Making Toast

by Roger Rosenblatt

  My brother Peter took the train from New York. Ginny’s mother, Betty, tried to make the trip but was too frail. Ginny’s brothers, Lee and Ricky, came, Lee with his wife, Nancy, and their two grown children, Lee and Sarah. Reserved, good people, they stood with us stunned and brokenhearted. Sarah brought Jessie her first Webkin, a stuffed animal used in an interactive computer game. Dee, Howard, and Beth, and Rose and Bob, visited often and helped out with the children. Kindness followed upon kindness. Ginny’s friends Robyn Newmyer and Kay Allaire drove her car down from Quogue so that she could use it in Bethesda. Friends phoned frequently, and send books and toys for the children. The day after Amy died, Jessie’s teacher Coleen Carone came to the house and at once gathered Sammy and Jessie and seven or eight other children around her in a circle. They made paper flowers into a bouquet for Amy. Several years ago I wrote a book called Rules for Aging, one of which was “Nobody’s thinking about you.” Wrong again.

  Because she paid unswerving attention to those she encountered, Amy made friends quickly—of people she met while walking the children in the neighborhood, of the nurses in the juvenile penitentiary where she had worked once a week, of Captain Ehab, who ran the car service she sometimes used, of hospital workers, of the policewoman across the road, of the saleswoman in the children’s shoe department in Nordstrom’s, of the Terminix man. They had crowded the funeral chapel, where the doors were left open so that those who could not get in would be able to hear the service. A hundred people had stood on the stone steps in the cold. Friends and colleagues of mine came from Stony Brook. Friends and former colleagues came from Harvard, and from The New Republic, the Washington Post, Time, and The NewsHour, where I had worked from the 1970s through the 1990s. Friends of the family came from Texas, Ohio, California, Mexico, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Kentucky. One old friend flew in from Oslo. Erik Kolbell, a family friend and Congregationalist minister, who had officiated at the funeral, told the more than 500 people who attended, “What better remembrance of Amy’s indistinguishable light than that we now illuminate each other’s lives.” John looked around and said, “I never knew we had so many friends.” I said, “Neither did I.”

  Friendships are renewed, friendships that were strained are repaired, new friends are made. I phone Dean Anthony Grieco at the NYU School of Medicine. Dean Grieco directs the alumni office, and is in charge of the Amy Rosenblatt Solomon Scholarship Fund. I ask him how the school plans to use the money, which, I have learned, has grown to a considerable sum with contributions from over 250 people. He tells me the fund will yield money for scholarships that will be based solely on need. Amy would approve. I tell him how grateful we are for the care shown by him and the school. Dean Grieco, who is also a professor of medicine, remembers Amy as a student. “No day goes by that I do not think of her,” he says.

  In Carl’s eulogy, he noted that when people die, they are said to be in a better place. He said he did not believe that for Amy: “The best place for you [looking at the casket] is right here.” He’d begun the eulogy by saying he could hear Amy telling him, “Don’t screw it up.”

  The week of Amy’s funeral had been difficult, but not without its distractions. At the funeral home, we were greeted by a peppy woman who asked if we wanted our car washed, an extra service. At the cemetery, we were led on a quasi–real estate tour by a woman with flaming hair who pointed out landmarks such as the headstone of a rock star who had committed suicide, and the gravesite of either the person who inspired Kermit the Frog, or Kermit himself—it was difficult to determine which. The secluded plot we chose happened to be in the Jewish section of the cemetery, admission to which, the woman informed us, was restricted to those “of Jewish blood.” I assured her I had plenty. I overheard John tell Carl, “It’s not a question of if Dad will explode, but when.” Just as John was about to be proved right, the woman mentioned that she, too, had lost a child.

  I wonder if having a religion makes death easier to take, there being established, possibly protective formalities that attend it. Ginny and I avoided religions ourselves and reared our children without one. She was born Episcopalian. We were married in a Unitarian church in New York. When we first visited the church to see if it would be right for us, they were dedicating a pew to a cat, which sealed the deal. Carl and Wendy, who was born Catholic, have a nonreligious home, as did Amy and Harris. We had something like a wake the day before the funeral, and when we greeted friends at home, it was akin to sitting shiva. But these events simply fell into place and God was not with us.

