When with Gary and Mona they’d watched I Love Lucy, Isidore had looked rapt. For Harriet, this was one of those odd things you notice without quite registering, until later.
She’d crumpled the note—and then decided that wasn’t enough, fished it out an hour later, tore it up, and dropped it in a garbage can at the Gristedes. A few weeks later, she came home from some errand and saw Isidore emerge from the garage pale and shaken. “Hello, hi everyone,” Isidore said, with wet and quivering vocal cords, vines out in a rainstorm.
And she kept her grief a private misfortune; she would not lose her family that easily. She unlisted their number. And when, under a fake calm, Isidore asked why she did, Harriet—rather than admit to what she’d done with his note—told him, with fake composure, about the physical ailments she’d been keeping to herself these last weeks and months, an acid catalog. “Have you noticed I haven’t been feeling well?”—loss of appetite, nausea, decreased weight, waking at two in the morning. The decipherable effects of the cause she wouldn’t name. This is when she began really to drink.
Sometimes at dinner; or when getting ready for bed; or behind the sound-compliant laundry room door, Harriet couldn’t hold back a cry. Or turning from the kids as they walked to the bus stop. She tried to picture herself as a body of water—tranquil, no matter what churned on the bottom, a placid surface. Her sons would wrap a parentish arm around her. Her husband would, too. Some lake she was. Waves slapped in her and foamed. But she had held Isidore in check. For the next decade, from his first coffee sip in the morning to his last sock removed at bedtime, Isidore was home, and didn’t stray.
But she’d become a lady with a handy drink and thin wrists who began to pull down the shades on her life. And Isidore changed, too. Once his kids were grown, and once Harriet’s alcoholism became too difficult—and his father’s death removed the barricade—Isidore left his wife for her best friend.
* * *
—
“MY GRANDFATHER WASN’T the type to have an affair with Lucille Ball, Mr. Defoe,” I said.
“All I’m saying,” he answered, raking his fingers across his forehead, “you’re being naïve.”
“My grandfather did kind of abandon my grandmother. But not for Lucy.”
“Mmm.” A scowl overcast his face. Then a smile came. “How many people you know cheat, they only cheated once?”
“I don’t think my grandfather ever cheated.” I lifted my chin primly, a grandson. “He left my grandmother, but then went to Mona.”
Defoe’s date’s face lowered; her brows lifted. “Really now,” she said.
* * *
—
LUCILLE JUST WOKE from a short hospital sleep that felt like a snuggle. That man had been kind. The memory of his hands kind on her cheeks, breasts, his lips kind on her waist. At a hotel in Beverly Hills. But now she’s here, on a bed that’s the opposite of a snuggle.
One long ago night at Danny’s Hideaway on steak row, Lucille had looked upon her new boyfriend, Gary, his heavy head peaceful over his fillet—his unimpeachable eyes, his weariness—and it hit her. You could not only survive companionship without love, but find yourself happier in the bargain.
It’s when we’re young that we cobble together our ambitions, and later have to deface them to fit our adult lives. People like Lucille can leave their ambitions intact until their very last hour. Fame, lonely independence, those had been hers—had it been worth it?
Daydreams are all the art most people ever make. Lucille’s daydreams have helped other people—they say art helps us live—but Lucille’s art has not helped her.
Hold-on probably would never have left his wife anyway, she thinks.
* * *
—
HARRIET DRANK at dinner, and not the demure single glass that was common in that time, when so many housewives were melancholics. Isidore would say nothing. By the time Bernie left for college, Harriet was drinking in the morning, in front of Arthur. By the time Arthur had graduated from college, Isidore was gone. And people, when they encountered her, would pretend not to smell the truth.
Once it became known that Harriet’s husband had abandoned her, “How are you?” came as a cruel mockery. Luckily, the party and lunch invites stopped coming. By the time her grandchildren knew her, she had become a glassy-eyed and snapping presence, disheveled in her robe at the kitchen table, a cigarette held between two fingers with misplaced elegance.
