by Lore Segal
* * *
—
Sitting Shiva
“I don’t know how,” said Ilka. Joe Bernstine remembered that when his father died, his mother had turned the faces of the mirrors to the wall. Ilka was struck with the gesture but embarrassed by its drama. “I know I’m supposed to sit on a low stool, but I can’t get any lower.” Ilka was sitting on the floor tickling Maggie, the fat, solemn, comfortable baby. Baby Maggie’s eyes were so large they seemed to go around the corner of the little face with its baroque hanging cheeks.
“A Viennese baby,” Eliza said.
“She’s fun to hold because she collapses her weight in your arms.” Ilka jumped Maggie up and down. “She must have heard me scream when the policemen told me.”
Eliza unpacked the tiny tomatoes from her garden. She had baked two long loaves of white bread. Jenny was arranging the cold cuts that she had brought onto the platters she had also brought. At some point in the morning Joe and Leslie rose to go to the Institute. They would be back in an hour. Leslie took Ilka’s hand and brought it to his lips.
Ilka said, “I called my mother and she is coming tomorrow.”
* * *
—
In the Institute
Celie at her desk across from the front entrance fanned herself with an envelope like one trying to avoid fainting. She told Betty, “I talked with him that actual morning! He comes running in, punches the elevator button, doesn’t wait and runs right up those stairs, comes right down. He’s stuffing papers in his briefcase. I told him, ‘You have a good trip now,’ and he says, ‘Oh shit!’ and he’s going to run back up except the elevator door opens, and he gets in, and goes back up.”
Betty was able to one-up Celie with her spatial proximity to the dead man, though at a greater temporal remove. The day before James drove to Washington he tried to open the door into the conference room with papers under his arm, carrying a cup of coffee, saying, “Anybody got a spare hand?” Betty had held the door for him. He had said “Oh! Thanks!”
Could a person for whom one held a door, who said “Oh shit!” and “Oh! Thanks!” be dead?
* * *
—
Words to Write to the Widow
Nancy Cohn and Maria Zee talked on the telephone and one-upped each other in respect to which of them was the more upset. “I got to my office,” said Maria, “and just sat.”
“I,” Nancy said, “never made it to the office because I’d kept waking up every hour on the hour.”
“I never got to sleep! I kept waking poor Zack to check if he was alive. He was furious.”
“Have you called her?”
“I thought I would write.”
“That’s what I’ll do. I’ll write her,” said Nancy.
* * *
—
Sitting Shiva, Day Two
“It’s good of you to come,” Ilka said to the visitors. The Institute staff, Celie, Betty, Wendy, and Barbara dropped over together, after office hours. They sat round the table in Ilka’s kitchen. The fellows sat in the living room. Ilka’s mother held the baby on her lap. Ilka let out a sudden laugh. “What’ll I do when the party is over!” She rose and took the baby and carried her out of the room past Dr. Stone hiding in the foyer.
Dr. Stone believed that by the time Ilka returned he would be ready with the right sentence, but when she came down Alfred was glad that the baby’s head intervened between his face and Ilka’s face so that it was not possible to say anything to her and the front-door bell was ringing again. Martin Moses walked in, took Ilka and her baby into a big hug, and said, “Christ, Ilka!” Ilka said, “Don’t I know it.”
“Give her to me,” Ilka’s mother said and took the child out of Ilka’s arms.
Alpha came out of the living room saying, “Hello, Martin. Ilka, listen, take it easy. You take a couple of days—as long as you like, you know that! Alfred, we have to go.” And the Ayes and the Zees had to go home. Celie and the rest left. Martin left. The Shakespeares said they would be back. Ilka thought everyone had gone when she heard the gentle clatter in the kitchen. Jenny Bernstine was washing dishes.
People trickled over in the evening—a smaller crowd that left sooner. Jenny washed more dishes. When Joe came to pick her up, she looked anxiously at Ilka, who said, “I’m okay.”
