The Laws of Gravity

by Liz Rosenberg

  Aunt Patti visited, too. This took some self-sacrifice on her part, and self-sacrifice did not come easily to Aunt Patti. She was terrified of the expressway. So she took all the back roads from Little Neck to Huntington. She had shrunk so much over the years that she sat perched on a pillow and still could barely see over the top of the steering wheel of her Subaru. She was the kind of woman who took traffic jams personally; she could never get it through her head that this was simply how Long Island was, these days. It was a giant, slow-moving tangle, like a ball of gnarled yarn. There was no way around it. But Aunt Patti seemed to believe if she had left a half hour earlier, or taken Jericho instead of Hempstead Turnpike, or not stopped at that particular bakery, she would have simply glided through some imaginary open road that had not existed for fifty years.

  Aunt Patti was more comfortable as host than as guest. She would arrive in her old Blackglama mink coat, bought in her heyday on TV, wearing a polka-dotted black-and-white scarf over her head and dark glasses—an ancient version of Marilyn Monroe. She had a key to Nicole’s house, so after rapping twice to announce herself, she would sail inside, shed the coat and scarf, and make her way to whatever room Nicole was occupying—often the back room behind the kitchen overlooking the backyard, sometimes the bedroom, where Patti would knock again, more softly, waiting for Nicole’s “Come in.” She would make her way through the house, carrying a coffee cake wrapped in string, or a bag of chocolate and cinnamon bobka, a quart of strawberries. She never came empty-handed.

  “Jesus, Nicole, why do you keep the house so dark?” she would say.

  “The glasses.” Nicole would gesture at Aunt Patti’s face. Aunt Patti would remove the sunglasses, but to retain her dignity add, “It’s still not very bright in here.”

  “I’m not very bright.”

  Aunt Patti pantomimed a laugh, then set about putting things away, serving Nicole tea and toast or pudding, watching her like a hawk till she ate a few bites. The sores in Nicole’s mouth and throat made it difficult to swallow. Aunt Patti was constantly trying to rearrange the rooms, as if that itself would make the house larger. She shared theater gossip and told old stories, especially about her late husband and her sister, Nicole’s mother.

  “She was the pretty one, I was the smart one. Dark like a gypsy. I was always jealous of her, they made such a fuss over her. Sometimes I would give her a knip”—she pinched Nicole’s arm lightly to demonstrate—“in the crib. Then when she cried, I pretended I knew nothing about it. My first acting job.”

  “You were a good big sister,” Nicole protested.

  “Well. Maybe. The night before her last surgery I slept in the hospital with her. Brought my pajamas, slippers, an old copy of Nancy Drew. I wouldn’t let that bitchy night nurse throw me out. I just read from the Nancy Drew till your mother finally fell asleep. When the day-shift nurse came in, she tried to draw my blood. Your mother would have let her. Luckily, she was wearing the hospital bracelet, not me.”

  Aunt Patti always had to be on her way somewhere else, even at her age. Parties, lunches, meetings, classes—she was always flying off to the next event. Nicole supposed if she had been born later, she would have been considered ADD and given medication. Instead she had become an actress, an eccentric. Patti was the kind of aunt who had called twice, three times a year. She sent gifts when she felt like it, seldom for occasions, and often threatened to come for a visit, but seldom followed up. All you had to do to make sure she never came was urge or press her. She hated obligations.

  Yet she had been a better aunt to Nicole and her sister than Nicole’s mother had been to Aunt Patti’s two boys. “They’re boys, I never know what to say to them,” her mother used to confide to Nicole. “That Al is a rotten apple, and the brother’s not much better. They’ll never amount to anything.” She dutifully sent checks or gift certificates at Hanukkah and for birthdays and graduations—nothing personal.

  Aunt Patti, on the other hand, hadn’t even shown up for Nicole’s high school graduation; she was rehearsing for some off-off-Broadway show. But when Nicole came down with pneumonia in college, Aunt Patti brought her a green-and-pink bead necklace that Nicole still treasured. Nicole let Daisy keep it in her jewelry box. Daisy was seldom around now for Aunt Patti’s visits. Nicole suspected it was because Aunt Patti could not bear the sadness of looking at this soon-to-be-motherless child. She could bluff her way past Nicole—or so she thought—but she could never have fooled a child. Her acting was simply not that good.

