Open Doors

by Gloria Goldreich

  She busied herself preparing the children for school, assuming a casual carefree attitude as she drove them there, so that they would not be infected by her own anxiety. Back on Canyon Drive she asked Maria to brew a pot of fresh coffee and she was relieved when Herb Glasser rang the bell. She, too, did not want to be alone.

  They sat together in the sunroom and watched Jose pass his net across the clear blue water of the pool. His graceful rhythmic movements were strangely comforting and they followed his progress as though he were a dancer gliding across a stage.

  “When I was a boy,” Herb said, “I took two buses and then a train to swim at the beach in Coney Island. For twenty cents I got a locker on the boardwalk where I could change clothes and take a shower. A towel was five cents more so we brought the towel from home. I wanted more for my children. I wanted them to have everything, to grow up in a fairyland, to walk through their own garden to a swimming pool. That was why we came to California when they were little, Gertrude and I. Here my business could grow. Here I could give them everything. And I did. The house, the pool, the wonderful schools. But what I couldn’t give them was health. First my Donny. A strong boy, a laughing boy. The smartest in his class. The best on every team. To look at him was to smile. And then one day he’s tired, very tired. Tests. Doctors. Hospitals. Leukemia, the doctor said, like he was apologizing that a boy like Donny should have such a disease. And Donny was gone. And now Lauren. In the same hospital where Donny died, where Gertrude died. That’s why I couldn’t go to that hospital this morning. I couldn’t sit again in that waiting room where I waited only for bad news. ‘We’re sorry about your son, Mr. Glasser. “‘We’re sorry about your wife, Mr. Glasser.’”

  “This is different, Herb,” Elaine said, struggling to keep her own voice free of tension. “It’s just a routine procedure. I spoke to my daughter, Lisa, last night. That’s what she said. A routine procedure.”

  “When my Gertrude went into the hospital it was also for a routine procedure. A small cyst. A nothing. Routine. But she died during the routine procedure. ‘We’re sorry about your wife, Mr. Glasser.’”

  He set his coffee cup down and looked past her at the expanse of lawn. Jose, having finished at the pool was pruning the rosebushes, carefully avoiding the full-grown yellow blossoms which, Elaine remembered suddenly and irrelevantly, Lauren favored.

  “She’ll be all right, Herb,” she said.

  “She’s all I have.” His voice broke. “Her and the children. I’m alone. Alone in that big house I built for my family. Quiet in the morning, quiet in the evening. I choke on the silence. I pinch myself to make sure that I’m alive, that I’m feeling something. I call information for a phone number so I can hear a voice. And then the phone rings and it’s my Lauren. Come watch me play tennis, Dad. Come for dinner, Dad. Come to Eric’s baseball game, to Renée’s recital. It’s my Lauren inviting me back into life. It’s different for you, Elaine. You lost your Neil and that was a terrible thing. But you have four children, grandchildren. Your work. And your friends. Women have friends. They meet for dinner. Go to the theater. They shop and have lunch. I see the widows, all around me. They talk, they laugh, they’re together. Men alone—we close the doors to our houses and turn on the television set but we don’t listen, we don’t watch.”

  “I have four children, all scattered,” Elaine said. “But I don’t get invited to dinner, to ball games, to dance recitals. I’m too far away. Too much removed from their lives, actually from the way they live their lives.”

  She thought of Sarah and Moshe and their murmurs of blessing. She could not fit herself into the circle of their belief. She shook her head, banishing the memory of her fierce anger at the seder table.

  She glanced around the sunroom with its white wicker furnishings, pastel pillows and sand-colored sisal carpet, an ambience of studied brightness, keyed to pleasure. In her loose gray cotton dress, wearing the jet ceramic pendant of her own design, her mass of thick black hair, she was an alien presence in this life that her son had chosen. Unlike Renee Evers, unlike Peter himself and perhaps Herb Glasser, she could not reinvent herself and become a Californian. Peter, like Sarah, had drifted into a precinct that was foreign to her just as she and Neil created a life that was very different from that of their immigrant parents. A generational divide was inevitable, she supposed. Life moved on. Children created their own lives, went their own ways. Renee Evers had fled to the west, her children had returned to New England.

