The Professor of Immortality

by Eileen Pollack

  “You need to sign in all three names.”

  As if Maxine might have been trying to smuggle her son and his fiancée into the home illegally. Zachary Pardue, she signs. Then Angelina Ruiz, wondering if Angelina intends to keep her surname or take her son’s. Maxine doesn’t care. But it occurs to her that the Sayers family name will die out with her.

  They take the elevator to the fifth floor. Like most young people, Zach and Angelina haven’t yet convinced themselves that banishing one’s elderly parent to a nursing home is ever justified. Passing the lineup of quivering, moaning invalids clearly tears at their hearts. But even this gauntlet of horrors doesn’t prepare Zach for stepping into his grandmother’s room and seeing what’s left of her propped up in her bed.

  “Grandmom?”

  Her eyes focus. She jerks her hands to her head, attempting to pat her hair into place. “Oh no!” she cries, any joy she might have taken in seeing her grandson destroyed because she hasn’t had time to primp.

  Zach leans down and kisses his grandmother. “I’m really sorry, Grandmom. I’ve been —”

  She cuts him off. “Men don’t apologize.” She peers at Angelina. “Is this your wife?” And before Zach can stammer that they aren’t yet married, but plan to be, very soon, she says, “She isn’t white, is she.”

  Horrified, Maxine steps between her mother and future daughter-in-law.

  “And there’s something the matter with her. Some kind of defect?”

  “Mother!” Maxine scolds. Her mother has never been racist or mean-spirited; the Parkinson’s has loosened her inhibitions. Maxine explains all of this to Angelina, not caring if her mother hears, but Angelina shakes her head, as if it is her place to accept whatever judgment her husband’s grandmother passes. Maxine, who spent years accepting her mother-in-law’s negative judgments of her, makes a note to tell Angelina she doesn’t need to take crap from anyone, not even from Zach’s grandmother. Or, for that matter, from her.

  “Grandmom,” Zach says, “if you love me, you’ll love Angelina.”

  “Of course I will,” his grandmother snaps. “I was going to say, if she isn’t white, and she has whatever else is wrong with her, and you still want to marry her, she must be a wonderful person.” With great difficulty, she lifts her head from the pillow and squints at Angelina’s belly. “Unless she is taking advantage of your good nature by shaming you into marrying her.”

  “Mom!” Maxine lifts her hand to her mother’s mouth as if to deflect further insults, but Angelina takes Maxine by the arm and gently pulls her back.

  “It’s all right,” she says. “I have a grandmother, too. Sometimes the things she says … I wouldn’t want Zach to hear those either.”

  Zach sits on the edge of his grandmother’s bed. “We’re moving to Detroit, Grandmom. We’re going to start a business.” He explains about buying the empty property and converting it to a farm. Maxine isn’t sure how much her mother understands. But she understands enough to smile and tell Zach he sounds like his grandfather.

  “Just don’t let anyone take advantage of you,” her mother warns Zach. “The way your grandfather let those miserable ‘partners’ take advantage of him. You make sure this young woman gets everything she deserves. She grew up poor, didn’t she? Like me. She deserves to be treated like a lady.” She closes her eyes. “And I am going to be right there. Clapping my hands off. When that baby graduates from college.”

  What delusion the human mind is capable of! But hasn’t Maxine, at some level, believed she would never die? The truth is, she won’t live to witness the Age of the Messiah. She might not even live to witness her grandchild receive his or her high-school diploma. And she won’t be observing her deadness from somewhere else. Won’t be there to comfort Zach in his mourning. The books and articles she has written, the institute she directs, her work on the effects of extended lifetimes—these have been nothing but her own form of terror management.

  “Why are you crying?” her mother demands. “I’m the one who’s sick!”

  Maxine pulls a tissue from the box, glad for the aloe in the fabric.

  “Zach,” her mother says, “you didn’t kill anyone, did you?”

  Maxine can sense her son’s shock, that his grandmother would even ask.

  “No, Grandmom. I haven’t killed anyone.”

  His grandmother’s expression isn’t relief so much as satisfaction. “Your mother thought maybe you had. But it was that other one. The one you were afraid of. I kept telling you not to spend so much time with him. No one ever listens to me.”

