The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  Since early August she’s been watching the days unfold as if from a great height, feeling clearheaded but knowing something would eventually give. She’s waited, imagined an obvious fall— say, an actual collapse at his gravesite, or an unrelenting impulse to speak with a rabbi. She’s waited and now Moshe has summoned her to his office for the reading of the will, and a younger Abe summons her from her old flat, and her skin feels strangely electric.

  It was Sadie who summoned her in August. Lillian was wrapping a box of party invitations, silver writing on pale pink paper, and Sadie called and said her father had died in his sleep. He didn’t suffer, the doctor had told her. His death was peaceful.

  August. Her hands seemed pink and silver. The words had been uttered and could not be taken back. Lillian told the customer she would deliver the invitations later, and ushered the woman out of the store and took a taxi to Lancaster. A hot, bright, breezy day. A few fat white clouds sailed east over the city. The taxi smelled of tobacco, and in the backseat she held her own unlit cigarette and felt herself suspended between worlds. There persisted the sense that she could talk Abe out of such a thing, the way she might talk him out of bad weather travel to New York. She knew he kept secrets about his health: the previous winter had been especially hard. But he’d seemed better since May, and now it was summer, it was August, the clouds were sailing east.

  When the taxi pulled up in front of the house, her fantasy of persuading him back dissipated. The maple leaves seemed unusually large and green, a kind of audience. The lawn was recently mown, the roses profuse. A silhouette appeared in the doorway— Jo? Celia? Sadie?—and vanished as Lillian approached. He was still in his bed, Sadie had told her, and Lillian walked without stopping through the foyer and up those stairs she had never ascended and followed the hallway to the doorway from which Sadie herself was emerging. For a moment, Sadie took hold of Lillian’s hands. There was a slight quivering in Sadie, her eyes liquid, bewildered, her mouth a pinched bud. Then she released Lillian’s hands and was gone. Abe lay on a large brass-frame bed, as if asleep, she wanted to tell herself, but there was an unnameable difference, even from the doorway. She walked to the bedside and touched his hands and face and sat with him for a time. Perhaps he had known this might happen: he had stayed at her house less and less in July. The doctor said he did not suffer, but the doctor was not there. Perhaps he was frightened. She had not wanted him to be alone, had not wanted him to be frightened, but he was a stubborn man, more stubborn, perhaps, than anyone else she’d known.

  Below she could hear footsteps, the opening and closing of the front door, murmurs. The light made a shadow pattern of leaves against the windowpane and the sheers and the far side of the bed. She did not want to see how the hours to follow would change him, and draw his body further and further from himself, nor did she want to leave this room, with the pattern of light and leaves, the brass bed and Abe. For a short while she remained, in the state of not-wanting, touching Abe’s hand, and then it was time to leave: she could not say why, but it was time. She kissed him on the forehead and left the room, and took the staircase down to where the Lipsky brothers were talking with Bill Feldstein, and passed them with a nod. It was all a matter of footsteps, she told herself, footsteps down the front walk, and the sidewalk, and up the street to Delaware, where she found a taxi.

  There was a funeral, which she attended, and a graveside service, which she did not. She sent flowers and fruit to the house on Lancaster and did not sit with his family, but instead closed her store and stayed home for a week. There were condolence notes and visitors—she’d apparently become a respectable widow. Most days Moshe and Bertha visited her, and Bertha, still fragile but stronger, brought her dinner. And then she returned to the store and began to wait for the death to be real. Even now, in mid-September, there’s the small daily shock that he has not come to her house these many weeks, that the death was not incidental and temporary, a buying trip to New York irritatingly extended. That he has not returned with the usual set of apologies for absence, the larger box of chocolates, the better bottle of gin, his favorite ways of touching her.

  If she travels or moves away, it will not matter to him. He will not miss her, because he does not exist. He will not look for her, because there is no “he” to look. And this Lillian finds oddly difficult to comprehend, though she knows it to be true. There is each day the smallest grain of doubt, and the incremental relearning of her current state of affairs.

