The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  She let go of the hat and ran to Daniel in what felt like slow motion, though it was the fastest she had ever moved. She wore a diaphanous muumuu over her bathing suit whose hem she had to carry; then, with a roar of consternation, she pulled the whole thing off and left it shriveled on the ground. Underneath was a black one-piece with a skirted hem that revealed her stout and dimpled thighs. She sloshed through the shallow water before inhaling deeply and plunging into the waves. Hurry, thought Daniel, gargling salt water. Hurry, Mama. He had not called her that since he was a toddler. At last, her hands appeared beneath his armpits. She dragged him out of the water and together they collapsed in the sand. Her entire body was red, her hair slicked to her head like an aviator’s helmet. She was heaving great breaths that Daniel thought were from exertion before he realized she was sobbing.

  At dinner that evening, he told the story of the near-drowning with pomp, but inside, he glowed with renewed attachment to his family. For the rest of the vacation, he forgave Varya her most sustained sleep-babbling. He let Klara take the first shower when they returned from the beach, even though her showers took so long that Gertie once banged on the door to ask why, if she needed this much water, Klara did not bring a bar of soap into the ocean. Years later, when Simon and Klara left home—and after that, when even Varya pulled away from him—Daniel could not understand why they didn’t feel what he had: the regret of separation, and the bliss of being returned. He waited. After all, what could he say? Don’t drift too far. You’ll miss us. But as the years passed and they did not, he became wounded and despairing, then bitter.

  At two a.m., he walks downstairs to the study. He leaves the overhead light off—the bluish glow of the computer screen is light enough—and enters the address for Raj and Ruby’s website. When it loads, large red words appear on the screen.

  Experience the WONDERS OF INDIA without leaving your seat! Let RAJ AND RUBY take you on a MAGIC CARPET RIDE of otherworldly delights, from the Indian Needle Trick to the Great Rope Mystery, which famously confounded HOWARD THURSTON—the greatest AMERICAN MAGICIAN of the TWENTIETH CENTURY!

  The capitalized letters dance and blink. Below them, Raj’s and Ruby’s faces loom, bindis on their foreheads. There’s a rotating slideshow in the center of the webpage. In one image, Raj is trapped in a basket that Ruby has stabbed with two long swords. In another, Raj holds a snake as thick as Daniel’s neck.

  It’s gaudy, Daniel thinks. Exploitative. Then again, it’s Vegas: clearly, gaudy is a selling point. He’s been twice—first for a friend’s bachelor party, then for a medical conference. Both times, it struck him as a uniquely American monstrosity, everything a blown-up cartoon version of itself. Restaurants called Margaritaville and Cabo Wabo. Volcanoes spewing pink smoke. The Forum Shops, a mall built to look like ancient Rome. Who could feel, living there, like they were in the real world? At least Raj and Ruby travel: their show is based at the Mirage, but a link marked Touring & Schedule shows that they’re performing at Boston’s Mystery Lounge this weekend. In two weeks, they’ll begin a monthlong run in New York City.

  Daniel wonders where they plan to spend Thanksgiving. Raj has largely kept Ruby from the Golds, reappearing and disappearing her every couple of years like a rabbit in a hat. Daniel saw her as a passionate three-year-old, then a somber, observant child of five and nine, last as a sullen preteen. That visit ended with an explosive argument about the Jaws of Life, Klara’s signature act. Raj was teaching it to Ruby, which sickened Daniel. He could not fathom why Raj would want to re-create the image of Klara hanging from a rope via her daughter.

  “I’m keeping her memory alive,” Raj had roared. “Can you say the same?”

  They haven’t spoken since, though this isn’t just Raj’s fault. There have been plenty of times when Daniel could have reached out—certainly before that falling-out, and even after. But being in the presence of Raj and Ruby has always given Daniel a disturbing feeling of regret. When Ruby was young, she looked like Raj, but in her teens, she assumed Klara’s full, dimpled cheeks and Cheshire cat smile. Long, curly hair fell to her waist like Klara’s, except that Ruby’s was brown—Klara’s natural color—instead of red. Sometimes, when she was moody, Daniel experienced a phantasmagoric sense of déjà vu. With holographic ease, Ruby became her mother, and Klara stared at Daniel with accusation. He had not been close enough to her, had not known how sick she was. He had initiated their visit to the fortune teller, too, which affected all of his siblings, but perhaps Klara most of all. He still remembers the way she looked in the alley afterward: wet-cheeked and raw-nosed, her eyes both alert and strangely vacant.

