Epilogue

by Anne Roiphe

  Some years ago we formed a dinner party group with four other couples. We met once a month at one of our houses and the host made a dinner, set the table with the best dishes, and we did this so that we could know each other better, become closer and closer. In a city, friends whirl about, one can go from month to month without speaking to those one holds dear and then you slip from their lives as they slip from yours. We had our dinners to hold on to each other. H. enjoyed cooking his best meals when these dinners were at our house. A week or so before the date he would take all the cookbooks and spread them out on our table and read through them, until he declared his menu. Now we are nine. I go alone. At the first dinner after H.’s death I did my best to join in conversation. The nineness of us was obvious. No one said anything, no one mentioned his name. I managed the evening well enough. I decided to cook myself for our next meeting, which was to be at our house—no, my house. I am not a cook. I haven’t the patience or the skill or the interest. H. loved cooking because he said it was like chemistry, his first passion.

  But I take out the cookbooks. I make a list and gather my ingredients. I cook the meal. Everyone says it is wonderful but they would say that even if I had served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I look around the table. My friends are here, which seems right, good. A toast to H. is proposed. I join in lifting my glass. I am glad that I can say his name in public again. Not saying his name was unnatural. He did not vanish. I remember him. I need my friends to remember him too.

  Some months go by and we are having our group dinner at a nearby house. But this time my friends are talking about the various remarkable trips they are taking or have just taken. One couple has just returned from a town in Mexico. They walked the cobblestone streets and visited the charming churches and took a course in Spanish. Another is off to the Caribbean to spend a week on the white beaches of Turks and Caicos. They spoke of other trips to Rome with their children, to Paris where the best restaurants were named. Another couple is going to the Arizona desert. The wife spoke of the trip she and her husband had taken a few years ago to South America where because of her work they were greeted at the airport by a chauffeur-driven car and treated as celebrities. There is talk of trips taken to Sicily and weeks spent in Asia and one man tells the story I have heard before of his journey on a private railroad car (provided by a famous judge) to the great Hindu sites and palaces in India. I sit silently. I have no trips planned. Someone is going to Istanbul in the fall. Someone else tells the story of a summer in Tuscany twenty-five years ago. I have heard this story before. I do not want to travel without H. I do not want to go out in the world alone at least not yet. My lack of a traveling companion keeps me homebound, boringly homebound.

  Of course we went places. Best of all we went fishing in Alaska for fifty-pound salmon. H. would stare at the water willing the fish to take his lure. I would admire the puffins passing by. I shivered in the cold spray but the waiting was rewarded, the waiting itself on the gray sea, with the distant mountains, with the bear at the shoreline, with the dive of the dolphins at the boat’s side, was a memory I treasured. I also have a small stone with a fossil embedded in its center, it’s of a tiny fish, clearly a fish, now stained orange. The stone sits by my computer. I don’t want to talk about my past trips. I suspect that I have washed ashore and will so remain.

  This is not necessary. I could find a friend to travel with me. I could go alone. But I can’t, not yet. This conversation about flights and exotic places—one couple has been to Bangladesh and another has met with the chief justice of South Africa—lasts and lasts, through the first course, into the second. I could change the subject but I don’t have the will. Also I am not sure it is fair of me to shift the subject when everyone else is enjoying the conversation. I am silent, which is rare. Then as I push the food about my plate, appetite gone, it comes to me, perhaps I don’t belong at this dinner anymore. Perhaps the coupled life of everyone else shuts me out in a way that I had not anticipated. This does not mean that I must lose my friends. It means that I need new friends who are not coupled, who have no trips planned. I see an advertisement on television for a cruise on a large white boat, a hotel with many stories that floats across a brilliant blue sea. I see an orchestra, waiters bearing champagne on silver trays. A couple dances in the moonlight on the deck. She wears a pink chiffon dress and a wedding ring. If there are sharks swimming in that sea they are not caught in the camera lens. Where do widows go to pass the time? If only there were a camp for us like the camps for the overweight kids advertised in the back of the New York Times Magazine. I could start a camp, cabins in the woods of Maine for singles over a certain age.

