“She died, baby, and some of it was my fault, because I didn’t pay enough attention.”
“Because you were trying to make partner?”
“No, because for a long time I ignored that she was sick because I didn’t want to see.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because it was too painful. I needed her to be well for all the plans I had for us. And after she died, I never thought I could love anyone else, not like that. I thought I was all used up. And then I met your mother, and you were born. And I realized that I was all wrong.”
“Why, Dad, why were you all wrong? Because you loved us?”
“Because I knew almost from the day you were born that I loved you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. More than I thought anyone could love anyone.”
“But what about Mom? Don’t you love her?”
“I love your mother, but in a different way.”
“What kind of way? Different than Gwendolyn?” she asked. Then, ever so quietly, she added, “Dad, are you and Mom gonna get divorced?”
That was one word she certainly understood. She knew who in her class saw a father on weekends, and who spent just holidays and summers. It was too awful to contemplate, and so he assured her of the only thing he could: “No matter what happens, I’ll never leave you, Gwen-Gwenny-Gwendolyn.” He leaned over, kissed her on the forehead, then reached over and turned out that lamp, but turning it off made no difference. The room was still illuminated by light flooding in from the hallway. And then he saw her, barefoot, in only a nightgown, standing in the doorway.
He got up and went to her. The nightgown was flesh colored, and her hair was pulled off her face, which was extremely pale. Even her lips had lost their color. She appeared to be frozen in that spot in the doorway of their daughter’s room, the place he least wanted to have a conversation. He tried to steer her out into the hallway, but she wouldn’t move.
“Crea?” he asked. She was shaking. He took off his suit jacket and put it around her shoulders, but she shook it off.
They could hear their daughter stirring in bed. Gwen had lain down and put the pillow over her head, one hand on each side, gripping it around her ears. Crea finally stepped out into the hallway and shut the door. A hand-painted plaque hung there announcing, in green curlicues bordered by a hedge of pink roses: Gwendolyn’s Room. Crea stared at it, and her eyes filled with tears. Of all the things he had done to her, this was the worst. The name of the other woman, affixed forever. She would have to say it, over and over, day in and day out. Their daughter’s name.
She looked so small and vulnerable in her thin nightgown. The rims of her eyes were red, not from crying, he suspected, but from the force of trying to hold back her tears. He started to ask her if there was anything he could do for her, anything that he could possibly say, but she cut him off, standing up straight, smoothing a strand of hair out of her eyes, and her voice became suddenly businesslike. “I suppose we can tell her tomorrow. Though she knows already, she’s known for a long time.”
“Known what?” Robert asked.
“That her parents aren’t going to live together anymore.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The end of Disston Street
Stacia Vishniak had most of her savings in government-backed securities, a money market fund, and plain old cash. But over the last few decades, and particularly since her son had gone into the business, she’d indulged here and there in the stock market. Barry had put some of her money into an index fund, and she’d had him buy her some shares of General Electric, because everyone always needed lightbulbs, and Sony, because the television she’d bought for the broadcast of the Nixon resignation was still going strong.
Stacia read the Philadelphia Inquirer, including the financial page. She watched Wall Street Week on PBS. And it did not take a genius to see that something was coming: the decline of the dollar; higher interest rates, creeping inflation, a Republican president who did not believe in regulation. And most of all, the crazed buying of the younger generations, who made expensive purchases when they had little savings and too much debt. Stacia could feel financial doom in her bones, but the appearance of the cat was what pushed her over the edge. A bad omen. The first week in October she called Barry and told him to get her out of the fund and send her the money.
Barry said she was crazy. What did she know about the market anyway? And when had she become superstitious? Who sells stock because of a cat? Was she forgetting things? Did she know what day it was?
She assured him that at seventy, she was still the soundest one in the whole family. And then she told him the story of the black cat, a story that Barry would repeat just weeks later, at the shivah that followed his mother’s funeral.
