Still Life with Bread Crumbs

by Anna Quindlen

  When her mother had first arrived Rebecca had pushed her chair to the casket, and she had stared at it with a glare so ferocious that Rebecca was instantly in mind of the bald eagle whose picture she had taken several months before. “Those eyes are frightening,” she had said and Jim Bates shook his head and replied, “Everybody says that. I don’t think he looks scary. I think he looks like he sees everything.”

  A woman in a dark suit hurried in, breathless. “Sorry,” she mouthed, sitting down. She lived in the apartment across the hall from Rebecca’s. Ben identified a man in a parka as the unit producer of the movie Ben had just finished. “Quite a crowd,” Ben said. Such were the rites for those who had outlived their own lives: a smattering of mourners tangentially related to the dearly beloved, the sorts of people who wouldn’t feel the need to make the drive to the cemetery.

  “The rabbi would like to start in a few minutes,” said the funeral director quietly, and Rebecca nodded.

  She knew exactly the kind of remarks the rabbi would make, and as she sat beside Ben in the first row, her mother on her other side in the wheelchair, he made them: Oscar Winter was a good man. (True.) He had been a very successful businessman. (No. Not even dimly.) But the most important thing in the world to him was his family. (True.) He rejoiced in the love of his wife, Beatrice, to whom he had been married for more than sixty years. (The number of years was correct. Rebecca’s mother did not even raise her head at the sound of her own name. Rebecca looked at her mother’s hands. She was playing the Moonlight Sonata. It was one of the only pieces Rebecca herself knew how to play and she recognized the fingering immediately. She had always thought of it as a funeral piece and she wondered whether her mother had, too. “That piece is for amateurs,” Bebe Winter had always said when someone requested it.)

  Only Rebecca and Ben rode in the black limousine to Brooklyn for the burial. Sonya had refused, sliding into the passenger seat of a compact car driven by a nephew. The nursing home had provided an ambulette for her mother and the aide, and Rebecca was ashamed that her first thought was that she would have to pay extra for that. Ben was wearing black jeans with a black sport coat. She didn’t mind, but she could imagine what her mother would have said had she been in her right mind. Even a very fine sport coat, navy cashmere, with very fine gray wool slacks—slacks, she called them, not pants—Bebe considered a kind of shoddy substitute for a suit.

  “He was a good dude,” said Ben, folding his hand over hers.

  “He was that.”

  “Benjie! Take a look! The Bridge on the River Kwai! Greatest movie ever made! Not like that moony stuff you go to see!”

  Rebecca smiled. “You do an excellent imitation of your grandfather. He would be proud.”

  “I’m gonna try it on Nana and see if she reacts.”

  “Don’t wake her, or interrupt her if she’s playing.”

  They drove past a series of bodegas and body shops. She felt a little lost. The driver must be taking a back way. Rebecca could see the hearse in front of them.

  “Is Leonard Bernstein really buried there, or did he just tell her that to keep her happy?” Ben said.

  “He is. And Jean-Michel Basquiat.”

  “Wow. That’s random. Is there room for you?”

  “I have no idea. Nor do I have any interest.”

  “Still life with urn?”

  “Have I told you that you are a terrible smart aleck?”

  “Do you know that now they can press your ashes into fireworks and set you off?”

  Rebecca raised an eyebrow.

  “Too soon?” said Ben, and Rebecca laughed.

  The paths wound round and round the lawns and monuments, beautiful lawns, beautiful monuments. Rebecca had taken photographs here once, but somehow they had never come to life. “Do you know a young agent who would like to represent an old photographer?” she asked Ben, staring out the window.

  “Are you serious?”

  She nodded. “I fired TG. Or maybe she fired me. I took some pictures of my dog and let Sarah hang them in her coffee shop and TG was offended. She kept saying ‘dog pictures.’ ”

  “I bet they’re great dog pictures.”

  “They’re good dog pictures. It’s a good dog. I’m certain you’ll like him. But now I need an agent. I’d prefer someone younger. And nicer.”