  Lillian has not seen Abe’s children since the funeral, when all of them, even Sadie and Irving, maintained a peculiar quiet, as if mute. And the image of them mute has stayed with her: she pictures them, lips buttoned, glassy-eyed, staring at the ground, the distant trees, each other, like dolls whose angle of vision occasionally shifts. But they must by now have returned to themselves, Lillian thinks, there are businesses and children to attend to. Though Celia might stay mute as long as she likes.

  And when Lillian arrives at the law office—the same-as-always law office, richer than twenty years ago, carpets and furniture replaced, but the same stolid look—Abe’s children are in fact speaking. Squabbling.

  They’re in the conference room with the long oak table, Sadie and Jo and Irving, and Moshe’s partner Solly Feigenbaum, Solly at the head of the table and Irving to his right, Sadie two chairs down on the left. There’s a file and a notepad in front of an empty chair toward the middle of the table, a scrawl of writing. Jo is severe in her navy blue suit, pacing the carpet between the table and the tall windows overlooking the city square.

  “Jo, would you sit down?” Sadie says. “If she decides to come up, she’ll come up.”

  “She said she would,” Jo says. “This morning she was calm and she said she would.”

  “She doesn’t like this sort of thing,” Sadie says.

  “Do you?”

  “Of course not. Hello, Lillian.”

  “Hello, Sadie,” Lillian says. “Hello, Jo. Solly, Irving.” Irving too is in a suit, a new one, his face strikingly serious, an uncanny imitation of Abe’s.

  “We can’t start without Celia,” Jo says.

  Feigenbaum busies himself with his file of papers, which attorneys confronted with families seem to do. He glances up, as if awakening from his reading, and checks his watch. “Moshe will be back in a minute.”

  “I gave her money for pastry,” Irving says to Jo. “She’ll be fine.” There’s a note of authority in his voice, recognizable if wobbly at the edges. He folds his hands on the table in front of him, another of his father’s gestures, and it seems for an instant as if he might bloom into Abe. He is the spitting image—she’s always known this but never has it struck her this way. She can’t help but look at him, marvel. There’s a curdling in her belly. As if something of Abe is physically alive, present, and it’s true of course: this is Abe’s son, and these his daughters (another one seems to be lurking in the coffee shop down the street). She glances away and then back at him: across the conference table in his suit—one identical, she realizes, to Abe’s beige linen suit—the expression on his face is so somber and attentive, so un-Irving, he does not seem to be Irving at all. At a glance he is Abe? then Irving. She wonders—she does not remember, does not know, but it suddenly seems important— if he has his father’s scent, a light musk mixed with tobacco and shaving lotion. The chair beside him is empty.

  “Good morning, Lillian,” Irving says. Somber, yes, though his voice is higher and less textured than his father’s. “How have you been?”

  And there’s the strange electric sense and a tightness beginning in her throat. “Not bad. You?”

  He shrugs, gestures vaguely toward the room, the way Abe might, the way Moshe might, the demeanor of a burdened, determined man. The merest flicker of fear crosses Irving’s face before the good suit reasserts itself.

  She could take the seat behind Irving (he used to borrow Abe’s shaving lotion, didn’t he?), but from the far side of the table she’d be more likely to see his
young-Abe face. Behind her she hears heavy steps, Moshe’s, and then Moshe is beside her. “Good morning, Lilly.” He kisses her cheek. He is surprisingly pale (could it be that he, too, is disconcerted by Irving?). He takes the seat in front of the notepad, Sadie to his left, and pats the empty chair to his right. It occurs to her that the others have also been instructed where to sit, as if at a formal dinner, and for good reasons, though what Irving smells like may not be one of them—she sizes up her brother—or perhaps it is.

  “Shall we, then?” Moshe says to Solly Feigenbaum.

  “Celia isn’t here,” Jo repeats. She’s jittery. Rattled, Lillian thinks. And of course she’s rattled, her father is dead, anyone would be, but with Jo you can’t predict.

  “That isn’t a problem,” Solly says.

  “Well, she should be here for this.”

  “Of course,” Solly says. “We hoped Celia, as well as Golda”— eyebrows lift—“would join us today, but it isn’t necessary. If you’d care to take a seat, here, I can show you the text of the will as I read.”

  Jo purses her lips, but acquiesces.

