Open Doors

by Gloria Goldreich

  She worked with Lizzie Simmons, Neil’s longtime secretary, in his office, clearing up what Lizzie referred to as “his affairs.” Lizzie spoke slowly and moved swiftly, her eyes red-rimmed, her lank brown hair pulled into a bun. When Neil was alive Lizzie had worn it loose and her fleshy face had always been carefully made up, her pale lashes stiffened with mascara, bright scarves at her mottled throat. She had dressed each morning for “her doctor,” the man whose day she arranged, whose lunch she ordered, whose phone calls she screened. She had been his office wife and, like Elaine, she, too, was widowed. Elaine wondered if Lizzie, like herself, wakened in the night and wondered if it was true that Neil had died. Did Lizzie come into the office and expect to find “her doctor” seated behind his desk as Elaine expected to find him sleeping beside her in the bed they had shared for so many years?

  It startled her that Neil’s professional life could be disposed of as swiftly and effortlessly as his toothbrush and his clothing. A young psychiatrist took over the lease of his office and bought the furnishings, the brown leather couch with its matching chair, the mahogany desk, the bookshelves. She and Lizzie packed his books into cartons. Sarah had arranged for them to be shipped to Israel where they would be donated to a private library.

  “They’ll put a plaque up with Dad’s name,” Sarah had said. “The Doctor Neil Gordon Library. I’ll feel that I have part of Daddy in Jerusalem and they really need the books.”

  “Fine.” Elaine had not hesitated. It was what Neil would have wanted and it pleased her to think that Sarah’s children could go to that library and see their grandfather’s name, that they might slide their small hands across the leather-bound volumes that he had treasured.

  It was Lizzie who had taken care of the final bookkeeping chores and informed patients and former patients of Neil’s death. Together, she and Elaine had gone through files and arranged for the storage of records that had to be preserved. They worked, for two weeks, in a companionable silence and when, at last, they had finished, they stood together in the early evening dimness of late autumn and wordlessly acknowledged that their work was done. Neil’s presence had vanished from the room that had been his world for so many years.

  “Is there anything that you would want, Lizzie?” Elaine asked and she was surprised when Lizzie pointed to the ceramic nameplate of Elaine’s own design. She had etched Neil’s name in gold upon the earth-toned glaze and it had rested on his desk from his very first day in practice.

  An odd choice, Elaine thought, but she nodded and handed it to Lizzie, along with an envelope that contained a generous check. She and Lizzie would not see each other again, she knew. With Neil’s death came other small deaths, the withering of friendships, the fading of voices once familiar, phone calls unanswered, invitations unreciprocated.

  They placed the office keys on the reception desk and left together. Neither of them wanted to hand them to the young psychiatrist who would sit in Neil’s chair and stare through the window at the birch tree that Neil had loved.

  They did not embrace but shook hands solemnly, sadly, and it shamed Elaine that tears glistened on Lizzie’s cheeks although she herself was dry-eyed. That night she looked at her legal pad and carefully ripped her lists into shreds.

  “Everything is taken care of,” she told Denis when he called. “I’m going back to the studio tomorrow.”

  “It will be good for you to get back to work,” her son said and she heard the relief in his voice. He would call his brother and his sisters and tell them that Mom was fine, that she was adjusting, that she would be okay.

  “Yes. I’m looking forward to it.” She willed her voice to a lightness she did not feel and remembered to ask him about Andrew whose soft voice she heard in the background.

  “He’s fine,” Denis replied. “Actually, we have some people over…”

  “And I have a lot to do,” she said quickly.

  “Good night, Mom.”

  She replaced the receiver gently and sat very still in her darkened silent living room and thought of her son, surrounded by laughing and talking friends, in his high-ceilinged Santa Fe home.