  “Mom, this is a complete no-brainer. You’re Rebecca Winter.”

  “I was Rebecca Winter,” and her voice caught and trembled, not because of money, or dog pictures, or TG, or her career, or the lasagna that had never ever arrived, but because she remembered how her father would sometimes introduce her: “My daughter, Rebecca Winter. And yes indeedy, she’s that Rebecca Winter.”

  The car stopped and Ben stepped out and gave her his hand and said, “You will always be Rebecca Winter,” and she started to cry.

  She wiped her eyes as she saw the pile of ocher soil only a few steps from the road, a garish pocket square of artificial grass beside it. She turned as the funeral director’s men, in their shiny dark suits and black topcoats, carried the wooden box to the metal stand atop the not-very-well-disguised opening in the earth.

  Ben had his arm around her and it was not until she was standing right at the graveside that she saw Sarah and Tad standing on the other side. Sarah was wearing a gray coat with a fake fur collar that was far too snug, and Rebecca wondered if she had borrowed it for the occasion. The rabbi spoke again, vaguely. He read from the Book of Wisdom and then handed Rebecca a shovel. She knew she was supposed to shovel in just a bit, just for show, but she shoveled and shoveled until her arms began to burn and Ben came behind her and whispered, “Hey, lady, give a guy a chance.” Ben shoveled for a long time until he handed the shovel to Sonya, who shook her head and handed it to Tad. He was a good shoveler. Then Ben put the shovel into Bebe Winter’s hands and pretended that she had helped him put a shovelful of earth into the grave.

  “Benjamin Symington, the grandson of Oscar Winter, will recite the burial Kaddish,” the rabbi said, and Rebecca listened as her son, who had not been bar mitzvahed, whom she had had to fight to have circumcised—“barbaric,” Peter said, but for some reason she would not let it go, it was one of the few things on which she had stood her ground—recited Kaddish in Hebrew. She realized he must have learned it some time before, to know it so soon after his grandfather’s death. All those years of being brought up in a Jewish household that never acknowledged being Jewish, and she could remember only one thing about Kaddish, that it included “lovingkindness” as a single word. And that fact she had learned in a world religions class at Holyoke.

  (“Pop Pop, teach me Kaddish,” Ben said one evening after the Final Jeopardy! question.

  And he did. “Now you can say Kaddish for me when I’m gone,” Oscar Winter said. “You want ice cream? Ben and Jerry’s! The good stuff!”)

  When Ben was done he bowed his head, and two things happened at the same instant: Tad began to sing and Rebecca’s mother began to—what? Keen? Wail? Or was that singing, too, of a sort, the counterpoint to Tad, who was singing a Kaddish himself? Whatever it was, it rose in the air like smoke and lingered there after the last notes had been sung. It sounded exactly like sorrow.

  “We’re going to take her back if it’s okay with you all,” said the aide. “You can’t tell how much of this she’s getting, you know? It can be upsetting.” But Bebe Winter’s head had fallen forward again and her eyes were closed, as though she had said what she had come to say and fallen immediately into a deep sleep. “We’re taking you home, Mrs. Winter,” the aide said, very loudly, pointing to the ambulette, red and white against the greens and grays of the cemetery.

  “That was a very odd service,” the man who had lived in their old building said to his wife as they shuffled to their car.

  “My most heartfelt apologies for being late,” said Tad.

  “Good job, man. You can really sing,” Ben said to Tad, shaking his hand.

  “Tad, that was marvelous. Really mar
velous. I can’t thank you enough. My father would have appreciated it. I would not have guessed that you knew Kaddish.”

  “I have studied sacred music on a freelance basis,” Tad said.

  “You can really sing,” Ben repeated.

  Tad bowed from the waist. Sarah grabbed Rebecca’s hands in hers and began to talk in a half whisper. “Really, we thought we would have plenty of time but there was an accident on the freeway, and then it turned out someone doesn’t know New York as well as he says he does.”

  “Our directions were not good,” said Tad.

