Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  Angelica gazed steadily at her grandmother. “I will do as you say.” She offered her right hand to confirm the agreement. But Gran just continued to smoke.

  THE NEXT SUMMER Gran lay ill in the Manhattan brownstone. Gramp crouched on a hassock in a corner of the bedroom. No one had the heart to open the house in Maine. The three daughters came, left, came again. Angelica’s mother brought Angelica from Paris. During their sad week in New York—Gran had stopped talk-ing—Toby’s mother flew up from Washington with Toby. The two cousins were shooed out of the house. They sat in awkward silence at a delicatessen. They slouched through a museum.

  “I have discovered astronomy,” Toby said.

  “Our stars are our destinies.”

  “That’s astrology, as of course you know. What you and I need is a bed.” What they needed was a bedroom full of cast-off furniture and a diamonded diamond window. But one more time, why not … She allowed herself to be led to a grimy hotel where, taking off only their lower garments, they each enjoyed a brief spasm of relief—first Toby, then Angelica, taking turns as if under a nurse-maid’s eye.

  “I will begin Russian next year,” Angelica said, adjusting her sandal.

  “Yes, well then, so will I,” he said without conviction.

  Gran died in August. An important rabbi conducted a dignified graveside ceremony. The Buenos Aires daughter began a eulogy of her own but broke down midway. Then prayers; then everybody wept: the three daughters, the three sons-in-law, the nine grandchildren, the great-uncle from South Africa and his brood, the great-aunt from Jerusalem. One by one they threw clods of earth onto the pine coffin. And the Presbyterian relatives, Myrrh included, followed suit, and then offered condolences to speechless Gramp. They were odd, stubborn, unchosen: yet in Angelica’s veins their Maine blood kept company with the overwrought Antwerp stuff; and maybe someday she would have a stark daughter who collected beetles and preferred Route 201 to the Boulevard Raspail and played a flute that caught the light … Cousin Myrrh was extending her hand. Angelica took it.

  All of Great-grandfather’s descendants stayed the week, and then returned home, if that’s what they called it. “Good-bye, beloved mother of my mother,” Angelica whispered to the thick indifference of the Air France window. “Good-bye, Tobski,” she added, an afterthought.

  THE LITTLE WIFE

  THEY FLEW FROM BOSTON to Bangor on a mild February morning. Gail pretended to read a dumb novel selected by her group. Max brought some scientific tome. But he kept the volume closed on his knees, and on top of it he had opened the Beethoven score, opus 66, which he was practicing on his wide thighs. Gail playfully inserted a manicured nail between two of his busy fingers, and with uncharacteristic irritation he flicked her hand away.

  They were in their late sixties, both retired. They were going to Maine to see their friend Fox, probably for the last time. Gail, fond of Fox, nevertheless looked forward to this finale with as much curiosity as dread. Every death foretold your own—there would be something to learn. She had been a schoolteacher; discovery was a lifetime habit.

  I.

  THERE IS AN ANECDOTE ATTRIBUTED, though not traceable, to Beethoven: In Vienna, seeing a passing woman, he remarked to his friend Janitschek, “What a magnificent behind, like the beloved pigs of my youth.”

  Long ago, when they were in college, Fox had instructed Max not to believe this tale. Fox had said that if anybody made the remark it wasn’t Beethoven and not Janitschek, either, but Janácek, the Czech composer who lived almost a century later and who so loved the folk that he probably loved their livestock, too. Beethoven was a city boy, argued Fox; he knew pigs only as sausage. “But a pig’s behind is indeed a thing of beauty,” Fox went on to say. Fox’s uncle had been a gentleman farmer in Vermont, and during a few summers spent with him Fox had come to appreciate the plump joyousness of swine.

  Max was acquainted with pigs mostly from the warnings in Leviticus. He did remember carcasses behind the window of the Italian butchery on Avenue J, which he had passed every day on his way to grade school. They hung there for all to see, upside down like Mussolini. “Dead and cured,” Max told Fox.

  “A pig deceased bears little resemblance to a pig alive,” Fox informed him.

  “HOW DID YOU and your roommate find each other?” Gail asked Max a decade after college. They had just met. Seated next to each other at a bat mitzvah luncheon, they were asking each other question after question, rudely ignoring the other singles at their table.

