“What?” Robin said again. “I don’t see anything.”
Linda opened the trunk of the car and took out the plastic mortuary box. It seemed heavier than she remembered.
“What’s that?” Robin asked.
Linda hesitated for a moment, and then she said, “It’s your father’s ashes, Robin.”
“But he didn’t smoke!” Robin said, and then her face swiftly changed and Linda knew that she understood.
“I brought them all the way from Jersey,” Linda said. “I didn’t tell you about them because … well, because I thought you were too young, that it was too morbid. But now I think it’s your right to know, to help me to scatter them.”
Robin was staring at the box. Linda might have been holding a live cobra.
“For a while I thought the location was most important, you know, somewhere peaceful and beautiful. I thought I would have to find a cliff somewhere, or a running stream. No place seemed exactly right, and I couldn’t bring myself to just leave him … them anywhere. Maybe that’s because it was wrong to keep this from you in the first place. Maybe I was waiting for an opportunity to do this with you. Should we walk into the woods a little?”
Robin was unable to answer. It was as if she were being confronted with her father’s death for the first time. The idea of ashes horrified her, although she had understood about the cremation, and clearly remembered the rush of air from the oven. Maybe you are never done with dead people. If there are ashes, perhaps there are also ghosts.
Linda was walking away, going through the trees carrying the box. Robin paused and then followed her, quickly catching up. It was sharply cooler in this shaded place, and really quiet. Robin didn’t want to think about anything, least of ail what they were about to do. Maybe Linda was lying. Maybe there were cigars in that box, or candy. It was shaped something like a book, and it could contain anything.
Linda stopped walking suddenly, and Robin almost collided with her. “This is a good place, isn’t it?” Linda asked. “I mean, it’s cool and still here. He painted trees a lot, too.” She put her right hand on the lid of the box and tugged, but it didn’t open. She held the box in the crook of her elbow and pulled harder, but still nothing happened. She smiled at Robin. “It’s stuck, I think,” she said. She tapped the box lightly with her fist, still smiling, and then tapped it a little harder. Her mouth formed a firm, determined line as she pulled at the lid once more. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be any reason … There’s no tape on it or anything. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong.”
Robin leaned against a tree and waited. She scratched off little flakes of bark and crumbled them, and she watched as Linda bent to pick up a small rock.
“This is awful,” Linda said. “The terrible thing is that he was so good at opening things: olive jars, peanuts, sardine cans, anything.” She clenched her teeth and hammered at the box with the rock. She looked as if she was trying to kill something.
Robin blinked at each blow. She thought of all the nicknames her father had used for her: Bobolink, Redbird, Roblet. Nobody would call her those names any more.
Linda put the box on the ground. She picked up a bigger rock and held it over her head, grunting. “Oh, God,” she said, and brought it down with force. There was a large crack in the lid’s surface now, but the box was still closed. Linda was sweating. She sat down and leaned against a tree, holding the box in her lap. “I can’t seem to do anything right,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She stroked the lid with her fingertips and it sprang open.
“Oh,” Robin said. She leaned forward and peered inside. There was a thick, rolled plastic bag there.
“It’s like a Chinese puzzle,” Linda said. “Or a desk with a secret compartment. It just opened—like that!—when I touched it a certain way. I thought I’d have to get a screwdriver from the car, or something.” She, too, was staring at the plastic bag. Then she stood, unsteadily, taking the bag from the box. Something rattled, like beads.
Linda unrolled the bag slowly and looked into it. Robin had leaned backward and was averting her face, but not her eyes. Linda wasn’t sure what she had expected to see. She’d thought of the fat, substantial ashes left by cigars, and of the ashes in a fireplace after a good fire, the residue that can be swept with a broom until it disappears. But the contents of the bag hardly looked like ashes at all. They were a grayish yellow, and were like pieces of fallen plaster or chipped paint. And they clattered against each other, making an unexpected noise. For the briefest moment she imagined that she had been given the wrong box—through some incredible mix-up or hoax. Then she knew what it was she was holding. These were bits of bone, of Wright’s bones, mortal relics impervious even to fire. The knowledge seemed to travel through her own marrow and then explode into her bloodstream. Robin—she had almost forgotten her—was hugging the tree, and waiting. There were no tears, only an expression of genuine terror.
Linda felt light, as if she had entered another atmosphere in which she’d become weightless. She cleared her throat. “I guess we should begin,” she said. “I’ll say something first, a kind of prayer or eulogy, you know, to mark the occasion. Then you can, too, if you want to.” She cleared her throat again. “We have stopped here in the woods in … near Quartzsite, Arizona, to say farewell to Wright Henry Reismann, dear husband and father, who has left this life … He was a good man … and we will remember him.” Linda tipped the plastic bag and began to shake out its contents. She was grateful for the soft floor of pine needles that took the ashes so quietly. “Robin?” she said.
But Robin still held the tree and did not say anything.
Linda walked around a little, shaking the bag gently until it was empty. Then she put her arm around Robin’s shoulders and drew her away. They walked back through the woods to the rest area, where two other families had now stopped to eat at the picnic tables. A little girl held a sandwich in one hand and waved with the other. Linda waved back. She realized she was still holding the plastic bag. “Just a minute,” she said to Robin, and she walked to one of the trash baskets and threw it in.