  In the interim hours, Nicole took up needlepoint. She no longer had the patience for books, and she could not bear watching television. The only TV shows she watched were Daisy’s goofy sitcoms on the Disney channel, featuring improbably beautiful teenagers who were supposed to be “homely” or “fat” or “unpopular,” who got themselves into one ridiculous scrape after another and then sang about them. But she didn’t really watch the shows. She watched Daisy watching them. The needlepoint on which she was currently working was a large linen canvas—thirty-four inches by thirty-four. It featured a seascape: waves in the background, wild roses in the foreground. It was wool tapestry, and the stitches were tiny, one slant line after another.

  Part of her knew she would never finish it. The other part, the stubbornly hopeful one, kept at it as an act of defiance against the inevitable. Slowly but surely it came to life under her hands, the bright threaded waves and flowers creeping up along the blank linen.

  She sat with her needlepoint by the large bank of windows at the back of the house, where she could watch the same process of life spreading across the wintry waste of the yard. She refused to stop loving the world just because she had to leave it. Snowdrops and crocuses pushed through the blank snow, in white and yellow-gold and purple. Next came the daffodils, the dainty orange-eyed narcissi, and the large trumpet daffodils, yellow as rain slickers, creeping in clumps across the old snow. The forsythia began to bud, then the pussy willows, then even the pink tulip magnolia that had been a Mother’s Day gift from Daisy the year she was only three.

  Nicole thought a good deal about her past, as if she were watching a movie constantly playing in her mind. Childhood, adolescence, marriage, teaching, motherhood. Faces of people she had not thought about in years came to her, like the ones who appear in dreams. Some living, some dead. She’d remember scraps of long-forgotten conversations. Little romances. And moments came back to her as if they had been preserved in the back of her brain all along, just waiting for something to trigger them back to life. Skating around and around the community ice rink, holding mittened hands with Ari. Ancient vacations by the beach with her family. A nest of chicks, bright yellow, rescued by the dune buggy in which they were riding. It was one of her earliest memories, and she had lost it for years. I’ve had a good run, she would think. Short, but good.

  Judge Solomon Richter could feel everyone walking on eggshells, eyeing him nervously as he set about emptying his chambers. He was closing up shop. The clerks and secretaries, the undersecretaries, recorders, security staff, and especially his own wife and daughter, appeared to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. He seemed altogether too calm, sorting through his law books, taking little with him, just a few boxes of books and memorabilia. In truth, now that the time had come, he was anxious to leave. And this shocked everyone, including himself.

  He could not have said exactly what he was looking forward to. He had lost a principal clerk, a man he’d once considered his friend, and he had also finished his last case in a way that left a bitter taste in the mouth. He had always understood the limits of the law intellectually. But now he knew them intimately, as if the rending had happened in his own family. It was humbling.

  After almost fifty years working in one office or another, he was about to enter the world. And it was spring. The weeping willows by the town pond in Roslyn had turned a tender golden green. The trees were beginning to bud in his own backyard. He looked with new interest at Joe Iccarino next door, planting vegetables a
nd herbs in neat, tiered rows. Maybe he would learn to garden.

  His final case had been, in his own private estimation, an utter failure from beginning to end. The press took his side, made him out to be a hero, which only proved how moronic the press was these days. He should have found the loophole that would have permitted justice and mercy to slip through the net of law. His great nemesis, the Newsday journalist, was the only man who agreed with him.

  “If, as Justice Solomon Richter wrote in his final opinion, the case of Greene vs. Wiesenthal was ‘morally indefensible,’ why could he not come to a decision less ‘revolting to every moral sense’? Where was the justice in Justice Richter’s ruling?” It was a wail of wounded outrage. Clearly, Katrina Turock had already dumped the writer and moved on.

