Kennedy died on a Friday, but I remember watching television with my mother and Edwin that night, watching the unending coverage after Kennedy’s death. Surely Uncle Edwin did not break his rule and come on a Friday. Either we were still watching the following Thursday, or in my mind I have combined two different evenings of television. In my memory it is the same day, when my tooth is still newly freed from pain, and I am still surprised: surprised that something had surprised me. The upheavals of the sixties were caused by Kennedy’s death. Young people who had not voted either for or against him and had little sense of who he was were made capable of change by the discovery, on November 22, 1963, that sudden, important change could occur.
In my home the death of Kennedy was the first happening in a rapid series, a transitional period of new developments—some coming when they did only by chance—at the end of which nothing was recognizable, as if everything had been blue before and was yellow afterward. Now came the first days in which blue was only slightly mixed with yellow, to form a subtly greenish blue, which would turn to green, then to a yellowish green, and finally to a yellow that made me blink and squint, as if Bobbie and I had come out into unshielded, searing sunshine.
The first time Edwin came over after Kennedy’s death, whenever it was, I didn’t yawn and go into my room after we’d watched a little television. I couldn’t stop watching. I was sure Bobbie and Edwin would rather watch than go to bed, even they. Or I considered it unseemly to turn off the TV at such a time and go into the bedroom, and I wanted to save my mother and her boyfriend from impropriety, in case they were tempted. With the shocked, honest sound of the radio announcer in my mind, I could no longer carry off that fake yawn.
So I heard my mother say in a low voice to Edwin, “I have a lump.”
He looked away from the television, straight at her. He said, “You mean—” and he touched his chest as if pledging allegiance to the flag. A balding man then in his forties, Edwin had sandy hair and glasses with colorless plastic frames, as if to proclaim that, like Brooklyn and Dr. Dressel, he concealed nothing anywhere. When he touched his chest, looking scared, just as some kind of solemn footage appeared on the television screen, he looked as if he really was pledging allegiance. I was trying to persuade myself that what my mother had said was not alarming, that Edwin didn’t look scared, just curious, and I tried for an expression of disinterested curiosity on my own face.
“How do you know?” he said.
“I was taking a shower,” said my mother. They spoke in low voices, apparently thinking I might be so absorbed by the television that I wouldn’t pay attention.
Now I couldn’t keep from looking at my mother’s chest. I wanted and didn’t want to know which breast had a lump. My mother was a short, slightly plump woman with round, bouncing, distinct breasts—not the undifferentiated bosom of my grandmother or of Aunt Clara, my mother’s oldest sister. Bobbie showed off her two breasts, wearing not exactly plunging but rounded, low necklines, so a little cleavage showed. She wore perfume and high heels, even around the house, especially when Edwin was coming, and she didn’t quite know how to walk in high heels even though she’d worn them for decades. She had a slightly tripping gait, as if the shoes made her walk faster than she wanted to. Sometimes a heel rubbed noisily, making an ugly sound on the kitchen linoleum. “Sor-REE!” she’d say, sounding not sorry but amused.
Edwin didn’t seem to know what to say. After a while he turned off the television. I still couldn’t pretend to yawn. “Do you want tea?” my mother asked Edwin.
I didn’t drink tea, so the question at last sent me to my bedroom. I could hear Edwin and Bobbie talking in the kitchen, while dishes clattered and water ran. She was washing the dinner dishes, something she usually did not do when Edwin was there. They’d be in the sink the next morning, and she’d finally scrub them clean after supper that night. This time I heard dishwashing for a long time, as if Bobbie washed them over and over, keeping her hands in the suds all evening and her back toward her lover, then shaking the drops off to show Edwin to the door.