  “Fox and I? We were married by the university shadchan.”

  Gail understood; the housing office had placed them together as freshmen. “Not an obvious pairing,” she ventured.

  “We, too, wondered about it.” In those days freshmen were assigned to room with fellows who resembled them in backgrounds, religious and athletic preferences, secondary educations. In none of those particulars—except, perhaps, that neither played a sport—did there seem to be a match between Foxcroft Whitelaw and Max Chernoff. One of Fox’s grandfathers had been governor of Maine and the other a president of a small New England college; further in the past a Protestant divine had cast a wrathful glance over his own and succeeding generations. Max’s ancestors, keepers of small unprofitable stores, receded namelessly into the shadowy shtetlach his grandfathers had abandoned. In their turn his Brooklyn parents abandoned most observances, though they did keep kosher to please the old folks. During the first years of their marriage, Max and Gail did the same in honor of those ancient grandparents, who sometimes took a meal with them. When the last grandparent died, the young Chernoffs gave up the practice, and soon they were boiling lobsters in their own kitchen.

  Max hadn’t always been Max. But entering college had given him the opportunity to discard the affected “Maurice” his parents had saddled him with. Later, though, when he’d become established as a historian of medicine, he was grateful for the dignity of “Maurice Leopold Chernoff ” decorating both his books. Shortly after the publication of the first book a gift came in the mail: a recording of Maurice Abravanel conducting Maurice André and the Utah Symphony Orchestra in trumpet works by Ravel. Foxcroft, said the enclosed card. Max turned the record over and over in his hands. “Neither of us plays the trumpet, neither of us likes Ravel …,” he wondered aloud.

  Such a learned man; such a sometime dope. “He thought this had your name on it,” Gail explained.

  Music connected the roommates—perhaps the college housing office had been shrewder than it seemed. As a little boy, Max had been taught scales and finger exercises and “Für Elise” by a monstrously unmusical great-aunt. (“It’s a wonder you can even hum,” Gail remarked after meeting this redoubtable, still alive when they married.) Then he studied with a real teacher on Twenty-third Street. During the first semester of freshman year he sometimes played after dinner in the dormitory’s common room—jazz, mostly, but also Bach and Chopin. He was an adept amateur. Fox, thoughtfully listening, mentioned that he himself had tried various members of the string family. Then, the day after Christmas vacation, while Max was memorizing formulas in their shared bedroom, he heard Fox returning to their shared living room, making more than the usual amount of noise. Small wonder: he was carrying a battered cello case and had to kick his second suitcase. From the cello case he withdrew a magnificent instrument. “I just thought,” he said. Max hoped the thing was insured.

  Fox turned out to be accomplished and dedicated. He was soon practicing an hour a day, and he joined a student quartet and played duets with Max in the common room on afternoons when neither had a lab and no one else was around. They both enjoyed these sessions, though the disparity between their instruments—Max’s the dormitory’s upright, Fox’s the invaluable cello—and between their abilities reminded Max of the other disparities that sometimes grieved him. Flatbush boys, Gail thought when Max told her of this old distress; is there any species so easily stung?

  Fox went to medical school in Chicago, Max in New York. Fox married before gradu
ating. “A surprise to me, that early marriage,” Max said to Gail at the fateful bat mitzvah. “He was wary of girls in college. Well, so was I …” Sophia Whitelaw was a bony, unadorned young woman who had flouted her aristocratic background, skipped college altogether, tramped around Europe like a hobo. At the wedding she danced with all the men and also with her sister, Hebe, an undersized ten-year-old in love with her horse.

  “Foxcroft’s sister-in-law is named—what?” Gail inquired. They were still only an hour into their lifetime companionship; each had just been issued half a chicken. “Hebe? As in heebie-jeebies?”

  “As in the Greek goddess of youth.”

  Max was then working on his second graduate degree, in the history of medicine this time. “I find I prefer the library to the bedside,” he told her. Gail was teaching fourth grade. (She would later take time off after the birth of their only child, a son, then return to the classroom for another thirty years.) Her hair was curly, her nose fixed. She read a lot and collected art deco jewelry. She had her choice of suitors, including a rich one who had loved her before the nose job, when she still wore an owl’s profile, but she felt elevated by being chosen by a doctor, even if he was not planning to hang out a shingle. (For her part Sophia seemed to consider medical practice on a social level with window washing.)