  Without looking at it, I pick up a pen to write a thank-you note for a condolence letter. I push in the button at the top of the pen, and the pen sings in a tinny voice: “Nobody’s perfect. I gotta work it.” Smiling at me from the barrel of the musical pink-and-purple ballpoint is Hannah Montana’s irrepressible face. I get another pen.

  Few things make Jessie and Sammy happier than stories of Amy as a girl. They are interested in Amy as a teenager in New York, where we lived in the 1980s and part of the ’90s. She was a very fast runner in high school. She beat Carl and John in footraces without breathing hard. And she was durable. Her brothers used to invite her to an after-dinner game called, unambiguously, “Tackle Amy.” That she readily accepted their invitation was a sign of her disdain. The children are especially eager to know about their mother when she was little, like themselves. Her flagrant cuteness. When Amy turned four, Carl was so distraught at the attention she was getting in her birthday party dress, he threw himself in the garbage can.

  Amy on baseball. She adopted the Kansas City Royals as her team. “I like the name,” she said. “The Royals?” I asked. “Kansas City,” she said. Amy watching television. One night I observed her in her transfixion as the Bionic Woman leapt over one wall and through another. “Amy,” I said three or four times until she turned to me. “Amy, how does she do that?” The five-year-old deigned to explain, “She’s bionic.” Amy in peril. When she was about eight or nine months of age, and just becoming vertical, Carl used to come at her on his tricycle. Her crime was her existence. Perhaps out of a sense of fair play, he would signal his hit-and-run intentions by singing an atonal dirge that went, “Amy took the car, Amy drove it home. But she had trouble. So Carl drove…” As the song continued, he would barrel down on his baby sister. Upon hearing it, Ginny or I would rush to grab her up, usually before the vehicle got to her first.

  Amy doing cartwheels—her preferred mode of travel. Once, as I walked behind her, buckling under three suitcases, she cartwheeled the length of Logan Airport. Amy in kindergarten at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, where we lived in the 1970s. Carl went there, too, and Ginny taught kindergarten and first grade there. If ever Amy caught Ginny with another child on her lap, she would saunter by and elbow her mother in the ribs as a reminder of who came first. Amy and “The Case of the Very Strange Rabbit.” For her fifth birthday, we reluctantly got her a bunny that had been advertised as a “dwarf rabbit,” but which grew to colossal size, nearly filling his large cage. From behind the wire mesh he stared at you with his red eyes. He was pure white. Amy named him “Raisin.” Amy and Carl in competition. Amy and Carl in conspiracy. At the ages of ten and seven, they surprised Ginny with a Mother’s Day breakfast in bed. They had prepared scrambled eggs without using butter in the pan, giving the dish the look and consistency of the skin of an armadillo. Smiling and chewing very slowly, Ginny ate every bite.

  Boppo taking Amy shopping when she was four, for a green Lacoste dress. (Amy was pleased when I took Jessie on a similar shopping trip.) Boppo taking Amy out to dinner in a restaurant, also when she was four, just us two. She wore a blue-and-white check dress and black Mary Janes, and her hair was in bangs. We went to Billy Martin’s in Georgetown. The headwaiter held Amy’s chair. We sat and talked for a minute or two. Then she said she’d like to go to the ladies room. She returned to the table, but went back to the ladies room every few minutes for the duration of the meal.
She didn’t need to go. It made her feel sophisticated.

  A favorite story of Jessie’s concerns Amy when she was three, and we were living in Dunster House at Harvard. It was a Saturday morning, and I was about to go off to a meeting of a committee to award fellowships for study in Cambridge, England. At the breakfast table, I told the children it was a very old fellowship—I probably called it a prize—even older than the country, and that the boys who won the prize were very special. Three-year-old Amy was outraged. “What about the girls?” she said.