  Zach takes his grandmother’s hand and pats it. “You’re right. He was a very disturbed person.”

  “Hah!” she says. “That’s not the only thing I was right about. It’s here. The letter from Cousin Joel. You promised, Maxine! You promised you would look. Not pretend. Really look. Zach, you help her.”

  Maxine shoots Zach a look to convey they need to humor his grandmother. First, she picks up the tissue box. Nothing hidden there. The manicure set. The mirror. The crossword puzzle book her mother hasn’t opened in months. The makeup kit. The menu for the following week, beneath which Maxine finds the schedule of activities, and, beneath that, the issues of Vogue that, until recently, her mother enjoyed browsing. At the bottom of the pile Maxine pulls out the tattered manila envelope in which her mother has preserved the letters and cards Zach sent her over the years. The letter from Cousin Joel won’t be in this envelope, but Maxine will enjoy reminding herself how thoughtful her son has been.

  She lifts the flap and pulls out the cards—for Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, her mother’s birthday. A postcard shows the Golden Gate Bridge; on the back, Zach has printed that he is enjoying his job (a lie!), thinking of his grandmother (who knows, maybe he was), sending his hugs and love. She reaches the last card and shuffles the pile back into the envelope. But in doing so, she notices a thin sheet of onionskin paper, folded twice, wedged inside a card whose glittery surface must have caused the paper to adhere. The brittle stationery is printed with the faded address of Cousin Joel’s law office in Albany—not that Cousin Joel has practiced law in decades. When Maxine unfolds it, a typewritten letter explains to her mother that her husband’s former employee and business partner, Spider Macalvoy, a few weeks prior to his death, confessed to his youngest daughter, Caitlin Garrity, of Orlando, Florida, that he and Dr. Simon and Dr. Vincent, formerly of Fenstead, New York, had been aware that Maxine’s father had been planning to sell his cable television company to the TelePrompTer corporation for twenty million dollars. When they offered to buy Maxine’s mother’s share for a mere fifty thousand, they had cheated her. A good Catholic, Spider couldn’t die with that deception on his conscience. As a result, he has left Maxine’s mother an additional twenty-five thousand of his remaining share.

  Maxine grips her mother’s fragile wrist. “Mom! You were right!”

  “I know!” Her mother shakes her wrist free. “About what?”

  “Spider. He confessed on his deathbed. He left you another twenty-five thousand dollars.” Which is only a fraction of what her mother should have gotten. Most of this will go to pay Stuart Greenglass. But her mother’s lawsuit paid off.

  Her mother is silent a long time. Should Maxine try to rouse her? Finally, her mother says, “He could cheat a poor widow. And his partner’s little girl. But then, on his deathbed …”

  She can’t finish the thought, but Maxine fills in the rest. Spider could have gone to his grave with no one the wiser. Instead, he invented a God who would chastise him with a vengeance Spider hadn’t managed to turn on himself and consign him to torment for eternity. If the human race ever became immortal, would deathbed repentance become irrelevant?

  Her mother asks Maxine to reread the letter. When she finishes, her mother repeats, “I won?” Her tone sounds disappointed, as if she will no longer have a reas
on to live.

  “Wow, Grandmom!” Zach says. “Twenty-five thousand dollars!”

  At one time, her mother might have used such a sum to pay Maxine’s tuition. Or redecorate the house in Fenstead. Or travel to France.

  Then again, the lawsuit was never about the money. Her mother sued to avenge Maxine’s father’s honor. She sued because Maxine’s father would have wanted the proceeds from his invention to go to the daughter he loved, to finance whatever project she chose to undertake to bring about the age of a messiah she no longer believes will come.

  … Eats a Hot Dog with a Dying Man

  Sunday evening, Zach and Angelina get ready to drive to Ypsilanti to have dinner with her parents. They will break the news that she is pregnant. That she and Zach are getting married. That they will be moving to Detroit to start a business.

  “I can’t do this,” Angelina says. “My mother … my father.”

  Maxine takes Angelina’s hands. “They’re your parents. They’ll be hurt you didn’t tell them the truth. But they’ll forgive you. They’ll keep loving you, no matter what.”