My aunts took charge of the lump in my mother’s breast. Bobbie was deemed incapable of managing it—or maybe she asked for help. Someone had to accompany her to the doctor, and Aunt Fanny, whom I didn’t like, was assigned. Fanny I thought of as my powdered aunt. She was surrounded by a scented cloud, and her kisses made me sneeze. I think I disliked her because she was unhappy, and I knew she was unhappy because more than anyone else she believed nothing could change, at least not in a good way. I thought my mother, too, would have preferred Sylvia, but Sylvia taught school all day. My grandmother—a white-haired, passionate old lady, held somewhat in check by her committee of daughters—was too emotional and ignorant, and so was Aunt Clara. Minnie, the youngest, lived in Chicago.
“Can’t Aunt Sylvia take a day off?” I asked.
“Of course not,” said my mother. Sylvia—a bossy, skinny lady—intrigued me, not just because she was the mother of Richard the pianist. Sylvia seemed to stretch farther in some direction than the rest of us, exploring the blurry areas of the map whether they confused her or not.
I came home from school on a Monday. I know it was a Monday because it was as far as possible from the day Edwin would come. In my memory it’s the Monday after Kennedy was shot, but it surely wasn’t. I found women all over the place. Aunt Fanny had come home from the doctor’s with my mother, and apparently Aunt Clara and my grandmother had been summoned after all, because there they were. Aunt Sylvia had come over after school to find out what the doctor had said, and now sat up straight on a wooden chair, her big teacher’s purse, filled with spelling tests, propped at her feet. Everybody’s eyes looked strained as they stared at me. They must have begun to stare when they heard my key in the lock. By the time I opened the door they looked exhausted from staring. Aunt Fanny’s powder was splotchy. My mother dropped a navy blue partially knitted sleeve to come to me. Her ball of yarn rolled to the floor as she ran toward me in her heels. She said, “Now, I don’t want you to worry, Bradley, it’s probably nothing.”
“He said it was nothing?”
She hugged me. Aunt Sylvia said, “She has to have a biopsy. Then they can see if it’s anything.”
“What will they do then?” I said, putting my mother gently to one side and setting my books on the coffee table.
“Oh, they’ll keep her overnight in the hospital. You can stay with me,” Aunt Fanny said.
“He’ll stay with me,” said Aunt Sylvia. “If it’s malignant,” she said then, looking hard at me, “they’ll take off the breast.” I know now that she said “the” because she couldn’t bear to say “her,” not because she preferred to be impersonal. It was one of Aunt Sylvia’s “he should know” speeches, which I’d heard off and on throughout my childhood. I knew the breast would come off and my mother would die anyway. The aunts had been right all along: Bobbie’s foolish hopes and ambitions would come to nothing. That they had been correct made me—for the time being—hate them. I picked up the blue sleeve. One needle had slipped out of its stitches, and I picked that needle up, too, and the ball, and rolled up the yarn that had come loose. I felt unbearably tender toward my mother, while my aunts’ presence seemed like the cause of our trouble rather than a response to it. In my confusion I turned away without looking at my mother and without speaking. Not taking my coat off, I picked up my books and went into my room—still clutching the knitting—and remained there, emerging only to go to the bathroom. I never did homework before supper. Now I began solving geometry problems, but I couldn’t stop imagining my mother on a table, and a long, narrow knife with a stainless steel handle, something like the knife my mother used to cut roasts. I made myself think of something else. But I had to know when my mother would go into the hospital and have her breast cut off. At last I left my room. I went to the kitchen and poured a glass of milk, something else I never did. I was behaving like a boy in a naive children’s book, drinking milk and starting homework after
school. The voices in the living room were now discussing Uncle Edwin—blaming my mother, as usual, for putting up with him when he didn’t marry her. “Now at least I should hope—” said Aunt Fanny.
“Did you call him?” said Sylvia.
“Not yet,” said Bobbie.
“Do you want me to call him?” asked Fanny.
“I’ll call him later,” said my mother. I walked into the living room, carrying my glass of milk like a prop in a play. Instead of asking when the biopsy and possible surgery would take place, I looked angrily at my mother and said in a voice that came out squeaky, “Tell them to go away! Just tell them!”
Nobody said anything. They left soon, and when they were quite gone, my mother said, “I’d had enough of them, too.”
“Let’s call Edwin,” I said.
