Dinner with Edward

by Isabel Vincent

  Encouraged, Edward almost forgot why he had come to the store. He launched into the story of how he had met his wife, the history behind the photograph, how he had taken the image on a beach in California when they both still believed that they could make it in Hollywood.

  And then, sensing that the young woman had been unusually attentive—sensitive and beautiful and truly interested in his life—Edward asked her if she liked to read poetry.

  “Oh, I love poetry!”

  After he paid her for the mat, Edward wrote down the young woman’s address, so that he could send her a few copies of his most recent poems in the mail. When he asked for her name, Edward’s heart seemed to skip a beat when he heard the answer.

  “Paula,” she said.

  12

  Grilled Lamb Chops

  Broccoli Rabe Stewed with Smoked Pigs’ Knuckles

  Corn Bread

  Macarons

  Malbec

  I knew Edward was feeling nostalgic for the South when he called to tell me that he had been cooking a pot of broccoli rabe with smoked pigs’ knuckles on the stove all day. He was also planning to make corn bread, he said. Would I please come to dinner? He knew it was an invitation I couldn’t possibly refuse, but as I walked out of the subway and the few blocks to his building on Roosevelt Island, I wondered what had sparked the sudden nostalgia for his childhood in Nashville.

  “Time is going by so quickly,” he said, wrapping a dish towel around the hot plates of seared lamb chops, still sizzling from the grill pan.

  I bit into pink flesh glistening with bits of fresh rosemary. The broccoli rabe was a deep green, slightly bitter and smoky, and so tender there was almost no need to chew—it simply melted on my tongue. The corn bread was dense and only a little sweet—a perfect counterpoint to the gaminess of the lamb and the smoky richness of the greens.

  Dispensing with my utensils, I picked up one of my lamb chops with my hands and tore into the meat, gnawing it to the bone to savor every last bite. When I finally looked up from my plate, I told Edward that I agreed with him about how quickly time was passing. It had been more than three years since I met this endearing man. I was now officially divorced and my daughter was rapidly becoming a teenager.

  But Edward shook his head. No, he said, he meant something else. He meant that he was conscious of time running out and that he just wouldn’t have the energy to do some of the things he wanted to do before he died. He got up to clear the table.

  He hadn’t spoken about death for a long time. So what had changed?

  Edward had gone to a funeral for a friend earlier in the week and his longtime doctor had died the day before. So death was on his mind again.

  “When I die, I will probably have a memorial service, and I hope you will say something,” he said in even tones. “You know so much about me.”

  Of course, Edward had already made it clear there would be no funeral for him. And he didn’t want any memorial to be sad, or overwrought, certainly not religious. He admired the actions of his former physician. When Will Grossman was diagnosed with cancer and decided not to seek treatment, he wrote a letter to all of his friends, outlining what they had meant to him, and bidding them a proper adieu.

  “He had great dignity,” said Edward, who had started to write a poem about the doctor. For Edward, dignity meant someone who always seeks the truth and has integrity. And Will was clearly someone who stood out.

  Edward had been attending a lot of funerals lately as his friends and family members steadily passed away. And he had been nothing but critical of most of the services. The funeral for his friend, Roosevelt Island neighbor Mike Michaels, who was ninety-­one when he died, was an example.

  “His family members got up to speak but they were too emotional,” complained Edward. “That’s not the way to honor someone’s life or to tell a story.”

  So Edward, who was sitting in the back row, decided that Mike needed to be remembered a different way and asked the family if he could say a few words. Edward got up to speak in front of the sixty or so mourners, and after a few minutes had everyone laughing at the memory of a man who was the youngest in a family with five girls, whose Jewish parents were so grateful to have a boy that they always called him by the Yiddish term of affection bubala. For years, Edward told the group, almost no one in his family could recall his real name! Which is why he was known as Michael Michaels.

  “All we have are our stories,” said Edward.

  I remembered something Rita had said at one dinner. “You know, Edward, I came for dinner, but I was really coming here for the story.” We all came for the story. Edward was our own Scheherazade. At most of our dinners, there was a story Edward was burning to tell me. He spun tales about his life in the South, told me stories about the people in the portraits encased in silver frames on a shelf in his living room. There was an uncle who became a sugar baron in turn-­of-­the-­century Cuba, a great-­grandfather who had shot a man over land in Missouri and escaped to Mexico where he lived out the rest of his life on the lam, an aunt who had taken to the pulpit when her preacher father suddenly stopped talking in mid-­sermon, overcome by throat cancer that constricted his vocal cords.

  And now who would tell Edward’s story? Would he simply be forgotten? I know these thoughts must have been occupying him. What would become of the voluminous scrapbooks in which he had so painstakingly chronicled that story—his life with Paula and his daughters? “What will happen to all these albums I have made with their personal importance? I wonder about that on occasion,” he had once written to me. “But not for long, since it offers no resolution.”

  There were faded photographs of the neat house he and Paula moved into on Long Island after their first daughter, Laura, was born; of Edward and Paula on a trip to London; of Laura and Valerie graduating from high school; of family weddings. There was Edward standing proudly in his old living room beside a piece of furniture he had made, or next to the bushes of red raspberries in the backyard.