Stacia, notorious hater of air-conditioning, always looked forward to Indian summer. All through September and into October, she slept with the bedroom window open, but this provided no real explanation as to how the animal got into the house in the first place. Barry speculated that the cat had come up from the basement, clever enough to exploit the rotting wood at the base of the garage door, soft, pliable wood—for years he’d been after her to replace it, even if she never used the garage. Likely the cat squeezed underneath, through the basement, up the stairs, and through the house, finding her way to Stacia, who awoke in the middle of the night to such a feeling of heaviness on her chest that she began to panic, sure that she was having a heart attack. Then she heard the soft meow, and felt the animal’s paws shift on the light blanket. Sitting up with difficulty, she turned on the light by the bed. The cat dug her paws into the bedsheet and the woman underneath. Cursing, Stacia shoved the animal aside and, seeing that she would not leave, grasped her in the middle, marched downstairs, opened the front door, and threw the angry ball of fur out onto the cement.
She knew exactly where the thing had come from. Her neighbor, Gertrude, a childless widow, had a black cat named Nefertiti, and one of the few things that all Stacia’s neighbors could agree on was that Nefertiti was a pretentious name for a cat. Nefertiti ate expensive canned food, and had tiny stuffed-mouse toys with little bells attached to their tails, which Gert sometimes brought out on her patio in an attempt to engage the animal. But Nefertiti preferred to roam. She had been found in many houses on the block, but her attachment to Stacia would be of a more lasting nature. Night after night that fall, the cat found her way into the Vishniak house, only to be tossed out.
Stacia waited, patiently, for something to happen, and when it did, on October 19, she should have felt smug and self-satisfied, safe and secure. Her sister called, asking if she was a psychic, or a genius of finance. Stacia assured her that she had not expected anything this drastic. The fact that she had been so right was not satisfying but terrifying. Who on earth was in charge when an omen was more accurate than a hundred-year-old brokerage house filled with people who had college degrees? What about her savings? Thousands still sat there, unguarded. Lolly tried to calm her down—the banks were not closing — but Stacia, keeping the telephone to her ear, listened to the words spoken over and over again by the anchormen, commentators, and people interviewed on the street. Her sister was listening, also with the sound turned up as loud as possible, so that Stacia and Lolly heard the words in stereo, the same words that had frightened them half out of their wits as girls: crash, collapse, calamity, careless, catastrophic, costly. It was only a matter of time, Stacia insisted, before the newscaster moved up the alphabet.
“I have to go check my supplies.” She hung up and likely went to examine her basement stash of canned goods. That was the last time Lolly ever talked to her sister.
The next day, Stacia was scheduled to work the cash register for the Oxford Circle Jewish Community Center subsidized lunch for seniors, as she had done every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, from 11:00 to 2:00, for the past five years. It was a volunteer position, though it came with a free meal. She never showed. At 3:00 p.m., after repeatedly trying Stacia’s house, the directo
r of the center called Lolly.
Around the same time, Gert also became concerned—the cat always came home by midday to eat, but not this time. Gert walked the neighborhood, asking if anyone had seen Nefertiti. Finally, though she dreaded the confrontation, she went to Stacia’s house and knocked on the door. No one was home. She tried again and was about to give up when she saw Stacia’s sister approaching. Lolly used her key, and together they walked through the living and dining rooms and then the kitchen, while Gert called for the cat. Lolly went to the basement, and Gert walked upstairs. As she got to the top of the steps, she heard the familiar meowing, and there she found Nefertiti standing on Stacia’s lifeless body as if guarding the tomb of some ancient pharaoh.