  V. calls again. He has waited a few weeks. I almost forgot him. He tells me he has been busy writing papers for his courses at his local university. We agree to meet on the next Saturday and go to the Metropolitan Museum after lunch. This is my favorite kind of Saturday. I think about the Universalist Church. I prefer a fiercer kind of religion if one is going to have a religion at all. I like a thundering Jehovah and can even understand a bleeding Christ, but a church that is nice and understanding and modern seems like a hospital lobby to me, an anteroom to the real story. At lunch he tells me about his family. He grew up on a poor farm in Nebraska. His mother had only a wood-burning stove until he was fourteen. He worked on the farm every day before he went to school. He went on scholarship to a liberal arts college in California and from there to graduate school to become a professor of history but at the time positions in academia were scarce and so he went into business instead. I think of him on the farm. This is the farm of my childhood imagination where Indians circled and good men and women worked with their hands to make a living from the earth while fighting off drought and locusts and the foreclosing bank and the storms that came each year. In my urban mind this farm was America, a real America. I could love a man who came from such a place, maybe. H. came from Brooklyn and his parents were immigrants who worked in a cigar factory and spoke Yiddish and had escaped the czar’s edicts. I understood that. I knew that world. V.’s farm was a mystery, an alien mystery. This was becoming interesting. He asks me if I like hiking. I do but have not done a lot of formal walking around in the woods, not since my camp days. V. goes on group hikes up the mountains of New Hampshire. He has a business appointment and has to cancel our afternoon at the museum. We stand outside the restaurant where we had lunch and a cold wind blows about my ears and my nose is turning red. He kisses me and holds me close. The hug seems to be a promise of future meetings. But perhaps it is a good-bye hug. Could I love this man? I could try, I decide.

  On the other hand why should I try? Trying is not the way to loving I’m sure. Also I think that we are too different, come from such unlike worlds, that I would lose myself along the way. But if I am a real person with a memory and a history of my own I can’t get lost or can I?

  Then there is K., who lives in my apartment building. For the last years I have seen him walking up and down the street carrying groceries, wearing shorts in the coldest of weather. He is a tall man with a wide chest, two sons each well over six foot five. He has a sad beat-up Irish face. He has always looked at me kindly, offered to carry my packages, once he put an umbrella up over my head. He is never seen in a suit and a tie. He is a widower. His wife has been gone about five years. He wanders, still boyish, an old athlete, up and down. In the afternoon he goes to the park to jump rope to keep in condition. He stops me on the street. The building gossip has told him that H. has died. “How are you?” he asks. I shrug. His eyes fill with tears. “It’s the loneliness,” he says, “the loneliness.” “You could,” I say, “go to dinner with me one evening.” “I could,” he says. A few days later there is a message on my machine from him. “Go down,” he says, “to the park and you will see on the left of the path the snowdrops my wife Linda planted there. She brought them back from my grandmother’s house and they are blooming.” It’s March. I did not know that flowers bloomed in the cold winds off the drive
. The next morning I go and look. There they are, white petals, shining in the thin grass, their stems thrusting up from the cold, dark ground. “I saw the flowers,” I say to his machine. “They are beautiful.” I thought he might call. He doesn’t.

  Today there is a fog out my window. The Empire State Building has disappeared. The mist hangs over the rooftops and the water towers. I see the pipes reaching upwards, green and black on the tops of nearby brownstones. The terraces below hold summer chairs, a wilted plant or two, a rain-soaked barbeque. The traffic lights at the end of the block float and shimmer. The gargoyles on the building down the avenue are shrouded as an occasional wing or fang appears above the stone arches. Yesterday I went to Brooklyn to see my daughters and their children. I am fortunate to have their affection. I am fortunate to be welcome always in their homes. I am thankful for their company. I am also worried about this delicate matter of how much a presence I should be in their lives. How dependent on them could or should I become? In other cultures the old mother moves in with her daughter, helps with the care of the children, does the cooking. It is not unreasonable for the old to depend on the young, to be in their households as the young were once protected by their parents. And yet the idea appalls. Perhaps if I were in an Orthodox Jewish family, or an Old World Italian family, or a Navajo Indian family, I would have none of this unease but as it is I think I should be soon ready to pull away a little further, to call and be called less often, to hear fewer details of their days. I should be fading not entirely but somewhat from their view.

