Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  When I arrive at the hospital, I go through the same choice I’ve had to make each day since the accident: Do I go to my father first? Or my mother? I have solved this problem—or at least alleviated my guilt about it—by alternating between them. Today is my father’s turn, but something makes me press the elevator button for my mother’s floor. I figure I’ll visit with my mother, then go to my father. It will be easier to say good-bye to him, since he won’t really notice that I’m leaving.

  The door to my mother’s room is closed. There is a glass pane in the door, just like the one we had in Hillside—only instead of seeing a marble foyer with an old Spanish table covered with piles of magazines and mail, instead of hearing the click and yap of Poofy, I see my mother in her hospital bed, surrounded by strangers.

  I push the door open.

  “There’s the daughter,” someone says. Or am I imagining this? Has this memory been thickened by successive years of memory, each like a coat of paint obscuring the colors beneath?

  There’s the daughter.

  Somebody get a chair.

  Where’s the other daughter?

  I open my mouth but no sound comes out. In the instant before my mother reaches her trembling arms out to me, I already know. These people are clergy, social workers, nurses. They are here because something terrible is happening elsewhere, on another floor of this hospital.

  “Come here, Dani,” my mother cries. I go to her, climbing between her casts, trying to get as close as I can without hurting her. I hold her head against my chest.

  “It’s okay,” I whisper, stroking her hair. Her whole body is shaking. I remember one of the doctors telling me that my mother isn’t out of the woods yet; with the number of fractures her body has sustained, any kind of shock could literally kill her.

  “Ssshhh,” I breathe into her ear. I wrap my arms around her, holding her like a newborn. Our hearts pound together.

  I look up at a woman standing by the foot of my mother’s bed, a stranger in a multicolored woven vest and ethnic jewelry.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Your father—they’re working on him,” she says.

  “What does that mean?” My own voice sounds as if it’s approaching me from far away, shrill as a siren.

  “They’re doing everything they can.”

  As I kiss the top of my mother’s head I am aware that if it were a couple of hours later, I’d be halfway to London. I’d be drinking scotch on the Concorde, watching the digital display in the front of the cabin where you can see the precise moment you break the sound barrier.

  All I know right now is this: I pressed the elevator button for the sixth floor rather than the eighth, and for that reason alone I am not standing in the doorway of my father’s room watching electrodes be placed against his chest, watching them cut open his throat and place a tube inside, hearing shouts and the pounding of rubber-soled feet. I am not watching my father die.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  The morning of my father’s death seems to be a moment I have been preparing for all my life. I sink into a cold, stark numbness as if taking a single step backward into my own shadow. As we sit and wait—my mother, the social worker, the hospital priest, two nurses, and myself—it seems inevitable. Beshert—a Yiddish word that loosely translates into meant to be—ricochets through my head. I gird myself, preparing for the final blow, as if the shape of grief is something I am familiar with and I know it will knock the breath out of me.

  It is just past ten in the morning when the doctor walks through the door of my mother’s room, his head bowed. Sorry, he says, then embolism, and then, autopsy. The next few seconds slow to a standstill as I cradle by mother in my arms, as if I can shield her from this information.

  “I’m here,” I murmur into her ear. “I’m here,” I repeat, as if my presence can possibly be of comfort. She is trembling all over like a wounded animal, and I am a crevice into which she has crawled to seek shelter.

  I’m saying this as much for myself as for my mother. In years to come, I will be grateful for the small kernels of luck embedded into the center of this horror show: I am not in London with Lenny. They will not have to postpone my father’s funeral in order for me to return home.

  “Doctor, there will be no autopsy. It’s against our religion.” My mother’s voice is amazingly strong, but there is a crack in the middle of it, a fissure. She isn’t even Orthodox. How does she know that the body is considered sacred, that it is a sin to cut into it? Her face is absolutely still, collapsed into itself.

  I call Susie.