36 A candle flickered between them on the table, while the waitress intoned the specialties of the day. “Chicken Cordon Bleu, Sole Amandine, Veal Marsala.” She might have been a train conductor in a foreign country, calling out the strange names of the stations.
They ordered steak. After the waitress left, Linda said, “I felt we should splurge tonight, the last night, so to speak, in our old life.”
Robin sipped water and crushed an ice cube between her teeth.
“We’re practically there, you know, and I’m so excited. Can you imagine the pioneers? Although they couldn’t tell when they crossed into another state, could they? I think the land ought to look more like it does on the map. When I was a child, Robin, I actually thought it did, the colors and all, and the little broken lines.”
“Could I have a Seven-Up?” Robin asked.
“Sure. Of course. You can have anything you like. Should we go all out and order the onion rings? And the garlic bread?”
By the time the waitress came with their steaks, Robin had finished all the bread in the basket, and the water and ice in both glasses. She’d been to the salad bar twice, once illegally. She seemed to be eating with the same manic appetite that was driving Linda to talk.
“Here we go,” the waitress said. “Green flag’s for medium, blue one’s well-done. Sour cream for the potatoes, and ketchup if you need it. Enjoy your dinner, ladies.”
“Everything looks lovely,” Linda told her. “Thank you very much.” She pulled the green paper flag from her steak and picked up her knife and fork. Then she put them down again. “Before we left New Jersey,” she said, “I did a little research. I went to the library and looked California up in the encyclopedia. And there were some books and magazine articles, too. Do you know what I found out?”
Robin was putting both butter and sour cream on her baked potato. Her steak was covered with ket
chup. She had washed her hands before dinner, but Linda saw that she still wore little wristlets of dirt. In the candlelight, she could have been twelve or thirty-seven.
“Well, for one thing,” Linda said, “there are more cars per capita in Los Angeles than in any other large American city. And the supermarkets are open twenty-four hours a day. If you feel like having a snack in the middle of the night, you just go out and get it. And they have drive-in churches! There was a picture in one of the magazines. They put these little speakers in your car, the way they do at a drive-in movie, and you can listen to the sermon without getting out. And Disneyland! It’s the most popular tourist attraction in the whole country!”
Linda was winded, and Robin didn’t seem to be paying any attention to her. The girl was attacking her steak, chewing steadily and hard. Her mouth was rimmed with ketchup, and the very ends of her hair were frosted with sour cream.
Why am I talking so much, Linda wondered, and decided it was to avoid speaking the unspeakable. It was because she could not say aloud that she was bound to Robin, that you can become a family by the grace of accident and will, that we have a duty to console one another as best we can. Iola used to tell Linda that she was too soft for this life. Wolfie said she was romantic. And Robin had called her an asshole, which is more or less the same thing. Linda thought that she had outgrown some of that despised sentimentality, and would become tougher and more disenchanted as she went along. Finally she would be old and tired of everything, and ready to face death with resignation, if not courage. But then someone would probably come in at the last minute, wearing a coat that still held the scent of cold air. And Linda would want more, the way she did now.
She realized she had stopped talking, and that during her silence Robin had stopped eating. The ruins of dinner cluttered the table. Linda looked up and found Robin looking back, her eyes alive with tears.
“We’re here!” Robin said, and they were.
There had to be some scientific explanation for the blueness of the air: smog, the onset of evening, some simple chemical balance of heat and moisture and light. Linda’s right foot pressed the accelerator and her left one was braced against the floor of the Maverick, but she believed she was dancing.
FOR MY MOTHER, Rose Liebman,
and for Danny Arnold—
two brave hearts
Read on for a preview of
THE
DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER
by Hilma Wolitzer
Coming in March 2006
from Ballantine Books
1
The moment I awoke I knew that something was terribly wrong. I could feel it in that place behind my breastbone, where bad news always slides in like junk mail through a slot. It was there that I first acknowledged my parents would die someday (“Oh, sweetheart, but not for such a long, long time!”); where I knew I was ugly and would never be loved; where I suffered spasms of regret about my marriage and my children, and fear of their deaths and of my own. God knows there were plenty of things wrong in the larger world I could easily have named, and that aroused a similar sense of dread, but whatever was lodged in my chest that April morning was personal, not global. I knew that much, at least.
Was it something I’d done, or forgotten to do? There was a vague suggestion of amnesia, of loss, but when I tried to pin down its source, it proved to be elusive, a dream dissolving in daylight. In fact, I’d had a dream just before waking, but the content was obscured by a kind of white scrim. The only thing I could remember was the whiteness. And I couldn’t discuss any of this with Everett—we’d quarreled again the night before and were being stonily polite. And what if my awful feeling turned out to be about him?
So I put it all aside while we ate breakfast, chaperoned by CNN and the Times, and chatted about Iraq and the weather and the eggs on our plates. I told myself that this was what long-married people do, even when things are good between them. Then I had a flash of my parents in their nightclothes, slow-dancing to the radio in their Riverdale kitchen.
