by Amy Bloom
Falling in love for the first time at forty-six was foolish and unnerving and wrong. It was not romantic. Forty-six-year-old emotional virgin. Just that was bad enough; Max had always felt an easy, cynical affection toward his passing desires, relieved admiration for his own unassailable paternal love. He knew, without wanting to know anything, that he was holding on by less than a finger, and when it was too hard to hold on and he found himself laying his cherished Walther P-38 in his mouth, swallowing traces of oil and steel, he decided, as people often do when they have backed themselves into bravery, that he would rather die leaping than clinging and that there was some possibility of safe landing after the leap and none at all on the crumbling ledge. He called her.
“I’m going to be really busy next year,” Elizabeth said.
“Please. I can’t do it without you,” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Elizabeth, don’t make me beg,” Max said.
She walked into his office a full year more beautiful, so lovely he laughed and felt sorry for them both. She smiled tentatively. Max had no idea how she really looked anymore. Her dream face, the pale, sweet, wide-boned face that floated in front of him at three in the morning, slid right over her actual sixteen-year-old features, and if she had acne or ritual scars or a pair of tattoos, he wouldn’t see. He did see the clothes. Green tights, denim miniskirt, stamp-size, undoubtedly snuck past Margaret—her mother would not tolerate that kind of vulgarity, nor would Max, at least not on a daughter of his—and a shapeless green turtleneck, which nevertheless clung to her nipples. His genuine efforts at kindness toward Greta, his late-night examinations of his soul, his frequent forswearing of Scotch, were revealed as transparent, feeble attempts to avoid the truth; the truth stood in his doorway, one foot resting atop the other.
Max didn’t dare stand up to say hello; he waved her in, his face so fiercely distant Elizabeth almost changed her mind.
“I can help out on Wednesdays,” she said. “Can you teach me how to drive a stick-shift?”
You have to, she thought. You love me and I came back.
It was possible she mumbled something perfunctory about having been busy last year, which he ignored, saying only that he was glad they’d be working together and that he could probably teach her, said it with as much reserve as he could manage, even finished grading a paper as she waited, showing her who’s boss while he wondered in what state they might be allowed to marry.
Max thought, If I love her after three hours’ hard riding on my clutch, surely I have proven, even in the eyes of the Lord, that my love is pure. Fairly pure. Her skirt creased up into her emerald-green crotch as they jerked and crunched down side streets, narrowly missing not only a school bus but Benjie’s scout leader doing a double take down Arrandale, trying to see what was happening in Max’s car, this beautiful, straining, perspiring girl beside him, eyes rolling like a stallion’s.
With Max’s two fingers on the wheel, and his calm and constant instructions (self-control learned from years of six small hands “helping” around the yard), Elizabeth parked the car under the chestnut trees, near her bike, and they congratulated each other. He put one hand on her damp bangs, worn as all the girls wore them that year, trailing right into her eyes, and smoothed them back, astonished still that touching her sticky hair should transport him so. She twisted over the stick and kissed him on the lips, and he managed not to weep in gratitude, to remember that she hadn’t ever liked his touch, and to ask her to move the car behind the chestnut trees.
He tried to be clever, but he made mistakes. He could see them now, large and plain as highway signs, but each bad idea was magic until he tried it and saw her soft face shrink to a tight screw, sharpening around the jaw as she listened. Amazing to see a middle-aged woman’s disgust and pity on that lucky, un-lived-in pastry dab of a face. He’d thought he still had a chance until she’d fallen for that boy, whoever he was, doing something so right, being so right in his tight flesh and steel dick, fucking her in a way that Max could not, wouldn’t dare try to with his moidering patchwork body, with middle-aged breath and clinking teeth. Elizabeth was so happy to be rid of him, there was no hiding that the last lunchtime hour was dimming affection and politeness and only middle-class manners had made her kiss him good-bye.
One three-second kiss to play over and over, for Max to hold, recall, taste the mint and salt and that fine, dry pressure on his lips, making him press his hand to his mouth a hundred times a day, for months, although even his palm felt too rough. Nothing came close except the skin on Benjie’s back when he got out of the water, and Max would not let himself touch that and think of this. He reached for her, eyes half closed, hoping for another kiss, one that would turn him, not into the lucky boyfriend, but into part of her, freshly peeled, pink, all uptilted.