What she wanted was the finality of anger. But when something came up that she wanted to tell her husband—“The toilet is backed up” or “Norman and Matilda were fighting last night; you could hear from next door”—she would talk to him. Just start chatting.
At first, this meant phoning him at the apartment he shared with Mona; more often—and more comfortably—it meant talking as if he were next to her, as if he’d never left. “Remember that time we went to see Judgment at Nuremberg in Manhasset?” she’d say to the air. Then, even more to herself, “That may have been the last time we were happy.” It became less strange, this feeling of eating with, sleeping next to, asking questions of someone who wasn’t present—at least not present in a way you could measure. She stopped phoning Isidore altogether and talked to him much more often in the more comfortable living room of her mind.
She didn’t remove the framed wedding shot from the dresser.
She stopped going outside altogether.
When her need grew its loudest, she would hear his answers, she would see him answering. With him not around, physically, the marriage was better than it had been in years.
There were drawbacks, of course. “I’m lonely; did you ever think of that?” she’d said once to Air-Isidore. This was February 1977.
“I’m sorry,” Harriet heard Isidore say. He shrugged, inside Harriet’s brain. “I did this for us, Harriet. My leaving was the only way we could stay together.”
And then she blinked away her husband and thought of Lucille Ball. “I know why that hussy did it,” Harriet thought.
“I don’t know why I did it,” Lucille thought, once, in her hospital bed. She realized what had begun happening to her, but to some extent she felt outside the bleak scene. Her time with Isidore, of all things, took her attention now.
“You did do it—you fell for me, Lucille,” Isidore said, silently. He’d said it in his head one foggy night, not long after Norman’s funeral, when he was out near the Havana-Madrid after a late dinner with Arthur. “I know you fell for me.” Walking among the crowds of 1980s New York, Isidore for a moment failed to see Arthur, the unkempt hair and sunglasses in his periphery. Instead, when Isidore noticed which marquee’s lights were piercing the haze, he left the Times Square tableau of beer cans and crumpled papers; he addressed Lucille, as he had been doing more since Norman’s funeral. “You did fall for me.”
“Well, come to think of it, there may have been something there between them, Mr. Defoe,” I said.
“The hussy did it because she never knew a thing about love,” Harriet told her absent husband. “People like that never love anyone but themselves.”
“That’s not true, Harriet,” Isidore said. (Or imagined telling her.) “Not true. She loved me.”
As for Lucille, she thought, “I did love Desi.” She had trouble breathing now, her cold skin bothered by tingles. “So much. But I was in love with that other man, too. I was. And then he changed his number.” He changed his number on her; she was convinced she’d actually tried calling. He changed his number on me! Anyway, the memory vanished; it was like waking from a dream that within seconds you can’t recall.
She thought about what was beginning to happen to her—thought more than felt the physicality of it, although she did feel that, too. This calm empty brightening hospital room seemed cruelly undramatic for such an occasion, for such a woman.
Lucill
e! is what Isidore thought, standing at his brother’s casket.
Oh, how long ago it all was! he thought. (Even here, even now, he thought this. And of the little space in the calendar they’d clawed out for themselves—having found the Almighty in the everyday. The juddering heart and sighed breath; sunlight in the windows; that too-soft bed; that indolent, warm, kind of slithery bed.) I’d fallen helplessly in—collapsed into, been lifted high toward—love, he thought. Oh, stop bullshitting yourself. A car horn was blaring somewhere close to ruin the effect of funereal drama. Norman’s wiglike hair lay across his dead brow. My brother was an asshole. But he had the advantage of having lived his life without bullshitting himself, Isidore thought. Look at Norman—the dead chin resting so gentle on the dead upper body, amid all the dead satin. Norman was a shrewd man. He cheated on his wife. He cheated me, Isidore thought. But you couldn’t say Norman hadn’t seen what was what. He knew what the things in his life meant to him; he died with that, at least.