  The only phone number Daniel has is Raj’s landline. Since they’re traveling, he clicks on Contact. E-mail addresses are listed for Raj and Ruby’s manager, publicist, and agent above a box that reads, Write to the Chapals! Who knows if they even check it—the box seems designed for fan mail—but he decides to try.

  Raj:

  Daniel Gold here. It’s been quite some time, so I thought I’d write. I noticed that you’ll be traveling to New York in the coming weeks. Any Thanksgiving plans? We’d be happy to host you. It seems a shame to go so long without seeing family.

  Best,

  DG

  Daniel rereads the e-mail and worries it’s too casual. He puts dear before Raj, then deletes it (Raj isn’t dear to him, and neither Daniel nor Raj tolerate phoniness; it’s one of the few things they have in common). Daniel writes, Do you have before any Thanksgiving plans? and substitutes really like for be happy before to host you. He deletes the last line—are they family, really?—and then rewrites it. They’re close enough. He hits Send.

  • • •

  He figured he’d be up at 6:30 the next morning, despite his suspension—at forty-eight years old, he’s nothing if not predictable—but when his cell phone rings, the sun is high in the sky. He squints at the clock, shakes his head, squints again: it’s eleven. He fumbles around his bedside table with one hand, finds his glasses and flip phone, puts the first on and opens the second. Could Raj be calling already?

  “‘Lo?”

  He’s greeted by static. “Daniel,” says a voice. “. . . t’s . . . Dee . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” says Daniel. “You’re breaking up. What was that?”

  “It’s . . . Dee . . . here in the . . . son . . . ley . . . service . . .”

  “Dee?”

  “. . . Dee,” says the voice, insistently. “Eddie O . . . hue . . .”

  “Eddie O’Donoghue?” Even in its garbled form, something about the name jogs Daniel’s memory. He sits up, stuffing a pillow behind him.

  “. . . ’es . . . Cop . . . we met . . . cisco . . . your . . . ’ter . . . FBI . . .”

  “Oh my God,” Daniel says. “Of course.”

  Eddie O’Donoghue was the FBI agent assigned to Klara’s case. He attended her memorial service in San Francisco, and afterward, Daniel ran into him at a pub on Geary. The following day, Daniel woke with a splitting migraine and could not imagine why he’d shared so much with Eddie, but he hoped the agent had been drunk enough to forget it.

  “. . . pull over,” says Eddie, and suddenly, his voice becomes clear. “There we go. Mother of God, the service here is shit. I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “We have a landline,” says Daniel. “It’s much more reliable.”

  “Listen, I can’t talk long—I’m on the side of the highway—but would that work for you? Four, five o’clock? Some place in town? There’s a few things I want to share with you.”

  Daniel blinks. The phone call—the entire morning—feels surreal.

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s meet at the Hoffman House. Four thirty.”

  Not until he hangs up does he notice the wide shadow in the bedroom doorway: his mother.

  “Jesus, Ma,” Daniel says, pulling the covers up. She still has the power to make him feel like a twelve-year
-old. “I didn’t see you.”

  “Who were you talking to?” Gertie is wearing her quilted pink bathrobe—how many decades she’s owned it, Daniel doesn’t want to calculate—and her thick gray hair looks like Beethoven’s.

  “No one,” he says. “Mira.”

  “Like hell it was Mira. I’m not an imbecile.”

  “No.” Daniel gets out of bed, pulls on a SUNY Binghamton sweatshirt and steps into his sheepskin slippers. Then he walks to the doorway and kisses his mother’s cheek. “But you are a busybody. Have you eaten?”

  “Have I eaten? Of course I’ve eaten. It’s almost noon. And here’s you sleeping in like a teenager.”

  “I’ve been suspended.”

  “I know. Mira told me.”

