World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  “And Malcolm agrees?”

  She nods. She feels more strongly than he does, but then on most things she feels more strongly than he does. It’s one of the things that make them well suited: there’s room for only so much strong feeling in one relationship. “And just so you know I’m not that stubborn, if Malcolm and I were to have children, we probably would get married, just because it would be easier on them if we did. It may not always be that way, but it still is, I think, and I wouldn’t want them to have to bear the burden of my principles.”

  “But you’re not going to have children?”

  She shakes her head. On this Malcolm feels as strongly as she does. She thinks of that saying, Why do they make two-year-olds so cute? Because if they didn’t, there would never be any three-year-olds. But for her and Malcolm, two-year-olds aren’t nearly cute enough to make them want to have a three-year-old. Or an eight-year-old or a fifteen-year-old, for that matter. She’s happy to be an aunt, and Malcolm’s happy to be an uncle, or whatever he is to Noelle’s and Thisbe’s boys.

  “Married or not,” her father says, “do you think you guys are in it for the long haul?”

  “I do,” she says. She and Malcolm have been together for ten years, which puts them ahead of a lot of people. Not that she can ever be sure. What’s happening with her parents—well, it’s enough to give anyone pause. She once read that when your friends get divorced it makes you twice as likely to get divorced yourself. Breaking up really is contagious. “I’ve been having this idea,” she says. “I want you to move down to D.C.”

  “Oh, Lily. Why in the world would I move down to D.C? I hate it there.”

  “I hate it there, too, and look at me. I’ve been living there for over a decade.”

  “And that should be incentive for me to move there? Because you hate it there, too?”

  “You almost moved to California,” she reminds him. “It’s harder to picture you in California than in D.C.”

  “I didn’t almost move to California. I simply humored Mom until she came to her senses.”

  “And if she hadn’t?”

  “I probably would have gone.”

  “And look where you’d be now.”

  “I’d be alone in California, and you’re telling me instead I should be alone in D.C.?”

  “You wouldn’t be alone. I’d be there.”

  “Lily.”

  “Seriously, Dad. What do you have left in New York?”

  “I have everything there. I have my friends, my life, I still have the apartment. Clarissa and Nathaniel are right across the East River.”

  “You could use a new start.”

  “I’m almost seventy, darling. There are no new starts for me.”

  “Come down to D.C., Dad. I’ll set you up with a senator’s widow.”

  “I don’t want to be set up with a senator’s widow.”

  “Or a congressman’s, then.”

  “I don’t want to be set up at all.”

  “Single or attached, I’ll be happy to have you. You can help out at Malcolm’s restaurant. He’ll put you to work.”

  “As what? The world’s oldest busboy?”

  “No one would know you were. I’ve heard about your jaunts around the Central Park loop. You probably run the mile faster than I do.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You can run along the Potomac, Dad. There’s opera in D.C., too. We can get you a subscription to the Kennedy Center.”

  “Lily,” he says, laughing, “that’s nice of you. I’ll be all right, darling. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I’m just saying I’d like to see you more.”

  “I’d like to see you more, too.”

  “Then can we rent you a place for a couple of months? You don’t even have to move down there. Think of it a test drive.”

  He hesitates.

  “Will you at least consider it?”

  “Okay,” he says. “I will.”

  He’s staring now beyond the lawn, out to the road girdled with traffic, where the rest of the family will arrive soon. For an instant he thinks he sees Clarissa’s car. “I’ve faced tough times before and I’ve gotten through them.”

  “I know you have.”

  “Really tough times.”

  “You’re thinking about your father?”

  He is. He was six when his father died. He has memories from earlier than that, recollections that go back to when he was three, but even in those his father is curiously absent. There are a few glints. His father, tall and broad-backed, striding through the living room as dinner is being announced. A Saturday morning and his father is shaving, and he stands on the toilet, eye level with the man, and afterward, alone, he draws swirls in the mirror with the discarded whiskers. Breakfast, the feel of his father behind him, a whiff of mint, his father’s hands in front of him as if they’re his own hands, cutting his waffle into tiny squares so that his meal looks like a chessboard. But when he visits these memories they disintegrate, and were it not for the photographs he has kept in a drawer he doubts he could recall what his father looked like. A year after his father died, he had a stepfather, and when he died, ten years later, another one lay in wait, and though both of them were good men who treated him kindly, he hardly remembers them any better than he remembers his own father; they were but dim music in the background of his days. He recalls his childhood as having taken place alone and in the company of a few solitary friends. He knows it’s not true, exactly, but he thinks of himself as a latchkey kid; it’s as if he raised himself.

