“Okay,” Arlo said, “give them to me.”
His father unclenched his fingers and opened his mouth.
One by one, Arlo dropped the pills into his father’s mouth, giving him some milk between each pill. “Talk to me, Dad.”
Arlo’s father was silent.
“Come on, Dad! Talk to me!” Arlo’s gaze fell on The New York Review of Books, and a memory came to him from years ago: standing in the shadows at a dinner party, unnoticed among the guests. Someone was making fun of The New York Review of Books, calling it The New York Review of Each Other’s Books, and Arlo’s father just smiled, as impervious to insult as Arlo was pervious to it. Because Arlo’s father had written for The New York Review of Books and he’d had his books reviewed by them. He could afford to be impervious: he was a member of the club.
Arlo bent over to tie his shoelaces, and his father spoke for the first time. “Bunny ears.”
“Dad?” When Arlo was five, his father had taught him how to tie his shoelaces. Most people tied their shoelaces with only one loop, but it was easier for a five-year-old to use two loops. And the loops did look like bunny ears. Even then, it had been incongruous to hear those words coming from his father’s mouth, though no more incongruous than to hear them coming from his own mouth, because Arlo Zackheim, thirty-four years old, worth millions of dollars, continued to tie his shoelaces with two loops, and every time he did so he still heard the words bunny ears.
He thought of his father’s shirt, which he’d slept with as a boy. His security blanket, his mother had called it, on those cold nights when he lived with her, his father countless states away, a voice on a telephone, a line gone dead. A white Oxford shirt, but now it was shredded from all the nights he’d slept with it. And a wallet-sized photo of his parents together, his father resting his elbow on his mother’s head. Arlo secreted that photo in his dresser next to his list of vocabulary words. He would raise that shirt to his nose, and he would see that photo of his happy parents, and it would, for a time, make him happy, too. “Should I put on some music for you, Dad?”
Arlo’s father was quiet, so Arlo turned on the Victrola, and the sounds of Chopin came through the room.
His father was trying to speak.
“What is it, Dad?”
“Play.” His father was pointing at the closet, and all at once, Arlo understood. His father wanted him to play the ukulele.
The problem was, Arlo’s ukulele wasn’t in the closet. The only instrument in the closet was Sarah’s violin.
So Arlo took the violin, and acting as if it were a ukulele, he plucked away at the strings. He played “Yankee Doodle Dandy” for his father.
This was what he would remember: The smell of Mennen antiperspirant, the empty cans of Fresca piled outside the back door. The all-caps emails. The closetful of neckties hanging from their hooks like tongues. The sound of his father’s voice when he picked up the phone, the “HEL-lo!” as if projected into a bullhorn—his auburn-haired father, his face paisleyed with freckles, who continued to call the stereo the Victrola, the TV the boob tube. There were people to see, stairs to walk, and he took those stairs as if he were on a reconnaissance mission: two at a time, three at a time, sometimes even four.
Arlo could hear Pru walking down the hall, coming to rescue him. But he didn’t want to be rescued; he wanted another minute alone with his father. He allowed himself a moment’s regret, longing for a life that was no longer his—that had never been his, really—those school breaks and summers, that restive, fitful, unfortunate two years when he’d tried to make a go of it under his father’s roof, but it hadn’t worked out, he hadn’t been able to make a go of it.
He looked across the table. This was the last time he would see his father. He would never see his father again.
Then the footsteps were upon him: his stepmother, backlit, had entered the room. “You can stay longer if you want.”
But Arlo was already standing up to go, preparing, as always, to make his getaway.
43
It was March in Columbus, and out the window of Pru’s childhood bedroom the pallets of snow were stacked to the ground. Pru had flown out with Spence for her mother’s eighty-fifth birthday. Sarah had come, too. Even Hank had flown in. How strange, Pru thought, that Hank was her brother. He was six years older than she was, and he’d moved to Hong Kong when she was still in college. Years ago, when he’d worked at the World Bank, she’d said, “That’s all we need, a bank that runs the world,” and Hank said, “Do you even know what the World Bank does?” The fact was, she didn’t. “Opinions, opinions,” Hank liked to say; he considered Pru a limousine liberal. Though Hank was the one who was taken to work by limousine and picked up by limousine again at night. Pru recalled playing Twister with Hank, six years old and he was twelve, how for two hours she’d contorted herself until, exhausted and exasperated, she’d given up.
“Tell me about Spence,” Hank said now.
What was there to tell him? Spence sat before them, on display.
“I knew it was bad…”
“But not this bad?”
Hank was quiet. “Is there anything I can do?”
Pru touched his wrist. “Thank you, Hank.” She took it for what it was, an offer, not insincere, coming from someone far away from her.
In the dining room, Pru’s mother laid out pastrami sandwiches. She’d gotten a banh mi tofu sandwich for Sarah, who ate it dutifully, though she didn’t like tofu. Her grandmother wasn’t alone in thinking that if you were a vegetarian you had to like tofu, as if it were an obligation you’d incurred.