  “We never had raspberries growing up, Dad,” said Laura one night at dinner, after she had moved back to New York and settled into an apartment across the street from Edward.

  Edward proved her wrong, by going back to the scrapbooks, dutifully examining every page to find the series of photographs Paula had taken of him in his garden. And there he was: a handsome, much younger Edward, proudly displaying his raspberry bushes in a color snapshot.

  There were certain events in his past that he had longed to chronicle on the page, too, but while he seemed so adept at capturing the nuance in other people’s lives, he had trouble writing about his own. Almost two years into our friendship Edward wrote me a letter about his struggles in making sense of his own story. He was specifically referring to the difficulty in writing about his father’s death, an event that was still too raw to relate even more than half a century after the fact. Edward had sent me neatly typed copies of his stories, about his Irish neighbor Megan, about Paula, and many others, but he had never sent anything about his father.

  “I have worked on it before, trying to get it down on paper, but each effort has failed. I gave up after trying to write it in the second person, to myself, as if I did not know it from having lived it.”

  But on this particular evening, after the lamb chops and the corn bread and the macarons that Rita had brought over from a Polish patisserie in Queens that afternoon, Edward swept aside our dishes with the back of his hand. He was determined to tell me the story, no matter how painful it proved to be.

  In the summer of 1955, Edward’s father lay dying in Nashville. Leslie was 68 and a lifelong smoker. He had been sick with cancer for a long time. Family members took turns watching him during the day while Veronica, Edward’s mother, sold corsets to try to keep up with the mounting medical bills.

  “After working all day long seeing people and selling, she came home to lie next to him in their small double bed,” he said. “For sleep? For rest? For comfort? There couldn’t have been much
for her in those nights.”

  Veronica had Gibson Girl glamour, even after seven children, and even as she slid past middle age. In the sepia-­toned portrait of his mother that he keeps in his living room, her brown hair is styled in a Victorian updo, with wispy curls touching the creamy skin at the nape of her neck. Edward was the youngest of the seven children. Not that Veronica spent all that much time raising them. She was often away on one of her get-­rich-­quick schemes, so parenting fell to her sister, Edward’s Aunt Beatrice. Never married, Beatrice became the nanny who doted on the children. She had saved Edward’s life when he was a toddler by forcing milk down his throat after he had swallowed poison. He had tears in his eyes when he talked about Beatrice and said that he hadn’t realized the important part she played in his life until years after her death.

  Despite Veronica’s benign neglect of her children, she was passionate about Leslie. As her husband lay dying, she devoted herself to his care, even as she was forced to transfer him to Nashville’s Protestant Hospital, where he became a charity patient in a crowded ward.

  “I spoke often with him on the phone,” Edward told me. “I heard his confusion. They weren’t about to tell him the truth, that he was dying.” But Edward kept putting off the trip to Nashville to see his ailing father. When it became clear that Leslie’s death was imminent, though, Edward bundled his wife and daughters into their secondhand Chevy sedan. He reasoned that it would take three days to make the trip from Long Island to Nashville, if the car didn’t break down along the way. At that time, the superhighways hadn’t yet been completed. You could drive on five-­to-­ten-mile stretches of paved road and then you were back on the old system for fifty to sixty miles at a time. They took the Skyline Drive along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains so that the girls could enjoy the dramatic scenery.

  “I wanted them to see the cotton candy clouds,” said Edward.

  It was part of the same route that Paula and Edward took when they made their trip to California as newlyweds. They even stayed at the same tourist home they had stopped at on their wedding night, when they still dreamed that they could make it big in Hollywood. This time Edward was thirty-­five, and as he set off on his journey South to see his dying father, his dreams of becoming an actor had long vanished. After he and Paula moved to California, in the early 1940s, the closest Edward got to Hollywood glamour was filling grocery orders for some of the biggest movie stars of the day at the May Co. in Los Angeles. During the day, he worked as a clerk, taking phone orders from the butlers of Orson Welles, Judy Garland, and Katharine Hepburn, filling their boxes with produce and studying his lines for the amateur theatrical productions he starred in at night. Later, he took a night school course in welding and worked the graveyard shift at the San Pedro shipyard.

  In 1941, he landed the lead role in a play called American Sampler. One night, a talent scout connected with Columbia Pictures saw one of his performances and asked him to set up a screen test. But Edward’s timing was off. His screen test was cancelled after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged America into the Second World War.

  Weeks later, Edward was called up for military service. He was twenty-­three years old, over six feet tall, and barely 130 pounds. After hours of standing in line with dozens of draftees at a federal recruitment office in Los Angeles, waiting for an army doctor to do a physical examination, he collapsed. The room full of men was stuffy, and the next thing he knew he was lying on the floor, while an orderly tried to revive him with smelling salts. Edward had fainted and would soon fail his medical exam.

  Four years into their Hollywood sojourn, Edward and Paula made the decision to return to New York for good. His agent suggested that he would have a better chance of being discovered on Broadway by talent agents than in the low-budget theatrical productions he was doing in Hollywood. “Let them find you there,” said the agent.

