The phone was ringing. I reached for it and was jerked back by the IV. Shit, it was still true. I must have dozed off for a couple of minutes; there wasn’t any pain now. I looked at my watch. 4:25! Tomorrow, today, I’d be neighborhood news. People would feel bad when they heard about it, and a little glad it wasn’t them. Like reading the obits and realizing how nice the weather is, how good dinner smells.
Paulie would call Mike—he’d have to run the studio alone for a while, or hire somebody. I had a ten-thirty appointment to cut a demo for a C&W group from Merrick. Mike could handle that. But I forgot to tell Paulie not to call my mother. She’d come up here like a bullet and drive us all nuts. When my father died, I went down to Florida for the funeral, and to stay with her for a couple of days. Every night she played out another episode in the hit series that was their life together. She had anecdotes, photographs, letters, souvenirs.
I used to wake up to their fights when I was a kid. They were mostly in Yiddish, but somehow I always got the drift. He was a gambler, my weak-hearted father. After a morning’s work at the funeral home, he’d head for the track. I guess he looked at a few of those boxed bodies and decided he had nothing to lose. He lost plenty, though, and she wasn’t going to let him forget it. She cursed him in two languages, calling him a thief and a gonif. He’d stolen not only her money but her youth and good looks as well. He didn’t say much, he just banged his fist on the walls and the tables. As they got older, they both mellowed; I suppose even she saw how all quarrels eventually end. They moved down to Miami, to a smaller apartment, like a couple of newlyweds. They bought everything in pairs: Barcaloungers, place mats, heating pads. When their ailments started piling up, they grew really considerate of each other, keeping careful track of who took what pill, and when, from that drug arsenal on their kitchen table.
My sister, Beverly, had come from L.A. for the services and then gone right back again. She claimed that her own husband wasn’t well, but she and my mother had never been close. After Beverly left, my mother and I lay on the twin Barcaloungers and talked about my father. She told me that he hadn’t chosen the mortuary business—it chose him. His cousins, who had come over earlier, had started it, and they took him in. It was a living, she added, and shrugged at her unintended irony. The pictures she showed me were from the good times, when my sister and I were little and our parents were in charge of the world. She didn’t bring up the Depression or the war, or any of their own knock-down, drag-out fights. She was canonizing him and rewriting history. I felt sleepy and relaxed while she told me all that crap. She was like Scheherazade, keeping herself alive with her stories and keeping me from going home to Paulie. “It’s winter up there,” she reminded me. “Get in a little sun while you can.” It wasn’t just that she was lonely. Neighbors came and went all day. They had each other’s keys, in case of emergencies: strokes, broken hips, sudden death. They were all old women like her, curved into commas and baked to a crisp under that Florida sun.
Paulie called up all the time, even during the day rates. “What’s going on?” she asked. I could practically hear the snow falling in the background. She put the kids on to babble and scream “Daddy! Daddy!” in my ear. The heat was off in the building, Paulie told me, the super out on a bender. Some creep in the laundry room had a fix on her, and the whole family had coughs. She made Jason cough into the phone.
I came to my senses after two weeks and prepared to go home. My mother cried and said not to worry, she would be fine. Although she knew that I wasn’t a believer, she begged me to pray for my dead father’s soul, and for hers, too, when her turn came. Soon, she assured me. She gave me a box of my father’s things to take home, the kind of stuff you end up shoving into a drawer and never look at again: shoe trees, street maps, his green golf cap.
The earth that Paulie’s second husband turned over in my garden, in my mind, might be for me. Would she be as forgiving as my mother, and sign me up for sainthood? When I went crazy that time, and ran away with Marie, Paulie said that I’d broken her heart. It healed, though, didn’t it? I thought of her eyes last night, bright with tears, and the way she’d kissed my hand. I saw a box of my own belongings being divided between my children. Annie would take my bathrobe and wear it, like she did when she was little. Jason would choose my saxophone. It was what he knew me best by, and he could always hock it if he had to. When had I played it last? It was shining away right now in its dark case in the dark hall closet. I would be like that, without music, without light. Oh, boy, these sure weren’t positive thoughts. I ransacked my head for something better and came up with the old days, with our combo, the Fantasy Five, playing a club date. How good it always felt under the pink heat of the spots, the crowd buzzing in the shadows while we warmed up. Carl and Alex noodled around the melody on the piano and guitar, Jojo did paradiddles and rim shots, and Roy thumped out the beat on his bass. When I blew my sax, the sound went right through me like a hit of something pure and expensive. One night, we played a dance downtown at NYU, and there was this big, lovely, flushed-looking girl leaning against the wall, listening and watching. A few days later we were in my car and I was moving down her body as she was climbing mine. I thought we’d go right past each other in our excitement, but we didn’t; we made Jason, and later we made Annie.
My mother was right, I’m not a believer, except in some nameless force that probably gets you for not believing. But as I started drifting off again, I prayed a little—just in case—not for my father’s immortal soul, but for the rest of my own unused life. I swore I’d stop smoking for good this time. I’d start working out and eat right if I could have another chance at everything. I’d even march with Paulie, against grapes and lettuce and pestilence and war. And I would give up Janine.