Gone for good.
Max watched Elizabeth and Rachel turn the corner. He left before the last bell rang. Briefcase into the backseat, empties into the dumpster. Drive home. Good, it’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Milk, Cheerios, orange juice, cigarettes.
I Sing Because I’m Happy,
I Sing Because I’m Free
Sometimes God makes a mistake. Just carelessness. He doesn’t check the calendar. If He had checked, He might have seen that Elizabeth was overbooked for loss. Elizabeth didn’t believe in a real God, but she had a God character in her head, part Mr. Klein, part Santa. In grade school, when Mimi Tedeschi’s little brother died, Mimi had leaned forward from two seats back to whisper that God took him to be one of His angels. Elizabeth almost stood up in the middle of spelling to scream. Who could believe such ugly, cruel nonsense? That God would steal babies from their families because He was lonely, snuff the life out of them because He needed company?
And even if there was a huge Winnie-the-Pooh nursery for all of God’s dead baby angels, where did that leave Mrs. Hill?
Elizabeth lay in her bed every day after school, missing Huddie so badly her body gave out after a few hours. Rachel called, but Elizabeth was too tired to talk. Her mother hovered in the doorway, wishing Elizabeth unconscious until the pain passed.
“Would you like to talk about whatever it is?”
“No.” Elizabeth rolled over.
“Are you quite sure?”
Elizabeth pulled the covers up. The only good thing about a broken heart at a young age is that you don’t yet feel the compulsion to behave well, to consider your effect on others. Margaret brought a plate of square chocolate-dipped cookies and a cup of tea, which is what she would have liked someone to bring her, and Elizabeth wept for the Huddie-colored chocolate and ate all the cookies without gratitude, without appreciation, without any awareness that every day her mother left her office to come home, take her daughter’s emotional pulse, and put a little plateful of appealing cookies on her nightstand. For the rest of her life, when people were in trouble and she cared at all, Elizabeth gave them a box of French cookies, plain on one side, a thick chocolate slab on the other.
The lady who phoned didn’t know who exactly Elizabeth was, and the beginning of the call was a tangle of misunderstanding and misfiring expectations. Elizabeth didn’t know anyone with such a silky, low-pitched, and definitely black voice, and Reverend Shales had not told the A.M.E. Zion Church clerk, who had not told Mrs. Hazlipp, that Elizabeth Taube was a white girl. In the end, Mrs. Hazlipp made it clear that Mrs. Hill’s funeral was on Friday at one, at Doolittle’s Funeral Home, on Little Church Road off Middle Neck, and that Dr. Vivian Hill had indicated that Elizabeth was, of course, “welcome to mourn the passing of Sister Hill.” She was not so welcome that Dr. Hill had called directly, but Mrs. Hazlipp offered that it was a very difficult time for Vivian Hill, what with losing her mother and what with her very busy medical practice in Los Angeles. Elizabeth nodded, unseen, and agreed to everything, not sure that she was allowed to say how much she had loved Mrs. Hill.
Three church Stewardesses went right to Mrs. Hill’s house. They went about their business, tid
ying up, remarking, wrestling the smell of death out the door, humming melody and harmony for their favorite hymns. No one knew what Mrs. Hill’s favorites were. When Mr. Hill died, all her sociability went with him. No Missionary Society, no Board, not even the Four Seasons Tea or the community potluck could get her back to church. The Stewardesses were not cleaning for Mrs. Hill, they were certainly not cleaning for hincty Vivian Hill, graduated first in her class from North Shore High School, went to medical school in California, left an ailing mother, hardly visited, couldn’t be bothered with the church when she did. They were cleaning for the Stewardesses, for their sense of what was right, for their own peace of mind. No one would say they had not done right by Sister Hill, least of all Miss Vivian in that white Mercedes.