  From her seat at the table Lillian can see the dropping curve of Moshe’s cheek and chin against his gray suit jacket, the set of Sadie’s white linen shoulders, Jo’s face as she leans in to read with Solly Feigenbaum, Solly himself, Irving. Unlike Jo, Irving does not lean forward, though he is not relaxed. He sits the way Abe did at business meetings, straight-backed and attentive. He’s a good actor, persuasive. She has known this about him for some time— has learned, for example, not to approach him in public—but knowing it does not seem to matter now.

  Hardly a year ago, Lillian went to an Italian bakery on the West Side to buy cannoli for Bertha, and in the adjoining coffee shop she glimpsed a man she took at first glance for Abe, a startling, too young Abe, though of course it was Irving. He sat with a petite brunette, pretty, overly made-up. Perhaps Irving glanced her way—it seemed he had, but he hadn’t caught her eye. As she was leaving the bakery, Lillian walked over to say hello. He was half turned away, though the woman gazed at Lillian directly.

  “Irving?” Lillian said, and the woman touched his shoulder and gestured at Lillian.

  He turned, greeted her with a look of incomprehension. “Madam? Is there something you need?” The woman glanced back and forth between them, assessing, but he seemed utterly innocent, baffled.

  Lillian quickly apologized and pretended to fish inside her bag for her reading glasses. “You’ll have to excuse me, I should wear my glasses, forgive me for interrupting. I mistook you for a navy friend of my brother’s.”

  “I’m an army man,” Irving said. “Is your brother’s friend handsome?” He winked at the woman, who relaxed then, smiled at him, reached for his hand.

  Lillian left for the street and the rest of her errands, and when she saw him again at the jewelry store, he greeted her as he did in the law office—”Hello, Lillian, how have you been?”—neither then nor later making any allusion to the coffee shop or the West Side or the woman.

  And now she needs to be careful, with Irving consciously imitating Abe, and the younger Abe popping into her head, saying Do you? and Abe’s will, his wishes transmuted to this other form and read in the voice of Solly Feigenbaum: all traces and echoes and illusion, seductive ephemera. She rubs her thumb and index finger together to calm herself.

  Feigenbaum reads with lackluster precision, and there’s a lulling effect, a counterweight to the strange thrumming that seems to swim through the room. The words do not sound like Abe’s, though the logic does. He’s left most of the jewelry business to Irving, with the intention that Irving manage it, but 30 percent goes to Jo. There’s the matter of the house on Lancaster, ownership of which is to be equally divided among his children, Golda, Celia, Josephine and Irving Cohen and Sadie Cohen Feldstein. The Ford to be shared by Josephine and Irving Cohen. A small trust has been set up for Celia Cohen. Stock set aside for Josephine Cohen, Sadie, Margo and Elaine Feldstein and Lillian Schumacher, as well as $3,000 to Miss Schumacher. The wedding ring of Rebecca Cohen to go to Golda Cohen (at this Sadie inhales noticeably); Rebecca Cohen’s pearls to Sadie Cohen Feldstein; Rebecca Cohen’s other jewelry to remain with Josephine Cohen, with the understanding that she and Celia Cohen equally share ownership of this jewelry. A pocket watch, two particular pairs of cuff links to Moshe Schumacher (Irving nods. Jo bites her lip). Abraham Cohen’s pipe collection to go to Moshe Schumacher.

  “One of them is mine,” Jo says.

  “One?” Solly says.

  “Pipe. Cherrywood.”

  “If you own a pipe then by definition it would not be part of Abraham’s collection,” Solly tells her.

  “Well, it is,” Jo says. “But he said I could have it.”

  “I see,” Solly says. “Do you intend to contest this bequest?”

  “Jo,” Moshe says. “Why don’t we talk about this later?”

  “He did say I could have it.”

  “It’s a pipe,” Sadie says. “Why would you want a pipe?”

  “It’s my pipe,” Jo says.

