Rhoda put her head inside the kitchen door. “So?” she said conspiratorially.
“So, what?” I replied.
She glanced back into the living room, as if spies might be shadowing her. Then she stepped into the kitchen, holding a plate weighted down with ribs and tortellini.
“So where’s your mother’s boyfriend?”
“You mean Mr. Conroy?” I asked.
“Right, right. Him.”
“He said he’ll come if he can,” I told her.
“Well, I’m not holding my breath. I’ve tried to introduce your mother to some very nice men, but is she interested? Of course not!”
“Aunt Rhoda,” I said, “the last man you introduced her to had one foot in the grave.”
“Who? Mr. Pearlman? He’s a wonderful man. He would have been very nice company for your mother.”
“How old is he? Seventy-five?”
“Look, at her age your mother can’t be too particular.”
Then Rhoda asked me about Rachel. Rhoda had never met her, but no doubt my mother had been dreaming up a scenario for her sister about how I would finally marry the rabbi’s daughter and live happily ever after. Normally, I would have been angry at my mother for putting me in this position, but instead I felt furious, finally, with Rhoda.
“How come you don’t ask me about Molly?” I said.
“Because that’s been over for five years.”
“So? I haven’t been with Rachel since college. It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Molly’s Catholic?”
“Yes, I admit that I’d prefer you marry a rabbi’s daughter. What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, I’m not going to marry the rabbi’s daughter.”
“Why not? Is she married?”
“No. She’s a lesbian.”
Rhoda put her hand to the side of her face. “Oy vey iz mir. Do you know why? Was she molested as a child?”
“No. She had a beautiful childhood,” I lied. “But I didn’t sexually satisfy her.” I felt Sarah give me another painful pinch.
“Look, I’m sorry to hear that,” Rhoda replied. “But you know sex isn’t everything in life.”
“To some people it is,” I said.
“Seth, doll, I have news for you. If you keep up that attitude, you’ll never get married. You’ll end up just like your mother.”
“What’s so bad about ending up like my mother?” I asked.
Rhoda appeared genuinely dumbfounded by this question. “Look, all these years she’s been carrying on with a married man. Everyone in that living room knows about them. How she can live like that I’ll never understand.”
“Is that all you can say about our mother, Rhoda?” I asked. “She raised three children. She’s taught hundreds of other children to read. She’s loving and generous. She has friends who value her. But all you and Barry ever do is treat her like her life is one big embarrassment.”
“Say, look here. I only want what’s best for your mother. You know that.”
“Like hell you do,” I said.
The lines of her mouth went rigid before she banged her way out the door.
Sarah turned to the sink, gripping the sides of it, her back shuddering.
“Sarah?” I said. I touched her shoulder and she turned to me, pressing her wet cheek against my neck and holding me more tightly than anyone had held me for a long time.
THE LIGHTS WENT DOWN, and a chorus of “Happy Birthday” rose up as Sarah and I came out of the kitchen bearing the candlelit cake, which looked like a small field of swaying fire. We put it down and stood off to one side, but Ruth brought her three children over, pulling Seamus and me close together. All four of us leaned into the heat and brightness of the flames. “One, two, three,” Ruth counted, and we exhaled in unison, one capacious breath sending the fire sputtering and lurching. Ruth ran out of breath, and Seamus stepped back. Sarah and I raced to blow out the remaining candles. We were bent over, laughing, gasping, when the doorbell rang, freezing everyone for a moment. I reached for my drink and swilled it down.
Someone opened the door and accepted a delivery of thirty-six roses. People commented on their splendor and beauty as they were handed up to Ruth. She appeared a little embarrassed by so many flowers, by this extravagant gesture of love and regret. She read the card that accompanied them, and I noticed a chain reaction of yearning passing from one guest to another, everyone joined together in a silent prayer for Ruth’s happiness, everyone secretly encouraging her. She put the flowers down and smiled bravely.