Elizabeth went to the funeral as properly dressed as she could stand, expecting warmth and light and a huge, swaying choir of sweet black voices, Mrs. Hill’s community, her people, throwing their arms around Mrs. Hill to take her in and carry her home, laying her head on a soft dark breast.
The funeral parlor was not large. Dusty olive-green velvet drapes hung down behind two tottering plant stands crowned by massive pink and yellow gladioli. The front rows were empty except for a single woman wearing sunglasses, a chic black silk suit, and black patent leather heels. She was the only woman without a hat, with close-cropped natural hair, and when a large church lady in a grey dress and matching jacket and an ivory grey-feathered turban sat down next to her and put one gloved hand on her dark, ringless hand, Elizabeth could see that Dr. Hill was an outsider too. There were no other white people, and Elizabeth headed toward the back, away from the casket, away from the light bouncing off Reverend Shales as he began to rumble informally beneath the organ wheezing through “God Will Take Care of You.”
Someone put a pamphlet in Elizabeth’s hand, and she looked hard at the tiny xeroxed picture of a middle-aged Mrs. Hill frowning back, even then cocking her head a little. The lady in the grey dress got up, smoothed her white gloves, and stood foursquare in the room. She sang “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and Elizabeth closed her eyes and tried to feel and smell Huddie in this warm, scented room of brown flesh that was all not him. The voice was sweet and full of feeling, but it was not feeling for Mrs. Hill. It was the singer’s love for her Lord, her powerful, in-the-very-core-of-her-being belief in her personal relationship with her Savior, and it was her devotion to Reverend Samuel C. Shales. Mrs. Hill was only an opportunity to celebrate, and the celebration of this whole world that was not Elizabeth’s and not open to her, the slap-obvious truth that this place was not her home, any more than her mother’s house was, that her only home had been Mrs. Hill’s footstool and Huddie’s narrow bed, made Elizabeth crumple up and cry until one of the ladies beside her, kind and curious, passed her a lace hankie that Elizabeth tried to use without actually soiling it or blowing her nose on it.
Reverend Shales said all life was precious, said something soft-voiced and tender about those who lived in the shelter of the Lords something, and then he swung into it.
“Death reminds us that life is given by God, by God Almighty alone, and life is taken away by God. Live righteously and prepare for Judgment Day. As it has come to Sister Hill, it will come to each and every one of us. Live righteously and be judged righteous, for those that are judged righteous shall sit with the Lord in his heavenly mansions, I say they shall sit at the right hand of God in his glorious, heavenly home, and they, the righteous among us, shall feast at the heavenly banquet.”
The women around her began to shift and nod, and Elizabeth could see Mrs. Hill nodding to herself, rooting around in the pork rind bag until she found the really crispy, curlicued ones.
Reverend Shales rose on his tiptoes, thundering now, and the chairs rocked on a tide of Amen and Yes, Lord. Elizabeth saw the straight, lean back of Dr. Hill and hoped that it was rigid with outraged love and the knowledge that Mrs. Hill was not in this place, not even held temporarily in that mauve pearlized casket.
“For those who don’t live right, fornicators, adulterers, liars, thieves, gossips, the impure, the immoral, the amoral, those who refuse to give their hearts to the Lord and those, even worse, who gave their hearts to the Lord and turned their backs on Him—backsliders and disbelievers—they will burn forever in a lake of fire. Because, be not deceived, brothers and sisters, God is not mocked. For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.…”
The organ came in on cue and everyone stood, up as the lady in grey sang again, sang the only hymn Mrs. Hill had ever sung, in her cracked, phlegmy voice. She sang it so often Elizabeth learned the words and hummed along, not wanting to intrude or do the wrong thing, until Mrs. Hill called her into her bedroom one evening and said, “Sing,” and they had sat up together in Mrs. Hill’s bed, their hands in a pile and night falling fast, singing “ ‘Why should I feel discouraged, why do the shadows come, / why should my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home, / when Jesus is my portion, my constant friend is he, / for his eye is on the sparrow and I know he’s watching me, / and I know he’s watching me-e-e-e,’ ” and Mrs. Hill touched Elizabeth’s face with paper-dry fingertips and said, “You’re the sparrow, girl”; and Elizabeth thought that this was family, dirty dishes and unappreciated treasures, the low friendly buzz of TV and two stiff fingers tapping her cheek, a full embrace of all-believing, all-hoping, all-enduring love in the face of deceit and pretense and the unchangeable past and the inevitable end.