  And Lillian pictures his pipes, the casual intimacy of Abe’s smoking, some imprint of his lips still on the mouthpiece. Perhaps Lillian herself should have a pipe: how much closer can one get, now, to Abe’s body? Which is gone, Lillian thinks, the man’s gone, though perhaps Jo will try to extract him from the pipe. As if the pipe will confer what her father, or her life, has not. How can you blame her? Pretend there’s a chance—tiny, but real—that a pipe could grant you your father’s legacy, or any of your hopes: wouldn’t you take it? Carry that pipe everywhere? Yet it’s a dangerous impulse; what’s the difference between the wish to have that pipe and to smell Abe’s shaving lotion on his son? Imagine Do you? expanding to a morass of Abe memorabilia (the house? the store?), Abe’s shadow solidifying, then smothering her, smothering all of them.

  Jo, don’t, Lillian thinks. Just don’t.

  “I’ll buy you a pipe,” Sadie says.

  “I would be happy to buy you a pipe,” Irving says.

  “I’m sure,” Moshe says, “we could work out a trade.” There’s an underlying tone of command, which seems to bring Jo back to herself.

  “Go on,” she mumbles to Solly.

  And Solly returns to the monotone apportioning of the contents of the house and personal effects among Abe’s children, most objects—the glassware and fine china and silver—intended for one or another version of shared use and joint ownership. And then he is done reading the list, and still that electric sensation is with Lillian and still she is waiting for something more profound, some deeper knowledge gleaned from the will. Jo’s dogged concentration persists. Irving’s brow furrows, though he remains still and mute. Sadie turns to glance at Moshe and Lillian, then back to Solly—all of them, it seems, waiting, though Solly has read to the end, they can see that. The room itself is silent, but for Solly Feigenbaum’s shuffling of papers, and Lillian understands then that she is waiting for a personal message from Abe, something like a love letter, something like a kiss. And there is the startled recognition of her own childish confusion—a will is not a love letter. He has been generous in his provisions but money and stock are not the point, or, in truth, are not enough. She wants whatever lay at the center of her relationship with Abe revealed at last, named and offered to her safekeeping, the pure thing tangible as stone.

  It takes a moment for her to collect herself. Moshe is watching her. Moshe himself is unmistakable, he seems utterly permanent— though today he is too pale. She cannot imagine Moshe’s death, but she also cannot imagine his absence sparking this kind of bewilderment. He is her brother. He loves her. He has always loved her. He has never disappeared. Abe, alive, often disappeared, and what compensations are there for the ways the living vanish?

  Jo is peering out the windows again. She leaves the room without a good-bye, and Irving shakes hands with Solly Feigenbaum. Lillian, stunned, remains intent on carrying herself through this moment, thi
s leave-taking: the polite good-bye to Sadie, who hurries after Jo, the polite good-bye to Irving (Abe’s lotion? She can’t tell when he gives her a peck on the cheek) as he and Solly walk to Solly’s office. She does not yet notice what has occurred, or failed to occur: that she hasn’t once imagined the house on Lancaster. It is, for her, empty of desire, a house for strangers. And when she later envisions the house, it seems to her peeled into stiff wooden segments, the way you might peel the bark off a branch and idly split the inner green fibers.

  Lillian crosses to the windows: along the street, a miniature Sadie waits outside the coffee shop and then a small Jo emerges through the door, and Sadie takes Jo’s arm and walks her north up the block. Lillian’s aware of her detachment, of watching without longing, but the distance, the sense of being outside other lives, is the old familiar one. Perhaps she has always missed the center of things. It’s the periphery she knows, the periphery she moves through most easily, but with the assumption of some center, somewhere. And perhaps Abe recognized something beyond the loneliness of peripheries, or something about what the center is and is not. The time with him already feels like dandelion weeds blown, the small floating bits leaving a skeletal awareness. Of course you cannot save moments, but she thought they would have accumulated anyway into something more solid. Or that, at the very heart of her time with Abe she would have known—this is the center, the depth, the point of greatest immersion—and that knowledge would be a homecoming from which she could not be exiled. And if such a thing did occur with him, she was not aware, except for the intensity of their lovemaking at particular moments: was it then? Always something seemed withheld, the immersion so brief and fleeting that even then she remained on the peripheries. And he was too soon dead. And she had forgotten what is now evident: she is a woman with a home and a business, a life distinct. She is not in fact a widow: he has spared her widowhood, he has spared her the morass of his house and children, the financial squabbling that would have ensued, has spared her maddening years.