  After the two young people drive off, she tries to concentrate on preparing for the class she needs to teach the next day. But she can’t keep her mind off Thaddy. At ten, she tries to sleep but can’t. Did she once want to live forever? She barely can make it through another sleepless night. The next morning, she trudges downstairs to find Zach making waffles for Angelina. Or rather, he has pulled the waffle iron from the top shelf and is rummaging through the cookbooks beneath the microwave.

  “Where’s the recipe Dad used to use?”

  She nudges him aside and finds the card. Floury. Yellowing. Fragrant with vanilla. At the bottom is a chocolate fingerprint that must be Sam’s. It’s all she can do not to stuff the card in her mouth and eat it.

  Settled deep in her tatty orange robe, she watches her son heat the iron and produce a perfect chocolate-pecan waffle for his future wife. Angelina wears a striped maize-and-blue-stripped rugby shirt that used to be Zach’s; it barely contains her belly. That another life is being lived invisibly so near her own makes Maxine feel as if her house is inhabited by another family, curled up in some fifth dimension. Why didn’t she and Sam have a second child? At the beginning, she wanted to enjoy Zach’s babyhood. Then she needed to finish her book so she wouldn’t look foolish when she came up for tenure. Then she needed time to set up her institute. After that, Sam had been on the road so often. Did they believe the limits of a woman’s fertility didn’t apply to them? Would it have been better if Sam had left not one but two children without a father?

  “How did it go last night?” she asks Zach.

  “I was a coward,” he says. “I just sat there and let Angie’s parents yell and carry on as if I weren’t there.”

  “That isn’t true!” Angelina scolds him. “Zach stood up for me. He stood up for us. My parents were upset. Because we had lied. But like you said, they couldn’t stay angry. Not when they thought of their first grandchild coming—so soon! And the three of us living so nearby.”

  Angelina continues about how much her parents love and respect Zach, how willing they are to accept him into their family. Maxine asks about their wedding plans. Having married a man who wasn’t Jewish, she can’t very well require her son to find a rabbi. (She and Sam ended up asking a classmate of Sam’s who received his ordination from the Universal Life Church. A jovial, bearded Jew, this classmate allowed Maxine’s mother to imagine her daughter was being married by a rabbi, an illusion reinforced by the canopy beneath which she and Sam stood in the chapel at MIT, while the absence of any overtly Jewish symbolism minimized Sam’s mother’s sorrow that her son wasn’t marrying a gentile debutante.) Maxine listens as Angelina excitedly describes the ceremony she and Zach are planning in her parents’ backyard, the vegetarian organic Mexican food Angelina’s friend Suzanne’s fledgling catering company will be providing. Sam’s mother might or might not attend. Maxine’s mother, if she makes it that long, will be too infirm to get out of bed. Rosa, Mick, and a few other Ann Arbor friends will show up. Plus a few of Zach’s childhood friends, like Norm. But Zach will miss his father, the way Maxine missed her own father as she walked down the aisle on her uncle’s arm. The way her mother missed her father at the same event.

  Angelina forks a wedge of waffle in her mouth and moans in pleasure. But the moan turns to a grunt and she grabs her side. “Oof. Feel that. That has to be an elbow.”

  Zach allows Angelina to place two of his fingers to the spot where their child elbowed or kicked. His face lights up with astonishment. Then he kisses the bump. Oh! Maxine thinks. I get it! Part of the joy of being a grandparent is watching your child experience the bliss you experienced raising him.

  She lingers as long as she can. Then she excuses herself and hurries upstairs to dress. It’s Monday; she needs to teach. But she doesn’t intend to stop by either of her offices. She hates to think of Special Agent Burdock paging through the hundreds of letters of recommendation she has written, shaking his head at the vacuous praise, the laziness of repetition. Snickering over her student evaluations. Judging her lecture notes to be esoteric, boring. Then again, whose life would bear up under investigation by the FBI? Maxine has gossiped. She has made politically suspect jokes. She has made catty remarks about her colleagues. If her emails are released to the public, will she retain a shred of self-respect? Or a single friend?