  She was in her studio at first light the next morning and she surveyed her workplace as though she were a tourist newly arrived at a foreign port. Weeks had passed since she had rushed out in response to Neil’s call and in all that time she had never followed the path through her garden to the small stucco building that had been Neil’s gift to her on their fifth anniversary. Although she had worked in that large wide-windowed room for four decades, it seemed strangely unfamiliar to her. She opened and closed the door to her kiln, slid her hand across her worktable, encrusted now with dust and droplets of the cobalt glaze she had been mixing when the phone rang, Neil’s last and terrible call. She shivered, scraped at the hardened fleck with a fingernail and tried to remember why she had settled on that color. She glanced at the shelves of chemicals and pigments, noted that she needed to replenish her supply of both whites and reds, and tossed styluses and brushes into the sink. Slowly, slowly, she reclaimed the studio, restored it to order, wresting it from the chaos of her loss. Within hours she had swept it clean, washed her implements, sponged the worktable and ordered supplies. Only then did she study the designs for the work she had to complete, pleased that there were so many unfinished projects on hand. She would have to complete the enameled rainbow-colored tiles for a cocktail table commissioned by an interior designer, the insets for a small mural at the local art museum, a series of graceful miniature bowls commissioned for Mimi Armstrong’s gallery show. Elaine reviewed her sketches of those bowls, womb-shaped and gently rimmed. She had thought to use a celadon glaze for the largest one and gradually to darken it until the fourth and final one was a dark forest green. She would tackle the bowls first, she thought and reached for the clay which would, of course, have to be pounded into a moist softness before it could be properly thrown.

  She worked throughout the day, breaking only to eat a quick lunch and hurrying back to the studio, switching on the light as the shadows of early evening darkened the room. She molded the clay, shaped it, refined it, disliked the final shape and pounded it with a mallet so that she might begin again. It pleased her to have such control over her material, to have the power to translate a visual ideal into tactile reality, to reclaim that total immersion in work, blocking out all loss and loneliness. Absorbed and exhausted, she continued to work the clay until her hands weakened and her arms ached. She was startled then to see that night had fallen and reluctantly she retraced her steps across the sere grass of her garden back to her dark and empty house. Still with her coat on, she sat at her kitchen table, covered her face with her hands and rocked back and forth, the keening wail of loss and grief a sound that was alien to her own ears. She did not eat supper that first night but fell into an exhausted sleep on Neil’s side of the bed, her head resting on his pillow.

  Day after day, she followed the same routine, working from early in the morning until late in the evening. She willed her voice to cheerfulness as she spoke to her children. She was fine, busy, catching up. She asked the right questions.

  How was Sarah feeling? Was she getting enough rest?

  “Rest?” Sarah’s voice was riddled with merry incredulity. “Mom, I have four children and I’m running a business. If you want me to get some rest come to Jerusalem and help me.”

  “We’ll see.” The noncommittal reply sufficed. Sarah did not press her. It was, after all, the middle of the night in Jerusalem.

  She checked with Lisa on the progress of the adoption. When would it be finalized? Lisa was vague. International adoptions proceeded slowly, took time. She wanted to come to Westchester but she was busy, involved in opening a new radiology lab in Bala Cynwyd. It was in a beautiful Main Line suburb. Did Elaine want to see it? Why didn’t she come to Philadelphia for a weekend.

  “Perhaps. Soon. I’ll think about it.”

  Denis and Andrew were building a studio adjacent to Andrew’s darkroom.r />
  “A perfect place for you to work, Mom,” Denis said wistfully. “I want you to see it.”

  “Oh, I will,” she promised.

  Peter sent pictures of his children, Eric smiling, Renée looking sullen. He called from a hotel in Chicago where he had gone for a meeting, from a resort in Arizona where he was scouting out locations for a television show not yet in production. She asked about Lauren and Lauren’s widowed father, Herb, whom she and Neil had always liked. She wondered why Peter so seldom mentioned Lauren but feared to ask him.

  “Lauren’s fine.” He hesitated and then too swiftly changed the subject. “I hope you’re thinking of coming out to the coast,” he said.

  “Thinking about it,” she agreed pleasantly and he did not press her.

  She heard a woman’s voice in the background but, of course, he was at work and calling her between meetings.

