by Anne Roiphe
My husband was a man consumed with his love for his children. I knew this before we married and had our own children. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at them. I could see it in his hands when he touched their heads. I could see it in his smile when he talked to them. He told me on our first date in great detail about buying his younger one a toy oven and how he kept it in his apartment for her when she visited because her mother would not let her take it home. We took children on our honeymoon. We were not always good parents. But we were always parents. That was the primary subject of our lives, even after the children grew up, even after we knew we had done well with some and not so well with others. We were only human, we told each other. We tried not to talk about our children all the time, hardly ever when we were with friends, but to each other we admitted our pride, our deep pride, our regrets, our mistakes. Our children were our fortune, our land, our nation. In other words we did what we could. We also knew our limitations. The children mourn him. Above all else he would have wanted to spare them that pain. I burn, fire rages in my brain when they speak to me of their memories, of their missing him. I listen quietly and nod, and sometimes add a few details to a memory that has faded over time. I am still a dutiful parent, the only one they have now.
I am forwarded the psychoanalytic publications that once went to H.’s office. I read them from cover to cover. I memorize the names of new medications. I read about new theories of transference and countertransference. I understand everything but I have no use for the information. There is no psychoanalyst in this house anymore. I search for case histories. In them the patients are given initials. They report their dreams. They have trouble working or loving or both. I read their secrets the way one opens a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant. Perhaps I will find a message meant just for me. I wonder why I am reading. I keep the publications in a corner of the bedroom. I look at the covers and sometimes I think I should throw them all out. I don’t.
I am going to Broadway to purchase coffee and a roll. Now I know how to make coffee but I don’t want to. Orange plastic ribbons run from one side of the street to the other. Police barricades prevent passage. Several cars with red lights spinning on their hoods are at both ends of the block. Two fire trucks are parked along the way, firemen move back and forth, their black plastic coats, their yellow stripes, their big hats, their boots moving around and around. I see a huge tree that has fallen on the roof of a Budget truck that was double-parked on the other side of the street. The truck’s roof is partially crushed. The tree’s branches are askew, its thick trunk is bent way over as though bowing to some unseen royal being. No, I can’t pass through. I walk around and go down another street.
That afternoon I walk to the corner. The street is cleared. No police, no fire trucks. I walk down the block toward Broadway and I see it, a huge chunk of sidewalk has heaved up and cracked down the center. The tree has been sawed off and all that remains is a circle of raw wood surrounded by a mound of dirt. I look at the rings in the wide stump. Its thick roots must have gone deep into the dirt and back underneath the brownstone buildings behind it. I stand there. I attempt to count the circles but I lose track. The tree may have been here before there were subways, before there were apartment buildings on Riverside Drive, maybe it was here when Henry Hudson sailed up the winding river not knowing where he was going or if he would return. How many wars ago did it root itself in the ground, how many babies in carriages rolled past it not noticing its height, its breadth, its breathing out oxygen into our air? It was gone in an instant. Fort, da, what made it heave up onto the sidewalk at just that moment? Two Hassidic Jews, one older than the other, in high black hats, white shirts, black jackets with the fringes of their tallith, hanging out over their pants, come down the block. They are heavily bearded with bushy eyebrows and black shiny shoes and pale faces, lavender shadows under their eyes. They stop by the tree and take out cigarettes. They pull out lighters, they smoke, inhaling deeply. I sit on the stoop behind them and watch. One finishes his cigarette and throws the still-lit end into the dirt by the tree. He grinds it out with his black shoe.
How could such a tall tree fall? It was not called to God, of that I am sure.
The phone: “This is Susie of the (name blurred) national polling institute. Can I speak to Dr. Roiphe on questions of national importance?” “He can’t come to the phone right now,” I say. Questions of national importance will have to go unanswered.