  We gather at one daughter’s house, a small rented carriage house behind a brownstone on a tree-lined street. You enter through a narrow gate and walk down a path between buildings barely wide enough for an adult to pass. The house has a small garden but now it is winter and the ground is cracked and an abandoned doll is lying in the dirt. The living-room floor is covered with the two-year-old’s drum, a rag doll, a dress-up box from which tulle and taffeta burst and velvet hats and beads fall. The little girls will pull on satin dresses, bonnets, aprons, lace capes.

  They will turn into princesses and mermaids. Why are they not warriors or pirates or space explorers? Diana of the hunt has been dropped from the pantheon of goddesses. What happened to the breaking of barriers that was my generation’s contribution to this future? Is it over already?

  There on the table waits our usual fare of bagels and whitefish and smoked salmon. H. always prepared brunch. He would have added apples and cider and quiche. The computer on a table by the couch is running a slide show of photographs of all of us, again and again. It is hard not to watch as the photos change. There for an instant I see H. with a large fish in his arms and a wide smile, sun reflecting off his dark glasses. My other daughter arrives with her three-year-old. She sits in front of the computer and checks her e-mail. Her back is toward me and the room. A cell phone rings. My stepdaughter and her husband and her ten-year-old arrive and use the chairs around the dining table for seats. The ten-year-old has been at a sleepover with a friend and now is pale and tired and bored and curls up in her father’s lap. The three-year-old is hit with a drumstick by the two-year-old and screams and sobs. Her mother comforts her. Her aunt distracts her. The two-year-old is sent for a time-out. The conversation between the sisters rises and falls. So many things are left unsaid. Everyone wants to be pleased to be together. The little girls now are cutting strips of Play-Doh. They are preparing a pretend dinner. I have read too many New Yorker short stories, I think. I am looking through a glass darkly. The problem is with the way I am looking, not with the glass.

  The sons-in-law do not dislike each other, I think. But there is an awkwardness anyway. Despite the fact that they are both lawyers they cannot think of anything to say to each other. “How did I get here, in this company?” I hear each of them silently whispering to the God of Family Life, who if not malevolent is certainly mischievous. I ask a legal question about a trial in the news. A conversation begins and winds down. Time passes slowly. I now want to go home. How is this possible?—after all, I am here with my family. If H. were here he would be clearing plates. He would be quiet too, expecting me to begin a conversation.

  I do not want to be a burden to those I love: not now in my healthy years nor when I may become frail or needy. I do not want to spoil an evening of theirs, to intrude on a conversation of theirs, to steal a moment from the prime of their days. And yet now I need my daughters to call me, to anchor me, to know me. That’s all right as long as I keep the balance clear. As long as I don’t cross some invisible line and become like an unwanted growth on their family lives. They need their privacy, their secrets from me. I need to keep mine from them, or do I?

  Do I have any secrets?

  The fog has thickened. Now I can’t see to the end of the street. I am hoping that someone will call me. What do I want to talk about? Perhaps the article in the New York Times that I read hours ago and wanted to share with H. Perhaps I want to tell someone that when I came home from Brooklyn yesterday there was a letter waiting in my mailbox from H.’s ex-wife. She is not the person who sued me whom I cannot write about. She wants me to pay her the alimony for the entire month in which H. died. The letter is addressed to the executor of his estate. She won’t use my name. She wants the last drop of honey from the pot. She has in fact sued us several times over the thirty-nine years of our marriage. She hired accountants to go over our taxes, convinced that we were hiding money from her. Nothing has ever been found. Nothing had ever been hidden. She had notified the IRS at least five years running that we were cheating. Each year for five years running the IRS audited and found nothing. We weren’t cheating. Now I rage. I think I won’t pay her this last small amount. I think I will make her take me to small-claims court. I am spoiling for a fight. I sit at my computer and write her a letter. I tell her she is a parasite and has lived her life as a parasite. I offer to find her a social worker who can put her in touch with an organization that can aid the elderly in distress. I want to humiliate her although I realize that what might humiliate me would likely not faze her at all. Money is for her an absolute so fine that she will fight for the smallest amount, scratch out my eyes for several dollars, feel victorious when she receives it. And then again perhaps now she really needs it. I watch the mist swirl by. I feel guilty. I could find some kindness in my heart and send her the check.

