Where the God of Love Hangs Out

by Amy Bloom

  Their next-door neighbor found my name on the tiny phone list my mother kept taped to the kitchen wall. Your father’s too upset, Mrs. Cannon said, so I’m calling. Andy and I met at the airport and rented a car and drove to our house. Mrs. Rachlin greeted us very warmly and Mr. Rachlin waited in the living room, sitting next to my father, who was reading the paper. Mr. Rachlin jumped up to hug us. He jerked his head toward my father. “It hasn’t really sunk in,” he said, and Andy and I nodded. My father said, “Hey, kids.” Mrs. Cannon left a lasagna on the kitchen table. Broadway Delicatessen delivered platters twice, fried chicken from the hospital where my mother volunteered, and right before dinnertime, six pounds of corned beef and pastrami, with a pound each of cole slaw and kosher dills, from my father’s law firm. We let the Rachlins go home and I gave Mr. Rachlin a little kiss for my mother’s sake. My father unwrapped the corned beef and made himself a sandwich.

  “You kids want some?”

  We said we weren’t hungry. My father ate his sandwich over the sink.

  “You slimmed down,” he said to Andy. “The trick is keeping it off. Discipline. Without that, the avoirdupois just piles back on.”

  I put all the food in the fridge and, for the same reason that I still recut the flowers in a bouquet before I put them in a vase with an aspirin and always put scented soaps in with my underwear and cedar chips in with my sweaters in May, that is, because I am my mother’s daughter, I made us all sit down in the living room, To Talk.

  “Go ahead,” my father said, flirting with a corner of the front page.

  “Daddy,” is how I started, and I couldn’t say another word. On the phone I always called him Alvin, as if it were a joke.

  Andy picked up the ball and ran with it. Nope, my father said. No sitting shiva; your mother and I didn’t believe in that. And no memorial service; your mother wouldn’t have wanted that. I couldn’t imagine why she wouldn’t have wanted it but my father was adamant about everything. Cremation, he said; your mother felt very strongly about that—you know she hated cemeteries. And I’ll take care of it.

  “We’d like to participate,” I said.

  “The fact is,” my father said, “I already had it taken care of.”

  “Where’s the urn,” I said.

  My father laughed. “What, you don’t believe me?” He pointed to the sideboard, and we saw a black box about the size of a lunch thermos and sealed with gold tape, sitting next to a bottle of Tia Maria, two bottles of sherry, and a bottle of Scotch someone gave my father fourteen years ago. Andy and I got up to look at it.

  “And the will,” my brother said. “I’m just asking because—

  “She left everything to me,” my father said, “but if you kids want something from her jewelry box, go ahead and take it.”

  My father picked up the paper in both hands, and we went into their bedroom, which was as neat as it always had been, except for my father’s underwear on my mother’s bargello bench. Her jewelry box was on their dresser, centered beneath their big Venetian mirror.

  “I wish she had something you’d want,” I said.

  “She kept Poppa’s watch in the bottom,” he said. “I’ll take that. I don’t think the Erwin Pearl clip-ons are going to work for me.”

  Our grandfather’s handsome old Hamilton watch was not in the bottom of her jewelry box. And her good pearls were gone and her diamond watch and the sapphire earrings and matching bracelet she’d bought for herself on her sixtieth birthday, cashing in the bonds her father left her.

  “Daddy,” I said. “Mom’s good stuff is missing.”

  “Nothing’s missing,” he said coldly, and I thought, Christ, I’m going to have to show him, but he cleared his throat and said, “I put all of her valuables in a safety-deposit box. With people in and out of the house, it seemed smart.”

  There was no answer to that. “Oh, good thinking,” I said. I went back to their bedroom with a handful of plastic bags.

  “Just take half of it,” I told Andy. “In case you have a daughter or you have a friend with a daughter or you start dressing up. Just take half of every fucking thing that’s in there.”