  “So go easy on me.”

  “Why do you think I didn’t wake you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” says Daniel, walking downstairs. “Maybe because I’m no longer a child?”

  “Wrong.” Gertie sneaks out from behind him and takes the lead, sweeping magisterially into the kitchen. “Because I go easy on you. No one goes easier on you than me. Now sit down if you want me to make you coffee.”

  • • •

  Gertie moved to Kingston three years ago, in the fall of 2003. Until then, she insisted on remaining at Clinton Street. Usually, Daniel visited monthly, but that year, he had skipped March and April: work was chaotic due to the Iraq invasion, and Gertie assured him that she would spend Passover with a friend.

  When he arrived on the first of May, she was in bed, wearing her bathrobe and reading Kafka’s The Trial. The windows were covered in brown packing paper. Where the wooden-framed mirror above her dresser once hung, there was now a lone nail. She had pried the bathroom mirror, which doubled as the door of the medicine cabinet, off by its hinges, exposing a cluttered pharmacy of prescription pill bottles.

  “Ma,” said Daniel. His throat was dry. “Who’s been prescribing this stuff?”

  Gertie walked into the bathroom. Her eyes had a stubborn Who, me? quality.

  “Doctors.”

  “Which doctors? How many doctors?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I can say. I see a man for my gut problems and a man for my bones. There’s the primary physician, the eye doctor, the dentist, the allergy doctor, although I haven’t seen her in months, the women’s doctor, the physical therapist who thinks I have scoliosis, which nobody once diagnosed even though all my life I’ve had back pain; there’s a little bone in my rib cage that I swear to you pops out when I do what Dr. Kurtzburg calls ‘heavy twisting’”—she held up a palm as Daniel began to protest—“and you should be glad I’m being treated, cared for, looked after, an old woman alone, needing what care she can get in this world, and getting it. You,” she repeats, keeping her palm aloft, “should be glad.”

  “You don’t have scoliosis.”

  “You’re not my doctor.”

  “I’m better than that. I’m your son.”

  “I just remembered the dermatologist. She’s keeping an eye on my moles. People think they’re just beauty marks, but beauty can kill you. Did you ever consider whether Marilyn Monroe died of a mole? That one on her face she was famous for?”

  “Marilyn Monroe committed suicide. She took a bunch of barbiturates.”

  “Maybe,” said Gertie, conspiratorially.

  “Why did you take down the mirrors?”

  “That’s for your brother and your sister and your father,” Gertie said. Daniel walked into the kitchen. A tall glass of wine, rimmed by fruit flies, sat on the counter. “And that’s for Elijah. Don’t touch it.”

  When Daniel poured the reeking Manischewitz down the drain, a haze of flies rose and dispersed. Gertie huffed. On the other side of the sink was an aluminum tray of store-bought kugel, left uncovered: the noodles were shiny and hard as plastic. Here, as in the bedroom, the windows were covered with paper.

  “Why did you black out the windows?”

  “There’s reflections in there, too,” Gertie said, her pupils dilating, and Daniel knew something had to be done.

  Initially, Gertie refused, but she was flattered to think Daniel wanted her close and relieved by the end of her solitude. They moved her out of Manhattan in August. Varya had relocated to California to take a job at the Drake Institute for Research on Aging, but she flew east to assist. By evening, the apartment was so denuded that Daniel felt sorrow at having done it. Once they carried out Saul’s pea-green velvet chair, a hideous piece of furniture that the entire family adored, the only remaining task was to dismantle the bunk beds.

  “I won’t watch,” said Gertie—half-threatening, half-despondent. The bunk beds had been purchased at Sears forty years earlier, but even after Klara and Simon were gone, she wouldn’t take them down. At first she claimed that everyone would need a place to sleep, should Daniel and Mira and Varya all visit at once, but when Daniel suggested that at least one of the pairs could be taken apart, Gertie became so agitated that he knew not to raise the issue again. Before Mira ushered her down to the car, Gertie insisted on having her picture taken with the bunks. She stood holding her pocketbook and smiling gaily, like a tourist in front of the Taj Mahal, before she trundled quickly out of the bedroom, turning her face toward the wall so that they could not see it.