  For a long time he looked to father figures—his seventh-grade social studies teacher, a high school soccer coach, his dissertation adviser whom he so wanted to please he didn’t drop out of graduate school until long after he first wanted to, settling, finally, on becoming ABD only when it became clear that he’d sooner kill himself than do another semester of research. He’s not that way anymore (his own father, dead more than sixty years now, would be over a hundred if he were still alive), but he still has a thing about fathers and sons, about fathers and children in general. Marilyn was the one who insisted they stop at four (if it had been up to him, they’d have kept going), and back when he was still teaching, he would gravitate to the students who had lost a parent, knowing instinctively who they were without ever having been told. He was, in practice, the English-teacher-slash-guidance-counselor, though he’d been trained for only half the job. Late afternoons when classes let out, he could be seen in his office consulting with these students, who would sit there casting him their fugitive glances. His own father, who ran a big shoe conglomerate, always said that in a different life he’d have been a schoolteacher. It was math his father wanted to teach, but it was the teaching itself that interested him, and it wasn’t until David had his first teaching job, installed in the high school where he would remain for thirty-nine years, that he even made the connection. “It’s funny,” he says. “I always wanted a son, but then Mom gave birth to you girls and I figured I was destined to have daughters and it was probably for the best. I thought having a boy would be more complicated.”

  “Was it?”

  He shakes his head. “Or no more complicated than having any child.” When Marilyn was pregnant with Leo, it was the early days of amniocentesis and the doctor told her she was having a boy. David thought Marilyn was pulling his leg, so he called the doctor and made her tell him herself. It was as if she were telling him he was having a gerbil.

  “Fathers and sons,” he says. He’s thinking about Calder, who certainly won’t remember Leo; he barely remembers him already. It’s probably better that way. It’s the same thing with divorce. Best to get it over with before the kids are born, and if there are kids, do it when they’re toddlers so they don’t remember what they’re missing. Still, he thinks, there’s a loss.

  And now, suddenly, he’s crying. “I miss Leo,” he says, and all Lily can think is Don’t cry, Dad. Please. Because, if he does, she won’t be able to make
it. But he goes on crying, and she feels like a doll made of porcelain, her face about to crack.

  She goes upstairs and walks across the ballroom, passing again beneath that monstrous ceiling fan. “Here they come,” she says. Through the window she can see her family getting out of their cars, her sisters and Nathaniel walking slowly beside each other, the children in dark jackets trailing them, her mother and Thisbe bringing up the rear.

  12

  It’s twelve-thirty, and the memorial was supposed to start half an hour ago. The crowd is upstairs lingering quietly outside the ballroom, some of them next to the wine and the beer cooler, the raw vegetables still laid out but covered in cellophane to remind everyone they’re for after the service.

  Out on the balcony overlooking the playground, Clarissa, Lily, Marilyn, and David are conferring; soon Thisbe and Nathaniel join them. “What do you think?” Marilyn says. She’s talking about Amram, who still hasn’t shown up. Outside on Walker Street, Noelle is patrolling the block, looking in every direction for his car.

  “We should wait,” Thisbe says.

  Above them, a helicopter comes into view. “Who’s that?” says David.

  “Is it the fucking press?” Marilyn says. The one reporter who’s been allowed in is already here, loitering in back in his dark jacket and sunglasses, his press pass hanging like a pendant from him, looking vigilant and dour. He was carrying a camera when he arrived, but Marilyn told him to put it away. No cameras, no recording equipment, all the speeches at the memorial are off the record: those were the ground rules she set. The reporter can talk to the immediate family, but no one else is to be interviewed.

  “Where’s Amram when we need him?” Clarissa says.

  “What do you mean?” says David.

  “Wasn’t he in the Israeli army? He probably knows how to shoot down helicopters.”

  Lily stares up at the aircraft. “The only thing Amram learned in the Israeli army was how to strip-search Palestinians.”

  “Enough,” Marilyn says crossly. “Not today. Not now.”

  A group of Leo’s friends have returned and are chatting amiably beside the wine and the beer cooler. There’s an older assemblage, too, most of them Marilyn and David’s friends, having driven up from New York and over from Boston, though there are also a few acquaintances from Lenox who have known the family over the years. An old babysitter of the girls is back in town, and she introduces herself to Clarissa and Lily. “I remember when Leo was in diapers,” she says.

  “We all do,” says Clarissa.

  “I remember when Clarissa was in diapers,” Lily says, “and I’m younger than she is.”

  In the front row, Thisbe is whispering to Calder. Beside him sit his cousins. Next to Akiva is an empty seat, which he’s holding for Amram. Noelle has told the boys their father called and he’s coming back soon. She didn’t want to scare them. She has convinced herself she’s helping Amram save face, though it’s really her own face she’s saving.

  Outside now, she asks the security guard for a match, then lights up a cigarette. She looks into the sun, her hand at ninety degrees to her forehead, though what is there to see? Amram can be coming in one of three directions, and he isn’t coming from any of them. Unless he’s planning to parachute in, like the military commando he’s always wanted to be; at this point, she’d put nothing past him.

  Finally, this morning, she began to panic. He’d been gone for nearly twenty-four hours, and it was time, she realized, to give up on pride and stop waiting for his call. She phoned him but was sent straight to voicemail. She phoned him again and was sent there once more. She started to rifle through his belongings—his coat, his pants pockets, his datebook, his memo pad, even the velvet sacks in which he keeps his prayer shawl and phylacteries—looking for any clue to where he was. She turned his pockets inside out, but all she could unearth was a cough-drop wrapper. The only other thing she found was the number 41 written randomly in pencil in his hand, and feeling desperate, she got on the computer to see if there was a flight with that number to Tel Aviv.