NO ONE WAS ABLE to reach Barry, and Robert did not expect him, so he was shocked when, that Thursday morning, he saw his brother walk through the wide glass doors of Goldman’s Funeral Parlor on Broad Street. His hair stood out from his head in wild, graying curls, and his pants were baggy, barely held up by a thin belt. His shirt had a stain on it. If not for the added weight he’d put on in his years of plenty, he would have looked exactly the same as before he entered Prudence Brothers. Robert stood in silent disbelief as Barry introduced himself to the balding, freckled undertaker, who pronounced his words slowly, as if speaking to a class of small children. He told them to follow him into his office. Barry put his hand on Robert’s arm, pulling him back. “I don’t have any money,” he whispered, “none available, anyway.”
“Neither do I, thanks to you,” Robert replied.
“You’ve got more than I do. It’s not like you lost everything.”
“Pretty damned close.”
“Don’t talk about that now.”
“I’m leaving my job and Crea has asked me to move out.”
“Oh,” Barry said. “You got a credit card, don’t you? Put it on there. Then when the money comes through —”
“What money?”
“Ma’s money,” Barry said. “All that saving. We’ve got to inherit something.”
“You heard of something called probate? Let’s hear what the man has to say.”
“Ma hated these places. She said nothing was a bigger racket than the funeral business.”
“We can’t exactly put her on an ice float and send her out to sea,” Robert snapped, pulling Barry toward the somber man, who stood waiting for them in his paneled office. Robert and Barry took the two chairs across from him. The room smelled of pine air freshener.
“We want the cheapest one you have,” Barry said.
The undertaker looked at Robert, who was not dressed like a man who wanted a cheap coffin.
“What do you have on the low end?” Robert asked.
“Low?”
“Five or six hundred dollars?”
“I don’t have anything that cheap, not on display.”
Barry stood up to leave. Where, Robert wondered, was he going? There were only a few Jewish funeral parlors in Philadelphia, and they were all more or less the same. “We’ll have her cremated,” Barry said.
“We charge for cremation,” the man replied. “I can give you our rates. Many Jews have religious issues with it. Was your mother observant?”
“Not at all,” Barry said.
“She had her moments,” Robert corrected, as the undertaker flipped through the thick, glossy catalog in front of him. Then he pushed the book at Robert. The coffin was plastic-looking with metal trim and cost $1,200. “This is the Shalom model. It’s reasonably priced.”
“Sir, I said we have a cash flow problem here.”
“There’s a plain wooden box. Very popular with the Orthodox,” the man replied. He showed Robert what looked to be a refrigerator box made of wood, which cost $875.
“What do you charge for cremation?” Barry asked, as Robert flipped through the book himself.
“We’re not having her cremated,” Robert replied. “We’re burying her next to Pop.” The coffin was only part of the deal. They still had to pay for the cost of inscribing the blank half of their parents’ double headstone, plus what they were being charged right now, for keeping their mother here, preparing the body for burial and then transporting her to the cemetery. Goldman’s also offered prayer books and yarmulkes for the service, an announcement in the paper, and transportation to the funeral, and they could recommend a rabbi, too. The place had a list, which the undertaker called a “menu.” He slid it toward Robert, along with the catalog of coffins, and asked if they planned on purchasing custodial services—someone would trim the weeds back from the stone twice a year. The funeral home offered a discount with the cemetery.
It cost a fortune to die, and with Jews burying so fast, you were forced to make decisions at your least rational. But Robert had had so many things to deal with in the past week that his mother’s death, oddly enough, had not been such a shock, only one in a series of upheavals, all timed so badly that were he a believer, he might have equated himself with Job. Might have, had he not been aware of just how much of this he’d brought on himself. He shoved the book back at the undertaker. “There,” he said. “That one, right there.”
“That’s not actually a coffin,” the man said. “It’s a container we use in cremation.”
“Is it biodegradable?” Robert asked. “Can we bury her in it, legally?”
“Technically, yes, but this is made from pressed, recycled wood particles. Little more than a packing crate.” The undertaker stared down at his lap, looking as if he might cry for the shame of the two sons whose mother had given them so much, and who were repaying her with so little. “I think you could regret this, when the shock wears off. What of your mother’s memory?”
“She’s dead,” Barry said. “She’ll never know.”
