Silver

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Our next-door neighbor, Gordon Brooks, cornered me near the kitchen. He wanted to know who we were thinking of selling our house to. “Whoever wants to buy it,” I said, remembering how he’d once marked off his property line with a shoveled trench that left our azaleas on the wrong side. So far, several people had come to inspect the house, but nobody had made a serious offer. And one of them may have stolen a gold bangle from my dresser top. It was missing, anyway, after a series of prospective buyers had been through. I’d suspected that some of them were only browsing, looking for a little distraction on those boring Sundays, the way Howard and I used to do. “Well, don’t forget that we still have to live here,” Gordon reminded me.

  Sara’s parents arrived at the party about an hour after we did. “What a lovely occasion,” Mrs. Bartlett said, kissing the air near my cheek. I had followed up my unreturned phone calls to her, during Sara’s pregnancy, with a furious and imploring letter, which she didn’t answer, either. But she had been unable to resist the actual, born, named baby, although she’d held out a week longer than her husband. I had called his law office the Monday after Byron was born, and he burst into tears over the phone. They gave Sara an allowance now, and they’d set up a trust fund for Byron, carefully keeping the money out of Jason’s reach.

  I looked at the oversized wedding picture, and remembered a double sarcophagus I had seen years ago, when Howard and I were in Boston, and wandering through the Museum of Fine Arts. Etruscan, 4th century B.C., the little sign said. The stone couple were facing one another in an embrace on their stone bed. I realized they bore an uncanny resemblance to Howard and me: the very curve of their features, their carved, eternal curls. The man even had a beard, the way Howard did then. “Look, Howie!” I’d cried, but he had gone ahead into the next room. Now Gordon’s younger daughter came up beside me and stared at the photograph. “That’s not you, is it?” she said.

  I went into Ann’s room and took By from Sara, who had just finished nursing him in the rocking chair. I inhaled his milky breath, nuzzled his talcumed neck. “Who’s the most beautiful boy?” I asked. “Who does Grandma love best?”

  There was a murmur of excitement when I came back into the living room, still carrying him. Someone swooped him from my arms, the lights were dimmed, and I saw Jason coming from the kitchen, balancing a three-tiered wedding cake high on one hand, like a basketball. “Watch out! Be careful!” people warned, and the bride and groom on the cake seemed to whirl near the silvery spackle of the ceiling. Howard was on the other side of the room, being pushed toward me, as if he were a shy and reluctant suitor.

  I thought of Bernie again as Howard claimed me, to a burst of whistling and applause. When I’d told him that Howard and I were getting back together, he said, with a rueful smile, that he’d expected as much all along, that I had never really let go. I denied it fervently, because it shamed me, although I knew it was true.

  “Oh, Paulette,” Bernie said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

  “But we did, didn’t we?” I said, realizing too late that he might have only been quoting Brett Ashley.

  When the children were little and broke one of their toys, Howard would promise to fix it, to make it as good as new. But, oh, dear reader, I’d married him—and toys are one thing, marriage another. Dr. Lewin spoke more conservatively to us of forgiveness, of renewal. At first, Howard had resisted counseling as much as he’d resisted putting the house up for sale. He’d sit in Dr. Lewin’s office, brooding and silent, like a prisoner in the docket, as I leveled charges against him. But then he began to defend himself and bring those old countercharges, until we were interrupting each other and shouting, while Dr. Lewin beamed at us across the steeple of her hands. “Listen to yourselves,” she said. “Still so much passion!”

  Had it endured, despite everything, or had it merely been revived? I’m not sure. But at his little cousin’s concert that afternoon, as she sawed her way through Mendelssohn’s D minor Trio, we held hands like the sweethearts we’d once been. And later, after the wedding cake was ceremoniously cut, we waltzed around the perimeters of the living room, the winners in an arduous marathon dance.

  That night, when the party was over, Howard went to our bedroom and lay in wait for me, wearing only his suit of tarnished flesh. I walked toward the bed through the pewter light, dressed in all the awful beauty of my years. We looked at one another.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author thanks the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation of Yaddo for their generous support

  With gratitude also to Linda Pastan for allowing me to borrow six lines from her poem “A Winter Prothalamion,”

  and for her friendship

  A Biography of Hilma Wolitzer

  Hilma Wolitzer (b. 1930) is a critically hailed author of literary fiction. Her work has been described by the New York Times as “often hilarious and always compassionate.” Born in Brooklyn, New York, she began writing as a child. She was first published at age nine, when a poem she wrote about winter appeared in a local journal. She was voted the poet laureate of her junior high school, but after graduating from high school at sixteen she worked at various jobs, from renting beach chairs under the boardwalk in Coney Island to pasting feathers on hats in a factory and holding a position as an office clerk.

  Wolitzer married at twenty-two, and though her family consumed most of her time, she began writing again. Her first published short story, “Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket,” appeared in print when she was thirty-six. Eight years (and several short stories) later, she published Ending (1974), a novel about a young man with a terminal illness. The New York Times called it “as moving in its ideas as it is in its emotions.” Ending was released when Wolitzer was forty-four years old and she was dubbed the “Great Middle-Aged Hope.”