  She couldn’t find one, but she called El Al, anyway, and when the representative came on, she asked if an Amram Glucksman had checked in from Boston. “He’s my husband,” she said.

  “What flight is he on?”

  “The one this morning.”

  But there was more than one flight this morning from Boston to Tel Aviv, and when the representative asked to put her on hold, she grew afraid and hung up. She didn’t want Amram to get detained, didn’t want to get detained herself if she and the boys had to return home without him.

  Next she tried rental car. She plundered her purse to find the information, but Amram was the one who had rented the car, and she hadn’t paid attention to the company. She called Thrifty and Budget, thinking those were names Amram would like, but they had no more information than the airline did. Finally, she turned off her cell phone and gave up.

  Amram, she reminds herself, loves a grand entrance. He was half an hour late to his own son’s bris, and when he finally arrived he said, “I thought I’d keep the young man waiting. I figured I’d stave off his pain.” Though it’s her own pain she’s staving off now by trying to convince herself he wouldn’t miss this.

  Her mother comes outside to join her. “He knows when the memorial is, doesn’t he?”

  “Of course he does.”

  “I just—”

  “Do you think he’s an idiot?”

  “And he knows where?”

  “He knows everything he needs to.”

  “Do you want me to call him?”

  “Believe me, he won’t pick up.”

  It’s one o’clock now, and Noelle examines her watch as if for errors, but it’s just her way of avoiding her mother’s gaze, of avoiding the gaze of her sisters, who are leaning out the window now, looking down at her.

  She lights another cigarette. “Don’t tell me not to smoke.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  She takes a lap around the Community Center, and another lap, and another, yanking out a dandelion as she tramples through the tall grass, tearing its head off and tossing it behind her in violence and disgust, in her other hand her cigarette diminishing to a nub so that she practically singes her cuticles.

  When she returns, her mother is still waiting for her out front. “You know we want him here, Noelle. He’s part of our family.”

  For a second Noelle softens, but then her mother says, “Aren’t you scared?” and Noelle says, “Of course I’m scared, I’m fucking terrified.”

  The only thing blunting the edge of her fear is the anger trying to displace it. He’s part of our family. She feels gratitude to her mother for saying this, but along with this gratitude comes shame, because maybe she doesn’t want him as part of the family. He has spent the last day embarrassing her, and now he’s embarrassing her even more; no doubt if he shows up he’ll embarrass her further. Maybe she embarrasses easily. Or maybe this is just how he is. She’s furious at him for not having shown up, even as she hopes he won’t show up, which will allow her to be even more furious at him.

  She walks out onto the street, into the July Fourth traffic, looking, she realizes, like some deranged police officer, as if by standing there amongst the cars she’ll get Amram to show up.

  Upstairs, heads swivel as she enters the hall. Her mother beckons her out onto the balcony. “Noelle, we have to—”

  “I know.”

  “What?”

  “You have to start without him.”

  “It’s almost one-thirty. We only have the room for another couple of hours.”

  “That’s fine,” she says, but she starts to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Noelle. I really am.” She reaches out to hug her, but Noelle pushes her away.

  She stays out on the balcony, watching everyone through the glass. Her father motions to her to come inside, but she pretends not to see him. If they want to go ahead without Amram, they’ll have to go ahead without
her too. Now her mother is gesturing at her emphatically, but she turns from her as well.

  Through the window, she can see Clarissa seated onstage, playing the processional on the cello, and listening to her sister, to the mournful sounds of the cello, she’s brought back to a time when the world felt open and young, when it was just her and her siblings and their days were marked by the sounds of Clarissa practicing music in the other room. Now those days are gone and Leo’s gone with them, and now Amram is gone, too, and she feels as if she’s gone as well; she doesn’t know who she is any longer. She has a fantasy in which the Community Center gets blown up and everyone is killed except for her. All the people she’s ever known are dead, and she’s alone now. What will she do? Who will befriend her?

  When she steps inside, she sees the room has been partitioned in back, which makes it appear smaller than it is, and this has the effect of making the crowd seem larger. She’s not good with numbers; when she attends an event, Amram’s always asking her how many people were there, and invariably she doesn’t know. He’s constantly quizzing her, putting her on the spot. At dinner, presiding over his clan, he checks in with their boys, who sit around him like a constellation of moons, and then he checks in with her; he wants her to report on her day. She tries to do her best, but his questions fluster her. She’s back in school, asked to remember the signing of the Constitution, the words Lincoln uttered at Gettysburg, who said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” The glare of the lights is on her, her teacher’s rebuking gaze; she’d rather die than to have to sit there and report. The sad thing is, she feels this way even now with her own family, the people she’s supposed to be comfortable with. That word report freezes her, and she can’t remember anything. If Amram wants to know how many people were at the memorial, he should have shown up. Still, she reflexively scans the rows of seats so she can give him an answer when he asks. She counts seventy-five people, eighty-five, over a hundred now, her family’s friends and acquaintances fanning out, a few faces she doesn’t recognize.