  He picked up a turquoise bracelet and a handful of cheap Indian bangles and I nodded. I put the beautiful Italian shoes she stopped wearing when she got bunions into a garbage bag and I put the beautiful heavy silk French scarves that she wore until she died in my suitcase. When Andy and I had cleaned out her closet and her jewelry box, leaving her track suits and sneakers and her sensible poly-silk blouses for my father to deal with, we went into my room. I pressed the push lock on the door.

  “Please sleep in here,” I said.

  Andy patted my hand. “We didn’t say good night.”

  “Good night,” we both yelled through the closed door.

  “Good night, kids,” he yelled back. “I’ll be back for lunch.”

  We took a walk in the morning and threw some bad costume jewelry (Boca Bohemian, Oaxaca Farm Girl) into Long Island Sound and cried and talked while the gulls circled and we waited until my father came back. I made three corned-beef-pastrami-and-cole-slaw sandwiches and we each took an A&P diet soda from the case on the kitchen counter.

  “So,” Andy said. “No service, no interment, no obit, and no visiting. Is that it?”

  “That’s it,” my father said.

  “Do you need anything?” I said.

  “Like what?” my father said.

  “We’ll head to the airport this afternoon, then,” Andy said.

  “Sure,” my father said. “You’ve got jobs, don’t you?”

  I didn’t stop speaking to my father. I did what my mother would have wanted me to do. (I like to think that her wish was for my father to have slipped painlessly and just hours after Andy was born into a deep crack in the world and never return, but I could never get her to say so. What I wanted was to have come out of her womb armed to my little baby lips and killed him with my superpowers before the cord was cut.) My weekly phone calls had none of my mother’s social flourishes. (It doesn’t hurt to be nice, she said, but that wasn’t true in this case.) I did make sure my father wasn’t dead and that he was not, with his driving, a danger to others or, with some old-man slippage in hygiene or nutrition, a danger to himself. I hired Delphine Jones to keep the house tidy and to look in on him three times a week, and when she couldn’t stand him anymore (“Your father is a very exacting man,” she said, her island lilt just about knocked flat after days and weeks with Alvin Lowald), she would pass him on to a colleague for a week of R & R.

  Delphine called me on a Wednesday afternoon in January.

  “I see the pipes have burst,” she said. “Your father isn’t sure who to call.”

  I called Andy, and he called a plumber, who, for only fourteen hundred dollars up front, would make things right, and I found the Cutler Brothers Catastrophe Company, whose receptionist said, very kindly, that they specialized in “this kind of thing,” and I canceled my appointments and got back on a plane to make sure that things were okay. (“I’ll give you a million dollars if I don’t have to go this time” Andy said. “Seriously. I will give you a weekend at the spa of your choice. I will buy you diamond earrings.”)

  I rang the doorbell and my father let me in. Aside from needing a haircut, he looked good. The house did not. And it smelled the way it had forty years ago, when our whole family sat on the kitchen porch and watched Long Island Sound rise past the pear tree and onto the driveway and then into the TV room, which had never really recovered.

  “Better late than never,” he said. “The girl left a note for you.”

  The note said, as I knew it would, that Delphine found herself too busy to clean for my father, and it was her distinct impression that he actually needed more than a cleaning person since, as she wrote in her neat, curvy handwriting, there was an exceptional amount of filth and personal uncleanliness accumulating from week to week (she itemized the most offensive occurrences at the bottom of the page). She was happy to recommend
Beate Jaszulski, a Polish person who had been a nurse in Poland and whom she had met at adult education. She left me Beate’s number. My father and I ate the only things in the refrigerator, hard-boiled eggs and American cheese, and he asked why Andy hadn’t come. I said Andy was very busy, and my father snorted.

  “Busy sucking some guy’s cock,” my father said.

  “You know,” I said conversationally, “we try to be nice to you. We try to be nice, which isn’t easy because you are an emotional black hole and the coldest, most self-centered sonofabitch I have ever known, we try to be nice in honor of our mother’s memory. So, if you can’t be civil, why don’t you just shut the fuck up?”