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
She was walking back and forth to the kitchen, carrying coffee cups as if it had been an ordinary visit. “He doesn’t like to talk on the phone.”
“But this is an emergency.”
“It’ll keep,” she said, her back to me. “Why upset him?”
But I was sure he’d want to know. Or I wanted him to know, or just wanted him. When she was in the bathroom I searched her address book but couldn’t find Edwin. If I took the phone book from its drawer she’d catch me. I had no privacy. I generally went to bed before her, and woke up after she did. When I left for school, she’d be drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, still in her bathrobe. (I knew from times I was home that soon she’d look at the clock and stub out the cigarette decisively. Within a few minutes she’d be showered, dressed, and out the door, leaving the dishes on the table.)
The next morning I stopped at a candy store on the way to school and looked up Edwin Friend in the phone book. He lived on a street I’d never heard of. Of course he’d be at work. I didn’t want to phone, anyway. I didn’t know whether he lived with his disagreeable mother. I went to the library after school and eventually found Edwin’s street on a map of Brooklyn. It seemed fairly close to Dr. Dressel’s office, with a piece of Prospect Park in between. I set out guiltily, worried that this trip would take so long, my mother would be home before me. At fifteen, I wasn’t required to let Bobbie know if I’d be late, but she’d expect me today of all days. The night before, I had only managed to say, “You’ll be fine.”
I waited for one bus, then the other. According to the map, if I stayed on it a few blocks past Dr. Dressel’s office, then walked right, I’d come to Prospect Park, and Edwin’s street wouldn’t be far beyond it. The walk to the park took longer than I had thought, and it began to grow dark. After a while I asked directions from a woman who looked like Aunt Fanny. She looked at me with my schoolbooks, maybe trying to decide whether she had the authority to ask me what I was up to. Then she pointed me toward the park, where the paths were curved, and each path led to another curved path, curving differently, so I quickly lost my sense of direction. There was a lake I had to walk around. I was afraid I’d end up where I began, but I didn’t. At last I emerged in the dark—cold, hungry, and tired. The streets I now came to had names I remembered from the map, and I found the right one after asking directions only twice more.
Edwin lived on the first floor of a small apartment house. I found the apartment number on the mailbox. As I neared his door, I heard a television. When I rang the doorbell, it was answered by a girl of about my age. After all that, I’d apparently gone to the wrong place. “I’m looking for Mr. Edwin Friend,” I said. The girl was dressed, but wearing large, realistic bunny slippers, which made me think it must be late at night, and she’d been on her way to bed. Still looking at me, she shouted, “Daddy!”
Then, as I began to feel strangely ill, I heard familiar footsteps, and familiar Edwin came into the hallway where I stood, opening his eyes wide behind his glasses. “What’s wrong?”
“Never mind,” I said. I turned, but another voice spoke, a voice I knew.
“Who’s there?” When I turned back, for a moment I couldn’t place the woman in slacks who stood beside Edwin. “What is it?” she said.
“My mother’s sick,” I answered.
“Do you live around here?” she said. “I didn’t know you lived around here.” Then I knew who she was—Dorothy, Dr. Dressel’s hygienist, earnestly trying to figure out why the boy who cross-examined the dentist was standing in her front hall.
“I’d better go,” I said.
“But what is it?” said Dorothy.
“I know where he lives,” Edwin said, touching Dorothy on the shoulder.
“You know him?” she said. Another girl, older than I, came into the hallway. They were a family. Edwin had a family.
“I’ll drive him home,” said Edwin. “He’s lost. Wait right here. Right here, son. I don’t want you to move from this spot.” He drew me in and closed the door, and they all disappeared. I heard voices, then a toilet flushing, and Edwin came back carrying his coat. He seemed to have trouble putting it on. Then he opened the door. He said nothing while we walked. We came to a car I recognized as his, and now he leaned against it. “What about your mother?” he said.
Edwin was married, but he listened, then drove me home and came inside as if it were Thursday. Bobbie was in tears, not knowing where I could be, so long after supper. I sat and ate, and they sat and watched me, while Bobbie told Edwin what the doctor had said. After he left, I said, “There’s something you have to know.”