  “I’m surprised to see both of you,” Rebecca said. “I’m very touched. Extremely touched. You didn’t have to come all this way.”

  “What do you mean? Of course we came. Tad saw it somewhere online and I said, we have to go to the wake, and then he had to explain to me, which was really confusing, I have to admit—you’re Jewish?”

  “Nominally.”

  “It’s just—Winter? Is that a Jewish name?”

  “Winter is the sort of Jewish name a certain kind of family named Weiner adopts.”

  “Deft, Mom,” muttered Ben.

  “And your last name is Simon?” Sarah asked Ben. “Is that Jewish, too?”

  And suddenly it was all too much for Rebecca, and she began to laugh, a barking laugh that made the men from the funeral chapel turn in surprise. She put a hand to her mouth.

  “There’s a thin line between grief and losing it,” Sarah whispered to Ben. She put a hand on Rebecca’s and took her aside. “I’m sure Jim would have come with us if he’d known,” she said. “But I just couldn’t stand to tell him. I knew you’d understand. The poor guy’s been through so much and, I thought, if I tell him about Rebecca’s dad it will just bring it all back and he just doesn’t need that right now, sad as he is. I mean, you can tell, he’s hurting with everything that happened. He’s a strong guy, he’ll pull out of it, right? But it’s gonna take time, and I thought, I just won’t say anything and he can give you condolences in his own way, at home. Right?”

  It was as though Rebecca were at one of those terrible Manhattan cocktail parties, at which people pretended to understand conversations about events they weren’t aware of and people they didn’t know. She knew that she should nod, but instead she said what no one ever said at those parties: “Sarah, I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.”

  “About his sister, Polly. You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “About his sister dying, how hard that’s been for him, how it’s weighed on him.”

  “She died? His sister, Polly? She died?”

  “You didn’t know? I thought we talked about it that day I came out to your house. We did, didn’t we? I mean, I thought you were upset about it, the way you were acting, so we didn’t really get into it, if you know what I mean. You really didn’t know? Tad, Rebecca didn’t know about Polly Bates!”

  “Very tragic,” Tad said.

  “How did she die?”

  “No one knows precisely,” Tad said. “She’d been quite ill for some time.”

  “She died?” said Rebecca. “Oh, no, I had no idea. When did she die?”

  “Right after that big storm,” Sarah said. “Actually, I think he found her the day after that big storm. People thought maybe that’s why there was no service, you know, too hard to get around and all that. Or maybe the ground was too hard, you know? I hate to think about stuff like that, but maybe that was it.”

  “Oh, no,” said Rebecca.

  “You okay, Mom?” Ben said.

  “It’s just broken his heart,” Sarah said.

  “Oh, no,” said Rebecca, as Ben put his arm around her, and as they walked away one of the men at the grave site nodded and they began to finish filling in Oscar Winter’s grave.

  SHIVAH

  After they left the cemetery Tad took Sarah to lunch at an Italian restaurant on East Twenty-First Street at which all the waiters sang opera as they waited on tables. Tad had been taken there for dinner the night before the Rothrock competition by the assistant choral director and his wife, and he had never forgotten it. It was a very old restaurant, with very old flourishes, the kinds of flourishes that had long ago gone out of fashion: tapers that dripped colored wax down Chianti bottles, Venetian scenes in enormous rococo gold frames on the walls (although the food was Neopolitan). Tad had the same thing he had had when he was thirteen, veal saltimbocca. The first taste of the food reminded him of the last completely happy night of his life.

  “My heart belongs to New York City,” he said.

  “I don’t get it, myself,” Sarah said. “I just always feel like there’s way too much going on, you know, and for someone in my line of work it would be impossible, there’s a coffee shop on every corner. Plus, have you ever noticed, every single woman is skinny. Every single one. But you could live here if you wanted. I bet you could do three or four birthday parties every weekend.”

  “I can’t say that it hasn’t occurred to me,” Tad said. “Meeting Ms. Winter has been an inspiration. She is a true artist.”

