“You are doing great,” said Desi in Jolene’s voice. “Lucille?”
His strong thick hand squeezing her biceps right before the reporters asked their questions about communism—the incredible team she and he made—and the destruction of that team. It wasn’t her, she loved Desi and would always love Desi. But she wasn’t innocent, either.
She felt the nurse’s hands slide up her spine. Lucille found Jolene’s half-boy/half-girl hair not unpleasant, just odd. These aren’t my times, she thought. Jolene’s hair made her look like the Apache wife in a John Ford picture. I almost did a western once, Lucille thought.
“Okay,” Jolene said, “that’s a good walk, right?”
“Oh God, Nurse,” Lucille said. “I’m so tired.”
The empty hallway was a bit ridiculous—lonely, like a movie set of a hospital. Abstruse machines here and there. Lucille stopped walking, took a huge breath, and thought: It wasn’t a western I almost did. It was a Civil War picture, with a black lead.
“You’re doing fine, Lucille,” Jolene said, the l’s getting twirled around some accent Lucille was too tired to place. “The doctor says if you’re feeling well at this stage, the operation was a success.”
Lucille nodded; fatigue had taken away her words. Okay, she thought. But who says I’m feeling well?
Back to her own room now and its view. THE HARD ROCK LOVES LUCY. GET WELL! Jolene was arranging her own hair behind her big pink ear, having shouldered (and hipped and buttocked) the slack Lucille into bed.
Lying down, Lucille eyed a spot on the ceiling. She could feel herself gathering directly beneath that spot, at the root of the skull. I’m going to be all right, she thought. Her son popped into her head (she was thinking about the hospitalizations of a drug addiction like his) as she’d had the thought that the very old were addicted to living no matter what—were life-junkies. My son’s a dopehead, I’m a lifehead, she thought. She hadn’t seen either of her children that much lately.
Once, she’d had this vacation with Desi in Florida. She didn’t remember exactly why, but they’d driven a rented Chevy Bel Air into the Everglades. Windows rolled down. They’d sung Bing Crosby and “Babalu”; the roads lost their shape. Swamps crowding onto asphalt. Songs sung about love. The Chevy bumping through the thick air. “Down here is where you find the real me!” Desi claimed. Orange groves. Crayon-pink skies. This happened in one of the frazzled weeks before they’d sold I Love Lucy; she was living with the rumor of renewed fame but not the brass tacks of it. “A swamp? Who are you kidding, city boy,” she said. “I would fin’ you in the city of Miami, Dez.” When they neared the town called Chokoloskee, Lucille had to go to the toilet. (This far in, the Glades had begun to edge into pinewoods.) Can you wait, sweetheart? No—she couldn’t. There was a hotel up on the left. The Beau Meadows, a tin roof, a veranda scattered with potted trees, and all boarded up. The Glades themselves felt boarded up too; deserted. Okay then: off into the woods. (Desi waited in the car, humming.) Frogs’ ribbits and a shaggy curtain of mosquitoes. Lucille (who squatted behind a bald cypress with her slacks pulled down) saw something. It took her a second. There was an alligator, that Sherman tank on short legs—armored brow, tire-tread skin, jammed with menace. No more than fifteen feet from her. Desi! Come quick!—but she breathed the words out, a wheeze no one could hear. What a monster it was! If I run now, Lucille thought. The beast made a noise like a very throaty snore. Its egg-sized teeth were pointed at rude angles. Now the beast took a baby step forward, with its baby feet. Her bump-a-bump pulse, the flutter in her thighs. Up close, its eyes contained not pupils but flecks of gold leaf. Lucille crawled stiffly to stand.
She tried to hurry; poking into the soft earth, her ankles crumpling—she tried to hurry. Pants down at her shins. “Help!” Both hands on her hat so that it wouldn’t blow off. “Help! Help!”
Desi (opening the passenger-side door, leaning sideways within the car) would eventually be credited with the invention of the rerun and of multiple-camera programs—and with the very idea of a live TV audience for taped shows. What Lucille sought here (falling into the car now, slamming the door after her) was just husbandly concern. Or a little sympathy. What he said was, “ ‘Help, help,’ she says!”—and that was it. He was weak with laughter. Ha ha ha! You looked so funny!