* * *
—
Writing to the Widow
Nancy Cohn went to look for Nat. He was on the living-room couch watching TV.
Nancy said, “I’m embarrassed not to know what to write to Ilka. It’s embarrassing worrying about being embarrassed for Chrissake!”
“Calamity is a foreign country. We don’t know how to talk to the people who live there.”
Nancy said, “You write her. You’re the writer in the family.”
“I’m not feeling well,” said Nat.
“She’s your colleague!” said Nancy.
And so neither of them wrote to Ilka.
* * *
—
Maria called Alicia and asked her, “I mean, we went over there. Do we still have to write?”
Alicia said, “Alvin says we’ll have her over next time we have people in.”
* * *
—
A Casserole
Celie cooked a casserole and told Art, her thirteen-year-old, to take it over to Mrs. Carl’s house.
“The woman that her husband burned up in his car? No way!”
Linda, who was fifteen, said, “For your information, he did not even burn up. He broke his neck.” She advised her brother to check his facts.
Art said, “Linda will go and take it over to her.”
Well, Linda wasn’t going over there, not by herself, so Celie made them both go.
Nobody answered the front bell.
Art said, “I never knew a dead person before.”
Linda said, “You mean you never knew a person, and afterward they died and you didn’t as a fact even know this person at all.”
Art said, “But I know Mom, and Mom knew him. Ring it again.”
They found a couple of bricks, piled one on top of the other, and took turns standing on them to look in the window. Those were the stairs the dead man must have walked up and down on. There was a little table with a telephone on it and a chair. Had the dead man sat on that exact chair and lifted that phone to his ear?
* * *
—
Running Away
Yvette, who had not called on Ilka, drove over, rang the bell, saw the casserole by the front door, thought, She’s out, skipped down the steps, got in her car, and drove away.
* * *
—
“Ilka was out, with the baby,” Dr. Alfred Stone reported to his wife, “and I practically fell over the stroller, corner of Euclid.”
“What did you say to her?” Alpha asked him.
“Say?” said Alfred. “Nothing. She was across the street on the other sidewalk.”
Trying to imagine an impossibility hurts the head. Having failed to envisage Alfred falling over a stroller that was on the other sidewalk, Alpha chose to assume that she had missed or misunderstood some part of what he had told her.
Alfred came to remember not what had happened but what he said had happened. The unspoken words he owed the widow displaced themselves into his chest and gave him heartburn.
* * *
—
Night Conversation
“Celie left a casserole. Alfred fell into Maggie’s stroller,” Ilka reported to the Shakespeares, when they called that night.
Leslie said, “Eliza says, What did Alfred say?”
“He slapped his forehead the way you’re supposed to slap your forehead when you remember something you’ve forgotten—and ran across the street to the other sidewalk. Poor Alfred! He’s so beautiful.”
Eliza took the phone from Leslie. “Why ‘poor Alfred’ when he’s behaving like a heel?”
Ilka said, “Because Jimmy’s death is making him shy of me. He thinks
it’s impolite of him to be standing upright.”
Eliza said, “The good lord intended Alfred to be your basic shit, and Alfred went into medicine in the hope of turning into a human being.”
“Doesn’t he get points for hoping?”
“Why can’t you just be offended?”
“Don’t know,” said Ilka again. “I mean people can’t help being shits.”
“You sound like Jimmy,” said Eliza. Ilka listened and heard the sound, over the telephone, of Eliza weeping for Ilka’s husband.
* * *
—
Inviting the Widow
Nancy said, “We’ll have her in when we have people over. The Stones are coming Sunday. Only, you think she wants to be around people?”
“Call her and ask her,” said Nat.
“You call her and ask her.”
“I’m not going to call her. You call her.”
“She’s your colleague, you call her.”
“I’m not well.”
“I don’t think she wants to be around people,” Nancy said. “And her mother is staying with her.”