What will I die with? Isidore thought. The dunes at the beach. The way Lucille raised an eyebrow in pleasure…How much had Isidore asked those few memories to do for him? He’d asked them to embrace him. In front of his brother’s casket, images of Lucille now hit. He’d asked them to see him through wind and rain. Even here, they flashed into view—flashed across his inner sky like white streaking wings.
I pined, he thought. But for what? I pined over what I’d had for a few days. A weekend I made into a magnet that pulled my life toward it.
Christ, what glamour was there in sitting on a Long Island sofa, watching Lucille, watching Lucy, sipping Coca-Cola as your kids and life played at the side of your vision?
I believed a weekend had not been a weekend. A weekend had been a ladder to the could-be. I beat myself up that I’d never climbed it. There was no glamour in that, he thought.
And so now he quickly excused himself and told his sons and Mona that he was sorry, he had to go; he asked them all (on his way out of the funeral home) to offer Matilda his regrets, and he jumped into a cab; and the driver sped down the Long Island Expressway to LaGuardia, where Isidore went to catch the next plane to L.A.; and next, when Isidore’s flight arrived—ten hours and twenty-seven minutes later—when he emerged without baggage onto the lighted, slick, midnight taxi line, and got into his second hired car of this very long day, Isidore decided to spring for a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he could plan his search in comfort, and begin lavishing some of his recently abbreviated savings on a P.I., a professional searcher, who would probably determine in five minutes where Lucille Ball lived; this would mean he’d get to see her wide-mouthed indulgent warm smile the next day; he’d get to say hi to her again; and when that happened, when he arrived at her surprisingly modest little mansion, and when in a new-bought shirt he walked across her porch and futzed with the bell, it was Lucille who opened the door for him; and it was Lucille who, after a stunned moment, took him into her hug (Lucille was always partial to a good hug, he remembered that detail, or maybe he’d invented it, but it seemed right)—and now she exclaimed Hold-on! as a kind of hubba-hubba welcome, the verbal equivalent of a kiss. And in a minute he and she were sitting together on her couch, holding hands—each finding the other’s hand skeletal and sandpapery and yet somehow the perfect hello—and they began talking freely about the last few decades, about their new significant others, and, as they spoke about finding a way to begin enjoying time together, Lucille caught his eye (her own big blue eyes biggening), and, even at her advanced age, there was some excited bounce to her legs, a bounce that revealed so much about her life’s final act, the act whose surprise ending would costar him: he who would live out his days seeing her, being in her presence, as much as possible.
Wouldn’t it be a perfect gift to my grandfather if I could write that and have it be true?
No one, Isidore thought as Norman’s funeral continued apace, can tell I’m not really here.
EPILOGUE
SPRING 1989; AUTUMN 2000
IT’S THE OLD STORY.
In every life you get what effectively are two passports made of circumstance. The first passport you receive at birth. This one has been stamped: genetics, surroundings, all the influencing factors, the stuff that establishes who you’re meant to be. And this passport sets you on your early way. The second passport is one you hand to yourself. As your life firms into its shape, the reach of your imagination and of your tenacity determines just how like the first this second passport will be. How many of the old limitations will it have? How much will you let it govern where you can’t go? You start off cleared to travel a certain distance, and, if you’re strong enough, you might advance to worlds beyond what you once knew.
It’s a function, above all, of bravery.
If you have been stamped as a poor girl in a time of men, if you’re from a cold upstate nowhere in an age when distances were not easily spanned, if your father died young, if your mother dumped you with distant relatives, if you are deemed plain and inept, if you don’t fit in, if you feel unloved, if you showed no early talent, how do you travel all the way to your own giant room in the temple of fame?
Lucille Ball traveled, by some measures, further than any American woman before her; she was astonishing, exalted, six hundred and fifty feet tall, she glowed, and on April 26, 1989, in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, at 5:47 A.M., she died, convalescing from surgery.