Even in those days Lucille had taken him for what he was, no more or less. She’d gotten married in a delirium of twilight pleasures and an impoverishment of empathy. Oh, you should of seen yourself, Red!
“I almost got killed, Desi!” And her poor heart, exhausted from having thrown uppercut after uppercut.
“ ‘Help, help,’ the hat—you are so funny,” he said. “Oh, we are going to make a million dollars.”
People often don’t notice, when the beginning of the end comes. “Drive, will you?” she’d said. The beginning of the end may seem, to those who live through it, just like another beginning. This had been 1943.
Now, out the predawn 1989 hospital window, the blue wiped away the last star, and then the blue went pale. Lucille felt the course of her blood. She felt it with such certainty and precision that she could say where in her the dead man’s aorta was, just by closing her eyes. She had no doubt. She felt the buzzing telephone-wire hum of it. All through her, the brilliant shimmering of life. When would her husband and her children come? Her new husband. New as of twenty-eight years ago. She lay there winded, still a little scared. But it was a fake scared. She was positive it was: she felt life, didn’t she? Desi had mocked her terror, Gary and her children wanted comfort from her. All she needed, even now, was someone who cared for her as her. She found herself thinking of Hold-on Strauss.
* * *
—
TWO YEARS EARLIER, Isidore, poking his face into the Riverside-Nassau North Chapel, could still hear—couldn’t stop hearing—his brother’s voice, its joviality and its naughtiness. “Well,” Norman’s voice somehow said, “this is not my idea of a weekend.” Oh, Norman. Norman, Norman, Norman, how could you?
Norman had died. And this—death for Isidore’s longtime business partner and forever brother—wasn’t even the most upsetting Norman-related news of these past days.
“You okay, Iz?”
Mona, his girlfriend (strange how puny the word felt, but what else?), stepped in beside, her hand on his back.
From a clear plastic bowl by the entrance, Isidore plucked a scratchy, black, faux-silk yarmulke. He covered his head unthinkingly. Today he felt old.
“Yup, sure,” he said. “I’m all right.”
A planned milling-about period; a murmury gathering—some fifty people in all. Everyone’s voices going out on tiptoe. Would Harriet come? Abruptly woozy, Isidore felt something kick—hard—one side of his heart, then the other. Harriet showing up would be all I need, he thought.
Then came the memory-blow of what Norman did. How could I be so stupid? Well, he thought, because he is your brother. Was your brother.
“You okay, sweetie? Seriously.” Mona’s hair was dyed an unnatural red, meant to represent nothing but itself. Her cheery sweetness in the face of everything often had its benefits but didn’t today.
“No,” he said.
All around, the exchange of muted condolence. How people love to come out and do a support act and gloat inwardly it’s not their turn. And there was the suddenly scary matter of Isidore’s heart. More fists, more shoves, coming from more sides. This wasn’t nerves, he thought. His heart was getting worked over.
“Dad?” Bernie had evidently come up and put his hand on Isidore’s arm. “It’s true?” Bernie said.
Bernie was forty-seven. Isidore was seventy-four. No, seventy-six! He couldn’t even keep track. And Norman was dead. Also, evidently, Norman was the kind of man who embezzled from the company he shared with his brother. Isidore felt his jaw tighten. No, don’t let your an
ger—
“Hi, Dad.” This was Arthur, having come up next to Bernie.
“Your mother here, boys?” Isidore asked. He said this with, for some reason, a radiant look.
His sons’ gazes veered like scrambling jets to the neutral space of the floor.
All right, Isidore almost told Bernie and Arthur, what your mother told you is true. Your uncle screwed me. But now his sons’ wives (hesitantly) walked up and offered the whispered unavoidables. The prattle of sympathy, the pats and strokes of comfort. They wouldn’t look him in the face; they knew, they knew.
Arthur and Bernie each had a family with two adolescent children. But Isidore had seen none of his grandkids, though they were probably here, too.
“What a day,” Isidore said.
Every old man’s life is a bullet train picking up speed. But standing here at his brother’s funeral—twelve hours after learning that Norman had embezzled a fortune from their shared pile—Isidore couldn’t help feeling his life had derailed.
