But then I was awakened by new sounds, the ones that threatened and alarmed: my mother’s voice rising, rising, the hard, flat counterpoint of my father’s. He told her that she was crazy, that she had a wild imagination.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re the one who’s crazy if you think I’ll stand for it. One whore after another. Do you think I’m stupid?”
He told her that she was cold, that she punished him for what existed only in her mind.
She warned that he did not know what punishment was, that she would show him, that she would teach him.
But two days later, no more, I came from school and found him leaning back in a shampoo chair, with his eyes shut. My mother was bending over him like a lover, washing his hair.
The memory made me wakeful and I sat up next to Jay in the bed. I began to talk about my parents and the pattern of their life together.
“She never forgave him,” Jay said.
“No.”
“Did you?”
“Me? He wasn’t unfaithful to me.”
“In a way,” Jay said, “all fathers are unfaithful to their daughters.”
“I felt sorry for him. I don’t know why.”
“For him?”
“Oh, for her too. She worked so hard. She always looked so disappointed, so bitter. But my father had an air of innocence that seemed to absolve him. He was like a naughty but appealing boy. Everyone always liked him more than they liked my mother.”
“But he wasn’t innocent.”
I sighed. “Not in the real sense of the word. Listen, he still has an eye for the girls.”
“And your mother still has her eye on him.”
“Yes.”
Jay stroked the back of my neck with one finger. “Would you let me off that easily?” he asked.
“You?”
“Yeah, under the same circumstances.”
“The circumstances couldn’t be the same. You’re not like my father …”
“But would you let me off?”
“I suppose I would kill you.”
Jay laughed. “How?”
“How? I don’t know. I guess I’d hack you up. An ax murder.”
“Which part first?”
“Ha ha.”
“I wouldn’t let you off either,” Jay said.
“What would you do?”
“Don’t find out,” he said. His hands moved under the covers.
“Is that what you’d do?”
“Maybe. Or this, or this.”
“Chop chop,” I said, reaching for him. He shuddered and I laughed.
“Shhh,” Jay said. “Don’t.” Then the play stopped and we became serious. We touched each other slowly, deliberately, armed with new ideas and a strange new excitement.
8
MARTIN WAS SITTING UP in bed and crying. He rubbed his fist against his eyes. “I’m very emotional, Mrs. Kaufman. I can’t help it. I know it’s only tests, but I got scared anyway, when I saw him.”
But Jay was frightening, lying there in sleep, back from a treacherous journey, looking smaller, more wasted than he had before. His mouth was open, his brow wrinkled as if in deep thought, and a gentle snoring sound came with each breath.
I said, “Martin, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Even in the movies or a book I feel terrible when something happens to somebody. I get involved with the characters until I get emotional. Some characters I feel like I’ve known all my life.”
“The authors would be crazy about you,” I said. “Listen, if you don’t get involved you don’t feel anything at all. That would be worse.”
He looked at Jay again. “I thought it was something terrible. I acted like a baby. I’ll be surprised if they don’t move me down to the kids’ ward.”
“Jay wouldn’t let them. He needs you here,” I told him.
“He was talking out of his mind,” Martin said.
My heart seemed to fall sideways in my chest. “What did he say?”
“A lot of stuff.” He hesitated. “A lot of crazy stuff. Once he said, ‘I don’t want to,’ as if he was arguing with somebody. And some curse words. He didn’t even know he was saying them.” Martin flushed.
I sat in the chair next to Jay’s bed without touching him. I sat there for two hours but he didn’t wake up so I blew a kiss to Martin, who waved at me, and then I tip-toed out of the room.
9
DR. BROCK HAD A bad cold. In fact, his nurse confided, he had come to the hospital specifically to see me. This news so rocked my being that I had to touch the wall for balance on the way to his consultation room.
He blew his nose with a noise of geese honking and he motioned me into the chair facing him. There we sat for a few moments, each studying the other’s face. I sighed then, a signal that I was ready, and he began. “Mrs. Kaufman, I’m very, very sorry,” he said, and I held up my hand to ward off his news, to bring the onrush of traffic to an instantaneous halt. But he continued, his running nose and eyes giving the illusion of weeping, his voice a monotonous counterpoint to his words. “I can’t make it easier,” he said. “I don’t know how. It’s in his very bones. In the marrow.” He waited. Then, “It’s called multiple myeloma. Tumors in the marrow, actually.”
Marrow, marrow, I thought wildly of soup bones.
He paused, waiting for me to speak, to ask questions and lead him into answers. But I was struck dumb and he began again, like an actor picking up the cues for some poor cluck mute with stage fright “He’s not in much pain. He may not be.” His voice rushed through the tunnel of wind in my ears. “There aren’t remissions with this, usually. We’ll give him medication, and we’ll keep him as comfortable as we can. But he will grow weaker. It will probably be a matter of weeks, maybe months.”