Spence, for his part, was eating broccoli. All his life, he’d hated broccoli, but the disease had dulled his taste buds along with everything else. The senior George Bush didn’t like broccoli either; it was the one thing he and Spence agreed on. When Bush became president and broccoli was banned on Air Force One, when broccoli sales plummeted across the nation, Spence forced himself to eat broccoli. In the name of his opposition to George Bush, to the appointment of Clarence Thomas and the invasion of Panama, to the pardoning of Robert McFarlane and Elliott Abrams, Spence ate a vegetable that, under other circumstances, would have made him throw up, just as George Bush had thrown up, sitting beside the Japanese prime minister. Even after he left office, that was what George Bush was remembered for: not for invading Panama or appointing Clarence Thomas or pardoning Robert McFarlane and Elliott Abrams, not for Saddam Hussein and the first Gulf War, but for throwing up next to the Japanese prime minister, which, if you asked Spence, was exactly the problem with this country.
“It’s good for you,” Pru said, cutting up his broccoli, hearing how foolish she sounded, telling a dying man to eat his vegetables.
* * *
—
The next day, Pru and Sarah went to the cemetery, to pay their respects to Pru’s father. Pru had hoped Hank would come, too, but he begged off.
“Hank doesn’t like death,” Pru said.
“Not many people do.” You discovered that as a doctor if you didn’t know it already.
They walked among the tombstones, and after a few minutes they found Pru’s father’s grave.
seymour steiner
june 4, 1926—september 19, 1979
“He was only fifty-three,” Sarah said. She’d known this, of course, but it had a starker cast spelled out this way. Her grandfather had died before she was born. In the photos in her grandmother’s living room, he bore a mystical air, everything dark: his eyes, his fedora, the beginnings of a black beard. Even in stories he remained vaguely adumbrated: elusive, apart. Apparently, he’d been that way in life too—a man of few words, hardworking, not unkind, but it had been difficult even for his own children to get to know him. “It’s strange that he was related to me.”
“It’s funny,” Pru said, “because in my mind you two are connected.” She recall
ed a yahrtzeit from years ago, getting up early to say Kaddish, holding Sarah in a sling.
“Why do Jews put pebbles on gravestones?”
The truth was, she’d forgotten. She had become a Jewish ignoramus.
“At least you once knew something,” Sarah said. “You had a foundation.”
“You did, too. You went to Hebrew school.”
Sarah laughed. Sandy Koufax and Albert Einstein, famous Jews I call my own: that was what Hebrew school had been. She wished her parents had sent her to Jewish day school; she would have liked to reject what her mother had rejected—to make a choice—but as it was, she wasn’t in a position to reject anything. And she had spiritual leanings, a craving for something bigger than herself, and she didn’t know what to do with it. A friend at Reed had offered to take her to church, but she didn’t want to go to church. She wasn’t a believer, but the God she didn’t believe in was the Jewish God, and the house of worship she didn’t pray in was a synagogue, and the person who wasn’t her spiritual guide was a rabbi. For a time, she thought of going back to synagogue, but the only synagogue she liked was her synagogue in New York, and she’d stopped going after her Bat Mitzvah. There was a Greater Portland Hillel, which served Portland State, Lewis & Clark, University of Portland, and Reed, but it took four colleges to make one Hillel, and what she’d liked about her synagogue was being part of a large group. On Friday nights at B’nai Jeshurun she’d been one of six hundred, and she feared that at Hillel she’d be one of six, and she didn’t want to be a trailblazer, especially when she didn’t know what trail she would blaze. “What about Dad? Are we going to bury him here?”
Her mother gave a start.
“He is going to die, Mom.”
“I know.” Now that his death was getting closer, Pru spoke about it more and more. But she half believed that talking about it inoculated her, as if treating it as inevitable might make it never come. Now Sarah was mentioning burial—the practicalities—and what had been abstract became tangible once more.
“I thought you might have a family plot.”
They did have a family plot, but it was in one of the big Jewish cemeteries across the George Washington Bridge. It would be better to bury Spence close to home so the people who loved him could come visit.
“Will you say Kaddish for him?” Sarah said.
“Of course.” If she’d said Kaddish for her father, she’d certainly say it for Spence. Though it perplexed her—angered her, even—that you said Kaddish for a parent for eleven months but only thirty days for a spouse. “What about you, darling?”
“It’s hard to imagine him wanting me to say Kaddish.” The world’s greatest atheist, Sarah thought: he credited the Torah for inspiring Michelangelo and Rembrandt, but otherwise he thought it was a waste. And she, an atheist herself: it would seem doubly duplicitous. Spend my yahrtzeit in the museum of science. That was what her father would have said.
“It’s funny,” Pru said, “because the last few months Ginny was with us, she started to take Dad to church.” She thought of those quiet Sundays when she got a few hours to herself, Spence in his jacket and loosely knotted tie, coming home in the afternoon with the smell of incense on his clothes, humming some vaguely recalled hymnal.
She ran a cloth over her father’s tombstone. “I wish I’d had someone to share Grandpa’s death with.”
“You had Grandma.”
“I meant a sibling.”
“What about Hank?”
She shrugged. Hank lived far away, and they’d never been close. “Sometimes I wish I had more siblings.” A bird landed on the tombstone. “What about you?”