  I found it easy to beat Amy in a footrace. We would start out on a quarter-mile track, and once she had burst from the starting line and was about to leave me in the dust, I would jog some twenty yards, cut across the oval, and wait for her frown of disgust at the finish. Nothing to it.

  When Wendy was pregnant with Andrew, Ginny gave her a baby shower. She asked Amy and all the women invited to write a cherished memory of their childhoods, which Ginny collected in a book for Wendy. Amy wrote: “One of my favorite childhood memories is when I would go out to dinner just with my Dad. I would get all dressed up and we would walk into Georgetown and go to Billy Martin’s. I loved the excitement of feeling so grown up. And I loved just being with my Dad. The best part, of course, was leaving Carl at home.”

  “Ginny’s perfect, isn’t she?” says one of our friends, observing her change Bubbies and direct Jessie to a homework assignment, while efficiently handling an “I-won’t-wear-this-jacket” crisis with Sammy. “Nobody’s perfect,” I say, and tell him a story that makes my and Hannah Montana’s point. We were living in Cambridge. Carl was five, Amy two. It was the night before Easter and the Easter Bunny was about to pay his nocturnal visit. Carl had grown apprehensive at the prospect of an oversize egg-bearing mammal skulking about the house. At 11:00 p.m. Ginny and I were headed for bed. Carl emerged from his room and asked, “Is the Easter Bunny here yet?” No, we said, and he went back to his room. At about one a.m., he reappeared at our bedside. “Is the Easter Bunny here yet?” No, we said. “Go back to bed,” said Ginny. “You’ll hunt for the eggs in the morning.” At 2:00 a.m., there was Carl, with the same concern. I don’t think he had slept. Again at three. He stood by our bedside at 4:00 a.m. and awakened us one more time. Before he could get out his question, Ginny sat straight up and shouted, “There is no fucking Easter Bunny!” Instead of being alarmed at his mother’s using a word she had probably never used before, an expression of relief washed over Carl’s face. He returned to his room a happy boy.

  An Amy story I do not tell Jessie and Sammy involves the time we were moving from Cambridge to Washington. We had applied to several schools for Carl and Amy, including one with a snooty reputation in which we had little interest, but we were obliged to cover the bases. In a taxi on the way to the children’s interviews at that school, Ginny and I realized we’d left Nanny, Amy’s security blanket, back at the hotel. After a while, so did Amy. Nanny, in spite of having been reduced to the size of a matchbook cover, had lost none of its supernatural powers. “Where’s Nanny?” said Amy. She was three and a half. I told her we’d forgotten Nanny, but not to worry. We’d talk to the people at the school and get back to Nanny as soon as possible. She took the news of our error unsympathetically, since the whole purpose of Nanny was to alleviate tense situations like that one. When we arrived for the interviews—Carl’s for second grade, Amy’s for kindergarten—a woman whose demeanor confirmed the school’s reputation appeared and went off with the disgruntled Amy. When the interview was over, Amy looked more disgruntled, and she had trouble slipping her arms into the sleeves of her little green coat. On the way out, still battling the coat, she stomped on ahead of us down the hall, muttering but loudly, “Shit! Shit! Shit!”—language she undoubtedly had picked up from her mother. The school accepted Carl.

  I teach only one writing workshop in the spring term, on the novella, so I drive to Long Island on Sunday, hold class on Monday, and return on Monday night or on Tuesday. The drive from Bethesda to Quogue feels longer than the drive back. I have mentally mapped it into segments, to help the time pass. The first and longest leg of the trip is from Bethesda to the New Jersey Turnpike, through Maryland and Delaware, which usually takes an hour and thirty-five minutes, if I don’t get pulled over. From the southern end of the Turnpike to the Verrazano Bridge takes about an hour and a half. The Belt Parkway in Brooklyn takes twenty-five minutes and the Southern State Parkway, extending to eastern Long Island, another thirty-five. The last leg of the trip, consisting of the Sunrise Highway and the connecting roads to Quogue, takes about forty minutes. As one music station fades out, I pick up another, having preset the call letters for each part of the trip. Classical till the Turnpike. Jazz through New Jersey and into Brooklyn. Classical again most of the rest of the way, until the last fifteen minutes, when I listen to rock. I am learning a little about classical music as I go. I have developed a low opinion of Telemann and a high opinion of Haydn and Handel. In terms of emotions, I can take most anything but Rachmaninoff, the second symphony in particular.