  “Besides I have my work, my studio,” she continued. “Neil had it built so that my window faces our wonderful maple tree.”

  The tree would be fully leafed now, she thought, its branches casting dancing shadows across the carpet of wildf lowers with which they seeded their back lawn. Sometimes, molding a piece of clay, she had willed her fingers to follow the dance of the branches.

  “There are studios in California. I rent to artists,” he said and she understood that he was not only urging her to live closer to family, he was extending an invitation into his own life, extending the intimacy of their shared grandparenthood. He would have her be his companion, his partner in their shared battle against the silence of empty rooms, the starkness of a table set for one.

  “A gallery owner made me such an offer,” she said.

  Her own words surprised her. She recognized that she had not immediately rejected his suggestion but was actually placing it in the range of consideration.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that I’d think about it. When everything calms down.”

  “Yes. This is not a good time to make decisions. We will talk about it more. When the surgery is over. When other things are settled.”

  She looked at him sharply but she did not ask him what he meant. He was a father with an acute sensitivity to his daughter. He would, of course, have guessed that something was wrong, that Lauren’s life was newly and dangerously unsettled. He looked at his watch, looked at the clock, looked at the phone.

  They both jerked forward when it rang. Fearfully, they stared at it, allowed it to ring again and then Elaine answered it.

  Peter’s voice, calm, relaxed.

  “The surgery went well,” he said. “No complications. She’s fine.”

  “Of course. Of course. She’s fine.” Her own words tumbled over each other in an explosion of relief. She turned, beaming, smiling to Herb who seized the phone.

  “Good. Wonderful. She’s awake? I’ll come. Soon. I’ll come.”

  Color returned to his face, light to his eyes. He set the receiver down and he and Elaine embraced. She relaxed into the strength of his arms, listened, with her head pressed against his chest, to the slowing of his heartbeat as the fear that had haunted him eased. He touched her hair, and, oddly, tenderly, traced the arc of her eyebrow with his finger. Her heart turned and she drew away, fearful that it might break.

  He left then, eager to see Lauren, and she took up her sketch pad. She concentrated again on the drawing of Neil’s hand, of those graceful fingers that had so often passed across her face, resting now on her lips, now on her eyelids and, yes, tracing the arc of her eyebrow.

  She picked up the children at the end of their school day but she did not follow Lauren’s carefully prepared schedule.

  “We’re celebrating,” she told them happily. “Mommy’s fine. We’re going out for ice cream.”

  “But where’s Daddy?” Renée was a child who would always be in need of reassurance. She did not take good news at face value but required witnesses, reiteration. As a small girl, she would ask, at the conclusion of a fairy tale, “But how do we know they really lived happily ever after?” If Elaine was reading she turned to Neil, if Neil was reading she turned to Elaine. Two adults were needed to testify to the truth. Neil had called her a cautious child. Elaine thought it more likely that she was a frightened child. And her fear today was not misplaced. She had been old enough to register the deaths of two grandparents. She understood that hospitals were ominous
venues.

  “Daddy will be home for dinner,” Elaine assured her. “He wants to be with Mommy this afternoon.”

  Peter did come home for dinner, arriving with Herb and carrying a pizza which immediately turned the evening meal into a celebration party. Elaine found paper plates and cups left over from a birthday party with a Lion King theme.

  “My party,” Eric said proudly. “Mommy makes the best birthday parties. My whole class says so.”

  “Mommy wanted you to have pizza tonight,” Peter told the children. “And she says we can have pizza again when she comes home.”

  “When will she come home?” Renée asked.

  “The day after tomorrow,” Peter said.

  “Is that when she’s coming home, Grandpa?” Renée asked, ever in need of corroboration.