  Psychoanalysts (H.) always distinguish between thought and action. It is human to have wild and nasty thoughts, to wish one’s enemy dead or worse. In the privacy of the mind ethics can be thrown to the wind, kindness is unnecessary, savagery permissible, blood flows freely. In the actual world of course better behavior is required, not just to avoid jail, but to soothe the conscience, and preserve decency: to be able to look at oneself in the mirror.

  I decide not to send the letter. I will pay her, at least I will pay her a prorated amount based on the last fourteen days of H.’s life, the fourteen days he lived in December for which he now owes her posthumous alimony. Truth is that this cloistered, bitter, eighty-five-year-old sparrow-sized lady who has spent her life on a sparrow ledge, eating sparrow food, her twig-like legs and arms moving to protect against a danger always expected but never arrived, cannot hurt me in any significant way. It is the absence of H. that brings the unrelenting storm to my shores.

  I CAN’T SEE THE MOON OUT MY WINDOW. THERE IS A FAINT golden haze up in the dark sky. It has no shape or form. It is there although I can’t see it. I hear a flock of helicopters approaching. They are patrolling the city, up one side and down the other. Their lights blurred, their bug shapes indistinct, their noise coming closer, and with it some threat, invasion of terrorists, plague, fire. I sit at my window and watch the helicopters until they disappear behind the backs of the apartment buildings a few blocks away.

  V. takes another month before he calls. We agree to meet for lunch when he is in town next. He calls; we arrange a lunch. On the morning of the lunch I wash my hair and put on my new red sweater. I am attempt
ing to close the latch on my bracelet when the phone rings. He has a meeting at his church. He isn’t coming into town. He says he will call me. He doesn’t call. Of course he is right. We are not meant for each other. My willing suspension of disbelief was nine-tenths wish and one-tenth amazement at the situation in which I find myself.

  Do I want to meet another man? I wake with the question on my divided mind. It has been three months since I told M. to go away. He would have gone eventually by himself. He was somewhat gone even when he was here. But I have met no one else. I have heard of widows who went on trips and found a new love abroad. I have heard of widows who moved into new towns and found a man while waiting to buy stamps at the post office. I know of men and women in assisted-living arrangements who fall in love over the bingo games or at the four o’clock movie. I am too young and healthy for an assisted-living arrangement. Also I wonder if my desire for a new love is not a bluff, a way of getting through without admitting to myself that I cannot imagine a new attachment. I am pinned like a butterfly in this sterility: drying out.

  I see the Tom Stoppard play Voyage. I go with dear friends. The play is about the hopeful and perhaps ridiculous politics and philosophy of young Russian men in the middle of the nineteenth century, while Russia was still a monstrous feudal world with most of the population held in serfdom, a real slavery. The scenery moves, waves of water seem to come forward and slide backwards. A man sails off and we see him recede in depth. Beds rise from the floor, a ginger cat who represents the death to come, the grim uncaring mockery of human aspirations, dances across the stage. I remember when I wanted to change the world. When we thought that Negro men and women would be our friends and our children raised in a world of racial equality. I remember when I thought that the winds of social change would blow forever, bringing education and health to all. I wanted to be a nurse in Appalachia so that I might make sure that milk was available to small children and shoes were worn on feet. The characters on stage end up exiled, or dead of TB. The world that followed them was worse than the world they wanted to change. I am so old now that I am afraid of change. Something more horrible than all that I know may wait in the shadows. Is this depression? Is this realism? Is this simply the result of having lived through two-thirds of the last century? Is this why old people become conservative? You begin to fear that if you remove one rotting brick the entire edifice may fall down on your head.