  Fox joined an endocrinology group in Maine. Max taught in Boston. The families sometimes spent weekends in each other’s homes. The men listened to music and played duets; the children—the Whitelaws had a daughter, Thea—played checkers and, in later years, chess; the women went to the museum if they were in Boston and to crafts fairs if in Maine. Once Sophia drove Gail and Hebe (the Goddess of Youth visited her sister frequently) all the way to Lewiston to see some notable antique farming tools. The crone who collected and sold the stuff also dealt in jewelry, mostly worthless. But there, tossed onto a table, was a circle of diamonds banded in silver banded in black enamel. Gail put the bracelet on. What a transformation—she felt like a queen, or at least like a commoner with a royal wrist.

  “I could bring the price down a little,” said the witchy proprietress.

  “Won’t you have a birthday one of these years?” said Hebe, fondling Gail’s upper arm.

  “Filch the housekeeping money. Insist on a special gift,” advised Sophia. “Satisfy yourself,” she urged, this Yankee who didn’t wear even an engagement ring.

  Gail slid the conspicuous shackle from her arm and shook her head: No. Some weeks later, Sophia, satisfying her own self, left husband and teenage daughter, Thea, and resumed her life of vagabondage—modified, this time; she was home as often as she was away. “No, I don’t mind,” Thea said, in her forthright way, when Gail asked. “It’s fun when she’s here, relaxing when she’s gone.”

  II.

  “SOMEONE IN YOUR LARGER COHORT has to die first,” Max had mentioned early on. “To start the avalanche.” In the first decades there were the accidents, the horrific early cancers, the suicides. And there were deaths of children, other people’s children, thank God, but Gail was never without fear for her own boy. Luckily, the Whitelaw daughter and the Chernoff son turned into healthy adolescents and then healthy young adults—nobody nowadays considered male homosexuality an affliction, not out loud, anyway.

  After a while came diseases predictable by any actuary. Somehow Fox and Sophia and Max and Gail avoided them. They couldn’t avoid growing old, though. The men did it in differing ways. Neither stayed fit—neither had been fit to begin with—but Fox at least was naturally skinny. Max steadily gained weight—that was natural, too, or at least familial, or at least not pathological (he pointed out to Gail); extra flesh, his grandmother had assured him, is protection against various ills. A statistical analysis published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society supported this unlikely truth. Max’s narrow shoulders contracted through the years and his broad hips broadened. When, naked after lovemaking (an activity increasingly rare in their age group, studies show, while other studies show also that both members of an aging couple like to pretend that their partners are movie stars during the business), he walked from bed to bathroom, Gail sometimes imagined that she was watching the retreat of a satiated woman. But when he returned after the scrubbing he considered necessary—Gail would have lain around in sweat and jism until morning—with his member shrunken and a smile stretching his bushy mustache, he looked male again. Her man.

  A few ailments did afflict them. Gail’s fibroids required a hysterectomy. Max had to have a hernia repaired. Various antidepressants gave Fox various side effects like constipation and patchy hair loss. But Sophia—she was never sick. And her gaunt attractiveness mutated into blinding beauty: the excellent bones and good teeth; the unlined skin that had never known a moisturizer; the pale hair, only slightly faded, bundled loosely at her nape. She still climbed, skied, went scuba diving. When she returned, frequently, to her Maine home, Hebe joined her. The Goddess of Youth had developed crow’s-feet like everybody else, and her little teeth were yellowing. Sometimes the Chernoffs were invited for a weekend. They’d find Hebe chattering at Fox. They’d find Sophia atop an un-trustworthy ladder, rewiring the porch lantern, or mounted on one of the gables as if it were a pony, shingling the roof. She had a boy’s daring and a man’s competence and a woman’s grace. She seemed to be at the beginning of a very long life. Gail found herself jealous, or was it desirous?

  Back home: “Sophia will bury the rest of us,” Gail predicted to Max.

  “Somebody has to be the last.”

  Sophia wouldn’t be the last, she’d be the exception; but Gail kept this more precise insight to herself until she could share it with young Thea Whitelaw. One summer, Thea, working on her masters in teaching at Harvard, stayed with the Chernoffs between apartments. “Your mother may live for centuries,” said Gail.