  “Definitely,” Herb said and placed another slice on Renée’s plate.

  Peter immediately cut away the crust that Renée disliked. He was, Elaine thought, a very good father.

  She watched him, noting the creases of fatigue about his eyes, the pallor of exhaustion that blanched his face. His cell phone rang and he carried it into another room. It was a long conversation and when he returned to the table he shoved his plate aside and turned to the children.

  “Listen guys,” he said apologetically, “I’m sorry but there are problems on one of my shoots. I have to drive down to the desert so I’m going to take off now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “You mean you’re not going to sleep here tonight?” Eric asked and his voice quivered.

  “Hey, Eric, you know sometimes that happens with my work. It’s happened before.” Peter tousled his son’s hair but he did not look at either his mother or his father-in-law.

  “Yeah, but Mommy was always home.”

  “Well, Grandma’s here.”

  “I like it when you and Mommy are both home together,” Renée said. “Besides, it’s dark. You can’t have a shoot in the dark.”

  “That’s why we have lights, Renée. Remember, I showed them to you when your class came down to the location in Palm Springs. Anyway, I have to get some things and start moving. It’s a long drive.”

  They stared down at their plates, the party atmosphere evaporated. The uneaten pizza slices lay in cold and congealed triangles on the soggy paper plates. Elaine brought out chocolate pudding. They stared at it indifferently and then ate it very slowly. They did not look up when Peter returned, minutes later, carrying a flight bag and his laptop. Renée twitched impatiently when he kissed her forehead and Eric turned away. Herb Glasser nodded his farewell. Elaine walked Peter out to his car.

  “This is the wrong night to be away,” she said quietly. “The children are still nervous about Lauren.”

  “She’s fine. I told them that.”

  “They really need you to be with them,” she insisted.

  “And I need to do what I’m doing,” he replied curtly.

  “Peter, your highest priority must be your children.”

  “And were your children always your highest priority? Were we Dad’s highest priority?” he shot back and then bit his lip, reached out and touched her shoulder.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not the one you should be apologizing to.”

  He flinched at the hardness of her tone and shook his head wearily.

  “They’ll be all right. I’ll call,” he said and he revved the motor of the small red sports car and drove too quickly down the circular driveway and onto Canyon Drive.

  The phone rang early the next morning but it was not Peter. It was Sarah calling from Israel, the children chattering in the background. It was late afternoon in Jerusalem. Sarah’s kitchen counter would be covered with vegetables for the evening meal, her table buried beneath the children’s homework and fabric samples.

  “Lauren is fine,” Elaine assured her before Sarah even had time to ask.

  “Yes. I know. Lisa called last night and told me. Actually, I’m calling about Lisa. Although I don’t want her to know that I spoke to you.”

  “Is everything all right?” Elaine asked.

  “The adoption agency wants her to travel to Russia to meet Genia. That’s the child’s name. Lisa had thought that David might go with her but it seems that he’s too busy with work and I think she’s really uneasy about traveling there alone.”

  “I did offer to go with her,” Elaine said. “I want to go with her. But she insisted that she’d be fine on her own.”

  She remembered now the sudden chill in Lisa’s voice when she had made that tentative offer, her own words hesitant because Lisa had always been so resistant to her advice and suggestions.

  “Lisa is not as independent as she would have us think,” Sarah said. “She’s careful about revealing her feelings.”

  “To me? I’m her mother, Sarah.”

  Sarah did not reply and in that long-distance silence Elaine imagined the words unsaid. Especially to you. It would seem, she thought bitterly, that her daughters knew and understood each other better than she understood either of them.

  “Of course I’ll go to Russia with her,” Elaine said. “I’ll insist on going.”

  She remembered Lisa’s reply to that initial offer. I want you to do what you want to do. She understood suddenly that Lisa wanted to claim her heartfelt involvement, her unconditional commitment to both the journey and the adoption.

  “That would be great, Mom. Lisa’s not as strong as everyone thinks she is.”