* * *
—
Dr. Alfred Stone
Dr. Alfred Stone continued to mean to say to the widow what, as a doctor—as the doctor who had been on the scene of the accident—he ought and must surely be going to say to her. He always thought that by the next time he was face to face with her he was going to have found the appropriate words and blushed crimson when he walked into the Shakespeares’ kitchen and saw little Maggie sitting on a high chair and Ilka crawling underneath the table. She said, “Hi, Alfred. Look what Maggie did to poor Eliza’s floor. And now Bethy is going to take Maggie to play in the yard so the grown-ups can sit down in peace and quiet. Okay, Bethy. She’s all yours.”
Bethy had grown bigger and bulkier. The bend of Bethy’s waist, as she buttoned the baby into her sweater, cried out to her parents, to her parents’ friends: Watch me buttoning the baby’s sweater! Bethy’s foot on the back stair into the yard pleaded, This is me taking the baby into the yard. Notice me!
Murphy’s Law seated Dr. Alfred Stone next to the widow. While the conversation was general, he tried for a sideways view of her face which was turned to Eliza on her other side. Alfred was looking for the mark on Ilka, the sign that her husband had been thrown from a burning car and had broken his neck. Alfred studied his wife across the table. Would Alpha, if he, Alfred, broke his neck, look so regular and ordinary? Would she laugh at something Eliza said?
* * *
—
As they were leaving, Alpha asked Ilka to dinner and Ilka said, “If I can get a sitter. My mother has gone back to New York.” Jenny Bernstine offered Bethy.
After that and for the next weeks, the friends and colleagues invited Ilka to their dinners. She always said yes. “I’m afraid,” she told the Shakespeares, “that my first No, thank you, will facilitate the next no and start a future of noes.” Then, one day, as she was driving herself to the Zees’, Ilka drove past their house, made a U-turn, and drove home. She insisted on paying Bethy for the full evening.
“We missed you,” Leslie said on the telephone.
“How come it gets harder instead of easier? You put on your right stocking and there’s the left stocking to still be put on, and the right and left shoe…” Ilka heard Leslie tell Eliza what Ilka said.
In the morning, Ilka called Maria to apologize and Maria said, “Don’t be silly!”
“A rain check?”
“Absolutely,” said Maria. “Or you call me.”
“Absolutely,” said Ilka. But Ilka did not call her, and Maria did not call Ilka. One’s house seemed more comfortable without Ilka from Calamity.
* * *
—
Bethy Bernstine
The Bernstines and the Shakespeares were the true friends. Ilka loved them and missed Jimmy because he was missing Eliza’s beautiful risotto and Leslie’s wine that yielded taste upon taste on the tongue. Ilka held out her glass, watched Joe’s hand tip the bottle and thought, Joe will die, not now, not soon, but he will die. Ilka saw Jenny looking at her with her soft, anxious affection and thought, Jenny will die. “Will you forgive me,” Ilka said to them, “if I take myself home?” Of course, of course! Leslie must drive Ilka. “Absolutely not! Honestly! You would do me the greatest possible favor if you would let me go by myself.” “Joe will drive Ilka.” “Let me drive you!” said Joe. “No, no, no!” cried Ilka. They could see that she was distraught. “Let Ilka alone,” said Leslie. “Ilka will drive herself. Ilka will be fine.”
Leslie and Joe came out to put Ilka into her car. She saw them, in her rearview mirror as she drove away, two old friends standing together, talking on the sidewalk. There would be a time when both of them would have been dead for years.
Bethy was curled on the couch, warm and smelling of sleep, her skin sweet and dewy. Cruel for a sixteen-year-old to be plain—too much chin and jowl, the little, pursed, unhappy mouth. Ilka woke Bethy with a hand on her shoulder. She helped the young girl collect herself, straighten her bones, pick her books off the floor. Ilka walked her out and stood on the sidewalk.
Maggie was sleeping on her back, arms above her head, palms curled. In her throat, and behind her eyes, Ilka felt the tears she could not begin to cry. Ilka feared that beast in the jungle which might, someday, stop the tears from stopping.