  Daniel closed the front door behind her and returned to the bedroom. At first, he didn’t see Varya. But snuffling noises came from her old top bunk, and when Daniel peered upward, he saw her right foot listing over the edge. Tears rolled sideways out of each eye, creating two wet circles on the mattress.

  “Oh, V,” he said. He began to reach for her, then thought better of it: he knew she didn’t like to be touched. For years, he was hurt by her habit of ducking hugs, and by her general distance. They were the only two left, and sometimes it took weeks for her to return his calls. But what could he do? It was too late for either of them to change very much.

  “I was just thinking about,” Varya said, and inhaled. “When I used to sleep here.”

  “What, when we were kids?”

  “No. When we were older. When I was”—she hiccupped—“visiting.”

  The word seemed freighted with meaning, but Daniel had no idea what that meaning was. This was the way it went with her: the landscape she saw was different, certain things portentous or ominous, Varya veering around what seemed to him an unblemished piece of sidewalk. Sometimes he thought of asking her, but then whatever channel had opened up between them closed, as it did now: Varya wiped her face hurriedly with one hand and swung her legs around to the ladder.

  But she couldn’t climb down. The ladder was attached to the top bunk with screws so old that the sudden force of Varya’s weight caused them to pull out of the wood. The ladder keeled to the floor; Varya cried out, one foot dangling. The jump from the top bunk to the floor was far from dangerous, but she clung to the railing, looking dubiously over the edge.

  Daniel held his arms out. “Come here, you old bird,” he said.

  Varya paused. Then she gasped her laughter and reached for him. He put his hands under her armpits, and she held on to his shoulders as he lowered her to the ground.

  22.

  Fifteen years ago, Klara’s memorial took place at the San Francisco Columbarium. Raj planned to have her body sent to the Gold family plot in Queens, but Gertie initially forbade it. When Daniel confronted his mother, she cited the Jewish law that prohibits those who commit suicide from being buried within six feet of other Jewish dead, as though only the strictest adherence could protect the Golds who remained. Daniel raged at Gertie until she cowered; he could have hit her. He had never felt capable of such a thing before.

  Daniel and Mira had just moved to Kingston. Mira had secured an assistant professorship at SUNY New Paltz in art history and Jewish studies, Daniel an overnight position at the hospital. His job would begin in one month, his wedding w
ould take place in six, and he had never felt more incapacitated. Simon’s death had been shattering enough; how was it possible to lose Klara, too? How could the family sustain it? After the memorial, Daniel stumbled into an Irish pub on Geary, lay his head on the bar, and wept. He was scarcely aware of how he looked, or what he was saying—Oh God, oh God; everyone’s dying—until someone responded.

  “Yes,” said the man on the next barstool. “But that never makes it any easier.”

  Daniel looked up. The man was roughly his age, with strawberry blond hair and thick sideburns. His eyes—a queer color, more gold than brown—were threaded with red. A scruff of stubble extended from his cheeks to the bottom of his neck.

  He raised his Guinness. “Eddie O’Donoghue.”

  “Daniel Gold.”

  Eddie nodded. “I saw you at the service. I investigated your sister’s passing.” He reached into the pocket of his black pants and pulled out an FBI ID. Special Agent, it read, beside an unintelligible signature.

  “Oh,” Daniel managed. “Thank you.”

  Was that what one said, under the circumstances? Daniel was glad, very glad, that Klara’s death was being investigated—he had his own suspicions—but he was alarmed that the feds were involved.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “why did the FBI take the case? Why not the local police?”

  Eddie put his ID away and looked at Daniel. Despite the bloodshot eyes and the scruff, he looked like a boy. “I was in love with her.”

  Daniel nearly choked on his own saliva. “What?”

  “I was in love with her,” repeated Eddie.

  “With—my sister? She was unfaithful to Raj?”

  “No, no. I doubt she knew him back then. Anyway, it wasn’t returned.”

  The bartender appeared. “Get you boys anything?”

  “I’ll have another. And so will he. On me.” Eddie nodded at Daniel’s glass of bourbon, a bourbon Daniel only just realized he’d been drinking.