  My father took his slice of cheese into the living room and read until he heard me go to bed.

  In the morning, I showered with my mother’s Arpège bath soap and used her antique hair dryer and got dressed and started again. I suggested that it might be wise to sell the house and move into assisted living. Near me, I even said.

  “The only way I’m leaving this house is feetfirst,” he said.

  I have to say, I did laugh and I did say, “That’s not a problem.” Oh, we should have smothered him the night after my mother died, we should have just snuck into their bedroom, pulled back that Venetian damask duvet cover she was so proud of, put the matching pillows over his face, and leaned in until he stopped moving.

  “Look,” I said, “You can sell the house and move into assisted living or you can keep the house and hire someone to care for you—a housekeeper-type person—and you do that for as long as you can afford it, and then your backup plan is you die before you run out of money.”

  “Fine,” my father said. “Hire someone. A nice pair of tits wouldn’t hurt.”

  Beate Jaszulski moved into my old room. My father handed her the car keys. (What do I need the hassle for? People drive like goddamn idiots around here anyway.) And every Friday, she dropped him off at the five o’clock movie, while she did the grocery shopping. She kept the house clean, he said (You can eat off the goddamn floor) and cooked the meals he preferred (Just plain food, he said, no French song and dance). Two boiled eggs and dry rye toast every morning, a grilled cheese sandwich every day for lunch, and two broiled lamb chops and rice for dinner, or sometimes, caution to the winds, she cooked a small rib eye with a side of mashed potatoes. I know this because I spoke to Beate every Sunday and she would recite the meals cooked, the walks taken, the minor household repairs her cousin Janek performed and she billed us for. She never complained about my father and she never criticized me for not visiting. At the end of every conversation, I’d ask to speak with my father, and she’d say, “Sure. Sure, you want to talk to Dad,” sympathetically, as if she understood that I was so eager to talk to him, I just couldn’t stand another moment of chitchat.

  “Alvin,” I said.

  “Alison.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “Okay. Good. Everything good with Beate?” What did I think? She would rob him and he would know and report it to me, in due time? She would, at not quite five feet tall and as big around, and sixty-five if she was a day, hurt him or seduce him?

  “It’s okay.” Sometimes he would tell me that Beate listened to the radio too loud or used too much ammonia on the kitchen floor or he’d found the lamb a little tough, and I would mention these things to her very delicately and she’d say, “I take care of it.” No complaint was ever repeated. Andy referred to her as Mother Beate and he made a lot of jokes about the number of old men she had buried and their grateful children. (“That’s how she got that Porsche and that house in Cap-Ferrat,” he said. “God bless her.”)

  After about a year with Beate:

  “Alvin,” I said.

  “Alison. Alibaloo.”

  “Dad? Are you all right?”

  “Never better. Bea—how am I?”

  I heard Beate talking in the background and my father chuckled and he said, “There you go. I’m—how old am I, Bea?—there you go, I’m eighty-eight and holding my own. No pun intended.”

  Beate got on the phone and told me that her own mother was dying in Poland and she had to fly home.

  “Just for a week. I be back for Mr. Lovald. I go on a Saturday, I be back on a Sunday.”

  I asked if Beate had any thoughts about who would keep my father company, make his meals, drive him on his errands, do his laundry. “Forget the laundry,” I said. “It can pile up for a week. Who will do the other things,” I asked Beate, and there was a long, flat Polish silence.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be there Saturday and we can do the … handoff.”

  Beate understood well enough what I meant and her voice brightened as we went back to her plans, which included dry-cleaning her raincoat, buying a pair of good boots, laying in a supply of frozen lamb chops and clean boxers for my father for a week, and bringing peanut butter to Ruda Slaska.

  “Janek will take me to airport,” she said. “Newark.”

  My cab pulled up in front of the house at four o’clock. Beate showed me the eggs, the sliced American cheese, the rye bread, and the fourteen frozen lamb chops. She handed me the keys. She gestured toward my parents’ bedroom.