  “What’s up?” she asks breezily. For the second time in just a few weeks I am in the position of being the bearer of shattering news. I imagine my half sister in her West Village apartment, the morning sunlight gleaming against her grand piano, the Sunday Arts & Leisure section spread across her coffee table.

  Do I tell her to sit down? Is it possible to fall back on such a cliché? Susie would remember the moment better than I do. Time has supplied me with a gauzy scrim, except for this: as I tell my half sister, just saying it straight—It’s Dad, Susie—I will not let go of my mother’s hand. I am afraid she is about to slip away from me. The possibility of her death has its own presence in this room. The doctor has moved to the other side of her bed, where he is holding her hand by the wrist, surreptitiously taking her pulse.

  Susie’s voice barely changes. Years of psychoanalytic training serve, in a moment like this, as a way of keeping her reactions—if not emotions—in check. Whatever actually goes on inside of her, she doesn’t miss a beat.

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  “I’m here—with Irene.”

  “Do Harvey and Shirl know?”

  “No. I called you first.”

  “I’ll call them,” she says. “Shirl and Moe will need to get down from Boston. I’ll call Harvey at Gram’s and drive out to the hospital with him.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. I don’t want to let her off the phone. I want something to happen between Susie and me—a moment of shared grief—but instead I feel the distance between us, stretched as tightly as the phone’s wire that I have wrapped around my wrist.

  “Dan, make sure they don’t touch Dad,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “No autopsy—”

  “Irene already took care of that—”

  There is an ironic little pause in which, without saying a word, Susie and I both know that we are contemplating my mother’s less than encyclopedic knowledge of Orthodox ritual.

  “Someone has to stay with the body,” she says.

  It should not surprise me that Susie knows more about this than I do.

  “Okay,” I say faintly. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I am tracing the ropey veins of my mother’s left hand as I catch the doctor’s eye. He inclines his head at me, then at the door, letting me know he wants to talk to me in private.

  “Mom, I’m going to get something to drink,” I whisper.

  “Don’t leave—” she moans.

  “I’ll be right back—I promise.”

  I follow the doctor into the corridor. The hospital has suddenly become as strange to me as the set of a science fiction movie. Where do bodies go? The thought that my father is being wheeled into some hospital morgue is more than I can bear.

  “Do you want to see your father?” the doctor asks.

  This stops me in my tracks.

  “You mean—” I falter.

  “Before he’s taken—”

  “No,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut. This is a moment I can never take back, and yet I am certain that I don’t want to see my father dead. If I see him that way, I imagine that image will become all I will ever be able to remember.

  “Can you just—ask them to leave my father in his room until his family gets here?” I ask. “It’s against our religion to move him.”

  I have no idea if this is true, but it certainly seems effective. The doctor
stops at the nurses’ station and confers with one of the nurses who nods her head and picks up the phone. Then he turns to me and I see that he feels bad about this, he really does. He knows that I am looking at him thinking: This is the man who could not save my father’s life.

  “Miss Shapiro, your mother—”

  He hesitates.

  “Go on,” I say. “Whatever you have to say, just say it.”

  “Your mother is a very sick woman. I know she’s been looking better, but she’s nowhere near out of the woods.”

  He pauses again, looking at me searchingly. What is he trying to tell me?

  “She may not survive this,” he says. “We have to keep her as calm as possible.”

  I have always believed my mother would live forever. While I have never said good-bye to my father without the thought crossing my mind that I might never see him again, my mother has seemed indestructible, fixed in my consciousness like a gnarled and stately tree that has taken root there. If she is ripped away at this moment in my life, she will take her roots with her and I will be left with less than nothing: a ragged, empty hole.

  “My mother will survive,” I say to the doctor forcefully, as if the depths of my need for this to be true will make the slightest difference.

  It seems no time at all has elapsed before Harvey and Susie have materialized in the corridor. At least an hour has gone by—it would have taken that long for Susie to go to her garage, pick up Harvey, and drive from the West Village to Summit, even with no traffic—but it seems time has stopped.

  Susie doesn’t look me in the eye.