  “Well, what about you? You say you don’t sing anymore and then you open up your mouth today and, oh my gosh, it’s so freaking beautiful, excuse my French, but it is. I couldn’t understand a word, you and Ben—Ben, right? That’s his name?—I couldn’t understand a word either of you were saying but it was so so sad. And the way you sing—wow. Just wow. Really.”

  Tad lowered his eyes. He was fond of Sarah, but he did not necessarily think she was a good judge of music. On the other hand he had been very touched by Rebecca’s words. He had a sense that she was not a woman given to overpraise.

  (At lunch with Ben, in a so-called Asian-French fusion restaurant that was, coincidentally, only a few blocks from where Tad and Sarah sat, Rebecca told him the story of Tad’s downfall at the competition. “He’s no boy soprano anymore, but the guy’s a good tenor,” Ben said.

  “I was so touched that you said Kaddish,” Rebecca said.

  “Yeah, let’s not share that moment with Dad, okay?”

  “Understood.”

  “You okay?” Ben said.

  “I really need a glass of wine.”

  “Because of what Sarah told you about that guy and his sister? That’s the guy you work with, right?”

  Rebecca nodded. “I feel terrible. I should have known.”

  “We’re New Yorkers. We mind our own business.”

  “I’m not so sure about that anymore,” Rebecca said.)

  “I’m beyond shocked that Rebecca didn’t know about Polly Bates,” Sarah said. “I thought they were such good friends. Not she and Polly, I don’t know that anyone was friends with her, she never even came in the shop, I wouldn’t know her if I fell over her. Well, you know what I mean, I wouldn’t have known her if I’d fallen over her. I meant Jim. You’d think Jim would have told Rebecca. I told you, right, that I sold all of those pictures of the dog she did. All at once, too. She gave me a whole new set and maybe I’ll sell those, too.”

  Their waiter put down two espressos and then began to sing “La donna è mobile.” Tad hummed under his breath. “I know this one,” Sarah said.

  As they left Tad picked up the restaurant’s card and put it in his jacket pocket.

  MORE SHIVAH

  Rebecca took out her gold fountain pen and opened a box of pale blue paper she had gotten at the Walmart.

  The dog lay beneath the table sighing conspicuously. He had not liked spending two days in the shed while Rebecca was in New York. It was cold, and not what he had become used to.

  Dear Jim,

  I was so very sorry to learn of your sister’s death.

  Cold. Formal. She tossed the paper into the basket beneath the table. The dog removed it and began to shred it happily with his teeth.

  Dear Jim,

  Sarah told me that your sister Polly had died unexpectedly.

  Unexpected? She had been told that his sister was sick. Perhaps she had lingered for mo
nths, likely to die at any moment, not to mention at the moment that her only brother was with Rebecca.

  She took another sheet.

  Dear Jim,

  I am writing to you

  No.

  Dear Jim,

  Please know that I

  No.

  In the end she wrote only:

  Jim,

  I’m so sorry about your sister.

  Rebecca

  Before she could find something wrong with what she had written she folded the note in half and slipped it into an envelope. “Jim Bates,” she wrote in her strong slanting handwriting, the black ink harsh against the sky blue, and then she stopped.

  She didn’t know his address. She didn’t know his address. She could conjure the small house with the yellow kitchen, the flowered paper. But she didn’t know the street name, the house number.

  And so the note sat there on the table, beneath the rounded rock, as each day she determined to get the address, from Sarah, from Tad, from someone in town. There it sat, waiting.

  A YOUNG AGENT, AN OLD PHOTOGRAPHER

  “Paige Whittington,” Ben said.

  “That can’t honestly be her name,” Rebecca said.

  “Don’t be a reverse snob,” said Ben. “She’s the best. I called Maddie, and that’s what she said. ‘She’s the best.’ ”

  “She’s the best,” said Ben’s grade school friend Maddie, who was an assistant to a very prolific painter who was prolific because his assistants did much of his actual painting from what he called templates. “She has a penchant for black-and-white, but she has a few people who work in color. She represents that guy, you know the one, who does the subway cars?”