Alice unfolded a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “SUPER-TEACHER” and signed by Ruth’s twenty-eight second graders. She praised Ruth’s diligence in teaching for thirty years. She estimated that that came to nearly one thousand students, “or about two thousand shoes that needed lacing at one time or another.” Everyone applauded as Ruth dramatically kneaded her lower back.
More salutations and gifts were sent her way: Rhoda and Barry wowed everyone with a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate to Lord & Taylor. Sarah handed up her present. Ruth read the card and said, “Oh, honey, that’s beautiful. Just beautiful. Can I read this out loud?”
Sarah nodded and Ruth read: “Dear Mom, I can’t give you anything you don’t already have. I can only return some of the gifts you have shared with me. I love you. Sarah.” She opened Sarah’s present, a leather-bound edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s collected poems. She paged through the book until she found the poem she wanted, and then she read it aloud:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
I silently accompanied her reading, for I remembered Ruth reciting this poem many nights to Sarah, Seamus, and me. My mother reached over some boxes and squeezed Sarah’s hand. Behind me, I heard Rhoda whisper to Barry, “Is that the whole poem?”
Seamus gave her a menorah, then I stood up and handed her my present: an antique amethyst brooch. She opened the case and held the brooch up like a small trophy, and I realized that everyone was waiting for me to say something. I raised my cup and looked at my mother’s expectant face. “To a wonderful mom. . . .” Then, in a rush, I added, “Thanks for all your lovely light!” I rapidly drained my champagne and put my arm around Ruth to let all the guests know that the speech was over.
Everyone applauded, but I felt dizzy and made my way down the hall. The bed in my old room was covered with coats, so I lay down on Ruth’s bed. I put a pillow over my head, afraid that the room was going to begin revolving, the bed spinning faster and faster.
I felt a hand on my foot. Lifting the pillow, I saw Sarah standing by the bed with a cup of coffee. “I thought you might need this,” she said.
I leaned back against the headboard, sipping. “I guess Mr. Conroy isn’t coming,” I said.
Ruth’s laughter rose up over the din. “Doesn’t sound as if she’s very upset about it,” Sarah replied.
“Actually, we were discussing him in the car. Mom was concerned I thought she was wanton.”
“Wanton?” Sarah repeated, incredulous.
“That’s the word she used. Can you believe it?” I set the cup down.
“The sad thing is she probably believes it. She’s slept with three men in fifty years. God, I had slept with four boys by the time I was eighteen.”
“Yeah, that’s what I told her.”
She laughed and conked me on the head with a pillow.
“She told me she felt a hundred times better after hearing that,” I said, grabbing her wrist and placing her in a light headlock.
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” She freed herself, still laughing. Then we both leaned against the headboard. Sarah tilted her head against my shoulder.
“Sarah?”
“Yes?”
“Do you remember that time Jimmy Conroy woke us up in the middle of the night and took us to Rhoda and Barry’s house?”
�
��How old were we?”
“Ten or so.”
“I try not to remember those years.”
“That’s probably a good idea.”
I remembered him gently waking us up, telling us that our mother was in the hospital but that she would be fine and that he was taking us to our aunt and uncle’s house. I remembered sitting with my brother and sister in the spacious backseat of Mr. Conroy’s station wagon and Sarah—who usually never let a tear come to her eyes, even when I socked her in the back or yanked her ear—crying hysterically. Her tears had begun when we saw the bloodstained carpet outside our mother’s bedroom and continued after Rhoda put us to bed in her guest room, in two single beds on opposite sides of a night table. Sarah was crying more quietly by then—an eerie, rhythmic moaning. Then I heard her choke out my name. I lay very still, my heart vibrating. She said my name again, keening it, pleading. I put my feet on the floor, which felt as strange as the surface of the moon, and climbed in next to her. She put her arm around me, and I could feel her body heaving with grief, as if she knew our mother would not recover.