  “We were upstairs to see Dad,” she says accusingly. “They intubated him.”

  I don’t know what this means. Later, I will find out that they opened my father’s trachea and tried to get him breathing again.

  “Harvey had to actually pull the tubes out himself,” Susie says. She is pale and looks exhausted, and is wearing layers of old cotton sweat clothes that look slept in. She must have grabbed her keys and walked straight out of her apartment when she got the news. I want to hug her, to reach out and hold her. She is all I have left of my father, and I want to breathe her in and see if anything of him remains.

  “Have you been to see Irene yet?” I ask.

  “No.”

  Harvey, who looks like a slightly Satanic version of my father—olive-skinned, with a pointy dark beard—seems kind of crazed. He is pacing back and forth, running a hand through his thinning hair. His eyes, through the thick lenses of his glasses, are red and swollen. He has always been envious of his more successful, more respectable older brother. What was it like for him to pass his hand over the eyes of that brother, closing them forever? Has he been drinking? Harvey’s alcoholism, as I will later learn to call it, is not something I think about on this particular morning, but I have no doubt it impacts every step he takes.

  “I called Riverside,” Harvey says, referring to the Upper West Side memorial chapel. “They scheduled the funeral for eleven tomorrow.”

  “The Chevre Kadishe are coming to take Dad,” Susie says. “There are some papers we need to sign.”

  “What’s the Chevre Kadishe?” I ask. Another couple of words I’ve never heard before. My vocabulary is expanding by the minute.

  “They make sure the body is prepared properly for burial,” Susie says.

  “Has anyone gotten in touch with Rabbi Riskin?” Harvey asks.

  They are talking over one another, at me, into the vast, swirling whiteness of the corridor. We are twenty paces from my mother’s room, and my uncle and half sister are making decisions that it suddenly dawns on me are not theirs to make.

  “Why don’t we go talk to Irene about all this?” I ask, my voice thin with rage. They both look at me, startled. It seems my mother has not been a factor in considering arrangements for my father’s funeral.

  We march into my mother’s room. She has her little family around her—Roz and Hy, Morton and Shirley—and I am relieved to see her taking small sips from a paper cup of orange juice. She is clutching a photograph of my father, the one that had been tacked to her bulletin board. I see his wide, dimpled grin, his eyes cast to the side, the white yarmulke covering the dome of his head.

  “Hello, dear.”

  “Oh, Harv—” my mother clasps her arms around Harvey’s neck and draws him close. Her eyes are wide and soft. On this day, my mother and her in-laws have something in common that transcends the bitterness and misunderstandings between them.

  Susie bends down to give her a kiss.

  “Irene, I’m so sorry,” she murmurs, her hair falling over both their faces. The life that Susie and my mother shared, which began when Susie was nine years old, has now abruptly ended, though it will be months before it becomes clear that they will never speak again.

  “Oh God, Susie—”

  At the sight of my half sister, my mother begins to cry. She seems surprised to see each new face looming over her bed. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Roz pat Harvey’s back, her hand moving in figure eights. Morton and Shirley Sugerman are standing in the doorway, and Hy is sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed. He pulls a hankie from his jacket pocket and presses it into her clenched fist. The room is crowded with people who never would have known one another if not for a chance meeting between a man and a woman on East Ninth Street thirty years ago.

  “Irene, if it’s all right with you—” Harvey begins, his eyes flickering toward me, “I called Riverside to make arrangements.”

  “Riverside,” my mother repeats, her brow knitting together. “But that won’t be possible.”

  “Why not?” Susie asks.

  “Look at me,” my mother says, gesturing to her legs, casts dangling in traction. A few signatures are dotted across the plaster, along with scattered little messages. Someone actually wrote Get well soon.

  “I can’t be moved.”

  “So … what are you suggesting?” Harvey asks slowly.

  “The funeral’s going to have to be here in the hospital,” says my mother.

  “But—” Harvey begins.

  Roz removes her hand from his back.