  The conversations with her children wearied her. Too often she ate a cold dinner in the kitchen, standing at the counter as she picked at the food, turning on the television to banish the silence.

  The Newnhams invited her to dinner. Two other couples were included and Elaine understood that well-meaning Claire Newnham had struggled over the uneven seating, at last placing Elaine, the single woman, between the two husbands, both of them doctors who had known Neil and spoke gently to his widow. Their solicitude irritated her. She saw the two wives glance at each other and flinched from the pity in their eyes. She drank too much wine and talked too much about her work. She wanted them to understand that she was not defined by her widowhood, her new aloneness. She was glad that she had applied her makeup so carefully and had chosen to wear the gray cashmere dress that Neil had always favored. She told amusing stories that made the men laugh and their laughter caused the women to frown. She supposed, uncharitably, that they feared her; she was an attractive, creative woman, suddenly single again. Their fear was strangely gratifying. Shrugging into her coat, she glanced at herself in the mirror, saw the two men watching her and felt a surge of power.

  But when she returned home that night she could not contain a new and unfamiliar melancholy. She wandered through the house, still wearing her long black cape, tears streaking her cheeks, sobbing quietly as she moved through the darkness although there was no one to hear the full volume of the sorrow she could not contain.

  “Goddamn it, Neil!” Never in life had she spoken to her husband with the fury she aimed at him in death.

  She went to the theater with Mimi Armstrong, meeting her first for dinner at a too brightly lit expensive restaurant. Mimi drank two martinis and talked at length about her unhappy marriage and her even unhappier divorce. Being alone was not that difficult, she told Elaine. She liked her life as it was. She had her gallery, an occasional lover, a circle of friends. Money. She fingered the chunky gold necklace designed by one of the artists she represented, flicked at her streaked hair with a curved bloodred fingernail and when she smiled her teeth were blindingly white. Elaine did not ask her how she coped with the silence of the long nights, with the loneliness that came at daybreak, with the hovering emptiness that haunted even a day crowded with work and appointments.

  She had lunch with Serena, whom she had known since college, at whose wedding she had danced. She, too, was widowed, having nursed her husband, clever successful Eliot, through a long and losing battle with cancer. Serena had always been a quiet woman, quiet in her happiness and quiet now in her grief. Her dark hair had turned silver during Eliot’s illness and she did not darken it. Her face was thin and fine-featured and she wore no makeup. A cream-colored silk scarf draped her tailored olive-green wool dress. Loss seemed to have drained her of all color and yet when she spoke it was with gentleness and calm.

  “How are you coping, Elaine?” she asked and, wisely, did not wait for an answer. “I know, of course I know, how hard it is.” She twisted the wedding band that she still wore and Elaine, in turn, glanced down at her own ring.

  “I’m managing,” she said. “I’ve taken care of a lot of logistical stuff. Neil’s office. His things. The damn thank-you notes.”

  “Yes. I received mine,” Serena said dryly.

  Elaine blushed.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I seem to be drowning in the waters of self-pity.”

  “Phase one of widowhood. But it passes. Or at least, it gets easier. Work helps.” Serena glanced at her watch. She was the librarian at a nearby community college and had a limited time for lunch.

  “Yes. I spend a lot of time in the studio. Fortunately, I’m working on some interesting projects.” Elaine toyed with her salad, poured herself more wine.

  “That means you’re spending a lot of time by yourself,” Serena observed. “Working alone was okay when there was someone to be with when you left the studio. Without Neil there’s an emptiness. The two of you were so focused on each other.”

  Elaine bit her lips, fought against tears that already seared her eyes. Serena, quiet gentle Serena, had perceived the core of her sadness, the enormity of her loss.

  Of course she and Neil had been focused on each other, both of them only-children, solitary strivers, friends before they were lovers, husband and wife when they were barely out of their teens. He was hers and she was his, their hours together a sealed and exclusive expanse of time. Even their children, their wonderful and beloved children, had not penetrated the singular closeness of their shared beginning.