“May I?” I said, my hand just above her belly.
“Of course.”
I placed my hand on the small mound.
“Can you feel anything?” she asked.
“No. Am I supposed to?”
“Sometimes you can.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be a father,” I said.
“You still have plenty of time. I mean, you are a man. You don’t have the ticking clock problem.”
“I wasn’t thinking of the problem as biological.”
“You’ll find someone, Seth. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t think so. Molly was my best chance. She loved me for all the right reasons, but I didn’t love her well enough. I’m not sure if I’m capable of loving anyone very well.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” she said softly. “Don’t think that way.”
“All right. I won’t. I promise.”
Sarah told me she needed to get back to the party. It had become very lively. My mother’s voice was especially loud and joyous. In three hours, after everyone was gone, my mother would be lying in this bed, her cigarette gleaming on and off through the night. But I imagined her standing in her bathrobe in the backyard of our old house in Massachusetts. On the page I’d taken from her old journal, she’d said it was the happiest morning of her life. The date was June 15, 1956, five months before she gave birth to Sarah and me, six years before her husband left her, years before she fell in love with Jimmy Conroy, before she struck me with a cup, before she combed the streets of Patterson in search of an abortionist and then almost bled to death in her bed. She and my father had moved into the house in January, and the winter had been brutal; old drifts of gray snow had remained on the ground through the end of April. But on the morning of June 15, the clear morning air vibrated with the trilling of birds. Ruth stood in the middle of the yard, overjoyed to feel the warmth of the sun on her face. She stepped out of her wet slippers and shuddered from a series of our convulsive kicks inside her. She squeezed the ground between her toes and cradled her belly. Her fingertips slowly navigated its entire surface. All was well: all wondrous and alive.
DANCING WITH ELIJAH
• DECEMBER 1996 •
Ever since she was a young girl, my mother had been terrified of being pronounced dead on a Friday afternoon. Her fear came from an old family story. Her mother, Esther, had a younger brother, Samuel, who died at the age of twelve. The boy had been sick for a long time with a vague illness. He closed his eyes on a Wednesday night and still hadn’t opened them by three o’clock on Friday afternoon. A group of men congregated around his bed, debating what to do. If the boy was dead, they were required to bury him within twenty-four hours, but they had to act immediately because they were prohibited from interring the body over the Sabbath. Samuel’s father, Jacob, pulled back a curtain and studied the gray and gloomy sky. The December sun would set in less than two hours. He held a small pocket mirror under his son’s nose. It remained clear, unclouded by any sign of life. The men exchanged somber glances, a rabbi nodded, and Jacob wrapped his son in a prayer shawl and buried him before the sun went down. For many years, Ruth had a recurring nightmare in which young Samuel opened his eyes inside the pitch black coffin, shouted for help, and pounded his fist against the lid, and all to no avail because the mourners had departed.
On the last Friday morning of her life, her mind in a slight morphine haze, Ruth reminded me not to let anyone bury her until after she had been dead for a full twenty-four hours. We were in a bright hospital room. Seamus was the only Orthodox Jew left in the family, and she knew very well that he would wait until after the Sabbath to bury her if she died by the end of the day. I held her hand and told her she didn’t have anything to worry about. She still looked anxious, so I added that I would chain myself to her body if necessary. She laughed wheezily. Then she squeezed my hand and looked at me emotionally. “Seth, darling,” she said, “I hope I was a good mother.”
“Yes, of course you were.” Tears slid slowly down across her temples. “Despite everything, I always felt loved,” I added.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said, and I finally felt that I had said the right thing, had reminded her of the one thing she did well—she had loved her children absolutely, unconditionally. Then I whispered in her ear that I loved her.
When she woke up Saturday morning, I was so relieved that I permitted a prayer of thanks to rise from my lips. She died later that afternoon.
