Karen sighed. Perry had reminded her. Now she would have to tell Lisa that Jeffrey left. In the mêlée following the bus arrival, Lisa hadn’t seemed to notice his absence, but Karen couldn’t put it off any longer. It would probably offend Lisa, but now there was no alternative.
Before Karen could make a move, the bandleader spoke into the microphone. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, a moment I know you’ve been waiting for. Tiffany Saperstein’s candle-lighting ceremony.’ The band played a tired fanfare, the lights flickered and then dimmed, and a cadre of waiters rushed across the floor with a wheeled table displaying an enormous pancake. There was some scattered applause from the guests who remained and then a spotlight came on, illuminating the cake and a woebegone Tiffany standing behind it. She held a candle in one hand and a small deck of index cards in the other.
‘For my first …’ She was speaking right next to the microphone, and her voice came out in a breathy gabble impossible to hear or comprehend.
‘Louder,’ someone yelled. She looked up for a moment, squinting against the light.
‘For-my-first-candle-I-would-like-to-ask-my-grand-mother-and-grandfather-Saperstein-to-come-and-join-me,’ she said in a monotone. ‘I-have-spent-so-many-summer-vacations-at-their-house-and-have-enjoyed-all-my-visits.’ There wasn’t a bit of emotion or even inflection to her reading of the card. There was more scattered clapping, the band began to play, and Leonard’s parents rose, walked to the center of the room, kissed Tiffany, and lit a candle.
Then it dawned on Karen. Tiffany was surely going to call out her name and Jeffrey’s. What would she do? A photographer was busily snapping pictures of the Saperstein grandparents beside Tiffany, immortalizing the moment, at least for as long as Kodak paper lasted. Oh my God, Karen thought, she had forgotten about this bit. She’d really screwed up royally.
Tiffany was equally impervious to the light bulbs and the cheek kissing. Before her grandparents were even finished lighting the candle, she moved on to the next card. ‘Now-I’d-like-to-ask-my-grandma-Belle-and-grandpa-Arnold-to-come-up. I-want-to-thank-them-for-all-the-love-and-support-they-have-given-me-over-the-years.’ The child’s lack of affect was frightening. The entire room was silent, listening to her recite with a lot less liveliness than a Disney audio-animatronic.
Belle and Arnold made their way up to the enormous cake and kissed Tiffany. In the glare of the spotlight, Arnold looked worse than ever. He’s getting old, Karen thought. Belle took the candle from Tiffany’s hands and lit the second one on the cake. More pictures were taken and people clapped. Tiffany, emotionless, looked down at her cards. ‘Now-I’d-like-to-ask-my-sister-Stephanie-to-come-up-here. Sometimes-we-fight-like-cats-and-dogs-but-underneath-it-we-really-love-each-other.’
Stephanie moved easily into the spotlight. The girl was truly beautiful, tall and lithe and thin. Thinner than ever. Karen stared at her. Had she been throwing up on purpose? Was that was Belle had been trying to say? When the photographer started flashing, Stephanie came alive for him, throwing an arm around Tiffany and pouting for the camera. Tiffany ignored her and simply looked down at the next card.
‘And-now-I’d-like-to-ask-my-Aunt-Karen-and-Uncle-Jeffrey-up-to-light-a-candle. They-are-always-very-goodto-me-and-even-if-I-don’t-see-them-as-often-as-I-would-like-to-I-love-them-very-much.’
Karen rose, sick at heart, and walked across the empty dance floor to the girl. She would have to explain about all this later. She took Tiffany’s ice-cold hand in both of her own. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked uselessly. Tiffany didn’t even nod in response, but merely pushed the candle into Karen’s hands. If Tiff noticed that her uncle wasn’t there, she wasn’t mentioning it. Karen could think of nothing to do but take the candle and move toward the cake.
‘Where’s Jeffrey?’ Belle hissed in a stage whisper. ‘I told you about the cake.’
Karen never got to light the candle. At that moment, Arnold crumpled, his left leg seeming to collapse under him. He fell, like an axed tree in an open field. And as he fell he clutched at the air desperately for a moment with his extended right hand. There was nothing for it to catch to stop his fall. But in the seconds before he hit the floor, he jerked his arm with enough strength to send the table, the cake, and all the candles flying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
By a Thread
Belle met Karen at the elevator on the seventh floor of the Harkness Pavilion of Columbia Presbyterian in northern Manhattan. She was still in her outfit from the bat mitzvah, and she looked as if she were having what the cardiologists were calling ‘an episode.’ ‘The doctor just left,’ she told Karen. ‘He said your father has stabilized.’
