“It was the happiest day of my life,” she said, as she smiled at Max and showed him the photograph. They had no money, and had just survived a war and a horror beyond belief, had lost everyone they loved, were wearing ugly cast-off clothes that didn’t fit, and were about to follow each other to an unknown destiny in a foreign country, and she could still say it was the happiest day of her life. As Max looked at her, he noticed a photograph of his own wedding in a silver frame on his father’s desk, and wondered if Julie would say the same, or if he would. He wasn’t sure.
Chapter 15
Max stayed at the apartment with his mother for the next two days to help organize his father’s funeral, and canceled all his appointments so he could be there with her. Julie came into the city to help them. She was quiet and respectful, and went out to get them lunch.
Emmanuelle told Max that she didn’t want Jakob’s funeral to be at the temple. She didn’t want to be hypocritical about it. They weren’t religious or members of the temple, and she knew he wouldn’t have wanted that. So Max arranged to use the large nondenominational chapel at the funeral home for the service, and they found a Reform rabbi to officiate. Max wrote the obituary with the information his mother gave him. He was surprised by how much he’d never known before about his father’s family in Vienna, their importance in the community, their bank, his accomplishments, his studies at university, the things he’d done, the people he was related to, the languages he spoke. All he knew about was the business Jakob had inherited from Izzie, his time in Buchenwald, and where he came from. But there was so much more. Julie took the obituary to the New York Times office herself.
By the time they got to the funeral home for the service two days later, the flowers were perfect, the program for the service with a beautiful photograph of him, the music had been chosen, everything had been arranged. The chapel was full before they got there, and there were rows of people standing who had come to pay their respects. Julie had thought to bring two black leather guest books so people could write their names. And she had been very kind to Emmanuelle.
The service was dignified and traditional. It respected Jewish traditions and customs, without being overly religious, which was perfect for the man Jakob had been. There were dozens of people who had respected him profoundly from the business he had worked in, and there was an elderly German couple Max didn’t know who Emmanuelle said had been sponsored by the same people and came over on the boat with them. There were people from every part of their life since they’d been in the States. Forty-five years of their history were represented and nothing from before. And the photograph Emmanuelle had selected for the program showed Jakob young and strong and healthy again after the war, smiling broadly. Emmanuelle had worn an elegant black suit she had copied from Chanel, a chic black hat Julie had gotten for her at Saks, and the diamond ring Jakob had given her twenty-five years before that had almost never left her hand since. He had teased her that he was going to buy her a fifty-carat diamond for their fiftieth anniversary, which wasn’t far away. He had almost made it, and was months away from his seventieth birthday.
After the service, they went to the cemetery, just Max and his mother and Julie and the rabbi. He said a few words, read from the Torah, and they each poured a shovelful of dirt onto the casket as they had for Izzie. And then Max took his mother home and Julie went back to Connecticut. Emmanuelle thanked her for all her help, and Max stayed with his mother again that night, and the next day he went back to work, and then finally went back to Greenwich that night.
But as the weeks went by, Max realized that his life had changed immeasurably. He was stunned by how much he missed his father. Although he was busy and didn’t see him all the time, they spoke often and he valued his advice. His absence left a huge void where his loving presence had been, and he knew it did for his mother too. He tried to call her every day to see how she was doing, and she said she was fine, but her voice was small and sad. She felt as though half of her had died with her husband, and Max could hear it and didn’t know what to say. There was no way to make up for a loss like that. They had been through so much together. She went to visit the children, which usually cheered her. And within a week of his father’s death, Max was on the road again, and she could see that Julie was upset. She was used to it, but it had been bothering her more and more recently. Max knew he needed to spend more time at home, just as his father had said, and he’d meant to, but something always came up that was more pressing. It was hard to make time with his family happen, and he was worried about his mother now too, and didn’t see enough of her.
Two months after his father’s death, he went to play golf with a man he’d been doing business with. They went to an exclusive club in Greenwich and someone he scarcely knew made a snide remark implying that Julie was having an affair.
He waited for the right moment when they were alone that night and he was shaking when he asked her. As much as he traveled, he had never cheated on her, and now suddenly he remembered his father’s words and knew he’d been right. He asked her point-blank if she was having an affair, and she ardently denied it. He didn’t know if she was telling the truth, and it opened the door to a deeper conversation between them that was long overdue.
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” she said and looked as though she meant it, “but you’re never here, Max. Half the time, you’re not even in the city I think you’re in. Sometimes you’re in three cities in a day. I can never count on you to go anywhere with me. We never do anything together. We don’t even go out to dinner. You’re either gone, too tired, or I’m in the city at something you were supposed to come to and didn’t. You’re like a phantom husband. You care more about your business deals than you do about me.”