After Ev left for work, I grabbed my bag and left the apartment, too. I had to go to the bank, and then I was going to buy a sandwich and sit near the East River to read manuscripts. Maybe the bank would be my last stop—it wasn’t safe to walk around this crazy city with that much money.
Our doorman and the doorman from the building next door were outside in the sunlight, taking a breather from the bell jars of their lobbies. It must have rained the night before; the drying pavement gave off that sour-sweet musk I love, and up and down York Avenue, the ginkgo and honey locusts were suddenly, lushly budding. At fifty-one and with everything I knew, I was still such a sucker for spring. I probed for that sensitive spot in my chest as I walked, almost jogged, along in my jeans and Reeboks, outpacing kids in business suits, and it seemed diminished by then, practically gone. It probably really was only the residue of a bad dream.
Outside Sloan-Kettering, patients tethered to their which she often read to me at bedtime. I’m still haunted by its recurring lament:
Alas! Queens daughter, there thou gangest.
If thy mother knew thy fate,
Her heart would break with grief so great.
As a child, I didn’t really get all that archaic usage, or other words in the story, like cambric and knacker. But listening to my mother read “The Goose Girl” aloud as she lay next to me at night initiated my lifelong romance with language. The plot was electrifying, with its drama of switched identities, talking drops of blood, and a decapitated horse’s head (also verbal), more than a century before Mario Puzo. And the message, that children, especially girls, are responsible for their mothers’ happiness, was profound and unsettling. I became determined never to break my mother’s heart, any more than I would break her back by inadvertently stepping on a sidewalk crack. And I meant to keep my promise to my father about not smoking again.
Passing the Mary Manning Walsh home at 71st Street, I thought of him, imprisoned since early winter in that other place, the one he’d always called, with a theatrical shudder, the “Cadillac” of nursing homes. “I’d rather be dead, Alice,” he once said, pointedly, as if he were extracting another, unspoken promise. The Hebrew Home for the Aged isn’t very far from the house where we once lived, although since his confinement my father didn’t remember that proximity or appreciate the sad irony of it. He didn’t remember a lot of things, including me most of the time, a likely source of misery in any grown child’s breast. But somehow I knew it wasn’t the source of mine. Maybe that was because I’d had several months to deal with the gradual death of my father’s personality, a dress rehearsal for the big event.
Occasionally, he would still ask after my mother. “And how is Helen?” was the way he’d put it, a ghostlike version of his old courtly self. The first time he asked, I was so dismayed I couldn’t speak. After that, I tried telling him the truth, but he always received it as fresh, agonizing news, and he’d grieve for a few awful moments before he went blank again. I couldn’t keep putting him, and myself, through that, so I began to simply say, “She’s fine.” But once I saw him flinch when I said it, and I amended my lie to reflect his absence from home. “Getting along as best she can, Daddy,” I said.
“But who’s taking care of her?” he asked, with the perseverance of demented logic.
The worms, I thought, but I said, “Why, I am. And Faye, of course.” And he finally sank back in his wheelchair, assuaged. Faye had been our family’s housekeeper during my childhood—if he could bend time, well, then so could I. As I crossed East End Avenue to enter Carl Schurz Park, I realized that I hadn’t visited my father in almost two weeks. I had to go and see him soon, but not on such a perfect day.
There was the usual pedestrian parade in the park. Runners went by wearing wristbands and earphones. Babies were being pushed in their strollers and the elderly in their wheelchairs, like a fast-forwarded film on the human life cycle. The pigeons paced, as if they’d forgotten they could fly, and dogs circled and snif
fed one another while their owners, in a tangle of leashes, exchanged shy, indulgent smiles.
The homeless man who screamed was quietly sunning himself on my favorite bench, so I sat a few benches away, next to a woman absorbed in a paperback. I glanced at the cover, expecting a bodice ripper or a whodunit, but she was reading Proust, in French. Touché. The river glittered and flowed on the periphery of my vision as I took the manuscripts out of my bag. I was sure they would distract me from whatever was worrying me; they always did, even when I knew what was on my mind. There were four new submissions that day, three nonfiction proposals and a few chapters of a novel in progress. I began to read, and quickly set aside, the first three submissions. After all this time, I can usually tell before the end of the first paragraph if a writer has any talent.
My training began in 1974 at the literary publishing house of Grace & Findlay, where I mostly answered the phones, typed and filed for the editors, and read through the slush pile. It was only a summer internship, between Swarthmore and an MFA, and before I knew it some lowly reader at another publisher was going to discover my novel in their slush pile and make me rich and famous. That never happened, though. All I ever received were standard letters of rejection, the ones that say “Thank you for thinking of us, but your manuscript doesn’t meet our needs right now,” with the hidden subtext: This is precisely what we hate. Do try us again when hell freezes over.
A few years later, I joined the enemy, becoming an assistant editor at G&F, and I was still there, in a senior position, last June, when they merged with a multinational communications group and let me go. I understood that my firing was merely a fiscal matter, and I saw it coming, like a storm darkening a radar screen. But I felt shocked and betrayed anyway, even with the generous severance package.
Hearts Page 27