‘Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?’ Karen looked at Belle’s face. It didn’t look like good news according to Belle.
‘Of course it’s good news. Apparently, it wasn’t that serious to begin with. I just can’t believe he had to pick right then to do it. He ruined the cake.’
Karen sighed. ‘Mother, he didn’t choose the time, it just happened.’
‘Well, I know that,’ Belle snapped. They walked down the hall together toward Arnold’s room. The hall was deserted. ‘Lisa and Leonard went home?’
‘Yes. They left me alone about an hour ago.’
‘Oh, come on, Mother, I heard both of them offer to stay before I left and the doctors told you it was okay for you to go home to change. Let’s not make this worse than it is.’ Why was it that though Arnold was the one lying on the bed with tubes in his nose, Belle acted as though she were the victim? Karen wondered if she could talk to the doctor by herself. Everything was distorted through Belle’s perception. At one moment, Arnold was almost faking his illness, according to her, and at another she was virtually the bereaved widow. Karen needed to talk to someone calming and competent. Where was Dr Kropsey? ‘Am I allowed to go in to see Daddy?’ she asked Belle.
‘It’s probably not a good idea. He’s resting,’ Belle said.
But when they got to the door of his room, Karen couldn’t resist peeking in to look at her father. Arnold was still hooked up to a lot of machines, but he had some of his color back and he was awake and alert. He lifted a hand and waved weakly to her.
‘I’ll go in and sit with him,’ she told her mother. It was a relief that only one visitor was allowed at a time.
‘Fine. She knows when she’s not wanted,’ Belle said, and Karen didn’t bother to correct her but simply walked in and sat down beside her father’s bed. Arnold still had the oxygen tubes up his nose, and Karen was shocked to see that the chest hair that escaped from the top of his hospital gown was totally white. Somehow, she had accepted the graying of the hair on his head, but his body had always been furry as a bear’s. A brown bear’s. When was the last time she had seen Arnold’s chest hair? He was a modest man, and had always worn both pajamas and a robe around the house in the evenings, a fully buttoned shirt, tie, and jacket in the day – even on warm days. But had he aged slowly, while Karen hadn’t noticed, or was this something new? Belle maintained herself so carefully that it seemed to Karen she hadn’t changed in any way in decades. Like a fly in amber, her hairstyle, her makeup, and her wardrobe were immutable. Only Arnold aged.
Karen sat down beside him. She took his free hand, the one that didn’t have the drip running into it. ‘You don’t have to talk,’ she told Arnold.
‘Who has the opportunity?’ Arnold asked. ‘Your mother is here.’ Karen smiled. Arnold rarely made jokes at Belle’s expense. His hand, still big, felt light and papery. She pressed it firmly between her own.
‘Just rest, Dad,’ she said. He nodded, and closed his eyes for a few minutes. Karen wondered whether Arnold could go back to work. She suspected their financial position wasn’t too good. Well, she could support them now. But would her dad consider any money from the deal as blood money? Arnold’s eyelids fluttered. Then he opened them and looked directly at her.
‘Could you do me a favor, Karen?’ he asked. ‘Could you call a number for me?�
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Business now? Was he crazy? Hadn’t work driven him to this? ‘Can’t it wait?’ Karen asked.
‘No. Do me a favor. Call Inez at 516-848-2306.’ Inez was her dad’s legal secretary. ‘Tell her that I’m okay. Ask her not to visit. Tell her I said that, and that I said I was fine.’
Karen reached into her schlep bag and pulled out a scrap of paper and a pen. After jotting down the number, she looked at her father. His gray eyes were rimmed with red, and his face, though not so pale as it had been, still looked puffy. Was his relationship with Inez more than professional? Inez was a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman who lived somewhere out on the island. She’d worked with Arnold for almost twenty years. ‘Sure, Dad. I’ll call her,’ Karen promised, and jotted down the number.
Now it was Arnold’s turn to pat her hand. ‘You’re a good girl, Karen,’ he said. ‘I knew that the first time I saw you.’