Once a long time ago we had a twelve-year-old daughter who had pneumonia and recovered. But soon it became clear that the pneumonia had left her with lung damage. For months we watched as she ran fevers at the end of each day and lost weight and coughed through the night, leaving dark green spots on the wall by her bedside, which I would wash off each morning. I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s friends Sara and Gerald Murphy, who had lost a child to tuberculosis. I thought of all the children who had died of polio and ear infections in other centuries where the death of a child was never a surprise. The doctors said that our daughter would not survive unless they removed the contaminated part of her lung. Deep in its tendrils the bacteria had settled and no antibiotic had the power to penetrate through the tangled brambles of tissue. We went to the hospital the day before her surgery. In the room next to hers a small boy was dying of leukemia and his father was a policeman and the police bagpipe unit came to serenade the child. The sound was meant to cheer but it didn’t. In another room a Hispanic family gathered around the bedside of a child with diabetes. At visiting hour the mother’s pastor and ten congregants came to visit the child. They lit candles and threw rice around the room in ceremonial passion. The nurses came to forbid the candles and demanded that the crowd of visitors leave. The pastor continued his chants. The candles continued to flicker, their lights casting shadows on the curtain pulled around the child’s bed. The nurses called security. The congregants blocked the nurses’ entrance to the room and when the security guards arrived the congregants singing in Spanish threw rice at their heads. Everyone was shouting. My daughter put her blanket up over her head. The candles burned on. I took my daughter to the elevators planning to flee. Then it was over and the pastor finding us in the lounge offered to come and repeat the ceremony for my daughter. One congregant kindly threw a bowl of uncooked rice under my child’s bed. I wanted H. but he couldn’t come because he was home with our other daughter who was of course in need of his company.
H. and I waited in the cafeteria for the operation to be over. It was supposed to take two and a half hours. Five hours later the doctor had not emerged. I did not let go of H.’s hand. Something had gone wrong. “Don’t imagine anything,” H. said. I nodded. But I was imagining everything. “I will die, if she dies,” I said. H. let go of my hand. “You will not,” he said. “That is unacceptable,” he said. “I don’t mean it,” I said. “You can’t threaten the universe,” he said. An hour later the operation was over. They brought her down to the intensive care unit, tubes with blood running from her side, a tube down her throat, but her color was pink. She was no longer the ashen green of her year of illness. H. brought me a container of watery coffee. We didn’t have anything we needed to say to each other. We just leaned one on another like people standing on the roadside shocked to be alive after an accident that crushed their car.
I feel a surge of envy when I see a woman about my age in a restaurant with her spouse, the two of them talking softly. Are they planning a vacation or worrying about their kids, a job lost, a divorce, a setback of mind or body? Are they talking about their friends, analyzing this or that foible, this or that peculiarity? Are they talking about the abductions in Baghdad or the CIA prisons hidden in byways of foreign countries? Are they discussing his blood pressure medicine or her next dental appointment?
I am becoming selfish. I can’t remember other people’s birthdays. I forget to ask about their children. I am self-absorbed. That is to say it takes all my energy to hold myself together. This may be a normal response to a great lo
ss (I expect it is), but I do not like myself like this.
If I were a polar bear I would go into a cave and hibernate.
We are, however, social creatures. The need for touch is built into our biology. If the first mother had not swept her baby up into her arms and folded it into her flesh and fed it and watched over it, the helpless baby would have died, and with it the entire human experiment. H. believed in Darwin the way hedge fund managers believe in the market. He said we need a group for protection, for efficient food production, for survival. We are not single predators, we are not fish that mate without touching. Right now I think I am more fish than mammal.
I watch television without caring if the victim is avenged, if the murderer is caught, if the good doctor gets the woman of his dreams, if the serial killer gives himself up. H. could fall asleep watching television. Perhaps the drama in his office was sufficient. I always had to wait until the plot’s resolution. I had to sit through the commercials because I needed to know how the story ended. Now I don’t care anymore. This is not good but I have no idea how to bring back my appetite for story, my connection to the people in my life. Perhaps time will restore me, perhaps it won’t.