“Do I wish I had more siblings?” Often enough, she’d wished she had less. “Now that you mention it, why didn’t you and Dad have more kids?”
“We thought about it,” Pru said. Or, rather, she’d thought about it, but Spence hadn’t wanted another child. They already had Sarah, and their apartment wasn’t big enough for someone else, with Arlo coming and going. And it was easy to want something when the other person didn’t want it back. She’d told Spence they should give Sarah a sibling, but she was simply saying what she was supposed to say—everyone believed children were better off with siblings—mimicking other people’s words without making them her own.
And then she got pregnant by accident.
“Jesus, Mom. When?”
“You must have been three or four.” She’d miscarried at eleven weeks. She was ravaged at first, but soon she realized she didn’t want another child. She was happy with Sarah and with Arlo’s punctuated visits, happy with the life they had.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Miscarriages are a dime a dozen. Almost a quarter of pregnancies end in them.” She rested her hand on her father’s tombstone. “What about you?” she said. “Where are you going to be buried?”
“Mom, I’m thirty-one years old! I don’t even know where I’m going to live, much less where I’m going to die.”
“Where are you going to live?”
“In L.A. for now.”
“And after that?”
“My boyfriend’s from L.A., so we’ll have to see.”
“Your what?”
“I know.”
“When did this happen?”
“Last fall.”
“And you weren’t going to tell me?”
“You waited almost thirty years to tell me you had a miscarriage. I only waited a few months.”
“Are you going to marry him?”
“Mom, come on.”
Why? Pru thought. She’d gotten married to Spence after only nine months. “What else haven’t you told me?”
“I finally got my driver’s license.” She’d already been stopped twice for speeding. She drove like a teenager. It was as if she had to pass through some pupal stage before she became an adult.
“Come back to New York,” Pru said. “You don’t need to drive there. And the city’s a great place to raise kids. You just put them on the subway and off they go.”
“They aren’t even born yet and you’re already putting them on the subway?”
“I’m just saying.”
And Sarah was just saying, too. “Slow down, Mom, slow down.”
“If you don’t come back, I might have to move to California myself.”
It was hard for Sarah to imagine that. But then it had been hard for her to imagine moving to California herself, and she’d gone ahead and done it.
Pru said, “The world is filled with people whose grandchildren live across the world.”
“L.A.’s not across the world.”
“Whatever else, it doesn’t have a subway.” There would be other consolations for her grandchildren, but right now she couldn’t think of any. “I’ll fly out to baby-sit,” she said.
“There’s no one to baby-sit, Mom.”
“Plan, plan.” That had always been her way. She cleaned off her father’s tombstone one last time. Then she took Sarah’s hand and they headed to the car.
44
The memorial was held at Columbia, in the same auditorium where Spence gave his lectures—filled to the bleachers, everyone used to say, though Spence, ever modest, downplayed those accounts. He was a humanist, besides, and he didn’t believe in numbers. Pru recalled their disagreements over how many people to invite to their wedding. “Why would I want people at my wedding?” he said. “They can come to my memorial if they insist.”
And, it turned out, they had.
Back in Ohio, Spence had turned her mother’s birthday celebration into a wake. Because when Pru and Sarah returned from the cemetery, they found him in bed, struggling to breathe.
“Walking pneumonia,” the doctor said, and Pru should have known to be suspicious, seeing as he couldn’t walk.
The next day he was worse and he
was admitted to the hospital. The day after that the doctor said, “I think we’re nearing the end.”
Pru didn’t want him to die in the hospital, but she refused to let him die in her mother’s home, in the house she’d grown up in, so she told the doctor, “Just make sure he’s not in pain.”
He’d already stopped eating; soon he stopped drinking too. He allowed the nurse to insert a wet washcloth between his lips, but before long he’d locked his jaw. He was still Spence: still stubborn. Pru asked everyone to leave. She was alone with Spence, as she’d been at the beginning. She got into the hospital bed and lay there holding him, and she just lay there and lay there and she held him and she lay there.
She chartered a plane to fly the body home. It was just the two of them and the pilot on their own private jet, which would have been enough to kill Spence if he hadn’t been dead already. “Finally, darling, we get to fly corporate.”
They went straight from Newark to the cemetery, to the family plot across the G.W. Bridge. Afterward, she covered the mirrors and did the ceremonial ripping of the shirt, and she sat on a low stool with Sarah and Arlo in their private rendition of shiva.
Complications of Alzheimer’s. That was what the obituary said. How she hated that term. There were no complications. It wasn’t complicated at all.
“Do you want his wedding ring?” the undertaker had asked.
How anomalous that Spence had worn that ring—Spence, who took a dim view of jewelry on men and didn’t like it much on women either. In junior high school, when Sarah pierced her ears, he said, “Why put holes in your body just to dangle something from them?” But for Pru he would wear jewelry.
Now, at the memorial, she wore his ring around her neck.
The speeches were laudatory and interminable, and she remembered none of them. Afterward she stepped outside. It was June and summer school had started; the students were frescoed across the grass. As she looked up, she saw Ginny standing across from her, in her blue dress and pillbox hat.
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