  “I’m sorry,” Serena said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Elaine shook her head.

  “It’s all right. You were being honest. Thank you.” She dabbed at her eyes, unashamed of her tears, and struggled to invoke a smile. “What else helps? Besides work.”

  “There are support groups. Bereavement groups. With therapists, without therapists. I’ve been to both.”

  “And they work?”

  “Elaine, nothing works. You’ve lost the most important person in your life and what you had can’t be restored to you. Nothing is ever going to bring Eliot back to me or Neil back to you. But listening to other people, giving voice to your own feelings helps. For me it meant that I stopped choking on my own loneliness, that I acknowledged my own terror at being alone, that I stopped lying to my children. It was all right to tell them that I missed their father, that I was lonely, that I needed them and that I hoped they needed me. I guess that was what I got out of the support groups, my two meetings with a self-proclaimed grief counselor. I told my children who I was, what I was feeling.” Again she glanced at her watch. “I have to get back to the library,” she said. “Are you all right? Relatively speaking, of course.”

  She smiled and Elaine smiled back.

  “Relatively all right,” she said.

  Serena looked hard at her.

  “It will get easier, you know,” she said gravely.

  Elaine nodded. “I hope so.”

  She went back to her studio and worked late into the night, Serena’s words echoing as she experimented with a glaze, moistened her clay.

  The next morning she sifted through her mail, glancing indifferently at her synagogue’s monthly bulletin. She was not a regular synagogue attendee and since Neil’s death she had not been at a single service.

  “Sarah’s religious enough for the entire family,” she had said jokingly when Denis asked her if she might not find some comfort in a Sabbath service. He himself was deeply involved in what he called a “new-age” synagogue in New Mexico, a revelation which surprised her. But then Denis had always surprised her. She wondered if Andrew joined him when he went to services and if a gay Jamaican man would be welcomed even at a so-called “new-age” congregation, but she dared not ask Denis. She acknowledged then how little she knew about his life, how little she knew about the lives of all her children. She thought, amused at her own honesty, that she had not meant their independence to be quite so complete.

  She reread the synagogue bulletin. A small item announced the meeting of a bereavement group later that week. Widow
s, widowers and divorced members might find it helpful. The text was tactful, the implication clear. Anyone who had lost a spouse would have a forum.

  “I won’t go,” she said aloud but she cut the announcement out and tacked it onto her bulletin board.

  It rained on the evening of the meeting and she stared into the darkness, listened to the rhythmic patter and watched the droplets pelt her window. She and Neil had loved rainy evenings. Often they had drawn open the drapes so that they might watch the storm, safe and dry in the warmth of their home, in the islands of lamplight that sheltered them. They had known themselves to be fortune’s favored, safe and together. But now Elaine was alone and she knew herself to be vulnerable. A sudden flash of lightning frightened her.

  Abruptly, she closed the drapes and, without thinking, she changed from her work clothes into a black pantsuit, a white sweater, appropriate for a widow, she thought bitterly. She applied her makeup, brushed her hair so that the curls framed her face and, seizing her hooded raincoat, drove the few miles to the synagogue.

  She and Neil were longtime members of the Woodside Hebrew Center. It was the building’s architecture, its clean angular lines and glass brick frontage, that had originally attracted them. It had also pleased them that the congregation’s philosophy was basically humanistic, that the various rabbis who had come and gone through the years of their membership had all had an intellectual bent and were both undemanding and accommodating. Their children had all been enrolled in the religious school but little fuss was made over missed attendance or even the indifference with which both Peter and Dennis had approached their bar mitzvah preparations.

  “We can’t demand more of them than we demand of ourselves,” Neil had said reasonably. They both acknowledged that their religion, their Judaism, was peripheral to their lives, observed more in memory of their parents than because of their own inclinations. Why then should they expect more of their children? That was perhaps why Sarah’s embrace of orthodox Judaism had so surprised them, why she found it intriguing that Denis attended innovative services in his very innovative community.