I stared at him as if the words themselves were visible as they left his mouth, rising over his head and dissolving in a vapor. Was he thinking then of going home, to hot tea and lemon, of his wife pulling off her slip at bedside in a white pool of lamplight? Why didn’t he call me by my first name if he wanted me to believe those terrible lies he told me about my husband, about his poor invaded bones, his failure to do well on tests, his irrevocable doom? Then my voice came up through my throat like rusty water forced through unused plumbing. “And Jay?” I asked. “What about Jay?”
Dr. Block knew what I meant. He stroked his jaw, was thoughtful. “No, I wouldn’t tell him,” he said finally. “Not yet, I think. Because”—he rummaged in his bag of words—“because then you remove hope.”
Hope! The word was senseless, a stupid, blunt dud of a word.
“Of course,” he said, “we don’t know everything. There is always some element of hope. There is research …” I raised my hand. He touched it in midair and it fell to the desk between us.
In the parking lot, two women with linked arms walked cautiously across the ice to their car. “Be careful or we’ll break our necks,” one said.
“Just what I need,” said the other.
It was a clear night, the roofs of the cars frosted in artificial light. I looked back at the hospital, where only shadows moved behind the yellow blocks. The motor of the women’s car gunned in the silence and then they were gone. I walked to my own car, surprised that I remembered where it was parked.
In the distance a dog barked a high yipping complaint and I thought that dogs have no foreknowledge of death. If Jay had been a dog he would die anyway, but without dread and without longing. Jay loved dogs, had always wanted one, but they don’t allow animals in our apartment building. The lifespan of a dog is very short. Do dogs mourn for dead people? Our children had turtles kept in a glass bowl with a plastic palm tree on a center island. Harry would let them walk up the soft flesh of his inner arm. I will never to the end of my life know what Harry is feeling. Is there something wrong with Harry that I cannot know what he’s feeling or thinking? Is there something wrong with me?
I didn’t want to go home or anywhere else. What if I had n
ot come at the doctor’s summons? Would that have kept Jay’s sentence suspended in time? I leaned against the hood of the car like a suspect waiting to be frisked. I believed then that I was crazy. I thought that I was capable of any act: laughing as easily as howling, dancing, stealing a car, shooting off a gun, lighting fires, driving with my eyes shut, anything.
If I was not crazy, why didn’t I simply think of Jay? Why didn’t I review love and happiness or weep for real loss, forever and forever and forever? I leaned against the car, dry and panting as an animal pursued and cornered.
A man asked, “Are you having any trouble? Is your lock frozen?”
I didn’t have a voice yet. His shadow fell across my face. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Ha. Maybe I’m crazy. Do I look crazy?”
He removed my hands from the hood of the car and made me face him. “Can you walk?” He led me across the parking field to a blue station wagon. He took keys from his pocket and opened the door. I was shivering now and my teeth were jumping in my head. He moved a baby’s car seat from the front and then he guided me in.
“Listen,” I told him. “Jay is dying.”
“Your kid? Your husband?”
“Yes. I’ve known him since high school. High-school sweethearts. Nobody else.” My body jerked in little spasms.
“Oh Jesus,” he said. He leaned across me and unlocked the glove compartment. He took a small silver flask out, opened it and held it to my mouth. The whiskey was swallowed fire. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Sandy,” I answered, reduced to only one name.
“Okay, Sandy. My name is Francis—Frank. Sandy? Listen to me. You’re not crazy. It’s a terrible thing that you’re suffering, that you’re going to suffer. Nobody can say anything or do anything to make it different or make it easier. Are you listening to me, Sandy?”
I only nodded and he took my hand and held it in the palm of his. “Do you have children?” he asked.
I held my other hand up in a V-sign. “Two.”
“Ah,” he said. “Do you want another drink?”
“No.” I sighed, caught my breath, giggled.
Francis smiled and squeezed my hand. “You don’t look like a boozer. You look like a nice girl.”
“I used to be.”
“What do you mean, used to be?”
“Now I don’t know what I am, what I’m going to do.”
“You’ll do all right. I’m a good judge.”
“I thought I would do something crazy.”
“Not you,” he said. “Do you want to talk about it—about Jay?”
“I can’t. I can’t even concentrate.”
“Will you promise to go home then and get into bed? Can you drive?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can’t tell you …”
“Don’t.” He turned the key in the ignition. “Don’t tell me.” We drove in silence to the other side of the parking lot and my car. Francis took my keys and opened the door for me. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m not worried about you, Sandy,” he said, and he waited with his headlights shining like beacons until my car curved out of the parking lot and onto the road.
Harry has always been a thin child, his bones sharp and urgent when you put your arms around him. One of the things he does is refuse to eat. My mother says that he is wasting away to nothing and she pokes tidbits at the unyielding slit of his mouth. She cajoles and wheedles. “Harry loves Grandma’s hamburger patties. Harry only wants Grandma’s vegetable soup.”
But who knows what Harry wants? He is not wasting away, he is growing. He is incalculably strong, his fists hard knots on the ends of those thin arms.
Yet I could not resist the game either. I plied him with my specialities, seduced him with rice and chicken and eggs.
Jay said, “Leave him alone. He’ll come around.”
I knew that he was right and for a long time I placed things before Harry and stepped back like a mute but anxious servant.