“We’ve served the Kupferberg and Vishniak families before. What of her sister and brother and their families? We wouldn’t want them to think that these are our normal services.”
“They already know we’re special,” Barry mumbled.
“There is a kind of poetry in this.” Robert held out his credit card. “You see,” he explained, “no one loved a bargain like our mother.” And then he and Barry laughed, softly at first and then louder, until the man looked at them helplessly, taking Robert’s MasterCard and walking into the next room as the two brothers howled with laughter, tears rolling slowly down their cheeks.
THE FUNERAL WAS QUICK because they had no rabbi—she didn’t belong to a synagogue, and they would not pay a rabbi they didn’t know, did not think it necessary for a family that read Hebrew badly or not at all. Neither did they post a death notice in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent to alert any distant cousins or old friends who might want to attend or make a donation to charity. Relatives had to find their way by word of mouth.
The temperature that morning was nearly fifty degrees, but many of the people who came to the graveside were elderly and wore their winter coats. Their adult children came with them so that they might help their fragile parents exit cars and walk through the grounds. The two remaining Vishniak brothers were there. One used a walker, another a cane. Aunt Lolly leaned on Uncle Fred, one of the few tall men in the family but bent over now. Only Uncle Frank and his wife were still relatively young, though old enough to have a grown daughter. Frank walked over to the brothers and embraced them, too stricken to speak.
A woman from the Oxford Circle Jewish Community Center mumbled something about how good Stacia was at making change. Then a man in his thirties said: “She always got the children safely across the street,” then added, “and now I’m an osteopath.”
Robert thanked people for their platitudes, self-references, clichés. Yet Stacia Vishniak was the least clichéd person he’d ever known. There would never be anyone like her again.
He passed out the books supplied by the funeral parlor. Most of the men reached into their pockets and took out their own flimsy silk yarmulkes, the kind—received free at weddings or previous funerals—that never held its shape and f
ormed a tiny point on top of their heads. To Robert’s surprise, Barry still had some rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew; Robert had forgotten. Uncle Frank stood next to Barry and helped him. Barry chanted, “Yisgadal v’-yiskadash sh’mei raba, b’ alma di v’ra khir’usei…”
Robert read the English: “Magnified and sanctified be the great name of God throughout the world, which He hath created according to His will.”
“. . . v’yamlikh malkhusei b’-hayeikhon u-v’yomeikhon, uv’-hayei d’khol beis yisrael…”
“May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of Israel.”
The prayer never mentioned the word death, only the ideal world, and the kingdom of heaven that God would create after the coming of the Messiah. Only there was no ideal world, no world to come, on heaven or on earth. His mother had known this, and he knew it, too. There is only the world we make for ourselves, our own private heavens and hells.
As the service, such as it was, ended, Robert and Barry each took a shovel, scooped up some dirt from the pile next to the new grave, and threw it on the coffin. Then each put his shovel back into the dirt as the other mourners lined up to take their turns. They were supposed to hear the sound of the dirt as it hit, a reminder that death was final. But when the scoops of earth fell on the small cardboard coffin, they made almost no sound at all.
* * *
ROBERT AND BARRY HAD hardly spoken in the forty-eight hours between their trip to see the undertaker and the actual funeral. Barry had gone through stuff in the basement, eventually just throwing the junk into piles and calling the Salvation Army. Nothing his mother saved —empty paper towel rolls, chipped glasses, dented cans, broken umbrellas, ancient winter coats, and endless rags made from bedsheets and towels—seemed worth having. On the second floor, Robert went through her bedroom, collecting the financial records that she kept in her chest of drawers—he was executor of the will and would have to deal with the money, as well. Neither intended to stay at the house very long, and there was a lot to clear away. Even at meals, each man ate separately, making sandwiches from the cold brisket left in the refrigerator, eating the cookies and the kasha, knowing it was the last time they would ever taste their mother’s cooking.
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