  “Oh, she will,” said Thea. “She’s part cetacean. Cetus is Latin, from the Greek ktos …”

  “Sea monster, yes. We grade-school teachers haul around a lot of facts. Pseudo-erudition.” Gail spoke in a stern voice—pseudo-stern. She had grown close to this young woman, dark eyes like a rain cloud, brown hair in one thick braid.

  SOMEONE IN THE SMALLER cohort has to die first, too.

  One of those usually curable carcinomas sought out Fox. But in his case … not so curable. Still, several years went by: treatments, time off, new treatments, everyone knows the drill.

  There had been no Whitelaw-Chernoff visits since the diagnosis. Fox’s therapy took a lot of time. And the Chernoffs’ son now lived in Savannah; his parents tended to travel south when they traveled at all. Max’s weight hampered him a bit. Gail was frequently fatigued. Her eyelids had become pleated, but the rest of her face, she knew, was still lively, still pretty: the tilted chin, hers by right; the tilted nose, hers by rhinoplasty. She was glad they had sold their house and moved into a condo. Its kitchen had all the latest devices, and granite countertops, too. She didn’t care if she never cooked another meal, but she liked laying palms and then cheek on the cool stone.

  Thea was back in Maine, living in her father’s house. Her mother was sometimes there; Hebe too. Thea was teaching fifth grade. She called one January morning.

  “It’s almost over, Gail.”

  “What do you mean? Max and your father talked just last week … well, last month … before Christmas. Is Fox in the hospital again?”

  “No. He’s limping around, can do just about everything but eat, takes stuff for the pain. I don’t mean he’s dying. I just mean he’s dying.”

  The difference between the imminent and the soon: yes. There was also the inevitable, but they all belonged in that group, even cetacean Sophia.

  “Come up, please,” said Thea. “Bring music.”

  “Well … which music?”

  “Beethoven?”

  “Oh, too difficult. Max hardly plays now. Some kid stuff, that’s all, for the neighbors’ daughter.” A brat, that little girl: or perhaps Gail hadn’t yet made peace wit
h her own no-grandchildren destiny. “The other morning he did do a marvelous riff on ‘Oh, Mr. Sun,’ ” she admitted.

  “What about the variations on the Magic Flute thing?”

  “Ein Mädchen—”

  “—oder Weibchen. Please don’t tell me I’m pseudo-erudite.”

  “Okay,” Gail said, complying with the request, and also agreeing to the program: Beethoven’s Twelve Variations on Mozart’s A Maiden or Little Wife.

  III.

  BANGOR. The plane banked over pines, over water. Thea’s boyfriend was waiting for them at the airport. They got into his Piper, Max taking the copilot’s seat. This flight took just ten minutes. They landed on an oblong of earth with spruce trees at its margins. And then, in the boyfriend’s Jeep, they drove along a rutted road from island to island, across meager bridges, until they reached the last island in the series, the familiar outcrop with its fifty-odd houses. The easternmost house, brown-shingled like the rest, belonged to Fox. A deep porch wrapped around the three sides of it that faced the fierce sea. Inside were angles, odd windows, nooks, all grown familiar through the years. The music room held a Steinway bought on the occasion of Fox’s birth. In the attic stood a hard double bed. On it Gail and Max would make love as they always did here, as if it were a guestly obligation.

  The big main rooms were farthest from the road. Their windows, and the front door, too, opened onto the porch and the sea beyond. The back of the house faced the road. Max and Thea’s boyfriend carried the suitcases under a trellised arch, and disappeared. They’d climb the steps of the porch and enter the house. Gail wrenched herself out of the Jeep. She looked up at the rear of the house, where she saw, in a high window—the back-stairs landing, wasn’t it?—a female form: Thea, carrying two pillows no doubt destined for their marital bed. Thea waved, continued upward. One story below, behind a window with purplish glass, stood Fox. He raised a hand. In the kitchen moved another female figure—Sophia. And in the now-open back doorway, which led into a kitchen of elderly appliances where the family took all its meals, stood little Hebe, hugging her own freckled arms in excitement. “Gail!” piped the Goddess of Youth, and ran down the wooden stairs and threw herself upon the unenthusiastic Gail.