“That’s not true.” He tried to deny it but he knew it seemed that way, not only to others but, more important, to her. “I can’t just give it all up and retire. I’m too young to do that. I want to put more aside for us before I do.”
“Can’t you slow down a little?” she asked, pleading with him, and the look in her eyes tugged at his heart. “Your girls don’t even know you. Hélène is going to be nine, and you don’t go to any of her school events. The other fathers do.” She made him feel like a total heel, and he realized it looked that way to everyone else, and maybe he was.
“I’ll try to do better,” he promised her and meant it, and they made love that night for the first time in months. Talking made a difference, but he also knew that he had to deliver more than promises this time. For the next month, he tried to do everything he said he would, he even went to a science fair at Hélène’s school and she was thrilled. He visited his mother in New York too, and took her to lunch. She was more nervous than he’d seen her in a long time. Jakob had balanced her and calmed her when she got anxious. Now she had no one to curb her fears and they had grown again. She wasn’t worried about a war anymore, or an imminent Holocaust, but she was worried about her son, his marriage and his health, and how little time he spent with his daughters.
“Let me worry about all that, Mom. That’s between Julie and me.”
“She doesn’t say anything to you, she just goes out on her own. She’s never there when I visit the girls.”
“Her mother has been sick.” He made excuses for her, but wondered if it was true that she was out all the time, especially when he was away. She had never been a stay-at-home mother the way his had been. They had help for that, a lot of it, but he was suddenly curious about whether or not she ever picked Hélène and Kendra up at school, or took them to ballet or the dentist. He had no idea if she did.
A week later, a series of crises pulled him away again. He felt guilty every time he left now, but he had an empire to run. He was horrified to realize, three weeks later, that he hadn’t seen his mother in a month. He dropped by to see her at the apartment, and was shocked by how pale she was. She looked like a ghost.
“A
re you feeling okay, Mom?” he asked, and she insisted she was.
“I’ve been having problems with my stomach again. I lost a little weight.” He hadn’t noticed that she was thinner too. “It’s the same old stuff. I’ve had it ever since the camp.” It had almost killed her once before until she got it under control through sheer grit, but she was frailer now and Max suspected that without his father to cook for, she wasn’t eating much. He promised himself he’d take her out to dinner once a week and he tried, but most of the time she refused him and didn’t want to go out, so he dropped by for a cup of coffee after work instead. He had the frightening feeling that she was fading away. Without Jakob, she had no anchor, and no purpose to her life. She went out to Greenwich to visit his children, but a few weeks later Julie told him that she hadn’t been to see them recently, and he went to see his mother the next day.
“Something’s wrong, Mom. You have to go to a doctor.” Her clothes were hanging on her, her face was gaunt, and she looked gray. She promised to see her physician. When she did, they sent her for tests, and since she’d listed Max as her next of kin, they called him with the results. She had advanced stomach cancer which had metastasized, and leukemia. Max closed his eyes and felt the room spin around him when he heard the words.
“Can you operate?” he asked the doctor.
“There’s no way we could. It’s spread pretty much everywhere. We can’t take out her stomach, and the leukemia has weakened her. We can transfuse her, which might give her some energy back, but her condition is severe, Mr. Stein. I didn’t want to tell her. I thought you should know first.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Max asked, sounding desperate.
“Very little, except make her comfortable. She says she lives alone since she lost her husband. You’ll want hospice nurses with her eventually.” Max couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This couldn’t be happening to his mother, who never let anything beat her. But alone, her life had no purpose now. She had lived for Jakob, and her son.
“Please don’t tell her,” Max said in a hoarse voice, wondering how he could talk her into moving in with them so they could take care of her, but he didn’t think she’d do it. A few days later, she told him the results they had given her, which were not the real ones.
“The doctor called with the test results. He said I’m anemic. I guess I need to eat spinach and liver,” she said, neither of which she liked.
“Why don’t you come stay with us for a while, Mom? Our cook can feed you so you don’t have to cook. The girls would love it, and so would we.” She thought about it for a moment, but she was happy in her own apartment with all her own things around her.
“Maybe for a weekend,” she said after thinking about it. “I don’t want to bother Julie or be intrusive. You two need time to yourselves.”
“We’d love it,” he insisted, and she said she’d let him know. But two weeks later she had a hemorrhage in her stomach and wound up in the hospital. They gave her three transfusions and kept her for several days, and after that she agreed to come to Greenwich for a week. She was too weak to go home alone, and didn’t want nurses.