  “I’m glad you called, Sarah,” Elaine said. In the background she heard Moshe talking softly to the children, heard the baby Yuval chortle and Ephraim’s voice chanting a Torah lesson. Leora took the phone from her mother, breathless with the exciting knowledge that her voice was traveling thousands of miles from Jerusalem to Los Angeles.

  “We miss you, Savta,” she said. “Are you working on the tiles for Grandpa’s mural?”

  “I am,” Elaine assured her. “And I miss you, too.”

  She and Sarah said their goodbyes then. Elaine heard the relief in her daughter’s voice and thought of how protective the twins had always been of each other. When they were smaller she had sensed that they vied with each other for her attention, for Neil’s notice, but as they grew older, although their life choices were very different, their closeness intensified. They were best friends, lending each other support and, Elaine supposed, sharing secrets. There had been a special bond between them since their junior years abroad, the year Sarah (Sandy then. Sandy who wore miniskirts that showed her slender legs and sleeveless blouses that revealed arms now covered to the wrists) spent in Jerusalem and Lisa in Italy. Lisa had had a boyfriend that year but she had never told Elaine how and why that relationship had ended.

  Elaine sighed. She had not, before, thought that her children concealed the truths of their lives from her or from Neil, nor had she suspected that they harbored resentments.

  “Our kids know that they don’t have to hide anything from us,” she had more than once assured friends who discussed their own problems with their children. “Of course we respect their privacy.”

  Peter, and Sarah, too, had disabused her of that complacency.

  She went into the kitchen and, following Lauren’s meticulous printed instructions, told Maria to prepare lamb chops and broccoli for dinner that night. The Mexican woman nodded.

  “I am glad that Señora Gordon is all right,” she said. “I do not like hospitals. They are bad places.”

  Elaine smiled.

  “I think so, too,” she said. “But the señora is fine. No need to worry.”

  fourteen

  Elaine spent the rest of the morning completing yet another tile that she envisioned as part of a triptych, a circle of children holding hands. It would represent their children, their grandchildren, the generational validation of their shared life, enduring beyond Neil’s death. Her drawing pencil flew and she thought that she would need larger templates, a strong stylus for the initial etching.

&nbs
p; She reached for the phone, intending to call Renee Evers but even as she touched it, it rang.

  A man’s voice, so muffled by sorrow that it was unrecognizable to her, said her name, Peter’s name, Lauren’s name. She struggled to understand the words that he spoke, struggled to determine who it was whose voice faded into a bleat of misery and realized that it was Herb Glasser.

  “Herb, what is it? What’s happened?”

  “Lauren. It’s Lauren. Find Peter.”

  “You must tell me what happened.” She spoke with calm authority, Neil’s legacy to her, the tone he used to coax calm from an agitated patient, to reason with a distraught child. But now she herself was talking to a father, to her daughter-in-law’s father, agitated and distraught.

  Still, the formula worked. His answer was terse, coherent.

  “Lauren suddenly started hemorrhaging. They don’t know why. She’s lost a lot of blood. It’s dangerous, they say. Find Peter. Elaine. Find Peter. I’m afraid for Lauren. My Lauren.” His voice broke again and he hung up.

  Her hand trembling, she called Peter’s office. He was out. His secretary did not know where he was. A location meeting, she thought.

  “Try his cell phone,” she suggested helpfully and even more helpfully she gave Elaine the number.

  Her fingers trembling, her heart pounding, Elaine punched the numbers in. She heard one ring, then another and yet another. At last a woman’s voice, edged with laughter, answered.

  “Peter Gordon is unable to come to the phone just now,” she said playfully.

  “This is Peter Gordon’s mother. Give the phone to him immediately,” Elaine said harshly.

  Peter’s voice was tense, exuding uneasiness.

  “Mom, what’s going on? Oh God, I know I said I’d call in the morning but I got hung up here. Are the kids very upset?”

  “I’m not calling about Renée and Eric, Peter. I’m calling because you have to get over to the hospital right now.”