Now Isidore’s youngest brother (now only brother) approached. Phil tried to give Isidore a smile. “Iz, Mo,” he said, hugging his brother, kissing his brother’s girlfriend.
Philip in 1960 had married an Episcopalian; their father as a result had disowned him. Now Philip was middle-aging out in Oakland with a wife and kids the rest of his family barely knew.
Isidore tried to smile and Phil tried to smile but their chins had trouble.
And then, questions no one needed the answer to. The flight was good—got in an hour ago. She’s good, Bernie, thanks. Yeah, Phil, Darin’s sixteen now—he’s over there somewhere. (Isidore’s oldest grandson hoped, as Isidore himself had hoped, to become a writer.) “—so, are you?” Phil was asking Isidore.
And Isidore realized the microphone in the center of his brain had registered that Phil had asked him a question.
“Am I what? Going to speak?” Isidore said. He rubbed his hands. “Um, I—”
Mona buoyed him with her look, head tilted. “Do what you want, sweetie,” she said. “Don’t feel any pressure.”
Men of his social class and generation didn’t know how to live without a woman. By 1987, he and Mona had been married/not-married for closing on twenty years. “Oh, there’s Aunt Tillie,” Bernie said. “She doesn’t see us.”
Yes, she does, Isidore thought. She’s just embarrassed.
Norman’s wife, Matilda, short, nervous, stupid, walked beside a bleak little rabbi, past the gathered mourners and into some antechamber, some green room for the celebrities of this death.
Don’t be nasty. Not her fault, Isidore thought.
His sense of himself and his brother had changed in short order. Norman collapsed, massive heart attack, seventy-four. Matilda happened to have called Harriet first, soon as she’d found Norman dead. Harriet, the shut-in, the abandoned, the forever neighbor. Next, Harriet called Isidore; they still spoke occasionally over the phone, very occasionally, even in those days, because Isidore paid for the house and the bills, for everything except her freedom. Your brother is dead. Just like that. Then Matilda called Harriet again the next morning. Har, I found something in my sewing closet, what is it? Dumb, sweet Tillie. She’d come across a suitcase full of money. Cash, in high-denomination bills. Harriet had called Isidore right away. Did Norman do something bad to us, Iz? Harriet said. Us, as if they were still married. Isidore did some poking though Chase Manhattan statements; Norman had cleaned out much of the business. So yes, something bad. If I’d walked away from him; if I’d joined LeFrak! he thought. You, Isidore, I want to work with. But that Norman I don’t trust. And now Isidore’s future was in doubt. How broke was he? He didn’t know. Norman had managed the books.
It was time to head over to the service, to cross a little hallway and its little fjord of carpet. Time to say some words over the lacquered box that held his brother. Poor Norman. In the ground in an hour.
Isidore took Mona by the pronounced ball of her elbow—an older person’s elbow. But I feel young; brain’s the same as ever, though my knees and neck hurt, he thought, and I’m out of breath and I look like my father in any photograph or reflection. But that’s not me. Where I’m really me, I feel I’m still young. Hey, don’t say Poor Norman. Isidore got angry that he felt sad, and then sad that he’d gotten angry. Poor, assholic Norman.
Isidore changed his angle of vision just enough to see Harriet enter, wearing a neon-blue knit cap. Immediately he lowered his gaze. Oh, no, he thought.
One of our earliest beliefs is that if you don’t see someone, they don’t see you.
Having spoken to her on the phone every five–six months made it feel as if they still saw each other often. Well, that and the vividness of memory. Images of a lapsed life. But seeing her in person was another matter. Could Harriet look that old? Could he? He had to lift his chin to swallow, like someone struggling with a large pill. There was no mistaking Harriet, her dark poking eyes, her frailty and lipstick. The sharp nose. It was her. He’d know his own wife.
“Condolences to you”; people who passed him, “Hi, Isidore,” offering eloquent smiles or saying these ready-mades, sad bouquets offered in the air, sorry, sorry, sorry for your loss. You have no idea what I’ve lost, he thought.
Harriet stood holding shut the collar of her long, cream-colored coat; its fur-trimmed sleeves were very stylish twenty years earlier.