She stayed two weeks in the end, and they didn’t know it, but they were her final weeks. The stomach cancer had moved so quickly that she went steadily downhill, coupled with the leukemia. She had a wonderful time with the children, and ate her meals with them until she couldn’t get out of bed anymore in the last few days. She and Max had a long talk the night he came back from a trip, about how much she loved him and her grandchildren. She fell asleep while he was sitting with her, with a smile on her face, holding his hand, and she died in her sleep that night. The end had come swiftly and gently, and had been a blessing for her. She didn’t have to go back to the hospital. She had died with her family around her, and Julie had been very kind to her. They had never been great friends but she was a respectful daughter-in-law, and she helped Max make the arrangements.
He couldn’t believe what had happened. Four and a half months after his father’s death, he had lost both his parents. They had been the mainstay and foundation of his life, as he had been the hub of theirs. He had never expected to lose them so young. His mother was only sixty-eight years old, and his father had been turning seventy. Their war experiences had taken too great a toll and cut their lives short, long before their natural times. They had valiantly withstood the punishment of Buchenwald, but it caught up with both of them in the end, and Max had the feeling that his mother no longer wanted to go on without his father, and didn’t want to upset him by saying so. She had suddenly opened her mental floodgates and allowed herself to be swept away by forces she could no longer resist without him. They were unable to survive without each other. In a sense, theirs had been a perfect love, and he would have liked to experience one like it. What he had with Julie was far more earthbound and superficial, and never as deep. What his parents had shared was of another dimension, and he was sure they were together again. He said as much to his children, and told them that Opa and Mamie Emm were in Heaven now, together. And he believed it.
His daughters had all been baptized Episcopalian, at the insistence of Julie’s parents. They’d never had a formal baptism with friends and godparents, but it had been done by the minister of their church with only Julie and her parents present, Max hadn’t attended. The children had no formal religious education. They knew that their father was Jewish and their mother wasn’t. Telling them that Mamie Emm had gone to Heaven was the only religious thought he had ever shared with them. Hélène had always been fascinated by the fact that her grandparents were Jewish and always said she wanted to go to temple one day. Max was sad that Daisy and maybe even Kendra were too young to remember her and Hélène was the only one who would. He wished his mother could have lived many more years to watch her grandchildren grow up and for them to get to know her.
They buried Emmanuelle in the same cemetery where they had buried Jakob. They had a small service for her, but kept the service and burial private and knowing his mother, Max felt sure she would have preferred it that way.
He fell into a melancholy sadness for weeks afterward. The loss of both his parents hit him harder than even he would have expected. He suddenly questioned what kind of son he had been, and saw all the ways he’d fallen short. He remembered how ashamed of them he had been as a boy because his parents were different, and had accents when they spoke English, his father with his very educated, cultured Austrian accent, and Emmanuelle’s French accent which stayed strong. She and Jakob always spoke French to each other, although Max spoke to her in English despite his still fluent French. But he had wanted an American mother so badly and tried to pretend she was. Now he felt that he hadn’t been there enough for them, but at least they had each other, which had always been such a close relationship that sometimes he felt left out.
He spent several days packing up his parents’ apartment. He kept boxes and boxes of things that were sentimental to them and brought them back to Greenwich. Albums, photographs, letters, favorite books. He put their furniture in storage to deal with later. His parents had left everything to him, including Jakob’s fortune. He would have preferred to have his parents than their money. And Jakob had left a large amount to each of his granddaughters.
Max had so many regrets now that it distracted him from everything else. He went back to traveling all the time, just to keep moving and to escape the haunting voices in his head that reproached him for everything he had done wrong. And he drank more than he should and knew it. He hardly talked to Julie while he mourned his parents. He felt as though he had been in an emotional freefall since his mother’s death and couldn’t find the ground under his feet. He forgot Kendra’s birthday, and then Hélène’s, and missed her birthday party after promising to be there, and instead he was at a meeting in Houston and didn’t come home. He forgot his own birthday and the people Julie had told him she’d invited to have di
nner with them. He was in a daze from which he couldn’t seem to waken, but he remembered to light the Chanukah candles for his children as his mother would have. He had brought them back with him to Greenwich after she died. He had put the apartment on the market, and had an offer on it a month later, which he accepted. He suddenly felt steeped in the past and lost in the present.
When he forgot his anniversary with Julie, their tenth, which made it even worse, there was a chasm between them that neither could reach across. All communication was down between them. She knew he was devastated about his parents, but she couldn’t get near him to comfort him, or even talk to him, he was in too much pain. All she had left were three children that she could barely handle without the help of nannies they preferred to her anyway, and a husband who was never there. Both of her sisters had married and moved to other cities, her own mother was dying, and she had never felt so alone in her life. She waited till the day after the anniversary he’d forgotten to give him the news that she knew would blow the lid right off their life.
He was reading through a stack of memos and messages his office had dropped off for him. He had just come back from Houston that afternoon, and she walked into his study, stood across his desk from him with a grim expression. She felt sorry for him and his grief over his mother, but she had problems of her own.
In His Father's Footsteps Page 21
