,” Josh said. “It’s your friend Bob Goldstein.” “Dr. Bob,” she cried. “Wow. And Nurse Hopkins. And isn’t that Paj Mukherjee?” Josh nodded and waved at the doctors, until Emily tugged his arm down. “We’ll talk to them later,” she whispered, then flashed him a smile to counteract her wifely tones.

  The clock moved past eleven, but the stream of people kept flowing. Lil and Tuck’s neighbors in Williamsburg: the British waiter from the L café, the owner of the yoga studio, nearly unrecognizable in a brown wool dress (none of them had ever seen her in anything but knit pants and tank tops), the redheaded woman who ran Ugly Luggage, the slender bartender at Oznot’s, and, as Rose stage-whispered, “Girls, let’s get this started,” and the rabbi strode across the front of the sanctuary, Clara and her anarchist publisher, waving at the group and sitting down a few rows behind them.

  Sobered by the sight of the cleric, in his neat suit and shiny shoes, the group settled down, until a blonde apparition emerged at the base of the aisle, paused dramatically, hands sculpturally aloft, and surveyed the crowd: Caitlin Green-Gold—now Caitlin Shamsie—in a smart black shift, vividly pregnant. Ismael’s small, noble face peeped over her shoulder, suspended in some sort of sling or cloth backpack, which looped around her shoulders. “Oh, no,” Sadie moaned.