  “If that’s the way Irene wants it, that’s the way it’s going to be,” she says sharply.

  “The hospital isn’t exactly set up for a funeral,” says Susie, using the neutral voice she probably uses to talk down psychotic patients. “Don’t you think we ought to—”

  “I’m going to attend my husband’s funeral,” my mother says. Her chin lifts, her eyes darken, and in her face I see absolute determination. If she had to get out of bed and walk there, at this moment I believe she would and could.

  For the first time since I have known him, I call Lenny’s house. Or to be more precise, I call his house and don’t hang up when someone answers the phone. For years now, I have grown accustomed to the sound of his wife’s hello. She’s one of those people who divide the word into three happy syllables: hel-lo-o, she practically chirps into the phone. Usually I just hang on and breathe quietly, cradling the receiver against my shoulder. I listen as her hello grows puzzled, then impatient. Is anybody there? Who is this?

  This time a child answers the phone. Lenny has an astounding number of children: three stepdaughters (including Jess), three adopted daughters from an earlier marriage, and two daughters with his wife. They range from my age to the toddler.

  “Hi, is your daddy there?” I ask.

  “No.” She says it softly, almost inquisitively.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Shit. Lenny’s probably on his way to the airport. Suddenly I remember that one of his partners is traveling to London with us and think maybe I can catch him at home before Lenny picks him up. I dial directory assistance for Mount Kisco and get the partner’s home number.

  His wife answers the phone.

  “Hi, this is a friend of Lenny Klein’s,” I say. “I’m trying to reach him. Have they left yet?”

  “No, they’re right here,” she says. She sounds puzzle
d, and why wouldn’t she?

  Lenny gets on the phone, his voice furious, but careful.

  “Is there a problem?” he asks. We both know I have just broken the cardinal rule.

  “Sorry to bother you, but my father’s dead,” I say evenly.

  Silence. I can almost hear his mind clicking.

  “Oh, Fox,” he sighs. “I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”

  What does he mean? If I were his wife, would he be asking what I want him to do? I feel like telling him to just go to London. After all, what place does he have in what comes next? My extended family has never met him, my half sister can’t stand him, and my mother will, to say the least, not find his presence comforting. But I feel that I need him. My mother is alone, Susie is alone—but I cannot bear to be alone.

  “Get here as soon as you can,” I say.

  He pauses. Was this what he was expecting?

  “I’ll be there within the hour.”

  In the meantime my mother has become a whirling dervish of organization. From her hospital bed, legs dangling above her, she orchestrates the details of her husband’s funeral. My mother is a formidable woman, and no less formidable for being flat on her back. No is not an option, she tells the hospital administrators who balk at the idea of two hundred people descending on their chapel tomorrow morning. She calls Isaac Swift, the great Orthodox rabbi who married my parents almost thirty years ago, and asks him to perform the service. She hands me lists of names and numbers, some unfamiliar to me, and asks me to begin breaking the news. From now on, when I think of the morning of my father’s death, I will picture myself standing by a pay phone in the Overlook Hospital corridor, wearing a gold silk shirt slit up the back, a black miniskirt and heels, crossing names off a yellow legal pad, the shocked moans of my father’s old friends echoing in my ears.

  Lenny arrives at Overlook at the same time as my friend Diane. They walk quickly down the hall toward me, their noses red from the cold, bundled into scarves and overcoats. Diane, whose mother died when we were freshmen at Sarah Lawrence, is my only friend who understands what it’s like to suddenly have to grow up. She reaches me before Lenny does, and gives me a long, close hug. I close my eyes and try to breathe. Diane’s wearing a floral perfume, her hair is soft against my face, and suddenly I am weeping. It has only been a couple of years since we were college students together, and never have I so desperately wished I could turn back the clock. It seems as if everything that’s happened since I left college has slowly, inexorably led to this moment. I imagine that all this is somehow my fault. I caused my parents’ accident as surely as if I had been behind the wheel of the car on that snowy night two weeks ago.