* * *
—
THE TRAIN PUNCHED through the dark. This was the F line, those miles of swerve and whoosh, ridden all the way to the end. I sat in the front of the first car; the glass showed a TV program of speeding tunnels. The whole point of America was to believe that anything was possible. I felt a kind of full-body palpitation while, on the crossing to Brooklyn, the train lights went dead. This American belief that anything was possible wasn’t necessarily beneficial—not on any kind of large scale—or morally right. It had helped people like Lucille, and it may have helped P. N. Defoe, but I didn’t feel helped by it. After my midnight at the Dahlberg Café, I’d had nowhere to go. I’d boarded the F train, riding for no reason but an urge to ride. I wanted to commune with the dark, with the lonesomeness, with the bumps of the trip. The F had pulled into a station called Bay Parkway. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. If you see something, say something. And the coming end of the line meant Coney Island.
Out on the boardwalk, it was cold. The amusement park in off-season; that giant empty roller-coaster, with its branched look of belligerence. A couple feet ahead of me, a crowd of European tourists stood at a fence: just staring at this famous, impassive thing. (I thought of my grandfather—had that American belief in the possible helped him? Had it helped my grandmother?) Up ahead, one of the tourists bent her blond head to her camera, a stubby 35 mm, in motionless concentration. I approached. She snapped a Cyclone photo and, unfolding her posture, stood just in time to ignore anonymous me as I passed.
The realization of what I had to do came slowly. But it did come.
Off the Atlantic there came a current of refrigerated air. I hardly noticed. What had for a long time been a burden to me no longer had weight. The wind, meanwhile, kept performing the usual wind tricks, flinging newspapers, gusting the sky free of clouds. Anyway, I knew what I had to write.
My imagination began clearing its throat. But, no. Defoe was wrong. The story didn’t call for any imagination. I began to walk toward the tide line, the first pleats of brown sand. A few beach birds nearby took off to flicker softly, in formation, overhead. A work of imagination wasn’t the book I needed to write. This was.
INSTEAD OF AN AFTERWORD
IN FAMILIES, AT least in families like mine, a fact is interesting or useful only if it’s been encrusted into myth.
Strauss family memories are dunked in legend; my relatives make fanciful splashes. And I do too. We’re left with a kind of minikin Iliad—the collective inh
eritance of a bunch of would-be singer-poets. And the truth sinks into the wine-dark sea.
Of course, another word for legend is bullshit.
* * *
—
MY GRANDMOTHER’S FATHER played baseball for the Brooklyn Kings before the team found the name by which you know them: the Dodgers. First base, quick bat, glove like flypaper. That was the legend I grew up on, anyway.
I have a copy of the carefree team photo. A memento from the crack of the twentieth century. Manny Joseph, the Jewish King—the only Jewish King, the one not in uniform—had escaped shul to join the picture. (It’d been taken on Yom Kippur, 1901.) Clean in his straw hat, and in intricate necktie, Manny Joseph doesn’t exactly look handsome among his scruffier teammates; all of them wear the old-fashioned mitt that’s like a cartoon-swollen hand. But my grandfather’s black-and-white face is lighted by one of those rakish smiles so beneficial to a good boy’s looks when he’s acting naughty, or thinks he is. Holidays he never cared for. His wife he didn’t like. But pro baseball was my great-grandfather’s delight.
Or so the story goes.
I drove recently to the library at Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame. And this is where the bullshit comes in.
“There is no Manny Joseph here,” said the reluctant librarian, her snail-like gaze creeping over a book of all those who’ve ever played professional baseball in America. It was as impressively bound as you’d imagine, this Saint Peter’s roll of all who’d passed the exalted gates and gone into the majors. “And,” this woman said, with a voice practiced at killing the already slain, “the Brooklyn Dodgers came out of a team called the Superbas, not the Kings. The Kings were maybe a semipro team, or like an adult Little League. You’ve been steered wrong.”
The Queen of Tuesday Page 30