H. read every Trollope novel at least four times. He had his favorite heroines. Lady Glencora, Jane, Elizabeth. He was fond of the Pallisers one and all. When we married, his prize possession, not trusted to the movers but carried in his arms to our new home, was an old, brown-leather, yellow-paged 1894 edition of the Trollope novels that spread out across two bookshelves. He read and reread George Elliot. Sometimes when we were riding a distance in the car he would tell me the plot of Daniel Deronda in all its detail. It didn’t matter to him that I knew the story, had read the book. He liked telling it to me. I liked listening. Again and again he read Patrick O’Brian’s novels of the sea battles between the French and the English. His favorite character, Doctor Maturin, was a spy, an adventurer, a sailor, to whom he was particularly attached. If in my imagination I bore a certain lifetime resemblance to Nancy Drew, then he was Maturin, physician to the captain of the ship.
Born to immigrants in Brooklyn’s Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush, H. attended movies every Saturday afternoon, where he learned to speak without the Yiddish inflection of his parents or the Brooklyn accent of his neighbors. He told me that at a Saturday matinee double feature in 1936 he won a raffle and brought home a box of brand-new blue-and-white porcelain dishes to his mother.
It is amazing that the nineteenth-century world of English gentry could so hold his attention. He would not be pleased at my current disaffection from stories. He would be impatient with my wet mood. I assume he would understand that my mind is restricted in its play for good reasons. But he would not want such a condition to become permanent.
I once had a long-widowed friend who said that she loved her bed and her television and her kitchen and she felt well only inside her apartment. I thought this was sad, I thought that she had retreated too soon. But now I understand this better. It is becoming true for me too. The familiar forms a cocoon around me, asks nothing of me, provides me with a space to let my mind roam where it will. I am less anxious inside than out, less vulnerable, less apt to wonder what will become of me. I understand that at a certain age there has been enough adventuring, enough sailing forth. It seems right to curl up like a sick cat on a pillow and wait for the end. I see this and I fear this.
“Yes,” said Molly Bloom. “Yes,” say I. If anyone asks. Although I have my doubts.
I go to a Sunday-night dinner—it’s not just a dinner. For many years H. and I have gone to this house and watched the Giants football games with other fans and spouses. We have a betting pool. Each of us writes on a small card the name of the winner, and by how much. It costs ten dollars to enter. The cards sit in a large glass bowl in the center of the dining table. H., child of the Great Depression, hated to lose the ten dollars but was willing. Sometimes we held the dinner at our house. Often H. and I watched the Giants in our bedroom. He, covering his eyes when the other team threatened or walking out of the room if one of ours fouled or fumbled. H. reached for the sports section first thing in the morning. It was a lifelong habit. “Why would you read the sports section before the first page?” I asked. I never got an answer.
This time I go to watch the game without him.
Wives sometimes go into another room and talk or play Scrabble while the game goes on. Some wives leave after an hour. A few watch. I watch. I like the male talk about point spreads and injuries and weights and coaches’ failures, and the quick reports of what has happened on the field before it is explained to the television audience. I listen when one or another of them gives the reason for the red handkerchief tossed on the ground before the referee calls out to the stands. Sometimes the referee wearing his prison-stripe uniform yells, “Unnecessary roughness.” As if the entire game weren’t unnecessary roughness. I like the male jostling in the room: which baseball player hit the most home runs in 1974? Someone will know. Are there enough Jewish players in all baseball history to make a team? And then they start to name them. Such and such a player had a fractured tibia four years ago and hasn’t been the same since. They seem like a pack of dogs playing in the yard, yelping and nuzzling, a smell of wet fur in the air, licking and jumping. Without H. there I feel awkward. But then I don’t.
What I wait for is the moment when the quarterback swings back his arm and hurls the ball halfway down the field and his receiver, outrunning by a half a step his pursuer, puts his hands in the air and pulls down the ball, as if it was always meant to be in his arms, as if it was choreographed that way, and the crowd cheers and I feel for a moment as if anything is possible. Strange that large men can commit such acts of God-like grace.