Back at the house, the church ladies bustled and clucked and spread cloths over flat surfaces and laid out a ruby-red ham, banquet platters of fried chicken, roasting pans of macaroni and cheese, three-bean salad, warm greens with sliding grey-pink chunks of fatback, two coconut cakes, a chess pie, and one towering, lightly sweating lemon meringue pie. They arranged and rearranged in a serious way, serious about the food and serious about grief (of which there was not much and even Elizabeth could tell that Dr. Hill, refusing to sit down, calmly sipping a cup of tea, was not the kind of mourner the Stewardesses warmed up to), and serious about their role.
Gus Lester uncovered the chicken and sliced the ham in a proprietary way, and when Elizabeth came through to the table, they locked eyes.
Elizabeth said, “Hello, Mr. Lester.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “I was wondering if I could have Huddie’s address,” and saw in his face the open wish to do her harm.
Dr. Hill came out of the bedroom holding a neat paper-bag package.
“Here, Elizabeth, this is for you.” She shoved the package into Elizabeth’s hands, and Elizabeth turned it over a few times, wanting to shake it for a clue about the contents, certain that funeral protocol could not be the same as birthday protocol.
“You can open it now if you want. It’s those spoons of hers.”
How many? Elizabeth wondered, and took out the nine spoons and thought that if Dr. Hill did not cry at her mother’s funeral, Elizabeth certainly had no business weeping over spoons she’d tried to steal and the hundreds of cups of tea they’d had and the way in which even Huddie, banished forever, was closer to Elizabeth now than Mrs. Hill would ever be.
“Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome. You were very good to my mother and I know that having you around—”
The Stewardesses swarmed around Dr. Hill with plates of food she would have to eat and names of people she would have to thank warmly. They carried her across the room to Reverend Shales and put her in the chair next to him, staying close enough to make an exit impossible. Vivian Hill waved to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth took one last walk through Mrs. Hill’s bedroom. The hatboxes were gone.
* * *
Elizabeth’s father—who did not understand children, who had not understood his wife except to see clearly that he was not the man she should have married, who could not understand how his kindnesses were so often misinterpreted, who would not understand anything at all about love until his third wife’s dyed red hair, big Jewish behind, and wi
de white hands knocked him into the best part of himself—understood loss. He had grown up comfortably in Brownsville; they had no boarders, they had a small parlor and two bedrooms, and he was allowed to finish high school, during the daytime. He had had a much easier life than his closest friend, Myron Flaverman, whose father cut cloth.
His own father, as reliable as a clock, stopped to pick up the Forward one day at Saratoga and Sutter, as he always did, and a blue Franklin from New Jersey jumped the curb and drove right through the newsstand.
Sol wore his father’s clothes, sold fruit for Meyer Shimmelweiss, and slept on the couch for four years to make room for two Slovenian cousins, but he went to college. By subway, at night, dripping sweat into cheap, tight shoes, awash in his late father’s wool trousers. But he did go, graduating from City College three days after his mother’s death, one day before her tiny funeral.
Tucson, June 16, 1970
My dear Elizabeth,
Your mother told me about your friend Mrs. Hill’s death. I wish I knew the right words, not to make you feel better, but to let you know that this—DEATH—is part of life. I recall that you felt very close to her. I remember you were always over there, when your mother and I were divorcing.
I hope she was a good friend to you, and a comfort. I’m sure you took good care of her. You will remember her and keep her alive within you, and I believe that she is also remembering you, something about which your mother and I disagree. As you know, she does not believe in an afterlife.
Your mother told me that you’re not planning to attend your high school graduation. I’ll come if you change your mind.
If you wish to visit me, I will send you a ticket. Please use this for flowers for Mrs. Hill or a donation to her favorite charity.
With love,
Your father