  He had waited to begin missing Flannery, like an amputee waiting for the stump to ache. It simply did not come. He, the judge, had misjudged his right-hand man. Et quod vides perisse, perditum ducas. “What you see is over, accept that it’s truly over.”

  Ari Wiesenthal, to the very last, showed no sign of remorse, no hint that he might change his mind. When interviewed by the press, he said, “This is a very sobering experience. There’s nothing to rejoice about, but we feel that justice has been served.”

  Nicole, of course, did not speak to the press. Her husband stood guard in front of their house like the angel with the flaming sword outside Eden. He had protected her from the beginning; surely he would protect her to the end. Sol sometimes allowed himself to hope that Ari might at the eleventh hour have a change of heart. Such things were possible. He kept his ear to the ground, but no such rumors reached him. In the eyes of the press, the judge was something venerable. To himself, he was a man who had become ensnared by the law. He could not find a way out of it or through it so that this woman might live.

  But Sol kept quiet about his own doubts and regrets, for once determined to spare those around him. He would go quietly and with dignity. He declined a glitzy retirement party, even when pressed. DeNunzio persisted. “It doesn’t look good,” DeNunzio said the third time he called. “It looks like you’re turning your back on us. There is such a thing as collegiality.”

  “There is also such a thing as going when it’s time to go.”

  “Not the tune you were singing last year,” DeNunzio said. “When you came to me for help.”

  “I don’t like big parties. Retirement parties least of all.”

  “Who does?” DeNunzio said. “Still, you do it.”

  “I don’t,” Sol said.

  They did not part on good terms. Sol sensed he was burning bridges, but then, he was past worrying about all that, too. There were certain bridges he hoped never to cross again. Perhaps this is how dying people felt. One let go. The only melancholy he felt was over what must have seemed like the minutiae. Faces he would miss, morning banter with the staff. Simple pleasantries and human contacts. He would have to seek them out now, where for decades they had been given. The wisecracking mail clerk; the Chinese woman in the cafeteria who always slid him an extra helping of rice pudding—they had never been part of his home life. He never discussed these people, or even thought much about them beyond the walls of the courthouse. So there was no way to begin talking about them now. And no point in grieving over them in any case.

  Instead of a formal gathering catered by the court, Sol’s brother Arthur threw a small but elegant buffet luncheon at his two-bedroom apartment in Mineola. The chubby little man could cook. All those culinary classes had paid off. His wife Ruth dressed like a cross between a waitress and a hooker, in a short skirt with a frilly white apron, and went good-naturedly around the room, serving the tiny Manchego cheese tarts and tea sandwiches, the raspberry mousse desserts like jewels hidden in their ruffled, dark brown paper cups. This party was a casual affair to which Sol invited only the people he liked best from his days at court. For some reason his wife’s rabbi was there, too, though mostly he stayed out of the way in the kitchen, helping Abigail and Sarah fill the trays.

  “He’s not going to pray over me, is he?” Sol muttered to his wife.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Then why is he here?”

  She shrugged, smiling, her eyes mysterious.

  When moving day came around, Sol refused all outside help. He cleared out the office himself. A young judge would be moving in the next week. Chambers like his were in high demand and short supply. The new judge looked like a kid to him, fresh out of law school, but he was in his midforties; he just appeared younger, with a short-cut Afro, a gleaming smile and shy manner. He was a protégée of Tom Lieu.

  Sol waited till the end of the day to collect his few remaining boxes. It was still early enough in spring so that darkness had mostly fallen by six that evening. The sky was bluish black outside his window. The courthouse felt deserted, like an abandoned schoolhouse. Sol felt one quick, sharp pang of melancholy as he looked around his chambers. Already it felt like a stranger’s office, no longer his.

  As if to confirm his suspicion, a timid knock came at the door. Sol sighed and opened it, only to find his brother Arthur standing there, stamping his feet, his black wool overcoat buttoned up high around his throat.

  “I came to see if my big brother needed help,” he said. He was puffing from the exertion of walking down the hall.

  Sol nodded, not wanting to show his relief. “Come in,” he said. “There isn’t much left.”

  Arthur whistled. “You cleaned the place out.” He nodded. “Good.”