  She followed this success with In the Flesh (1977), a well-received novel of a conventional marriage threatened by an affair. Since then, her novels have dealt mostly with domestic themes, and she has drawn praise for illuminating the dark interiors of the American home. In the late seventies and mid-eighties, Wolitzer also published a quartet of young adult novels: Introducing Shirley Braverman (1975), Out of Love (1976), Toby Lived Here (1978), and Wish You Were Here (1984).

  Following her novels Hearts (1980), In the Palomar Arms (1983), Silver (1988), and Tunnel of Love (1994), Wolitzer confronted a paralyzing writer’s block. Unable to write more than a page or two a day—none of which ever congealed into a story—she did not publish a book for more than a decade.

  After working with a therapist to try to understand the block, she completed the first draft of a new novel—about a woman who consults a therapist to solve a psychic mystery—in just a few months. Upon its release, The Doctor’s Daughter (2006) was touted as a “triumphant comeback” by the New York Times Book Review. Since then, Wolitzer has published two more books—Summer Reading (2007) and An Available Man (2012).

  In addition to her novels, Wolitzer has published nonfiction as well, including a book on writing called The Company of Writers (2001). She has also taught writing at colleges and workshops around the country. She has two daughters—an editor and a novelist—and lives with her husband in New York City, where she continues to write.

  A three-year-old Wolitzer poses for a portrait, taken in 1933.

  Wolitzer with her mother, Rose Liebman, and sisters, Anita and Eleanor, circa 1943.

  Wolitzer drew this picture of FDR in 1945.

  Wolitzer and her husband, Morton, celebrate their wedding day, September 7, 1952, in Brooklyn, New York.

  Wolitzer sits on a park bench with her daughters, Meg and Nancy, in 1964.

  Wolitzer relaxes on the beach in Oyster Bay, New York, with her daughters in the 1960s.

  Pictured here (clockwise): Wolitzer, Linda Pastan, Stanley Elkin (with his back to the camera), and Tim O’Brien talking at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1985.

  Wolitzer has frequently visit
ed schools across the country to teach children about writing—experiences that she remembers fondly. Pictured here is a thank-you note from a fifth-grade student in Greenville, South Carolina, circa 1992.

  Wolitzer enjoys time with her grandsons, Charlie and Gabriel, in Springs, New York, in 1996.

  Wolitzer with her husband, now a retired psychologist.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Paulette and Howard series

  1

  WE WERE MARRIED IN 1957, in those dark ages before legalized abortion. I know that’s no excuse. There were always illegal abortions. But my social circles were narrow and unsophisticated. The doctors in my life were of the old-fashioned tongue depressor variety. Their worst crimes were probably kickbacks on unnecessary, but lawful, hysterectomies.

  I knew vaguely about worldlier women who flew down to Puerto Rico or other tropical places to have safe, painless surgery, and probably even had time to get in a little sun and dance the carioca. But I had never even been in an airplane. And the stories I knew by heart were about hapless girls in the back rooms of drugstores after hours, whose blood flowed in fountains, poor girls whose butchered parts were packaged and distributed among the trash cans of the city.

  In those days, my mother, in her innocence, spoke with longing to her cronies about being a grandmother someday. It appeared to be her goal in life. I think she wanted to wear a gold charm bracelet dangling with symbols that commemorated the births of babies. She wanted a record of bright and precocious sayings and an accordion folder of photographs—that first-class ticket to the society of grandmothers.

  I was her lone child, come late in life, “like a biblical miracle.” She might have more appropriately named me Ruth or Leah, but instead she chose Paulette, after her favorite actress and after a distant cousin on my father’s side. I believe she had a premonition that I was to be last as well as first and so had used the female version of a masculine name to cover all unfulfilled dreams. And she was right. My birth had denied passage to any future brothers and sisters. My mother claimed that one morning a few months later everything had simply fallen out of her. As a young misinformed girl, I had pictured the worst: a giblet tangle of fallopian tubes, ovaries, and the little pear-shaped uterus, all lying useless on the bathroom floor. But first I had been born, dropped in agony like an oversized egg from a disconsolate chicken. Way behind schedule, my mother was impatient for the natural order of the generations.

  When I was twenty my goal was to lie entwined with Howard forever. We had met at a school dance in my second year at N.Y.U. He was eight years older, a saxophonist with the combo that was playing that night. I didn’t want to dance at all; I just stood against a wall and watched him and listened to the music and felt that giddy sickness that would not go away. “What’s the matter with you?” my girl friends asked, but I couldn’t explain it then.

  Sex, which I had discovered in the misery of childhood (like everyone else), had finally reached the ultimate stage of partnership. And what a partner I had! Even cramped in the back seat of Howard’s car, I recognized with awe all those sensations we invented and that new voice that came from the dark pit of my throat (“Don’t … oh yes … oh God.”)

  Was it possible that my mother and father didn’t know? In their world there could be mingling without coupling, kisses without tongues. When I came home, struck with experience, I tiptoed past their bedroom, and they yoo-hooed and advised me to take some milk and cupcakes before I went to bed.