RACHEL WAS COMING! We had not seen each other in twelve years, since her mother’s funeral. When Sarah was married in 1986, I had sent her an invitation to the wedding, but she had called me up and asked if I expected her to pretend to be my girlfriend. I had replied that it would certainly make my mother happy if she did. Then she said that she wasn’t comfortable pretending to be my girlfriend anymore. “Let me get this straight,” I’d said. “Pun very much intended, by the way. You couldn’t bring yourself to come out to your mother, but now you want me to out you to my mother?”
Rachel hung up on me.
We went two years without speaking or writing to each other. Then I sent her a long letter, apologizing for not dealing well with her relationship with Lucinda. I explained that for five years I had known I was the most important person in her life and it was difficult for me not to be connected to her in the same way anymore. I told her about my job, about Molly. When she wrote back, she reminded me that she had pledged to be my friend for life and she still meant it.
On Saturday night, I drove to Newark Airport to get her. She had made her reservation the day before when I told her I didn’t think my mother would survive the night. At the airport, we embraced for a long time, then stepped back and studied each other.
“You look exactly the same,” Rachel said.
“You look better,” I replied.
“Liar,” she said, laughing.
Actually, I was hoping she would say that I looked better. I wondered if she remembered our last night together in Chicago when, lying in each other’s arms, she had stroked my face and told me I was going to look so handsome when I was older. The morning I turned forty, I faced myself in the mirror and thought that Rachel had been wrong about everything—my personal life, my career, my looks, especially my looks. I had pouches under my eyes, a deeply lined forehead, and the skin around my Adam’s apple had become ringed with age. My nose, with each passing year, became more pocked and porous.
Driving out of the airport, I asked Rachel if she wanted to come back to my mother’s apartment for a drink. With Ruth’s death imminent, I had come down to New Jersey the week before, and I had been staying in my mother’s apartment, the apartment I grew up in, drinking my way through the dust-coated bottles of liquor Ruth kept under the kitchen sink. Rachel said that she was really exhausted and just wanted to go to her hotel and lie down. I was still disappointed that she was staying at a hotel. B
efore she came east for the funeral, I had told her she was welcome to stay with me. Rachel had replied that she didn’t want to put me out. I had said that I wouldn’t be put out. The apartment had two bedrooms, I reminded her. Of course I was really hoping that we would share the same bed. After all, who wants to sleep alone the night before he buries his mother? Rachel, no doubt aware of what I really wanted, had thanked me all the same and said she’d prefer to stay in a hotel.
After saying good night to Rachel at her hotel, I drove back to the apartment and immediately poured myself a drink. Sarah and I had already divided up our mother’s belongings. Seamus had said he didn’t want anything, shocking both Sarah and me. The two of us had easily split up everything. I just wanted Ruth’s books and records. Sarah wanted our mother’s bed, the china and the jewelry, which she offered to share with me because it was worth money. “No, no,” I had said. “Those are things you can pass down to your children. Who knows if I’ll ever have children?” Sarah had said I could always change my mind if I did have children someday.
Drink in hand, I went to the bookshelf, trying to decide which books I wanted to keep. Her collection was eclectic—e. e. cummings, Harold Robbins, Herman Wouk, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thomas Wolfe, Shakespeare, Henry and Philip Roth, Theodore White, Abraham Joshua Heschel. I had read practically every book on the shelf by the time I had graduated from high school. I looked through one of the Harold Robbins novels, A Stone for Danny Fisher, recalled how avidly I had read it when I was fifteen, and decided I would simply keep every book. I put back the Harold Robbins and removed my mother’s copy of Pride and Prejudice for the time being.
I had not been in contact with Molly for years, but after two stiff drinks, I was on the verge of calling her, certain that I still remembered her telephone number. I dialed it, deciding to leave things to chance: If it was the right number, then I would know I had done the right thing. A man answered and I put the phone back down. I called Rachel at her hotel.
“Rachel, can I come over and sleep with you?”
“Seth, no.”
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