‘Where was that?’ she asked, before she had time to think about it. Then she blushed with embarrassment. God, was she going to use this opening to pump him?
But she didn’t have to pump. Arnold seemed ready to reminisce. ‘Chicago. When we went to pick you up. Mrs Talmidge was holding you and you put your arms right out to me. I’ll never forget it.’ He patted her hand again. ‘You were always a good girl.’
‘Who was Mrs Talmidge, Dad?’ Karen asked, her heart beating so loudly she was sure all the machines surrounding them would pick up on it. You should be ashamed, she told herself.
‘The woman from the Chicago Board of Child Guardians. She was a nice woman.’ He closed his eyes.
Karen sat there, his hand in hers. He had always been a good man. If he had been overwhelmed by Belle, how could she blame him? Who wouldn’t be? And if he had sometimes escaped Belle and abandoned the two girls to her, wasn’t that what all fathers had done back then in the days before paternal involvement? He had provided for Karen, raised her as his own, and he always approved of her and helped her in any way he could. Karen felt tears begin to film over her eyes, but she blinked them away. She turned as she heard the door open behind her and the doctor came in. He took Arnold’s hand from hers and felt for his pulse. Then he motioned her out of the room, into the hallway.
‘He’s doing fine,’ the doctor told her when he joined her. ‘We may want to perform a catheterization, and there is definitely a problem with the valve, but that’s nothing abnormal for a man his age. He’s really stabilized. He’s not in any danger. He’s fine, Mrs Kahn.’
‘What can I do?’ she asked.
‘Well, you could take your mother home. She is upsetting the nurses and keeping your father awake. She needs a rest herself,’ he said. ‘I could give you a prescription.’ Then he patted her shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’
Karen nodded. He looked like a nice man, only a little older than she was, and his eyes were warm. ‘Are you telling me the truth?’ she asked. ‘He’s not going to die?’
‘Well, we’re all going to die, but I don’t think he’s going to do it any time soon. It was actually fortuitous that he had this episode in a public place. It will give us a chance to diagnose and treat his condition before it becomes acute. But that’s the thing to understand; this is chronic but not acute. With proper care he’ll be just fine.’ Karen took a deep breath. She felt overwhelmed by the good news, and by the secret of Inez, and by the information her father had given her about her own background. Did things like her Paris show really matter compared to Arnold’s life? What was she spending her time on?
‘Thank you, doctor,’ she said, and turned to walk down the long hall to cope with Belle.
Every real New Yorker has a Greek joint they consider their own. The ubiquitous New York ‘coffee shop’ – which usually serves lousy coffee – is the metropolitan equivalent of the American small-town diner. Seinfeld made Tom’s Restaurant famous, but every metropolitan dweller claims a place that’s a combination salon, kitchen extension, and waiting room. What the club is to the English gentleman, what the pub is to the English working class, what the café is to the French, that is what the Greek joint is to New Yorkers.
Karen’s was the Nectar. It was no better or worse than the Athenian, the Three Guys, the Two Brothers, or the ten thousand other restaurants just like it. Like other New Yorkers, Karen chose it because of proximity, because of George, the owner, and because it had a good window booth.
Now, she sat with Defina in the booth she favored. They both had thick, white, china mugs before them. Karen’s was filled with black coffee, Defina’s with hot water and the herbs she had poured into it. Karen had also emptied two packets of Equal into her cup, despite head shaking from Defina. Defina was against chemicals, but the last thing Karen needed right now was nutritional guidance. She played with the empty sweetener packets, tracing patterns with their edges on the wet Formica tabletop.
Defina looked over the menu. ‘Greek cuisine,’ she said with contempt. ‘Since when do olives and feta cheese equal a cuisine? You gonna eat something?’
Karen shook her head. She had spent much of the night at Columbia Presbyterian, where she had insisted her father be sent once he had been diagnosed at the Great Neck hospital. ‘So it wasn’t a real heart attack?’ Defina asked.
‘They don’t think so. Anyway, they call them “myocardial infarctions,” not heart attacks. They are calling what he had “an episode.” But they think he has probably had a lot of them. They don’t know how much damage has been done to the heart muscle but there’s clearly some kind of valve problem.’