“I already know,” Bobbie said.
“How do you know?”
“It’s a thing you guess eventually,” she said.
“Does Edwin know you know?”
“Maybe he thinks I’m finding out right this minute,” she said.
“Does Aunt Sylvia know?”
“Nobody knows but me,” said Bobbie.
“He should leave her and marry you,” I said, weeping.
“He has children.” She took me in her arms.
Edwin had lived two irreconcilable lives for eleven years, but Kennedy had died and it was possible to change. Edwin left Dorothy soon after my mother’s breast was removed, and moved to a little apartment in Queens. I had to switch to the unpleasant dentist Aunt Sylvia and my mother saw. Edwin didn’t marry my mother—he did have an aged, difficult, anti-Semitic mother—but he visited Bobbie every day and often stayed overnight. Evenings as I read in my room I’d hear him and Bobbie laughing, sometimes at the TV and sometimes without it.
He talked sadly about his daughters, and after a long time, the two girls began to visit us. I didn’t like seeing my mother trying to make it up to them with compliments and cakes. “I’m not a good woman,” she said to me more than once, and possibly her sisters would have agreed, but they were impressed with Bobbie for other reasons, astonished that she’d known and kept the secret. “I wouldn’t have thought she had it in her,” Aunt Sylvia said to me, years later.
My mother lived until I was in my late twenties, but was never well for long again. I became different during those years. I became someone who believed in change and was curious about it, though frightened, someone who could put one hand on the hand of a man who attracted me, another on his shoulder. And I became someone able to tell stories about myself. It was part of who I was at City College. When I wasn’t getting arrested for political action—for demanding more change—I told funny stories, or stories that seemed funny at first. The one my friends demanded I repeat and repeat was the story of how innocent young Bradley finally deduced that his mother’s bachelor boyfriend was married to the dental hygienist. My voice became raucous as the walk through Prospect Park grew longer and longer, the trees darker and more menacing. In exchange for the foolish, pretty mother I never quite had again—and in exchange for her mute son, poised helplessly at the edge of the map—came shouts of harsh laughter from my friends.
Ms. Insight
At fifty-six, Ruth Hillsberg still wore her thick gray hair well below her shoulders though it ca
ught in pocketbook straps and perhaps made her look out of control. In hot weather she brushed it back into a ponytail. That way, she believed, she appeared almost civilized. Ruth was a magazine editor, a good one. If a confused and badly written story was an unlaundered, tangled pair of tights, she could find the indispensable smelly toe, then tug and smooth until the piece took its true form, feet down/waist up. And after she straightened the tights, she liked to think, she washed them.
Ruth was not quite slim, but she was used to her body, and could buy clothes that fit without trying them on. She permitted herself to walk out of a concert partway through or to leave a museum after looking at only six paintings, and as she walked into the weather she felt grandly draped, not just in her hair but in the freedom she’d given herself.
Ruth had loved several men and been married once, with two splendid children—a son and a daughter in their twenties—to show for it. For several years she had traveled now and then from Boston, where she’d lived for most of her adult life, to a lover’s bed in Brooklyn. Then she heard of a job in New York. Old associates praised her, she was interviewed again and again, she got it. “We could live together,” she told her lover, Jeremy, who was five years younger than she was. Jeremy doubted, but she was sure. His Park Slope apartment had only one bedroom but a versatile alcove. “It’ll be fine,” she said confidently. “And we’ll be fine.”
Once her furniture arrived the apartment was crowded, and sometimes she imagined living alone there. Life was not as companionable as she’d pictured it, and she and Jeremy did not cut up fresh vegetables while sipping Shiraz on autumn evenings. But Ruth had grown up in Brooklyn, and it was good to be back. Her son, David, lived on Staten Island with an indoor cat and numerous cameras. David told people he earned his living selling chocolate chip cookies at the farmers’ market in Union Square, but as far as Ruth knew he made money designing Web sites and taking photographs.
In Case We're Separated Page 13