I lose the football pool. I, like H., bet out of loyalty, not sense. The odds are always against me. There was a purity and an absoluteness in H.’s attachment to his teams. His heart could be broken by a dropped pass, a stumble at a crucial moment, a kick that fell short of the goal posts. This drama is the way some men play with fate. Sitting in the room before the television set, nibbling on cookies, I think of H. Not sadly. Not with pain. I just think of him. Love wells up from far within, the way the whale breaks, the spout shooting upwards, the smooth surface of the waves splinter into foam, the dorsal fin rises across the surface of the water. Glorious—even if the image is used in a TV ad for life insurance.
I see a play about a woman dying of breast cancer. Her life ends when one character whispers in her ear the best joke in the world, a joke so funny that the listener laughs to death. The conceit is both charming and grating. Would that death were so easy. I have thought about it. The window, pills, the ocean, the gas stove—I hold the idea in my mind, saving it for the right moment the way one might a good champagne, a piece of jewelry reserved for such a special occasion that it hasn’t yet arrived. Not right now. My children would grieve. I would not want to cause them pain. They should not have to lose two parents within a short time span. Aged orphans they will one day be but they should have time to get used to the idea. I am loathe to leave the story before its end, although I suppose I will in time, just not now. I still have friends I want to meet, movies I haven’t yet seen, books to read that might not even have been written yet. Old age with its dribble and tremble and watery eyes and half-hearing ears is not a delightful prospect, but erasure can only promise itself. The choice remains mine. I’ll take it when I’m ready. I won’t need a joke, especially when the joke’s on me.
A man calls me. He is a widower. He lives in Brooklyn. He is an acquaintance of a friend of mine. He is a doctor. His wife died five years ago of a long and terrible illness. He invites me to lunch on Sunday. He is an ear doctor who is still practicing a few days a week. He has just purchased a condominium in Sarasota and plans to spend ten days a month in Florida. I agree to meet him on Sunday. I begin to imagine myself in Florida reading a book by a pool. I think of the warm sun on my legs. I know about the malls and the golf games and
the early-bird dinners but I am thinking of blue water and red flowers and palm trees. I am thinking of a man’s razor in my bathroom. I think that maybe I could slip myself into another life. Maybe. Sunday comes and I dress carefully, my best sweater, my new skirt. I look in the mirror, not too long. I am about to put on my coat when the phone rings. It is my lunch date. The tunnel to Manhattan has been closed for repair and he cannot make it into Manhattan. He’ll call another time. I go for a walk on Broadway. I am not going to Florida after all.
I had not imagined all the legal forms that follow the death of a spouse. Death certificates—tax papers, conversations with lawyers and accountants. I wander in a deep wood and I am way past the middle of my life. Have I made a major costly mistake, here or there or everywhere? Money is just money and I have not paid as much attention to it as I should have. This is my error. I tend to wait for rescue by a shining knight. Not this time.
I HAVE BEEN GOING TO CONCERTS WITH A MAN I’LL CALL M. I had known him when he was the partner of a woman I knew. They stopped seeing each other a few years ago. A friend of mine who knew him said she would call him and find out if he had a new lady friend. “Thank you,” I said. She told M. that I was widowed. She told him I would be pleased if he called and he did. M. is a retired divorce lawyer. He is also a pianist. Music is now his main passion. He has tickets to opera and tickets to concerts and a gadget that lets him hear any opera he wants on the nearest radio: a sweet soul this. He is a tall man with a softness to his body, but he walks fast, holds my arm tight. Not only is he fond of divas but he is also a baseball fan. He takes me to the Yankees game. He has me meet him in front of the stadium. He tells me what subway to take to get there. I walk with the crowd to the gate where he will be waiting. The crowds flow past. If H. were with me I would hold his hand tightly. I would not want him to lose me in this river of fans. The sky is a light blue and the lights on the stadium cast a yellow color across the faces of those approaching the ticket-takers. No reason to be alarmed, I tell myself. I know how to find my way back to my home. M. appears with tickets in hand. On a folded piece of paper on his lap he keeps track of every action on the field and marks down errors, successes, scores. We take the subway back to Manhattan and he tells me what stop to get out to take a bus to reach my apartment. He stays on the subway. I wave good-bye to him through the window as the train pulls out of the station.