3
“SO, IS HE GOING to die, or what?” Jason asked, as soon as we were back in the CCU waiting room.
“I don’t believe you just said that,” Ann said, jabbing him with her elbow. “What’s wrong with you?”
There was nothing wrong with Jason; he was only being himself, suffering this news in his own way. His eyes had the furious, tearful look they’d get when he was little and couldn’t learn to read. His first-grade teacher had explained on conference day that he was a bright, but disabled, little boy, that he saw things backward on the page. Mirror-reading, she called it. Later they’d call it dyslexia, but they still didn’t have a cure. The teacher told us he was frustrated, as if Howard and I hadn’t noticed, as if we hadn’t mended the ripped reader over and over again in the aftermath of Jason’s little storms.
Ann had taught herself to read before she started kindergarten. She read road signs aloud as we whizzed past them in the car, and was always in an advanced reading group in school. Still, she wasn’t very sympathetic or charitable to Jason. She claimed he got away with plenty, even if he was dumb. I explained over and over again, for her benefit and his, that he wasn’t dumb at all, that he only had a little problem he’d outgrow. And he did learn to read finally, although without exceptional skill or joy. But his real redemption was his gift for music. We’d bought the drums for him as a therapeutic toy, and were surprised by his concentrated interest and his talent. He started improvising right away, like a little Mozart of rock and roll. Music was the thing that bound him to Howard more than to me, despite the competition, the enmity between them. It was a secret language they shared, that made Ann and me feel like outsiders sometimes, even though she was Howard’s known favorite. If his father died, Jason would lose the comfort of that connection, and be left with the argument they’d never resolved.
“No,” I said. “I really think Dad’s going to be okay.” Just as I used to hold the taped-up reader and say, “See, Jasie, this is Farmer Brown’s cow.”
We had all just visited Howard for the allotted five minutes. At first the CCU nurse had said only two of us at a time, but Ann stared her down and said she’d come all the way from Saudi Arabia to see her father, that our family hadn’t been togethe
r for five years. She might have come from anywhere, with that stunning tan and crisp safari dress, the armload of gold bangles colliding with a crash at her elegant wrist. Jason and I gaped at her, amazed by her nerve and invention, and the nurse, who appeared mesmerized, if not convinced, said, “Well … all right, but just this time.”
Ann had achieved other goals in her life with the persuasion of charm and self-confidence. At her admissions interview at U. Penn, the school of her choice, she’d claimed she was going to become a corporate executive before her twenty-fifth birthday, and she’d rattled off the names of female role models in the Fortune 500. Howard used to say that she was the brains and beauty in the family, driving another wedge between himself and Jason. Ann’s ambition held up—before she’d completed her undergraduate degree, she was accepted by the M.B.A. programs at Wharton, Harvard, and Columbia. She’d chosen Columbia so that she could be near Spence. They had met right after her junior year at Penn, when she was a summer intern with his father’s Wall Street firm and he was its rising star. Now she managed to merge her schooling nicely with marriage, bolstered, no doubt, by their hefty income. Looking at her and then at Jason, in his impoverished disarray, I understood why they didn’t get along better, and why there were revolutions in small, underdeveloped nations.
“Dad looks lousy to me,” Jason offered, earning another elbow jab from Ann.
“He looks better than he did last night,” I said, which was actually true. Last night he’d looked ready for Madame Tussaud’s.
“Do we have the best doctor?” Ann asked.
“Yes,” I said, and by then we did. That morning, after I’d called the children and my mother, I called Katherine, who was the source of various useful references for all her friends. Someone she knew put us in touch with an anesthesiologist at Nassau General, and by the time Howard woke up, his tests were being reviewed by the chief of cardiology. He was going to confer with the other doctors and speak to us later. Spence and Sara were expected soon, and I felt as if we were forming an army against the medical opinion. I had the irrational idea that if there were more of us, Howard would get a better prognosis.
He’d tried to control his emotions when the kids and I approached his bed. “Look who’s here,” he said in a wobbly, strangled voice. “Did you come to spring me?” His overnight stubble made him look more like a derelict than a patient.
“Nah, to borrow money,” Jason said.
“Oh, Daddy,” Ann said, truthfully, almost undoing all of us.
We hadn’t said much of anything else before our time was up and we were ushered out of there. I saw Jason’s furtive glances at the sick and dying in the other beds and I knew we were both having the same nervous, speculative thoughts.
The two-hour stretches between visits with Howard were unbearably long. We were like strangers trying to make conversation at an airport during a flight delay. The cardiologist, Dr. Croyden, didn’t show up until late afternoon. Spence and Sara were there by then, too, but we were an untrained, makeshift army against the power of his opinion. He told us that Howard had indeed had a heart attack. He didn’t use the young resident’s medical jargon, and he said that the damage was moderate, not small. So, is he going to die, or what, I wondered, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
“What’s the prognosis?” Spence asked.
“Good, I’d say,” Dr. Croyden said. “Of course, the first forty-eight hours are crucial. Then we’ll keep him here a couple of weeks, to watch him and let him rest. I expect he’ll have to make some changes in his lifestyle once he gets home.”