  Hands-free phone conversations with Carl and John, with my brother Peter, with Pete Weissman, with my longtime friend and assistant, the artist Jane Freeman, and with my Stony Brook friend and colleague Bob Reeves help speed up the drive. I check in with Ginny, who checks in with me. I try to be alert to the dangers of driving as much as I do, though sometimes I drift. Whenever I feel drowsy, I pull over and nap for a few minutes, but that rarely happens. Shirley Kenny, the president of Stony Brook, having learned of my driving schedule, wrote a letter warning me not to let my mind wander on the roadways. Ten years ago, she and her husband, Bob, lost their thirty-seven-year-old son Joel to leukemia. Her letter recalling the practical consequences of grief arrived a week after I had run a red light—the first time I’d ever done that.

  I try to limit my stops to two: one at the first exit of the Turnpike, where I have a “tall” Starbucks coffee and a blueberry muffin; the other at Exit 11, to fill up. Where the Turnpike divides, I always take the lanes for cars and trucks, and not the ones for cars alone. Since I drive up on Sundays, there are few trucks and the traffic moves quickly. The lane-shift tricks of the trip have become routine. When at last I turn the corner of our street in Quogue, I am always surprised to see our house. I pull into the driveway. Entering, I turn on most of the lights.

  Carl calls me on his cell phone nearly every morning on his way to work. I call him later in the day, and I also speak with John. Carl and John talk with each other, and with Ginny. The family always spoke frequently before Amy died, but our conversations have increased since. We seem to be assuring ourselves of the others’ wellbeing. I have assumed the role of chief worrier, which is unlike me. Before, unless there had been a particular reason, I never worried about anything. Now the simplest casual event involving the family has me anxious. I worry when any of them takes a trip. I worry about Ginny driving in Bethesda. I worry when the children or grandchildren are down with a cold. I worry about John walking at night in New York. Ginny merely mentions a pain in her right knee. I worry.

  At my urging, John arranged to have a CT angiogram, to determine that he did not have Amy’s anomaly. So did Carl. The chances were minimal that either of them was at risk, but should that have been the case, there are corrective measures cardiologists can take. Because he is our youngest and on his own, I worry about John generally, trying not to show it. The more I try, the more he is aware of it. He tolerates my fretting with good humor. I ask him if he wants me to go with him to the radiologist. “Only if you buy me a toy,” he says.

  Throughout the winter and the spring, there is hardly a moment for anything but play, caretaking, schooling, chauffeuring, and by 9:00 p.m., sleep. Jessie has soccer practice; Sammy has a party; Jess and Sammy have tennis; Sammy has a play-date; Jessie has Spanish; Bubbies has “gym” (an hour in which babies waddle around a large, highly polished floor, heedless of the commands of an “instructor,” and bump into one another); Jessie star
ts piano.

  When we were living in Washington, I wrote a weekly column for the Washington Post. One column, called “No Sleep-Overs,” was a father’s complaint about what was then the recent practice of overstuffing a child’s day with lessons and social life. I received more hate mail in response to that piece than to anything I wrote against capital punishment or in favor of gun control. Clearly, I was out of touch, as usual.

  These days, I am grateful for the children’s crammed schedules. Between December and June, Sammy and Jessie had birthdays, advancing to five and seven, and Bubbies went from fourteen months to twenty. His transformation seemed like one of those time-lapse tricks in movies. In April, we celebrated Amy’s birthday. When we blew out the candles, Harris asked Sammy what he thought Mommy would wish for. “To be alive,” Sammy said.