  Lying in bed, “in trouble” already, I used a wad of toilet paper and a flashlight for undercover checking. Nothing.

  There was probably still a chance that I was mistaken or that my body was just giving me some punitive suspense. As I had assured Howard, it was my safe time and our pleasure didn’t have to be deferred for the sake of caution. Of course he had hardly waited anyway, had barely missed a stroke.

  I checked again. Nothing.

  During the past week I had looked around for heavy things to lift. Nothing seemed just right. Books were ridiculously light, and the refrigerator was stationary.

  Howard and I even ran four laps around the Jamaica High School track and then collapsed panting in the tall grass behind it. There I found out that his own birth had been unplanned. It seemed like the saddest irony. “But how do you know that?” I asked.

  “My mother told me,” Howard said casually.

  I was shocked. If there was a baby, or its meager beginnings inside me, that refused to be dislodged, if I actually had it and it grew up, I would always tell it how we planned its being, nurtured it, and then rejoiced in its arrival. Everyone is entitled to that.

  But in the meantime, hot baths and strenuous exercise. Drifting into sleep, the flashlight locked between my knees, I thought about the slow passage of sperm, the mere chance of it, that rendezvous of sperm and egg like some nostalgic event.

  I adored Howard’s physical presence in a room, was willing to overlook ordinary frailties and even idiosyncratic turns in view of his special dark beauty. In my first stunned perception of him, he looked like a cross between Bugsy Siegel and Delmore Schwartz.

  But he was a moody man, given to occasional depressions and frequent existential twinges. Sometimes he complained about a feeling of sinking or drowning, and I saw myself swimming tirelessly alongside him, his own personal Gertrude Ederle, buoying him up, keeping his spirits above water.

  I was delighted to have an obsession. I dearly loved the intensity of that word, reminiscent of old Bette Davis movies, of thrilling historical passions.

  No one approved. Howard had been married briefly before to a woman named Renee, a maniac of sorts. He still heard from her from time to time. My mother said that his loyalty would certainly be divided, and besides he had bedroom eyes. My father said that he was not ambitious. Sherry, a classmate with bohemian leanings, was never going to let herself be snared this way. When I told her about Howard and me, she was another prophet of doom. “What is he? Scorpio?” she said. “Uh-oh.”

  Howard’s mother was convinced that our relationship was only a phase. She would probably say the same thing, if asked, about the human condition. His father jangled the change in his pockets and looked like he was making plans.

  As our crisis mounted, Howard became more unsure about committing himself. I tried to be understanding, remembering what he had been through in his life so far. We sat in his car, parked on a dark street in a neutral neighborhood. There was no question of doubt anymore. All the evidence was in.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  Fear had canceled some second thoughts. Now unreasonable love wiped out the rest. “You know,” I said, trying to telegraph that love. “What about you?”

  He sighed, his eyes shifted restlessly, and I imagined my mother’s pride and joy, a slender gelatinous thread riding the sewer currents of Queens.

  “Are you afraid, Paulie?” Howard said, and I knew then that he was.

  I made him say it anyway. “Of what?” I asked, forcing his glance.

  “Of … I don’t know… of medical complications.”

  “Aren’t you?” What a mess it could be! I concentrated, flashing terrible mental pictures at him, Daily News headlines, even threw in some war atrocities for good measure.

  He shuddered, receiving my message. I couldn’t help thinking that men whose mothers have established an early pattern of guilt in them are probably the easiest. Even in those green days I had a psychological bent.

  “So that’s it, I guess,” Howard said, and we were engaged.

  I threw my arms around him, sealing the bond with an ecstasy that was almost religious. “It will be wonderful,” I promised. “We’ll have a wonderful life together. We’ll have terrific good luck. I can feel it.”

  He hugged me back, but all I could really feel were the doombeat of his heart and the collapsing walls of his will.

  2

  THROUGH SOME MINOR POLITICAL influence we were given first refusal on an apartment on th
e nineteenth floor of a building in a large cluster of buildings in Forest Hills. We were assured that thirty other couples on legitimate waiting lists had been bypassed in our favor.

  We went to see the apartment two weeks before the wedding. The couple who were moving out led the way through a maze of labeled cartons and crates. For some reason the man felt obliged to point out the obvious. “Well, here’s the oven,” he said, and we peered dutifully inside, as trusting as Hansel and Gretel. “And this is the refrigerator.” An orange nestled against what appeared to be a urine specimen. There was the boiled egg smell of school lunchrooms.

  Somewhere an infant cried, its wails muted and distant-sounding. Was it packed into one of the crates?

  Howard poked around. He looked into closets and he examined sink stains as if they were hieroglyphics. “You folks going into the suburbs?” he asked. I could see he was getting ready to have one of those discussions about the merits of city life against those of the country. He smiled encouragement at the man who didn’t smile back.

  “We’re splitting up,” the wife said, and she threw a couple of pot covers into a carton where they clanged together like cymbals in mid-symphony.

  My heart tilted. Premonitory signs meant a lot to Howard. I looked at him, but he didn’t say anything. What could he say anyway? Good luck? You can’t win them all? He wandered away, wordless and troubled.