He meant diet and exercise and giving up cigarettes, but my first thought was of the plans I’d been making just before Howard got sick. Last night I’d left the hospital heavy with fear, with the weight of love and love’s history. If Howard had died, I would have howled and keened like any bereaved widow. I probably would have wanted to die, too. Yet I’d kept my secret intentions on hold, in some chilly, dark corner of my heart. This changed everything, of course, for now; but in the long run it didn’t change anything. I felt justified and guilty and miserable all at once. I wanted to confess, to unburden myself, but Croyden was a clinician and a stranger, and the kids had their own troubles. Ann had developed dark circles under her eyes in just a few hours. And she loved Howard unconditionally; she would think I was some kind of monster. Jason was more likely to understand my ambivalence, because of his own, but this was no time to test him. Maybe there would never be a right time. They were both adults, but they still belonged on the other side of our bedroom door.
My friends had volunteered to sit with me at the hospital, and I’d told them to wait a few days, until Howard had improved a little. Even my mother had asked if I wanted her to come, without complaining for once about how sick she was. “Oh, no!” she’d cried when I told her the news, as if she wanted to deny it. Did tragedy bring out the best in everybody?
Sara sat quietly in the waiting room all afternoon, nibbling on her ragged fingernails. I asked her if she’d like to see Howard and she blushed and said she wasn’t family, that only family was supposed to go in. “When he’s feeling better,” she added. She was there for Jason to lean against during the two-hour intervals, to absorb his unhappiness. I watched the way she waited for cues from him, assessing his mood before she touched him or spoke. She had a store of things in her pockets she could offer him at the right moment: chewing gum, crumpled pink Kleenex that she ironed with the flat of her palm before she handed them over, quarters for when he needed to make phone calls. Once, she plopped down next to me on one of those wheezing vinyl sofas, squeezed my arm, and gave me a cracked and linty Chiclet. I thought of Ruth, in the Bible, cleaving to her mother-in-law, and I was moved. It was sentimental, I knew, but everything seemed to affect me that way: the other families waiting for the five-minute visits with their patients; Howard rallying to talk to us one time, and lying there fast asleep the next; Spence bringing sandwiches and coffee for everyone; Ann coming from the ladies’ room with her lipstick freshened and her eyes red and swollen. Whenever it was time to see Howard again, two of us would rise, queasy with suspense, and go in. Nothing dramatic happened, for which we were all grateful, and ultimately a little bored. Mostly we flanked Howard, careful not to jar the bedside paraphernalia, and watched his heart monitor, the way other families watch television reruns together.
When I got home that night and La Rae came over, I was exhausted, and ready to tell her everything. Bless friendship, I thought, as we sat together in the kitchen, sipping iced tea. Sometimes I think we bully men with the mystique of closeness between women, another phenomenon besides childbearing we can torment them with. But the affinity is real, whether the women are teenagers in perpetual crisis, or forty-five-year-olds like us, surprised to still be in the thick of things. La Rae listened without comment, like a nondirective analyst, pushing my own Kleenex dispenser toward me when the waterworks began. “It’s weird,” I said, after I blew my nose. “I feel as if I’ve wronged him, somehow. And maybe I have, but I don’t think so. You just know when you know these things, don’t you?” I wasn’t fishing—La Rae had told me a long time ago that Frank had had numerous casual affairs, from the very beginning of their marriage. Her complacency about it stunned me. I remembered my rampant craziness when Howard was with that woman, Marie, how I’d wanted to kill them both.
La Rae had tried to explain her position. “Look,” she’d said. “It’s something you get used to, as part of the package, that you accept—like gambling, or snoring, or sloppiness. It’s only one more accommodation you make, like all the others,” she said.
“No, it isn’t,” I said.
“You’re right,” La Rae quickly agreed. “It isn’t. So let’s just say that I’m sick—lovesick. It qualifies me to do my column. When people write to tell me they’re heartbroken, I can honestly answer that I understand. It’s that visceral, personal response that makes me so popular with my readers.”
Now she said, “Here�
�s some free, unsolicited advice for you, Paulie—you’d better talk to Howard about all this.”
“I know that,” I said, “but not right now, not when he’s so sick.”
“Yeah, not now. There’d be no point in killing him when he’s in bed alone.”
I sighed, feeling some of the tension leaving me. What a relief confession was, even without absolution. But I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d spoken to Howard—if I’d accused or questioned him—before the heart attack began, I would have believed I had caused it. Maybe Howard would have believed it, too. Katherine, who was always looking for a connection between random events, might think I was responsible, anyway. Or that Howard had brought it on himself.
“La Rae,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone about this, all right?”
“You mean Katherine?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “Or anybody. Not even Frank. It wouldn’t be fair to Howard if I blab about it before he and I have a chance to discuss it. You’re the only one I’ve told.”
“The reward for being closemouthed is getting to hear all the juicy stuff.”
“You think this is juicy?” I didn’t know why that notion pleased me.
“No, not really,” she said, after a pause. “Except in the context of our pathetic little lives. I mean Flaubert made literature out of provincial intrigue, didn’t he? I’ll probably just get a lousy column out of it.”
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