Then one day, in a rage that entered me like a blade, I shouted, “Eat, eat, damn you! Eat, eat, eat,” shaking his shoulders until his head wobbled in a blur before me and I was spent.
Coming home from the hospital, I wondered about Harry and about me as if we were star-crossed lovers. What was happening to Jay made all of us seem so fragile. Old guilts stepped up like children in a school play to recite themselves. How could I have shaken such a small child? What happens to love? And if Jay was dying (dying!), why had I not been better, as well, with him?
Joseph was there, pale in the light and shadows of the television set. I willed it and he didn’t ask me anything.
The boys were asleep. I walked from room to room as if I were assessing the value of our lives. Jay had asked me to bring him two of his cameras. I set them aside on the dresser in our bedroom and then I went back and took one of them from its case. I walked around with the camera, peering through the viewfinder, seeing everything a frame at a time. I wondered why we choose to live out our lives in rooms like these. I looked at lamps and ashtrays and tables and chairs. I went into the kitchen and looked at two bananas on the counter, at the clock above the sink, at a gray scratch on the wall where Jay’s chair scraped when he pushed it away from the dinner table.
Then I went to the window and saw my encapsulated view of Rego Park, the high-rise buildings like guardians of the lit and empty playgrounds. Did I want to live here? Did it matter? A few people, foreshortened and looking furtive, hurried into buildings. In the distance cars rumbled on Queens Boulevard.
I put the camera back into its case and went into the children’s bedroom. I leaned over Harry’s bed and shook him gently. His face became fierce and he rolled away from me, trying to straddle the wall and save his sleep. “Harry,” I whispered. “Listen, Harry, wake up.”
He rolled back and his eyes opened. “Shhh,” I warned and I took his hand and led him from the bed. We went into the living room, where I dimmed the light so that he could open his eyes again.
Harry is a fair child, his coloring like my own, yet paler, as if he has faded. He seemed a little fleshed out with the puffiness of sleep and there were red sleep creases down the side of one cheek and on his neck. I sat on the sofa and pulled him up onto my lap. Not yet really awake, he was soft and pliant. He leaned against my chest, his breath on my throat.
“Harry,” I said, “I have to tell you something. Are you listening?”
He sighed, making a small motion with his head.
“Harry,” I said, “if I ever did any bad things to you, I didn’t mean them. Do you understand? I love you better than anyone. Do you hear me?”
He looked back at me and he didn’t answer. But I thought I perceived a new yielding of his body as I held him against me and I was satisfied.
10
AFTER A WHILE, PEOPLE began to know. Joseph’s mother knew with a terrible look of triumph. Joseph knew with a sudden inability to meet my glance when he spoke to me, awed by my close association with horror.
One Sunday I left the boys with him at a playground near our house and I went to visit my mother and father. We sat in their living room, steam piping up from a chorus of radiators. My mother picked at a doily on the arm of the sofa. She stood up and stared at the row of philodendron plants on top of the television set as if she had never seen them before.
“He was always a gentlemen,” she said. The most tender of epitaphs. “Do you remember when you were only kids? Do you remember his nice manners?”
My father nodded his head and tapped his fingers on the table next to his chair. “Do you remember when he used to come in on a Sunday and I would cut his hair?”
“Hello Mrs. Stein, good-bye Mrs. Stein. Thank you, please, you’re welcome.”
“Such thick hair,” my father murmured. “Such a good head of hair.”
“Tootsie,” my mother said, touching my arm. “Maybe, just maybe with modern science …”
“No, Ma,” I said. “Don’t.”
“Everybody dies,” my father said with a thoughtful sigh.
“What does that have to do with it?” My mother’s eyes were cruel. “What do you know about it?”
Even now, I wondered, she could remember old wrongs and feel new anger. Things that were fresh when I was a child in their house. Words that poured through the wall separating our bedrooms. She had promised never to forgive him and she had kept her word. But I remembered the sounds of them together as well, imagined my mother’s clothing dropping to her feet, the white nylon uniform with her name, Rose, imagined that the name blazed through to her very flesh, that my father saw it there as he fell on her breast.
“Ma,” I said. “Daddy loves Jay.”
“I love him,” my father confirmed. His eyes filled with tears and he blew his nose.
“Are you going to tell Mona?” my mother asked.
“I’ll have to tell her sometime.” I would have to invade Paradise. “Not yet. I don’t know. I don’t want to do anything. I want the whole world to stop.”
“Sandy …”
“Don’t worry, Ma. I talk, talk, talk.”
“You don’t talk so much,” my father observed. “Get it off your chest.”
“Thanks, Daddy.”
“Do you need money?” he asked.
“Not now. We’re okay now.”
“As soon as you need ….”
“Thanks, Daddy. I know.”
“Well,” my mother said. I saw that she was searching her head for a new subject. What could she say that would not be indelicately jovial, or that would not bring us back full circle to Jay? “Well,” she said, wringing her hands. “Is anybody hungry?”
11
“IZZY,” I SAID. “HELP me.”
“I’m a good one to help,” she said. But that afternoon she came to visit me. “Look what I did to my own life;” she said, taking her coat off.
Ending Page 3