  Back in New York, though, acting opportunities dried up. Paula had long since abandoned acting, and now Edward, too, put his performance dreams aside when Paula became pregnant with Laura. They moved into a second-­floor walk-­up on Jones Street in the Village, but with a baby on the way, they no longer felt comfortable living in cramped quarters in Manhattan. They relocated to the Long Island suburbs, and by the time Valerie arrived seven years later, Edward was working alternately as a tailor and a welder. Later, he sewed upholstery in a car factory.

  But Paula and Edward wrote stage plays together at night. Edward showed me the correspondence they received from one of the biggest producers on Broadway in the 1950s. He wanted to put on one of Edward and Paula’s plays, but in the end decided against going with two unknowns. “I was, in 1955, accepting finally that we were not good enough as playwrights,” Edward said. “So be it. The girls were growing and I was providing for us essentially, though I should have been earning more to make our lives easier.”

  Occasionally, to make up the shortfall, Edward took the train to Belmont to bet on the horses. Sometimes he won several thousand dollars. But these events were few and far between.

  As he drove across the country on his grim mission to Nashville, a sense of failure overtook him.

  “I was headstrong and had more insecurities than Paula should have had to put up with,” he confessed to me. “But she didn’t push me and was marvelously supportive as well as endlessly appreciative and admiring of me. Well, she loved me, like no one ever could. I was luckier than I had a right to be. I’m ashamed I didn’t know it then.”

  And as he approached his family home in Nashville, he braced himself for what he knew would be a final meeting with his father. But nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to encounter in the hospital room.

  “He looked, lying on that bed, like the victims we had seen in Shoah,” recalled Edward. The horrors of the Nazi Holocaust had been revealed only a decade earlier. Edward wanted to take his father off life support, to end his suffering, and tried to rally his mother, brothers, and sisters to the cause.

  “Fuck the hospital,” he had said to his family; this was no way for any human being to die. “He was all protruding blue veins and tubes and wires,” recalled Edward. “Tubes from plastic bags overhead fed solutions drop by drop into his veins on quivering arms and body. And from his bladder and colon, contents flowed through more tubes into pans beneath the bed. I begged the intern to remove the tubes and allow him to die with dignity, but no one listened.”

  That night, as Paula and the children were asleep in his old bedroom, Edward was restless, anxious about his father’s suffering. The air was heavy as before a storm, and the city was dark and silent. Edward stared out the second-­floor window of his childhood home, straining to catch the intermittent glow of fireflies.

  And then he heard chirping and looked out as a lone mockingbird fluttered up and down on a pole in his backyard. Losing himself in the birdsong, Edward felt something graze his leg.

  A mouse? A rat?

  “I felt that rats were invading the walls of our home, the way the cancer had invaded my father’s veins,” Edward said. The next day, before heading to the hospital, Edward bought traps and set them up inside the house and in the bushes next to the foundation, right under his father’s bedroom window. He was standing in the living room when he heard one of the traps snap shut. At the same time, he became vaguely aware of the doorbell ringing. He ignored the doorbell and rushed to dispose of the trapped rodent. But as he approached the trap, Edward recoiled.

  “I saw that I had trapped something gray,” said Edward, who began to tear at the memory. “But it wasn’t a rat.” By now he was sobbing as he struggled to tell me the rest of the story. Before he even managed to get the words out, I knew what he was going to say.

  “I killed the mockingbird,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

  He sat on the ground in the garden of his childhood home cradling the dead bird, a symbol of the South, his youth, and perhaps his innocence. He didn’t need to hear the news from the hospital messenger who had bee
n incessantly ringing the doorbell. He already knew that his father was dead.

  “I buried the bird, trap and all, in the backyard,” said Edward, still crying. “It was the Fourth of July.”

  The funeral was two days later, and the day after that Edward and his family got in their Chevy to return to New York. Back on the Skyline Drive, Edward was so tired and distraught that he swerved off the highway, “only stopping by some miracle when I slammed my foot on the brake before we would have catapulted off the side down to our deaths below.”

  We were quiet for what seemed to be a long time after Edward finished his story—until Edward rose from the table and busied himself with the Turkish coffee that he made in a makeshift ibrik on the stove. He poured the thick dark liquid from his coffee pot into two espresso cups and added a few drops of Ricard to each cup.

  We drank our little cups of coffee quietly, watching as the fine grains made swirling patterns on the sides of the white cups after each sip, and then collected in a muddy sludge at the bottom by the time we’d finished. What could those grounds tell us about where we were going, where we had come from, and how we ended up here in this hushed dining room in New York City?

  Finally, Edward turned to me, smiling. “That’s a hell­uva way to end an evening,” he said.

  13

  Linguine with Homemade Pesto

  Salad

  Assorted Chocolates

  Martini, Pinot Grigio

  I told Edward I was through with men.

  I stood beside him as he warmed plates in the oven and wondered what we were having for dinner. Edward didn’t say anything. He didn’t even glance my way; he simply had no reaction to my pronouncement. Instead, he opened the freezer, removed a frosty martini glass and the Pyrex cup that contained his magical icy mixture, and poured it into the cold glass. He poured himself one as well.