When Leslie called to make sure she had got home, Ilka said, “I’ve been doing arithmetic. Subtract the age I am from the age at which I’m likely to die and it seems like a hell of a lot of years.”
* * *
—
Though the words Dr. Alfred Stone had failed to say to Ilka had become inappropriate and could never be said, he tended, when they were in the same room, to move along the wall at the furthest remove from where Ilka might be moving or standing or sitting.
LESLIE’S SHOES
Ilka didn’t see that it was a phallus until she noticed a second one on the left; then she saw the whole row—another row on the right, an avenue of them. She was walking with the Cokers, an elderly couple from her table in the ship’s dining room, the second day out, on their third Greek island. Mr. Coker put on his glasses, recognized the five-footer on its stone pedestal, and took his glasses off. He polished them with a white handkerchief, laid them away in their hard case, and said, “Bifocals! Would you believe a hundred bucks?”
“Wow,” said Ilka.
“You can say that again!” said Mr. Coker and, shaking his head in admiration, returned the case into his breast pocket. Mrs. Coker carried a large beige bag. Ilka had meant to look at her across the breakfast table, but the eyes refused to focus on Mrs. Coker. Ilka once again dismissed the bizarre notion that Mr. Coker beat Mrs. Coker. We can’t deal with other people till we’ve cut them down to fit some idea about them, thought Ilka, and looked around for anybody to say this to. Ilka’s idea about the Cokers was that one didn’t tell them one’s ideas. She looked at the Cokers to see if they were cutting her down, but she could tell that the Cokers had no ideas about her.
Ilka looked over at the American woman, but she was looking through her camera, saying, “Belle, Hank, lovies, go stand over by the left one so I can get in all that sea behind you.” The American woman appeared to be traveling with that little bevy of good-looking younger people, but it was her one noticed. One always knew the table at which she sat, not because her voice was loud but because it was fearless. Ilka thought of her as the American woman although many passengers on the British cruise ship Ithaca were Americans. Ilka herself was a naturalized American, but this was a tall, slim, fair woman who moved as if gladly, frequently turning her head to look this way and that. She kept generating fresh and always casual and expensive pairs of pastel pants and sweaters.
Ilka stored her idea about the Cokers and her curiosity about the American woman in the back of her mind to tell Leslie, whom she was scheduled to meet in an Athens hotel—a week from yesterday.
* *
*
—
In the waiting area at Heathrow, Ilka had checked out the glum, embarrassed passengers with the telltale green flight bags and had yearned toward the interesting English group in the leather chairs by the window—two couples and a beautiful one-armed clergyman. They seemed to know one another. Perhaps they were old friends?
At the Athens airport the green flight-bag people had been transferred onto buses to take them down to the Piraeus, and the three men from the leather chairs turned out to be the three English scholars who came as part of the package. Professor Charles Baines-Smith knew what there was to be known about shipbuilding in the ancient Near East; Willoughby Austen had published a monograph on the identity of the Island of Thera with the lost island of Atlantis. It was the Reverend Martin Gallsworth who gave the lecture that first evening, after dinner, as the Ithaca pulled out of the wharf.
Ilka sat in a state of romance. She looked up at the Greek moon in the Greek sky and across the glittering black strip of the Aegean to the Attic coast passing on the right. She leaned to hear what the Reverend Gallsworth was saying about the absence, in the Hellenic thought system, of the concept of conscience which the Hebrews were developing in that same historical moment, some hundred miles to the east.
The two classy Greek women guides assigned to the Ithaca did not appear till breakfast, which they ate at a little table for two. Dimitra, the elder by ten years, walked with a stick, as if she were in pain—a small, stout, cultivated woman. Ilka liked her. She assembled the crowd in the foyer between the purser’s desk and the little triangular corner counter where one could buy toothpaste and postcards of the Ithaca riding at anchor or the little square pool on the upper deck. Ilka sent the Ithaca card to everybody at Concordance.