‘What does that mean, “an episode”?’ Defina asked scornfully. ‘Makes your daddy sound like a sitcom or something.’ Defina stretched her hand across the table and took Karen’s. ‘He gonna be all right?’ she asked.
‘They think so. I mean, not all right like back-to-normal all right. All right like he-isn’t-dead-so-he’s-all-right kind of all right. He looks like death on a gurney. It was scary.’
‘I bet.’ The two of them sat there in silence, staring out the window. Amsterdam Avenue was just beginning to get busy, with a single early-morning yuppie carrying a briefcase, thrusting out his arm and running back and forth across the street trying to snag a cab. His unbuttoned coat flapped around his skinny body.
‘He looks like a chicken.’
Karen thought of the old chicken riddle. ‘Why did the man cross the road?’ she asked, listlessly.
‘Why do men do anything they do?’ Defina responded with a shrug.
Karen watched the yuppie trying to get a taxi. Dozens of others struggled to the subway entrance. It tired Karen out just to look at them. ‘I don’t know how people do it: get up every day, don’t think about why they do what they do, commute like sleepwalkers, and show up at their job at Chemical Bank or Mobil Oil without questioning why. What’s the point?’
‘They’re the lucky ones, Karen. The ones who don’t think about it. The ones who just do it – they’re the ones who are okay.’
Karen wondered why she did what she did. All the fuss, all the deadlines, all the drama, to make a skirt for some woman to wear to a luncheon. Karen shook her head. ‘I don’t understand anything,’ she said.
‘I understand everything – except men,’ Defina said.
‘You having trouble with Roi again?’ Karen asked.
Roi Pompey was Defina’s brother. Karen couldn’t count all the times Defina had bailed him out of trouble.
‘Nothin’ worse than usual. Anyway, we talkin’ about you.’
‘Oh, I can’t stand talking about me anymore.’
‘Well, since you asked, I did get laid last night,’ Defina admitted.
‘Defina? Are you still seeing Bradley?’ Since Tangela had moved out, Defina had started to date, but her choice struck Karen as weird – or maybe irresponsible. Bradley was only twenty-three, just a couple of years older than Tangela. Bradley was unemployed, and weeks ago had stopped Dee outside her house on Striver’s Row and asked Defina if she needed a handyman. It was how they had met,
and, after cleaning out Defina’s basement, the two of them had fallen into a carnal relationship. Karen had been shocked, not by the age difference as much as their difference in experience, education, and status. She’d been relieved when Defina – somewhat reluctantly – said she was giving Bradley up. Clearly, she’d changed her mind. Now, Karen lifted the cup of coffee to her lips. The thick crockery warmth of it was comforting. ‘But Defina, don’t you want a man who’s your equal?’
Defina reached over to the sugar holder and picked up a pink packet and a blue one. She threw the blue one onto the Formica and grinned. ‘Who needs Equal? I prefer Sweet and Low,’ she said, and laughed. Then the smile left her face. ‘So, what you gonna do about Paris? Do you need to stay here with your daddy?’
‘I don’t know,’ Karen said, exhausted. ‘I’m going up to the hospital in another hour or two and I’ll talk to the cardiologist then. I should stay, but I know I also should do the show or God knows what will happen to the business, to the deal. Jesus, who knows?’
‘Girl, I hear you “shoulding” all over yourself. Give yourself a break. What does Jeffrey say?’
‘I haven’t been able to reach him, with the time difference and everything. Well, you know, he was just supposed to get off the plane and hit the ground running. I guess he did. I left word at the hotel.’
Defina’s eyes narrowed, but before she could say anything the cellular telephone rang. Karen’s stomach lurched. Was it the hospital? She had reluctantly given her mother the cellular number. What the hell, she wasn’t getting any baby calls anyway. Defina picked it up and sat there staring at Karen. Defina was nodding her head slightly and mumbling ‘uh-uhs.’ She hung up and shook her head. ‘If all that ain’t bad enough, Casey just heard from Munchin and they refused to release two hundred dozen blazers from the bridge line until their invoices get paid.’
Karen put down her cup with a loud bang. Coffee sloshed onto the Formica. Her stomach lurched with fear. Jeffrey usually wheedled the manufacturers to release goods, but he couldn’t do it long distance from Paris. Lenny or Casey would have to handle it. God, did anything go right?
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