  “Suppose you take this box”—Sol gestured at the lighter of the two—“and I’ll take that one.”

  Arthur slapped his gloves together. “That’s it? Just two boxes?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Good for you,” Arthur said again. He bent from the knees, the way he’d been taught, and lifted the box. “Not too terrible,” he said. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Out,” Sol said. “Follow me.”

  Before he could get out the door, Arthur bumped him lightly with his left shoulder. His arms were full. This was the closest he could get to throwing an arm around his brother. “So…how you holding up?”

  “Fine,” Sol admitted. “I don’t know. I feel—lighter. Maybe it will all blow up next week when reality sets in.”

  “I don’t think so,” Arthur said. “You’ve got little Iris in your life now. You’ll have your hands full.”

  Sol nodded. He would never admit how he doted on this granddaughter, barely a toddler now, with her long head and serious black eyes. Everything about her enraptured him, even the way she stored a mouthful of bread in her cheek an hour after he had given it to her. Apparently food hoarding was not uncommon among the orphans. He’d heard of children storing sandwiches in their toy cupboards, secreting candy bars under their beds. He would spend more time with her now that he was retired. He could take over on the nights when Sarah was going to her Jewish classes, he told Abigail, save her some babysitting money.

  “Okay,” she had agreed, surprised.

  “I want to help out,” he said.

  “That’s very nice of you, Pop.”

  “Don’t expect me to do anything but spoil her.”

  “I don’t.” She laughed.

  Sol paused at the threshold of his chambers. Empty rooms always looked smaller. His chambers seemed to have shrunk like something in Alice in Wonderland. There were holes left in the walls where he had hung his diplomas, patches of peeling paint. He had left behind everything he intended—office supplies, the coatrack he had used for thirty years, all of the filing cabinets cleared out and ready to be refilled by the next generation. By Monday the room would be repainted and cleaned.

  “Go ahead,” he told his brother. “I’ll get the light.” And by pressing down with his elbow on the switch, he turned the lights out on his long, illustrious career.

  A few days later his sister-in-law Ruth called, shrill on the answering machine. Sarah was out, Sol doing the dishes,
so when he heard Ruth’s voice he decided to ignore it, till he caught the pitch of hysteria. “Sol, please call me,” she said. “Please, right away! Here, I’m going to give you the hospital number—” Sol rushed to the phone, his hands soapy, while she fumbled in the background. He snatched up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Thank God!” she yelled, straight into his ear. Her volume actually increased once he picked up the phone.

  “What’s going on?” He could hear a commotion at the other end.

  “It’s Arthur,” she said, sobbing. “He’s had a stroke. We’re at Long Island Jewish Emergency.”

  “I’m on my way,” Sol said, and hung up. He drove straight to the hospital, his hands still soapy, shaking on the wheel.

  By the time he got there, Arthur had been moved to the ICU. A white curtain separated him from the rest of the world. He was attached to a variety of machines and tubes, nearly all of them beeping or clicking. His eyes were closed, but he looked younger than he had in years. No lines marred the broad expanse of his white forehead. Ruth was weeping; she was dressed in an old coat and wore no makeup. She looked like an ordinary aging housewife, which endeared her to Sol with an unexpected lurch of his heart. As he came into the ICU room, she leaped for Sol’s hand and clung to it.

  “We were having lunch at that new French place in Roslyn,” she explained. “La something. Arthur had been wanting to try it, and it’s just a week”—she tried to stifle her sobs—“just a week to our anniversary. We were having a nice lunch, Arthur was enjoying himself, when all of a sudden he said, ‘I feel funny,’ and lurched over sideways. I thought he was kidding at first. I said, ‘Arthur, quit kidding around. The French don’t have no sense of humor.’

  “Then he opened his mouth and nothing came out. I could see from the look in his eyes he was scared. So we called nine-one-one and they came right away and I told them—to take him here. I always heard it was a good place.” She released his hand and blew her nose into a clutch of Kleenex. “If anything should happen to my Arthur! I should never have let him eat the goose liver pâté! Never!”