  Zach and Angelina are driving to Detroit to gather details about the mortgage they will need to buy that delinquent property. She waves at their departing car, then sets off for campus. As she crosses the Diag, she notices Jackson Sparrow heading toward her. He is wearing one of those flat black caps that remind her of the headgear on a Depression-era newsboy, or maybe Lenin. His left cheek is covered by a bandage the size of an address label.

  “Maxine! I was about to grab a hot dog from the cart. See that nice patch of grass? Why don’t you save it and I’ll be right over. Mustard? Sauerkraut? And, what, a Diet Coke?”

  Before she can refuse, he is off to buy their hot dogs. The spot of grass Jackson pointed out is so green and lush she is tempted to drop to her knees and graze. She settles to the ground and lifts her face to the warmth and light. Jackson rejoins her, handing down the four hot dogs, the two bags of chips, the two cans of diet pop.

  “Better watch out.” He motions toward the sun. “You wouldn’t want to get one of these.” He taps his cheek. “All those summers I spent working outdoors. Construction.”

  She squints up at him. “Was it …” She can’t say the word “malignant.”

  “Not as if I had high hopes of winning a beauty pageant anyway.” He eases himself down. Even with the bandage, he has the edgy, intelligent face some scrawny Jewish men are surprised to find themselves blessed with as they age. But his skin is so thin she can see the veins. His hair is translucent, the scalp pink as a baby’s. When he smiles, she glimpses his receding gums. How could she fall in love with a man with gray teeth? A gray tooth is a dead tooth. The man has dying teeth because the man is dying!

  “I appreciate the concern, but it’s not as if I’m about to kick off right here at our picnic.”

  No doubt he is minimizing the seriousness of what he has been through. With a bandage that size, the surgeon must have gouged a considerable chunk of Jackson’s flesh. Still, he is motioning her to eat, so she bites her hot dog. Compared to the bland, squishy tofu pups she used to buy for Zach, this perfectly charred all-beef frankfurter stimulates senses she forgot she has. The skin bursts between her teeth; juices shoot out on her tongue. She registers the tang of mustard. The vinegar of sauerkraut. Adds the salty crunch of a potato chip, then washes everything down with the metallic sweetness of the Diet Coke.

  “Mmm,” she murmurs, taking another bite and chewing.

  “My doctor keeps telling me these things will kill me,” Jackson says. �
�But if I can’t eat a Coney or two for lunch, why would I want to live?”

  She stuffs the last of the second hot dog in her mouth, then licks her fingers. Jackson reaches with a napkin and wipes mustard from her cheek.

  “Wouldn’t want you teaching your class with schmutz on your face. Almost as bad as teaching with your fly open.”

  “Thanks.” She smiles, afraid he will take the smile for more than it is.

  “You know, I really am very attracted to you. And you can’t tell me you’re not lonely. You live just down the street. I see you. Wouldn’t you rather be watching the news curled up on the sofa with me than all alone? Are you going to tell me you never want to be made love to again?”

  “I have a lot on my mind right now,” she mutters, vaguely creeped out that he has been watching her watch the news.

  “He’s not coming back,” Jackson says. Which might strike her as a non sequitur if she didn’t know whom he meant. “Sam won’t be jealous. He would be jealous if he were alive. But he’s not alive.” Jackson wads his napkin and tosses it in the can. “You think they’re coming back. You think, well, she died, that’s very sad, she’s going to be gone for a year, or two, maybe even three. Then she’ll show up, and we’ll have missed a few good years, but we’ll be together for the rest of our lives. Except that’s not how it works. The dead stay dead. That’s how one of my poet friends put it. ‘You think their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.’”

  When she was in college and grasped some physical law that kept the galaxies spinning or predicted the decay of a radioactive particle, she would literally gasp at the beauty of such a truth. And these few lines of poetry seem even truer than that.

  “We miss them,” Jackson says. “But when they were alive, they weren’t as perfect as we make them out to be.”

  This, too, is true. Sam didn’t need to go to Africa to find people who could benefit from low-cost technology. He traveled so much because life in Ann Arbor bored him. His life with her. His life with Zach. He put too much of a burden on their son. He clipped his toenails in bed, no matter how many times she asked him not to. Unfortunately, remembering these flaws makes her miss him even more.