  “He naps,” she said. “I see him Sunday. Seven days.” She held up seven fingers and then she picked up her suitcase and waved good-bye. As she stepped onto the porch, a car appeared, and my guess was that her cousin had parked up the street and was just waiting for my cab to leave.

  Beate was out the door, and it would be just me and Alvin for the next seven days, unless I killed him, in which case I would spend at least half the week in jail. The house looked, somehow, more like my childhood home than it had for the last twenty years. Beate had found my mother’s old spring slipcovers and covered the cigar-burned navy couch with pink and yellow chintz and she’d even found the yellow chintz pillows and the yellow-and-white-striped slipcover that went on my father’s armchair. It was all aggressively and hopelessly cheerful, and I expected my mother to walk out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a clean apron, and saying either, “Who wants quiche?” which was a good day or, “There’s no reason to upset him,” which was not.

  “Bea? Bea?” My father was yelling, pretty loudly.

  I opened the door a crack. I had no wish to be in my parents’ bedroom with my father, where he still slept on his side of the bed and where there was still, on my mother’s nightstand, a box of tissues and a paperback.

  “It’s me, Dad. It’s Alison. Beate’ll be back in a week. I’m here in the meantime.”

  “What?” he said and he sat up, patting his nightstand all over for his glasses, which were lying on the floor. I handed him his glasses.

  “Thank you. You’re a good kid,” he said.

  His hair was going in four different directions and there were little scabs on his chest and the backs of his hands. He scratched a scab until it bled and he pressed his bleeding wrist against the sheet.

  “Where’s Bea?”

  “She’s gone to see her mother. In Poland. Her mother’s not well,” I said, and I was trying not to yell because I knew that yelling did not help people understand you better.

  “That’s a shame,” he said. “My mother died when I was nineteen and my father, I don’t think he got over it. He became an old man overnight. You know what I mean?” I did know what he meant, of course, but since I had never heard my father mention his mother or his father or the emotional state of any living being, I was speechless.

  “An old man overnight, Alison,” he said.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “You want some lunch?”

  I made two grilled cheese sandwiches and I wondered whether I should offer my father a beer, since on one hand, I had no idea who he was and in his altered state, alcohol might be bad for him, and on the other hand, what the hell. My father and I had our sandwiches. (“Burn it,” he said. “That’s what they used to say in the diner. Put a farmer on the raft and burn it.”
“What diner?” I said, and my father said, not unkindly, “Well, you’re no Julia Child.”) And we drank our beers.

  “Salud, amor, y dinero,” he said and clinked my bottle. “Is everybody okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t know who everybody was. He called Andy Fatso, he called Michael The Faigele, he called Jay Babe, the Blue Ox, and my mother had been dead for two years.

  “I’ll take a grilled cheese sandwich,” he said.

  “Another? Okay.” Was this good? It could be good, an appetite for life or something like that, or it could be that he didn’t know if he’d eaten or not.

  “Can’t I get some lunch?” he said, and I made the sandwich, which he nibbled and then he said, “I’m gonna take a little nap.” He stood up and waited for me to stand up.

  I walked him to the bedroom and to his bed and he used my arm to swing himself into bed.

  “Good kid,” he said, patting my face.

  I called Jay and he said, “You are too Julia Child,” and we exchanged I love yous and he said, “Hurry home,” and I said I would.

  I called my brother and told him that he might not want to miss the Second Coming of Alvin Lowald, in which our father had been snatched by pod people who’d sent us a nice old man who thanked me and called me a good kid.

  “Is this permanent?” Andy asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’ll be back to normal tomorrow.”

  “Great. Back to the crypt. Does it seem like he’s dying—is this pre-death niceness?”

  I swore to him that our father did not seem to be dying, that he had done a good job on one and a half grilled cheese sandwiches and all of a Heineken and was now snoring loudly in his bed. Andy swore back that he would get on the redeye Thursday night, as soon as they were done casting a police drama in which none of the criminals or women could be more than five feet five, which was the height of this particular TV detective.