“Wait,” Mona said, pulling her elbow from Isidore’s touch, as if caught doing something shameful. “There’s Harriet. Wait.”
She always adopted what she thought of as a magnanimous attitude toward her former best friend: Why aren’t we all more sociable? Mona’s good cheer was the box she’d made to house the black pellet of her remorse.
Isidore said, “I have to, I know.”
Walking over to Harriet alone felt like walking back into guilty days and insomniac nights. She stood next to an easel that held a spray of pink carnations.
Harriet said, too wifelily, “Oh, hello, you.” The past wobbled the air between them, a shiver on his skin.
Isidore saw Harriet’s young self rise inside her old face. It was like someone coming up from quicksand, or a sheet of pink plastic taking, on an assembly line, a mask’s shape.
“Iz,” she said. “Iz, Iz, Iz.”
This ended the special effect of memory. Harriet was a drunken old woman. But, oh, the ashed cigarette of that snuffed love—it still gave off a little of its particular smoke.
“Hi,” he said.
“I’m truly sorry about Norman”—too formal, as though it hadn’t been her who had broken the news to him on the phone.
He said, “Nice you came.”
“Are you joking?” she said. Her hand twisted one of the carnations into a pinwheel. I’m your wife, she didn’t say.
I’m going to apologize to her now, he thought. For everything.
She was looking at him with shining, matrimonial eyes. She considered herself his eternal spouse.
“So I take it you’ve been thinking about it” is what he said. “The money Norman took. And you told the boys.”
“Well,” Harriet said, straightening her hat that didn’t need straightening.
She seemed irked for his not understanding that such knowledge was part of being a wife—a family.
That was it; too much. Isidore had to excuse himself, find Mona. Thank you for coming, Harriet.
He’d never been able to figure out exactly what had happened to him at Coney Island, on that sandy celebrity night, back when Lucille Ball had first given him a kiss.
“You okay, sweetie?” Mona said, placing her possessive hand on his back. “You’re not, because look at that frown. I can tell. Was Harriet nasty?”
Isidore’s memory scampered off and for some reason this is what it brought back in its jaws: going on a
picnic with the family at some land he’d bought. He felt returned to 1951 or ’52 now, to holding his two little boys’ hands, to walking through a grassy lot—a blue and green and bright contentment, his wife dutifully at his side. He didn’t know why, but those little hands in his, under the wide sky of God’s abundance, hadn’t been enough.
* * *
—
WHO MR. P. N. Defoe at the Dahlberg Café reminded me of, ironically enough, was my grandfather. Not Isidore as he had been these last few weeks in the hospital—bent, docile, paper-gowned in moderate eyeglasses, and picking through his memories. No. Defoe reminded me of Poppa Izzy fifteen or so years before, when he stood straight and had confident black eyebrows and may have still believed he might see Lucille one last time.
“What are you asking me to do, Mr. Defoe?” I said.
* * *
—
HARRIET’S DISTRUST HAD begun on the corner of Sixth and West Fifty-first, outside the Havana-Madrid. And back home from the theater, later on, sleeping next to her husband, or not sleeping in that vale of snores and blanket hogging, Harriet lay there and told herself, No, you’re being silly. Sometimes, in their house, Isidore didn’t make himself fully at home. He’d kind of wander from room to room, as if he were trying to find something that was his.
But I must have done something wrong! she thought after the Kramers’ party. Even before she’d found Lucille’s note, she put questions to him (“Chicago is where you and Norman were planning to do what again?”); she told fibs to uncover possible lies (“Matilda said Norman was excited about that possible project in Chicago?” “She did?”). But at the same time Harriet became a detective; in her head she donned the tweed cap, picked up the magnifying glass, and scoured every corner.
“Just going to the garage for a sec, kids,” she said one day. And then she stumbled upon the folded-up end of her innocence.
“For Hold-on.” He had gone so far as inventing another life for himself. What was the story behind “Hold-on”? It’s because I’m shy around other people, and this woman is the opposite of me, she thought. Isidore has stories (and this is what was unbelievable) that didn’t involve me? All she had were stories about him and her. And yet she said nothing. And the weeks kept coming.
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